only once in a while. It wasn t generally seen as something that grew and shrank with the administration of psychotropic drugs. The way we experienced the world, the amount of stimulation we needed at any one time, wasn t talked about so much.
But in the present media moment, attention span is everything. It determines how and where we receive media, which in turn influences the kind of media produced. There s the amount of time you can spend on any one thing, and then there s the depth at which you appreciate it.
I ve never meditated, but I understand that a goal of the practice is to expand the present moment, to ever have. For a guy like me, who spends so much energy processing what went means, living in the moment can be difficult. Of the three types of people in the world-- those who make things happen, those who let things happen, and those who wonder what the hell happened-- I m definitely the latter.
life is about details. Art that stays with me and affects how I see and hear things even after it s over. Art that reminds me to pay closer attention to the makes when it s idling, the smell of gasoline, the way the sun cuts through the leaves in the woods, a mother walking down the street holding hands with her daughter while also listening to an iPod.
Most of being alive is whatever your senses are taking in minute to minute. Video artist and musician Takagi Masakatsu has built an oeuvre to honor this fact. I m a latecomer to his stuff, encountering it first earlier The CD was nice, just the kind of highly repetitive, glitch-laden, and vaguely sentimental electronic music I usually go for.
But once I saw the DVD, I realized that the music is made to support Masakatsu s images. The videos, at the most basic level, are as banal as it gets: birds sitting on telephone wires, amusement park-goers flying around on a Chair-O-Planes, people playing on a beach, a person swimming underwater, a bunch of kids jumping around, staring into the camera. They re just little moments of nothing, rendered without them to within an inch of their lives, and leaves us alone to confront the details.
He pushes the contrast into absurd realms, smears the colors into something that makes no sense, inserts video noise, and layers one background behind another. But if these techniques have long been staples of music video, Masakatsu s work comes from a much quieter, more contemplative place. All the distortions are meant to amplify, highlight, draw back a curtain to reveal something that was there all along.
Masakatsu has another release on Carpark this fall, World Is So Beautiful, which collects an hour s worth of pieces originally released on disc). The title says it all, really, capturing in one cheesy phrase why this guy travels the globe pointing his camera at things. It s DVD-only, no accompanying CD, which for these pieces makes sense.
The sound accompanying the piece titled Cho Cho Thing Gale , for example, which digital snow, wouldn t stand on its own. It s faintly suggestive of a street band s actual sound, with a creaky melodica and a crude drum machine subtly communicating a march, and without the video it would be boring. But the combined effect is impressively psychedelic, as shots that linger on the musicians faces aren t always discernible with the extreme color shifts.
Another piece, more powerful still, shows a nine-year old girl playing an accordion for money on the streets of Istanbul. Masakatsu s tiny bit of backward warping happening, creating an emotionally neutral space in which to consider her image. He shoots her in high contrast black and white; we see her tiny self dwarfed by the legs of all the adults walking past.
She rocks back and forth in slow motion while she plays, a smile on her face that looks genuine, like she is actually happy to be sitting there playing. But she looks tough, too, as she would have to be in order to be out there hustling alone. The genius of it is that Masakatsu inserts an image of another life, constructing brilliantly colored animations to swirl around her as she plays.
Dragons float past, lions romp through underbrush, a huge purple and blue ocean wave crashes. He s correcting reality here, creating the imaginative space we want this girl to inhabit, instead of her dull, possibly dangerous reality. Another piece, South Beach , is built on footage of teenage boys splashing around on a seaside cluster of rocks in Havana, Cuba.
This segment is Masakatsu s musical triumph, as he creates a Reichian swirl of the images, is almost painfully affecting. The video is like the cover of Led Zeppelin s House of the Holy brought to life, as silhouetted figures climb jagged rocks cut roughly into steps, with small lagoons dug out by the tides perfect for diving. Masakatsu constantly messes with the shimmering ocean, changing the color from blue to green to orange in weird flashes while the bodies of the bathers are black and looming in front.
The way it s filmed, it s like the wonder of these kids existence, the mere fact that they are alive and breathing and here today, is a never-ending revelation. You, Dr. Kevorkian in 2000.
In the introduction he tells a story of his Uncle Alex, who felt that people didn t do enough to appreciate the good times. was good. While sitting around drinking lemonade in the shade on a hot day, he might break into a conversation to say, If this isn t nice, what is?
Vonnegut himself carries on the practice, saying it really cheers me up to keep score out loud that way. You might say that World Is So Beautiful is Masakatsu s scorekeeping method.
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