I have a side project, My Country of Illusion, which has been ongoing for about ten years with my music and artistic collaborator, Barnmaster Scud. Last summer T.Foley from the Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Fe, NM invited us to be guest artists for the day. Her students made this fun little video for the track, “Dreaming America,” from our album, American Dream Life.
Archive for November, 2007
If I weren’t busy being born, there were two places I wish I had been in 1966: London’s UFO club watching Pink Floyd or at Warhol’s Factory watching the Velvet Underground. I digress from the normal thread here, but if you have 16 minutes, you may enjoy this little trip to I wish we were there from Peter Whitehead’s 1967 documentary of the London scene, Tonight Let’s All Make Love In London, featuring Pink Floyd. Makes you want to time travel to the ’60s all over again.
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Image by Antonio Lopez
I admit that I have a love/hate relationship with the Adrants. Their MO is to out-snark the snarkiest of marketers, but the unsettling thing is that Adrants is usually right. Below is a delightful little rant that buttresses my theory that marketing is so out of control that is ceases to be effective. This doesn’t mean I don’t think advertising’s overall impact on the human psyche is negative, but I also don’t believe the sky is falling. Alarmists ignore the important component that the individual still has control over the relationship with that which enters and exits the brain, 3,500 ads a day be damned.
Consumers Still Bombarded With Advertising, Ad Model Still Broken » Adrants:
Start Slide Show with PicLens LiteWith media fragmentation comes advertiser’s use of that fragmentation in the increasingly difficult war waged to win the valuable consumer eyeball. This fragmentation has given way to more unique forms of advertising that fall into the guerrilla marketing space but even these efforts are getting tired. Once novel, tactics such as forehead advertising, invertising, advergaming, dogvertising, adverblogging, blogvertising, bloodvertising and bravertising are now old hat. Other methods such as school bus, in-school and police car advertising are considered only out of financial desperation. Layer on top of that more recent whacked social media efforts like PayPerPost and clearly, the model is hurting.
Here’s a fun activity that doesn’t involve drugs or video games.
Absolute Vodka is running a campaign about what a more perfect world might be like. In this version Times Square is filled with paintings instead of ads. It’s easy to pick on Absolute because the subtext of most alcohol ads is that in a perfect world you are an alcoholic and no one will judge you for it (alcoholics, though a minority of the population, buy the most alcohol, so they are the primary demographic). This ad illustrates this principle perfectly because it is the bottle of Absolute that delivers us to this Utopic place. (Bag News Notes has more links to the other versions of the campaign)
More interesting to me is how the misperception that art and advertising inhabit different worlds is represented in the ad. It’s true that they are products of different micro systems of production, but art and advertising are similar in that they simultaneously promote particular worldviews. They are both the “propaganda” of their times. When Benjamin argued that mass media art lacked an “aura,” he saw potential for good and bad, the good being that aesthetics would be available to a wider audience, bad because of the potential for aesthetics to be in the service of war, as was the case with the Nazis. In any case, art historically is part of system of production and economics, and if not, it is in dialog with those forces. The Absolute ad appeals to a false sense of idealism that we would be better served by art than ads. I would like to agree with this sentiment, but after spending considerable time in the Vatican Museums, my sense is that in the old system of patronage, art served the vision of the Church, which to my cynical mind is a kind of business, too. Anything that involves the public is going to take money, and those who control the purse strings often will have the say as to what does and doesn’t get seen. In non-European systems, the situation is much different. If there is no word for art, for example, there is no concept of it in the sense that we think of art being separate from daily activity. Where did we make a wrong turn?
Not to generalize, but I think there are some examples of art that transcend economics. The few that come to mind are graffiti and street art, but even in those cases they can be a kind of advertising and branding, albeit for a different audience.
I’m not trying to be a downer here, but trying to elucidate some of our contradictory beliefs concerning the difference between advertising and art. There is one huge distinction, though, and that is the intention behind the creation. If we want to get to the crux of the issue, I’d start there.
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It’s that season again– the two-year propaganda itch we call the election cycle. So if you want evidence of the extent by which the media electoral process eats its young, look no further then Tom Tancredo’s latest salvo against faceless aliens roaming around just waiting to kill their weakened prey.
As the Buddha said, hatred cannot cease by hatred.
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The Buddhist magazine Tricycle has a daily dharma post you can subsribe to. In this one, Jack Kornfield discusses near enemies. I find this a very useful concept for thinking about media, because they deliver nerve stimulation that we often mistake for pleasure. Yes, it’s fun to be entertained– I do it all the time. But we also must be mindful of the fact that what ever enters our brains stays there.
The Daily Dharma
November 19, 2007
Near Enemies
The near enemies are qualities that arise in the mind and masquerade
as genuine spiritual realization, when in fact they are only an
imitation, serving to separate us from true feeling rather than
connecting us to it . . .The near enemy of loving-kindness is attachment…. At first, attachment
may feel like love, but as it grows it becomes more clearly the
opposite, characterized by clinging, controlling and fear.The near enemy of compassion is pity, and this also separates us. Pity
feels sorry for “that poor person over here,” as if he were somehow
different from us . . .The near enemy of sympathetic joy (the joy in the happiness of others)
is comparison, which looks to see if we have more of, the same as, or
less than another . . .The near enemy of equanimity is indifference. True equanimity is
balance in the midst of experience, whereas indifference is withdrawal
and not caring, based on fear….If we do not recognize and understand the near enemies, they will
deaden our spiritual practice. The compartments they make cannot
shield us for long from the pain and unpredictability of life, but
they will surely stifle the joy and open connectedness of true
relationships.–Jack Kornfield, in A Path with Heart
from Everyday Mind, edited by Jean Smith
I stumbled on this nice little interview snippet with William S. Burroughs talking about Carlos Castaneda. Meanwhile, it reminded me of the Burroughs’ piece, Thanksgiving Prayer, which is posted above. Gobble Gobble.
BURROUGHS: …You’ve read Castaneda’s Don Juan books. Don Juan says that nothing can be accomplished magically. Stopping the internal dialogue, in effect, enables you to have access to your will. Stopping the internal dialogue enables you to will without desiring. Don Juan says that you can’t advance until you achieve that. see, If you want money without desiring it, you get it, but if you desire it and are thinking, ‘I’m going to do this, that and the other with it,’ that desire becomes a hindrance.
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A beautiful discourse on the intersection between mythology and brands. I’d hate to pollute this wonderful discourse with my own words. Please read the whole thing, it’s well worth your time.
The Holy Breath of Inspiration (Triple Pundit):
Start Slide Show with PicLens LiteThe Nike swoosh is a great example of a brand that holds a key to one of these core mythological human needs. The swoosh is air. It is ethereal and quickly able to “Just Do It.” It moves effortlessly and with great power. The Nike corporation defines itself as being in service to human potential. According to Nike, “If you have a body, you are an athlete.” Basically, the story of the swoosh proclaims a universal truth: if you are breathing, you are alive, and you are wrought with physical potential through the breath, the element of air.
According to David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous, our verbiage is formed by sounds in nature. Therefore, it is not uncommon to notice that certain words, like swoosh, replicate the sounds of what they represent. Swoosh is definitely a wind word. Abram also notes that the holy word for the un-nameable divine essence, Yahweh, actually represents the breath by inhale (yah) and exhale (weh). If one takes a deep breath with lips slightly parted, the subtle sound of yah-weh can be heard. So, the essence of living consciousness, breath, is the only sound-name to approximate the divinity of what cannot be described: the mystery of life.
As you probably heard, Bill O’Reilly is jumping the gun this year to wage his counter-offensive in the so-called War on Christmas. Couldn’t he at least wait until after Thanksgiving? Enter the anti-Bill, Rev. Billy, the Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir crusader. Just in time for war, a new documentary about the Rev and his Christmas crusade, What Would Jesus Buy?, is about to make the battle really interesting. Who will win? Can xmas survive a corporate exorcism? You be the judge.
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Sometimes you have to thank the media gods for providing free resources to deconstruct their world. So welcome to Super Bowl Monday Planet: Firebrand, a ridiculously conceived Website that can be likened to a content-free television network, i.e. all ads, now shows. But if you are like me and are infinitely curious and attracted to ads like we are to a car wreck on the freeway, then Firebrand is pure unadulterated consumeristic voyeurism. Forget the strange premise that people will watch ads for entertainment value. We have a free media literacy download site!
You can download any commercials onto your computer and use them for teaching about media. Firebrand supports a number of formats, including iPod, iPhone, Windows Media and Quicktime.
OK media lit folks. Have at it!
From the Website:
OUR MANIFESTO
We love commercials. We submit, with rare exception, that they?re the best stuff on TV. In under a minute you get the best directors, the sickest special effects, the funniest writers?what?s not to love?
We love commercials. 1984. Mean Joe Green. Whasssup? You know you love them, too. So let?s gather ?round the best of them. Sort them. Judge them. Share them. Love them.
We love commercials. The eye candy. The laugh out louds. The did-you-just-see-thats. The most loved, the most emailed, the ones we still talk about today. Let every day be Super Bowl Monday.
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Is the video Web becoming technological glossolalia? It seems like most new ventures these days are speaking in tongues. Hulu, Bebo, Vuguru, Miro– you’d think the Internet was becoming a tiki bar drink menu. I don’t have a point in particular, but I’m just curious about the spate of nonsense words being used for viral video startups.
Pride in substance abuse that goes along with being a persecuted minority?
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I haven’t followed the WGA strike as closely as I like, but this video, which is causing a small stir, says it all. The media companies want to squeeze every penny from as many eyeballs as possible, yet little, if any, will be returned to the brains behind the content. It’s an old story and one of the reasons I quit the journalism biz. The contracts were becoming far too one-sided and nefarious. The truth is, media companies in general view the writers as contract workers who have no ownership or right to the product that is the source for the company’s profit. The industry is basically a glorified factory business that manufactures fantassy. For this I am so happy the writers have some spine.
For snarky (and entertaining) updates on the strike situation, go here.
Air Force Academy chapel, Colorado Springs, CO
Cylon Resurrection Ship, somewhere in outer space
In case you haven’t seen Sci-Fi network’s Battlestar Galactica (I highly recommend that you do), the premise of the story is that a race of robots created by humans decides to destroy their creators. The cyborgs, called Cylons, have developed a theistic construct of the universe, believing in a single God (the humans are polytheists who warship something akin to the the Greek pantheon). It’s one of the more interesting twists in the series plot lines. The Cylons eventually believe they are doing “God’s” work, so instead of simply destroying the fleshy heathens they decide to invade and occupy a human colony in order to convert them to their cybernetic lord (sound familiar?). In the process of the occupation the Cylons torture, detain and kill the humans without a hint of irony (again, sound familiar?). The hint that perhaps the Cylons are stand-ins for fundamentalists comes with their ability to “resurrect” their consciousness into cloned bodies whenever one of their advanced humanoid models is killed. The “resurrection ship” (pictured above) contains fresh cyborgs that can be downloaded with the consciousness of terminated or killed Cylons.
The religious pursuits of the Cylons obviously have their real world analog, and is a sophisticated commentary on the nature of fundamentalist religion. In it I find echoes of my own sense that monotheism is a bit like a dangerous thought virus that has no logical basis in reality, yet has a way of repeating and transferring itself from one generation to another. Thus I was intrigued to discover the similarities of the Air Force Academy chapel (the first image) with the resurrection ship. Since we know Cylons are not modernists (as the chapel was made in the 1960s and is clearly inspired by modernist architecture), it’s probably a clue that Battlestar Galactica’s writers do in fact view the Cylons as a type of fundamentalist culture which is militaristic, dogmatic and homogeneous. After all, one of the key reasons the Cylons initially attack the human race is that they are viewed as sinful and impure. All these elements happen to be aspects of what is transpiring at the Air Force Academy– and the US military in general– which has become a fierce fundamentalist conversion center, thereby combining high tech with militancy and intense faith. Things get a little loopy, however, when it turns out that it’s tied to the ministry of Ted Haggard (you know, the preacher guy who apparently loved speed and hard (male) bodies).
According to David Antoon, who writes about the academy in a scary article about Christina fundamentalism in the US military:
The Christian supremacist fascism first reported at the Air Force Academy is endemic throughout the military. From the top down, there has been a complete repudiation of constitutional values and time-honored codes of ethics and honor codes in favor of religious ideology. And we now have a revolving door between Blackwater USA, which is Bush’s Praetorian Guard, and the U.S. military at every level. The citizen-soldier military dictated by our founding fathers has been replaced with professional and mercenary right-wing Christian crusaders in control of the world’s most powerful military. The risks to our democratic form of government cannot be overstated.
It’s expedient for the warmongering neocons to encourage fundamentalist militancy in the armed forces because it gives them a hardcore base to execute their goals for economic domination of Muslim controlled oil fields. But like the Cylons, the danger of cultivating such a class of “theo-cons” is that they ultimately may not be controllable and will put forward their own agenda of apocalypse and rapture, something Bush apparently believes in, although I find that to be an excuse at best, and a deadly ruse to hide more nefarious goals. The connection between the mercenary army, Blackwater, and Christian supremacy is an example of the kinds of bad things that happen when you let the tiger out of the cage. In the end, by deploying its private fundamentalist army in the heart of Iraq, the White House may have ultimately undermined its mission. It’s hard to put a smily face mask on extremists in the age of transparent global media. So we may be saved from a Cylon attack after all.
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A terrific interview with media scholar Belinda Barnet. It covers a lot of ground, from the impact of mobile phones on our attention, to the difficulty for universities to catch up to technology (they had 500 years to deal with books– now what?).
Start Slide Show with PicLens LiteSince the beginning of time, physicists tell us, the entropy of the universe has been increasing. Matter has a tendency to disintegrate, to lose energy and form over time, to move towards disorder and chaos. As I see it personally, life is about the preservation of form in this flux. One way it does this is through that most primary form of writing – DNA. On another level, we preserve things as a species in artefacts, in language and in culture; in technics. Human beings have always felt compelled to capture fragments of their lives, to store and transmit memories; we have inscribed ourselves in books and on cave walls, in folk songs and on New York subway benches. I think it is one of the most primary reflexes of human life – preserving memories. Technics as a form of memory is also something Stiegler explores in his book, Technics and Time. I think I should stop there, or I’ll rabbit on forever! If you want to read more about human evolution and technology, Niles Eldredge and other interesting bits, see my essay in CTHEORY.
The loss of identity is a Western problem. One argument concerning the multitude is that the growing immigrant and migratory class– including refugees– will have what it takes to survive the global mindfrak, since they are the ones adept at transitioning states of being. Only those attached to a “stable” reality are screwed. While it is true the multinational pop-media-military-fear complex is in the business of producing subjectivities, they are now highly dependent on the user for content. A cynic might argue that the “prosumer” is just a deeper step into the control of our time, because we “work” at all hours producing their content and by giving them our attention. I still feel strongly that deep inside even the most scared and mechanically destroyed consciousness is a sense of authenticity, truth, love, and all that we deem as “good.” The problem for corporations is that their hyper commercialism threatens to cancel their messages out. There is so much brand noise, there isn’t much to be distinguished anymore (except the subjectivity itself which is imploding under the weight of post-irony). I don’t agree with most media critics who believe that we are being brainwashed. That is only true if we continue to believe in the reality bubble of the West that assumes that we inhabit a false reality. Furthermore, we should not fear the media. If we do, they win. But “they” is suspicious. In the end, we are the media.
Out-slacking the slackers: right on!
What happens when this young man rules the world?
Stay Free! Daily:
Carrie McLaren from Stay Free! discusses in the above post the recent whining in the media about what crappy workers the next batch of post-grads have become. The so-called “millennials” are even out-slacking the slackers (that would be my generation: “X”– sorry folks, the name is taken). Like Carrie I’ve been irritated by a lot of the complainers who are attacking liberal media or parenting techniques by the so-called “helicopter” parents. Who are these dreaded parents destroying the world with all their love and affection? Last time I checked (and as a former teacher I can tell you that I checked a lot), most families I dealt with were completely broken: divorced, working ten jobs, alcoholic, impoverished, I could go on. This mythic creature of the suburban parent and the overly protective family is some kind of demographic fantasy, or… I may just live on the wrong planet. Both might be true.
I think Carrie nails a few points. One is that advertising does demonize authority, teachers and parents. If you don’t believe me, randomly select any Budweiser ad and tell me I’m wrong. The common concern of the articles she sites is that immigrants still have a strong work ethic and , boo-hoo, the white race will slack off and die. The problem for marketers and the businesses that depend on them is that their realities are imploding. The whole history of sucking the emotion out of workers is the source of “cool” and the current trend of the ironic disposition. No one is allowed to care anymore, because if you do, you might actually unionize (see my previous post on the writer’s strike). Besides, why should we care? Most corporations of yore (the kind that our parents and grandparents grew up working for) at least offered you job security for selling your soul to the company store. Not anymore. They want your undying attention and will farm your pension to some bankrupt Enron of the future so that every dime of your retirement ends up in the golden parachute of the next defrocked CEO of international finance. Geez, with so much hypocrisy looping around our economic system, it’s hard to find a reason why anyone should care about whether or not a 20 year old has enough focus to read a spreadsheet before switching to Tetras. Slack on!
Oh, and add to that the need for a volunteer military who cares enough and will willingly die for abstract concepts like freedom and democracy in the world’s shitholes that happen to be of interest because of their proximity to composted dinosaurs. LOL.
I’d like to add the following theory. Part of the reason our culture (the affluent one that is supposed to perform the knowledge work of our society) is imploding is because they are the last generation to play out the final act of the alphabetized, and hence right-brained, mind. Immigrants, many of whom come from countries that are not dominated by the history of print literacy, have spacial minds that contain broader realities, including the multidimensional, multilayered, pattern-like world that is emerging. Perhaps that is is why they will some day (soon) rule the world. I’m crying crocodile tears.
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