by Charles Greene
The structure of the mass ornament reflects that of the entire contemporary situation. Since the principal of the capitalist production process does not arise purely out of nature, it must destroy the natural organism that it regards either as means or as resistance. Community and personality perish when what is demanded is calculability
– Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament
Siegfried Kracauer penned these words in 1927, choosing the term ornament to characterize the modern trend toward the disappearance of the unique individual into a faceless, characterless mass by means of visual representation. His essay, The Mass Ornament, appearing nearly a decade after the end of the First World War, and just two years before the Great Depression, came at a time when the creation of the modernized industrial capitalist society was already well under way in Western Europe and North America. Strongly influenced by the Marxist social theories so in vogue after the war, Kracauer interprets the world around him through a socialist lens, seeing in the surface culture of the West an aesthetic mirroring of the underlying capitalist foundations supporting that culture.
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by J. Albin Larson
Discussed in this article: Time’s Arrow
by Martin Amis [Vintage International, 1992]
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It feels a little hypocritical to write a column criticizing the current trend of instant nostalgia permeating our daily lives while sitting in my apartment listening to The Promise Ring’s Nothing Feels Good (which came out when I was 16), and having spent the first few hours of the coffee-drinking morning watching High Fidelity (which came out when I was 19), but I’m going to do it anyway. Example: This morning I visited everyone’s favorite time-waster, Facebook—and when I say “everyone” I mean quite literally 400 million people—and scrolled through the Newsfeed updates of people I haven’t seen or heard from in several years. I’ll be 30 years old in less than three months. Is it really important for me to know that a girl I went on two dates with once upon a time didn’t think Inception was as good as everyone has been saying or that a guy I knew in grade school had a great weekend with his in-laws at the lake? Probably not.[1] Further, the irony isn’t lost on me that when this column comes out in the new issue of InDigest, I’ll definitely be posting it and telling all these same people to “check it out.” (So…Hi, guys! Hope you’re doing well! [Like])
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by Ben Barnhart
Discussed in this article:
February
by Lisa Moore [Grove Press, 2010]
In a Perfect World
by Laura Kasischke [Harper, 2009]
Thanks for joining me in the second of these columns, which, as the title implies, focuses on books I’ve read recently. Nothing fancy going on here (except for the fabulous people who edit and write for InDigest, of course); just good books and some thoughts from me. This time around we have two novels that focus on worlds that are falling apart.
When I was fifteen I vowed to never put the words “elegiac” and “page-turner” in the same sentence, a vow I’ve had to break after reading Lisa Moore’s fantastic February. It’s cotton candy for the literarily inclined (or deep-fried cheese curds, depending on your culinary persuasion). Moore’s story takes place in Newfoundland and, like our own recent Deepwater Horizon disaster, it focuses on a tragedy tied to the extraction of oil from the ocean floor. When the Ocean Ranger capsizes and sinks just off the coast, Helen O’Mara, pregnant at the time, loses her husband, Cal, and is left to raise her young family by herself. The novel ping-pongs between that moment in 1982 and the modern day where her adult son, John, is grappling with the unexpected (and unwelcome) news that he’s about to become a father. In alternating chapters, we learn of Helen immediately after Cal’s death—a woman thrust into a role she doesn’t want and almost can’t manage—and the contemporary Helen—a portrait of grace under pressure, the single mother forced to endure a lifetime of unbelievable loss and remain standing to raise her children. Yet, Helen is anything but proper or dull, nor the kind of cinematic character we’ve come to expect from our modern take on tragedy—the zany heroine, stretching out her legs to explore an unanticipated life of freedom. Helen defies stereotypes—after a lifetime of austerity and abiding by the rules, the novel opens with her giving a jawbreaker to her grandson, in spite of the knowledge that his mother—her daughter—would forbid it, and Helen’s own knowledge that she would never have given it to her daughter.
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By Dustin Luke Nelson
Discussed in this article:
Lost Keaton: Sixteen Comedy Shorts 1934-1937
. dir. Various [Kino, 2010]
Metropolis
(1927). dir. Fritz Lang [Kino, 2003] (this is not the version discussed here)
Nostalgia is a funny thing. The way we experience nostalgia is complicated, suffice to say that there are plenty of books, essays, and discussions dedicated to the topic and the intricacies of the experience. I won’t go there, but it’s clear we experience nostalgia daily. From the eerie feeling in your stomach to déjà vu to things as commonplace and tangible as the resurgence of fashion trends. The one indisputable fact about nostalgia is that it is always altered. Every time we pull up a memory it’s slightly different, maybe imperceptibly, but it’s different than the last time you called up that memory, and different than the actual event.
We alter the fashions that we bring back into style. When musical trends come back around – like say the new wave resurgence in indie-rock a few years ago – we update them, we modernize the sound. This isn’t a bad thing at all. This is a direct dialogue with history, which is an important way of asserting individuality and finding yourself within the linearity of human existence. But this is a column about film. How does nostalgia work in film? Well, there are many ways it functions, but only two I’m particularly interested in. One: New films updating old themes. Say, pretty much anything the Coen Brothers have made. They are updates of genre pictures, gangster films, noirs, slapstick comedies Or, the second fashion being restorations. We return the films to the directors “original intentions,” we re-score, we re-discover. These are all ways of making the past important again, making it our own. Rediscovering ourselves through our interaction with the past and seeing the time in between in a new light. In a way it’s our way of asserting our authority over the past, of knowing the past better than the past knew itself, tangible evidence of our evolution. We have made some part of the past our own special product; we own it.
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by Kim Gek Lin Short
Discussed in this article:
The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits
by Kim Gek Lin Short [Tarpaulin Sky Press]
Run by Kim Gek Lin Short [Rope-a-Dope]
The Residents by Kim Gek Lin Short [Dancing Girl Press]
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What about a boy who is also a bug? Who loves a girl who is also a corpse? Or an adolescent wannabe-cowgirl in Hong Kong who’s hellbent on becoming an American singing sensation? Or the older American kidnapper who’s hellbent on fucking her? This is the way stories begin for me, with characters. What initiates the birth of these characters is a mystery—a poster of a blonde Chinese girl in a Hong Kong video rental shop, or the terrible but catchy sentimental song, “Beside You,” on Iggy Pop’s flop American Caesar. It is the creak in the stage you hear during every day’s performance, something given-up that wants to be again.
But how to make it be?
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Summer reading lists are everywhere. Everyone has a list of the ten best ____ of summer. Instead of telling you what you should be reading on humid days, or on your European vacation, or at the beach, or on the train, we’ve decided to ask some friends of InDigest what they are actually reading and enjoying this summer. Take a second to get a pen and paper, and then begin to read about all the books you’ll never have time to read.
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Meakin Armstrong: (Fiction editor at Guernica Magazine)
I’m reading the Collected Works of Gordon Lish. It’s surprising stuff–a lot of flash fiction that makes you think the writer is a younger man. Lish is older than my father, though. But from reading him I know that he’s a lot younger, too. Lish was the man who made Raymond Carver RAYMOND CARVER. But he should be better known for his own works. He deserves the capital letter treatment, too.
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