0 8A - Monday, October 25, 2010 The Michigan Daily - michigandaily.com E aXHII PROFILEa Cage's stormy 'Weather' FILM COLUMN Disillusioned * by lglines c b Som of thug from t of the and so art ins the nat nomen Institu Humar its cc of the Festiva Arbor festiva six run is hous tribute of the contrib tore on by the Cage,is The a grou perforr traditin Arbor. NCE. MORE. ago, and found shared insights in these musicians. A fusion of their rings back'60s work has become the ONCE. MORE. Festival., which began its run on avant-garde Sept.20 and runs through Nov. S. Cage's "Lecture on the Weath- By BRAD SANDERS er," originally created in 1975 and DailyArts Writer inspired by the American bicenten- nial, is his account of the misdirec- e people are deathly afraid tion of politics and society, and his nderstorms, some get a thrill appreciation for the role of natural he sounds sounds in producing music. Amanda ir terror John Cage Krugliak, curator for the Institute me make ___4P - for the Humanities and School of spired by Installation: Art & Design professor, evolved this ural phe- Lctu're an account into a multimedia exhibit a. The , that includes loud sounds, lighting te for the the Weather' and film, at its climax reproducing nities, in Through Nov. 5 an entire thunderstorm. lebration Instituteforthe "He was mostly interested in e ONCE Humanities sound for the sake of sound, he l, an Ann Free thought pure sound was music," music Krugliak said. "There's certainly 1 that had plenty of scholars who talk about us between the '60s and '70s, Cage and how sophisticated his sing multiple exhibits paying methods were, but at the end of the to the avant-garde mindsets day Cage was just about the sound of musicians and artists who the street and the sound of a mixer uted to the festivals. "Lee- and the sound of water." the Weather," an installation Cage was heavily influenced by late iconic composer John Henry David Thoreau and their s one such tribute. similar appreciation for the natural ONCE Festival consisted of world. Drawings from Thoreau's p of talented composers and sketchbook are included in the mers who shared their non- exhibit. onal tastes formusic with Ann "In some ways they are both nat- Cage attended half a century uralists, they care about something pure," Krugliak explained. "In a time when we have so much tech- nology, that really these basic ways of working and imaging with sounds and speakers has such impact" The audio used for the exhibition is from a 2007 recording of "Lecture on the Weather," which is directed by Kuhn. "I don't know if it's just me, but I get excited at the fact that I'm hear- ing these people that otherwise you think about being in a textbook or something you're studying," Krug- liak said. "You're in this room with their voices - it's as if you've con- jured up ghosts or something. It's really cool." Cage was also fascinated by the concept of time. Visitors to the exhibit may lose their sense of time as they are enveloped in the closed- off room. "One quote I love ... spoke about how time wasn't vertical - it was horizontal, meaning there isn't a really clear beginning and end, and the past is just this big open space where a lot has happened," Krug- liak said. "In the recording we used ("4:33"), there were four minutes and 33 seconds where you only heard the sound of the audience and no one played ... he based everything on that little measurement of time." Krugliak hopes that this exhibit can serve as a forum for discussion. "This is really rare - the trust doesn't give permission for this to be done very often and it's only been shown a few places," Krugliak said. "I would love for a group of students to use this as a class, and talk about politics, music and anything else." In Krugliak's perspective, this work can be incorporated into mod- ern student life at the University. "To hear Cage's voice fill a room in 2010 is sublime. It reignites the past," Krugliak said. "To recreate 'Lecture on the Weather' inspires the present, and adds to it the sounds of students bustling in the hallways, jackhammers completing last-minute repairs and conversa- tions about new ideas. It speaks of choice and possibility." As part of the festival, there will be University Musical Society per- formances by some of the original festival composers and founders: ONCE. THEN. on Nov. 2 and ONCE. NOW. on Nov. 4. A Nov. 3 sympo- sium will feature distinguished fac- ulty speaking on Ann Arbor's role in avant-garde art and Case Trust Director Laura Kuhn will deliver a Nov. 4 Penny Stamps Distinguished Speakers Series lecture at the Mich- igan Theater. Also, the Institute for the Humanities has a display of documents, posters and compos- ers's manuscripts from the original festival. ANTWOORD From Page 7A "Ay-yay-yay, I am your butter- fly" at a pitch right out of "Yoshi Story," Ninja trills a fast-paced rap and a background of com- puter bleeps manages to gather it into something resembling a song. But "Rich Bitch" starts to turn up the tacky. The track is Yolandi's proclamation that her newfound success hasn't changed the fact that she's still an asshole ("I do my own thing when the phone rings ... Only speak to people I wanna speak to"). It's one big trashy whine, but something about its obnoxiously whirring harmony and the whis- pers in the background holds your attention. "She Makes Me A Killer" also occupies the middle ground between crude-funny and out- GUSTER From Page 7A sweetness; it produces the same overbearing queasiness that inevitably comes after that third Snickers bar that you totally thought you could stomach, but now causes you to become ill at the sight of sweets. Case in point: right disgusting. Stealing back the spotlight, Ninja uses a few sexual anecdotes to teach listeners why they shouldn't marry a pretty woman. The poor guy can't understand how his horny nature makes things go from "hunky-fucking- dory" to him getting beat up and ball-broken by the ladies. Explicit it is, but it's still hard not to laugh when, over a frantic synth shim- mer, he offers a girl he's with to his DJ and lets out a panic-stricken "I thought Barney said sharing is caring!" But when the nasty takes over, $O$ loses its sense of fun. "Fish Paste" is a four-minute insult about somebody's mom's vagina, and it would be ill-advised to weed through the thick vowels and roll- ing "r"s of "Beat Boy" to find the song's lyrics. Die Antwoord can make a good beat and has a sort of trashy appeal, but everything has its limit. Embarrassingly explicit at On "Bad Bad World," Gardner brings sugary naivet6 to new heights when he sings "There is love / There is peace in this world" followed by his earnest proclamation "It isn't such a bad, bad world!" You can almost see the yel- low smiley faces and peace signs swirling in this guy's brain as you gag from the heaping spoonful of sugar being poured down your What striking ... walipaper. times, the group doesn't under- stand moderation or social mores. But the bizarre gratuity that makes it unlistenable is also its throat. One may wonder why a bunch of Jewish guys from Tufts Uni- versity would float a few Jesus/ quasi-biblical themes throughout the album ("Stay with Me Jesus," "Jesus and Mary"). Sure, stranger things have happened, perhaps, but this intriguing turn is mini- mized considerably by the fierce, albeit annoying, optimism on this record. aving spent so much time in front of the screen, I've often assumed that a jump to a creative role in film would be a simple thing. How- ever, beyond film's practi- cal difficul- ties - which are daunting ANKUR no matter the SOHONI environment - I've found it tough in my time at the University transiioning from consumer to creator and viewer to artist. Recently introduced to screen- writingthrough a class here at the University, I've been constantly struggling to develop a good bal- ance between viewer and writer, suddenly stumbling across a mine- field of my own self-delusions and arrogance and discovering the difficulties any filmmaker has in developing a voice. There is incongruence between the two sides of a film. Each film is created in a certain way and with certain motiva- tions, and then each is viewed in a manner entirely independent of those motivations. The separa- tion contributes to the beauty of the art, because a single film can be seen an infinite number of ways. Nonetheless, the gap is a frustrating one to cross. I watch film on a moment- by-moment basis. That sounds simple, but it's true beyond the obvious statement that film is a collection of images. It reckons back to the very first films, which were entirely non-narrative and illustrated only a single scene, such as the Lumiere brothers' 1896 classic "The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station." Film is naturally momentary, not nar- rative, but narrative film is all I've ever known. And that's something I didn't realize until I saw the other side of the art. When I watch a film, story can take a back seat, and the macro film's fatal flaws matter little in the context of the micro scene's emotional connection. In every subsequent moment, the film has a chance to win me over. I don't watch anything with a cynical urge to throw it away, and I don't make ajudgmentuntil the closing credits roll. I'm an easy sell. And I'm the type of viewer that movie studios love. That said, much to my cha- grin, myviewer identity doesn't translate well into a creative one. Films are not conceptually created on such an elemental, scene-by-scene basis. Screen- writing, as the beginning for the process, focuses on the narrative flow and character development of the entire film; the idea is that viewers can subconsciously sense narrative structure in a way that will automatically feed their con- scious reaction to the film. Many interested viewers, of course, will critique a film's narrative struc- ture quite consciously, but such analysis is more often done after the actual viewing, not during it. STRANGER From Page 7A "Manhattan;" Dianne Wiest's soft and tender "I'm pregnant" in "Hannah and Her Sisters." But what exactly have the aughts yielded for us? Murder and three- somes? Even the decade's best, the nubile "Match Point" and "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," are missing that brief descent from sexy fantasy-romp into reality. In fact, the absent ending isn't so much an anomaly as a grow- ing constant, as distasteful to the audience as the grating voiceover narrations. These items mark the tragic realization we all don't want to admit: The world is no longer relevant to Woody. And what's worse: Woody is no longer Before a writer takes on the actual writing of a screenplay, he or she must create a "logline" - a one-sentence outline of the film's plot, identifyingthe protagonist, conflict and primary goal in concise and simple fashion. This was my first writing challenge - one made insurmountable at first because of my viewing style. Envisioning my creations, I would always see an image, not a story. It was disappointing to see how unprepared I truly was to make the jump, but even more disap- pointing to realize that visual and dramatic creativity is of little value without an established structure in the narrative. From the logline, every writer moves closer toward a more detailed plan, eventually develop- ing scenes and going step by step through the scriptbefore actu- ally writing it. In the actual act of screenwriting, there's signifi- cantly less spontaneity than I had ever envisioned. I had looked forward to the cre- ative process of writing a script, going freestyle and making some- thing artistically attributable to a single burst of creative energy. The same way that poets let their words flow, whether they have a saving grace: As infectious, penis- fixated South African scenester rap groups go, Die Antwoord is the best. Not since Ren and Stimpy's "Happy Happy Joy Joy" has there been a musical product released with the same ecstatic message so relentlessly stated. By the time the final track "OK Alright" begins with another jaunty, cute-as-a-button piano riff and Gardner singing "Oh no, here we go," you can't help but agree. It's time to go on a sugar- free diet. 0 Screenwriting * might not be for me after all. specific structure or not, or the way that a jazz musician will play an improvised solo - that was the way I envisioned screenwriting, usingthe formal qualities of the craft to my creative advantage while allowingthe story to devel- op itself almost automatically. Screenwriting can't be approached with the same momentary perspective with which I view films. Screenplays are not films, and to impose the experimental qualities of one on the other would miss the point. I love watching film because of the visual moment - when image, sound and editing com- bine to carry the viewers beyond the story and leave a lasting imprint in their memory. There is little a screenplay can do to truly replicate that, because all the necessary ingredients are added much further down the road. The joy I feel in watching films isn't present in screenwriting, and without jumpingto conclusions, it might not be the best role for me. That said, I'm too dedicated to film to let itngo, and by the time I finish my first screenplay my voice will be more fully formed. I'll like- ly discover further difficulties and roadblocks to my creativity, but if I can bring something personal to the process, it's my tenacity to let the moments stand out from within the whole. Sohoni's next career goal isto be a mime. Crush his dreams by e-mailing him at asohoni@umich.edu, relevant to us. Notthatthis newswill makethe flock of Woody aficionados attend any fewer of his films, as the num- bers at the box office can attest to. When the film ended, there were claps in the audience, because there are always claps. When the lights went up, people stayed to watch the credits, because they always do. With each new movie around the corner, all we really want to see is "the nextgreat Woody Allen movie," and we are willing to wait for it until the day we die. Maybe that masterpiece will come, and maybe it won't, but in the mean- time, all we can do is hold onto the constants - these glimmers of past greatness. Because for us, the illusion is better than the medicine, any day. Mlake your moment count Spotlight a Purchase a student ticket to any regular movie or event presented by the Michigan Theater and a portion of the proceeds will be donated to the U-M Comprehensive Cancer Center Breast Cancer Research Program during the period of October 17th through October 31st. Michigan Theater E. Liberty N. University ay Campus m in DO YOU HATE COMIC SANS? JOIN DAILY DESIGN. E-mail annaz@umich.edu for information on applying.