The Truniverse

Thoughts on "The End"

2010-05-29T13:10:00.012-04:00

One week ago, Lost wrapped up with a big tearjerker finale. Was I disappointed? Mostly. Yes. I've loved Lost for three years now. I remember when it first premiered, on the helm of Survivor's raging success. My mom loved it because she thought it was going to be a fictionalized version of Survivor. I dismissed it for the same reason. Somewhere near the end of Season 3, my then-boyfriend Silas gave me all the DVDs and demanded that I watch it. I got hooked, and passed it on to my next boyfriend and my sister, who both got hooked and passed it on themselves.

That's the kind of show Lost was. It captured you. It made you want to spread it, to create communities around it. You loved and cared about these people, about the incendiary nature of being stuck with strangers in desperate situations, of alienation. It echoed and enriched the feelings I had the first time I realized just how big the universe was, how little of it I understood, how beautiful the mystery. For me, this feeling is a source of life. I get up every morning because there is hidden ground in every day, soft patches of in-between places and infinite libraries of the unknown. There are no reruns in life, and little satisfaction. It sparks the desire, the urge to move forward, and if anything, Lost was a reiteration of a child's dream, a sometimes nightmarish wonderland of wild cards and veiled forces.

In that way, I am trying to remember the show for the questions it posed, rather than the conclusion it drew.

Carlton Cuse said in one video interview "we're not like J.K. Rowling", in that they require the intricate collaboration of a taskforce of team members. It's cyclical. Ideas go out, run through the tints and filters of hundreds of interpretations, and becomes a self-directed entity by the time the show hits the waves. It's beautifully organic in this sense, but the downside is loss of control. Even Cuse and Lindelof couldn't seal it off in a vacuum tube in the same way that Rowling could create the infinitesimally complex system of Harry Potter on the unified front of one brain.

After watching the conclusion I couldn't help but see this comparison as ominous. They both suffered the same pratfalls in the end. I didn't feel emotionally involved in the ending of Lost because, like Harry Potter, I mostly just felt confused and shortchanged.

I trusted the writers because the characterization was so good, and there were some amazing payoffs in the course of the show, but ultimately I made the conscious decision to trust. If you don't trust, you can't feel the tension. Like a string tied tight between two poles, if you don't believe in the second pole, the thread just hangs loose on the ground.

Fear of rejection, and fear of being let down, those things preemptively clash with the possibility of a meaningful experience. If a fictitious work doesn't read as authentic to me, I stop watching. I stop reading. What I won't do is suffer a show for easy weekly thrills if I think there is no binding universe. Lost was a let-down only because it was so good, only to be so amateur in its final moments.

There is a difference between open ended mystery and glaring plot hole. There is an art to the unanswered question. One, the question must come from an authentic place. Two, there must be a matrix in place by which it is possible to surmise an answer, or at least to believe that there is one. My unease stems from the sense that I cannot imagine the writers had this planned all along. That means the story lacks structural integrity. Not honoring the questions is far worse than not answering them.

Some elements don't need explanation because, though they are big and generative, they serve only to give birth to real point. Where did Mother come from? I don't care. In Satanic Verses, why did Gibreel and Saladin morph into deities and then fall back? It matters not in the least. In the same way, the large and sweeping mysteries of this island, the cosmic forces of good and evil, the mysterious and mythic properties of science, none of that needed explanation.

Katey Rich, as a guest on the Slash Filmcast made a really good point when she said that, based on the answers we did get, we really wouldn't want more answers from the show. I think that's true. I'm more unhappy about the silly answers than the nonexistent ones. I wasn't disappointed that they took a spiritual approach, but that they used the gauze and the inspecificity of spirituality to blur over the frayed plot threads, like cauterizing a wound so deep it couldn't heal naturally.

The Sideways world seemed like a giant fake left, distracting us from the "answer" of the Island, which was simplistic, incomplete and hastily cobbled. There is a particular Dashiel Hammet style of writing wherein the lead character figures things out much faster than the audience. But past a certain point this is narrative laziness. But when characters know so much, and know it mysteriously through no system of interrogation or reason, the audiences are isolated.

For example, I had no idea what Desmond was supposed to be doing down in the cave, or how Jack knew this would somehow mortalize the Man in Black. The cork in the cave was Rowling's Elder Wand, a suddenly inserted dues ex machina tool, magically understood by Harry to be his through a series of extremely fuzzy chain of events. I can follow that Desmond knows things because he has a wider perspective a la time and dimension jumping, but Jack? And the cork in the cave? How are these rules arbitrated, and how on earth does anyone know them, even Smokie or Jacob? Especially when, over and over again, these island rules are nebulous and inconsistent at best? And this is coming from someone who accepted that a Hydrogen bomb could throw you thirty years into the future.

These are my broader thoughts on the trainwreck (plane crash?) conclusion of Lost. It makes me sad. I honestly wanted to like this finale. Now I honestly am going to have to figure out how to continue liking this show.

One nit to pick in terms of content. One nit and I'm out.

So Across the Sea was a Rosetta Stone, more or less, for everything Jacob has said thus far. The Island is both physically and metaphysically a source of light, energy, life. It's electromagnetic properties shield it from the outside world by creating a refraction, like a straw in a glass of water. It refracts time and waveforms (say, sonar, radio signals) and essentially camouflages itself in this way.

Because some people find it anyway, it needs a protector. Cool.

I can't imagine that we would actually equate Mother with godliness, or Jacob with Christlike love and free will. God does not want (as much as I can presume the nature of God) his/her children to be ignorant thumb-sucking emotional stumps, whereas Mother was pretty insistent this be case. That doesn't sound like the force of good. In fact, it just sounds like the church. An institution of fallible humans built around the righteousness of Knowing the Answer, using violence and seclusion to grow a generation of brainwashed successors. I say that, and I'm not even anti-religion. I'm saying if we are to draw this parallel, religion doesn't look so good in Lost.

If Jacob is supposed to represent free will, why does he determine the fates of people with a touch? Why does he bring people to the island against their will, only to coolly witness their self-destruction from a cryptic and removed perspective? How many people did Mother murder in that first village? How many people died in the Dharma purge, as ordered by Jacob?

What has the Man in Black done that is really evil? Let's review.

He killed some people. Okay, so did Jacob (indirectly) and Mother (directly). Man in Black at least usually offered a choice or looked into their souls first. Smokie knows people in a way that Jacob never did. He chose not to abide in the luxury of being removed. He wanted to get off the island, and for that his choice was either to trick the candidates into killing themselves (because he could not do it) or to take them along. His incentive is usually always the same. His motivation for murder was defensive. Jacob brought people to the island and let them die just to keep patching over his own mistake in creating the smoke monster.

What does the Man in Black want? To get off the island.
Before he became a smoke monster, why did people want to keep him on the island? Fear of sin, which seems to have made it to the island just fine on its own.

Why does he want the light? To get off the island.
In other words, lots of things would have been really okay if Mother just told him the straight truth about the real world and, you know, let him leave.

The thing that irks me is this. The Man in Black resisted being sheltered. Jacob embraced being sheltered. I don't like this being painted as the model of what it means to be noble.

It's amazing to me that the show who brought us "bad" guys like Widmore, and Ben, Sayid and Michael, all of whom were given a serious modicum of second thought, totally phoned it in with the most important villain of them all. He's the monster Jacob created. He was played as standard action movie death. Good, evil is destroyed, we can all get on with our lives.

That's the end of my nit.

I'll only say this as my final thought. I don't appreciate when sentimentality saturates the final moments of an otherwise epic adventure. I don't like when the feelings of the writers seep through, their own heartstrings tugged at the termination of their own work. This is including but not limited to unnecessary jumps into the the future, where-are-they-now segues, lots of white light, mist, hugs, and hodgepodge spirituality. This is another Harry Potter overlap. Please, stop it. What you do when you do that is feel everything for me. You rob me of my own loss. Sandman's "The Wake" (SPOILER in italics) was a great ending because, though they stopped to reminisce on the death of the titular character, momentum never ceased. Daniel carried on the torch, old and loved characters paused for a moment in their dreams and the whole dizzy world tilted on. That allowed me to feel the sadness I should have felt for Lost. When all the nuance deflates like a punctured airbag, when the best characters vanish without mention and we spent half an hour watching Jack go deer-eyed and die, I am left with nothing.

Nothing but the memories, and my imagination to pick up the ball they dropped.

"We Have Met the Enemy, and He is Us" - Pogo

2010-04-24T20:29:00.022-04:00

Rich Dad Poor Dad

"They who have put out the peoples eyes reproach them of their blindnesse." - John Milton

Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki was bought for me in the spirit of helpfulness, I suppose as a sort of primer for making more out of the money I make. About halfway through I'm still waiting for the practical advice. Kiyosaki writes from a strange place, from a semi-fabled history of two major influences in his life. Besides the thinly veiled disgust for his biological Poor Dad, who by all accounts seems exactly like the father I wish I'd had, educated and literate, socially concerned, eclectic and devoted to his job as a schoolteacher, but who never made his money blossom forth from a magical wellspring and was therefore a waste of life, "even though he was the one with all those degrees", there is a lack of critical reasoning here that I find disturbing.

I'm a little shaken that a book barely edited for typos made the New York Times bestseller list, but perhaps that's tangential. What's crucial is Kiyosaki's anecdotal and incredibly reductionist style, here is a man who never learned how to put forth a persuasive argument except as an appeal to greed. What lacks tremendously is an acknowledgment (a true acknowledgment, not a few words of lip service) of fundamentally differing value systems. Of what it means to be a meaningful human. The practical thing I've learned so far? Buy assets, not liabilities. Okay, well, great, after I buy groceries I should have enough left over to start saving for that rental property. And back in the day when I worked two jobs and went to school, all that time I spent in CVS debating with myself over whether hair conditioner was a luxury, I really should have been managing my investment portfolio.

Admittedly, Kiyosaki describes the psychology of the poor with some accuracy. He describes the fear that gets you up in the morning, plodding unhappily to a job that saps your energy and makes you hate life. He describes the strained human relationships, the weary soul, the tendency to spend all your spare time just trying to forget. The unbearable anxiety over bills that keeps you up at night, the panic that hits you suddenly in the shower when you aren't looking, the overwhelming feeling of powerlessness, that huge Goliath structures might, with the slightest tug, bring your life toppling to the ground. I'll even concede his point that many poor people, when they do eventually start coming in to a little disposable income, have a hard time not spending it all right away. That's because poor people aren't used to money that lasts. They are structured to think only of immediate needs. They know how to be extremely thrifty, but they don't know how to save. They see extra money, and for them its a time to exhale. Of course, even in this wild state whereupon a poor person comes upon an extra hundred dollars, they still don't spend as magnanimously as a middle class person on an average day, so I have a hard time passing judgment. But I understand the impulse and it's something I have to control within myself. For someone who hates math, I think about numbers a lot. If I have more than I need to survive (a fairly recent status, believe me), some primal hounds within me start making noise. If I don't use it soon, someone will take it from me, they say. It makes me uneasy. This is an unexpected reaction, but a true one. Most people are slaves to money, the wealthy included.

But where Kiyosaki goes grossly awry is in stating that poor people don't know about this cycle of fear and desire. They are entirely unaware of their status as the enslaved, the vehicles of labor stringing their guts out for the pittance of the business owners. Believe me, if there is one thing poor people know, it's that they are slaves to money. Rich Dad (who by the way sounds like a complete asshole) underpays his employees and justifies it by saying that if they were smart enough they could get themselves out of that bind. He justifies the whole system this way, in what amounts to an outlandish assumption that poor people are only poor because they are ignorant, irresponsible, or unresourceful. He says that when they blame him, or other owners of capital, for their problems, they aren't taking personal responsibility. His responsibility to pay his employees a fair wage and to treat people with respect, of course goes unmentioned. Because he has no responsibility beyond himself. Rich Dad is the "self-made" man, making himself in the image of Social Darwinism, of the oversimplified doctrine of self-interest.

It is, to say the least, offensive proselytizing on Kiyosaki's part, and to say the most, a voluntarily blindness to more critical aspects of the human condition. So, frankly, bullshit. Why these systemic problems in the first place? As revolutionary feminist Frances Wright once exclaimed, "Let us inquire!"

Creating an Other

The existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre said that identity is formed through the creation of an other, and by placing one-self in negation with that other. This is not inevitable or irreversible, but a rather natural tendency of human behavior. Hegel developed the notion that human beings are comprised of two parts, the part which is the physical, static self and the transcendent, transformational part which observes the self. Respectively, the en-soi (it-itself) and the pour-soi (for-itself). This is important, and relates to almost everything I'm about to say.

The struggle for self-actualization and the anxiety of wasted time can really be understood as the struggle between these two facets. The en-soi is the human enacted, the state which is. The pour-soi is the state which is not, it lives in the future, contains a notion of the ideal-self, and tries desperately to embody itself in the en-soi. It is tied to the en-soi, relies on it for material, practical existence, but judges it also for not realizing its full potential.

Sartre says we put into the Other that which we like least about ourselves. "The Other is that which I make myself not-be" he says.

Josephine Donavan's paraphrasing: "Just as the pour-soi depends on the en-soi, so does the master or subject consciousness depend on the existence of the Other. For the pour-soi defines itself by the fact that it is not the Other. Unlike the en-soi, however, the Other exists also as consciousness attempting to reduce other selves to the level of object in order that it may exist as a pour-soi. So, struggle ensues when the self attempts to reduce the other consciousness to an object level, in order itself to become a transcendent free poir-soi. One thus comes eventually to see the Other as having all the negative qualities that one wishes not to have oneself."

That is not to say that the rich and powerful are the only ones who engage in creating the Other and then projecting onto this Other the qualities they fear most about themselves. The poor have just as much a culture of hating the rich, of reducing them to an abstract thing-ness, and trying to lend strength to their own identity by purporting that they live a more "authentic" life. It's exactly fitting that inauthenticity is their main critique of the rich when through a capitalist system, their self-authenticity is most at risk. However, the ideology of the ruling class has always been vastly more potent in terms of practical application. Let's break it down.

Wage-Slavery, Thing-ness

One of Noam Chomsky's major speaking points is the total waste of human potential incurred when the system forces the large majority to "rent" themselves to survive. An enormous thread in Marxist ideology is the degradation of existing solely as human capital, a thing, a vehicle of labor. Both suggest, as a solution, shared ownership over means of production (which obviously Chomsky took from Marx, but by virtue of being alive and still talkative on these subjects, he assumes importance in my mind).

There is enormous physical and mental pressure to let yourself slide into the status of thing. The extremely poor have no choice but to be a thing to someone. The real battle is whether or not they remain human to themselves. Remaining human, or exercising the pour-soi, is extremely exhausting when the entire world seems to think otherwise. The pressure is both practical and psychological. First off, the physical energy it takes to keep the body alive means that practically all of your attention is on the en-soi. Second, being cut off from higher education and told to leave your brain by the door 12 hours a day makes it rather difficult to mentally cultivate a strong and functioning poir-soi, an authentic self. Is it possible to stubbornly cling to your humanity despite all odds? Yes, always. Is it possible to escape wage-slavery on a practical level? Not always. And I would implore anyone who thinks otherwise to go be a migrant worker in South Texas and see how long it takes the powerful land-owners to sacrifice cheap labor by giving you any opportunity whatsoever. Or to see how easy it is to make any opportunity for yourself when you have neither time nor money.

Obviously this is an unsustainable state of the human spirit. The authentic self never really dies, smothered and subdued as it may be. It will always come back to haunt you. And when things reach a critical level, popular revolutions happen. The small group of the truly powerful are terrified of this.

Rhetorial Tactics of the Ruling Class

Unlike many other cultural and ethnic groups, the rich need not create the Other to develop their identity. They create the Other in self-defense, reacting exactly to what threatens their status. And if you can't control with violence (thank God), you control with rhetoric.

They have three major tactics:

1. Deny the structure.

Hence all these terms like "self-made" "bootstraps" and "American individualism". We don't live in total isolation from each other, but that's what the American doctrine preaches. We are part of a human ecosystem, and if there are vast social problems afoot then one must look at the whole picture for any real solution. But when this denial of the structure is disseminated down to the poor, they begin to self-inflict it. All of the blame for their poverty goes right into themselves, they are poor mainly because they are simple people who aren't working hard enough. This effects a "can't beat them, join them" mentality wherein the poor either actually succeed in becoming rich and thus assimilating entirely into the system of oppression (as Kiyosaki purports that he has done, even though he was never poor to begin with), or they string themselves out trying to reach that unattainable place. Who gets away scot-free in that environment? I'll let you answer that.

2. Create false alliances.

This is where we get extremely weird phenoms like cowboy presidents and soccer mom governors. In the days of Coolidge, simple farmers actually could become Presidents, but these days politicians have to co-opt a rather falsified culture of such.

3. Create false enemies.

Of course it goes back to the Other. The "liberal elite", "terrorists", "immigrants". The liberal elite concept always baffled me, because in my own bias the "elite" are snogbag Republicans who know enough to vote in their own interests. I suppose that yes, there are plenty of Kennedy-esque leftist bluebloods on the coasts, but I don't see how they are the enemy exactly for wanting to tax themselves more, you know?

Back in slave days it was black people. Plantation owners appealed to the vast underclass whites so effectively that they created a whole Confederate Army out of them, simply by saying "I may be rich and you may be poor, but we are both white." All of these things are redirects, a grand distraction of the fact that the powerful and the privileged absolutely do not care about the rest of us. Even Kiyosaki makes it pretty damn clear that Rich Dad has no stake in social responsibility whatsoever.

Internalizing the Otherness, The Poor Identity

Sartre calls it "bad faith", the drifting away from the authentic self, when an individual "takes toward oneself the point of view of the Other". Heidegger says that when subsumed by prefabricated identity, in other words, giving in to what culture tells you about your kind, the authentic self "drifts along towards an alienation in which its own-most potentiality-for-Being is hidden from it." The use of the word "alienation" here is a translation from the original German word Entfremdung. And I don't know what original word Marx used to describe "alienation", but the similarity of meaning is still notable. Marxist alienation is estrangement from ownership of one's labor, Heidegger's alienation is estrangement from the authentic self. I'd say that those are one and the same.

The question arises of how to attain power without being co-opted by the powers-that-be-already. How to achieve agency and comfort, but not accept the language and exclusionary brutality of the power. It's an issue that spans all cultural divides, race and gender to start. There is a hell of a lot of gender and race theory circulating that deals with exactly this issue. Feminist Julia Kristeva says that women face the dilemma of either becoming a man or relegating to the margins. "Becoming white" was sort of a buzzy term for a while in American black dialogues.

Personally I just never felt that dilemma as a woman. I have no idea why. The more masculine the realms I enter, the more feminine I feel. I see my gender as fixed, and therefor not threatened. But I have felt an identity crisis immensely in terms of class. It's problematic, and yes, an Achilles tendon of sorts. Let's get one thing straight. I don't consider myself "poor" right now. All of my base needs are being met. I am able to both support myself and mollify the people I owe for the privilege of getting an education. But emotional memory remains. I fear nothing more or less than slow death, underneath it all.

To me, class identity is thornier than gender identity because it is not fixed. How do I behave now, that I am within sight of infiltrating that tenuous thing called "middle class"? Who does that make me? I never expected this reaction, but yes, there it is. The culture of poor rural Texans that shaped my early mind think very differently from the philosophy of capitalism, ironically. For them, money is a direct result of function. Money for free is immoral. I still deal with that. I still feel like a faker in a lot of ways. The burden of coming into political power is how to define your identity that is outside the language of oppression and yet not subsumed into existing powers. So that is a problem and I admit it tints my thinking.

Here is another weird archetype. In debates between socialization and privatization, an example of the lazy good-for-nothing comes up quite often. "Poor people expect the government to solve all of their problems" says Kiyoki, who is apparently five years old. I would argue that the welfare queen is a much rarer occurrence than cultural memes would have us believe. There certainly isn't an army of them pushing for audacious services like health care. To sit like a lump on a log and expect money to come to you for absolutely nothing is a pretty specific neurosis. It's voluntary denial of the pour-soi, which I don't think is a natural state. Besides, government assistance doesn't exactly make your life comfortable. Every economic structure has the burden of how to deal with ne'er-do-wells where they do exist. The specifics of that can be debated, but I'm not talking about them. I doubt greatly that a few lazy people in the lowest echelons of society have dragged this entire nation to its knees. I've got a pretty good idea of who actually has done that, and they aren't poor. No, I'm talking about people who get up every morning and go to work and still don't have a means of fulfilling their most basic needs, much less build a savings for retirement. This is all too common, and entirely unacceptable.

On Personal Responsibility

I demand more personal responsibility than the capitalists. Kiyosaki would have you believe that personal responsibility is solely acting in your own self-interest. In doing so, you hoist yourself up from the masses and cease to be a burden on society. But all of us depend on each other. To begrudge anyone a living wage, or social services if their wage cannot afford it, is to ignore the fact that you depend on their labor for survival.

Personal responsibility is educating yourself about the things that have held you down, seeing past rhetoric, having a critical understanding of the values at the core of all rational thought. Yes, personal responsibility is carrying your weight in society, but it's also addressing the larger foundations which put people in such compromising positions in the first place. Personal responsibility is social responsibility.

Follow the Money

"Well, what are some major things, say, today? There are some things being addressed in a way. The feminist movement is addressing some. The civil rights movement is addressing others. The one major thing that's not being seriously addressed is the one that's really at the core of the system of domination, and that's private control over resources. And that means an attack on the fundamental structure of State capitalism. I think that's in order." - Noam Chomsky

It's not that capitalism is inherently evil, it's that private interests are inherently suspect. We've reached a point where the government is the servant of corporate interests. Does that mean that government is behind our failures? Yes and no. We had no place propping up sagging corporate structures. But whose interest is at work here? The government's interest, as they continue hemorrhaging money? No, it's private interests, who through a little thing called deregulation have managed to get "Too Big to Fail". Find the beneficiary of a corrupt system, and you find the perpetrator.

In a functioning the democracy the government acts to protect consumers from corporate abuses through regulation. How you want to organize economically has some room for interpretation. There are examples of well-functioning socialized nations (Uruguay) and examples of privatized but highly regulated nations also doing well (Switzerland). But I can't think of a single example of a country where commercial interests have no government oversight and there is not also a broad swath of the population living in total poverty and income inequality is sky-high. Seriously, give me an example if you think of one.

Freedom-to-Have versus Freedom-to-Be

I'll keep it simple. If you want to boil it down to core values, liberty for some means the freedom-to-be, for others it is freedom-to-have. These are two philosophies of liberty. Nobody realizes that we are talking about two different things and so we just yell back and forth a lot. Personally I think all this deference to Freedom-to-Have is responsible for a lot of human suffering, and I don't think consumption is real freedom. I don't think people necessarily have the right to get rich. Everyone has a right to health care and to education, as they do safety and legal rights. I think that in a nation as developed as ours, denying someone adequate health care is crime by neglect. When a mother doesn't feed her kid, so the kid starves to death, she gets convicted of child abuse. It's treated in exactly the same manner as if she had murdered her child through positive actions. People who are out of the power, god, even if they somehow could muster the Herculean effort to pull themselves out of destitution, need to not fear their lives. The punishment does not fit the crime.

This is essential to freedom-to-be, which I would categorized under the "pursuit of happiness" and I think is the only real freedom.

Once the argument is distilled down to those principles, it's very hard to go from there. They are intrinsic, and entirely opinion. So if you disagree with me on that, you probably won't agree with anything else I say. I do think though, that you might accept the argument that our current system allow neither freedom for a lot of people. Okay, so lets work on that first.

Conclusion

As Noam Chomsky says over and over again, this is not a functioning democracy. That's another problem. Maybe a more fundamental one.

I think the way we prevent abuses by an overwhelmingly privileged few is through a strong and functioning democracy. Large or small government is not the problem. Who controls the government is the problem. When government is the natural extension of the people, as it is intended to be in a democracy, it is no overlord, but a mechanism by which the concerns of many are manifested in a body functioned to address those concerns. Corporations inherently have no such obligations. As such, I'd rather put my energy into resurrecting a functioning democracy than in ensuring corporations the right to go on unsupervised.

The Third and the Seventh (and then some)

2010-04-18T22:00:00.004-04:00

Watch this: http://vimeo.com/7809605?hd=1

Two ideas of art, which are superficially contradictory, are, speaking broadly, formalism versus abstraction. Sometimes it’s rephrased as content versus form. These characterizations have the handy flexibility of being able to stretch over almost any medium. In film, it’s kind of crudely construed as what the movie’s about versus how pretty it is. In painting, or in plotless filmmaking (I’m starting to think that there is no such thing as “non-narrative”), the visual style is seen as the definitive trait which differentiates formal from abstract.

For example, early European paintings doggedly pursued realism in form, even if the content was lushly fantastical or religious. This came from a fundamental understanding of what art was at the time. Art was not a outlet of the marginalized or a pursuit of new avenues or even personal fulfillment (not to say this wasn’t a byproduct). Art was generally commissioned by a monarch or religious leader to depict specific ideas. Namely, religious anecdotes or the glorification of the state. That’s what it was, and that was fine. The point is not necessarily that the content was realistic, because it often wasn’t, but that art subscribed to certain rules, and those rules had the agenda of furthering the mainstream ideology.

So the popular understanding of subversive or critical art is that which fiddles with form. In this country that was comics, which still has the stigma of being un-intellectual, and then the abstract expressionists of the 50’s like Pollock, Motherwell, Krasner, Kline. Music did the same thing with people like Coletrane and Davis. But that’s just America – it was happening everywhere.

That’s why the art that I really find interesting is work with abstracted content, but a rigid adherence to form. Magritte was big on this. Sure, his stuff was stylized, but it was stylized into a kind of smoothness, a sterility. His paintings look like early computer animations. They lack the dust and the scuffs, the wildness present in other avant-garde artists. It was his content that got you. It was the subtle play on light, the painting dissolving into a field, the macabre transmutation of the human face, therein lay the subversion.

So I find the Third and the Seventh interesting in the same way. And this must have been conscious on Alex Roman’s part. I scoffed inwardly the first time I heard someone say that this film visually references Magritte, but on second though, yes of course it does. And true to form, it’s entirely computer generated.

This allows the “camera” to enter impossible spaces, and then later to create spaces which are impossibly constructed for use by humans. It depicts a serene and almost lifeless hyper-modern landscape, where life is preserved but not lived, like a beta fish frozen in an ice cube. Humans, where present, are only glimpsed. They are distant machinations, shadows and sounds softly overlayed with the slowly breathing orchestral score.

“arquitecture as art”, solid letters suspended in space, give us the only verbal cue. Split screens reveal parallel movements, as if searching for something. The camera that is not a camera pulls further and further back. It roves over the ledges and vertiginous curves that we glimpsed as children, looking skyward, wishing we had wings to play. It is a city, vast and emperial and lonely, but beautiful.

The content grows increasingly surreal. Now we are in nature, which seems to exist in a utopian balance with mankind. Old wood framed buildings have Bauhaus rigidity. Enormous water droplets crystallize over floors and fields. The one human depicted, much less a protagonist than a fellow observer, calmly unfolds a black umbrella.

But what interests me more than anything is the focus on cameras. The camera as the subject may seem masturbatory, and maybe it is. In this case though, we can’t even call it self-referential. The camera is a tool for seeing, but here it is being seen in isolation. It can’t even look back at you. It’s not real. It was created by a staggeringly complex system of vectors and algorithms. It has been separated from the herd and hunted down.

The Third and the Seventh is one of the most painstaking efforts I’ve ever seen to delve into those impossible angles and heights through CGI, to render visually possible all that was previously constrained by physical limitations. I mean really, just to see. The film alludes to this with one shot of an old and unmanned film camera perched intrepidly on the precipice of the long and dangerously sloped rooftop of an ultramodern building. Who put it there? Or was it always there, finding the edges? Maybe this is a film about seeing. I think it is.

And that’s really why I’ve brought it up. The Third and the Seventh is a perfectly clear example of what art should be, not in terms of aesthetics or of content, but of purpose.

Someone told me once (in the middle of an argument about Avatar, of course), that “if you want to send a message, write a telegram”. In other words, it is not for movies or art to tell us things. I would go so far to say that this guy was implying that movies should be for entertainment value only, and that’s a beast I’d like to brutally slaughter on another day. But for now, yes, I agree with the idea. The purpose of art is not to send a message. In storytelling, good art is a hypothesis. A hypothesis is really question. A hypothesis is a truth on trial. Scientific method aside, there is no better way to explore our ruts, our habits, our prejudices and culture neurosis than through fiction.

But zooming out, the purpose of art, if there can ever be one, is to reflect the latent world of inner life, of subjective vision. Even if it is about outside events, say, in the famous Guernica, it is still about the seeing of those events. And that is monumentally important. Art need be neither entertainment nor a message, and even that is no dichotomy. Art is the pursuit of that monarch butterfly, that magic moment when the brain acts of its own accord, departs from the eyes, overrides the senses and becomes a thing called the Individual. It has been happening all your life. Art is an attempt to externalize that, so that we understand each other.

It is sometimes the feeling, the taste of another’s life in your own mouth, communicated in synchronistic forms that nearly every human understands without words. Words, those silly, limited things, get closest to the truth when even grammar is subverted. That’s poetry. The truth is that language is never translated correctly, and people have even less trust in wordless communication. In my mind that mishap of meaning is both the beauty of life and the reason art is undervalued as part of society. It is inefficient, and therefore seen as a useless frivolity.

I vehemently disagree, and I will all of my life. Art says that life can be seen and understood in ways you have not seen or understood it before. That is absolutely, practically crucial to the development of a critical consciousness about oneself and the world. It assists the development from solipsist to participating human being. Because if one can get so close to the subjective consciousness of someone else, one is forced to recognize a sentience in the “other” that is similar to that of the self. And that if we deign intrinsic value in ourselves, we should logically deign it in others.

The examples are clear. Societies without art, or for whom art is relegated to another purpose like entertainment or propaganda, are ethnocentric, intolerant, exclusionary and incapable of critical analysis. The United States has devalued its own culture to the extent that the only surviving threads are those which bring in profit, so it’s no wonder that Americanism means consumerism. It’s no wonder that the world sees us as fat and cheap and stupid. Not that we should run around in fear of what everyone else thinks, but if all your friends things you are a jerk, it is at least worth a moment to beg the question, am I a jerk? We think that freedom is the pursuit of bang-dash imperialism. We think nothing of claiming the natural resources of unwilling nations, of making completely impractical value judgments, squandering our domestic resources by mere provocation of the fear of the other. Is it really that much of a surprise? Given that we clearly don’t think it is important to experience the “other” at all?

We could start by looking at the Other right here at home. I think in many ways, marginalized groups in this country have the most to contribute to American art. Not only can they provide a subjective vision that is ancillary to the common narrative just by virtue of living outside it, but it is they from whom we’ve not yet heard. Mountains of silence waiting to move at the slightest noise.

.

I Made a Mirror Men Playlist

2010-03-14T14:33:00.002-04:00

I'm not sure why. But it is nice.

The "Fencepost" Problem (or so I just learned...)

2010-02-27T12:55:00.007-05:00

I've felt for a while as if there is something fundamentally different in my logic and the logic of people who understand numbers. Maybe I have a hard time dealing with things that make sense at face value, I don't know. I'm sure that anyone who really grasps mathematical concepts can then whirl off into my fun happy land of theory and abstraction, but I, a humanities-head, just never hired the captain for that particular boat.

There was a wall I hit when I was young, regarding math. It was an obstacle to my understanding, a conceptual dilemma so deep that I still don't get it. It perplexed me so much that rather than dwell, than trying to wrap my third grade mind around it, I just pushed it away. But deep in the back of my mind, this Unknown instilled a deep mistrust in me regarding even the simplest of equations. To this day I check myself over and over again. I never relaxed, never relinquished my mind to the muscle-memory required to know instantly that six times seven is forty-two.

I'll explain the problem by example. Next week is the 22nd to the 26th. That's five days. But 26 minus 22 is 4. That makes NO SENSE to me. I guess it is because the day of the 22nd is also an entity that is being taken away, but I always felt like the function of subtraction was to reveal a quantity that has been parsed from a whole. So what's the point if it gives you the wrong number? I mean I must conclude here that when we subtract numbers from each other, we are really counting the spaces between them, the integers. The concept of integers helps me a little bit, but no one explained integers to me in third grade so I was pretty disheveled about the whole thing.

I see numbers as things that exists independently of the objects they quantify. I see them like ghost skins. If we have three apples, the first apple is wrapped in a ghost skin that is 1. The third apple is wrapped in a ghost skin that is 3. 3 minus 1 is 2. That makes sense because if you take one apple away you have two left.

But what does it mean when you say that the "difference" between 3 and 1 is 2? Seems to me that the difference between 3 and 1 is 1. Apple 2 is the difference, the solid object that lies between apple 1 and apple 3.

When you say the "difference" is 2, you must be saying that there are 2 spaces between apples 1, 2 and 3. "Difference" in math is supposed to be synonymous with "subtraction". But the only way you can say that the difference between 1 and 3 is 2 is by counting the spaces. But when you "subtract" 1 from 3 and get 2, you are counting the apples - the solid objects - not the spaces.

Way more complicated than it has to be. Well, welcome to my brain. This is something I've avoided trying to think about for 15 years.

The problem is not necessary in my ability to wrap abstract numbers around the physical universe. It's something to with my expectations of how this marriage works. I feel subtly betrayed by the 1 up or 1 down problem when trying to add or subtract real quantities, and most of the time I just give up and count on my fingers. Because fingers are real, physical, and won't trick you with silly things like "differences". I looked up math disabilities in grade schoolers and none of them really sound like what my issue was. So I'd just be curious to know if anyone else knows what I'm talking about.

Edit: I feel incredible satisfaction at finding this wiki page, thanks to the all-knowing Bjorn.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fencepost_problem#Fencepost_error

This is What I Did Saturday Instead of Writing a Blog Post

2010-02-09T08:20:00.004-05:00

(there was also the record breaking snow storm)

Post-Humanism has nothing to do with Humanism. SILLY.

2010-01-30T23:50:00.011-05:00

A few nights ago I had a dream that I lived in deep dark city in the future, and that an army of men wearing all black, even over their faces, started rounding people up to be militarized and controlled. They killed everyone who resisted. If you submitted, they might very well let you live, but you had to accept that your life belonged to them, and that everything you did, and whether you lived or died, depended upon their caprice. I decided to run for it. I hid in the empty buildings left by the people they had taken. Someone else was with me. I knew him in waking life but I don't remember who he was and I never saw his face.

I was ultimately killed by a dog. It was a black dog with electronic red eyes. It had chased me down the last hall, into the last room, and I shut myself in with a door made of glass. I could see him on the other side, looking for me. I knew he would find me soon enough so I picked up a rifle with one bullet and tried to shoot him through the glass. The bullet missed, the glass shattered, and he attacked.

It wasn't a nightmare, actually. It was more a dream about urgency and purpose than about fear. It was about the physical will to live in conflict with the reasons for being alive: that is, freedom, autonomy, expression, love.

And the dog, I knew this in the dream-way that one knows these things: The dog had been an ordinary black lab. At some point it had been infected with an artificially engineered nanovirus. He caught the virus in the way one catches any ordinary cold, by breathing it in. The nanovirus lodged itself in some muscle tissue somewhere and started multiplying itself, and those replicas began to manufacture metal and dissolve calcium, began to wire into the nervous system and attack organic cells, consuming them as energy and replacing them with tiny machines. Many of the basic organs were left intact to save energy, like the heart. But this dog's bones were as strong as steel, and his brain and eyes were hardwired terminator style.

I have no doubt that this dream was inspired by Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. Namely the "mites", which are microscopic nanotech devices programmed to do any number of things. These mites are omnipresent and inevitable in the air around you. Of course there are some malcontents that engineer and release harmful virus mites, which is why cities have developed their own immune systems a la defense mites that are programmed to seek and destroy the harmful ones.

But what's interesting to me is that despite all this talk in the book of implants and even of smart tattoos that achieve this end, those mites, those viruses in the Diamond Age never assimilate humans or animals the way the dog in my dream was subsumed. They either killed the organism, or tracked it, or read its mind, or made it prettier, but they never reproduced themselves. They never attempted to make a larger machine out of many small ones, to, in effect, turn a "natural" creature into a cyborg at least not in the physical sense. Most of Stephenson's stuff (this is the guy who brought you Snowcrash, remember), seems more focused on virtual realities, mental departures that may or may not ultimately culminate in a sort of bodilessness, but bodilessness nonetheless is different from a body infected with a machine like cancer.

No, that kind of cyberpunk belongs to the Japanese, mostly. The way they explore the relationship between technology and the body is fairly unique and developed. Human souls can exist inside machines, machines can gobble the body from within.

There seem to be two criteria when talking about post-humanism.

First, there is the physical body. Second, there is consciousness. When the physical body digresses from its natural state, it relies on technology to exist as it does, and becomes, in essence, part machine. I can't see two feet in front of my face without glasses or contacts. I've got a metal wire glued to the back of my bottom teeth. My grandmother has fake knees. Whatever.
When you outsource basic and necessary pieces of information (how many phone numbers do you know by heart?), you've used technology like an external hard drive for your mind. If you have long-distance friends you talk to primarily over the internet, you're allowing for - not a little - a lot of mitigation of your personality, your personhood, by a machine. One is tactile, the other is metaphysical. One is mechanical, the other is wireless.

There are people who argue that we have already become post-human and people who say we have not. Usually when they argue, they are really favoring one of those two things as a definition of what makes us human. In the physical sense, the litmus test is "if you shoot it in the heart, does it die?". I really want to talk about a Star Trek TNG episode right now, but I'll contain myself.

The problem with both of these threads in any case is they lie across a spectrum, and spectrums are dubious ugly little critters that muck everything up, and the whole universe lies across one. They say that physical accompaniments make us super-human, but the first time some guy used a sharp rock as an extension of his hand to make up for his short, clawless fingers, was he post-human? They say that uploading one's consciousness makes us cybernetic, but when the first guy drew a story about some buffalo on a wall, was he post-human?

And hey, are these not the very traits by which we distinguished the human from all others? Were they not written into our very makeup?

The anticipation is of the ticker tipping over, when we cross that line and develop out of our very skins. But I don't know if we're becoming post-human, I think it's far more likely we are becoming more human.

But what's crazy about all this is the pervasive sense that technological development takes us away from nature, as if the two exist on a kind of pulley system. Here's where post-humanism meets post-modernism and gets really annoying. Because who's to say what is natural? Who is to define the essence of a human? To even enter into an argument about post-humanism is to take a weirdly empiricist stance. On the contrary, if there is no outside judge, if nothing outside of us defines us, then we are what we are and it doesn't matter.

But it does matter doesn't it? Because of the fear. I have no idea why humans write into their fictions the most awful and terrifying psychosomatic wars between organic and artificial, fictions which by and large express seething anxiety over being enslaved, crushed, destroyed, or simply replaced by robots, and then turn around like hungry, cloying, desperate children tugging at the skirts of progress, begging more more more technology, more upgrades, more devices, faster, easier, stronger, smarter machines.

Is it self-conscious? Is it our discomfort over how much we love it? Is anything actually being lost? Why is almost every science fiction film or book dystopian? Are we afraid of a world in which we dial in our emotions like in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Losing, maybe, our ability to feel? Losing touch with mortality? Losing our sense of limitation? Is the fear warranted or is this evolutionary adolescence? How can we possibly take ourselves from ourselves?

That's all I can fit in one blog post. Just a thought.

sneaks!

2010-01-06T10:56:00.006-05:00

I made this yesterday afternoon at work. Made the soundtrack too, so it's original but very digital.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKkWZr5gPWU

.

Housekeeping

2009-12-06T01:08:00.006-05:00

Capseatarian is on hiatus until I have time to post real postings.

And also, I finished Dune (it was awesome, I recommend this blog: http://www.dharbin.com/blog/category/opinion/books/dune-book-club/), so it shouldn't be under my current book. I'm reading Salmon Rushie's Satanic Verses (thanks Caity!). I found it, literally just came across this book in my living room, as if it had been dropped there by an owl, unwrapped, with a note addressed to me, from Caity about how she had to get me this book because it was one of her favorites and it was on my wish list.

The Satanic Versus is very cool. It's sort of if Gabriel Garcia Marquez was on acid. It moves like that.

Will let you know when this thing gets its tail on fire again.

Love,
Gracie

Je n'en connais pas la fin

2009-10-04T22:46:00.011-04:00

There is a light at the end of the street partially obscured by garden growth, twisted lines layered over each other, diffusing into darkness.

The yellow window quivers in my view as my knees stutter under me, somewhere deep in my bones there are rings growing, etched around my marrow, bark crackling out of the calcium and I become twitchy. Twitchy, as if flesh and blood have taken flight, have reeled back and retreated yellowbellied into the night, taking with them my softness, the give in my body, the rubberyelastic stretch of skin and blood cells break apart from their plasmic suspension, chickering off like startled geese.

My rainstick throat takes a reluctant breath. My pulse is the dry flap of wings against chest.

I am the devil in this transmutation. I was the butcher who sold myself off in parts. I was the liar who turned my face into a prism of multiple angles and matterless reflections for which there is increasingly less of a true source.

Among the dry and dying, I am afraid of fire. How it would wipe me out, how it would scatter me so thinly I would make no sense. I would be chemically irreparable and my remnants, though substantial when gathered, would be nothing to anyone in their isolated corners of the universe.

My legs stop in their roots. One leg goes back obeying the orders of a separate mind. Ahead of me the light is unshaken. It has no doubts.

What is the price of bravery? What is obscured by fear? What is necessitated by knowing?

.

What if Alien Abduction is Just a Metaphor for Birth?

2009-09-19T23:31:00.007-04:00

I got a copy of my birth certificate in the mail today. It is strange to see the rote and foreign facts which describe the circumstances surrounding your entrance into this world. How many live births before me? 2 Mother's age? 37. "Sharyn" "Grace" "Johnson" weird weird weird. Babies don't have any baggage. They weigh less than ten pounds. If they are lucky, everything is done for them.

I saw a question at the bottom of the certificate which kinda confused me.

"What Eye Prophylaxis Used?: Yes"

So, Google.

http://www.chp.edu/CHP/P02698

Let me get this straight okay? You're a baby, you're born. They pull you out of your mother's womb into florescent lights, slap your ass to make you cry, then they take a clipper and sever the cord that connects you to her. They put a plastic band around your wrist and wheel you away, where they put drops in your eyes, stick a needle in your leg. If you are most males, they slice off your foreskin. If you were jaundiced, like me, they stick you in a glass box and shine and blue light in your face. Then they cover your genitals and wheel you up to a window where strangers come to stare at you. And that's with no complications.

Makes you wonder, doesn't it?

.

The Quandry of Moral Relativism as Pertains to Extraterrestrials

2009-08-23T23:06:00.007-04:00

Why the Wait?
Standig Explains Why Delays Required for Imminent Contact

One week after confirming authenticity of the "star-pod", Oxford University's renowned socio-ethicist Dr. Philip A. Standig was appointed head of a hastily assembled Global Commission on Extraterrestrial Diplomacy (GCED). The group includes some of the world's finest minds, including linguists, code-breakers, futurists, successful ambassadors, biologists, mechanical and aeronautics engineers and medical practitioners.

"Despite the fact that we have yet to understand completely the contents of the star-pod," stated a representative of GCED in their first release, "We are clear on the basic message. The star-pod was intelligently designed as a capsule by which a foreign race could concisely represent itself to an unknown entity. In this case, us."

Later reports remained vague as to the intention of the star-pod, except for the latest statement on Tuesday, which indicated that we should "not see this as a warning" but implies that the human race would do well to prepare itself for a possible follow-up.

I sat with Dr. Philip Standig in his first interview after the star-pod's arrival. He is disarmingly young for his credentials, but speaks with the sort of measured calmness befitting a more more practiced public official. The traces of fatigue in his face are no match for the ambition in his voice. Standig has taken quite a bit of heat for suggesting that we stay grounded after the CIA declassified their fleet of K-14 spacecraft. Now, for the first time, he explains why:

Q: Let's get right to the point, Dr. Standig. The star-pod poses an imminent threat to life on Planet Earth. With this sort of time-crunch, why are you so insistent that we simply do nothing?

A: I'm going to have to correct two assumptions in that question. First, the star-pod itself is no threat to our planet, none whatsoever. It has been thoroughly examined for every possible form of reactive, malignant technology and been deemed safe, even for direct contact with GCED. The star-pod indicates what we have previously been unable to confirm, and that is, intelligent life beyond earth. This is our source of fear, not the pod. The threat is perceived, and should not be assumed without further evidence. Second, I have not suggested that we "do nothing", only that we refrain from preemptive attack. First impressions are irreplaceable. If we strike them as a warlike people, we may never be able to regain their confidence.

Q: But they are headed our way, are they not? Shouldn't we be prepared for any threats leveled against us?

A: Yes and no. The pod's tracking device does indicate that it was launched from a larger body which was moving, more slowly, in the direction of our solar system. But I do not think this can logically be construed as aggression. If the life-form had hostile ambitions, why would they send us a pod which not only foretold their destination, but informed us of their precise location?

Q: But you aren't discounting the possibility, right?

A: No. The possibility remains under serious consideration.

Q: So, given that, what are you doing to prepare for this? What is taking so long?

A: I have to remind you that GCED has been in existence for less than a week. The problem is not logistical, but philosophical. When you think about it, humans have never been confronted with this form of moral structuring. I do not think it is too prudent to draft a basic doctrine of ethics before we proceed.

Q: Dr. Standig, mankind has dealt with issues of conflict and negotiation since we stood on two legs. I don't see how redrafting our ethical standards would involve anything new, especially when there are far more diligent measures -

A: (interrupting) I have to stop you there, I'm afraid. Inter-human conflict resolution is entirely different from the scenario we face now, for a variety of reasons.

Q: Explain.

A: With some fluctuation, domestic legal systems and diplomatic relations between nations have been based on a secular humanist ideology. That is not to say that every nation holds a secular government, but rather, international communication necessitates that individual players broaden their scope beyond religious doctrine. It is, as I've said, absolutely necessary for trade, diplomacy, alliance, every form of positive cooperation. Most wars involve some element of unwillingness to concede to secular ethics. Religious doctrine is untestable, and moral beliefs based solely on said doctrine cannot be demonstrated to a group outside of that religion. As a result, one country, unable to work within a moral structure that does not directly involve religious doctrine, simply cannot see eye to eye with another country of a different religion. It's quite simple.

Q: There are many examples of different theocracies having similar laws, and even co-operating.

A: Yes, but in every case this involves some sort of ethical overlap. The overlap most often occurs in instances where the values are not only shared by those religions, but by the secular community as well. They are demonstrable. For better or worse, I tend to think better, our most common values as a global society are those which improve the quality of life in a tangible way. They are largely agreed upon despite your background. In other words, whether spiritually or pragmatically motivated, they are "humanist".

A: The star-pod is not human in origin.

Q: That's exactly the point.

A: But how are we to project our ethics on a form of life which we know absolutely nothing about? Isn't humanism the best template, given we have nothing else to go on?

Q: Again I have to say yes and no. I don't have the answers yet, so I admit that my concern may be problematic.

A: Yes, so what does this have to do with our very real situation? We don't have time to theorize, we need a plan.

Q: Fair enough. The problem is this. Humans cannot, as theologians suggest, really agree on a universal standard of morality. First, the standard is not so universal as we like to think. Even the most common assumptions of criminal law, such as the wrong-ness of murder or theft, are not shared by every government of every country in every case. Take the Western world. We are relatively similar in our value system, yet our value system is not shared by every agent in society. Some people do not think murder is wrong, despite our court system which says it is.

Q: Those people usually deranged though, they're sociopaths.

A: Sociopath, yes, but how to you define deranged? Our most common indicator of mental illness is that-which-is-not-like-the-majority. Who are we to say that murder is wrong?

Q: It is wrong.

A: But we must accept that we consider it wrong because the vast majority - not all - of us believe it is wrong. We must accept that nothing is absolute. Nothing is ever unanimous. We, a secular government, base our laws only on the most popular assessment of ethical standards. Those less popular assessments, sticky issues like abortion or euthanasia, ricochet wildly through our legal system and create quite a flummox! They are never without heated contention. But even if the most egregious acts, say, child pornography, gained wide and popular acceptance, we would have to accept that it is "right". No doubt the small remaining minority would be quite passionate that it is wrong, but nonetheless...

Q: So what are the implications for extraterrestrial contact?

A: It goes like this: If you remove God from the equation, as I feel you must when considering mankind holistically, there is no objective moral standard. Humans generally create their ethics based on the needs of their own survival. If you zoom out far enough, self-interest is a good thing.

The foreseeable result of wanton and unregulated violence between humans, especially in a post-nuclear age, is the extinction of the human race.

Or say we turn our violence against animals. If we disrupt the food chain of which we are a part, we face serious, if not lethal, repercussions.

Or say we turn our violence against the planet, against the natural resources we enjoy. We shave off the ozone, we burn. We melt the ice-caps, we drown. We flatten the rain-forest, we degrade our air quality and lose, permanently, potential medical discoveries that could save our lives.

The earth is not at stake. We are. The danger of our actions falls directly upon our own heads. Once we are gone, the earth will rebuild. This planet's unfettered conditions naturally support life, and it will do so with or without us.

So ultimately, every action we take, moral, immoral, or amoral, is self-afflicting. There is nothing we could do that is worse than total self-destruction. On the grand scale, that's not so bad. Life on earth only has value to life on earth. Humanity only has value to humans. It has always been this way. Our moral standard is a contingent structure that always - not sometimes - always, gets back around to us.

But what now? A foreign agent, something outside this closed circuit of earth-ethics, has made contact with us.

So we pack up our K-14 spacecraft, we ready our nuclear missiles, and we head into the great open universe.

What happens to our ethics then? How do we begin? How to we wager our livelihoods outside of this reciprocal system?

And moreover, what is our worth?

-

Black and White Television

2009-08-16T16:05:00.013-04:00

Being that this particular subject was inspired almost entirely by Race Class and Gender by Paula Rothenburg (1), and more specifically by the essay "Racial Formations" by Michael Omi and Howard Winant, it may be more fair to call it a response text.

This paragraph caught my eye on page 17:

"Film and television, for example, have been notorious in disseminating images of racial minorities which establish for audiences what people from these groups look like, how they behave, and "who they are". The power of the media lies not only in their ability to reflect the dominant racial ideology, but in their capacity to shape that ideology in the first place. "

This phenomenon isn't specific to racial minorities, as anyone with a liberal arts degree can attest, wincing as they touch the bump on their head where they were repeatedly beaten with post-modernism.

Before the advent of mass media, race and culture were primarily experiential. According to this same essay, before the late 1700's there was really no concept of black vs. white in America. Without going into too much unnecessary detail, color differences were largely exploited by the wealthy elite to keep the slave class (at one time, poor whites, too, were slaves) from uniting in rebellion. Thus race was largely manufactured, as it still is today (2).

Racial politics is not really my area, I'll be the first to admit. I generally rely on things I read to tell me what's going on. What interests me is how race pertains to media studies, or, in this case, how black people in television affects black culture.

There are two reasons that African Americans make a good case study.

First, and most obvious, they have made more strides in television than any other ethnic group while still retaining minority status (3). They have their own channel, which I'll disregard, because everyone has their own channel. They have been making deep inroads in film and television since the seventies. By this I mean, mainstream, primetime television specifically contextualized around black life in America. Most, if not all of these shows, had at least one black person working as a producer or writer. I'm not saying it's perfect, as many of these shows were still created by white people, but it is substantial. We are just beginning to see this develop with Latino culture, and we have yet to see it with any other American racial group.

Second, anyone who reads this and has horrible college flashbacks of dead horses will know that in the age of post-modernism, TV is a feedback loop. Put simply, television producers glean what they can from pre-existing popular culture to write shows that they think people will like. People take their cues from television and mimic it in popular culture. Television producers act on these initiatives to create yet more distilled, hyper-realized television truths which in turn create the culture that they mimic. At a certain point it becomes unclear, and in fact, impossible to discern who's mimicking whom. African-Americans, I'd venture to say, have been dealing with a similar culture war for centuries, as they were unwillingly assimilated into this country and given artificial mandates about who they are. The result is, even today they struggle to assume an identity that is their own - yet not reactionary.

"Racial Formations" goes on to say (still on page 17)

In US television, the necessity to define characters in the briefest and most condensed manner has led to the perpetuation of racial caricatures, as racial stereotypes serve as shorthand for scriptwriters, directors and actors, in commercials, etc. Television's tendency to address the "lowest common denominator" in order to render programs "familiar" to an enormous and diverse audience leads it regularly to assign and reassign racial characteristics to particular groups, both minority and majority.

The "lowest common denominator" may look racially motivated, but at heart it is economic. Most television today takes no leading role in creating newer, healthier attitudes toward the "other", but rather reflects the simplest assumptions made by the largest number of people. This is especially true in sitcoms, which are largely situational comedies with little time for character development. I say it isn't racially motivated because, where the profit margin is involved, no one is safe. As a woman, I turn on the television and learn that my gender is slutty, catty, idiotic, petty, judgmental, humorless, and obsessed with babies and weddings. As a straight man, you turn on the television and learn that you are obsessed with sex, a simian couch potato with no common sense, no complexity, and no passions other than sports.

The problem of whites controlling black television is obvious. But black media professionals face a more unique dilemma. If I were a black person, I would want my ethnic identity to be preserved in the transition to popular media, but ways that are neither pejorative nor assimilated into “white” culture. It's the eternal dilemma, blending without forfeiture, yet remaining distinct without isolation.

Pulling from an unlikely source, I recently read Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud (5). There is no way to tell you how interesting this book is, just go read it. What pertains here is how McCloud details the gradual movement of images from physical representation to iconic representation. As this happened, the images grew simpler and simpler. Instead of, for example, many thin swooshy lines trying to look like movement, you had strong, thick lines that symbolizes movement. I would argue that because of this country's racial history, dark skin has become iconic (7). In the brief moments of co-habitation before people had time to develop this specific prejudice, the appearance of blackness meant you came from Africa. Now, far removed from Africa, the appearance of blackness signals a long list of character traits that may or may not have anything to do with the actual person. Conversely, the actual person is faced with the unweildy task of defining and redefining their race every day as a living symbol (7). This is how "blackness" has come to be "shorthand".

So, how do black TV writers, directors and producers deal with this issue? Could you say that their hand in mainstream television has advanced black culture? I would say yes, but not in perfect way. Black is still "iconic", meaning, "reductionist". I made a list of a few popular television shows with all black casts with at least one black person behind it. Then I made a list of popular television shows which are mostly all white with one or two black characters. It seems to me that in both cases, "blackness" is a significant part of the equation, but in all black shows, a significant effort is made to "normalize" blackness, whereas in white shows with black characters, blackness is used for emphasis or contrast (6).

Black television marketed to white people is a particularly curious thing. Take Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which is almost a cult classic among white people (to the extent that that's often the only "rap" most white people know). It features a somewhat sterilized street kid who is supposed to represent black urban culture with his garish, brightly colored graffiti name and sideways baseball cap, coming to life with his stuffy, naive, and obscenely rich black relatives.

The conflict between them represents many things. Imagine if the Banks family was white. They would seem like an almost extreme version of whiteness, wouldn't they? Yet they are black, and in so being they represent the clash within black culture itself. Furthermore, setting the Banks family opposite an imminently like-able Will normalizes black culture on both ends. There is something of a debate in the black community over whether people like the Banks (to use an extreme, fictional example) are insulting because they "act white", or if community blacklash against "acting white" is merely a symptom made up by white people to account for their own racism (8).

Do these shows represent an attempt to de-stigmatize African-Americans? Do they succeed or do they just make them white for easy consumption? That's not a thing I can answer. But I do have a sneaking suspicion that a deeper representation of blacks - not an iconic one - would not look like this. But then again, 20 minute episodes rarely allow for depth of any color.

I don't pretend to have all the answers, but black presence in television interests me because my life's goal is to improve access to the media machine for all under-represented groups. African Americans have done quite well for themselves already, so they give us an idea of what it looks like when alternative perspectives enter mainstream (mainstream still being primarily white-male dominated). What are the complications? What are the dangers to the original culture? What does equal representation actually look like? Have we even begun to achieve it?

This is not fair representation in television for television's sake. I am not trying to artificially inject the entertainment world with my values. It's pragmatically crucial because, as I said earlier, television creates culture. Not just television. All media. If we continue to whitewash it, if we continue to grow gender, class, race, orientation, locations, etc to mythical proportions then the ideology of the masses will reflect that myth.

Only one thing is clear. The only way that media can dispel harmful myth and facilitate complexity, not just of race but of any stigmatized demographic, is to let people speak for themselves and allow for a wider range of voices on the creative end of media. I don't think this is artificial. I think rich white male hegemony is artificial. Diversity is a method by which we can dismantle that artifice, not to mention make television more interesting.

1) Race Class and Gender...

2) described in great detail in "Racial Formations", you should really check it out.

3) I'm disregarding Jewish people, while not completely free and clear of discrimination, essentially became white after WWII, when every racist in America was grabbing their awkward collars.

4) Baudrillard, my fave post-modernist.

5) Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud.

6) I didn't include many specific examples in the interest of space. It's still an issue, keeping things short. Working on it!

7) This isn't offered as proof of point, but this relevant Daria clip is an insightful illustration. Good stuff starts at 1:15. I'd like to point out the iconography of blackness. Jodie has to represent, or symbolize, her entire race, whereas Daria has only to speak for herself. It's a rather unfair burden.

8) One example: "Acting White" Also, more lengthy: http://www.hoover.org/publications/ednext/3212736.html

Just Marvelous

2009-08-12T08:01:00.003-04:00

A No-Duh Kind of Thought.

2009-06-27T09:36:00.004-04:00

I watched a clip of a Richard Dawkins video last night. His discovery, at a young age, of Darwin's work lead him de facto to atheism. I suppose that is fine for him, but it was sort of a ding ding moment for me.

It's not that I haven't thought this before, it's just that I've never really isolated the thought, I don't think, or pulled it out of the rubble.

Why the insistence or assumption of an "Explanation God"? And yes, I just made that term up. What I mean is, why do believers need to believe that God is the ghost in the machine, God is the creator and thus the solution to the riddle of the physical universe? And why do non-believers think that humankind just created God to answer the things that they, at the time, could not answer with science?

I suppose I answered my own question. Believers do tend to believe that, because that is the mythos of God isn't it? God makes the sun rise, God made the dirt, God coaxes the stem from the seed. I think it is a mistake to teach this in church as a necessary stipulation of God. The church builds its own straw man. I guess it went over my head in confirmation class, because they said a lot of silly things at me and honestly I was way ahead of them.

God is not the answer or the explanation. God is not the balm to appease my feeble mind. No wonder the evolution debate always seemed so banal to me. God explains nothing, and it is specifically that quality which obliges me to believe.

God is not the the regular momentum of grass growing. God is chaos in a hypodermic needle.

__

Porn: A Thought Nugget

2009-06-10T01:14:00.003-04:00

I am not fundamentally opposed to pornography. I am not even opposed to it in practice. I think the notion that women shouldn't or wouldn't do porn if given the option betrays a fundamentally sexist attitude that robs women of the power of true consent. Women are not always objectified; in the industry they have far more choosing power than their male counterparts. I take umbrage with the concept that to use one's body for money is somehow more onerous than the sort of objectification millions of people endure every day when no one cares about their brain, their degrees, their skills, their ambition. Wage slaves are used, the whole lot of them, but unlike female porn stars they have no behind-the-scenes agency, they are not celebrated or trophied, and no aspect of their self-ness praised, and they certainly cannot name their price.

In terms of humanity imbued through popular, straight porn, the odd-men-out are just that - men. Whereas women, however dollish and fake, are trundled up like pigs on slaughterhouse chains, the men are even less human. In pop-porn, men are large penises emanating from the corners of pages and screens. They have few faces, no names, no eye contact. They serve only to venerate the almighty vagina with their plentiful and generic members. They are props, literally. Unless they have some special talent or attribute, heterosexual male porn stars take the pay they get and shuffle off into the cold unknown.

It is no odd surprise to me that the same sort of extremist, so-called feminism that would rob women of consent also robs women of dissent. It creates a rigid dogma which admits no growth and allows into its language only the false dichotomy of militance or treason. I know the world of pornography is rife with horror stories of unwitting girls trying to make a buck. But I object when this strain of feminism allows no room in its stiff and brittle paradigm for the women who want to be porn stars, who enjoy it, who feel no personal loss, who retain their autonomy, who like the sweet bucks they pull down but who ultimately have pursued this path as a means of sexual exploration.

But there is something that bothers me about porn, something I can't quite describe. I have thought about it off and on for several months. This isn't conservatism at work here, and it isn't hard-core feminism either. No doubt that almost all porn is packaged for men, bought by men, consumed by men. Porn is a male-centric product, but it's not inherent misogyny. Women as vendors and men as consumers equates a symbiotic relationship when women enter willingly into the cycle. To say that men have the only power in this relationship is to fall back on old memes where men are the only arbiters of power - this is false.

But I still couldn't decide what I didn't like about porn. Yeah, women look stupid in it, but so do men.

It occurred to me that the real problem of porn has been masked because we insist on seeing it as a gender issue. Maybe it isn't.

The problem is that all of the porn I've ever seen (and I'll go out on a limb here to admit that I've seen a lot) is trite, and banal, and stupid.

Maybe this issue is balder to me because it's still a novelty in my life. I had no interest in porn until I came into contact with a boy, which makes sense, because porn is targeted to him and not me. But I kept watching, kept looking, firstly to identify with him but secondly because I was trying to ferret out that feeling I had, the feeling of being intellectually pie-faced and completely unimpressed.

The people in porn look like morons. I don't relate to the women, and the men are completely unappealing. Even as the "subject", I'd bet the typical male porn star serves as a poor proxy to the millions of lonely boys imagining themselves in his place. He looks like a dull crayon, a coke-fried frat boy, a sad aging divorce', a greasy good-for-nothing-log-lump. And the women!

Why this need to have their mouths hanging open like anorexic zombies, eyes glazed-over and half-shut, their legs flayed out like dead chickens? I know they aren't as stupid as they look. Consider trendsetter Sasha Grey, or Jenna Jameson's graceful parlay into mainstream TV and entrepreneurship, or Stormy Daniels's bid for the U.S. Senate. I think even listing examples is trite. There are just as many dummies in porn as there are in any other sector, just as many smarties too.

What I detest is the aesthetic of stupidity. Magazine design looks like something out of Idiocracy, all bubble-gum fonts and stars and primary colors. Videos are laughable, crappy DV-quality, poorly placed mics, unimaginative lighting, zero effort.

In part, this is commercialism at work. Low overhead = no change in demand = more profit.

But I think perhaps that women's issues are a red-herring. It's a culture issue. Maybe it's closer to the truth to say that porn makes itself stupid out of self-defense. A sexually stifling culture lies all about us, so for porn to protect itself, it must inoculate itself by falling submissively into those patterns. Porn becomes the expected, it fills out the convenient stereotypes handed down by those who would judge it. We are living in a world still obsessed with the Madonna-Whore complex. Women who are sexually open must be whores, and whores must be idiots, as well as everyone who supports the whoring.

Stupid sex is easy, it's so easy. We have so many prototypes in place, and we always have. It's the same thing when Marilyn Monroe had to play dumb blonde to be a sexpot. It's the same thing when the Conservative Right believes so strongly the homosexuality is wrong because they are all promiscuous bastards, yet fights so hard to prevent those promiscuous bastards from getting married. Intertwining the separate realms of sexuality and idiocy is the opposition's way of keeping porn condemnable. And yet, I know that this mantra of stupidity can't be the whole story. Lots of people are in to porn, and not all of them are apes. I'm not asking for the moon here, I'm just asking for porn stars who don't look like they've all just recently suffered concussions.

This problem isn't confined to porn. Several counter-culture movements shield themselves beneath a veil of easy irrelevance. Indy movies were, for a while, chalked with empty angst. Cynicism reigns supreme, nihilism the only - and the unrealistic - solution to cultural boredom. So dense that they can easily be dismissed. So crass and tactlessly manufactured that audiences may cop out by calling it recreational slumming.

The problem with porn being this way is that it bleeds into real sex. The boys who were raised on this stuff often don't know how to differentiate it from life. Genuine physical connections are swapped out for poorly imitated porn fantasies which are - in themselves - just simulation. We have been robbed, once again, of original experience, only this time it's harmful and degrading and guilt-ridden. At best it it pale and sickly. This is the legacy handed down from, yes, our puritanical founders who see the only alternative to abstinence and holy marital procreation as soulless, brainless debauchery. We have lost our vocabulary for it, lost our ownership. This is one of the few areas where I agree with Andrea Dworkin. But unlike her I think porn can be reclaimed, or claimed for the first time. Pornographers, stop dicking around and do your job.

.

EFF

2009-06-08T01:50:00.002-04:00

Added a new link: the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I've heard about them by-the-by from their involvement in intellectual property cases, but I didn't check out the website until John told me about this article.

Lawrence Lessig pointed out a pretty valid problem in Free Culture, when, I think he was talking about Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid,a film that entirely re-appropriates old film noir footage into a new screwball comedy starring Steve Martin. Lessig pointed out how grossly unfair it is that a production company is capable of paying out the nose for all of these old licenses to create a transformative work, while Joe Shmoe would catch a lawsuit for the very same concept. The problem is primarily that this re-appropriation technique is an entirely new brand of creativity which now belongs only to the rich and the well-lawyered. Where cheap technology and the internet has "democratized" media production, stuffy copyrights keep it gentrified.

Free Culture came out a while ago and things have changed a little since then, but fair use is still so impossibly murky that the victor is often the powerful, not the just. A good example is the guy from Grand Rapids (Van der Beer? Van der something) who lost a lawsuit to JK Rowling for trying to publish a Harry Potter encyclopedia. To me that's a clear cut case of transformative work, and specifically with the Potter books it is not unprecedented. He lost anyway.

So that may defeat my next point when I say that despite all this, the best tool we have now for ownership in the new media landscape is to be well-informed about copyright and fair use. That's why Teaching Copyright is important. I think it's pretty cool.

Sorry I haven't been around much. I will continue to not be around much for the next several days. Settling in and starting a new life in DC is a full time job.

Update + Two Very Different Books and Why I'm Hemming and Hawing at Both of Them

2009-05-19T19:56:00.002-04:00

Now, in typical Grace fashion, I started reading Androids and then stopped, but still am kind of reading it, but read another book instead and am now reading two other books. I really need to learn how to not multi-read.

The two very different books in question are Andrea Dworkin's Intercourse and C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity. They are both quite titular aren't they? Straight to the point.

But Here's Why I Can't Buy Either of Them for the Same Reason:

Let's start with Dworkin. Feminism is important but doesn't really interest me. I've been arguing about it quite a lot lately, particularly the politics of sex and rape. *sigh* It's a big issue, one I don't feel like reiterating here, but essentially I am baffled by the common and so-called feminist notion that 1) rape is worse than murder, and 2) all sex is rape to some degree. The former places sexual fidelity over life itself (would you like to ask some one who was raped if they'd rather be dead?) and the latter both strips power of consent from women and belittles the gravity of actual rape.

Intercourse argues, well, it's so incomprehensible it's hard to find a well-structured argument anywhere, but I'm told that it argues that gender politics are inherent in the bedroom, and that the nature of sex itself is intrinsically unequal. The last sentence of the back cover summary reads Can a woman fight the power when he shares her bed?

Blech. Maybe there was a time when this kind of feminism was important and relevant. They had to be on the offense. But I do not, and never have in my life, felt lesser than a man, societally or individually. Fight the power? I am the power. If I were to meet institutional inequality I would treat it with incredulity, not anger. Their system demands equality, my system expects it as a given. Their system makes the chauvinist man the "power", mine makes him the village idiot. I know that my sort of rationale isn't systemic yet, but can't we all agree that it's ideal? And if I feel this way, after all the fighting women have done for exactly these rights, if I feel no disadvantage as a woman, should I really be told that I am brainwashed? Licked? Accepting of male hegemony? No. Women like me should multiply and prosper, but this societal pocket that goes by the name of feminism seems oddly intent on the prevention of such.

Dworkin writes, with utter seriousness:

"... Tolstoy's repulsion for women as such is not modern either. Now this repulsion is literal and linear; directed especially against her genitals, also her breasts, also her mouth newly perceived as a sex organ. It is a goose-stepping hatred of cunt. The woman has no human dimension, no human meaning. The repulsion requires no explanation, no rationalization. She has no internal life, no human resonance; she needs no human interpretation. Her flesh is hated; she is without more. The hatred is by rote, with no human individuation, no highfalutin philosophy or pedestrian emotional ambivalence. The repulsion is self-evidently justified by the physical nature of the thing itself; the repulsion inheres in what the thing is. For the male, the repulsion is sexually intense, genitally focused, sexually solipsistic, without any critical or moral self-consciousness. Photograph what she is, paint it pink; the camera delivers her up as a dead thing; the picture is of a corpse , embalmed. The contemporary novelist does it with words: paints the thing, fucks it, kills it."

Why do I get the feeling that's it's Dworkin who hates women? A self-hating woman, perhaps? It should be noted that while she's spent the first several chapters analyzing misogynistic works of fiction, for all her pronouncements of the modern condition she offers up not one persuasive point, not one survey or shred of evidence.

Maybe it reaches that point later in the book, but I realized with horror that she was starting with this. I'm sorry, Dworkin, but if you think that societal "hatred of cunt" is a given, then we've got problems. I'm happy, eager even, to read arguments for positions I don't agree with, but you have to make me accept your premise first, or at least accept the rationale. I'm a bit scared to see where she progresses, if this is what she assumes at the outset.

I started reading C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity and found a similar problem. Read on:

"Book One: Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe
Chapter One: The Law of Human Nature.

Everyone has heard people quarrelling. Something it sounds funny and something it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kinds of things the say. they say things like this: "How'd you like it if anything did the same to you?" - "That's my seat, I was there first" - "Leave him alone, he isn't doing you any harm" - "Why should you shove in first?" - "Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine" - "Come on, you promised." People say things like that every day. Educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.

Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man's behavior does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behavior which he expects the other man to know about."

Lewis goes on to a few other anecdotes, some true, some not, but I've already stopped. I know what he's getting at. He's trying to cleverly reveal God as the source of our universal moral standard. First, the moral standard isn't as universal as everyone seems to think. Second, though I believe in a god of sorts, I think that morality as arriving from God is a load of baloney. I'm a strong believer in Hobbes and the Social Contract. It makes sense to me; there are no gaps here.

I like Lewis, and I like British brainiacs, but I don't like when very disputable and alternatively explicable things are presented to me as persuasion.

The difference is that I think there's hope for Lewis, so I'll keep reading. Eventually he'll get over his little moral standard and talk about something else. Dworkin, I'm not sure she'll ever get over her victimhood. I wish she would make one lick of sense so I could keep reading.

That's all for now.

Luziden Documentary

2009-05-14T18:19:00.002-04:00

It looks kind of crappy on the internet because I compressed it and squished it fairly haphazardly, but I hope you enjoy it anyway :)

Luziden: Inside the Dreaming Mind from Capseat Media on Vimeo.

Lo in Boston

2009-04-29T13:53:00.002-04:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1B76o9_Spk

This video just posted, about the Lo crew coming to Boston. I'm in there around 6:44, John right after me. I think it's hilarious to see out-of-towners do adorable things like go on the freedom trail. And also, yeah, Boston shuts down at night and it's really freaking cold.

Also, apparently I am only concerned with silly things like emotions and I say "like" a lot. NOTE TO SELF.

A Speculative Essay on STEAMPUNK

2009-04-21T22:59:00.002-04:00

I say "speculative" for two reasons. One, people seem to have been throwing around the term "speculative fiction" a lot lately and I thought I'd join the party. Two, I've always known what steampunk is but I've never been an expert on it, and educated speculation is still speculation when the extent of your knowledge comes from conversation and poking around on the internet.

Now, onward.

Steampunk is a genre of fiction, and it was always that, first. But the literary genre was defined most strongly by an aesthetic that manifested later in pop culture, most notably fashion and industrial design. From time to time a film (like Final Cut) borrows lightly from the aesthetic but leaves the themes at home.

In my last post I mused as to why it is Britain, specifically, that would have born such a genre. A few people had a few theories on that. Briana said it was cultural ties to the land. Sean said it was discomfort with industrialization. John, like me, said it was the pagan roots. I'm sure that like any true thing, it's a combination.

I remember being in England a couple of years ago. We saw lots of really old things, but it hit me hardest when we saw the Tower of London and some one said that it was over 900 years old. My god! I thought to myself. The United States is so young, we absolutely cannot fathom what 900 or a thousand years of history even feels like. There is no such thing as an American historical figure of 1200 AD. The dust on English shelves is several times older than our government. The closest we get to even existing that early in the record books is some viking who took a boat out and wrote about the land mass in his little viking diary.

So imagine a region like that, whose mythological counterpart is Arthurian legend. They had a good thing going for several centuries, and the most recent of those centuries was spent ping-ponging wildly between - guess what? Science and religion. I imagine it was a difficult thing for a group of little islands to fully accept the industrial revolution when they had roots so deep in magic.

Jules Verne and HG Wells were loose contemporaries of the industrial revolution, which, in case you didn't take 9th grade world history, was totally a British thing until some jerk literally smuggled the designs of the steam engine into the States.

Verne and Wells were futurists and politicos just as much as they were novelists. Their work is responsible for steampunk, but it's not really fair to call them steampunk. At the time they were regular old science fiction writers. Like any good science fiction writer (heh. heh.), they wrote about social structures as much as anything else. They had lived through the Victorian Era, entering into the Edwardian Era, and here before them they saw the birth of marvelous new technologies. When they wrote, they naturally combined the cultural moors of the Victorians with futuristic devices like airplanes, rocketships, submarines, time machines. To a turn of the century man, the future was in steam, just like the real-life, totally game-changing steam engine trains.

Fast forward about a hundred years. The Industrial Revolution in Britain had fizzled to kind of an Industrial Meh, but now it's 1970ish, so, you know, lots of other stuff is going on.

Like punk. I'm sorry, PUNK!!! And not surprisingly, the UK is right there too. You know The Sex Pistols, Clash? Yeah, I'm sure you've never heard of them. The seeds planted by Wells and Verne are rustling in the ground.

I don't know what it was that started this magic brew, but for some reason the punk movement dug out those old books and found a match made in heaven.

I don't know why this happened. Maybe the punks related to the sort of existential crisis posed by a civilization on the brink of a major paradigm shift. Maybe it was Victorian sexual fetishism. Or maybe they just thought it was really damn cool.

Because suddenly the ordinary science fiction of The Invisible Man or 2000 Leagues became a marvelous future that never was, as imagined by people for whom Victorian style was a reality and not a novelty. Since then people have really taken with the notion of rewinding before moving forward.

Steampunk unlike fantasy, usually doesn't deal with alternate dimensions or hidden worlds. It deals with our world, but with key differences, as if we could just back the car up in reverse and take another direction. It has since grown to popularity in other cultures, but at its origin it is a terribly, terribly, terribly British thing.

Which means of course, that there is also magic. And this is the happiest thing of all.

Key Characteristics:

- it's often dystopian or post-apocalyptic, but not always
- It's generally a hash-up of Victorian England and 1980s England, but not always
- Often has paranormal, fantastic, or magical themes.
- Magic and technology have a special relationship, they are either at odds or mutually enabling.
- Steam-powered technology
- Modern writers, having more perspective on the time period that Victorian writers were trying to describe, like to add in other funky time warp gadgets, like wooden computers.

Examples:

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (British Comic): Written by Alan Moore and having mutated to lots of other mediums. Pretty hardcore steampunk. Directly derivative of Verne and Wells.

Full Metal Alchemist (Japanese Anime): Basically posits that Alchemist efforts of yore actually worked and have been taken to their logical extreme.
http://www.onemanga.com/Full_Metal_Alchemist/94/00-cover/
Note the big clunky robot, the turn of the century bifocal guy, and the dude in the cape.

Arcanum (American Videogame): Basically if the LotR style traditional fantasy universe went through the Industrial Revolution. In this case, magic is in direct conflict with technology.

FreakAngels (British Webcomic): I was pointed there when an acquaintance read my last post. It's a very good comic, and ongoing, but I'm still waiting for something... 12 young hot things with telepathic/paranormal powers try to run a small urban compound in post-apocalyptic, mostly-flooded London.
If you want a good example of how Victorian meets punk in fashion, just check out KK and Conor's clothes:
http://www.freakangels.com/?p=25&page=5
For the sake of beating a dead horse I should probably tell you that KK dropped a water canteen on the blonde girl because that's what runs her magical steam-powered helicopter bike.

And because I've never read any steampunk novels, here's an Amazon forum with a few people who have, and who have opinions.

That's all I've got. If you have anything to say, or anything you think I would like, send my way please? Thanks.

I Have a Question

2009-04-20T00:04:00.001-04:00

In my very last semester of college I took a class called Magical Realism/Virtual Reality. On the very first day of that class I asked a question which was possibly embarrassing, which was, "what about them?" We can learn about their histories and so on, but what's the relationship? The professor laughed and told me that I would figure it out. By the end of that class she still hadn't told me.

It was weird taking a class predicated on some one else's theory, but they won't tell you what the theory is. It's like reading an essay with no hypothesis.

Anyway I eventually figured out that there was some sort of relationship in the way people sublimate their existential discontent through "unrealistic" fiction, first world industrial countries through extremely high-tech Jeff Noon Waichowsky Brothers Philip Dick debacles, poor undeveloped countries through myth-weaving, old gods, sentient nature, and the extraordinary commonplace. It's as if you use what's in front of you. If you have nature you use nature. If you have technology you use technology.

And I as a person, though being born in a first world nation whose one measure of global worth is our ravenous consumption of techo-gadgetry, was still also born in the middle of the woods where vinyl records long outstayed their welcome and household computers were unheard of and religion was everything.

And my fiance, being the High King of all gadget-nerds (you dare challenge him?), goes on and on about this stuff. Sometimes I feel like I'm missing the point, missing something very important. Why do other people care so much? Why do people camp in front of the Apple store whenever they have some new model of the iPod? Why is it that my friends can go on about this or that doohickey, when I don't so much as give a gosh damn?

But my fiance, who also knows me about as well as a person could, tells me that it's probably because I never made that bond when I was young. Like the poor undeveloped countries without computers, I found my first intellectual roots in nature. My first atoms of self-awareness were formed on the backdrop of bark and grass and dirt.

I was in to science fiction for a few years as a kid. I even wrote a really terrible science fiction book. But I left it for fantasy, at least, as soon as I realized fantasy existed because my parents went to great lengths to keep life boring. But I think my fantasy is still a little more metallic than most.

But so going off of this neat little dichotomy, that science fiction is 1st world and magical realism is 3rd world because people improvise off the tools they have access to:

Then what does that say about Britain? They are the original industrialized country, still as first world as their lily white skin and as developed as their CO2 emissions.

I think I can safely suggest that the UK totally owns the fantasy genre. Not magical realism, but fantasy, which is different yet similar in its rustic qualities. It's nature based, it draws on old religions and myth. Why does Britain get to tread this line? Do they have some cloistered cultural memory? What forces are those that produced Tolkien and Lewis, Barrie or Carroll? And today, still, Rowling and Gaiman and Alan Moore?

And what fascinates me now is steampunk, Wells and Verne. Because that genre literally describes that rather bipolar amalgamation of high and low tech. Maybe only the UK could have done steampunk right.

But why the fantasy at all? Was it the pagans? Was it the Crusades?

Flatlining in the New World

2009-04-19T18:08:00.001-04:00

in the new world,
death will be an allegory
turned into an idiom
which means
“to hesitate” or
“to cease momentarily”

as in:
“Mary, I’m dying on this menu.
Baked penne
or pasta prima vera?”

as in:
“Joe died at the green light
and missed his chance.”

as in:
“Die before you leap.”

in the old world
death is a way of expressing desire
or shock.

as in:
“when he told me he was gay
I just died!”

or:
“I’m still dying to see
the next big thing
in underworld fashion”

Death has a way of implementing
euphemism.
A thousand other words to take its place.
Death has a way
of crawling into other
vernacular spaces
like a mold
to mean a thousand things it is not.

In the new world
death will be a theory
like gravity
or evolution
or strings.

people of the new world
will find better ways
to synthesize a living body
with biodegradable cartilage
and saline fluids
to prolong the great hesitation

people will find better ways
to avoid decay
don’t judge them
you do it too.
your fridge is stocked with produce,
which is dead.
sealed and frozen and sprayed to look undead
to solve our necrophilic urge to consume death
death, death.

in the new world
bodies don’t rot.
they only dissipate
our plastics are environmentally friendly.

we will have
such sophisticated holographic techniques
informed by state of the art archival devices
recorded from birth
that when they are finally gone
you won’t know the difference.
you won’t even miss them.

They would have wanted it this way.

MAXAT Corp.

2009-04-18T16:33:00.002-04:00

A man named Tempest
wasn't walking home
he took a long train down
to a place that - in English -
means "one bridge"

He spent his last stolna
and wagered his bearings to be on that train
he had nothing to give
no north star, no moss

Tempest doesn't know English
He doesn't know any language except mutt.
His parents named him by pointing in a dictionary
to erase his clues.
His family were the birds that ate the breadcrumbs.

This morning a Jehovah Witness knocked on my door.
You sound solid, sad, without couth. without graces.
I kept looking at his silent protoge, a kid in freckles.

The old man asked
if I thought it was possible for the world
to get any better
And Tempest walked across my head.
He lives in the future and follows lots of maps.

I said yes but only if we accept
that these current paradigms work no longer, sir.
That includes your religion, sir.
That includes your suit, sir.
That includes the hegemonic renegotiation of rights, sir.

But then, who's really got a right to anything they didn't kill?

Tempest came on to a man with a cart
selling goat meat by the river
the man told Tempest that amputees could regrow parts,
but not without loss.
The man told Tempest that he took the form
of whichever creature observed him.
Tempest wondered if he was hungry enough.

The man at my door reads a passage from Revelations.
I wonder how hard it is to be snatched.
God's precious hostage.
The man asks me what a good world looks like.
I ask him what this world looks like.

I said "we're both philosophers sir, and I admire your will, sir
I'm glad you know the answer, sir,
but I don't live here,
and neither do you."

Tempest puts his hand on the doorknob.
"No one is ever home," I tell him.
But he doesn't understand a word.

LUZIDEN!

2009-04-16T14:45:00.002-04:00

Luziden is coming up quickly. Very quickly.

I want to invite everyone out to the premiere, which is at Space 242, connected to the Dig Offices.

Here's the specs:

April 24th
6-8pm
242 E. Berkeley St.
Boston MA.

You can get there easily by taking the Silver Line from Boylston, into the South End. Get off at the East Berkeley stop and take a left.

There will be an open bar, so get there early if you actually want free beer. The line gets long. Luziden is showing as part of the Weekly Dig's Final Fridays, which is an event designed to showcase their new exhibit of the month. This month it's DESTROY BOSTON. I'm excited for that as well. It's a really sweet space, too, if you haven't been there.

Luziden was also selected to show at the Huret and Spectre Gallery at Emerson (being an Emerson kid doesn't get you in automatically, trust me). That's running May 1-18th, in the Tufte Building.

A short documentary called "In the Dreaming Mind", which I guess I'm making, will be showing at the Coolidge Corner Theatre on May 15th. I'll post the times as soon as I know.

Wait, something I'm making is going to play at the Coolidge? I'm sorry, that just occurred to me and it blew my mind a little. Wow. Yeah. Okay, moving on.

If you go to the BFA screenings (which you should, in any case), they will be May 17th at the Museum of Fine Arts. Still don't know the exact time of that, either. But stills, and possibly production stills, for Luziden will be playing at intermission. At that point though, there will only be one more day to see it at the Huret and Spectre, so you better get with the program.

Here is an overview of the entire deal:

If traditional cinema is, as Jacques Lacan claims, a Freudian dreamstate, Luziden
attempts to be the cinematic equivalent of a lucid dream - one in which the viewer
asserts some degree of control over what transpires.
To create the materials for the piece, numerous individuals were asked to submit dreams
they had experienced. Submissions were made via first-person interviews, anonymous
emails, and via the official Facebook group. These dreams were analysed in order to find
common themes running throughout. The themes discovered in this way were used to generate
original examples of dream elements, which can be combined dynamically. This process is
designed to attempt to tap into a Jungian collective unconscious, and make the dream
experience more authentic for viewers.
The materials include HD video (shot in 1080p), audio, and HDR (high dynamic-range) photo
backgrounds. The installation is being programmed in Quartz Composer and Ableton Live.
The triptych widescreen display is being handled by a Matrox TripleHead2Go breakout box.

If you want to see some composite stills, go here, and scroll past the giant mouth: http://www.capseat.com/John/resume/newmedia.html

How did I end up with so much work? At least it's awesome. Go Capseat Go!

Jung Called it Synchronicity, but Maybe I'm Just Suiting My Own Needs

2009-03-27T16:01:00.002-04:00

Right. so. All I have to do now is figure out how I do this thing I want to do.

Do you ever have on of those realizations where you find yourself, quite unexpectedly, caught in the crosshairs of every choice you've ever made? For better or worse, you have one of those great cumulative moments at the apex of Life Thus Far?

In his signature way of inserting self-conscious commentary into his own narratives, Kundera describes his stories like spiderwebs, strings that pinwheel out into the big picture and meet at the core. When you tell a story you aren't inching along a straight line, you're following those strings back to their center, one at a time until you've traced the entire web, or most of it.

Isn't it funny how people perceive Death as a conclusion? As if all points in a human's life are only plot devices building to that final moment of resignation. As if every street taken and every choice was ultimately to resolve life as one violent end, or one quiet end, or one pitiful end, or one abrupt end.

If I walk out of this building right now and get squashed by a falling scaffold (as one neurosurgeon was crushed in that exact place three years ago), is that what my life meant? How I die is no summary of me. In a way, this is a malignant feature of linear narratives. If life imitates art, then we have accepted that each day overrides the last, and that the final day overrides all other days.

Life is in the web, I think. This is more and more how I see time. When I die I want people to dissect me downwards from the future to the past, so that I die young and tinted orange like a photograph from 1986.

And believing as I do in a vaguely greater order of things, I've followed my instincts down their natural paths. I've been disappointed, I mean existentially disappointed when my efforts seem fruitless. How am I supposed to think, to behave, when the things that felt right turned out not to be?

But I realized lately, all things considered, even my failures were right. Everything I've tried, every person I erroneously thought myself to be, informs who I am now. I don't mean this in a sentimental way, I mean that this was...part of the web. The only way I can describe it is by using a bad movie reference, so forgive me, but it's like Signs. I'm looking around and suddenly glasses of water are everywhere.

Things I did with little thought are suddenly so serendipitous. That renews my faith in magic...just a little bit.

You Can Write, but You Can't Edit

2009-03-27T12:03:00.001-04:00

My favorite thing about writing Vaganto will be the total lack of linear progress.

We are moving out of our apartment this weekend, and when we do I sincerely hope to find the moleskine Vaganto notebook I'd been keeping. It was a lot of interesting stuff in there, toward the building of a future world.

My challenge to myself is, what would the world look like if half the citizens in it actively undermined the notion of a geopolitical states? So many sparks came out of that simple premise - to have an entire class of people who do not even know where they came from, who were, in most cases, born into a life of travel, of vagrancy, basically living like gypsies. Unlike gypsies, though, they have a certain amount of political swagger due to sheer numbers and thus aren't necessarily criminals. But that's not even the whole story.

There are new political factions even within the vaganto, a whole mess of problems resulting from privitization of public services the gnarliest of which being transnational transportation. In this world, he who owns transportation owns the world.

They have reduced war, but war has gone corporate. Imagine for a second if it wasn't Israel or Palestine, but Pepsi and Coke. That's just pulled out of a hat, of course, Pepsi and Coke are kind of irrelevant.

But the nature of this book is the cross section of a new universe, told through fragments of myth, newspaper articles, the journal entries of Tempest 42, transcripts and new religious texts. Totally something I can treat like a series of small stories, which I've always wanted to do.

But right now, sadly, what I need is for some cruel overlord to crack a whip over my head and make me revise Mirror Men. Urg.

Eternally Now

2009-03-14T16:26:00.002-04:00

One of my favorite literary characters of all time is the dragon in John Gardner's Grendel. She's a time philosopher in the same fashion as Dr. Manhattan or the aliens from Slaughterhouse Five or Faraday in Lost (SIGH). At one point she argues with Grendel about the future. Just because she knows the future, she says, doesn't mean she can change it, and doesn't mean she necessarily had any pivotal role in its execution. Even knowledge of the future, even actions taken with the intent to prevent it, are all part of the vast unchanging loop of causality. For in no universe, in no instance did the poor, hapless protagonist not know his fate.

Kundera took the notion a bit more literally in Unbearable Lightness of Being, in which history repeats itself over and over again, and all things will happen have happened already, and at the end of time, as the universe collapses in on itself, it creates again an unwitting embryo of all things to come.

I tend not to believe in fate, or even in a destiny. But I do believe that life comes with a sense of should-be, and that somewhere in the subconscious of the individual and the collective human race, we perceive a future ideal, a great shining conclusion to the story of planet earth, and those desiring to be good people strive toward that ideal their whole lives, like tiny ants pulling a boulder across the Sahara.

Once in a car in Michigan Ep told me about some theologian or other who believes that all things are Eternally Now, that everything happens always, and that it is only a function of human limitation that we should perceive time as happening one instant after the other. Basically, that the future informs the present as much as the past.

I like this idea too, generally enough to believe in it. I think our ability to reasonably predict the future is just as significant as our ability to faultily remember the past. I think that knowledge of causality and nature, in couplet with instincts, is the future's way of communicating with us.

I believe very strongly in trusting your instincts. Our instincts press toward the future ideal (if you listen to them and are not evil).

I stood in line at Starbucks. Starbucks has made a trend of fair-trade, which is a bit like Madonna making a trend of Kaballa, but there are more harmful things in this world to quibble about. John had just called me to tell me that the company where he interviewed decided not to call him back for a second interview. It's been three months since he graduated. Three months of no income.

We had decided that this was it. We've tried so hard to find work, we've given up our passions to make a living, we've strung our guts out across Mass Ave. and still no fruit. So this job was it. If he didn't get it, we were moving to Washington D.C. at the end of April, after his installation went up.

In the line at Starbucks, after John called, it occured to me that there was a contradiction in my two beliefs: 1) the Future Ideal acting on our desires and 2) all things being Eternally Now. Because it's highly unlikely that the Future Ideal will actually happen, how can the future (probably quite a sad, violent, dystopian one)really inform the present? How can we feel the presense of an ideal conclusion that will probably never happen?

I had an epiphany. Of course! It's not just one future that informs us, it's infinite variations of the future that informs us. And will every successive decision we eliminate more of those variations. But perhaps we don't elimate them from existence, we just eliminate them from our own lives. Perhaps somewhere, in some alternative dimension, we live the decisions we never made.

I bought John a London Fog as a consolation for not being hired. But the thought of moving to D.C. brought a feeling of immense relief. I'm not happy here. I want to be happy, but I've become a brittle survival machine, a tired sack of life. D.C. feels right to me, and maybe Boston has become so impossible because that alternative future doesn't exist for me. Maybe it never happened.

The days are longer now. The late afternoon sun shines through the windows of the train. I have daylight on my side again.

Milan Kundera

2009-03-05T22:33:00.000-05:00

I've fallen prey to my same old habits in book-reading. I start a hard book, some heady non-fiction thing, and I read about 3 pages a day. It takes me that long because, honestly, I'm not smart enough to get them on the first pass. I have to take notes, usually, or at least read the same thing several times. Especially when it's freaking Baudrillard who picks up the same unfortunate habit of obfuscation that I've seen in every intellectual dude except Jung and Chomsky (so far). Once I figure out what he means I could easily have rephrased it to be intelligible. It's just bad writing. Does not impress.

But Anyway! Sometimes I like to read when I am sleepy, before bed, or on the train in the morning when my body still hates me for waking it up and thus refuses to feed any blood to my brain. So, for those moments, I pick up something funner, and fictionaller.

Like Life is Elsewhere! I love this book already, love love love it. I think, in fact, that it confirms my general suspicion that Kundera is one of my favorite authors ever. I hope that my writing eventually takes influence from his. High school English teachers always say you should show and not tell. I disagree, at least with how absolute that sentiment is. My favorite books are ones that tell. This style introduces a meta-person that goes above and beyond the diegetic characters. The narrator is in his/herself a character who flavors the entire narrative, though they are never materialized. The narrator isn't always the author, but in Kundera's case I see the invisible man in the armchair, some old scruffy dude under a yellow light with a cigar.

Other authors that tell instead of show: basically every British author before the 20th century, John Steinbeck, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Vonnegut sometimes. They all create a sense of distance from the characters. It's paradoxical though, because at the same time we are privy to their most intimate thoughts, things they would never confess, things kept secret even from their own psyche. And at times - Kundera does this a lot - suddenly the reader is yanked back because the narrator pretends innocently not to know the character at a given moment. Or either, the narrator skips over natural facts because they are deemed irrelevant. The reader is kept in the universe of the story teller. They aren't allowed really to descend into the story, but the tradeoff is that the reader gains omniscience.

Anyway, another reason I really love Milan Kundera is because he - more than anyone I know - is able to weave together philisophical abstractions with standard plotlines without sacrificing either. I've tried and failed. Well, maybe not. Mirror Men is like that, but the plot is still subservient to the philosophy and that's my biggest problem in the second draft. It's hard!

I have a secret bias toward Kundera too - He's Czechoslovakian. When my folks crossed the pond, they left from Czechoslovakia, which of course doesn't exist anymore in that incarnation. Of all of my ethnic makeup, I'm most fascinated by being Czechoslovakian. I'm German too, but Germans are Western European and thus too familiar. My father's heritage is muddy at best, and what I do know of it (Scots-Irish, Cherokee) is well-worn in American bloodlines. It's Czech culture alone that remains mysterious, aloof. People hardly pay any attention to Eastern Europe anymore.

And I see it in my features. My full-Czech grandfather is the only person I really recognize myself in. I only know him from pictures, and that may have been a blessing. He never became human to me. He was only a distant, frozen expression locked in sepia. He looked handsome and troubled. He had my nose. In real life he drank his way to early death. He couldn't hold a job and couldn't stay away from pretty women and babysat my tiny mom by dragging her to bars with him. Not unlike a Kundera character, actually.

I even seen a vague resemblance in Kundera himself. It's hard to describe. It's less in the particular features and more in the holistic composition of the face. The full lips and strong checkbones, the squinty eyes, I don't know. But Kundera makes Prague feel like a place of narrow alleys and wide wooden lofts, and his generation was one of artistic - if not nihilistic - abandon, of sexual exploration and political unrest. I've been to Prague - it's as gorgeous as everyone says. But Kundera is one who shared with me the spirit of Czechoslovakia. Otherwise, I never would have known.

Housekeeping

2009-03-02T00:45:00.002-05:00

Two Things:

The first, if you are in Boston you should definitely check out the Motion Graphics Fest this weekend. I'm particularly psyched about the Realtime Performance Showcase on Friday night at the Brattle. We're also going, on John's behest, to the Installation Showcase at the Axiom (you have to scroll down to see that one). The Axiom is just down the road from where I live, attached to the Green St. Stop.

John wants to submit his installation to the MG Fest in Austin, which, if he got in, would be a tremendous streak of serendipity because my friend's wedding will also be in Texas, about a week later, and we were planning to take a trip there anyway.

The second thing is this article in adbusters: The Politics of Youth. I'm not sure I catch what Hardt is tossing in the first half, but I do agree with this bit:

You know, the quality of one’s enemy has something to do with making one more or less intelligent. And I think that struggling against Bush made us stupid. Because we had to struggle against the most obvious of things: against torture, against the occupation in Iraq. I hope that we don’t have to struggle against these in the years to come. My hope for the Obama presidency is that we will be able to focus on struggles that really designate a better world. That does not mean utopian aspirations for the Obama presidency, but rather utopian aspirations for the kind of struggles that can be born under, and sometimes against, an Obama administration.

That rings a bell with me, certainly. Being pitted against a creature so utterly irrational as Bush made us all frustrated, and it made us all scared. Our president wasn't listening, and didn't care, and more than likely has a case of early onset dementia, and that freaked everyone out, because people were dying for him. We dealt with this for eight years. It's like the 2000 elections were the big bang of the racing gun, amidst all the struggle and scandle we saw something ugly leap out of the gate. So sure I got angry. Everyone did, our words didn't work so we tried volume instead. Now people on the right were shocked at our behavior in the most recent elections, shocked at how viciously we maligned miss Palin. Well, it's easy to play it cool - or at least to pretend - when you're on top, much harder when you're afraid. (and god! the thought of that woman!)

Now, I may not agree completely with Bama, but I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that at the very least, it's reassuring to know that he listens. I believe (not without a suspicious eye, but I believe) he genuinely wants what's best for the country, and in being that kind of president, he releases us from the anger. We don't need our brute strength anymore, we can use our reason. And isn't that nice?

I've been thinking a lot lately about Obama's new Faith Based Outreach program. It makes me squint my eyes. Thinking too a lot about the case of that lesbian who was fired (for religious reasons) from a Baptist non-profit which, incidentally, received federal funding. I believe quite strongly in separation of church and state, to the extent that it usually trumps all of my other beliefs. I think it's one of the best things in our constitution. But this particular situation is really tricky, as is the FBO program. And, of course, it's way more than I'm able to talk about tonight, when I should be sleeping an hour ago before I have work tomorrow. Eek!

A Great and Sleepless Weekend

2009-02-23T02:47:00.001-05:00

This has been a fantastic weekend, even though I feel like I spent the whole time awake. Still lingering in sickness but slowly crawling out, I spent most of the nights coughing up my lungs and trying to breathe without my nose.

Friday I picked up the BUFF postcards and came home to hammer out some final notes on the Holly Hox shoot the next day. John and I fell asleep late, and somehow managed to continue arguing as we slept. I have no idea, I just remember talking and being angry without really processing how or why. We sort of get on these bickering streaks sometimes, it's just dumb stuff that doesn't really affect us emotionally. There's just a lot going on now, with the potential move to DC and the job hunt and the BFA and the wedding. We feel the weight of everything, definitely. But we keep each other around.

Saturday morning we drug ourselves out of bed, made a hasty pot of coffee and headed for Allston. My friend Caity invited me to dinner that night, and in a miraculous stroke of convenience, she lives with Nate, who is in the Holly Hox band. We had the shoot during the day and then hung out all night with beers. They are all people I don't see nearly enough.

Woke up this morning surprisingly hung over (3 beers?). Made some coffee and got to work cleaning the house like mad. Between my full time job and John's, um, indifference, the mess started piling up until it reached epic, war-zone proportions. I really wanted to get to the BUFF meeting today, but we ran completely out of time and had to start setting up for the evening Holly Hox shoot, as well as getting the food ready for dinner.

Five people over for dinner, crammed in our little kitchen over vegetarian coq-au-vin (keep an eye out for it on John's blog). When they left, I couldn't help myself, I started cutting the Holly Hox footage together. It looks great, which makes me really happy, and makes me feel confident for once. I haven't made anything of my own in a while, and though this is being done for someone else, it's to the same effect. Mirror Men has been my only self-contained project, really, in an extremely long time.

Now I have to work on the BUFF calendar a little, see if there's something I can go to tomorrow night (probably at the Milky Way if you kids want to join me), and write Anna Feder an email. It's three in the morning, I have work tomorrow, and I'm dog tired but I honestly don't want to sleep. I want to make more coffee and keep going. I really want to do well at everything I've got in my hands right now. I guess we'll see.

Festival Madness

2009-02-20T22:10:00.002-05:00

The Boston Underground Film Festival is going to be awesome this year. Please do go! I'm going around to events in Boston with these postcards, so I might as well drop one on my blog.

It'll be March 19th through the 26th, and I'll post a notice when the site has listed a program schedule. From what I know and what I've seen of the programming though, it's really great and wet and awful and sometimes thinky-thinky.

(Card design by Bryan McKay, I'm 95% sure).

I'm going to be on the ground at a lot of the parties during the fest, and John is going to be doing videography, probably with an awesome dude named Dave. So, you know, sexy times.

And while I'm at it, if any of you are presumably coming to my wedding in Oct, and you want to do a performance or a vid or artwork or whatever, shoot me an email. I'll make a folder for it.

The Blessings and Burdens of Local Media:

2009-02-12T21:46:00.005-05:00

I love NPR. Adore it. That is the true godsend of my day job. I realized that I can happily carry on in the most mundane tasks if I have a steady stream of public talk radio in my ear. Where normally I would have gotten my daily dose of current events from skimming the metro on the T on the way to work each morning, now I get more streamlined information virtually all day long on a myriad of subjects: politics, history, science, opinion, the arts, anything I want.

All public media outlets like NPR and PBS are extremely, inexpressibly valuable to our cultural welfare. On a national level, there is virtually no qualitative difference between these and commercial stations (I mean in terms of production value - I prefer the content of public media). I only wish that local public stations were...how to put this sensitively...better. But of course that defeats the purpose of being public, doesn't it?

Not necessarily. The problem inherent in public access stations is that, when you let anyone do anything they want, the quality of programming goes so far down hill that no one watches the channel. Community or Public Access is amazing in theory, but usually fizzles in practice. I'm not suggesting that we restrict people or programs, no no no. That is what I love about public access. I think every municipality should have an open TV station, just like a library. Media technology is at the heart of mass information in this society, and we need to keep up, teach people how to be active participants, or at least literate viewers. No one really acknowledges how important that is.

A few years ago I was a production intern at Somerville Community Access. They were pretty happening as far as that sort of thing goes. I loved Critical Focus, which, despite understandably low production value, was always smart and earnest and engaging. I just wish I could take moments and shows like that, including shows which are really fully about the community, and grow them to occupy a larger time slot. Because the truth is, you turn on most local access TV and it's a near incomprehensible mumble of people who simply don't know how to use the medium. So no one ends up watching even the good stuff.

I've got no clear answers to how to fix this, and it's probably arguable that we should leave well enough alone. I certainly don't think we should restrict member's abilities to air programs based on quality; that defeats the very foundation of membership. However, I suspect that everyone who cares enough to submit programming would also care enough to make it good, so the problem of quality could be solved in a more grassroots manner. I think people ought to be trained better, and I think youth-produced programs should be more integral. I think people should really pro-actively pursue a means of filling up what is literally dead time (by which I mean the endless rotary of lime-green announcements with elevator music), with real, quality, intelligent, provocative television.

Here we have, in our hands, the golden means by which media can be produced without FCC interference, corporate control, commercial obligations, and large special interest agendas disconnected from the needs and concerns of real people in the community. Here we have the perfect outlet for real interaction, real education, unbiased (or totally biased) interpretations, free education, and just about the most unrestricted speech you can put on the screen. SCAT let any member or resident bring in programming and it would get aired. You could show virtually anything, and that is amazing. Why aren't more people taking advantage?

It also concerns me because pressures are mounting on these little stations. As far as I know, institutions like NPR and PBS are safe for the time being. But local programming, which in my mind is theoretically more awesome than national broadcasting, is feeling the weight of big conglomerate cable providers who no longer have to compete and thus no longer see the need to fund such trivial pursuits.

Even your local news affiliate is almost certainly controlled by New Corp., which not only owns a strikingly large share of global media, but is controlled by a strikingly small number of people. And lets just say Rupert isn't exactly a paragon of journalistic integrity. So if people don't start recognizing this, don't start truly engaging with the blessing that is public media, then they won't even notice when it's taken away from them.

I guess that's just what I'm worried about.

Theologic: Refuting Atheism as "Logical"

2009-01-28T00:34:00.002-05:00

This idea came to me today while I recalculating GPAs. It took me so long to jot down the notes that I had to call it a "lunch break" and ended up not actually eating. So I hope it was worth it.

__

I'm sure that anyone who catches the sight of this title and who probably also knows that I believe in a "god" would expect an entire litany of earthly properties inexplicable by science alone, all sorts of proclamations about the awesome improbability of life itself, the beauty of it, yada yada.

I hope you know me better than that.

There is certainly a wide spectrum of those who would consider themselves atheists, I realize that. Most of them would be considered agnostics by a lot of outside standards. Conversely, a lot of agnostics could be argued as atheists. By some standards even I would fall into those categories (though I try not to fall at all). Some self-titled atheists believe vaguely in a higher order, but not a sentient, omnipotent entity, not a "person-god" as is common in western religion. Some atheists believe there is quite a lot of layered mystery in the universe, but do not consider it "higher", or even paranormal. A disturbing number of general atheist types have revoked specifically the religion of their upbringing, including its historically violent rise to power, which is a faction I could easily be considered part of, but we part ways where they use this momentum to reject god itself. Personally I find this shortsighted. since they make a point to deny specifically the god of their religion, and in doing so accept all of the terms and features attributed to god by the very religion against which they rebel. Does that make sense? It's not the belief, but the lack of analysis that I take umbrage with.

And again, to a fundamentalist in any religion, others of a different faith are just as good as atheists. So here is what I mean: for the purpose of this essay, an "atheist" is a materialist, a total reductionist. And atheist is one who specifically refutes even the possibility of some higher order, who negates the existence of a soul, who claims that even love is nothing more than a rush of neurotransmitters, that life was a chemical accident, that science is the only truth, all "transcendence" is a function of human subjectivity, etc.

Those are the most extreme of atheistic ideas, the materialist. I'll use them for the argument, not to build a straw man, but to cover all bases, from farthest left to farthest right.

Then there is "god". I use lower case god, and quotes, to get as far away as possible from the connotation of the Judeo-Christian god. He's in there, but not what I'm talking about. Ok, I'll drop the "god" quotes because they are annoying and I'm sure you know what I'm saying by now.

Also, I am certainly not setting out to say that atheism is illogical. The point is that atheism, like theism, is neither logical nor illogical. I'm saying that in trying to saddle the cosmic "what" and "how", logic is both useless and irrelevant. And no, the irony doesn't escape me that I would use logic to point this out. I hope only to dismantle the erroneous belief that atheism is logical, intellectual, while belief in a higher power is emotional, cultish, and ignorant.

Fundamentally, we do not totally know the true nature of our universe (here the scientist would agree with me much more enthusiastically than the zealot). The problem is that logic relies on evidence, but evidence is only good if you know what you are trying to make evident.

In a courtroom trial, both the prosecution and the defense must state their aims before going any further. What good is exhibit A if you don't know the charge?

In the same way, all attempts to prove or disprove god fall flat, because they first presume to know the nature of god. For example, there's a pretty funny lecture on the internet about intelligent design. I will try to find it. As an actual theological argument, though, it's not much though, because it argues that we are too dilapidated to have been intelligently designed, and in doing so presumes that everything god creates would be perfect, or even good.

Given that, lets accept for a second that we don't know the reason we exist because we haven't been able to prove anything. It's a question mark. I hope you can at least accept a question mark, broad enough for literally every belief you could possibly have.

Now picture that the universe is a closed cardboard box. Inside that box is the ultimate truth, is the why-are-we-here. Christianity says there is a red rubber ball in that box, Judaism says there is a wooden spoon in that box, Islam says there is a tiny kitten, whatever. But atheists say there is nothing in the box (or science could be in the box, it doesn't matter) that the box simply assembled itself through a random but meaningful accumulation of cardboard particles, and trust me, that's okay.

The problem is that as a culture we are trained to think in opposites, in contrast, in dichotomies. There is black and white, yes and no, up and down, substance and absence. And our popular mode of thinking is that there is either cosmic substance or there is cosmic absence. There either is a higher force, or there is not. So, for every possible option, there is a corollary absence. For every spoon, or ball, or kitten, there is a not-spoon, a not-ball, a not-kitten. You add all of these up, and it seems far more likely that there is "nothing" there than there is specifically one of these things.

It looks like of like this: (forgive me, I never took statistics)

It could keep going. Add up the totals there, it seems in this case that "Nothing" has an infinitely greater chance of being in the box than David Duchovney.

To a materialist, "Nothing" is the great big counterpoint to any and all supernatural possibilities. It is infinitely more probable that any one belief, yet powerful enough to hold its own against all beliefs, and and it is this notion which falsely ties together materialism and reason.

But get this: Nothing is not nothing.

Nothing is Something.

Nothing is not the absence of belief, it is a belief, pro-actively made. It's strength is derived when two ideas contrast each other.

The key point is this:

Ideas have opposites. Not things. Absence and substance are only opposites in concept. In reality, substance has no opposite.

A chair has no opposite.

A table has no opposite.

A tiny kitten has no opposite.

Outside this box, we must think in ideas. Unable to see through the box, ideas are all we have. That is why spiritualists and atheists alike find it so easy to draw the neat line between something and nothing.

Inside the box, however, is not an idea, but a reality. Even if that reality is nothing. In this case we are dealing with real substance, "nothing" is not the opposite. Nothing is only one of the possibilities, including all the various incarnations of "nothing" that people think up.

So it really looks more like this:

Inside that box there can only be substance, again, even if that substance is nothing. Nothing has weight. Nothing is exactly equal to all other possibility.

The ultimate purpose of religion is to shake that box long and hard, to listen for clues and make compelling and educated guesses as to its contents.

Ludicrous is the religion or the individual who stands back and points resolutely at the box (especially if it is only hearsay and they have never themselves touched it!) and says with utter certainty that "X is in the box", because no matter what, you're hedging 100% of your bets on an infinitely small chance, and that certainly is illogical.

To say "I shook the box and heard nothing" has a great deal more reason behind it, because it stakes no guaranteed claim and speak only from experience, which is all we ever have to speak from beyond studying what the great shakers and listeners of our time heard themselves.

There is, of course, always the option to stand back and say "I have no idea what's in the box" but what a hard thing to do when it is so close within your reach!

It may seem now, from my little flimsy percentages, that I believe it far more likely that something exists than nothing. Not so. Because once you start adding up the disparate substances, you are back to the Idea-of-substance (real life objects cannot be added to each other like a chair added to a fork). Each separate answer to "what's in the box?" must be considered individually to maintain their substance-hood, for you cannot weigh an idea (all anything!) against a substance (the lone nothing). It's nonsensical.

And I'm sure there are those who reject the box metaphor all together, who say there is no interior and would rather fold it up into a piece of flat cardboard. But know that if you do this, you are not refusing theology in the name of science. You are refuting science. You are negating Darwin, you are killing Nietzsche and the big bang. You are refuting every possible cause, refuting even that we were ever caused at all.

You are welcome to do that, of course, but it's trying a bit hard, if you ask me.

We've Got to Go Back!

2009-01-24T03:06:00.002-05:00

My sleep schedule has gone a bit wonky, which leads me here at 3 in the morning, despite having a 9-5 job, and a conference tomorrow morning at 9:30. This meeting-type thing (I know relatively little about it) will take up almost the entire day and run until 3:00. I intend to take copious notes, as Boston is slated to expand quite dramatically in the industry and I intend to be a part of that. I see John taking a lot more initiative on this front than I did when I just got out of school. This makes me happy. He has a lot more confidence than I do and he's taking a little more time to find the right job instead of just any job. I could not do that last year, for pragmatic reasons, and quickly found myself in the most evil company I have ever associated with, a thing that shook me quite deeply, but, I think, ultimately pushed me in other directions politically and ideologically, which is a good thing. Since then, life has been a search for good.

LOST

Last Wednesday me and a few friends gathered in the livingroom to watch the season 5 premiere of Lost. Boy howdy! John and I have been holding our breaths for months.

There was nothing terribly mind-blowing about it, besides a few soft punches. Contrary to typical Lost-style, I think more questions were answered than created. I feel as though the episode was about establishing new ground rules, making solid some shared knowledge so that the questions can begin to build again on a new level.

When we were first introduced to Daniel Faraday, I was skeptical and a bit dismayed. Lost is my favorite show ever in the history of time, but it also has moments of transparency. Ok so, Faraday is a physicist who has devoted his life to understanding time travel. I wonder if he's going to be useful to the plot? Nah.

However, unlike almost every female character on Lost, they put a real person inside Faraday. He's got a funny, skittish way about him, with squinty eyes always carefully dissecting the thin papery layers of perceived truth and cosmic reality. (Miles: "something wrong with your neck?"). He never knows - I realized once - he never knows the world at face value like everyone else. For him, each moment requires conscious effort to understand the most basic assets of his environment. When is he? When does everyone else think they are? What should he tell them to make them understand? What should he say to avoid being lynched? It's quite obvious how intimidated he is by the other survivors, and not without reason. Very good character, and he's the first one in a while to challenge Ben's place as my favorite character ever.

One of my biggest problems with Lost is the lazy, two-dimensional way they've portrayed virtually every female on the show. You know the Madonna/Whore complex? They've got that, except it's the Tough Chick/Wallflower complex. There are two exceptions, Rose and Sun. Sun was definitely a Wallflower until recently, with hints of her outcoming scattered through former seasons (accidentally poisoning Michael, and what the hell was she burying when she lost her ring? I can't remember anymore). Rose started out cool, being the woman who lost her cancer and telepathically knew her husband was still alive, but since then she's disappointedly fizzled into a sassy-old-black-woman cliche.

Sun is my favorite female character because she alone plays her cards really close to her chest. She's totally sweet and nice until it counts. And you know what? I'm a little afraid of her now. I think the perpetual lesson of Lost is that people go a little crazy when they lose the ones they love. I don't know if Sun is going to turn into some kind of villain, but you know what? I think I'm going with her, either way.

Every other woman on this show is either innocuous/complacent/sweet/a little dumb or a constipated adrenaline junkie with a really bad attitude*. Is that their idea of a strong female? People like Juliet who can't manage their problems and thus traipse around with a self-righteous smirk which they intend to inflict on every underling who attempts at complexity? Okay. People like Charlotte Lewis? Who is she? Did she wander off the set of Indiana Jones? Get lost, Charlotte, with your stupid multilingualism.

Char, Faraday, and Juliet. *Note identical expressions on the females. Note squinty Faraday eyes.

Beyond this, um, I really like this show delving into time travel and paradoxes. I LOVE Desmond and his Billy Pilgrim syndrome. I wish Hurley and Sayid had been the odd couple for a little more than one episode. I like Ben's new slick look. I don't know how Sun came around to blaming Ben for Jin's "death" (still dubious). I still don't care about Kate. Ms. Hawking is back: OK.

I made this for fun tonight.

2009-01-16T00:09:00.001-05:00

Joan Robinson is Neat, Too.

2009-01-13T21:41:00.002-05:00

Herman Daly is my new hero, up there with Noam and Chesterton and Kant. But less so the last two, because they are dead. I've heard about Daly before, but never read any primary source text.

But you and everyone you know should read this:

http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/81/the_crisis.html

.

Simulation and Simulacra Response Pt 1

2009-01-10T00:52:00.002-05:00

Beaudrillard begins Simulacra and Simulation with a sentence that is a paragraph long, half of which is a parenthetical phrase referencing - but not really describing - a fable I have never heard of. At first I thought, “god,he’s obtuse.” Then I began to think he was full of sawdust. I don’t really think that anymore, but I do think he’s not so good at explaining things. He’s talking from inside his own head, vaguely alluding to his own unspoken thoughts, or at least that’s what it seems like.

The “hyperreal” is a model of the real without origin. It has effectively become its own pure simulacrum, a thing unto itself. It’s particularly interesting to think - I remember several years ago walking through Times Square with Mike Lore when he said suddenly “this is all so hyperreal”. It’s spooky and strange to think of Times Square as pure simulacrum, a gobbled up and spit out representation of itself, a hollow reflection of a thing that used to exist - or did it? B says the representation eventually destroys the reference. This was what I first thought was blither-blather, apparently not so much.

The image moves from (in his words) reflecting a profound reality, to masking a profound reality, to masking the absence of a reality, to becoming“reality”, pure simulacrum. He says that particular sects of protestantism disavowed simulacra in the church because on some level they feared that the simulacra would reveal the “truth” that God him/itself is also simulacra, that the imagery of the Catholic church only masks the absence of God, no, actually destroys the “reality” of God by their existence.

You make think I’m phrasing it wrong, or that I’ve missed the point, and it’s because I had. I did miss the point. I’m just explaining my thought process.

Without any other context I thought that possibly what he was trying to say was that simulacrum reveals the falsity of the original by...um...exposing the process. In other words, making a statue of a deer undermines the authenticity of a real deer...because the deer itself is just a creation. But of course that made me totally confused. For one, is an object rendered false by the act ofcreation? That’s just silly. Does simulacrum require intent? Maybe, haven’t read that far yet. But most of all, I’m pretty sure Beaudrillard isa hardcore atheist, and implying that a live deer is “created”, as in, by a sentient being, as in, one capable of intent, that is actually an argument insupport of God. In that case, the image would support the original. So at that point I knew I had misunderstood, and I was only on page five. Stick with me.

I got it on my next lunch break, when I resumed where I had left off. It’s not the physical form that’s being negated, it’s the meaning, or the transfer of significance in the case of the Anabapists and the no-image thing. There is a statue of the crucifix at the front of the church, with Jesus hanging up there by his wrist bones, because Christian are kind of messed up like that. The statue begins as a reflection, a reminder of Christ. Then it becomes (as it already has) the predominant image of Christ in people’s minds. Eventually on some level Christians stop worshipping Christ and worship the statue, or, in a broader sense, the image of the crucifix. The statue representation at the front of the church has effectively canceled out the original. The symbol comes into its own.

This is particularly strange and telling when you think about communion and Catholic transubstantiation. This is unique to Catholics. I was raised Lutheran and I guarantee you they weren't that literal. But that doesn’t mean they haven’t reached the point of pure simulacrum on some level. I’m not sure yet as to whether “pure simulacrum” necessarily includes the physical image or just the conceptual one. I remember when I was little, reading the story of Moses on Mt. Sinai while the people worshipped the golden calf. I remember asking my mom whether the people were worshipping the golden calf itself, that is, the physical statue, or another god that was merely represented by the golden calf. I don’t remember what she said because that was, like, 18 years ago, but she probably said that they were worshipping the actual statue, because she takes a pretty literal view of the bible. We were baptists back then. Big surprise there.

Beaudrillard goes to say that simulation, the kind that has destroyed the original and come into its own, “inaugerates the era of simulacra and simulation, in which there is no longer a God to recognize his own, no longer a Last Judgement to separate the false from the true, the real from its artificial resurrection, as everything is already dead and resurrected in advance.”(p.6*)
What he describes as the “Last Judgement”, I’ve thought about before as an outside, true Objectic Standard, sort of a Cosmic Yardstick . Without really stating this explicitly, or stating it as God, most humans believe in the Cosmic Yardstick. They also believe in the closely related Cosmic Ladder. What I mean by this is an actual, final Truth, a totally objective classification of everything in the universe that stands independent from human interference.

If you ask me, the Cosmic Yardstick doesn’t exist - total human construct -but it also kind of does in a tiny way. To think that reality is built entirely on human perception, that subjectivity is everything, and that the universe would cease to exist without us to perceive it, that’s not only narcissistic but it’s just silly. I’d take it a step further. Reality does exist objectively outside of us, but not only is it totally, completely, impossibly inaccessible by human comprehension, but our silly little attributes don’t apply or matter. Beaudrillard says there is no final judgement of“original” vs. “simulation”. I have pages and pages of journal entries dealing with the final judgement, or cosmic yardstick, and lack thereof. What, for example, is value? How can we possibly assess value to things, except toadmit that value is meaningless outside of our shared agreement? And what does it mean to “deserve” something? The number of advantages or disadvantages in life are so impossibly relative, at what point does anyone actually deserve anything? I won’t continue down this train of thought because it’s too tangential. But basically, a lot of things look different when you absolve the Cosmic Yardstick. But it gets better once you accept that the Yardstick is only human, and therefore still important to us.

Post-modernism isn’t the only line of thought that’s inherently self-destructive, but I hadn’t thought about science and anthropology. The point at which Beaud told the story of the Tasadays is the point at which I caught his drift.
A group of extremely primitive tribespeople cut off from civilization was discovered in the jungle of the Philippines in 1971. The Philippines government decided to put them back in the jungle untouched, encouraged particularly, and ironically, by anthropologists. It’s a historical inevitably that indigenous peoples are destroyed by contact with civilization, starting with the scientists. The scientists know that to observe the object is to destroy it. It changes under the microscope. Beaudrillard then refers to the Vengeance of Death. When the object dies, it enacts its vengeance by becoming inaccessible to the scientist. It’s sort of a more philosophical version of the Quantum Measurement Problem, most commonly exemplified as Schrodinger’s cat.

To look at something is to change it. B says it’s naive of us to think that primitive people are the only victims. “We are all Tasadays” (p.9*) he says. We have all been destroyed and resurrected as the artifice, the simulation. New York, Times Square, it is a thing that would not exist as it is without observation and recreation, without the giant, intangible loop of sight and being seen. Times Square knows you are looking, and when you look, it morphs into the image you have created from popular concept. This isn’t fluff - it happens in a very real and consequential fashion to post-colonial third world countries, Westerners attracted to their exotic mythos came to observe it. Impoverished countries figured out very quickly that the more they exuded and performed the Western narrative, the more the tourist dollars flow in. So these people in various corners of the world have functionally streamlined, filtered, and saturated their own culture to live the mythos for Western consumers. Those who have won the hegemonic battle are those who write the narrative. Fact and Fiction interlock until they are virtually indistinguishable. But we shouldn’t pity them for this reason alone. We’ve done it to ourselves. We live the symbol.

This paints The Hills in an interesting color, doesn’t it?

*University of Michigan Press, 2006

Vaganto

2009-01-09T21:43:00.001-05:00

The next book after Mirror Men that I want to write (other than a couple of Mirror Men sequels which are endlessly entertaining in their possibilities), is Vaganto. The idea started during a conversation with him about the various unforeseen forces which could affect our global future. At first it was about the future aesthetic, how, instead of the sleek metallics, we reverse into a sort of nostalgic wood-finished look. New things made to look old. Maybe as a ramification of technology gone awry, maybe as a result of a crumbling infrastructure, who knows. But function, not just form, would be on the chopping block. It's interesting to imagine a world in which incredibly advanced technology exists alongside antiquated tools, tools resurrected out of history because Marxist alienation reached its breaking point, or because exponentially advancing scientific discoveries stratify society to a point where one man's basic is another man's unattainable, or some trendsetter revitalizes pre-industrial rev. "utopia", or some man-made catastrophe decimates mankind and creates a Japanese-style fear of technology which results in the opposite extreme. Any of these things. But Vaganto won't be about any of that. It will take place in a future world in which all of our hot topics have been said and done. That isn't the story.

The reason I bring this up is trivial. I can't find my notebook. The crux of Vaganto (which means wanderer in Esperanto), is that an inestimably large portion of people renounced their citizenship at some point a few generations ago, and it continues to be a common occurrence. Not just US Citizenship. People from all countries collectively - yet separately - decided that alignment with a city-state is not only useless, but actually contrary to their own interests.

The notebook (which I lost and am now trying to find again) had all of my random thoughts about such a global society, or non-society. These people are called Non-Citizens, and they are both collective and staunchly individual. Many of them are wanderers. By sheer number alone they force changes in immigration and travel legislation. People with no paperwork can't be catalogued. There are myriad ways in which established countries deal with this problem. The United States, surprisingly, is one of the more accommodating. But that's too much to get into now.

In my notes I also had a list of the groups of Non-Citizens, loosely formed around particular ideologies. There are, for example, extremely militant Non-Citizens who not only against citizenship, but against any sort of organization at all, even among themselves. There are native-non-citizens, people who were born to non-citizens, many of whom don't even know their country of origin. There are native-non-citizens who wish to re-integrate, 1st generation elective non-citizens, non-citizens who wish to form some sort of alliance, and so on. They all have their own names, but I can't remember because I can't find my notebook.

And the trains. Trains are a big deal. They are not only the primary mode of transportation, they are a hub of contention and violence. Because non-citizens make up something like 85% of of train traffic, trains can't even be partially supported by federal taxes. Trains become completely privatized and are near monopolies, with only two or three companies controlling the entire world. It's the Gilded Age all over again, but bigger. Trains are the biggest and baddest example of corporate rule, as corporations now wield more power than governments, and in some cases this is the ironic result of the non-citizen movement. There are those who wage war against the train system by forcing their way on with violence - hijacking and destruction are common along train routes, clusters of makeshift non-citizen camps collect alongside them like river silt.

There are so many things in my notebook. This notebook describes this world in a level of detail I can't possibly recreate. They have their own mythology, their own aesthetic, their own language, their own rules. Globalization moves East to West. There are stories of "Tragi-villa" that are never explained. The geography is different. The main character is a man with a made-up name and vague, non-descript features. He doesn't know where he's from. He just keeps walking.

I'll find it. Grr.

After that, I have a screenplay to write that goes in the opposite direction. The two main eponymous characters are Abaddon and Abednego, a pair of arch angels livings alongside man in an ancient civilization.

True Story

2009-01-06T21:26:00.002-05:00

Did you know how we got the word "sabotage"?

Before the industrial revolution hit France, most lower-class French people were farmworkers. They essentially sharecropped for the richy-rich estate owners.

They had special wooden shoes called "sabots". When they found themselves being replaced by much more efficient machines, they sought revenge by throwing their shoes into the gears.

Sabotage.

Lot's Wife

2009-01-05T22:36:00.001-05:00

Maybe in the end

She didn't give a shit

what the big man thought

she was the wife of Lot

he kept running

just to save himself

he kept running

She said you don't know

what it means to be human

you think you know

but you're so full of hubris

you don't know

what it means to be able to die

to not know what comes after

the end of time

Lot's wife, she hated her teeth

she was the angriest woman

you'd have the pleasure to meet

She was always hanging on to things

on to things

She kept her hair tied up tight

and hated her neighbors

till she woke up in the night

and heard them screaming

She wondered what, God,

is the point of faith

if you're just gonna keep

taking it away (from me)

and what, God, is the point of Love

you talk so much

but I don't see any of it

What. God. is the point of faith

if you're just gonna keep taking it away

What, God, is the point of Love

you talk so much, but I don't see any of it.

So maybe in the end

she didn't give a shit

what the big man thought

the wife of Lot

he was no bleeder

he was no seeker

Lot's Wife, at first they thought she was rare

but it turns out, she was everywhere

with her white skin

and her eyes looking back on sin

Lot's Wife, at first they thought she was rare

but it turns out, she was everywhere

Lot's Wife, at first they thought she was rare

but it turns out, she was everywhere

she was so dry

she's in the rocks now

2008-12-30T18:55:00.000-05:00

I kind of want this book.

Catch-22

2008-12-30T14:45:00.000-05:00

I'm back from DC, after being blissfully disconnected from all manner of electronical technology. No TV, no internet, and I'm not even sure where my cell phone is now. I guess I should charge it and rejoin planet earth. But thanks so much for the comments on the last post, guys. It gave me a good place to start.

We came home after 6 days to find that the cats were still alive, thank god. I was worried all week, even though I left them with enough food and water and litter to accommodate a small colony of cats. Baskerville actually took advantage of the free-for-all and got really fat. I had no idea one cat could put on so much weight in a week! I can almost hear him grunt when he jumps up to the bathroom sink. Ah well, we'll work on that. Maybe I should take him out jogging.

I finished reading Catch-22 this morning. It's one of those books that, despite being a practically sparkling display of wit and brilliance, took me a long time to finish. I have very little interest in "war" books, as I have very little interest in war as a fictional backdrop. But this one wasn't so much about the war as it was about a world in which war was necessarily a part. The island of Pianosa was a microcosm for larger systems, and the mysteriously sane-looking inhabitants were totally cuckooed out of their minds, but only in the way a large group of people (say, a nation-state) would parade that insanity with total confidence in themselves, the sort of confidence that could only come from being blissfully free of reality checks, or anyone powerful enough to give them one.

Yossarian is a well-earned protagonist, and had he been placed in any other book, he might have just blended in. But he operates as you'd think any normal person would, which makes him an aberration in the world of Catch-22. He exudes the sort of cool-headed self-interest that seems so God-given, so natural, and he is the only person who does it without remorse or subterfuge. The perfect Yossarian statement, I think, was "Whoever wants me dead is my enemy, I don't care what side he's on", and he reacts in his unshakeable sensibility, with perfect horror, at his own commanding officers.

There is irony at every turn, and it operates in a near-fractal pattern, with broad strokes of plot deftly striking against each other, down to the tiniest remarks found on any page.

Maybe that's why I had a hard time getting through the book. Most stories waddle along inconspicuously until they glow, then the glow fades and you're drifting again. You get the feeling that those little spots of glow are exactly what the story was written for, as if everything else was designed to build blurrily up to this one peak of clarity, this one bright dazzle of brilliance that tells you everything you ever wanted to know or feel about life and more. Those bright spots accentuate the dimmer ones. If you can believe it, Catch-22 was all bright, and that's why it got tiresome from time to time. I couldn't handle the constant clever derring-dos between the officers, the prostitutes, the facts, the gentle, subtle, narrative interjections. There was virtually no plot beyond the same three or four rehashed disagreements.

Milo Minderbender is the perfect satire of mindless capitalism. His introductory chapter was one of my favorite parts of the book. Among other things he buys German aircraft, then leases them back to the Germans, sells out his own squadron's location, then tries to sell chocolate covered cotton while he attends the funeral of people who died in the attack. He sells secrets and equipment to both sides, and somehow he's still tolerated because he's the best businessman who ever lived. It's boggling.

The end of the book was interesting, mainly because I wasn't expecting it to have an "end" at all. One of the most unstructured, uniformly composed books I've ever read somehow managed to read a conclusion. Yossarian reveals himself in the plainest way to actually have a bit of a deeper, philosophical grievance against the war and the warmongers when he finally does something contrary to his self interest basically just to shaft the man. He really, honestly, lives on the highest plain of moral reason, though his actions seem simple. In the end, he is neither a sheep nor a egocentrist, adrift in a world constructed to receive only those who are both.

The Birth of a Frontier

2008-12-23T06:49:00.003-05:00

So, I spent all night cleaning apartment because me and the fiance are leaving for DC this morning. I finally finished around 6:30, which leaves me with exactly thirty minutes before I have to leave to run last minute errands downtown. (Jamaica Plain downtown, not Boston downtown). Instead of sleeping, which I find futile under these conditions, I decided to eat little pieces of cheese and read some stuff that FreePress sent me:

In Move to Digital TV, Confusion is in the Air, NY Times

For once, I'm going to have to go out on a limb here and say that the government, the FCC, and other commercial networks are doing a pretty decent job of informing people about the switch . Although, when I read that most people think that this switch requires them to start buying cable or satellite service, I did narrow my eyes a little at Comcast, whose commercials are vague and slightly condescending enough to nudge people in that direction.

The reason there is still great confusion is quite simple: it's really confusing. I get that. It's also more or less unprecendented, and when you try to do something different and universal, the average joe-shmoe is slow on the uptake, no matter how many times you blast it into his face. It's not his fault, or anyone's. Technology is generally intimidating for middle-aged rug salesmen who just wants to watch CSI after work, because he's generally not interested unless he has to be.

My question is not in the logistics. I know that Feb 17th will be the second coming of hell (whatever that is) for a lot of people. My question is why.

Really, why this government mandated switch? I have no idea. To be fair, I haven't done much digging, but I thought I would pose the question to the masses, because my friends are smarter than the internet.

Another interesting thing of note. When the digital transition was announced, analogue TVs disappeared off the shelf. Whooosh, gone. It's not like they stopped ordering new analogue TVs wholesale, they vanquished them entirely.

What happens now, to those empty airwaves? They don't just disappear. This, I am very very interested in. I feel like it would be a rogue playground for all the basement pirates, a beautiful oasis of DIY indie love, or at least for one dreamer's second. It will probably be quickly snatched up by some one else, some one big, but...who? I don't think for a second that the government is about to let that newly whitewashed airwave frontier go to waste.

It reminds me of Edwin Armstrong and the new days of FM Radio. David Sarnoff of RCA basically sucked him dry of all he had and drove him to suicide because he had discovered, temporarily, a product that RCA did not know how to commodify. I think it's one of the great unsung American tragedies.

Future Post! I plan to talk about zombies a little, and vampires a little more.

A Photographic Record of a Really Good Day (in reverse order)

2008-12-23T01:43:00.000-05:00

This was not actually from that day, it was just an accident.

Alex's Christmas tree.

Alex is a person I like.

Our messy kitchen table. (we'll leave it for now)

John is a model.

Mrs. Eaves is pretty and shy.

Bob Baskerville, Esq.

Carol Chomsky

2008-12-20T03:25:00.002-05:00

Carol Chomsky

Noam Chomsky lost his wife of 60 years yesterday.

It makes me sadder than I planned on being.

Just thought you should know.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

2008-12-19T12:06:00.002-05:00

Dir: David Fincher
Wri: Eric Roth

I was lucky to see an advanced screening of Benjamin Button (due out on Christmas - is that really a good idea?). They had all sorts of rules about not bringing in cameras, camera phones, or any sort of recording devices. I mean, they always have those rules, but they searched our bags.

But they can't stop me from writing about it, can they?

First I would have to say that this ranks among one of my favorite films ever, but I think that's because it mostly matches my particular sensiblities. I came out of the theatre completely in awe, but after the post-movie glow wore off, the imperfections rose to the surface. I don't really see myself revealing spoilers here, as it's hard to spoil a movie which has no great reveal, but the criticisms may tell you more than you want to know, so I'll leave them for the end.

I've never read Fitzgerald's short story which formed the basis of this movie, but I've heard it's surprisingly short. The movie, on the other hand, is an epic 2 hours and 45 minutes in which lots of things happen but nothing really happens. That's how I like it - why all this dependence on a strictly ordered and strategically placed chain of causality? Benjamin Button is a character study, a long, sweeping tale pocked with extraordinary bit characters, ordinary magic and the mysterious gloom of de Chirico skies, lights bleeping through ocean fog, orange-lit porches and tilt-a-whirl Southern accents.

One of my favorite books is 100 Years of Solitude, for many of the same reasons. Rather than following one man over the concrete course of a lifetime, Solitude follows an entire family from what feels like the beginning of time to the very, very end. It's a sensual sort of thing, they act like real people but they feel like gods, their lives are both petty and catasophic, characters drift in and out like ghosts through a vacant room. Many of the characters have the same name, which gets really confusing, and I have no idea how Gabriel Garcia Marquez pulled it off.

But I read an interview with Marquez once, and I'll never forget this. He said that his grandmother told stories with matter-of-fact simplicity, but the stories themselves were so impossible, and that, he felt, was the best way to treat to fantastical - to never blink, to never give pause, to never aggrandize. 100 Years is one of the definitive examples of magical realism, and Benjamin Button borrows all of its virtues.

I love it, for example, that those who know Benjamin either accept his condition unflinchingly or fail to notice it. Brad Pitt does an amazing job - I really don't think I've ever seen him do a better one. I would love to know how they did all of the age effects (does anyone know?) because it was quite a feat creating a shriveled old man with a recognizable Brad-face. I wouldn't be surprised if that was a different actor with prosthetics. He must have had body doubles, and there was certainly an abundance of full-body shots where his face was tactfully shrouded. It's just...the transition was so graceful and fluid. They've got to win some kind of award for that. Everyone said it couldn't be done, and I'm usually not one to remark on the technical details, but it's just awesome. But I digress.

The story also comes with its own Melquiades, its own pseudo-omniscient puppeteer man. There's a short, sort of anecdotal story about a blind master clock-maker who made his clock to run backwards so that he may rewind time and bring his son back alive from the Great War. It's understood that through some mythical quirk, Benjamin was affected by the clock. This is never fully explained, as well it shouldn't be. What Benjamin Button gives you is lots of pieces, some of them insignificant but meaningful (yes), some of them only important in that they were mentioned, and they must have been mentioned for a reason.

My favorite stories are like that because in the end, you hold all of the peices in the air and cross your eyes a bit, and you see a picture that you can't explain. And you know how I feel about explanations. The mind is quite capable of intuitively understanding some things before they get pared down into words, and we must never forget to trust that sense. Ironic, coming from me.

But definitely, definitely go see it. You won't get bored. Tilda Swinton will be there too!

There were problems, too. I have them in white, so just highlight if you don't mind the slightly spoilerish non-spoilers. You can still see the white text, but hey, it's indiscernible enough that you won't accidentally read something you don't want to.

1. The hummingbird that appears after a death. I agree with Ali, it's dumb. It is interesting, however that they chose a hummingbird, the only bird that can fly backwards or hover, and is completely unbound by the forward motion of flight.

2. I don't see why he had to leave Daisy in the end. His expressed reason is that he didn't want his daughter to have a child for a father, and that he didn't want Daisy to have to raise them both. That's bull. I would have believed it if he had expressed any anguish, or experienced any hardship at all in his life because of his condition, but he didn't. Before the stupid, so-called altruistic move of abandoning his wife and kid, Benjamin's life had appeared pretty consistently hunky-dory. If he really loved Daisy he would have worked it out. It seems completely improbable and unmotivated, to say the least.

3. Their 12-year-old daughter Caroline? BAD casting choice.

4. Daisy apparently gets old by wearing heavier eyeliner.

5. The Magnolia-esque aside that describes the whole process leading to Daisy getting hit by a taxi. Interesting, but sort of out-of-place. I can accept it, I guess. It was a cool sequence. It just felt tangential.

And that's my two cents.