"Flag" Burning as Symbolic Speech

Many of my critics will point out to you that no one will be arrested for simply disparaging the flag. Only the rascally Communist flag burners are going to go to jail. Here are two points I like to make to them. First, many First Amendment scholars believe that if that is the case, arrests will be overturned until every possible non-political flag desecrator is in jail -- only then will protestors be prosecuted. So I won't go to jail for my political beliefs until Barbara Bush goes to jail for her flag hair bandanna. (That's one way to ensure that no freedom of speech is quashed by this law.) Second, Jehovah's Witnesses and others who refuse to salute the flag are committing a desecration (failure to give the flag the respect the law commands.) This desecration is just as illegal as any radical flag burning. These people will all go to jail under the new Constitution. Refusual to salute the flag is considered desecration, but acceptable under the current First Amendment. Any new change to the constitution will supercede the original.
{Warren S. Apel}
Extracted from:http://www.esquilax.com/flag/define.shtml

Legionnaire's Disease
An art exhibit featuring Old Glory has city and state officials scrambling to do
something BY MICHAEL KIEFER
Last Friday at the Phoenix Art Museum, a group of ladies on a tour stood around the infamous U.S. flag on the floor, peering over the edges, their faces frozen in smiles, looking for the emperor's new clothes. The work in question, Dread Scott's 1988 "What Is the Proper Way to Display the U.S. Flag?", along with a 1970 piece titled "The American Dream Goes to Pot," by Kate Millet, which features a flag in a toilet in a jail cell, has been all over the news. Angry World War II veterans have twice yanked the flag from the toilet; others picked the flag from the Dread Scott piece off the floor and properly folded it.
[...]
The show at the Phoenix Art Museum, "Old Glory: The American Flag in Contemporary Art," sets those obvious patriot-baiting works in a context that is lost to the TV audience watching American Legionnaires tussling over the flag. And, unfortunately, the context was also lost to state and city officials who are seriously considering ways to censor the show and censure the museum for daring to show it.

Extracted from: http://www.esquilax.com/flag/artexhibit-04041996.pdf

Reported by the Associated Press on 3-23-97, American Indian artist Steven Leyba experienced first-hand governmental censorship of his work, Wounded Knee Decomposition I, which was on display in an Albuquerque art gallery. The mixed-media work, which commemorates the 1890 massacre in South Dakota, includes two mutilated American flags. City officials asked the artist to remove it from public view, and when he refused, they erected a partition to cover it from view. The artwork was eventually moved, and the partition was taken down. Another fine example of an obtrusive government meddling in affairs which would be better decided by healthy public debate.
http://www.esquilax.com/flag/culture.shtml

symbolic speech : conduct that is intended to convey a particular message which is likely to b
e understood by those viewing it
Example: it is well established that wearing certain clothing can be a form of protected symbolic speech -- City of Harvard v. Gaut, 660 N.E.2d 259 (1996)
(compare commercial speech pure speech)
Note: Symbolic speech is entitled to free speech protection under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution unless its regulation is within the constitutional power of the government and is justified by an important government interest, and the restriction placed on it by regulation is no greater than is essential to the furtherance of that interest.

Extracted from: http://dictionary.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/results.pl?co=dictionary.lp.findlaw.com&topic=bf/bf7657c95bca28020ec9503b1c50a000

Street v. New York, 394 U.S. 576 (1969)

With this case, the court overturned the conviction of veteran and Bronze Star honoree Sydney Street, who burned his flag in protest after learning that civil rights activist James Meredith had been shot. Although the case marked the first opportunity for the court to deal with the actual destruction of a flag, the justices declined to consider the legalities of flag desecration. But the court determined that the New York statute under which Street had been convicted was unconstitutionally applied because it permitted the veteran to be punished merely for speaking defiantly about the American flag. Among the dissenters: Hugo Black, one of the court's leading champions of the First Amendment. "It passes my belief that anything in the Federal Constitution bars a State from making the deliberate burning of the American flag an offense," he wrote. "It is immaterial to me that words are spoken in connection with the burning." http://www.freedomforum.org/packages/first/Flag/sctcases.htm#street

"Blind Panorama of New York" by F. G. Lorca

If it isn’t the birds

covered with ashes,

if it isn’t the cries beating on the windows of the wedding,

it must be the delicate creatures of air

that pour out new blood in the unending night.

But no, it isn’t the birds

because the birds are ready to be oxen;

they can be white rocks with the aid of the moon

and are always wounded youths before

the judges raise the sheet.

Everyone understands the grief that comes with death

but true grief is not present in the spirit.

It isn’t in the air or in our lives

or in these terraces full of smoke.

True grief that keeps things awake

is a small infinite burn

in the innocent eyes of other systems.

An abandoned suit weighs so much on the shoulders

that many times the sky gathers them in rugged herds.

And the women who die in childbirth know in their final hour

that every rumor will be stone and every footprint pulse.

We ignore that thought has outlying boroughs

where philosopher is devoured by Chinamen and caterpillars.

And some idiot children have found in the kitchen

some swallows on crutches

that knew how to say the word love.

No, it isn’t the birds.

It isn’t a bird that expresses the clouded pond-like fever

or the longing for murder that oppresses us each minute

or the metalic suicidal rumor that gives breath to each dawn.

It’s a capsule of air where the whole world hurts us,

it’s a small living space to the crazy unison of light,

it’s an undefinable scale where clouds and roses forget

the Chinese clamor that bustles on the docks of blood.

Many times I’ve lost myself

in order to search for the burn that keeps things awake

and I’ve only found sailors leaning over the railing

and small creatures of the sky buried in the snow.

But real grief was in other plazas

where chrystallized fish agonized inside the tree trunks;

plazas of a strange sky for the ancient untouched statues

and for the tender intimacies of volcanoes.

There’s no grief in my voice. Only my teeth exist,

teeth that go silent in the isolation of black satin.

There’s no grief in my voice. Here only the earth exists,

the earth with the doors of forever

that lead to the shame of fruit.

Federico García Lorca, taken from "Poet in New York: III Streets and Dreams"

(renovacyoun)

Part of Speech: noun

Pronunciation: [ren-uh-'vey-shun]

Definition: Restoration, the process of renovating, refreshing.

Usage: The noun renovation refers to the physical (or, in its original sense, spiritual) act of restoring something to a new condition. Renovation is most commonly used in reference to houses or buildings, which undergo a process wherein the structural and cosmetic deficiencies are repaired like new. Until recently, the word was more commonly used in reference to the heart, "renovated" by the grace of God in the Christian world.

Suggested Usage: Nearly anything can be renovated, not just the houses on Extreme Home Makeover, and the word deserves to be used as such. Your car can undergo a renovation, it's true. But your elderly grandfather can experience renovation as well. Give him an iPod, a pair of skinny jeans, a Guitar Hero controller, and an earring. Let him keep his browline glasses, though. They're coming back in a big way.

Etymology: Used in the early 15th century, the Middle English word that eventually became renovation (renovacyoun) referred exclusively to the spiritual rebirth experienced in Christianity. It is derived from the Latin past participle renovare, as re + novare means to make new. The term "renovate" was not seen in print until some time later

Extracted from http://www.yourdictionary.com/wotd/renovation.

Cardrew On Wittgenstein

Cornelius Cardrew: Towards An Ethic of Improvisation

In his later writing Wittgenstein has abandoned theory, and all the glory that theory can bring on a philosopher (or musician), in favour of an illustrative technique. The following is one of his analogies:

"Do not be troubled by the fact that languages a. and b. consist only of orders. If you want to say that this shews [sic] them to be incomplete, ask yourself whether our language is complete;-whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notations of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses."

"A city analogy can also be used to illustrate the interpreter's relationship to the music he is playing. I once wrote: "Entering a city for the first time you view it at a particular time of day and year, under particular weather and light conditions. You see its surface and can form only theoretical ideas of how this surface was moulded. As you stay there over the years you see the light change in a million ways, you see the insides of houses-and having seen the inside of a house the outside will never look the same again. You get to know the inhabitants, maybe you marry one of them, eventually you are inhabitant- a native yourself. You have become part of the city. If the city is attacked, you go to defend it; if it is under siege, you feel hunger - you are the city. When you play music, you are the music."


{Extracted from: http://www.ubu.com/papers/cardew_ethics.html}

Francisco López

Francisco López transforms the environmental recordings captured by his equipment into fascinating, disconcerting imaginary worlds –alternative universes that require a profound listening, free from aesthetic prejudices and especially from the need to associate what we hear with our actual surroundings. Because while the essential ingredients of López's work – his "musical objects", in Schaefferian terms – are often sourced from nature (insects, rivers, the wind, birds, urban soundscapes), his music totally transcends the original context of these p honemes {extracted from http://ww w.ubu.com/sound/spanish_avant. html}

Sound Matter

Collectively transforming city sound environments into sonic virtualities

"Sound Matter" is a series of collective projects conceived and directed by sound artist Francisco López. In each project a small group of experienced sound artists / composers is teamed up to work collectively in and on the city where they live / work. The artists explore the city sound environments, gather field recordings, generate a series of shared pools of sonic materials -both original and transformed- and then create several original pieces that are presented live in an immersive multi-channel set-up, in which a new sonic virtual city is generated.

BIRMINGHAM SOUND MATTER (2009)

Organized by Modulate
Participating artists:
Helena Gough, Annie Mahtani, Nicholas Bullen, Cormac Faulkner, Martin Clarke, Bobby Bird, Mark Harris.

Towards the blur by Francisco López November 2001

I refuse my nationality. As I would do with any nationality. Patriotism is a form of tribal sickness that is not cured by travelling -as many believe-but rather by simply considering people as what they should be: individuals.

The nomad doesn't "go out to see the world". He / she lives it, and "out" has no meaning for him / her.

Music as a tint for language: so often and since such a long time, so good for story-telling, so bad for music.

Many times I feel nature as a giant ghost with no language and without the slightest interest on me. That's when it becomes a thrilling experience.

Ticks are more noble than birds: they don't hide their nature behind a song.

There should be special labyrinths for explorers. Unknown places need a break. We should be concerned about the loss of unkonwnness in our world. Another option is to go back to legends.

Be careful if you are a mutant; there are many Blade Runners out there.

{Extracted from: http://www.franciscolopez.net/env.html}
"The illusion of realism or the fallacy of the 'real' The recordings of La Selva have not been modified or subjected to any process of further mixing or additions. In a traditional context, it could therefore be said that this work features 'pure' straight nature sound environments, as it is often claimed in many nature recordings releases. Yet I believe this to be too simplistic and also to obscure a series of problems on the sense of reality and its portrayal through sound recordings..."

"...Furthermore, a sound environment is not only the consequence of all its sound-producing components, but also of all its sound-transmitting and sound-modifying elements. The birdsong we hear in the forest is as much a consequence of the bird as of the trees or the forest floor. If we are really listening, the topography, the degree of humidity of the air or the type of materials in the topsoil are as essential and definitory as the sound-producing animals that inhabit a certain space."

Time Loops Our Sonic Stigmata

Tellus: Time Loops Our Sonic Stigmata

The thing with New York was that, by the very nature of this urban beast, silence was a rare commodity and linearity a near impossibility. To be at home or in the studio was to have not just the sounds of one's own thoughts, but a myriad of street noises- cars, sirens, people yelling, garbage trucks, and radios spitting out a ceaseless pastiche of international pop vernaculars. Perhaps the neighbors would be having another fight, the kids selling dope on the corner a new brand name to extol, the television is on, as is the stereo, and you've not quite put that book down to pick up the phone. This overlapping, all-subsuming, surfeit sensory saturation is the condition in which much of the music here was made. And what we hear of it today is inevitably either the denial or embrace each artist must determine in their relationship to the din of existence.
{Carlo McCormick, extract from http://www.ubu.com/sound/tellus.html}

Kafka & Sinatra

The unlikely duo become me in my presentation; more characters to swallow; to be possesed by; to channel; transmit; translate from body to body; Franz Schinaatra... perhaps. Now the phantasy can finally happen; all singing all dancing toe tappin' sidewalk flyin' ~ the musical of border patrol guards line dancing, stripped down for the one-man solo for my presentation.

The novel {Amerika} more explicitly humorous and slightly more realistic (except in the last chapter) than most of Kafka's works, but it shares the same motifs of an oppressive and intangible system putting the protagonist repeatedly in bizarre situations.

Not to raise myself to any level of being a 'protagonist' in my own adventure of enquiry {though I guess that I am de facto}, the oppresive and intagible system is present all around me, esepcially given the 'texuality' of the citytext - often of rules and discrepancies unbeknownst to me e.g. how even though the traffic signals show the 'white man'/O Illuminated One, Strolling, vehicles continued to keep crossing my path causing alarm and confusion at what I thought was their total lack of respect for my pedestrian rights. Later, I discovered, when eplaining my own 'road rage' of the afternoon, that vehicles do have this right in the state & city of New York- but the pedestrian always maintains the 'right of way' when the white man is illuminated.

Although Kafka never visited America, he crossed over to the land of red, white, and blue
through a portal of secondary sources. “Kafka read American travel books, attended lectures,
collected printed materials, and spoke with returning emigrants,” E. L. Doctorow explains in the
Foreword of Amerika, “all for the purpose of writing a realistic novel authenticated with ‘up-todate’ American detail” (Doctorow ix).

Likewise, I had never visited America, not before the CEP at least, but the seeds had been sown, the dream has been living inside of me for a long time before the CEP was even a known part of the Dartington degree. Indeed, just like Kafka and all modern day immigrants and tourists alike, we are all draw like moths to a flame by the mythology of this city like no other.

Part of my enquiry and investigation was about the confrontation of these phantasies with the everyday reality of being in the city "that never sleeps" . Both Kafka and I gathered our infomation is vastly similar ways, albeit I also have the knowledge powerhouse that is the World Wide Web at my disposal, but I still read a number of guidebooks, collected a vast amount of printed material e.g. newspapers, leaflets, flyers, postcards, business cards etc. from my journies around the city, and have spoken with a number of 'returned migrants' both in the city and back in Britian about their experience of being-in-the-city and their status as {im}migrants.

However, where Kafka and I part company is over the 'attention to realism' and 'up-to-date detail'. Whereas Kafka like so many writers of his historical context both as well as mine/Ours, his concern is with the portrayal of some 'truth' or in other words, as accurate an American 'world' as he can write having no first hand experience of the context. Whereas my enquiry was with first hand experience, but with the primary concern with the hyperreal, postmodern and symbolic source of American and New York 'mythology'- again in the Barthesian line of flight.

Specifically, within Amerika, a scorned individual often must plead his innocence in front of remote and mysterious figures of authority.

In the story, the Statue of Liberty is holding a sword, and some scholars have interpreted this as a "might makes right" philosphy Kafka may have believed the United States holds {Wikipedia}:

As Karl Rossmann, a poor boy of sixteen who had been packed off to America
by his parents because a servant girl had seduced him and got herself a child by him, stood on the liner slowly entering the harbour of New York, a sudden burst of sunshine seemed to illumine the Statue of Liberty, so that he saw it in a new light, although he had sighted it long before. The arm with the sword rose up as if newly stretched aloft, and round the figure blew the free winds of heaven (Kafka 3).

Kafka’s description of a Statue of Liberty that holds a sword rather than a torch leaps out as themost striking part of the opening paragraph. Controversy arises as to whether the factual error serves an intentional, symbolic purpose or whether it exists merely because of an unintentional misinterpretation of “contemporary photographs taken from a considerable distance and blurring all details” (Spann 76). Regardless of the intentionality of the mistake, however, the fact remains that Kafka consciously chooses to place a sword rather than anything else in Lady Liberty’s hand.
{Extract from http://people.csail.mit.edu/edmond/writings/amerikan-dream.pdf}

The irony of the sword replacing the torch rings masonic bells, yet the interpretation is what I find most intriguing. That the supposed materialized 'image' of America, of the photograph medium of the message, caused a misunderstanding, a misreading, resulting in the rewriting of the now symbolic archetype of liberty, freedom, opportunity and NYC/USA.

In a similar manner can I relate and compare my recent video and audio work about the 'blurring all details' of recognition and familiarity in order to achieve a simulated 'new' sound and image.

Writing style

Kafka often made extensive use of a characteristic peculiar to the German language allowing for long sentences that sometimes can span an entire page. Kafka's sentences then deliver an unexpected impact just before the full stop—that being the finalizing meaning and focus. This is achieved due to the construction of certain sentences in German which require that the verb be positioned at the end of the sentence. Such constructions are difficult to duplicate in English, so it is up to the resourceful translator to provide the reader with the same (or at least equivalent) effect found in the original text. {Wikipedia}

A shared writing style; an aversion to the punctuation and short sentences {albeit from my writing 'past'. The recent adoption of more 'creative' use of lesser known punctuation marks has caused some institutional backlash, but not as much as during my adolescence when my teachers would force me rewrite entire paragraphs of seemingly endless setences over and over again, reducing the length till they achieves some ersatz 'crystallization' of which I despsed more than anything. My damnations each night are aimed at this reductivist world, this Occam's Context I wish I could splice with my razor on a darkened night...

Another virtually insurmountable problem facing the translator is how to deal with the author's intentional use of ambiguous terms or of words that have several meanings.

Frank Sinatra:

Born in December 1915, Sinatra was the only child of Italian immigrants Natalie Della Garaventa and Antonino Martino Sinatra.^[7]

A pastiche I thought I would never attempt: to use the Broadway hit "New York, New York" during my presentation and future performance of *this* time of mine in NYC.Yet, Broadway is a major part of the performance context and history and world-wide theatrical status of NYC and therefore is it not inimical that a student of performance ought to parody the hell out of the ludicruous and decadent form of the Broadway musical as best they can?

Made some more sonic experiments by ripping a Youtube verison of the popular hit {actually written and recorded first by Liza Minelli} then taking the very first few bars, the famous opening sequence, then applying the following modifications, mutations, translations:

Reverse ~> Slow Tempo {-100%} ~> Wah-Wah ~> Delay

= a Euphoria/Trance/Chillout break-down and a 'complete' mutation of te original; has become 'a whole other' to that of the initial mp3 first worked with. It's on the left hand player, have a listen. Towards the end of the track I often hear a slight fantasmic trace of the famous opening bars, but perhaps this is an audible projection from my countless kareoke sessions here in the apartment now there's no one around to hear me practice...

I am particularly drawn to the lines in the 2nd verse of

"These small town blues/ Are melting away/ I'm gonna make a brand new start of it/ In old New York"

which could prove an interesting Goat Island approach of reperforming the song but shifting the beginning middle and end to different parts of the presentation¬performance playing the with the recognisable structure, offering fantasmic allusions

perhaps even play the song under the 'blankets' of city noise or Audicity/effects pedal modification...