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so.
Lee Friedlander and Don DeLillo. Think about it!
No, actually I thought about it. I don’t know how that makes me feel. But somehow? On a strict diet of non-fluids, like 24 hours after a horrible, involuntarily 3 days of master cleansing? They seemed to go together. Like crazy. And like, complement each other and bring out each others’ textures and flavors of like, um, saffon and truffles or something. Something luxe and so far-out that they come back to meet each other in a separate plane? You know?
If not, here’s more: Because here’s Lee Friedlander, and here he is photographing the American monuments one by one and at first it’s sort of. A dud? Can I say that without sounding like a total philistine? Anyway, at first pass, you can understand all the eye-rolls at contemporary art. I mean, it definitely smacks of ‘I could’ve done that’, because there’s no evident technical whizz-bang here, and, Jesus, it’s not as if the scenery - roadside relics, little pigeon-islands of forgotten bronze statues - is really anything spectacular. You can take any single photo and look at it alone, and it’ll seem like any single photo from any family camera. But, somehow, pooled together, they start gaining a momentum, and you get the sense of play that photography has.
Maybe it’s just projecting (it could definitely be projecting) but you kind of get a whisper of Friedlander’s own feelings towards Event or Deep Feeling X that inspired the photographed monument. Friedlander shuns gradiosity. Big Guys, like Mount Rushmore, or Iwo Jima, are tucked away, playing peekaboo in bubbling tourist milieu that surround them. The majestic gets gets framed Just So, so we see how manufactured and, in a way, _small_ they are. We’ve very much made our own gods, and Friedlander emphasizes that point, a little merciless in his own mute way. There’s this one picture of Roosevelt Island (or… some other Roosevelt memorabilia? The not knowing’s the point!) where Some Roosevelt Thing sits in the center of the picture, barely in focus and ensnared in a bramble of closer branches and shrubs; Friedlander’s version of carelessness; of firing off a shot without even bothering to see the Thing. Roosevelt who?
But in the smaller town monuments, you can feel a slight thawing. The sad, modest shrines, wishing luck and safety and evincing a brittle kind of human frailty? Friedlander seems to Get those. He poses those in a methodical, studied way that makes them either poignant or witty or something else ALIVE. And there’s a very real sense of personality and locality in those little snapshots of Place.
So, yeah, it’s very much the mundane framed in a way that snaps dimension into an image. Which, I guess, is what Art and Stuff is? And maybe where the Delillo comes in? I’m not sure. To be honest, I just thought that it would be bangin to have some of these American Monument photos placed in White Noise or something. Two off-kilter Americanas, head to head. Don’t overthink it, jeez.
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"To take taxis across the Green Line. To light up in a bloody great smile when Israeli jets break the sound barrier. To pretend to be unaffected when guns start firing round the corner. That’s why he went.”
The worn voice began to acquire a certain disregarding impetus. Soon it would fall into monologue, an inner speech that did not need a context or listener.
“To sit there with his beer, chatting with a colleague as the mortars rain down or whatever they do. Absolutely unmoved. I think he lived for such moments. They were the high points of Lebanon, as demonstrations were the high points of Panama when we were there. During the worst of the anti-American demonstrations he’d put on his Union Jack lapel badge and go walking right into it. How I came to hate that badge. He felt he couldn’t be harmed wearing it. And so he sits in someone’s office in Beirut when militiamen are active. To betray no sign of emotion. To chat. What’s the point of getting excited, he liked to say to me. Truly believing there is good sense in this. As if getting excited had something to do with deciding to get excited, making a conscious decision to get excited. They’re out there, hurling grenated, firing rockets. What’s the point of getting excited? What’s the point?"-Delillo, The Names (244)
The long way to say ‘asshole’.
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"My hand moved slowly over the words, feeling for breaks between the inlay and marble, not to fault the craftsmen, of course, but only to find the human labor, the individual, in the wholness and beauty of the tomb.
It wasn’t until we were walking back through the garden that I asked our driver what the words represented. They were the ninety-nine names of God."- Delillo, The Names -
"Not that it was an experience confined to some narrow category, the rural poor, the dispossessed. Many kinds of people knew the experience. Dallas executives spoke in tongues in gospel meetings in the shimmering tinfoil Hyatt. Catholics knew the experience, and middle-class blacks of the charismatic renewal, and fellowships of Christian dentists. Imagine their surprise, these tax-paying people, he said, these veterans of patio barbecues, when they learned they were carriers of ectasy."
- Delillo, The Names (173) -
"Why is the language of destruction so beautful?” Owen said.
I didn’t know what he meant. Did he mean ordinary hardware - stun grenades, parabellum ammo? Or what a terrorist might carry, some soft-eyed boy from Adana, slung over his shoulder, Kalashnikov, sweet whisper in the dark, with a flash suppressor and folding stock. He say quietly, Owen did, working out an answer. The way was open to interpretation, broader landscapes. He would have a patient theory to submit on the adductive force of such sounds, how they stir the chemistry of the early brain. Or did he mean the language of the mathematics of war, nuclear game theory, that bone country of tech data and little clicking words."- Don Delillo, The Names (115) -
"He did mention that at Berkeley he was in a favorable position to study two of the esoteric wonders of our time, subjects that only an adept might begin to penetrate. Pure mathematics and the state of California. There were no analogies from the real world that might help him explain either of these."
-Don Dellilo, The Names (163)
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"All around us the human noise, the heat of a running crowd."
- The Names, Delillo (233) -
"
Possibly, to Tap, the strange language exposed the whole idea as gibberish, the idea of forecasts, the idea of talking before a camera about the weather. It had been gibberish in English as well. But he hadn’t realized it until now.
We sat in the blue glow, laughing.
"- The Names, Delillo (189) -
"The fear of sea and things that come from the sea is easily spoken. The other fear is different, hard to name, the fear of things at one’s back, the silent inland presence."
- Delillo, The Names (73) -
"Self-deprecation is a language I don’t think I understand. It’s so often a form of ego, isn’t it, a form of aggression, a wanting to be noticed even for one’s flaws. I don’t know these modern languages."
-Delillo, The Names (160)
Ouch.
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"To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don’t cling to you the way they do back home. You’re able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You’re expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travelers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don’t know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence. Together with thousands, you are granted immunity and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysenteric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event."
- Don Delillo, The Names (44) -
"Vietnam is the war, the reality. This is the movie, where the scripts are written and the actors perform. American kids don’t want to seize control. They want movies, music."
- The Black and White Ball, Don Delillo -
"I’ve come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version."
- The Names, Don Delillo (23) -
Scales
Libra, Don Delillo
Delillo is always a difficult author to get a perfect handle on, but goddamn this was a rip-tide of a book. Reads like an incantation of an assassination, with an eerie fatalistic pulse pumping through the latter half. Frustrating and opaque, as always, at times, but still unnervingly convincing. And shi-it, what a first-rate nightmare.
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"All my fears are primitive. It’s the limbic system of the brain. I’ve got a million years of terror stored up in there."
- Libra, Delillo (292)
decent
you should feel bad.
