Media Permaculture
In my summer reading list I forgot to mention this awesome little book of selected quotes on nonviolence by Gandhi. But the best part is the opening introduction by Thomas Merton who deconstructs the Western mind to reveal our most significant operating system errors.
Even though I haven’t been online that much this summer, I have still been pretty mediated, albeit old school style with books. I thought I’d share during this brief blogging pause what I’ve been reading.
“The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization’s Rough Landscape” (Harm De Blij)
So far so good, The Power of Place uses geography to remap how we think about globalization. This is a myth buster.
“Spook Country” (William Gibson)
I didn’t like this one so much. Shallow characters and uninteresting plot, but Gibson has such an interesting mind that many of the book’s concepts and commentary save it.
“The Hidden Connections: A Science for Sustainable Living” (Fritjof Capra)
I wish I had read this before writing my book. What a powerhouse of ideas and inspiration for relating cell structure with how societies are constructed. Super scary stuff on GMOs as well.
“The Sustainability Revolution: Portrait of a Paradigm Shift” (Andres R. Edwards)
If you don’t know much about what sustainability is, you’re not alone. Most people who were polled in the US couldn’t define or recognize the term, “sustainability.” No matter, the book gets under the hood by providing a wealth of definitions from various ecological organizations and schools of thought.
This is the best pedagogical overview you will find that filters education through an ecological paradigm. Again, I wish I had read this before I wrote my book.
“Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations” (Clay Shirky)
Worth all the buzz. Shirky translates in simple language the emerging paradigm of social networks and activism.
As I blogged previously, I found this book to be a good breakdown of how economic control and imperialism is actually practiced. This was probably the most interesting summer read for me because at times it’s like a spy novel, but it’s all true.
And finally my book. I’ve been reading it here and there and still feel good about it.
Written by a former Economic Hit Man, John Perkins‘ The Secret History of the American Empire takes you on an inside journey of “corporatocracy” empire building. The book is fairly simplistic when it comes to history, but it confers with all the more academic sources I’ve read about the subject. What is great about the book is that makes the material accessible to a wider audience, especially concerning how important financial institutions (such as the World Bank and IMF) are for keeping the system in place. The book has a really good definition of empire, and also offers several alternative approaches to counteract what may seem like an inevitable process of control, but actually is highly dependent on our ignorance and complicity through consumer habits. If we are going to have an ethical approach to media production and analysis, we must acknowledge that the US government acts and engages in the world as an empire. To deny this fact is to distort the nature of how corporate media filters the world.
H/T to Scud for recommending the book.
The Pirate’s Dilemma is slightly maddening. The intention is valid: to steer people towards thinking about piracy in a new light. The “pirate’s dilemma” is whether to persecute and shut down piracy, or to recognize it as a kind of creative competition. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. The thrust of Mason’s argument can be summarized by the two models of music industry approaches to P2P file sharing: either go the route of Apple and create a cheap, viable option for consumers, or the RIAA route and sue its customers.
As a former DJ, Mason cuts and pastes his way through the book with anecdotes. At first I found the approach a little obnoxious– a kind of overly cheerful airline-style of magazine writing. As a former punk, I found the whole chapter on punk capitalism a little superficial, and lacking a discussion of a really important DIY capitalist operation, Dischord Records. The section “Tao of Pirates” was also missing an important discussion of historical pirate culture, i.e. the black beard types that are so debated so interestingly in Wilson’s Pirate Utopias. I think the word pirate is used too generally. Basically, anyone under 50 is a pirate these days, and I don’t thing that’s true. Finally, the remix section failed to credit Dada.
But as I read on, I warmed up to the book and found the discussion of guerrilla marketing and hip hop pretty good. There was some history and anecdotes that I wasn’t aware of, so I was pleasantly surprised here and there. Still, if you want a more in-depth analysis of the economic situation of open source, read Benkler’s Wealth of Networks.
Ultimately I think Mason’s intentions are good. I’m not sure celebrating the cooptation of underground culture by capitalism is something that is to be happy about, but I suppose as the pirates become more mainstream, maybe our society will be better for it, and that to me, is the ultimate Pirate’s Dilemma.
“True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society” (Farhad Manjoo)
I just finished True Enough, which challenges the conventional thinking that new media democratize information and will lead to greater vetting and truth. On the contrary, the author argues that new media encourage the retreat into reality tunnels. The greatest benefit of the book is a detailed analysis of the psychological factors that go into propaganda. It explains why “Swift Boating” works. Manjoo– a Salon.com columnist whose platform is the Web– makes an insightful and correct analysis, but I’m also wondering if there is also a nostalgia for solidity, to the days when there were less media, and diminished freedom of expression due to the top-down model of the one-to-many media structure of old. I think the warnings he makes about our tendency to regress into info tribes should be headed. Does he want to a return to the Jeffersonian ideal of educated elites, or a newspaper saturated public sphere? The solution, I think, is rather old, which is to rely on the Buddhist concept of mindfulness, which is to not hold onto some notion of mediated truth, but to surf it as an engaged, mindful observer.
For more insight follow the debate about the book’s conclusions between Manjoo and Steven Johnson, author of Emergence.
Not that Clark! Former counterterrorism czar, Richard Clark, has written a sci-fi thriller that apparently is loaded with grounded futurism. I listened to a fascinating interview with him on the Diane Rehm radio program. If you click below you can listen to the hour-long segment. I haven’t read Breakpoint yet, but it sounds like good airplane reading.
WAMU 88.5 FM American University Radio - The Diane Rehm Show for Tuesday January 23, 2007:
11:00Richard Clarke: “Breakpoint” (Putnam)
The counterterrorism czar to Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush presents his latest novel. It’s a tale of cyber-insecurity, the growing threat from China, and a not too distant future where advances in science and technology threaten what it means to be human.
Guests
From Publishers Weekly (via Amazon.com)
Veteran counterterrorism official Clarke, author of Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror and the novel The Scorpion’s Gate, proves once again that authenticity, insider information and top-secret access artfully applied trumps fancy writing with this cutting-edge, nail-biter techno-thriller set in 2012. Clarke’s intriguing plot centers on the development of Living Software, a massive computer program designed to travel throughout the Internet correcting computer errors and creating software without any help or oversight from human beings. Volunteers would be connected to this program in a project aimed at reverse engineering the human brain. Added to this fascinating mix is the Transhumanist movement, whose labs grow designer children with extra chromosomes. Mysterious entities who would deny this progress are blowing up government Internet connections, killing scientists and destroying the labs participating in this research. Savvy readers will ignore the evidence that points to the obvious suspect, but still be surprised at the identity of the perpetrator when all is revealed. (Jan.)
“Breakpoint” (Richard A. Clarke)
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It’s about time the pop culture produced a decent dystopic cult movie. Enter Children of Men, directed by Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron (Y tu mama tambien, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), a post-Baghdad, Road Warrior-type movie sans the cheesy trappings of antiseptic sci-fi. Add one part Black Hawk Down, two parts Blade Runner, one part Sarajevo, stir, and you get a gritty, politically conscious thriller capturing the ennui of our times. Just as Casino Royale eschews the usual Bond clichés for a more neo-realist, noire vision of realpolitik, Children of Men disposes the neon and shoulder pads for sour-reeking pollution, mob rule, torture-for-democracy, dust-covered video monitors, and the post-apocalyptic ambience of globalization on the brink of losing-it-badly. Not too far off really, and if you look closely, much of the background is a stand-in for daily reality that most immigrants and residents of third-world slums already grapple with.
The story celebrates life amidst so much death, but you can barely avoid mortality’s stench. The moving moments offer hope for the alternate reality creeping up on our horizon line. Coming from Mexico, I suspect that Cuaron has true instincts for the reality of future megalopolises, and a great suspicion of the cruel combination of fear, power and racism. Like all sci-fi, Children of Men is as much about the future as it is about the present.
For supplemental reading, I recommend a few pieces by people much smarter than me. I really enjoyed Sheerly Avni’s piece, “‘Children of Men’: Universal’s Orphaned Masterpiece,” which goes into how Universal is doing everything it can to bury this decidedly anti-Bush/Blair/Neo-Con movie. Also, at the Children of Men Web site, there is some really interesting commentary from chic philosopher, Slavoj Zizek. I quote it entirely here:
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Continue reading ‘Children of dystopia’
Be forewarned, a movie about magic employs the principle technique of enchantment: misdirection. Thus any film claiming to be about magic has as its subtext the fact of the film itself, which is a carefully constructed illusion, just as any Hollywood motion picture about spectacle is ultimately self-referential (such as Gladiator being a veiled commentary on the studio system). Curiously, this year there have been two films that deal with fabricating reality, locating their narrative in Victorian-era 19th Century: The Illusionist and The Prestige. Both situate themselves at the early stages of media spectacle, a time when phantasmagoria—the predecessor of modern film—was a popular form of pubic performance that utilized the proverbial smoke and mirrors. That there would be a cultural curiosity about this nascent period of magic, performance and spectacle is not coincidental. As we are facing ourselves in a fully engaged mirror of mediation, we are innately curious about the origins of our societal identity crises as we encounter our interdependent relationship with media.
Of the two films, The Prestige is particularly relevant. The foreground of The Prestige is a war between two rival professional magicians. The background is the enmity between two magicians of a different sort: Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, the inventors of our modern electrical system. The film’s subplot concerning the life and work of Tesla (played by the quintessential space cadet, David Bowie, no less) alludes to the ambivalence the society had with new technology at the advent of electricity. One of the most repressed figures of modern history, Tesla, we may recall, invented/discovered alternating-current (AC) electricity, which competed with direct-current (DC) electricity championed by Edison. As the cliché goes, history is written by its winners, and it’s no wonder that Edison, a brazen self-promoter and showman, engaged in a number of public spectacles and dirty tricks to discredit his nemesis, Tesla. Edison publicly electrocuted stray animals to shock people into believing in the dangers of AC (one scene in The Prestige alludes to such a public war). Not coincidentally, Edison was one of the earliest innovators and promoters of moving image technology, something that eluded Tesla who preferred to experiment privately with this radical, newly harnessed energy. But even Tesla was known to be a bit of a show-off. When his studio was in New York he was known to entertain celebrity visitors like Mark Twain’s entourage and dazzled them by conducting high voltage electricity through his body that produced an eerie aura, and used wireless florescent light tubes (one of his many inventions) that were powered as if by magic. Witnesses reported also seeing Tesla hold “balls of lightening.” Continue reading ‘The Prestige: an alternate time that is our own’
Few films are as gratifying as X-Men: The Last Stand. The effects are seamless, plot complex, emotions driven and social issues nuanced and prescient. The movie as dream is utterly captivating, and since most will focus on the entertaining aspect of the film, I just want to point out a few social aspects worth noting.
The mutants are humans merging with nature; as ciphers for us, they are hybrids. Typically in sci-fi, hybrids are part machine. In the case of X-Men, the characters are elemental or animalistic. In a sense they are the earth force re-balancing the human realm, which at first resists the mutants and insists on instituting a policy of “curing them” (made possible by a genetically engineered serum). Unlike typical sci-fi, the conflict is not mediated by technology, but rather by biology (and bio-science). As the struggle ensues between the mutant factions, the battle goes mano-a-mano, albeit the group that harnesses the perfect balance between the forces of nature and human prevails.
As an example of “sustainable media,” the X-Men strikes an equilibrium between cinema’s tendency to obliterate nature through the spectacle of destruction (both in the act of making the film and symbolically), and to bridge the natural world through its fusion of electricity (a biological force) and communication. It eliminates the false barrier we make between the environment and media, for in our world, media is the environment, yet it has a hybrid quality like the mutants. Though few are willing to admit it, we in the high-tech world are cyborgs, but in a good sense. Our fusion with technology is not into a false world, but into one of complexity and hybridity. There are dangers, of course, due to the unsustainable paradigm of our collective operating system. Yet we also have an opportunity to leverage interdependence. As operators, each one of us has the ability to input new data into the system as it self-organizes. As Buckminster Fuller once said, on Spaceship Earth there are no passengers, only pilots. Just as the new beings in Xavier’s Academy for Gifted Youngsters learn to harvest their abilities for the collective good, so too can we not reject our powers, but embrace them for the evolutionary challenges that await us.
Note: the title of this post is not only lifted from my beloved Devo, but also from a chapter in an excellent book on film and ecology:
“EcoMedia (Contemporary Cinema 1)” (Sean Cubitt)
“Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!” (Devo)
“Devo - The Complete Truth About De-Evolution” (Rhino / Wea)
Today there will be national demonstrations against revised efforts to “reform” immigration law that are expected to draw over a million folks. This is great news. In an effort to explain why this sleeping jaguar has awakened, some in the mainstream media have finally examined the debate from a Latino perspective. In particular CNN profiled the producers of A Day Without a Mexican
Visit the filmmaker’s site.
Only the Flaming Lips would have the audacity to cover Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” but they did, and you would be remise to not immediately download/purchase/rip/borrow their super awesome epic, At War With The Mystics
Meanwhile, I’m going to whine (me? never!) about one little annoying thing: iTunes has to stop making crappy rips of their files. They are the top music retailer in the world and their MP3s totally suck. This is the second album in a row that I purchased on iTunes that distorts on many frequencies. Another download service I use, emusic, has no such problems. Unfortunately they don’t distribute blockbusters, but they’re awesome for indie, jazz, folk, trip hop and weird music. Apple did credit me for the last bad album (I haven’t hit them up for the Lips yet), but the point is, invest some of that marketing money for making decent files meant to be listened to on something other than a stupid phone!
The Internet is all about tomorrow, but the way my schedule is, it’s all about yesterday. But like the pile of books growing in my flat like slime mold (if only they could pay rent!), it may take ten years to get through them, but when the time is right, they’ll get read. Which brings me to a few movies that without the assistance of Netflix, I would never have gotten to, even in ten years. As it stands, a week sitting in the pretty little unopened red envelopes seems like decades in Net time. Anyhow, this brings me to two documentaries that appropriately arrived within days of each other, and in a way are bookends to this all-important religion of mine, DIY (do-it-yourself).
Rize
In general, Punk: Attitude is a good primer, made by now prolific punkumentarian, Don Letts, also maker of the great video, The Clash: Westway to the World
I haven’t seen the Minutemen movie yet, We Jam Econo, but a friend from the old LA scene complained that it reflected how male dominated the punk music scene was. True, but it was vastly better than any other music movement of the time. I’m still waiting for the DVD of the Decline of Western Civilization (what the hell!), the movie on LA’s punk underground released in ‘81 that got me to shave my surfer boy hair. So it remains, the ’80s is yet to be adequately documented from the vantage of history, although Dogtown and Z Boys definitely does it for skate culture.
On to Rize. This is pop photographer David LaChapelle ’s ode to Krunk, the hip hop clown-inspired street dancing that is part theater, part kung fu, part subterranean Africa, the sum of which is most definitely LA. Krunk makes me happy. It’s the ghetto doppelganger of punk. It is DIY style, uplifting culture, an alternative to BS you see in what my rootsy MC friend Mike 360 calls “shit hop.” Krunk kids remind me so much of what punk felt like pre-Nirvana (not to dis on my boys). Of course the danger of turning the lens on any subculture is to immediately commodify it. To see it is to destroy it. I don’t know the state of Krunk in the wake of LaChapelle ’s film, but I hope it had the same impact on some alienated youth the same way that Decline had on me. Personally I found the documentary a sincere gesture, a moving tribute to a bunch of kids who remain, even today in 2006, an underclass in American because of their race.
Here is an ambiguous short review of an ambiguous movie. Rather than spoil the plot, which is fairly nuanced, I’d say that first of all, V is for Vendetta is better than the Matrix Trilogy, the first follow-up by the Wachowski Brothers. The film is not dominated by action sequences, and is philosophically more complex. As a dystopia, the film has the usual tropes of jack-booted thugs, fascists donning couture black and heroic individuals who save the world. What is novel about the movie is that it provides a handy tool set for deconstructing the psychology of power, fascism and terrorism. Located in the very near future, there is plenty of commentary about current events– as we should all know by now, the future is always about the present. The popularity of this film will be a test of the gestalt of our times. Its gray morality surrounding terrorism is a lot muddier than the year following 9/11 when Bush could say you are either “against us or for us” and people would just nod in blind approval.
For the record I’m opposed to all forms of violence, including terrorism and war, so I don’t casually recommend this film, but its nuanced treatment of the matter lends complexity to politics and violence, which John Kerry failed to communicate effectively in the last election. For these reasons I think it will be a positive addition to the pop discourse of our era.
The film’s tag line, on the other hand- “People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people”- is tricky. Like other catchy feel good slogans, such as “Fight the Power,” it sounds better for an ad campaign than as a unifying battle cry. (Hey, wait, it is a an ad slogan- for the film!) The trouble with the phrase is that it promotes fear- that somehow inducing fear is a desired political strategy. That is the ultimate failure of terrorism (beyond its violence): that it doesn’t build community but splatters it. There is no worm hole to community organizing. Typical of media, this film promotes a short-cut to real social change.
Likewise The Matrix also lacked a social strategy. That some Jesus-like character, “The One” (Neo), would save the world is a very disempowering message. When will we wake up to the realization that we are the ones we have been waiting for? No more heroes! No more rock stars! (See, punk is not entirely dead!)
One final thought. The credits roll with the Stone’s “Street Fighting Man,” but it should have been the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the UK.” Come on, get with it!
Read Part I here.
Dadadelica remixes the sublime: the awesome strangeness of the impermanent hybridreal that causes the human ego to flitter when facing the greater chaosmoses. Jim O’Roarke’s “Door 2005″ video installation does just that. On the peripheral walls are shuttering doors in stereo, presumably alluding to the doors of perception, and facing you is the slow-mo landing at dusk of an airliner, all accompanied by a minimalist, comforting dreamy drone of sound. (Unfortunately the Village Voice’s Jerry Saltz singled this out unfavorably).
Paul Chen’s mesmerizing video installation projected an oblong canvas on the gallery floor depicts a silhouette of a telephone pole (a stand-in for a cross) stabilizing our reference point as various objects like cell phones and eyeglasses float to the sky, reminiscent of the rapture. Eventually bodies fall from outside the frame no-doubt invoking the twin towers, but also to another Biblical allusion. Here sentient machines hum along while things blow apart are sublime, ecstatic, and trippy. The reflection off the floor created a beautiful splat of diffused video color on the wall, like a reverse reflection pool. It was funny to see how people were nervous to cross the boundry of the projection as if it were a real object. I was tempted to walk across it just for the sake of transgressing, but I
