Sympathy for the Garfunkel

Somehow I missed the magic week at the SFMOMA blog that opened with Dana Ward on Corey Arcangel’s editing down of Simon and Garfunkel’s 1984 Central Park concert to only the footage where Art’s got his hands in his pockets, and closed with Brandon Brown’s answering piece on the satanics of Kanye West. Brown pulls a thread through two centuries of “poetry which portends towards devotion to the Satanic,” his own days “entrenched in wizardry” in the 1980s, and the “audacious impiety” of Kanye’s Twitter pronouncements about his upcoming My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, while Ward reads angelic Art’s “increasingly enigmatic gesture”—boredom? regret? interpersonal friction?—as “a prosody to that which one never knew one desired to know.” Art’s remarkable “junction of poise and unease” through the concert, as Ward sees it, “speaks to the fragile happiness engendered by every false armistice.” I liked this, too:

“[Arcangel’s work] reminds me that reverie is the scholarship of unproductive time, and that inquiry undertaken there is hard won and precious and just what the world of work seeks to undo.” 

See what can happen when you let poets out of their usual malbolge?