The Tasty Spoonful

Instagram scattered thoughts

2012-01-06T06:56:00.001-08:00

The simple way to think about Instagram is that it's a play on nostalgia--that it looks to recreate the sense of a previous era's photographic aesthetic for the purposes only of making pictures seem vintage.

The problem with this view is not only that it ignores an important reason why people actually seem to use the app. That is, it seems to foreclose a discussion of the emotions that we are trying to evoke with the app's various filters, focus options, captions, etc. Rather, it also seems to paper over the question of how the form of the app is changing what we think constitutes photography.

How does Instagram change our understanding of the snapshot? What are users trying to tap into other than nostalgia?

A framing thought: the photo filters *don't* really aim to recapture any lost sense of how photos creates meaning or induced emotion. When these filters weren't filters (that is, when it was just the way analog technology worked), the style would have seemed eminently modern. So at the very least Instagram actually warps the sensations created by the filters in the very act of trying to reproduce them.

I dunno. I'm on a bus. Thoughts instagrammers?

So Long Zuccotti

2011-11-15T11:11:00.000-08:00

Tough to support this claim, guys.

Last night's collective shower was inevitable. Occupation in the absence of meaningful negotiations with (or even a few demands of) those who hold political power is as empty as violence in the absence of meaningful negotiations. In this, as a chapter of OWS comes to a close, it seems an obvious opportunity to talk about why it has failed so far:

Occupation is a Political Tactic, not a Strategy:

As pictures of sanitation workers cleaning up the newly-cleared Zuccotti park have been hitting the Interwesbs all day, I'm struck by the orderliness and swiftness with which evidence of the presence of OWS protesters has been eradicated. This of course reveals something essential to the "movement" itself: its presence is physical, embodied, and built on only one half of the required tactics to achieve political ends. Occupation has always been a stalling tactic--something that brings negotiators to the table; an opening up of space somewhere else for dialogue. Not so for OWS.

Violence against protesters by the police in the streets is a horrible thing. But in a case where negotiators are working with those in power, it can at least be a bargaining chip. Violence against protesters who have no one speaking for them is a total waste.

The Call to Arms by the Newer-New-Left has been Unhelpful (their reading of the financial collapse is incomplete, and their call for abstract change is counterproductive)

Sweaty, bedraggled, and seemingly trying to hold back a smile during a fiery speech in the early weeks of OWS, Slavoj Zizek lay down the hammer:

Here there is already socialism for the rich. They say we don't respect private property. But in the 2008 financial crash down, more hard-earned private property was destroyed than if all of us here were to be destroying it night and day for weeks. They tell you we are dreamers. The true dreamers are those who think that things can go on indefinitely the way they are. We are not dreamers. We are the awakening from a dream which is turning into a nightmare. We are not destroying anything. We are only witnessing how the system is destroying itself.

The first part of this paragraph, which emphasizes the weird cult-like aural landscape induced by the "human-megaphone"--seems right enough, except for the fact that it wasn't as much private property that was destroyed as financial capital. The difference is not unimportant. The intangibility of the crisis itself has resulted in an incoherent (or, at best inchoate) set of demands from protesters.

This might be why the materialist critical response to the financial collapse has been so unsatisfying: it's difficult for thinkers in the Marxist tradition to talk about things like credit. This is especially so when it seems that people are less interested in overthrowing the system of private property and more interested in getting jobs. For the most part, even the most unreasonable sounding protesters at OWS wanted jobs and health insurance--not the overthrow of capitalism.

Or,

It's not the eradication of banking: it's the privileging of a certain kind of bank (credit unions)
It's not the eradication of corporations: it's the eradication of an ineffective corporate tax structure masked as rhetoric that wants the end of corporations
It's not the elimination of globalization: it's the perceived democratization of the means of global interchange (side note here, this is why Twitter and Facebook were so much more effectively used in Arab Spring revolts, where these methods of communication were perceived as unsuppressable...they were used in defiance of political powers. Here, it was frequently observed that corporations would never shut down wireless systems to prevent people from Tweeting pics of their drum circles from Zuccotti).

The failure to articulate a concrete set of demands is, in other words, not just the fault of the protesters. It's the fault of the intellectuals and politicians who exacerbated the problem by fanning the flames of--not really extremist: if you notice, there's nothing that extreme or really new about what Zizek says--totally impractical rhetoric.

If You're Planning on Repopulating Zuccotti, Bring a Warm Blanket--and Also, Read About the Tea Party

There are 62 members of the Tea Party Caucus right now in Congress. There will be ZERO Occupy Wall Street representatives in Congress as of next fall if nothing changes. Elizabeth Warren can't be the only reasoned voice in the room. Period.

On Memory and Moving On

2011-09-11T08:03:00.000-07:00

Try to Praise the Mutilated World, Adam Zagajewski, September 2001

 Try to praise the mutilated world. 
Remember June's long days, 
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew. 
The nettles that methodically overgrow 
the abandoned homesteads of exiles. 
You must praise the mutilated world. 
You watched the stylish yachts and ships; 
one of them had a long trip ahead of it, 
while salty oblivion awaited others. 
You've seen the refugees heading nowhere, 
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully. 
You should praise the mutilated world. 
Remember the moments when we were together 
in a white room and the curtain fluttered. 
Return in thought to the concert where music flared. 
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn 
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars. 
Praise the mutilated world 
and the grey feather a thrush lost, 
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes 
and returns.

Times Finally Reports on Nineties Nostalgia

2011-07-20T08:40:00.000-07:00

NYTimes did a piece on Nineties Nostalgia (the existence of which, somehow, surprised them). What struck me is how smart Nick is in their redeployment of Doug and others. They're not only responding to pressures from social media outlets, but now also responding to audience participation on social networking sites to determine their schedules.

The other thing, as I've continually been thinking about nostalgia these past few months: we're nostalgic for forms of media engagement. As those forms change more rapidly, the thing we can be nostalgic for gets more and more recent. After school cable television was the primary form of entertainment. But check out these social networking stats (passed on me by Tyler, of course....). Notice the crazy-weird spike of internet usage by the youngest demographic. Also note that 11% of Facebook users are 13-17 years old. ELEVEN PERCENT! This is more than 75 million kids.

Forget about watching stuff like Nick. KIDS are online poking each other *cough* ever earlier.

These kids will be nostalgic for the old Facebook messaging interface, like, next week.

(Just kidding, they'll be nostalgic for Google+).

Errol Morris's Favorite Commercial

2011-07-19T14:21:00.000-07:00

I've written about Errol Morris's directorial work on the High Life campaign here and (I think it should show up this afternoon) on Splitsider. But props to NPR for spotting and boosting Morris's tweet from year calling out this commercial as his own personal favorite.

Take that, High Life Man.

Critical Engagement with "Tree of Life"

2011-07-06T11:42:00.000-07:00

There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie. (Jonathan Franzen, Liking is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts," NYTimes 5/28)

In a sharp and often moving criticism of social networks, Jonathan Franzen sets "liking" against "loving." Whereas to like something sets us apart from the liked (or disliked) object, love demands the opening of one's life to another. Love is about cohabitation, and not just in the sense of splitting the rent. It's about a metaphoric (and sometimes not metaphoric) sharing of the same bodily, mental, and emotional space. To put it in the words of the only *actually* moving wedding homily I've ever heard, it helps us salve the loneliness inherent in the human condition. And it does this by attempting to come as close as possible to shared consciousness with another person--regardless of whether one believes this idea is nutty (at best) or impossible (at worst).

But the kind of criticism that has emerged in the wake of Terrence Malick's Tree of Life has exposed a complication of Franzen's argument. Simply to like or dislike a film embodies the laziest sort of critical response available to a writer. I was taught this in high school. An English teacher instructed me never to write "I like this book" in an essay. He told me that merely liking something is uninteresting, and that asking what I think something means would always constitute a more worthwhile form of engagement. But critiques about Tree of Life often ignore the lesson of this observation about good writing, and instead go to the extreme to defend or attack the movie, along with Malick, contemporary filmmaking, and, in some cases God.

That is, we don't need to like or dislike the film. But neither do we need to address what it means.

We need to love it or hate it.

Critics seem to think that where complex, frustrating, resistant objects like Tree of Life are concerned, liking or disliking is not enough. This may be the real consequence of the Facebook like button (and maybe even of Internet-based criticism in general): that we come to view love and hatred simply as hyperbolic manifestations of liking and disliking. It's an old problem with a new face. The difference between liking and loving is reduced to a question of degree, and is not recognized as one that depends on different kinds of emotional investment and personal openness. I dislike reading articles that trumpet Malick's towering cinematic achievements as much as I dislike reading articles that pillory his bombastic confrontation with God. And I dislike them both for the same reason. They lack curiosity, and often exhibit what seems like a fear of confronting the work itself.

Which is a shame because, above all, the film itself exhibits persistent curiosity about the nature of our connection to one another. It strives to portray the interior lives of individuals as woven together by a shared cosmic origin story whose realization on the screen is in many moments as visually arresting as advertised. What binds us together is our childhood desire to understand our origins; our relative abandonment of dreams about God and the cosmic order as adults; and the shocking return of these existentially motivated questions in moments where the reality of our own death suddenly sweeps into view.

In essence, the film suggests that we can draw solace from the notion that our interior lives are all characterized by the same unanswerable questions--the same unknowable God. "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?" God asks from the Book of Job--the framing epigraph for the movie. And the answer seems to be, defiantly: we weren't. And our digital reconstructions of the Big Bang, even 4.7999 billion years of evolution later, pale in comparison to the actuality of those events. But at least we're all thinking about it. And in Tree of Life, the juxtaposition of our imagination's projections of the divine with the space of the ordinary helps remind us of our weird cosmic relationship to one another. In the film's vernacular, we're all here by virtue of the same divine grace or the same natural cause

In other words, I don't know if I liked Tree of Life. But setting aside outrage and euphoria, this is, at its core, a film about love. About its grand and microscopic scales. About the remediation of loneliness in our consideration of the divine and in our relationships with one another. About the way we are together, and in our simple desire to one day hold the people that we have lost.

In this it deserves something more than a thumbs up or down.

Grasping For One Another: Artist Nathan Vernau

2011-06-10T00:50:00.000-07:00

“Let me go grab even more stuff,” Nathan said to me. I was sitting at his coffee table trying not to let my mouth sag onto the pile of his work. Nathan Vernau moved to Chicago after finishing his MFA at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He participated in a widely lauded group show at Robert Bills Contemporary, curated by gallery director Emma Stein, and will appear in the Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival later this summer. Last year, he appeared on the cover of New American Paintings. News about his upcoming shows and festival appearances can be found at his website.

But look. I’m burnt. I’ve tried to write this piece five times, and endured total accidental deletion of 1500 words that I thought were finally adequate to the task of describing what Nathan’s work “is.” I haven’t written anything but a piece on Ren and Stimpy in two weeks as a result. And once again, I find myself not saying what I want to say about the piles of pictures that lay in front of me on Nathan’s coffee table. So I’ll just say it: Nathan’s work is vital, urgent, unnerving, and deeply felt.

And there’s a lot of it.

We started talking about one of his most recent pieces, "You Don’t See, Don’t You See," which seems to embody many of Nathan’s current and ongoing formal and thematic concerns. An elaborately posed pile of contorted self-portraits holding blankets and wearing bunny hats emerges out of the bottom of the frame. The figures have their backs turned to what appear to be open windows, illuminated dimly by tautly hung light bulbs caught mid orbit as they swing in almost perfect circles. The density of the textured surface does not adequately show up on screen. In person, the work is layered, and the blue windows seem to open into a space behind the surface. Only when face to face with Nathan’s pictures (say, on a coffee table in his Avondale/Logan Square apartment) does the meticulousness of his penciling and the complex layering of his collaged arrangements become evident. His figures seem to emerge not just vertically, but also outward from the picture plane, though they remain caught, held down, stuck. This stuckness—and the expenditure of physical effort in defiance of paralysis—runs through much of Nathan’s work. His pieces explore the limits of expression and the often violent desire to be heard/felt/seen/understood.

The roots of Nathan’s particular means of working through these themes can be found in an early series of self-portraits with pink balloons. Nathan sits shirtless in a chair, reading a book, playing with a pink pistol, and wearing a cowboy hat. Surrounded by balloons that respond to his mood and gestures, Nathan cycles through a series of emotions that range from patience, to an all out explosion of pent-up energy. The series climaxes with “God-damnit it’s About Time – Let me Celebrate,” in which the figure leans back and laughs, as if firing the gun in the air. But at the end of this outburst, there is a return to indifference or moody contemplation of one’s inability to effect lasting change upon the environment. Nathan “hangs his hat and sighs” in the aftermath of what proves to be an ineffective or inconsequential outburst of emotion. Two important themes become apparent in this early series.

The first is the degree to which Nathan thematizes performance as a means of communicating artistic meaning. In the balloon series, several objects make appearances. In addition to the balloons themselves, the gun, hat, and shorts reappear in several of Nathan's work. A "cast" of recurring props including hearts, the bunny hat, paper bags, and more recently envelopes create a sense of continuity across time in Nathan's body of work. But more importantly, they convey a sense that the self-portraits are always in a sense a stage for the artist to express some kind of mediated truth about himself. We are always receiving Nathan in a staged setting. In "Still Life Portrait," Nathan makes this even more apparent. Covered with a paper bag, he is effaced and surrounded by objects that stand in for him in the artistic space. What does it mean to be a prop or performer in one's own work?

This question becomes more urgent when we consider the ways in which we play roles in our ordinary interactions with one another. Much of Nathan's recent pieces seem to grapple with the idea that we are always performing--that all communicative or relational actions require a sense of subservience to the limitations of language. And that therefore we are always grasping at shadows of ourselves and others. In "Constant C-O-N-T-A-C-T," the figures seem to be reaching toward an open window, where strings (tied to what? Are these light switches that will provide illumination? Are they helium balloons that will provide escapes) evade capture. Regardless, they are grasping toward some kind of connection even as the strings seem to be wafting in the breeze. Connection remains just beyond our capacity.

In "Lett 'er Tell Me," which Nathan describes as a riff on his own experiences sending email messages in the online dating world, he gets at this idea from the opposite end. Here the figures are lamenting the lack of response to a message sent into the world--the failure to receive confirmation of emotional connection. In both cases, the thing to mourn is the ultimate impossibility of coming into contact with some object or person. The titles of both works are thus ironic. They gesture precisely toward the impossibility of contact or unwillingness to contact.

Yet Nathan's work insistently pursues contact in spite of these failures. In "As Much as I'd Like to Be I'm Not in this Picture," Nathan sums up a sentiment at the core of his work. What does it mean for the artist to be in his work? Perhaps it is just a sense of "all-rightness" with the idea of the inadequacy of language--but a simultaneous impulse to continue to struggle for communication. The artist will not convey any true sense of self or identity. True contact might not be possible. But in Nathan's work, we get the sense that it's worth it to keep trying--on the off chance that, in our efforts to grasp for one another, we might actually touch.

Torture and the State of Exception

2011-05-23T05:28:00.000-07:00

Politico recently reported that, according to Bush Administration speech writer Marc Theissen, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed mocked his captors at Guantánamo while being waterboarded. "KSM figured out waterboarding," Theissen said at the American Enterprise Institute last week. "He figured out the limits," and allegedly counted off seconds until his interrogators were required to pull back.

Theissen's comments seem to suggest that the problem with the Bush Administration's waterboarding policy was that it did not allow agents of the government to go far enough. For me, reading from selections of the Torture Memos provides enough evidence that this assessment is misguided at best--and insane or inhuman at worst. Yet somehow the debate about the merits of waterboarding persists. I have been struck in the past few weeks by the quiet resumption of what I thought was a closed matter: that waterboarding yielded little in the way of useful information at Guantánamo Bay.

The fact that this debate has reemerged in the wake of the death of Osama bin Laden points to a much larger and more complicated issue explored by Nasser Hussein in a 2006 article in Critical Inquiry called "Beyond Norm and Exception." For Hussein, the continued existence of the detention center at Guantánamo and the torturing of inmates there during the post-9/11 period, points to a pressing problem regarding the "state of exception" in contemporary democracy. He argues that "exceptional laws seem to deserve that appellation to the extent that they are occasioned by an exceptional circumstance (such as the attacks of 9/11)." That is, laws enacted during a so-called "state of exception" no longer carry with them the promise of being repealed at the end of an emergency. Rather, governments use exceptional "circumstances" as an excuse to expand indefinitely their sovereignty over a greater portion of ordinary life.

In other words, while the central matter of justice to consider when thinking about waterboarding undoubtedly relates to the lives of those being tortured, we must also ask what about our ordinary life is destabilized when we find ourselves subjects of a government that tortures. Hussein points to the proliferation of laws, distinctions, technicalities and procedures that accompany the initiation of a so-called emergency or state of exception. Rather than the suspension of rights (the traditional case is habeas corpus, "what one witnesses in contemporary emergency is a proliferation of new laws and regulations passed in an ad hoc or tactical manner, administrative procedures, and the use of older laws and cases tweaked and transformed for newer purposes." In essence, we get the torture memos and the enhanced interrogation and detention practices at Guantánamo. But this is the extreme case of what Hussein suggests is a more complex web of laws and regulations that govern ordinary spaces in the space of an indefinite emergency.

That is, if we consider the post-9/11 world to be one fraught with legislation enacted to protect the homeland, increase security, prevent increased terrorist attacks, etc--then it seems impossible to imagine that we will never be "back to normal" (to return to the phrasing of Lucien, the protagonist of Deborah Eisenberg's short story "Twilight of the Superheroes"). Or more to the point, we'll never be out of this particular state of exception. Rather, our society is permanently marked by the enhanced governmental authority granted in the wake of 9/11.

What then does it mean to be subject to the authority of a state that tortures in the post-9/11 world? What does it mean if that state decides it will no longer torture (for real, this time, we are assured)? Hussein's argument seems to suggest that, even if the United States no longer tortures, we will still live under conditions of exception, for the pertinent problem is that we will still live in a state that has the authority to break its own laws in the interest of using a supposed exception to augment its authority.

The High Life Man, Part II: What Women Want

2011-05-18T13:01:00.000-07:00

In Part One of my discussion of the High Life Man, I suggested that an aesthetic transition has taken place in the portrayal of men over the course of the last decade. Using the new Old Spice Man as my point of comparison, I suggested that the masculinity embodied by the be-toweled Isaiah Mustafa "doesn't derive from an internal code, but from the female gaze." This ostensibly stands apart from Errol Morris's High Life Man, whose code of manly behavior comes from within: from adherence to an internal ethos of manhood. To understand what this transition could mean, it seems appropriate to analyze what the High Life Man actually says about female desire (and women in general) and compare that to a reading of the Old Spice spot.

In Questions, the contemporary Old Spice Man asks ladies, "Do you want a man who smells like he can bake you a gourmet cake in the dream kitchen he built for you with his own hands?" That is, do you (ladies) want a skilled man to satisfy your every (sexual) need? "Of course you do," because then you can "Swan dive! Into the best night of your life." Proficiency in baking, construction, and log rolling correlates with sexual desire, and ultimately, sexual performance. The Old Spice Man's proficiency has everything to do with seamless understanding of female desire.

The High Life Man--in Casanova (above) for example--needs instructions about female desire, primarily because women don't occupy a great deal of his attention. "Here's a lesson for the would-be Casanova," says the voiceover. "Every so often it's advantageous to remind the little lady she hasn't dropped off the radar." Already there are significant differences between this spot and the Old Spice ad. The man--the would-be Casanova--is the object of address, whereas the Old Spice Man speaks directly to "ladies." In other words, Old Spice shuttles sexual desire through women, whereas the High Life Man tries to educate a hapless Joe on the mysteries of his "little lady's" wants. The Old Spice Man's every cake and kitchen is made with women in mind, whereas the High Life Man can only "every so often" remember that his monogamous partner even exists. The significance lies in the difference between heterogeneous (but definitely heterosexual) desire--general sexual availability to women--and a monogamous (but, yeah, still definitely heterosexual) relationships.

Granted, the Old Spice Man says he stands in for "your man," which does imply a consistent relationship. But in the spot, he is plugging himself as a viable alternative to any man. He can take the place (and, with his wry smile, suggests that he gladly would) of any significant other, in any woman's arms. Finally, while the Old Spice Man promises the best night of a woman's life, the High Life Man throws a flower into a used bottle (it seems probable that he's been drinking already) and can expect satisfaction of his sexual desires by his little lady that evening.

What goes unsaid about the characterization of heterosexual monogamous female desire in the High Life Man spot? The High Life Man has a very low bar to meet. A relationship can be sustained by periodic affection that is geared toward the satisfaction of male sexual need. I'm not saying that either commercial gives us a rosy picture of the way that men and women relate to one another, but the importance here is not that the High Life Man has no clue what women want--rather that he thinks a woman's desire should be channeled through his own. The woman gets his spent beer bottle and, as thanks, will satisfy his sexual desire.

What, in turn, does this say about the kind of woman that the High Life Man desires? Usefully, the campaign gives us a direct answer:

The "newlywed gal" stands in front of the beer case in her sensible shoes and plaid skirt that rises tantalizingly above her calves. What kind of man does you want, future little lady? "Correct. You want a High Life Man." The commercial seems to offer a conceit similar to that of the Old Spice Man, asking the woman what she desires. But this turns out to be a false gambit because the voice-over confirms the rightness of her decision. The man still controls the world of the supermarket, and the woman chooses correctly because her beer purchase validates the man's desire for High Life. What does an investment in High Life by this young bride mean for her future? Chances are, it means something like the future painted in Casanova.

This has started to sound a bit depressing, but there are two things that complicate the equation here and may redeem the High Life Man in the end. I'm not sure.

The first: these two commercials are pretty clearly ironic--as are many in the series. There's another reading of the High Life Man's attempts at romance too. Chances are he's a lovable galoot who makes mistakes and takes flak from his little lady with some regularity. She probably keeps him in line. In exchange for consistent fireworks, we get the slow burn of a committed relationship. A good example of this is in Mr. Fix-It: the man's competence here is very different from that of the Old Spice Man. Here, proficiency with a wrench (wink wink) is kept within the confines of the marital bedroom. The High Life Man doesn't cheat.

And finally, in its very sincerity--its clarity or apparent surety of what women want, the Old Spice Man might be a little more nefarious in his rhetoric. The voice of the commercial is so certain and confident in what appear to be genuine female desires, it's possible to read it as attempting to manipulate ladies' desire. There's no way a woman would be satisfied by a flower in a High Life bottle--(although, yes, my girlfriend does love High Life, and I love that about her, though I hardly think she would describe me as a High Life Man...or a Casanova)--but there is something that aims to be compelling about cakes, walking on water, swan diving, hot tubs, and building a house. Women are supposed to like this. That's the manipulative part of the Old Spice Man. He convinces ladies he knows what they want. The High Life Man just tries to get by.

Oskar's Mom: Searching and Loss in "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close"

2011-05-15T22:07:00.000-07:00

Words Words Words

I'm not big on announcing "SPOILER ALERT!" but be that as it may, don't read this brief piece on Jonathan Safran Foer's 2005 novel unless you're okay with knowing some things that happen in the end of the book. Or, in other words: Spoiler Alert.

Oskar Schell never considers himself a detective in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. He's not looking for the solution to a mystery, and instead characterizes his travels around New York City as "my search," telling people he meets that he's merely "looking for a lock." Of course, what we learn throughout the novel is that the search itself gives Oskar a means of carrying on a day-to-day life in the absence of his father. It gives him a means of ordering and calming his otherwise inchoate body of symptoms (self-bruises, tics, obsessions about 9/11 and clothing and death, etc). Oskar fears that the conclusion of his search ostensibly forecloses the possibility of proximity (ie: his extreme closeness) to his father. Once Oskar finds the lock he worries aloud to his grandfather: "I found it and now I can't look for it [...] Looking for it let me stay close to him for a little while longer" (304). Finding the lock could never have been as important as engaging in the process of endless searching.

Put another way, Oskar's search is not epistemological (it does not seek an end or solution), but rather ontological (it stands a kind of personal justification for his life). What the book leaves unanswered--and why I think this 9/11 novel offers a frustrating framework for trying to understand the aftermath of personal and historical loss--is whether there is a way to break out of cycles of traumatic (and often self-inflicted) re-wounding. One key (HA!) way to approach this problem is to consider the role of Oskar's mother in reorienting Oskar's search around the pursuit of a conclusion.

Whether it seems plausible that Oskar can emerge from his traumatic pattern at the end of the novel depends on a reading of his mother's actions. Throughout the book Oskar's Mom emerges as the character that seems to have the best sense of how to reorder her world in an attempt to move on from 9/11. And yet even she finds comfort in a relationship with Ron built upon the shared personal tragedy of spousal loss. Oskar's Mom--moreso than his grandparents--most fully acknowledges a need for an intimacy based on grief as a means for rebuilding life after loss. She allows Oskar's search to proceed only insofar as it will not continue indefinitely. Oskar observes: "My search was a play that Mom had written, and she knew the ending when I was at the beginning" (292). In other words, part of her own means of coping with the loss of her husband is her ability to manage the coping mechanisms of her son. She attempts to help break Oskar out of what may otherwise be an endless and purposeless search.

Oskar's proximity to his father entails participation in a constant ordering and reordering of the world, in which solutions are always delayed in the interest of keeping open all possible narratives. This is the mode of being that he has inherited from Thomas. Oskar never means for the objects he gathers to build a "case." Objective solutions do not exist in the world shared by Oskar and his father. Oskar presses him on this issue in the bedtime story of the Sixth Burough: "I know there wasn't really a sixth borough. I mean, objectively," he says to his father (221). And Thomas dodges the point, asking, "Are you an optimist or a pessimist?" (221) Optimism implies faith in the continuity of the story--in its constant openness to new possibilities. Pessimism, by contrast, simply means that there is a definitive solution to be arrived at. Or, in Thomas's words: "There's nothing that could convince someone who doesn't want to be convinced. But there is an abundance of clues that would give the wanting believer something to hold on to" (221). His son takes these words as an instruction to accumulate rather than analyze: to go on an endless search for clues rather than a purposeful investigation for a solution to the problem of the key.

The problem here is that Oskar has inherited an inherently symptomatic mode of being from his dad--one that characterized Thomas's melancholic attachment to his own absent father (and the corresponding need to keep open the possibility of his father's return). The book does not blame Thomas for saddling his son with a neurotic way of inhabiting the world. This is just the way things are: we inherit broken coping mechanisms from our families and our shared histories. Oskar's desire for (incredible) proximity to his father would have the potential for endless repetitions were it not for its purposeful orientation by his mother around the satisfaction of a certain narrative end.

That is: the conclusion of the story--the arrival at a solution--at least provides Oskar with a means to express the inexpressable. He can admit his secret to the last Mr. Black, who in turn forgives him for his inability to speak previously. In the final scene, we seem to arrive at something like the possibility for moving forward when Oskar's mother reveals her own secret about Thomas's final cellphone call. Oskar wonders about his mother's emotions as she recounts the events of 9/11: "Was she relieved? Was she depressed? Grateful? Exhausted?" But at the same time, he thinks of his own, "Was I angry? Was I glad?" (323) In a moment of confusion, a new closeness seems to be growing between Oskar and his mom as they share memories of 9/11 for the first time. It is only now--after the conclusion of the search, that Oskar can think backwards: from the end of what has turned out to be an investigation to the the beginning of his father's story about the Sixth Borough. The space of shared intimacy with his Mom--of a growing ability to express grief openly--seems to point to the possibility of moving forward.

Ordinary Politics: Pictures from Michael Mergen

2011-05-11T11:34:00.000-07:00

Precinct 7-1, Centerville, TN, 2010

Ordinary Engagement with the Political

Michael Mergen's photography hung at the ArtChicago fair this month as part of an exhibition featuring the work of 19 top MFA candidates from around the country. Pictures from Vote, a series that reveals the often unexpected contexts in which Americans cast ballots, stood out for their documentary presentation of scenes in which everyday life becomes a stage for political participation. A Philadelphia native, Mergen began his career as a photojournalist, and is currently a graduate student at the Rhode Island School of Design. His growing portfolio of work, which has been featured in Mother Jones and elsewhere, represents an expanding inquiry into the modes of political participation in America at the level of everyday ritual and routine--not just when we feel like we are performing civic duties. Mergen's pictures stand as an important commentary on the over-saturation of daily life by the political, exposing ways in which citizens are constantly exposed to civic imperatives in scenes of ordinary life.

Vote Next to the Slot Machine

In a phone conversation this past weekend, Mergen told me that before before shooting images for Vote, he had a very clear set of assumptions about the spaces where elections take place. "In my mind you vote in a church basement, a library, or city hall," he said. These are spaces we go to when we want to feel like citizens: places in which we declare ourselves to be part of a collective. "The series is challenging assumptions about those notions," he said. They document the diversity of contexts in which political participation takes place, and belie the idea that there are a set of locations deemed appropriate for casting ballots. In Mergen's images, voting booths appear next to vending machines, slot machines, and stacks of Gatorade bottles, demonstrating that elections take place in a much broader group of spaces that we occupy on a regular basis.

At the same time, the photographs are--with one exception--devoid of people pulling levers or grappling with electronic touch screens. They are not about voters, but rather about ordinary spaces that feel charged with the political on election days. In the absence of vot-ers, Vote emphasizes the depersonalization of democratic ritual, perhaps reversing what we normally think of as the defining expression of political individuality and agency in a democratic system. When figures do appear in Ward 64, Precinct 11, they are covered privacy curtains that humorously replicate a blue automobile cover in the background of what appears to be a garage. As Mergen put it, "The mechanics of the process are nationalized or systematized." As a consequence of this standardization, we take ourselves to be swept into the collectivizing abstract space of national identity.

On one hand, this sense of belonging is reassuring, and we feel ourselves to be characters in the unifying patriotic narrative. But on the other, it constitutes a manipulation of individuals that is necessary to the reproduction of democratic institutions. We become part of the machine of democracy when we vote, and the fantasy of individual expression is shot through with a sensation that our vote might not actually matter: that we are being erased from the political process as soon as we pull the curtain behind us--that our identity is being effaced whenever we consider ourselves with respect to the collective electorate. "Voting becomes a disembodied act of citizenship," Mergen said. The upshot is that we submit ourselves to a process that makes our individuality abstract--expressible in a unit of political participation.

Mergen's images are not criticizing this process, but they do seem interested in exposing otherwise hidden instances when the ordinary becomes a scene for overt political action. What does it mean when voting booths are situated in casinos, convenience stores, or in a private home surrounded by what are likely family portraits of soldiers? It seems that these pictures are invested in a correction of our assumption that voting takes place in spaces reserved for civic participation. It's not just voting (or jury duty--one of Mergen's recent series is called Deliberate, and he takes photographs of the sparse, though often humorous, furnishings of jury rooms). They are alive to the contradiction between our expectation of what constitutes political participation, and the reality of political saturation of ordinary spaces.

Saturated Landscapes

In two other series, Mergen pushes beyond the overt cases when we take part in political processes, and engages with more abstract instances in which the political reaches into the blank, mundane spaces of everyday routine and ritual. In 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, he presents photographs of the White House's famous address in other parts of the country. The idea here seems simple enough. An otherwise ordinary address takes on a layer of meaning because of its association with Washington. But we may also read these images as exposing the pervasiveness of abstract political power even in the absence of direct references to the Capital City. The famous address can call our attention to wider markers of our identity as subjects of citizenship narratives--the way we are constantly bombarded with images and rhetoric that binds us to a collective identity.

The degree to which these connections have become abstract becomes most apparent than in Mergen's latest body of work, a set of images of highway sections named for War Veterans, Victims of War or Terrorism, and other groups deemed worthy of patriotic designation. What's interesting here is the active intrusion of the political into an ordinary space. "Voting is an elective sport," Mergen said, referring not just to the electing of officials, but to the fact that voting represents voluntary participation in the political process. Even in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue the association with the political requires an act of interpretation and association. By contrast, "driving is an apolitical, functional act," at least when it comes to our relatively low expectations to engage in narratives of patriotism. (Though I think you could argue that a choice to place political bumper stickers and flags on cars make driving somewhat more political). The significance of works like The American Ex-Prisoner of War Memorial Highway, I-695, Connecticut (2010) and The United Spanish American War Veterans Highway, Massachusetts (2010) rests again in the juxtaposition of the title with the bare ordinariness of the space that it designates. But in this case, the rhetorical function of the signs is precisely to invest an ordinarily apolitical space with the rhetoric of patriotism.

These are situations in which the political/patriotic narratives of citizenship in the United States are thrust upon us. A number of important questions emerge: Who do we determine to be worthy of memorializing in this way? Why is this even deemed an appropriate way to memorialize individuals in the first place? Does the act of seeing these signs--the mere fact of driving on roads dedicated to the memory of someone--constitute a patriotic act? Is this the purpose of these designations in the first place? Finally--what will it mean when we see "Victims of 9/11 Memorial Connector Road"?

Under contemporary conditions, given the saturation of ordinary life with the political, perhaps any death can be claimed as patriotic (think of the "Heroic Victims of 9/11"). The subsequent question must be: Should we be worrying about this? What does the presence of the political or patriotic in our ordinary lives mean for our agency as members of a collective? Mergen gives us the aesthetic works necessary to think through these questions.

All images reproduced here with permission from Mike Mergen. You can find his site here.

"United 93" and OBL

2011-05-08T22:43:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of reasons to think about Paul Greengrass's 2006 United 93--not least of which is the film's complicated portrayal of Islam. Here's my best effort when it comes to relating the movie to last week's events.

Since Osama bin Laden’s death last week, a part of the national conversation has been dedicated to determining how “we” are supposed to feel. It’s a dilemma. What emotions are appropriate this kind of event? Ambivalence? Relief? Joy? Satisfaction? Perhaps more interestingly, the question of how to feel has often been framed as an accusation. That is, it’s seemed quite common to hear people asking: “What emotions are inappropriate for this kind of event?” in an effort to disavow certain sets of reactions. I wonder why accusations of emotional immaturity and wrongheaded patriotism have been heaped with such vehemence upon crowds of White House and Times Square “OBL” revelers. And I want to suggest that the narrative function of United 93 is in part to give us fictional space to experience these emotions without having to avow them.

I don’t mean to say that bare-chested chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” were the only way to go. But at the same time it seems less productive to declare that some combination of joy/pride/patriotism was wrong than to ask why we may have been feeling these ways in the first place. To do so, it might be useful to consider the last moments of Paul Greengrass’s 2006 film United 93, when the doomed passengers finally mount their assault on the hijackers. The fictional representation of the pain and death of terrorists seems to provide a narrative opening for violent—but, I think ultimately human—emotions. Is it equally wrong to root for the deaths of terrorists in this fictional space? Can we forgive ourselves for forgetting that these were real people, and that we wish them ill in this scene? Is the film providing us with an outlet for the violent feelings that we want to disavow? Or am I the only one who was—despite my own (mainstream, middle-road) ambivalence and thoughtful relief during the President’s speech last Sunday—rooting for the passengers in that last scene?

In the social media tsunami that followed the announcement “OBL’s” death, two quotes were often repeated on Facebook walls and Twitter feeds. The first comes from Mark Twain: “I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.” The second was at first attributed to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr: “I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.” King never said this, and thanks to some rushed detective work, Megan McArdle of The Atlantic initially suggested that the quote had been maliciously fabricated. To her credit, she apologized the following day after it was revealed that the misattribution occurred by accident. Here’s McArdle in her mea culpa blog post:

It turns out I was far too uncharitable in my search for a motive behind the fake quote. I assumed that someone had made it up on purpose. I was wrong.

The point is that the Internet was a significant rhetorical battleground for those rushing to offer, judge, and counter-judge emotional reactions to the death of Al Qaeda’s longtime leader.

But the thing about watching a movie is that it’s far less likely that someone will judge you for feeling a certain way with respect to characters, even when those characters are wrapped up in a narrative that claims to be “based on a true story.” Greengrass’s film gives us the illusion of fidelity to the actual events on United Flight 93 when no one knows what exactly happened in those final moments. It tells us what we want to know, even though we suppress the desire to know it: the passengers fought back and managed to inflict pain on their captors before the crash. In the imagined battle for the cockpit, we feel freer to root for a passenger to deliver a fire extinguisher to the plexus of a fictional terrorist. These things happened, and yet didn’t happen. Because of their portrayal in film, we can avow our desire to see the death of the terrorists, and then disavow that same desire when the lights come on.

Derrick Rose and Fan Highlight Reels

2011-05-04T15:08:00.000-07:00

Derrick Rose became the youngest player ever to win the NBA's Most Valuable Player award today. By this point, even if you don't live in Chicago, you might know why. If not, Sports Illustrated's version of Derrick Rose Central essentially provides all the numbers necessary to make a convincing case that he was the most dominant player in the league. I'm not going to try to express in too many words the thrill of watching Rose play (though it's something akin to watching a man run downhill and jump off cliffs over and over again for 48 minutes). Rather, it's a good opportunity to think about the phenomenon of fan-generated highlight films--and how they are changing the nature of sports fandom.

A YouTube search for "Derrick Rose Highlights" yields 7,500 video clips. Filtering for "HD" leaves me with roughly 3,500. But what's interesting about the videos is not just the sheer number, or the diversity of production values (though my favorites are the super cheesy ones), or the diversity of background music (everything from Kanye (below, my favorite*) to the "Derrick Rose Remix" of Rebecca Black). Many contain religious-like fervor and investment in historical continuity between Jordan and Rose (and who could blame Chicago for desperately wanting to make that connection).

Perhaps what I want to say here is that Derrick Rose adds very little to the content of these videos. The highlights themselves only infrequently seem to be the focus of fan videos. In this way, they stand apart from, say, official highlight reels from sports networks). Here, it's the announcers who contextualize the SICK DUNKS (I'm having a lot of trouble controlling myself watching these clips). This kind of clip resembles traditional sports viewing, with announcers as the chief mediator of the content.

By contrast, each fan video represents a particular combination of simple production abilities with curatorial choices, the confluence of which embody an attempt to engender a very specific emotional impact. Almost categorically, my reaction to Derrick Rose dunks is "OH MY GOD." But YouTube fan videos allow for seemingly endless choices of emotional contexts in which to place that "OH MY GOD." And, the volume of YouTube clips featuring the same highlight materials with different supporting songs and clips allows me to explore which of these contexts I like best. Do I want to feel serious? Badass? Corny? Religious? I can immediately scroll through however many I want and experience a range of feelings immediately.

That's awesome.

But there's a next step. Individual fan videos seem less interested in reaching Derrick Rose fans on the basis of his talents (side note: the fantastic sub-genre of anti-fan videos can be similarly explored), and more interested in finding viewers that desire the production of a particular feeling with regard to Derrick Rose. Why? So that like-minded viewers will share their video as a link. In this way, Mr. MVP is not necessarily the central focus or purpose of fan videos. Rather, these clips aim to connect individuals with similar aesthetically-expressed emotional communities and guarantee the expansion of those communities through social networks.

Fan videos create sub-bases within fan-bases, and in the process essentially reverse the concept of fandom. They don't support the players as much as they speak to the need of fans to express their particular emotional investment in athletes, and perpetuate that community online. In other words: you don't share all of the videos that you see. Rather, you pick the one that you most identify with, and identify yourself as belonging to a particular community of feeling. Derrick Rose exists for the satisfaction of your particular need to sense participation in a unique community.

*So, thanks, Promixes95, for reminding me of what it feels like to listen to Kanye (btw, already a deeply manipulative song) and want so badly to be a Chicagoan. The collision of two Chicago hometown heroes lets me feel as though I too an a native.

The Built Environment and Photography

2011-05-04T09:29:00.000-07:00

The above composite of photographs taken by Hilla and Bernd Becher appeared in the 1975 exhibition The New Topographics: Photographs from a Man-Altered Landscape at the George Eastman House in Upstate New York. Like many of the pictures in this exhibition, the black and white documentary stare of the camera presents what seems an objective perspective on scenes of industrial production. The majority of the pictures at the Eastman House were taken in black and white, and were starkly depopulated. They present stark landscapes created by "man," but devoid of his presence. Now, a new show (that I am absolutely flipping out about since my girlfriend told me about it [I might have to go alone, I'll be so annoying]) at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Photography called Public Works demonstrates the multiple directions that artists have taken the lessons of New Topographics.
Some background on the built environment in photography

As has been well-documented, especially after the exhibition's retrospective run in the US, The New Topographics represented a stark shift in ideas about the potential for and purpose of photographic representation. In an excellent collection of essays Reframing the New Topographics, published by Columbia College (Chicago) this March, critics reconsider the role of this landmark body of pictures (I previously wrote about the collection and Arcade Fire's album The Suburbs). Nearly all of them point out that few actually attended the original exhibition. Those who did rejected the influence of the academy on photographic production. Many of the artists had earned -- gasp -- MFA degrees in photography, and their studied framing of the landscape seemed sterile to many. Established photographers, who had been fighting the outsider status of photography, worried that young artists were falling victim to the critique that had hampered the acceptance of the art form as a form of high art: they were letting their cameras do the work.

Yet in the 35-odd years since New Topographics, the representation of built environments has shifted dramatically, largely thanks to the aesthetic choices made by the artists in that show. Artists had recognized the political potential of documentary representation in photography, but it became accepted within the artistic establishment to pursue this objectivity--that is, to embrace the lens's credibility and exploit it as a means of making aesthetic and political arguments.

In light of this exhibition, and some exciting young photographers whose work I saw this past weekend at ArtChicago, it seems possible to argue that two main contemporary perspectives on "built environments" (perhaps an updated moniker for "man-altered landscapes") have emerged.

Environmental Disaster and the Working Class Ordinary

The British photographer Martin Parr represents one direction: repopulating the built environment. Throughout his career, Parr has seemed to focus on the consequences of filling the blank industrial, suburban, and exurban landscapes presented by the artists in The New Topographics. Most notably in his series The Last Resort (images made in 1983-6), the working class of Britain is portrayed on holiday in the polluted "oasis" of Brighton Beach, long a seaside retreat for Londoners.

In wide landscape shots of Brighton, Parr's photos capture cranes and cargo ships on the horizon. In close ups, they often focus on those who will inherit the destroyed built environment: children. Parr places young children front-and-center in the frame, in bathing suits or naked, playing among trash and industrial machinery. Some of the images at first seem documentary -- simple narratives of family life on the beach. But they also have an overtly dark, ironic, and politically charged subtext. These "retreats" for the working class are nothing like the idyllic locales populated by the rich, generically displayed as places where solitude is sought (say, for example: this). Rather, they are spaces where the lower middle enjoys the pleasures affordedby repopulating landscapes that had been abandoned to industrial production.

When the built environment is reconstituted as a site of working class recreation, as Parr demonstrates, the consequences are images that demonstrate the precarious nature of life as the working poor, and its proximity to the environmental consequences of capitalist production. In contrast to the bare facts of economic activities (the landscapes of New Topographics), here are the emotionally rich portrayals of a population at "play" amid the refuse of contemporary life.

[As a coda here, Parr's more recent work considers what happens when these middle class desires for basic forms of recreation begin to arise in developing nations. His photos of beaches and ski resorts are phe.no.me.nal. They display populations still enamored with the idea that consumption can produce environments laden with possibilities for transcendence of ordinary drudgery.]

The Emotional Life of Machines: In Awe of Circulation

Another direction for photographers (and one that seems to have emerged more recently, though I could be off base here), is the reintroduction of emotional registers into landscape photography. Frank Breuer's photographs of containers are featured in Public Works. Jon McNeals pictures are not, but they are nevertheless pertinent to the conversation that the exhibit is enacting. They seem to be probing whether the machines of production and circulation can inherit or begin to embody the emotions of humans who build them. Rather than merely documenting the built environment, these images are full of playful juxtaposition and are often downright pretty.

Consider the humorous slogans of the DelMonte trucks in Antwerpen, the "cute" truck against a green backdrop in Liege, and the almost other-wordly uncanny presence of an airplane in Mojave. Breuer's work features images of objects that seem to be posing their own quirkiness for the camera. He captures the unique weirdnesses possible in contemporary life, where goods circulate the globe at unprecedented speeds and find themselves in unexpected places. The shots are close-in, and don't allow for the kind of sweeping political considerations that are more alive in Parr's work. So, for example, we don't think about environmental destruction when we see a trailer in front of trees. We see a funny juxtaposition. We don't see the conditions of mass food consumption when we see the DelMonte trucks. We see the kitschy slogan. The pictures help us see how production attempts to conceal itself in the ordinary.

By contrast, McNeal's photographs are beautiful objects. Here, we arrive at what might be the most recent iteration of photography that inherits *something* from The New Topographics. Where the 1975 exhibit documented the sublime size and scope of man's effect on his environment, McNeal's photographs portray the aesthetics of industry. We get setting suns over cranes, and extreme (and, it cannot be said enough, beautiful) perspectives on interstate exchanges. This is production at its most appealing, its most apparently symbiotic with the environment. And yet at the same time, McNeal seems to help us consider why we believe these scenes to be beautiful. His images don't praise the beauty they portray, but rather ask how we come to lavish praise upon ourselves for our industriousness.

The 9/11 Commission Report as Memorial

2011-05-02T15:12:00.000-07:00

The 9/11 Commission Report stands as the government’s official take on “what happened” almost ten years ago on that infamously beautiful day on the Eastern Seaboard. Perhaps surprisingly, it also stands as one of the most engaging narratives about the history of Al Qaeda and America’s counter-terrorism efforts. It’s really well written—a fact that surprised many critics when it was first published.

In light of last night’s events—a kind of strange kickoff of the nation’s Tenth Anniversary of 9/11 pensiveness—I have been thinking about other ways to think of the report. Perhaps we can think of the report, less as a government document, or even as a work of literature. It’s an instruction manual on what, why, and how we should respect the authority of the state. In effect, the report acts as a kind of memorial to September 11. Memorials establish the rules for what constitutes citizenship, and confirm our participation in a fantasy of national belonging. When thought of as a memorial, it seems possible to suggest a broader importance for this government document.

What we Should Respect About the State: Surveillance

I was struck last night by the quality of personal agency in the President’s rhetoric: “I learned.” “I was briefed.” “I directed.” His language took ownership of the operation that led to the death of Osama bin Laden, and he strenuously reminded us of his role as the head of the complex machineries of state—most importantly, those related to the armed forces. (The mobilization of similar language by President Bush in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 is very insightfully explored in Sandra Silverstein’s 2002 book War of Words).

Notice, for example, the essential and yet mysterious role of JSOC (the Joint Special Operations Command) in the Administration’s narrative about the operations that led to the death of Osama bin Laden. In JSOC the Obama Administration has found an exemplar of the state security apparatus’s ability to operate beyond the bounds of international detection. It is the twenty-first century’s version of what OSS or CIA were when first founded. Part of the state’s power lies in its ability to constantly assure citizens that it can navigate, observe, and control ordinarily unseen spaces. This is what we should respect about the state.

The 9/11 Commission Report similarly performs reassurances about the state’s enduring authority, but in a different way. The report stands as the prime source of what is supposed to be viewed as objective information about the events and their history. In other words, it conveys the state’s authority in a kind of omniscient narrative voice, apart from the events themselves. The state acts as a master fact-gatherer—as a source of detached and comprehensive information.

The report conveys a sense of omniscience and authority in the length and breadth of the information it provides (400+ pages long with 120 pages of endnotes, diagrams, photographs, etc). It overwhelms readers with its extensiveness. There can be no end to the connections it draws. This thoroughness—and, one might argue, the title page and signatures of Commission members—suggests not only that the document is authoritative. More importantly, it speaks to the existence of a coherent governmental authority standing behind the facts: one whose investigative prowess and interpretive capacity should be a source of shared confidence. That is, we should respect—and be reassured by—the claims of a body whose methods of surveillance, data collection, and analysis are highly organized and sophisticated.

Why we Owe the State Something: Adaptable Protection

The book assures its readers that, although the government was unprepared for the attacks, its security, defense, and other state apparatuses have the capabilities to adapt. In other words, citizens owe fidelity to the nation-state because of its ability to both protect individuals, and change itself when that protection fails. This assertion seems to establish why we should have faith in the state.

The two chapters that conclude the book: What to Do?: A Global Strategy and How to do it? A Different Way of Organizing the Government, insist upon the continuity and improvement of the state’s authority. Patriotic participation in the narrative of national belonging requires faith in the government’s ability to sustain a threat, adapt to that threat, and care for the maintenance of the citizenry’s ordinary life. The report assures readers that “Countering terrorism has become, beyond any doubt, the top national security priority for the United States” (361). The report offers recommendations and responses to terrorist threats, and suggests that implementations of their strategies will increase the safety of citizens. The government will adapt. The document stands as evidence of its commitment to change.

How we Owe what we Owe: Participation

But in an interesting rhetorical move, the report then suggests that the America people’s participation in the recommendations will be essential to the success of the government’s efforts to keep citizens safe. The shift in policy, “has occurred with the full support of the Congress, both major political parties, the media, and the American people” (361, emphasis added). “Engaged citizens” are encouraged to “redefine their relationships with government, working through the processes of the American republic” (361). In other words, the state’s ability to respond to future threats requires the patriotic participation of individuals. How should we help the state achieve its aims in keeping us safe? We should participate in the governmental institutions: understand and share our history, volunteer for the military, support the economy, hang flags, etc.

The recommendations made by the Commission are couched, not merely in bureaucratic policy shifts, but rather lean heavily on traditional narratives of participatory American democracy.

By tying the success of policy recommendations to specific actions by individual Americans, the document seems to solidify its role as a memorial. Like a memorial, the document attempts to mobilize a common site of national mourning as a means to reinforce the foundations of the state’s power. In response to a historical event, it emphasizes the agency of individuals to contribute to an American narrative. The onus of properly memorializing the victims of September 11, 2001 lies ultimately with the American people. This theme runs throughout the entire report.

In the Heroism and Horror Chapter, the commission suggests that “a rededication to preparedness is perhaps the best way to honor the memories of those we lost that day” (323). Here, the report connects individual actions with individual memory. Preparation for terrorist threats becomes itself a kind of memorializing. To read a book about how to be better prepared thus constitutes a proper and patriotic form of memory.

The book’s thoroughness coupled with its narrative voice both insist upon the government’s authority and implicate the reader into the process of building an improved state. The report educates as it includes the reader in the collective traumatic events of September 11. In other words, it defines and insists upon the scope of the government’s authority, while teaching us how to be good citizens within the system it describes.

An Evening of Gentlemanly Pursuits, Part IIIa

2011-04-29T13:31:00.000-07:00

What follows is a setting of a scene--something that contributes to the understanding of the grand sweep and narrative context that found me walking up Fulton Market Street on an almost impossibly warm day in early May 2010, on my way to an interview with Paul Kahan at Publican. Of course, not everyone agrees about the importance of historical flows and contingencies, and so this is an interlude, a prelude to that interview itself. Skippable, sure. After all, there are those that refuse to acknowledge that we are all bound up in contexts and stories and narratives. That we are more than the mere technologies that record these contexts and stories and narratives. That we contain each other. That the remediation of loneliness and apartness comes, in part, from reminders of this togetherness across time. Remember this Mr. Achatz, if you think that you are some kind of context-less newcomer with your fancy cocktails and your seasonal menu. Remember your history. Remember as you sell tickets to the opening of your latest concern. Because we may seem like our own most important moment, but even as we hurtle toward whatever we perceive as the future, the tentacles of our collective pasts tug at our tendons, our tissues and weave themselves into something that we might call, in our more contemplative or hopeful or fearful moments, a soul.

A Brief but Important History of the Blommer Chocolate Company and the West Loop, Vitally Necessary to an Understanding of what One Might Think About on the Way to an Interview with Paul Kahan, Restaurateur

The Blommer Chocolate Company was founded in 1939 in Chicago. The Blommer family--Henry Blommer and his two sons Al and Ben--built a handsome modern headquarters and factory in the Near West Side at the intersection of Kinzie and Desplaines, a few steps from the western bank of the putrid stench of the Chicago River. The city still had no solution for the dumping of industrial waste into the River, and its flow had long before been reversed to reduce pollution of the city's blue jewel, Lake Michigan. The factory was close to the cheap and desperate muscle of a Depression-ravaged immigrant populations, and yet within shouting distance of the Loop--long the city's commercial aorta.

Chicago's population in 1939 was 3.4 million, almost 1 million more than today, despite the expansion of the city's territory over the past decades. The overcrowding was murderous. I found some maps from 1937 of public housing projects and the city's plans for new ones in the Newberry Library (above). Within two miles of the Blommer factory (which you can see on the map right where the "H" in "Hudson" is), there are four low-income housing projects. A neighborhood of factories and warehouses had grown up west of the River and growing local industries drew from the poor Hungarians, Poles, and Russian workforce in the immediate surround that had settled down on the West Side. The newly-arrived joined the offspring of 200,000 Chicagoans that had fled the 1871 fire across the sludgy River to the West Side. This first wave was responsible for the majority the neighborhood's population, and their children had grown up with the hard labor of rebuilding a city, their grandchildren the brutal humiliation of persistent unemployment. These obscure children spoke English with Chicago accents and dreamed of New York and no longer understood when their grandparents said that the low Midwestern sky reminded them of Minsk in November.

The neighborhood became known as "Jew Town" and by 1939 the pockets of Eastern Europeans had hardened into blocs of delis, tailor-shops, and smokehouses. But they were still poor. There were only three movie theaters where West Siders could attend showings of some of the greatest movies ever made that year--all of which came out in '39: The Wizard of Oz, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Of Mice and Men, and Stagecoach. So that, even if families could have afforded to see the sudden introduction of color into American cinema, and experience the shock of the fantasy world on the screen seeming so much more like their own world so immediately, they probably couldn't have.

Later, a growing number of blacks (there were roughly 26,000 in the Near West Side by 1939) began arriving, and the Near West Side would eventually become one of the chief landing places for Great Migrators, arriving from Alabama and Tennessee and Georgia in the hard winters of the 1940's, and moving further west and south into the Garfield and Austin sections of the city. Still later, the riots after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's assassination would explode along Madison Street, mostly West of the Blommer factory. Clips of footage can distract for hours. The violence was explosive. And despite the relative distance from the worst of the damage, industry largely abandoned the Near West Side. A 1988 Reader article written on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the riots mentions the thriving machine factories on Lake Street just west of the Loop:

Many of the firms there closed their doors and fled to places like Elk Grove Village, where an opportunistic developer established a new machine-tool center in the safety of the suburbs.

In the interim, the neighborhood itself had been split by the construction of the Kennedy Expressway, and residential communities moved away too, fleeing violent city streets in the Seventies and Eighties. Paul Kahan's father opened several small businesses, and closed all of them on the Near West Side during the same period. And right around the turn of the Millennium, his son teamed up with Donnie Madia, took a big risk, and opened two restaurants on Jefferson, right next to one another, launching what would eventually become a "renaissance" for the neighborhood.

The Blommer Chocolate Company is still where it was in 1939. It never moved. Today it has a tasting room and a small gift shop. Tours are offered for a fee. And you can find it easily enough on Google Earth. There's no need anymore to learn about cities in archives or static maps. We navigate the world at our leisure, and go where we want in the virtual space.

View Larger Map

I love Streetview. It's the audacity of the project that gets me, and I imagine, a lot of people, more than anything else. It's the idea--or maybe just the illusion--that you could ever capture the entirety of a city in a single moment: stitching together images from around the entirety of Chicago or New York or Mumbai. But more than anything else, it's reassuring to know that Blommer is right where it's supposed to be. We get what seems to be guaranteed visual confirmation of the factory's existence, in the same position it's occupied for 80 years. The photos are updated--a general sense of history is established. We trust in the continuity created on the Internet. The starkness of the ordinary laid out in images of loading docks and parking lots, and we can scroll up and see the same blue Blommer lettering.

With a flick of our fingers, I can look at Blommer from outer space, and everything is put into visual context.

Alternative Perspective on History: Speculating on a Morning of Avram Jakobsen, May 1939

We don't experience ordinary life like this, do we? That is, we don't always feel the weight of history. It would be paralyzing if we did. History is a sleight of hand; but so too is fiction. And when we feel impacted by either we are being tricked into having faith in narrative as a means of connection. This is we do when we write. And when we write fiction, we color history with a deep desire for connectedness. We salve our absolute apartness with a narrative illusion. Can the history of the Near West Side be told around Blommer? Very usefully, yes. We can reduce it to a single day and say that the entirety of the neighborhood's history revolves around it. Specifically: the day when Henry Blommer and his two sons started up the machinery and set workers to their work at the Blommer Family Chocolate Factory, producing sweets and candies for Marshall Field's Department Store.

And what if we thought about a singular moment on Roosevelt Street on that May 1939 morning, when eight-year-old Avram Jakobsen (Abe to his Chicago-born friends), while on his way to school near Jane Addams House, stops and sniffs the mysteriously warm air, which on a spring morning is--as usual--overhung with the soot and grime from machine tooling factories? Can we imagine, for a second, the strange alchemy of confusion and innocent arousal that builds within his tiny frame when, amid the crush of poverty and bodies yearning for Chicago spring, with the whistles of steam locomotives around him and the almost-stagnant river emptying inland from Lake Michigan, and everything slowly coming back to life, he turns his nose upward to catch the SW breeze? The noise and the din of the city, and the exigencies of history that Avram hasn't even begun to consider yet all fall away in that instant. Everything collapses into complete conscious sensation of the world: the upturned nose and a smile that builds on Avram's face as he puts down his small bag, his fingers unclenching, and--could it be imagination? Certainly not--Avram considers the possibility of his own body fooling him because in that moment something magnificent and other-worldly, and altogether unexpected happens. Things like this defy the logic of context and history and narratives, because, as it turns out, sometimes things are literally just in the air. And there's nothing for Avram to do but trust that what he suddenly senses must be something like what his parents talk about when they talk about love or hope or God, because some part of him thinks that if he ever loses what this so-sudden sensation feels like, he would die. Think about how much or little it matters that the fire forced his grandparents to the Near West Side; that his father has been losing sleep over an unexpected and persistent pain in his abdomen; that his mother yelled at him for spending three cents that he found in the street at the movies. Because right in this instant, the miraculous--think in terms of childhood expectations for miracles here--happens and Avram becomes the first person ever on the Near West Side of hundreds of thousands to follow him to feel a particular sensation course through his body, connecting him to every one of them: a single moment of almost impossible joy in the rich air that anyone who comes to the Near West Side knows.

Because Avram smells chocolate.

The High Life Man: Masculinity in America

2011-04-27T15:04:00.000-07:00

Overture: The High Life Man's Credo
I went up to the Block Cinema at Northwestern University last week to see Errol Morris's latest documentary Tabloid. I'm a longtime fan of Morris's extensive series (more than 100 ads in all) of advertisements for Miller High Life. According to Morris's website, so is he. The director of documentaries like The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War considers the High Life commercials "his most impressive achievement." Their sheer volume aside, Morris's meticulous attention to consistency of tone, humor, and warmth throughout the campaign is pretty amazing. Because they ran for so long (almost eight years), and seem to establish a consistent aesthetic for a certain kind of ideal American man, Morris's commercials raise a lot of issues related to the supposed crisis of confidence plaguing American masculinity.

The ads chronicle the attributes and lifestyle of the "High Life Man," played by roughly interchangeable middle-aged, able-but-perhaps-a-little-soft-bodied, usually white men (I think there's only one commercial featuring a black High Life Man--more on that soon), most often with either receding or non-existent hair line. Upon the retirement of the campaign, Jonah Bloom of Advertising Age wrote:
In an era when much of advertising feels fake, especially brewers' ads, which tend to depict too-preened girlymen prancing around predictably beautiful women, the High Life man has been an honest, authentic campaign that regular beer drinkers could relate to.
But how did the High Life Man relate to his viewers? And how might things have changed during the span of his run as Miller's spokesman? Finally, what--if anything--can the High Life Man tell me about where American masculinity is today?

Trading Pants for Skirts

Consider "SUV," a 30-second spot that has many of the key characteristics of the High Life Man campaign.

The ad begins with disdain for what appears to be the degeneration of the contemporary moment. After listing the features of the vehicle in the frame, the narrator says "nowadays you'll hear people call this a truck." Against the grain of this accursed present, it's "A MAN" who "knows a station wagon when he sees one." The station wagon here seems to allude to traditional categories of feminine work: caring for the family, grocery shopping, picking up the kids after school, shuttling sweaty 10-year-olds to the ice-cream parlor, etc. By comparison, it's assumed that men drive un-airconditioned, manual transmission trucks. The commercial is very specific about what kind of man: the camera gives us a close shot of a "high and tight" haircut as a voiceover that sounds straight out of a World War II History Channel documentary says "A MAN." These are men that sweat and have agency and control over their vehicles. These are men who would never drive an SUV.

But perhaps more important is the commercial's punch line. The voiceover continues: "If this vehicular masquerade represents the high life to which men are called, we should trade our trousers for skirts right now." There are two significant rhetorical moves here. First, it's not that the driver of an SUV is not a man because of what he drives. Rather, it is an act of "masquerade" implicit in his choice of vehicle that the narrator laments. A real man is thus the "authentic" man, and the question of authenticity is one that extends throughout all of these commercials. Secondly, the commercial does not accuse the SUV driver of being a woman, but perhaps more accurately, a cross-dresser. That is, a sissy, a ninny--also a kind of performer or poser. It's not beyond bounds to say that this is an unsubtle gesture toward homophobia, but the commercial is not as homophobic as much as it is deploying this rhetoric against posing as a man. In all of these commercials, the High Life Man is portrayed as heterosexual--in a bumbling, disturbingly unhealthy, lovable brute way--but to understand their importance, it's vital to keep hold of where the commercials deploy the language of authenticity.

Throughout this series, I'll be tracking these characteristics of the High Life Man campaign in order to probe what the commercials said about masculinity during their run, and what they might have to say about American manhood now. I argue that the campaign tried to foster nostalgia for the "authentic" male. What is being lamented is not the contemporary moment, but rather the loss of the possibility of authenticity embodied by the High Life Man himself. Manhood does not end when the High Life Man retires--but a particular kind of manhood is already being eclipsed.

The End of Men (?)

We can take the opposite view. Let's assume, like The Atlantic did last year, that the end times of men have arrived. Senior Atlantic editor and founder of DoubleX Hanna Rosin supports this claim in her article "The End of Men" by analyzing sweeping trends in economic productivity since the 1970's (a period characterized by the rise of what is frequently referred to as Postfordism). The piece revolves around the question, "What if the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men?" In other words, Rosin considers whether contemporary American society is trading one form of gender hegemony (male) for another (female)--and that this is due to a shift in the kind of labor necessary in leading productive economies. Since we no longer build things, we rely on individuals who are better at providing "affective" labor. That is, in a service economy, women will eventually be selected (in a Darwinian sense) and men, well, won't.

Rosin offers a compelling account of one reason why the labor force has become more balanced over the past four decades. And I think I would agree with her perspective by posing a very simple question: Can you really picture this guy working in a factory?:

Everything is different about the new Old Spice Man. He's not white. He's fit, and has a rapid-fire delivery of a voice that sounds less like it's been through war and more like it's been through acting classes. He is unconcerned about appearing feminine. The exact opposite. He wants to know female desires intimately so that he can satisfy (or manipulate) women by performing a certain way. So he bakes and builds houses, walks on logs in casual outdoor-wear, and "swan dives" in such a way that his body can be on view the entire way down into the whirlpool below, landing on a motorcycle. He seems to have everything a man should have to be appealing to women.

But does he feel authentic? I don't know, ladies: "You tell me." The definition of his masculinity doesn't come from within--but from women. Put another way, his masculinity doesn't derive from an internal code, but from the female gaze.

Perhaps the "crisis" of the American male might not be one that arises solely out of politics and economics, but rather one that is deeply rooted in an aesthetic shift in the way men are presented in the media. Simply: we have seen a movement away from the High Life Man--and toward the new Old Spice man: a suave, bare-chested, handsome, social-media-savvy spokesman. This is a man who doesn't sweat, who works out, and who probably drives a BMW Crossover vehicle with leather seats--the next logical performance activity vehicle after the nadir of the SUV.

To give a little body to my argument about the High Life Man, I aim to put an analysis of Morris's work in conversation with Rosin's article. I'm not concerned as much with economics, as with aesthetics and their relationship to the rise of a fundamentally different kind of "ideal male" that has emerged since the turn of the Millennium. That is to say, I'm also concerned with a more compressed period of time than the one that Rosin engages with.

Over the course of the next few weeks, I'll be writing about several of the standout ads to ask what they tell us about American Male today. Can we, even now, aspire to the High Life? And should we?

Newspapers in "Falling Man"

2011-04-24T22:48:00.000-07:00

Trying to combine the last two posts together a bit. Don DeLillo's 9/11 novel Falling Man thinks a lot about the relationship between the individual and the historical, but in a way that is much different from Junot Diaz and Jennifer Egan. Here the concern is about the relationship between individuals and an exemplary/spectacular/singular event. How does an individual's relationship to a historical event like 9/11 differ from that individual's relationship to the ongoing narrative of a continuous history? I think the novel helps us address some of these questions, while at the same time providing some insight on how newspapers mediate the transition from post-trauma to ordinary life. Or something. I'm really tired.

Don DeLillo's Falling Man presents characters with different relationships to visual, literary, and performance art. The novel meditates on the ability of different genres and forms of art to mediate trauma--to help characters work through the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. Meanwhile, the novel itself attempts to work in different genres. The staccato, stilted dialogue of the characters often seems more like terse poetry than realistic portrayals of conversations; and (as we discussed in class), the tightly stylized form of the book resembles a self-contained still life. In other words, Falling Man engages with questions about the usefulness (uselessness) of artistic forms as means of smoothing the transition from trauma "back to" ordinary life.

But newspapers as a medium play an equally important role as visual, performance, and literary arts when it comes to working the events of 9/11 into new patterns of ordinary existence. I'm wondering about how newspapers act in the novel to structure emotional responses to the attacks, and what we might learn about the way that newspapers as a medium play a role in the experience of 9/11 as an event.

Lianne first confronts the face of the hijacker stand-in for Mohammad Atta in the newspaper, and this image becomes the exemplar of a terrorist identity. "Hammad's" picture is the only one "to have a face at this point, staring out of the photo, taut, with hard eyes that seemed too knowing to belong to a face on a driver's license." The foreboding stare that Lianne identifies here does not arise from the driver's license photo of "Hammad," but from that picture's reproduction in the newspaper. A state document photograph becomes something altogether different when reproduced after 9/11. It is the exemplary portrait of a terrorist. The state document becomes interpretable, but only within the register of suspicion or dread. It becomes something to be consumed by the public sphere and read for signs of something essentially evil, foreboding--or in this case, knowing--about the terrorist. It is no longer the document that identifies the individual merely as the subject of state authority. In the newspaper, that individual's photo now becomes the object that the public will examine as a piece of evidence.

In a related way, Lianne reads the newspaper profiles of the victims, ostensibly out of a sense of fidelity to the event. These profiles are also "evidence," giving narrative body to the victims and establishing a genre for collective grieving. Consumption of these daily testimonies to the ordinariness of the victims stands as a metaphoric weaving of traumatic loss into Lianne's daily life. She believes that: "Not to read them, every one, was an offense, a violation of responsibility and trust." In other words, Lianne feels she must daily rehearse the integration of traumatic loss into her life out of respect for the victims. She feels a responsibility to structure a new daily routine around the consumption of the newspaper profiles. This responsibility remains obscure to her. It arises out of "some need she did not try to interpret." Unlike the photograph, whose hermeneutic importance is self evident in its bare publication (it's in the newspaper so that the public sphere can come to the same interpretive conclusion: here is a terrorist. Look for clues to prove that this is a terrorist), Lianne feels unable to interpret her own sense of responsibility to the victims. The suggestion here is perhaps that one should not have to interpret a desire to have solidarity with these individuals. As a means of rebuilding the world for oneself, one structures life around a routine that integrates loss in a concrete, repeatable way.

The last obituary we see Lianne reading is for the falling man himself: David Janiak. What seems most important here is that the falling man's performances themselves seem a kind of testimony or obituary for the victims of the terrorist attacks. It's a strange moment in the book--one that takes us farther into the future than at least 2003. The immediate importance of the obituary doesn't strike Lianne. She seems to have fallen out of the habit of reading the paper regularly ("She came across the obituary late one night, looking a t a newspaper that was six days old"). It's not until she reads about the "particular man who was photographed falling from the north tower of the World Trade Center, headfirst" that she places the importance of the obituary. The newspaper not only contextualizes Janiak's role in the world of the novel; it also provides one of the book's two direct references to the site of the terrorist attacks. Years after 9/11, it is a newspaper that reminds Lianne not only of the fading memory of the spectacular terrorist attacks and their immediate aftermath, but also highlights the fact that the event has faded to the background. In the ongoing life that extends well beyond the immediate post-traumatic moment, the newspaper obituary of Janiak forces Lianne to re-confront the spectacularity of 9/11, while reminding her that the event and its aftermath have slipped into the background of her ordinary life.

Wondrous Goons

2011-04-18T19:10:00.000-07:00

I've been swooning over Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad for a while now. It's no longer my private recommendation--my "sleeper" candidate for best book of 2010 (and, to be fair, it was everyone else's sleeper candidate in that category well before it was mine. That is, well before I got around to Goon Squad, the secret that the book was a secret success had very much gotten out). By now, everyone knows it's a book that deserves to be torn apart, read multiple times in multiple directions: one whose parts can seem momentarily greater than the whole, but only momentarily. And this is great news for a lot of reasons that involve a lot of things--particularly the opening up of the novel as a form, and the generation of dialogue about the future of fiction making. But I wasn't so much thinking about the future as the past.

Something caught me off guard when looking at the list of past winners. I was suddenly reminded of A Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the prize in 2008. [NB: I devoured this book, an inscribed copy was given to me by one of my closest friends for Christmas and I spent two afternoons gobbling it]. Junot Diaz's novel does not experiment with form as much as does Egan's book. But both novels offer meditations on the individual's relationship with history--considerations of how we are all tethered to larger collective narratives of culture, race, class, and desire. And okay, sure, this is the case for a lot of novels. But the thing that made me pause when thinking about the two books together is their shared depiction of characters who fight against the "goons" of history. ABWLOOW and AVFTGS merit a paired reading because they describe history in a way that postmodern authors suggested was no longer possible.

You can say a lot of things about history in these novels, and one of those things is that they, well, say a lot of things about history. They're not ahistorical ramblings about the plight of characters in a hyper-mediatized, post-nation-state, post-capitalist order. They're books that think very seriously about the effects of history on people, and the ways that consciousness is formed in part by the effort of those people to fight/go with/learn from/endure/and understand history.

For Diaz, history's sinister reach manifests itself in the first pages as fuku, the curse placed on Hispanola on the occasion Europe's arrival in the Americas. Fuku wears a lot of hats over the course of Dominican history. America's occupation? Fuku. The DR's murderous dictator Trujillo? Fuku. Ultimately, we are left to wonder whether fuku even has something to do with the fate of the novel's beloved ur-nerd Oscar. History moves unidirectionally. The past--the invasion of the Europeans--reaches into the present.

In Egan's novel, individuals seem more caught up in webs of history than affected by the singular passage of time. The Goons? Well, they're time, catching up with characters in numerous ways. But throughout the novel, we are shuttled not only back and forth through time (Diaz jolts us in a similar way); rather we are told the future fates of characters in the present. We are given narratives of individuals, and then told their entire back stories in a single sentence. Egan forces us to flip back and forth to realize how characters are connected to one another--how chance encounters can happen to two individuals with unrelated histories hurtling toward one another, as well as how chance encounters can set individuals on totally different paths.

The point here is that, in these two Pulitzer winners, we get a distinct sense that it is possible in novels to explore the individual's constant subjugation to the forces of history. Maybe we're not post-historical or ahistorical or even hysterical (to use James Wood's famous terminology) about our relationship to history and reality. Maybe we're just subject to it, and it's part of the novelist's contemporary responsibility to inject history into fiction in new forms. These books share a concern about what comes after the postmodern assertion that the present has collapsed on itself. We don't live only in the present. Maybe that was always just a convenient lie to make for some interesting and extremely aggravating and difficult literature. But now it's possible that we have to deal with the consequences of ignoring history for so long.

Does Dave (only) Tell us How it Feels to Him?

2011-04-17T20:51:00.000-07:00

I have been writing and thinking about terrorism, ordinary life, patriotism, trauma, and collective identity a lot in the past two years. (Again, really, I'm a happy person in general disposition). This week I reread The View from Mrs. Thompson's, a brief essay by (I know, I know) David Foster Wallace. In light of the official publication of his posthumous novel The Pale King this week as well as the beautiful Jonathan Franzen essay in The New Yorker--and because I just realized (reading this thing for the tenth time is no less heartbreaking, of course) that he "gets" the things I wanted to "get" better in four pages than I did in thousands of writing, reading, revising, rehashing, suffering through--here are a few thoughts on Dave's account of "The Horror."

In the first half of his essay "Tell me How Does it Feel?" James Wood indicts novelists interested in writing the "Great American Social Novel," claiming: "they will sooner or later be outrun by their own streaking material." In other words, a writer attempting to capture the totality of a social moment--its interpersonal, economic, demographic, horticultural (etc) elements—will always fall short of actually describing the world. And worse, in the process of trying to do so, she will also fail to document anything essential about human feeling. Yet Wood seems to rely on the assumption that human feeling should reside solely within the world that the author portrays. He ignores the possibility of locating feeling within the narrative voice.

I’m not sure if this perspective necessarily addresses Wood’s concerns—and perhaps it merely suggests that writers are vain and solipsistic and can only talk about the interior landscape of their own heads. But if this portrayal is honest and curious, and conducted with the interest of connecting the writer to a reader, is it something we should lament?

In The View from Mrs. Thompson's, David Foster Wallace takes it as a given that it would be impossible to describe all of the elements necessary to understand how to synthesize the feelings induced by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The piece does not attempt to portray the totality of the moment; rather, by cataloguing details he observes from the ordinary lives of individuals in Bloomington, Wallace in effect tries to at least give the reader an understanding of how he makes an effort to cope. He describes some conditions “on the ground” in Bloomington--but does so in order to give readers insight into the only consciousness that he feels able to occupy in the wake of “the Horror”: his own.

For me, the most important moments of the essay are therefore not necessarily the long descriptive passages, but rather come at the quietest moments when the reader gets Dave at his most un-distracted. Wallace’s ability to render the brutality of a Midwestern winter (“a pitiless bitch”) and the unique unsettling-ness of summer in that same place (“it can be a little creepy, especially in high summer when nobody’s out and all that green just sits in the heat and seethes”). He interrupts the long meditation on the importance of flags to the performance of patriotism when he suddenly realizes how caught up he has become in the net of emotion he feels simultaneously compelled to expose. In an instant he realizes “All those people dead, and I’m sent to the edge by a plastic flag.” We get a very brief glimpse of the author overcome, unable to conduct anything like a sterile or objective observation of “innocent” Americans going about their innocent grief rituals. Instead, the owner of a convenient store “offers solace and a shoulder and a strange kind of unspoken understanding.” These moments—in which Wallace suddenly finds himself unable to precisely describe the connection he has with another individual—often seem like the instants in which he becomes most accessible to the reader.

When read in this manner, Wallace’s desire to be an insider with those who surround him bounces off his insistent cataloguing of facts and observations about Bloomington. We feel his apartness from others, perhaps recognizing in his halting attempts to behave like the “ladies” our own desires and (frequently failed) attempts to feel comforted by participation in collective grief/mourning/ritual. This kind of alienation strikes me as much more important than the one that Wallace overtly describes at the end of the essay, which he characterizes as a “vague but progressive feeling of alienation from these good people.” The separateness that he ultimately spells out attempts to separate the cynics (like him, and maybe F--) from the innocents (the ladies). The essay collapses in the final paragraphs into a cursory list of various (perhaps he would say “upscale people”) scary political and theoretical questions, and meditates on why he—Dave—thinks about these questions while they—the ladies—don’t. I’m not sure if this is where the feeling of this essay resides. His apartness is not based necessarily on any differences in intellectual/political/historical concerns (and maybe this is why his riff on the ladies being so smart sounds a bit off-key). Rather, it’s the ordinary apartness of being different people—all of whom are experiencing grief in a different, ultimately private way. Wallace shares how this feels—to him—with us.

An Evening of Gentlemanly Pursuits, Part II

2011-04-14T18:19:00.000-07:00

Part II: Solipsism is Just a Kind of Self-Love

My ambitions at the start of the whole process of writing about Paul Kahan far outstripped my abilities as a journalist and reflect the naive belief that one can fake good intentions and yet write something that people actually want to read--something, that is (and maybe I'm assuming incorrectly about what readers want to read, but I'd like to think that I'm not too far off here), honest about the world that we inhabit that explores why and how we choose to inhabit it together.

Essentially, I was bored and broke--reading a lot of novels and living off of excess student loan money and the occasional sale of stock. I wanted to eat at fancy restaurants and pretend that I was a writer.

So I said I wanted to write something about Chicago and its relationship to food. I said I wanted to write something about the stagnation of twentysomething upward mobility in the midst of a recession. I said I wanted to write about politics. I said I wanted to write about happy hour crowds choking down organically fed pork and going nowhere very fast, but laughing very, very hard.

But not-so-secretly, I wanted to be part of those crowds. To envelop myself in the damp embrace of a soft upper-middle class enjoying its soft upper-middling privileges. I wanted to convince someone important in some minor way that I too was important and could laugh very, very hard. And I had thought for a long time that writing about something, giving narrative to something, made that something more important, but also made the writer more important. In retrospect, this is absolute nonsense. I thought that it would be easy to write something interesting about food and urban wealth and politics and nostalgia and social networks and desire, while getting a lot of free stuff at the same time.

Well it turns out that it is relatively easy to convince someone that you are an important writer. Credentials-checking is apparently not the primary role of restaurant public relations directors, and at the very least I now know that if I need a table at a popular restaurant, all one needs to do is say that one is a writer for a fancy high-brow magazine on a relatively-near-in-the-future deadline.

But at the very same time, it turns out that food and urban wealth and politics and nostalgia and social networks and desire (which in turn is further split off, obviously, into categories of sexual, financial, political, and even virtual) combine and relate in stroke-inducingly complex ways that complicate the process of conducting a thorough investigation of any single one of these sources of ordinary alienation and inadequacy--let alone all of them at once.

How, for example, do Tyler's tweeted pictures of our first two rounds of drinks, of our charcuterie plate, and of me writing in my Moleskine fit into the process of reconstructing the night? Tyler emailed the pictures to me last week with the imperative "get to work," and I scrolled back and forth through them (there will be more in Parts III and IV).

These pictures don't just serve as a diary of consumption, though the evidence is compelling that we "got to work" pretty early. I've been thinking about jealousy, desperation, loneliness, and about the changing nature of nostalgia with respect to Twitter (really I'm a sunny person most of the time), and the pictures brought something into clarity for me.

I thought for the first time about standing in The Publican watching everyone snapping iPhone pictures of their food.

"I'm here," Jeannie and Greg and Robert and whoever else tweeted insistently, almost indignantly, about their head cheese, their pork loin, their saison delivered in goblet-form on the first truly hot day of the year. "I'm here I'm here I'm here sucking the head cheese out of life and you're somewhere else." And in that instant--the instant they preserved that present moment for all 30 of their "followers"--what did they feel? Lonely? Together with someone else through the mediated space of their 100-odd characters?

What do I feel, looking at my lower torso, my hands, my pen, insisting upon--well--something in blue script? I found the page I was writing. "Pictures of pigs everywhere" it says in some kind of reverie about the decor. An instant full of promise, and a nice buzz, and totally ordinary and forgettable. Distracted from realizing everything that was actually going on around me. Snarky descriptions of the beer I was drinking ("Vigneronne tastes like an orange in a gym sock"), but totally inured to the dramas of intimacy everywhere in the room, taking place 140 words at a time. The quiet shrieks of presence, while I had my head down in a book.

All this is to say: it proved to be the case that distractions from said investigation become more numerous in direct proportion to the length of time necessary to thoroughly convince someone else of omy importance. As this kind of charade proceeds, the writer becomes less able to focus on the outside world, and develops an increasing sense that everyone around him can see he's faking it. He must dedicate more emotional, mental, and narrative energies to the maintenance of the charade--to the faking of "it"--and fewer of these same resources to considerations of the world around him.

He's left with scribbled notes about surface things. Do these considerations make up for the moment of inattention? (See Fig. 1).

Fig. 1:

This is a correction. Of intent. Of outcome. It's an attempt to make up for inattention with a surfeit of artifice. A reminder to observe the world. It's the remainder: the product of a short-circuited system of memory attempting to reassemble itself into something more than a linear series of episodes. We don't work linearly, do we? Do we forgive in lines? Do we get over?

***

What follows is a rough approximation of the interview with Paul Kahan that I conducted on an unnervingly warm spring morning in 2010, modified. I can't find the original notes. They're in a box somewhere. A lot of the quotes come from my first draft, a piece so abominable to me now in rereading it that the prose feels oily, dirty.

An Evening of Gentlemanly Pursuits, Part I

2011-04-07T08:46:00.000-07:00

Some background.

Grant Achatz, Chicago celebrity chef/darling/villain/prettyboy, will open two new restaurants in the West Loop very soon: Next and Aviary. Though he rose to fame with Alinea, now ranked among the greatest restaurants in the world, he is trying to woo a new following. Enter Donnie Madia and Paul Kahan. The pair essentially started the West Loop’s renaissance when they first opened Blackbird more than ten years ago. More than that, Kahan literally grew up here, working at a deli on Green Street. Achatz would be nowhere near West Fulton Market Street were it not for Kahan, Madia. And now he’s elbowing into what is very much their territory.

This piece began as an article about the restaurants that Donnie Madia and Paul Kahan opened.

Last year, well before I knew about Achatz, I wanted to find out why all of the restaurants in the Kahan-Madia empire—there are five, soon to be six, in all—are so popular. I pitched the story to a writer for The Atlantic, who said he liked the idea, but it never got published. Why it never got published will become apparent, I think, almost immediately. But the more I think about that night, and everything leading up to it, the more important it seems to become. So here, after rewrites and more rewrites and revisions, in roughly 1000-word installments (and with Achatz as an excuse), is the article in a radically different form than the one I first “submitted.”

One last thing. It’s no longer as much about food as it is about other things. Some things are reconstructions, imaginations, and outright lies. A writer's claims to veracity are always conditioned by his or her sense of how words relate to reality; by the substances they consume while "researching"; and by whom they're trying to impress. To varying degrees, my own sense of the relationship between language and the world is affected by all of these. The piece is nonfictional to the extent that it aims to capture a real mood, a sense, a bundle of affects that characterizes a particular moment in my life and the life of a friend. In this way, I have convinced myself that the writing is honest. And maybe only in this way.

Part I: Aftermath

I woke up on the hardwood floor in Tyler’s apartment, twisted into a crumpled pile of chewed up meat. There was blood everywhere. On my shirt, my pants. The tip of my thumb was sliced somewhat less than totally open, and had turned an alarming shade of purple. There was a crust of stale sweat coating my body. It felt as though the alcohol had sucked all the fluids out of my skin, and now I lay as dried out as an iguana. Pieces of malignantly flaking skin hung off my lips. I ran my shriveled tongue against the raw roof of my mouth and felt something scrape off. I swallowed and coughed, as the day began to insist upon consciousness, sputtering like a dying fish on the deck of a listing ship.

The earth tilted at a hideous angle. It was a eighty-five degrees in the apartment and new-summer sunlight gushed through the bay windows, activating violent headache whose pulsations generated a fuzzy blinking purple dot in the upper right hand corner of my right eye. I probed my eyelid with my fingernail and the dot grew spindles and darkened. The dot beat in rhythm with a buzzing noise in my ear that ebbed and flowed. Some amount of time passed.

Then I heard Tyler fall out of bed. There was a pause, and then the sound of some hesitant footsteps. Collapsing elaborately onto the living room couch, he asked if I had slept. Some narrative impulse kicked in, and my brain began the descrambling process of ordering the night’s scenes. The last memory I had was of walking from the El to the apartment holding my thumb over my head—I suppose to staunch the bleeding—screaming at the top of my lungs about something.

“I think I slept,” I said. My voice filled the room, floated above us, and stuck to the ceiling. I was still poking at my eyelid.

It was, by any stretch, a successful night. We had eaten at four of the best restaurants in the city and had been treated like minor celebrities, thanks to what amounted to a fortuitous accident. When the hangover subsided, I would write a magnificent review that weaved together commentary on food, new media, masculinity, loneliness, language, and the brawny vigor of Chicago in Spring. For now, there was only the pain. Pain that sharpened the room and muted everything else. But pain that would make for a fantastic introduction, later.

____

I sat in the cab on the Dan Ryan Expressway, flipping my black notebook. My last legible entry was at 11 PM. “Spaulding Gray is way better than Dickens.” After that my script morphs at an accelerating rate into horrifying alien scrawls from which I could pick out only occasional words, punctuation marks, possibly a salsa stain. Nothing was usable. It looked like Cy Twombly or a three year old or an Alzheimer’s patient had gotten to my right hand. There were spirals and something that looked like a deranged smiley face.

Worse news awaited, as it always does, in the litany of my phone’s misbehaviors. I remembered I had called a writer from The Atlantic—whose number I had thanks to my participation in a creative writing class at a University where he was a visiting professor—twice. Once at midnight to tell him how great the piece was going to be, and then again at 12:14 to apologize for calling.

Just to cap it off, I had apparently called my parents at 3 AM (an hour later on the East Coast). A distant echo of my father’s voice padded off my memory. The mucosy sound of his sleep-addled voice. Some gauzy, nasal declaration, uttered from the depths of middle-aged sleep, which is already haunted by the idea of late-night phone calls.

And then, on the last page of my notebook, I could make out “we are the generation that calls our parents at 3 am. That’s what we are.” In what must have felt like a monumental expenditure of effort and concentration, I had managed to scribe out a single sentence in my post-evening glee or self-pity or disgust. In careful script, it was the dutiful message of parental love I had left for myself. I love my parents, and nothing more.

By some miracle of gastric muscle control, I didn’t throw up. All that headcheese and quail and expensive bourbon jostling around in me. I couldn’t possibly afford the clean-up fee, so I just opened the window and breathed in the offensively hot air. Nor did I think that I could survive the indignity of hurling. A panic started to grow up inside me and began to take the place of the pain.

I had to write something about the night. Had to begin putting the pieces together somehow. I sat in the cab and breathed, and breathed some more, and knew that the panic would grow into remorse and regret over a missed opportunity.

But these would become just another part of the hangover ritual. Like standing under the shower and letting the water drip around your open mouth. Like coffee. Like porn, penance, promises, and probably a fitful late-afternoon nap. I’d stare into the mirror and ask “What the fuck.” I’d call my ex-girlfriend and pretend I felt amazing and ask what she was up to “these days.”

And when the day spit me back out on the other side, I would be purified and then I would write.

Everyone in Between: Toronto Artist Arowbe on the Borders

2011-03-29T07:08:00.000-07:00

It's easy to have good conversations with Toronto-based poet/musician/composer/performer Rob Bolton. But this particular conversation was having a tough time getting off the ground. When we finally got vchat to work on two finicky wireless networks, important business interrupted:

“Hold on one second, I think my coffee is ready,” he said. It was Saturday morning.

Rob writes and performs for the group Broadway Sleep, as well as for the duo Times Neue Roman (which has a new video dropping today for Hands no Hands). He has also written songs for artist Tanika Charles, including Silly Happy Wild, which was nominated for a Stylus Award in the category of Canadian Best R&B Single. He participated in TEDx Toronto as a solo artist and with Broadway Sleep. He writes hip-hop odes to Music and Math; homages to motown; and writes Lacanian lyric poetry. In other words, he's pretty busy these days.

"My desire to have a mix of genres and styles is a big part of who I am as an artist," Rob said, describing the varied approach that characterizes his projects. And what strikes me about his work in its various iterations is not the variety itself--but rather the consistent practice that binds together the different forms. There's an underlying (and as-yet still forming) commitment to cross-disciplinary method to Rob's work--not to its own end, but rather as a means of answering questions about contemporary life. It's tough to see this when browsing through his evolving portfolio of work (though I would argue that the track Music and Math relays it pretty readily). Rather, to understand where Rob--or Arowbe, as he's better known up north--is coming from, the best starting point is Aesthetics of (In)Betweennesss. In this video, Rob lays out what he calls "a statement of poetic"--one that embodies an important perspective on the nature of contemporary artistic production.

In a cultural moment dominated by the increasing influence of the virtual--as online life encroaches on the "real"--Rob explores the traditional borderlands between genres as a means of trying to redefine the role of art/music/poetry/image. The digitalization of ordinary life produces a virtual space into which we upload our ideas, photos, tweets, likes, and other identificatory information--but also some important piece of the content of our relationships, emotions, and desires. What is the nature of the space of social networks? What part of our self-identify resides there? How do we create and disseminate mediatized identities of ourselves? How can art help us understand the middle places between forms of media and the meanings that these forms produce? These questions become central to Rob's inter-genre projects.

Aesthetics of (In)betweenness provides a primer for why artists working in the current moment should be considering the collisions and combinations of genres and forms of expression. Throughout the video Rob walks through mostly uninhabited, industrial, and generally abandoned spaces in New York. These are the spaces we think of as traditionally "in between"--the places we navigate on our way to somewhere else.

But in a key scene, Rob stands stationary, as crowds flow around him in Times Square. "I'm Totally fascinated by Times Square," Rob said, but only to the extent that:

it's my least favorite place in the world. It’s an inbetween space but it’s also a destination. Nobody really ends there. Everybody is coming and going there. But then it’s the center of the dissemination of media and advertising.

Times Square is the quintissential in-the-world embodiment of an in-between zone: a place where information is constantly flowing elsewhere--a place where people come to see precisely the flows and non-interactions of others on the way to a different destination. It excites the senses, but can also be deeply unnerving. Inhabiting the middle space--occupying a borderland between multiple destinations--is what cross-disciplinary work in the arts (when done right) should do. And it's what Arowbe is working on in Toronto.

Touch the Art...No Really.

2011-03-23T07:17:00.000-07:00

I picked up Emma Stein underneath the El tracks at Robert Bills Contemporary--where she spends her days working as Gallery Director--on a sloppy, gray afternoon last week. It's the time of year when even optimistic Chicagoans start to wonder if Spring will ever arrive, and as a native Californian, Emma has had more than her fill of snow and slush.

Weather aside, Emma has thrived in Chicago. Having completed her MA in Art History at the University of Chicago last June, she won high praise from the Tribune for her most recent curated group show: Exploding Faces, Confining Spaces. But she has also been working on her own project proposal for an exhibition that rethinks the senses and sensations associated with the consumption of art in the gallery and museum. Playfully titled Please Touch the Artwork, Emma's project considers how the blind experience what we traditionally call "visual arts." It's a deeply personal issue for her, as two members of her family--including her mom--are affected by a degenerative disease that affects the retinas, often leaving patients legally blind. Emma's idea not only has the potential to raise awareness about the problematic way museums attempt to address accessibility, but also to expand how individuals conceive of their relationship to art.

(Why touching the art matters...after the jump)

As Emma puts it on the project's website, "Creating an exhibition that demonstrates the diverse methods employed by contemporary artists to branch out of the visual realm and utilizes feasible curatorial methods to ensure accessibility would help set a precedent for accessibility reform in American art institutions." Please Touch the Artwork is not about the exemplarity (and by this I mean, the spectacular or exceptional) of the disabled body and its relationship with art--but about creating a more inclusive definition of the kind of multi-sensory art that belongs in the space of the gallery and museum.

What makes the project so compelling is its commitment to critical, bodily, and political engagement in the gallery space. The project has a blog and Facebook page and will be funded by donations on Kickstarter, a still-relatively-new way for young artists, non-profiters, and entrepreneurs alike to get financial support for their ideas. Kickstarter allows users to pledge money to projects, but does not require them to make good on their pledges unless the targeted overall amount of contributions is reached. It's an innovative and simple way for individuals to raise small-ish amounts of money that can go a long way.

In all, Emma's idea seems to be a model for collaborative arts projects, integrating an important and under-examined thematic topic with a development and outreach plan that leans heavily on social networking. After our conversation over double-IPA's at Bucktown's popular Map Room, I came away thinking that Please Touch the Artwork could be model for how young artists and aspiring gallery curators should be promoting the arts.

Touch isn't Just for Kids

"Only a small number of people are trying to translate vision into another sense," Emma told me. "But there's not much in the United States, and what is here is geared toward kids." She pointed to the accessibility gallery at Chicago's Art Institute, which is not only in the basement, but located next to a space dedicated to children's art. According to Emma, the problem is often that museums "think accessibility means saying 'we have a ramp.'" She argues that a significant opportunity is lost because museums and galleries infantilize touch, and tacitly reinforce the notion that vision is the primary precondition for having a meaningful relationship with art. Please Touch the Artwork aims to subvert this assertion.

Museums have experimented with "tactile diagrams" that attempt to reproduce the topography of a painting for the visually impaired, but Emma is more interested in creating "non-visual curating"--practices and methods that more comprehensively address questions of accessibility. For Emma, it's not just about navigating through a museum that caters to those who can see, but about creating an experience in which the loss of a sense is shared by everyone in the gallery. She imagines an exhibit in which a "tactile path" will guide attendees around a collection of "multisensory" artworks that rely on non-visual engagement. Touch will be only one component, but the common experience of all gallery-goers will be a shared loss of sight.

The idea here is important, and not just because Please Touch the Artwork will provide curated exposure to artworks designed with the visually impaired in mind. Perhaps more importantly, it will allow for broad consideration of how vision's status as the primary sense associated with consumption of art affects our relationship to our other senses. In other words, the exhibit starts from questions about accessibility, and moves toward broader questions about our senses in general.

Seriously. Touch it.

Part of the commentary about the role of touch in art asks us to consider how museums and galleries impose institutional practices that reinforce a hierarchy of senses. "Part of why touching is so interesting is because it's something that's so forbidden," Emma pointed out. Please Touch the Artwork aims at "getting blind people in the gallery," but also asks us think about how everyone's interaction with art is framed by the space of the gallery. To this extent, Emma is drawing on a long tradition of conceptual artists who aimed to challenge the existing borders of the museum.

But the value of her idea is not just in the concept of flipping the gallery on its head. Rather, it is about orienting the perspective of gallery visitors toward a more comprehensive consideration of the sense-experience of art works in a space traditionally reserved for visual encounters. It is in part about making the experience of an art gallery more bodily, based in more senses, and not primarily about what is "lost" in the absence of sight.

Kickstarting Emma's Project

A final note. One of my personally favorite things about this project is its collaborative nature. Please Touch the Artwork showcases the way that artists and curators can mobilize multiple virtual resources to produce real-world exhibitions that take on important theoretical concerns--and, as I have argued in this instance, an important question of accessibility. I wonder how other artists might replicate Emma's savvy use of social media to raise money and awareness for their art, especially in a place like Chicago, where gallery space is available--but often at a cost that prohibits the showcase of ambitious work by young artists and arts professionals.

AMIWWL: Zodiac and Targets

2011-03-12T15:22:00.000-08:00

[I'm going to categorize most of my future posts on film as: "Analysis of Movies I Watch with Lindsey" (AMIWWL), mainly because I can never say exactly what I think about them until way after. I'm not used to analyzing film. I'm used to reading at my own glacial pace (sometimes I think I read at a fifth grade level). In general, I'm not a very quick writer either, and need to take my time and let thoughts congeal, and then get them down. As you might imagine, this makes me a really awful conversationalist, especially when it comes to film. But since we're all expected to be critics of movies, I'll make some efforts].

[Oh, also, I spoil everything]

This week it was Zodiac and Targets, two films that are roughly 40 years apart and extremely different--but that both try to get at the heart of what might be an obsession-in-transition in the American psyche: the Serial Killer. Peter Bogdanovich's 1968 film Targets, starring Boris Karloff, draws (in many places quite overtly) from the infamous University of Texas bell-tower shootings of 1966. David Fincher's 2007 Zodiac examines the exploits of the Zodiac Killer, who murdered seven people (though he claimed responsibility for almost 40 murders) in the Bay Area during the late Sixties and early Seventies. Unlike Targets, Fincher's film takes up the perspective of the investigators assigned to the case, though it also reconstructs scenes from the perspective of Zodiac's victims.

The movies explore different-seeming phenomena--the single-day rampage vs. the methodical insanity of a killer who reigned for more than a decade--but when put next to one another they provide an opportunity to question how the fears that plagued 1960's and 70's America have morphed and been translated over time. I'm interested in two main questions:

How does "place" or "placelessness" affect one's conception of the possibility of violence?

Targets is a movie that happens in and around some of Los Angeles's "non-places." The murderer takes out drivers on the freeway from atop a refinery tank, and in the anonymous sprawl of the San Fernando Valley. It seems to be about nowhere and anywhere in America. In Zodiac, by contrast, the killer first strikes in Vallejo and Napa, and his entrance into San Francisco comes to mark an ominous shift in his behavior. "The Zodiac comes to San Francisco" says a menacing radio voice-over. His undetected arrival in the urban setting--where systems of surveillance and law enforcement would seem to afford the greatest security against a serial-killer--is alarming in its shattering of the assumption that the city provides a safe space.

Bogdanovich's movie, which was made in the very moment when random violence in unexpected places was on the public's mind, tries to determine how it might be possible for ordinary suburban life to come apart at the seams. Joe lives with his wife in his parents' home. As the original trailer points out, this is a "typical" American family. The fear that Targets taps into is that the promise of a peaceful life in the exurbs can be interrupted at any time by a killer from within. An unnoticed or even unnoticeable psychological break results in the rampage. That is, a gun nut can come unhinged and, from within the apparent safety of a suburban community, go on to shatter the fabric of everyday life for an entire community.

In Zodiac, Fincher's views of San Francisco are often too high definition to be believed. Indeed, many of the shots of SF, including the above vista of the Golden Gate Bridge, are digitally created. Car scenes thus often look like video games. Instead of the graininess of Targets' insistent realism, we get a hyper-fantasized world of a San Francisco that no longer exists, but whose existence needs to be recreated.

That is, the precise terror that the Zodiac killer harnessed was the idea of a threat coming from without. But at the same time, he was also a kind of virtual menace, forcing his threats into the public sphere by virtue of his letters to San Francisco papers. He invaded the city, not only by committing crimes there, but also by becoming a media (and mediated figure). Fincher's use of digital technology to render the scenes strikes me as appropriate precisely because it plays with the notion that the Zodiac killer was not just invading the physical city, but the way that the city imagined itself. He was less a real-life ordinary threat than a virtual threat.

And with forty years of distance, this has become even more the case. The crime was never solved; all suspects have died; and the Zodiac killer will forever be able to ultimately hold onto his anonymity.

What does any of this mean for serial killer movies being made today? How might they relate to a different kind of fear of violence?

It seems to me (and this might be totally off given how few movies I see), but aside from No Country for Old Men (and Zodiac itself along with 7even, also directed by Fincher ), there haven't been many successful serial killer films made in the last decade. I think this might have something to do with a transition away from a fear or fascination or obsession with serial killers--and toward an obsession with the potential for terrorist violence.

This seems to relate to a shift, not only in how the public perceives serial violence of the type characterized in both of these films, but also of how the legal system has been adapted to accommodate new forms of violence. The story behind terrorism is always the same: radicalization by some ideological influence, most often the fear is radical Islam. Consider the "DC Sniper," who killed and injured dozens in the immediate aftermath of September 11. He was tried and convicted, not just of murder, but of terrorism (this was how the Virginia prosecutor was able to secure the death penalty). Unlike serial killer narratives, which compel us in part because of the individual pathologies, methods, and backgrounds of killers and cops, terrorist narrative always comes down to the same point. There is no reason to ask the question how is this possible? when one talks about terrorism...because we have been conditioned to believe it can only be radicalization.

Covert Urban: Chicago Artist Gwendolyn Zabicki

2011-03-07T11:06:00.000-08:00

"Somebody called me the Bruce Springsteen of painting," said Gwen Zabicki. We were eating homemade steak and ale pie, sitting in Ikea recliners in her UIC studio. Gwen is one of only three painters in the most recent crop of the University's MFA students. "And I thought, oh no, so I'm really earnest and hamfisted and there's a honking sax in the background." It seemed like a real concern, especially because Gwen paints subject matter that can be easily associated with the middle or blue-collar urban class. In other words: solidly in Springsteen territory. But after our conversation, it was readily apparent that there is an important difference between earnestness and inquisitiveness. The former is about latching onto an emotion and glorifying it. The latter seems more about asking why we feel a certain way in the world, and whether we might be able to feel differently by changing our perspective.

In thoughtful and measured paintings, it is this territory that Gwen's work inhabits.

Her work deals with unseen and often ignored objects that populate the urban landscape, and grapples with questions about how we engage--or fail to engage--with the material that makes up our everyday life. She paints mailboxes, dumpsters, billboards, interstates, leftover food, streetscapes and Popeye's restaurants. When it comes to style, she is influenced by the Ashcan School of painters, Americans who worked at the beginning of the 20th Century. Like the Ashcans, Gwen is interested in how objects interact with one another, and compete with one another for our visual attention. Her latest project is a 24-foot long painting of a decommissioned Washington Mutual sign hanging at Division Street and Ashland Avenue. The sign is wrapped in a sheet of plastic covering, but is still clearly legible. The attempt to erase the sign from the city turns out to draw attention: to failure, to finance, and to the importance we place on material accumulation.

In general, Gwen's pictures operate from the assumption that the ordinary is shot through with unseen tensions--and it becomes the painter's job to expose them. The works do not elevate or celebrate what seems merely mundane or boring (that would be hamfisted boosterism; or perhaps more simply, Springsteenism), but rather seek to expose the hidden contradictions that reside in the margins of city life and enliven the ordinary.

What's compelling about Gwen's work is that it is able to generate an awareness of thematic tensions from a formal perspective. Her landscapes consistently produce a sense of isolation in a crowd, or the feeling of placelessness in a specific urban context. In the absence of precise markers of location or direction (we don't know that the WaMu sign is in Ukranian Village, for example) , we are forced to confront the relationship between objects. In A Bridge During Travel we look at the road from the interior of a car. We are surrounded by other cars and other drivers, but are at the same time alone in an anonymous Plains landscape. In Billboards our perspective seems to be just above street level. We are too high to see pedestrians and cars that pass just beneath our eyes. Neither can we see street signs or storefronts to position ourselves with any degree of certainty.

These works allow us to think about objects, not necessarily with respect to a larger sense of place, but in relation to one another. In Bridge During Travel, we notice the interruption of the horizon line by the dark bridge, and the contrast between the sky and the road. We have to drive toward the darkness under the bridge before returning to sunlight. In Billboards smokestacks, light posts, and ladders reach vertically. But the billboards themselves are dark and horizontal. We are looking at their backs and cannot be distracted by advertising. Instead, we experience them as pure material: as horizontal shapes in an otherwise vertically oriented scene.

But over the course of the year, Gwen's work has also been examining different ways to "zoom in" on individual objects. It seems significant that this thematic shift is also marked by a formal difference. Unlike the landscapes, works like Spanikopita, Chandalier, and Mailbox are lush with thick paint and vibrant colors. What seems consistent across the works is a sense of warmth--a feeling of being invited into (rather than pushed away from) the pictures. But whereas the landscapes often seem merely melancholy or lonely, the object paintings seem capable of inducing a wider set of emotions. These paintings thematize the relationship between the viewer and a specific object and get us to think about how we develop attachments to inanimate things. And there's something particularly depressing about cold, dried out spinach in a foil container.

My favorite of these paintings is Mailbox. The box stands on a street corner in winter, though the context takes a backseat to the object itself. "They wanted me to give it a background, give it a place," Gwen said of a critique she received of her work. Earlier efforts to paint objects seemed to miss a crucial point: "We want to see the object as we experience it," she said. But paint changes objects. By hanging the life-sized object on the wall, we are positioned below it. It's as though we are experiencing the mailbox from the perspective of a child. The object looms, and is thick with brushstrokes. The handle is invisible, as the "mouth" of the box gets obscured in darkness. In this rendering, I think of being held up by my dad to mail a letter, thinking that if I wasn't careful, I'd get swallowed.

It is this attention to our relationship with things that Gwen's work enlivens.

Best Books for Valentine's Day

2011-02-14T16:01:00.000-08:00

I love Valentine's Day. I really do. It's some sort of weird disorder, or maybe just a testament to the successful rhetoric of greeting card companies. But in any case, it's nice to think that once a year you can either do something self-consciously hokey (or, you know, break out the ol' love swing) with your significant other, or cry yourself to sleep watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and listening to Coldplay.

Regardless of the state of your heart this February 14, here are some books to read to make sure that your brain is working:

Got a little someone special in your life? Try Lolita. It's not exactly the most un-horrifying experience in the history of modern literature, but it sure makes you feel normal by comparison.

Nobokov's unbelievably sinister portrayal of Humbert Humbert takes us through the psychology of a pedophile and leaves us wondering, well, how he thought up all of this stuff. The salacious content of the novel is one thing...and there are arguments on both sides about whether it is pornographic. I come down on the side that says: this is a novel that pushes the limits of narrator-reliability. Its unrelenting portrayal of psychosis is absolutely unique.

Whether you're trying to work through the psychodynamics of your favorite fetish or in the market for a new one, boy has Freud written the book for you! In his essential work, the good doctor lays out the foundation for some of his most famous ideas. What made The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality such a scandal at the time was its bold overthrow of just about everything that psychiatrists and sociologists were saying about sex.

Freud aims to strip moral judgment from "the perversions," and uses them to try and determine just what we mean when we talk about "normal sexual behavior." So go ahead and enjoy that leather spiked thong! It's just object-cathexis!

Girls! Trying to figure out what to buy Dad for V-Day? Or, looking to send the message to that special boyfriend that he's just your father with a different haircut? Well, then it's got to be Ariel. Give that big lovable brute in your life a dose of what he really deserves, and quit living in that shoe of yours!

Published in 1965, two years after her suicide, reading Plath's poems in one sitting is a bit like digging into a scab until you need stitches! Nothing says "I love you" like "But they pulled me out of the sack / And they stuck me together with glue. / And then I knew what to do. / I made a model of you, / A man in black with a Meinkampf look. Say "I do!" to Sylvia!

Last, give the gift that truly does keep on giving: meaning. Kafka's In the Penal Colony helps us all understand when signification is conveyed through bodily feeling, and no longer just language! There can be no more beautiful message to share with your loved one on Valentine's Day than the idea that he or she makes you feel something deeply unintelligible and incommunicable. Your love is beyond the ability of language to communicate!

Tell them exactly that by sharing Kafka's In the Penal Colony, wherein a deranged commandant of a prison tortures condemned inmates in a machine contrived to carve nonsensical scripts into their backs until they perish from blood loss after twelve hours! It's the ultimate expression of the inability of language to express!

[Coda: For real picks--books that try to portray love in all of its mundane and satisfying ordinary give-and-take and heartache/break--try Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth, Jonathan Lethem's As she Climbed Across the Table, Lydia Davis's Collected Fiction (or if you're someone who likes to really drag out awkwardness and pain: The End of the Story)]

Super Bowl Car Commercials II: Vader Kid

2011-02-10T18:36:00.000-08:00

It has been declared, almost unanimously it seems, the best commercial of the Super Bowl. And it's for a Volkswagen Passat, a decidedly un-luxurious vehicle. What does this spot tell us about the persistence of traditional narratives of middle class desire? And moreover, why should we care? Why do I want to suck the joy out of this adorable commercial by overanalyzing it to death?

Because, although much cuter and less evil than the Audi commercial I profiled yesterday, Volkswagen's ad perpetuates in its own ways certain ideas about the kind of labor appropriate to men and women. By merely watching this spot and saying "oh how cute," we might miss the subtle ways that the volks at Deutsche Inc (Volkswagen's agency for a little over a year) are manipulating our memories of childhood, and the things we may have been taught to expect from middle class domestic life. So:

To the kitchy, menacing, and utterly familiar soundtrack of the Imperial March from Star Wars, a young child (whose gender we don't know), wearing an extremely elaborate Darth Vader costume complete with enormous helmet and mask, stalks around the house. The little tyke tries to use THE FORCE on objects--the laundry machine, an exercise bike, the dog, a doll, and a peanut butter sandwich that his mother makes for him--to no avail. Nothing reacts the way the kid wants--that is, nothing floats, turns on, activates, barks, or responds to the mystical "Force."

But then Dad returns from the office in a new Volkswagen Passat. The child runs past Dad, foregoing a fatherly hug. He's busy trying to get the force to work, after all. Dad looks momentarily miffed, but walks into the house. "I'm busy with serious work, Dad," the kid seems to say. The adorable Lord of the Sith concentrates extra hard, trying to use the force on the car. The music softens, and much to everyone's surprise, das auto starts!

This is a great moment. I mean, imagine you're the kid here (and what Star Wars geek hasn't tried to use the force?) "HOLY MOLY," you would say, and our little protagonist staggers back from the running car, just as we would.

"IT WORKED!"

Then there's a cut to a remote control, and then another that shows the mischievous father holding it, standing next to his wife in the kitchen. He has started the car from the window. A little parental joke to drive the kid's imagination. Hubby raises his eyebrows at wifey, proud of his trick. Lord Vader looks to the house in disbelief, and then back at the car. Amazing. The Volkswagen Passat is only around $20,000 the tagline tells us.

We all know little Vader's pain. The promise of George Lucas's franchise is that we should be able to use the force. And when it doesn't work, there's a profound disconnect between the promise of the fantastical world, and the mundane truth of the real world. (Side note: these particular parents seem extra-intent on making their kid believe the force is real...why this child has such a professional-looking Vader costume though, I can't really say). What seems to matter most here is that Mom is at home and Dad is at work. Very simply, the domestic landscape of the home--Mom's terrain--is denigrated (shrugged at), while Daddy's arrival from the mystical land of the "office" heralds the extraordinary. This commercial plays on our accepted notions of how life in the suburbs functions: Mom's role is in the house; Dad's is at work. Mom performs the crucial but unappreciated labor of making the home. Dad performs the abstract labor necessary to pay for it all. Mom is ordinary. Dad is extraordinary.

Consider the things that junior tries to use the force on. There's the exercise bike--mostly unused in any American middle class home. The dog--the affable golden lab who just wants to lay around any American middle class home. And the American Girl-looking doll, official doll of the American middle class daughter.

There's also the laundry machine, and then the peanut butter sandwich. Here's where I want to start focusing in on the character of Mom. Mom takes care of her little one. She, ostensibly, is the one busy doing laundry, taking the dog out for a walk, tidying up the house, and making lunch. Junior tries to get the laundry machine to start. But only mom can get the stains out of his cape. And what about Mom's sandwich? It's miraculous that Mom provides food, and yet all she gets from her ungrateful little one is a shrug. Seriously, when you're a kid, it should seem much more amazing that Mom just always has something made for lunch. The point is that it is magical that Mom is there to make sandwiches, do the dishes, and clean everyone's clothes. The little brat just shrugs it off--same way we probably did.

In this commercial, Mom makes everything work in the ordinary landscape of the domestic sphere. Everything that is boring and yet necessary to the reproduction of the child's life comes off as uninteresting. It literally fails to come to life for the child, even as Mom's labors are the life-giving force behind everything.

And then Daddy returns.

We've all been here. Daddy gets home from work. When we're extremely young, we might run to the door and greet Daddy with a hug and a kiss. But when we get a little older, and we're home from school on summer break, it just sucks that Daddy has to leave. We resent him for going off every day to do his "work." Junior acts the way most seven or eight year-olds would act, avoiding the hug and wanting instead to show Pa what they've been doing all day. That is, Lil' Vader runs past his father and gets to work on the car, aiming to show Dad that cool and very important things happen at home too! Daddy shouldn't leave because COOL STUFF HAPPENS HERE.

The car starts. The kid is absolutely freaking stunned.

There are two significant parts to the shots that make this into a joke. One is the knowing eyebrow gesture from the father. Is it just me, or can we all imagine the mother saying something like "Oh, our offspring has been traipsing around the house all day trying to use the force on something." Dad then says: "Wait, I know what to do," and whips out his magic tool.....*cough*

In other words, it is the abstract, magical labor of Daddy, who is coming back from the far off land of "WORK" that brings the climax of this mini-narrative. Father also sustains the order of the house--but in a more abstract way in the mind of the child. He is the one who leaves every morning to earn money at his (probably white collar--I mean, did you notice the lawn and the hardwood floors??) job, leaving the Dark Lord with Mommy. And now, in the final scene, it is Dad's machine that reacts to the child's game. The departure and return of Daddy is symbolized by the car itself. That the child can turn on the car seems symbolic of the ability to win the affirmation from the father (perhaps that's why Cute Vader turns around toward the kitchen and looks toward both parents), even as the evidence of that approval is generated by daddy.

Simply: Dad, and Dad's approval as symbolized by the car's response to the child's use of the "force" is magic. His arrival in his big car leads to the fulfillment of the child's wish--not only in the form of the car starting, but in that act's confirmation of fatherly love.

In other words, Mommy is the one who does the material work of sustaining the child throughout the day. She provides the traditionally "ordinary" work of keeping the house in order. But it's still Daddy, and his association with the Passat, that the child will remember in bed that night. It's Daddy's arrival that makes it possible for the force to work, and that serves as the ordering force of approval. The child is confirmed by the father's tool.......*COUGH*

This commercial plays on traditional assumptions about the kind of labor that is appropriate to men and women in middle class, hetero-normative, white suburban homes. Mom stays home and takes care of the kids, washes clothes, does the dishes. Dad goes off to work and becomes the site of wish-fulfillment for the child. (And actually, for Mom too. There's something inescapably sexual--"Look at me knowing how to make our kid's day. I'm so awesome"--in that raised eyebrow).

The commercial offers a variation on embedded narratives of American middle class life as old as apple pie and the Fourth of July.

Verdict: I doubt I'm the only one who thinks that contemporary middle class America should be a different kind of place: one where both parents split domestic labor. To my mind, the mundane nature of chores is made "worth it" by the simple pleasure of being able to provide comfort for those you love. Responsibilities, and the right to pursue differently meaningful work outside the home, should be shared. Duh. I'm a feminist, after all. Or at least I like to think so. Though I do know how to make a better peanut butter sandwich than my girlfriend--who incidentally thinks all of this analysis just ruins a good commercial. And okay, fine. My labor is pretty abstract. I just hope she doesn't shrug at me when I make dinner and rub her feet.

Super Bowl Commercials I: Is it Okay to Start Buying Stuff Again?

2011-02-09T09:18:00.000-08:00

Can the privileged class start enjoying its privileges again already? Here's the first in a three-part series on the Super Bowl's auto commercials (including perhaps THE only two popular ads this year). They tell a divided story.

Audi: Release the Hounds (Or, Meet the New Boss: Same as the Old Boss)

Two bathrobed prisoners in a jail for the wealthy break out, to a soundtrack of their delighted fellow inmates' cheers, and Kenny G. The warden orders "Release the hounds," and as the prisoners reach the gate, they have a choice: climb into a white Mercedes, or a flashy Audi A8. The older of the pair hops into the Benz--"My father had one of these," he says, and is driven immediately back to the jail. The younger accelerates to freedom in the Audi, passing under the George Washington Bridge as a voice-over implores us: "Escape the confines of old luxury." The tagline reads: "Luxury has progressed."

So the ad aims to convince us that old luxury is dead, and that it's acceptable, sexy, desirable, etc. to indulge in new luxuries. This is not a very new idea (just watch the above Philadelphia Story and notice how similar Carey Grant looks to the protagonist of the Audi commercial, and how different Grant's car looks from everyone else's). That is, if there is a victim of the last four years of endemic unemployment and economic collapse, it's certainly not conspicuous consumption itself (that was the rumor circa January 2009)--but rather simply the consumption of old guard luxury brands.

Of course, there's nothing fundamentally different about the latest iteration of luxury at all. To begin with, the prisoners are all in the same jail. Old and new wealth are locked up in the same physical space at the beginning of the ad. Why, precisely, are they there? We are told that these poor souls are "confined" by old luxury. But what does this actually mean? What are the trappings of contemporary wealth? One can't help but conclude that they are serving time for white-collar crimes. If this is so, then at the end, we're rooting for the young Wall Street investor who has come up with a new algorithm/program/options-scheme that goes undetected by regulators. He gets away because he has figured out a way to beat the system.

Audi gets us to root for the return of the same exact financial structures in a new packaging. We cheer for the a new young buck who evades the law and flies down the Hudson. "Where is he headed?" we may wonder. Well, if you look closely, he's driving southbound below the West Side Highway during the early morning hours, ostensibly driving to work at Goldman from suburban Westchester.

That the commercial advocates the revitalization of accepted modes of exploitation goes as well for how it is subtly racialized. All of the prisoners, drivers, and guards are white, except for one. The only non-white character is dressed as a doorman who releases the hounds on the fleeing prisoners. (This is the commercial's real rage-inducing moment for me. REALLY AUDI? A DOORMAN?) A black man releasing hounds on a pair of fleeing white millionaires is a narrative inversion of the most sinister kind. That is, I think it's still rather soon to be joking about slavery jokes in commercials...and it always will be. But at the same time, this inversion points us to another way in which the order of this commercial simply plays reproduces and repackages existing structures of power. The commercial's only racially "marked" character takes orders from the warden. He works for the jail. He is a night-watchman, a security guard -- in other words, a low income laborer who probably takes this job knowing that he will never afford either a Benz or an Audi.

Luxury never progresses in our society--it merely morphs, making new products seem more desirable to newly privileged classes making its privileges seem prettier than the privileged who came before them.

Verdict: NOT buying an A8. (I'm more of a white Benz man myself, anyway. There's something dignified in being honest about being a prick, no?)

Dispatches from DC: The Problematic Ambitions of "Donald"

2011-02-04T11:27:00.000-08:00

I like McSweeney's when it's funny. And though I have gone back and forth on Dave Eggers, I have been strongly in the "pro" camp (at least when it comes to his work) since Zeitoun, a powerful piece of writing about Katrina that may very well go down as one of the best books about that disaster.

But last night's reading of the McSweeney's-backed Donald at 826 DC was not funny. The evening presented a confusing and often painful caricature of what Eggers’s enterprise morphs into when it boosts authors who "do" politics. The concept and execution of Donald come off as shrill, opportunistic, and incurious. All the while, its authors trumpeted the incoherent idea of "serious fiction"--a term that McSweeney's did not invent, but one that it seems all too ready to mobilize as its reason for existence. Donald, written by Eric Martin and Stephen Elliott, attempts to turn the tables on Donald Rumsfeld. Set to hit shelves on the same day as Rummy's memoir, the book is described as an "allegory," in which a Rumsfeld-inspired character is kidnapped, rendered, and tortured at the hands of an unnamed regime. Simply: Donald is the wrong book at the wrong time with the wrong message, and it took me less than an hour to decide that McSweeney’s owes its fan much more than this.

Donald is Shrill - According to the two authors, the creation myth behind Donald goes something like this:

It all started when Elliott was walking around one day, and suddenly "got mad about torture." He wondered what would happen in an alternate history, where a character not-so-loosely-based on Donald Rumsfeld was tortured.

"It began as a revenge book," he said. Some people laughed. I cringed.

Martin stepped in here to assure the audience that it became something more. What it became was a book that would help readers better understand "the other." As he attempted to explain, sometimes it's really hard to identify with "the other" and it's easier to understand things…like torture…when it happens to someone of the "same color" and nation.

I cringed again.

Now, maybe I have this all wrong. I have never published a novel, and I’m writing from a purely amateur perspective. I haven’t taken classes in the MFA Program at UT. But I have been taught that once a writer starts from revenge, it's all over. Once a writer wants to harm instead of understand, he or she has lost all credibility when it comes to empathy (more on that below). And once a writer wants to preach about that empathy, rather than trying to depict it in the world of characters, readers can (and should) lose interest.

The authors’ claim that the book began from a place of revenge was disappointing, but their suggestion that readers would better understand and appreciate the effects of torture by reading Donald seemed downright disingenuous.

Just to be clear, here are ten techniques authorized by the Bush Administration, as described in the “Torture Memos”:

Attention grasp, walling (in which the suspect could be pushed into a wall [and held there with a collar]), a facial hold, a facial slap, cramped confinement, wall standing, sleep deprivation, insects placed in a confinement box (the suspect had a fear of insects) and the waterboard.

I don't think anyone sitting in 826 DC's headquarters last night (cozy but for the incessant toilets flushing somewhere above--with a little imagination, it might have easily been the sound of someone being aggressively waterboarded) needed anything more than those brute facts to empathize with victims of torture--"other" or otherwise. Not to mention the fact that I find no American--white, black, purple, green, or pink--more other than Donald Rumsfeld. Donald is not about learning how to better empathize with victims of torture

Rather, Donald is Opportunistic, timed to coincide with Rumsfeld's memoirs, and sure to illicit knee-jerk partisan reactions from both liberal and conservative readers. McSweeney’s will score a cheap point, sell books to fans that agree with the novel's premise from the get-go, and move on to the next stunt.

The way the authors tell it, they pitched the idea of the book in an informal meeting with Dave Eggers himself. "It was such a Dave moment," one of the two said, characterizing the "laid back" conversation at something that sounded like a McSweeney's safehouse in New England somewhere. They told Dave that Rumsfeld's memoir would soon be released, and characterized his reaction as something along the lines of: That's it! That’s the only time it can be published!

And thus began a 60-day flurry of production (the book wasn't close to done yet). Martin and Elliott emphasized how much research McSweeney's interns did to get the facts straight. They described the furious nights of writing. And in the end, they emphasized that they were "unsure" if Dave had "actually read" the novel at all.

But why should anyone have expected him to? After all, Donald itself is incurious.

Consider: Eric Martin has just today published a feature on The Rumpus called an "Unreview" of Rumsfeld's Known and Unknown. Martin describes an unreview as an exercise in which a "writer reviews a book he or she has not read." The premise—regardless of whether Martin, or one of his interns, read the book—on its own exhibits a lack of curiosity that would seem essential to the composition of good fiction. Such curiosity, by extension, is the basic condition for anything resembling empathy. How can one identify with the feelings of others if one is not curious?

And yet, according to both authors, "conservatives lack empathy.” This, in turn, explains why there are no conservative novelists out there. That's right, all conservatives--fully one-half or more of the American population--lack empathy. Only liberals have this quality of shared human understanding. That’s why only liberals write serious fiction.

Perhaps that's why Martin tells his readers that he has no intention of actually reading the book that his own novel purports to respond to. That is, he can "empathize" his way right into an understanding of Rumsfeld's book. But it does not explain why the authors insisted that conservatives would read Donald, and that Rumsfeld himself might enjoy it. I wonder what makes them think that the former Secretary would find their work interesting. It must not be to empathize with their position. Maybe he will just be intrigued by the cover, on which he is portrayed in a Guantanamo-style orange prison uniform.

Or maybe their confidence in their work grows from the idea that they have made a piece of serious fiction. Martin and Elliott readily offered two definitions of serious fiction:

Serious Fiction is: CHARACTER DRIVEN - This would seem to mean that readers interpret the work and learn about the world primarily through the lens of the persons that the authors portray. But the problem with Donald seems to be that the protagonist is not a character as much as he is a Frankenstein's monster of cobbled-together bits of "Rumsfeld's Rules" and inmate protocols authored by the Bush Administration. In the bits that they read, Donald seems cool, calculating, unafraid, and entirely unlikable. It is rather the prison guards who seem uncertain, hesitant in their jobs, in other words: human.

Serious Fiction is EMPATHETIC - I almost laughed when they made this conclusion. It seemed like a big stretch to take lessons about empathy from two guys who seemed honestly to believe that conservatives lack empathy. Their inability to inhabit a conservative’s view of the world and think, for a moment, that it might be in some ways similar to theirs, was quite simply the most stunning display of unempathy in the whole hour.

But really, what they wanted to say was: "Serious fiction is what we do here. Trust us.”

If Donald is a piece of serious fiction, then I want to be in a different business. We need novels that grow out of a genuine desire to know each other, not to preach one side of an issue. Our country tortured foreign nationals (and, by many accounts, still might be doing so at Bagram and elsewhere). This shouldn’t just make us mad. It should stand as an extraordinary blot on the history of the country. Torture became a partisan issue during the Bush Administration, but questionable practices regarding detainment of foreign nationals began much sooner. Extraordinary rendition began during the Clinton Administration. Fiction that aims at true empathy should rise above the manipulation of historical circumstances to make a political point. It should try to get at the heart of what leads individuals and states to torture, and help us eliminate the possibility for individuals to create legal and emotional loopholes to justify its use.

In the meantime, I think we all should read both Rumsfeld’s memoir and Donald…but perhaps it would be best to wait until they are available in the library.

What Does "Persepolis" Help us Understand About #Jan25?

2011-01-30T19:16:00.000-08:00

In a moment when the world's eyes are fixed on Egypt, what does a book about Iran have to teach us about politics, media, and representation of revolution?

Marjane Satrapi's celebrated graphic memoir Persepolis tells the story of the author's childhood and early-adulthood in Iran during the Cultural Revolution and its immediate aftermath. News outlets have been comparing the historic protests across Egypt to the period between 1978 and 1980 when the Shah was overthrown. The conversation in news media outlets this week has often centered on whether the Obama Administration is making the same mistakes dealing with Egypt that Carter made during the Iranian crisis.

Yet Satrapi's book does not exactly provide us with a clear perspective on how to view America's role in the political and cultural turmoil in Iran. The book portrays historical events, but that's not why it is essential reading. I don't even know if it's helpful to compare the Egyptian protests to Iran (and Persepolis did help me get a basic understanding of some of the crucial differences between Arab and Persian contexts). Rather, Satrapi interweaves the personal with the political, giving us a picture of how ordinary life adapts to and works through moments of national and cultural trauma. Moreover, it conveys this narrative in what is probably the most appropriate form to the task of portraying revolution: graphic narrative.

As Hillary Chute puts it in her excellent reading of Persepolis in Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics,

Persepolis shows trauma as ordinary, both in the text's form, the understated, spacial correspondences Persepolis employs to narrative effect through comics panelization, and in style, the understated quality of Satrapi's line that rejects the visually laborious in order to departicularize the singular witnessing of the author as well as open out the text to readers.

In other words, throughout the narrative, Satrapi places panels of everyday experiences next to panels that portray political protests and the subsequent violence of the regime's retribution. This seems to correct--or perhaps helpfully caption/contextualize--our experience of political phenomena like the Green protests in Iran 2008, and this month's events in Tunisia and Iran. The way we consume media privileges iconic imagery, like the photo of Neda's gunshot wound in 2008 (graphic) or The Atlantic's photo of an Egyptian woman kissing a police officer. But in reality, revolution and protest are phenomena with families in the background--with children who are confused during the action, and who are told to keep down, stay safe, remain calm, listen to their parents.

When we are told and shown in images that an entire country is protesting, we should remember that the fracture of ordinary life occurs in everyone's homes, behind closed doors. Satrapi presents us with a set of images that juxtaposes the ordinary with the extraordinary or spectacularity of a national order in crisis.

It matters too that this medium is comics, a form that has long been on the margins of literary production, but one whose accelerating popularity and critical attention makes it pertinent in a discussion about the role of new media in the broadcast of political news around the world. I'm thinking here about the genres of images, text, video, and sounds that are available to us in the historical moment of Twitter, Facebook, and all other forms of social media, that make it possible for individuals to broadcast dispatches from scenes of political protest and violence around the world.

Remember that Chute claims the stripped down style of Satrapi "departicularizes" the process of witnessing and opens it up to the experience of readers. It strikes me that this is the same affective phenomenon that occurs when CNN or Al Jazeera or whomever broadcasts pixellated video footage from individuals holding cellphone cameras at protests. We get a personal perspective, but faces and bodies are washed out, similarly departicularizing the experience. A related phenomenon seems to be operating when we read articles that record Facebook status updates or track the functionality of Twitter. These convey unique voices, but in their sheer volume, smooth the jagged nature of individual communication--and harmonize voices with #hashtags.

In both its form and content, Persepolis is extremely pertinent to an understanding of the way we consume media during moments of national protest and change.

Brainwashed: "Exit Through the Gift Shop" and Anonymity as a Commodity

2011-01-30T18:29:00.000-08:00

Nominated for an Academy Award in the category of "Best Documentary," Exit through the Gift Shop purports to tell the story of Banksy, the well-known British King of Street Art. We're told right from the start that this is "A Banksy Film," but over the course of the film's manic ninety minutes, it evolves into a biopic of Thierry Guetta. Guetta's fortuitous relationship with Space Invader--an early Street Art celebrity--and his relentless obsession with capturing constant footage of his everyday life make him a kind of videographic mascot for an ever-larger group of artists. Guetta gains the trust of a circle of international Street Artists, and from the income generated by what appears to be a vintage clothing store in Los Angeles, is able to follow them around and document everything. After a series of good luck, Guetta (so we are led to believe) develops a friendship with Banksy himself...and the film shifts.

I won't go into all of the twists, but essentially Guetta adopts the moniker "Mr. Brainwash," and goes on to launch an incredibly lucrative art career with a show that becomes the toast of LA's gullible art consumers.

It is impossible to determine whether "Mr. Brainwash" is actually an elaborately constructed con, and many reviews of the movie try to get answers as to whether Banksy himself might be behind everything, tricking audiences to accept the mustachioed charlatan Guetta as a legitimate artist. Regardless, the oscillation between anonymity and celebrity produces one of the most interesting thematic tensions throughout the film. Anonymity began as a necessary condition of doing street art. As more street artists become famous, is the form "over"? If so, what was it? And how can we characterize its relationship to anonymity?

Street Art, which after a history that spans (depending on whose perspective you take) decades, has coalesced suddenly into an international art phenomenon. Banksy is certainly the most famous of its practitioners, but cities around the world have become the canvas for ever more inventive artists. Along the way, it has found itself appropriated by dominant political rhetoric (Shepard Fairey is responsible for the "Hope" Obama posters, ubiquitous during the 2008 campaign), and by the art establishment itself.

Since street art was at its beginnings (and still is) mostly considered a variant of illegal graffiti, anonymity came with the territory. The rapidity with which their work was washed away, torn down, scrubbed clean, and otherwise erased by authorities--in other words, the fleeting nature of their art--became part of the allure. Whereas artists like Christo collaborate with city government officials, planners, architects, and designers to produce installations in cities, it is the anonymity of Street Artists that distinguished them. The aesthetic connections between these two types of artists is minimal--what is important is that they embody what seem to be polar positions when it comes to the artist's relationship to the urban landscape.

But now, Street Art has more mainstream and the art has become insanely marketable and salable. Exit includes footage from Banksy's famously successful show in Los Angeles, where Brangelina are portrayed perusing his works (they spent upwards of $400,000). As it changes, we should consider the stakes of anonymity's decline in general. In a cultural moment where a simple Google search yields results about your job, the value of your house, your social network activity, anything you've ever published anywhere, etc, the very possibility of anonymity has dwindled. That seems to have been one of the most amazing things about Street Art (and at least remains mostly true about Banksy). The notion that there were caped crusaders jumping across rooftops to prank the cities of the world is almost unthinkable now that street artists are coming out and declaring their identities.

If there is any doubt about the transformation of anonymity into a valuable commodity, consider the one exception--the one artist not only clinging, but seemingly pretty comfortable in maintaining his anonymity--that is, Banksy himself. As more street artists attempt to claim their legitimacy by selling artworks in galleries to the adoring public, Banksy remains in the shadows in Exit.

And he's still the most successful, arguing quite persuasively though surprisingly humbly throughout the film (and especially after "Mr. Brainwash's" enormous and gut-bustingly hilarious success) that he remains one of the last authentic street artists.

With all sorts of speculation about whether Banksy will take off the mask if he wins an Oscar for this perplexing, funny, and often beautiful film (you have to hand it to Mr. Guetta--he got some great footage), I sure hope he's willing to stay behind the curtain.

The New New Topographics.....Nostalgia for the Suburban

2011-01-26T19:33:00.000-08:00

So, do we want to move back to the suburbs or not? Because I've been getting mixed signals lately, and I'm trying to think through what might or might not be the opening salvo in a renaissance of suburban longing (if there has already been a full-blown renaissance in suburban longing, please someone fill me in).

Arcade Fire's 2010 widely acclaimed album The Suburbs pines for an idyllic return to the simplicity of low expectations, wide lawns, and strip malls. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out if they're being serious or not. But I thought it might be interesting to consider the album next to the 1975 photography exhibition "New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape," if only because it takes as its subject the very scenes of 1970's suburban life that Arcade Fire sings so moonily about (incidentally, a new collection of essays to be published by the U of C Press in February reconsiders the show, so I'm trying to get my shots in here quickly)

The images in "New Topographics" portrayed trailer parks, decrepit factories in the exurbs, blank urban spaces, and parking lots. Though it would eventually become one of the most influential bodies of landscape photography in history, the show flopped when it first appeared. The images marked a major departure from previous modes of photography in their simple descriptions of scenes. They did not seem to overtly judge, and yet there was an undeniable snarkiness to the pictures. Audiences seemed not to "get it." It didn't help that the Eastman House was featuring the work of university-trained photographers--a maligned crop of academic practitioners that allegedly lacked the natural talent thought to be necessary for authentic picture-making.My juxtaposition of "New Topographics" with Arcade Fire's 2010 album The Suburbs is a bit tongue in cheek, though I still really can't tell if the group is actually pining for the suburbs or not. I can't tell who is being sincere and who is being ironic. Is Arcade Fire genuinely longing for the suburbs, or are they satirizing the desire for convertibles and freshly paved roads? Are the photographers in "New Topographics" genuinely trying to do documentary work, or does their rendering of empty "man-altered" landscapes nakedly satirize or criticize the spaces they depict?

I really don't know. I just wanted to type a few words about both, regardless...

The Onslaught of the "Best Books About 9/11"

2011-01-25T07:58:00.000-08:00

It's inevitable. Come September, we will be awash in a national project of stock-taking--a look back at the previous ten years on the anniversary of the September attacks of 9/11/2001. It seems useful to think about what will be the value of these collective considerations. I wonder whether the two camps that formed in the wake of the attacks have softened a bit. There were those who believed 9/11 changed essentially everything, and those who believed 9/11 changed essentially nothing--is it time that we all agree that neither is the case, but that something happened? If we can, I think we can move on to helpful questions about what art and literature is doing to help us think about the politics and culture of "The Post-9/11 Moment" as a historically bound phase in American identity. Deborah Eisenberg's wonderful collection Twilight of the Superheroes helps us understand what it means to move beyond a nationally post-traumatic stage and move to work 9/11 into something like a collectivized memory (even though you probably won't see it on Top Ten Books About 9/11 lists that are guaranteed to materialize).

Ten years after "the events of 9/11," I think two pertinent questions have evolved, both of which help us understand how cultural/national trauma gets absorbed at the level of individuals

What was the post-9/11 moment? What was special about American politics and culture during a period that followed 9/11/2001? How were particular strategies and tactics mobilized to achieve certain cultural and political objectives? How did these strategies and tactics wane over time? Is the post-9/11 moment something that could ever end?

How did the Post-9/11 Moment structure our thinking about the "event" itself? This is related to the possibility of ever being anything other than Post-Traumatic in the wake of the attacks. The "Post-9/11 Moment" might be thought of as a period that begins with standardized modes of national grief and moves to the recent past, where 9/11 is taken as a kind of given in the American consciousness. Perhaps the Post-9/11 moment was the period during which this shift took place. Eisenberg's collection helps us work through this idea. The title story of the collection--and the first in the book--depicts the attacks. "Something changed," we are told," in the lives of Eisenberg's twentysomething characters who view the attacks from a Manhattan balcony. The trick is to figure out what.

But 9/11 recedes to the background of the collection. When it appears in the ensuing stories, it is in echoes: changed airport security procedure; televised war protests; references to a kind of Blackwater or Halliburton firm. The explosions of planes recede into the past of the collection in the same way that they recede into the background noise of ordinary lives made complicated by family life. The dramas of our interactions with one another are shaded by--not dominated by--a collectivized national trauma. Eisenberg's collection seems to portray the machinations by which this transition from nationalized grief toward everyday sub-awareness occurred.

Wells Tower Says Some Things

2011-01-18T07:57:00.000-08:00

A few months back, I got a chance to exchange emails with Wells Tower. Below, find answers to some of my questions in full. Author of the collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, and recipient of a 2010-2011 New York Public Library Fellowship, Tower is currently working on his first novel. Here he talks about the supposed "death of the novel," the "rise of the short story," ordinary life...and Pliny the Younger. His collection was among the best reviewed (it got the unheard-of honor of being TWICE reviewed in the New York Times). You can listen to him read the hilarious and violent and beautiful Viking title story here, and read one of the best travel essays (about visiting Iceland with his father here). But first, here's the interview:

1) Writers from Philip Roth to James Wood have been warning us about the "death of the novel" for almost fifty years. What kind of credence, if any, do you give to these kinds of claims (that the novel is obsolete, dehumanized, hysterical, and incapable of "keeping up")?

We hear the same thing about literature generally, and I don't buy it. Prophesies of the novel's death are a kindred vanity to the Evangelicals' claim that the Rapture, any day now, is upon us. It's fun to feel like the last of something. And, sure, video games outsell literary novels by a dispiriting proportion, but unless we somehow cease to use language to make sense of the world, I am sure that people will continue to write novels that matter. (Way more after the jump...)

2) How would you characterize the place of short fiction in contemporary American letters, especially in comparison with the place of the novel? You have said in several different places that Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is not intended as a series of linked stories, for example. How do you think a set of linked stories works on readers differently than something like your collection?

a) The conventional answer, of course, is that the short story is the neglected runt of American lit, and it's probably true that with the short story's radically diminished presence in glossy magazines over the past few decades, the average American reader may be a bit less comfortable engaging with a piece of short fiction than our grandparents were. But the chief effect of the shrinking mainstream market for short stories is that these days people write them because they want to, not because they aim to get rich, which has assisted short fiction's transformation into a "literary" form, i.e. one in which the writers care about language and art and not necessarily about their work's ready adaptability for the Hollywood screen. In this sense, I can't see how the short story's lot is tremendously different from that of the literary novel.

b) I didn't deliberately not intend EREB to be a set of linked stories. They simply happened to be the first nine stories that I wrote the republication of which between book covers didn't rouse me to cold heaves. Linked stories can be wondrous (Winesburg Ohio, Jesus' Son, etc., etc.), and with non-linked batches, there's something thrilling in seeing a writer create a new microverse every fifteen or twenty pages or whatever. The only hazard with the linked collection is when the stories have been deliberately riveted together out of misbegotten obedience to market forces, a move recognizable when a character from one story wanders into another only to ask someone the time and quit the scene.

3) Why do you think nonfiction and "creative nonfiction" is popular right now? I love the anecdote about the inspiration for "The Brown Coast" as kind of a hybrid story about a local bartender and your trip down to the Gulf. What role does nonfiction play in shaping your work?

a) Is creative nonfiction more popular than it once was? It seems to me that going back to jeez, Pliny the Younger, through Mayhew, Orwell, Capote, Didion to the heavies of the present moment, people have always wanted to read accounts of true things rendered with the novelist's tools.

b) That story, actually, I think germinated in the traditional way. I heard an anecdote, staffed it with characters of my own devising and set it on an unlovely stretch of coast I'd chanced upon in Florida. But sure, my nonfiction magazine work informs the fiction plenty. My hard drive contains thousands of pages of conversations with people I've met while reporting, and often their voices bleed into the fiction.

4) Every fifteen years or so (if not even more frequently), critics declare a "renaissance" in the form of the short story. It happened with Carver and the Dirty Realists. It happened around the time of Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son. It seems to be happening right now. You have mentioned that, based on your understanding of the climate in America when it comes to short fiction, you had expected your collection to go largely unnoticed. In your estimation, why does short fiction seem to go in and out of favor?

I have absolutely no idea.

5) You describe your characters as being "on the verge." What are they on the verge of? Is this almost-not-quiteness a circumstance unique to contemporary life in America?

It's an interesting question. I certainly didn't set out to write anything broadly diagnostic about the American psyche, but perhaps I can get away with saying that our national dreamlife--of bootstrapping prosperity, professional fulfillment, emerald lawns, bridal magazine kitsch, etc., etc.--rewards us with a particularly American sort of dissatisfaction when our lives fail to match up.

I can't remember when I described my characters as "on the verge," which now sounds foolish to me. Maybe what I was trying to describe is my preference, in short stories, for characters in sufficiently precarious situations that the events in the story may alter them (the characters) lastingly. Why? I think it was my high school English teacher who said, "They don't make movies about people who don't get hit by cars."

6) Can you say something about the relationship between physical and emotional pain at the level of ordinary life in the work? It seems less than common in recent American fiction to portray the grit and grime of everyday life. But maybe I'm off on this point.

I'm not sure I'll be of help here. Being a fairly sunny person, I can't offer a lot of wisdom about how so much dark stuff creeps into my fiction. I guess I expect fiction to say something honest about what it is to be a person, a difficult condition for most us. We are cursed with nimble minds that constantly, punitively present us with images of better lives, better versions of ourselves and the people we love. I suppose that the brutality in the stories--emotional and physical--simply wants to be a means of vivifying by amplification those quotidian disappointments and regrets that would bore and irritate me if I tried to write them life-size.

Remembering the "Other" Black Writers

2011-01-17T11:59:00.000-08:00

While trying to wrap one's head around the mindbending legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, it is important to remember black writers and artists who fit outside the dominant and often patronizing paradigms of black cultural production inculcated during things like "Black History Month." Growing up, I was taught to believe in a single cohesive narrative that explains how the leaders of black culture (to use an already fraught term) contributed to bringing the end of institutionalized racism in America. When reading Their Eyes were Watching God, Native Son, Invisible Man, and Go Tell it on the Mountain, the narrative was often oversimplified: black writers wrote books that overtly protested segregationist practices, and did so in a single unified voice. The truth is, of course, much richer and more complicated, but also more difficult to teach.Maybe this is hyperbolic, but my sense is, not by much. The point is that characterization of a unified black voice in the long middle part of the century misses two very important facts:

First of all, Hurston, Wright, and Baldwin had huge differences of opinion, not only about how best to fight Jim Crow--but perhaps more importantly what constituted material that was necessary for portrayal by black artists, and how aesthetics could be used as strategic practice for subverting legalized segregation.

Secondly, there were a number of black writers who eschewed the form and style (though, I argue not the themes) of Protest Fiction, and in so doing worked within commercial and cultural structures to manipulate these structures from the inside. They are important to remember because they demonstrated that black writers could gain recognition within the literary and Hollywood establishment precisely by not writing protest fiction. They gained membership in what had always been a whites-only club, and along the way made it possible for the establishment to recognize the necessary inclusion of black artists.

I want to be clear here: an understanding of the contributions of both camps of artists is vital. The problem arises when writers like Frank Yerby, Chester Himes, Willard Motley, and Ann Petry (among many others) are denigrated as "genre" or even "pulp" artists whose critical contributions to the canon of African-American literature are largely ignored. This, despite the fact that they were among the most popular and most widely read figures during the early part of the Civil Rights Movement

Take the case of Yerby and his first novel Foxes of Harrow, for example. Instead of fighting against segregation in his fiction, so the story goes, Yerby absconded for Europe in 1951 and published most of his 33 novels from Spain, racing cars and fattening his wallet with proceeds from romance genre bestsellers. For the last forty years, the few scholars who have written about him have attempted to justify (or apologize for) his genre, taking it as a given that he dodged confrontations with problems of race in order to set his own rules for publication. According to these readings, the value of Yerby’s work arises more from his rejection of expectations imposed upon African-American writers of his generation than from thematic or formal achievements. Yet close examination of The Foxes of Harrow, his first hugely popular novel, presents an opportunity for reconsideration of racial themes in Yerby’s work.

After all, Foxes was optioned by Hollywood for $150,000, making Yerby the first black author to win a big film contract, and this despite the fact that the book dealt with themes of miscegenation in the racially complex setting of Civil War New Orleans. Moreover, it was a huge deal that Yerby had written a commercially successful novel (for which he received a six-year contract with Dial Press and a huge advance) that featured a white protagonist. To this point, it was assumed that black authors either could not, or simply did not desire to, center a story on a white character. Simply: it wasn't something that black authors were doing or that readers were used to seeing.

But what critics often miss when fetishizing the commercial success of the novel, is that Yerby did not abandon racial themes simply by featuring a white protagonist. Rather, the subversion of slavery plays a central role in the book. One of the novel's most prominent characters, Caleen, is a slave whose influence over the white owner of the plantation controls the direction of much of the plot. Caleen wields mysterious predictive and healing powers, and is believed by white characters to be a kind of witch. But there is strong evidence throughout the novel that Caleen is fully aware of how to mobilize these "powers" in order to gain meaningful concessions from Stephen Fox, the owner of the plantation. She does so in the interest of eventually securing the freedom of her grandson Inch from the Fox estate. By the end of the book [spoiler alert], her grandson Inch escapes slavery and returns to New Orleans after the war as the chief of police. He now has legal jurisdiction over his former masters.

Because Yerby was popular, and because he was not writing the next Native Son (and was, in fact, frustrated by his inability to write Protest Fiction that he could sell), he is on the margins of academic research. But moreover, despite his outrageous commercial success and the impact that he had on readers during a four decade-long career, he is almost entirely forgotten outside of English departments (where PhD students love him precisely because he is just that forgotten).

We should not lose sight of the broad range of politically vital commentaries levied against institutionalized racism by popular black authors. Nor should we limit our vision of what constitutes important works by black authors to those writing overtly about racism in the 20th Century. Rather, we should expand our view to include the achievements of black artists, who by exploring race in subtle and yet often wildly popular ways, helped pave the way for broader racial inclusion in the structures of literary and cultural production.

Hedi Kaddour's "The Bus Driver" and Ordinary Life

2011-01-16T20:09:00.000-08:00

The Bus Driver: Hedi Kaddour

What has gotten into the bus driver
Who has left his bus, who has sat down
On a curb on the Place de l'Opera
Where he slips into the ease of being
Nothing more than his own tears? The passersby
Who bend over such a shared and
Presentable sorrow would like him
To tell them that the wind used to know
How to come out of the woods toward a woman's dress,
Or that one day his brother said to him,
Even your shadow wants nothing to do with you.
His feet in a puddle, the bus driver
Can only repeat, This work is hard
And people aren't kind.

-- from A Walk in the City, Treason (YUP 2010), translated by Marilyn Hacker

Like 35 Shots, Hedi Kaddour's amazing collection Treason explores the lives of characters confronting breakdowns in the flows and rhythms of their routines. I don't want to sound like a broken record citing recent French art for doing this kind of thing so well, but I thought this poem could be fun to think of next to Denis's film , especially because Lionel drives trains and the bus driver in Kaddour's poem...well....you get it (apparently there's just something super ordinary about working in public transportation in Paris).Anyway...

In Kaddour's poem, we see a man broken down, not by any specific event, but by what seems to be an accumulation of the daily grind. A crowd encircles him and observes him on the ground. "Merde, what a drag" they seem to be saying. "Who wants to see this normally friendly, affable bus driver so f*cking bummed? What a terrible reminder of how terrible his life must be as a bus driver."And so they try to coax him back to his friendly, joking ways. "Tell us that story about that chick with the wind and the dress," they want to say. They feel like asking, "Come on, tell remind us of that terrible thing your brother used to kid you about." But the bus driver can only sit in the "ease of being / Nothing more than his own tears." The work is hard--and sometimes it's just easier to have a good cry.

But....what's the work? It seems easy to say that the poem isn't about bus driving. I think it is--and it's important that it's not train driving, or plumbering, or widget making--because bus driving fits into a larger category of work that we don't generally think of as laden with affect. A bus driver deals in small moments of emotional intensities that we've all seen: road rage, passengers coming up short on fare, fighting in the back, strapping in wheelchairs, and often navigating the dodgier spaces of the city at night. Here, the accumulated "sorrow" is too "presentable" and the reaction is both disappointment and strange curiosity.

But it is also about how work more broadly demands constant emotional energies to manage what I think are often called "light-touch" encounters with anonymous strangers in the urban environment. Unlike 35 Shots, which conceives of the continuity of life as interrupted by concrete events, here we see the breakdown of routine in a moment of internal reflection. It is important that there is nothing in particular that causes this breakage and that everyone seems to wonder "What has gotten into the bus driver?" What's gotten into him is the simple realization that it takes a lot to muster the emotional resources to constantly rededicate ourselves to engagement in the world and to each other.

Or, more saccharinely, we're all the bus driver and the world keeps asking us to do emotional work for it. That work doesn't get any easier. We are expected to be happy workers, at the same time as we are supposed to be good husbands, wives, sons, daughters, students, and even good strangers. In this poem, Kaddour makes helpfully abstract what 35 Shots does in concrete terms. He asks us to pause and consider how anonymity and blank pleasantries and glimpses of anger add up. People are unkind when they refuse to acknowledge the draining quality of the ordinary--how the processes of maintaining our world for ourselves and for each other can overwhelm. Kindness might, in Kaddour's world, might mean openness and constant awareness to this exhaustion--and a willingness to be with and provide for (rather than constantly demanding from) one another.

Why it's Important to Start Using the Past Tense when it Comes to Hipsters

2011-01-15T15:16:00.000-08:00

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="560" caption="Photo Credit: New York Magazine"][/caption]

Last October, Mark Greif published an appraisal of hipster culture in New York Magazine. Greif is one of the founders of the supposedly-annoying magazine and online journal N+1. I don't know enough about it to say whether I like the pubication or not (although characterizations of it as an elitist and pseudo-academic journal lead me to the assumption--if I am to be honest with myself--that I would probably dig it). But I do think that the conceit of the article--assigning the past tense to consider hipster culture as a historically bound phenomenon--is a useful one. Opinions of Greif's role within the hipster universe aside, if the piece had been more descriptive and less overtly condemnatory, I doubt it would have raised the hackles of The Village Voice. But then again, N+1 proudly characterizes Greif's work as "Possibly the most divisive publication since the Warren Commission," and so probably doesn't mind the attention. But to me (full disclaimer: I've been obsessing recently with how to articulate the sentiment: JESUS CHRIST STOP TALKING ABOUT BROOKLYN ALREADY in a fuller, more developed way) the analysis of the term is often right, and the criticism accurately aimed.

Especially the bold part:

The hipster is that person, overlapping with the intentional dropout or the unintentionally declassed individual—the neo-bohemian, the vegan or bicyclist or skatepunk, the would-be blue-collar or postracial twentysomething, the starving artist or graduate student—who in fact aligns himself both with rebel subculture and with the dominant class, and thus opens up a poisonous conduit between the two.

This seems right because hipsterism has always seemed hapless when it comes to generating useful countercultural positions. What strikes me is how frequently I see articles complaining about how we shouldn't be talking about hipsters--how the term doesn't matter at all. And to try to determine whether authors of such pieces even consider the subsequent useful-/lessness of critiques of critiques of hipsters is enough to make my brain explode. To me the mere existence of the term and the wide application of "hipster" to so many aspects of contemporary urban culture make it fair game for discussion. But as I think I have already betrayed my stripes in admitting that I agree with the analysis of Greiff's article--especially in his assertion that hipster culture acts as a means of generating a subset dominant culture rather than resisting it--I think it should be clear that I'm interested in understanding the term for different reasons.

Namely: I think it's time we stop complaining about how much hipsters should be hated, and start coming up with ways to invigorate contemporary production of art with some of the things that we complain hipsters lack. Simply: the question that Greif leaves out--"what takes the hipster's place?"--seems like the kind of question that those searching for a new kind of political or ethical position in art and culture should be asking.

Certainly, understanding the enemy and naming it is useful. But now let's say, "Well okay, how do we do better?" I suspect Greif left this question off the table as a not-so-subtle hint that the folks at N+1 are already doing that kind of work. Again, I have little familiarity with that publication stands for. However, a quick perusal of current topics that it explores: MFA vs. NYC, four reviews of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, and an article on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri suggest that it might be guilty of a different commonly lamented crime, that of academic bellybutton staring.

Here are some things that I think we should be looking for when trying to answer the question of "what comes next?"....something more useful than "not-trucker-hats."

Where hipsters aim for exclusivity and in-the-knowness, the anti-hipster artist will portray inclusiveness of the ordinary and the common ground of lived experience.

Where hipsters are covertly capitalist, the anti hipster artist will constantly insist that capital makes it impossible to divorce art from a system of production and consumption.

Where hipsters cherry-pick cultural and historical objects and reinterpret them out of nostalgia for the past, the anti-hipster builds future worlds out of passion for the present.

Where hipsters feign a mistrust of the upper classes in hopes of being recognized by them, the anti-hipster artist makes work that resists the widening of the gap between the underclasses and the upper classes.

Where hipsters declare their constant attainment of the authentic, the anti hipster artist will strive for depictions of the ineffable true.

Where hipsters eschew politics, the anti-hipster artist will criticize the political

This is getting kind of loony and more than a little shrill...but art movements have started from empty phrases and declarations before............

Some notes on "The Bell Jar," Richard Powers, and Evolving Definitions of Mental Life

2011-01-15T13:41:00.000-08:00

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="286" caption="Yes I accidentally bought an edition meant for "young readers." I'm owning it."][/caption]

In an effort to make up for more than a few literary and personal-life-ish oversights, I finally read The Bell Jar this week. From there, I turned back to some of the more famous poems in Ariel, making what I think is a common bonehead mistake when reading Plath. It becomes incredibly difficult when reading Path's work not to consider biography as overdetermining every detail in her fiction and poetry. Maybe it's partially her fault, sure. The Bell Jar is so close to autobiographical that Plath famously prevented its publication in the United States and insisted upon releasing it under a pseudonym in Great Britain. But I do want to try to put all of that aside. To say that Plath's story is tragic (and even to suggest, as a friend put it, that Ted Hughs pulled of the most dastardly murder in the history of modern letters) does miss the point of this novel: namely, that Esther Greenwood is probably one of of the most distinctive characters in mid-20th Century American fiction. I don't have the ability or background to articulate what the novel meant for the feminist movement, although Esther's observations about men and relationships are scathing and often hilarious.Rather, I started to think of how a reconsideration of Esther's psychological life in a contemporary context might reshape a reading of the novel. This kind of consideration becomes richer when The Bell Jar is considered in conversation with Richard Powers's incredibly beautiful book The Echo Maker. Powers's novel won the National Book Award in 2006, in part because of his masterful expansion of a question that I think lies at the heart of The Bell Jar. His novel offers a very contemporary picture of how mind works within the context of current neuroscience, but also forces us to determine how--in light of such advances--Esther's description of psychological and physical life as dichotomous might continue to lend us an understanding of ourselves.

In The Bell Jar Esther describes the relationship between mind and body as one in which each imprisons the other. The mind traps the body literally: it gets Esther locked in a psychiatric hospital. But at the same time, the body traps the mind. It has "little tricks" for preventing her from killing herself. She calls the body a "cage" that prevents the mind from extinguishing itself (for example, her grip loosens as she tries to strangle herself with a belt and begins to pass out). "If only there were something wrong with my body," she wants to tell the nurses. She would prefer it if something were wrong with her body. But to Esther, the mind is an entirely different question. Problems with the mind are separate from those of the body and, in her view, are much worse.

The question in play is a simple one, and it goes something like this: how has the transition toward control of psychology through psychopharmaceuticals and neuroscience redefined the boundaries between mental and physical existence? As contemporary neuroscience finds more and more ways to describe the subtleties of mental/emotional life (and medicalizes these primarily by identifying and controlling symptoms), what use does something like Esther's description have for us? To what extent might it be useful to view the distinction as she does?

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="333" caption="The Echo Maker: Capgras and Geese"][/caption]

Powers's book gives us something that looks like a rejoinder, if not a response, to this question. The Echo Maker describes the condition Capgras Syndrome. Capgras involves a breakdown between systems of recognition and systems of memory in the brain. Essentially, after a brain trauma, Mark Schluter believes that his sister Karin (his primary familial caretaker) is being played by an imposter. While he can recognize familiar physical and emotional characteristics marked off as "Karin-like," he does not recognize the actual Karin as his real sister.

Mark refuses to believe anyone's insistence that Karin is related to him. He is trapped in a recovery ward of a hospital, ostensibly until his mental faculties improve to the point that the connection in his brain is repaired.

In The Echo Maker, medical science is embodied by the well-meaning but (so the implication goes) inexperienced Dr. Hayes, who insists that he can only describe brain injuries and their physical effects--and the respected and popular neuroscientist (whose case studies bear a strong resemblance to those of Oliver Sacks of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat fame) Dr. Weber. At the end of his career, Weber continues to insist on psychological and medical practices that seem outdated in the face of advanced technological means of patient-evaluation. But of course, the novel demonstrates, that the older techniques of investigation and interview and close observation retain an air of mysterious effectiveness.

What intrigues me about reading these novels next to one another is the resulting ability to analyze how far we have actually gotten away from the division of mind and body that Esther articulated more than 50 years ago. We now recognize the phenomenon that Plath describes in the voice of Esther Greenwood, and Powers's novel explores how the relationship between medical science and something like classical psychoanalysis might work together in a kind of comprehensive investigation of the brain. But at the same time, we want to hang onto the older model. We want to believe in the specialness of individuality and unique subjecthood.

I am definitely in the camp of people that does not want to be reduced to a clump of scientifically analyzable symptoms, but the experience of reading these novels in succession forces a reader to consider why we cling so desperately to the notion that we are not reducible by science. Even five decades later--and despite the fact that Esther's description of the mutual imprisonment of mind and body--we still identify with the way that she describes the self.

Ordinary Life in "35 Shots"

2011-01-15T11:54:00.000-08:00

We need more movies like Claire Denis's 35 Rhums. Beautiful in its composition, and subtle in the exploration of its themes, the film takes us on a ride (literally--we are moved around the city and banlieue-scapes of Paris in trains, taxis, buses, motorcycles, and vans) through the ordinary lives of its characters. Denis's exploration of the familiar seems so spot-on not only because of the understated way in which she deals with interruptions in the ordinary, but also the diligence and precision with which she records the everyday as an emotionally charged ground for exploration. By painstakingly documenting small daily rituals and routines, Denis's film helps us see how variations in the smallest facets of life become the record of momentous and often tragic events.Much of the emotional intensity of 35 Shots is staged in the apartment that Lionel shares with his daughter Jo, where the rhythms of daily life rule the action. Lionel takes off shoes in the hallway; Jo puts laundry in the machine and puts her headphones on to study; she prepares dinner and the two eat togehter. The film repeats these scenes over and again, to the extent that they condition our experience of the narrative. We see Lionel enter the apartment every night either after work or drinking with friends. We see him take off his shoes and walk down the hallway of his apartment to his bedroom. We see him put on his robe and get ready to take his shower. We become, in effect, sensitized to the fact that these are repeated actions, and can begin to look for variations in the manner that he carries out the routine. Instead of asking whether certain actions in the film will take place, we come to expect them, and in turn ask how the routines will change in response to events that take place outside of the apartment.

In this domestic space, we notice the subtlest variations, which stand out as a record of how characters manage the impact of events in the outside world. The way that Lionel takes off his shoes becomes an index of his state of sobriety. We notice that the only seated meal that Jo and her father share is the first in the film--a formal recognition of Lionel's unexpectedly thoughtful gift of the rice cooker (in every subsequent meal, they are standing). On nights when Lionel is particularly tired or affected by some event of the day, he forgoes the shower. Jo listens at the bathroom door for subtle variations in the noises her father is making as he bathes. They become signifiers of his emotional state.

Jo manages this domestic space, and attempts to control it by constantly cleaning and cooking. Despite Lionel's request that she stop trying to take care of him and live her own life, Jo feels compelled to make the home as blank a space as possible for the staging of everyday life. In turn, her impulse to clear the apartment of clutter is set off against Noe's penthouse, which is riddled with clothing, old furniture, garbage, and eventually his dead cat. He is constantly out of milk--unable to keep the kitchen supplied with what is necessary to have a smooth daily routine. Though he tries to remove the debris from his life, he eventually decides instead to sell the place. It is too fraught with memories. In essence, it can never be a space of simple domestic life because it is packed with objects that carry emotionally charged associations.

If the apartment becomes the place where characters find sanctuary--or perhaps, most often seek comfort--in rhythms, the outside world becomes a set of sites that resist the search for flow that is nevertheless constant. The film opens with an extended sequence of trains, shot from both the inside of a cab and from Lionel's perspective on the side of a track. Day turns to night. The trains move along and lights come on. Sometimes the noise of the trains passing is the smooth sliding of steel wheels on track. Sometimes we see the cab jerk to the side as it passes over a switch. We look for the reassurance of rhythm in the portrayal of commutes and labor. But there are only momentary sensations of in-flowness, punctuated by Lionel's cigarettes and by shots of commuters banging into Jo and causing her to wince. It seems significant that Jo and Lionel only seem comfortable in the outside world when they are experiencing a kind of domesticized rhythm together: sharing the motion of the motorbike, or in the comfort of their awesome little van--which contains a kitchen and enough space to share a meal. To feel in tune with the world, they must take their domestic space with them.

Jo insists that she could "live exactly like this," with her father; but of course, it is the interruptions in the rhythms of simple domestic life that drive the action of most of the film--and in effect, drive Jo precisely away from the life she shares with her father. The film suggests that while routine and ritual help us find comfort in the world, only interruption and exception drive us forward. That is: only interruptions in the narrative of routine can create forward motion that drives the plot. When Gabrielle's taxi breaks down and the group must miss the concert, Lionel spends the night with a bartender and Jo reacts by trying to strip the apartment of memories of her mother. The characters are forced to stop moving, and in doing so, must confront what is in front of them. This happens again toward the climax of the film. Rene's suicide on the RER tracks not only causes Lionel to stop his train, but also serves as the catalyst for Lionel and Jo to take a trip to Germany and visit the grave of Methilde.

I wonder whether Denis has set up a dichotomy between repetitive and forward motion, or if my reading of these two types of experiences in the world are necessarily set apart from one another in the film. Does ordinary experience require interruption for the reevaluation of self? Considering the final scene, I'm not exactly sure. Lionel celebrates the end of his current domestic life with his daughter by drinking the 35 Shots of Rum--a ritual whose origin goes unstated but which has a special significance for him. Here, Lionel turns to ritual in a case of celebration. It is the fusion of the repeatable or traditional and the exemplary or spectacular event. It is joy for his daughter and nostalgia for their already-lost life together that fuses the two.

Persistent Inattention

2010-12-17T10:18:00.000-08:00

I had made it three and a half hours without talking to him. Mostly by furiously underlining in my book. The whole time I could feel him fidgeting in his chair, shifting positions. He had brought a pillow in the shape of a pineapple and made a show of punching and tugging at it before setting it down on his tray table. He wanted me to remark on the pineapple. He wanted my attention. I could feel it. And when I didn't give it to him, he reached down underneath the seat in front of him and pulled his knapsack onto his lap. He put the pineapple into the bag and then shoved the bag back under the seat. I snuck a peek at his shoulders as he pressed the bag. He sat back up and sighed.

We flew for a few hours. He slept. He was awake. He played SuDoKu on his iPod.

I remained glued to the pages in front of me. I felt as though I hadn't concentrated so hard on a piece of fiction in a long time. The stories danced for me in a way they hadn't. I felt very serious.

But on the 214th minute of the flight, I suddenly lost concentration and looked up at the back of the seat in front of me. The kid in the middle seat, seizing the opportunity to break the plane of my attention, reached over me and pulled up the shade to look out the window.

"I'm just trying to see," he said. In the grey yellow of my reading light, he looked unshaven and tired, but he had earnest eyes. Dangerous eyes. There was almost an hour of flight time remaining. I turned toward the window and could see his reflection craning to see around my head.

"We're over Las Vegas," I said, looking down at the bizarre splotch of lights in the middle of the black desert. I think I was hoping that by confirming our location, I could somehow get back down into the private headspace I had established for myself. I looked back into my book, staring at the words more intently, but feeling the kid's eyes pointed out the window. We crept by Vegas, and I stared at the Strip, unable at our altitude to pick out any detail.

"What class are you reading that for?" he asked.

I turned toward him.

"I'm not in school," I said.

"Oh, I just thought you had the look of a student."

We let that sit for a moment.

I decided that I would be ruthless in my disengagement. That I would sit and listen with a flat look on my face. That I would let whatever he said wash straight over me until he was pummeled into submission by my own inattentiveness. This had been my defense before.

I looked at my watch and put my pen in the book to mark the page.

"What are you going to do in Los Angeles?" he asked.

"Visiting a friend," I said.

"I'm going home from my first semester in college at Southern University." He leaned back in his chair, confident all of a sudden that he had attained my attention and could shift into easy conversation.

"Have you heard of it?"

I shook my head.

"It's a small Seventh-Day Adventist University in Chattanooga. Do you know where Chattanooga is?"

"Yes."

"Well anyway, it's really right outside of Chattanooga, in a small town called College Crossing."

I imagined

The Suburbs

2010-12-07T21:35:00.000-08:00

For a few years every December, my family would go driving around the neighborhoods to look at Christmas lights. This was around when I was about five till seven years old, and my little sister between three and five. We never put up lights on the outside of our own house. My father is Jewish, and for some reason there was an unspoken rule that--while we could have the biggest tree on the block and enough lights inside the house to raise the temperature by a few degrees--we would never put lights outside. This never seemed in any way contradictory to me.

"Why don't we put lights on the house," my sister once asked me.

"Because of Dad," I said.

Ironically, my father seemed to love these aimless overheated drives more than anyone else in the family. And he had a real appreciation for people who seemed to put monumental time into stringing lights.

"Look at the detailing on that snowman!" he would say of an outline of white lights. "I bet that took hours."

And he had a term for haphazard or half-assed attempts. "Mish mosh," my father would say when we passed a house with a string of blue lights thrown over a hedge. Or God forbid a house should have blinking lights. "What are you going to do that for?" he'd ask, the aesthetic so repulsive to him that the question obviously did not need to be addressed.

"Oh Mike, just leave it alone," my mother would respond.

Sometimes we set out with specific destinations in mind. Cul-de-sacs lit up with efflorescent motorized Santas, and wattage so intense you could probably have benefited from a pair of science-grade eye protection. These were blocks in places like White Plains and Eastchester ("You have to hand it to these Italians," my mother would say) that people knew about. Places where families had blood feuds every year over who got the best coverage or prime picture placement in The Journal News.

Slow moving Ford Windstars, Dodge Caravans, and Nissan Stanzas circled around. Kids like me and my sister were glued to the windows, clouding up the glass and then wiping it off with our hands. The sharp sensation of glass against the cold nights and the sound of rubbing our skin against it.

But mostly we just drove around, switching back around neighborhoods in search of the perfect house. It was always best to run into a totally unexpected house on a dark block. We would turn around a corner and everyone would say, "OooOOOOoooooh." I remember one house we would visit every year. It was our favorite, and became the standard bearer for light-decorations. It was as though we had to go every year to remind ourselves of what was truly exceptional in the business of lights. This particular house always prioritized white lights. They used color, but used it tastefully (though that always seemed a bit random). They never used reindeer on the roof or anything animatronic. And of course, there were no blinking lights.

"Maybe we should knock on the door sometime," my mother said one year.

"What, are you crazy?" my father said. "Like--hi we've been stalking your house for several years now, and just thought we would say hello."

"I don't know," she responded. "I just think it would be nice to tell them that we appreciate their house."

It made me nervous to think of knocking on strangers' doors. And more nervous to hear my parents fighting.

When we had driven around for about an hour, my mother would start to yawn. We would drive back down the Hutchinson River Parkway to Mount Vernon, and up our darkened block of houses inhabited mainly by elderly couples.

"No lights on our block," my father would observe, and we wouldn't say anything. I can't remember ever really wanting lights on our house.

We would get home and my mother would open the garage door and always say "Hey look at our tree!" And we would look through our bay windows and see our warm living room, lit up, glowing in the dark.

Tasty Spoonful

2010-09-30T20:19:00.000-07:00

An admired teacher of mine wrote the following in a letter:

It is extremely difficult to express anything in words with real accuracy. And the more truthful you are with yourself, the more discerning, and the higher your esthetic and intellectual standards, the more difficult it is. And when you start out, this is likely to be absolutely shocking, especially if you're accustomed to being able to do things easily, to the satisfaction of other people. It's really the fun of writing, for me, but it can be very, very frustrating.

Here are efforts to find and make truthful and discerning writing that (...um...hopefully?) adheres to high standards. Or, in the absence of finding and making that kind of writing, at the very least some manifestations of well-meant, deeply-felt frustration--because when it comes to writing, it seems we are all always just starting out.