Track of the Week: 6 Ghosts by Nine Inch Nails

I'm not gonna lie: I have tremendous respect for Trent Reznor. At about the same time Radiohead were shattering traditional methods of music distribution, Reznor was also digitally releasing some amazing material sans record label (and without asking his fans to qualify their appreciation by coming up with their own price).

The guy is intelligent and talented. Don't believe me? Check out NPR's World Cafe interview.

This week's track comes from a massive, 36-song instrumental collection called Ghosts. Reznor made the first of four parts of this collection available for free download. And it's good.

6 Ghosts.

Enjoy (and don't be afraid).

"What Life Asks of Us": In Defense of a Liberal Education

In a recent New York Times opinion piece, David Brooks laments what he sees as the degradation of traditional, vocational codes for behavior (and in Brooks's perspective, identity).

In his words:

A few years ago, a faculty committee at Harvard produced a report on the purpose of education. “The aim of a liberal education” the report declared, “is to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances, to disorient young people and to help them to find ways to reorient themselves.”

The report implied an entire way of living. Individuals should learn to think for themselves. They should be skeptical of pre-existing arrangements. They should break free from the way they were raised, examine life from the outside and discover their own values.

In short, according to Brooks, the results of a liberal education - thinking for yourself, questioning social and behavioral scripts, "breaking free" from "the way you were raised," examining life, discovering your own values - are bad. Very bad. "The rules of a profession or an institution are not like traffic regulations," he says. "They are deeply woven into the identity of the people who practice them." Question these rules and, apparently, your identity will crumble.

Brooks concedes that "institutional thinking is eroding" and that "Faith in all institutions, including charities, has declined." Furthermore, he notes that the popular perception is that "Institutions do all the things that are supposed to be bad. They impede personal exploration. They enforce conformity."

Brooks, however, apparently eschews personal exploration and embraces institutional conformity. As he puts it, institutionalized rules for behavior, scripts for identity, "often save us from our weaknesses and give meaning to life."

I'm speechless. How can there still be room in the Twenty-First Century, in the post-Bush era, in Urban America for the fear of a liberal education?

Mash-Up!

Tonight, I was going to continue something I started earlier today in debate with a close friend: a rant I started regarding the "institutionalization" of the arts through the creation of a Secretary of the Arts (or Culture Czar) position in Washington. For those who don't know, Quincy Jones has suggested he'll ask ("beg" even) for a Secretary of the Arts position during his next talk with Obama. In support of Jones, Jaime Austria, a bass player with the New York City Opera, started an online petition (which, at the time of this post, has received well over 207,000 signatures).

Rather than rant, I'll just ask this question:

If the U.S. government appointed a Secretary of the Arts (and let's hope Obama would be as wise in making this appointment as he was in the appointment of, for example, a Nobel Physicist as Energy Secretary), would, at the end of Obama's presidency, the "mash-up" still be the most popular go-to form for artistic expression?

Mojito Weekend

w/Helio

Happy Weekend!

Track of the Week: "Rolling Sea" by Vetiver

From Vetiver's forthcoming album Tight Nit.

Rolling Sea.

Enjoy!

Spoiler Culture

I'll admit it: I'm a Lost addict. I'll not try to justify, qualify, or explain my raging fandom. It just is.

As it has for other television series with cult followings (ranging from Battlestar Galactica to Survivor), the surrounding spoiler culture is thriving as a new season begins. As Wired's Hugh Hart puts it: "To the true believer, spoilers are the sincerest form of flattery."

Books, blogs, websites, and even a Lostpedia provide venue for believers to obsess and flatter. I'll not take a stab at spoiling anything here (I struggle with both the obsessive urge to know and a romanticized sentiment for enjoying the surprise), other than to say this:

I may be taking Wednesdays off for a while...

oooh...commercial's over!

Inauguration Day

From Richard Monasterky's article "America Elects a Professor in Chief" published in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

The 2008 presidential election has broken so many political barriers that historians may overlook one unusual fact: When Barack Obama takes the oath of office in January alongside his running mate, Joe Biden, it will be the first time that the president, the vice president, and both of their spouses have worked in higher education.

Taken together, the Obamas and the Bidens have amassed decades of experience at colleges and universities. Mr. Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 until 2004. His wife, Michelle, has worked in the administration at the same university. For the past 17 years, Mr. Biden has taught constitutional law at Widener University School of Law. His wife, Jill, teaches English at Delaware Technical and Community College's Stanton-Wilmington campus.

The world of academia and Obama's presidency further intersect at Post_Moot: Two Miami University of Ohio English professors have put together a blog they describe as "A Radically Inclusive Online Anthology of Responses to the Inauguration of the President-Elect Barack Obama." The blog invites anyone to post responses, pictures, comments, etc. on the inauguration of our 44th president. Check it out here.

And Happy Inauguration Day!

Thanks and Have Fun Running the Country

McSweeney's, the publishing company founded by Dave Eggers (the author of the excellent, an actually appropriately named A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius), and 826 National, a national, non-profit organization that promotes and teaches literacy skills to youth, have teamed up to publish a collection of letters, words of wisdom, and advice for President-elect Obama.

From the McSweeney's store:

A few days after the election of Barack Obama, kids around the country were asked to provide advice and guidance to their new president. In this collection, arriving at inauguration time, there's loads of advice for the president, often hilarious, sometimes heartfelt and occasionally downright practical. Students from all over the country reach out to the 44th president, speaking to the issues closest to their hearts, relating their life stories, and asking for help. Topics include the economy, education, war, global warming, race relations in America and immigration. The book also includes letters about snow cones, puppies, microwavable burritos, dinosaur projects, multiplication and the ghost of Abraham Lincoln, reportedly haunting a White House bedroom.

Thanks and Have Fun Running the Country includes such advice as:
"If I were president, I would help all nations, even Hawaii."
— Chad Timsing, age 9, Los Angeles

"I really hope you put America back together. No pressure though."
— Sheenie Shannon Yip, age 13, Seattle

"1. Fly to the White House in a helicopter. 2. Walk in. 3. Wipe feet. 4. Walk to the Oval Office. 5. Sit down in a chair. 6. Put hand sanitizer on hands. 7. Enjoy moment. 8. Get up. 9. Get in car. 10. Go to the dog pound."
— Chandler Browne, age 12, Chicago

And, while it wasn't advice, exactly, we thought this was worth sharing:
"You are just like a big me." — Avante Price, age 7, Seattle

Cute, huh?

For more hilarious and touching excerpts from McSweeney's, click here.

To purchase Thanks and Have Fun Running the Country: Kids' Letters to President Obama (ed. Jory John) directly from 826 National, click here.

Mojito Weekend

Happy Weekend!

Track of the Week: "You Remind Me of Something" by Bonnie "Prince" Billy

When I lived in Louisville, I was often told I should check out local act Will Oldham aka Palace Brothers aka Bonnie 'Prince' Billie. As usual, when I'm told I should check out any cultural product (be it film, television show, album, artist, etc.), I'm resistant. Oppositional, even. I mean, c'mon, I'm a unique, precious snowflake: irreducible to your simplified assumptions regarding my artistic preferences, tastes, etc. You don't know me, man.

So, I never got around to checking out old Will.

Thanks to a recent New Yorker article, I decided to give him a shot. That's right, my friends don't know me, The New Yorker does.

Everyone who said I'd like Oldham was right.

"You Remind Me of Something"

Enjoy!

Unwavering bands of light: What's post- the post?

I'm fond of talking, theorizing, about what comes after Postmodernism. Some see the whole PoMo thing as a paradigmatic example of exaggerated, pretentious intellectualism. I don't.

As a literary and cultural movement, it has given us useful language and a situational discourse to understand the underpinnings - the psyche - of our contemporary culture. More importantly, it's given voice to a multiplicity of perspectives that have traditionally fallen outside of academic discourse. It has sought to liberate marginalized groups by not only giving them a voice, but also by seeking to understand what it means to "be" ~someone~.

It essentially asks my favorite question: Why are you you? Its responses to this question have been various, and they typically suggest that the Postmodern identity is ideologically interpellated, socially constructed, subject to contextualized performative imperatives, unstable, under continual construction, without a core essence, open to continual possibility, and so on. I don't find this scary, or even existentially overwhelming, as some do. I actually find it hopeful. And important.

But what comes next? Historically, at least in America, cultural shifts - in literature, art, film, etc. - have coincided with wars. As many theorists have observed, cultural production is intrinsically linked to both economics and the widespread concerns of the masses. These things show up in the art. During periods of war, economics are affected as are our cultural concerns. The time is beyond ripe.

Appropriately the tone and focus of various academic discourses has been shifting: I've noticed a greater attention being paid to aesthetics. Postmodernism essentially did away with aesthetic concerns, noting that aesthetic taste is, on one hand, subjective (and thus socially constructed) and, on the other, without essence (like the PoMo subject). If anything, PoMo gave us the aesthetic of the abject: piss, shit, blood, vomit, that which is within me and I violently expel (read Kristeva, if you dare). I think we've gotten what we need from the abject and are ready for a new sense of aesthetics.

I think this also points towards the development of a new understanding of ontology, of being. I think that we'll see something that seems like a return to considerations of essentialized identity, but I think these considerations will be unfettered from religious associations, and, by and large, will be free from considerations of the permanence or infinite status of the soul. Rather, I think these considerations will, in some ways be extensions of pre-existing understandings of subjectivity - and will thus have an existential component. In other words, I think we may see considerations of the subject reconsider the possibility of a vestige of selfhood that isn't explained by the complex interrelationships of genetic preconditions, environmental factors, social constructions, and so on. I think we'll see a Post-Postmodern formation of subjectivity that considers both the complex interaction, and the process of putting together fragments of selfhood, as resulting in a ~something else~ that isn't necessarily reducible to the focus of previous considerations of subjectivity.

I'm seeing evidence of this shift a lot these days (but perhaps it is only the reflection of my own perspective). Consider the lyrics from the new Animal Collective album I recently mentioned:

Am I really all the things that are outside of me?

Would I complete myself without the things I like around?

Does the music that I make play on my awkward face?

Do you appreciate the subtleties of taste buds?

Or maybe Vonnegut - being, as always, ahead of his time - wrote it best when, after writing himself into Breakfast of Champions as both author and character, changed his perspective from this:

I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide.

to this (in the voice of the book's artist Rabo Karabekian):

"I now give you my word of honor," he went on, "that the picture your city owns shows everything about life which truly matters, with nothing left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animal. It is the immaterial core of every animal - the 'I am' to which all messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us - in a mouse, in a deer, in a cocktail waitress. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us. A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would show two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery."

I'm still working this out, but I'm curious: What do you think, you unwavering band of light, you.

Surveillance, Property, and the Body

I just came across David Kravets's recently posted comments on a University of California study of the effectiveness of public surveillance as a method of reducing violent crime rates. He points out that, although property crime rates decrease in the presence of visible surveillance cameras, violent crimes don't.

"Violent incidents do not decline in areas near the cameras relative to areas further away," added the study, which noted the cameras helped police bring charges against six people accused of felony property crimes. "We observe no decline in violent crimes occurring in public places."

Of course, I find this study fascinating. For the record, I'm far more interested in the ways the widespread distribution of surveillance cameras can be liberating, or at the very least, I'm interested in how a proliferation of visual information affects postmodern subjectivity and narrative structures. It's interesting, though, that the mechanism meant to create the illusion of safety does little to actually secure it.

Image from aforementioned Threat Level blog post.

Church Mouse

How can he know and not be crazy?

"On Not Winning the Nobel Prize"

From Doris Lessing's 2007 Nobel Lecture, given in acceptance of the Nobel Prize in Literature the same year she wrote The Cleft (click here for the New York Times review):

Writers are often asked, How do you write? With a wordprocessor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand? But the essential question is, "Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write?" Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas - inspiration.

If a writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn.

Read the full lecture here, or get it as a .pdf courtesy Nobelprize.org.

BTW: Orhan Pamuk's 2006 lecture - "My Father's Suitcase" - is also wonderful.

Mojito Weekend!

Happy Weekend!

Track of the Week: "My Girls" by Animal Collective

I love this band so freakin' much. Their new one... Merriweather Post Pavilion...geez oh man, it's good.

Pitchfork Review.

Buy it from Domino.

Listen to "My Girls".

Enjoy!

Susan Sontag's Journals

I haven't read Reborn yet, but I want to.

As Daryll Pickney describes it in his New Yorker review:

Sontag’s “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $25), edited by her son, David Rieff, is a fascinating document of her apprenticeship, charting her earnest quest for education, identity, and voice. The volume takes us from her last days at North Hollywood High School to the year that, now living in New York, she published her first novel, “The Benefactor.”

NPR's John Freeman points out that:

Reborn is full of earnest exhortations to read books (Moll Flanders, another tale of self-creation) and smile less ("Think of Blake. He didn't smile for others"), as well as descriptions of lectures attended and films inhaled, sometimes at the rate of three a day.

I'll admit that posthumously publishing someone's journals is worse than hanging their dirty undies out to dry (and for everyone to see), and the fact that it was her own son who published them is a bit...bothersome. But, according to Richard Eder of The New York Times, Rieff published the journals knowing that "Sontag had left her papers without restrictions to the University of California, Los Angeles. If he did not do the job, thus at least keeping some control, someone else would."

I guess Junior didn't think he could have destroyed the journals himself (which is what he says his mother would have done were she alive). And I'm glad he didn't. Here's the thing about seeing someone's dirty undies blowing in the breeze: it's hard not to look.

Besides, I love reading journals written during a period of intense creativity. Take Kafka's journal entries produced during the writing of The Trial. They're wonderful insights into not only the writer's mind, but also into the process of writing.

For example:

August 29. The end of one chapter a failure; another chapter, which began beautifully, I shall hardly--or rather certainly not--be able to continue as beautifully, while at the time, during the night, I should certainly have succeeded with it. But I must not forsake myself, I am entirely alone.

September 1. In complete helplessness barely wrote two pages.

October 15. Two weeks of good work; full insight into my situation occasionally.

November 1. Yesterday, after a long time, made a great deal of progress; today again virtually nothing; the two weeks since my vacation have been almost a complete loss.

December 19. Yesterday wrote "The Village Schoolmaster" ["The Giant Mole"] almost without knowing it...

January 20. The end of writing. When will it take me up again?

Excerpts from The Diaries of Franz Kafka, Vol. II, 1914-1923

You see? Even Kafka struggled. And you see? Pretty interesting, huh? I bet Sontag's journals are even better.

Stanley Fish's 10 Best American Movies

Stanley Fish - most famous in my world for the concept of "interpretive communities," or the idea that readers interpret a text subjectively but in the context of the specific linguistic system to which readers belong - recently posted his list for "The 10 Best American Movies" on his New York Times blog.

His introduction and rationale:

It’s Top Ten time again, and like everyone else I have a list, in my case a list of the 10 best American movies ever. Here it is, with brief descriptions and no justifications. Only the first two films are in order. The others are all tied for third.

His List:

1. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
2. Sunset Blvd. (1950)
3. Double Indemnity (1944)
4. Shane (1953)
5. Red River (1948)
6. Raging Bull (1980)
7. Vertigo (1958)
8. Groundhog Day (1993)
9. Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
10. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945)

Has Fish only seen two films since 1953? And did he decide he should put them on the list for good measure?

Now I know that, while Fish's list is largely subjective, most film critics would probably agree that most of these are important, if not good, films. Moreover, I can accept that Fish himself is part of an interpretive community that brings a socially constructed value system to his "readings" of these films.

But, seriously...two Westerns? Not a single film from the last 18 years? And Groundhog Day? Really?

Don't get me wrong: I loves me some Shane. And Red River is a classy-classic John Wayne Western - if I'm channel surfing and hit this one on AMC, chances are I'll watch it (and for the upteenth time). The Best Years of Our Life - a bit depressing, but a good melodrama (and I can understand that, for a film made in 1946, it pushed the envelope on things like war, love, and...dismemberment). Scorsese, Hitchcock, and...okay...even Wilder deserve spots on a "10 Greatest Filmmakers of All Time" list. Sure...

And I totally dig Fish. I find his take on socially constructed interpretation compelling. He's a good writer - his blurbs about each film are great. I've even seen him talk and enjoyed it. But that's all beside the point. The point is:

Groundhog Day? One of the Best American Movies ever? Really?

Web 2.0 and the Expansion of the Filmic Event

In my talk at the recent MLA conference, I made the following case:

I believe that both the virtual community’s relationship to film and the advancing development of entertainment technology, in and out of the virtual world, suggest that the filmic experience is telescopically, if not exponentially, expanding to an inevitable point: an organic and integrated experience that straddles and blurs the boundaries between the real world and the virtual, between forms and genres of visual entertainment, and between the spatio-temporally isolated experience of the cinema and television and the ongoing experience of everyday life.

and that this "inevitable point" means that:

From here on out, and for those who have the technology and access, the filmic experience will become something less identifiable as traditional film and more recognizable as a hybrid between traditional film and something like a television show (if, in no other way, only by virtue of length and accompanied advertisements). The viewer will be able to choose what she wants to watch and when and where she wants to watch it. Moreover, the experience itself may well be accompanied by a social, “Web 2.0” component wherein the viewer may evaluate a film, asynchronously communicate with the filmmaker, synchronously interact with a virtual community of fellow viewers, or take part in an ARG or fantasy community collaboratively constructed around a particular film or around a series of films.

I used The YouTube Screening Room - a venue gushed about in December - as my paradigmatic example of this - but there are so many more examples of both digital venues and real-world technologies (like AppleTV and the TiVo).

What surprised me so much in the audience's reaction was the vast difference between those who felt like I was pointing out the obvious and those who couldn't accept that the cinematic experience can really happen to someone watching it on a computer screen (or iPhone or other such device) as opposed to the old movie house, big screen.

It seems to me that "Web 2.0" - particularly Web 2.0 as social space - has become a dividing line between those who can accept that social activity can happen without a physical bodily referent (these are the folks who have no problem with considering their facebook friends to be closer than their classmates, co-workers, etc.) and those who can't. Unfortunately, this line too easily looks like one determined by age - typically, the folks who haven't grown up with with the internet fall on one side; and those in the "Wired Generation" fall on the other.

Age aside, perhaps the key to my perspective - one that I'm still figuring out - is that I suggest that the cinematic experience will become (or already is) a hybrid one (and hybrid in a unique way for each individual): consider alternate reality games (ARG) that have surrounded films and television (from the marketing campaign called "The Beast" for the Kubrick cum Spielberg film A.I. to the more recent "Lost Experience"), the popularity of video games based on films (like ones that let you explore the Star Wars galaxy or roam Tolkein's MiddleEarth), or even just the popularity of rating film clips on YouTube... For those of us who want the filmic experience to go beyond the cinema screen, there is ample opportunity.

On the other side of this coin, so to speak, we might expect a cultural reaction comparable to the one regarding the digital distribution of music. Vinyl sales have been skyrocketing in the last few years, suggesting that the digitization of music has left us hungering for a physical artifact. What, then, might a similar reaction to digital film distribution be?

Long Story Short:

The Summary of Everything That's Happened Since My Last Post:

Orlando.
Winter Park, FL where we sampled wine at one of the more excellent places on earth.
Christmas on a plane (to Pittsburgh).
Fog in Atlanta -> delayed flight -> missed connection -> lost luggage.
3 a.m., $3 breakfast with Coronas at Terrible's near the Las Vegas strip (which was never on the itinerary to begin with).
San Francisco.
Disappointed by Haight-Ashbury.
A $5 tie from Walgreens.
The Nutcracker performed by the San Francisco Ballet at the historic War Memorial Opera House.
Fisherman's Wharf -> Irish Coffee at The Buena Vista.
My Talk: Web 2.0 and the Expansion of the Filmic Event.
Louisville.
NYE wedding.
Home again (thank god!).

My apologies for the brevity.