Popol Vuh: Letzte Tage - Letzte Nächte

http://www.divshare.com/download/4580580-39a

This German space rock group's sixth album, from 1976, one of their greatest achievements. Blissfully clangy/reverbed out guitars that are precursors to the sounds of Television and Sonic Youth. Beauty of the ethereal Orient. Serene invocations, otherworldly power and tranquility.

"Last Days, Last Nights" is how you would say this title in English.

We know a sort special optics which these sort of last times can throw upon a world: a lens of holy twilight. For example, when a stay of some duration comes to an end, and, against the backdrop of their imminent disappearance, the things of one's world are cast in a glow that must be a glimmer of that which covered the earth the day that its creator came to rest.

That's why so often when I have made somewhere my home for a season, the last one or two weeks are inevitably suffused with this kind of light, tinged by melancholy, by innocence, joy, and by the fading warmth of unrealized promise.

In the world of men, this light only shows up around the edges: during beginning and ends, and those moments of grand interruption. It is forever dimmed by engagements, projects, the "yeas and nays of busy people."

But the epic fade-out is not the only way things can end. There are countless ways. Another way something can end is when its participants have no idea which way this is, or even finally if it is a way at all, or if the end is really happening. This is the case of Beckett's Endgame, which I saw recently at BAM Theater, with John Turturro as Hamm, the central character.



It is characteristic of Beckett's writing that it always circuits between great metaphysical intensity and the banal preoccupations of the profane world. This is how allegory works, by moving between two dimensions without ever reconciling them, without ever fully carrying out a translation between them.

In other words, while Endgame confronts grand concerns of human significance and the depths of metaphysical nihilism, it is also about a couple breaking up. In exactly the same way that "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" by The Clash is about a break-up.

One exemplary passage of this:

CLOV:

So you all want me to leave you.

HAMM:

Naturally.

CLOV:

Then I'll leave you.

HAMM:

You can't leave us.

CLOV:

Then I won't leave you.

(Pause.)

HAMM:

Why don't you finish us?

(Pause.)

I'll tell you the combination of the cupboard if you promise to finish me.

CLOV:

I couldn't finish you.

HAMM:

Then you won't finish me.

(Pause.)

CLOV:

I'll leave you, I have things to do.

But it's not at all that the break-up is used to explain the metaphysics, or the other way around. It's about both, and the play produces an endless cluster of echoes by allowing sound from one world to strike the contours of the other.

Clov never leaves. The play ends with Clov, having retreated to his room to dress himself, reappearing in the door dressed in his travel clothes, which in their formality appear all the more out-of-place considering he's about to venture into a "The Road"-type post-disaster world of endless gray where all nature has been extinguished. My friend pointed out that this final scene strikes an ambiguous tone, because as the curtain falls, from the standpoint of sheer gesture it seems like Clov could also be returning from a long voyage, and that the scene is actually a beginning instead of an end.

What doesn't come into play in this play is the problem of afterlife, which would be like a ghostly inversion of Endgame's scenario: this would be when you think you've made an end of something, but it stays around, the end is not an end but it persists, it has a life of its own, it has a story of its own, an afterlife, to be explored and borne forward.

In this case however, Endgame's insistent dialogic refrain still holds weight:

HAMM (anguished):

What's happening, what's happening?

CLOV:

Something is taking its course.

Boris: Miscalculating in the Aftermath

Boris



Recently we took a look at the problem of artistic aftermath, of trying to navigate, to reorient oneself after reaching a point of no return. Think Nico going from the breezy tambourine blonde who sang Jackson Browne-penned songs on "Chelsea Girls" to the nihilistic proto-goth cemetery dweller of "The Marble Index". Radiohead post-OK Computer is probably the most compelling contemporary example of a group trying to find its way exactly when there's no way anymore, trying to cut some kind of path across a signless desert of unexplored possibilities.

The Japanese psych-noise trio Boris, having found itself in the eye of a storm of praise following its album Pink, has recently gone through a similar process. The new album Smile has all kinds of marks on it of a highly talented band going through all kinds of untried tricks in order to work itself out of the corner it has found itself in.

Now here is the track that opens the Japanese version of Smile, "Message" and which does not appear on the US release, except in a wildly de-balled version (renamed "Statement"). The track has a markedly similar electro-triphammer rhythmic punch to "Machine Gun", the new single by Portishead, and it sounds like some kind of unholy punk Konono 1 hybrid: Hawkwind doing the soundtrack for Mad Max in Africa. It's the best thing on either version of the record. While it's a mystery to me what it's doing absent from the US version, the fact of this absence sums up the disoriented state that Boris must kind of have been in: making out-there stuff they've never done before, but then not having the confidence, or not giving enough of a shit, to take it all the way, to follow the line of flight across the desert. Portishead, in contrast, are heroes of the aftermath problem, they managed to throw off their accumulated stylistic baggage and strike deep in the vein at point zero.

But that's the aftermath for you, it's also after-math, it comes after math, after a way of calculating, of adding up, of accounting or taking score, has failed or is no longer available. It's math after math, and while it's not always as aesthetically satisfying as the high-point that an artist is trying to work out from under, it's still a highly compelling story.