Hermenautic Circle blog

Deane Yang asks in comments:  “What athletes do you especially like?”  That’s actually what I was going to post about today anyway.  A short list, excluding people who play for teams I follow:  Rickey Henderson.  Manny Ramirez.  Barry Bonds.  Jim Thome.  Nomar Garciaparra.  Edgar Martinez.  Randall Cunningham.  Ricky Williams.  Jake Plummer.  Gus Frerotte.  Surya Bonaly.  Arantxa Sanchez.

Reclusive author J.D. Salinger and crusading historian Howard Zinn died on the same day this year, January 27. In honor of these two greats, Hilobrow offers a quick history of the United States in the voice of Salinger's famous young protagonist, Holden Caulfield. Here's how it starts:

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is how the Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look and that kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

Read it here. Hilobrow is an intriguing new Web repository for the discriminating brainiac. * Graphic above via NYT.

I told my friend JV about my campaign to bring the KSM trial to Newburgh and he said that if we ever team up to write a movie about the trial, it should be called “Judgment at Newburgh.”

Thanks to everyone who came to Saturday’s show at Open Space in Beacon. Sorry for those who couldn’t get in. We’ll give you priority seating at the next comedy show …

At TNR, Anthony Grafton considers Oxford don Mary Beard's blog-to-book odyssey. (Courtesy of Ian Corey-Boulet.)

From Denis Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist and his Master, trans. David Coward (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999):

Jacques. Me, sir, drink water! Jacques on holy water! I’d rather have a thousand legions of devils take up permanent residence in my insides than touch a drop of water, holy or unholy. Haven’t you ever noticed that I’m hydrophobic?

Just a moment! ‘Hydrophobic’? Jacques said ‘hydrophobic’?
No, reader, he didn’t. I confess the word wasn’t his. But if you want to apply such high critical standards, I challenge you to read any scene from a comedy or a tragedy, one dialogue, however well-written, and not detect the voice of the author in the mouth of his characters. What Jacques actually said was: ‘Haven’t you ever noticed, sir, that the mere sight of water makes me jump backwards like a mad dog?…’ There it is. In expressing it differently from him, I was true but more succinct.

A mere four days after the "Impossible Geometries" reading...I'll be at Housing Works with...



!!!

(I am pretty sure this will be the last time I'll be reading this winter/spring.)

For a few weeks in January, I was almost certain that for the first time since c. 1996 or so I was only going to be working on one book this year.

Alas, it does not seem temperamentally feasible - the bread and butter of the novel book is an ambitious project that must be executed thoughtfully and slowly over the process of a few years, it will need to be complemented by a little book that I (no doubt wildly unrealistically) feel I might be able to dash off in a matter of weeks - a little book on style in which I pretty much just write exactly what I taught in my lecture class this fall!

I would like to get it out there more widely, that is the thing, it is the fruit of much reading and many years of thought on the matter of sentences and voice in the novel, it is a pity not to transform it into something that will sit on bookshelves here and there...

“Facebook’s coming at it from a corporate position. It’s basically like AOL in 1997 — everything is there and there’s no need to go anywhere else. I don’t know if they’re even considering what users want anymore. It’s all about how to maximize revenue and all that crap. It’s wanting to be everything to everybody possible so they won’t have to go anywhere else.”

– Matt Haughey. (via.)

Facebook is worse than AOL. It’s like a neverending digital teambuilding exercise. But instead of trailing a rope course or catching blindfolded people leaning backward, participants post pictures of doppelgangers and list “25 things” about themselves.

I really dislike the term “walled garden,” as it brings Frances Hodgson Burnett to mind and people imagine something privately enjoyed rather than simply restricted access. Don’t confuse this with invite-only message boards or mailing lists that make the Internet wonderful. To end the confusion, lets call the good places secret gardens.

Back in the day, AOL had a lot of secret gardens. According to my friend Erin, there was a Spin magazine message board frequented by established rock critics that at an off the index location. A lot of corporations and publications created “channels” which would include chat rooms and message boards. These were about as successful as the businesses with Second Life presences. But some users would take over the dead space and make it their own. Several online friends and I once claimed the message boards for a Canadian radio station long after it was launched and quickly abandoned. Likely the citizens of Second Life do that with virtual ghost town storefronts.

It’s a little surprising Facebook isn’t used more like a message board or a mailing list –most people seem to use Ning or Google Groups for that purpose. The problem is something that tries to do everything can’t do anything well. Anyone who remembers Usenet or even the AOL message boards knows that as soon as posts dropped to one or two a week, the whole thing died not long after. Constant updates keep a social network alive.

I don’t have a problem with secret gardens on the Internet. Actually, just about everyone I know is on some kind of private invite-only mailing list or message board. But a walled garden leads to a number of complications. In 2007, Jason Kottke called Facebook the New AOL, referring their platform:

What happens when Flickr and LinkedIn and Google and Microsoft and MySpace and YouTube and MetaFilter and Vimeo and Last.fm launch their platforms that you need to develop apps for in some proprietary language that’s different for each platform? That gets expensive, time-consuming, and irritating. It’s difficult enough to develop for OS X, Windows, and Linux simultaneously…imagine if you had 30 different platforms to develop for.

As it happens, we already have a platform on which anyone can communicate and collaborate with anyone else, individuals and companies can develop applications which can interoperate with one another through open and freely available tools, protocols, and interfaces. It’s called the internet and it’s more compelling than AOL was in 1994 and Facebook in 2007. Eventually, someone will come along and turn Facebook inside-out, so that instead of custom applications running on a platform in a walled garden, applications run on the internet, out in the open, and people can tie their social network into it if they want, with privacy controls, access levels, and alter-egos galore.

This sort of reminded me of Alex Payne’s The Case Against Everything Buckets. Someone smarter than me about these subjects could probably make a comment about how this is happening with mobile apps right now. Android developers, for example, fear that too many differentiated models will make their job harder. I’d love to see data on how many users don’t install Facebook apps at all. Or never use them. Or only use them. For a lot of people Farmville is Facebook.

My real frustration with Facebook has to do with context collapse. This was exactly why I was slow to sign up for the service. I can’t remember exactly when I did, maybe 2006, but I used the email I have just for online shopping and mailing lists and never imported my gmail contacts. I knew then I wanted it to be as small a part of my life as possible. Why? Because my friends weren’t on it, but a bunch of professional acquaintances were. And also because of the poke feature. danah boyd’s Facebook vs MySpace class distinctions was very apparent, as I was living in Chicago, and had few friends affiliated with universities, but old work colleagues from DC were all there. Even today, many of the musicians and artists I knew there still favor Myspace, but is there a 4.0 average student alive who doesn’t Facebook?

And when I heard about the “poke” feature that did it for me. It indicated the creators just weren’t serious about making something that could be more than a place for goofing around in a perplexingly formal way. “Poke” is the dumbest and worst feature ever invented for a social network. Even worse than that “suggest a match” thing on Friendster back in the dark ages (I still turn bright red and wince thinking of the time a less than socially savvy pal suggested a match for me with the person I had a crush on at the time.) I don’t really like when people lay out “best practices” for social networking like, “oh, she doesn’t @ reply enough people on Twitter.” And “netiquette” very often neglects the fact that introvert/extrovert classifications also exists in the digital world. But no, there’s never a good time for a poke. (Why stop with the poke? Why not call me and hang up before answering? Why not send me a blank email with no subject? Why not blank @ me?)

Rule of thumb on who to listen to in social media: ignore every non-artworld person talking about “curation” and instead subscribe to the feeds of those blogging about “filter failure.” (More on this in an upcoming post.) Facebook epitomizes filter failure for me. Yes, there are ways to segment information and keep groups, but there aren’t very good ways to keep worlds from overlapping. Facebook isn’t a more neutral LinkedIn and Myspace. It is the collapse of LinkedIn, Myspace, and a bunch of other networks, while many people want these worlds compartmentalized. I mostly avoid Facebook the same way that I’ll get drinks on a Monday night with colleagues, but not on a Friday or Saturday night. This generation blurs the line between work and play, but there is still a line or else you’re not getting the best out of either.

Now, this is my experience with Facebook. I don’t doubt there’s value to it for lots of people. I like it as a visual rolodex, and if I were a heavy user, I can see the advantage of adding just about everyone you meet at a conference or class as a “friend.” But mainly my use of Facebook is transitionary. I import my contacts to newer, hopefully better social networks as they come along like Foursquare or Quora.

That being said… add me.

Previously: The Overexamined Life: Finding Bits of Ourselves in Digital Ghost Towns

Childhood wonderment, nihilistic neuroscience, and the magical legacy of Kenneth Grant.Listen. <<>>   Subscribe to Erik Davis' Techgnosis by Email

[Bid on this Significant Object, with story by Chris Adrian, here. Part of a special collaboration with Underwater New York, this object's story will ship rolled into a vintage bottle found on the beach of Dead Horse Bay, Brooklyn. Proceeds from this auction go to 826 National.]

My brother and I could not agree on how to worship the mouse.  It was typical of us back then that we could agree that it should be worshipped—that was obvious from the day it arrived in the mail, a gift from our father, who had been in Vietnam for three years, which was one-third of George’s life and one-half of mine, on business more important than his wife and his sons. The last gift had been a green and yellow straw mat, and we agreed that it was, in fact, a prayer-mat, the use of which only became clear with the advent of the mouse. The evening it arrived we knelt in our room in our pajamas in the dark. George had his flashlight out and he shined it on the mouse’s face.

“Great Faaa,” he said. “Mighty Faaa, hear our prayers.” He said the name in a sing-song, high-pitched voice. We had just seen “Day of the Dolphin” the week before. I put my hand on the flashlight and pushed it down, so the little monkey in the mouse’s heart was more plainly illuminated.

“Mr. Peepers,” I said. “Source of the All, forgive our sins! Don’t punish us!”

“What are you doing?” George asked, and our argument began.  We quarreled subtly, at first—we still shared the mouse, but prayed differently to it—and then more obviously, stealing Him back and forth, and performing secret worship in the closet or the basement or the pool shed.  The violence, when it came, attracted our mother’s attention. “If you can’t share that hideous piece of trash, I’m going to throw it away,” she said, and that night we prayed peacefully, imploring Faaa and Mr. Peepers not to hurt her, but by the morning we were fighting again. “Faaa!” George said to me, sitting on my chest and pummeling my head with the sides of his fists, and I could almost understand how his whole argument could be contained in just the name. I wanted to tell him that there was a monkey in my heart, and a monkey in his heart, and a monkey in everybody’s heart, and there was nothing worse in the world than an unappeased, unworshipped monkey who lived in you and was mad at you. But all I could say was, “Mr. Peepers!”

“Why can’t you two just be good?” our mother asked, and she took up Peepers-Faaa in her hand and threw Him against the wall, breaking off His ear. I cried, but George screamed at her, telling something horrible was going to happen to us because of what she had done, and horrible things did happen to us. She took up the body and flushed it down the toilet, and George said later that it was a miracle of Faaa that it flushed, but that it made sense that He would exercise His magic to get away from our mother, and from me.

I still have the ear.

From the OED, 2nd ed. (1989):

bread and butter

(Often written with hyphens, esp. when used attrib.)

1. a. Bread spread with butter; also attrib. Also attrib. and comb., as bread-and-butter pudding; bread-and-butterless adj.
1630 WADSWORTH Sp. Pilgr. iii. 15 Euery one hath..a peece of bread and butter. 1711 ADDISON Spect. No. 323 {page}6 Eat a slice of Bread and butter, drank a dish of Bohea. 1729 E. SMITH Compl. Housewife (ed. 3) 81 A Bread and Butter Pudding... Take a two-penny Loaf..spread it in very thin slices [etc.]. 1817 BYRON Beppo xxxix, The Nursery still lisps out in all they utter{em}Besides, they always smell of bread and butter. 1822 W. KITCHINER Cook's Orac. 449 Bread and Butter Pudding. 1849 [see TEALESS a.]. 1853 MRS. GASKELL Cranford i. 14 He..lessened the pretty maid-servant's labour by waiting on empty cups, and bread-and-butterless ladies. 1883 ROE in Harper's Mag. Dec. 50/2 She likes bread and butter and..realities.

b. dial. A slice of bread and butter.
1853 W. D. COOPER Gloss. of Provincialisms in Sussex, Bread and butters, slices of bread buttered. 1927 W. E. COLLINSON Contemp. Eng. 54, I well remember the disgust we children felt at a lady..who always said a bread and butter, where we used a piece of bread and butter.

2. Taken as a type of every day food; the means of living; hence attrib. in many elliptical and allusive expressions. See also QUARREL v. 1a.
1732 SWIFT Let. 12 Aug. (1965) IV. 60 Your quarrelling with each other upon the subject of bread and butter is the most usual thing in the world. 1738 {emem} Polite Conv. I. 17, I won't quarrel with my Bread and Butter for all that: I know when I'm well. 1836-7 SIR W. HAMILTON Metaph. (1859) I. i. 6 By the Germans, the latter [i.e. the professional or lucrative sciences] are usually distinguished as the Brodwissenschaften, which we may translate, ‘The Bread and Butter Sciences’. 1844 H. TWISS Life Ld. Eldon I. vi. 119 Young man, your bread and butter is cut for life. 1870 LOWELL Among my Bks. Ser. I. (1873) 222 Life lifted above the plane of bread-and-butter associations. 1884 Harper's Mag. Dec. 92/2 Industries were not so plenty..that men could afford..to quarrel with their bread and butter. 1886 Contemp. Rev. May 663 Journalists who frankly avow what is called the bread-and-butter theory of their craft. 1929 Publishers' Weekly 30 Nov. 2588/1 The old stand-bys, the bread-and-butter books in every department. 1939 A. CHRISTIE Murder is Easy xii. 128 One musn't quarrel with one's bread and butter. 1955 Times 11 May 6/1 Providing furniture for new houses was the bread and butter of the industry.

3. no bread and butter of mine: no matter affecting my material interests, no business of mine.
1764 FOOTE Mayor of G. I. i, However, it is no bread and butter of mine.

4. a. attrib.; spec. Of or pertaining to the age when bread-and-butter is extensively consumed; boyish, girlish; esp. (cf. quot. 1817 in 1) school-girlish.
a1625 BEAUM. & FL. Hum. Lieut. III. vi, Ye bread-and-butter rogues, do ye run from me? 1807 W. IRVING Salmag. (1824) 180 These little, beardless, bread and butter politicians. 1861 TROLLOPE Barchester T. xli. (D.) A lady at any rate past the wishy-washy bread-and-butter period of life. 1865 Pall Mall G. 13 May 4 Would feel that they were tittered at as bread-and-butter Misses.

b. bread-and-butter letter orig. U.S., a letter of thanks for hospitality; cf. COLLINS. Also ellipt.
1901 HOWELLS Pair of Patient Lovers 82 His prompt bread-and-butter letter. 1933 N. STREATFEILD Tops & Bottoms xxiv. 308 Please never write me bread-and-butter letters. 1964 E. BOWEN Little Girls III. i. 164 Rude? Should have written a bread-and-butter?

Hence (with reference to sense 4) bread-and-butterhood, -butterishness, bread-and-buttery a.
1884 LADY MAJENDIE Out of Element III. xxiv. 321, I think the ties of bread-and-butterhood are stronger than any later ones after all. 1843 Blackw. Mag. LIII. 80 They..emerge..into the full and perfect imago of little..gentlemen, and little ladies, without any of those intermediate conditions of laddism, hobble-de-hoyism, or bread-and-butterishness. 1859 G. MEREDITH R. Feverel xiii. (1885) 90 His future bride is now pinafored and bread-and-buttery. 1882 MRS. J. H. RIDDELL Struggle for Fame xxvi, You [an authoress] are rather bread-and-buttery still.

Aaron Schmidt has a column in Library Journal about user experience. Here is his first column. The ideas of design and user experience seem sometimes orthogonal to what we do in libraries. We are concerned with content not containers, you know “judging a book by its cover” and all that. Aaron explains why design matters and how it pervades many aspects of what we do. Sarah got the best pullquote out of it already

Every time librarians create a bookmark, decide to house a collection in a new spot, or figure out how a new service might work, they’re making design decisions. This is what I like to call design by neglect or unintentional design. Whether library employees wear name tags is a design decision. The length of loan periods and whether or not you charge fines is a design decision. Anytime you choose how people will interact with your library, you’re making a design decision. All of these decisions add up to create an experience, good or bad, for your patrons.

This comes up in my technology-instruction world quite often. Many things about how a user interacts with a computer are pre-determined or at least have a default setting. So the talking paperclip? Someone made a choice that you would see that, instead of having it be a turn-onable option. The “your computer may be at risk!” messages? You can turn them off but the default is ON. These are all choices, actively or passively made. My feeling is that the more we explain to people that they can re-make some of these choices [get the talking dog away from the search box!] it empowers them to envision their computing experience the way they might want it to be, to know they have choices.

The ACLU filed a lawsuit agains the Library of Congress for terminating a CRS Assistant Director for writing a letter to the editor for the Washington post and an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal. Colonel Morris D. Davis was, prior to his CRS position, responsible for the prosecution of suspected terrorists held at Guantánamo Bay.

62. Because of his former position as the Chief Prosecutor for the military commissions, Col. Davis is regularly asked to comment on Guantánamo and the military commissions system. Col. Davis believes he has a unique perspective to add to this debate, and he would like to convey his insights and opinions to the public. Since he was informed that he was being terminated by CRS, however, Col. Davis has declined numerous opportunities to speak publicly about military commissions issues out of fear that he could be subject to further retaliation by the Library and [CRS Director Daniel] Mulhollan.
63. The decision to terminate Col. Davis for his speech has intimidated and chilled other CRS employees from speaking and writing in public. CRS employees are confused, uncertain, and fearful about what outside speaking and writing is permissible.
64. As a result of the Library’s and Mr. Mulhollan’s actions, Col. Davis has suffered, and/or will suffer, both economic and non-economic losses, emotional distress, and other compensable damages.

A stuck accelerator is a terrifying prospect, but an article in Car and Driver provides some counterintuitive solace: Modern brakes will stop a vehicle in that situation. In fact, somewhat amazingly, the magazine's editors say that unless you're driving an outlandishly powerful sports car, brakes will stop your vehicle nearly as quickly as if the gas pedal were not stuck.

[Image: Mudslides strike Los Angeles; photo by Gary Friedman for the L.A. Times].

In his short novel Man in the Holocene, author Max Frisch describes the psychological implications of living in the presence of possible Alpine landslides. The idea that the very earth beneath your feet might someday start to avalanche takes on existential overtones.

"Nobody in the village," Frisch writes, for instance, "thinks that the day, or perhaps night, will come when the whole mountain could begin to slide, burying the village for all time." He then supplies us with the image of a "laborer who has been working all his life on supporting walls and does not believe the whole mountain could ever begin to slide"; for someone such as that, a landslide's accompanying loss of foundation is simply too extraordinary to think about.

Somewhere in the hills, though, Frisch suggests, is a hidden logic: it both explains and demonstrates how thousands of tons of rocks and the spaces between them can unlock, breaking open into discrete geometries to tumble toward the valleys below, perhaps bringing houses—whole cities—down with them.

And it can all start with a minor act: a small crack, perhaps a rainstorm, perhaps just the weight of one man hiking alone. "That is the way landslides begin, cracks appearing noiselessly, not widening, or hardly at all, for weeks on end, until suddenly, when one is least expecting it, the whole slope below the crack begins to slide, carrying even forests and all else that is not firm rock down with it," Frisch writes.

Indeed, "One must be prepared for everything."


[Images: Beneath the pavement, liquid terrain. All photos by Anne Cusack for the L.A. Times].

A few months ago, meanwhile, I bookmarked a short article in the L.A. Times. Published after massive wildfires had burned through the hills around the city, denuding them of all vegetation and thus destabilizing the rock and soil, the article reported on a number of city residents in the outlying hilltop communities who had begun to eye the slopes around them with alarm. It was as if the earth itself had been weaponized: every hill, scarred by fire now and insecure for void of plantlife, was a mudslide waiting to happen.

To protect against this cascading eventuality, a new municipal landscape architecture thus emerged: mazes of concrete barriers and walls of sandbags showed up to redivide the streets. Circulation through the neighborhood would be entirely redefined, and a massive landscape of waiting would be installed: a space patient for all the material locked inside those hills to arrive.

Officials have said the concrete barriers [they soon installed] will stay in place for three to four years because the hillsides are completely barren in the wake of the Station fire, which charred more than 160,000 acres. It was the worst wildfire in L.A. County's history. Many measures had been put in place, including the clearing of debris basins, the notification of residents in high-risk areas, the distribution of sandbags and the laying of several thousand feet of K-rails.

These spatial precautions were put to heavy use last week when the hills disgorged themselves, liquifying, going mobile, and flowing through, past, and over the neighborhood houses.

It was a "Niagara of mud," the L.A. Times reported.


[Image: Photo by Irfan Khan for the L.A. Times].

"The mudflow twisted garage doors into dented accordions," we read, and it "disintegrated walls of sandbags and knocked over 4,000-pound concrete barriers that lined the road to divert water away from homes. About 25 vehicles were damaged, flowing down the street and smashing against walls, trees and one another." In one case, "a white single-story home appeared submerged in several feet of dirt, looking as if a giant child had dropped the house in a sand pit."

Another man, woken up in his Snover Canyon house in the middle of the night, looked outside to see "muddy water carrying boulders the size of bowling balls... through the 4-foot-high barricade of sandbags, a plywood wall and a chain-link fence. A sheet of mud nearly a half-foot deep and 16 feet wide cascaded across the backyard."

He ran to the bathroom window. He had expected this. It was the weak point of his defense. There at the corner of the yard, a geyser of water crashed into the remains of the wall and shot into the air. He had to get his family out. He didn’t know what else might be coming down that mountain.

The terrestrial uncertainty of that final sentence is astonishing.


[Image: Photo by Irfan Khan for the L.A. Times].

Once the mudslides abated in one district, "nine homes in the foothill area suffered enough damage to be red-tagged, which means they’re partially collapsed and uninhabitable. With crumbling walls, sunken roofs, shattered windows and mud-filled living rooms, the structures are in a precarious position," themselves now more like residual appendages of the debris flow than freestanding architectural units.


[Image: Photo by Irfan Khan for the L.A. Times].

However, perhaps the best article ever written about mudslides in Los Angeles was produced nearly 30 years ago by John McPhee. Called "Los Angeles Against the Mountains," it was originally published in The New Yorker but was later collected in McPhee's genuinely excellent and very highly recommended book The Control of Nature.

Among many other things, McPhee devotes several paragraphs to a description of the DIY architectural tweaks that have arisen in response to these landscapes-gone-mobile. "At least one family," he writes, for instance, "has experienced so many debris flows coming through their back yard that they long ago installed overhead doors in the rear end of their built-in garage. To guide the flows, they put deflection walls in their back yard. Now when the boulders come they open both ends of their garage, and the debris goes through to the street."

Not only has this image stuck with me for years now, ever since I first read McPhee's book, but it has also been impossible for me to avoid thinking about when looking at the photographs you see here, particularly those taken on the mud-slicked streets themselves by Irfan Khan. But the very idea that one could deliberately open a causeway for the natural world to flow, with awe-inspiring violence, through one's own personal space—that you could actually build a kind of sacrifice zone within your own house for forces otherwise well beyond spatial control—is, at the very least, an extraordinary metaphor for living with the natural world.

This minor architecture—of repurposed overhead doors, emergency ditching, concrete crib structures, deflection walls, and more—brings the ever-present possibility of geologic collapse into world of design.

After all, how do you build on an earth that keeps disappearing?


[Images: Photos by Irfan Khan for the L.A. Times].

Returning to Frisch's book, there is a fantastic, if brief, image of sound being put to use to stimulate minor avalanches, perhaps as a way to help avoid the Big One later on. "Men blow three times on a little horn and wave a red flag," Frisch writes, as if describing a fairy tale of precisely administered sonic land-disassembly, "and shortly afterward the bits come rattling down, pebbles and gravel from the Ice Age."

I mention this out of the possibility that perhaps Los Angeles city officials should not be responding to the ever-present threat of landslides on the urban perimeter with hardened architectural defenses but with something more like preemptive techniques: why wait for the hills to come to you, in other words (see this diagram of how debris basins work), when you could simply bring them down on your own time and schedule, in rock-by-rock increments, pulling rivers of solid geology out from their halo'd terraces above the city? Could micro-landslides somehow keep apocalyptic avalanches at bay?

Or, more realistically, does L.A. need to ditch the bulky mazes of concrete switching walls and go for a massive replanting effort, instead? Like Beijing's Great Green Wall against the coming desert, L.A. needs to plant a wall of minor roots against the instability of its mountains.

[Image: The opening ceremony of the 1964 Innsbruck Winter Olympics; photographer unknown].

A comment from Alexander Trevi on a recent post pointed our attention to the final paragraph of an article by the Associated Press: "According to the International Olympic Committee," we read there as part of an overall discussion of the forthcoming Vancouver Olympics and that city's unseasonal condition of snowlessness, "the 1964 Innsbruck Games also faced a lack of snow. The Austrian army rushed to the rescue," however, "carving out 20,000 blocks of ice from the mountainside and transporting it to the luge and bobsled tracks. They also carried 1.4 million cubic feet of snow to the Alpine ski slopes."

This landscape-on-the-move arrived just in time to format the local terrain for winter sports purposes, temporarily repurposing an assembly line of athletic tracks and military equipment in the process.

It was a great game, perhaps the most gripping final NFL showdown of the past five years, with a second half opening with a daring onside kick and Garrett Hartley becoming the first placekicker to make three field goals over forty yards in any Super Bowl. Marvelous. And I might have come away from the annual experience howling in the streets for my avenged Jets, had not my viewing been sullied by an atavistic rash of misogynistic commercials.

Granted, your average redblooded spectator does not necessarily watch television sports commercials with the intent of seeing women presented as positive role models. We’ve become used to seeing women objectified, often dressed in bikinis and/or using their anatomy to sell some vacuous commercial experience. But Super Bowl XLIV’s commercials were much different. They were cruder and uglier, going well out of their way to not only objectify women, but to suggest that anyone with a vagina who asserted herself should be ridiculed.

There was the Motorola commercial featuring a naked Megan Fox in a bubble bath, referring to her phone as “this little guy” and permitting her objectified photographic form to cause a series of disruptions. But that was comparatively modest with the misogyny to come. There was the FloTV commercial in which a man suffered from an allegorical injury in which his girlfriend had removed his spine, “rendering him incapable of watching the game.” FloTV’s underlying idea, of course, was that women could not possibly enjoy football and that women are natural ballbusters who force their boyfriends to go shopping. There was the Dodge Charger Commercial, in which various men are seen, with their internal thoughts voiced by Dexter star Michael C. Hall, who announces the perfunctory domestic demands from other women: “I will eat some fruit as part of my breakfast. I will shave. I will clean the sink after I shave.”

But the real big-prick offender was probably Bud Light’s Book Club ad (which can be viewed above), which combined its misogynistic message with an anti-reading subtext. The commercial begins with a woman describing how there’s “so much passion” within the book she’s reading. A man then arrives wearing a sports T-shirt and shorts, saying, “Have a nice book club. I’ll be at the game.” He then eyes several chilled bottles of Bud Light and then sits down on a couch between two women, rudely interrupting their discussion. “So what’s the story?” he says, as some rock and roll music emerges onto the soundtrack. “We were discussing the relationship of two women…”

“Two women,” he interrupts, immediately connoting a lesbian fantasy, perhaps with the two women he is squeezed between.

“…who are thrust in by war,” continues the woman.

“Oooh,” he replies. “Thrusting.”

“A war neither of them understands,” she continues, offering a modest nod that indicates her role as either patient nurturer or someone barely able to understand the book that she’s discussing.

“Awesome,” he says. “Good times. I love Book Club!”

And in a rather sly move by the director, sealing the woman’s objectified place, the woman’s red sweater slips down her left shoulder, revealing more of her anatomy.

We cut back after a product announcement and observe an exchange between the man and another woman. The book club has degenerated into a beer drinking session.

This new woman says, “So then do you like Little Women?” (Little, get it?)

He says, “Yeah, I’m not too picky. No.” And the commercial then stops, ending on this open-ended sexual proposition.

Here then is the ad’s anti-women and anti-reading worldview: Women, no matter what their goals, aspirations, or interests, have no other role in society other than getting fucked by men. Let women have their “little” book clubs, which can be easily interrupted on a masculine whim and which women will never dare object to. They will set everything aside to give you head or to serve you beer.

And, by the way, if you’re a man, you don’t even need to read to get ahead in the world. (Indeed, one of the commercial’s curious philosophical positions is that one cannot both enjoy beer — at least the stuff better than the undrinkable swill that is being sold in this commercial — and books. Speaking as a man who enjoys beer, books, and football, and who finds intelligent women far sexier than empty-headed centerfolds, I happily refute these stereotypes through my very existence.)

Some might argue that the advertisement is not intended to be taken seriously — that it is a jocular offering to be easily disregarded. But because the Super Bowl is watched by close to 100 million people and because the Super Bowl commercials are subjected to such intense post-game scrutiny (to cite one example, as I write this essay, a message now appears at the top of YouTube: “Watch and Vote on Your Favorite Commercials from Super Bowl Sunday. Vote Now.”), it is perhaps more important for us to consider the impact that one Super Bowl commercial has on its audience. Let us assume that 1% of the Super Bowl audience (or about 1 million) take the Book Club advertisement seriously. Will they, in turn, be inspired to avoid books and break up female book clubs?

The great irony here is that these misogynist commercials were aired, including an anti-abortion Focus on the Family advocacy ad, even as CBS rejected a gay online dating commercial. And, indeed, if women are deemed so problematic by the Madison Avenue hucksters, then why shouldn’t the audience consider a man instead?

The open-ended question of whether Super Bowl commercials should be guided by some morality was indeed broached by Chicago Tribune religious reporter Manya Brachear. To this, I would respond that Super Bowl XXXVIII’s infamous Nipplegate controversy established very clear moral guidelines. Show part of a woman’s breast (adorned with nipple plate) and you will be hounded by the FCC and Christian moralists. But feel free to objectify a woman’s breast all you like. Because the need to sell more Coca-Cola outweighs human dignity.

[UPDATE: A reader correctly points out that, in this essay's original form, I confused this year's Teleflora ad, which involved a similar setup, with last year's Teleflora ad. Accordingly, I have removed the following description from the piece, preserving it at the end to demonstrate another example of Madison Avenue's commitment to Super Bowl misogyny: "Then there was the despicable Teleflora ad, in which a woman receives flowers and the flowers talk back, 'Oh no! Look at the mug on you! Diane, you're a trainwreck. That's why he always sent a box of flowers. Go home to your romance novels and your fat smelly cat,' followed by another sully: 'Nobody wants to see you naked.' The Teleflora commercial presented an additional punchline: a male office worker named Gary who comes up to Diane not to ask if she's okay, but to announce, 'I'd like to see you naked' (surely a violation of sexual harassment law), before being cut off by the humiliated Diane.]

[UPDATE 2: Survival of the Book's Brianoffers a thoughtful response to my post, pointing out one minor point I neglected to mention -- that the women were the ones who procured the Bud Lights for their own enjoyment in the commercial. This raises the possibility that they were trying to get rid of the jock so that they could enjoy their beer with their books. It's a fair interpretation: one that I might entirely agree with, had the women not been presented as sex objects in the latter portion of the commercial. Brian's interpretation permits the Book Club to serve as a male fantasy. But if this crude male fantasy involves sneering down at women and books, then I stand by my original assessment.]

All map, no territory. Armory Show preview on Flickr. Internet Archaeology tumblr (via.) Another great Sam Anderson piece in New York mag, this one on ChatRoulette. Los Angeles no longer plays itself. Found that on Interdome, a great blog on the age of atemporality. I can’t wait to read Triple Canopy on an iPad. And comics. Are comics suited for digital? Listen to Scott McLeod on this. “There’s Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late at Night,” short stories about Rurual Shanxi peasants, by Cao Naiqian, entirely “concerned with the basic instincts for food and sex.” looks interesting. Someone is trying to send Jerry Saltz a message. Do you look pretty or smart? Save the egg drinks! Lauren Cornell on how net art is not new, it’s been thriving for nearly two decades now. More from Tom Moody. Bot-Mediated Reality. Alan Lomax in Haiti. Life in a “microstudio” (via.) And in the middle of all that, one woman cried out, “Fuck this.” “With enough libraries, all content is free.” – Jessamyn West.