2001:Play Time

I am home from a symposium on visual communication called Look Better where Jordan Tate (who has a great blog) invited me to present a "silent lecture". I joked with friends that it was inevitable that I would one day be paid to not-speak. It turned out however, to be harder, and take much more consideration to say nothing that I ever imagined. I have uploaded a short segment of the project I presented called, 2001:Play Time - it is not embedded here because of copyright. (Which I edited with the generous help of Erik Spooner and Spencer Holstein.) Instead of illustrating an idea (what I originally set out to do), it tests a theory: I suspect there is a relationship that exists between Jacque Tati's film, Play Time, and George Lucas' original Star Wars film. No one has told me this, and I can't find a single mention of Tati by Lucas, but Play Time bridges a gap between Star Wars and a film that Lucas does site as an influence: Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Star Trek: Utopians at War

HG Wells, JT Kirk

"This is now a war for peace" wrote the Radium Age scifi master, H.G. Wells, in 1914, "This is the greatest of all wars, not just another war - it is the last war!" In 1932, as if answering Wells directly, but also predicting the rest of the 20th century, the Nazi jurist Carle Schmitt wrote "Such a war is necessarily unusually intense and inhuman because, by transcending the limits of political framework, it simultaneously degrades the enemy into moral and other categories and is forced to make of him a monster that must not only be defeated but utterly destroyed."

Star Trek and Satiability

Binge Drinking: Evil Kirk and anti-Occupy Wall Street

Critics of consumerism, on both the Right and Left, usually count it as one of capitalism's sins. But according to Richard Wilkinson, modern consumerist societies require some level of relative income equality for good health. The laissez faire capitalism of the 19th Century (the brand championed by Rupert Murdoch's media outlets and the Koch brother's lobbying industry), made no concessions to address income disparity (I will leave it to Slavoj Žižek to explain the inadequacy of charity.) The socialism that rose up to challenge that era's unrestrained capitalism's misery was a demand for complete economic equality. Star Trek is often described as a socialist utopia, but that hides its greater aspect. David Simon, who grew up in consumer culture and is now as the creator of The Wire, is one of its most successful creator-class, argues beautifully in a recent talk, "If you believe in group insurance you are a socialist." But that leaves the question of what you believe in if you are a consumerist. There is a simple ethical test that delivers a very peculiar answer: What would Kirk do?

Star Trek: A Diamond Age Social Contract

Debating the future: Let That Be Your Last Battlefield (1969); Occupy Wall Street (2011)

In his new book, The Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama writes that, "In tribal societies justice between individuals is a bit like contemporary international relations, based on the self-help of rival groups in a world where there is no third party enforce or rules." This is the bread and butter of libertarian thinkers in the mold of Friedrich Hayek, who believe that the formation of the rule of law was an organic and incremental process. But "Hayek was simply wrong about certain of his historical facts" Fukuyama observes that; and that "although law did precede legislation in many societies, political authorities frequently stepped in to alter it, even in early societies." He also points out that Hayek makes "not a single reference to, yet religion is clearly a critical source of legal rules in Jewish, Christian, Hindu, and Muslim societies." Fukuyama's point is not only that religious text form the bedrock of legal systems, but that the kinds of things people believe, the stories they tell to one another as a society, for better or worse, shape the directions societies take. Star Trek is exactly that sort of story (for better); Hayek's libertarianism another (for worse).

Star Trek and Gluttony

Deseases of excess; Captain Kirk, Ayn Rand

My friend Guan asked where "rugged individualism" fits into my understanding of the American Dream and pointed me to a post by J. Bradford DeLong. "What has survived throughout is the American myth of rugged individualism," DeLong writes. "The power of this myth has meant that the United States is not, and never will be, a European-style social democracy. People may come together for barn raisings, but America is still the land of upward mobility and opportunity, where the most common questions are, I've done it, so why haven't you?" But the truth is almost no Americans have "done it". Jeb Bush, who is the grandson of a US Senator, son of one US President and brother of another, once claimed to be a "self-made man". Most of those who claim to have "done it" usually mean: "Fuck you, I got mine." Any Rand, "famously a believer in rugged individualism," but after a lifetime of heavy smoking and venomous opposition to government social welfare programs, Rand became ill with lung cancer and accepted Social Security and Medicare payments.

Star Trek and Postscarcity Consumerism

James Doohan and Simon Pegg as Scotty

Even if many Americans have lost track of the full promise of the American Dream - the dream that a nation's wealth is measured not simply by how great it is, but how greatly it is shared - our cousins in Scotland have not. I have no idea what they're putting in scotch eggs these days, but between Charles Stross, Ken MacLeod, Grant Morrison and Mark Millar, the Scots have a lock on myth creation at the moment. The Godfather of this second Scottish Enlightenment is Iain M. Banks, who describes his Culture novels as his own "secular heaven". But while Banks says that he "could [n]ever write in someone else's universe like Star Wars or Star Trek, as it would be too restrictive" his Culture series clearly picks up where Roddenberry left off - projecting into a distant future where the United Federation of Planets has grown into a galaxy-spanning civilization of multiple humanoid species and massively powerful artificial intelligences. 

Star Trek and the American Dream

Ben Fry, All Streets (2009): David Brin, Pyramids and Diamonds (2011); Star Trek, Spectre of the Gun (1968)

According to Kevin Kelly "The uber American dream is to build your own comfy place on the edge of wilderness with your own hands." And indeed, that is the national myth; Manifest Destiny that begins with the founding fathers and goes right up to the returning vets of WWII settling the first suburbs. On his site, the author David Brin points to a very different aspect of the American Dream: "The founders started by banning primogeniture, so no family fortune could sit and accumulate, undivided, as a lordly demesne at the pyramid's peak. Instead, they would get divided among the large numbers of children that folks had then -- an intentional act of "social engineering" and outright 'levelling.'" Star Trek had some Manifest Destiny in the mix of its myth - but the greater part of the story it told was the promise of leveling.

Anglo Spring: Why We Fight

Love in the social network free riots of Vancouver; Hate at the Twitter and Facebook fueled UK riots.

When the riots broke out in Tottenham this summer two very different stories leapt to mind. One was Jonathan Franzen's commencement speech tirade in which he warned a group of freshly minted BAs against, consigning themselves "to 10 years of merely taking up space on the planet and burning up its resources." He was warning them against being - "in the most damning sense of the word" - consumers. Franzen railed against the shallow narcissism of "liking" on social networks and triumphed the greater depths of real world "love" (giving the example of the un-commodifiable love of bird watching). "Sooner or later" he explained about love, "you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight."

Anglo Spring: Sociopathocracy

Wisconsin's "unseemly circus"(2011); Gustave Courbet, The Burial at Ornan (1850)

When Gustave Courbet showed his painting, The Burial at Ornan, in 1850 it upset his Parisian audience. The historian TJ Clark explains that Courbet refused to depict peasants at pious and simple, instead he "painted worship without worshipers." But more maddening still, Courbet painted the peasants fashionably dressed, undermining the Parisian's patronizing vision of country people. Adding injury to insult, Courbet's massive canvas rubbed his audience wrong because of their own diminished prospects, burial had become a privilege that most Parisians could no longer afford: "Thus burial took on barbed and complex meanings; it became an institution, a privilege, a matter of envy and dispute." It now appears escaping justice is and institution, a privilege and a matter of envy and dispute. Those are the conditions that Socrates branded the "justice of a band of robbers."

Anglo Spring: It is time for this unseemly circus to stop.

Downton Abbey (2010); Irascables (1950)

The painter Jasper Johns famously observed that, “artists are the elite of the servant class.” What Johns fails to note however, is exactly which servant artists most resemble. In the BBC series Downton Abbey we are reminded how clearly the roles of butlers, footmen and maids were defined. Each has very particular expertise and places within very old and explicit hierarchies. The only premodern equivalent to role of the modern artist meanwhile is a class of servant that withered away at just about the same moment as the first modern artists were appearing. Artists are jesters. 

White Walls, Consumerism (A Conclusion)

Consumerism's carrot and stick: Jobs vs. no jobs.

(Part 10)

This summer, as I watched the DSK prosecution stall and collapse, Right-wing ideologs turn the debt ceiling debate into a crisis that cost American tax payers billions, and the riots in England, I found myself experiencing far more than my usual level of disgusted with capitalism - but perversely defensive on the part of consumerism. Capitalism is nothing more than a bundle of mechanisms for distributing wealth: markets, property and financial instruments are a part of a group of technologies that have been developing over the pst few hundreds of years. Proponents of capitalism like to think of it as a meritocracy, but capitalism only promises enormous wealth to the lucky few and that is because it is a creature of Malthusian economics - the bedrock of its logic is scarcity. Capitalism favors the creation of mega-wealth and super-elites. Consumerism meanwhile, is a creature of the Industrial Revolution, and more particularly of Postwar America - it is an ideology built on the experience of post-Malthusian economies of scale - it's bedrock is abundance: the very modern promise of wealth that increases the more it is shared.

The Forty Part Motet and the meaning of art after September 11th

Takashings, Sky Blue Sky (2011); Janet Cardiff and George Bures, Forty Part Motet (2001)

I know exactly why Janet Cardiff and George Bures' Forty Part Motet has been included in MoMA PS1's show to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. I know because I happen to have participated (along with hundreds of other museum goers) in making the association between the two. I attended the opening of Cardiff's show when Motet was shown for the first time in NYC, just a month after the 2001 attacks. I didn't know Cardiff's work before the show. I remember thinking the little theaters she makes with her collaborator George Bures were tricky but not much more. I entered the gallery where Motet was installed, and was relieved that the miniature theater portion of the show had ended (not my thing). But unlike the theater pieces, I didn't know at all what to make of what I heard and saw. Motet was nothing but an oval of forty plain black speakers, each mounted head high on black iron stands. Entering the gallery, the view from the windows immediately overwhelmed the minimalist aesthetic of the piece. The long wall of windows on the gallery's west side faced Manhattan. The sky was a beautifully clear and bright - the same cloudless blue as the morning of September 11th. "A sky blue sky" Laurie Anderson might of called it.