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aion-rsa · 4 years

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His Dark Materials Season 2 Episode 1 Review: The City of Magpies

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This His Dark Materials review contains spoilers. Here’s our spoiler-free review.

In our world, it’s been almost a year since Lyra and Pan stepped through the hole Lord Asriel tore in the sky. And what a year. If ever the prospect of turning your back on one reality and escaping to another were attractive, it’s now. In lieu of Asriel’s scientific equipment and what might be termed broad-minded attitude towards the moral taboo of child murder, this is our hole in the sky: courtesy of the BBC and HBO, a seven-episode trip out of here.

In episode one, His Dark Materials takes us to Cittàgazze, the city glimpsed by Asriel in the Northern Lights, where Lyra and Pan find themselves after crossing over. New world, new rules. Just when we had a grasp on one fantasy realm (human souls as talking animals, magical know-it-all gadget, ruling class of creepy church dudes…) we step into another with its own logic (no adults, no daemons, soul-sucking fog of evil, al fresco courtyard dining…). Usefully for us, the newly met Lyra and Will needed things explaining too, so we can learn at the same time.

The city turned Marie Celeste after its adults came under attack by Spectres, or floating smoke-monsters who drain grown-ups of humanity and leave them wandering, empty husks, very like the post-incision children of Bolvangar. Spectres feed only on the post-pubescent and can’t be seen by children, so, much in the style of UK tabloid newspapers, they invisibly stalk kids on the cusp, waiting for the precise moment they tip over into adulthood and become fair game. That’s where the episode one cliff-hanger left Will – pursued by a soul-sucker biding its time.

Before the monsters arrived, Lyra and Will’s scenes in Cittàgazze were a rare interlude of warmth in this chilly, cerebral story. The beautifully realised Mediterranean-style city was a picturesque backdrop for the kids’ meet-cute. Until that roiling squirm of smoke intestines showed up to remind us they were in mortal peril, for a time, there was peace. Will fixed the stand-up bath and made an ‘om-lat’, Lyra stole his bed and served him cooked eggshell (as a ward of Jordan College, she’s been waited on her whole life so doesn’t know a frying pan from a cheese grater). It was – briefly – gentle and sweet, two things in short supply elsewhere in this tale.

That’s evidenced by the continuing, twisted adventures of Mrs Coulter and the Magisterium. The sole woman among a bunch of men, Mrs Coulter is the Magisterium’s Smurfette, if that is, Smurfette had understood the heady and intoxicating power of her alien female sexuality and used it to manipulate Papa Smurf to perform her evil bidding, which, of course she did. Why else do you think she wore those shoes.

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Mrs Coulter’s manipulation of the god squad is deliciously twisted. Dressed in siren-red, with her Hedy Lamarr glamour, she has a devil’s instinct for temptation. To the priests she doesn’t stun into terrified silence by her presence alone, she pantomimes faux-subservience while clearly giving them (apologies for baseness while discussing a family show but hey, I didn’t script that ring-kissing scene) the under-the-cassock excitement of their lives.

The submarine setting gave it all more than a touch of WWII noir thriller. As dark as Cittàgazze was light, it made Mrs Coulter a Gestapo villain. Such evil. Ruth Wilson, of course, wrapped herself in those scenes like they were a Dalmatian-fur coat. She’s never channelled the role of classic baddy so fully as when slowly and deliberately removing her jewellery in preparation to torture a prisoner until they begged for death.

Death arrived in the form of the no-messing witch queen Ruta Skadi (Jade Anouka), who may have failed to convince her sisters to join her attack on The Magisterium but succeeded in both keeping the prophecy about Lyra from her mother, and making an impression on us. That was a rock-star entrance, flying through the storm, releasing Mrs Coulter’s victim from her pain, and cutting a swathe through Magisterium security before sticking one right in the Cardinal’s chest. Now Mrs Coulter’s going to finish him off – somebody add priest-murder to that woman’s ever-growing list of sins.

His Dark Materials’ witches are at their best in battle. Standing around on clifftops discussing witch admin like the even more humourless relations of The Lord of the Rings’ elves, they’re less exciting. That council of witches scene was beautiful – I mean, look at those ladies, look at those dresses – but compared to other characters, their high fantasy formality drains them of life. Now that Lee Scoresby (Lin Manuel Miranda) has his magic flower and a side mission off in search of a magical protective doohickey, let’s hope the witches only show up to dish out more high-speed ass-kickings.

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Overall, ‘The City of Magpies’ is a confident opener on an impressive scale. It keeps the momentum of the finale going while leaving enough space around Lyra and Will’s first meeting to let us get close to them before they’re swept up by the plot. Outside, the storm clouds of Destiny, a Mighty Battle, and all that capital letter fantasy stuff are swirling, but the cautiously developing intimacy of those two gives us that all-important emotional reason to take their side in the fight to come.

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artandanthropology-blog1 · 7 years

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POLITICS, PLAY, AND ART: DOCUMENTING “AFGHANISTAN,” BY MICHAEL TAUSSIG

May 3, 2014

In Kabul early June 2010 I slept behind massive concrete bunkers and five pat-downs by scowling security guards every time I entered the hotel. They looked at me as a potential suicide bomber and I looked at them the same way. They would act mean and they would act efficient, better than professional actors. It was game we played, all five hands many times a day just to get in and get out, never knowing whom to trust. I played a game of badminton out on the lawn there with young Tom Francis but after a few tries was mystified and frightened to learn that I could not coordinate my body. Every time I threw the shuttlecock in the air to serve, I missed it, and with that realized I was missing an awful lot of other things, as well, not so much about Afghanistan and the wars there as how to “come to grips” with that, meaning in the first instance frame it and talk about it, meaning how to “serve” it.

“Very disorganized,” pouted the German ambassador after his fourth attempt to get a cup of iced mint tea in our bunkered luxury hotel. Was he also referring to what he perceived as our foolish mission “making art” in Afghanistan?

After all anyone with the slightest acumen knew there was no way out of the hopelessly routinized way the West talked to itself about Afghanistan, moving the pieces around the same old chess board that had been used for Iraq and before that . . . Kipling had referred to this stretch of territory as subject to the Great Game between super powers, and you really had to wonder if what we were now inside of was not a variant of that same game with three men slugging it out--Bin Laden, Bush, and Cheney—collapsing world historical forces into grotesque puppetry of good and evil awash in billions of dollars especially for Cheney’s old outfit by name of Haliburton. Everyone sensed this but in the chaos of mixed motives, secrecy, deceit, short-term necessities, and games concealing other games, the more you tried to figure it out, the more it slipped through your fingers. Truth was a grey mist of rumor, guerrilla tactics, and entangled bureaucracy made mistier still by the certainties propounded daily by the experts. Truth was make-believe. All “very disorganized,” that’s for sure, something that Francis Alys, with that great calm he exudes, must have felt in his eight trips to Afghanistan since 2010.

In this situation “making art,” as with his Reel-Unreel and Color Bars, suggests a way out of the game. Both of these works are about games, too, if not games, themselves. It could not be otherwise. The first is about two kids racing through the streets of Kabul using film reels as hoops, the other is about the game armies love to play with stripes of color as with medals and, in this case, with the blazons troops wear on their upper sleeve ostensibly for identification but also, surely, to ward off evil spirits.

But first, to get a sense of what’s required to get in close to make such art, think of how foreign journalists work in this situation of danger and fluid boundaries. They need a “fixer,” someone who speaks English as well as a couple of Afghani languages and has, as they say, “connections.” In 2010 I was told a good fixer cost 150-250 USD a day, 1,000 for an interview with a Talib. A somewhat unsettling term, the “fixer” hovers between a cluster of words like translator, prostitute, pimp, sleuth, and anthropologist. It is a highly risky occupation. But then so is being a foreign journalist and photographer. The journalists I met were usually young, under twenty five, stunningly smart, not yet jaded, still overcome by the enormity of it all, and great risk-takers, such that I could never understand why the material they had published by their editors back in London or New York always sounded the same no matter who wrote it or what it was about, a regular sausage machine with a dash of “human interest” like death and torture thrown in.

There was a pale slender woman wearing a blue chador down to her ankles, her face largely uncovered, waiting on the tarmac at Heart on the Iranian border for the flight to Kabul. She was a Dutch journalist going to cover the assembly of (all male) tribal elders June 3rd, rumor being that Kabul would be attacked by some Taliban instigated suicide bombers. “Boring,” she said, referring to these assemblies. She bore the face of a saint, the grace, too. Her eyes were tired. She had been on the beat for years; Cambodia, East Timor, Iraq, and now Afghanistan. “Iraq fatigue,” she explained, was what was preventing the translation of her book on Baghdad into English. This trip started three months ago. In her chador she looks at home here. In Herat she was researching the suicide in 2003 of a woman writer. She works for the Dutch weeklies, she told me, describing her work as “slow journalism,” which I guess evaded the worst of the sausage machine, like Michael Herr was able to do, writing on the war in Vietnam at his own pace for Esquire magazine in the 1960s. His book Dispatches is generally considered one of the finest if not the best book on that war from the viewpoint of the American soldier. Fredric Jameson, wrote somewhere that it changed our very language. It is hard to imagine that happening today. The very soul has been sucked out of representation. Not even irony and cynicism can get a toehold.

Which brings us to art, or “art,” as James Agee, that untamed genius of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, would have put it, “art” being something he abhorred in the writing and photography of the poor when he accepted a commission to report on the condition of white share-croppers in Alabama in the 1930s.

On one of his eight trips Francis was “embedded” for fifteen days as an artist in five “forward operating bases” with UK forces (the US would not accept him) in Helmand province. It was then when he got the idea for his “color bar” drawings of the “tactical recognition flashes” these British soldiers wore on their upper left sleeve. Why make “art” out of these flashes and, anyway, why are they called “flashes”? Listening to the artist I get the idea that the basic simplicity of the flashes—these little patches of stripes of color--is a catharsis from the bewildering overload of conflicting information that “Afghanistan” generates. Yet does not such simplicity succeed through its combining simplicity with abstraction that is not simple at all? It is a catharsis because the simplicity is too simple. It is a mystery. In other words despite the staid, ever-reliable, stolidity of the flashes, they are actually just that, “flashes” of this and that like fireflies in the night-land that is Afghanistan.

Show color bars

From the moment I met him, Francis struck me as an odd bird. A flash, you might say. A firefly, for sure. Blessed with an ever surprising imagination, he was searingly practical, as well. If Charles Fourier needed an engineer to construct his utopias, well, here he was! Francis took in detail like a sponge and, more than that, saw connections and patterns in the eye of the hurricane dissolving all patterns. Meticulous and cerebral as his work is, it owes much to children’s games. “They are a major source of inspiration in my work,” he once told me, adding that he had to date made at least fifteen videos of kids’ games (which you can see as s the first item on his web site).

Does this mean his work is generally “childish”? Well, yes. And no. Is Magritte childish? Or Duchamp? It is childish in its studied innocence and self-absorption, cut off from the busy world of the adults, the pesky mothers and the demanding fathers. Like a children’s game it sails off into uncharted seas—and by children’s games I mean the games children have played with each other for a long, long, time, not the one’s invented by adults such as video games generally isolating the child from other children and from their own bodies.

Actually I first met not him but his shadow or empty space because he had disappeared, causing our chaperone all manner of anxiety. Like a naughty child he had played hooky to wander around threatening Kabul with his newly found architect Afghani friend, thereby manifesting yet again his ceaseless curiosity as to the ways of the world. You could see that curiosity in the marvelous photographs he would send you on email of our travels together, shots you would carefully archive, as much for their aesthetic power as for what they were about. You could see that in the “extra mile” he would go to get some other view, that extra question, that extra immersion, that comes to fill the notebook.

Much if not most of Francis’ artwork involves games in which exchange and circulation recur, invoking the idea of the gift in the circuitry of the social. “Work” as in “artwork” is somewhat of a misnomer for this art. “Art-game” would be more appropriate and that is why—and how—these artworks are so often overworked jokes, as with the artwork called Watercolor, a video 1:19 minutes in length, in which a plastic pail of water dipped into the Black Sea in Turkey is taken and emptied into the Red Sea in Jordan. That’s it, Watercolor! 1:19 minutes. But how long did it take to travel from The Black Sea to the Red?

This humor—uncovering exchange circuits that were not obvious before the artwork--is immediately apparent in le temps de sommeil (“the time of sleep”), 111 little paintings (roughly seven inches by five inches) created between 1996 and 2009, exhibited in the Irish Museum of Modern Art and published as a small book in 2010. The exchanges depicted may be between objects, such as pouring the contents of one glass into another, back and forth, or they may involve uncanny dimensions of the social world, as evident in the very last item in this book, “I will wander in the streets of Tokyo until someone calls my name.”

The most significant gift involving exchange and circulation, however, occurs at the meta-level wherein the painting on one page is juxtaposed with a short text of one or two lines on the page facing, the connection being—how shall I put this?—a gift exchange between image and text, barely a connection, a “flash,” we could say, yet in its tenuous fragility just right, meaning more than right, making you stare at the painting and then back again to the statement, your mind never still, oscillating, like playing badminton.

One or two openings in the le temps de sommeil book

There is another “childish” aspect to this and that lies with the very character of the drawings, deceptively simple, petite, sketchy, impish and wistful. As for the gift in this back and forth, it kick starts the process of exchange and circulation wherein one side—the image, for instance—offers itself as a gift to the other, meaning the text, for instance. And then there is the return gift, the fruit or reward of the interchange, creating that surplus which perforce becomes metamorphic of the text-image mix. Bataille’s notion of depense or unproductive expenditure comes to mind, depense itself being indispensable to gaming.

Are children’s games dying out, like a threatened species? Are the streets the world over ever more empty of kids playing—except for the poor parts of town and poor parts of the world, like Afghanistan? Have our cityscapes become ever more denuded and less sonorous with the cries of children replaced by cars and trucks? I look back at my own childhood in Sydney and certainly see this evolution, which sets me to wonder about the history of children’s games and toys.

In his Centuries of Childhood, for instance, Philippe Aries argues that childhood in western Europe is an invention of the late seventeenth century and that before then children were little adults, as testified by Velasquez’ Las Meninas, which is what I observe in rural Colombia also. But what does that imply for our understanding of toys and play? “Little adults” were surely not averse to play even if the “cult” of childhood had not been invented.

Benjamin, for example, whose work—like that of Francis Alys—can be seen as one big toy, a toy of theory--was entranced by children’s toys which he saw as in continuous negotiation with the world of adults, including adults’ notion of play and of childhood! Above all he insisted that the locus of joy and fascination with toys lay in the child’s love of mimesis and the body more than in the toy itself, as when he writes that “a child wants to pull something, and so he becomes a horse; he wants to play with sand, and so he turns into a baker; he wants to hide, and so he turns into a robber or a policeman.” (1)

I cannot but think of Francis pushing his block of ice through Mexico City.

And as regards the age and origins of toys, Benjamin suggests that the baby rattle has its origin in the need to ward off evil spirits and that hoops, kites, balls, and spinning tops were once what he calls cult objects. The spinning top is the main “character” in the Jose Maria Arguedas’ novel, Los ríos profundos, set in the highlands of Peru mid-twentieth century. The spinning top that the children play become not only animated, it becomes human-like and, more than that, a spirit that coordinates the narrative and unfolding events. In his book on play, Roger Caillois states that hopscotch, commonly played in the street or in the schoolyard, derives from the labyrinth in which one pushed a stone—meaning one’s soul—towards the exit. With Christianity the labyrinth took the form of the basilica and the exit was heaven. (2)

So where does that put Francis’ ice-block pushed into nothingness through the labyrinth of the third world city? What does this latest manifestation of the labyrinth say about our long forgotten connections to ancient mythology and to forgetting?

To invoke history and pre-history is to also ask if Francis’ work is inspired not so much by children’s games as by their world historical loss? I myself think this is so. As Benjamin says in relation to he art of the storyteller, it would be fatuous to see this merely as a symptom of decay and of modernization. Instead this loss is a symptom of the secular forces of economic production combined with the loss of narrative from the realm of living speech, “making it possible to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.” (3) Is it therefore all that surprising that our architect-artist from western Europe who has chosen to live in Mexico City would be sensitive to this “new beauty in what is vanishing.”

But what about screens? What about kids glued to video games and computers the world over? Is this not a sign that gaming is alive and well, at least electronically? In which case what do you make of the elimination of the body from such games?

Bodily involvement is starkly obvious in all Francis’ movies of children’s games, especially and gut wrenchingly so in Papalote (4:10 minutes) set in Balkh, Afghanistan, featuring a ten year old boy flying a kite. The involvement of the body is overwhelming yet as finely wrought as a mirage. Against a dun colored adobe wall, standing under a powder blue sky, the boy wears a pinkish trouser suit. He is gesticulating like crazy, emitting frenzied gesture language, conversing in stops and starts with the heavens or at least with the gusting wind because you never see the kite and because the string is so fine you can’t see that either. All you see--what you see--is the body in action with unknown forces, pulling to the left, pulling to the right, up, down, quick, over to the left again, and so on and on. The body is all the more obvious because it is connected like this to the coursing wind by an invisible string. This is not only the body of the boy but the body of the world in a deft mimesis of each other, amounting to what I call “the mastery of non-mastery” which, after all, is the greatest game of all, a guide, a goal, a strategy—all in one—for dealing with man’s domination of nature (including human nature).

An analogous trick—or should we call it a game?—makes mesmerizing magic out of the game “Rock, Paper, Scissors” (2:51 minutes). Here we see not the hands themselves but their shadows on a whitish background as the two antagonists play with that tremendous skill that only kids can muster in what seems impossibly fast motion; the clenched fist of “rock,” the two open fingers of “scissors,” and the flat hand of “paper.” “Conceptual art,” you say, the kind you could watch for hours, the hands as synecdoche not of the body but of the two bodies in a controlled frenzy of elegant interaction and dissolution.

I wonder what the Taliban attitudes are towards children’s games like this, let alone towards videos thereof? But as we quickly learned once we got to Afghanistan in 2010 there is more than one “Taliban” and the ban on images is hardly uniform or coherent. But then, what is an “image”?

The Director the National Museum in Kabul, elegant in a fawn linen suit and golden tie, explained how in 1996 he had personally painted flowers and trees in watercolors over paintings with human and animal figures in the museum to protect the paintings before the Taliban came and smashed all the statues. Someone else ventured that the ban on image-making meant you couldn’t image animate beings and suggested breathing as the criterion of such animatedness. I was also told that the Taliban forbade photography and xeroxing—except for those things indispensable for state control, IDs and passports.

In the longest and most ambitious of the Afghan videos, Reel-Unreel, the notion of animate is really put to the Taliban test, as well as testing, in ways delightful and exploratory, western notions of what animate might encompass. Thanks to the skill and derring-do of two boys spinning film reels like hoops as fast as they can, the pixilated multitude that is Kabul springs to life as the camera follows the boys’ will-o’-the-wisp chase, aimless—completely aimless--except for the mad intensity with which the boy behind races to keep up with the boy some twenty feet in front, and the boy in front races to keep ahead of the one twenty feet behind. Could this be an allegory for that which is today called “Afghanistan,” meaning the continuous state of siege constituting that game in which the more you know, the less you know? Blind Man’s Buff also comes to mind. One is tempted to invoke the “cult objects” idea of hoops and kites, let alone rattles.

Like earlier works by Francis, such as the magnetic shoes and the magnetic “horse” he set perambulating the streets of Havana and Mexico City, attracting all manner of metallic debris, Reel-Unreel similarly attracts all manner of “debris.” In these and many if not most of his artwork, Francis seems to have set into motion Michel de Certeau’s principle of “walking the city” and Walter Benjamin’s idea of colportage--by which is meant the art that combines walking the city with filmic montage and with taking hashish. (4)

The two boys and their two reels, are bound together. The boy in front has his reel unwinding its load of celluloid film while the one behind winds it on to his reel at pretty much the same frenzied pace. It seems like this is film that has been developed and has frames with pictures, as we see when a boy holds up a segment to the light to look at the images therein. As for “debris,” much is made in this work of the destruction of the film and its picking up scratches and dirt as it slithers, snake-like, along the rough ground. This is above all a sonic phenomenon with scratching, screeching, sound, matter-in-torment, at once playful and sinister, at other times a whiplash. You ask yourself, “Is this unconsciously playing with Taliban prohibition of film? Is it another way of filmmaking and un-filmmaking?”

Certainly Reel-Unreel offers an unusual perspective on reality for not only does it animate the landscapes through which the reels pass, but it often does this at knee-height, the height of the boys and the height of the reels bouncing their ways precariously though thick and thin. This is political filmmaking in a new key, the perspective from the ground up with wheels in motion. It is up to you, the viewer, to decide whether this be the wheels of Nietzche’s Eternal Return, Marx’s locomotive of history, or a Deleuzian post-Nietzchean “becoming intense, becoming animal . . ,” or—heaven forbid--something you make up yourself.

In The Accursed Share, Bataille makes a big point about war in the twentieth century being the privileged instance of depense—of spending the surplus in orgies of waste displacing by far Roman Carnival with its bread and circuses and Aztec sacrifice with its thousands of victims offered the gods. Now entering its thirteenth year, that gargantuan spending spree of life and treasure (not money but “treasure,” as they say repeatedly in the US Senate) the US led war in Afghanistan surely qualifies as the Great Depense as much as the Great Game.

Kipling narrated this game through a young boy, Kimball O Hara, just as Francis Alys has the two boys chasing each other over the mountains and choked streets of Kabul, only his game and the boys’ game auto-cannibalises narration. It is, as Bataille would have it in his essay on Van Gogh and the sacred dimension of auto-mutilation, the practice of self-sacrifice of narration and of the very idea of a purpose—which is, after all, what you need to make sense. A sense of purpose, that is. There is no beginning and no end to Reel-Unreel, just this mad breathless chase to no purpose other than itself. After all, the very title cleverly expresses just this. One would also like to say that the tension is not only intense but continuous. Yet like the state of exception/emergency it is not so much continuous, not so much like the river flowing, as it is staggered and chaotic, with each “moment” a world on its own and unpredictable from what was before and what comes after. Differential calculus on mescaline, what I elsewhere call “the nervous system.” But yes!, there is an end, when the leading reel plunges to its destruction over a cliff. That is sacrifice. But this end is totally unexpected, more a nervous system collapse than an ending. Game Over.

mick taussig greene ave brooklyn

1. ‘The Cultural History of Toys,” in Selected Writings, Vol 2, p. 115. See also Jeffrey Mehlman, Walter Benjamin for Children, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) 1993.

2. Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press), 2001 [1958].

3. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken), 1968, p. 87.

4. Michel de Certeau, “Walking In The City,” in The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press); on colportage see “Chronology” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Works, Vol 2 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 1999, p. 255, 827.

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