Metronome
title:
Metronome
onscreen text:
“How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life!”
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value
VO:
This will be my rhythm for the day.
Beating on the chest is the best way to internalize a beat, because you feel the impact throughout your whole body. If I keep this up long enough, my heart might take the same tempo, like how a roomful of pendulums eventually decides somehow on a unanimous rhythm.
Once you start walking, it gets harder. This beat is too fast to walk to. The trick is to find a footstep tempo that’s expressible in a simple mathematical ratio to the main tempo. Like now: I’ve got a 3-against-4 going on. The lower the common denominator, the easier. The lowest common denominator of 3 and 4 is 12, so a cycle’s only 12 beats long. Not too hard to keep track of. 4 groups of 3… 3 groups of 4.
Pass-the-god-damn-but-ter, Pass-the-god-damn-but-ter. Pass-the-god-damn-but-ter That’s a mnemonic device for learning the 3-against-4 polyrhythm. I found it useful for about a week. Then I got the hang of it, and I didn’t need that mnemonic any more. But the thing that troubles me is — and this is the point — now I can’t hear a 3-against-4 rhythm without thinking: “Pass-the-god-damn-but-ter. Pass-the-god-damn-but-ter.”
And really, that mnemonic phrase is a lie. It condenses the two rhythms into one, it doesn’t allow for their separate existence, it robs them of their original meaning. I wonder sometimes whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Maybe they should be perceived together.
I mean, there’s all of these rhythms that you have to cope with, and if you were aware of all of them individually and simultaneously, you’d either be God or you’d go insane — or maybe both. And maybe there’s an all-encompassing ratio, the greatest lowest common denominator of them all. Maybe if you put all of these rhythms together, you’d get the universal meter, and there might be some magical mnemonic sentence that sums that one up too, some incredibly long or incredibly short phrase, in a language no one has ever heard, that would encompass the rhythmic totality.
I think about this kind of thing a lot. I’m not entirely convinced of its usefulness.
But I always end up there. For example: every time I see Jar Jar Binks, that makes me think of Liam Neeson, whom I always confuse with Ralph Fiennes. Ralph Fiennes was in “The End Of The Affair”, which makes me think of Graham Greene, and then Catholicism, and then Hell, which for various reasons I associate with loops and rhythmic infinity. And I know there’s an infinite number of thoughts to think, but the paths they lead me down are very few, and they all lead to the same place.
Whenever I go to visit my friend Jeff, who lives at Bathurst and Eglinton, I take the Bathurst bus — and now, every time I take that bus, I think about the time I got the idea to make this video (right about here). And then I think about how I had just seen “Fight Club”, for the second time, the night before that. And for some reason, I thought of how this voiceover would sound, and it doesn’t feel like it was really my idea. I had the rhythm and the timbre of Ed Norton’s monologues swirling around whichever mental whirlpool I was stuck in that day on the Bathurst bus.
sign:
STOP REQUESTED
VO:
Sometimes I wonder about all the movies I watch. Each one of them has its own beat, which of course gets multiplied or amplified on repeated viewing. So I wonder what the combined polyrhythm of all these movies looks and sounds like, and what it means.
The meter of the movies is more distinct than the rhythm of real life. It’s easier to pick out the subrhythms and trace the countermelodies in the movies. There’s one countermelody that I keep hearing, that’s stuck in my head, and, not surprisingly, it’s about rhythm — or, more specifically, about rhythm’s visual correlative, which is order. The movies sing me this song about order, and what it looks like, and how it feels. Order looks like boxes and circles and geometric patterns, and repetition and sychronization and uniformity. Order feels seductive, and aesthetic, and perfect — and it equals despair. This song the movies keep singing to me is all about how sameness is the enemy of the soul.
And ever since we learned about quantum mechanics, it seems the movies want to inspect this sameness at the subatomic level, to reduce all experience to a series of neural firings and electrical impulses. All this, too, is seductive, aesthetic, perfect despair. And you can’t argue with it. But I don’t buy it. Or, more accurately, I don’t find it very useful.
Nevertheless, a lot of movies use it as their argument’s fundamental premise — by which I mean their opening credits. I think I know what my opening credit sequence was. It happened in the autumn of 1997, when I took two hauls off a joint and suddenly found myself living here, in total amnesia, for about a half hour.
I worry a lot that this will be my closing credit sequence, too. If my life’s argument has a conclusion (by which I mean closing credits), I hope they’re not my life flashing before my eyes. I mean, Woody Allen has already done that — and, for that matter, so has Robert Altman. And everybody knows they got it from Bergman.
It would be nice if my end credits were to show me how I could have lived outside this steady pounding monologue that I hold onto and hate and love so much, if they were to provide a final escape from determinism and dissatisfaction, loops and language. But maybe I just want that because that’s what Lester Burnham got and it looked so pretty. Damn.
The movies do have a lot of ideas about how to escape, how to save your inner individual from the onslaught of sameness. And you get the impression that, for some reason, escape might involve poor performance at work — which often means smoking at work — and, if professional apathy doesn’t do it for you, you can just start breaking the things you can’t change. Inanimate objects make good scapegoats, because they don’t fight back. And I’m not totally clear on what you’re supposed to do once you’ve broken everything, but I think there’s something to do with trying to fuck a girl who’s one-third of your age — which for me is difficult, not to mention illegal. I don’t know… maybe when I’m older.
The movies don’t really provide an escape, they just provide another beat to drown out all the regular noise — which, I guess, is all I’m trying to do here. I apologize. But I don’t know that this video could have turned out any way other than it did, or if it’s just the intersection of all the little loops in my head, which began spinning either when I was born in 1976 or when I was born in 1997.
I don’t claim to be some Pavlovian victim of the universal conditioning machine, or even the cinematic conditioning machine. But pendulums synchronize their swings. Bodies internalize rhythms. If I could shut up, believe me, I would. Maybe. All I can do is lay down a beat and say, “This is mine, and I don’t care where it came from”. But this might not have been the most useful idea, either. Once you get going, it’s hard to stop.
onscreen text:
“Language sets everyone the same traps; it is an immense network of wrong turnings.
VO:
Jesus, how much longer is this going to go on?
onscreen text:
And so we watch one man after another walking down the same paths and we know in advance where he will branch off, where walk straight on without noticing the side turning, etc. etc. What I have to do then is erect signposts at all the junctions where there are wrong turnings so as to help people past the danger points.”
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value
sign:
STOP REQUESTED
credits:
a videotape by Daniel Cockburn
edited by Hilda Rasula
shot by Chris MacLean
sound edited and mixed by Stephen Roque
After Effects: Ryan Feldman
assistant director: Dave Tebby
location sound: Brandy Hamilton
production assistant: Travis Hoover
additional camera: Hilda Rasula, Daniel Cockburn
post-production facilities: Charles Street Video
produced under the Charles Street Video “Home Show” Residency Program
thanks to:
Lise Brin
James Bell
Alexander James Glenfield
The Estate of the Art
The Clearspot
Greg and the CSV staff
L.I.F.T.
all the other beat gnomes
works excerpted:
The Age of Innocence (Martin Scorsese)
American Beauty (Sam Mendes)
A Beautiful Mind (Ron Howard)
The Black Hole (Gary Nelson)
Brazil (Terry Gilliam)
A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick)
Crimes and Misdemeanors (Woody Allen)
The End of the Affair (Neil Jordan)
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (Russ Meyer)
Fight Club (David Fincher)
The Fly (David Cronenberg)
Frankenstein (James Whale)
Ghost in the Shell (Mamoru Oshii)
Johnny Mnemonic (Robert Longo)
Lolita (Stanley Kubrick)
M*A*S*H (Robert Altman)
The Matrix (Andy & Larry Wachowski)
Metropolis (Fritz Lang)
Office Space (Mike Judge)
Pi (Darren Aronofsky)
Playtime (Jacques Tati)
Proverb (Steve Reich)
Star Wars Episode I : The Phantom Menace (director unknown)
Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow)
Trees Lounge (Steve Buscemi)
TRON (Steven Lisberger)
Trust (Hal Hartley)
Village of the Damned (Wolf Rilla)
Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman)
all original material
and the structuring, contextualization, and modification of all appropriated material
© zeroFunction 2002