a sweet shot
I love the expressions on this couple’s faces.
Archive for June, 2009
class concerns with online spaces and content
danah boyd speaks at the Personal Democracy Forum about “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online”
For decades, we’ve assumed that inequality in relation to technology has everything to do with “access” and that if we fix the access problem, all will be fine. This is the grand narrative of concepts like the “digital divide.” Yet, increasingly, we’re seeing people with similar levels of access engage in fundamentally different ways. And we’re seeing a social media landscape where participation “choice” leads to a digital reproduction of social divisions. This is most salient in the States which is intentionally the focus of my talk here today.
I suggest you read it all, it’s not terribly long, but if you’re part of the tl;dr generation, the salient point for libraries is this
If you are trying to connect with the public, where you go online matters. If you choose to make Facebook your platform for civic activity, you are implicitly suggesting that a specific class of people is more worth your time and attention than others. Of course, splitting your attention can also be costly and doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll be reaching everyone anyhow. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. The key to developing a social media strategy is to understand who you’re reaching and who you’re not and make certain that your perspective is accounting for said choices. Understand your biases and work to counter them.
Pirates: no leftist utopians, they
Last year in Ideas, Joanna Weiss wrote that the George Mason economist Peter T. Leeson was at work on a book that would demonstrate that "the democratic tenets we hold so dear were used to great effect on pirate ships. Checks and balances. Social insurance. Freedom of expression."
Leeson's book is finally here, "The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates." And, true enough, the economist gives democratic aspects of pirate life their due. (Pirates elected their captains, for example, and could depose them by a vote.) But what most stands out is just how eager Leeson is to rescue pirates from the clutches of left-wing historians and social theorists, and to claim them as avatars of right-wing economic theory. Pirates, Leeson suggests, were avid Hayekians avant la lettre.
Five Easy Pieces
In Five Easy Pieces (dir. Bob Rafaelson, 1970) Robert Eroica Dupea, played by a young-ish Jack Nicholson, has "dropped out" by dropping down a couple of levels in the class structure. Frustrated by the constraints of a serious classical music career, when we first meet him he is working on an oil rig, hanging out with his working class buddies at the bowling alley, and dating a diner waitress (Karen Black), in a thorough rejection of his upper class background and ideals.
However, his new identity doesn't fit him all that well either. Stuck in a traffic jam on the way to the fields one day, he leaps out of the car and discovers an old piano on the back of an open moving truck. Pulling the cover off, he starts playing Chopin's Fantasie in F Minor on the out-of-tune upright, accompanied by the Art Brut of the commuters' horns. Then the one-two punch of discovering his girlfriend is pregnant, and his father is dying, sends him back on the road, ostensibly to visit the family compound and pay his last respects, but really to question again his place in the scheme of things.
So he jumps in the car and starts up the Pacific Coast. While his girlfriend smothers him by alternating baby talk with Tammy Wynette tunes, they pick up a pair of hitchhikers bound for Alaska. Providing social commentary as comic relief, one hitchhiker goes on what is presumably a states-long rant about consumerism, the environment, and the hidden costs of late capitalism. All of which is right but none of which you can imagine yourself wanting to hear when trapped in a car together for days. But it puts a little space between him and the waitress, as if to remind us that the structure of society does play a significant role in who we get close to, despite experimentation with social spaces.
In Puget Sound his family maintains an Ingmar Bergman-like compound on an island, where, following their ex-prodigy patriarch, they have all dedicated themselves to classical music. It is inferred that Bobby was the most talented of all, and we see some black and white Van Cliburn-style photos. It was this hothouse atmosphere of high art that Bobby rejected when he left. With the entire 1960s happening a ferry ride away, how could a young person with any passion insulate themselves by playing prewritten notes from hundreds of years ago? Yes, there is artistry in interpretation; in fact classical pianists predicate their careers, and themselves, on exactly that. But all the notes are neatly contained in measures, all the roles are prescribed, all the interpretations are determined: adagio, forte, pianissimo, glissando, legato -- da capo. Where is there room to find yourself? Where is there room for something new? Thus the oil rig, the nonintellectual friends -- and "classic" country music.
But while at the compound he tries to reach across anyway, attempting an affair with his brother's fiance. Catherine (Susan Anspach) lives fully within classical music. She is attracted to Bobby's freewheeling energy, but realizes that he's not rejoining her world, and she, despite the open door, has no intention of embracing the uncertainty on offer in his. The tragedy, it is suggested, is that only with a fellow social refugee can Bobby have the option of finding or creating some kind of new identity and new world into which to fit himself.
In an emotional scene with his father, he breaks down and confesses that he hasn't found any answers "outside," either:
"I move around a lot, not because I'm looking for anything really, but 'cause I'm getting away from things that get bad if I stay."
But the father has had a stroke, and cannot speak. What do you do when the promise of the 60s doesn't pan out? When the predetermined role is not what you want, but your class-based road-tripping is revealed as tourism? The father says nothing, as if to say, "well, this was what we had to offer. You didn't want it. We (the establishment) don't have any advice for your new world. And if you don't want that either, well . . ."
The most famous scene is of Bobby ordering toast in the diner. Toast is not on the menu. So Bobby tries to order a chicken salad sandwich, hold the mayo, hold the lettuce, hold the chicken . . . he does not get his toast. That he doesn't get his toast is only further confirmation of the fact that he has not found a place in either high- or lowbrow culture. It is not on the menu.
The best scene of the movie, though, is the one under the closing credits. A long shot of a gas station, it sums up the entire decade to come, its broken promises, its open-ended swarm of attempts and options, its apathy and confusion. Life doesn't stop just because you haven't figured it out. Right. So, what's next?
[From my review on the Brattle Theater Film Blog.]
Elevator
Elevator
Tomorrow! “The Origin and the Distance”
Tomorrow (Weds. 7/1) I'll be appearing on a panel at the Korea Society with the novelists Janice Y.K. Lee (The Piano Teacher) and Sung J. Woo (Everything Asian), discussing what it means to be a Korean American fiction writer...There's a reception at 6, and the event proper starts at 6:30.
More info from the Korea Society site:
Ed Park is a founding editor of The Believer, a four-time finalist for the National Magazine Award. His novel, Personal Days (Random House, 2008), was a finalist for the PEN Hemingway Award and was shortlisted for the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize. He writes a monthly book-review column for the Los Angeles Times and contributes to many other publications, including the New York Times, Bookforum, and Modern Painters. He was an editor and writer at The Village Voice for many years, where he was also the editor of the Voice Literary Supplement. Park teaches creative writing at Columbia University.
Janice Y. K. Lee was born and raised in Hong Kong, where she currently lives, and went to boarding school in the United States before attending Harvard College. A graduate of Hunter College's MFA program and a freelance writer, she is a former features editor at Elle and Mirabella magazines in New York. Her critically acclaimed first novel, The Piano Teacher, a New York Times bestseller and Richard and Judy Summer Read pick. The book will be published in 23 languages.
Sung J. Woo’s short stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, McSweeney’s, and KoreAm Journal. His debut novel, Everything Asian (Thomas Dunne Books, 2009) has received praises from the Christian Science Monitor, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus Reviews. His short story “Limits” was an Editor’s Choice winner in Carve Magazine’s 2008 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest. A graduate of Cornell University with an MFA from New York University, he lives in Washington, New Jersey.
The Korea Society
950 Third Avenue @ 57th Street, 8th Floor
(Building entrance on SW corner of
Third Avenue and 57th Street)
More info from the Korea Society site:
A growing number of Korean American authors have found both critical and commercial success in the past decade. Does this "literary wave" mean that Americans of Korean origin have successfully moved from the margins to the mainstream of American literature, writing simply as a "writers" and not as "ethnic writers?" Join us for a literary conversation with novelists Ed Park, Janice Y.K. Lee, and Sung J. Woo, as they discuss issues of acculturation, isolation, cultural alienation, race and class, in relation to their own works.
$10 for members and students, $20 for nonmembers
(Walk-in registration will incur an additional charge of $5.)
Buy tickets
For more information or to register for the program, contact Patrick Clair at 212-759-7525, ext. 328, or emailThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .
Ed Park is a founding editor of The Believer, a four-time finalist for the National Magazine Award. His novel, Personal Days (Random House, 2008), was a finalist for the PEN Hemingway Award and was shortlisted for the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize. He writes a monthly book-review column for the Los Angeles Times and contributes to many other publications, including the New York Times, Bookforum, and Modern Painters. He was an editor and writer at The Village Voice for many years, where he was also the editor of the Voice Literary Supplement. Park teaches creative writing at Columbia University.
Janice Y. K. Lee was born and raised in Hong Kong, where she currently lives, and went to boarding school in the United States before attending Harvard College. A graduate of Hunter College's MFA program and a freelance writer, she is a former features editor at Elle and Mirabella magazines in New York. Her critically acclaimed first novel, The Piano Teacher, a New York Times bestseller and Richard and Judy Summer Read pick. The book will be published in 23 languages.
Sung J. Woo’s short stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, McSweeney’s, and KoreAm Journal. His debut novel, Everything Asian (Thomas Dunne Books, 2009) has received praises from the Christian Science Monitor, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus Reviews. His short story “Limits” was an Editor’s Choice winner in Carve Magazine’s 2008 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest. A graduate of Cornell University with an MFA from New York University, he lives in Washington, New Jersey.
The Korea Society
950 Third Avenue @ 57th Street, 8th Floor
(Building entrance on SW corner of
Third Avenue and 57th Street)
Life Inc. Dispatches
I’m getting a lot of email about the Life Inc Dispatches we’ve been posting. They are loving the weekly video podcasts, and even suggesting I write a book based on these facts, insights, and strategies for reclaiming commerce as a human (rather than just a corporate) activity.
And while I’m glad people think there’s a book in this, I really do want them to know I’ve actually already written one. So it seems my fear of “over marketing” and thus distorting the purpose of my book has actually led to under-communicating its very existence. Live and learn.
I’m going to try erring on the other side and see what happens. Anyway, here is the link to the Life Inc Dispatches page. We’ll be creating a way to subscribe via rss and iTunes as soon as we can figure that part out. In the meantime, subscribing to the rss of this blog will certainly get you links to those dispatches when they come out. Here’s #1: “Crisis as Opportunity”
Life Inc. Dispatch 01: Crisis as Opportunity from Douglas Rushkoff on Vimeo.
but then sometimes the glass like all fictions melts away into a…
but then sometimes the glass like all fictions melts away into a thousand drops …
The Last Picture Show
The Last Picture Show (dir. Peter Bogdanovich, 1971) presents the enigma of the old western wrapped in the mystery of the new. Set in the early 1960s in a windswept Texas town -- the kind of small town that springs up on the way from somewhere to somewhere else -- the story focuses on two high school seniors, Sonny and Duane, co-captains of a football team so monumentally inept that at one point they manage to lose 121 - 14. The future they face seems as bleak as the empty streets in the town and the endless flat plains of the surrounding land. They sense it as they stumble through the paces of late adolescence: girlfriends, jobs, uncertainty.
The acting is naturalistic and remarkable; you feel as if you are there despite, or perhaps because of, the choice to shoot in black and white, and the camera's occasional intrusion right into the characters' faces. You don't know them deeply, it is a film more of surfaces than interiors, but you know them as well as they know themselves.
And this may be enough. The Last Picture Show was adapted for the screen by Larry McMurtry from his loosely autobiographical novel of the same name. Throughout his career McMurtry has both memorialized and desmystified the west, and the western (including Lonesome Dove, which won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a TV miniseries, and Brokeback Mountain, for which he co-adapted the screenplay), wrestling with what he sees as its central question: do we -- can we -- make any difference in all this space?
This is the challenge posed by the west to the western-as-genre. It is not nature seen as Ruskin's sublime, or tamed into gardens, or courted at its edges by cities and ports. The great Yellowstone post-volcanic caldera is clearly not cultivated with human interests in mind. And despite our continuing attempts at such cultivation; the west has implacably insisted on its scale, its silence, and its terms.
The film keeps a respectful distance from its characters while doing a close reading of the landscape. But how can one do a close reading of emptiness? One way is to look closer. What seems empty has been significantly altered by its human inhabitants: the trees, as one character points out, were not there when he was young, they have been planted since. And the pond where they fish had not been a pond, before people arrived who felt like fishing. We carve out little habitats in space to suit us. While fishing, Sam ("the Lion"), Sonny's ersatz father figure, remembers a love affair:
"If she was here, I'd probably be just as crazy now as I was then in about five minutes. Ain't that ridiculous? Naw, it ain't really. 'Cause bein' crazy 'bout a woman like her's always the right thing to do."
As you watch you realize that the entire place has been imagined into being by films. America defined itself by identification and confrontation with the west -- its size, its inhabitants, its demands and its freedoms. The western got its start as a literary and theatrical genre almost the minute that the actual frontier closed -- the fences were still down in the landscape of ideas. In films, the western turned hardscrabble Civil War veterans into icons, and invited suburban WWII vets to imagine that they too were larger than life despite the end of the battlefield. Any lingering feelings of insignificance were both justified and mollified by the oversized vistas, as man could not hope to be heard by distant rocks, themselves marked only by the passage of geologic time.
The echoes of Bresson and Godard here are not accidental. Faced with the impersonality of the natural landscape, existentialism seems an almost "natural" response. How do we fit into this immensity? What are we doing here? And yet, existentialism is not the right response; it is too interior, and also, oddly, too bleak. The landscape has not been tamed, but it has been modified, and it may not require huge amounts of introspection to do something about it.
The literal last picture show in the movie is an 'old' western, a showing of Red River, the John Wayne classic dramatizing one of the first cattle drives and the beginning of the free-range cowboy. But the final few frames are themselves framed by the run-down theater, and when the lights come up you can see all the empty seats. The new western is not cowboys fighting with Indians, or each other. The new western is a confrontation with emptiness, and the challenge to make something up to fill it, something worth it. The American response to just showing up without a script is -- well, let's make something of it. As Lois, the femme fatale mother of the high school's femme fatale puts it,
"I guess if it wasn't for Sam, I'd just about have missed it, whatever 'it' is. I'd have been one of them Amity types that thinks that playin' bridge is about the best thing that life has to offer."
Pragmatism, not existentialism, is the result of an uniquely American confrontation between individual and social desires -- desire in general -- and a landscape so unmistakably made for itself.
[From my review on the Brattle Theater Film Blog.]
Lost Boy
AMIDST THE CYCLE of encomiums spurred by Michael Jackson’s death last week, his weirdness has been treated as an unfortunate epiphenomenon and distraction from his greatness. But the weird—a thoroughgoing weird without stint or scruple—was essential to MJ’s work, and whatever we term his greatness can’t be understood without acknowledging this.
Casting about for a useful analysis of Jackson’s fey glamor, we were pointed towards a penetrating, prescient essay by James Parker in the Boston Globe. Parker was writing in 2004, when Jackson’s child molestation trial coincided with the centennial of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. “Michael and Peter go way back,” Parker observed. “In his weirdness and calculation the King of Pop may have reached deeper inside the myth than anyone else would care to.”
Parker’s essay reveals the essentially infernal nature of MJ’s lure, a magic stranger even than the Pan’s expiatingly feral freedom. For Jackson was as profoundly, illimitably uncanny as a Greek god or one of the death spirits the Japanese call Shinigami. His voice was a vortex of keening ecstasy; his dancing was palsied, but magically; his wonted innocence was pixillated, elfin. The iterations of his persona revealed themselves as so many nested dolls of abominated brilliance.
And yet he won the adulation of millions—less a case of mass delusion than a revelation of the power of the uncanny. “His rise was phenomenal, unbelievable,” Parker observes; and he concludes with startling foresight: “Guilty or not, his fall will be Luciferian.”
R.I.P. Sky Saxon, Michael Jackson, and Pina Bausch
A fond farewell to three brilliant artists, of varying degrees of weirdness. What frequently gets missed in discussions of MJ is his uncanny skill as a choreographer; he was possibly America's greatest pop choreographer since Jerome Robbins. All will be missed.
Saxon's band The Seeds performing their 1966 hit "Pushing Too Hard" (immortalized on the Nuggets compilation) on a sitcom whose name I don't have on hand:
Pina Bausch's Wuppertal Tanztheater performing the Rite of Spring:
MJ Performing "Thriller" live in 1987:
Saxon's band The Seeds performing their 1966 hit "Pushing Too Hard" (immortalized on the Nuggets compilation) on a sitcom whose name I don't have on hand:
Pina Bausch's Wuppertal Tanztheater performing the Rite of Spring:
MJ Performing "Thriller" live in 1987:
High/low ad juxtaposition of the week
Yesterday, just below and to the right of a serious discussion of Robert Wright's new book, "The Evolution of God," on Bloggingheads.tv, there appeared a striking ad for an online role-playing game called Evony. The central image was of a radiant, amply endowed (serious décolletage), quasi-medieval-looking maiden, her head tipped back in an attitude suggestive of incipient ecstasy, and the tag line was, "Play now, My Lord." Come again?
Yes, there's that God-Lord link. But what demographic niche could Evony's makers possibly be shooting for? Is there data to show that consumers of theological debate also like Harlequin-flavored gaming? Interesting, if true!
James Joyce’s blog
Several lit-bloggers have flagged this typically allusive passage by James Joyce ("Finnegans Wake"), for its deployment of the word "blog." Consensus seems to be that it's a play on "bog," not any kind of techno-prescience.
Also, everyone seems to agree that the phrase "thomistically drunk" is particularly fine, even if it is hard to parse.
Air keyboard
OK guys, for this first shot, I want you to pretend you're playing your instruments....yeah....I know it looks weird but believe me it's gonna look amazing when we actually put the instruments in....yeah.....yeah.........what's that, Steve? Well......no, I guess you'll just keep on doing what you're doing.......I mean, we can't just suddenly give you an instrument, right? That would be too disorienting for the viewer....so just.....keep pumpin' away.....yeah, just keep....just.....keep doing that......right............
$5000 for one of the best library ad campaigns I’ve seen
I put this on Twitter last week while I was trying to figure out how to get permission to post one of these photos. The link got buzzed around really speedily and the photos were everywhere. I figured I’d drop it here for posterity too. Aren’t these trucks great looking? Another neat thing from Johnson County Library System (KS).
Old Brooklyn Saloon Mysteries– No. 1 in a series
McNALLY CASE AT STANDSTILL
Police Admit They Have Run Down Every Clue Without
Reaching a Solution of the Mysterious Brooklyn Murder
The mystery surrounding the murder of saloonkeeper Frank McNally of No. 104 Park Avenue, Brooklyn is as far from solution as ever. Today Capt. Toole of the Flushing Avenue station authorised this statement:
“We nave worked every clue in our possession its end and have discovered nothing We have no information which warrants us making an arrest.”
It developed today that less than a week before the murder McNally’s apartment over his saloon was robbed. Toma Hanlon, the actress, to whom he was engaged, said that she went to see McNally about two weeks ago, and that she found the door of his rooms open. She summoned McNally from the saloon below. He, after making a search, announced that a roll of bills amounting to $57 had been taken from the pocket of a pair of trousers.
“About the story told by two boys that I had a key to Frank’s apartment, I want to say that either the boys are either vicious liars or they are simply fools, who are repeating something they have heard somewhere. I never in my life had a key to the flat and never even had the use of Frank’s own key. He wore it on a ring attached to his trousers by a chain and never took it from the ring.”
An expert was employed to open the safe in the saloon today and McNally’s brother, Owen J. McNally, Capt. Toole and half a dozen detectives were present to investigate the contents in the hope of discovering some thread to have a clue on. They found a piece of gaspipe, a lamp shade and slate containing the names of customers who had sought credit in the saloon, a few old bankbooks, and a fire insurance policy. There were no letters or memoranda of any kind.
— The Evening World, 26 September 1904
See also: “35 Cooper Square” at Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York and (the respectfully retitled) Klube’s: A Starter Kit! at Lost City New York. —Kenny Wisdom
Sunday at the beach
Imperial Beach is basically the southwestern-most community shore in the contiguous United States, right to the north of the Tijuana River estuary on the southwest edge of San Diego County.
There is a pier, an old-school sea shell shop, and the sands are crowded with multiethnic families, chilled-out cholos, and crews of gangster-ish and red-faced skater-surfers, seemingly proud to be calling this their turf. Every summer a major sand sculpture festival happens here.
With easy access to parking and an extra-heavy dose of that laid-back Southern Cali feel, IB is also an ideal place to dip into the Pacific and lie away a few hours on a vacationy sort of Sunday afternoon.
Why do commencement speakers lie so much?
So asks Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias, a blog I like reading because it presents a smart, well-thought-out, likeable account of a style of thinking and valuation so utterly alien to my own that I can hardly believe human beings manage it.
Hanson objects to the speaker at his son’s graduation saying things like “Never let anyone tell you there is something you can’t do,” and “You’ll have setbacks, but never let them discourage you.” He remarks:
I was embarrassed to be associated with such transparent falsehoods, but apparently I’m in a minority. What obvious lies have you heard at commencement, and why do you think such lies were told?
Surely this is one of those questions only an economist could be puzzled about. Lots of posters and commenters on Overcoming Bias seem to live in a weird Gricean dystopia in which every utterance is a mechanism for, and only for, modifying our degrees of belief about the truth-values of various propositions. Which means, I guess, that every utterance that fails to do this is a “lie.”
Of course, lots of utterances — especially utterances produced in public, and directed at a heterogeneous audience — aren’t like this. Love, for instance, is not “all you need” — oxygen, protein, and sunlight are at least as essential to life. But the Beatles aren’t liars. For each person in the commencement audience, there is indeed something they cannot do. And that doesn’t make the commencement speaker a liar, either. Commencement speeches, like songs, are mainly intended to produce feelings. This is not worthless. But now I’m puzzled, because Hanson obviously knows all this. He is not — I assume — the kind of person who, when asked “Would you mind passing the salt?” answers “No, I wouldn’t,” and keeps the salt.
Anyway, comment if you too find Overcoming Bias interesting and alien, or if you find it interesting and mainstream and think I’m the alien. That would be good to know.
