Ersatz

Moving On

2007-09-28T10:48:00.000-07:00

I have relocated. You can now find me anywhere on the planet at http://www.rogerstahl.info. Cheers.

Box Cover - Very Exciting

2007-08-29T15:20:00.000-07:00

Final box cover for Militainment, Inc. Not half bad. If you're interested in reading it, just click and it will get bigger. No, that's not me in front of the TV. I'm not sure who it is. By the way, the video page is also posted at the Media Education Foundation site, so if you would like to order an advanced copy for your institution, there it is.

The Listening Post

2007-08-13T07:24:00.000-07:00

I mentioned I did an interview for a segment on Al Jazeera English for a show called "The Listening Post." This segment looked at the relationship between Hollywood and the Pentagon. You'll have to excuse my shaved head. It was a summertime experiment.

Piercing the Eye

2007-08-12T11:19:00.000-07:00

This fall I'm teaching a new class called 'Cultures of the Camera' which examines not the image but rather the 'gaze' and the act of looking. If you're interested, I've made the syllabus and all of our readings available in pdf online. We mainly look at two things. The first is what the eye symbolizes in the West - as well as what all of the prostheses of the eye have meant. Second, we look at how power has been reflected in various architectures of looking: reality TV, gender, exhibitionism, voyeurism, police power, sousveillance, war, Americas Most Wanted, Girls Gone Wild, etc. Should be interesting. I'm ending with an exploration of the mirror as symbol (i.e. looking at oneself). So if everything goes right, the entire universe ought to collapse into a singularity at the end, which is to my mind the ideal way to finish a course.

A bit of the class examines the implications of Bentham's panopticon prison, Foucault's elaboration of it as an architecture of power, and how this notion is threaded through camera cultures, the miniaturization of the camera, and other technological changes. A natural choice, I think.

Yesterday, I was re-reading the interview with Foucault from Power/Knowledge regarding the panopticon entitled "The Eye of Power." He has a real knack for taking such a mechanical subject and infusing it with energy. A passage stood out. In describing the shape of the structure, Foucault mentioned it had a central tower "pierced" with windows. I thought this was a curious metaphor. The image from La Chien Andalou was the first thing to cross my mind, especially considering the title of the interview and Foucault's links to surrealist thought. Bataille's Story of the Eye, too.

Foucault's piercing metaphor conjured a second association: the panopticon's tower is a stand-in for the phallus and the observed prison standing in for the vulva - a kind of sexual Rosetta Stone for power architectures. As I considered this, I was stunned it had never occurred to me in all these years. What stunned me more was that Foucault had never mentioned it or even implied these associations anywhere. Of course, Foucault is not one to subscribe to ideas of sexual essence or anything less than an absolutely fluid gender produced by power relations. Archetypes are just not his game.

In any case, in the tower-phallus coupling we have the missing link between the eye and the masculine archetype that polices the microphysics of power - observability, accountability, and perhaps, via some circuitous route, the word. Of course, this connection is obvious in the French as both savoir (knowledge) and pavoir (power or purview) both contain voir (a variant of "to see"). The archetype of power is to see and not be seen, as in the image of the police officer with mirrored sunglasses. This is true for the tower as well, which, according to Foucault, wears its own shades so that its true power of observation remains invisible. His point is that the existence of the tower is enough, regardless of whether or not anyone occupies the tower. The radiating lights that shroud the tower in the above picture signify this radiation of power. Like God, the visible invisibility of power is proof of its omnipresence. These are also the basics of war strategy, though Foucault's power is not about one force conquering another but rather about an architecture that conquers everyone.

We can also follow the faculty of sight along metaphysical lines too. Epistemological foundationalist thought (Platonic, Cartesian) elevates sight to the highest of the senses - making it synonymous with truth, a highly masculinist formulation. Anti-foundationalist thought, on the other hand, has been quite adamant in denouncing "the spectacle," in some Critical Theory quarters, and the fascism of observation, as in Foucault's maxim "visibility is a trap." Martin Jay has a wonderful book on this subject. Foucault's project thus can be seen as a kind of castration, a destruction of the eye-phallus power coupling - a "piercing" of the phallus, as it were. We're way over the destruction of the eye (just see any Mel Gibson film). If there is one thing that cannot be shown on television or in film, it is the the phallus, because turning the gaze back on the phallus represents the reversal and undoing of power: the penetration of the penetrator. At the extreme end, the ultimate underground image of that-which-cannot-be-seen is the the actual piercing of the phallus itself, an image that, kind reader, I will refrain from reproducing here.

Al Jazeera English

2007-08-03T07:08:00.000-07:00

I recently did an interview for Al Jazeera English regarding the relationship between Hollywood and the Pentagon. It's showing on The Listening Post beginning Friday, August 3 and runs twice daily for a week. Here's a schedule. You can watch it online. They also post Listening Post clips on YouTube, so I will probably link that later.

One commenter on this blog wondered where he/she could find a more journalistic discussion of Hollywood's relationship with the Pentagon and/or the executive:

I just found this site and some of the info about your new movie. I remember noticing years ago that for some reason Hollywood began making military-friendly movies again. This was ramped up a good bit during the Clinton years. Your postings seem to be heavily academic. I would like to see something a bit more journalistic such as: who were the persons who drove the making of all the key military-friendly movies since, say, Tom Cruise's "Top Gun." Do these persons have any obvious, or less than obvious, connections to national right-wing and GOP political organizations, think tanks, etc.? My recollection is that the ball really got going in Hollywood after that flick.

I hope to address some of these questions in my upcoming book, and I do so to some extent in my film. There are a number of other resources out there, however. I would first suggest picking up David Robb's book, Operation Hollywood. Robb is a journalist, and this book is written for a general audience. To my knowledge, it is the only comprehensive treatment of its kind. Robb also did a short documentary by the same name for the BBC, which you can watch on google video. If you would like to sample the book, I make a reading available to my class online. You can download the 8MB pdf file if you like.

A number of producers and directors regularly step through Washington's revolving door. Jerry Bruckheimer is high on the list, as is Tony Scott. The commenter above is correct that Top Gun (1986) was a turning point in military-Hollywood cooperation. Both Bruckheimer and Scott were involved with it. The case of Lionel Chetwynd is interesting. I've excerpted a slice of my book below that traces his biography.

Indeed, the Pentagon and NBC collaborated immediately after the Persian Gulf War on a made-for-TV film called The Heroes of Desert Storm (1991). Disregarding reality altogether, the film intercut news footage with scripted material read by both professional actors and actual Gulf War veterans. The effect of the film is to annihilate the viewer’s capacity to distinguish between fact and fiction. Moreover, this appears to have been the intended consequence. A disclaimer notes up front that, in the interest of something called “realism,” “no distinction is made among these elements.” The decision to air a made-for-TV movie was a natural one given that the Gulf War had already aired in made-for-TV form.

The brain behind Heroes, writer Lionel Chetwynd, was perhaps one of the main authors of the support-the-troops fervor that eventually eclipsed public debate during the Persian Gulf War. Chetwynd penned the high profile film The Hanoi Hilton (1987), which helped burn the POW/MIA mythology permanently into the public memory as the prime motive of the American ravishing of Vietnam. Chetwynd also wrote and produced a television series for the A&E Network called To Heal a Nation, another Vietnam tale of the trials of U.S. soldiers, this time on the home front. These depictions of Vietnam dovetailed precisely with Reagan administration attempts to reverse the Vietnam Syndrome by appealing to the “cult of the soldier.” In fact, Chetwynd had served on Reagan’s campaign team in 1980. Naturally, he was the man best positioned to later direct a celebration of the Persian Gulf War in cooperation with the George H.W. Bush administration. The Heroes of Desert Storm even opens with a special address tailored for the movie from President Bush, who urges us to think not of the Generals who make history, but of the average soldiers who are the real heroes of Desert Storm. Some years later, after President George W. Bush appointed him to serve on the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, Chetwynd went on to direct DC 9/11: Time of Crisis (2003) for Showtime. This film focused on the heroism of President George W. Bush and his cabinet, what the Independent called “a piece of myth-making to put the propagandists of every tin-pot totalitarian regime to shame.” Following this film, Chetwynd wrote the straight-to-video Celsius 41.11: The Temperature at which the Brain … Begins to Die (2004), a rejoinder to Michael Moore’s 2003 theatrical release critical of the Bush administration, Fahrenheit 9/11. Chetwynd’s biography captures two distinct trajectories of the spectacular war: a collapse of screen power into military power and a post-ideological refocusing of public attention onto the war machine itself.

As far as think tanks, Karl Rove met with Hollywood brass immediately after 9/11 to discuss ways that the industry could assist with the "war on terror." Here's a snippet from the Washington Post, November 12, 2001. Jack Valenti, former president of the MPAA, has been a long-term supporter of neo-con politics.

HEADLINE: Hollywood's White House War Council;
A Bicoastal Meeting of Minds Is Bipartisan, Too

BYLINE: Rene Sanchez, Washington Post Staff Writer

Top executives from every major Hollywood studio and other titans in the entertainment industry emerged from a private discussion with senior White House adviser Karl Rove this afternoon vowing to play a broad, but still vague, role in the nation's fight against terrorism.

But Rove did come with a seven-point agenda of broad themes for Hollywood to ponder, suggesting that the industry find creative ways to urge Americans to support the war with volunteerism, to raise the morale of U.S. troops, and to illustrate that "this is a war against terrorism, not Islam."

Sherry Lansing, chairwoman of Paramount Pictures, called the meeting "the beginning of the beginning" and said industry executives would meet again soon to work on specific plans. She and other executives said they stressed to Rove that they were not interested in producing propaganda, but wanted to help.

Participants in today's meeting, which ended slightly earlier than had been planned, also said that at no point were any political deals suggested for enlisting the help of Hollywood, which has been under fire in Congress for the violent content it produces in films and television and fears new regulation.

"Nothing was discussed that in any way touched a nerve," said Bob Iger, Walt Disney Co.'s president.

But today's gathering, which Rove initiated, drew more than 20 Hollywood heavyweights -- top power brokers in film and television as well as the leaders of the industry's creative unions. Afterward, they stood side by side and said they were determined, for once, to work together to help the country during wartime.

Valenti, for one, expressed interest in developing movies or public-service announcements to be shown here and overseas that emphasize that the war on terrorism is not an attack on Muslims as well as films that have themes about "how America has been the most generous country in the world."

If we want to look at where the rubber really meets the road, in my opinion, we have to look at what kinds of stories are being told. From there we can work backward through the political economy of the story production. While it's interesting to search out individuals, cabals, and think tanks, I think it's more productive to look at organizations and how they benefit from certain depictions. Clearly, there is a symbiotic benefit between Pentagon PR and Hollywood's need for authentic props in war films. But these public relations pairings stretch far beyond Hollywood into a number of entertainment venues and the news. War can be an extremely profitable venture for those who would spend taxpayer money for, say, securing the corporate rights to fossil fuel supplies. The entertainment industries have increasingly become handmaidens for getting the taxpayer (and the taxpayer's conscience) to go along with these ventures. The trick for military PR is releasing the right kinds of stories - those that will both deliver the entertaining war and "stay on message." Someone like Walt Disney's Bob Iger is ultimately looking out for his company and the interests of shareholders. Disney's access to the Pentagon public relations machine, unless publicly denounced, is more likely than not going to be a profitable one. It makes business sense to keep these channels open. And of course the Pentagon is more than happy to oblige.

Militainment Exposure

2007-07-27T08:09:00.000-07:00

Since I've been in exile from this blog machine, there have been some interesting developments. The Media Education Foundation is working hard on getting the film printed. Above is the proposed box cover. Snazzy. For now, you can still watch a low quality version of the unmastered film here (it's about 245 MB). The film has its own website now and has "left the nest." Please see: www.militainmentthemovie.com. Here's the trailer:

The book, tentatively titled Militainment, Inc., is also on the way. I'm getting it out to publishers as I write.

Pole Position with People

2007-04-06T15:58:00.000-07:00

This is a really outstanding idea. Meditative, almost.

Gun-Camera-Gun-Camera

2007-03-04T09:12:00.000-08:00

This is a picture of Etienne Jules Marey's 1882 invention, the chronophotographic gun, perhaps the first moving picture camera. With it Marey made a series of flipbooks and other live motion shots. This camera was inspired by the machine gun. I have been doing a bit of research and thinking regarding the politics of seeing and the pivotal place of the camera lately.

The camera and the gun have had quite an intimate history together. Taken together, they are both instruments of the eye. They are both governed by the metaphor of "shooting." They both express relations of power - the one who gets to point, shoot, track, gaze, and capture. We can even correlate this interchangeability with the displacement of the mighty hunter (the decline in so-called "blood sports") by the increased prestige of the camera as masculine prosthesis par excellence. The camera is the postmodern gun, in other words. The powerful class brandishes its power by "seeing the world" and its trophies are the reels of exotic images. And this is why "see the world" functioned for so long as a military recruiting slogan. We can also see this dynamic in the ease by which the "war correspondent," - that most prestigious journalist - melds into the figure of the soldier and vice versa. As Foucault remarked, the true center of military power is not in guns but rather in technologies of the spirit.

Aerodunamis

2007-02-24T19:17:00.000-08:00

Having now spent an entire day at the Denver International airport, I have had enough time to consider the ways in which the airport is the new metaphor for 21st-century American life.

1. The airport is a placeless space without history, depth, or context.

2. The airport is a faceless space. Anonymity incommunicado.

3. The airport is a voyeuristic space alight with the hum of averted glances and "people watching."

4. The airport is a timeless time. The main sport in the airport is "killing time" while the jet lag resolves and the time zones collide into one another.

5. The airport is a big box in the "ex-urbs." Airports grow on grassy steppes, on perfectly groomed, windswept land, moonscapes.

6. The airport is a continual state of emergency, a police state, a terror alert orange. The airport is where the word "homeland" is uttered most frequently. At the airport, everyone is a suspect subject to intimate search and x-ray.

7. The airport is the maturation of the mall - an enclosed pleasure prison where material needs are met with a continual circulation of disposable goods, consumption, escalators, and big brands.

8. The airport is an institutionalized caste system of front and rear, high and low. The most trivial and ephemeral item can be turned into an object of class distinction.

9. The airport is an Internetted rhizome of terminals and links.

10. The airport is the proving ground for the cybernetic organism, gilded with silicon from head to toe and blinking with lines of flight.

11. The airport is the contest between the machines of material commuting and the machines of immaterial communication.

12. The airport aesthetic is comfortable, spare, designed not for immediate appreciation or joy, but rather to keep traffic moving.

13. The airport features a clear division between the managerial/creative class and the service class, which is marked most clearly by race. This division is represented by the paradox of the itinerant citizen and the stationary immigrant, who converse across countertops like two answering machines addressing one another.

14. There is no dirt in the airport.

15. The airport is the most extreme contrast between absolute boredom and banality and the absolute exhilaration of flight. The seen-it-all-from-an-airplane-window attitude compounds the boredom. This is what it is like to be a god among ant-men.

16. The airport is proof that kids can turn anywhere into a playground.

"Militainment, Inc." Wildfire

2007-02-18T09:42:00.000-08:00

If you want a quick and easy way to watch "Militainment, Inc.," a number of folks have posted the video online.

The YouTube competitor VeOh has got the whole 2hr thing up, and you can watch it straight through. This is the newest version, which was put up six days ago. It has gotten about a thousand hits a day since then, and it was listed among their top ten most popular downloads for the week.

It's on YouTube in 10 minute segments.

If you're into BitTorrent, you can download the film from Chomsky Torrents.

Or from PirateBay Torrents.

And you can download a higher quality copy directly from my school server.

I'm kind of overwhelmed by the spread of this film and the amount of activity. My web server downloads the film about 100 times a day. I just discovered the VeOh thing.

The Media Education Foundation will be distributing this video soon. If you want to inquire about when this will be or reserve a copy, I would suggest that you contact them. The video will be offered at an institutional price - probably in the range of $100-150.

I'm also planning a showing at the University of Georgia's Tate Center theater soon as well as the Athens Anarchist Collective. I'll be doing a showing at Lewis and Clarke College in Portland, OR on Tuesday, Feb. 27. And in around March 12, I'll be showing the film at the University of Delaware. So I'm pleased with the response. Enjoy.

Dainty Shapes / Hairy Apes

2007-02-03T18:30:00.000-08:00

Last night I was invited to a dress rehearsal in town of a play that opened tonight in Athens: "Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes: Or the Green Pill." My dear Kate Morrissey plays a young temptress. If you have a brain, I urge you to see this play. Very clever and unendingly hilarious. I was tickled up and down.

If you like dada-ist philosophical jousts between pure Platonic men and lusty Dionysian women, this one is for you. Plus you get to wear an animal hat and play an instrument in lieu of applause. The audience a good chunk of the show - as evident in the opening scene where two characters sit high above the stage on lifeguard chairs, scanning the wiley audience with binoculars - while we stare at Miss Kate displayed much closer to the earth in a dazzling red sequined dress. Cal Clements, the director, is a genius with this kind of stuff, and the play is a trip.

Playing all February, every Saturday at 8:30. See the article in the Red and Black.

Jokey Smurf is a Terrorist

2007-02-02T09:41:00.000-08:00

I remember getting gas in West Virginia, and on the pump of all places was a sticker featuring a picture of Jokey Smurf and the words, "Jokey Smurf is a Terrorist." This got me thinking about humor and affective energy. The Jokester is also the Trickster is also the Abbie Hoffman dissident, and you can see where I'm going with this. Sudden outbursts of affect are becoming, it seems, more politically significant. Take Howard Dean and his "unpresidential" hooting. Not acceptable in a time of terror.

Well, now we have another icon for the age. An alien, a middle finger, and an ad prank. Looks like a bomb. Implicates itself into the signs of terrorism, however accidentally. Winds up a public relations circus. This is the place where performance art and guerilla advertising meet. This is also the place where advertising and terrorism meet (if terrorism wasn't already a form of advertising and vice versa). And certainly, if we are to believe in the recent buzz about the death of advertising and the rise of public relations, then we have our man. And however much contempt I have for advertising's nothing-sacred approach these days, I have to say that this press conference was freaking hilarious. Give us a circus, we'll give you a circus. Everyone has fun. A big obscene orgy of public relations, tabloid journalism, and the politics of fear. Feedback loops collapsing into black holes of infinite density.

Watch this.

"Militainment , Inc." Final Cut

2007-02-02T09:30:00.000-08:00

I've finished a final version of Militainment, Inc.! In fact, I premiered the whole darned 2hr thing to an attentive and enthusiastic crowd last night at Steve and Noah's monthly salon here in Athens. There are still some things to tweak (like the intro), but the thing is ready for pressing.

You can download the video in one piece and in compressed format here. Please distribute freely. Use in your classrooms. It's 550MB or so and in Divx form, so if you don't have it already, you'll need the Xvid plugin, which you can download here. Run it, and it will load easily and automatically into Windows Media Player. The video is also in circulation as a BitTorrent file. You can get the torrent at ChomskyTorrents.org.

Morning Star

2007-01-05T19:24:00.000-08:00

I noticed today that my old William Blake anthology naturally falls open to this poem:

**************
To the Accuser Who is the God of this World

Truly, My Satan, thou art but a Dunce,
And dost not know the Garment from the Man
Every Harlot was a Virgin once,
Nor can'st thou ever change Kate into Nan.

Tho' thou art Worship'd by the Names Divine
Of Jesus & Jehovah, thou art still
The Son of Morn in weary Night's decline,
the lost Traveller's Dream under the Hill.

*******

That's a fine one, indeed. Hilarious and touching, even.

Adamantine

2007-01-05T17:51:00.000-08:00

I have been watching the film Blood Diamond make the rounds by way of all the cautionary segments on daytime talk shows. Because I have taught speech courses for a while, I have heard no end of persuasive speeches on conflict diamonds and that magic-bullet solution, the Kimberley process. Truly, the action on the part of the UN and both Presidents Clinton and Bush is all commendable. Diamonds were unquestionably funding civil wars in Sierra Leone and Angola for a while - and probably will continue to fund other conflicts. This is a tragedy and I wish it would stop. I wish all funding of conflicts would stop.

That said, does all the pop focus on "blood diamonds" strike anyone else as a little perverse? I'm trying to unravel the public fascination with this issue. I know that half of it is a story of moral outrage in the tradition of Kathee Lee Gifford apologizing about sweat shop labor conditions. Now the scene is more like Phyllis Diller apologizing for a double-amputee African child. The sheer juxtaposition is undeniable - old/young, white/black, rich/poor - and that highest symbol of timelessness standing outside the world of utility, the diamond, pitched against the vision of someone digging with bare hands at gunpoint. The diamond, which is no more than a thought, a sign, refracting blood, the ultimate sign of signlessness. It's compelling - and not because there is some war going on in Africa. Since when have Americans cared about that before the movie came out ten years later? This is different; the movie is out now.

On the surface, this is a moral tale. But I think the shadow of this collective gush of concern is highly racialized. It is a story of superiority, after all. The axis stretches between the rulers and the ruled on this global scale, between blacks who slave, suffer, and die so that whites can satisfy even their most trifling caprices. The cultural phenomenon of "blood diamonds" is also a story about Darkest Africa and the primeval chaos that has so occupied the Western mind since Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad. In this instance, the blacks, who are not above carving up children, must be disciplined. Here the "white man's burden" has been lifted to the featherweight Kimberley process. While the motif of "blood diamonds" goes around the talk show circuit, I can't help but think that this is at least as much about people feeling their white privilege as feeling compassion.

The fact is that diamonds squander enormous amounts of human energy. That's what makes them valuable as a sign. (The vast majority of the diamond trade goes into producing signs and nothing more.) The entire sign system of the diamond is predicated on the differential between misery and privilege. I can't see how the "blood diamond" story will do anything but reinforce the symbolic value of the diamond. The Kimberley process, indeed the film Blood Diamond (whatever activist pose it might strike), is practically an advertisement for the diamond trade. As an unnamed woman at an aquaintence's wedding told me recently while waving her enormous diamond ring in my face: "I don't care how many African children died for this. I wanted it!" Her defense was entirely voluntary and unprovoked in any way. That's just the point. The more African children die, the more she wants it. She will even go out of her way to bring the subject up. Quite adamant, she was.*

*Adamant

1.	utterly unyielding in attitude or opinion in spite of all appeals, urgings, etc.

2.	too hard to cut, break, or pierce.

–noun

3.	any impenetrably or unyieldingly hard substance.

4.	a legendary stone of impenetrable hardness, formerly sometimes identified with the diamond.

From Greek daman: to tame, conquer

Happy Net Neutrality New Year!

2007-01-02T09:04:00.000-08:00

While you were recovering, the FCC signed off a merger deal between AT&T and Bell South. AT&T had been fighting to exempt itself from "net neutrality" rules that require it to treat all signals equally and not charge companies and consumers for access to a tiered system. Net neutrality prevents large companies from defining internet traffic to suit their own interests. In the face of monopolistic power in some sector (telecom, in this case) net neutrality preserves a level playing field in both political and capitalistic senses.

Second only to the issue of media consolidation, net neutrality has become a popular cause with small organizations like Save the Internet leading the fight. (Larger Internet companies, like Amazon and Yahoo, also had a stake in net neutrality.)

On December 29, the FCC ruled that if AT&T is to merge with Bell South, it would have to abide by a net neutrality principle that lasts for 2 years. Astonishingly, this provision is strong enough to please even the most ardent net neutrality activist. The surprise success on this issue is a probable result of three factors: 1) the Democratic takeover of congress; 2) consumer activism; 3) corporate lobbying from the likes of large internet holdings like Google and Amazon. In any case, a wonderful way to kick off the New Year.

Fifteen Nanoseconds of Fame

2006-12-23T18:28:00.000-08:00

Over break, I happened to catch a press conference staged by Donald Trump on behalf of Miss USA. All the stations ran it live. Tara Connor had been crowned in 2006, but since, the story goes, got involved in cocaine, kissing Miss Teen USA in public, and other improprieties unbecoming the title of Miss USA. So Donald Trump staged a press conference to announce whether Ms. Connor would continue in that role. The bait for the networks was irresistible. Everyone waiting for Trump to say "You're fired!" and call it good. After Tara's tearful explanation, Trump explained that she was a young girl who got caught up in the Babylon that is New York City and that he would give her "a second chance."

My acute distaste for such tabloid nonsense was somehow overcome by the cleverness of the entire spectacle. Let me get theoretical about celebrity for a second...

Perhaps the democratization of the camera began with Andy Warhol, his "fifteen minutes" quip and general preference for using non-celebrities in his amateur films. The miniaturization and multiplication of the camera continued on its way to flower into what we call "reality TV," and a new cult of celebrity. Celebrities are now famous for no other reason than the fact that they are famous. Fame has been ostensibly "flattened," democratized. This has coincided with the "long tail" phenomenon in marketing (the flattening of the cultural mainstream) and the "authorship society" of Web 2.0. Of course all of these democratizing forces have been well tempered with the consolidation of authorship, celebrity, and attention, all of which sell themselves to mass audiences with an ever-intensifying rhetoric of democratic celebrity. We all can be famous. See the TIME magazine Person of the Year 2006.

This process has naturally involved the destruction of celebrity. Celebrities nowadays seemingly exist for the mere purpose of scandal and schadenfreude. From "Behind the Music" to "Biography," the daily fare of entertainment news has been the metanarrative of "the fall." This narrative far eclipses any kind of apotheosis or hero worship. We can view this as a function of capitalism having to contend with the "attention economy" where the main problem is cutting through the clutter and noise of media saturation. Just as rhetorics of fear have colonized every facet of politics, the pleasures of "the fall" have a slight advantage in an attention economy characterized by sound bites and short-term affect. (The eventual resting point for this kind of entertainment is not only the destruction of celebrity, but the destruction of the everyman as depicted in the quasi-snuff films of "America's Wildest Police Chases" and the ilk.)

A problem develops in this kind of economy. The precious commodity is fame itself, which is becoming scarce. That is, fame cannot keep up with all the idol-smashing. The problem is that fame cannot reproduce itself fast enough before it is plundered by the all-searching eye, the swarms of paparazzi, or even what they have called the "celebrity blood sport" that mainstream blogging has become (see, for example, Wonkette, who only differs in medium from, say, Mark David Chapman). When everyone has a camera, it seems we are crayfish in a bucket, an eager metaphor for the self-policing function of a surveillance society.

What Trump did was masterful because it took advantage of the new politics of fame. Connor was by no means famous before this event. No one cared about Miss USA, much less saw it as representative of anyone's "values." Very likely more people witnessed the press conference than the pageant. The brilliance of the press conference was that it created a de facto celebrity by virtue of her "fall" - all in the same instant. The total package in fifteen nanoseconds. For Trump, the benefits will likely last, having given the Miss USA organization some credibility by virtue of its success in assembling so many cameras. (As PT Barnum said, "Nothing draws a crowd like a crowd.") The irony is that to do this, Trump relied implicitly on a Girls Gone Wild narrative - a narrative already at work in the politics between the camera and celebrity.

Solar Tech

2006-12-06T07:40:00.000-08:00

At our house, we've been experimenting with passive solar heat with great success. On a sunny day, we can heat our entire upstairs for free using a small 2x4 sun collecting panel. Normally, these would come in 4x8 size, but Clear Dome Solar has come out with an ultra efficient model. In my own test, 70 degree air goes in, and 106 degree air blows out. I'm just amazed that eight square feet of sunlight can produce that much heat. But the company says that the black collector material has a 95% efficiency. Anyway, in our two week trial, the house heater goes entirely quiet from 10am to about 7pm. And we have high ceilings.

These panels come in at a cost of about $450 each, and they can be hooked together in series. I just made a window panel with one intake and one outake hole to circulate indoor air out through the panel and back into the house (my soon-to-be-famous soup can duct design). Right now, the panel is just standing upright on the porch in front of the window - not affixed to anything. So it's portable and lightweight. The black collector has a thermostat switch that turns the circulating fan on when it exceeds 70 degrees and off when it dips below. Why not one of these on every house?

The N Word

2006-12-03T20:52:00.000-08:00

Jim Aune of* the Blogora linked this very nice Slate editorial regarding the cultural prohibition against comparing anything to Nazi Germany. I predict when they finally pass a law against making such a reference, the bill will include a rider that dissolves congress.

*Notice I didn't say "over at" the Blogora. I'm on strike against insipid little spatial metaphors. I hope you will join me.

Borat Big Hit in the South

2006-11-26T16:50:00.000-08:00

As a big fan of HBO's Da Ali G Show, I was exciting! to see Borat. Sacha Cohen, at least on the series, had a way of exposing the dark racist (and every other -ist) American underbelly with exquisitely placed judo moves. So Kate and I saw Borat on opening day. After all, the reviews were near monolithic in the opinion that this was the funniest and most subversive comedy since Andy Kaufman or something.

I have to say that we both left the theater feeling vaguely ill. Sacha Cohen compromised the intelligence of Da Ali G Show for a broader, clearly duller audience. Here are my reasons:

1. Over-reliance on the cheap adolescent idiocy pioneered by Tom Green and Jackass. Not to say that this kind of thing doesn't have a place, but it's not genius. Some of it is just plain nauseating.

2. The Borat character on Da Ali G Show is an obviously overdrawn caricature of a "foreigner," whose very believability is the central trick played on his unwitting interviewee. That is, if you buy Borat as representative of some reality, then you are the dupe. The Borat in the film, on the other hand, asks the audience to accept him as a parody of a Kazakhstani (or a Muslim or pick-your-backward-culture). In other words, Borat switches hats from a critique of the foreigner of the American imagination to an American critique of an imaginary foreigner. Rather than destabilizing these prejudices, Borat reinforces them.

3. Borat is representationally meaningless. The lines between fiction and documentary are drawn so thin that you do not know quite what to laugh at. When Borat exposes someone's prejudices in the documentary style, the joke is on the real-life subject. When this is fictionalized, the joke is on...whom? Let's take an example. At the rodeo, by explaining his "culture" first, Borat gets a man to admit that he would also like to see all homosexuals in the U.S. burnt at the stake. Clearly Borat's trick is to act as permission for this man's dark shadow to rear its head. Good stuff. At the end of the film, Borat stands in line to meet Pamela Anderson at a book signing, during which he tries to put her in a supposed Kazakhi "marriage bag" and carry her off. Since this scene is in no way filmically distinct from the Cohen's other public stunts, we don't know whether or not this is staged. Turns out it is. But in this case, the joke only reinforces dominant prejudices through the representational (rather than non-representational) character of Borat. The scene in which Borat and his producer get in a fight and then end up running through the hotel naked and into an managerial conference meeting is also a bizarre mixture of gratuitous fictional plotline and a presumably real-life stunt. I'm getting my Baudrillardian undies in a bunch, but the "joke" of Borat is defanged by its refusal to afix itself to any reality. This ambiguity makes it possible for Borat to appeal to the conscientious and the prejudiced alike: the film reads both ways. What we are left with is a laundry list of free-floating insults - because in the end, the context of who said them for what reason ceases to matter. This is what critics mean when they say that Borat is an "equal opportunity offender." We wind up with a kind of shock jock comedy where the language of prejudicial taboo is slung around for its own sake, not to make any kind of moral point but because it is by itself "offensive."

These are the reasons why Borat can be at the same time so "subversive" and also go down so easy. I remember entering the theater right behind some hooting frat guys who had "heard that this movie" was "so offensive." Their squealing swinish glee should have been a signal to go home then. I truly wish I had. I hope the real trick of Borat was Cohen's masterful gathering of a roaring homophobic, anti-semitic, misogynistic audience amidst which I could sit shellshocked. I hope that was the plan. If so, it far surpasses any prank that Andy Kaufmann ever dreamed up.

Colbert Product Placement

2006-11-21T17:55:00.000-08:00

The Colbert Report on Comedy Central is one of the few things I TIVO. And it is the practice of TIVO-ing and burning through the ads that has forced the television culture industry to plunge headlong into the strange world of product placement in order to get brands seen - that is, if the show isn't already a full-blown ad. Product placement is a tricky business. The conventional wisdom has always been that if the audience recognizes the product as "placed," it tends to be a real turnoff. Successful placement demands seamless integration, blending the brand naturally into the environment. The other tactic we might call the "Austin Powers" method whereby product placement is foregrounded with an ironic wink so the audience not only doesn't feel insulted, they feel like they're in on some kind of subversive joke with Mike Meyers. But the subversive joke is on the audience, of course.

This brings us to the fascinating case of the Colbert Report. The show's demographic is very likely well-educated and very "cynical" about advertising as they say on Madison Ave - leftists who jibe with Colbert's anti-authoritarian triple-decker ironic sense of humor. Also, it is very likely that Colbert viewers are very valuable, upscale demographic. And because of these circumstances, they probably have TIVO machines. The show has managed to catch the attention of the so-called "new democrats" who really are latte-drinking liberals (not working class labor union types). For advanced capital, this is rare prey indeed. And wiley.

I don't know if I should be stunned by this, but Colbert must contend with massive product placement. I would love to make a complete list. So far I have:

1. Kraft Cheese Crumbles. They're "crumbelievable." Colbert spent 20 minutes of a show with this as his "Word."

2. The iPod. Apple sponsored the "green screen challenge," which asked fans at home to participate and take Colbert's green screened image and make something interesting out of it. On two separate occasions, they featured the "submission," which took Colbert's image and turned it into an iPod sillouette with white earplugs.

3. Just the other night, Colbert made a "joke" about being fueled by Starbucks coffee. The joke was that he was trying to quit drinking coffee - but...he...just...couldn't...throw...away...the...
luscious....goodness...of...the...Starbucks...latte.

4. I swear I remember VW popping up somewhere.

5. Colbert seems to take a lot of sips of bottled water and Dr. Pepper when he's parched in the middle of sketches. There's always some brand to display under his desk.

6. The Motorola Razr phone - displayed proudly by Colbert's new "black friend" P.K. Winsome, the "Black Republican." It takes great pictures.

7. Colbert suggests renaming the Iraqi civil war something "everyone likes" like the "Cool Ranch Doritos War."

This really intrigues me. I often yell at the screen. I wonder if anyone else notices the exquisite tension between the ostensible ethos of the show and the way Colbert whores products left and right like Bob Barker.

"Militainment, Inc." Goes Live

2006-10-23T11:40:00.000-07:00

I just got word from Sut Jhally that the Media Education Foundation will be distributing "Militainment, Inc." beginning in the spring of '07. I'm quite pleased as I think MEF is the perfect venue for such a film.

Sadly, I'm going to be taking the free version offline soon. I'm confident that by the time MEF gets through mastering the video, though, it will be much more pleasing to the eye. So those of you looking to get a copy on your library shelves, look this spring.

Woohoo! In celebration, I'm offering this printable Topps trading card featuring Condi Rice. Collect them all!

650,000

2006-10-21T09:46:00.000-07:00

Recently, a Johns Hopkins U. team did another cluster sample in Iraq that determined that 650,000 Iraqi civilians have died since the 2003 invasion. In 2004, they determined this number to be 100,000. Of course, the administration sees these numbers as "inflated" and "absurd." Pajamas Media actually sat down with Professor Gilbert Burnham, the principle investigator on the studies. Burnham answered the most common objections to his study.

Colorless Green Ideas

2006-10-12T08:34:00.000-07:00

In 1957, linguist Noam Chomsky invented a famous sentence that he claimed was grammatically incorrect but nonsensical: "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." In 1985 Stanford University hosted a competition to make the sentence sensible via fewer than 100 words and 14 lines of verse. Here are some heroic entries, quite beautiful, furious, verdant, and somnolent.

It can only be the thought of verdure to come,
which prompts us in the autumn
to buy these dormant white lumps of vegetable
matter covered by a brown
papery skin, and lovingly to plant
them and care for them. It is a marvel
to me that under this cover they are
labouring unseen at such a rate
within to give us the sudden awesome beauty
of spring flowering bulbs.
While winter reigns the earth reposes but these
colourless green ideas
sleep furiously.
C. M. Street

Behold the pent-up power of the winter tree;
Leafless it stands, in lifeless slumber.
Yet its very resting is revival and renewal:
Inside the dark gnarled world of trunk and roots,
Cradled in the chemistry of cell and sap,
Colourless green ideas sleep furiously
In deep and dedicated doormancy,
Concentrating, conserving, constructing:
Knowing, by some ancient quantum law
Of chlorophyll and sun
That come the sudden surge of spring,
Dreams become reality, and ideas action.
Bryan O. Wright

Let us think on them, the Twelve Makers
Of myths, trailblazing quakers
Scourging earthshakers
Colourless green ideas sleep furiously
Before their chrysalides open curiously
Anarchy burgeons spuriously
Order raises new seedlings in the world
By word and gun upheld
The scarlet banner is unfurled
The New Country appears
Man loosens his fears
The New Dawn nears
Recollect our first fathers
The good society in momentum gathers.
("recently discovered sonnet by Alexander Blok")
translated by Edward Black


The Winner:

Thus Adam's Eden-plot in far-off time:
Colour-rampant flowers, trees a myriad green;
Helped by God-bless'd wind and temp'rate clime.
The path to primate knowledge unforseen,
He sleeps in peace at eve with Eve.
One apple later, he looks curiously
At the gardens of dichromates, in whom
colourless green ideas sleep furiously
then rage for birth each morning, until doom
Brings rainbows they at last perceive.
D. A. H. Byatt

Sanctuary

2006-10-11T19:35:00.000-07:00

A friend directed me to this project. It's an online flash film based on the book Without Sanctuary, a collection of lynching postcards from the reconstruction era and beyond. The book arrived in 2000 amid much publicity. The website was posted early this year, as far as I can tell. It has obvious teaching value.

The "forum" section of the website is most interesting. The first thing to strike me was that it had been spammed with phentermine and porn ads. This was striking given that I had just watched the slideshow with James Allen's narration. "In America," he says referring to the grisly memorabilia of the lynchings, "everything is for sale." The whole machinic aspect of the scene really got to me. A continuation of the sale by other means. The weekend lynchings - the 'barbecue,' as one participant scrawled on the back of a card - and the pack mentality of the lynching culture, the automaticity of it all...seemed as ruthlessly banal and mechanical as the roving spambot that seized on the site. Allen's remarks during the slideshow - that these are pictures of the "steel trigger" in every heart - captured this sense for me. I'm sorry that the site's creators must continue with that undignified task of shoveling the spam.

The comments from real "people" were interesting too. They range from the racist to the reflective. Though condemnation is the easy route, it is much more difficult to ask how we are pulling that trigger today. After all, it only takes a couple of people to do the dirty work. The rest are spectators. Even today, we are comfortable spectators. As Susan Sontag wrote, no matter what the subject, the camera aestheticizes, distances, gives sanctuary. I was inspired by those who, in their comments, broke through the lens of this bias, those who could look beyond the past and see the everpresent.

9/11 Questions

2006-10-10T18:51:00.000-07:00

I tend to think that 9/11 conspiracy theories have gotten a little out of control, though it is still a mystery why WTC building #7 went down when it wasn't struck by anything. In any case, there's a new film you can watch online that thankfully steers clear of much of that juvenile stuff and asks some very interesting questions about the investigation of 9/11. Of particular interest are the failure to capture Bin Laden or any of his cronies as well as the much documented Pakistani connection to funding and ordering of the attacks. If any country ought to be considered suspect in 9/11, it is Pakistan - not Afghanistan or Iraq - a number of luminaries including Sy Hersh assert. Instead, Pakistan is a close ally in the 'WoT.' In the film, the story is mainly told through the eyes of the survivors of those lost in the attack. It's quite good.

A little exposure

2006-10-06T15:01:00.000-07:00

"Militainment, Inc." featured on MediaChannel. Thanks for the big uptick, Mr. Danny Schechter.

West Wingers

2006-10-02T17:47:00.000-07:00

I don't much go for George Bush impressions because it's just too easy. But a comedy troop at Shoutboy.com has got a series of sketches called West Wingers, which is just spot on. They are apparently associated with the Upright Citizens Brigade, which had a very funny sketch show on Comedy Central a couple years back. Anyway, watch this sketch on YouTube first. The impression of the prez really gets at the nuances, the gutteral speech, the misplacedness of GWB. And the writing is smart, too - especially the bit about "the enemy who kills theirself." I won't give away the final punchline, but it's worth seeing the whole thing through to the end.

Militainment, Inc. 2.0

2006-09-30T16:57:00.000-07:00

Check out the finished version of:

Militainment, Inc.

The film, in 9 parts, is posted and ready for convenient screening online. Right now, the film is being reviewed by potential distributers, but you get a sneak peek. Feel free to use this in your classrooms.

Going Into Iran in Seven Weeks

2006-09-28T06:35:00.000-07:00

Here we go. Large scale military deployments to Iran are happening right now. And it's not just being alleged by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker. This time it's on CNN and in Time Magazine. Not only are Special Forces on the ground in Iran - as they have been for over a year - now the executive is going ahead with large naval deployments. Recently, Karl Rove bragged to RNC insiders that he had an "October surprise" waiting to maintain a neo-con majority in congress. Wonder how he's going to pull the fear strings this time. Um... if my math is correct...

Watch this fascinating CNN interview with a retired Air Force colonel. When large news organization does a story like this, we have passed the point of no return in the eyes of the administration. Perhaps we should listen to former CIA specialist Ray McGovern who said on September 17th that “We have about seven weeks to try and stop this next war from happening.”

The Fall of the Wall

2006-09-21T18:27:00.000-07:00

In trying to set up a decent server to host downloads of my new documentary, I have become an accidental Linux convert. Microsoft, you see, has undertaken a disasterous policy regarding its Windows platform recently. In order to curb casual piracy of Windows XP (letting one's friend borrow the installation disk), Microsoft has implemented the Windows Product Activation (WPA) scheme. This plan only allows one copy of Windows per installation of Windows. These days if you want to use Windows, you have to hook into Microsoft's database to receive updates and security software. Now Microsoft is keeping a massive database of serial numbers. If yours appears twice in their database, even if it's just a reinstallation, you are up a creek. A big notification that you might be a "victim of software piracy" flashes on the screen. In reality, you are a victim of Microsoft's new policy of stonewalling anything suspicious. The problem is that reinstallation of Windows becomes a major headache and the policy is even affecting people using Windows fresh from the box.

I predict that this policy is going to push massive numbers of people toward platform alternatives like open-source Linux. And not just because I believe the world revolves around me. The problems with WPA are so significant and the Linux alternatives so appealing and sophisticated (and FREE!) at this point, that Microsoft is in for a surprise.

I have been experimenting with two of the more user-friendly "distributions" (operating system and software packages) available: Ark Linux and Freespire. Compared with the last time I looked at Linux - in 1998 when they released their first off-the-shelf platform, Caldera - things have changed quite a bit. The interface is gorgeous for both of these. It feels great. It's also much leaner and quicker. One major change is a panel that accesses a database of free Linux open source software. You just find what you want to install of 1000 programs organized nicely, click it, and it installs. That can't be done with proprietary software, where you have to hunt down each program, download it individually, wonder if it has malware, and (for me) find a crack for it. Now I don't feel like such a criminal. Plus, Linux is virtually spyware and virus free, a big, big plus.

Enough of my sales pitch. My point here is that Microsoft is making a big business mistake (one likely to be made by big business). Their strong suit is that Windows is so ubiquitous that it seems there is no alternative. And for very sophisticated programs - like music and video production - there isn't (outside of Mac). Windows still has 95% of the operating systems. Probably half of these are pirated. So Microsoft is going to squeeze this lemon a bit. The problem is that Microsoft's power lies in the fact that theirs is the default operating system, whether people are pirating it or not. With the new WPA policy, Microsoft is threatening the very thing that allows it monopoly power. Microsoft is tempting people to switch paradigms. The company should be giving Windows away for free if they want to keep their platform hegemony.

I think a big boom has got to happen sooner or later. A critical mass of people-friendly Linux platforms will form and Microsoft is going to do something to ignite it. I think it's happening right now.

An Intoxicating Truth

2006-09-16T19:34:00.000-07:00

This article in The Independent is perhaps the best condensation of the impact that greenhouse climate change is having worldwide. It amazes me how near the issue is. Switzerland is watching its alpine skyline change before its eyes as mountains calve large chunks of rock held in place by millennia of ice-glue. They're even having trouble drilling for oil in Alaska because the number of permafrost days (when heavy equipment can travel) have shrunk from 150 days per year to 75.

Apart from the brand new barley fields in Greenland and the prediction that garden plots will be impossible in England in 20 years, the wine industry in California may be next to see the effects of climate change. Grapes are a very temperature sensitive crop, and they predict that in the next few (less than five) years, the industry will be hit very hard. I heard this story on NPR when I returned from California this summer. I thought, "What a perfect story for the effete NPR aficionado, choking on his pinot and staring wide-eyed at his radio." Kate and I were staying on the Stanford campus in Palo Alto, and we took a short tour through the outer fringes of Napa Valley where the tastings are still free and relatively untouristed. We had scheduled the trip during the hottest day in a notable summer heat wave that killed 130 people. Try drinking red wine and wandering the desert. It's like sweating phosphate-laced delirium. When the day was over, we found ourselves a cold diner and a blueberry malt. I remember a woman rushing in the front door, her white blouse soaked with what appeared to be an entire glass of Napa's finest, dripping with sweat and tears, slipping across the greasy floor toward the bathroom in the back of the diner. That could have been me, I thought. And it probably was.

I have often puzzled about the evolutionary mechanisms that allow a species to slow-cook itself, to foul its nest as we have. Certainly there ought to be an adaptive principle that can pull us out of this mess. But then I think of grapes and wine, and the fact that the last of the yeasties to dine on the grape sugars eventually drowns in its own waste when the alcoholic brew reaches that magical 12% mark. It probably makes perfect sense at the time. Blind to the signs of the end, the process predictably runs its course. Perhaps God is preparing for a party at his great winery in the sky.

Arrival: Militainment, Inc.

2006-09-13T14:08:00.000-07:00

I'm dusting it off the ol' apocalicious board to announce the completion of Militainment, Inc. - at least a rough cut. See previous post if you need context. Right now the thing is in eight sections, but it will soon have an opening bumper with theme song and all the accoutrements.

I'll be cleaning these up and updating them soon, so there's a version 2.0 on the way. Each is anywhere from 11-20min in length; about 110 minutes total. I welcome comments as I'm cleaning them up, especially picky little things. We are looking at several potential distribution routes. Any suggestions in this regard would be welcomed as well. Thanks and enjoy.

download

A Flag to Burn

2006-09-11T10:05:00.000-07:00

Last night I attended a flag burning. Athens' most interesting gallery had an opening featuring anti-authoritarian themed works from a variety of artists. This included a charred corpse in the sand manufactured out of melted green army men, a 15-foot high mushroom cloud with a rope ladder hanging out of it (presumably a cross-reference to heaven), and a performance of a eulogy mourning the death of America (and our aspirations of human rights) at the hands of a primitive authoritarian element.

Later on in the night, the attendees were invited outside to listen to an a capella Star Spangled Banner and the burning of a lighter fluid soaked flag - "as a celebration of the freedom that we have to do so...for now." Others were invited to throw smaller flags in the fire. The reactions were varied. The crowd stood in silence. Some people left. One lady said that it brought tears to her eyes. The event was marked with a strange anticlimax, though.

The sense was due, I think, to a broader process of the banalization of the flag in the larger culture. On one hand, the post-911 flag is ubiquitous - stamped on everything but the toilet paper. This might signal the increased importance of the flag as an object of veneration. But this use has diluting effect, too. No longer is the family flag flown and taken down each night, folded, and burned ceremoniously at the end of its life. Now every SUV is marked with a series of magnetic "loyalties," one of which is probably the US flag. (Another might be one's favorite sports team logo. At Penn State, they managed to conserve space on the tailgate by merging the two.) A million tattered plastic car window flags have flown into roadside ditches. I find them there all the time on my walks. Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph Lauren have most successfully wringed the recognizability capital out of the flag, but they are certainly not the only ones.

In the famous Texas v. Johnson flag burning case, which ruled against the vague Texas statute prohibiting flag burning, the justices debated the idea of descecration. They came to agree that that descecration required something venerable in the first place. Makes sense. The problem now is that the flag burning amendment debated in congress every Flag Day is in danger of becoming increasingly meaningless. I wouldn't be surprised if the issue goes away completely. This is not for lack of veneration, but rather a change in the relationship between flag and citizen. The new relationship is a symptom of the corporatization of civil life - that a flag exists not as a object that symbolizes a set of common values, but rather an object of consumption that expresses the most primitive (go, team) kind of loyalty. In short, the flag, that symbol of both the greatest (of democratic aspirations) and the worst (of nationalist imperialism), has been all but bled dry of its significance.

When the last bit of charred flag dropped off the pole, the person with the candle said very matter-of-factly, "This flag was made in China." For better or worse, I long for the days when we had a flag worth burning.

Serious Rock N Roll

2006-09-02T11:10:00.000-07:00

The art of tongue in cheek. Jaik Willis. I met this guy about a year ago. A friend of a friend of a wife. Seemed nice enough. Listen to this song.

Coming Soon: Militainment, Inc.

2006-06-25T10:19:00.000-07:00

In about a month, I expect to have a finished version of a video documentary I'm making regarding the convergence of war and popular culture. I'm calling it "Militainment, Inc." It's quite a big solo project, consisting of perhaps 300 television clips and voiceover, music, etc. The video will be about 90 minutes, divided up into nine, ten minute sections, which will facilitate classroom use.

1. The War Movie. This looks at the TV war as a spectacle meant for a cinematic-like consumption. The re-emergence of explicit cooperation between Hollywood and the Pentagon. The manufacture of "instant history" in a series of made for TV events, such as Shock and Awe, the Saddam Statue felling, and the Jessica Lynch story as well as the war movie soundtrack. Also looks at the manufacture of the enemy, especially Saddam Hussein, and the time tested methods of demonization.

2. The Clean War. Briefly examines the history of war presentation since Vietnam, the "Vietnam Syndrome" and attempts to minimize the appearance of human destruction. Recurring patterns by which the clean war appears on television during the 2003 invasion. The Dehumanization of Destruction. Contradictions of the clean war, and how war is produced as a consumable event.

3. Technofetishism. Examines the worship of weapons as a mode for consuming militainment. "Seeing through" weapons and the visual positioning of the viewer. The aestheticizing of weapons. Depicting high tech weapons as morally superior to low tech.

4. Reality TV. Looks at the history of embedded reporting and its emergence from a Pentagon/ABC experiment in reality TV called "Profiles from the Front Line." Also goes through a number of other reality TV events from 2000-2005. Explores the significance of reality TV as a metaphor for embedded reporting.

5. Spectator Sports. Explores the convergence of sports (extreme sports and traditional sports) in war discourse. Sports metaphors in war news coverage. The appearance of military themes and programs surrounding sporting events such as the Super Bowl. The "extreme sports" motif in the Army of One recruitment campaign.

6. Toys. Looks at the War Movie as it is expressed in toys, both for children and adults. The explosion in popularity of toys taking themes directly from television.

7. The Video Game War. Investigates the medium of the video game and its convergence with television news, military recruiting, and real world events. Explores the ways in which TV news resembles real time play as well as the ways that video games are taking on the themes, style, and content of 24 hour news channels - as well as the games like Kuma/War that claim they are a news service. Also examines the military's use of the America's Army game for recruitment.

8. Time Crunch. Examines the integration of homefront and battlefield as an overall theory of militarism (with reality TV and video games as exemplars). The history of "real time" coverage is discussed along with its relationship to democratic deliberation. This section examines the rhetorics of time - especially the appearance of the countdown clock in the 2003 Iraq invasion - as a way of understanding the implications of "real time" coverage. It is argued here that the obsessive focus on time forecloses the possibility for democratic deliberation.

9. The Future of Democracy. Argues that the role of the citizen is policed and channeled. Dissent is often criminalized or portrayed as a social disease to be quarantined. Strict definitions for who can speak about war are enforced (no one but administrative officials or soldiers). Democratic deliberation is replaced by integration into the spectacles of militainment. Examines strategies for reclaiming a critical citizenship.

*******

So watch for it. I will be posting links for samples of the film soon. I have about half the video in rough cut form now. Polished vignettes are forthcoming. Colleagues and I plan to seek distribution through a few major outlets that do critical media videos, and the film will probably go out to a couple of festivals. If you have ideas for distribution, let me know. This is my first foray into this genre. We are looking to start a critical media center here at UGA to help facilitate this kind of critical exploration.

The Kingdom of Sunshine

2006-06-24T21:06:00.000-07:00

I'm here in Sioux Falls, SD at a coffee shop called Black Sheep listening to my lovely Kate Morrissey do a little show (see link on right). We are making our way across the U.S. to Palo Alto, CA for the summer to teach at a Stanford program for gifted high schoolers. Sioux Falls is a very cosmopolitan town. The Ellis Island of the Midwest. A big Ethiopian population, and good Ethiopian food.

Here's something good we can do. The U.S. is propping up a murderous dictatorial regime in Ethiopia and has been giving the dictator, Meles Zenawi, over a billion dollars a year in military aid since he came to power fourteen years ago. He is the biggest recipient of U.S. military aid in the Sub-Sahara. The house is now in the process of reviewing this "aid" as part of HR 4423. This nascent bill needs your support. Urge your congressperson to cosponsor this bill. And sign this petition. You can read about the human rights violations that are being committed with your US tax dollar, but here's a little bit from the Human Rights Watch Ethiopia overview page.

******
Key International Actors
Ethiopia is considered an essential partner of the United States in its "war on terrorism," and Washington has generally been unwilling to apply meaningful pressure on the Ethiopian government over its human rights record. The U.S. suspects Islamic extremist groups are hiding in bordering areas of Somalia, and sometimes inside Ethiopia itself. The U.S. military, operating primarily out of a base in Djibouti, cooperates closely with the Ethiopian armed forces in counterterrorism efforts and capacity building work. The United States is also the largest donor of bilateral aid in Ethiopia.

Political Repression
Government officials and security forces in much of Ethiopia make routine use of various forms of human rights abuse to deter and punish dissent. For more than a decade, authorities in the country’s vast Oromia region have used exaggerated concerns about armed insurgency and “terrorism” to justify the torture, imprisonment and sustained harassment of their critics and even ordinary citizens. Student protests in 2004 at Addis Ababa University and in secondary schools throughout Oromia led to the arrest of hundreds of students, many of whom were mistreated while in custody. Ever since the protests and throughout 2005, regional officials in Oromia have gone to oppressive lengths to monitor and control the speech and conduct of students and teachers alike.

******

Of course, the Bush administration rhetoric about aiding democratic movements in the world is nonsense. The empire much prefers a dictator like Zenawi to true democratic self rule. Ethiopia is virgin territory for the mining, and Zenawi is happy to enrich his regime and Western transnational companies. All he asks in return is military aid so that those who think that the Ethiopian people should claim their own wealth can be terrorized into submission. Last time they checked with an election, in 2005, this was about 90% of the population. Zenawi did not like this and decided to chase the independent election overseers out of the country and burn all the ballots. Nearly the entire print, radio, and television media apparatus was thrown in jail along with the winning candidates. Not very democratic, one would think. Yet, for the U.S., Ethiopia remains a vital ally in the war on terror. Hmmm.

Israeli Lobby

2006-05-01T22:07:00.000-07:00

If you've seen the documentary about Al Jazeera, Control Room, you may remember an acerbic "independent journalist" arguing with a blue-eyed marine press liaison. I had the opportunity to see the acerbic journalist, Ahhmahed Schleifer, give a talk here at UGA recently. (That blue-eyed marine, Joshua Rushing, incidentally, has joined Al Jazeera and now hosts his own show. Also at this talk I met the 2003-2006 CNN Arabic translator. I recognized his voice from 2003 news clips that I'm editing right now into a video/documentary about consuming war. Small world.)

Anyway....
Schleifer gave a somewhat nonconfrontational presentation regarding reporting tendencies of the U.S. press when it comes to Middle Eastern politics. His rather simplistic analysis argued that two filters determine the western press picture of the Middle East. The first, he said, is access. We have more sympathy toward westernized states due to access and sheer point of view of the camera. Second, he said that suicide bombings create good news because, essentially, if it bleeds, it leads. I found his analysis rather conventional and unsatisfying given that he has had so much experience covering Middle Eastern conflict. So I asked him this question: "Americans do not seem to have a point of reference for understanding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There is no sense that there is even an occupation, that Israel has all the guns, and that anywhere from 4 to 7 times as many Palestinians are dying of F16 strikes and bombs than Israelis getting blown up in pizza parlours. What accounts for this? It can't be 'access,' because Israel has a relatively free press. And there is plenty of violence to satisfy the blood thirstiness of the camera, so this can't be the reason either. What is it?"

His soft, hand-wringing answer was: "There is a very powerful Israeli lobby in the U.S., and this puts a tremendous amount of pressure on journalists to report the right things lest they be labeled anti-semitic. But this fact is so obvious that it goes without saying."

Afterward, many people thanked me for asking the question, even though the answer was "so obvious" that I didn't need to ask. I have run into this "Israeli lobby" argument in a few places, notably in the Media Education Foundation's wonderful documentary, Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land, where they cite organizations like CAMERA and AIPAC as comprising important filters alongside corporate/state strategic interests in the Middle East (i.e. Israel as U.S. mililtary outpost). I have been a little hesitant to grant much credence to this argument. Who wants to be labeled an anti-semite and end up like Norman Finkelstein, shunned? Only he can't be an anti-semite because of his Jewish ethnicity. For him, they bring out the old Christian epithet "self-hating Jew." You might check out his book, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History.

Here's what I'm leading up to. Recently a couple of reputable professors, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, published a little piece about the Israel lobby in the London Review of Books. It had been turned down at several other publications. The piece has received attention of all kinds. Here's an article about its impact in The Nation. The politics surrounding the bare mentioning of an Israeli lobby are quite enough to make your head spin. But this fact, strangely, does not keep Fox News from writing a story about it, even though they have adopted the language of these lobby groups in their insistant use of "homicide bombers" among other things.

NeoCon CrackUp

2006-05-01T21:54:00.000-07:00

I heart Stephen Colbert. Two very gutsy moments. Wanna see?

Stephen at the White House Correspondent's Dinner giving the keynote speech.
Quicktime Vid.

Stephen putting William Kristol's feet to the flames.
Comedy Central Vid.

On a side note...
I don't want to be dropping names or anything, but a very strange thing happened to me a few days ago. William Kristol apparently paged through my reading packet for my special topics course "Exploring Media and the War on Terror." I wasn't there, but he reportedly "liked it." I was very disappointed to hear this since I have been campaigning like mad to get on David Horowitz's Most Dangerous Professors List.

Conjuring the Devil

2006-04-08T11:53:00.000-07:00

V for Vendetta, the new Wachowski Bros. graphic-novel-turned-film, was panned by nearly everyone for being ham-fisted and overly stylized. It seemed like the smart people in my life liked it quite a bit, though, at least the more anarcho-minded of them. Kate and I laid down our $7. Seemed like the right thing to do given that all the comic book geeks have been hipified and euphemized by the Jamesonian pomo "graphic novel."

The film is gorgeous in many ways, and there are some arresting moments, such as the domino scene, a Wachowski device that gets me every time. And there are some very clever plot change-ups. The Guy Fawkes dionysian mask metaphor was really exquisite. And the Benny Hill slapstick scene is precious, but I won't spoil it for you.

Presumably, the film "calls into question" what it means to be a "terrorist" by casting the character as a "freedom fighter" in a techno-totalitarian Britain. People claim that the film is a "courageous" allegory for these tense times. The narrative form of the film, however, plays into the rhetorics of the War on Terror. In other words, the film is not a rewriting of the WoT script, but rather an underscoring.

Let's consider God and the Devil for a moment. We could say that there is no God without Satan, and as such, the two were conceived in the same Zoroastrian moment. In like manner, Christians need the existence of Satanists, largely penning them into existence with a whole genre of satanic panic books and 20/20 specials. Apparently some misguided individuals are happy to take this absurdist role and write farcical texts like the Satanic Bible, which finds its greatest success as a prop in Christian "Culture War" speeches. Christianity in many respects is a history of conjuring the devil and convincing the world of His immanent threat.

The War on Terror is a history of conjuring the devil, too - of a worldwide terrorist network led by the uncatchable Dark Prince himself, who is motivated by raw hate and resentment for being cast out of the Mall of America. The closest we can come to him is his #2 man (whom we have nabbed at least a dozen times). If Bin Laden were to be caught, which is unlikely, he would necessarily have to be invented again. Of course, we are inventing Bin Ladens all the time. The supposed Iraqi-Al Qaeda mastermind, Al Zarkawi, is even more ghostly than Bin Laden. Journalist Robert Fisk, the storied war correspondent for The Independent, questions whether Zarkawi really "exists."

Let's take one more example, since the WoT is as much a domestic discourse as an international one. Consider the figure of the black block anarchist in televised scenes of domestic dissent. This is the masked figure scrapping with black-clad SWAT police, spitting, burning road debris, and kicking in the Starbucks window. The 1999 WTO "Battle of Seattle" burned this figure into the American psyche. Now the black block anarchist says, "Don't just stand there with your signs, do something!" And when the windows get kicked in, the news cameras are more than happy to oblige. The proliferation of images of the violence of domestic dissent has legitimized dissent's criminalization. The figure of the black block, in other words, is necessary for the War on Terror to be a war on dissent.

Back to V for Vendetta. The protagonist,"V," is an underground, black-clad man in a Guy Fawkes mask - pale skin, pointed goatee, and a goulish smile: a dead ringer for Satan. His opposite, played by John Hurt, is a Hitleresque visage on a 1984 big screen, Chancellor Sutler. V traipses around town pontificating and blowing things up. Privately, the Chancellor is telling his staff that they gotta catch him. Publicly, on the state-owned TV station, V's acts are downplayed as accidents or pre-planned demolitions. The people dismiss the TV news as propaganda.

Note that the that this supposed critical allegory reverses the logics of the War on Terror. The WoT does not publicly translate terrorist acts as accidents. Rather, Bin Laden is ascribed near magical powers, such that his role in natural disasters has to be practically disproven. And clearly the administration is not concerned with catching Bin Laden, finding the villain much more valuable alive and scheming. After all, without the Dark Shadow, there is no God-King Bush.

The film reiterates rather than criticizes the narrative of the WoT, albeit by taking us on a devilish and pyromaniacal pleasure cruise. But we are already asked to do this in the WoT. We are asked to "play" the terrorist and dream up the most spectacular destructive public acts. We are asked to never again fall victim to the "failure of imagination" by the 9/11 council. We read fantasy novels about the worst possible scenarios of water contamination and dirty bomb radiation. In the same manner as the gothic satanic panic expose asks Christians to fantasize about unspeakable evil, the citizen in the WoT is asked to fantasize about what Bin Laden might do next, to out-imagine Him, to ascribe to Him the unstoppable force that will be met with the immovable object of a crystallizing fascist government.

At the climax of V for Vendetta, V stokes a popular revolution by blowing up Parliament. It is a fantastic explosion with fireworks and music. We cheer that we have overcome the powers that be. The explosion follows a series of Hollywood onscreen explosions of symbols of republican modernity - the White House, the Legislature. In this sense, it follows the Zeitgeist: the displacement of democratic institutions with corporate feudalism. After all, this is the humanist critique of the black block postmodernists: that the pomo left has deconstructed democracy along with everything else, throwing the baby of justice out with the bathwater of oppression. The Nietzschean visage of V is the very picture of the adolescent anarchist so craved by fascist image-makers. V does the dirty work; he dissolves parliament with a smile. So did Hitler. So did Napoleon. So did Caesar. And now the Bush administration is doing everything it can to weaken and make irrelevant every organ of democratic participation. The Neo-Con leadership is now steeped in pomo language about "manufacturing reality" and Bush's cronies are writing books about him with titles like Rebel in Chief. Maybe he and V can get together and blow up Parliament.

"The establishment will spit in your face and make you fight. Because when they've got you fighting, then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don't know how to handle is nonviolence and humor." - John Lennon

Time

2006-03-02T10:24:00.000-08:00

Here's an excerpt from a piece I'm working on right now about the discourses of time in the War on Terror. The article will be a series of unpublishable vignettes.

UnReal Time…

The Iraqi desert dunes shift in the hourglass of the world’s television set, cycling with but transcending time. “Moonscape,” the war correspondent repeats into his videophone, radiating a signal up through the crystal clear dry night air to a geostationary satellite, through the switchboard of the 24-hour network, and into a million homes. Beneath his feet, blankets of white sand shelter enormous lakes of black crude, a testament to Earth’s organic prehistory. In the lo-fi crackle of the reporter’s satellite uplink videophone, whose fine components are driven by a sputtering gas generator, the world hears the contrasts of black and white, carbon and silicon, past and future. The collision of opposites yields a peculiar synthesis called “real time,” a designation whose most explosive admixture is the real time television war, where a billowing flag marked “LIVE” flies high above an advancing parade of death. In this peculiar spot on the globe, one can seemingly trace time from the Big Bang forward: from the universe of night sky bearing down on the horizon, through mineral time of the desert, beyond the liquefaction of organic time, to the protean mirages of human time. It was here, in the womb of the Fertile Crescent, that the Sumerians first “invented time,” dividing up the day into increments of twelve and bestowing the base sixty number system that survives today on the face of every clock. The reporter checks his watch. It is five thousand years later, March 19 of the year 2003 c.e. The planet’s lone superpower, whose military nearly eclipses all the remaining militaries in the world combined, marches toward Sumerian Babylon, what is now called Baghdad. The reporter has been invited along for the ride. At the helm of this awesome force is a group of intellectuals who declare the superpower to represent the “end of history.” Indeed, in only a matter of days the invasion will create the conditions by which the main store of Mesopotamian archaeological artifacts, including the first known written tablet, will be lost: looted or destroyed. Human history will have cruelly effaced its very origins.

Terrorizing Professors

2006-03-02T08:06:00.000-08:00

An astonishing 300-1000 university professors - most in the humanities -
have been killed in targetted assassinations since the Iraq invasion.

Here are a range of voices on the matter ranging from newest to oldest.
The last one, written by Robert Fiske, is a nice first hand account.

Guardian
CS Monitor
Al Jazeera
New Statesman
USA Today
Robert Fiske

In Iraq it is a mystery who is perpetrating what seems to be a campaign
of terror directed at shutting down free expression in colleges.  Up to
1000 have been killed.  All are scared.  And 3000 of them have fled the
country resulting in a "brain drain."  The Al-Jazeera article notes that
a occupation-supporting newspaper printed that a famous professor had
been killed when it turned out he was alive.  This led some to speculate
whether the killings and resultant stories are instruments of intimidation.
Other accounts suggest that this may be part of a "de-Baathification"
strategy that has been in effect since the invasion.  Still others chalk
it up to angry former students exacting revenge or religious
fundamentalists clearing out the free thinkers.

This is particularly distressing when we stop to consider that Iraq,
before 1991 especially, had one of the most learned societies in the
Middle East.  As bad as things were under Saddam, and as devastating
as the Iran-Iraq war was, Iraq had an extremely advanced civilian
infrastructure: schools and health care, in particular, were up to first
world standards.  Iraq had a reputation for some of the brightest minds
in the ME.  I remember reading stories about the 1990s, when Iraq was
under some of the harshest sanctions of the modern era.  Books were in
short supply due to the sanctions, so the Iraqis would have these famous
book bazaars, what amounted to the learned sector trading their private
book collections with one another.  Books for blocks and blocks.

This issue of targetting professors resonates with the apparent targetting
of journalists not affiliated with the U.S. military - mostly during the
initial invasion. Some have argued that the targetting may be a media
control strategy.  Reporters Without Borders monitors the issue.  So far,
79 journalists have been killed in Iraq, a number that far exceeds the
number killed in 10 or so years of the Vietnam conflict.

Al Jazeera had been bombed twice by U.S. forces, once in Afghanistan
and once at a headquarters in Basra during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In another notable case, the Palestine Hotel, the main base for about
150 unilateral (non-embedded) journalists, was fired upon by a U.S.
tank, killing two journalists and wounding many others.

In early 2005, CNN chief Eason Jordan commented at
the World Economic Forum in Switzerland that coalition forces were
intentionally targetting journalists.  To avoid tarnishing CNN's
image, Jordan resigned.  It's strange whose image gets "tarnished"
when tanks kill civilian reporters.

Professors are Terrorists

2006-02-17T07:05:00.000-08:00

Michael Berube gave a talk recently that really captures the complexity of the controversies surrounding the Horowitz-inspired attack on academic freedom. If this debate has touched you at all, read it. Aside from being an astute guy, Berube is at Penn State, which resides in the first state to pass legislation regarding classroom activities. In the end, Berube notes, the problem isn't with an attack on ideology but rather the attack on ideological pluralism.

By the way, Berube appears with Sam Richards (Go Sam!) as Penn Staters who appear in Horowitz's list of America's 101 most dangerous professors, the subject of his new book. As we know, fascists of all stripes love making lists. And of course, for some, making the list has become somewhat of a badge of honor. Horowitz receives loads of solicitations from professors begging to be added. I would like to personally congratulate Dana Cloud, who, as far as I can tell, is the only rhetorician on the list. I may not agree with everything she says, but she must be doing something right.

The Authorship Society

2006-02-15T19:45:00.000-08:00

I don't usually link to the Weekly Standard, but here's a confoundingly wierd little Ayn Randy piece by Andrew Keen on the so-called Web 2.0 revolution, what many are calling the "authorship society." Keen first takes issue with the 60's Marxian utopianism of everyone-with-their-own-multimedia-blog thinking. While this is part of a the dream of "intellectual property communists" like Laurence Lessig, it's going to "flatten" the field of art into white noise. I applaud Keen for such a wonderful image. Strangely, Keen invokes the flattening metaphor that fellow neo-con Thomas Friedman uses to describe the equalizing tendencies of so-called free trade. Now there's a change-up. So, whither this authorship society? The horrors of anarchy or the wonders of unfettered free enterprise? Perhaps Keen shows his cards: the neo-cons have never been about free enterprise. Monopoly suits them much better. Art, Keen tells us, is supposed to be made by elites like...ahem...Hitchcock and Bono, who are the best the big monopoly studios have to offer. I wish it worked like that. Unfortunately, Keen fails to recognize that Hitchcock and Bono are the exception to his exalted Culture Industry. Britney is a much more honest illustration. I think I'm beginning to figure out the strange relationship neo-cons have to art and its production. Perhaps this relationship can be summed up this way: the art must be good; it came from the big art machine!

Permanent Super Bases in Iraq

2006-02-14T11:25:00.000-08:00

There is mounting public information that the U.S. is
establishing several massive permanent bases in Iraq -
complete with neighborhoods, swimming pools and Pizza Huts.
Now we know what happened to the "reconstruction" money.
Though this is not exactly surprising, the issue of permanent bases
is going to be a rhetorical challenge for the powers that be.  It does
not fit cleanly into the story that the U.S. has plans to leave Iraq
when the government becomes stable.  Tom Engelhardt does a
 superb job gathering the issue into one place.

CS Monitor
Tom Engelhardt

Protestors are Terrorists

2006-02-13T18:39:00.000-08:00

The Pentagon has listed a group of demonstrators at the University of Southern California - Santa Cruz as a "credible threat" to national security. This is part of a much larger domestic surveillance program begun in 2005 called CIFA, what appears to be a resurrection of COINTELPRO type activities.

Next in the Long War: Iran

2006-02-13T18:21:00.000-08:00

The U.S. executive is now openly preparing to bomb Iran. 
The targets have been mapped out by special forces on
the ground, and the U.S. is readying B2 bombers for air raids. 
Seymour Hersh, you are an oracle.

Interestingly, according to world opinion, the U.S. ranks a 
close second behind Iran as "countries whose influence
in the world is mainly negative."

In other news, we are officially no longer fighting the
War on Terror (TM).  The administration has rebranded the
venture as "The Long War."  Kind of glum, don't you think?

Spies and lies (with a side of freedom fries)

2006-02-10T06:15:00.000-08:00

Remember TIA (Total Information Awareness), the zen-sounding governmental agency that was finally going to be the biggest of all the Big Brothers? Remember how they proposed to make us all safer by attempting to construct the biggest data mining and electro-surveillance program in history? Remember the comforting logo that put them out of business, at least for the moment? "Scientia est Potentia": Knowledge is Power, it says. Indeed. Whether you are Francis Bacon or Michel Foucault, we can all agree on that. On the Daily Show the other night, John Stewart put it most simply: "It seems as though the government knows increasingly more about the people, and the people know increasingly less about the government." Hmm... always reminds me of the symbolic economy of the police officer's mirrored sunglasses. To me that is what the police state looks like: a one way mirror.

Now TIA has been resurrected in the form of ADVISE. The Christian Science Monitor did a nice article about it.* This time the acronym is so awkward, no one can get scared (Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement). And there are no logos that might rouse the humors of the Left Behind crowd. The program has achieved its ideal state: not an invisibility, but rather an absent presence: present in its very deniability. We might be concerned for the moment about phone tapping, and Alberto Gonzales might not ever answer any questions in front of subcommittees. Electronic surveillance is a much bigger question, though, than the telephone. ADVISE concerns every aspect of life in the information economy. ADVISE is the "will to truth" of the cyberstate: the citizen soul must be accounted for, disciplined, and controlled on every possible microscopic facet, polished like a silicon jewel to be auctioned off to the highest bidder.

Wanna do ... something?

*"Christian Science Monitor" would have been a good replacement name for TIA, don't you think? I must say I'm so impressed with the CSM these past few years; they are truly one of the last good investigative outlets in mainstream news.

Electronica Ground Zero

2006-01-23T06:57:00.000-08:00

In a couple of very interesting video pieces, L.A. artist Nate Harrison chronicles the origins of the electro aesthetic. In this first piece, Harrison looks at the so-called "Amen breakbeat" and how it has entered the "collective audio unconscious" of the culture. He also investigates this 6 second sample of audio as it traverses through the sticky world of intellectual property law.

The second piece looks at how the original bass synth, the Roland TB-303, was transformed from a bass guitar substitute to the generator of the "acid house" sound we recognize today.

Addendum:
"Wargasm," originally published in Frieze, a British art journal. Music critic Simon Reynolds discusses the militarization of electronica in the 1980s and 90s - mostly in terms of the "jungle" genre, which relies almost exclusively on the Amen breakbeat. The overt themes (lyrics, song names), the apocalyptic cityscapes, the sirens and minor tensions that never resolve, the discourse of 'Nam, the amphetamines and methamphetamines... It's a beautifully written article.

From the Circulation Desk

2006-01-17T08:13:00.000-08:00

This is perhaps the best blonde joke I have ever heard: the uber-metaphor for the next thousand years.

Innocence

2006-01-15T06:58:00.000-08:00

I saw the wonderful Miranda July film last night, You and Everyone We Know. If you see only one film this year... A really heartfelt piece about our sense of connection in these (dis)connected times. I would comment further, but the film's structure is so delicate and complex, that I feel that I would throw it off balance somehow by writing about it. I would suggest you watch it side-by-side with Palindromes (by Todd Solendz of Welcome to the Dollhouse).

The Horror

2006-01-15T06:51:00.000-08:00

I clipped this from the YahooNews site. Let's all take a second to think back on our memories of 2005:

AHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

Hitler's Favorite Movie

2005-12-31T08:52:00.000-08:00

On the way down to Central America, American Airlines treated Kate and I to an extended layover in Dallas-Ft. Worth, the Days Inn, and the local mall. I wanted to see the new remake of King Kong, but the film was three hours long, and we would miss the shuttle back to the hotel. So we ate burritos while the mall's Christmas psychological operations hammered the gospel of Capital into our skulls. Kong stayed with us the entire trip, though: in the jungles, in the cities. In some places, maybe Tikal (see previous entry), I half expected to see Kong. The archetypal terror and awe that I experienced as a boy watching the 1976 version was with me there as the jungle reverberated off the steep Mayan pyramidal inclines, stone angles that I somehow associate with the slope and prominence of the gorilla's forehead.

Kong was also with us in the space between the EuroWorld and the TwoThirdsWorld, a regard on display in the more touristed areas like Belize's Caye Caulker, which, besides being a launch pad for exploring the spectacular barrier reef, was a protected pomo mish mash market for selling the kind of generic primitivism that seems to show up at all of the hot so-called "ecotourism" sites in the world. This primitive aesthetic mostly comes in the form of carved representations of "savages" that appear to all come from the same factory no matter where you are in the world. One six foot carved ebony statue kept reappearing in Belize like a cigar-shop Indian. The statue was skinny, black, tall, dreadlocked, adorned with dried grass and husks, and in its hand was a long spear. The statue's face was twisted into an open-mouthed frown that showed off a set of sparse pointed teeth. The grotesquery was further intensified by the confounding of gender signs. Alongside the statue's apparent mascuilinity was a pair of breasts painfully bound with fibrous ropes. At the Belize airport gift shop, the statue was dressed in a t-shirt and boxer shorts (which read "Unbelizeable!"). As Kate and I waited for our plane home, we had the opportunity to witness a cross section of Belizean ecotourists - each uniformed with safari khakis and/or desert island white linens and the obligatory box of duty-free rum, each "tanned, rested, and ready" for work again. As the only English-speaking country south of the Rio Grande, certain parts of Belize are fast becoming Cancun II. This spectacle of tanned whites was emceed by the carved savage, who held a sign that transformed the entire little airport scene into a tidy metaphor for the whole post-colonial economy. The sign read in pidgin English: "I im di native god uv stress. You tek mi pitcha; I tek you stress." And this is exactly what happened.

One would think this symbolic economy would abate - that the Victorian-era rhetoric of savagery would be smoothed by a multicultural globalization. Instead, the opposite appears to be the case. The smoothing effects of global capital have produced a desire for the savage as a commodity whose "authenticity" must be increasingly intensified. Thus we end up with a vision of the hypersavage that never existed even in our wildest Victorian sexual panics. But this savage is not to be feared as such, but rather pursued and captured on film to demonstrate the authenticity of one's own spiritual quest. The savage becomes Lacan's small a object, the sublime mother object of reconciliation, the divine androgyne, the ultimate palliative for the dissociative life in Capital's Cubicles. You tek mi pitcha; I tek you stress.

On our first night back home, Kate and I paid our fifteen bucks to see King Kong in all its racist (and I mean Birth-of-a-Nation racist) glory - from the soot-black island natives and their gorrilla king to the blue sparkle in Naomi Watts' Aryan eye. (The 1933 version was reportedly Adolf Hitler's favorite film. Goebbles' was Snow White.) Unavoidably, Kong is a story of miscengenation panic. The surprising part was that the new film conspicuously de-eroticized the 1976 version. The director, Peter Jackson (of Lord of the Rings fame), came up with some clever ways around the patent racism of the storyline, too. The hypersavagery of the natives was so overboard, for a certain audience it must have read like a spoof. Moreover, the film utilizes a flicker effect that gives it a technicolored aesthetic, which contributes to its forgivability. That is, the film simulates an archaeological artifact that serves the same purpose as, say, '50s iconography on a pack of cigarrettes.

King Kong 2005 is a dizzying technological feat. In real dollars, it is the fifth most expensive film in history. There were at least 15 people, according to the credits, that were responsible for dressing the gorilla model's fur for two years. The film is an unrelenting thrill ride, and I will say I came away with my mind at least partially "blown." This is a film whose visceral aspect should position it very well for the global market. The epic power of the film comes precisely from the technological drama. The film itself, in many ways, is about filmic technology. The expeditionary team that hunts Kong down happens to be a film crew (unlike the film's predecessors). The action is mediated through a film producer's hand crank camera, whose aesthetic is reproduced for us on the big screen. Kong exists in technological layers - a movie-watcher's movie. Better yet, it is a movie producer's movie, seen through the filmmaker-character's eyes, perfectly adapted to the new culture of technological authorship - of individual tourist authors and video travelogues. This is a film for the Range Rover 80mm digital cam sharpshooter who occupies the most privileged position in the global economy: the god's eye that proves its omnipotence in the spectacle of its irresistable panopticism.

What is most striking and beautiful about the film is its symmetry. While it is both about race, gender, and technology, its umbrella theme is global interpenetration and its attendant disasters. On the one hand we have the island, a Hobbsian nightmare of nature at her most opportunistic. At its acutest, the chaos expresses itself in the destruction of the filmmaker's camera after a mighty fall into a ravine. More catastrophic than death, the loss of the captured images represents the ultimate tourist catastrophe (no pictures, honey!). Here at the nadir of the technological narrative, the camera itself is sacrificed in a mucoid crevice where the crew is swarmed with prehistoric insects. The symmetry is balanced later, of course, by Kong's fall from the Empire State Building after the technological apotheosis of Kong's swatting the airplanes. Of course, "It wasn't the airplanes; it was beauty what killed the beast" goes the line. The undeniable power and brilliance of the film is the unspoken mediation of the entire story through the eyes of the filmmaker, the girl, Kong, and the rest. It is entirely a story of the eye, of the eye's seduction and destruction. The camera is seduced and destroyed by the spectacle of the beast; the beast is seduced and destroyed by the spectacle of the girl/skyscraper.

In the 1976 version, the crew was an oil expedition, and Kong climbed the World Trade Center, a project finished in 1973 during the oil crisis. Oil and the towers have had obvious symbolic ties through 9/11. In Nietzschean terms, the dionysian-apollonian symmetry of the 1976 film is expressed in oil and architecture. On the dionysian end, the film portrays oil that literally springs forth from the heart of savagery, bubbling up through the ground during the natives' sacrificial orgy, even becoming part of the ritual itself. On the apollonian end, we are met by the Twin Towers, a technical triumph launched by this same black crude - towers that were the ultimate and perhaps final expression of Le Corbusier's architectural modernism. In contrast, the 2005 Kong plays out a symbolic economy for the postmodern, post 9/11 world where the towers have dissolved into columns of light and video image. That is, the new economy works not with the materiality of oil and steel, but rather with the immateriality of meaning. This is exemplified by the new resource of value - exoticism itself - which enters the logics of the apollonian apparatus, the corporate mediascape. The commodity system has turned inward to the harvesting of meaning (in other words, the organization of cybernetic capital). So to answer the question "Where was King Kong when we need him?": he's gone Hollywood.

Por el Nortamericanos

2005-12-22T09:02:00.000-08:00

I largely think that travel blogs are self-indulgent, but in lieu of a mass-email... an impersonal virtual postcard!

Kate and I are in Livingston, Guatemala, a sleepy little port town, taking a break for a couple of days. Here are some highlights of the trip so far:

1. Some spectacular reef snorkeling in Belize's Caye Caulker, including being mobbed by 5' wingspan rays and 7' nurse sharks (who don't eat people). I learned first-hand that a ray is silky smooth, and a nurse shark is sandpapery.

2. Visited the Mayan monuments of Tikal, Guatemala. I can only describe this place as terrifyingly wonderful. The theatricism and verticality of the main square coupled with the thought of all that human sacrifice is enough to make your head spin. Plus the howler monkeys in the jungle.

3. Took some chicken buses down through Guatemala to an ecotourism spot near Poptun and stayed in a treehouse. Took a horseback ride through the jungle.

4. We are going from Livingston to Punta Gorda where we will be visting some small Mayan villages, going on some jungle hikes, and hopefully catching the 'deer dance' harvest festival. Then we will finish things off with some beach time at Placencia, Belize.

Oh, my Internet time is ticking! Wish us a gastronomically sound remainder of the trip!

Lists

2005-12-10T11:20:00.000-08:00

The online lit magazine, McSweeney's, has a section of funny lists. I just sent this one in, and you get an exclusive preview.

Phrases You Thought You Heard When Others Mentioned Twentieth-Century U.S. Presidents

Run old ray gun

Shimmy car door

Share all Darfur-ed

Er…Itch hard, Nicks on!

Who’d row ill, son?

The ardor rules if felt

Her beer too far

Fear ankle, and he rules if felt

Sure, sherbet. Oh, I hawk war putsch

Sure stub your putsch

Will he, um, shiver sunk lint in?

Tea white-eye zen hour

Jawin’ if kindred-y

Ailin’ down mange on sin

Cowfan clueless

Will he, um, owe a taffeta?

War on jihad-ing

‘Ere he is drummin’

The First Church of Disney

2005-12-08T23:01:00.000-08:00

My Rhetoric and Pop Culture large lecture is winding up. I ask students to engage in a critical/creative/performance group project to round out the course. I am again blown away by one or two stellar projects.

A good bit of the course attempts to tease out the significance of the brand when it comes to pop culture - especially the "megabrand," which colonizes a segment of the lifeworld. As such, one group decided to do a performance piece outside the student union, the Tate Center, where a lot of the touring campus preachers do their thing. Instead, this group performed a 25min sermon extolling the virtues of Disney as a spiritual path - complete with communion, blessings, and stories of the "promised land" (Celebration, FL). They call themselves the "Mickey Mousenaries," and you can find video of the performance here. You won't be disappointed. (The full 25min, 110MB windows media file is available, too.)

You can find the entire list of project links here.

Trademarking the Flag

2005-12-02T14:06:00.000-08:00

One of the jammers at Artmark has apparently trademarked any U.S. flag design with 51 or more stars. I've been trying to get a hold of him/her for a possible project on the flag and the burgeoning discourse of "brand America." The increasing dilution of the flag seems to be reflected in the increasing meaninglessness of flag burning and attempts to ban it. In any case, sorry Puerto Rico (and Iraq). Perhaps we'll have to resort to the Culture Jammer's parody flag. The sun never sets...

Imagine This

2005-12-01T20:17:00.000-08:00

An Aussie who goes by the name of Wax Audio has released a number of cut-up audio tracks, one of which has gone vvvery vvviral. It's called "Imagine This". The track selectively slices Bush's words and overlays them on Lennon's "Imagine" and "Give Peace a Chance." It's brilliant stuff and is available free of charge. Enjoy.

The Cost of Freedom

2005-11-30T18:56:00.000-08:00

Fox News has a new financial show called "The Cost of Freedom". It's interesting that this ought to show up now when people are more seriously considering the cost of our involvement in Iraq. Here I'm assuming the usual WWII understanding of the phrase, and it fits right into the whole amnesiac rhetoric of casting Iraq as Nazi Germany. A new genre: talking points smuggled into show titles. But the phrase is being thrown around in some strange ways. First, it seems to be a rather dire name for a show about money and business. There is a sense in which the businessperson, rather than the soldier, is the martyr for freedom.

Second is the sense that freedom is only available to those who can afford it, that freedom is no longer priceless. Freedom costs money. Those who can afford to get out of New Orleans, for example, have it. Zygmunt Baumann identifies the ability to travel as the new class division in the globalist new millenium. This ethos is signified in a million shiny car ads.

Finally, there is perhaps the most bizarre, yet seemingly dominant meaning of the phrase, which is that freedom itself is bad for business. I say dominant because you can read it as a simple association of two words. Freedom costs, it hurts. That is, "the cost of freedom" is code for the value system of the advancing corporate-fascist state. The kind of freedom enshrined in the Bill of Rights, for example, must be stamped out. Freedom, if left to its idle hands, has a habit of questioning wartime profiteering, demanding all kinds of inefficiencies like public parks and Social Security and Freedom of Information Acts. The citizen of the corporate-fascist state does not have freedom (though it is said that one may acquire it for a price); this citizen rather has duties to The Economy, to suit up in a designer hairshirt of debt every year in a bizarre ritual mix of aceticism and hedonism to please the latest avatar-god, Santa. (And no, you do not have to wish for it because someday it will be Christmas all year long!) Now I think I truly understand the phrase "Freedom Isn't Free" when I see it on a car window next to a decal of a child peeing on Brand X. The hidden meaning is plain to those who do not understand irony. Freedom isn't free anymore.

Chavez and Good Deeds

2005-11-30T15:55:00.000-08:00

When Rita and Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast and brought the question of poverty to the image market; when oil refineries were trashed, gas prices thrust into orbit, and oil companies were making a windfall off dire speculation; and when Pat Robertson was calling for Hugo Chavez's assassination - this is when Chavez suggested that he might offer poor Americans cheap gas and heating oil through the Venezuelan state-owned PdVSA (Petroleum de Venezuela) and its US outlets, 7-11 and Citgo. At the time, he was very nearly laughed off the second page. How would he accomplish this even if he were serious? He must be just trying to rub Bush's political problems in his face.

But Chavez is following through with his announcement. The New York Daily News has been on the case. Chavez revealed the details of his pilot plan in September, which was to start shipments to poor districts in Chicago and New York Citgos. According to the Daily News, shipments of cheap fuel will begin arriving in the Bronx this week.

With gasoline prices still very high, this act ought to play very interestingly in the media. Now, for the past nine months, we have seen a ramping up of Chavez news activity. He has been on the Bush/Oilies hit list for some time now, and this year, at least before Iraq/Hurricane/Plame public opinion went south, the Bushies had been mentioning him quite often. Chavez will remain on the edge of the public radar for a while. When the time is right again, I suspect that the powers that be will engage in a full-on campaign of demonization.

Chavez knows this, and he is staging a Robin Hood spectacle as a preemptive attack. He is aware that the real battle is the rhetorical one - who can claim the higher moral ground. With the spectre of poverty rearing its un-American head and Chavez emerging as the only one who seems to care, it will be tough to turn him into a wood-chipping Saddam Hussein. And the whole thing is polished with nothing less than an ironic coat of crude oil.

But perhaps this will only infuriate the wealthier majority in the country who have to pay regular price to fill up their behemoth SUV's. They are the ones you don't want to rattle. They will run your ass over on their way to church.

Christopher Hitchens

2005-11-29T15:53:00.000-08:00

MRZine recently published a lovely piece by Richard Seymour about the psychopathy of Christopher Hitchens. For me, Hitchens has stopped being a bogeyman turncoat and become more of a curiosity. I get the sense that Hitchens is pulling some kind of Andy Kaufmann stunt on the world, and it is sheer brilliance. Or he is practicing to be a chameleon in the next life. Or he is some kind of razor-tongued alien sent back from the future to out post all the post toasty lefties who consider politics irrelevant and futile. Or perhaps like Dennis Miller, Hitchens made a cold, calculated (but misinformed) wager to be on the winning team...

And because Hitchens resembles and has some of the same manerisms as a very good friend of mine, Mike Wagner, I'm willing to cut him some slack. Sorry, Mike.

The wily, opportunistic Hitchens

The wily, principled Wagner

The Psychological Effect

2005-11-29T14:06:00.000-08:00

I've been listening to the torture debates since McCain led the Senate in passing the amendment to the defense spending bill that banned torture, a ban that Cheney opposed. All of the debates, of course, come back to Alan Dershowitz's "ticking clock" scenario where a bomb is set to go off at the Super Bowl, the CIA has the suspect, and, well... I don't think this torture debate is going to end with the McCain amendment. The executive is going to continue to press for policy that will grant amnesty if the executive is caught in a high-profile torture case that people care about. We already know that U.S. torture practices are systemic and historic.

Now, on mainstream TV news, the answer to the ticking clock argument is always the same: 1) Torture is not something an enlightened state does, and 2) Torture doesn't work. Here the "debate" ends. The enlightened state argument is trumped by the magnitude of the imminent explosion, a utilitarian (Enlightenment) appeal. The argument that torture "doesn't work" has a little more weight. But then again, if a bomb is going to go off, who cares if suspects will say darned near anything under torture? The debate ends on the tacit conclusion that torture is better than nothing. Might as well torture the hell out of the guy who is going to ruin the halftime show.

There is one response to the ticking clock argument that I have yet to see. Say a person buys the line that torture "doesn't work." Why would a snarly VP then care about the right to excercise the torture option? I'm dumbfounded that those straw-man lefties on TV don't jump up to fill this gaping logical hole. The answer is that torture DOES WORK very well. Though it may not be good for extracting correct information, it is very good for extracting confessions, a steady stream of which the administration desperately needs to convince the electorate to submit to the plutocracy. Torture has also been quite effective in human history for terrorizing a population into submission - a handy tool for running an empire. Torture works quite well for a number of things, just nothing that will protect the nation from a ticking bomb.

Like the continued U.S. use of banned-by-treaty munitions (depleted uranium, cluster bombs, white phosphorous, napalm, land mines), torture is a handy tool whose effects reach beyond only the bodies of the tortured. Like the napalm used in Fullajah, torture "works."

Col. James Alles, commander of the U.S. Marine Air Group II. "We napalmed both those bridge approaches," he said. "Unfortunately, there were people there … you could see them in the cockpit video. … It's no great way to die. The generals love napalm. It has a big psychological effect."

Anarchy in the USA

2005-10-28T17:04:00.000-07:00

Kate and I took a walk in the park today. We saw this on a minivan in the parking lot. So we gawked for a second and took a photo. Though at first blush a hilarious oxymoron, the scene seemed to make more and more sense, especially with the current booooooondoggle. The postmodern president. Beyond ideology. The death of law. Down the rabbit hole. The end of history, indeed. Put it on your car!

Plame Game III

2005-10-25T06:55:00.000-07:00

I don't think we would have had a Plame Game at all if Katrina and Harriet hadn't blown through. But here we are. It looks as though the principle investigator Fitzgerald is going to get into the source of the forged yellowcake documents. When we find that out, I believe we'll have a kind of Rosetta Stone for reading the NewCon architecture. And Bush's primary alibi - that the WMD claims were made in "good faith" - will be blown to bits. Adding fuel to the fire is Dennis Kucinich, who is demanding the release of documents regarding the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) whose job it was to market the Iraq war.

UPI has come out with a nice synopsis of the situation. I don't often make predictions, but I would humbly refer you to this.

Support the Troops

2005-10-22T14:35:00.000-07:00

Here's some quality satire from Bob Odenkirk, who actually ate a yellow ribbon to support the troops.

Excerpt:

When this thing began, I was a yellow-bellied liberal. As Karl Rove pointed out, my initial suggestion immediately after 9-11 was to send therapists to the Middle East. I wanted to try to “understand” the people who committed this horrifying deed. I wanted to hold their hands, pat them on the back, and send them “we’re sorry” cards and shipments of “Peeps” Easter candies in a “we heart you” basket. In fact, I was the one who suggested we get Dr. Phil on Al jazeera, daily. I wanted to send a delegation of children over there to make a giant clay sculpture entitled “Peace Lump”. I wanted to start a dialogue, whatever that is. I remember thinking, wrongly, “Well, this is a part of the world which we have used and used and where we have neglected to engage with it’s people in a serious manner and the wave of anger and resentment they have for us must run deep and strong. Probably we will have a long slog of engagement and adjustment and entrenchment ahead of us over there to win them over.” How stupid of me.

Silicon and the Electric God

2005-10-22T09:04:00.000-07:00

The Mormons have been faithfully visiting my house every month for a while. I grew up Mormon, and they have me on a list. I asked the missionaries once about their strangest door-to-door experiences. One of them told me that a resident once proclaimed a belief in electricity as a pantheological force. I went inside and grabbed a book I had picked up serendipitously at the library called The Theology of Electricity by the German Ernst Benz. We all had an uneasy laugh.

The book traces the history of the discovery of electricity and how it was integrated into Christian and cabbalist theology. For example, in Genesis, before the creation of light, "the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters" - 1:2. An 18th Century Moravian theologian and scientist Prokop Divisch suspected that the Spirit of God was indeed an electrical force moving upon the electrolytes of the salty oceans. The history of the lightning rod was also great. Preachers had long used the striking of buildings (churches, especially) as evidence that God was angry and people should shape up. The lightning rod was therefore seen as "playing God" in the eighteenth-century mind.

Apart from Divisch, the book details accounts by Benjamin Franklin around the time of his kite trick, Franz Mesmer, and an earlier Jesuit figure named Athanasius Kircher, all of whom had a profound interest in magnetism and electricity. What is most striking is that these three figures had a simultaneous and obsessive interest in the resonance of glass. Mesmer would accompany his mystical healing ceremonies by stroking variously tuned wine glasses. Kircher, too, in his theories of "musical magnetism" had a set of experimental glass goblets. Franklin eventually invented the glass harmonica, quite apart from any knowledge of these other two.

Benz documents this seeming coincidence but does not draw any real conclusions by it. In the cybernetic age, this affinity seems prophetic. Silicon, indeed, has come to be the electrical medium. The Spirit of God is now making some transition from carbon-based life to silicon-based life.

A year or so ago, Kate and I visited a friend at Indiana University. Strolling through Bloomington, we were eventually drawn into a little shop that sold incense and bells and books on Eastern mysticism. More of an elegant little curiosity shop than a head shop. It was run by a blind man who deftly flitted around the place. While we looked around the sky outside the big bank of windows got very dark and still. The radio, between sharp blasts of static, said there was a tornado warning and to take shelter. The air became charged with the kind of potential energy that gives everything a sharp edge. The sun lit the empty street a pale yellow that glittered like stage lighting against a pitch black thunderhead. We tried to bide our time inside, carefully picking through every last piece of display merchandise: shawls, finger cymbals, twinkling Chinese balls.

I noticed that a large steel reinforced door was cracked open in the back. The shop owner told me that the place used to be a bank and that was the vault. I couldn't think of a better shelter for a tornado, so we asked him if we could stick around. He showed us the vault. Inside were a number of large glass bowls on a shelf. The man picked up a rubber mallet and a suede wand and started to play them - both by striking them and caressing them with the wand as one would play a wine glass. The bowls were various sizes and all harmonized in a deafening chord that resonated through every bone in my skeleton. At the end of it all, not one of us could or wanted to speak. I had the profound feeling of harmonization and that a word would break the harmony. We had forgotten about the tornado, even.

I bought one of the large (18") bowls and it now sits on a pedestal in my house. This one is supposedly tuned to a low C, a note, by some system or other, that corresponds to the base chakra. By itself, it is quite a powerful thing. With the slightest pressure, the suede wand can bring the bowl to a tone so singular and penetrating that I wonder if it will shatter the windows. I later found out that one cannot play two bowls at high amplitude next to one another because one of them could shatter. I often ponder the bowl as metaphor. It is fashioned after the Buddhist singing bowls that are usually smaller, made of brass, and played with a wooden wand. The singing bowls are meant to focus the mind and are often found in zendos. The bowl is a wonderful metaphor for the union of the sexes - wand and vessel. Beyond this, the glass bowl is a cyborgian metaphor of the union of flesh (suede) and silicon in vibratory bliss. Without exception, everyone who has tried to play it is transfixed by it.

But back to electricity. My original motivation for writing today was to draw attention to this fellow Athanasius Kircher, the seventeenth-century Jesuit. I have been pulled into his world in a big way lately. He was, by all accounts, the "last polymath," the last Aristotle, before Western Civilization split into its million specializations. Kircher existed at all kinds of epistemological crisis points - between alchemy and new science, Christianity and humanism. He attempted to compose an encyclopedia of human knowledge - everything from natural science, to astrology and alchemy, to literature, to theology, to even a nascent notion of evolution. He was all over the intellectual and global map. I've been reading sections of Derrida's Of Grammatology lately, and he refers to "Father Kircher" in a discussion of Kircher's attempts to linguistically systematize Chinese script, one of Kircher's better-known projects. Kircher's main interest was magnetism and the idea that the universe was magnetically sympathetic, which is an inheritance from alchemy. Walking through his world is like wandering through a curiosity shop - a shop that he erected in Rome. You can read more, but I'll excerpt from this biographical site.

As a youngster Kircher had three near-death experiences. While swimming in a forbidden pond he was swept under a mill wheel; later inadvertently he was pushed from an onlooking crowd into the path of race horses; and finally he suffered a gangrenous leg from a skating accident. The last cured suddenly after he prayed to the Blessed Virgin and it occurred to young Athanasius that he was receiving a great deal of divine protection and he did not forget these signs. In 1661 he found the remains of an ancient Marian church built by Constantine on the spot of St. Eustace's vision. He restored the place as a shrine and visited it often. Then when he died his heart was taken and buried there according to his last request. It is rather remarkable that this brilliant geometer and encyclopedist, called the "Father of Geology" and of Egyptology, founder of the first public museum and skilled in so many other branches of knowledge should reveal such simple piety.

His Kircher Museum was considered one of the best science museums in the world. Among his inventions are listed the megaphone, the pantometrum for solving geometrical problems, and a counting machine. His discoveries include sea phosphorescence as well as microscopically small organisms (germs) which transmit epidemic diseases. It was by facilitating a wide diffusion of knowledge, by stimulating thought and discussion by his vast collections of scientific information, that Kircher earned a place among the fathers of modern science and the titles of "universal genius" and "master of a hundred arts".

Unfortunately, due to some of Kircher's more outlandish ideas, he was largely written out of scientific history. One of his ideas stuck with me. Kircher noticed that the face of the sunflower always followed the sun. As such, he built a "sunflower clock" that acted like a sundial. He placed a floating pot in a pool of water and surrounded it with a circular dial. Apparently it works (though I don't really see how). Kircher claimed that the functioning of the clock was proof of his theory of "universal magnetism," a force present in the universe that renders all matter sympathetic. For Kircher, this universal magnetism was also related to the electricity that pervades all matter.

Having recently run across Kircher, I remembered that I had seen a display of his work in the Stanford University library a few years back during a teaching gig. Take a look. The collection simultaneously curious and hilarious - an enlightenment en-lightning.

(r)evolutions

2005-09-28T15:20:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking quite a bit lately about the relationship between evolution and culture. It's become somewhat of a perennial "big question." For one, we have for want of a better term, the "materialization of information," what Derrida would call "writing" in the broad sense. That is, technology has cut the earthly tethers of the simulation, and now it is increasingly meaningless to distinguish a "thing" from its representation. The symbolics of computer code occupies this threshold. Code is at once material and immaterial, operating in a threshold space that destroys this distinction. The posthumanists tell us that as the difference between artifice and reality implodes, so does the distinction between nature and culture. The mapping of the genome and the possibility of its free manipulation is perhaps the primary marker of this paradigm shift. It is only "natural" that we start asking not only whether culture is subject to natural laws, but also whether it is part of some greater Gaian development. And what are the mechanisms of these changes?

The extant attempts to reconcile nature with culture under an evolutionary framework do not seem to capture the full story. Many of these take Richard Dawkins' "selfish gene" as central to the process and culture as derivative. These theories state that either culture is a direct expression of our genes or the genes hold culture on a long leash where it can have somewhat a life of its own. Then came so-called "meme theory" where the replicator gene became a very poor analogy for understanding how ideas propagate. In the meme theory put forth by Susan Blackmore, a meme is "any attempt at imitation." Memes survive because they are, as tools, "useful." Meme theory hit a pretty solid dead end in academe, doomed from the beginning it seems by a false analogy. The language of memes continues to survive in the popular lexicon, however. "Meme" is also still a buzzword in the world of viral marketing.

Most of these theories were hatched by scientists used to seeing the world in terms of human subject-object relations - a world of tools. Instead, I think we ought to be thinking about cultural evolution in terms of "political technologies." Political technologies are symbolic systems that produce various configurations of people, and I conceive of "political" in a Foucauldian way: as a micropolitics of production. That is, culture on a grand scale produces political organs. We can conceive of these political organs much like the supercolonial anthill. What keeps the anthill solvent and the ants from just wandering off? The answer is that ant evolution is also the evolution of political technologies - probably pheremonally based. The learning of political technologies is perhaps the defining characteristic of humanity. The existence of our large brains - especially our linguistic capacity - has baffled evolutionary scientists for quite some time. But here we may have an answer. Our seemingly evolutionarily disadvantageous brains allow for complex social networks to form - for a larger "organism" (a political organ or body politic) to develop. This larger organism has an evolutionary advantage, much like the anthill as an organism has an advantage over the ant. Language and image are the primary technologies of production, but all kinds of other technologies are involved such as brick and mortar architecture, communication tech, "tools," energy flow, etc.

Let's imagine watching human history from an easy chair on the moon. We would very likely notice various competing human configurations. Some would survive and some we would watch become obsolete. Empires would rise and crumble like some strange circuitry on the surface of an orange. We would probably have no better idea of what kept these configurations solvent than if we were staring at an anthill. If we looked closer, we would find that various discourses of identity were the main mechanisms by which these political organs were constituted. Communication logics would be the stuff of which these human organelles were made. We could then say that the discourses would be the political organisms themselves, and these discourses would compete in Darwinian fashion.

In order to survive, these political organisms would have to police themselves and produce themselves. Foucault has outlined both of these processes: institutions of discipline and discourses of production, reproduction, and propagation. Foucault and Nietzsche are uniquely suited for this task given their reliance on a guiding metaphor of "geneology" with regard to knowledge structures. The problem is that Foucault is not so interested in evolution as he is very critical of any metanarrative of progress. We can cross Foucault with evolution, though, even the idea of abrupt non-linear cultural shifts, what he calls episteme. We can say that evolution is comprised of abrupt epistemic shifts if we can conceive DNA as a kind of knowledge structure. (Indeed, genome informatics are dematerializing DNA to the extent that computer code is materializing language.) The informatics of nature are always "vibrating" evolutionary biologists tell us. This idea is featured in so-called "quantum evolution" and SJ Gould's notion of "punctuated equilibrium." Nature is always in a process of overcoming itself in the Nietzschean way, always opportunistically mutating to meet changing circumstances, always ready to initiate new ecological pairings. In this same way, political technologies will also constantly vibrate. Discourses mix, self-efface, mutate. Though flesh and blood dies, the political organ lives. In the middle ages, they would say "The king is dead; long live the king," meaning that the real king was the discursive constitution of the people (the king's other body, as Ernst Kantorowicz would have it.) Thus, I think that narratives of identity that constitute political organisms (as well as the knowledge logics that animate them) have a place in the discussion of this ever evolving, living planet.

The National Guard MIA

2005-08-30T16:14:00.000-07:00

As the newspeople repeat, our hearts go out to the millions stranded in Louisiana and Mississippi. And we ponder the unimaginable environmental devastation. The Coast Guard, we are told, is on the job, but cannot satisfy the enormous demand for help. Interestingly, we hear little about the National Guard, the first and largest responder to natural disasters, on the news. For the past two years, the National Guard has been largely unavailable to fight forest fires as more than a third of the Guard has been dedicated to the war in Iraq. Now, they are unavailable for the REAL CRISIS IN THE GULF and the very LITERAL QUAGMIRE at home. The Southwest will burn, and the South will drown, with nary a peep about the MIA Guard in the wall-to-wall coverage.

Guard Stretched Thin - Washington Post, June 6, 2004. Ah, and here's someone who knows what he is talking about. And please see Ken Rufo's intelligent breakdown of the politics of Katrina.

Addendum:
I am also wondering how the "question that has been on everyone's lips," the "elephant in the living room" - that is to say, the "race and class question" - is going to pan out. I'm not confident that anyone with any real power will take it seriously. But what all this talk does provide is a framework for understanding the spectacle as a kind of "third world chaos," as network newspeople everywhere are putting it. That is, it is a picture of black anarchy (surrounded by white noise) that feeds everything from Cops to the L.A. Riots to the MTV brand hip hop. If it can't be ignored wholesale like Rwanda or Darfur, what remains is racist spectacle of misery packaged for the consumption of those who live in the other America. As Geraldo Rivera barked tonight (the fifth day, when the Guard finally did show up), "When night falls this place [the convention center] is going to blow."

This is a one time when I have to give it up for Fox News' Shepard Smith. He has been camped out in the former city of New Orleans for five days. Tonight he was a via satellite guest of Bill O'Reilly's. I don't know if they were jousting for Fox territory or what, but they got into it a little. O'Reilly of course made the argument that it's not a race thing but rather bad planning and poor leadership. Smith, cutting O'Reilly off in a rare moment, brought up the fact that rich tourists at a waterfront hotel received transportation privileges and were ushered to the front of food lines at the dome. Smith literally sounded like he was undergoing some kind of crisis of conscience. He later tempered his remarks with an "I am not placing blame" comment, but his message clearly did fit into O'Reilly's scheme.

Pat Robertson

2005-08-30T08:54:00.000-07:00

Like a lot of folks, I've been following the U.S. doctrine of assassination and torture (at least the public doctrine - we've had a long history of both in regard to covert, unacknowledged practices. I will recommend again perhaps the most stunning book on the topic, William Blum's Killing Hope.

As we all know by now, Pat Robertson recommended the assassination of Venezuelan Pres. Hugo Chavez. I've been watching with interest the rhetoric surrounding Chavez. In 2002, the U.S. arranged a coup that took him out for two days. Since then he has received spotty attention - just enough to keep his name in the news in case we need to go in and take the fifth largest oil reserves in the world from his country. This is hard to do because Chavez is extremely popular in Venezuela and S. America in general. He was democratically elected by a strong majority with international oversight of the elections. Jimmy Carter, among other, will vouch for it. Chavez also feeds its oil wealth back into the people through numerous social works programs (which reminds me again to tell everyone to buy your gas at Citgo, which is owned by the Venezuelan government.) Chavez recently offered the Dominican Republic and Cuba cheap gas. Moreover, he says he would like to offer discounted gasoline to American poor if there was some way of doing it. Now that's a hot potato for the Bush administration.

Chavez, anticipating another coup, has armed his people in the manner of Switzerland so that they may again take back the country from international rule. The Bush cronies have tried to pin a bunch of stuff on him to cast him as an evil madman in the War on Terror: he harbors Islamic extremists; he is supporting the "communist" FARC rebels in Colombia. Regarding the latter, he probably is. But then again Colombia is fighting its own war to take back the country from the plundering transnationals.

So I was both shocked by Pat Robertson's candid comments and shocked by the media vilification of him as a screwball ... at first. Then the pieces began to fit, and damage control began to do its work. Robertson's comments got Chavez's name in the news again, and we saw dozens of stories on "Who is this guy, Chavez?" Robertson was also set up in contrast to the "real U.S. government policy," which, of course, would never think to assassinate a foreign leader - unless, of course, it was absolutely necessary.

But in the end, Pat Robertson's comments have made the job of taking Chavez out much more difficult for our crypto-fascist corporate leadership. See this wonderful piece by Richard Kim in The Nation.

Aside: Potpourri

2005-07-12T08:04:00.000-07:00

Was in Boston the other day visiting Kate's sister, tooling around Cambridge. If you're into folkitude, keep your eye out for Rachael Davis. Good heavens, what a voice. Cuts like a knife, but it feels so right. She did an a capella version of (that previously loathsome song) Somewhere Over the Rainbow that made me question everything. This was at Club Passim, the grooviest joint in that jewel of a city.

Today Kate and I will eat at the only Ethiopian buffet in N. America, as far as I know.

Kate bought me an Udu clay "drum." I have been having a ball with it. It is a spherical terra cotta shell with a hole in the side that you hit. No membrane. It makes a beautiful watery resonant thooooo ( and a wu wup if you do it fast). The tone bends depending on the way you cover the hole. It just makes you think that you are swimming in a freshwater cave under the desert.

I'm reading a collection called Short Studies from Lingua Franca regarding various titillating episodes in public intellectual life - mostly from the 90's. A few essays on the politics of obscurantist language (Sokal hoax, Judith Butler, blah blah), murdered professors, sexual harrassment, what it's like to be Zizek-the-dazzler, etc. Also reading some Peter Mathieson and Mircea Eliade. Picked up the Eliade with a Richard Cavendish book about the history of the Tarot. They read quite nicely together.

Here's a new idea. Let's grant that the lifeworld is being colonized by technology - especially the managerial professional sector of the world economy, i.e. the West. There is no on-the-clock/off-the-clock. Everyone is on call with their cell phones and laptops. Let's also grant that this colonization is advancing and won't stop until we are working all the time. The question is this: What are the human limits of this progression? I think two things: the human needs of intoxication and of sleep. Regarding the first, I think we can take a model from drunk driving, which we designate as a preventable phenomenon that takes more lives than almost any other single thing. But it's not alcohol that is interfering with driving. Historically, one would have to say that it's driving interfering with alcohol- the car and its demands encroaching on the human phenomenon of intoxication. Sleep is similar in that it is almost as mysterious of a foe. Certain sectors of society already have sleep laws, but it is difficult, minus some real breakthroughs in sleep research, to see how it could go beyond this rudimentary discipline. Computers don't need sleep, but the mind still mysteriously does. In any case, sleep and intoxication seem to be the main barriers to a fully trans or post-human body politic. How will intoxication be tranhumanized? (Potential Answer: tranhumanization is an intoxication.) How will sleep be transhumanized? (Dunno.)

In other news, the Valerie Plame/Rove case is going mainstream, picked up by the AP, Reuters, LA Times, Guardian, and others you want to read about it. The congressional democrats are pressing the national security buttons. The only thing I can't figure out is why someone as intelligent as David Corn of The Nation is asking that Rove be "fired" from Bush's cabinet. What is going on here?!! I cannot think of a better cop-out strategy for the Bush administration. What we ought to be asking for is prison time and a thorough independent investigation that not only strikes at the Plame Naming but also at all of the fabrication of documents and other impeachable offenses.

On Having Nothing to Say

2005-07-10T14:49:00.000-07:00

I'm not claiming any scientific survey size, but I noticed that folks - various cultural critics - opted out of any commentary on the London Bombing of the 7th. The news struck me with similar pangs. Douglas Rushkoff, for example, writes: "I'm supposed to have something intelligent to say about this morning's blasts in London. It's become one of those obligatory blog things - so much so, that people are emailing me today asking why I haven't said anything about it." Ken Rufo and the folks at Progressive Commons write: "For those wondering why it is we haven't commented on the terrorist attacks on London, it's because we, or at least I, have nothing profound to say."

This got me thinking about the politics of withdrawal. We have clearly entered a period of popular calls for full or partial withdrawal from Iraq. On its heels is a strategy of resistance to the neo-con rhetoric of the War on Terror that is a certain withdrawal of communication. The very profitable WOT paradoxically needs a continual feed of explosions to survive. Moreover, the explosions need a complicit media - and vice versa. The entire thing is, as scholars of terrorism have long maintained, a macabre ratcheting assemblage of the two. At one point we might have said tongue in cheek that car accidents need gawkers. The WOT intensifies this marriage, feeding the gawkers back into the steam and twisted metal of the accident - as if every accident calls for its future perfection, and we are caught out-imagining one another. The London Bombings perhaps occur at a moment of realization, not just burnout and acceptance of a certain kind of fate of the industrialized West. The realization is one of tactics: we understand what terrorism is now, and we don't want to be a part of it.

In Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut constructs an island on which everyone practices a forbidden religion called Bokonon. (I always wondered if this was a reference to Bakunin...). Those who are caught by the governor of practicing the black art of Bokonon, recognizable by the practice of two people putting the soles of their feet together, would be ceremonially punished by public hanging on "the hook." What's more, the government was on the constant hunt for the hirsute underground spiritual leader of the Bokonon movement, who always managed to escape by the skin of his teeth. He could do this because he had a secret agreement with the government to do so. That is, he was purposefully designed by the government to be uncatchable. The drama of the practice, the punishments, and the spectacle of the heroic, uncatchable leader kept the people from revolting. A beautiful circular drama.

A pretty good allegory, except that it's hard to argue that everyone secretly wishes to be part of an terrorist cell and is rooting for Bin Laden. But perhaps it's easier than we think. Jean Baudrillard claims that terrorism works because we secretly wanted the towers to fall - and the evidence for this is in film, where we imagined the destruction, a la Independence Day, of all our monuments to modernity. The Onion cleverly exploited this theme with a headline entitled "Where's Bin Laden? There's a little Bin Laden in each of us, FBI concludes." We might alter this slightly to say that there is a little War on Terror in each of us.

So perhaps we have come to the conclusion that the WOT is a feedback loop that demands our participation to sustain itself. More specifically, it demands attention - our eyeballs - to function. Every word about it nudges the momentum of the big flywheel. We are all complicit, because we all are gawkers in one way or another. The incredible flury of Flickr and cell phone activity around the London Bombings is ringed by the secondary shockwave of television news, then the cottage industries of terrorism scholarship and political opportunism, and then perhaps that final distanct ripple of media critics. But we have figured out the game and how it is rigged. We don't want to play anymore. We look away. We choose instead to mourn the loss like we would an act of nature or a traffic pile-up on a winter day. And we try not to play favorites over suffering elsewhere in the world. We unplug, we depoliticize. Gille Deleuze argued that resistance in the pomo control society resembles a circuit breaker. We used to say "What if they held a war and no one showed up?" Now we say, "What if there was a terrorist attack and no one Flickr-ed?"

Plame Game II

2005-07-07T19:41:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Judith Miller was thrown in jail for refusing to divulge her source in the Plame Naming. She won't testify to what everyone practically knows already - that Karl Rove is deep throating it around Washington. Though there is real potential for holding the administration administration accountable, there is an underbelly to the Plame case. We could see some real damage done to the "right" to keep confidential sources - only a conventional right currently, not a legal one. Miller's lost court case will very likely have a profound chilling effect on the practice of using confidential sources, whistleblowers, and the like - a practice that, on balance, serves the interests of investigative journalism much more often than it does the powers that be. Miller is posing now as the sacrificial savior of independent journalism, but if we recall, she was perhaps the loudest voice on the Shock and Awe Cheerleading Squad at the Times. When the Times issued an apology for shoddy reporting regarding WMD claims, Miller's reporting was called out specifically.

Today I was in New York City taking a tour around the UN building (before John Bolton lops off the upper fifteen floors, as folks say.) Among other things, I had the pleasure of seeing both the Syrian and Cuban ambassadors address an academically-minded audience. But the headline speakers could not have been more appropriate. First was Joel Simon, Deputy Director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, an international organization advocating for the safety and rights of journalists. Following him was Gail Collins, the Editorial Page Editor for The New York Times. Of course both were very concerned about the state of investigative journalism after the Miller jailing. It seems that Rove hedged his bets with the Plame Naming by holding hostage one of the critical tools of investigative journalism. We trade our queen for theirs ... that is, if the trial goes live...

Unfortunately (and for the administration, conveniently) the entire case will probably be swallowed up by the London bombings this morning. This was yet another reason why it was strange to be walking Manhattan's sidewalks today. Grand Central Station was buzzing with TV cameras and stumping politicians. Another measured weight seemed to have descended onto the shoulders of the people whisking along. Kate and I spent the rest of the afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art looking for some consolation on the Surrealist floors. Andre Breton said that art would be convulsive or it would not be. Well, we finally got our convulsive art form. The coming attractions are splashed all over the newspapers already, and we know that the show will arrive tomorrow or the next or the next. What match are all these silly rights in the face of such an awful spectacle?

The Plame Game

2005-07-04T20:26:00.000-07:00

Editor and Publisher has been doing a good job of keeping tabs on the Valerie Plame situation. Perhaps I'm being optimistic, but this case seems to have all the ingredients of a high profile gatey gate gate. That is to say it will make good TV. There appears to be quite a line-up of Pandoras, each with her own spring-loaded box. I'm going to make an out-of-hand prediction that this case will go LIVE. Here's why:

1. Big names. GWB, Cheney, and Rove will be subpoenaed for the grand jury testimony. Certainly reporters from NY Times, Time Magazine, and Robert Novak will be part of the parade. Perhaps Kato Kaelin.

2. The case has an actual legal teeth - Rove's illegal blowing the cover of an acting CIA officer, what could in these times easily be cast as a breach of national security.

3. Very sensitive questions about the existence of an Iraq-Niger yellowcake connection will have to be asked and answered. It is highly likely that there will be an investigation of the forged documents. Until now, everyone had agreed that the documents were forged, but no press entity has had the guts to ask who forged them (the documents apparently fell from heaven like the forged CBS National Guard memo that so conveniently diverted attention away from GBW's military record and toward "uncooperative" reporters like Dan Rather). Forging documents is a very deliberate act of deception - much more damning than a "misstatement." Unfortunately for the neo-cons, Rathergate has already whet the public appetite for forged documents.

4. Plamegate arrives in the midst of general discontent regarding the necessity of the war. Less than 50% of Americans believe "the war is worth it." Yes, the survey question is weird - phrased as though the war is an end in itself - but the trend is real. (If anything, the question ought to be whether "it" was worth a war.)

5. The Downing Street Memo is on the verge of a boil. Toss in a little yellowcake forgery, let soak, sprinkle with a little espicy perjury, and I think the average American will have a satisfying, prime time, red meat meal.

6. If the interrogators are really on their toes, and public opinion being what it is, questions of Halliburton's loss of $9 billion of taxpayer money might become salient. This is further down the laundry list given the order of mainstream American values these days: 1) national security; 2) our soldiers; 3) our money; 4) the trust of our leaders; 5) the rest of it - Iraqi civilians, human rights, international law.

So there you have it - made for TV: international intrigue, a husband-and-wife spy duo, trust betrayed, hard evidence, a wild card president who could say anything on the stand if left to his own devices, a sneaky new puppetmaster character, legal bite. The whole thing has got a "everybody knows but nobody tells" intrigue about it. Much like Jerry Springer, the dramatic skeleton is a simple one. The secret guests wait in the wings, and they will no doubt sass their way onto the stage. The spectacle will be as satisfying as it is predictable. But I could be wrong.

Bible Thumper

2005-06-17T16:04:00.000-07:00

I have been running from the interstellar police for a while, so apologies for the long wait. Tomorrow it's off to Pennsylvania to see my dear Kate, Minnesota to see her twin get married, and out to Yale for a month for a less-glamorous-than-it-sounds-but-still-cool teaching stint.

In the meantime I have been contemplating whether firefighters would be such objects of female lust if they were called by what I think would be a more proper name: "fire extinguishers."

Here's the funniest thing I have heard in a long time: Bible Thumpers. It's an answering machine message that has been making its way around. It's funny, scripted or no. Thanks to George Tuft.

You might also try crying while eating. Seriously, and film it while you do it.

Maxwell's Demon vs. The Sun

2005-05-10T19:29:00.000-07:00

One of my projects right now is building an electric bicycle that will let me commute 8 miles each way to work every day. I'm shooting for something that will cruise at 30-35 mph, though that is well above the 20mph maximum the state of Georgia will allow for such a contraption. More on these bikes later...

In my research, I found people who had success with folding solar panels for recharging the bicycle. (The bike will go 30 mi. a charge.) Along the way, I ran across some very interesting solar applications. There is the solar oven that is being used by campers everywhere and has become a viable response to third world wood-fuel use and its environmental devastation. A more sophisticated oven uses a reflective parabolic dish the size of a DirecTV antenna. With these, they have generated hotspots 900-1500 degrees F. I think I might collect a few of these, coat them with Mylar and see if I can't build myself a solar grill. Beyond dishes, people have been experimenting with large, flat fresnel lenses for focusing sunlight. Big ones (40") are for sale for about $60, and they get hot enough to blow a hole in a concrete sidewalk.

*Scientists cooking with sunlight

Many people assume that solar power is limited to photo-voltaic cells, which have a very low efficiency - something on the order of 7%. More efficient technologies for solar-to-electric conversion are the mirror fields of Arizona that focus sunlight on a tower and store heat in molten salts.

Another perhaps more promising mode is the use of the Stirling Engine for solar-thermal generation, which turns out to be the most efficient generation system yet. The Stirling concept has been around since the late 19th C., but has only recently been put to real use. Most of them can be found in novelty sciences stores. A small sterling engine can be powered with the heat from one's hand OR an ice cube. The idea is that the engine only needs a differential of heat to go - i.e. one cylinder hot and the other cold. Thus it can be powered with a coffee cup and cool air.

In the case of sunlight, the Stirling engine works best when the air is cool and the sun is bright. Warmer air narrows the differential. But let's say that the sun heats the air consistently. In that case, the degree to which you could concentrate the sunlight would provide the differential needed to drive the Stirling engine. All you have to do is carve the right grooves in the piece of glass that you place between the sun and the engine. That is, the glass would need to be inscribed with the right information.

The whole thing reminds me of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, a novel essentially about information systems. On the hunt for a secret, underground mail system that had been around since Elizabethan times, the main character is led to a rather wizardly man's house. The man brings out a two-cylinder engine and sets it on the table. This engine, in my read, is the metaphor for the entire novel. The engine runs on the principle of Maxwell's Demon, an idea advanced by the nineteenth-century mathematician, James Clerk Maxwell. Here's the idea. Imagine a box filled with air and bifurcated with a partition. Molecules are bouncing off the walls, some slow, and others fast. If there was, say, a little demon who had a little trap door on the partition, he may be able to let the fast ones through to one side and keep the slow ones on the other. This would create a heat differential that would be capable of driving an engine. This newfound power would only result from a certain kind of informational exchange. In Pynchon's novel, the main character is invited to contact the demon. It is said that by focusing on the machine, some people can make the pistons move a little. The main character tries, but nothing happens.

Maxwell's Demon is an allegory for magic in all of its forms. The hermetic ideal posits a sympathetic universe that is balanced (captured in the phrase "as above, so below"). Action occurs as a result of an imbalance - a differential - the same kind that drives the Stirling engine. Thus, through an act of will or spell, you can get rain, but it will be extra dry somewhere or sometime else. Slavoj Zizek has written about this:

The very notion of man as an "excess" with respect to nature's balanced circuit has finally to be abandoned. The image of nature as a balanced circuit is nothing but a retroactive projection of man. Herein lies the lesson of recent theories of chaos: "nature" is already, in itself, turbulent, imbalanced; it's "rule" is not a well balanced oscillation around some constant point of attraction, but a chaotic dispersion within the limits of what the theory of chaos calls the "strange attractor," a regularity directing chaos itself (Looking Awry, 38).

Thus it is not a balance that makes "nature," but like the Stirling, a motive imbalance. A demon had gotten into the mix. Perhaps Maxwell's demon is the "strange attractor" of chaos theory. In any case, the demon directs the energy in the system such that it throws things out of balance. My mother reminded me yesterday of the explosion in the dalmatian puppy market after the Disney film 101 Dalmatians opened in theaters. The problems was that dalmatians are notoriously difficult dogs, and no one knew how to care for them. This is a relatively minor example of Maxwell's demon at work. In the world of finance capital, these energetic shifts can nearly defy imagination. We know that the words of Alan Greenspan, that strange attractor, can move mountains. I learned recently that the military-staged toppling of the Saddam statue in front of the Palestine Hotel (where the reporters stayed) precipitated a mini-crash on Wall Street. This was due to the resemblance of the event to the images emanating from the collapsing Soviet Bloc.

Float Tank

2005-05-10T19:24:00.000-07:00

I just finished building a float tank. What is a "float tank," you ask?

Some more Komunyakaa

2005-05-10T19:20:00.000-07:00

This one struck me the other day: Yusef Komuyakaa, Ode to a Drum

Listen in RealPlayer

Gazelle, I killed you
for your skin's exquisite
touch, for how easy it is
to be nailed to a board
weathered raw as white
butcher paper. Last night
I heard my daughter praying
for the meat here at my feet.
You know it wasn't anger
that made me stop my heart
till the hammer fell. Weeks
ago, I broke you as a woman
once shattered me into a song
beneath her weight, before
you slouched into that
grassy hush. But now
I'm tightening lashes,
shaping hide as if around
a ribcage, stretched
like five bowstrings.
Ghosts cannot slip back
inside the body's drum.
You've been seasoned
by wind, dusk & sunlight.
Pressure can make everything
whole again, brass nails
tacked into the ebony wood
your face has been carved
five times. I have to drive
trouble from the valley.
Trouble in the hills.
Trouble on the river
too. There's no kola nut,
palm wine, fish, salt,
or calabash. Kadoom.
Kadoom. Kadoom. Ka-
doooom. Kadoom. Now
I have beaten a song back into you,
rise & walk away like a panther.

Navel Gazing (Omphalomancy)

2005-04-26T11:50:00.000-07:00

Reading Josh Gunn's blog today... about the cultural tendency to see signals of the end everywhere - the Virgin Mary on a PopTart, Jack Van Impe (Love him!), etc. Gunn identifies this interpretive tendency with the Greek term "pareidolia" as in "para" (around) and "eidos" (roughly, idea). I would have posted a comment there but couldn't for some reason.

I've been quite interested in approaching interpretation in this way - drawing form from chance or noise. Normally this goes by a number of names - divination, scrying, etc. One can divine the future seemingly from anything at hand, birds, chicken entrails, clouds, stars, waving grass. People have looked at pans of water, gazed into candle flames, tossed the Tarot. My grandmother used to read the day in the coffee grounds at the bottom of the cup. The names of many of these techniques have some form of the word manteis attached to the end (-mancy). Manteis literally means "prophet" or "seer." The word "mantis," as in the insect "praying mantis" is related to this word. The Greeks named the insect genus "mantis" because it appeared to be in the archetypal prayer position, a divine body pose. The "divinator" is literally one who is acting as the divine - as a god, or as an artist.

The "casting of lots" is another powerful component of divination. I grew up Mormon, and this was expressly forbidden (gambling and card playing). But I suspect the prohibition against the casting of lots goes deeper than the idea that one could lose one's shirt gambling. Insofar as monotheisms have evolved particular mechanisms of social control and dissemination, they have also evolved mechanisms for stability. Chance has its place at the top (usually administered by a pope or endowed prophet), but among the flock it is trouble, resulting in splinter groups, etc. Thus, the casting of lots is factored out of the religious discourse. It is a sign of witchery (from "wicca," to bend, as in wicker chair or wicked) or sorcery (a word with direct roots in the "casting of lots"). Remember Leviticus: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." One culture's crucified prophet is another culture's sorcerer burning at the stake; the two are closely related. They are both probably on the edge of insanity, ecstasy, or some kind of sublime holy (wholly) state.

The casting of lots has something to do with idols as well, and their counterpart, the jealous God. Once one has divined an image from chaos (a sign in the coffee cup), it may or may not be assimilated into the discourse at hand (say, Christianity). If the sign functions as strengthening the social bonds of the faith or is useful for some contingent adaptation, it will be embraced. If not, it will be rejected as a false idol. Thus, divination could be seen as a kind of "mutant gene" phenomenon in an organic discourse like Islam or Christianity, where the bending of reality (in the form of artistic figurative representation) is outlawed (as in some Islamic sects), heavily policed (as in medieval art) or looked upon skeptically (Jesse Helms and the NEA). Evolutionary biologists tell us that nature is always "oscillating" and preparing to adapt. The change is part of an adaptation, part of a new species, or the change kills the organism (cancer).

The casting of lots is even "told out of" history. As Foucault suggests, history is not contiguous, but rather it is a series of episteme or abrupt shifts and mutations. We tell history back into shape retrospectively, but then these stories too suffer their mutations. By closely examining history (what Foucualt calls "genealogy") the present story by which we understand the world is destabilized. I am reminded of the surrealist Max Ernst and his method of floating a canvas in water to form random paint patterns before filling in the scene. This is the artist-as-sorcerer equation that is fundamental to the idea of divination. This is, in part, the sorcerer's art - to potentiate the present with the force of chance.

The Pure White Light

2005-04-17T07:25:00.000-07:00

I was doing some reading in early Jewish philosophy yesterday from a compilation of Kate's (Frank, Leaman and Manekin's The Jewish Philosophy Reader, 2000). This was serendipitous reading at 3am. Much of Jewish philosophy, like Christian apologetics, is an attempt to rangle with ideas like free will and theodicy through a few touchstone problems, scriptural knots. In the Pentateuch these are generally the creation story, God's ordering of Abraham to kill Isaac, the story of Job, and God's hardening of the Pharoah's heart (and subsequently punishing him for a hard heart).

In any case, I'm reading a 1st C. figure named Philo, who is wrangling with the creation myth, activity and passivity, time creation, and the nature of this architect god. While most of the essay is pedantic in style, Philo does wax poetic when he begins to talk about the nature of humanity in relation to God-the-Creator. This is in Part XXIII of the essay "On the Creation of the World." I'm going to excerpt the striking passage here:

*******
XXIII. After all the rest, as I have said, Moses tells us that man was creator after the image of God and after His likeness (Gen. 1. 26.) . Right well does he say this, for nothing earth-born is more like God than man. Let no one represent the likeness as one to a bodily form; for neither is God in human form, nor is the human body God-like. No, it is in respect of the Mind, the sovereign element of the soul that the word 'image' is used; for after the pattern of a single Mind, even the Mind of the Universe as an archetype, the mind in each of those who successively came into being was moulded. It is in a fashion a god to him who carries and enshrines it as an object of reverence, for the human mind evidently occupies a position in men precisely answering to that which the great Ruler occupies in all the world. It is invisible while itself seeing all things, and while comprehending the substances of others, it is as to its own substance unperceived; and while it opens by arts and sciences roads branching in many directions, all of them great highways, it comes through land and sea investigating what either element contains. Again, when you soaring wing it has contemplated the atmosphere and all its phases, it is borne yet higher to the ether and the circuit of heaven, and is whilred round with the dances of planets and fixed stars, in accordance with the laws of perfect music, following that love of wisdom that guides its steps. And so, carrying its gaze beyond the confines of all substance discernible by sense, it comes to a point at which it reaches out after the intelligible world, and on descrying in that world sights of surpassing loveliness, even the patterns and the originals of the things of sense which it saw here, it is seized by a sober intoxication, like those filled with Corybantic frenzy, and is inspired, possessed by a longing far other than theirs and the nobler desire. Wafted by this to the topmost arch of the things perceptible to mind, it seems to be on its way to the Great King Himself; but, amid its longing to see Him, pure and untempered rays of concentrated light stream forth like a torrent, so that by its gleams the eye of the understanding is dazzled.
********

Quite lovely. Platonic through and through, with the doctrine of ideal forms and a movement very similar to the allegory of the cave. But much more poetic and seductive than Plato ever was - even some of Indra's pearls thrown in to hedge his bets. (Indra was the early Vedic supreme god who resembled a vast lattice of pearl beads. In each bead could be seen a reflection of every other bead).

This story of apotheosis particularly struck me after an incident that happened earlier in the day. I was digging post holes to put up a swinging chair in the yard when my neighbor pulled up in his old Jeep Cherokee. He startled me, but we got to making small talk. I told him I was a new professor at the university, and he said he was a retired Navy man. I told him about my research in media and war, and he mentioned how it ain't like it was. Then he tells me that he was involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and was flying an AWACS plane around the Florida Keys at the time the world was balanced like a needle on a thread. He had his hand on one of the buttons that would have launched a nuclear warheaded torpedo at the Russian subs. He was, of course, very careful to mention how close we were to a global nuclear holocaust that day. I looked at his hands and imagined them literally on THE BUTTON, waiting for orders. They were like the hands of any 70 year old. The only remarkable thing about him was his unsteadiness and seeming lack of confidence - like he had seen the pure and untempered rays of concentrated light, and it had dazzled his understanding.

He was visiting various houses in the neighborhood and asking folks to sign a petition under the name Citizens for a Quiet Oglethorpe County. There happens to be a house nearby that keeps 20 howling dobermans, and now he is ... we are ... going to take the owners to small claims court. I wanted to make an appeal to the dog owners: "This man, your neighbor, could have annihilated the world. But he didn't. The least you could do is give him a little peace and quiet."

The Wrong Bolton

2005-04-04T20:57:00.000-07:00

There are precious few moments in life when one prefers Michael Bolton. Here's one...

John Bolton, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, has been named by Bush II to the position of U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., a very sensitive position these days insofar as this person assumes the role of ambassador to the world. In many ways, John Bolton is the administration's perfect candidate for this spot. He has shown nothing but brazen contempt for the U.N. and any attempt by countries other than "the one that matters" to decide anything. In short, John Bolton would have the U.N. razed to the ground. I imagine he's the kind of guy who sweves around crossing guards on the way to work as well. If there is one lesson the administration taught us in the recent Iraq invasion, it's that though reference to the authority of the U.N. is a convenient rhetorical appeal, might makes right in the end. The rest is, well, a speed bump.

Check out this video clip from GlobalSolutions.org. Imperial hubris on parade. Everything but the stiff-armed solute.

This is why, as I say, there are some times in life when we look to Michael Bolton for inspiration. Along with Michael, I would like to ask the world the musical question...

How can we be lovers if we can't be friends?
How can we start over when the fighting never ends?

Power of Nightmares

2005-03-30T18:07:00.000-08:00

One of the most fascinating, artful, and comprehensive documentaries regarding the War on Terror is available for download. The Power of Nightmares is a three-part, three-hour series that was aired in 2004 on the BBC. It begins by examining the lineage of bin Laden-style Islamic extremism alongside the emergence of Neo-Con ideology. We are taken through the histories of these two groups, side by side. The third part (my favorite) examines the way in which "Al Qaeda" was constructed in 2000-2001 by a series of events following terrorist bombings of Kenya. (Among other things, there is no evidence that Osama used the words "Al Qaeda" before 9/11.) The myth of a vast terrorist network is examined thoroughly and debunked in the last section through an examination of evidence presented by the administration and its claims. This film comes highly recommended.

"In the past, politicians promised to create a better world. They had different ways of achieving this. But their power and authority came from the optimistic visions they offered to their people. Those dreams failed. And today, people have lost faith in ideologies. Increasingly, politicians are seen simply as managers of public life. But now, they have discovered a new role that restores their power and authority. Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to protect us from nightmares. They say that they will rescue us from dreadful dangers that we cannot see and do not understand."

The entire documentary can be 1) viewed in low resolution in-browser, or 2) downloaded as a high-resolution bit torrent file.

Low-tech Grooves

2005-03-27T12:12:00.000-08:00

Been away for a while. Getting back in the saddle...
This ought to keep us all entertained in the meantime.

Gearing Up for Iran

2005-03-02T17:40:00.000-08:00

Here's perhaps the most thought-provoking treatment of
the situation with Iran that I've read recently.  It's
by Ray McGovern. McGovern served as a CIA analyst for 27
years -- from the administration of John F. Kennedy to
that of George H. W. Bush. During the early 1980s, he
was one of the writers/editors of the President's Daily
Brief and briefed it one-on-one to the president's most
senior advisers. He also chaired National Intelligence
Estimates. In January 2003, he and four former
colleagues founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals
for Sanity.

Among other things, you will learn who "the crazies"
are.  The article starts a little way down the page.  Enjoy.

Mosquitos

2005-02-21T15:42:00.000-08:00

"We know for sure that there is so much more to be revealed, even when we dismiss the many conspiracy theories that swirl around our body politic like malarial mosquitos feeding on the national unease" - Danny Schechter on 9/11 in Media Wars, p. xxxviii

I have been thinking about the mosquito metaphor lately in regard to the current War on Terror. I have a swampy area near my house, and as I gaze into it, I can just imagine the hordes that will rise from it this next summer. In Georgia the mosquito problem was temporarily quelled by the mid-century use of DDT, and apparently the mosquitos are on the rebound in its absence. Mosquitos are peculiar in that, unless they get very thick, they aren't really a problem until someone mentions them. The thought of mosquitos can be almost more oppressive than the bugs themselves. Terrorism, by definition, works in a similar way.

The West Nile Virus is a superb analog to the War on Terror. Though West Nile is dangerous to some extent, with a very limited number of fatalities, it is essentially a creation of media fear mongering. Like high rise office buildings, subways, and jet aircraft, mosquitos are everywhere, and the threat is continually signified, seemingly ever-present. Since September 11, more Americans have been killed by lightning than by terrorism, and yet its specter haunts us to the last person.

Noam Chomsky wrote a widely circulated essay entitled "Drain the Swamp and There Will Be No More Mosquitos," referring to a statment made by Israel's military head, Yehoshaphat Harkabi, concerning the "Palestinian Question." The metaphor has found its way elsewhere too. The idea justifies, for example, the targetting of "rogue states" and "failed states" preemptively - the swamps - in order to destroy the "breeding grounds." As water itself is perhaps replacing oil as the world's most precious resource, it, like oil, has become a weapon. Saddam Hussein, after the first Gulf War, infamously drained the wetlands of southern Iraq and displaced the 5,000-year-old and 250,000 strong culture of the Marsh Arabs, presumably to punish the Shia for the post-war failed uprising. Part of the impetus behind the Israeli wall is to claim precious aquifer access from the Palestinians. Much of the devastation resulting from the decade of U.S.-led economic sanctions against Iraq (1.5 million dead, according to the UN) was a result of an initial bombing of water treatment facilities followed by the denial of replacement parts and purification supplies.

The word "mosquito" is an anglicized version of "Miskito," the African-Indian tribes of what is now Nicaragua. In the late 18th Century, the Miskito people were the subjects of harsh British colonization, and there was an insurgent situation. While the British were battling the mosquito, they were also battling the Miskito.

The mosquito metaphor also quite aptly plays into the oil war equation. The most common anti-war slogan in the lead up to the Iraq wars in both 1991 and 2003 was "No Blood for Oil." This slogan was chanted so often, the two liquids seemed to have transubstantiated into one. The force of empire assumes that the oil belongs to U.S. corporations, and it is often said that it is the "lifeblood" of the post-industrial West. The Iraqis, with their demands for self-determination, have a habit for randomly blowing up pipelines. These tiny flying parasites cannot be allowed to drain what rightly belongs to corpulent corporate oil. All junkyard tires must be turned and sitting water siphoned away. The threat is everywhere, even within our own borders, and the war is never-ending.

Digital Aesthetics and 9/11

2005-02-19T07:40:00.000-08:00

"There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those that understand binary code and those that don't."

"You are either with us or you are with the terrorists"

When the CD emerged and began to replace magnetic audio tape as the dominant music medium, Neil Young reportedly complained that whereas listening to a tape was a like being caressed by a warm ocean wave, digital sound was like being pushed over by a pile of ice cubes. Neil Young has never struck me as one with a particularly tuned ear, but his statement begins to address the digital aesthetic. What he heard - or thought he heard (the difference?) - were jagged clouds of binary pairs, of on-offs, of cold shoulders. In the digital realm, there is no jerry-rigging. The entire ritual of retracking the tape, winding with pencils, and hiding it from your neodymium speaker magnets is gone. There are no gray areas, no fudging. The information is either present or not. We might ride Neil Young's train of thought and argue that we are losing our pliability, our fleshiness, to the brittle world of silicon.

When digital goes wrong, it goes big. Some of the most inhumane sounds emanate from my speakers when the CD skips or when the digital player fumbles. The perfection of digital audio is only matched by its irredeemability when it goes wrong. Paul Virilio argues that every technology has built within it a catastrophe. To find out if this is true, one only has to follow the general use of the word "crash." The word has come to be almost exclusively associated with our machines of commuting and communication - cars and computers. Computers don't just falter or lose step. They crash. The specter of the Y2K bug was the anticipation of this idea coming to fruition on a grand scale - a general "system crash."

Whereas the digital aesthetic early on was one of perfection, now it has become sufficiently complex enough to contain dirt. The computer virus, for example, is a symptom of this complexity. But what does the aesthetic look like? It is violent. It contains big crashes (system failures) and little ones (dropped film frames and jagged discontinuities, pixellation, screeching mutations). The digital aesthetic longs for the golden days of static, the noise component of analog media. Static is fetishized in the digital aesthetic. Static is humane and forgiving. The digital aesthetic is intolerant of any aberration.

Philosopher Gilles Deleuze talks about the "control society" emerging out of "disciplinary society." That is, the modes of social control are moving from their linguistic and institutional bases to cybernetic, pharmaceutical, and military ones. Think of the control society as a high-tech, decentrallized, crystallization of the social field. Terry Gilliam's film Brazil is a great illustration. While the social field of Brazil looks more like a low-tech 1960's Soviet Bloc country, it has a number of features of the control society. The inhabitants of this world never see the face of the master, and they can never see beyond immediate orders. There are explosions everywhere - at the restaurant, at work. The "terrorists" are hard at work. People have grown accustomed to the seemingly random violence that it doesn't even demand a second look.

The control society is the digital aesthetic applied to the political field. Another word for this is the War on Terror. The politics of fear, on the domestic end, along with a cocktail of antidepressants, are what the global managerial society needs to remain solvent. The managerial machine needs to remain in tension, like the integrated circuit. The energy that pulses through it needs to be stabilized. All the errant libidos are tamed with Zoloft and soothed with Nexium. The aesthetics of the Terror War are either clean (as in the clean desert TV wars) or unconscionably bloody and senseless - as in the case of the sudden, shocking, still unexplained collapse of the Twin Towers, not undone by an outside rocket, but by the confounding of its internal machinery. The War on Terror is as brittle and smooth as silicon itself, punctuated with the most violent ruptures. The explanation for this is as mystifying as the the computer message "Error: 0048485923LL4" - only decipherable by the most specialized technocrats of state who "do not negotiate with terrorists." Even the towers themselves seemed to imitate the ones and zeros of binary code.

One could argue that 9/11 was only an early episode in the progress of the control society; that as the digital age complexifies, the big crash will diffuse through the system; that these microcrashes will really constitute the mutant genes of social-technological life; that the space for free movement will be potentialized in the catastrophic fragility of everything. This is why the modes of social enforcement are moving away from a discourse of "defense" to one of "security," as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri note in their Multitudes. The new paradigm is also showing up in the combination of military and police forces on domestic streets. As the image of "black bloc" protest violence advances, so does the security state and the emphasis on the development of the less-than-lethal weaponry of domestic crowd control. "System crashes," will perhaps themselves "network out." By this time, of course, it will be meaningless to talk of a "digital aesthetic."

God's Gets an Idea

2005-02-18T14:31:00.000-08:00

In December, astronomers documented the largest starburst on human record (AFP, Feb 18). In 1/10 of a second, this exploding neutron star emitted the energy our sun would in 100,000 years. The sky briefly lit up with the force of a full moon. Apocalicious televangelist Jack Van Impe ought to have a hay day with this. I am about ready to take it as a sign of something. Hmm. Back to Daniel and the book of Revelations for this one.

The Name

2005-02-14T19:50:00.000-08:00

This is a very fun, interactive graph of baby names and their popularity over time. I don't know what I learned from it, but... er... something. If nothing else, you can find out how conventional your parents or grandparent are by matching names with birthdays. My parents decided to go retro with me. "America," by the way, has really exploded with the steepest recent curve I could find.

Happy Lupercalia!

2005-02-14T19:09:00.000-08:00

Channeling the History Channel today...

While some believe that Valentine's Day is celebrated in the middle of February to commemorate the anniversary of Valentine's death or burial -- which probably occurred around 270 A.D -- others claim that the Christian church may have decided to celebrate Valentine's feast day in the middle of February in an effort to 'christianize' celebrations of the pagan Lupercalia festival. In ancient Rome, February was the official beginning of spring and was considered a time for purification. Houses were ritually cleansed by sweeping them out and then sprinkling salt and a type of wheat called spelt throughout their interiors. Lupercalia, which began at the ides of February, February 15, was a fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture, as well as to the Roman founders Romulus and Remus.

To begin the festival, members of the Luperci, an order of Roman priests, would gather at the sacred cave where the infants Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were believed to have been cared for by a she-wolf or lupa. The priests would then sacrifice a goat, for fertility, and a dog, for purification.

The boys then sliced the goat's hide into strips, dipped them in the sacrificial blood and took to the streets, gently slapping both women and fields of crops with the goathide strips. Far from being fearful, Roman women welcomed being touched with the hides because it was believed the strips would make them more fertile in the coming year. Later in the day, according to legend, all the young women in the city would place their names in a big urn. The city's bachelors would then each choose a name out of the urn and become paired for the year with his chosen woman. These matches often ended in marriage. Pope Gelasius declared February 14 St. Valentine's Day around 498 A.D. The Roman 'lottery' system for romantic pairing was deemed un-Christian and outlawed.

(more)

Shooting Journalists Shooting the Shooting of Journalists

2005-02-14T18:03:00.000-08:00

First they came for CBS, and as I did not really like Dan Rather and thought he really did screw up (or let himself get set up), I did not protest.

Then they came for CNN, and as I considered CNN to be largely a lapdog to the administration, I did not protest.

(to be continued)

Is it me, or does it appear to you that the disciplining of journalism has given way to open discrediting? Could it be that the politics of media consolidation also is beginning to increasingly include dirty tricks to consolidate audience? After Sept 11, we saw the first intermedia mudslinging between news segments. Fox and MSNBC were battling it out to prove which one was more "patriotic." Peter Arnett is a traitor, Geraldo Rivera is giving away strategic military secrets, etc.

As to the CNN news chief's exiting remarks, I think he is spot on. Many unilateral (unembedded) reporters were hit by U.S. fire. Many were killed. More in the short duration of the Iraq II than in Vietnam. They were a "pain in our rear" as one Pentagon media spokesperson at Centcom stated. We know that Al Jazeera headquartersand Abu Dabai TV were intentionally hit by U.S. bombs. As they say in trial law, the actus reus is not in dispute, only the mens rea. Were these killings intentional? The evidence would seem to suggest that it's not only possible but useful military strategy.

Intenational journalists seek war crimes investigation.

Sliding Scale Citizenship

2005-02-14T16:08:00.000-08:00

You know the times are a-changin' when the so-called "conservatives" are on board for loosening immigration restrictions. While paleocons like Pat Buchanan is still talking about building a wall on the Rio Grande, Bush is proposing that we let folks in on temporary work permits.

I had an inkling that this might happen a few years ago when I was doing a little summer teaching gig in Palo Alto, CA at Stanford. Palo Alto is such a prized Silicon Valley location that even tenured professors at Stanford can't afford to live in town. Yet there is a whole lower class serf population that keeps the town running - mainly Mexican immigrant labor. I remember thinking at the time: beds have to get made, and these rich folks are not going to do it. Since then, the ghettoization of the service sector has become more visible. Is it just me?

Over the past 20 years, the US has become a managerial hub of the world. Whereas factory manufacturing used to dominate, now the workforce is in one of three big areas - global production management (overseeing overseas factories), marketing/entertainment industry (they've melded into one), and the shifting temp workforce (Manpower being the largest employer in the US). To a lesser extent there are others like R&D, retail, military, and domestic agribusiness. With such a grand consolidation of the world's wealth, we have indeed become Reagan's shining city on a hill - or, better yet, the great gated community on Nob Hill. Now our biggest business concern is not breaking up the labor unions, but rather policing the world's export processing zones.

But again, beds need to get made. Who will do this? 1) Former factory labor, now temp labor (usually handling the non-skilled paper-cut and data entry jobs); 2) The prison industrial complex, which is taking an ever larger slice of the population (1 of 74 males is in prison, just edging out China for world's largest prison population. Privatization of prisons and the use of prisoners for cheap labor by Microsoft, Dell, Northwest Airlines, YouNameItCorp, etc.); and 3) Temporary immigrant labor.

This last one is a recent switch in approach. Whereas the paleocons demonized immigration to ostensibly protect American factory jobs when we had them and whip up racial fear to keep the color caste system in place - now the new global economic consciousness says hey, these immigrants are money in the bank! In other words, while the new economy has figured out how to export manufacturing jobs to the third world, it hasn't figured out (until now) how to get the third world to come to the US to do the service sector jobs we can't export. The answer: temporary work permits. All the benefits of low wage labor without all those pesky citizenship rights. See Fritz Lang's Metropolis or Mario Cuomo's response to Reagan's shining city at the 1984 DNC: the tale of two cities: one above ground, one below. None dare call it slavery.

This changing econcomic landscape is captured with remarkable sensitivity in the 2004 PBS POV documentary Farmingville, about a small town on Long Island battling over the influx of Mexican day laborers. It's highly recommended if you can get your hands on it. It's the story of reactionaries, racists, and paleocons on the one hand lining up against neocons and immigrant rights groups on the other. Some strange bedfellows. Of course, the Bush administration and various business interests are mobilizing the "compassionate" rhetoric of conservatism to push this liberalization of immigration policy. Managing the global economy while increasing the wealth disparity is messy business. Get ready for sliding scale citizenship. Already we have a partial infrastructure of this with the War on Terror, do-not-fly lists, felony voting and job restrictions, etc. Remember the neocon slogan, "All men are equal, but some are more equal than others."

Honorsystemistas

2005-02-08T14:26:00.000-08:00

I have been considering the cultural effects of file-sharing lately. Already there been a resurgence in live music as the economy shifts away from the CD commodity, though live music venues are still controlled by large media conglomerates. I think there will be other interesting effects of file-sharing. The vast availability of feature films on BitTorrent and eMule formats has generated a crisis in Hollywood. At the same time, the web is able to deliver much more independent video content. As Hollywood adapts to the web, it will likely make the full transition to product-placement revenue - i.e. releasing feature-length advertisements, complete with interactive shopping, into the peer-o-sphere. Pornography has really taken the lead in this respect, releasing peer-to-peer files to the winds in the hopes that, like carrier pigeons, they will point customers home. This strategy is otherwise known as "viral advertising": advertisers, taking a cue from pornographers, release a "too hot for TV" clip in the hopes that it will take wing on a warm wind of taboo.

But back to film and music. Say that people demand meaningful art and get wise to pocket-picking advertisers. One option is pay-to-play film and audio. Right now, this is working largely in an environment of scarcity. Online music stores exchange money for the rights to download content. In a fully developed file-sharing world, on the other hand, there is no scarcity, and everyone has the right to download. Does the starving artist finally starve? I don't think so. I take the record label Magnatune to be a case in point. Though they are not quite where I think music and film will go, they are miles ahead of the curve. Magnatune, for the most part, uses the honor system. You pay the artist what you can or will. Compared to record label CD sales, where an artist gets from 25 cents to a dollar per CD, this is a pretty good deal.

We can imagine a world where, at the end of a peer-to-peer file, there is an admonishment for some kind of viewer- or listener-supported donation. This is a situation much more like public television and radio. In this environment - on the honor system - it would seem to me that certain kinds of art would be economically more viable. For example, Bowling for Columbine would do much better than Resident Evil. That is, file sharing would foster an honorable culture to complement the honor system. Communitarian values would persist while the messages of "all against all" would fail. There would be exceptions to this rule - namely fear-based holy crusades, which will always nab a portion of the population.

As it stands, we are already well on our way to a polarized body politic. It is only part of the story to claim the red state/blue state split is made up of metro liberals vs. heartland conservatives - F911 vs. Passion of the Christ. The other part is the divide between those with Internet access and those fed with TV. As the technology of file sharing spreads, I believe the body politic will continue to cleave into yet another recognizable dialectic - the overcommercialized and the honorsystemistas.

Priming Chavez

2005-02-02T13:55:00.000-08:00

Tonight, Fox News is doing a special on Venezuela's populist president, Hugo Chavez. I've been wainting for some time for the mainstream media to get to demonizin' him. I guess we've had too much on our plate. Justifications for going into Venezuela are slim. In the Cold War, he would have been an obvious communist menace on the order of Nicaragua or Chile. (Perhaps they will still pin him up as a drug smuggler.) Now, he's just a guy who would like to continue nationalizing Venezuelan oil instead of giving it away. This is threatening to wealthy interests both in his country (which compromise the 20% who oppose him) and in the U.S. The CIA attempted a coup that worked for about 24 hours in 2002 (See the fine documentary, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised"). He's a very popular leader, and in anticipation of another attempted coup, he has armed his citizenry a la Switzerland.

The Fox News promo took an interesting tack. They went right for the argument that Chavez could disrupt the oil supply - the "lifeblood" of America. All the arguments for going into Iraq having fallen through, perhaps the corporate establishment has given up on lofty justifications, settling instead for fin de siecle real politix of resource scarcity. I don't know which is worse, being flim-flammed by lovely humanitarian language or the acceptance that people don't need those sorts of explanations anymore. This Fox Online article makes reference to the State Department's criticizing of Chavez's government for restricting freedom of expression. How? By limiting sex and violence on television. Not much to work with there.

If you have eMule, by the way, here's a wonderful site for accessing all kinds of provocative and interesting documentaries - including The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

Social Insecurity

2005-01-26T17:18:00.000-08:00

The administration's push to privatize social security is now big news. For years, commentators have been referring to the fund as a "sacred cow," implying perhaps that the program belongs to some benighted era. Having laid that groundwork, now, with the right combination of second-term politics and a republican-controlled congress, the program is on the chopping block. The administration is in the process of developing a rhetoric that will make the abolition (not "reform") of SS appealing to the masses. Other social safety nets such as welfare have been and can be dismantled with a "back to work" rhetoric of responsibility. There is no such justification for leaving the poor and elderly out in the cold. Of course, the abolition of social security will only benefit those with money. Thus, the administration must manufacture scare scenarios about the immanent demise of SS and progressive-sounding arguments about how it disproportionately benefits those with statistically longer lifespans (i.e. whites and those with money). The alibi is still on the drawing board. Apart from the choice of "reform" over "abolition," the administration has decided to use the term "personal" rather than "private" to refer to the new plan. Moreover, the mainstream news appear to have boiled the issue down to this question: Will you ever see the money you put in? The framing of this manufactured crisis, while simple on its surface, contains a value system that is incompatible with SS at the outset. The only way one is guaranteed to see the money one contributes is through the program's abolition. The question answers itself. One only has to ask a similar question about welfare to see the absurdity of this framing.

Here's a copy of the republican talking points that are being passed around for selling SS demolition.

Here's a good rebuttal of administration arguments.

Carrier Wave

2005-01-22T21:33:00.000-08:00

I recommend everyone go out and buy Patty Griffin's "Flaming Red" (and, while you're at it, the live album, "A Kiss in Time"). Flaming Red is a wonderful synthesis of her delicate, driving, incising voice and her deliberate, lapidary verse. For me, her melodies are so strangely familiar that each song is like flexing a muscle I didn't know I had. I was particularly struck by "Carry Me ," which takes you out of body to electromagnetic pulse and back. It seems to really capture a certain delicious anxiety of the body going fully wireless, humans evaporating and lifting from the earth in all of our alchemical quicksilvery love-flight. Whatever else have people sung about? The song reminds me of the lingo of amateur radio. Communication by the broken wave of morse code is called "CW," shorthand for "carrier wave." My grandfather is a radio nut, building them from the ground up. The desire to transfigure the voice and broadcast it into the ethers runs in the family. But who doesn't like flight? It's ever so fly. "Language is a virus from outer space," said Burroughs. If so, the aliens have already landed... and perhaps they are preparing for take-off again.

Maybe they come by land
Maybe they come by sea
Maybe they've already come
Maybe they come by me
Slipping into the twilight
I ride the broken wave tonight
An old song on the radio
You knew a long time ago
An old song on the radio
Going out over the ocean

Carry, carry...

Maybe it's World War I
Maybe its World War III
Maybe it's Vietnam
Maybe we're on TV
Falling into the tall grass
Melting into the tall glass
Spilling out over the lip and
Into the ocean
Into the ocean

Carry, carry, carry me
Over the ocean, over the ocean, over the ocean, over the ocean
Over the sea

Maybe I've come so far
Maybe I'm on my knees
Maybe I'm dead or alive
Maybe I'm none of these
Just an old song on the radio
Someone put on a long time ago
Going out over the ocean
Over and over the ocean
Over and over the ocean
Over and over the ocean

Inauguration

2005-01-20T17:29:00.000-08:00

I was doing the dishes at the time, not paying particular attention, and this was the speech that I heard:

"From the sniper turrets atop the White House, let freedom ring! From the mouths of underground missile silos, let freedom ring! From the grinding steel treads of bulldozers in the occupied territories, let freedom ring! Let it ring from the secret corridors of the advancing police state! Let it ring from the black hole of Gitmo Bay! Let it ring from the wreckage of Fallujah and Baghdad, from every uranium-tipped bullet to rain down on the fertile crescent! Let it ring, ring, ring in your ears every time a marketplace or hospital is bombed from a plane flying too high to see! Let it ring like the talking points of an army of guest political analysts! Yes, let freedom ring so loudly that it drowns out the First Amendment! Let it ring your bell, baby, with the butt end of a rifle or the push of a button."

Upon reading the speech later, it had a slightly different tone. The Inaugural was epic, poetic, and certainly a turning point in this administration's rhetoric. No longer is the emphasis on fear, remembrance, and protection, but rather the crusade of "freedom" on a global scale. Now the War on Terror's first priority is breaking the yoke of oppression, and our own safety will be the by-product. Alright. I've heard this one before somewhere ... Oh, yes. It was emanating from the throngs of pepper-sprayed protesters at the castle gates, "No Justice! No Peace!" The speech was a masterpiece of progressive posturing. Let's see if we can take Bush's speech point-for-point. I agree with much of it.

"We have seen our vulnerability - and we have seen its deepest source. For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny - prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder - violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat."

It's true. Iraq had no particular ties to Al-Qaeda's loose network. Now, because of this corporate war, the country has become a hotbed of resentment and a well-spring of future retaliation. Take it from the Pentagon itself.

"There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom."

Yes, indeed. I think the world has done a pretty good job of it. See the 14 million who took to the streets on February 15, 2003, the largest day of worldwide protest in human history.

"We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world."

Agreed. Thank goodness for the Internet and the liberties of foreign news. To quote David Cross, the comedian: "Things are messed up when you have to look to the foreign press to find out what's going on inside your own country."

"Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our Nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling of our time."

Well said. Now where's the part about bringing the troops home? Oh, they're staying to make sure this whole "self-governance" thing go to Halliburton's, Bechtel's, and the Carlisle Group's plans.

"Freedom, by its nature, must be chosen, and defended by citizens, and sustained by the rule of law and the protection of minorities. And when the soul of a nation finally speaks, the institutions that arise may reflect customs and traditions very different from our own. America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling. Our goal instead is to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom, and make their own way."

Good...er...right in step with Article 51 of the UN Charter and international law designed to thwart the pre-emptive invasion and overthrow of a sovereign nation. Why would we attempt to impose anything on anyone? Let the voice of the people be heard! Now what's all this I hear about bombing Al Jazeera?

"We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation: The moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right. America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies."

Right on. I suppose this sentiment would apply first and foremost to the country with the most guns.

"We will encourage reform in other governments by making clear that success in our relations will require the decent treatment of their own people. America's belief in human dignity will guide our policies, yet rights must be more than the grudging concessions of dictators; they are secured by free dissent and the participation of the governed. In the long run, there is no justice without freedom, and there can be no human rights without human liberty."

I don't know about you, but I believe this is the first time I've heard our president utter the words, "human rights." But, hey, who's not for human rights? Well, apparently those who would ally with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Uzbekistan, and, until 1990, even during its worst atrocities, Iraq. And those who regard the Bill of Rights as a speed bump on the way to power.

"Eventually, the call of freedom comes to every mind and every soul. We do not accept the existence of permanent tyranny because we do not accept the possibility of permanent slavery. Liberty will come to those who love it."

Indeed. Probably why half the population in the U.S. is vehemently opposed to any further hastening of the apocalypse. Join with me now as we channel the spirit of Thomas Jefferson. Or, in the words of Steve Earle from "Christmastime in Washington:" Come back Woody Guthrie/ Rise up old Joe Hill/ The barricades are going up/ But they cannot break our will// Come back to us Malcolm X and Martin Luther King/ They're marching into Selma as the bells of freedom ring.

"Democratic reformers facing repression, prison, or exile can know: America sees you for who you are: the future leaders of your free country."

God bless it, my favorite line in the entire speech. If I may quote Abraham Lincoln, "Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and, under the rule of a just God, cannot long retain it." Whoops. Bush beat me to the Lincoln line.

"In America's ideal of freedom, citizens find the dignity and security of economic independence, instead of laboring on the edge of subsistence. This is the broader definition of liberty that motivated the Homestead Act, the Social Security Act, and the G.I. Bill of Rights. And now we will extend this vision by reforming great institutions to serve the needs of our time."

If Social Security is so great, why does it need reform...er...abolishing? This seems to be the weakest part of the speech. It seems to lack coherence - or maybe a better word is "resolve."

"When the Declaration of Independence was first read in public and the Liberty Bell was sounded in celebration, a witness said, 'It rang as if it meant something.' In our time it means something still."

Let it ring.

"May God bless you, and may He watch over the United States of America."

I prefer Dickens myself, "God Bless us, everyone."

30% Evil

2005-01-12T21:34:00.000-08:00

In scanning the net for references and rhetorics of evil (a current project of mine), I came across the Gematriculator, a web-based program that calculates the goodness or evilness of any give website based on a simple alpha-numeric algorithm. Gematria is the esoteric, kabbalistic method of divining the secret truths in Hebrew religious texts, assumed to be written in God's language by God himself. At the turn of the 20th century, one of its celebrated later practioners, Russian born mathematician Dr. Ivan Panin, became obsessed with the first verse of John's Gospel in the New Testament: "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with the God and the Word was God..."

[This passage is one of my favorites as "word" in the Greek is "logos," a term that both means "the said" but also has in it a profound sense of "dividing up" of the world into opposites and proportions relative to one another. John's paradoxical statement seems to imply both that the world was spoken - "thus sayeth the Lord" - into view (of particular interest to students of rhetoric like myself) and that this God was and is an imminent thing that differentiated itself from a singularity into the manifest world - that God is the Big Bang and everything after. This is an altogether different conception than God as the transcendent being that stands outside of time and creation. An alternative interpretation of the Gospel passage might suggest that the word itself is responsible for the creation of God as Kenneth Burke argues - that the birth of language was also the birth of the idea of perfection and "God" as the ultimate term in the hierarchy of valuation that language fosters by its very nature.]

In any case, Panin found through his methods that the first verse in the Hebrew Bible, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" (Gen 1:1), contains over 30 different combinations of 7, and the 3 nouns, "God," "heaven," and "earth," equal 777. Moreover, 7 is a number of overwhelming significance in the Bible, especially Revelations in which there are 7 of almost everything. This is plain to see even without a calculator handy. The association of the number 7 with things divine - in Indo-European cultures - most likely has its roots in the seven visible planets. Also, 7 is a prime number, sum of 3 (heavenly things - trinity) and 4 (Earth - 4 elements). Here's a great numerological-cultural primer.

Addendum: After penning this entry, according to the Gematriculator, my blog's "evil" rating went down 1%. It's true!! It's all true!!

Prayer to CNN

2005-01-06T07:59:00.001-08:00

from netcowboy:

O Wolf Blitzer, Ask Me Thy Question That Will Get So Deep In Me and Unplug My Cork
O Christiane Amonpour, Who Liketh To Hear The Sound of Thy Own Voice, Drone On Thy Throne Where The Sun Rises Before Here
O Larry King, Who Mixeth All Information Into Thy Comfort Food, Make Me Feel From Thy Fragile Seventh Heart of Compassion
O Aaron Brown, Whom Witnesseth Great Destruction, Draw Me In With Thy Trident of Courage and Introduce Thou The Next Commercial
O Paula Zahn, the Vanilla Goddess of Mediocrity, Put Everything In A Convenient Box for Easy Transport
O Soledad O'Brien, Who Licketh the Ears of All Men with Thy Billion Humming Tongues, Vouchsafe Me Drink from Thy Coffee Mug
O Anderson Cooper, When Life's Little Victims Upstage Thy Airtime, Be Thou Noisier Than They So I Might Know Thou Art Not Outscoopable
O Lou Dobbs, Who Laboreth Below, Bring Thou My Wallet to Fullness Even As Thou Chortle in Thy Glittering Studio
O Judy Woodruff, Hub of All Gods and Goddesses, Outperform Thou Thy Wanderers and Report Stories Best Heard with Loud Stacatto Horns

O CNN, In The Throes of Unspeakable Tragedy, I turn to Thy Heads Which Talk and to Thy Headlines Which Art More Precious Than Static.

Christmas Questions

2005-01-05T13:36:00.000-08:00

If Santa Claus is the new savior, is Frosty the Snowman a martyred saint? Is the Grinch Beelzebub?

When we look directly under the Christmas tree star, what does it mean that we find consumer goods instead of the baby Jesus?

Why are SUV's by far the most likely vehicles one finds in ditches alongside icy North Dakota interstates?

Is God responsible for evil in the world? If not, can we say He is omnipotent?

When I attended Christmas mass, why was the figure of the crucified Jesus behind the altar holding up two fingers on each hand like Nixon?

Is it possible that the mythical and incidental actions of three wise men two thousand years ago have become the bedrock of the most powerful economy in the world?

Consult the Oracle, or WWGD?

2004-12-11T15:56:00.000-08:00

Until very recently, if you were to search for "Bush's foreign friends" on Google, you would have gotten this page: "Zero results. Did you mean 'Bush's former foreign friends'?" A much more reasonable search. If you search it now, there still aren't any foreign friends, but you will find scores of people like me marvelling at the fact.

If you find yourself in a pinch and need some cryptic, oracular, double-edged advice, I suggest consulting the great ersatz mind of Google. Douwe Osinga of Zurich has put together an interesting algorithm called "Google Talk". For example, if I type "Roger Stahl is" into Google Talk, I get "Roger Stahl is being hunted by the police. You can be a woman soon." Thanks, Google! Consider it done. That'll throw 'em off the trail.

Check out his other projects as well, which include various AI simulators and tests for whether "peace" or "war" will prevail in great cybermind.

Wakeful

2004-12-09T13:16:00.000-08:00

Here's some Robert Graves to pass the time.

Counting the Beats

You, love, and I,
(He whispers) you and I,
And if no more than only you and I
What care you or I?

Counting the beats,
Counting the slow heart beats,
The bleeding to death of time in slow heart beats,
Wakeful they lie.

Cloudless day,
Night, and cloudless day,
Yet the huge storm will burst upon their heads one day
From a bitter sky.

Where shall we be,
(She whispers) where shall we be,
When death strikes home, O where then shall we be
Who were you and I?

Not there but here,
(He whispers) only here,
As we are, here, together, now and here
Always you and I.

Counting the beats,
Counting the slow heart beats,
The bleeding to death of time in slow heart beats,
Wakeful they lie.