Time Out of Joint:

Rubio, Water, and the House of Cards

 

When is a drink of water not just a drink of water?

Melissa and I have been burning through David Fincher's brilliant new political drama House of Cards over the past few days. If you don't know about it yet, be sure to listen to David Bianculli spot-on review here.

Needless to say, we were moved to watch some of the State of the Union last night, and, of course, Marco Rubio's Republican response ... And then it happened ... the drink of water. I sighed, shook my head, looked to Melissa, and we both shook our heads in collective incredulity, and we immediately agreed that this is destined to be a Saturday Night Live skit. In an age of hyperreality and manufactured pseudo-events, how can the Republican dream boy botch such a brief moment in the sun? Doesn't he know the Frank Underwood principle? That to control information is the power to create and shape reality, and when you abdicate that control, someone else usurps the storytelling power from you—to tell it about you.

This principle is one of the brilliant elements in House of Cards, for which the writer seems to have done his homework. Specifically, Daniel Boorstin's The Image: a Guide to Pseudo-Events in America and Jean Baudrillard's writing on Hyperreality permeate the fabric of the show's concerns. The power to control information is far more important than simply "making news."  

In HoC Chapter 2, we see Congressman and Majority Whip Frank Underwood use the advances of the young, hip, and hungry journalist Zoe Barnes to his own reality-shaping designs. He understands that creating/manufacturing news is more powerful than merely, passively, "being" the news. This sort of information warfare has been the cornerstone of the American political scene since the 1960 Presidential debate—the basis of Boorstin's meditation on image.

In HoC Chapter 6, this image is creatively executed when Frank Underwood goes to the CNN studios to debate with the head of the teacher's union. The set tells the story: A table and chairs are draped and dominated by the very icon of image manufacturing—the green screen. When we cut to the televised event, we see the sophisticated and somewhat chaotic horror vacui of the CNN backdrop bleeding information ... but it's all an illusion ... just as illusory as the manufactured issue that Frank Underwood is debating for his own designs of power—and he's not about to abdicate that control. 

So ... When is a drink of water not just a drink of water? When it's not calculated to look like a drink of water. Welcome to the age of hyperreality.

The times are certainly out of joint ...

the physicality of books (and cinema) part 1

There's perhaps no more everyday physical struggle tedium that the 21st century Westerner has to go through than the house move. All of ones wealth and possessions moving from one physical location to the next. Having just finished post-grad wok i had somewhere in the vicinity of 30 boxes of books. Not 30 boxes of paperbacks, but 30 boxes (50 lbs or more each) of dense reads.

Several people cheekily suggested that all of these books would easily fit on a Kindle. It would be the same thing only lighter.

My first thought was of the great Star Trek episode when Cpt. Kirk was on trial and was defended by the eccentric Samuel T. Cogley:

                           

 

My second thought was, "Really? Is it really the SAME thing?"

Now, although passionate (as one would expect from an eccentric Romantic), Cogley doesn't give the most clear defense of why physical books matter, but he does gives clues:

This is where the law is. Not in that homogenized, pasteurized, synthesized...

Homogenization is the process of making a mixture the same throughout at high pressure. Think the mixture of syrup and carbonated water to make soda. It's the process of making things the same.

Pasteurization, of corse, is the super heating then cooling of food to keep it from spoiling quickly. Yes, computers keep books from decay (though this itself is an illusion). But we also now acknowledge that there is something lost in pasteurization. Beneficialy enzymes and microbes. Raw milk and pasteurized milk are not the same thing.

This leads to the other clue, Cogley's concern that it is also synthesized ... synthetic. It is a new compound and different from the 'original'.

But then Cogley goes on what seem to be a non sequitur:

Do you want to know the law? The ancient concepts in their own language? Learn the intent of the men who wrote them? From Moses to the tribunal on Alpha III? Books.

This begs the questions: Why wouldn't you be able to do this with a computer? What does this have to do with the medium in which the artifact is presented? The key seems to be in a relationship between imaginative mediation of the artifact and use. Or more specifically, the way in which mediation has an affect on physical use as it makes the artifact known to us.

It's like the difference between a hot succulent fillet mignon and a freeze dried, or even space food steak. There is something ceremonial about the aesthetic details and the sheer physicality of the fillet that demands a different form of attention from our bodies. The space food is a tool in service of time that could just as well be a flavored pill. it presences the molecules in a reductionistict format so it can be more efficiently consumed. In fact, this is what Cogley says (although he is directly refering to the pressing matter of Kirk's court-martial, we can still apply the point):

If time wasn't so important I'd show you something. My library! Thousands of them.

In many ways this approximation of physicality reminds me of David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986). On the verge of unlocking the secrets of teleportation, Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) runs a final experiment:

Seth Brundle: [Seth and Ronnie try an experiment late at night. Seth takes a steak and cuts it in half. He cooks one half, and the other half is teleported then cooked. He hands one plate to Ronnie and cuts her a piece] Okay. Eat this, and I need an objective opinion.
Seth Brundle: [Ronnie chews it and looks at Seth confused as to what he is doing] Yeah?
Ronnie: Well, it could use some finesse, but um... it tastes like a steak.
Seth Brundle: Mmm-hmm.
[Cuts some steak]
Seth Brundle: Now, I want you to try this... teleported half.
Ronnie: Oh, are you serious? A monkey just came apart in there.
Seth Brundle: Baboon... Eat.
Ronnie: [Ronnie eats it] Oh... Oh, oh, tastes funny.
[Spits it in a napkin]
Seth Brundle: Funny? How?
Ronnie: It tastes um... synthetic.
Seth Brundle: [Seth smiles and takes the napkin] Mmm-hmm.
Ronnie: [smiles with intrigue] So, what have we proved?
Seth Brundle: The computer is giving us its interpretation... of a steak. It's, uh translating it for us; it's rethinking it, rather than *reproducing* it, and something is getting lost in the translation.
Ronnie: Me... I'm lost.
Seth Brundle: The flesh. It should make the computer, uh crazy. Like those old ladies pinching babies. But it doesn't; not yet because I haven't taught the computer to be made crazy by the...
[smiles at Ronnie]
Seth Brundle: flesh. The poetry of the steak. So, I'm gonna start teaching it now.

Of course, one of the dreams of technology is in unlocking the "poetry" of physicality. In our own time think of the endless quest for artificial intelligence and the fascination with Human +. But the cost seems to be that we are required to give up, or limit, the depths of what makes us human in order to reach that goal. Technology demands this abdication. Tools are not benign, they change us.

Returning to Samuel T. Cogley, then, we can say that there is a physicality to reading that goes far beyond the inputting of data into a machine. The ancient Christian monks used to read out-loud because they would hear with their eyes and read with their ears. Every person of substance that I know vociferously marks and makes annotations on any text they read.This only further  enhances the physical interaction and hermeneutical interaction of the reader and writer of the text. These books aren't just oversized data disks, they are worlds that demand exploration; they are angels that bid us to wrestle with through the night. And maybe this is what Samuel T. Cogley was trying to say?

This, of course, posses particularly interesting possibilities and problems when we consider (the physicality of) cinema and the 'virtual' in the 21st century ...

The HDR Chapel

The aesthetics of gaming, virtual reality, and second life are beginning to have their way with reality. My particular concern is with cinematic 'representations' of everyday life at the moment. One very popular photographic technique called HDR (High-Dynamic-Range imagining) attempts to plasticize and pixelize reality in an attempt to make it conform to their own hyperreal fetish.

The problems with this technique, and the sensibility in general, are never more apparent as with this HDR short film (which is no doubt a mile stone in HDR cinema). The Chapel is a very queer film in that whilst its desire is to reveal the glories of the digital colonization of this abandoned church (Zeliszów, Poland, designed by Karl Langhans and built in 1796-1797) the ancient aesthetics of light refuse to go quietly into the night. Glimpses of 'the real' are felt in the play of dust in shafts of light and the texture of banal surfaces coming to life only to be dominated once more by digital sequencing.

Watch closely, the Light may be calling you too ...

 

Harvard Researchers Monitor Violence in Sudan | The Harvard Crimson

A team of researchers from Harvard University is collaborating with Google and a humanitarian group led by George Clooney to implement a monitoring system that will watch for violence in southern Sudan.

The Satellite Sentinel Project—a joint effort by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, the Enough Project, the U.N.’s Operational Satellite Applications Programme, Google, and Trellon—will analyze satellite images of areas of southern Sudan in the hopes of preventing human rights violations, such as potential genocide attacks, before they escalate.

“This early warning system has a profound implication for monitoring and responding to emerging crisis,” said Jonathan J. Hutson, director of communications for the Enough Project.

via www.thecrimson.com

I'm really suspicious of the idea of surveillance stopping genocide. Not only is the suggestion the apex of neo-Liberal Orwellianism, but my greatest fear is the emergence of something akin to genocide porn.

Our modern scopophilic obsession with seeing is believing is reaching critical mass. Jean Baudrillard called this obsession with 'fidelity' the pornography of the real. The problem, however, is that our obsession is backfiring. The only way to gain fidelity (e.g. to really hear, see, etc.) is to increase the artificial reproduction of 'the real', which moves us further and further away from reality: hyperreality.

George Clooney, one of the founders of Enough! believes that if the perpetrators of genocide know that "the whole world is watching" then genocide may be averted. Is that really the case? If we had cameras inside Auschwitz would the ovens have turned off, as Mr. Clooney suggests? Does he not remember Theresienstdat? Hasn't a 'seeing world' created a far more apathetic world when we are confronted with real violence. 
When we saw emaciated prisoners of war on the cover of Time magazine during the Yugoslav civil war, a picture no doubt manufactured to invoke WW2, did the world jump? No.

For a civilization so dominated by images and moving images we really are ignorant to what they do to us.

With that said, the world has failed the Christians of Southern Sudan. Not even Mr. Obama has done anything different than George W. The U. N. is impotent to stop mass rapes and slaughter. Africa is still behind every other continent on the planet when it comes to benefiting from the Industrial Revolution. (see this video by Hans Rosling and BBC) In many places in Africa even clean drinking water is a luxury.

Enough is enough already. If governments fail, then let the voice of the people be heard!

The Christmas movie: Die Hard (1988) part 3

John McClane is about to crawl and fight his way through the bowels of a strange new world to save his family's Christmas from late-modern hypercapitalism. But with every move he makes the structures of power, both internal and external, are standing in his way.

culture, history, and graphs

a not so precise look at the problem, as i see it, via google's nifty Ngram viewer. Anyone who has read The Virgin and the Dynamo by Henry Adams shouldn't be surprised by the following trends:

 

 

hidden in the vine, however, is a mode of resistance to the folly of an age of mechanical reproducibility, electronic media, and hyperreality: the virtuous imagination.

The Christmas movie: Die Hard (1988) part 2

John McClane is a stranger in a strange land. He has traveled into a new reality, the reality of late-capitalist globalism, in an attempt to rescue his family (and Christmas) from a culture of greed and excess. Mr. Takagi has just informed the guests that, "this has been one of the greatest years in the history of the Nakatomi Corporation". Bach's highly symbolic Baroque masterpiece, the Brandenburg Concierto No. III, plays from the balcony. It is Christmas eve, but just barely. Even the Christmas trees (in the downstairs lobby and at the 30th floor) seem to stand as an awkward reminder of this world's worship of form over substance, the immediate over the lasting, the material over the metaphysical.

The use of these trees in architectural space (either intended or implicit by virtue of the unique 'language' of the space) represents a hermenutical key that I don't think has been applied to Die Hard.

The Architecture of the Non-Place:

From Parking garage to lobby, to executive lobby, to executive offices and the Japanese decor of Mr. Takagi's board room, to stairwells, to computer center, to the unfinished 32 floor, to elevator shaft, air shaft, and the roof, Die Hard is a film about the 'Non-Places' of supermodernity. While the architecture of Nakatomi Plaza is about as aesthetically pleasing as a tape deck, Jan de Bont's slow and disciplined camera movement helps us understand the logic of its varying spaces. Not trained by MTV or commercial television, de Bont resists short shots that must be layered in the editing room to create tension (although when done well it can allow us to experience subjectively). This technique allows these late-modern architectural spaces to impose their meaning upon scenes.

So, for example, in the two Christmas tree scenes (above) we see how the void of the lobby is a space for John to simply pass through. Whatever mean John, and the tree, bring to that space is swallowed up, truncated, and forced through the space. This is evident when John attempts to whistle Jingle Bells as he walks to the elevator --rather than jolly, the sound is empty. The sense is ominous and even 'brutal'.

In a different way, the executive lobby accomplishes the same goal. The executive lobby is designed to make people feel as though they are basking under the cultured and opulent rays of Mr. Takagi's leadership. Natural stone, the peaceful sound of the waterfall trickling, green plants and resplendent views. The 30th floor is a hyperreal non-space. It is an approximation of goodness and joy (which is locked away in Mr. Takagi's vault). And similar to the Christmas tree in the lobby, between the drunken revelry and the Baroque harmonies of Bach the Christmas tree might as well be a stuffed bear. These readings, however subconscious, factor into every varied space throughout the film.

This importance on scale and architecture is never more evident than in the model room scene where Mr. Takagi keeps scaled representations of Nakatomi Corporation's varied exploits and projects around the world. "And when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer", Hans Gruber recites upon seeing Nakatomi Plaza. 

The non-place architecture of Nakatomi Plaza is a trompe l'oeil world of beauty, culture, technology, and varying degrees of moral degradations. It is the budding lifeworld of globalism, a space that is neither American nor Japanese, but hyper-capitalist.

"You throw quite a party," says John McClane when first meeting Mr. Takagi. "I didn't realize they celebrated Christmas in Japan," he snidely adds. "Hey, we're flexible. Pearl Harbor didn't work out so we got you tape decks," replies Mr. Takagi, head executive of Nakatomi Corporation in America. At this point the reader should be reminded that after the most catastrophic event in human history, World War 2, the war machine of Japan, Germany and America were transformed into a different kind of weapon ... the market machine. Honda, Mitsubishi, Sony, Toyota, Volkswagen for the masses, Mercedes and BMW for the Yuppies, and suburban dreams (with all the fixins) for the middle class; in the ashes of World War 2 a new world of mass reproduced commodity and international capital was born. Canned goods, sliced white bread, industrialized slaughter houses, chicken prison camps. Our inheritance was rich and cheap, but its underbelly dark and orc-like.

It should be of no surprise then that yet another element is added to John McClane's Christmas eve: the German financial terrorist Hans Gruber.

Ode To Joy:

 And so we come to the most (in)famous cinematic device in Die Hard: Michael Kamen's use of Beethoven's 9th symphony Ode to Joy theme. In 1988, I'm sure the music was heard with a strong sense of irony and humor, but 25 years later its use as a leitmotif for the struggle for the true meaning of Christmas (not for the terrorists themselves) is unmistakable. Hear the cello's calling out from behind the vault with Beethoven's classic melody when Hans Gruber sees it for the first time. The shot is long and either overly dramatic or another moment where a character finds themselves on a threshold.

Let me say this: I like Hans Gruber and I think we are asked to also. His refinement is a far cry from the coke snorting, cowardly, yuppie, Ellis.  But Hans Gruber's refinement and culture is misdirected. "Ladies and gentlemen. Due to the Nakatomi Corporation's legacy of greed around the globe, they are about to be taught a lesson in the real use of power," states Has Gruber. The joy he seeks is as evanescent as Mr. Takagi and Nakatomi Corporation's --material fulfilment and late-capitalist greed which is calcified, commodified, represented (as a macguffin) in the $620 million fiat dollars in bearer bonds (I mean, what is that anyways?).

I see now that Hans Gruber is the Fascist impulses the free world attempted to vanquish in the twentieth century, now transformed into wall street greed using the power of the state to protect themselves. Quite simply, Hans Gruber is a raider ... a hyper-capitalist junk-bond raider!

In Part 3 we will examine the battle for the soul and joy of Christmas and the varied responses in John McClane/Roy Rogers, Sgt. Powell, Dept. Chief of Police Robinson, and the Agents 'Smith' to hyper-capitalist Christmas materialism/consumerism.

 

read Part 3

 

 

 

The Christmas movie: Die Hard (1988) part 1

This post might as well be filed under whimsy, but I'm including it in my Christmas movie list because I just can't shake it, and I don't know why. I invite you to find out with me ...

Die Hard (1988) might very well be the finest American action film of the last 25 years. If not the best, then, in a post Sly Stallone/Arnie action gorgy, it certainly set the mark for what a successful modern action-film looks like. Its formula was certainly repeated often in movies such as Speed, Passenger 57, Under Seige, The Rock, Airforce One ...

However, part of Die Hard's genius was to not just set the action film in the milieu of Christmas in late-capitalist America, but making late-capitalist America its subject matter. The result is an  insightful morality play. Sure, it is a high octane and perhaps unintededly deep morality play (although Producer Joel Silver has a long track record of trying to make action films with a 'message'), but it is a morality play nonetheless.

It is important to remember that the cinematic action-image is the quintessential expression of an American optimism and belief in a world that can be changed for the better. Gilles Deleuze describes the action-image as a film that presents a milieu or a Situation, a course of Action is taken and applied, which results in a new Situation: SAS'

This SAS' form is repeated over and over through a series of 'organic' editorial cuts, that create the representation (illusion) of time via movement through space,  until a resolution to the narrative is achieved. The principles of this form were established by D. W. Griffith in the first decade of the last century and probably achieved its highest artistry in the films of John Ford, Frank Capra, Elia Kazan, and Nicholas Ray. One might even say that its artistic heritage and potential is preserved today in the Pixar animated features.

The Hero and the Quest:

Los Angeles, California 1988. Detective John McClane is a man who gets his strength from having two feet firmly planted on the ground. He's an existentially grounded hero. In may ways he is the anti-anti-hero attempting to take back virtuous ground lost in the previous 20 years of cinema. He's the kind of man who sits in the front seat of a limo and is more comfortable in the battle for the streets of NY than in a high rise Christmas party. John McClane wants his family back and is about to travel into the heart of an emerging globalism to get it back.

Our introduction to John McClane's character is a close-up of his hand clenching an arm rest as his flight from NY lands in LA. We learn a lot in this opening sequence. John McClane doesn't like air travel, he is a man of violent action (signified by his gun), he is a man desired (the extra long gaze given by the stewardess), and he is a family man (signified by the awkwardly oversized teddy bear). John McClane belongs in a John Ford film; he is a man out of time and place; he is a time traveler (a cowboy, if you will) in late twentieth century America ... the center of the free world in the waining days of the Cold War.

Next to John McClane is a business man who has embraced the perils of late twentieth century space time displacement. NY to LA in 4 hours. This transition, time travel from the 'now' (John's simple cowboy nature) to the 'future' of America (Nakatomi Plaza), is signified in John's repeated phrase, "California!"

The advice on re-grounding yourself. Take your shoes and socks of and make fists with your toes in the carpet.

This advice will no doubt prepare our hero for his quest through the architecture of the late-capitalist West (signified in the Nakatomi Plaza). Like the Greek myth of Antaeus, John McClane gets his strength from re-grounding, but this need/act will also reveal the tender vulnerability of such simple virtue in this ever complicating globalized milieu. But now we are ahead of ourselves ...

Back to the Christmas movie. A balmy 70 degrees in LA; this is no 'traditional' Christmas. This is the same hyperreal setting that inspired Irving Berlin's White Christmas ... "there's never been such a day, in Beverly Hills, LA." Rather than the sentimental swoon of Bing Crosby, however, Argyle (the Limo driver) pops in the Run DMC.

"Don't you have any Christmas music?", asks John. "Man, this is Christmas music!", Argyle proudly exclaims.

Jan de Bont's cinematography is key. His at times chaotic, and other times cold and sanitized, lighting schemes are balanced with fluid camera movements that seem reserved compared to Michael Bay or Tony Scott. Thislong take logic allows us to make sense of space. The architecture of Nakatomi is a landscape that shapes the action (as architecture should) rather than treating it as a 'set', or representation, to be passed through or demolished.

It is, however, the transition from dusk in act one to various grades of artificial lighting in act two that communicates much.

 

It is quite clear that the sun is setting on the old order of things. The sun is setting on the nuclear family. John's wife Holly, who took a high paying job at the international Nakatomi corporation, now goes by her maiden name of Gennaro. The sun is setting on the working class American dream. This is certainly seen, in various forms, in Mr. Takagi, Hans Gruber, and the yuppie Me-generation scum, Harry Ellis. And certainly the sun is setting on the simple Christmas values of faith, hope, and charity. As we can now testify in retrospect, this new age of globalism, a technological battle ground for the wealth of the world, will displace theses virtues in favor of consumption and hyper-ponzi-financing. The new global age is a global Potterville. (We might even say that, thematically, Die Hard owes much to It's A Wonderful Life)

And so, after an inordinately long (25 seconds!) close-up of John looking into the setting sun (he has traveled so far West he has now entered into a new pattern of signification ... a new reality), John McClane enters this new global lifeworld. After passing various levels of mechanized security measures the elevator opens and the game is afoot ...

In Part 2 we will see that the Nakatomi Plaza is a hyperreal space filled with beauty, culture, technology and varying degrees of moral degredation. This trompe l'oeil world will soon crumble in a battle over wealth, order, and Christmas 'Joy' in a new age. 

 

read Part 2

The coming wave of augmented reality

Forrester Research this week predicted an impending boom in the field of "augmented reality." Soon, we won't even need to put that term in quotation marks. It will be an everyday expression. Augmented reality is mostly commonly used to mean the overlaying of digital images onto a real scene. So you'll point your smart phone's camera at your car and you'll see repair manuals, operator instructions, auto part stores that can help. It's reality but with more to it. Reality plus.

via marketplace.publicradio.org

There is a market and entertainment induced transformation of what it means to be a human being taking place daily in the 21st century. Its appearance is banal. GPS: "In 200 yards, Turn right." Google map on your iPhone. Even the ability to pause live television, and soon, the ability to edit live images. It is Reality plus --the step in the Human plus evolution.

I for one will make step to resist at every turn. You may call me a Luddite, but you're wrong. I'm just a human being who would prefer to mediate reality with my corporeal imagination rather than have it mediated for me.

Truth to Power in a Hyperreal Age

If you speak Truth to Power and no news outlet covers it ... was it said at all? Unfortunately, no. Welcome to the hyperreal age. Here, in the halls of power, Ron Paul delivers a body blow to the U. S. government's response to WikiLeaks, but because it won't be covered by 'established journalists' it won't enter into the public debate. This is speaking Truth to Power in the Matrix, dear reader.

                             

(h/t Iain Munro)