Images used for posts published on 28 June
in 2018, 2022, and 2023
Sometimes - especially those times when, like today, I'm STILL working on an 8000-word essay to do with the Sex Pistols (and now have a deadline looming into view) - it's almost a form of relaxation to be able to look back and see what one was thinking on this date in years gone by.
And so, let's make a jump to the left and a step to the right ... landing first of all in June 2018 for a post on the ultraviolence of chimps; then zipping forward to 2022 and a post on beatniks, before, finally, ending up in June of last year when it appears that the subject of glitch art was on my mind.
When I look back at old posts, I often want to significantly revise
them (and in some cases even want to hit the delete button). But, as I feel relatively happy with all
three of these posts, I offer them here
pretty much as first published, with very little additional commentary.
However, I have not reproduced the notes that came with them and readers who are interested in knowing more might care to consult the original posts and can do so by clicking on the titles.
Despite what idealistic chimp-lovers like to believe, ape society is not some kind of simian utopia or one long tea-party. Indeed, researchers have conceded that chimps are natural born killers who enjoy inflicting cruelty and engaging in acts of savage (often coordinated) violence as much as man.
This overturns the belief that their aggression was a consequence of being forced to live in an ever-restricted space due to the destruction of their natural habitat.
Until recently, primatologists would watch on as a group of males patrolling the forest battered the brains out of any outsider unfortunate enough to have strayed on to their patch and insist that it was a sign of human impact and social breakdown. But now they admit that grotesque acts of ultra-violence, including cannibalism, are how chimpanzees actually maintain their brutal social order.
It seems that lethal violence is an evolved tactic or adaptive strategy that improves fitness amongst those animals with no qualms about using any means necessary to ensure their survival and group status by giving them increased access to food and reproductive opportunities.
Thus, when I read an email sent to me which suggested that humans were uniquely evil animals who would benefit greatly by rediscovering their inner-ape, I had to smile. For some chimps would make even Danny Dyer's deadliest men look like choir boys in comparison.
Having said that, it's worth noting that in the original Planet of the Apes film series chimpanzees - in comparison to war-like and savage gorillas - were portrayed as peace-loving intellectuals who specialised in the sciences.
Did anyone ever actually describe themselves as a beatnik?
Or was the term purely a media invention; a way of reducing members of the Beat Generation to a cool but cartoonish stereotype?
That's the question I asked at the start of this post and, although it was written only two years ago, I really can't remember how I answered it - though I suspect that, like the term punk, it was not something that those involved in the scene cared for.
Indeed, I seem to recall now that Ginsberg wrote to The New York Times in 1959, deploring the use of the word beatnik and that his pal Jack Kerouac wasn't pleased either to see their philosophy become just another fad. Both authors feared that a generation of illuminated hipsters, would be replaced by brainwashed fashionistas interested only in looking the part.
Indeed, so exasperated was Kerouac by the popularity of the term that he declared to a reporter in 1969 (shortly before his death in October of that year): 'I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic.'
Like the punk generation, the beat generation was very much concerned with authenticity - but I ask you: Is there anything squarer than wanting to keep things real?
Thanks in large part to Jews working in the American entertainment industry, a fair few words of Yiddish origin have been adopted by English-speakers: chutzpah, klutz, mensch, schlep, schmooze, shtick ... etc.
But my favourite such word is the rather impish-sounding glitch, which first entered everyday English during the period of the Space Race (1955-1975).
Whilst it now refers to a temporary technical issue or a short-lived fault in a system that eventually corrects itself, glitch is derived from a Yiddish word for that which slides, slithers, or causes one to slip or skid, which is interesting; might one refer to a patch of black ice as a glitch in the road?
Apart from NASA engineers ad those working within the computing and electronics industries, the term glitch is also used by those in the world of art to refer to the contemporary practice of using errors for aesthetic purposes, either by corrupting digital data or physically manipulating electronic devices. As well as glitch imagery and film, there is also glitch music (a genre of experimental electronic sound that many people simply call noise).
Of course, whilst such 'errors' can be random effects, they are more often the result of deliberate manipulation and so not really errors at all. Numerous artists have posted online tutorials explaining the techniques they use to make their work and produce (pseudo) glitches on demand.
Personally, however, I prefer real errors and genuine glitches to those distortions and deviations that are the result of intention. But, either way, you can end up with some amusing results, which is why glitch art is increasingly common in the world of design. And of course, there's even an app allowing those who like to edit their pics on social media to produce an instant glitch effect.
Let's not pretend, however, that there's anything remotely subversive (or even all that original) about this phenomenon. Artists have played with light, sound, and colour and been aware that beauty often lies in small imperfections - that failure is often more instructive than benign success - long before the digital age or anyone was using the term glitch.
Consider the case, for example, of the Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, whose controversial images were lambasted by the critics and jeered at by her contemporaries for being smudged, smeared, or out of focus, but which are now regarded as brilliantly ahead of their time.
Error, we might say, was the hallmark of her style; Cameron deliberately left the flaws that others would have attempted to disguise or eliminate, affirming an art of imperfection and happy accident and rejecting the idea of photography as a scientific practice via which one aimed at a perfect representation of the world, or an accurate and precisely detailed rendering of the human subject.
Using an extremely messy - and slippery - process that involved coating glass with an even layer of collodion, sensitising it with a bath of silver nitrate, and then exposing and developing the plate whilst still wet, Cameron was, arguably, the Cindy Sherman of her day and elements in her work are not only postmodern as some commentators claim, but distinctly glitchy.
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