Report 1
Last night I read poems out loud for the first time in I think two years. The reading was at the Cité des Arts, an international art residency, in Montmartre, and it was so well organized, by J, a new friend. Each reader had 5 minutes each, and there were about 11 readers, plus one or two who spontaneously volunteered to read. There were only a couple of things that I didn’t like and that didn’t matter, I shall nonetheless try to articulate why. One was a series of short texts, each numbered pretentiously, that were painful to listen to because of the amount of leftist jargon, such as ‘collective life’, ‘solidarity’, neatly tied up with more clichés about love, in still neater rhyme; and the other, a poem, also of clichés, which was as if a rewrite of the concept of all Survivor- or I Will Survive-type songs, but without much distance. Both of these poems, sets of poems, had the quality of total earnestness, and set free something other than what their highly controlling authors seemed to have hoped for, whereas with other people's readings, I didn’t have the same impression. In short, the texts I didn’t like were sheerly embarrassing, because their authors’ let some kind of painful unconscious hang out, without knowing so, whereas, in other texts I heard, I either felt there was a self-conscious use of this, or a more sincere taking of risks. Otherwise, it was very mixed. The French poetry was characteristically prose-y and ironic, closer to stand up, because of the collective unease about taking on the role of poet. This, I have observed, often happens in general with artists who become poets. The international poetry included an angry rap about Schengen in French and Spanish, an amazing meditation on an unanswered letter from Brazil, a Korean poem about grandmothers and demonic spirits. There was a lot that was funny. The five minute space de-dramatised the fact of reading. There were candles instead of electric lights. There were crisps, cheese, pickles, tea, non alcoholic beer, carrot juice and also wine. As well as people's own works, someone recited from memory a poem by Mallarme that seemed so racist, no one knew if they should applaud, and someone else read erotic poems in Persian and had someone else read the translation. I read three poems.
We spoke to the artist who had read from the Persian poet’s book – we is three of us, all friends -- at the end of the reading when all the lights had come back on, and the intimate space had become again a common room. We asked her some questions and she began to describe her practice, by which she has a ‘partnership’ with ‘scientists’ who build ‘robots’. She builds sorts of sculpture organs, and has an exhibition soon. She is going to be making some organs with real blood. We asked what kind of blood and she said human blood, via donation, even though personally, she is phobic of blood herself. So she doesn’t know why she’s doing this. I said, well that’s why, you want to find out about your phobia. She then said, no but actually it’s because, I’ve had enough, the last few years, all we hear about is War War War, et j’en ai marre, et en fait, on a tous le meme sang, et en fait je vais prendre un gout de sang Iranienne, Palestinienne, Israelienne… (She wants to take a drop of blood from people of difference ‘races’, and put them all together in the same organ, to show that we all have the same blood).
This reminds me that a few days ago a friend described going to see a play in Paris put on by the company of some friends of his, and that he got in a disagreement with everyone there. The play is about Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens, how the latter wasn’t the successor of the former, that the two species co-existed, and about the scientists in the 1990s who led this discovery. If you look on the website of the piece it says something like “DNA is an encyclopedia”. And, for the grand finale, where did these Neanderthals and Homo sapiens coexist? Indeed, in the land that is now Israel-Palestine. A well intended humanism, with biological and racialist underpinnings. My friend got in a fight with everyone about the subventions that will soon be cut, saying well maybe it’s not such a bad idea, look what state funding gets us to. And was met with, but outreach in the provinces!
Report 2
I have 25 minutes to write this, before my biweekly 1-1 with one manager (online) and another weekly with my manager who is my ‘direct report’ (weekly), which are back to back. I wanted to go to the café at the end of the road and write this and somehow instead I ended up shopping for dinner. Not only shopping, but being fussy. Buying about one ingredient per shop. These 1-1s are inconvenient 15 minute slots that hang my week together. I spend most of my time trying to pretend I’m working, or trying to work. Last week I couldn’t work that much. I had to generate prompts which would prompt a set of instructions for a discussion, using my company’s own program. But as it turns out they hadn’t signed me up to an unlimited account, and I was stuck on the free one. I could only generate 10 at a time before getting locked out for several hours. I had a hundred to turn in. The gaps were at least 5 hours long. Kismet. I went out and had lunch. Tried to enjoy the ‘weather’. As of last week, according to a blurb screenshotted from Instagram that a friend sent me, this city had not had 3 consecutive days of sunshine since September, causing mass lack of vitamin D and sporadic depression. At the poetry reading I spoke about in my last report, a girl mocked the general climate with the phrase “I dream of a burnout”. A few weeks back, I kept getting locked out of my company laptop, so I had a few days where I just couldn’t work. In any case the weather was not nice, it was grey.
Anyway, I spent the rest of the day doing this impossible task of generating prompts. Then, that evening, rushing out of my 1-1, we had decided to go and see The Brutalist. Apparently the director says he spent 8 years writing it. It is a film that should have been written and made in a shorter time and it should also have be cut to a shorter running time. We are living in an epoch of cinema that has been allowed to take on epic proportions in length, without any demand on the content of the film being worthy of such a length. It is formless, its only quality being just that it is long. I blame Netflix, and the rise of the mini series, which means that films are now like a long episode (which, in the case of for example Dune, only guarantees a sequel). There is little at stake, but it is said over a long time. I have seen some truly awful long long films this and last year – Megalopolis, Nosferatu, and now The Brutalist, and they have this quality.
With the Brutalist, the opening shot announces the carnage, the tenor, doing what the film will do all the way through. In a shot which tempts us to think – camera d’epaule, following Adrien Brody -- we think we are following him out of the camps. But no! A clever feint, it is the boat. Here is the statue of Liberty! Welcome to America. This is the strategy of the whole film, beginning to end. We think the film will talk about the experience of the camp survivor, but no – the familiar fetish of “silence”. Except that this silence is full of on the nose images, on the nose dialogue.
As for the rest of the film, I found myself extremely anxious watching it. That is because, like with the tendency of our times, there is nothing there. It looks like its something but it isn’t. It sounds like language, but it’s not. There is an uncanniness we are living through. You watch it gaslighting yourself and unconsciously straining to find the thing, but there is nothing there. Perhaps the scenario was written by AI, or perhaps modern writing is now the same as LLMs. There is are disconcerting moments in which the dialogue sound is entirely isolated from any ambient noise. There is background music all the time. We are in a permanent and hellish elevator. Everything is smooth, shot like a drone. As for the dialogue -- why does it “feel AI”? Because everything, which could be suggested by the cunning combination of image, sound, motion, is explicated in speech. Everything is on the nose. There is no space in the film that isn’t being explained to us, whether in vulgarized pop-psychoanalysis (as the crippled Erzebet tells him I wanted you so badly, it made me sick), or the smorgasbord of maux, cynically put together as a tasting menu of all the possible things a modern viewer might find objectionable -- sodomy, rape, chemsex… The #metoo moment eyerollable. I found the niece’s articulation of her decision to make Aliyah much more of today’s discourse than what I imagine of New York in the 70s (I don’t know). And still, it all suddenly neatly leads to the architect’s enunciation of the words “they don’t want us here”, which I also questioned, thought was irresponsible and also anachronistic. In any case, the conclusion of the film – the beginning of postmodernism at the Venice Biennale -- is equally grave, it is indeed the wrong way around. In the end it is not the architect who makes his building despite the camp, but the camp that has dreamed the building. The building is a prison. I found this the most shocking, as if Nazis can be congratulated, in the end, for modern architecture, rather than what we know – that Nazis hate flat roofs, and it was the Bauhaus and ‘degenerate art’ that was so much of a threat to National Socialism that Bauhaus architects such as Gropius ended up in America.
I cried when I got home, or had a panic attack, finding the conclusions or implications of the film so terrible and historically dire, and also in shock or cognitive dissonance after having spent the day generating AI scenarios, and then finding myself in one. I don’t want to contribute to this world, the destruction of something I love which is cinema, and I find it startling and horrific how bad and ugly the films of our moment are, how historically revisionist.
