The Best Fireworks Display is Seen From a Plane Flying into LAX Sometime Between 9 - 10pm
Independence day is my favorite holiday. Partly because it’s not in the winter, so there’s no seasonal affective disorder. Another reason is you don’t need to celebrate it with your family. It is the first guaranteed easy day of summer. Plus it means my birthday is just a few weeks away.
Last year to the day tomorrow, I was flying into Los Angeles. The cheapest flight I could get was on the 4th in the evening. I thought I would be missing the parties, but what I got was so much more.
From my window I looked at the beautiful infinite motherboard of lights that is the city as seen from the air. And just above it, little ripples of hundreds more colored lights. The firework explosions were all so tiny, and yet I could see them go off above every city subdivision. And all of it was happening at once.
There was the Glendale fireworks and the Long Beach celebration over there. You could see another firework show above Malibu and Culver City, and Westwood, and everywhere else. A firework show for every neighborhood, and from my vantage point, I could see them all at once. It was one of the most beautiful and amazing things I’ve seen in my life; made even more special by that fact so few people will have the chance to experience it.
If this were a short story or a better crafted essay I might have played up my disappointement in missing all the Independence Day barbeques, or emphasize that the day has some sentimental significance to me besides what I’ve already written. But it is just a blog post so I’ll state the point here more directly, and even use a tired cliche to finish this post: the best things come when you least expect them.
Enjoy your holiday!
Images by Yoon Lee.
A Trip to the Zoo
The eyes of an animal when they consider a man are attentive and wary. The same animal may well look at other species the same way. He does not reserve a special look for man. But by no other species except man will the animal’s look be recognized as familiar. Other animals are held by the look. Man becomes aware of himself returning the look….
The relation may become clearer by comparing the look of an animal with the look of another man. Between two men the two abysses are, in principle, bridged by language. Even if the encounter is hostile and no words are used (even if the two speak different languages), the existence of language allows that at least one of them, if not mutually, is confirmed by the other. Language allows men to reckon with each other as with themselves. (In the confirmation made possible by language, human ignorance and fear may also be confirmed. Whereas in animals fear is a response to signal, in men it is endemic.) … No animal confirms man, either positively or negatively…The first metaphor was animal, it was because the essential relationship between man and animal was metaphoric. Within that relation what the two terms — man and animal — shared in common revealed what differentiated them. And vice versa.
-John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?” About Looking.
So maybe dolphins didn’t really commit mass suicide, and maybe elephants can’t really paint self-portraits, and maybe a parrot never 
served as key witness in a murder trial, and maybe monkeys don’t have real conversations– animals are a lot smarter than you think. To the left is my dog’s favorite toy, to the right is a coffee cup that scares the bejeebus out of her (it’s also a picture of her doppleganger.) Another example of how uncanny valley creeps out animals too.
The other day, I was in a shopping mall and for whatever reason stopped by the pet store. It was a typical mall pet store, the size of a closet, at the far corner where all the cheap and badly maintained stores are located. Seeing a dozen or so puppies in their cages gave me a terrible sense of guilt. Like I should take them all — pay for them — and save them from further torture. But that would only encourage the store to breed more puppies in even worse conditions.
The Sundance Channel’s Big Ideas for a Small Planet “animals” special is the best episode in an already great series. They highlighted an animal shelter in Dallas doing its best to provide safe, friendly, spacious (green) conditions for its inhabitants. The structural changes indirectly raised a practical question: who is going to go to the pound if you are only going to experience that guilty feeling that you need to save them all?
Another segment was on the maintenance of the Bronx zoo, where they emphasize that conservation is their major goal. It got me thinking about how much has changed since John Berger wrote “Why Look at Animals?” in 1977. Berger’s essay talks about the way zoos at once seek the distinction given to museums, although they are taking subjects out of the natural environment in order to display. So what you have is an animal with a “frame around it.”
Visitors visit the zoo to look at animals. They proceed from cage to cage, not unlike the visitors in an art gallery who stop in front of one painting, and then more on to the next or the one after next… When you look at these animals, even if the animal is up against the bars, less than a foot from you, looking outwards in the public direction, you are looking at something that has been rendered absolutely marginal; and the concentration you can muster will never be enough to render it…
The space in which they inhabit is artificial. Hence their tendency to bundle towards the edge of it. (Beyond the edges there may be real space.) In some cages the light is equally artificial. In all cases the environment is illusory.
Now zoo architects are working toward building less artificial environments(and cages are no longer acceptable in metropolitan zoos.) Still, the just open Norman Foster elephant house for the Copenhagen Zoo, and news surrounding it, shows the debate whether a zoo should exist at all never went away.
A design critic at The Guardian says, in an otherwise an enthusiastic post about the zoo addition, “How can any architect even begin to match the subtlety of a spider’s web or recreate the landscapes and forests elephants call home? Zoo architecture is, at best, an art, or beast, of uneasy and uncertain compromise.”
Images by Sarah Moon. Brightcove video and more about the artist.
The Weirdest Sci-Fi Kids Movies
Pretty much the only bad thing I can say about Wall-E is that I’m not 10 years old so I can’t enjoy it as much as I would were that the case. It even asks the question I find most fascinating in SF: how much of the natural world is an innate human need?
But the film is just another example of great science fiction aimed at young people. Generally kids have an appetite for the non-real and are willing to suspend belief rather than leave a theater arguing whether something is fantasy, regular sci-fi, hard sci-fi, or not genre at all. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if City of Ember is just as great. The Jeanne Duprau young adult novel was adapted for the screen by the very talented Caroline Thompson (who wrote Edward Scissorhands.)
Here some other great children’s sci-fi movies (and if this list seems 80s-centric, that is likely because of my age):
Jacob Two-two Meets the Hooded Fang, 1978
It is the darkest children’s story I can think of, outside of Daniel Handler and the Brothers Grimm, and this is its darkest adaptation. Jacob is sent to the “child prison” Slimer’s Island for insulting a candy store clerk. He says “Thank you very much, thank you very much!” The shopkeeeper thinks he’s insincere, but really Jacob has a bizarre stutter where he repeats himself. So for the crime of insincerity, Jacob is sentenced to “Two Years, Two months, two weeks, two minutes and two seconds”
Hooded Fang, a former wrestler, is the prison warden, and with a job like that is it redundant to say he hates kids? Hooded Flang’s two flunkies are Mr.Fish, a fish/human hybrid and Ms. Fowl, a bird-lady — all metallic makeup and theater whisper overacting. But never fear, child superheros Intrepid Shapiro and Fearless O’Toole are on the case.
I spent sometime in 2003 hunting the film down on VHS. Thankfully it’s now all on YouTube. Start from the beginning.
The Peanut Butter Solution, 1985
This is sci-fi mad science at its finest. Michael is spooked by something he finds exploring a haunted house. Soon afterward his hair falls out due to a condition the doctor calls, “Hairrem Scarrem.” No ten year old can wear a wig for long, so relief comes in the form of a ghost offering him peanut butter to rub on his head. Michael mistakenly uses too much and soon the hair growth is out of control. (A lot of you right now are laughing in anticipation of me mentioning that one mildly raunchy scene. Well, I’m not going to talk about it. This is a family website okay? Oh…alright.) Later, Michael’s art teacher gets the wacky idea to use his hair to build paint brushes. Soon they realize using these brushes allows an artist to instantly paint whatever he or she imagines.
The Peanut Butter Solution is the best known in a series of supernatural children’s movies, “Tales for All.”
Konrad, 1985
The most obscure film on the list. I’m tempted to purchase one of the VHS cassettes on Amazon as there is so little information out there on this one. This film is about a boy robot that arrives at their door totally naked inside a metal vat. From the All Movie Guide:
Directed by Nell Cox, Konrad centers around a strange, technology dominated method of placing children in appropriate foster homes. When a computer error sends Konrad (Huckleberry Fox), a seemingly ideal child, to an eccentric woman whose many quirks qualify her as a definite reject by the mysterious “birth factory’s” standards, no one is prepared for the resulting chaos. The film also features Ned Beatty, Polly Holliday, and Max Wright.
The Amazon reviews are all enthusiastic and not in the somewhat apologetic nostalgic way you typically find with someone remarking on a film once loved in childhood.
Small Wonder, 1985 and Out of This World, 1987 (TV)
Two is a trend! OK, this is TV and I already posted about it, but in cased you missed it, here are my two favorite TV shows from childhood.
The Misadventures of Merlin Jones, 1964
This innocuous seeming Disney film starring gay icon and “Scrabbled Egghead” Tommy Kirk (and Annette Funichello) is actually a subversive argument against the covert CIA mind-control and chemical interrogation research program, MKULTRA. After investigating hypnosis, Merlin discovers the secret to mind reading. The resulting internal dialogue he intercepts is just barely as scandalous as what Mel Gibson hears in What Women Want. In my favorite scene he tells everyone in the college library to “SHUT UP!”
The Flight of the Navigator, 1986
A film about aliens and time travel with one of the coolest looking spacecrafts I’ve ever seen. David is abducted by an alien ship. Because of time dilation he thinks he’s only been gone a few hours, but he actually returns to earth eight years later. Wikipedia has a long plot summary. This is a science fiction classic that’s yet to get its due.
Others I missed:
A lot of great science fiction children’s movies came out of the 80s like The Explorers, Baby, and The Electric Grandmother, (unfortunately I don’t remember these ones very well.) There’s ET of course, and Pinocchio probably counts as sci-fi too. I remember The Boy Who Could Fly, but not too fondly. I also remember being a kid and thinking Honey, I Shrunk the Kids seemed pretty dumb. And don’t forget, two of the best fantasy films of all time — Neverending Story and Return to Oz — also came out of that era. Earlier Fred MacMurray made a career out of weird kids sci-fi, with Flubber and the Absent Minded Professor.
Update: Somehow when I wrote this I blanked out about one of my childhood favorites The Brave Little Toaster, written by the same person responsible for most of my favorite books 20 years later: Thomas M Disch. (Although, I guess it just bridges the fantasy/sci-fi line.)
William Gibson Completely Deleted from BoingBoing Archives
Valleywag just reported Boing Boing deleted every mention of William Gibson on the site. A list he wrote of “Top 10 Science Fiction Memes of 2006″ is now offline. They no longer link to his books. A few days later the podcast interview they did with Gibson was offline too. Only a “via” link to a site that’s not his own remains.
Ok, it wasn’t William Gibson. It was Violet Blue who was unceremoniously purged. But whatever it was she did that so grossly offended Boing Boing, it is entirely possible that Gibson, Douglas Rushkoff, Bruce Sterling, Lawrence Lessig, Steven Johnson or any other male Boing Boing favorite could say or do the same thing. Violet Blue is a published author too (who is only going to gain prominence now that Kate Lee is representing her.) If you believe Boing Boing would ever so thoroughly scrub their archives of any of these men, please leave a comment here. I am always welcome to dissenting viewpoints.
This is sexism. It’s also bad journalism. And it goes against the free interactive spirit of blogging.
If Tim Noah got on David Plotz’s bad side, and the Chatterbox column vanished, the whole web would know about it within the hour. Pitchfork cleared Nick Sylvester’s reviews from their site after it was discovered he fabricated parts of a Village Voice cover story, a move most would say was unnecessary, but in the end it was Pitchfork’s call. (CORRECTION 7/2/08: They didn’t. The reviews are still there. Here’s one.) You’ll still see Jayson Blair as a byline in the New York Times archive. They only pulled the stories containing lies. “The Jayson Blair stories are going to (stay) in the archives,” Craig Whitney, standards editor for the New York Times told OJR. “We can’t pretend he was never here.” (He also discusses constant requests from divorced couples to nuke their wedding announcements.)
But no one is calling Violet Blue a dishonest journalist. She’s pulled from the Boing Boing site for some reason anyone several miles or more from Ritual will never know, (and doesn’t care to know either.)
And in one way what Boing Boing is doing is a lot worse than MSM pulling the plug on someone. It’s a snag in the blog quilt at large. Say I linked to a Violet Blue Boing Boing post using the old blog cliche “read the whole thing.” That post is worthless now, as is any external commentary on the content that Boing Boing deleted.
As Rebecca Blood wrote in her outline of weblog ethics:
Changing or deleting entries destroys the integrity of the network. The Web is designed to be connected; indeed, the weblog permalink is an invitation for others to link. Anyone who comments on or cites a document on the Web relies on that document (or entry) to remain unchanged. A prominent addendum is the preferred way to correct any information anywhere on the Web. If an addendum is impractical, as in the case of an essay that contains numerous inaccuracies, changes must be noted with the date and a brief description of the nature of the change…
The network of shared knowledge we are building will never be more than a novelty unless we protect its integrity by creating permanent records of our publications. The network benefits when even entries that are rendered irrelevant by changing circumstance are left as a historical record. As an example: A weblogger complains about inaccuracies in an online article; the writer corrects those inaccuracies (and notes them!); the weblogger’s entry is therefore meaningless — or is it? Deleting the entry somehow asserts that the whole incident simply didn’t happen — but it did. The record is more accurate and history is better served if the weblogger notes beneath the original entry that the writer has made the corrections and the article is now, to the weblogger’s knowledge, accurate.
History can be rewritten, but it cannot be undone. Changing or deleting words is possible on the Web, but possibility does not always make good policy. Think before you publish and stand behind what you write. If you later decide you were wrong about something, make a note of it and move on.
This is a discussion we need to be having. Already blog archives are rarely looked over by the authors or major readers of a site. But they are found by people googling something specific.
Evidently, this isn’t the first time Boing Boing has removed a post because of a perceived microfeud. In February this year, Rex Sorgatz wrote, “BoingBoing linked to me yesterday. For 10 minutes. Then someone apparently told them that I’m the guy who hates on BoingBoing. Post deleted.”
From the post in question:
One of these days I’m going to do a take-down article on a sacred cow of the internet: BoingBoing. I’ve already got a few ledes written: “BoingBoing, the pretend-thinking-man’s Fark,” “BoingBoing, your source for two-week-old links,” “BoingBoing, keeping post-hippiness alive since 1991….” And so on. Truth is, I like Cory and Xeni and the gang — they’re swell people. And I bet I’m the only one here who owns every single issue of bOING bOING — the magazine. But BoingBoing is clearly the most over-rated blog on the internet (which is easy to declare, since it’s also the third-most-popular).
Those are the words of a disgruntled fan, not a hater. There’s nothing there that wouldn’t get published in a print magazine Letters to the Editor section. Seems like Boing Boing should listen to Will Leitch’s parting words: “Someone Hates You Online. Try Not To Be Offended.”
Like Jim Harper at Tech Liberation Front, I get annoyed when people use “Big Brother” to describe non-coercive private actions. BoingBoing, as a private entity, is entirely free to censor their own material. They get a lot of flack for their overly eager moderating policy, but for the most part it seems to keep the trolls at bay. (Although, here’s an example of a heavy hand.)
But, Boing Boing hates corporate censorship too. They made a huge fuss when SmartFilter blocked their site for its “nudity.” And rightfully so. The story even ran in the NYT. The most interesting point coming out of the Valleywag story, was a comment from one of Cory Doctorow’s former students:
I find this extremely disappointing given that Cory Doctorow was a visiting Fulbright professor at the USC Annenberg School of Communication in the Public Diplomacy program. Needless to say, there is a great deal of irony in Cory assuming such a “public”, democratic position, and yet for BoingBoing to censor voices like they seem to be doing.
I took Cory’s graduate seminar, which was a life-altering experience, but he clearly is stuck in larger “networks”, I guess.
Another blogger writes she’s angry “because I know that — because Boing Boing taught me — that we’re supposed to call out sites that do shit like that. So that’s what I’m doing.” Unfortunately, it’s unlikely any other bloggers will. This is a big fish in a small enabling pond situation. Most bloggers will ignore the story because they want to keep in Boingboing’s favor. Big media will ignore it, because they think it’s insignificant Mission District coffee shop gossip. Banning Violet Blue doesn’t exactly merit a Vanessa Grigoriadis expose.
However, this unfortunate incident is now noted on the Boing Boing Wikipedia page (”Sex blogger Violet Blue has, in the past, been regularly mentioned in Boing Boing, including a being the subject of a Boing Boing Boing interview. On the 23rd of June 2008, Blue posted on Tiny Nibbles that all posts making mention of her had been deleted from Boing Boing, without explanation. Boing Boing has refused to comment at this time.”) In the meantime you can hear the podcast on The Internet Archive.
So what might really be behind Boing Boing’s people purges? Fear of the inevitable. In cycling the person racing ahead of everyone else has to work the hardest. The person behind has an aereodynamic advantage from the drift, meanwhile the rider ahead has to work as much as 35% harder. That’s a great metaphor for everything — especially in technology. The leader is always the one who sweats the most. Because everyone can see where he is heading, but he can’t turn around to look at what’s coming from behind. There’s going to be a website that will do what Boing Boing does now, but better. Whomever develops it, is likely watching this event closely and vowing never to make this kind of mistake.
Images from “The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia,” by David King
Update: 6/30/08 Finally the media is commenting on this. The LA Times blog has a pretty long piece on what happened:
No one, including Blue herself, has any idea what’s behind the scrubbing. BoingBoing has been conspicuously silent; despite considerable confusion in the blogopshere, the site has not posted about the issue or said they planned to. Blogger and long-time BoingBoing contributer Xeni Jardin did not respond to an e-mail from me, and several other bloggers and writers reported non-answers too…
It’s bizarre that BoingBoing has failed to take any steps to clarify the situation.
For one thing, post-snuffing is usually “a serious no-no,” said Eve Batey, Blue’s friend and Chronicle editor. “That’s just against the rules of the blog world.”
But there’s also the fact that BoingBoing has often presented itself as a stalwart of cultural openness. Doctorow himself is a well-known copyfighter — a crusader against restrictive intellectual property laws. He has removed a post at least once before — when writer Ursula K. Le Guin asked that an excerpt of her book be taken down — but he immediately wrote a long, apologetic explanation of the incident.
I really hope Wired News and others continue to cover this story.
Update 7/1/08: If you are reading this for the first time, understand you’re a little bit late to the conversation. I wrote this post on Saturday. I first read about the deleted posts on Valleywag last Wednesday. I wrote this post because no one was talking about the issue, I would have been happy enough staying out of it, had other blogs and news sources commented on the Valleywag post. Since Monday, mainstream media picked up the story and today Boing Boing finally made an announcement, admitting the posts were deleted an entire year ago.
In the comments, Suzie Q writes:
Here’s the best theory I’ve come up with - and DO feel free to send this around the blogosphere, since hitting on the wrong answer will get the real answer just as surely as hitting on the real answer will get no response - it all comes down to this article on friend-of-boingboing Amanda Congdon:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2007/04/05/violetblue.DTL
This is a pretty blatant slam on Congdon for dishonesty regarding her corporate sponsorships, and may in fact have been related to Congdon leaving ABC ( I believe I heard a rumor about them getting upset when they found out about the side vlogging).
Essentially, Violet Blue possibly got Amanda Congdon fired, or at least that’s what it looks like. I would imagine that very likely, VB found out about this in a Boing Boing-related way. It could even be that VB didn’t get her fired, but betrayed their trust in revealing the info about her.
Which is why they’re not saying what the reason is. Because it’s actually the only thing that would make them look more hypocritical… because it’s anti-transparency.
But note that the only hint we get in their note of explanation is that VB’s posts were removed about a year ago - and this was the only really noteworthy thing she did around that time; at least, publicly.
Of course no one really knows what is going on here, but maybe this is worthy of a Vanessa Grigoriadis expose after all.
Another update: “violet blue boing boing” is #31 on Google Trends today. “Violet Blue” is #12.
Update 3: Here’s the post about Rex that was deleted.
Update 4: LA Times Web Scout this afternoon:
In its explanation of the Blue purge, BoingBoing cited what it called an “erroneous” claim that it had removed 100 Violet Blue-related posts. They did not name the allegedly erroneous post as mine or even bother to link to it, so let me name the post: it was mine, and I linked to it earlier in the sentence. Notably, BoingBoing did not offer the correct number of purged posts (saying only that they had “unpublished some posts relating to her”). Also, someone from BoingBoing refused to tell me how far off my count of 100 was.
Let me correct the record. With some help from Violet Blue herself, and her boyfriend, who stayed up late last night writing a script to scan the WayBack Machine for Blue BB posts, I can present this spreadsheet.
It contains 72 BoingBoing posts containing the name of Violet Blue. I found one duplicate in the 40 or so that I spot checked. This was not a high duplication rate, and Violet’s boyfriend, she said, had written a second script to eliminate duplicates. Maybe it missed one or two. So maybe 72 is slightly high.
In any case, let’s say that more than just “some” posts were removed. And let’s also note that this search only went from January 2005 to August 2007, when the archive ends. Further, BoingBoing’s Internet archive has many different gaps in it where other Blue posts might have been sitting.
In sum, I was remiss to take at face value Violet Blue’s number of 100. I should have said at least 70.
I apologize for the imprecision.
Update 7/2/08: Zenarchery articulates why this is a great breach of ethics far better than I did.
Also, I’m no longer allowing comments to this post
Urban Safaris: Graffiti Sites Considered for Heritage Protection
Simon at Ballardian says Melbourne is not quite as lovely as the Treehugger article I linked to suggests:
[The] Treehugger article only explores Melbourne’s inner city. The suburbs are a different matter. Perhaps the overseas versions might weed out the worrying strain of Mad Max style behaviour that sees cyclists as game to be hunted.
But then again, such behaviour inspired Mad Max itself, one of the finest films ever made.
Well, it may not be a “pedestrian paradise,” but Melbourne is in the middle of a debate that could lead to some curious developments in urban landscapes around the world. Australia’s National Trust and Heritage Victoria is considering graffiti for heritage protection (via.)
Scott Hilditch, chief executive of Graffiti Hurts Australia, says that protecting graffiti would effectively condone acts of vandalism and cost the Australian government over $260 million (U.S. $250 million) a year to clean up.
Some artists oppose the idea as well, protesting that it is contrary to the spirit of the art form itself. Melbourne curator and artist Andrew Mac says it would interfere with the natural process of street art: “The work is ephemeral. It’s not meant to last. It lasts purely as long as the weather and other graffiti artists allow it to last.” Mac also feels that the councils backing protection may have real estate motives in mind, such as promoting graffiti sites to fuel tourism.
The Banksy House
A London suburban Victorian terrace house tagged by Banksy famously went for bid at four hundred thousand dollars, “a buyer would receive the mural—with the house thrown in ‘for free.’” The house was later destroyed by “vandals” — nevertheless — maybe therein lies the answer to our national housing crisis.
We could send Swoon and Elbow-Toe to the poorest neighborhoods in Cleveland, Washington Dc, Detroit, and elsewhere. Why stop at the cities? We could tag barns in North Dakota too. 
I’d pay a lot to live in a Swoon-tagged house. And I’d certainly move in a neighborhood I’d never otherwise consider in order to do so. But bidding would be fierce. We could see these properties turning into hipster summer homes, for when the trust fund PBR drinkers want to rough it in the “Common People” sense.
Anyone can see street art, not just the people willing to step in a gallery. And that adds value. The more eyes on a work of art, (usually) the more valuable it becomes (although diminishing marginal returns plays here too.) This is why artists will often reduce the price of their work to display it in a museum rather than sell it to someone for his personal collection.
If art economics is difficult to understand, the economics of street art is unprecedented in its confusion. In England, Banksy is as famous as Damon Alburn and earl grey tea. His prints sell for millions. But this month, one of his pieces was whitewashed in Northern London.
Art critics know that street art and graffiti refer to very different things. As Hrag Vartanian put it, “What appears to differentiate street art from its graffiti predecessor are two things: the self-consciousness in its conversation with the city and its lack of the aggression and violence.” But city workers can’t be bothered to appreciate the difference, and maybe there is aesthetic merit to be gleaned from its aggressive older cousin.
I think the Australian preservationists are on to something, and one day we all will be thinking bigger. Maybe downtown Detroit will be heralded as an architecture splendor — an UNESCO site, the modern day Cesky Krumlov. Tourists in fannypacks and shorts will motorbus out to see it, and marvel at the public artwork as they would walking through Florence, Italy.
Already tourists enjoy the spectacle of poverty. When I was in South Africa a few years ago, i was shocked at the opportunities to visit the shantytowns (”Townships”) by bus tours. Brazil is notorious for its “Favela tours.” Here’s a good post on poverty tourism by Vagabondish, explaining how to minimize the exploitation of the people who live in these areas:
I think that if it’s managed by real, interested professionals, and sensible ground rules are set – don’t take photographs, don’t give money or candy away (donate through a suitable charity or organization instead), stay in small groups, and so on – then perhaps poverty tourism really does provide some benefits for the locals. And at this stage in its development, when it’s mostly undertaken by fairly seasoned travelers who are genuinely interested in understanding more about a country and its people, it seems that such tours can truly be managed in this way. My fear is that poverty tourism could become a more mainstream activity, and money-hungry travel agents will start sending in large air-conditioned buses full of ignorant tourists snapping hundreds of pictures, and then the rot will really set in.
Still, I can’t feel comfortable with the idea of the New Orleans disaster tours. Something about busing out to see a someone’s personal possessions strewn about, reduced to trash and chaos, bothers me more than seeing human faces of a tragedy.
Art by Elbow-Toe
Related links:
- The Very Public Life of Street Art by Hrag Vartanian in the Brooklyn Rail
- My Love for You interviews Elbow Toe
- Shadow Cities by Robert Neuwirth
- Graffiti artist Mike Baca (standing trial for seven years for graffiti vandalism and trespassing, which is twice the usual sentence in NY) Juxtapoz
Saying Yes and Hearing No
Steven Pinker, extolling the virtues of human language, observes that information is the sole commodity that a person can give away and keep at the same time. I would add that sexual pleasure is also something that a person can confer on another and personally enjoy simultaneously. The linkage between sex and language can further be divined by noting that the English language tacitly acknowledges that sex was the primary force behind the evolution of speech. I doubt that it is mere coincidence that the word ‘intercourse’ has two common meanings, only one of which refers to speech.
- Daniel Dennett
The best advice I’ve heard in a long time, comes from a trashy women’s magazine I picked up at the gym the other day: “aim to hear the word ‘no’ at least three times a day.” Like most good advice, I’ve yet to fully integrate it into my life (I’m at the “maybe” and “we’ll see” one or twice a week stage.)
For their fall collection, Viktor & Rolf sent their models down the runway wearing the word “No” written in makeup on their faces or sewn into their clothes. Models without a cause. But the fashion designers called it female empowerment. And it is, I guess. People generally dislike saying “no,” more than they dislike hearing it — it means you’ve been challenged. Saying it can burn a bridge. Hearing it can be a great motivator.
But the economic principle of diminishing marginal returns (one scoop of ice cream is nice, two is better, three is alright, and four scoops is worse than none at all) definitely applies to this advice: hearing “no” more than three times a day would be demoralizing to the most blissed-out zen yoga instructor.
Is there anything worse than disputing a balance with a call center representative? They’ll tell you “no” three times in a single sentence. This week’s New Yorker goes behind the scenes of Avoke, a voice software company that measures the exact moment a caller breaks from “cold anger” (”in which words may be overarticulated but spoken softly”) or “hot anger” (”in which voices are louder and pitched higher”) to full-on WTF?!???!?!?
The article mostly explains the difficulty in programing a computer we can talk to both by hearing and speaking language. One major speed bump: we have a lot of words that mean the same thing, just with subtle nuances. Take the word yes:
Even a simple concept like “yes” might be expressed in dozens of different ways –including “yes,” “ya,” “yup,” “yeah,” “yeahuh,” “yeppers,” “yessirree,” “aye, aye,” “mmmhmm,” “uh-huh,” “sure,” “totally,” “certainly,” “indeed,” “affirmative,” “fine,” “definitely,” “you bet,” “you betcha,” “no problemo,” “and “okeydoke” — and what’s the rule in that? At Nuance, whose headquarters are outside Boston, speech engineers try to anticipate all the different ways people might say yes, but they still get surprised. For example, designers found that Southerners had more trouble using the system than Northerners did, because when instructed to answer “yes” or “no” Southerners regularly added “ma’am” or “sir,” depending on the I.V.R.’s gender, and the computer wasn’t programmed to recognize that.
One of my friend Iris’s favorite words is “yes.” She notes, “around the world, ‘yes’ or its equivalent frequently tops surveys as the most beautiful word in a given language; for you, too, is it the only word that you really want to hear?”
But how often do we hear it? Most positive responses are yep, ok, sure, will do, etc etc. What else could a film called “Yes” be about other than bodice ripping? The scarcity of “yes” in daily discussions must have something to do with its frequency as bedroom utterance.
When John Lennon first met Yoko Ono, he walked up a ladder to read a single tiny word with the aid of a magnifying glass: “Yes.” Then there is Molly’s soliloquy in Ulysses closing the book famously with the words “..yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
Interestingly, the Irish language has neither “yes” nor “no” (A fact that surely didn’t escape James Joyce when he wrote that.) Per a Wikipedia article that’s since edited, but is archived on Answers.com: “In it to indicate a positive or negate response to a question, the verb of the question is repeated in either the positive or negative form. For example (verb underlined)”
“An bhfaca tú an timpiste?” (”Did you see the accident?”)
“Chonaic.” (”Saw.”)or
“Ní fhaca.” (”Did not see.”)
The terms Sea (”is so”) and Ní hea (”is not so”) mean “yes” and “no”, but can only be used in response to the question An ea? (”is it so?”).
Previously:
- Alright, Sokay: Tomorrow’s English Language
- Open Source Art: Will There Ever Be Another Lily Chou-Chou?
Microcelebrity and Frienemies
If you used AOL in the early 90s, you likely remember Courtney Love going nuts on the music message boards. She’d stop in every few months and leave a whirlwind of mostly incoherent posts — sometimes something about Mary Lou Lord and oral sex and Kurt and a van after a show and how it is all NOT TRUE, sometimes just her daily gripes (”I am thinking heavily of trying Prozac…. I would appreciate info from intense, passionate, sexual (hetero, generally) and esp. CREATIVE females regarding this drug__I’m NOT clinically depressed__I’m not even manic-depressive, just super neurotic and paranoid….”) — whatever it was, she always sounded defensive. From an article written around that time:
“It’s like a masturbatory videogame all about me!” Courtney Love brags over the phone, only halfself-mockingly. Love first stormed onto America Online in the spring of ‘94, not long after her husband took a shotgun to his head and changed her life forever. Her first mission: to intercept her estranged father, Hank Harrison, who had been on the service promoting a very unauthorized Kurt Cobain biography he was writing. In an online battle in full view of AOL’s thenthree million users, “hunnypi 28″ accused “BioDad” of exploiting the tragedy. BioDad eventually vanished back into anonymity. Love decided to stick around.
“For a while I was really addicted to it,” she says now. “It was like my only friend. I just couldn’t deal with humans__I was dealing with these cyberbeings, and having these inane conversations, banal conversations, crazy conversations, dealing-with-grief conversations with people from fucking God-knows-where who looked like God-knows-what.”
But she wasn’t treated with adoration at all. Love was entangled in major drawn out online feuds, at a time when everyone hid behind anonymous “handles.” Part of it was to accuse her of killing Kurt, partly a reaction to her paranoid writing style, but I think most of the people coming at her, just wanted to get her attention.
Online, Courtney Love was a pinata, but most of these people were just random suburban teenagers who would inevitably act obsequiously given a backstage pass to meet her. Because they were — kinda — her fans. She still blogs, but has, as far as I know, kept out of online discussions.
There is one case when the rage toward a public figure is genuine: when it is not really the public figure, but someone posing as him. Look at Richard Dawkins on Twitter. Some hater registered the account and used the opportunity to eventually tell his fans how Dawkins is wrong. Following that, he got a number of flaming replies.
Now, anyone who paid attention from the beginning would have noticed it couldn’t possibly be Dawkins. But no one on the internet bothers investing the time to even read a sentence from somebody seemingly important, unless it directly matters to them. You just add “Richard Dawkins” to your Twitter feed cause you know he’s smart and you’d like to read his stuff one day and maybe that passive-contact will make you smarter by osmosis.
AOL users never doubted Courtney Love’s posts were fake. It had to be her. The way she wrote was so uniquely strange. It was a nervous breakdown reduced to online text. It was great!
I was reminded of Courtney Love, reading Keith Gessen’s blog. Not in terms of content, but the reactions he’s received. He made some comment about “Taking back the internet,” and a blog appeared using that name:
Last week, when Gawker linked to this blog, I took some solace in the fact that I suddenly had a slew of tumblr followers. My followers, I thought, would follow me to the ends of the earth.
But now I’ve clicked on some of your tumblrs, and it turns out you all hate me.
Will I ever forget the moment I discovered “takebacktheinternet.tumblr” in my followers? “Ah!” I thought. “A fan site.”
It was not a fan site.
So, without further ado, I’ve decided to take the initiative and buy up all the potential tumblrs my less than enthusiastic followers might be inclined to one day occupy. These are:
keithgessensucks.tumblr.com
keithgessensucksballs.tumblr.com
istuckmyballsinkeithgessen’sear.tumblr.com
istuckmyballsinkeithgessen’searandcalledhimnames.tumblr.com
istuckmyballsinkeithgessen’searandcalledhimnamesinthegawker
commentssection.tumblr.com
ididn’tevenstickmyballsinkeithgessen’searbecausei’veneverhe
ardofhimandhesucks.tumblr.comI think that about covers it. Now what you gonna do?
See that’s kind of funny. Maybe he’s not conceited, like everyone thought. And he’s writing it on a Tumblr — the least pretentious blog software one could use. But the criticism kept coming, playful jabs at his alleged inflated sense of entitlement (here and here and here.)
It’s a perpetuation of previous aggression and the capacity to get attention from someone who is in the public eye. Criticism is always easier to write than praise. But the haters don’t really hate him. At least, not the way I hate Chris Matthews or Londoners hate Boris Johnson. They may resent his success. They might find something about him annoying. But the premise of the annoyance — that Gessen takes himself too seriously — was proven wrong as soon as he set up a Tumblr. Now he’s having a party, inviting the very people behind the mocking websites.
Attention is attention whether its praise or venom. As Rex Sorgatz writes in his New York magazine article on how to attain microcelebrity:
If there is a Latin phrase for “reply to everything,” it should be crocheted on your pillows and tacked above your door. Anytime your name is used, you are required to e-mail, comment, or firebomb the person invoking it. When in doubt, remember these three maxims: There is no such thing as being above the fray, every battle is worth fighting, and all disputes are good press.
Tao Lin gets it. He offered free copies of his books to “shit talkers,” anyone who can produce evidence “that you don’t like me (a link to something you typed on the internet or a description of what you said to someone about me).”
McLuhen didn’t predict a medium that keeps you busy every minute of the day — even when you are doing nothing. There is always another thing to “Read Later” or email or blog or cut+paste, or skim rather than read. Time and attention are spread too thin. People are too busy to decide whether they like something or not, the Internet makes everything a joke.
What was the last thing on the Internet you concentrated on for longer than a minute? What got a strong reaction from you? Besides this photo of Ryan Gosling and this video from a My Bloody Valentine concert, just about everything I see online is encoded in my mind as a murky grey shade. And it isn’t often retrieved after I close my laptop for the day. I have no idea what I looked at thirty minutes ago. I could take or leave it, but I can’t tear myself away from looking, when I’m in the middle of it.
And that gets to an idea I have, which is going to be an upcoming post: why everything on the internet goes back to sex. Porn is the one thing that consistently holds one’s attention online (And if you can’t concentrate on that, man, maybe you really should consider visiting those Chinese rehab clinics.)
Another good point from Sorgatz’s piece:
Where traditional fame was steeped in class envy on the part of the audience and alienation on the part of the celebrity, microfame closes the gap between devotee and celebrity. It feels like a step toward equality. You can become Facebook friends with the microfamous; you can start IM sessions with them. You can love them and hate them at much closer proximity. And you can just as easily begin to cultivate your own set of admirers. Though an element of luck often plays a role in achieving traditional fame, microfame is practically a science. It is attainable like running a marathon or acing the LSAT. All you need is a road map.
This is important because for most creative types, microcelebrity is all you can dream to achieve. Sorgatz points out Tila Tequila only sold 13,000 copies of her album. But that’s the average for a Pitchfork-approved musician. An author under contract with a major publishing house might sell twice as many books. Microfame is inevitable for most authors and musicians, regardless of their web participation. And money plays a part in this. Someone can be extremely well known and just never manage to profit from it. When you hear about an author earning six figure advance for a novel, it might seem like they’ve entered a tax bracket above your own. But not really. If that book took two or three years to write (as it very well should have!) the advance isn’t as impressive.
How can you pretend to have any power over your fanbase when they earn twice as much as you did, working as administrative assistants? If you want to be a public figure in these times, you can’t play boss.
Images of male celebrities crying by Sam Taylor-Wood, courtesy of Arab Aquarius.
Previously:
- The President Isn’t Your Boss
- We Live in Public
- Will Kindle Save “Hypertext” Fiction?
- More tagged “web history“
Science Fiction: Women Do It Better
In a cafe in New Orleans a couple years ago, I overheard a couple in conversation. The girl was explaining the book she planned to write. For about thirty minutes I listened to this extraordinary idea for a narrative, a Jekyll and Hyde-inspired story dealing with female body insecurities that I’m not going to further explain because I really hope she’s still working on it, if not near publication.
“So that’s almost like science fiction,” her boyfriend said. “Not really,” she replied
No, it’s not just “like” it, her idea is science fiction. But for some reason the classification is avoided when the work is written by a woman. It’s speculative fiction, fantasy, or quirky McSweeny’s-style stories, but if a woman wrote it, it’s certainly not sci-fi.
Just look at the brilliant book Daughters of the North by Sarah Hall. I haven’t read anything better in years. The science fiction community has all but ignored it, giving only passing mention of its James Tiptree Jr award win.
This may seem like a superficial concern. Why should it matter whether something is part of a genre or not? But “science fiction” is known as the literature of ideas, intellectual rigor, and philosophic arguments. Science fiction indicates an imaginative literature: analytic, scientific — a creative work of scholarship rather than banal solipsism.
Even if a female author is labeled science fiction, another distinction is made: that she isn’t “hard science fiction.” The “hard science fiction” bar is raised when women want to write or film science fiction. Women tend to write a lot about biology, and more women study biology than other sciences. As Peggy at Biology and Science Fiction points out, “there aren’t that many gadgets that have come out of the biological sciences, at least as compared to the physical sciences” — and gadgety is representative of “hard science fiction.”
There was a panel about this at the WISCON, the women in science fiction con:
JB: Part of the reason the concept, the term is problematic is it’s used as a norm for “real science fiction” and however we define it, it has changed as more women enter the field. Fantastic, speculative, there’s other terms they call it when they don’t want to call it sf. Femspec. In early days of 50s and 60s sf, male authors would write about social issues and the social issues around tech but when women do it’s soft sf. Then we come to 70s and 80s when writing about biology was considered soft, because (the rhetoric is that) women are their biology in some way, women can therefore more easily be biochemical scientists… I expect the next thing to fall is going to be mathematics. Real, normative, actual, the only kind we should really care about, that counts, used in book reivews, not included in canon. This changing definition has a gender bias to it.
Margaret: Just like what has been called “art”. At various times pottery, woven stuff, wasn’t art, because it was women and people of color who were doing that. And very similar things done with gender and hard sf. As you’ve suggested, when men were doing very similar things with social issues, that was still “hard”.
There’s pressure on a woman to write “hard science fiction,” even if she doesn’t really want to — just to prove that she can.
People gave Sleater Kinney a lot of guff because they didn’t have a bass player; but no one ever said that meant they weren’t a rock band! Classification is always arbitrary. Had Joanna Russ befriended Donald Bartheleme in the 70s, instead of editors of Amazing, her work would be called metafiction, (or whatever.)
Going back to the idea that every subject can be science fiction, those of the gender that breed and bleed, have plenty of interesting science fiction concepts to bring to the table.
And they are definitely consuming science fiction. At least as many young girls have read the Handmaid’s Tale as young boys have read Ender’s Game — perhaps an equal number of boys and girls have read Ender’s Game. Females tend to read more fiction, after all.
Another two reasons I just don’t buy the idea that men are inherently more interested in science fiction than women: Small Wonder and Out of this World, about a girl-robot and time-shifter whose dad is an alien, respectively. Those two shows (and Punky Brewster about an orphan who was obsessed with astronauts) were my favorites and yours if happened to be a girl growing up in the 80s.
What makes these two television shows unique from other widely enjoyed tv sci-fi like Lost in Space or even BSG today, is both of the lead characters were girls. It might be the first time science fiction was made just for a mass young female audience. Silly as it seems now, the shows were no better or worse than any other 80s sitcoms.
Children watching these programs were engaged with philosophy of science fiction: what would it be like to stop time just by touching your fingertips together? (I’m sure I’m not the only one who practiced this in my bedroom when no one was looking.) Or if your friend is made of metal and wires, do you treat her just like everyone else?
Women love science fiction! We do! Probably more than you dudes! Nearly every art school girl has Ursula Le Guin’s books on her shelf. Women actually write most of the fanfic. Even at the basest, lowest low culture it is in there: a number of romantic comedies, (many starring Mel Gibson for some reason,) use science fiction furniture. And I learned, during a period of unemployment, that nearly every soap opera has a supernatural gimmick — clones, witches, even aliens. Instead of mocking it, we should embrace it, as the feminine counterpart to the shlocky science fiction made by the likes of The Rock and Sylvester Stallone in the 90s.
Some work by women that should be welcomed into the Science Fiction cannon: the writers Anna Kavan, Angela Carter, Shelley Jackson, Katharine Burdekin. In film: Lynne Littman, Kay Linaker, Caroline Thompson, and so many others. The music of Anne Clark. Art by Sara Sze and Patricia Piccinini. These are all just off the top of my head. I should probably make another post on this.
And let me praise Daughters of the North yet again. It’s magnificent. The Handmaid’s Tale comparisons were inevitable, but Atwood’s dystopia, while bleak and repressive, isn’t nearly as horrific as Hall’s vision. Hers is a world of hunger, suffering, torture, shit. It’s even better than Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Sarah Hall is a genius.
Images of sculptures by Sarah Sze
Previously:
- Science Fiction is for the Renaissance Men
- Dario Argento and the Paradoxical Feminism of Horror Films
Related links:
- Bat Segundo interviews Sarah Hall
- When Harry Met Sexism, Bidisha, The Guardian
- Science Fiction Fandom Has No Sex, This Recording
- What Chicks Don’t Like About Science Fiction, io9
- Gender and Fan Studies, CCC
The World’s Strangest Housing Communities
“People at Eden-Olympia have no time for getting drunk together, for infidelities or rows with the girlfriends, no time for adulterous affairs or coveting their neighbor’s wives, no time ever for friends,” Wilder Penrose says in J. G. Ballard’s Super Cannes. The “great defect is that there is no need for personal morality. Thousands of people live and work here without making a single decision about right and wrong. The moral order is engineered into their lives along with the speed limits and the security systems.”
Many of Ballard’s later novels investigate the coven-like nature of suburbia — gated communities, high rises. The architecture and technologies designed to save us time and make our lives easier, only dull our senses. Or, as Gang of Four put it, “The problem with leisure, is what to do for pleasure.”
Penrose, the psychiatrist in Ballard’s fictional French business park, believes there’s a science to it: “Part of the mind atrophies. A moral calculus that took thousands of years to develop starts to wither from neglect. Once you dispense with morality the important decisions become a matter of aesthetics. You’ve entered an adolescent world where you define yourself by the kind of trainers you wear.”
Ballard isn’t the only writer to explore these themes. Jingoism at the backyard level is the target in TC Boyle’s Tortilla Curtain. Neal Stephanson wrote about “burbclaves,” lots of franchised nations in suburbia. Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower takes place in a walled Los Angeles suburb. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino sees housing communities optimistically as chocolate boxes. Then again, every example comes from the main character’s imagination. Here are several examples stranger than fiction:
The Dystopia: Alphaville, Sao Paulo, Brazil
A housing community has to be equal parts elitist and oblivious to take its name from a dystopic film. I first read about this on Ballardian, appropriately as Ballard has long championed Godard’s film. This Alphaville is a walled city in the world’s fourth-largest metropolis. Hundreds of residents helicopter in and out over electric fences. Over a thousand security guards are employed. Residents watch “TV Alphaville,” a twenty -four hour monitor of people entering and exiting the premises. The reason for Alphaville’s militarized facility is clear: income disparity. From a 2002 Washington Post article: “the richest 10 percent of the population controlling more than 50 percent of the wealth, while the poorest 10 percent control less than 1 percent.” The article also explains Brazil’s $2 billion-a-year security industry. “Brazilians are armoring and bulletproofing an estimated 4,000 cars a year, twice as many as in Colombia, which is in the midst of a 38-year-old civil war.”
The Rumor: Wedderburn, “Midgetville,” Vienna, Virginia
Spend time in Northern Virginia and you’ll eventually hear of a community of little people in little houses…but no one ever knows how to get there. Given Fairfax County is a clown car of suburban landscaping — between two main drags three blocks apart, the tract housing seems to go on for miles — it’s entirely believable.
Wedderburn was built in the 1930s, in a wood along the W&OD Railroad. These cottages –some the size of small sheds — could be seen from the train, leading many to wonder if they were home to retired circus performers. That neighboring town Bailey’s Crossroads is connected to the Ringling Brothers collaborator made it believable.
Over the years, the rumors tended toward the sensationalistic. People said the “midgets” would attack your car if you drove near it. In 2004, after deciding to sell to a land developer, Wedderburn’s true identity was revealed. George Wedderburn’s relatives, who lived in some of the cottages and rented the others, said they were sick of teenage “midget hunters” vandalizing their property. See Nathan Rustlethwaite’s Flickr set for more. Sadly, it was torn down in March of 2008.
Update: From the comments on Hit and Run, I learned there’s a similar rumor about a neighborhood in New Jersey. Wikipedia says those small houses have no occupants, but does not give any history of its construction. There’s another community of “midget houses”in Oakdale, Long Island, New York. And this website claims there are a number of real gated midget communities in Kentucky, California, Ohio, and elsewhere. Maybe.
The Utopia: Auroville, Tamil Nadu, India
“Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole,” Mirra Alfassa, “The Mother” said, announcing the city’s incorporation in 1968. Most forms of private property are forbidden. Residents use electronic cards, rather than paper or coin currency, although visitors can pay in cash. The enormous golden golf ball is Matrimandir (”Temple of the Mother,”) the “soul of the city.” It is located in a large open area called “Peace.” If this is sounding like Jonestown or the Heaven’s Gate community, it might surprise you to learn religion too is banned. “The Mother” said, “The failure of religions is… because they were divided. They wanted people to be religious to the exclusion of other religions, and every branch of knowledge has been a failure because it has been exclusive. What the new consciousness wants (it is on this that it insists) is: no more divisions. To be able to understand the spiritual extreme, the material extreme, and to find the meeting point, the point where that becomes a real force.” Among the community’s other quirk’s — public drinking fountains have “dynamised” water, water that has “listened” to Bach and Mozart.
BBC recently investigated claims that some Aurovillians sexually abuse the children who live in poverty outside the city. The reporter called it a “brazen” practice, made worse by Auroville’s absent rule of law.
The Ruins: San Zhi, “Desolation Row,” Taipai, Taiwan
This pod city might have been a holiday destination for those who dream of living in a futuristic fairytale. But from what little is written about San Zhi in English, it appears construction was abandoned as the project was just weeks from completion.
There seems to be nothing wrong with the structure architecturally. Apart from the fabulous design, it seems a functional concept. Some speculate it was designed to build more pods vertically, if demand increased. Apparently, construction was halted as a number of fatal accidents plagued construction. Ghost stories abound, (but then again, there are bloggers who still believe in Midgetville.) The buildings have since been left to rot.
The web has its fill of ghost towns and urban ruins photography, but the obvious science fiction influence and its perplexing lack of use (I’ve heard more than several people say they’d love to spend the night there) make this the strangest example of an abandoned space yet. Google Sightseeing has a feature, and Craig Ferguson’s photographs are extraordinary. (More photos here.)
The Counterfeit: Orange County, China
China doesn’t just manufacture fake Louis Vuitton bags. They also copy United States gated communities. This Orange County is miles from the Beijing airport, and 45 minutes from the Forbidden City.
California McMansions developers were flown in to develop a replica of The OC, even taking its name. Ten miles from the Beijing Olympics facilities, when the New York Times reported on it in 2003, the six-lane highways were brand new and most of the land surround the OC had yet to be developed. It seems likely that space is under construction right now.
It would be unfair to criticize them just for ignoring their own culture. After all American architecture is just a pastiche of other traditions, and plenty of replicas like the windmills in Japan, are charming enough. Good magazine notes an “entire cottage industry has sprung up in academia to tar the development with the latest post-modern jargon…Other critics, with far bigger megaphones, see the development as emblematic of China’s burgeoning car culture and its wholehearted embrace of environmentally destructive growth.”
Rather Orange County, China is a mistake largely because it was built after suburbia’s failure was widely understood. Rather than embracing Jan Gehl and Jane Jacobs’ principles of urban planning, they implemented poor land use. If there’s anywhere China should be replicating, it’s Melbourne.
China, by the way, is home to another community living in the past: Nanjie Village, a re-collectivized land, nostalgic for the days of Mao Zedong.
Elsewhere
I considered including the proposal for Paulville to this list. It is an upcoming gated community for Ron Paul supporters. But I really doubt it will come to fruition. Previously, there was the Free State project, and New Hampshire still isn’t a major libertarian mecca. The same people who value individual choice, are unlikely to move specifically to join a community. It’s just not that high a priority to one’s personal interests
Other examples I thought of, like Celebration, Florida, Disney’s suburb, which opened its gate in 1997, are not so strange once one looks at the details. The people and the secrets may be unique, but the development itself differs not much from another planned community halfway across the globe.
Planned communities always hint at mob rule in its extremes — lynchings or what happened to Kitty Genovese. You may not agree with the Super Cannes character who believes that “places like Eden-Olympia are fertile grounds for an messiah with a grudge. The Adolph Hitlers and Pol Pots of the future won’t walk out of the desert. They’ll emerge from shopping malls and corporate business parks.” But it’s something to think about before signing up for a colony on Mars.
Related links:
- Fortress America, Edward J. Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder
- “Enemies Within, Gated Communities Unhinged” by Sarah Blandy
- ‘Gated Communities’ For the War-Ravaged, WP
- Most Expensive Gated Communities, Forbes
- Walls of Incompetence, Erasmus
Possession
Poor Sam Neill, Always the cuckhold, isn’t he? (In The Horse Whisperer, Yes,The Piano, Sleeping Dogs, Restoration, Dead Calm, etc, etc… He’s been in at least 400 films, so there’s going to be some repetition, but still, what is it about this poor man?)
Well, I like you, Sam Neill. Especially in Possession.
The 1980 film by Polish director Andrzej Zulawski begins like a traditional art film, with Fassbinder-like bright colors and hysterics. Sam Neill’s character discovers his wife, played Isabelle Adjani, is having an affair. He starts seeing a ballet instructor who is also played by Adjani, and the story continues using borrowed plot furniture from science fiction and horror — clones, serpents, slashings. Zulawski uses pulp elements as substitutes for emotions, like Cronenberg’s The Brood. It isn’t science fiction and it isn’t a horror film: it’s about the dissolve of a marriage, and the exaggerations — the overacting, the violence, the blood, the chaos — externalize emotions running high. One reviewer calls it “Grand Guignol.”
Adjani won the Best Actress award at Cannes, and it’s no surprise. Her freakouts are total adolescent in decadence. Just watch:
Just as memorable is her sex scene with a octopus-like creature, (it was banned in the UK as a “video nasty.”) The serpent was made by Carlo Rambaldi, (who did the special effects for Spielberg’s E.T.).
There are a couple of reasons this film hasn’t got the Cronenberg-sized audience it deserves. First, Zulawski hasn’t made a film in nearly ten years, and this is his only English language film. Secondly, it was badly butchered when it was first released here. Existing VHS copies are missing about 40 minutes of footage. The cut was to market it as part of the 80s junk drawer Italian horror craze — barf bags were distributed at American screenings. Horror fanatics who hate art films won’t like it, and those with strictly pretentious taste are sure to despise it. Thankfully, these binary distinctions are no longer as relevant — the art world includes some of the most voracious consumers of horror film.
I first found a copy of it at Borders about five years ago. It came as a set with a Mario Bava film. It’s no longer in print. Right now, the DVD is $50.00 through Amazon’s sellers. But there is good news: La Femme Publique (”The Public Woman”) will be released by Mondo Vision this year. If they continue releasing Zulawski’s other films, he may finally get the recognition he deserves for this incredible film.
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