Friday, April 18, 2008
I haven't said anything about the EMP conference here because I've had something of a hard time figuring out how to organize my thoughts. While there were excellent presentations, particularly J.D. Considine's and Todd Burns', I came away with a general sense of unease, but without anything specific to hang it on. Specifically, I was uneasy about many presenters' understanding of the conference's theme: politics.
Now, though, I think I've found a good example of what troubled me in
a post by a conference attendee, Carl Wilson. I don't want to seem like I'm picking on Carl here--I really am just trying to get at a persistent point of view that irks me. Most critics who espouse that point of view are unreadable, at least by me, and so I wouldn't be able to find an example in their work because I don't read them. Carl, on the other hand, I am happy to read, and consistently do. He is a very good writer who occasionally wades into this stuff and makes me cringe. I don't think it makes other people cringe, though. So that's what I'm trying to get at here: the source of the cringe.
Carl's post is not about the conference itself, but about Barack Obama's recent "bitter" gaffe. Nevertheless, I think it gets at something fundamental about how many cultural critics think about politics. Carl talks about how the gaffe reflects a problem the left has with understanding where people's beliefs come from and how valid those beliefs are.[1] He compares it to Thomas Frank's
What's the Matter With Kansas?, with its theory that working-class small-town Americans had been duped by the right into giving up their economic self-interest in favor of socially conservative politics that did them no good, and to his own pre-book attitude toward Celine Dion. To quote:
I thought a lot about these questions with regard to Celine Dion. There was a time when I would have figured that listening to Celine, like going to big blockbuster Hollywood movies, was a kind of false consciousness - being seduced by a materialistic Disneyland escapism that says nothing about real people's lives. I could have written a "What's the Matter with Celine Dion?" critique parallel to Frank's, claiming that people were being duped into listening to fairy-tale fantasy music sold to them by the very people who were strip-malling and outsourcing their communities' cultures out of existence.
But when I listened to Celine's music more and talked to her fans, I realized that she did, in fact, reflect her audience's values and concerns back to them in complicated ways - how to be at once strong, modern and feminine, for example, or the fate of tradition and family and community in an era of globalization and mass media - and that the more "rebellious" music that I used to think superior to the mainstream is often indifferent or hostile to those values and concerns. So why should they want it?
I came to think that everybody has a "false consciousness" of one kind or another, because everybody's cultural tastes are the product of their social experiences and position (including critics and rebels and radicals, seeking affirmation in the beliefs and culture they approve). Which is the same thing as saying no one has false consciousness. It's not that all beliefs are equally valid, but you won't get anywhere by assuming or claiming that other peoples' beliefs are inauthentic...
If we want to assert the importance of multiculturalism, adventurous art, minority cultures, reproductive freedom, then we have to recognize that some other people are equally attached to and serious about their religions, their social values, their leisure activities, their "American" culture.
Coming from my particular cultural viewpoint and set of beliefs, to conflate "adventurous art" and "reproductive freedom" is ludicrous. In the sense that they are both things that people can have different beliefs about, they're in entirely different categories. Disagreeing about reproductive freedom is a matter of ethics and practicality. We can argue about whether the rights of a fetus are more important than the rights of a woman. We can argue about adoption, poverty, rape, or, if you want to be really tolerant toward the conservative viewpoint, "post-abortion syndrome." Such an argument can proceed from a well-structured ethical system to factual discussion about the practical consequences of different policies toward reproductive freedom.
Disagreeing about adventurous art, on the other hand, is a matter of taste. And while taste is important, the arguments you can have about it are based in nothingness. You can never really "win" an argument about the avant-garde. You can win an argument about abortion. And that's as it should be, because abortion policy has real, demonstrable consequences. I can acknowledge and respect your viewpoint on adventurous art because, if it's different than mine, it has no consequences for me. This is not the case for actual matters of politics, for matters of
policy. If a lot of people dislike gay marriage, that means a bunch of my friends can't get married. If a lot of people like Celine Dion, I occasionally get annoyed while in a department store. That's not just a difference of degree, but a difference of kind.
Unless, of course, you really do think that cultural disagreements have substantial practical consequences. Carl does, I think. When he says that Celine represents people who are "strip-malling and outsourcing their communities' cultures out of existence,"[2] that's not just department-store annoyance. That is a sort of cultural genocide, and in that case, you can have a ethical argument about cultural issues.
Which, again, seems crazy to me. But there is an entire field of study devoted to just such an idea. They've constructed a complicated--some might say a bit conspiracy-esque--theory on how cultural actions have an impact on power relations and social structure as great as, or even greater than, economic interests or public policy. You can string it together from Habermas to Zizek to various other people, all working under the assumption that culture maintains the power relations in society by distributing the ruling class' dominant messages to the public and inclucating hegemony, the new word for "false consciousness." (Note: this is the only time I will say stuff like that in this post, I promise.) And the perspective came up again and again at the conference that cultural actions--which is to say, artistic actions--had real and substantial (and almost always
negative) effects on entire communities. This seems plausible when it comes to individuals, and certainly the role of culture in shaping people's identities is undeniable. But that's not what people were saying. Their arguments ran more along Carl's lines, that a strip mall eradicates the culture of a community. Moreover, there was a creepy strain of intentionality going on there, that zoning boards let strip malls in precisely so that they could accrue the benefits of destroying a community's culture. Over and over again, the most misused word in academia was invoked as shorthand for "corporations and governments are trying to destroy cultures because that is beneficial for their nefarious interests":
neo-liberalism. One guy even used it to describe Ronald Reagan's foreign policy, which there may be some sort of literature on, but which from a political perspective seemed as sensible as calling Jerry Falwell a socialist.
I don't want to bite off more than I can chew here; this is a big, big argument, and at the heart of it is a basic disagreement about how the world works. A cultural disagreement, I guess. So I'm just giving my own particular viewpoint here. Carl points out, rightly and usefully, that lefties have their own sort of "false consciousness" where they're always seeking out things that reinforce their beliefs. I think the perspective I'm highlighting here is a symptom of that. At a certain gut level, it feels right to dislike strip malls and Disney stores and multimational corporations. But which came first here? Does the elaborate theoretical framework exist, in part, to justify these beliefs? And if so, are these beliefs rational, or are they...taste? Is opposing Disney Stores merely a matter of aesthetics? From that same rationalist perspective (which, I understand, the Zizek dude dislikes?), the negative consequences of a Disney Store opening seem hard to pin down, and though we might all agree that they're distasteful, it's hard to compare it to, say, the closing of an abortion clinic, or a change in the gas tax, or welfare reform. Which actually has an effect?
So let's focus on culture for a second, to get out of this comparison. I don't think that the only problem here is the conflation of art and politics. There's also, and more immediately relevently, the consistent attempt to apply ethical standards of judgment to cultural matters. I'm happy Carl points out that we need to respect where other peoples' tastes come from. But I'm not sure you get a cookie for that. Being curious and respectful of what other people like isn't the
goal of criticism, but the
base standard for responsible criticism. I'm aware that this is not necessarily a consensus view, and I've heard many people say their minds were opened by Carl's book on Celine, which made a great argument for the value of understanding why people like things we dislike. And lord knows I sit around and bitch about bands I think are shit. But I recognize that this is play--that bitching about shitty art is
part of art. It's how more art gets made, for one thing.
I don't think that people at the conference really acknowledged this distinction. They seemed very serious about the evils they were cataloguing. They were making ethical arguments. But as I said above, the only way you can make ethical arguments about cultural matters is to assume that not following proper ethical standards has some sort of practical effect on the culture itself. In Carl's formulation, "communities' cultures" are being driven "out of existence"--are being destroyed. But this argument springs from a not entirely convincing vision of what culture is and how it works. In this vision, culture is a single, unchangable thing, that is how it has always been, and when it interacts with changing conditions, it doesn't change, but is, instead, destroyed. Here is the local culture, a pure and unmediated thing; here is the strip mall coming in; and there goes the local culture, which no longer exists, replaced with corporate culture. Different culture are, here, like salmon roe: distinct, unchanging elements that don't interact with each other but merely wait to be consumed, and, once they come into contact with a larger element, are obliterated.
To my way of thinking, though, culture is more like a sourdough starter. It's a basis from which other things spring, that people can take from without destroying, and which reacts to the infusion of new elements by changing, not by ceasing to exist; in fact, we
have to "feed it" in order to keep it alive. Any culture, no matter how "traditional" it might seem to us, is historically contingent, socially constructed, and contested. Rewind a few hundred years, or even a couple of decades, and it will look very different. Cultures have always come into contact with new things and changed, always been up for debate. By the terms we use for talking about art, almost any local culture is inauthentic. And that's how it should be. Culture doesn't thrive by standing still, it thrives through play and debate and negotiation and change. This is not to say that any change is positive--I'm happy to talk about positive and negative cultural changes. But to say that negative changes aren't changes but destructions reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of culture itself.
To bring it back to where we began: the problem isn't that we think people's
beliefs are inauthentic, it's that we think their culture
is authentic. The only authentic cultures are dead ones, certified and frozen by the museum treatment. Any culture worth worrying about is inauthentic as hell, and if it can't take a damn Disney Store, it's hard to see how it would've lasted very long at any point in history.
This taking of culture at face value is persistent, and, I think, unhelpful in our attempts to understand art, pop, and all the rest. To frame these debates in ethical terms is to attempt an impossible argument--to transmute taste to policy. It doesn't work. If we're going to talk about art, for god's sake, let's do it on its own terms. Let's not try and justify our tastes by making the tastes of others seem evil; let's try and figure out what's going on with those tastes in the first place, and what they have to say about the society they're situated within.
[1] Though he doesn't seem to acknowledge the contextual information about the quote that's come out, which makes clear that Obama was not so much espousing his own views as--to steal Carl's excellent language--
reflecting the likely views of a potential volunteer in San Francisco in such a way as to help the volunteer be more tolerant toward the Pennsylvania voters they were going to be canvassing. Obama has stuck to his statement for political reasons--saying it was a gaffe would be a sign of weakness, and he's done very well so far with embracing his embarassments--but I think what it reflects is less Obama's own intolerance (though, let's be honest here, a black man might be forgiven for being a
little intolerant toward rural Pennsylvanians) and more his continuing effort to try and get the left to think abut things in a moderate way while not necessarily giving up their actual beliefs. Maybe the difficulty he's run into reflects his occasional clumsiness at doing that, or maybe it reflects the problem with local primaries becoming national news.
[2] While this is in the context of discussing his old position, the only thing he reverses about that position is that the people who like Celine have been duped--he still believes that their communities' cultures are being etc.
Labels: carl wilson, emp, politics, pop, theory
Thursday, March 6, 2008
Given that the focus of this blog is art + politics, I would be remiss if I did not direct you to
Andrew WK's musical setting of an exchange from the McLaughlin Group, since it is a) amazing, and b) some sort of super-concentrated essence of that particular topic. I could go on about it for, oh, pages, but that seems silly to do for a 47-second joke, right? Let's just coronate it as the clapclap theme song and move on with our lives.
(You can also listen to a Be Your Own Pet song at that link, which will become relevent shortly.)
Labels: andrew wk, politics, pop, theme song
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Roberts's speech was supposed to be about the first amendment, which is already ironic given the "
Bong Hits 4 Jesus" decision. But then a not-unfair paraphrase of his speech would be "Without me, the first amendment is nothing. We might as well be living in Communist Russia." This is a fair paraphrase because he quoted the Soviet Union's constitution. And he actually said "these words are meaningless" in reference to the first amendment. It was like an ironic civics lesson! God protect Chief Justice John Roberts and confusing outlawing of absurdity! Fight that strange rear-guard action against the demon seed of "postmodernism" as if it's an ideology rather than a neutral description of the world! Stand up for schools' hilarious attempts to curb drug use! God bless you and yours: in a world where rebellion has seemingly become impossible, you give teenagers something to rebel against. From our seats in detention, the smartasses of the world salure you!
Labels: comedy, john roberts, politics
Today John Roberts, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, is at my school to give a speech and dedicate a new building.
Before he arrived, the members of the faculty were called into a meeting and were told how to address John Roberts should they happen into a coversation with him.
The first time they addressed him, they were told, they should use the term "Chief Justice Roberts."
Any subsequent times they addressed him, they were told, they should use the word "sir."
Labels: god save the queen, john roberts, politics
Saturday, September 15, 2007
This here
article on the canon wars (slight return) seems to have two fundamental flaws:
1) A disconnect with reality. Three particular claims stood out, the first being:
But Fish thinks humanities professors bear some blame for their diminished standing. He’s at work on a new book, “Save the World on Your Own Time,” which argues that academics should teach, not proselytize. In his view, “the invasion of political agendas” into the classroom in the ’60s and ’70s was “extremely dangerous,” since it meant classrooms could become battlegrounds for political demagoguery.
Yes, and it's not the 60s and 70s anymore. Aside from a few scattered wackos, who does this? My college was so political that in the 60s they changed the grading system so you couldn't get below a C (because if your GPA was below a C you could get drafted), but I was never proselytized to. Professors will try and convince you of things, but mainly those things run along the lines of "the things I study are important and you should care about them." Every professor I had was extremely sensitive to coming off as a libtard, and if anything, this seemed to restrain their capacity to teach effectively. Fish is grandstanding to a wider audience that thinks that somewhere they don't know about there are these hook-nosed (thanks Mallard Fillmore!) profs turning our children into black-hooded anarchists. If there's something that's diminishing the standing of professors, it's more likely to be people like Fish portraying a bunch of quiet, passionate nerds as demogogues.
Second:
For John Guillory, an English professor at New York University and the author of “Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation” (1993), “The major fact that the discipline is confronting today is global English, which is a cultural corollary of economic globalization.” At the same time, postcolonial Anglophone culture is only half a century old. “I’m often impressed by this scholarship, but I’m also concerned that this new field seems to be so disconnected from the history of literature and scholarship that goes before it,” Guillory said. “I see too many scholars in the field who know very little about anything before the 20th century, and that concerns me.”
Really? You see a lot of literature PhDs who know very little about pre-20th century literature? Or is it just that they care very little about pre-20th century literature? (And by "very little" I suspect he means "not as much as I do.") If someone's getting their doctorate without having an understanding of the scope of literature and literary history, I don't think that's the fault of "politics," it's the fault of whatever cut-rate university gave them the degree.
Judt also denounces the balkanization created by interdisciplinary ethnic studies programs. Multiculturalism “created lots and lots of microconstituencies, which universities didn’t have the courage to oppose,” he said. “It’s much more like a supermarket — kids can take pretty much any courses they like: Jewish kids take Jewish studies, gay students gay studies, black students African-American studies. You no longer have a university, but a series of identity constituencies all studying themselves.”
Again, where is this? No doubt some students take classes in "me studies," but how many of these kids then go on to major in that field? How many would have majored in English or History or Politics otherwise? If the number is low (and I suspect it is), then why does it matter that they take essentially a focused history, literature, or politics class that can engage them?
These three claims--that professors are political demogogues in the classroom, that a significant portion of English PhDs are ignorant of pre-20th c. literature, and that minority students primarily major in multicultural studies--are quite serious, and I hope they are all backed up with rigorous studies. Of course, none are cited here, but I'm sure that's just an oversight, rather than an attempt to play on stereotypes and lazy thinking to make a normally-functioning system seem frighteningly out-of-control.
2) More importantly than these nits that have been picked, though, it seems absolutely absurd that no one points out the significance of the year they keep citing as a turning point: not only is 1965 twenty years after the G.I. Bill was signed and right when the Baby Boomers were hitting college, it's the year after the Civil Rights Act was signed. In other words, these changes in American academia weren't random, but happened at the same time a whole lot more people were going to college, and that's no accident. More students meant more teachers and more colleges, and that meant the tight focus universities were able to maintain while serving only a small percentage of the population had to dissolve. While the article admits that "humanities departments thrive at elite institutions (at
Yale, for example, history has long been the most popular major, with English usually beating out economics for second place)" it's not really followed up on. People like Bloom are comparing apples with oranges here--the university system in their purported golden age is almost entirely different from what it is now. If we looked only at the colleges that existed before the G.I. Bill, would we find the same phenomenons? If our sample was the same kinds of people who went to college pre-WWII and the same colleges they went to, how much differentiation would we actually find? The article claims that "Reading lists, though, are a zero-sum game: for every writer added, another is dropped." But there's not just one reading list for all of academia, and in fact, there are now far more reading lists than there ever were. Academia didn't lose a classics-based education so much as gain a whole bunch of new fields of inquiry. And the idea that higher education should be, in effect, standardized is inimical to the goals of academia, which (you'd think) are to expand knowledge rather than continually pumping out the same ideas over and over again. These arguments, especially when accompanied by this utter lack of historical perspective (which is a little ironic given the participants), serve only to reinforce the phenomenon they seek to oppose. Why would multicutural studies departments stop being oppositional when there's still an enemy within claiming they shouldn't even exist? Why would we step back and examine these new additions to the canon when we apparently still have to battle for them even to be considered? The position taken by Fish et al seems actively anti-intellectual, an argument that we should stop being critical thinkers and continue to accept what's been handed us. (This isn't even getting into the hilarity of including Marx in a canon and then complaining about political activism.) The classics will always be there; there's no chance they'll be lost, and if you think Americans' lack of critical thinking stems from a lack of Plato-reading, then Americans were
never critical thinkers.
In the end, though, this is maybe an example of what seems to me to be academia's biggest problem right now: the "when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" syndrome. This essay is in the books section, after all, and maybe purely from the perspective of literature, this
is a problem, especially if you think Faulkner is objectively superior to Toni Morrison. And if you're used to proving things by close readings, then maybe it seems inarguable that the historical changes the academy has undergone
must produce these ill effects. But that's simply not true: those are charges that have to be actually proved if you're going to throw them around (and, to be parochial for a second, a classic example of mass society thinking). There are things I agree with here, but I think for different reasons than the proponants would want me to. I do think the Balkanization of academia is a bad thing, but I also recognize that it was necessary since grumpy old men like Bloom wouldn't let people study those things in the departments that currently existed. In other words, they're not failures, but symptoms. Academia's future leads not backwards to some imagined golden era of dons teaching the classics or outwards to a universe of microdisiplines. It leads across, and lies in the synthesis of ideas rather than the partitioning or limiting of them. All culture is culture war because culture is conflict, and not within the bounderies set up by academic departments. Culture is not something that conforms to our expectations--it's continually changing, and continually surprising. We'd all be better off if we recognized that, embraced that, rejoiced in that, rather than desperately scribbling lists to hold at bay the barbarians who have already won.
Labels: academia, culture war, politics, stanley fish
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Sometimes you just have to
admit you were wrong.
By the way, the forecast for today is "cloudy with a chance of thunderstorms." So my concerns were wholy justified.
Labels: hallelujah, politics
Monday, September 10, 2007
But I don't think it's going to get published.
***************************
To the Editor:
On September 7, Linda Lee of Oswego
wrote a letter [2nd letter, scroll down] suggesting that on this September 11th, we should turn on our car lights “as a way to remember the fallen.” But what if it is raining or overcast and we would have our car lights on regardless? How then would we let our patriotism be known?
So I have an alternate suggestion: when the sun sets this 9/11, let us leave our car lights off. I can think of no better tribute to those 3,000 dead souls than to drive through the nighttime streets with our headlights extinguished--to show the terrorists, once and for all, that we will not live in fear. And if we cannot see the road ahead, simply do as we have been doing for the last 6 years: press on, press on, though we know not where we’re going.
Michael Barthel
Syracuse
Labels: hallelujah, politics
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Comedy Central recently started running a cartoon called
Lil' Bush. It's set loosely during the presidency of George H.W. Bush, with all the players in the current political scene present as children. The main characters are the main characters in the original G.W. Bush administation, except with "Lil'" in front of their names: Lil' Condi (who has a crush on Lil' George), Lil' Cheney (who talks like a mix between Boomhauer and the Penguin), and Lil' Rummy. Also, Lil' Jeb, who acts like a dog for some reason. It's been generally
panned, seemingly because it debuted as cell-phone-only content, which is always mentioned, and despite the fact that the creator, Donick Cary, wrote for
The Simpsons, which is almost never mentioned.
It's a great show, though, in large part because it's not a
Robert Smeigel-style one-off, so it can't just coast on the "Bush is a
small child!" concept. It has to function as a cartoon in addition to functioning as a satire--it has to work in the way a regular ol' non-satirical cartoon does. And while it does engage in some parodying of its less-respectable cartoon forebears, with its opening credits featuing the Lil' characters jamming as a band for no particular reason a la
Jem and many plots being resolved in schematically the same way they would be on
Heathcliff[1], it still provides potent does of the silliness and absurdism that people have always come to cartoons for. (Take a look at old Looney Tunes shorts sometime and ignore the fact that all that stuff has become conventions and a common grammar. Is a talking meatball really that much more ridiculous than a coyote building a series of elaborate traps to catch a trickster bird?) The characters' status as children allows them to be cute--which is good--and also makes the offensive things more offensive. So, for instance, in the episode where the gang goes to camp ("Camp Lil' Camp David"), it allows the writers to tweak, revel in, and exploit all the conventions of a "going to camp" episode. The familiar structure provides opportunities for character-driven jokes (all Lil' George cares about is pranking), while at the same time the expectation of light conflict makes the discovery of an Al-Quaeda training camp as Camp Lil' Camp David's rivals (and the subsequent sending of a video in which one of the campers apparently has body parts sawed off) more surprising and thus more funny. The overall argument is not that Bush is dumb, but that Bush is unserious--in a world filled with real threats and real consequences, he blithely pursues his own individual interests and is saved only by a combination of luck and priviledge.
It's also notable, though, because it's the first of a number of attempts[2] at making sustained, character-based fun of the current administration to succeed both as comedy and as politics, the former in that it's funny and the latter in that it has a coherent and accurate point. You might recall Will Ferrell disowning his impression of George W. Bush as making him seem too nice of a guy and too harmless, more like a lost puppy than someone dangerously unfit to govern. Most other anti-Bush humor has been too self-righteous and desperate to really work as comedy, which requires both sympathy with and superiority to its subject.
The most obvious comparison, of course, is with the other show Comedy Central aired about George W. Bush:
That's My Bush! It was created by
South Park masterminds Trey Parker and Matt Stone and premiered shortly after the 2000 election (they said they were prepared to do one about Gore if he won, although I forget the less-hilarious title they had picked for his version of the show) and it wasn't very good, having little relation to any of the actual people being represented. Bush was just a lovable schlub, the other adminsitration members were his frustrated handlers, and the whole thing proceeded self-consciously as a parody of old laugh-track sitcoms. (See above about rising above your concept.) Non-Americans seem to like it, of course, but non-Americans seem to regard opposition to Bush as heroic rather than, you know, something at least half the country has done for most of his term. It didn't last more than three months.
It did, however, suggest some interesting things about Parker and Stone, which were later more or less confirmed in their movie
Team America: World Police. It was doomed from the start given that it was their cinematic follow-up to the
South Park movie, i.e. probably the Funniest Thing Ever, but it did fairly well for itself when it stuck to
wonderfully ambiguous jokes about jingoistic action movies and jingoism in general. The rest, though, was their Ouroboros moment, a likely byproduct of too much time spent in Hollywood: everyone with an anti-war viewpoint was a celebrity who didn't know what they were talking about. While we can all agree that Sean Penn should shut the fuck up, I don't think we spend too much time thinking about it, and whatever point they had to make seemed to be limited to a three-square-mile area of California. They seemed far less interested in expressing any kind of fundamental truth or meaning than they did in pointing out how people who are obviously wrong are obviously wrong.
Which is another way of saying that they're libertarians. A libertarian is what you say you are if you're a white male member of the entertainment industry who wants to talk about politics without alienating certain segments of your fanbase, and it basically means you're a liberal, but not one-a them wussy liberals like Tim Robbins[3]--think Bill Mahr. You still talk about things being "politically correct," even though no one else has for 15 years. The theory is that this makes you look like you don't care about, and in fact hate, ideology and political parties, which is kind of like saying you're a baseball fan but think teams are stupid. Small-l libertarianism (which Stone and Parker have basically admitted to) is an almost entirely superficial way of thinking about politics, like constructing an ideology out of Maureen Dowd columns. "Everybody is wrong but me" is their rallying cry, and while that's an undeniably attractive one to consumers from crochety old men to emo kids, it's not a political viewpoint but an
apolitical one. It's an attempt to opt out of something no one who interacts with other human beings can avoid. The social contract's a bitch, ain't it?
As usual, we can probably blame the boomers for this. They came along in the late 60s and decried politics based on one issue, Vietnam, that would have essentially corrected itself just as effectively without their help. They've lionized this moment ever since, despite the fact that what was accomplished through politics before them and outside them (school integration by the force of the friggin' military, civil rights, all of Johnson's great society programs) far outstripped anything brought about by their politics of no-politics; they also let douches like John Kerry have political careers. The party system has never been the same, although structural changes like open primaries account for a decent portion of that, and declaring yourself an independent, above the messy fray of politics and too smart to engage with other people's opinions, which are inevitably wrong, has increasingly been the thing to do. People have somehow gotten the impression that a political party is useless unless it precisely mirrors each and every one of their personal views, that unless a given candidate agrees with them on every issue, or even if they're insufficiently strenuous on a particular issue, then politics has failed. But the whole point of politics is that you can't always get what you want in a society of several million people. Politics is the process by which we negotiate the different things people want, need, think are right, and think are wrong, which unless you set up the kind of convenient scenarios Parker and Stone have a tendency to do, are rarely clear-cut. You're not supposed to get what you want in politics, and that doesn't mean politics doesn't work, but that it does.
Then again, maybe
Team America: World Police was just ahead of its time. Back in 2004, when it seemed like no one was against the war, criticizing the few people who were (however incoherently and self-centeredly) speaking out against it seemed like strangling the baby in its crib, and to align yourself with a conservative viewpoint that has actually been since proven wrong. But before they were, the climactic speech seemed, well, a little too jingoistic:[5]
We're dicks! We're reckless, arrogant, stupid dicks. And the Film Actors Guild are pussies. And Kim Jong Il is an asshole. Pussies don't like dicks, because pussies get fucked by dicks. But dicks also fuck assholes: assholes that just want to shit on everything. Pussies may think they can deal with assholes their way. But the only thing that can fuck an asshole is a dick, with some balls. The problem with dicks is: they fuck too much or fuck when it isn't appropriate - and it takes a pussy to show them that. But sometimes, pussies can be so full of shit that they become assholes themselves... because pussies are an inch and half away from ass holes. I don't know much about this crazy, crazy world, but I do know this: If you don't let us fuck this asshole, we're going to have our dicks and pussies all covered in shit!
In restrospect, though, Trey and Stone have always been decidedly sympathetic to the left, even if they do criticize it[4], and in this post-Iraq world, that speech reads more like a corrective to the isolationist drift that the Bush doctrine has set liberals on. War's bad, sure, but so are genocides and civil wars and all sorts of things that we might be able to stop. As
Madeline Albright said, if we're paying for this giant military, we should use it. Just because the current administration picked maybe the absolutely wrongest country possibile to intervene in doesn't mean that intervening in countries is bad, no more so than adding kimchee to strawberry shortcake means that kimchee is bad, and if we can accomplish the kind of things we did in Bosnia et al--well, if the dicks can do some good, what's wrong with a little fucking? It all depends on what you define as an asshole.
[1] The analysis of which was a watershed moment in structuralist criticism for me, at least as an eight-year old. I somehow never managed to crack the code of
Scooby-Doo until I was well into my adulthood, which is super embarassing.
[2] There's an odd tradition of long-lasting political humor that I've never quite understood. The most famous example is
The First Family, a parody of the Kennedies released in 1962 that sold enough copies to be as ubiquitous as Journey and Frank Sinatra at garage sales and used record stores. Essentially, the things being made fun of are all as time-sensitive as, say, the astronaut who wore a diaper, but peeing-astronaut jokes are told on TV and then disappear, whereas Presidential humor gets enshrined on albums and DVDs. Maybe that's just because Presidents stick around so long and inevitably do a lot of things you can make fun of, but regardless, it's interesting.
[3] In the 80s I guess this would be "like Alan Alda," which I only know from reading old comic strips and still don't really understand.
[4] Conservatives who think South Park is on their side would seem to think making fun of liberals necessarily implies you're against, say, gay marriage, in which case all my friends should be fighting with each other a lot more.
[5] And apparently endorsing the invasion of North Korea due to Kim Jong Il being a space alien.
Labels: cartoons, comedy, libertarians, lil bush, politics, south park, theory, TV
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Watching this week's
Frontline episode, on government surveillance, a thought occurred. The framing device of the show is that the FBI got mistaken wind of a terrorist plot to hit Las Vegas at New Year's, and so they went to all the casinos, requested via national security letter a blanket download of all the hotel's records of their current guests, and got it. One of the points made was that, while they might only need to use this data at the time, it doesn't go away after it's used. It sits in the FBI's possession for as long as, say, the CD-Rs it was transported on exist, and so that data can be used and misused far into the future.
But why can't it go away? The entertainment industry has invested a lot of time and effort into technology that makes data go away, or at least become unusable, after a particular period of time. In their case, it's media files, which lose their license at a certain point, and are thereafter (theoretically) unplayable. Why not do the same thing with data? Before private companies give the FBI digital data, they could be legally required to first pass it through a converter that would encrypt the information and put it all in a format that would require validation by an external site and would become unusable after a given, spcified period of time. If an objection is raised that putting it in a non-standard format would handicap investigations, a provision could be included that the requestee has to also provide the requestor with the immediate results of any data searches that cannot wait.
Is this a solution? Of course not. For one thing, it doesn't address the fact that the government really shouldn't be getting all this information from private companies, and as has been abundantly demonstrated, copy protection is easily breakable. But it at least requires
some effort to break. Whereas, under the current system, all an agent has to do is pop the CDR back in their drive--or just do a search on a central database--now there would be some actual effort, i.e. conscious lawbreaking, in order to (mis)use private data after the initial inquiry. It has the additional advantage of using technology people are actually familiar with, and it doesn't actually prohibit government agencies from acquiring information, which is a touchy subject. It just regulates how they use it, in a way that doesn't require constant oversight.
Just a thought.
Labels: politics, value added
Thursday, May 10, 2007
This:
Yes, Paris Hilton was there. And yes, Lovefoxx dedicated "Meeting Paris Hilton" to her. Hilton stood on a riser next to the stage and danced through most of CSS' set, which included their cover of L7's "Pretend We're Dead".
I repeat: Paris Hilton danced to CSS covering L7. You could not possibly invent a more flabbergasting third-wave feminist mindfuck. Oh wait-- apparently Courtney Love was there, too.
Plus
this:
Paris Hilton reportedly has turned to the one man she feels can keep her from serving a 45-day prison sentence: The Governator.
The Simple Life star and hotel heiress -- who was sentenced to 45 days in jail for violating her probation on a September 2006 drunken driving misdemeanor on Friday -- posted a message on her MySpace.com page on Monday that urges fans to petition California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to ask that she be pardoned.
Equals
this plus
this plus what's in the "About" box at the top-right corner of this page here. It's the moment when Paris officially becomes the Courtney Love of the 00s, which says something about the 00s, but anyway it was nice of Court to be there to pass the baton.
Paris before seemed to be actively working to draw attention to her, so that even events that would generally be considered to have originated from someone besides Paris, like the sex tape leak, were assumed to have been engineered by her in some way. But now she's hit escape velocity, overcome the static friction of fame, and so things are now drawn to her, explicitly without her having anything to do with it, and she's now able to respond to things rather than creating them in the first place, which is the more interesting place of meaning-making as I see it. Interestingly, this is because she actively courted fame; Courtney, because she was more ambivalent about it (or, rather, wanted fame on
her terms, since she distrusted her own ability to manage her fame, whereas Paris has always seemed happy to take fame as it comes), attracted independent actors much more quickly than Paris did, perhaps because her reluctance to fully embrace the spotlight indicated that she had something to hide. Paris didn't seem to hide anything.[1]
But now she's overcome that handicap, because she's entered into an arena where your participation matters little, if at all: politics! In terms of reality, she should clearly go to jail (get a driver, girl!), but in terms of, you know, art, she's getting into the spirit of the game well after a slow start, with the appeal to Arnold and all. Of course, Arnold will say no, but it's interesting that it's at least plausible, and that context has been created by Arnold himself, who was certainly in at least the same league, spoiled-celebrity-wise (his salvation coming at the hands of politics--you see?), as Paris, and so can be assumed to harbor some sort of sympathy. There's the movie paradigm of "well now she's gone and made trouble for us, how are we gonna handle this, boss?" but also the real-world context of the performance of fame and the community of celebrities that Paris has recognized Arnold straddles the line between it and politics; he's the bridge from parties to jail, and she's trying to get him to lift the drawbridge. It's a brilliant move, even, or especially, if it doesn't work, because it's saying something about the governor that we've mostly forgotten.
All in all, I think it means we have to think about Paris differently now; we can argue about whether her "handlers" (who?) are doing it or she is, but let's say Paris and whether we mean the brand or the woman, it's now a fully self-possessed force.
Oh, and the first thing is great because it contradicts my point in the CSS post. By staying true to the spirit of the original, insofar as "Meeting Paris Hilton" was true to the spirit of Paris rather than mocking her or appropriating her, ends up making
more meaning because it's attracted the presence of the original, and the original next to the cover is almost always an interesting thing. It conveys a blessing--which implies a superiority--but also shows the differences, and the proximity allows ideas to richochet off each other in a much more heated way than they could otherwise, and when you add Courtney, well, that's just about critical mass. Point taken.
[1] Even if, the more you consider her, the less sure you are about her.
Labels: convergence, courtney love, css, paris, politics
Thursday, March 29, 2007
It's fair to say that certain of the current administration's positions are
inexplicable, at least insofar as its
proponents have refused to explain them. There are many explanations as to why they
can do certain things like break international law (along with all the other stuff you can no doubt rattle off as well as I can)--parse the language in their own unique way so they can do what they want. But just because I can explain how to cause a chicken to crossbreed with a tomato doesn't mean I've explained why that's something you would want to do.[1] Most people would agree that some things the administration has done seem to violate common sense, and while you can certainly give justifications for this, you're eventually going to have to explain exactly why your idea will lead to a better outcome than the common sense option would. We can be told that doing things a certain way will protect the country or fight terrorism or make government better, but why, exactly, would it be more effective at doing these things (since no one's policies are really aimed at making the country weaker or the government worse[2]) than, say, doing what your critics think you should do.
Now that some administration cheerleaders are being cut loose, they have the leisure time to give fuller explanations of their
counterintuitive acts, and last week, former "definition of a bad idea" ambassador to the UN John Bolton[3] appeared on the Daily Show and did an interview with John Stewart. Bolton, as you may recall, was a controversial choice for the position due to the fact that he once suggested the UN would be no worse off if a certain percentage of its building was blown up. Unusually, he did not try and convince us that he did actually like the UN, and that this was just constructive criticism, etc. etc. Instead he said that this was not the first time he had been in such a position--he had served as an arms control administrator and he didn't particularly believe in that, either.
Why, then, was it OK for positions to be filled with people who would seem to have fundamental differences with what the position was created to accomplish? Bolton's explanation went something like this: the purpose of the bureaucracy of the executive branch, which all these positions fell under, is to carry out the policy goals of the President. That's it. The President's policy goals involve kicking puppies, so everyone should be working toward that goal, and if you're not, the President is well within his right to replace you.
The implications of this are, ah, interesting. In Bolton's view, it would seem:
1) Ideology trumps truth. The bureaucracy doesn't implement the right or best policy, it implements the one the President tells them to. And:
2) The efforts to expand executive power at all cost are good, because this will just make the process of implementing the President's policies more efficient. There shouldn't be restraints on the President's power because the President should be able to do whatever he wants in pursuit of his policy goals.
Now, obviously this is wrong. Constitutionally, the purpose of the executive branch isn't to make policy but to implement the laws as the legislative branch has passed them, so if the
bureaucracy should be working toward
anyone's policy goals, it should be Congress'. And all policies aren't created equal. Sure, you're in your dorm room at 3 am, you can claim that there is no truth and all viewpoints are equally valid so whoever has the strongest ideology should just win, but there is, in fact, a way of telling what policy will be best, and it's called cost-benefit analysis. It's not the best tool for every job, but it does provide a reasonably objective view on which policy would be the best one to pursue. No ideology is always right. Even mine! As for #2, no one in their right mind thinks the executive branch has been
losing power lately, shit.
Why, then, would he give us such a wrong explanation? It doesn't make sense in the context of reality, so from what point of view does it make sense? The grumpier among us would say, perhaps, postmodernism is to blame for this sort of thing--that it's the damn
Frenchies' endorsement of relativism and rejection of absolute truth that has allowed people of any political persuasion to claim that facts no longer matter. But Bolton doesn't believe that there is no truth[4]--he just believes that only he, and people he agrees with, have the truth. Another way of saying this is that he's a neoconservative, and that's the context in which his claims actually line up to anything.[5]
Neoconservatism is a school of political philosophy founded by Leo Strauss, a professor at the University of Chicago. One of its primary aspects was that the classic philosophical texts, especially actual classical texts, did not actually mean what everyone thought they meant. Instead, a certain elect group of great men could see the hidden meanings behind these texts, and these hidden meanings were the real truth of the world, and, moreover, the truths by which men should govern. To put it in even less positive terms, only Leo Strauss and his acolytes knew the
real truth about things, and
you can't ever even hope to understand it, so you should just do what they say. Sound familiar?
Yep, that's right: they're just high-
falutin' nerds! But they're nerds with power, and so it makes sense for them to believe that ideology is truth, because it's their ideology, and it flows from the hidden truths only they know, so it is really truth, we just can't understand it, so there's no point in even explaining it to us,
god. And of course the President should be unfettered, because he's just implementing truth, so his path should be cleared. And despite all the rhetoric at America's inception and for the full century afterwards about not having kings and very consciously avoiding monarchical trappings, things are just more efficient when you have one, powerful elect(ed) man driving things forward. It all makes sense! It's also
remarkably reminiscent of the rhetoric of
prog rock fans. Politically, though, it represents an utter inability to recognize other people as independent actors with their own thoughts, which may have some value. It also gives power a bad name, as something absolute that is used always as a stick, no matter how many carrots you have lying around, or how much evidence there is that it's actually fluid and letting it work as such is far more effective. Of course, from the
right's perspective, this is great--the
left's distaste for power is one of the
right's great advantages.
I've been making a few music jokes, but the
neocon attitude is distressingly widespread in art. Everywhere are genre and style partisans who feel validated by their own marginalization, thinking it makes them brave outsiders, and
vigilantly defending the borders of their own absolute truth from the corruption of outside influences, no matter how valid those influences may be. But art also shows us the way in which this sort of thing can be put to use, most recently in the case of Oprah picking
Cormac McCarthy's
The Road as her next book club selection.
McCarthy seems to almost entirely embody the image of
neocon artist.[6] He has an incredibly dark worldview that he expresses with blunt prose in books about men doing violent things, drawing stark lines between himself and his peers, who are generally known for close observations of everyday life that veer towards the banal, or
metanarrative trickery that feels untethered compared to McCarthy's earthy realism. He does not give interviews.
The Road is about a man and his son traveling through a sparsely-populated
postapocolyptic world, scavenging for food, carrying their
possessions in a shopping cart, wrapping themselves in blankets against the cold, wearing masks to keep out the ash, building fires every night and covering themselves with a tarp when it rains. Life is reduced to a struggle to survive, the days grow darker, and the man keeps coughing up blood. It's a little dark.
Now, though, he's been selected by Oprah, whose most recent efforts involved opening a girls' school in South Africa and promoting
The Secret, a DVD that rehashes the theory of "the power of positive thinking," which is almost diametrically opposed to McCarthy's book, it would seem. In other words, Oprah draws clear lines, too, and keeps herself and her audience within those. But in picking
The Road, she's brought it inside those lines, and given it a new context, thus blurring all those bright divisions that McCarthy would seem to embody. In doing so, she's pointing out that this dark,
dudeish novel is also very much an Oprah book. And it is: it's essentially a melodrama, albeit one that takes itself
very seriously, and like the stereotypical Oprah book, it's consists mostly of suffering with a little bit of hope and redemption at the end. It's
The Color Purple for men!
Here is soft power, and here is what can get done when you're able to open yourself up. I'm no Oprah-lover, but I greatly admire her as a
craftsperson. She does what she does better than anyone else, to the degree that she's actually expanded her mandate. She's not just a talk show host anymore, she's like a mass-market life coach. And she's used her power to expand what being
Oprahesque is, while also benefiting McCarthy and, if you're a believer in great literature being good, the new readers he'll gain. Everyone wins. Power can do this, if it wants; power can step outside of its careful lines and redefine itself to include more, and more, and more. By being open to what she believes in, she can bring more things into her purview. She got
Cormac McCarthy to come on a daytime talk show and give an interview. And he will come on, and people will read
The Road, and I'll tell you this: I bet it'll work out better than a lot of the things the
administration's been doing.
[1] Perhaps to simplify making spicy chicken sandwiches?
[2] Well...
[3] This is probably just me, but seeing Bolton is always vaguely disorienting, because he looks remarkably like Harlan Wilson, a former professor of mine who teaches political theory and is maybe as far away belief-wise from John Bolton as it's possible to be. But then Bolton starts talking and he has nowhere near as
mellifluous a voice as Harlan does.
[4] If you want to blame the pomos for something, you could try the whole "intelligent design" thing, especially the "teaching the controversy" thing. There's a great essay about this somewhere, but damned if I remember where it is.
[5] There's another thing he said that doesn't make sense in any context, but it doesn't really fit in with the themes of this post, so I'll stick it here: later, Bolton says that putting impediments (or, as the Constitution quaintly calls 'em, "checks") in the bureaucracy is anti-democratic, because it prevents the President from doing what the people elected him to do. This is only true if the President was the head of a parliamentary system, where he's presumed to be the representative of just some of the population. But he's
everyone's President, and his job is to reflect
everyone's interests, not just those of the people who elected him. This is to say nothing of the fact that the American people, as it's been exhaustively proven, don't vote for a set of policies when they're voting for President, they're voting for someone who'll be a good leader, someone who will take the future events we cannot
forsee and make the best decision. The President doing whatever he wants regardless of what the populace thinks is a bit republican, to be sure, but certainly not democratic.
[6] Metaphorically speaking; I have no idea what McCarthy's political beliefs are. He seems like a good guy, but, like Phish and Tori Amos, his fans are a little offputting.
Labels: books, Cormac McCarthy, neoconservative, Oprah, political theory, politics, pop
- Sorry about no post last week, but I ditched to go to the beach. It was real purty though--here's a picture:
- I got to see Madeleine Albright on
The Colbert Report up close and in person, thanks to
Nick. (Thanks Nick!) Seeing the taping was a pretty interesting experience, although I think I'm too scattered right now to really express how. I can say this, though: Maddie looks like, if you cross her, she'll shoot lightning out of her fingers at you, and I like that in a woman.
- Congratulations to
Scott and
Alison!
- Thanks, Google Ads--you can watch the Bolton interview
here if you'd like.
Labels: clinton administration, colbert, comedy, notes, pictures, politics
Thursday, March 8, 2007
It's hard to think of a show that's ever had as good a year as
The Colbert Report did in 2006. It was its first year of existence, and no one was really sure it was going to make it.
The Daily Show didn't really seem like something you could spin off, let alone spin off with someone whose best-known bit was "This Week in God." Good stuff, but how is that a half-hour program?
Well, suffice to say the show justified its existence. By the time it broadcast its last episode in December, one devoted entirely to a guitar duel between Colbert and one of the Decemberists, the show managed to attract both a devoted fanbase that Colbert delighted in exploiting as well as guests of increasingly high stature. And they did all this without significantly changing their approach. They just waited for people to come to them, and it worked.
What is that approach? In a nutshell: effusive cynicism.
The Colbert Report is undoubtedly the most cynical show in America, and it's paid off enormously for them. You realize just how cynical it is when you compare it to its sister program.
The Daily Show promotes the image of a sane oasis in a crazy world, never content simply to show you what's wrong when they can also explain why it's wrong[1], albeit sarcastically, and they even go so far as to suggest alternate policies at times, again sarcastically. But sarcasm is a language we all speak now, so much so that it no longer sounds like a foreign tongue. The most sincere among us (left-wing college students, say) routinely use sarcasm as a way of belittling our opponents, and it's worked its way into modern usage enough that we hear the sincerity simultaneously with the sarcasm. There's no translation, only synonyms. Begin a sentence with "Yes"[2] and it's as sure a reversal as slapping "ne" and "pas" around a French verb.
The main exceptions are the correspondents / "experts," of which Colbert was one before he left. They deliver their reports with a straight face, and this is a big part of the humor. But after their segments, they almost always talk with Stewart, and here the "we are sanity" feeling comes back in: they make some outrageous statement that's recognizable as an exaggeration of what someone else has said, and then Stewart plays the straight man and asks them the questions we ourselves would ask them if we didn't know they were making a joke. It's effective, but it's giving the audience an out, making the correspondent into the object of ridicule before our eyes rather than requiring the audience to make that leap.
On Colbert's show, this almost never happens. The attitude seems to be that the things they're parodying are so obviously absurd that they don't need to hold the viewers' hands. There's no critique necessary, no explanation of why the things they're saying are wrong. The correspondent stands alone, with no one to question him except his guests, who rarely succeed. This is a bleak view of society, one that simply repeats what it hears, raises its eyebrows slightly, and waits for a laugh.
The thing is, the laughs didn't really come at first. If you watch those early programs, people don't really get it: jokes fall flat, and guests seem genuinely outraged at the things Colbert is saying, even though they're on a network called "Comedy Central." No one seemed to know quite how to handle him, whether they should play along or take him at face value. It's hard to say if they'd be funnier now, if the jokes simply weren't up to snuff, but in terms of approach, it was essentially the same. Did this mean that their cynicism was unwarranted, that in fact things weren't so bad that you could offer up a simple parody in place of show-and-tell jokes?
Well, yes and no. Certainly people are actually laughing now, and comedy does require passing a certain tipping point of laughter before people really feel comfortable braying along, so maybe it's just that momentum built enough for them to cross that barrier. But the cynicism has been validated in unexpected ways. People have noted the ways in which Colbert's show has come to resemble the shows it's parodying, like
The O'Reilly Factor, particularly in regards to the devoted fanbase mentioned above. Colbert has built up a cult of personality around himself, so much so that he's able to get his fans to engage in coordinated collective action, and the ability he has to control his audience, down to the second he wants them to stop cheering, is a little scary.
This isn't a criticism of the show, though--it is the final proof of its cynicism. By managing to encourage this level of devotion, they've shown just how easy it is--so easy that a comedian can do it. And the appeal of this sort of rhetoric is so strong that even when it's being used sarcastically, it's incredibly effective. Colbert's fans read through the cynicism and take the sincerity they see on the other side just as fervently as O'Reilly's fans do. If this were
The Daily Show, this might be something to discourage. But the genius of Colbert's show is that it's absolutely committed to its cynicism. It's ridiculous that people will do whatever Colbert asks them to do, it's ridiculous that he could get Henry Kissinger to introduce a guitar duel and the newly-elected governor of New York to judge it. They've created such a good imitation that it functions in exactly the same way as what it's making fun of, and that's spectacular.
It's still cynical, though, and that's important to keep in mind. As effective a piece of performance art as
The Colbert Report is--utilizing mixed media, enabling interaction, drawing power to itself and using that power without restraint, just as its subject would--it all springs from a fundamentally cynical point of view. This rings false: cynicism seems to encourage a disassociation with the corrupted world, so devoted to its criticism that it is unable to engage with the things it's criticizing, and when it's criticizing society, the cynic sits outside it. Colbert has shown that you can be incredibly cynical (completely aware of the ways in which the object of study fails, clear-eyed in your evaluation of its faults) and yet use that knowledge, not simply throw it out there to prove your own superiority. They've seen exactly what's wrong with these sorts of shows and gone and pranked the world, making their points but also so cynical that they don't care if they cause exactly the same ill effects as the original. Why not? Doesn't it just prove their point more? And if you don't get the point, don't you deserve what you get? That's one way in which cynicism can be a productive force.
This is sorta-kinda the subject of an essay by Geert Lovink (!) entitled "
Blogging, the nihilist impulse." It's not the greatest read in the world, full of the autistic shorthand that's infested academia, and prone to statements like "there are 100 million blogs worldwide, and it is nearly impossible to make general statements about their 'nature' and divide them into proper genres. I will nonetheless attempt to do this." Don't mess with Lovink, man, that dude can do the
nearly impossible!
Anyway, this is a problem for me because there's no passage I can really quote to highlight what I'm interested in without subjecting you all to sentences like "It is constituted by cold enlightenment and by confession described by Michael Foucault." So, to summarize, Lovink[3] notes that blogging came about in this millennium, and the tenor of blogs is primarily cynical. This isn't an indictment, just an observation, and the consequence has been that there aren't grand movements (which are inherently suspicious), but the aggregation of lots of individual opinions, all of which can still think they're precious unique snowflakes, into a received wisdom.
He's right, and it's useful to acknowledge the inherently cynical nature of blogs. When I try to explain that, say, the Gawker sites aren't necessarily expressing a firmly-held and well-thought-out opinion, they're just paid to mock
everything, being able to cite cynicism will help. It's also a frustrating tendency of internet culture these days, one that leads to things like blogs being thought of as worthless even by their creators and so not worth the effort to make into art rather than brands, but that's for another time; for now, it's just nice to have a name.
His point about this cynicism being useful is a good one, I think. The example of
The Colbert Report highlight one strategy for utilization, but might there be others? I think so. Take pop music, for example. Almost no one involved in pop isn't cynical about it, and yet it still inspires devotion. You can see the machinery behind the music--the product placement, the obvious marketing plans, the unmistakable demographic targeting, the record company's tracklist calculus, the parade of new talent--and still enjoy the music for what it is. No one doesn't become cynical about pop, so much so that this is now a standard part of the life of a pop fan, even if fans generally won't admit it. (It's understandable--part of the pleasure of rejecting pop is thinking you see what other people don't, even if millions of people have seen it before you--but it's still unfortunate.) But people still listen to pop, still like pop, still make pop out of a love for the music. You can be cynical about something without invalidating it.
This is merely cynicism counterbalanced, though. What's interesting about pop is the ways in which cynicism can actually increase your admiration for the music. Once you're aware of the way the machine works, you can follow it and use your knowledge to become a better listener, by doing things like noticing and following particular producers and songwriters. Moreover, by being aware of the commercial obstacles that pop faces on its way to a finished CD--a condition unique to pop these days, since only pop musicians need to worry about getting someone else's approval for what they release, whereas everyone else can just burn a few thousand discs in their basement--you can gain a greater appreciation for the difficulties the artists face, and this often leads to a deeper enjoyment of their music.
Lovink said something else in there, though, something else that's notably wrong. He thinks this cynicism is a post-bubble thing, a reaction to the repudiation of the net's early utopian promises and grand schemes; like an embittered failure, so burned by his unrealized hopes that he thinks the world is shit. Well, something else happened in 2001--or, rather, two something elses happened. We got a new President, and…well, you know.
An article recently mentioned the 1999 anti-globalization protests in Seattle, and it was like suddenly remembering a dream you'd had. This used to be an inspirational moment for the left, and while I'm sure it's still an inspirational moment to some, it seems impossibly distant now. Fighting over trade policy instead of occupying armies: it's almost hard to imagine. This isn't an indictment of Seattle--far from it--but an illustration of why the mood's shifted since the end of 2000. There's no reason to think the internet couldn't have been dominated by a bunch of Googles, modest start-ups that still had a gleam in their eye, but with reduced expectations and more realistic business plans. But, as I've said
elsewhere, we all went a little crazy after 9/11, on all sides, and it's produced a range of reactions. But certainly there's little choice but to react to the right's version of going crazy with cynicism; there's simply no other option, given how shameless they've become. If the tenor of our times is cynical, well, there are quite legitimate reasons for that.
Point is, we don't pick the conditions under which we make art any more than we pick our upbringing or our talents. Maybe it'd be nice to have some more non-cynical art, but that's not the reality we live in right now. Pointing out the usefulness of cynicism is really just a way of pointing out the usefulness of
anything that's imposed upon us from outside, be it totalitarianism or boundless prosperity or an excess of penguins.[4] Art is creative but also reactive, and since you don't get to choose what there is to react against, it's necessary to find ways to work with anything, and those ways always exist. As long as we're going to view art through the context of its times--and that's forever--this will be a concern, and not an unimportant one, either. But as Colbert demonstrates, you need to bring yourself back into the world, to use those forces to make art within it and around it and, maybe, to contain it.
[1] There's even a common moment now where Jon Stewart turns to a particular camera and addresses a newsmaker directly, with humor but without irony.
[2] "Yes, throwing yourself off a cliff would be a great idea." "Yes, democracy certainly is on the march in the Middle East!" Tone matters, but not that much.
[3] I'm giggling every time I type that, by the way.
[4] This, obviously, leads to penguin sculptures, penguin ballets, etc.
Labels: colbert, comedy, cynicism, daily show, politics, pop, theory
- Twoheadedboy
makes some great points about the Arcade Fire and their public reception:
And what of the Arcade Fire's purported sincerity? Their heart-on-sleeve
emotionalism? Should we be touched, moved? When every song recruits a gargantan church organ to swell Win Butler's high school poetry to apocalyptic proportions
(“mirror, mirror / on the wall / show me where the / bombs will fall”)? I say,
stop touching me.
Also, at the end (and more importantly): "taking the Arcade Fire to task for aestheticizing politics." This is really smart.
I'm still trying to figure out why musicians' clumsy attempts at political gestures bug me so much, beyond, you know, "they're stupid." I hadn't really considered this one, though, and I think it's getting close to the heart of the matter, although I would phrase it more like "imposing lame indie aesthetics on politics, which already has its own aesthetics." The lyrics quoted above are a 1:1 equivalency of John Ashcroft
singing "Let The Eagle Soar." Just because you're singing something over a piano part doesn't mean it's a good song, and just because you say something about bombs doesn't make it a meaningful political statement, and when people think otherwise, that just indicates that they don't really know what they're talking about when it comes to songs or politics. Oh sure, sure; everyone's entitled to their opinion, and god forbid we "supress dissent" by telling someone they're being shallow, but if you think Ashcroft's song is lame, well. Aesthetics matter.
- As
suspected, the
House episode this week was practically a religious experience. I think I might be mentioning it again in the near future, so I won't say too much now, but seriously, episode of the year or something.
- As Frank
pointed out and Dave
responded to, there's been surprisingly little chatter in pop-nerd circles about Britney shaving her head, aside from the requisite "OMG she's bald" reactions. There's been a quote going around attributed to Courtney Love that I can't find an original source for (it might be on a google-proofed page like a message board), but it certainly
sounds like her:
she?s insane! I love it! I?m sad about what she?s ingesting, and the bad man who got her started on that shit.But she?s made herself a true outsider under the influence or not- which in itself is not a crime, she?s expressed what she?s feeling inside on the outside an dyes its the result of a psychotic break due to uh?ingestion of a very very very evil substance. and i know what I know because I know, the people who know- she cried for a long tome before she did it and her bodyguards were all that was with herhow the ultimate insider the person whose almost directly responsible for ruining guitar rock ended up shaving her head is an ultimate irony and the fact that she shaved her head hell if i did it no one would blink butt hats cos I?ve always been an outsider even when I?m an insider- but ths is breaking news due to that fact that this was the lolita fuck up fantasy doll jonbenet nightmare- i remember the first time i saw a little thing on her in spin I seriously very seriously thought it was a parody like an snl skit and when it became real I worried and it affected everyone, in my world in the world of rock n roll and this may as well be death in some ways- she wasn?t sober when she did it - i wish she had been because then id be able to really kind of get behind it and just say- fuck yeah express yourself- do it= you don?t feel pretty on ths inside anymore show it man, but it s happened and its legendary, this is going to be legendary.Is she going to join mercury rev? Start hanging at space land?i doubts he even understands that world but no decent punk at heart can begrudge the once totally self an dmommy sexualised ?virgin? for shaving g her dammed head, i love it and I?m sad for her at he same time.I?m sure she?s clueless to how brilliant this was, how in some ways anarchic an feminist it was- but she still needs to go back to rehab.That my two cents.
I like this, but I would. Maybe another productive avenue to go down would be comparing it with the "makeover" episode on
America's Next Top Model. It's at, what, the seventh time around now? Eighth? And every "cycle" (ugh, sorry) there's the makeover episode, and every makeover episode, they chop off a bunch of the girls' hair. And there's always lots of crying. It doesn't make sense--the contestants have clearly watched the show before, they know this is coming, and yet, every time, "OMG I can't believe they cut off my hair!" Really? Well, yeah. It's notable in comparison to another ANTM pattern: the nude shoot. Every season, usually after the makeover episode, there's a shoot where the girls have to be either nude, near-nude, or looking as if they are nude, and for the first few seasons, this would always knock at least one contestant out, because they would refuse on moral grounds to be nude and my body is a temple etc. etc. OH MY GOD GIRL YOU'RE TRYING TO BE A MODEL TAKE YOUR DAMN CLOTHES OFF ALREADY.
Um. Anyway, point is that this happened for the first few seasons, but then it stopped; there's still always a nude shoot, but people seem to have finally learned not to apply to the show if they don't want to get nudies. But they do still apply to the show even though they don't want to get their hair cut. It's still that unbelievable that someone would do that to them, I think, that you go ahead anyway.
So compare that to Britney: this is seen as a form of self-mutilation, evidenced by the fact that a few days later, people thought it credible that she
attempted suicide. And so, hair: it's an unacknowledged but potent symbol in pop, and maybe the seemingly superficial things we see female popstars do with their hair are worthy of a closer look: P!nk, Ashlee going brunette, etc. I don't really know what this would yield, but if I did, it would be a post rather than a note.
Labels: aesthetics, arcade fire, britney, courtney love, House, john ashcroft, notes, politics, pop, teenpop
Friday, February 2, 2007
THREE DEATHS
There were a number of notable deaths at the end of 2006. One was James Brown, and when his death was announced, I was at my parents' house for Christmas, far away from New York (or so it felt, anyway). I heard he was going to lie in state at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, and I was sad I was going to miss it. But when I opened up the paper onboard the Amtrak returning home, I found out I had miscalculated: the date of his "appearance" would be that day, and if I hustled a bit when I got home, I could go see him--or, at least, see the people waiting for him, since it was unlikely I would actually get in. (I missed the cutoff by maybe 50 people. This was the cutoff to wait another two hours to get in, though, so it's probably for the best.)
Why go, if not to actually see him? Well, James Brown was responsible for more than one genre of pop music, embraced and enhanced an incredible number of eras and styles, and was at the time of his death unquestionably the most influential musician alive, historically speaking. More than that, though, it was for the energy, for the spectacle of the thing. Just being outside would make me and my companions part of the event, and personally, because I work in an office all day, I feel like I miss out on a lot of the events New York has to offer, and granted the reprieve of a vacation day, I couldn't think of a better way to use it. Still can't.
I found lots of people, but not many of them were white. The only caucasians I got a good look at turned out to be French, and they don't really count. (French people are the second most likely group of people to be found at James Brown's wake.) But I am a white person, and I was in fact with two other white people. One was even Canadian. (Hi, Hannah!) But how could you not go out to James Brown's wake? Was I committing some sort of racial faux pas by being there? Or was it just attributable to New Yorkers' normal instincts for avoiding crowds?
What was there, symbolically speaking, was black culture. (The lack of white people helped make this as obvious as it was, but this fact was not technically part of the symbolism.) Let's just start with the actual attraction itself: James Brown's body in a royal blue suit, inside a gold coffin, lying on the stage of a theater whose most regular occupant these days is Mo'nique. The man's body was going on tour--next stop was the James Brown Arena in his hometown of Augusta.
But then there was the scene outside. The line to get into the Apollo Theater ran down 125th Street in Harlem and four blocks up Frederick Douglas Boulevard, past the headquarters of the Amersterdam Eagle. There were old ladies in their fancy church hats. There was a barbershop with people dancing outside. A man walked down 125th asking if anyone wanted to buy Newports. Two matching white SUVs drove slowly by with logos of what I can only assume are up-and-coming entertainment companies on the back windows. Men sold books whose titles I probably shouldn't be typing. For the first time since they went up, all the big-box stores that now populate 125th street, Old Navy and H&M and its brethren sprouting out from "Harlem USA," looked actually out of place, overwhelmed by Harlem rather than brazenly encroaching upon it.
And then there was the marquee. You've probably seen pictures of it, reading "REST IN PEACE APOLLO LEGEND / THE GODFATHER OF SOUL / JAMES BROWN / 1933-2006" But what no one seems to mention is that this was not, in fact, the only thing the marquee was saying. It's an electronic marquee, and it was cycling through not only this notice but other ones, advertising upcoming events at the Apollo, television showings of Amateur Night, and even things that had nothing to do with the Apollo whatsoever. A dead body was lying inside, and the body's host was advertising what other things would be appearing in the future where the body was now. And no one seemed at all bothered by this. James Brown was certainly one of the most revered figures in the culture, and there was no concern about this lack of reverence. It wasn't even worth remarking upon.
The cumulative effect was of all the symbols of black America, positive and negative, celebratory and damaging, signing a temporary truce so they could mingle for a day here in the cradle of African-American culture. It was a final testament to James Brown and his status as a unifying figure--possibly one of the last unifying figures black America will ever have.
*****
The above is not (or not just) a recitation of ignorant stereotypes of black people. It is the first part of a contrast. Around about the same time James Brown died, former President Gerald Ford (a man who was unifying in the sense that everyone was united in not caring about him much, unless your name was Nixon) also died, and the news stations seemed to ask themselves the question "how could you not cover his funeral nonstop?"
How indeed! Cable news offered up coffin-to-grave coverage of the ponderous ceremonies, and lordy, it was like watching paint die, er, dry. During primetime, ten channels--god bless a slow week--show us shots of a car stopping in front of some Boy Scouts, and waiting, and waiting, and waiting. And you can't say anything during all this, partially out of respect for the dead, but mainly because there isn't that much to say. But they showed us these static images anyway, encouraging us to ponder them, and in the process highlighting nothing so much as their utter blankness.
The fact that it was Ford's funeral meant that there was nothing about the man to consider, really, during all of this; you couldn't think about the absurd things people had been saying about the recently dead, as you could with Reagan, nor could you consider his impact on America, because that took about three minutes. There just wasn't that much to think about Gerald Ford, and this had the peculiar effect of forcing you to actually notice what was going on, to regard it not as mere pomp (the announcer's soothing voices droning a play-by-play only heightening the narcotic effect, customarily) but as actual concrete events. The physicality, the realness of it all stood out, for once. Ford was such an uninteresting President that it was like a spanner in the works, a disruption of the normal order of things, highlighting the absurdity of the goings-on.
And maybe you wouldn't have noticed it were it not for the recent festivities surrounding the Godfather of Soul, but the proceedings certainly were, well, white. Not only in the literal sense, with all that buffed marble, but in the "overwhelmingly caucasoid" sense as well. All this ceremony was imported directly from Western Europe, the loins of white Americans' fruit, with the strongest echoes being of British ceremony: the starkness, the regard for easy symbolism (infused with as much heavy tradition as a still-young country can muster) over aesthetics or resonance, the dryness of it all.
But it also struck you how much it was a product of the amalgamated white American culture. This culture does not seem strange, of course, because it is so familiar, but what we think of as white culture is oddly sourceless. The images Ford's funeral evoked were not those of, say, an Irish-American wake, with its comfortable materiality. They weren't those of a white Southern funeral, with its quiet beauty. They weren't even of a WASP funeral, which would have far more self-aware gentility and far less ostentatious humility. If anything, they would seem to have sprung from California, the leading candidate for the cradle of white American culture, but it seemed to lack the vague ridiculousness and crassness of a California funeral.
No, the sourceless white American culture that produces Presidential funerals is also the same culture that produces the accent of news anchors, one common across the country, whether you're a white guy in Georgia or an Asian lady in New York. It's also the same culture that determines the aesthetics of cable news: packed with information but lacking any context or deeper meaning, grasping at easy symbolism not as a means to express something deeper but merely as a way to invoke something faster, to pretend at depth. And this was why the news channels were so eager to give Ford's funeral nonstop coverage. It was white American culture--Boy Scouts and World War II[1] and landscaped trees and suits and silence and cable fucking news--coming together in the vast virtual space it always occupies to do yet another awkward dance.
And it made you wonder why this culture was still dominant. In a country where unpopular things have been falling like crazy lately, this culture, one that has been almost completely rejected by consumers, has survived as a social and political norm. Regardless of whether it's right or not, is it even Good For America? The Constitution--a legitimate source of glory white America's been milking for a long time now--is careful to protect the rights of minority populations. But what about the rights of minority cultures?
Now, when someone says something like this, it usually indicates that they are worried about the traditional practices of a tiny population that they see being eliminated by multinational pop culture. Of course, this ignores the fact that microcultures die all the time, they're just subsumed as artistic memory within the larger culture, and that generally these cultures die out because multinational pop culture is fun as fuck, one of the great achievements of our species, and forcing people to preserve their unwanted local customs so that one day they, too, can present them to bored four-year-olds and their conscientious parents at a children's museum seems like a form of sadism--well, that's not the kind of thing I'm try
