La-di-dah

HD VIDEO, color, sound, 3:39 (2012)

[WORLD PREMIERE: Intra-. Infra-. Ultra-. Auto-. Four Short Video Works. Solo Screening. Reid Hall, Columbia Global Centers-Paris, France, August 2017.]

La-di-dah is a visualization of the eponymous poem, composed by G. D. Cohen expressly for this piece. It begins with a protracted accumulation of ambient sounds and utterances over a black screen. From there, the video proceeds to the first of its two parts, in which a woman enters screen right, sits squarely in the middle of the frame, and commences to recite the poem, “La-di-dah.” Though she stares directly into the camera, her voice comes quite literally from somewhere else; so, too, it would seem, do the features of her face. No sooner does she conclude her recital than the poem begins again, this time in the alternating voices of a male and female reader, and in precise measure and time with a montage of scavenged images past and present, abstract and concrete. At last the video returns to the woman from part one, framed in medium shot as before, staring straight into the camera. The ambient sounds from the beginning of the film overcome the soundtrack before dissipating at last.

The poem “La-di-dah” itself is an exercise in rigorous formal experimentation. It comprises ten four-line stanzas, each line a single Cretic foot (“la-di-dah”). The words and phrases, too, derive from scavenged language, traces of idomatic expressions, the incongruous juxtaposition of images and concepts, and the syntactical rumor of nursery rhymes, Sophoclean choruses, blues laments, and subway banter.

The interaction of image and sound in “La-di-dah”, so conceived, aims to plumb varioius dimensions of memory, ephemeral sensory experience, the subconscious, and the horizon of everyday speech.

LA-DI-DAH

man of rope
weather cane
lithoglyph
wedding stain

timber chair
polymath
leather shoe
zenith grain

orchid pipe
putty knife
house of wax
granite pike

coffee cup
wooden spoon
Persian stag
tartar room

tallow lamp
wither mask
brittle lamb
whisper chaff

willow frond
organ bone
beveled glass
flannel wand

stainless grass
tender frame
celluloid
purple vein

drink the lye
tap the drain
close the door
trip the chain

dark the flash
shrug in vain
la-di-dah
ruin lain