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| The 10.31 Project | ||||
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| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Doom Bunker - Glenn Beck's "War Room" | ||||
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Thursday, June 04, 2009
Stephen Colbert: Doom Bunker - Glenn Beck's "War Room"
I noticed that Regal Cinema's Hamburg Theaters in Lexington, KY are hosting two! special showings of Glenn Beck from FOX News next week. Since I do not get TV in my household I didn't really know what Beck is about or why he would be "touring" in special showings hosted by Regal Cinemas. After watching Beck's schtick online I wondered who would want to increase the exposure of his fear mongering, sensationalism? Then I remembered that Regal Cinemas from time-to-time screens the Foundation for a Better Life propaganda ads and I realized that this is similar effort by Regal Cinema. I suggest a general boycott by film audiences of Regal Cinemas as a response. On the lighter side of this disturbing phenomenon, Stephen Colbert on Glenn Beck's apocalyptic rants:
DJ Spooky: Sampling & the Creative Act; RiP: A Remix Manifesto (Brett Gaylor: 2008); Jonathan Lethem: The Ecstasy of Influence - A Plagiarism
(A brilliant synthesis/celebration/defense of open culture and the art of the remix from Jonathan Lethem inspired this derive. Thanks to Open Source with Christopher Lydon for reminding me to revisit this essay. Free the culture!)
"If you think of an artist as a person who is creating singularly, you are missing the point."
--Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky, "In Through the Out Door: Sampling and the Creative Act."
Trailer for RiP: A Remix Manifesto (Brett Gaylor: 2008)
To watch it online: RiP: A Remix Manifesto (Brett Gaylor: 2008)
The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism
By Jonathan Lethem
Harper's Magazine
...
SOURCE HYPOCRISY, OR, DISNIAL
The Walt Disney Company has drawn an astonishing catalogue from the work of others: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi, Song of the South, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Robin Hood, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, Mulan, Sleeping Beauty, The Sword in the Stone, The Jungle Book, and, alas, Treasure Planet, a legacy of cultural sampling that Shakespeare, or De La Soul, could get behind. Yet Disney's protectorate of lobbyists has policed the resulting cache of cultural materials as vigilantly as if it were Fort Knox—threatening legal action, for instance, against the artist Dennis Oppenheim for the use of Disney characters in a sculpture, and prohibiting the scholar Holly Crawford from using any Disney-related images—including artwork by Lichtenstein, Warhol, Oldenburg, and others—in her monograph Attached to the Mouse: Disney and Contemporary Art.
This peculiar and specific act—the enclosure of commonwealth culture for the benefit of a sole or corporate owner—is close kin to what could be called imperial plagiarism, the free use of Third World or “primitive” artworks and styles by more privileged (and better-paid) artists. Think of Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, or some of the albums of Paul Simon or David Byrne: even without violating copyright, those creators have sometimes come in for a certain skepticism when the extent of their outsourcing became evident. And, as when Led Zeppelin found themselves sued for back royalties by the bluesman Willie Dixon, the act can occasionally be an expensive one. To live outside the law, you must be honest: perhaps it was this, in part, that spurred David Byrne and Brian Eno to recently launch a “remix” website, where anyone can download easily disassembled versions of two songs from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, an album reliant on vernacular speech sampled from a host of sources. Perhaps it also explains why Bob Dylan has never refused a request for a sample.
Kenneth Koch once said, “I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.” It was a charming confession, and a rare one. For so many artists, the act of creativity is intended as a Napoleonic imposition of one's uniqueness upon the universe—après moi le déluge of copycats! And for every James Joyce or Woody Guthrie or Martin Luther King Jr., or Walt Disney, who gathered a constellation of voices in his work, there may seem to be some corporation or literary estate eager to stopper the bottle: cultural debts flow in, but they don't flow out. We might call this tendency “source hypocrisy.” Or we could name it after the most pernicious source hypocrites of all time: Disnial.
YOU CAN'T STEAL A GIFT
My reader may, understandably, be on the verge of crying, “Communist!” A large, diverse society cannot survive without property; a large, diverse, and modern society cannot flourish without some form of intellectual property. But it takes little reflection to grasp that there is ample value that the term “property” doesn't capture. And works of art exist simultaneously in two economies, a market economy and a gift economy.
The cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange is that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people, whereas the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection. I go into a hardware store, pay the man for a hacksaw blade, and walk out. I may never see him again. The disconnectedness is, in fact, a virtue of the commodity mode. We don't want to be bothered, and if the clerk always wants to chat about the family, I'll shop elsewhere. I just want a hacksaw blade. But a gift makes a connection. There are many examples, the candy or cigarette offered to a stranger who shares a seat on the plane, the few words that indicate goodwill between passengers on the late-night bus. These tokens establish the simplest bonds of social life, but the model they offer may be extended to the most complicated of unions—marriage, parenthood, mentorship. If a value is placed on these (often essentially unequal) exchanges, they degenerate into something else.
Yet one of the more difficult things to comprehend is that the gift economies—like those that sustain open-source software—coexist so naturally with the market. It is precisely this doubleness in art practices that we must identify, ratify, and enshrine in our lives as participants in culture, either as “producers” or “consumers.” Art that matters to us—which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience—is received as a gift is received. Even if we've paid a fee at the door of the museum or concert hall, when we are touched by a work of art something comes to us that has nothing to do with the price. The daily commerce of our lives proceeds at its own constant level, but a gift conveys an uncommodifiable surplus of inspiration.
The way we treat a thing can change its nature, though. Religions often prohibit the sale of sacred objects, the implication being that their sanctity is lost if they are bought and sold. We consider it unacceptable to sell sex, babies, body organs, legal rights, and votes. The idea that something should never be commodified is generally known as inalienability or unalienability—a concept most famously expressed by Thomas Jefferson in the phrase “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights . . .” A work of art seems to be a hardier breed; it can be sold in the market and still emerge a work of art. But if it is true that in the essential commerce of art a gift is carried by the work from the artist to his audience, if I am right to say that where there is no gift there is no art, then it may be possible to destroy a work of art by converting it into a pure commodity. I don't maintain that art can't be bought and sold, but that the gift portion of the work places a constraint upon our merchandising. This is the reason why even a really beautiful, ingenious, powerful ad (of which there are a lot) can never be any kind of real art: an ad has no status as gift; i.e., it's never really for the person it's directed at.
The power of a gift economy remains difficult for the empiricists of our market culture to understand. In our times, the rhetoric of the market presumes that everything should be and can be appropriately bought, sold, and owned—a tide of alienation lapping daily at the dwindling redoubt of the unalienable. In free-market theory, an intervention to halt propertization is considered “paternalistic,” because it inhibits the free action of the citizen, now reposited as a “potential entrepreneur.” Of course, in the real world, we know that child-rearing, family life, education, socialization, sexuality, political life, and many other basic human activities require insulation from market forces. In fact, paying for many of these things can ruin them. We may be willing to peek at Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire or an eBay auction of the ova of fashion models, but only to reassure ourselves that some things are still beneath our standards of dignity.
What's remarkable about gift economies is that they can flourish in the most unlikely places—in run-down neighborhoods, on the Internet, in scientific communities, and among members of Alcoholics Anonymous. A classic example is commercial blood systems, which generally produce blood supplies of lower safety, purity, and potency than volunteer systems. A gift economy may be superior when it comes to maintaining a group's commitment to certain extra-market values.
THE COMMONS
Another way of understanding the presence of gift economies—which dwell like ghosts in the commercial machine—is in the sense of a public commons. A commons, of course, is anything like the streets over which we drive, the skies through which we pilot airplanes, or the public parks or beaches on which we dally. A commons belongs to everyone and no one, and its use is controlled only by common consent. A commons describes resources like the body of ancient music drawn on by composers and folk musicians alike, rather than the commodities, like “Happy Birthday to You,” for which ASCAP, 114 years after it was written, continues to collect a fee. Einstein's theory of relativity is a commons. Writings in the public domain are a commons. Gossip about celebrities is a commons. The silence in a movie theater is a transitory commons, impossibly fragile, treasured by those who crave it, and constructed as a mutual gift by those who compose it.
The world of art and culture is a vast commons, one that is salted through with zones of utter commerce yet remains gloriously immune to any overall commodification. The closest resemblance is to the commons of a language: altered by every contributor, expanded by even the most passive user. That a language is a commons doesn't mean that the community owns it; rather it belongs between people, possessed by no one, not even by society as a whole.
Nearly any commons, though, can be encroached upon, partitioned, enclosed. The American commons include tangible assets such as public forests and minerals, intangible wealth such as copyrights and patents, critical infrastructures such as the Internet and government research, and cultural resources such as the broadcast airwaves and public spaces. They include resources we've paid for as taxpayers and inherited from previous generations. They're not just an inventory of marketable assets; they're social institutions and cultural traditions that define us as Americans and enliven us as human beings. Some invasions of the commons are sanctioned because we can no longer muster a spirited commitment to the public sector. The abuse goes unnoticed because the theft of the commons is seen in glimpses, not in panorama. We may occasionally see a former wetland paved; we may hear about the breakthrough cancer drug that tax dollars helped develop, the rights to which pharmaceutical companies acquired for a song. The larger movement goes too much unremarked. The notion of a commons of cultural materials goes more or less unnamed.
Honoring the commons is not a matter of moral exhortation. It is a practical necessity. We in Western society are going through a period of intensifying belief in private ownership, to the detriment of the public good. We have to remain constantly vigilant to prevent raids by those who would selfishly exploit our common heritage for their private gain. Such raids on our natural resources are not examples of enterprise and initiative. They are attempts to take from all the people just for the benefit of a few.
UNDISCOVERED PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE
Artists and intellectuals despondent over the prospects for originality can take heart from a phenomenon identified about twenty years ago by Don Swanson, a library scientist at the University of Chicago. He called it “undiscovered public knowledge.” Swanson showed that standing problems in medical research may be significantly addressed, perhaps even solved, simply by systematically surveying the scientific literature. Left to its own devices, research tends to become more specialized and abstracted from the real-world problems that motivated it and to which it remains relevant. This suggests that such a problem may be tackled effectively not by commissioning more research but by assuming that most or all of the solution can already be found in various scientific journals, waiting to be assembled by someone willing to read across specialties. Swanson himself did this in the case of Raynaud's syndrome, a disease that causes the fingers of young women to become numb. His finding is especially striking—perhaps even scandalous—because it happened in the ever-expanding biomedical sciences.
Undiscovered public knowledge emboldens us to question the extreme claims to originality made in press releases and publishers' notices: Is an intellectual or creative offering truly novel, or have we just forgotten a worthy precursor? Does solving certain scientific problems really require massive additional funding, or could a computerized search engine, creatively deployed, do the same job more quickly and cheaply? Lastly, does our appetite for creative vitality require the violence and exasperation of another avant-garde, with its wearisome killing-the-father imperatives, or might we be better off ratifying the ecstasy of influence—and deepening our willingness to understand the commonality and timelessness of the methods and motifs available to artists?
...
To Read the Entire Essay and Access the List of Sources
"If you think of an artist as a person who is creating singularly, you are missing the point."
--Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky, "In Through the Out Door: Sampling and the Creative Act."
Trailer for RiP: A Remix Manifesto (Brett Gaylor: 2008)
To watch it online: RiP: A Remix Manifesto (Brett Gaylor: 2008)
The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism
By Jonathan Lethem
Harper's Magazine
...
SOURCE HYPOCRISY, OR, DISNIAL
The Walt Disney Company has drawn an astonishing catalogue from the work of others: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi, Song of the South, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Robin Hood, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, Mulan, Sleeping Beauty, The Sword in the Stone, The Jungle Book, and, alas, Treasure Planet, a legacy of cultural sampling that Shakespeare, or De La Soul, could get behind. Yet Disney's protectorate of lobbyists has policed the resulting cache of cultural materials as vigilantly as if it were Fort Knox—threatening legal action, for instance, against the artist Dennis Oppenheim for the use of Disney characters in a sculpture, and prohibiting the scholar Holly Crawford from using any Disney-related images—including artwork by Lichtenstein, Warhol, Oldenburg, and others—in her monograph Attached to the Mouse: Disney and Contemporary Art.
This peculiar and specific act—the enclosure of commonwealth culture for the benefit of a sole or corporate owner—is close kin to what could be called imperial plagiarism, the free use of Third World or “primitive” artworks and styles by more privileged (and better-paid) artists. Think of Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, or some of the albums of Paul Simon or David Byrne: even without violating copyright, those creators have sometimes come in for a certain skepticism when the extent of their outsourcing became evident. And, as when Led Zeppelin found themselves sued for back royalties by the bluesman Willie Dixon, the act can occasionally be an expensive one. To live outside the law, you must be honest: perhaps it was this, in part, that spurred David Byrne and Brian Eno to recently launch a “remix” website, where anyone can download easily disassembled versions of two songs from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, an album reliant on vernacular speech sampled from a host of sources. Perhaps it also explains why Bob Dylan has never refused a request for a sample.
Kenneth Koch once said, “I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.” It was a charming confession, and a rare one. For so many artists, the act of creativity is intended as a Napoleonic imposition of one's uniqueness upon the universe—après moi le déluge of copycats! And for every James Joyce or Woody Guthrie or Martin Luther King Jr., or Walt Disney, who gathered a constellation of voices in his work, there may seem to be some corporation or literary estate eager to stopper the bottle: cultural debts flow in, but they don't flow out. We might call this tendency “source hypocrisy.” Or we could name it after the most pernicious source hypocrites of all time: Disnial.
YOU CAN'T STEAL A GIFT
My reader may, understandably, be on the verge of crying, “Communist!” A large, diverse society cannot survive without property; a large, diverse, and modern society cannot flourish without some form of intellectual property. But it takes little reflection to grasp that there is ample value that the term “property” doesn't capture. And works of art exist simultaneously in two economies, a market economy and a gift economy.
The cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange is that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people, whereas the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection. I go into a hardware store, pay the man for a hacksaw blade, and walk out. I may never see him again. The disconnectedness is, in fact, a virtue of the commodity mode. We don't want to be bothered, and if the clerk always wants to chat about the family, I'll shop elsewhere. I just want a hacksaw blade. But a gift makes a connection. There are many examples, the candy or cigarette offered to a stranger who shares a seat on the plane, the few words that indicate goodwill between passengers on the late-night bus. These tokens establish the simplest bonds of social life, but the model they offer may be extended to the most complicated of unions—marriage, parenthood, mentorship. If a value is placed on these (often essentially unequal) exchanges, they degenerate into something else.
Yet one of the more difficult things to comprehend is that the gift economies—like those that sustain open-source software—coexist so naturally with the market. It is precisely this doubleness in art practices that we must identify, ratify, and enshrine in our lives as participants in culture, either as “producers” or “consumers.” Art that matters to us—which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience—is received as a gift is received. Even if we've paid a fee at the door of the museum or concert hall, when we are touched by a work of art something comes to us that has nothing to do with the price. The daily commerce of our lives proceeds at its own constant level, but a gift conveys an uncommodifiable surplus of inspiration.
The way we treat a thing can change its nature, though. Religions often prohibit the sale of sacred objects, the implication being that their sanctity is lost if they are bought and sold. We consider it unacceptable to sell sex, babies, body organs, legal rights, and votes. The idea that something should never be commodified is generally known as inalienability or unalienability—a concept most famously expressed by Thomas Jefferson in the phrase “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights . . .” A work of art seems to be a hardier breed; it can be sold in the market and still emerge a work of art. But if it is true that in the essential commerce of art a gift is carried by the work from the artist to his audience, if I am right to say that where there is no gift there is no art, then it may be possible to destroy a work of art by converting it into a pure commodity. I don't maintain that art can't be bought and sold, but that the gift portion of the work places a constraint upon our merchandising. This is the reason why even a really beautiful, ingenious, powerful ad (of which there are a lot) can never be any kind of real art: an ad has no status as gift; i.e., it's never really for the person it's directed at.
The power of a gift economy remains difficult for the empiricists of our market culture to understand. In our times, the rhetoric of the market presumes that everything should be and can be appropriately bought, sold, and owned—a tide of alienation lapping daily at the dwindling redoubt of the unalienable. In free-market theory, an intervention to halt propertization is considered “paternalistic,” because it inhibits the free action of the citizen, now reposited as a “potential entrepreneur.” Of course, in the real world, we know that child-rearing, family life, education, socialization, sexuality, political life, and many other basic human activities require insulation from market forces. In fact, paying for many of these things can ruin them. We may be willing to peek at Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire or an eBay auction of the ova of fashion models, but only to reassure ourselves that some things are still beneath our standards of dignity.
What's remarkable about gift economies is that they can flourish in the most unlikely places—in run-down neighborhoods, on the Internet, in scientific communities, and among members of Alcoholics Anonymous. A classic example is commercial blood systems, which generally produce blood supplies of lower safety, purity, and potency than volunteer systems. A gift economy may be superior when it comes to maintaining a group's commitment to certain extra-market values.
THE COMMONS
Another way of understanding the presence of gift economies—which dwell like ghosts in the commercial machine—is in the sense of a public commons. A commons, of course, is anything like the streets over which we drive, the skies through which we pilot airplanes, or the public parks or beaches on which we dally. A commons belongs to everyone and no one, and its use is controlled only by common consent. A commons describes resources like the body of ancient music drawn on by composers and folk musicians alike, rather than the commodities, like “Happy Birthday to You,” for which ASCAP, 114 years after it was written, continues to collect a fee. Einstein's theory of relativity is a commons. Writings in the public domain are a commons. Gossip about celebrities is a commons. The silence in a movie theater is a transitory commons, impossibly fragile, treasured by those who crave it, and constructed as a mutual gift by those who compose it.
The world of art and culture is a vast commons, one that is salted through with zones of utter commerce yet remains gloriously immune to any overall commodification. The closest resemblance is to the commons of a language: altered by every contributor, expanded by even the most passive user. That a language is a commons doesn't mean that the community owns it; rather it belongs between people, possessed by no one, not even by society as a whole.
Nearly any commons, though, can be encroached upon, partitioned, enclosed. The American commons include tangible assets such as public forests and minerals, intangible wealth such as copyrights and patents, critical infrastructures such as the Internet and government research, and cultural resources such as the broadcast airwaves and public spaces. They include resources we've paid for as taxpayers and inherited from previous generations. They're not just an inventory of marketable assets; they're social institutions and cultural traditions that define us as Americans and enliven us as human beings. Some invasions of the commons are sanctioned because we can no longer muster a spirited commitment to the public sector. The abuse goes unnoticed because the theft of the commons is seen in glimpses, not in panorama. We may occasionally see a former wetland paved; we may hear about the breakthrough cancer drug that tax dollars helped develop, the rights to which pharmaceutical companies acquired for a song. The larger movement goes too much unremarked. The notion of a commons of cultural materials goes more or less unnamed.
Honoring the commons is not a matter of moral exhortation. It is a practical necessity. We in Western society are going through a period of intensifying belief in private ownership, to the detriment of the public good. We have to remain constantly vigilant to prevent raids by those who would selfishly exploit our common heritage for their private gain. Such raids on our natural resources are not examples of enterprise and initiative. They are attempts to take from all the people just for the benefit of a few.
UNDISCOVERED PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE
Artists and intellectuals despondent over the prospects for originality can take heart from a phenomenon identified about twenty years ago by Don Swanson, a library scientist at the University of Chicago. He called it “undiscovered public knowledge.” Swanson showed that standing problems in medical research may be significantly addressed, perhaps even solved, simply by systematically surveying the scientific literature. Left to its own devices, research tends to become more specialized and abstracted from the real-world problems that motivated it and to which it remains relevant. This suggests that such a problem may be tackled effectively not by commissioning more research but by assuming that most or all of the solution can already be found in various scientific journals, waiting to be assembled by someone willing to read across specialties. Swanson himself did this in the case of Raynaud's syndrome, a disease that causes the fingers of young women to become numb. His finding is especially striking—perhaps even scandalous—because it happened in the ever-expanding biomedical sciences.
Undiscovered public knowledge emboldens us to question the extreme claims to originality made in press releases and publishers' notices: Is an intellectual or creative offering truly novel, or have we just forgotten a worthy precursor? Does solving certain scientific problems really require massive additional funding, or could a computerized search engine, creatively deployed, do the same job more quickly and cheaply? Lastly, does our appetite for creative vitality require the violence and exasperation of another avant-garde, with its wearisome killing-the-father imperatives, or might we be better off ratifying the ecstasy of influence—and deepening our willingness to understand the commonality and timelessness of the methods and motifs available to artists?
...
To Read the Entire Essay and Access the List of Sources
Wednesday, June 03, 2009
John Esther: Costas Gavras Talks About Z (Algeria/France, 1969), 40 Years Later
Costas Gavras Talks About Z, 40 Years Later
By John Esther
Z Magazine
A riveting action thriller about political assassination at the highest levels, this year marks the 40th anniversary of Z ... the Academy Award-winning 1969 film co-written and directed by Costas Gavras about a Judge (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant) who looks into the death of the Deputy (also referred to as Comrade Z, played by Yves Montand) who was about to give a speech on nuclear disarmament. Deliberately dissident, claiming its intention to resemble the U.S.-backed military coup of Greece in the early 1960s and the events surrounding the assassination of democratic Greek politician Gregoris Lambrakis in 1963, Gavras's film touched a nerve with audiences still reeling from the JFK, RFK, and MLK assassinations.
While Gavras has made many political films—Missing, Music Box, and Amen—his film titled after the banned letter, which was a symbolic reminder that Lambrakis (he) lives on—remains his masterpiece.
ESTHER: Why did you want to make Z in the first place?
GAVRAS: The colonels had just come to power in Greece, overthrowing democracy. Making Z was my way to protest them.
What were your political intentions?
To show they were a pack of fanatic and stupid military men that were foes to democracy.
How successful were you in achieving those goals?
If you consider how successful the film was all over the world—except in dictatorship-ruled countries, which banned my movie—I can say I reached my goals.
Which of the characters in the film do you identify with the most and why?
I identify with the journalist for his passion of seeking the truth and information and with the judge for his passion for justice, which he stands up for at great risk of losing everything.
To Read the Rest of the Interview
By John Esther
Z Magazine
A riveting action thriller about political assassination at the highest levels, this year marks the 40th anniversary of Z ... the Academy Award-winning 1969 film co-written and directed by Costas Gavras about a Judge (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant) who looks into the death of the Deputy (also referred to as Comrade Z, played by Yves Montand) who was about to give a speech on nuclear disarmament. Deliberately dissident, claiming its intention to resemble the U.S.-backed military coup of Greece in the early 1960s and the events surrounding the assassination of democratic Greek politician Gregoris Lambrakis in 1963, Gavras's film touched a nerve with audiences still reeling from the JFK, RFK, and MLK assassinations.
While Gavras has made many political films—Missing, Music Box, and Amen—his film titled after the banned letter, which was a symbolic reminder that Lambrakis (he) lives on—remains his masterpiece.
ESTHER: Why did you want to make Z in the first place?
GAVRAS: The colonels had just come to power in Greece, overthrowing democracy. Making Z was my way to protest them.
What were your political intentions?
To show they were a pack of fanatic and stupid military men that were foes to democracy.
How successful were you in achieving those goals?
If you consider how successful the film was all over the world—except in dictatorship-ruled countries, which banned my movie—I can say I reached my goals.
Which of the characters in the film do you identify with the most and why?
I identify with the journalist for his passion of seeking the truth and information and with the judge for his passion for justice, which he stands up for at great risk of losing everything.
To Read the Rest of the Interview
Human Rights Watch: Tianamen - China's Unhealed Wounds
(Courtesy of Center for Investigative Reporting)
Tianamen: China's Unhealed Wounds
Human Rights Watch
Twenty years after the army killed untold numbers of unarmed civilians in Beijing and other cities on and around June 3-4, 1989, the Chinese government continues to victimize survivors, victims’ families, and others who challenge the official version of events.
Featuring commentary by Wang Dan, a student leader of the 1989 Tiananmen protests, and Dr. Sophie Richardson and Carroll Bogert, Human Rights Watch.
To Watch the Video Documentary (6 minutes and 45 seconds)
Tianamen: China's Unhealed Wounds
Human Rights Watch
Twenty years after the army killed untold numbers of unarmed civilians in Beijing and other cities on and around June 3-4, 1989, the Chinese government continues to victimize survivors, victims’ families, and others who challenge the official version of events.
Featuring commentary by Wang Dan, a student leader of the 1989 Tiananmen protests, and Dr. Sophie Richardson and Carroll Bogert, Human Rights Watch.
To Watch the Video Documentary (6 minutes and 45 seconds)
Media Matters with Bob McChesney: David Barsamian on Pakistan and Afghanistan
David Barsamian, host and producer of Alternative Radio
Media Matters with Bob McChesney
His books include Targeting Iran, Confronting Empire with Eqbal Ahmad and Speaking of Empire & Resistance with Tariq Ali. Barsamian has been to Pakistan several times this year, and has broadcast a series of programs on Pakistan and Afghanistan.
To Listen to the Episode
Media Matters with Bob McChesney
His books include Targeting Iran, Confronting Empire with Eqbal Ahmad and Speaking of Empire & Resistance with Tariq Ali. Barsamian has been to Pakistan several times this year, and has broadcast a series of programs on Pakistan and Afghanistan.
To Listen to the Episode
Future of Music Coalition: Same Old Song - An Analysis of Radio Playlists in a Post-FCC Consent Decree World
Same Old Song: An Analysis of Radio Playlists in a Post-FCC Consent Decree World
Future of Music Coalition
In April 2007, the Federal Communications Commission and the nation’s four largest radio station group owners – Clear Channel, CBS Radio, Citadel and Entercom – signed a voluntary agreement as a response to collected evidence and widespread allegations about payola influencing what gets played on the radio. It has been two years since the FCC, radio station group owners and independent labels met around the table. The immediate questions for the music and policymaking community are: Did these agreements serve their purpose? Have payola-like practices been curtailed? Did the agreements have any effect on what gets played on the radio?
Using playlist data licensed from Mediaguide, Future of Music Coalition (FMC) examined four years of airplay – 2005-2008 – from national playlists, and from seven specific music formats: AC, Urban AC, Active Rock, Country, CHR Pop, Triple A Commercial and Triple A Noncommercial. FMC looked at each playlist and calculated the "airplay share" for five different categories of record labels to determine whether the ratio of major label to non-major label airplay has changed over the past four years.
The data in the report indicates almost no measurable change in station playlist composition over the past four years. While this may lead some to conclude that payola is alive and well, and that the Spitzer and FCC agreements were ineffective, the report instead views these results through a broader lens, using the data to describe the state of radio thirteen years after the passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. The playlist data analysis underscores how radio’s long-standing relationships with major labels, its status quo programming practices and the permissive regulatory structure all work together to create an environment in which songs from major label artists continue to dominate. The major labels’ built-in advantage, in large part the cumulative benefit of years payola-tainted engagement with commercial radio, combined with radio’s risk-averse programming practices, means there are very few spaces left on any playlist for new entrants. Independent labels, which comprise some 30 percent of the domestic music market, are left to vie for mere slivers of airtime, despite negotiated attempts to address this programming imbalance.
To Read the Report
Future of Music Coalition
In April 2007, the Federal Communications Commission and the nation’s four largest radio station group owners – Clear Channel, CBS Radio, Citadel and Entercom – signed a voluntary agreement as a response to collected evidence and widespread allegations about payola influencing what gets played on the radio. It has been two years since the FCC, radio station group owners and independent labels met around the table. The immediate questions for the music and policymaking community are: Did these agreements serve their purpose? Have payola-like practices been curtailed? Did the agreements have any effect on what gets played on the radio?
Using playlist data licensed from Mediaguide, Future of Music Coalition (FMC) examined four years of airplay – 2005-2008 – from national playlists, and from seven specific music formats: AC, Urban AC, Active Rock, Country, CHR Pop, Triple A Commercial and Triple A Noncommercial. FMC looked at each playlist and calculated the "airplay share" for five different categories of record labels to determine whether the ratio of major label to non-major label airplay has changed over the past four years.
The data in the report indicates almost no measurable change in station playlist composition over the past four years. While this may lead some to conclude that payola is alive and well, and that the Spitzer and FCC agreements were ineffective, the report instead views these results through a broader lens, using the data to describe the state of radio thirteen years after the passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. The playlist data analysis underscores how radio’s long-standing relationships with major labels, its status quo programming practices and the permissive regulatory structure all work together to create an environment in which songs from major label artists continue to dominate. The major labels’ built-in advantage, in large part the cumulative benefit of years payola-tainted engagement with commercial radio, combined with radio’s risk-averse programming practices, means there are very few spaces left on any playlist for new entrants. Independent labels, which comprise some 30 percent of the domestic music market, are left to vie for mere slivers of airtime, despite negotiated attempts to address this programming imbalance.
To Read the Report
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
Chuck Fields: Pot, Prisons, and the War on Drugs in Kentucky (Al's Bar: June 4th)
This is counting as my "press release," so feel free to circulate widely to friends and political rivals.
This Thursday, from 6-7 PM at Al's Bar on N. Limestone, Chuck Fields will speak on Pot, Prisons, and the War on Drugs in Kentucky.
Next week will be the final talk of the 4-week series: KFTC and Neighborhood Residents will speak on Voting Rights for Former Felons.
Thanks for listening,
danny
This Thursday, from 6-7 PM at Al's Bar on N. Limestone, Chuck Fields will speak on Pot, Prisons, and the War on Drugs in Kentucky.
Next week will be the final talk of the 4-week series: KFTC and Neighborhood Residents will speak on Voting Rights for Former Felons.
Thanks for listening,
danny
Media Matters: Danny Schecter - The News Dissector
Danny Schechter, the News Dissector
Media Matters with Bob McChesney
Our guest this week is Danny Schechter, the News Dissector. Schechter is editor of Media Channel, and produces a daily blog analyzing the news media.
Schechter is the producer and/or director of numerous film and television documentaries. He has written several books, including The More You Watch, The Less You Know. His latest book is Plunder: Investigating our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal.
To Listen to the Conversation
Media Matters with Bob McChesney
Our guest this week is Danny Schechter, the News Dissector. Schechter is editor of Media Channel, and produces a daily blog analyzing the news media.
Schechter is the producer and/or director of numerous film and television documentaries. He has written several books, including The More You Watch, The Less You Know. His latest book is Plunder: Investigating our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal.
To Listen to the Conversation
On the Media: Peer Pressure - How Journal Publishers and Drug Companies Work Together
Peer Pressure
On the Media
In a lawsuit last month against drug manufacturer Merck, the plaintiff introduced a 'peer reviewed journal' strongly supportive of Merck drugs. The ‘journal’, it turned out, was paid for by Merck and its peer-review status was a fraud. Since then, six other journals have been revealed – all falsely identified as peer reviewed. Dr. Peter Lurie of Public Citizen explains how journal publishers and drug companies work together.
To Listen/Read
On the Media
In a lawsuit last month against drug manufacturer Merck, the plaintiff introduced a 'peer reviewed journal' strongly supportive of Merck drugs. The ‘journal’, it turned out, was paid for by Merck and its peer-review status was a fraud. Since then, six other journals have been revealed – all falsely identified as peer reviewed. Dr. Peter Lurie of Public Citizen explains how journal publishers and drug companies work together.
To Listen/Read
Chris Hedges: War is Sin
War is Sin
by Chris Hedges
Truthdig
The crisis faced by combat veterans returning from war is not simply a profound struggle with trauma and alienation. It is often, for those who can slice through the suffering to self-awareness, an existential crisis. War exposes the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves. It rips open the hypocrisy of our religions and secular institutions. Those who return from war have learned something which is often incomprehensible to those who have stayed home. We are not a virtuous nation. God and fate have not blessed us above others. Victory is not assured. War is neither glorious nor noble. And we carry within us the capacity for evil we ascribe to those we fight.
Those who return to speak this truth, such as members of Iraq Veterans Against the War, are our contemporary prophets. But like all prophets they are condemned and ignored for their courage. They struggle, in a culture awash in lies, to tell what few have the fortitude to digest. They know that what we are taught in school, in worship, by the press, through the entertainment industry and at home, that the melding of the state’s rhetoric with the rhetoric of religion, is empty and false.
The words these prophets speak are painful. We, as a nation, prefer to listen to those who speak from the patriotic script. We prefer to hear ourselves exalted. If veterans speak of terrible wounds visible and invisible, of lies told to make them kill, of evil committed in our name, we fill our ears with wax. Not our boys, we say, not them, bred in our homes, endowed with goodness and decency. For if it is easy for them to murder, what about us? And so it is simpler and more comfortable not to hear. We do not listen to the angry words that cascade forth from their lips, wishing only that they would calm down, be reasonable, get some help, and go away. We, the deformed, brand our prophets as madmen. We cast them into the desert. And this is why so many veterans are estranged and enraged. This is why so many succumb to suicide or addictions.
To Read the Rest of the Column
by Chris Hedges
Truthdig
The crisis faced by combat veterans returning from war is not simply a profound struggle with trauma and alienation. It is often, for those who can slice through the suffering to self-awareness, an existential crisis. War exposes the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves. It rips open the hypocrisy of our religions and secular institutions. Those who return from war have learned something which is often incomprehensible to those who have stayed home. We are not a virtuous nation. God and fate have not blessed us above others. Victory is not assured. War is neither glorious nor noble. And we carry within us the capacity for evil we ascribe to those we fight.
Those who return to speak this truth, such as members of Iraq Veterans Against the War, are our contemporary prophets. But like all prophets they are condemned and ignored for their courage. They struggle, in a culture awash in lies, to tell what few have the fortitude to digest. They know that what we are taught in school, in worship, by the press, through the entertainment industry and at home, that the melding of the state’s rhetoric with the rhetoric of religion, is empty and false.
The words these prophets speak are painful. We, as a nation, prefer to listen to those who speak from the patriotic script. We prefer to hear ourselves exalted. If veterans speak of terrible wounds visible and invisible, of lies told to make them kill, of evil committed in our name, we fill our ears with wax. Not our boys, we say, not them, bred in our homes, endowed with goodness and decency. For if it is easy for them to murder, what about us? And so it is simpler and more comfortable not to hear. We do not listen to the angry words that cascade forth from their lips, wishing only that they would calm down, be reasonable, get some help, and go away. We, the deformed, brand our prophets as madmen. We cast them into the desert. And this is why so many veterans are estranged and enraged. This is why so many succumb to suicide or addictions.
To Read the Rest of the Column
Truthdig: Amy Goodman on Standing Up to the Madness
Amy Goodman on ‘Standing Up to the Madness’
Truthdig
The “Democracy Now!” host talks about her book, the state of activism and why “the media are the most powerful corporations on Earth—more powerful than any bomb, more powerful than any missile.”
To Listen to the Conversation
Truthdig
The “Democracy Now!” host talks about her book, the state of activism and why “the media are the most powerful corporations on Earth—more powerful than any bomb, more powerful than any missile.”
To Listen to the Conversation
Monday, June 01, 2009
Open Source: Russell Banks - What Novelists Are For
What Novelists are For: Russell Banks
Open Source with Christopher Lydon
Russell Banks reminds you what the great novelists (think Tolstoy, Dickens, Hugo, Joyce, Mailer) are for: to dream up stories that illuminate the social and emotional reality of their times and nations — “…to forge in the smithy of my soul,” in the line Joyce gave to Stephen Daedalus, “the uncreated conscience of my race.” Russell Banks is one of those writers, in the Dos Passos tradition, whose imaginative forge is solidly founded on history and social context — in great American novels like Continental Drift, a tough love story about a New Hampshire French Canadian guy who meets a Haitian woman and her two kids in exile in Florida…, and Cloudsplitter, the abolitionist John Brown’s story as reimagined by his son Owen.
Banks’s new book Dreaming Up America is something else again. It’s a conversation about the country — all context and history and angles of observation, no plot. The story is us, in the year we choose between McCain and Obama. It’s a form I love: the prophetic or at least deeply intuitive artist thinking out loud about whatever it is we are all going through. The Banks version of this presidential campaign year is that we are caught, as always, in the braid of American Dreams — the dreams of (1) moral freedom and virtue, (2) wealth and (3) reinvention; that is, the dreams of very different settlers of these shores: the Puritans’ dream of a City on a Hill; the Mid-Atlantic mercantilists’ dream of a City of Commerce; and Vasco da Gama’s dream of a Fountain of Youth… (or “starting over,” or maybe “Change You Can Believe In.”) Banks is inclined to believe all the dreams are illusions, maybe delusions, and that they’re all compromised now by the resurgence of a bullying imperial “get what you can grab” impulse that is “nothing new” in American history, going back to Manifest Destiny and our wars over Mexico, Cuba and the Philippines. There’s much to argue with in Dreaming Up America, but to my taste the style and form of the enterprise are thrilling. A French television producer had come to Banks (also to Jim Harrison) with the idea of a conversation explaining America. The conversation with Russell Banks ran to eleven hours of “my ranting and ruminating,” and when he’d polished the transcript just a little, he realized there was a book in it, and surely an example of other spoken meditations grounded only in lifetimes of study and reflection. Banks gave me a notion of others we should be conversing with about America in 2008 — William Vollman;, the Nigerian I met in Jamaica Chris Abani; the U.S. Poet Laureate, Belgrade-born Charles Simic.
To Listen to the Conversation
Open Source with Christopher Lydon
Russell Banks reminds you what the great novelists (think Tolstoy, Dickens, Hugo, Joyce, Mailer) are for: to dream up stories that illuminate the social and emotional reality of their times and nations — “…to forge in the smithy of my soul,” in the line Joyce gave to Stephen Daedalus, “the uncreated conscience of my race.” Russell Banks is one of those writers, in the Dos Passos tradition, whose imaginative forge is solidly founded on history and social context — in great American novels like Continental Drift, a tough love story about a New Hampshire French Canadian guy who meets a Haitian woman and her two kids in exile in Florida…, and Cloudsplitter, the abolitionist John Brown’s story as reimagined by his son Owen.
Banks’s new book Dreaming Up America is something else again. It’s a conversation about the country — all context and history and angles of observation, no plot. The story is us, in the year we choose between McCain and Obama. It’s a form I love: the prophetic or at least deeply intuitive artist thinking out loud about whatever it is we are all going through. The Banks version of this presidential campaign year is that we are caught, as always, in the braid of American Dreams — the dreams of (1) moral freedom and virtue, (2) wealth and (3) reinvention; that is, the dreams of very different settlers of these shores: the Puritans’ dream of a City on a Hill; the Mid-Atlantic mercantilists’ dream of a City of Commerce; and Vasco da Gama’s dream of a Fountain of Youth… (or “starting over,” or maybe “Change You Can Believe In.”) Banks is inclined to believe all the dreams are illusions, maybe delusions, and that they’re all compromised now by the resurgence of a bullying imperial “get what you can grab” impulse that is “nothing new” in American history, going back to Manifest Destiny and our wars over Mexico, Cuba and the Philippines. There’s much to argue with in Dreaming Up America, but to my taste the style and form of the enterprise are thrilling. A French television producer had come to Banks (also to Jim Harrison) with the idea of a conversation explaining America. The conversation with Russell Banks ran to eleven hours of “my ranting and ruminating,” and when he’d polished the transcript just a little, he realized there was a book in it, and surely an example of other spoken meditations grounded only in lifetimes of study and reflection. Banks gave me a notion of others we should be conversing with about America in 2008 — William Vollman;, the Nigerian I met in Jamaica Chris Abani; the U.S. Poet Laureate, Belgrade-born Charles Simic.
To Listen to the Conversation
Sunday, May 31, 2009
On the Media: The Inheritance of Loss
The Inheritance Of Loss
On the Media
Hosts: Bob Garfield and Brooke Gladstone
It seems like every week a city in America loses its newspaper. We decided to focus on one, Seattle, to find out what happens afterwards. In March, the 146-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer shuttered its print edition. We talk to alt-weekly staffers, neighborhood bloggers, online-only reporters, and the editor of the P-I's old rival to find out the shape of Seattle's new media landscape.
To Listen to the Report
On the Media
Hosts: Bob Garfield and Brooke Gladstone
It seems like every week a city in America loses its newspaper. We decided to focus on one, Seattle, to find out what happens afterwards. In March, the 146-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer shuttered its print edition. We talk to alt-weekly staffers, neighborhood bloggers, online-only reporters, and the editor of the P-I's old rival to find out the shape of Seattle's new media landscape.
To Listen to the Report
Jon Baskin: Death is Not the End - David Foster Wallace's Legacy and His Critics
(This is an excellent essay that has pointed me back to revisiting David Foster Wallace's work.)
Death Is Not the End: David Foster Wallace - His Legacy and his Critics
By Jon Baskin
The Point
...
The generation of novelists that followed Beckett pursued what may one day be known as a series of incredibly interesting dead ends. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Joyce, Woolf, Stein and Faulkner had developed experimental narrative techniques to explore what they took to be the new facts of human experience. They announced that the fragmented and self-conscious modern subject should be represented by a fragmented and self-conscious prose. Yet by the time Wallace arrived on the scene in the 1980s, writers were turning the techniques developed by the modernists against the idea of the modern subject, as well as most experiences we would conventionally call “human.” For the advanced artists of the 1960s and 70s, alienation was not a subjective experience but a social fact. It was no accident that their hostility to what had formerly been considered the novelist’s chief task—depicting subjective consciousness via the convention of character—had culminated in a “Literature of Exhaustion” charting the imminent death of the novel.
Though he admired John Barth, Don DeLillo and especially Thomas Pynchon, Wallace was critical of what he believed to be two dangerously antiquated aspects of their fiction. Philosophically, he took issue with what had become the habitual postmodern announcement that there were no longer any subjects. Barth, Pynchon, DeLillo—as well as Wallace’s popular contemporaries, Brett Easton Ellis and Mark Leyner—all sought to demonstrate how culture subsumed subjectivity. In place of characters, they presented mechanized or commercially determined automatons. Even the great novels of Pynchon and DeLillo treated subjectivity as at most a product of nostalgia for an epoch past saving. This made for insightful cultural commentary and a fiction so consistently alienating that the alienation itself became familiar. In early interviews and stories, Wallace indicated he would take a different tack. What deserved the novelist’s attention was the persistence of subjectivity, not its extinction. “If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction’s job is to dramatize what it is that makes it tough,” he said in an interview. “The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still ‘are’ human beings, now. Or can be.”
Wallace became the chronicler of a world where it was “tough” to be human, but not impossible. This was the subjective world of his readers, themselves animated by an anxious consciousness of their limitations and contingency. It was an article of faith for him that the educated person still came to serious literature for answers to the desperate questions of existence. If literature’s response was that this person, despite all appearances, no longer existed in any meaningful sense, this was a way of ending a conversation, not starting one. Wallace did not shrink from depicting an inhuman world in his novels, but he returned to the problem of what it felt like to carry on a human life in such a world. This is why it is a mistake to connect his own textual experiments—jump cuts, essayistic digressions, endnotes—with the distancing techniques characteristic of his postmodern predecessors. They are more appropriately linked with Wittgenstein’s language games, deployed to help the author mimic, explore and ultimately expose the confusions of a demographically distinct reader.
Wallace’s second critique was stylistic; rhetorically, too, he believed the advanced writers of his time had fallen into obsolescence. The problem received its clearest expression in the influential 1993 essay-cum-manifesto, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” The thesis of the essay was that a once-subversive postmodern rhetoric predicated on “irony and ridicule” no longer qualified as an appropriate challenge to a culture which had assimilated rebellion, cynicism and irony into its crassest popular forms: game shows, Pepsi ads, Married With Children. It was up to artists, Wallace believed, to offer counsel on questions of judgment, emotion and truth. Most troubling was the possibility that his contemporaries were failing at this task, instead contributing unwittingly to the ruling obsession with hip nihilism, “value-neutral” morality and an essentially ironic response to life’s challenges. The essay concluded with Wallace’s memorable vision of what would count as truly counter-cultural art. In contrast to “the old postmodern insurgents [who] risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship … the next real literary ‘rebels’… might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal’.”
While “E Unibus Pluram” inspired an assortment of earnest millennial fiction, (most of it published in McSweeney’s), critics like Michiko Kakutani, A.O. Scott and Walter Kirn would later chastise Wallace from precisely what they considered to be the essay’s point of view. They pointed out that his fiction—including Girl With Curious Hair, the collection of short stories he had published two years prior—contained plenty of irony and cynicism, not to mention a battery of pop references and authorial interruptions. In fact, neither Girl nor any of Wallace’s mature writing was at odds with the argument in “E Unibus Pluram,” which most critics seemed to have stopped reading halfway through. Wallace believed irony and ridicule had to be recognized as regnant, and potentially destructive, American norms. But since American literature “tends to be about U.S. culture and the people who inhabit it,” the contemporary writer had to acknowledge those norms in and through his fiction. Wallace might have wanted to tackle the fundamental questions head-on, like Dostoevsky—he even expressed such a desire in a late essay. The cultured postmodern reader, however, was programmed to tune out forms of address that did not rise to a certain level of self-consciousness or sophistication. It was neither possible nor desirable for contemporary fiction to eschew the ironic entirely, although there might, Wallace hinted, emerge a writer who recognized it as a means rather than an end.
The broader ambition of Wallace’s early stories was to explore how it felt to live in the world of Jeopardy, The David Letterman Show, McDonald’s, The Sot-Weed Factor, Gravity’s Rainbow and White Noise. And how it felt was: lonely. The opening story in Girl takes place on the set of Jeopardy, where one of the producers intones about “these lonely or somehow disturbed people who’ve had only the TV all their lives.” The collection’s concluding novella, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way,” concerns three young adults, all consumers of literary fiction, and all incapable of carrying on significant conversations with anyone but themselves. No less “lonely or somehow disturbed” than the TV-watchers, the aspiring intellectuals are the distressed products of what Wallace clearly considered irresponsible or immoral art. One is “fascinated with the misdirecting pose of bloodless abstraction.” Another thinks: “To be a Subject is to be Alone. Trapped. Kept from yourself”; the third that “cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive.” For Wallace, these characters are deluded by a false theory—what Wittgenstein would have called a “picture.” According to the theory, the authentic contemporary subject, just like the real artist, sacrifices sincerity and fellow feeling for the deeper truths of abstraction, alienation and cynicism.
The artist cannot afford to be deceived about the nature of his historical moment. Given the dialectic of escapism and conformity that had characterized mid-century popular culture, ironic alienation may have once qualified as an appropriate artistic strategy. The children of what Wallace once called “probably the single most self-absorbed generation since Louis XIV” faced new and opposite “horrors.” Chief among them: “anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without once having loved something more than yourself.” Alienation was for these Americans a way of life, not a confrontational art form. The writer for this generation would have to know his readers well enough to detain them with the appropriate challenge. The challenge would also be the therapy. The novel for our times would compel its reader to confront the limitations of his intellectual commitments.
...
To Read the Whole Essay
Also check out:
Andy Battaglia on David Foster Wallace books
Death Is Not the End: David Foster Wallace - His Legacy and his Critics
By Jon Baskin
The Point
...
The generation of novelists that followed Beckett pursued what may one day be known as a series of incredibly interesting dead ends. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Joyce, Woolf, Stein and Faulkner had developed experimental narrative techniques to explore what they took to be the new facts of human experience. They announced that the fragmented and self-conscious modern subject should be represented by a fragmented and self-conscious prose. Yet by the time Wallace arrived on the scene in the 1980s, writers were turning the techniques developed by the modernists against the idea of the modern subject, as well as most experiences we would conventionally call “human.” For the advanced artists of the 1960s and 70s, alienation was not a subjective experience but a social fact. It was no accident that their hostility to what had formerly been considered the novelist’s chief task—depicting subjective consciousness via the convention of character—had culminated in a “Literature of Exhaustion” charting the imminent death of the novel.
Though he admired John Barth, Don DeLillo and especially Thomas Pynchon, Wallace was critical of what he believed to be two dangerously antiquated aspects of their fiction. Philosophically, he took issue with what had become the habitual postmodern announcement that there were no longer any subjects. Barth, Pynchon, DeLillo—as well as Wallace’s popular contemporaries, Brett Easton Ellis and Mark Leyner—all sought to demonstrate how culture subsumed subjectivity. In place of characters, they presented mechanized or commercially determined automatons. Even the great novels of Pynchon and DeLillo treated subjectivity as at most a product of nostalgia for an epoch past saving. This made for insightful cultural commentary and a fiction so consistently alienating that the alienation itself became familiar. In early interviews and stories, Wallace indicated he would take a different tack. What deserved the novelist’s attention was the persistence of subjectivity, not its extinction. “If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction’s job is to dramatize what it is that makes it tough,” he said in an interview. “The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still ‘are’ human beings, now. Or can be.”
Wallace became the chronicler of a world where it was “tough” to be human, but not impossible. This was the subjective world of his readers, themselves animated by an anxious consciousness of their limitations and contingency. It was an article of faith for him that the educated person still came to serious literature for answers to the desperate questions of existence. If literature’s response was that this person, despite all appearances, no longer existed in any meaningful sense, this was a way of ending a conversation, not starting one. Wallace did not shrink from depicting an inhuman world in his novels, but he returned to the problem of what it felt like to carry on a human life in such a world. This is why it is a mistake to connect his own textual experiments—jump cuts, essayistic digressions, endnotes—with the distancing techniques characteristic of his postmodern predecessors. They are more appropriately linked with Wittgenstein’s language games, deployed to help the author mimic, explore and ultimately expose the confusions of a demographically distinct reader.
Wallace’s second critique was stylistic; rhetorically, too, he believed the advanced writers of his time had fallen into obsolescence. The problem received its clearest expression in the influential 1993 essay-cum-manifesto, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” The thesis of the essay was that a once-subversive postmodern rhetoric predicated on “irony and ridicule” no longer qualified as an appropriate challenge to a culture which had assimilated rebellion, cynicism and irony into its crassest popular forms: game shows, Pepsi ads, Married With Children. It was up to artists, Wallace believed, to offer counsel on questions of judgment, emotion and truth. Most troubling was the possibility that his contemporaries were failing at this task, instead contributing unwittingly to the ruling obsession with hip nihilism, “value-neutral” morality and an essentially ironic response to life’s challenges. The essay concluded with Wallace’s memorable vision of what would count as truly counter-cultural art. In contrast to “the old postmodern insurgents [who] risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship … the next real literary ‘rebels’… might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal’.”
While “E Unibus Pluram” inspired an assortment of earnest millennial fiction, (most of it published in McSweeney’s), critics like Michiko Kakutani, A.O. Scott and Walter Kirn would later chastise Wallace from precisely what they considered to be the essay’s point of view. They pointed out that his fiction—including Girl With Curious Hair, the collection of short stories he had published two years prior—contained plenty of irony and cynicism, not to mention a battery of pop references and authorial interruptions. In fact, neither Girl nor any of Wallace’s mature writing was at odds with the argument in “E Unibus Pluram,” which most critics seemed to have stopped reading halfway through. Wallace believed irony and ridicule had to be recognized as regnant, and potentially destructive, American norms. But since American literature “tends to be about U.S. culture and the people who inhabit it,” the contemporary writer had to acknowledge those norms in and through his fiction. Wallace might have wanted to tackle the fundamental questions head-on, like Dostoevsky—he even expressed such a desire in a late essay. The cultured postmodern reader, however, was programmed to tune out forms of address that did not rise to a certain level of self-consciousness or sophistication. It was neither possible nor desirable for contemporary fiction to eschew the ironic entirely, although there might, Wallace hinted, emerge a writer who recognized it as a means rather than an end.
The broader ambition of Wallace’s early stories was to explore how it felt to live in the world of Jeopardy, The David Letterman Show, McDonald’s, The Sot-Weed Factor, Gravity’s Rainbow and White Noise. And how it felt was: lonely. The opening story in Girl takes place on the set of Jeopardy, where one of the producers intones about “these lonely or somehow disturbed people who’ve had only the TV all their lives.” The collection’s concluding novella, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way,” concerns three young adults, all consumers of literary fiction, and all incapable of carrying on significant conversations with anyone but themselves. No less “lonely or somehow disturbed” than the TV-watchers, the aspiring intellectuals are the distressed products of what Wallace clearly considered irresponsible or immoral art. One is “fascinated with the misdirecting pose of bloodless abstraction.” Another thinks: “To be a Subject is to be Alone. Trapped. Kept from yourself”; the third that “cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive.” For Wallace, these characters are deluded by a false theory—what Wittgenstein would have called a “picture.” According to the theory, the authentic contemporary subject, just like the real artist, sacrifices sincerity and fellow feeling for the deeper truths of abstraction, alienation and cynicism.
The artist cannot afford to be deceived about the nature of his historical moment. Given the dialectic of escapism and conformity that had characterized mid-century popular culture, ironic alienation may have once qualified as an appropriate artistic strategy. The children of what Wallace once called “probably the single most self-absorbed generation since Louis XIV” faced new and opposite “horrors.” Chief among them: “anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without once having loved something more than yourself.” Alienation was for these Americans a way of life, not a confrontational art form. The writer for this generation would have to know his readers well enough to detain them with the appropriate challenge. The challenge would also be the therapy. The novel for our times would compel its reader to confront the limitations of his intellectual commitments.
...
To Read the Whole Essay
Also check out:
Andy Battaglia on David Foster Wallace books
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Open Source: James Carroll - Practicing "Americanist" Catholic
James Carroll: Practicing “Americanist” Catholic
Open Source with Christopher Lydon
...
“Americanist” — meaning: stamped with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s individualism and universal in-dwelling spirit. Embodied in the Boston priest of JFK’s inaugural, Richard Cardinal Cushing, who was moved by his love of his sister’s Jewish husband, Dick Pearlstein, to bury the old Roman boast that there was “no salvation outside the church.” Jim Carroll’s Americanist piety moves in a zone between, on one hand, our overtly secular national culture and, on the other, the anti-modern, anti-democratic European church tradition that Pope Benedict XVI seems to be reviving.
To Listen/Read
Open Source with Christopher Lydon
...
“Americanist” — meaning: stamped with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s individualism and universal in-dwelling spirit. Embodied in the Boston priest of JFK’s inaugural, Richard Cardinal Cushing, who was moved by his love of his sister’s Jewish husband, Dick Pearlstein, to bury the old Roman boast that there was “no salvation outside the church.” Jim Carroll’s Americanist piety moves in a zone between, on one hand, our overtly secular national culture and, on the other, the anti-modern, anti-democratic European church tradition that Pope Benedict XVI seems to be reviving.
To Listen/Read
Mark Engler: Science Fiction From Below: Alex Rivera, director of the new film Sleep Dealer, imagines the future of the Global South
Science Fiction From Below: Alex Rivera, director of the new film Sleep Dealer, imagines the future of the Global South.
by Mark Engler
ZNet
...
M.E.: How do you describe your film?
A.R.: Sleep Dealer is a science fiction thriller that takes a look at the future from a perspective that we've never seen before in science fiction. We've seen the future of Los Angeles, in Blade Runner. We've seen the future of Washington, D.C., in Steven Spielberg's Minority Report. We've seen London and Chicago. But we've never seen the places where the great majority of humanity actually lives. Those are in the global South. We've never seen Mexico; we've never seen Brazil; we've never seen India. We've never seen that future on film before.
M.E.: Your main character, Memo Cruz, is from rural Mexico, from Oaxaca. In many ways, the village that we see on film is very similar to many poor, remote communities today. It doesn't necessarily look like how we think about the future at all. What was your conception of how economic globalization would affect communities like these?
A.R.: One of the things that fascinates me about the genre is that, explicitly or not, science fiction is always partly about development theory. So when Spielberg shows us Washington, DC with 15-lane traffic flowing all around the city, he's putting forward a certain vision of development.
Sleep Dealer starts in Oaxaca, and to think about the future of Oaxaca, you have to think about how so-called "development" has been happening there and where might it go. And it's not superhighways and skyscrapers. That would be ridiculous. So, in the vision I put forward, most of the landscape remains the same. The buildings look older. Most of the streets still aren't paved. And yet there are these tendrils of technology that have infiltrated the environment. So instead of an old-fashioned TV, there is a high-definition TV. Instead of a calling booth like they have today in Mexican villages, where people call their relatives who are far away, in this future there is a video-calling booth. There's the presence of a North American corporation that has privatized the water and that uses technology to control the water supply. There are remote cameras with guns mounted on them and drones that do surveillance over the area.
The vision of Oaxaca in the future and of the South in the future is a kind of collage, where there are still elements that look ancient, there is still infrastructure that looks older even than it does today, and yet there are little capillaries of high technology that pulse through the environment.
ME: How far into the future did you set the film?
A.R.: I started working on the ideas in Sleep Dealer ten years ago, and at that point I thought I was writing about a future that was forty or fifty years away, or maybe a future that might not ever happen. Over this past decade, though, the world has rapidly caught up with a lot of the fantasy nightmares in the film. That's been an interesting process.
But, you know, a lot of times we use the word "futuristic" to describe things that are kind of explosions of capital, like skyscrapers or futuristic cities. We do not think of a cornfield as futuristic, even though that has as much to do with the future as does the shimmering skyscraper.
To Read the Rest of the Interview
by Mark Engler
ZNet
...
M.E.: How do you describe your film?
A.R.: Sleep Dealer is a science fiction thriller that takes a look at the future from a perspective that we've never seen before in science fiction. We've seen the future of Los Angeles, in Blade Runner. We've seen the future of Washington, D.C., in Steven Spielberg's Minority Report. We've seen London and Chicago. But we've never seen the places where the great majority of humanity actually lives. Those are in the global South. We've never seen Mexico; we've never seen Brazil; we've never seen India. We've never seen that future on film before.
M.E.: Your main character, Memo Cruz, is from rural Mexico, from Oaxaca. In many ways, the village that we see on film is very similar to many poor, remote communities today. It doesn't necessarily look like how we think about the future at all. What was your conception of how economic globalization would affect communities like these?
A.R.: One of the things that fascinates me about the genre is that, explicitly or not, science fiction is always partly about development theory. So when Spielberg shows us Washington, DC with 15-lane traffic flowing all around the city, he's putting forward a certain vision of development.
Sleep Dealer starts in Oaxaca, and to think about the future of Oaxaca, you have to think about how so-called "development" has been happening there and where might it go. And it's not superhighways and skyscrapers. That would be ridiculous. So, in the vision I put forward, most of the landscape remains the same. The buildings look older. Most of the streets still aren't paved. And yet there are these tendrils of technology that have infiltrated the environment. So instead of an old-fashioned TV, there is a high-definition TV. Instead of a calling booth like they have today in Mexican villages, where people call their relatives who are far away, in this future there is a video-calling booth. There's the presence of a North American corporation that has privatized the water and that uses technology to control the water supply. There are remote cameras with guns mounted on them and drones that do surveillance over the area.
The vision of Oaxaca in the future and of the South in the future is a kind of collage, where there are still elements that look ancient, there is still infrastructure that looks older even than it does today, and yet there are little capillaries of high technology that pulse through the environment.
ME: How far into the future did you set the film?
A.R.: I started working on the ideas in Sleep Dealer ten years ago, and at that point I thought I was writing about a future that was forty or fifty years away, or maybe a future that might not ever happen. Over this past decade, though, the world has rapidly caught up with a lot of the fantasy nightmares in the film. That's been an interesting process.
But, you know, a lot of times we use the word "futuristic" to describe things that are kind of explosions of capital, like skyscrapers or futuristic cities. We do not think of a cornfield as futuristic, even though that has as much to do with the future as does the shimmering skyscraper.
To Read the Rest of the Interview
Benjamin Barber: Totalitarian Consumerism and the Death of Citizenship
Totalitarian Consumerism and the Death of Citizenship
Benjamin Barber, president of CivWorld and Professor of Civil Society at the University of Maryland
UChannel (Princeton University)
(Oct 12, 2007 at the Hertie School of Governance)
Benjamin Barber, political theorist and guest professor at the Hertie School of Governance was invited by the Hertie School of Governance (HSoG) and the American Academy to give a special lecture on Oct. 12. Benjamin Barber presented provocative theses from his latest book Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults and Swallow Citizens for the first time to a German audience. Among the 100 listeners were the former president of the German Bundestag Rita Süßmuth and the founder of Transparency International, Peter Eigen.
Barber's lecture at the Hertie School of Governance was based on the theory that citizenship and democracy are being undermined by a global consumer wave. Barber makes the case that Germany and Europe are right behind the US in yielding to this new consumerist totalitarian temptation.
Barber's lecture was followed by a controversial and interesting discussion developed between Barber and the audience, which was continued informally over the course of the evening.
Benjamin Barber is Professor of Civil Society and Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, as well as president and director of the international NGO CivWorld, and senior fellow at Demos. An internationally renowned political theorist, Dr. Barber brings an abiding concern for democracy and citizenship to issues of politics, culture and education in America and abroad. He has served as a consultant to various political and civic leaders in the United States and around the world, including Bill Clinton and Roman Herzog. Currently Benjamin Barber is guest professor at the Hertie School of Governance.
Benjamin Barber has published 18 books including Strong Democracy and the international bestselling Jihad vs. McWorld, all of which are also published in German editions.
Barber's honours include a knighthood (Palmes Academiques/Chevalier) from the French Government (2001), the Berlin Prize of the American Academy (2001), and the John Dewey Award (2003). In 2002, he spent a semester as the DaimlerChrysler Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.
To Watch/Listen
More:
Bill Moyer's Crisis in Capitalism; Ben Barber asks "Global Consumer or Global Citizen?"; Naomi Klein's Brilliant History The Shock Doctrine
Benjamin Barber, president of CivWorld and Professor of Civil Society at the University of Maryland
UChannel (Princeton University)
(Oct 12, 2007 at the Hertie School of Governance)
Benjamin Barber, political theorist and guest professor at the Hertie School of Governance was invited by the Hertie School of Governance (HSoG) and the American Academy to give a special lecture on Oct. 12. Benjamin Barber presented provocative theses from his latest book Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults and Swallow Citizens for the first time to a German audience. Among the 100 listeners were the former president of the German Bundestag Rita Süßmuth and the founder of Transparency International, Peter Eigen.
Barber's lecture at the Hertie School of Governance was based on the theory that citizenship and democracy are being undermined by a global consumer wave. Barber makes the case that Germany and Europe are right behind the US in yielding to this new consumerist totalitarian temptation.
Barber's lecture was followed by a controversial and interesting discussion developed between Barber and the audience, which was continued informally over the course of the evening.
Benjamin Barber is Professor of Civil Society and Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, as well as president and director of the international NGO CivWorld, and senior fellow at Demos. An internationally renowned political theorist, Dr. Barber brings an abiding concern for democracy and citizenship to issues of politics, culture and education in America and abroad. He has served as a consultant to various political and civic leaders in the United States and around the world, including Bill Clinton and Roman Herzog. Currently Benjamin Barber is guest professor at the Hertie School of Governance.
Benjamin Barber has published 18 books including Strong Democracy and the international bestselling Jihad vs. McWorld, all of which are also published in German editions.
Barber's honours include a knighthood (Palmes Academiques/Chevalier) from the French Government (2001), the Berlin Prize of the American Academy (2001), and the John Dewey Award (2003). In 2002, he spent a semester as the DaimlerChrysler Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.
To Watch/Listen
More:
Bill Moyer's Crisis in Capitalism; Ben Barber asks "Global Consumer or Global Citizen?"; Naomi Klein's Brilliant History The Shock Doctrine
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