Lars Iyer's Blog, page 17

Here's the review from Booklist (hard copy only):

Nietzsche and the Burbs. By Lars Iyer Dec. 2019. 352p. Melville, paper, $16.99 (9781612198125) 

Paula, Art, Merv, and Chandra���a coterie of sixth-formers in a British secondary school, would-be nihilists in training wheels. When they discover the new boy in school is himself a nihilist, a philosopher manqu��, they quickly adopt him, dubbing him Nietzsche, inviting him to join their band as singer, and naming the band Nietzsche and the Burbs. Ah, the burbs, the focus of their sneering attention, their cynicism, their conviction that, though they might escape them temporarily, they will ultimately wind up back in their clutches. Their story, which takes place over the course of 10 weeks, is narrated by Chandra in a vaguely stream-of-consciousness voice replete with sentence fragments, omnipresent snippets of burbs philosophy, and extended conversation among the coterie. Nietzsche himself has little to say except for his pithy blog posts: e.g., ���Perpetual imminence. Eventless events. Nothing happening except for this nothing is happening.��� What is the book about? The kids��� quotidian school life, the occasional party, drinking, and Nietzsche���the real one, not the intriguing imitation. The limited action leads up to a denouement: an actual public performance by the band. Does it go well? Let���s just say readers won���t be surprised by the answer. How closely fictional Nietzsche is meant to resemble the real thing is moot except for the fact that the fictional one has gone off his meds. Uh-oh. Some readers may find the often-allusive book too clever by half; others will delight in its wit. In either case, the book is a model of originality. Clever, indeed. ��� Michael Cart 

First reviews for Nietzsche and the Burbs (due to be published in December 2019).

'A funny campus novel about despair��� dark, brooding fun'. Kirkus Reviews

'Devastatingly withering'. Publishers Weekly

Do you find collaborating more enjoyable than working on your own?

The reason that I do this is to discover, create, reveal and/or maintain connections with others. So collaboration is the pinnacle of musical experience. A couple of years ago, I made a record almost completely by myself. Then I played a heap of shows as a solo performer. In order for any of this activity to make sense to me, I needed to frame it as a deliberate and desperate act, as if I had come to the edge of a cliff at the end of the world with only one obvious exit.

Then I needed to look around and realize that there was another way, there were invisible collaborators who could airlift me out of that peril. These invisibles were/are the audience. I used to create music for an imagined audience, but I realized recently that I could accept that the audience was no longer imagined. They have become active collaborators. So that when I am on stage ���by myself��� making music ���alone���, in reality I am engaged in an active creative dialogue with the audience. They are completing the music then and there.

Will Oldham, interviewed

The drive, for me, in making music is not to express myself but to participate with others, including (and at times even especially) the audience/listener.

Will Oldham, interviewed.

We sit in front of the TV until 10:00.  We watch the press conference with Schranz.  I top off Thomas���s glass of mulled wine, make remarks and comments several times, but Thomas maintains his icy silence for 2 �� hours.  I can���t believe it���s impossible to dispel his sullenness; I���m intent on at least getting a peep out of him.  When the announcer on the television says that Karl Schranz is going to be flying to Innsbruck, I say: Schranz should have a fatal crash tomorrow; he reached his high point now; that would be the finest exit for him. Because in the future things can only go downhill for him.  I was expecting at least a nod from Thomas, because death is his pet topic, and Thomas smiles or smirks like a shot at everything that has to do with death or has some connection with death.  He remained icy.  At 10:00 he stood up, said ���Good night��� to my family.  I accompanied him to the front door.  Ordinarily I walk with him to his parking space as we chat; this time I stayed put at the front door and said ���Good night��� only belatedly.  You see, he left without making any kind of salutation.

Karl Ignaz Hennetmair, from A Year With Thomas Bernhard, translated by Douglas Robertson

Out in December.

... there is also a sense in which Mishima wants Japan to be in decline so that he can be its last defiant hero, a kamikaze of Japanese beauty. I read his entire project - in which I include his literary genres, his essays and critical writings, his public lectures and media appearances, and his violent suicide - as a single, sustained decadent lyric that ironically flaunts its own contradictions and its futility. Mishima's work is suffused with a sense of ending - the end of art, the end of eroticism, the end of culture, the end of the world - and it conforms to a decadent aestheticism that holds that beautiful things radiate their most intense beauty on the cusp of their destruction. 

... Mishima does not rush toward death. On the contrary, he takes his time. Assiduously and manipulatively he constructs a narrative that will enable him to give a logical cohesiveness to his character, to link himself to myth and to tradition, to turn his eroticism into an ethical obligation, and to make his death serve as the terrorist culmination of his desire to impose his conception of beauty on the world, whether the world likes it or not. 

[...] Mishima's death is, in obvious ways, the culmination of his life's work and of all the aspects of his thinking that we have investigated in this book. His extreme aestheticism, his narcissism, his eroticism, his desire to transcend modernity and link to the spirit of Japan's classical literature, to turn himself into a sublime object, and his compulsion toward crime, toward evil, and toward the divine terror, all achieve their clearest expression and, we must assume, their personal fulfillment. Mishima's death also affects a permanent change on his literary works, every one of which now appears to point inevitably to this moment, as if every word he had written was posthumous. Through originality in the arrangement of his fate, Mishima has given his work a seemingly indestructible cohesion.

As for Morita's role, on the level of psychodrama it is best to think of him as alternative Hiraoka [Hiraoka was Mishima's original name - Lars]. A Hiraoka free of artistic sensibility, with no interest in literature at all. A strong and healthy and happy Hiraoka. A Hiraoka who passed the military inspection and joined the Imperial Army. A heterosexual Hiraoka. This Hiraoka becomes Mishima's executioner.

The question that is always asked about Mishima is: was he sincere or was he acting? This really equates to asking: Is it real or is it art? But in Mishima's case, as I have tried to show, this is a nonquestion. For Mishima, art is not the opposite of reality. Art for him is a different kind of reality. Mishima represents an apotheosis  of the Nietzschean idea that life can be justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon. His act of aesthetic terrorism was not a failed coup d'��tat but a triumphant coup de th����tre, a spectacular piece of performance art that was simultaneously a radical anti-artistic gesture. Mishima believed that he had taken the idea of life as art to its extreme point, beyond which no one could go any further.

Jean Baudrillard says, 'The supreme consecration for a work: to be realised by the very event that destroys it'. Mishima has surely done more than this. The supreme consecration for an artist: to be destroyed by the very event that realises and completes his entire life's work.

An artist who actualises all his creative possibilities, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, and succeeds - through the pure realization of a will to power that will not yield to anything in this world - in condensing them into a single momentous even, the effect of which is so beautiful yet so shocking that those who contemplate it are left wondering whether it is a work of art or an act of madness, has surely achieved a masterpiece of some kind. It is, as Mishima intended it to be, a cruel and defiant masterpiece: a terror attack on the modern consciousness, a warning to the 'last humans', and a challenge to all those coming after Mishima who would dare to call themselves artists. 

Transcription mostly from the final, brilliant pages of Andrew Rankin's Mishima: Aesthetic Terrorist

... the coupling of art and terrorism is not perverse. Acts of terrorism are calculated displays of violence that speak to us through their impact on our senses. Visually spectacular and highly dramatic, often they seem to blur or reject conventional distinctions between performance and reality. This, of course, is a feature they share with modern art. Modern artists challenged the boundary between art and reality because they realised that they were addressing an audience whose sensitivity to act had atrophied. The shock tactics of modern art have been an attempt to stall this process of atrophy, to resuscitate art's magical communicative power. What drives modern artists to utilize 'terroristic' tactics is the ambition to overcome what Mishima calls 'the hell of relativity': the loss of absolute values, the transfer of art into the realm of aesthetics, the disconnectedness of artists from their material, from tradition, and from modern audiences who seemed to have grown immune to art.

... from shock to terror is not great step, and the dream of making a work of art that will dangerously overwhelm both the audience who experiences it and the artist who makes it has a great appeal to a certain kind of visionary mind. Mishima, acutely aware of sickly, wilting Japanese writers imploding under the pressure of art, determines to break this stereotype by shockingly and triumphantly exploding into his art. To that end, the modern tradition of Japanese terrorism offers him an ideal template for his project. As he observes, 'The ideology of Japanese terrorism is charaterised by its intimate bond to the ideology of suicide'.

[...] while Mishima hyperbolizes the issue of the emperor's divinity, there is no question that the humanization of the emperor after the war was a momentous event in the spiritual history of modern japan. People ought to have been stricken with panic, yet superficially they carried on as if it were merely a minor readjustment. It is this evasiveness, this willful repression of collective memory, that Mishima wants to attack. His intention is not just to melodramatize the trauma of the loss of the emperor as a value-guaranteeing absolute, but to insist that Japan's experience of this loss has not been traumatic enough. 

As Japan approached what many were hailing as the completion of its astonishingly rapid process of modernization and democratization after the Wesern model. Mishima taunted Japan by lauding aspects of its history and traditions that seemed most at odds with that process: aggressive ultranationalism, military glory, samurai ethics, ritual suicide, the way of the sword, religious reverence of the emperor, the ancient myths of violence and insurrection, the kamikaze, and so on.

[...] 'I refuse to believe in the future', declared Mishima in one of his many media interviews, 'I prefer to think that I carry all of tradition on my shoulders, and that literature will end with me'. Mishima's chief inspiration for this attitude was Hagakure, which instructs samurai to deepen their experience of the present by giving no thought for the future. 'Only the weak put their hopes in the future', says Mishima, 'only people who think of themselves as processes'. Refusing to believe in the future does not, he insists, mean living only in the present moment: 'We must think of ourselves as the result of many generations of culture and tradition, in order to perform our present work fully'.

But even as he says this, Mishima repeatedly portrays Japan as a culture in decline. His final statements are full of gloomy prophesies:

I no longer have any great hopes for Japan. each day deepens my feeling that Japan is ceasing to be Japan. Soon Japan will vanish altogether. In its place, all that will remain is an inorganic, empty, neutral, drab, wealthy, scheming, economic giant in a corner of the Far East. I will not listen any longer to people who are content with that prospect.

[...] we are the last humans, and there's nothing any of us can do about it. 

Andrew Rankin, Mishima: Aesthetic Terrorist [At last - a book worthy of its subject.]

When Murakawa/ Beat Takeshi puts the gun to his head and pulls the trigger, he displays a wholly anomalous grin, which, to his underlings, proces more frightening or disturbing than the act itself. 

Elena del Rio, The Grace of Destruction

The face of Beat Takeshi, playing Murakawa, transcends the category of realism ... [His] grin is like some sort of existentially alien substance that expresses the sheer anomality of Murakawa's flirtation with death.... On a superficial level, it seems that Takeshi is merely 'wearing' this grin.... His grin has a strange intensity, as if to dispel any meaning in excess of the grin itself.... it is nothing beyond a grin, transcending the viewer's ability to judge whether it is merely a shallow grin or a laugh from the depths of Murakawa's existence that has heretofore simply been suppressed.

Casio Abe, Beat Takeshi vs Takeshi Kitano

Kitano's films are largely built around his own body's formidable presence as the leading actor in most of his films. Beat Takeshi, Takeshi's acting name, becomes the image of a wounded masculinity in two intersecting ways: through the pursuit or experience of death, and through a consistent performance of exhaustion as the affect that allows for the commingling of life and death in one single body. [...]

The most characteristic imagine of Beat Takeshi in many of the films where he plays a tough, yet affectively wounded yakuza (or ex-cop) [....] is a frontal, purely exhibitionistic shot of his body dressed in a black Armani suit and white shirt, and wearing shades. His hands are either kept in his pockets in a relaxed stance or they are brandishing a gun at somebody in utter confidence of his shooting powers. His expression is invariably deadpan, and, as such, beyond sadness. 

Elena del Rio, The Grace of Destruction

Beat Takeshi is always fatigued in his movies. His roles never require him to act lively.... Sonatine's Murakawa appears to have already passed beyond the state of exhaustion [found in Boiling Point's Uehara]. He does not ahve sexual intercourse in this film ... he has already fallen into a state of sexual impotence.

Casio Abe, Beat Takeshi vs Takeshi Kitano