In 1975, my friend’s mother, Avril, was working at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, when who walked in, but Ms. Elizabeth Taylor, and Richard Burton. Avril was transfigured by their presence. A real star.

We begin inside a small Baptist church at dusk, on the outskirts of a Lagos neighborhood in the mid 1980’s. We are here for a rare event, the screening of a film depicting the second coming of Christ. This Baptist church is not my church. In my house, going to church is a special event—the whole family piling into the station wagon wearing special shoes and hats, sitting still for what seem like hours—reserved for a few Sundays a year. We are not Baptist, and there are certainly never any films shown at our church. We come to this new lively church on a regular weeknight at the invitation of my friend, a neighbor. I am allowed to go because it is just a short walk from home. The Baptist church is part of the grounds of the neighborhood secondary school, at which my father taught Mathematics and coached football for a few years. The walk is familiar. We pass my cousin’s apartment building, the general grocery store, cut through the quiet market-place with its stalls shuttered for the evening. I have never been to a public film screening before, never sat in the dark with strangers, silently sharing emotions. The large doors close on a crowded room, blocking out the evening breeze. A short speech by the pastor, and then the lights go out. In this dark place, we are rapt, focused on the portable hanging screen set up in front of the pulpit. What we see is a moving picture of the end of the world: radio broadcasts frantically announcing the mysterious disappearance of millions; irons left on, burning hot; eerily empty streets; abandoned cars; desolate shops; and a few very blond, very afraid stragglers screaming, running, left behind in the big American city. We emerge bewildered. Outside it is already night.

That was another lifetime. On Sherbourne Road in Detroit, Michigan. We were living there in the aftermath of the so-called Detroit riot of July, 1967–gunshots and looting only two blocks away, on Livernois Avenue, a nightmare cacophony of fire engines, police sirens, random shouts and cries, National Guardsmen with rifles, the acrid smell of smoke, smoldering fires that lingered for days–this “racial tinderbox” of an American city, which was also our home.

…

Memory pools accumulate beneath chairs in the waiting areas adjacent to Telemetry. It may be that actual tears have stained the tile or soaked into the carpets of such places. Everywhere, the odor of melancholy that is the very center of memory.
Nowhere in a hospital can you walk without wandering into the memory pools of strangers–their dread of what was imminent in their lives, the wild elation of their hopes, their sudden terrible and irrefutable knowledge. You do not wish to hear the echoes of their whispered exchanges: But he was looking so well yesterday! What has happened to him overnight? You do not wish to blunder into another’s sorrow. You will have all that you can do to resist your own.

For a long time the word “house” referred not to a particular style of music so much as to an attitude. If a song was “house” it was music from a cool club, it was underground, it was something you’d never hear on the radio. In Chicago the right club would be “house,” and if you went there, you’d be house and so would your friends. Walking down Michigan Avenue, you would be able to tell who was house and who wasn’t by what they were wearing. If their tape player was rocking The Gap Band, they were definitely not house, but if it was playing Loleatta Holloway or (surprisingly enough) the Eurythmics, they were and you would probably go over and talk to them.

One day soon, Chicago [black, gay] kids would invent a stark new kind of dance music, and because of where this came from [The Warehouse], and because of where it was played, it would steal the name for itself. But for several years, house was a feeling, a rebellious musical taste, a way of declaring yourself in the know. Certainly the word house was used long before people started making what we would now call house music.

–Bill Brewster & Frank Broughton, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey, (1999)

But, where does house music begin?

In the beginning there was Jack, and Jack had a groove, and from this groove came the groove of all grooves, and while one day viciously throwing down on his box, Jack boldly declared, let there be house.

–”My House” by Rhythm Control (1987)

And then, of course, there’s the New York version of this fancy-dancin’ story:

]]> http://archivingthecity.com/2010/06/24/the-dj-still-runs-this-house/feed/ 0 cityperson http://archivingthecity.com/2010/06/11/adrian-pipers-funk-lessons/ http://archivingthecity.com/2010/06/11/adrian-pipers-funk-lessons/#comments Fri, 11 Jun 2010 15:18:37 +0000 cityperson http://archivingthecity.com/?p=526 Continue reading →]]> Consider the history and style of funk dancing, as a form of expression in urban black America, and then as a popular American dance form. Consider how this form has disappeared, in a sense, from our everyday physical vernacular. How are popular dances, ways of moving and self expression, archival practices?

Notes on Funk I (excerpt)
by Adrian Piper
1985

From 1982 to 1984, I staged collaborative performances with large or small groups of people, entitled Funk Lessons. The first word in the title refers to a certain branch of black popular music and dance known as “funk” (in contrast, for example, to “punk,” “rap,” or “rock”). Its recent ancestor is called “rhythm and blues” or “soul,” and it has been developing as a distinctive cultural idiom within black culture since the early 1970s. Funk constitutes a language of interpersonal communication and collective self-expression that has its origins in African tribal music and dance and is the result of the increasing interest of contemporary black musicians and the populace in those sources elicited by the civil rights movement of the 1960s and early 1970s (African tribal drumming by slaves was banned in the United States during the nineteenth century, so it makes sense to describe this increasing interest as a “rediscovery”).

This medium of expression has been largely inaccessible to white culture, in part because of the different roles of social dance in white as opposed to black culture. For example, whereas social dance in white culture is often viewed in terms of achievement, social grace or competence, or spectator-oriented entertainment, it is a collective and participatory means of self-transcendence and social union in black culture along many dimensions, and is so often much more fully integrated into daily life. Thus it is based on a system of symbols, cultural meanings, attitudes and patterns of movement that one must directly experience in order to understand fully. This is particularly true in funk, where the concern is not how spectacular anyone looks but rather how completely everyone participates in a collectively shared , enjoyable experience.

My immediate aim in staging the large-scale performance (preferably with sixty people or more) was to enable everyone present to

GET DOWN AND PARTY. TOGETHER

and herbie hancock

sun ra

and of course, the inimitable Ms. Jones

A crazy tale of an alien invasion of everday residents of 1970s Vienna, Austria:

Invisible Adversaries film still

You can watch the film here.

The city stars in this film, in which the increasing paranoia of the human protagonist is matched by the harshness of personal interactions between the Viennese. While no “aliens” are ever seen–no little green men running around–strange occurences and affects seep into the spaces between people. Especially into the spaces between each person and her image, her reflections, her representations.

The doubles and shadows no longer walk in lock step with their originals. They have lives, affects, of their own.

VALIE EXPORT was working in a repressive, neo-fascist Vienna, in which the unwillingness to acknowledge the horrors of Nazism tainted all aspects of public life. The evidence of alien takeover is in the schizophrenia of images and visual representations. The protagonist herself is obsessed with images: she takes photographs, makes videos. The obsessiveness of her actions distinguishes her from “the others.” It is her image-making that helps her keep track of the alien takeover of urban life.

Today, we incessantly create doubles, triples, quadruples of ourselves, multiplying out across Facebook and Flickr; Twittering nonstop. What does our image-making, or creation of archives of our selves, our lives and our cities tell us about the way we live in our cities today? What anxieties are we tracking?