Review: Examined Life
Not quite a documentary, Astra Taylor’s “Examined Life” is like a game show for philosophers that takes advantage of their penchant for rambling academic poetry.
It gathers several modern thinkers and offers them 10 minutes to riff through their fields of specialty, often in a setting that will provide fodder for the intellectual improv. This is not the best way to learn about complicated ideas, to be sure. Uppity intellectuals delivering rapid-fire explanations of the sum of their big ideas leads to a lot of confusion for a layman, particularly when part of the monologues include a certain amount of thinking out loud before the person gets to the point — and the inevitable philosopher name-dropping that is often meant to alienate the listener even as it props up the speaker with a certain level of educational braggadocio.
It’s not unlike being cornered by someone slightly unhinged at a coffee shop as they try to explain their mad theories about who’s in charge of the world. It is possible to pick out ideas, though, even without any sort of context other than this person blathering on, and sometimes you will love the truth of the statements, and perhaps even the madness.
As a study of the delivery of ideas, “Examined Life” is mesmerizing. You may lose Cornel West in his ramble now and again — he’s pontificating in the back of a cab in New York City — but there’s something magnetic about his presence that makes you hang on every curious word. You might also find yourself sympathizing with what that poor Cambridge cop must have gone through in their much reported run-in. »» Review: Examined Life
Profile: Lesley Flanigan
Sound artist Lesley Flanigan might build her own electronic instruments, but the resulting work is more of a partnership with the equipment she has configured. She has moved into a different type of sculpture, one that seems intangible but in her experience is wrought through the very physical medium of circuits and resistors.
As a sound artist, Flanigan began her journey by fashioning a new musical instrument but eventually transformed that into a electronic choir that she not only conducts but also collaborates with.
Flanigan is a graduate of the ITP program at New York University, which afforded her the opportunity to work with analog electronics for the first time. It was this experience that allowed her to see electricity as a physical thing.
“When I started building little amplifying circuits, I was able to actually hear what would happen when I used a resistor or I used a capacitor,” she said during an interview this week. “It’s so much more of a direct relationship between this invisible electricity and what was actually going on.
“One of the ways that I would test these little amplifying circuits — really basic little amplifying circuits — was to take the piezo and the speaker and get sound out of them. At first, it was like hitting the piezo with my hand and just hearing it come out of the speaker. At some point the piezo touched the speaker and this crazy sound came out of it, which was feedback — but it was more than the sound of feedback, it was that the piezo bounced on the speaker and I could really play with it. Suddenly this whole cerebral experience became a very tangible, physical experience that was something that I related to instantly.” »» Profile: Lesley Flanigan
Review: Canadian band round-up
Canada has proved one of the most delightful music scenes in the world — and far more down to earth than our own in many ways. The sounds run the gamut of pleasingly soft acoustic pop to more jarring and sweeping progressive instrumentals. What it all has in common is the great deal of care and thought going into the sounds that come out, as well as the trust that quality will sell.
With “Origin Orphan” (Arts and Crafts) the Toronto band The Hidden Cameras offers an appealing collection that often dips back into the herky-jerky world of early ’80s new wave. “In the NA” sounds like something straight out of the old USA “Night Flight” show, while “He
Falls To Me” makes me think of nothing so much as “Mr. Roboto” — but good. Ditto for “Do I Belong?” and its John Waite-like sequencing and ballad riff.
The band isn’t a one-trick pony, though, and its satirical song arrangements also drift into gentle pop-acoustic mode and even a sweeping, dramatic, string-laden Euro epic called “Walk On.” Surely Andy Partridge must love these guys!
Montreal-based Malajube delivers French-language indie rock by way of grand, arena production, with lofty keyboard and Yes-like chorales and musical refrains on its album “Labyrinthes” (Dare To Care) — but the songwriting and performance is down to earth. This is revealed straight-away on the second song in “Porte Disparu,” an easy-going 1970s styled pop number with a romping Madness piano line driving the pace that flips moments with the band’s prog-rock inclinations. It uses this mix to great effect for the rest of the album, with a few new-wave power-pop anthems thrown in — particularly “333” — that make catchy use of prog refrains and siren calls. It’s this sort of mix of eras that shows the strength of creative retro stylings that blend to create something new rather than slavish. These guys should be superstars outside of Canada, riding on a Radiohead vibe. »» Review: Canadian band round-up
Review: Logicomix
It’s probably a given to most people that a sprawling graphic novel that concerns itself with the history of the field of logic — and the biography of eminent logician and philosopher Bertrand Russell — might not on the surface appear to be the most exciting subject matter ever put down to the form.
“Logicomix” — written by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou, drawn by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna and published by Bloomsbury — dares go into that very territory.
Amazingly, it comes out with an exciting chunk of a story that is entirely unexpected by wrapping the story around a lecture given by Russell in which he faces off with World War II protesters.
Also injected into the narrative are the arguments of the graphic novel creators themselves, as they struggle with the lessons of the story and how to present them alongside the towering work of logicians through the era.
As a focus, they settle on madness, which seems like it might be the exact opposite of logic. Instead, it is revealed to walk hand-in-hand with it to some degree.
That mental illness crept into the lives of logicians with such regularity provides the thematic dots for Russell’s story as it glides forward in time. If madness is the letting go of reality, the logic is shown to be the disregarding of it, and this same departure from the world manifests itself in mind similarly. By focusing on a singular line to be followed, despite the landscape surrounding that line, the journey of the logicians can sometimes be one of disconnection and disassociation to the wider context of life. »» Review: Logicomix
Profile: Susan Aldworth
Susan Aldworth's Brainscape 5
As artist Susan Aldworth explores the nature of consciousness, she asks the question of whether the self exists in the brain — or whether brains just think there’s a self.
Aldworth’s “Brainscapes is a series of etchings based on her observations of brain scans in operating theaters during critical brain procedures. Aldworth is artist in residence at Royal London Hospital, a position that has afforded her the opportunity to sit in on such intricate and private surgery.
“The sort of procedure I was watching is a scan where you’re looking real time on a monitor,” she said during an interview this week. “It’s like a video of the inside of someone’s brain via the arteries, so you’re seeing the structure of the brain, real-time.”
Working in etchings was a huge leap for Aldworth, who had always been a printmaker and had never worked from small sketches and translated those into prints. With the new challenge of medium came one of representation as well — Aldworth desired to have the etchings appear scan-like — negative images that reference x-rays.
“I also wanted to find a way of getting some chemical explosions on the etching plate to suggest the chemistry going on in the brain, and again we experimented with a mixture of methylated spirits and white spirits, very sort of organic marks that sit on the plate,” she said.
She managed to create works that captured with stunning clarity the objects she depicted, but despite the strong technical component of her work, she has never lost sight that these brains belong to living, breathing people, and she feels privileged to have been allowed to capture them in her art.
She is also distinctly aware that the operations she sits in on are life and death, and part of her job as an artist is to capture the immediacy of that moment, as well as the intimacy of the procedure. She understood this going into the project, which was inspired by her own personal experience with the procedure.
“I found myself 10 years ago on an operating table, having collapsed in the studio from inhaling too many white spirits by accident,” Aldworth said. “I was on that operating table, conscious during a brain scan, looking inside my own brain real-time, so I was thinking about myself, looking at myself. It was such a mad moment, both for an artist to see that, but also as someone with a background in philosophy, wondering about what human identity is.”
»» Profile: Susan Aldworth
Capt. Fantastic #6
Sadly, Capt. Fantastic #5 has gone missing, but I’m thinking the story is not so complicated that we can’t pick it up with some level of ease even after skipping a whole chapter.
This is the first of my early comics where I can honestly say that I did something in tribute rather than ripping it off wholeheartedly - that is, the inclusion of the Sleestak. As fans of Land of the Lost will note, that is not a Sleestak at all, but rather an homage. An homage that ends up in a hole in the ground in one of my favorite fictional sequences that I ever wrote. Two panels, one concise statement, but so much work and emotion in between.
Profile: Andrew Carnie
from Andrew Carnie's "Magic Forest"
Artist Andrew Carnie’s pursuits have come full circle — he started out as a student of science, and now he continues his interest through his creative work.
Carnie’s installation “Magic Forest” will be featured in “Landscapes of the Mind: Contemporary Artists Contemplate the Brain” at the Williams College Museum of Art, starting Saturday, Jan. 30, and running through May 2.
“Magic Forest” features 162 slides projected onto screens and dissolving into each other to create the illusion of a 20-minute animation. The screens are made out of net curtain, so that the light falls on the first screen but penetrates to the other ones, adding a 3-D feel to the work. Carnie’s slides contain images of neurons growing in the brain, resembling trees that transform the projected space into forests.
“I hand-drew all of the neurons and all of the images over a period of three or four months, working two or three days a week. It was about all I could stand,” Carnie said during an interview this week.
He based his images on Quicktime films from neurologist Richard Wingate. Wingate was growing brain cells in vitro from chickens and filming his efforts with a confocal microscope over a 24-hour period.
“You could see neurons growing,” said Carnie. “What he was doing was quite complex science. The movies he makes were just evidence of what was happening — basically he was switching on and off the proteins that control where these neurons go in the brain and their positioning.” »» Profile: Andrew Carnie
Review: Pictures That Tick by Dave McKean
As Neil Gaiman’s other — and I would say better — half, artist Dave McKean has mastered many visual forms, including film. He directed 2005’s “MirrorMask” and has a well-established career as an illustrator and photographer.
In the collection of his short narrative work “Pictures That Tick” — published by Dark Horse Books — McKean shows himself to be the master of many forms, including storytelling. The book gathers numerous stories of various length that unfold with both a poetic obscurity and a personable humor.
McKean opens not with a story — at least not a fictional one — but with a professional testament that doubles as poetry.
The words examine his creative life beyond comics and then ruminate on what seems to be the primal urge in all of us to create some form of them.
McKean speaks of snapshots arranged in a photo album in sequence for the purpose of telling a story. That , he explains, is a personal form of comics.
From there, he segues into the beautifully wrought allegorical fairy tale “Ash,” which likens one dark strain in a child’s life as a root that will grow into a mighty tree of depression and dysfunction. What McKean addresses is not just the idea of seizing control over your life, but also taking control of your own story. The story urges readers to image how each plot thread will wind through the years and seize the moment when editing — or, in context of the story, pruning — is in order.
It’s a beautiful beginning and, when coupled with his opening statements, a chance for a storyteller to lay out the collusion between art and life in personal circumstances. What follows are a string of intensely mysterious pieces that walk the line between poetry and parable — indeed many of them do have the quality of a tale that a wise man on top of the mountain might tell.
But McKean hinted at all this in the book’s preface, where he presents a version of the Book of Genesis as if it were written by Spike Milligan — or maybe Russell Hoban doing a “Riddley Walker” shtick.
It’s an exercise to disarm the sacred and replace it with something not only cockeyed, but also mysterious. This is largely thanks to the accompanying photo-collage work that shows the space between heaven and earth as more of a cluttered, antiquated type of Hell than anything else.
It’s this beautiful and skillful illustration work that binds the book together. McKean leaps from medium to medium in the visual work with the same precision of the movement of ideas that inhabit his tales. He doesn’t stick to one style and seems eager to do exactly what any individual story demands — from spare pen and ink to dense paints and beyond — often incorporating photographs.
“Some Like Dawn” uses atmospheric but straightforward photography, while the haunting “Your Clothes Are Dead” utilize the photos for abstract collage imagery. Collage is a major part of McKean’s work, functioning as a form of art-school jazz for his visual expression and even manifesting in painted works such as the darkly absurd “Yol’s Story.”
That is the beauty of McKean’s narrative work: Simplicity and clutter march hand in hand to create a chaotic order in the fiction, borne of the abstract poetry that flows out of him.
As such, McKean is the purest collaboration embodied by one guy. Words and pictures, in his case, are entwined, and this combination tells stories in the unknown language that exists between the two.
