My purpose in researching/writing for this project is to understand my feelings about the deeper, personal contexts of black metal and it's social & historical relevance. The following quote is by Hunter Hunt-Hendrix from his essay titled Transcendental Black Metal.
"The historical development of extreme metal is not a chance series of stylistic shifts. It is teleological - governed by a dimly understood but acutely felt Ideal, or a final cause."
This is exactly how I feel about black metal; as I listen to the music of the genre, a strong gut feeling grows inside of me like a mushroom cloud. I don't quite understand why I feel this way, but I know there is a definite call to action. The goal is to determine what that action is.
***************************************************************************
"This final cause is named the Haptic Void.
The Haptic Void is a hypothetical total or maximal level of intensity. It is the horizon of the history of metal.
Orientation towards the Haptic Void is expressed as feeling. The feeling is a unity, but as a thought we can break it down into four elements:
There is first of all a certain muscular clenching, a constriction of the jaws, fists, arms and chest.
Secondarily there is an affect: a certain aggression or brutality, a paradoxical sense of power, destruction, fullness and emptiness.
Thirdly it features a primordial satisfaction relating to the affect which acts normative. Good metal produces a satisfying bouquet of clenching, constriction and brutal affect.
Finally, there is a barely discernible je ne sais quoi that says 'not enough'. A complementary dissatisfaction - as though no brutal breakdown can be quite brutal enough. It is a fissure, a crack, a lack of being. An insufficiency compared to the promised plenitude. Maybe it's the inability of any concrete song to measure up to the inspiration that gave birth to it. Paradoxically this dissatisfaction is felt in direct proportion to the level of it's complement."
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
RE: Reee SURCH
EEEEEEE. This has been a stupid-hard year for me. My life has kept getting in the way of my goals at school and I am massively frustrated. The scope of my paper went from being an academic analysis of black metal, and has morphed into a discussion of the division between active participants/consumers in the scene versus scholars studying the scene's history/social relevance. It's simultaneously exhausting and exciting to be exploring the disparity between the two camps. But, whew. I'm beat.
Monday, March 21, 2011
Why do you quote?
(In-class Freewrite)
You quote in order to give credit where credit is due. If you neglect to quote/cite your source, that is plagiarism.
Also, quoting is a nice way to say things you may not want to be credited with saying, a way to "cover your ass", if you will.
You quote in order to give credit where credit is due. If you neglect to quote/cite your source, that is plagiarism.
Also, quoting is a nice way to say things you may not want to be credited with saying, a way to "cover your ass", if you will.
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
bibliography sources
Works Cited
Hunt-Hendrix, Hunter. "Transcendental Black Metal: A Vision of Apocalyptic Humanism." Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal Theory Symposium 1. Charleston, SC: urge Llc, 2010. 53-65. Print.
Ratliff, Ben. "Thank You, Professor, That Was Putrid." Http://www.nytimes.com. The New York Times Company, 14 Dec. 2009. Web. Feb.-Mar. 2011. <http://www.nytco.com>.
Shakespeare, Steven. "The Light That Illuminates Itself, The Dark That Soils Itself: Blackened Notes From Schelling's Underground." Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal Theory Symposium 1. Charleston, SC: urge Llc, 2010. 5-22. Print.
Until the Light Takes Us. Dir. Audrey Ewell and Aaron Aites. Perf. Varg Vikernes, Gylve Nagell, Harmony Korine. Factory 25, 2010. DVD.
ANNOTATIONS FORTHCOMING
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
NY Times article
Thank You Professor, That Was Putrid
The bald, beefy moderator, Niall Scott of the University of Central Lancashire, approached the podium in darkness. “It is my revolting pleasure,” he susurrated, pulling on his long goatee, “to introduce Professor Erik Butler, who will present his paper ‘The Counter-Reformation in Stone and Metal: Spiritual Substances.’ ”
And Mr. Butler, an assistant professor of German studies at Emory University, talked about black-metal music — in its second-wave, largely Norwegian form — as a cryptic expression of Roman Catholicism. He started with the 16th-century Council of Trent and the early modern church. He quoted lyrics from the face-painted, early-1990s Norwegian black-metal bands Gorgoroth and Immortal; he framed black metal as respecting some of rock’s orthodoxies, as opposed to the heresies of disco and punk; and he spoke of black metal’s preoccupation with “the abiding and transcendent: stone, mountain, moon.”
You can imagine several orders of hostility toward “Hideous Gnosis,” a six-hour theory symposium on black-metal music that commenced on Saturday afternoon at Public Assembly, a bar and nightclub in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Not just because plenty of people like to make fun of academics discoursing on youth culture but because the subject was something like the music that dare not speak its name.
Black metal, which has been a self-conscious genre since the early 1990s — with a prehistory in some ’80s metal bands — remains metal’s most underground subspecies. (Black refers to a bleak outlook on life.) Musically it’s all scoured howls, nonsyncopated blast-beat drums, and cold, trebly guitars. It sounds like it’s rotting, and that’s the point: black metal represents decay, radical individualism, misanthropy, negativity about all systems, and awe of the natural world. (Death metal, on the other hand, is more proactive, body-centered and psyched about gore.)
“The purest black-metal artist is one who’s unknown and inaccessible,” said Nicola Masciandaro, a professor of medieval literature at Brooklyn College who organized the six-hour event.
In a way, black metal runs on a very old cultural motor: loss of faith, and the hysterical fear and sadness that come with it. But it has become one of rock’s best modes of resistance, which is why it persists, why recent books and films about it have found an audience (like Peter Beste’s photo essay “True Norwegian Black Metal” and the documentary “Until the Light Takes Us”) and why it has inspired a new American wave of bands, including Nachtmystium, Krallice, Wolves in the Throne Room and Liturgy.
Even as the Americans bend black metal far away from tribalism, violence or antireligious malevolence (some Norwegian black-metal musicians became notorious for murder and church burnings) and toward something more Whitman-esque, it remains ingrown. Some of its practitioners — like the Americans Xasthur and Leviathan — make records but will not perform or, in Leviathan’s case, give interviews. Talking about black metal in certain quarters seems deeply lame.
One commenter on the online-forum page of the metal magazine Decibel summed up a certain kind of black-metal fan’s attitude toward the symposium. This music, the contributor wrote, “has nothing to do with being intellectual and everything to do with not wanting to try and break every little thing apart” for analysis.
“There’s lots of resentment toward a sensible discourse around black metal,” said Mr. Masciandaro in an interview. “There’s also lots of dissent and difference around what black metal is. Its center of gravity is an essential negativity, an idea of some remainder, something that cannot be reduced.” He was inspired to organize the symposium, he said, by the conference on heavy metal, held last year in Salzburg, Austria, organized by Mr. Scott. He was there and wanted to create a more specific event. He chose a club with a bar as the setting, rather than a university, figuring it would be more “ludic.”
Was the afternoon humorous, ridiculous or at least ludic? Not really. (It could have used a few more dozen spectators and a temperature boost of about 15 degrees.) To the contrary, it felt necessary. Despite what black-metal musicians might proclaim — Ovskum, an Italian singer and guitarist, was quoted in one of the symposium’s lectures as saying, “my music does not come from a philosophy but from a precritical compulsion” — their work is basically philosophy. It is theoretical, a grid for looking at life, with ancient roots. It could use a critical apparatus, and though the afternoon’s many citings of Continental philosophers like Lacan, Derrida and Bataille might have seemed ludicrously distant to the practice of black metal, such writings relate to the subgenre’s big subjects: death and time.
Mr. Masciandaro’s lecture, “Anti-Cosmosis: Black Mahapralaya,” dealt with ideas of cosmic evolution and annihilation in black metal. In “Perpetual Rot: Obsessive Cycles of Deterioration,” Joseph Russo talked about, um, rot, and the “liminal death-space” in the work of Xasthur. Brandon Stosuy, a Brooklyn music critic, read from his oral history in progress of American black metal: a welcome demystification, cast in normal-dude voices.
“Transcendental Black Metal,” a lecture by Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, the young singer and guitarist of the Brooklyn band Liturgy, gave the Nordic black-metal tradition a stern challenge, and amounted to an artistic manifesto for his own band. He discussed how America represents “dignity, freedom, renewal and hybridization,” and suggested that these qualities could be represented in a new form of black metal. He proposed a new rhythm to replace the blast beat: the “burst beat,” by which rhythm can contract and expand in time, as in free jazz. He cited Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” and Ornette Coleman’s “Skies of America” as philosophical models, with their “joyful experience of the continuity of existence.” He talked of “life and hypertrophy” replacing “death and atrophy,” and in his own way he was as nonnegotiable as Ovskum: “Our affirmation is a refusal to deny.”
During a Q. and A. period Mr. Hunt-Hendrix was challenged by Scott Wilson, a professor from Lancaster University, who, like Mr. Scott, had traveled from England to attend the conference. Mr. Wilson wondered, skeptically, if transcendentalist black metal just boiled down to “all you need is love.”
“I’m not so interested in defending anything I say,” Mr. Hunt-Hendrix replied. “I only like to be judged on whether it’s interesting or not.”
But perhaps the day’s most profound lecture came from Mr. Scott, who spoke in priestly cadences about black metal as part of the ritual of confession.
“The black metal event is a confession without need of absolution, without need of redemption,” he said. It is, he added, “a cleaning up of the mess of others.” He invoked the old English tradition of sin eating by means of burial cakes, in which a loaf of bread was put on a funeral bier or a corpse, and a paid member of the community would eat the bread, representing sin, to absolve and comfort the deceased.
“Black metal has become the sin eater,” he intoned. “It is engaged in transgressive behavior to be rid of it.”
The bald, beefy moderator, Niall Scott of the University of Central Lancashire, approached the podium in darkness. “It is my revolting pleasure,” he susurrated, pulling on his long goatee, “to introduce Professor Erik Butler, who will present his paper ‘The Counter-Reformation in Stone and Metal: Spiritual Substances.’ ”
And Mr. Butler, an assistant professor of German studies at Emory University, talked about black-metal music — in its second-wave, largely Norwegian form — as a cryptic expression of Roman Catholicism. He started with the 16th-century Council of Trent and the early modern church. He quoted lyrics from the face-painted, early-1990s Norwegian black-metal bands Gorgoroth and Immortal; he framed black metal as respecting some of rock’s orthodoxies, as opposed to the heresies of disco and punk; and he spoke of black metal’s preoccupation with “the abiding and transcendent: stone, mountain, moon.”
You can imagine several orders of hostility toward “Hideous Gnosis,” a six-hour theory symposium on black-metal music that commenced on Saturday afternoon at Public Assembly, a bar and nightclub in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Not just because plenty of people like to make fun of academics discoursing on youth culture but because the subject was something like the music that dare not speak its name.
Black metal, which has been a self-conscious genre since the early 1990s — with a prehistory in some ’80s metal bands — remains metal’s most underground subspecies. (Black refers to a bleak outlook on life.) Musically it’s all scoured howls, nonsyncopated blast-beat drums, and cold, trebly guitars. It sounds like it’s rotting, and that’s the point: black metal represents decay, radical individualism, misanthropy, negativity about all systems, and awe of the natural world. (Death metal, on the other hand, is more proactive, body-centered and psyched about gore.)
“The purest black-metal artist is one who’s unknown and inaccessible,” said Nicola Masciandaro, a professor of medieval literature at Brooklyn College who organized the six-hour event.
In a way, black metal runs on a very old cultural motor: loss of faith, and the hysterical fear and sadness that come with it. But it has become one of rock’s best modes of resistance, which is why it persists, why recent books and films about it have found an audience (like Peter Beste’s photo essay “True Norwegian Black Metal” and the documentary “Until the Light Takes Us”) and why it has inspired a new American wave of bands, including Nachtmystium, Krallice, Wolves in the Throne Room and Liturgy.
Even as the Americans bend black metal far away from tribalism, violence or antireligious malevolence (some Norwegian black-metal musicians became notorious for murder and church burnings) and toward something more Whitman-esque, it remains ingrown. Some of its practitioners — like the Americans Xasthur and Leviathan — make records but will not perform or, in Leviathan’s case, give interviews. Talking about black metal in certain quarters seems deeply lame.
One commenter on the online-forum page of the metal magazine Decibel summed up a certain kind of black-metal fan’s attitude toward the symposium. This music, the contributor wrote, “has nothing to do with being intellectual and everything to do with not wanting to try and break every little thing apart” for analysis.
“There’s lots of resentment toward a sensible discourse around black metal,” said Mr. Masciandaro in an interview. “There’s also lots of dissent and difference around what black metal is. Its center of gravity is an essential negativity, an idea of some remainder, something that cannot be reduced.” He was inspired to organize the symposium, he said, by the conference on heavy metal, held last year in Salzburg, Austria, organized by Mr. Scott. He was there and wanted to create a more specific event. He chose a club with a bar as the setting, rather than a university, figuring it would be more “ludic.”
Was the afternoon humorous, ridiculous or at least ludic? Not really. (It could have used a few more dozen spectators and a temperature boost of about 15 degrees.) To the contrary, it felt necessary. Despite what black-metal musicians might proclaim — Ovskum, an Italian singer and guitarist, was quoted in one of the symposium’s lectures as saying, “my music does not come from a philosophy but from a precritical compulsion” — their work is basically philosophy. It is theoretical, a grid for looking at life, with ancient roots. It could use a critical apparatus, and though the afternoon’s many citings of Continental philosophers like Lacan, Derrida and Bataille might have seemed ludicrously distant to the practice of black metal, such writings relate to the subgenre’s big subjects: death and time.
Mr. Masciandaro’s lecture, “Anti-Cosmosis: Black Mahapralaya,” dealt with ideas of cosmic evolution and annihilation in black metal. In “Perpetual Rot: Obsessive Cycles of Deterioration,” Joseph Russo talked about, um, rot, and the “liminal death-space” in the work of Xasthur. Brandon Stosuy, a Brooklyn music critic, read from his oral history in progress of American black metal: a welcome demystification, cast in normal-dude voices.
“Transcendental Black Metal,” a lecture by Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, the young singer and guitarist of the Brooklyn band Liturgy, gave the Nordic black-metal tradition a stern challenge, and amounted to an artistic manifesto for his own band. He discussed how America represents “dignity, freedom, renewal and hybridization,” and suggested that these qualities could be represented in a new form of black metal. He proposed a new rhythm to replace the blast beat: the “burst beat,” by which rhythm can contract and expand in time, as in free jazz. He cited Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” and Ornette Coleman’s “Skies of America” as philosophical models, with their “joyful experience of the continuity of existence.” He talked of “life and hypertrophy” replacing “death and atrophy,” and in his own way he was as nonnegotiable as Ovskum: “Our affirmation is a refusal to deny.”
During a Q. and A. period Mr. Hunt-Hendrix was challenged by Scott Wilson, a professor from Lancaster University, who, like Mr. Scott, had traveled from England to attend the conference. Mr. Wilson wondered, skeptically, if transcendentalist black metal just boiled down to “all you need is love.”
“I’m not so interested in defending anything I say,” Mr. Hunt-Hendrix replied. “I only like to be judged on whether it’s interesting or not.”
But perhaps the day’s most profound lecture came from Mr. Scott, who spoke in priestly cadences about black metal as part of the ritual of confession.
“The black metal event is a confession without need of absolution, without need of redemption,” he said. It is, he added, “a cleaning up of the mess of others.” He invoked the old English tradition of sin eating by means of burial cakes, in which a loaf of bread was put on a funeral bier or a corpse, and a paid member of the community would eat the bread, representing sin, to absolve and comfort the deceased.
“Black metal has become the sin eater,” he intoned. “It is engaged in transgressive behavior to be rid of it.”
The fine art of Summary.
"What have you learned/noticed about the art of summarizing that you will apply this weekend?"
After sharing my summary of the Wired article with my group, it came to light that I only brushed the surface of the act of summarizing. I Analyzed each paragraph and filtered it down to one sentence. This turned an article into a collection of 9 statements. I found that this was far too elementary to accurately re-state what was said, especially because I didn't put my own voice into it.
This weekend I plan on summarizing one of my sources by distilling the general point, inserting my own voice while being sure not to change the scope of the bibliography ("putting a spin on it").
+ karla +
After sharing my summary of the Wired article with my group, it came to light that I only brushed the surface of the act of summarizing. I Analyzed each paragraph and filtered it down to one sentence. This turned an article into a collection of 9 statements. I found that this was far too elementary to accurately re-state what was said, especially because I didn't put my own voice into it.
This weekend I plan on summarizing one of my sources by distilling the general point, inserting my own voice while being sure not to change the scope of the bibliography ("putting a spin on it").
+ karla +
Monday, February 28, 2011
New awesome source!
I found an awesome book on Amazon called Hideous Gnosis- it's a compilation of essays on Black Metal theory and it is my new source for my research paper.
There is also a blog behind the book- here. Descriptions from Amazon:
Essays and documents related to Hideous Gnosis, a symposium on black metal theory, which took place on December 12, 2009 in Brooklyn, NY. Expanded and Revised.
"Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous." - H.P. Lovecraft
"Poison yourself . . . with thought" - Arizmenda
______________________
So far, I have only read one essay- Transcendental Black Metal: A Vision of Apocalyptic Humanism, by Hunter Hunt-Hendrix. It's slightly dry and very abstract, but pleasing revelations have come from reading it.
Here is a sample passage:
"The technique of Hyperborean Black Metal is the blast beat. Pure black metal, represented by Transilvanian Hunger, means continuous open strumming and a continuous blast beat. But the pure blast beat is eternity in itself. No articulated figures, no beginning, no end, no pauses, no dynamic range. It is a bird soaring in the air with nowhere to perch even for a moment. What seemed at first to be a great clamor atrophied hum."
+ karla +
 |
| Black Metal theory has never looked so grim. |
Essays and documents related to Hideous Gnosis, a symposium on black metal theory, which took place on December 12, 2009 in Brooklyn, NY. Expanded and Revised.
"Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous." - H.P. Lovecraft
"Poison yourself . . . with thought" - Arizmenda
______________________
So far, I have only read one essay- Transcendental Black Metal: A Vision of Apocalyptic Humanism, by Hunter Hunt-Hendrix. It's slightly dry and very abstract, but pleasing revelations have come from reading it.
Here is a sample passage:
"The technique of Hyperborean Black Metal is the blast beat. Pure black metal, represented by Transilvanian Hunger, means continuous open strumming and a continuous blast beat. But the pure blast beat is eternity in itself. No articulated figures, no beginning, no end, no pauses, no dynamic range. It is a bird soaring in the air with nowhere to perch even for a moment. What seemed at first to be a great clamor atrophied hum."
+ karla +
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Some new sources.
 |
| Metal Genealogy. |
An Exploration of Death Metal Scenes
The Construction of 'Peoplehood' in the Second Wave of Norwegian Black Metal
I Am The Black Wizards: Multiplicity, Mysticism & Identity in Black Metal Music and Culture
Deluze and Music - Chapter 5 - Violence in Three Shades of Metal: Death, Doom & Black
Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge
Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music
Norwegian Black Metal: Analysis of Musical Style and it's Expression in an Underground Music Scene
This is a priceless tool in finding these articles: http://scholar.google.com/
Jef Whitehead arrested
Veterans of the tattoo world were trying to make sense of the allegations made against a renowned tattoo artist who Cook County prosecutors say used the tools of his trade to sexually assault his girlfriend after he slammed her head against a floor and choked her.
Jef Whitehead, 42, was charged with criminal sexual assault and aggravated domestic battery Sunday and held on $350,000 bond after allegedly attacking his girlfriend.
Prosecutors said an argument between the couple began about 12:30 a.m. Saturday at a home connected to a tattoo shop in the 1100 block of West Taylor Street.
___________________________________________________________________________
Who is Jef Whitehead and why is this relevant to my research blog? Well, in addition to being a renowned tattoo artist, Whitehead is also the one-man artist behind black metal outfits Leviathan and Lurker of Chalice.
Tattoo artist accused of assaulting girlfriend
Veterans of the tattoo world were trying to make sense of the allegations made against a renowned tattoo artist who Cook County prosecutors say used the tools of his trade to sexually assault his girlfriend after he slammed her head against a floor and choked her.
Jef Whitehead, 42, was charged with criminal sexual assault and aggravated domestic battery Sunday and held on $350,000 bond after allegedly attacking his girlfriend.
Prosecutors said an argument between the couple began about 12:30 a.m. Saturday at a home connected to a tattoo shop in the 1100 block of West Taylor Street.
___________________________________________________________________________
Who is Jef Whitehead and why is this relevant to my research blog? Well, in addition to being a renowned tattoo artist, Whitehead is also the one-man artist behind black metal outfits Leviathan and Lurker of Chalice.
First source
Strachota, Dan
S.F. Weekly 10 Apr. 2002,Alt-Press Watch (APW), ProQuest. Web. 16 Feb. 2011.
COMPLETE TEXT OF SOURCE
(796 words)
Copyright NT Media, LLC Apr 10, 2002
Audrey Ewell and Aaron Aites spent the last year and a half interviewing convicted murderers, neo-Nazis, and arsonists for a documentary called Until the Light Takes Us. The filmmakers weren't located in the bowels of some Texas prison, though; they were living in Norway, one of the richest, cleanest, and most socially conscious countries in the world. And these subjects weren't your run-of-the-mill menaces -- they were "black metal" musicians.For the record, Ewell and Aites are not metalheads. During an interview at a Lower Haight cafe, both locals profess their allegiance to experimental indie rock. (Aites even records his own noisy tunes under the name Iran.) But back in 1999, their friend Andee Connors -- drummer for P.E.E., A Minor Forest, and Lumen -- kept hounding them to listen to these heavy Norwegian acts. "I didn't realize there'd be ... a lot of common ground with the music I like and the music I make," Aites says. "It really took us both by surprise." After buying a couple of discs, Ewell says, "We liked Burzum more than we liked Ulver, and I thought, "That's weird, because that guy's a murderer and a church burner, and so now we're getting into murderer metal.'" Black metal, it turns out, isn't the wussy, flounce-around-in-spandex kind of metal. Black metal is dead serious -- so serious that in 1992 the drummer for influential act Emperor stabbed a Norwegian Olympic skier to death; two days later, he and other members of the black metal scene burned Oslo's Holmenkollen Chapel to the ground. In the next year, a dozen more churches would go up in flames, and Burzum's leader, Varg Vikernes, would slay his rival Euronymous. The media grabbed hold of the story and ran sensational reports, depicting the musicians as a Satanist cult that kidnapped and sacrificed young virgins. The truth was far different, of course -- the artists believed they were protesting Christianity and its coddling of the weak -- but as the black metal scene grew, it spawned copycat bands that were more interested in using the genre's scare tactics and harsh sound for commercial purposes. Vikernes and many of the original musicians were eventually thrown in jail, while their disciples torched the occasional church and shouted at the devil.
When they heard the story behind the music, Ewell and Aites went looking for a movie about the events, but they came up empty. After doing further research, they decided to head off to Norway to shoot the documentary -- even though neither of them had made one before. They soon found themselves sitting across the table from musicians who advocated the slaughter of anyone stupid enough to listen to their music. Amazingly enough, the documentarians discovered they liked their subjects. "I've seldom met a person before with as much integrity as [Fenriz, leader of Darkthrone]," says Ewell. "He cared so much about creating this kind of music that could not be co-opted, that was so ugly and extreme that it would never be a commercial thing. ... He's amazing and funny and smart -- and also very depressed." "Fenriz and I have a ridiculous amount of common ground," Aites says. "It's kind of freaky," Ewell admits. It was clear the planned six-month shoot would take far longer. It didn't help that their subjects had a natural suspicion of American media, or that Aites and Ewell's Bergen landlord allegedly burned down their building and then told the police they'd done it. "We now know what it's like to be interrogated for arson -- through an interpreter," Aites says ruefully. One complaint about the film they got from Norwegians is that the documentarians didn't plan to interview any of the victims of the metalers' crimes. Ewell explains that the movie isn't intended to be a journalistic view of both sides of the story; rather, it's an unnerving look into the minds of intelligent men who became so isolated from the rest of the world that they found it natural to commit heinous acts. Ewell says the film's also about re-contextualization -- how the followers' mistaken ideas of black metal became the reality to the rest of the world. "There's a particular sadness in that [the artists] specifically set out to do something that couldn't be appropriated or commercialized, and it was," Ewell says. Ewell and Aites plan to spend the rest of the year editing Until the Light Takes Us. They've received interest from distributors in the U.S. and abroad and will be sending it out to festivals. For now, though, they're having a difficult time readjusting to life in the States. "It's hard to get used to urine in the street," Aites says.
MY SUMMARY/ EVALUATION
Basically, this article discusses the massive misinterpretation of the genre known as Norwegian black metal. NBM is the misunderstood teenager of the extreme metal genres. What started out as a revolt against the peacock-strutting of thrash metal, a fervent denial of christianity, and the blatant rejection of commercialism, black metal was bought, sold and used up by the very people who the "original/ kvlt/ true" members considered to be an enemy. The following quote accurately represents this point:
"There's a particular sadness in that [the artists] specifically set out to do something that couldn't be appropriated or commercialized, and it was"
-Karla
S.F. Weekly 10 Apr. 2002,Alt-Press Watch (APW), ProQuest. Web. 16 Feb. 2011.
COMPLETE TEXT OF SOURCE
(796 words)
Copyright NT Media, LLC Apr 10, 2002
Audrey Ewell and Aaron Aites spent the last year and a half interviewing convicted murderers, neo-Nazis, and arsonists for a documentary called Until the Light Takes Us. The filmmakers weren't located in the bowels of some Texas prison, though; they were living in Norway, one of the richest, cleanest, and most socially conscious countries in the world. And these subjects weren't your run-of-the-mill menaces -- they were "black metal" musicians.For the record, Ewell and Aites are not metalheads. During an interview at a Lower Haight cafe, both locals profess their allegiance to experimental indie rock. (Aites even records his own noisy tunes under the name Iran.) But back in 1999, their friend Andee Connors -- drummer for P.E.E., A Minor Forest, and Lumen -- kept hounding them to listen to these heavy Norwegian acts. "I didn't realize there'd be ... a lot of common ground with the music I like and the music I make," Aites says. "It really took us both by surprise." After buying a couple of discs, Ewell says, "We liked Burzum more than we liked Ulver, and I thought, "That's weird, because that guy's a murderer and a church burner, and so now we're getting into murderer metal.'" Black metal, it turns out, isn't the wussy, flounce-around-in-spandex kind of metal. Black metal is dead serious -- so serious that in 1992 the drummer for influential act Emperor stabbed a Norwegian Olympic skier to death; two days later, he and other members of the black metal scene burned Oslo's Holmenkollen Chapel to the ground. In the next year, a dozen more churches would go up in flames, and Burzum's leader, Varg Vikernes, would slay his rival Euronymous. The media grabbed hold of the story and ran sensational reports, depicting the musicians as a Satanist cult that kidnapped and sacrificed young virgins. The truth was far different, of course -- the artists believed they were protesting Christianity and its coddling of the weak -- but as the black metal scene grew, it spawned copycat bands that were more interested in using the genre's scare tactics and harsh sound for commercial purposes. Vikernes and many of the original musicians were eventually thrown in jail, while their disciples torched the occasional church and shouted at the devil.
When they heard the story behind the music, Ewell and Aites went looking for a movie about the events, but they came up empty. After doing further research, they decided to head off to Norway to shoot the documentary -- even though neither of them had made one before. They soon found themselves sitting across the table from musicians who advocated the slaughter of anyone stupid enough to listen to their music. Amazingly enough, the documentarians discovered they liked their subjects. "I've seldom met a person before with as much integrity as [Fenriz, leader of Darkthrone]," says Ewell. "He cared so much about creating this kind of music that could not be co-opted, that was so ugly and extreme that it would never be a commercial thing. ... He's amazing and funny and smart -- and also very depressed." "Fenriz and I have a ridiculous amount of common ground," Aites says. "It's kind of freaky," Ewell admits. It was clear the planned six-month shoot would take far longer. It didn't help that their subjects had a natural suspicion of American media, or that Aites and Ewell's Bergen landlord allegedly burned down their building and then told the police they'd done it. "We now know what it's like to be interrogated for arson -- through an interpreter," Aites says ruefully. One complaint about the film they got from Norwegians is that the documentarians didn't plan to interview any of the victims of the metalers' crimes. Ewell explains that the movie isn't intended to be a journalistic view of both sides of the story; rather, it's an unnerving look into the minds of intelligent men who became so isolated from the rest of the world that they found it natural to commit heinous acts. Ewell says the film's also about re-contextualization -- how the followers' mistaken ideas of black metal became the reality to the rest of the world. "There's a particular sadness in that [the artists] specifically set out to do something that couldn't be appropriated or commercialized, and it was," Ewell says. Ewell and Aites plan to spend the rest of the year editing Until the Light Takes Us. They've received interest from distributors in the U.S. and abroad and will be sending it out to festivals. For now, though, they're having a difficult time readjusting to life in the States. "It's hard to get used to urine in the street," Aites says.
MY SUMMARY/ EVALUATION
Basically, this article discusses the massive misinterpretation of the genre known as Norwegian black metal. NBM is the misunderstood teenager of the extreme metal genres. What started out as a revolt against the peacock-strutting of thrash metal, a fervent denial of christianity, and the blatant rejection of commercialism, black metal was bought, sold and used up by the very people who the "original/ kvlt/ true" members considered to be an enemy. The following quote accurately represents this point:
"There's a particular sadness in that [the artists] specifically set out to do something that couldn't be appropriated or commercialized, and it was"
-Karla
Sad blog is sad.
I hate this school year. I don't know what has happened to me, but I went from optimistic learner to swamped, depressed loner, ready to just say "fuckitall" because my life has become the equivalent of a massive pile-up on a highway. I need help, I need a therapist, an assistant, a hug.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Censorship
By Blake Gopnik
Wednesday, December 1, 2010; C01
Wednesday, December 1, 2010; C01
"Against all odds, the stodgy old National Portrait Gallery has recently become one of the most interesting, daring institutions in Washington. Its 2009 show on Marcel Duchamp's self-portrayal was important, strange and brave. "Hide/Seek," the show about gay love that it opened in October, was crucial - a first of its kind - and courageous, as well as being full of wonderful art. My review of it was a rave.
Now the NPG, and the Smithsonian Institution it is part of, look set to come off as cowards. Today, after a few hours of pressure from the Catholic League and various conservatives, it decided to remove a video by David Wojnarowicz, a gay artist who died from AIDS-related illness in 1992. As part of "Hide/Seek," the gallery was showing a four-minute excerpt from a 1987 piece titled "A Fire in My Belly," made in honor of Peter Hujar, an artist-colleague and lover of Wojnarowicz who had died of AIDS complications in 1987. And for 11 seconds of that meandering, stream-of-consciousness work (the full version is 30 minutes long) a crucifix appears onscreen with ants crawling on it. It seems such an inconsequential part of the total video that neither I nor anyone I've spoken to who saw the work remembered it at all.
But that is the portion of the video that the Catholic League has decried as "designed to insult and inflict injury and assault the sensibilities of Christians," and described as "hate speech" - despite the artist's own hopes that the passage would speak to the suffering of his dead friend. The irony is that Wojnarowicz's reading of his piece puts it smack in the middle of the great tradition of using images of Christ to speak about the suffering of all mankind. There is a long, respectable history of showing hideously grisly images of Jesus - 17th-century sculptures in the National Gallery's recent show of Spanish sacred art could not have been more gory or distressing - and Wojnarowicz's video is nothing more than a relatively tepid reworking of that imagery, in modern terms.
Until Tuesday afternoon, museum staff, under Director Martin E. Sullivan, believed that "Fire" was interesting art that made important points. And now it looks as though they're somehow saying that they were wrong about that, and that it really was unfit to be seen or shown, after all.
If every piece of art that offended some person or some group was removed from a museum, our museums might start looking empty - or would contain nothing more than pabulum. Goya's great nudes? Gone. The Inquisition called them porn.
Norman Rockwell would get the boot, too, if I believed in pulling everything that I'm offended by: I can't stand the view of America that he presents, which I feel insults a huge number of us non-mainstream folks. But I didn't call for the Smithsonian American Art Museum to pull the Rockwell show that runs through Jan. 2, just down the hall from "Hide/Seek." Rockwell and his admirers got to have their say, and his detractors, including me, got to rant about how much they hated his art. Censorship would have prevented that discussion, and that's why we don't allow it.
Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) has said that taxpayer-funded museums should uphold "common standards of decency." But such "standards" don't exist, and shouldn't, in a pluralist society. My decency is your disgust, and one point of museums, and of contemporary art in general, is to test where lines get drawn and how we might want to rethink them. A great museum is a laboratory where ideas get tested, not a mausoleum full of dead thoughts and bromides.
In America no one group - and certainly no single religion - gets to declare what the rest of us should see and hear and think about. Aren't those kinds of declarations just what extremist imams get up to, in countries with less freedom?
Of course, it's pretty clear that this has almost nothing to do with religion. Eleven seconds of an ant-covered crucifix? Come on.
This fuss is about the larger topic of the show: Gay love, and images of it. The headline that ran over coverage of the matter on the right-wing Web site CNSnews.com mentioned the crucifix - but as only one item in a list of the exhibition's "shockers" that included "naked brothers kissing, genitalia and Ellen DeGeneres grabbing her breasts." (Through a bra, one might note, in an image that's less shocking than many moves by Lady Gaga.) The same site decries "a painting the Smithsonian itself describes in the show's catalog as 'homoerotic'. "
The attack is on gayness, and images of it, more than on sacrilege - even though, last I checked, many states are sanctioning gay love in marriage, and none continue to ban homosexuality.
And the Portrait Gallery has given into this attack.
Twenty-one years ago in Washington, the Corcoran Gallery of Art took a huge hit to its prestige and credibility - a hit it has yet to fully recover from - when it canceled a show of images by the gay photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, under similar puritanical pressures. The Washington Project for the Arts, which this year celebrates its 35th anniversary, had its finest moment when it embraced the show instead.
So here's a gauntlet thrown down to test the courage of Washington's art institutions: Will the Hirshhorn Museum, the Katzen Arts Center, tiny Transformer, Flashpoint, or even the Phillips or National Gallery - or maybe the Corcoran, in a rare redemptive moment - have the guts to mount the video the Portrait Gallery has taken down?
Artists have the right to express themselves. Curators have the right to choose the expression they think matters most. And the rest of us have the right to see that expression, and judge those choices for ourselves.
If anyone's offended by any work in any museum, they have the easiest redress: They can vote with their feet, and avoid the art they don't like."
This article is a great example of a researched work that doesn't come across as strict research. There are many examples that uphold the authors point, such as different museums that bent to pressures and censored art.
This article is a great example of a researched work that doesn't come across as strict research. There are many examples that uphold the authors point, such as different museums that bent to pressures and censored art.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Forecast for my brain: Storms.
(Note: I felt, since I am overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information on this topic, that it would be better to address all of the questions/prompts individually rather than in paragraph form, so I could better organize my thoughts.)
What do I already know about this topic?
I cannot possibly answer this in one go. I have been interested in, and a part of, black metal culture (kvltvre?) since I was about 17yrs old. Let's just say I know a fucking lot.
What draws me to this topic?
Part of why I'm doing my research paper on this topic is because I don't entirely understand why I am so drawn to this genre of music and the lifestyle. Emotionally, black metal music is a great release. Anger management, if you will. Intellectually, I am interested in the fact that this is (technically) still a very young culture, though it has roots that reach as far as Viking history, for example. Creatively, I am in love with the whole aesthetic of black metal- frosty, grim, lo-fi.
How would this project benefit me (or others)?
I am viewing this project as a chance to reconcile many issues and questions I have about the culture I am so immersed in, and when has a quest for knowledge NOT been beneficial to someone?
What questions/concerns/excitement do I have about this project?
In this culture, there are a lot of hot-button issues to address: anti-religion/satanism/paganism, racism, misogyny, rape, murder, church-burnings... it's quite a spicy topic. Controversy makes for an interesting read!
The Google search of "black metal" yielded expected results- the first thing was, of course, the Black Metal Wikipedia page. I took some screen captures of the results.
So after the publicly-edited info portal that is a wiki, we have blackmetal.com, a mail-order music and merch site. Then there are some image and video results of one of the typical heavy-hitters of the genre, Venom. A bit of Satanic imagery, a link to black metal radio (free/streaming mix)... some stuff about Norwegian bm, and NSBM (aka fucking racist metal)... not a very cheerful quick look for the casual browser.
5 potential guiding questions regarding research: I'll come back to this one...
Stream-of-consciousness keywords: black, goat, evil, Mayhem, Venom, Lucifer, Belial, crime, church burnings, performance, fire, grim, frost-bitten, cult/kult/kvlt, corpse paint, Watain, animal sacrifice, blood, pentagram, Crowley, snow, Norse gods/goddesses, bullet belt, fuck jesus, atheism, inverted cross, murder, I <3 Transylvania, Dead, shotgun, suicide, murder, Varg Vikernes, Until The Light Takes Us, Fenriz
More soon...
-Karla
What do I already know about this topic?
I cannot possibly answer this in one go. I have been interested in, and a part of, black metal culture (kvltvre?) since I was about 17yrs old. Let's just say I know a fucking lot.
What draws me to this topic?
Part of why I'm doing my research paper on this topic is because I don't entirely understand why I am so drawn to this genre of music and the lifestyle. Emotionally, black metal music is a great release. Anger management, if you will. Intellectually, I am interested in the fact that this is (technically) still a very young culture, though it has roots that reach as far as Viking history, for example. Creatively, I am in love with the whole aesthetic of black metal- frosty, grim, lo-fi.
How would this project benefit me (or others)?
I am viewing this project as a chance to reconcile many issues and questions I have about the culture I am so immersed in, and when has a quest for knowledge NOT been beneficial to someone?
What questions/concerns/excitement do I have about this project?
In this culture, there are a lot of hot-button issues to address: anti-religion/satanism/paganism, racism, misogyny, rape, murder, church-burnings... it's quite a spicy topic. Controversy makes for an interesting read!
The Google search of "black metal" yielded expected results- the first thing was, of course, the Black Metal Wikipedia page. I took some screen captures of the results.
5 potential guiding questions regarding research: I'll come back to this one...
Stream-of-consciousness keywords: black, goat, evil, Mayhem, Venom, Lucifer, Belial, crime, church burnings, performance, fire, grim, frost-bitten, cult/kult/kvlt, corpse paint, Watain, animal sacrifice, blood, pentagram, Crowley, snow, Norse gods/goddesses, bullet belt, fuck jesus, atheism, inverted cross, murder, I <3 Transylvania, Dead, shotgun, suicide, murder, Varg Vikernes, Until The Light Takes Us, Fenriz
More soon...
-Karla
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