There is a shrine in one corner of the current location of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s Dream House, at 275 Church Street, in Manhattan’s TriBeCa, dedicated to two individuals without whom the Dream House would not exist: their teacher and guru Pandit Pran Nath, and above him, on the wall, one of the few extant photographs of Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan, who was Pandit Pran Nath’s own teacher.

But perhaps “teacher” isn’t the right word. When Pandit Pran Nath first left home in Lahore, in his early teens, and approached the Ustad, who lived in the same city, he was roundly rejected. Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan, for one thing, was not into taking on Hindu students — he is on record as having objected vocally to his more famous cousin and contemporary Ustad Abdul Karim Khan’s unusual practice of accepting Hindu, especially Brahmin students to his innovative neo-gurukul, the Arya Sangeet Vidyalaya, in Poona. For another, he was just extremely old-school and of a markedly quietist Sufi bent: he refused to be recorded (the music in this short clip is from a radio session secretly recorded by a sound engineer at All India Radio in 1947), rarely performed publicly, resisted the modernizing, reformist adaptations and adjustments that Ustad Abdul Karim Khan embraced, and was just a generally thorny individual. Pandit Pran Nath used to say to his students — not without a sense of pride — that the poor hearing he had in one of his ears was due to the beatings that he received regularly during a very rough apprenticeship — one that began with years of menial service to the household and only gradually moved into explicitly musical matters.

Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan’s style, like Pandit Pran Nath’s, tends toward the epic and glacially slow: he preferred the ati vilambit (or super-slow) and the alap, or unmeasured introductory section to a raga. For singers of the Kirana gharana, the alap section is infused with a deep and esoteric mysticism that, by both its very nature and by the stringent demands of discipleship, is not something that can be or should be discussed openly, on the internet or anywhere else. Sound is God, said Pandit Pran Nath, and that much you may know just from listening to this brief sample of his rendition of the austere, architectonic nighttime raga Darbari. This is precisely the sort of raga that Kirana khayal singers excel at: grave and powerful, and extremely difficult to master — and when mastered capable of delivering intense emotional and physical effects. When I spoke with La Monte Young about my interest in the Kirana gharana, the first question he asked me was whether I had heard the recording of Abdul Wahid Khan from which this is taken. I know he considers it one of the most important recordings ever made by any artist. According to gharana lore, the reclusive Ustad only practiced two ragas: Todi in the morning and Darbari at night, and that when he was asked why, he answered that if morning were to last forever he would drop the Darbari.

Slow tempos, sustained tones, sonic sacrifice to the Unseen, discipleship and soul-shattering aural gnosis? Thank God the sun sets, and night comes.

Walter De Maria: “Ocean Music” (1968) via UbuWeb

This is the first installment of what will be a series of posts to music I listened to and learned from during months of researching my piece on Pandit Pran Nath in the current issue of Bidoun. There will be everything from deep dhrupad to raucous No Wave, with much time spent in the middle, not to mention along oxbows and the trackless backwaters… However, no time will be spent linking to file-sharing sites, except in the case of recordings that have passed into the public domain somehow or other. The reason is that I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to many of these artists, sometimes directly and personally, for their help and inspiration. I know that many of them feel stolen from because of the file-sharing that’s done by people who, after all, usually are ardent fans of their music. It is a weird paradox. Please support these artists by buying their work! They deserve no less.

I’m starting in medias res — like Dante — and in a peculiar corner that nevertheless invokes, I think in a beautiful and completely trippy way, an entire scene and sensibility.  It is something of a prelude to the main event, just to test the engines, although like the “chorister whose c preceded the choir. It was part of the colossal sun.” This is Walter De Maria’s “Ocean Music” from 1968, available on Ubuweb. De Maria is usually known as the “Lightning Field” guy, and this is understandable because the Lightning Field, from 1978, is incredibly sublime and, in my opinion, is easily one of the most important art works of the post-war era. That said, De Maria did a lot of other very interesting, and completely different things, including his two well-known permanent installations in New York from the late 70s, both of them in Soho: Earth Room, and The Broken Kilometer. What is less well known is that he was also a musician and composer, and came to New York from Berkeley about the same time as his friend La Monte Young, around 1959, did some sculpture and early conceptual works (the term concept art was coined by his friend and sometime band mate Henry Flynt), organized happenings, and performed on drums with the proto-Velvet Underground band called The Primitives, as well as with La Monte’s seminal and intense mid-60s group the Theatre of Eternal Music alongside Angus Maclise, Tony Conrad, and John Cale. De Maria’s drumming pulses without apparent time meter — achieving a kind of stasis-in-flux that you see in a lot of La Monte’s music as well — much more so than Angus Maclise, whose music tends more toward neo-pagan psychedelia and ritual frenzy.

By the time Pandit Pran Nath took up residence in New York, in 1971, De Maria had stopped playing music, but he was part of the same circle, and must have seen him perform many times. Like I said, this is an oblique beginning to the Pandit Pran Nath music series, but I think it is a really great example of where avant-garde music was headed, at least among the New York downtown composers, musicians and artists associated with La Monte Young, just on the eve of Pandit Pran Nath’s arrival on the scene.

In “Ocean Music” from 1968, we start with a very mundane, ambient field recording of ocean sounds, but it doesn’t linger there long, at least not only there.  The sound begins to blend, at first imperceptibly, with De Maria’s wash of percussion. Then things start to get fairly psychedelic with some overtones and other apparent effects kicking in and taking it to a whole different place. Like a Hindustani alap, it starts slow but builds in intensity toward a full-on secular re-enchantment, an aesthetically induced state of kenosis, an exhilaration mingled with awe. The music so clearly points at the impending Land Art scene — in which he was about to play a major role — and toward the Earth Room, the first iteration of which was installed in Heiner Friedrich’s Munich gallery in 1968, the year of this recording. This was the last sound recording De Maria made, to my knowledge — I would love to find out that I am wrong — and it was used as part of the soundtrack to his 1969 film Hard Core a post-Spaghetti Western that itself slowly builds from mundane realia to post-minimalist freakout — a film that stands quietly alongside, or somewhere between the space-cowboy post-westerns of Jodorowsky and Hellman.

But De Maria is a Thoreauvian at heart, perhaps by way of Wallace Stevens, an American gnostic and desert-rat, a searcher after the effectual Real hidden behind appearances, an advocate of moments of rupture, of earthquake epiphanies and transcendent states of consciousness. His invisibility on the present day art scene is self-imposed and deliberate, but from what I hear he is not a recluse, and he visits the Earth Room regularly in Soho. So should you! I’m writing about his work as part of a forthcoming Bidoun piece — the follow-up to the Pandit Pran Nath profile — an essay that takes on the rise and shattering fall of the first ten years at Dia Art Foundation, from its cryptic founding in 1974 to its very public collapse and rebirth in 1985. Meanwhile, stay tuned for more music!

“In the extreme south-west, behind Umbari, stands the sharp clear-cut cliff known as the Duke’s Nose or Nagphani that is the Cobra’s Hood. The likeness in the outline of this rock to the Duke of Wellington’s nose, the head lying back on the hill side, is best seen from near Lonavla. The overhanging point and side rocks which make the peak look like a cobra in act to strike are said to be best seen from near Khopivli or Campoli at the mouth of the Bor pass.”

Found image from a google books scan of Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Volume 18, Part 3, my source for the text on the Duke's Nose.

]]> http://www.mansishah.net/browntown/3210/feed 0 http://www.mansishah.net/browntown/3449 http://www.mansishah.net/browntown/3449#comments Sat, 20 Mar 2010 14:00:31 +0000 Alexander Keefe http://www.mansishah.net/browntown/?p=3449 Shameless self-promotion: please check out my just-published story on Pandit Pran Nath, written for the wonderful folks at Bidoun Magazine, who were kind enough to post it in its entirety online, along with some great photos shared by the incomparable La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. Here’s the teaser…

First comes the drone of the sci-fi supercharged tamburas, fluxing and oscillating, too high up in the mix for the bureaucrats and professors at All India Radio, way too high. It’s like the rush of a marsh on a midsummer night with a million crickets, or the howling wind stirring the power lines outside a cabin in backwoods Idaho, or the hushed roar of the stream in front of a hermit’s cave above Dehradun: see the blue-throated god lying there, recumbent and still, his eyes shut, the dangerous corpse of the Overlord waiting for the dancing feet of his bloody, love-mad consort.

Stay tuned for more, including a playlist of the incredible music I listened to for this piece very soon. And I’m researching the follow-up, another story for Bidoun on the first ten years of Dia Art Foundation, which funded La Monte Young and Pandit Pran Nath, along with a (very) few others you may have heard of: James Turrell’s Roden Crater, Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field, Donald Judd’s Marfa project, Dan Flavin’s one-man museum in Bridgehampton… Time to take a fresh look at this history and the forces behind the stunted version of it we’re now stuck with.

Spoiler alert: a young Mr. Deitch is one of the bad guys.

Kipling, drawn by Perriton Maxwell, from A Kipling Primer, 1899

from Perriton Maxwell's "A third of life" 1921

Edgar Allan Poe gets points for this passage, the third episode in my ongoing American avatar series. Why? Because he capitalizes the word like a monument. Because instead of going into a bunch of obvious, heavy-handed exoticizing, Poe trusts the word itself to subtly charge his sentence with the dangerous energy of some alien world. Nothing more needs to be said of the Red Death: “Blood was its Avatar and its seal.” The disease’s mystical, liquid appearance on the skin, its arrival from the uncharted inner universes of its human carrier into visibility is also, simultaneously, the red-wax seal on that wretched creature’s fate. Cast off from humanity, transformed into the physical sign of a horrendous, numinous Other, he is a post-human and a pariah. Rarely, if ever, has the word “avatar” been used to such precise and devastating effect in American literature.

Histoires extraordinaires / par Edgar Poe ; traduction de Charles Baudelaire.

addendum: Baudelaire, 1855

La Mort Rouge avait pendant longtemps dépeuplé la contrée. Jamais peste ne fut si fatale, si horrible. Son avatar, c’était le sang, — la rougeur et la hideur du sang. C’étaient des douleurs aiguës, un vertige soudain, et puis un suintement abondant par les pores, et la dissolution de l’être. Des taches pourpres sur le corps, et spécialement sur le visage de la victime, la mettaient au ban de l’humanité, et lui fermaient tout secours et toute sympathie. L’invasion, le progrès, le résultat de la maladie, tout cela était l’affair? d’une demi-heure.

addendum: Price, 1964

"Avatars- The Birds of India" 1996 Watercolor, gouache and pencil on paper, 59 3/4 x 40 inches

Next stop on the desultory voyage a l’avatar Americain is this huge watercolor by Walton Ford. I was flipping through his recently published super-deluxe Taschen coffeetable raisonné the other day at the public library and was especially struck by Ford’s Indophillic early 90s series “Avatars — The Birds of India.” The style of the series is the same as what you see elsewhere — retro Audubon-esque, done large on paper, with lots of ersatz marginalia scrawled across it in various scripts and media — and the theme is one he apparently returned to a lot in that decade, a theme I will loosely term: the scourge of Westernization in India. I may be oversimplifying but basically, in this bestiary of his, the allegory runs something like this: the nasty identical-looking starlings who arrive in hordes and fuck, eat, peck at and otherwise exploit beautiful, unique-looking native South Asian birds? Those are either lame tourists or even lamer old Orientalists. The beautiful ones getting ravaged? Well, those would be the natives. (It should be noted that NRIs don’t exactly get a free pass — they tend to hang out with starlings, let’s put it that way, as do parrot-collaborators.) Where he really nails the theme, however, is in the words: on one side you get the straight native dope (in this one I see some tantric symbols, some Sanskrit, and some earnest-looking all-caps wisdom: what pros in the Indophilia biz simply call “the classic”) and on the other, a bit of reductive western claptrap (here a nasty-looking blue jay — allegorically speaking, this is a tour-guide from Minnesota — squawks out bullshit explanatory texts sampled, it would seem, from various outdated surveys of Indian art, culture and society). The vulture and the stork? Don’t worry: both authentic natives. Both abound in ancient Sanskrit stories. But that little pink piece of flesh they are fighting over? That’s on you, West! Stay home!

Addendum: I almost forgot to add that I came across another Walton Ford recently, not at the library this time, but as the infographic to this Financial Times piece on the Indian art market called “Indians in Trouble.” Is this not a weird choice?

VOL. 1 - NO. 1 JUNE 9 - 22, '67 BOSTON, MASS. 25¢/35¢ OUT OF BOSTON

I am going to burn down the world
I am going to tear down everything that cannot stand alone

There were so many American avatars before Cameron’s. Among them: the biweekly underground zine/mouthpiece of the banjo-playing acid-folk pioneer and charismatic hippie cult leader Mel Lyman, self-published between 1967 and 1969 in Boston.

Back Cover of Vol. 1, No. 1 JUNE 9 - 22, '67

I am going to shove hope up your ass
I am going to turn ideals to shit

The “shadow-Dylan” Lyman was many things, but he was no Indophile: his notion of the avatar comes via many layers of mediation, as part of our shared inheritance that is the Great American Weird, a sepulchral gift from Emerson perhaps. Ultimately, for Lyman and his followers the wisdom of the East was the “Eastern cop-out,” no better than the other “false resolutions,” no different from what they called the Christian cop-out, the African cop-out, the Humanist cop-out… Lyman’s revelations were meant to be as American as acid and Frankie Valli and Benjamin Franklin. It all reminds me of Nietzche, in his final, lunatic days, signing his letters alternately “Dionysus” and “the Crucified One,” no longer able to keep them apart. Lyman wanted to be the Avatar of a Bacchic Christ, not of a Krishna.

I am going to reduce everything that stands to rubble
and then I am going to burn the rubble
and then I am going to scatter the ashes
and then maybe someone will be able to see something as it really is

Echt post-Orientalist psychedelia from a megalomaniacal, hipster madman and his maenads:

NO. 9 EASTCOAST UNITED FREE PRESS SEPT 29 OCT 12 WESTCOAST 30 CENTS 25¢

VOL. 1 - NO. 4 July 21 - Aug 4 BOSTON 25¢ EVERYWHERE 1967

Ferenc Berko. Chowpatty Beach, Bombay, 1945

In 1960, the Sierra Club published an influential book of photographs called This Is the American Earth, co-authored by photographer Ansel Adams and critic Nancy Newhall and featuring 85 black-and-white photographs by Adams and other photographers, accompanied by Newhall’s text.  A classic of environmentalist literature, the tone is in line with its authors’ aestheticized vision of a nonhuman, wild Sublime: nature is good, man bad… sing to America the endangered pristine! And Nature’s radical modernity! And don’t spell out your town’s name on a hillside with rocks!

What resulted was a heavily redacted vision of this American earth–its “thisness” neatly confined to the space between its covers–one in which proto-photoshop techniques were used to maintain artificial boundaries between the designated spheres of nature and culture; the camera’s power to index reality sneakily deployed to presage and prescribe it instead, issuing a visual signpost to a utopian, ecological modernity: technologically masterful man in well-planned cities on the one hand; vast stretches of unpeopled (actually, de-peopled) wilderness on the other.   Clean.  With that in mind, it was perhaps inevitable that India, in This Is the American Earth stands in as a kind of a parable, an emblematic Other to Adams and Newhall’s sanitizing eco-moderne.

India appears in one of just two two-page spreads in the book, and its close juxtaposition with the other two-page photograph–which immediately precedes it–is telling:  the first consists of an aerial, panoramic photograph of sprawling, dystopian Los Angeles by William Garnett; rows of identical suburban homes proliferate and march into the deadening distance, into the unplanned highway monotony, in what a reviewer in the New York Herald Tribune described as the “shocking revelation of a prison city.” Garnett’s photograph sets the mood for what follows: Ferenc Berko’s own aerial overhead, this one of pilgrims bathing in the river Ganges. The implication is clear, albeit strained: this is not the American earth, this is the nightmare vision of overcrowded unchecked human sprawl, the dangerous outcome of “reckless breeding,” if we aren’t careful this is where we’re headed. (Such a tour de force, scaring the suburbanites like this with Hindus!)  Newhall and Adams offer up India as a racially coded encapsulation of their worst fears, as a call to arms for the protection of the American landscape (from people) and as a poignant reminder of its embattled exceptionalism.

Ferenc Berko. Indian Cinema Advertising, 1938-40

If it isn’t already an old saying it should be one: beware storyteller lest you become a parable. And look, now the master narrators have become the narrated: I reductively offer up Adams and Newhall as exemplars of mid-century Indophobia, and the shoe is on the other foot! So much for the editors, but what about the ambiguous figure of the photographer, Ferenc Berko?  He was a Hungarian emigre with close ties to Moholy-Nagy and the Bauhaus “New Vision,” and he was on the move in the 30s and 40s because of the Nazis. I have written elsewhere about the weird and wonderful history of Hungarian travelers in India, their border-crossings and games of identity. Berko was no exception. He was, by all accounts, deeply sympathetic to (his notion of) Indian culture, and must have cringed when he saw a photograph that was intended to capture and express something of his admiration for Hindu spirituality used instead as a harbinger of imminent American doom, as a vehicle for mobilizing the fear of a black, overcrowded planet.

Or not. It was probably a feeling he was much accustomed to. I was reminded of the episode when I was looking through the photographs from a mid-century retrospective of Berko’s black-and-white work at the Gitterman Gallery in New York last month. There are many highly modernist, intimate–and frankly erotic–nude shots of his wife Mirte, some of them proto-sexo-psychedelic trip material. Others revel in the modernist fascination with the built landscape, shot with a sharp, hard-edged clarity that points on the one hand back to Moholy-Nagy’s influence, and forward to the post-Independence nationalist modernity immortalized in Corbu’s design for Chandigarh. There is photogrammatic abstraction and photojournalese and everything in between. Urchins pee in a Bombay “suburb’s” gutter. A crowd forms on Chowpatty Beach; seen from above, the people dissolve into a vertiginous horde, threateningly faceless, eddying and swirling together until they, too, become material for a kind of restless, slumdog abstraction. Seeing these disparate photographic genres side by side in Berko’s work from India brings a somewhat jarring realization that of all of them–the dreamy druggy nudes, the futurist architectural angle shots, and the street scenes–the street scenes alone have the kind of disseminative mobility, the visual portability sufficient to earn them access to the pages of something like This is the American Earth, or in the case of one well-known Rawalpindi street scene, Life magazine.

Ferenc Berko. Denture Shop, Rawalpindi, India, 1946

It is an arresting image, as displayed at Gitterman, at once anatomically surreal and grounded in the gritty Leica-snap effet de reel of the candid shot. We see man surrounded by multiple gigantic simulacra of dental prosthetics, darkly held there in the shadows of a grotesque and grotto-esque cavern of gleaming hungry teeth.  It is almost too much. We are ushered into some sort of carnival where the outcome is uncertain. Small is huge. And multiple. The synecdochical logic of “he made it by the skin of his teeth” is monstrously reversed, and the shepherd seems likely to come away shorn. What belongs inside is now outside. He is trapped in a landscape of signs, and none of them pretty: there are paintings of teeth, and sculptures of teeth, and even signs that say “teeth.”

This is a photograph with a lot to say, and so it is instructive to see how easily its tangled set of stories is muffled, stifled and stilled by Life’s photo editor; blinded in a white surgical light, the carnival is over. It is time for a different kind of spectacle, one with less patience for the shadows. The image has been cropped differently, and the resulting composition reduces the violation of scale that creates such visual energy at the heart of the print at Gitterman. But worse still, the image has been considerably lightened, as though opened up for a more thorough inspection by the magazine’s readers, comfortably exotic and extraordinary, well lit if possible: the man turns out to be the shopkeeper’s helper, or perhaps a household servant picking up a prescription. The shopkeeper himself peeks out curiously from behind his desk. The whole scene is an unveiling played for laughs, a quickie light drama of perception where the “huge red-and-white grins” are exposed for what they merely are, one more quirky detail of the bazaar. A quick snap, got you and I’m on my way.

The photo as it appeared in Life magazine, Mar 22, 1954

the text:
“While passing through the bazaar at Rawalpindi, last stop on his trip from Bombay to Kashmir, India, Photographer Ferenc Berko glimpsed the shop front window shown above. Since all perceptive photographers cut their eyeteeth on the unusual, Berko risked missing his bus to rush back for a second look. He discovered the huge red-and-white grins were not gigantic elephant traps but merely papier-mache blow-ups put there to lure bazaar customers into buying normal-sized dental plates within. Photographer Berko snapped the store teeth, got back to the bus station just by the skin of his own.