Archives for July 2008
Last year, I was in a commercial for a Rhode Island casino (long story.) They were all professional actors, from the tri-state who drove in and at coffee breaks they’d compare experiences getting work on Law & Order and its offshoots. It’s “a rite of passage” for New York actors says the Observer’s Peter Lettre, in his piece about playing a “pastor, of undisclosed denomination, with the misleadingly suggestive name of Minister Lester. Lester runs a soup kitchen uptown and was acquainted with one of the victims. It’s one of those bridge scenes that cop shows are littered with, full of enough exposition to move the story forward, but with just enough suspicion to keep it interesting.” (via.)
Steven Popkes posts about Nature’s documentary on the Antikythera mechanism, and the machine’s relevance to the Olympics: “The Games had to happen every four years on the full moon closest to the summer solstice. Now, let’s think about that. This machine related the lunar cycle to the solar cycle– two cycles that have no natural connection…. [it] had to figure out solstices, full moons, etc., in relationship to one another, with nothing but rods and gears. And it does it beautifully.” Last year, the New Yorker had a long article about its significance. More in todays NYT.
Now online: The Afterlife of American Clothes, my article on Secondhand (Pepe) and the Haitian used clothing trade in the new issue of Reason magazine. Here’s my interview with the filmmakers discussing this incredible business. And there’s more on Jezebel.
Five Books I Recommend to Everyone
I hate the idea of a canon of good books one must read “before you die,” or that sort of thing. Many of these are books aren’t beloved so much as revered. Has anyone ever felt passionately about “A Separate Peace?” If you do, it’s probably because you had a dog when you were nine named Phineas or some other subconscious sentimental reason. But besides the titles that only developed a reputation for substance, even the ones that are of merit and historical importance aren’t necessary to you, at least, not right now.
So many people make the mistake of plodding along with every sewer sub-plot in Les Miserables because they think doing so makes them smarter. One should be confident enough to call the “emperor has no clothes” on books that bore or fail to say anything illuminating. Many 19th century novels like Thomas Hardy’s were sold by word count. So don’t few guilty if you’re skimming through yet another description of the color of the fields for a scene with Eustacia Vye doing something crazy.
While it’s good to read popular and much loved books for a shared experience with the culture, how much like the rest of the world are you? Shouldn’t your reading reflect your personal fears and dreams and expectations? It’s sad to see how little readers demand of their writers. The experience I get with Anna Kavan’s or Steve Erickson’s novels seems to go way beyond anything I’ve ever felt about a book. I can’t say for certain that another reader might have the same feeling, but I hope you all come to love an author that much. Trial and error, really. Would you marry the girl you just kinda like, but find annoying sometimes, but guess is cute cause others say she’s cute? Then toss aside the book you’re not so into, and keep hunting for the right ones.
Here are several books I imagine anyone might like:
If you like Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, try Christopher Priest’s Inverted World
Every once in a while the elder statesmen book reviewers let a cult writer in the canon of great literature like Beckett or, to a lesser degree, Burroughs. O’Brien seems to be the newest corronated one. The Third Policeman is great, but after a million retrospective pieces in Harper’s, The Atlantic, and so forth, and a mention on the tv series Lost you might want to try another book about riddles and shifting dimensions. This is a traditional science fiction book, but ingenious — very reminiscent of Ballard’s early earth-disaster SF. And it’s a mindfuck. An Escher sketch in novel form. I couldn’t put it down. Proof that Modern Painters is better cued in to good literature than most literary publications, they have a review of this book in the newest issue.
If you like William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, try Anna Kavan’s Eagle’s Nest
As much as I like Burroughs, Naked Lunch is so full of 50s junkie slang it can be difficult to read. Anna Kavan, his contemporary, has a liquidy way of writing. Scenes are so full of life they seem to fall off the page. A heroin addict until she died in her sixties, with a truly heartbreaking lifestory, you can feel, with some bitterness, where the drug is influencing her writing as you read along. Adored by the likes of Anais Nin, Jean Rhys, Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Current 93’s David Tibet, and many others, why she isn’t better known here or abroad really baffles me.
If you like Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, try I’m Not Stiller by Max Frisch
I can’t imagine anyone disliking I’m Not Stiller. It’s witty and so smart. Imagine the best parts of Confederacy of Dunces and the best of Nabokov, with a little bit of Chandler suspense and Kafka humor, all written so well the Dalkey Archive would publish it.
If you like Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body, try by The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter
Winterson’s novel is a good book about gender and androgyny and all that, with pretty poetic language, but you can get all of those things plus a post-apocalyptic setting and a bunch of fun in The Passion of New Eve, Carter’s best and inexplicably most obscure novel. Were I handed a few million dollars, turning The Passion of New Eve into a musical would be on a short list of things I’d do with the money.
If you like Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, try Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai
Ok, I don’t like Safran Foer’s book at all, but a lot of people whose opinions I respect seemed to enjoy it. A better book about a young braniac, chock full of random information and done in a sweet, never cloying way, is The last Samurai. Of the 80 people reviewed it on Amazon, 56 gave it 5 stars, which should give you an idea how much people love this book.
Fashion photography by Alix Malka
Oh, to be in Barcelona with the beautiful people, tiny alleys, tapas, Zara outlets, Palau de la Musica, Gaudis, and the new JG Ballard exhibit. Ballardian has a great review of “Autopsy of the New Millennium” –”The first bit of irony comes quickly when you discover this building was first constructed as a hospital.” The show also includes Ballard-influenced art by Ann Lislegaard, Michelle Lord, and others. Nice quote from Bruce Sterling in the program: “Ballard never predicted events or devices; instead, he described future sensibilities–how it might feel, what it might mean. A bizarre contemporary event like the paparazzi car-crash death of Princess Diana is perfectly Ballardian. No flow chart, no equation, no profit projection could ever have predicted that, but if you’ve read Ballard, you swiftly recognize the smell of it. I daresay that’s the best the SF genre will ever do–and no more should ever be asked of it.”
In Favor of the Sensitive Superheroes
They had learned to expose the purely macho type, his false masculinity, physical force, dexterity in games, arrogance, but more dangerous still, his lack of sensitivity. The hero of Last Tango in Paris repulsed them. The sadist, the man who humiliates women, whose show of power is a facade. THe so-called heroes, the stance of a Hemingway or a Mailer in writing, the false strength. All this was exposed, disposed of by these new women, too intelligent to be deceived, too wise and too proud to be subjected to this display of power which did not protect them (as previous generations of women believed) but endagered their existence as individuals.
Their attraction shifted to the poet, the musician, the singer, the sensitive man they had studied with, to the natural sincere man without stance or display, nonassertive, the one concerned with true values, not ambition, the one who hates war and greed, commercialism and political expediencies. A new type of man to match the new type of woman. They helped each other through college, they answered each other’s poems, they wrote confessional and self-examining letters, they prized their relationship, they gave care to it, time, attention. They did not like impersonal sensuality. Both wanted to work at something they loved.
- Anais Nin, In Favor of the Sensitive Man.
One thing I find fascinating about the new Batman cast is Aaron Eckhart, Cillian Murphy, Christian Bale (well, up until last week) and the late Heath Ledger — each of them is someone a Vassar coed might be thrilled to share a pot of rooibus tea after Comparative Lit 201, watching “Fox and His Friends” on the futon. Just like Shia Leboeuf, Toby Maguire as Spiderman, Edward Norton, the Incredible Hulk and to a lesser extent, Will Smith in all his roles and Robert Downey Jr as Iron Man. And don’t forget how V in V for Vendetta didn’t just cook breakfast, he listened to Cat Power and Antony and the Johnsons too.
Today’s superhero is exactly what Anais Nin was pining for in In Favor of the Sensitive Man. (”Do not, I say to today’s women, please do not mistake sensitivity for weakness. This was the mistake which almost doomed our culture. Violence was mistaken for power, the misuse of power for strength.”)
Maybe the first sensitive superheros were Luke Skywalker and Hans Solo. But then Kurt Russell, Steven Seagal, Sylvester Stallone, and the governor of California came along. Might this be the real reason behind Indiana Jones’ twenty-five year absence? And now how things have changed: Joseph Gordon-Levitt is Cobra Commander in the upcoming GI Joe film!
Will this trend continue and will it grow more pronounced? Might alpha male frat guy stereotypes come to represent the ultimate evil, a foil to the bookish, respectful, feminist guys who beat them to a bloody pulp?
Are Vin Diesel project scripts now going to Lukas Haas? What about Alan Cumming as the first bisexual James Bond? I laugh, but of course the Seth Cohen-ization of superheroes is good for humanity, and blah, blah, blah…
Art by Yinka Shonibare
Previously:
Film Review: “Confessions of a Superhero”
Pandrogeny is when two people literally become like each other: physically, emotionally, and intellectually. Genesis P-Orridge and his partner Jacqueline Breyer took it to a new level with plastic surgery, “The Valentine’s Day operation gave them matching breast implants, size C. Later, Jaye had her eyes and nose done, and got a chin implant, to resemble Gen. Gen received cheek enhancements and a lip job. At one point, they looked into the idea of smoothing over their belly buttons, like angels.”
“Gentle” and “middle-aged” writing is a good thing? Cristina Nehring explains why The Best American Essays series is so boring (via.) “[Contemporary essayists] do so with no effort to make their experience relevant or useful to anyone else, with no effort to extract from it any generalizeable insight into the human condition… The problem, of course, is not merely our essayists; it’s our culture. We have grown terribly—if somewhat hypocritically—weary of larger truths. The smarter and more intellectual we count ourselves, the more adamantly we insist that there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as general human experience, that everything is plural and relative and therefore undiscussable.” Here’s another good, um, essay she wrote: “Books Make You a Boring Person.”
How to Frame the Internet: Attention and the New News Cycle
A narcissist enjoys punishment as much as praise. Maybe “enjoy” isn’t quite the right word, but criticism is preferable to no attention at all. The Abu Ghraib scandal is a classic example of our country’s narcissistic impulse. Attention was never on the Iraqi prisoner-victims. Instead we focused on how bad this made us look. How bad we were to let those bad people move up to high ranks.
The iconic photos were all about America — about us. And after several years, there is no singular image of an Iraq victim — out of the context of American imprisonment — that captured our attention the same way.
The Abu Ghraib images created a remote sense of guilt — anger more than sympathy. If the attention is on our own terribleness that means we can change (or pretend to change.) In the end, justice was carried out on those bad apple soldiers (or seemed that way.)
Compare that to the unblinking attention the famous image of Phan Thị Kim Phúc requires of a viewer. The photograph told the world the only way they could correct this wrongdoing and put an end to her suffering, was ending the Vietnam war entirely.
There are many photographs of the Iraq war as powerful as that picture of Phan Thị Kim Phúc, but none has marked the public consciousness the same way. I bet most people couldn’t recall a single image of a victim other than the Abu Ghraib photographs. I think that has to do with how we are adjusting to new ways of reading news.
The shift toward Internet as a primary news source didn’t cause the Iraq war, but certainly made it more convenient. You don’t have to eat your peas before desert, you don’t have to sit through fifteen minutes of world news to find out what celebrity got married today.
Maybe it is knowing that we can always access information about Iraq that keeps us from doing so in the present. If it were that ABC News only showed Iraq footage at 6 pm every night, maybe we’d be more likely to tune in because then the footage would feel like an event — something we had to know, that we could only glean within a certain time frame. Without an event framing it, the sense “I should watch this now” is lost to the understanding, “I can watch this later.”
The problem I see in terms of editing online content seems to be the absence of “frames.” Time frames as well as frames as a metaphor: ways of segmenting information so it doesn’t overlap with other content or ideas, complementary or not. Creating scarcity when there is abundance and understanding how to work with the desire that grows in anticipation of something.
I can’t remember the comedian — I want to say someone Saturday Night Live affiliated — but he was making a point about repetition in sketch comedy. You tell a joke once and it’s funny (well, sometimes, in the case of SNL.) Tell it again, it’s not funny. Tell it a third time it’s funny again. The next several times it’s really not funny, but if you keep repeating it after ten times and keep going, each of those times the joke is funny (this is, of course, a total perversion of the law of diminishing marginal returns.)
Art filmmakers are aware of the boredom they inflict when they hold a certain shot just a moment too long. Horror films especially are cruel games of anticipation. It is agonizing to watch the girl go down the steps to the basement tiptoe after tiptoe sooooo slowwwly.
The great change we are waiting for, the one that will make newsworthy information part of one’s daily media diet is online content that will acknowledge and work around a user’s lack of patience. This means creating an event out of what is being presented.
The challenge is designing a news website that encourage immediate and full attention. The Washington Post’s web chats with authors and public figures is a good example of this. The opportunity to communicate directly with a person of prominence cannot be done later, nor can one participate in a chat with only half his attention. I would also point to the book readings and events staged in Second Life, if Second Life didn’t seem so pet rock to me. A smart website would start using video conferencing software to have its writers interact with readers. The trick is not to archive the footage immediately. Make viewers mark in their calendars for it. Make them miss it if they miss it.
I really think a return to live chat is where web 3.0 (or whatever it is called) is going. Maybe we’ll also see a move toward call-in online video. Live email, instant messaging, and live Skype chats with the hosts.
Images by Yang Shaobin.
Update 7/23/08: Ekstasis made this great point:
This is why ARGs (Alternate Reality Games), like the famous I Love Bees, are so incredibly effetive, the reason I am so drawn to the old telephone poetry projects like Dial-A-Poem. Such projects make the passive recipient of information into an active participant…not “participant” in the more commonly used internet sense, not a creator of information, but a physically participatory comsumer of the given media. ARGs turn information consumption into a game, or at the very least an adventure. Something like Dial-A-Poem, or in the same way a radio call in show, turns the comsumption of media into a community actvity. It takes one outside of themselves into the very over-rated but nevertheless important realm of external reality. Everybody loves it, when they are participating. Everybody forgets about it when they go looking for “the next big thing.”
It’s true, the most exciting media right now is game-related. It will be interesting to see how the New York Times or others tries to implement games with their media (as I’m sure they will.) Wouldn’t it be great to get a free subscription to the Sunday paper if you get the highest score on a news quiz? Things like that will make such a difference.
Looking over this post again, which I didn’t really expect anyone to pay attention to (ha!) it seems like two different points and discontinuous. But the point of my intro on Abu Ghraib is that the one detail about the Iraq war people really know about and fixate on is more about us than about the Iraqis. It’s kind of like, if the only thing people knew about Vietnam were My Lai.
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