culture

…But I’d give up my soul for just one of them now…

It’s been a packed week down in the Bay. Wheeling and dealing, painting and sanding, whooping and shouting; the whole nine yards.

Went and saw The Avett Brothers on Friday night. They’re pretty great showmen as expected, and I got me a t-shirt — a much more effective way of supporting working musicians than paying for their music, btw — but I felt the concert could have been more. Slims is not my favorite place to see a show, and the crowd vibe was a little off. That and I had great expectations, which is generally unfair and I try not to do for the sake of giving artists a chance, but c’est la vie. That’s what you get for being real good.

They were touring on 2007’s Emotionalism, which is a great album, the first one I heard — coming via Pickathon and Chelsea late last summer — and probably the most natural cultural fit for SF. But having been exposed to their entire catalog, I celebrate the mo’ twangy stuff a bit more fully than that which leans indie. The crowd was on the other side of that leaning, didn’t seem to know a lot of the other/older stuff, and just wasn’t as lively as I’d hoped.

I suppose I was looking for something really wild and free, like when we saw The Devil Makes Three at the Starry Plough last month. That was hot and packed and foot-stomping scream-along-singing until you got light in the head and then another song would start up that was even better and more worth jumping around to; lather-rinse-repeat. By contrast, the crowd’s energy at this gig made it tough to even break a sweat. I also felt the encore was a bit too scripted, and there wasn’t sufficient demand in the room to draw out a spontaneous second round.

High expectations, see? Still, well worth it overall. They’re touring forever and I’ll bet next friday’s Portland show will be a real winner. I’d be really curious to see what a home-town Carolina crowd is like:

I attended with LGD, the designated-driving Lande-man, and another sociologist friend of theirs, a pretty lady from Mexico headed to a Cambodian/Vietnamese border town this summer on a grant, getting the kids together via soccer. Pretty neat. They swung by the office to pick me up which is the first time I’ve been able to show it off to any of my friends, which I found myself kind of proud to do. We had Hardnox (soulfood) and then SparksPLUS (dangerbooze) out behind the loading dock before heading to the show; a pretty pitch-perfect evening in the dogpatch if you ask me.

After the concert, me and the boys retired to the Cornell Club, where Lande and Luke played guitar while I tried to stay lucid in the living room. I feel like I aught to learn to sing some songs. I’m not likely to pick up a very good instrument other than maybe the tambourine, but I want to participate in the whole music thing when my friends get into it. I’m no Sinatra, but I had enough training to front some folk tunes. Even if I’d known some, Friday night probably wasn’t going to work out owing to the late hour, etc, but in general it’s something that I could probably do a decent job at.

After staying up until around 4:30am with the guitar and shenanigans, Saturday’s sun was a harsh wake-up call five hours later. I try to resist the narrative of aging, quarterlife crisis (will I live to 116?), or whatever you like to call it, but there’s nothing that brings it down on you harder than realizing you’re totally spent after only one night out on the town. You grows up and you grows up and you grows up, I suppose.

The Girth is gone at a wedding this weekend, so it’s just me and LGD. We got it together for Yemeni coffee from our spot around the corner — good stuff from bright eyed smiley guys with awesome beards — talking about various strategies for meeting pretty ladies, etc. This is something I’ve lately been trying not to think about, seeing if the “watched pot never boils” adage might work in reverse. As an antidote to overthinking everything, I’ve been letting myself get carried away with work, tipping down the parabolic descent into what looks to be a very busy couple of months.

That’s probably a poor tactic (as opposed to, say, hanging around the Berkeley campus more, which is what I suggested to my man) but my hope is that there’s some kind of crucible to be had, that maybe I’ll emerge on the other side with a new brand of mojo. I feel that a confident and loving perception of self is a vital component to any romantic success, and being into it with the job — as opposed to grudging or beat-down — is a step in the right direction, even if it does put me at the particularly American risk of conflating career with life.

In keeping with that, after Yemeni coffee, I rallied with the Zacker and we did some handyman work at the office. Our big goal was to patch a hole in our bathroom wall which was made when we tied into the water/drain lines to add a kitchen sink on the other side. It wasn’t huge, but it was vaguely of peeping-tom-ish, which nobody really wants. Victory achieved: fiberglass tape and spackle are a powerful combination. We also cleaned up the network and the conference room. Ready to start adding more people now.

Upon returning to the East Bay it became readily apparent that Saturday night would be a mellow one, grand schemes for getting out on the scene notwithstanding. We watched Talladega Nights, which I thought was kind of amazing. Adam McKay and Will Farrel learned some lessons from Anchorman, it seems. The writing here is vastly less self-indulgent (if still fairly undisciplined) and aims much higher. At it’s best it achieves a kind of highbrow/lowbrow synthesis that’s rarely attempted and hard to pull off, but highly rewarding when achieved. I’m not sure how it was taken by racing fans, but the parody here seemed both respectful and deep, which is in keeping with the overall idea. I had relatively low expectations, and was pleasantly surprised. Compare and contrast, yaknow?

Anyway, that and an early bedtime was Saturday. Sunday is now, and the week begins again. I’ll probably spend most of the day nerding-out, maybe watch some basketball, get set for the days to come.

Kellymundo succeeded in getting me to watch a few consecutive episodes of The West Wing on DVD the other day, and as someone who’s been steeped in politics over the past five years, it leaves an interesting impression. If 24 is the Dark Side of the contemporary political debate, The West Wing represents something of the sunny side.

The stuff I’ve seen is from Season two, which is something of a historical time-capsule, having been made prior to both the onset of the Bush Administration, and of course 9/11. It’s totally enjoyable, but also strikes me as anachronistically sanguine, a grown-up Schoolhouse Rock but with the benefit of excellent production values. The cast is strong, and the writing is excellent from a literary standpoint. On substance, though, I think the text reflects all too well the hazy miasma that surrounds our allegedly elite political discourse.

Two quick examples from the three or four episodes I’ve seen:

• In an episode concerning a jungle hostage situation in Columbia, the presidents strangely Rumsfeldian chief of staff delivers a strong appeal not to attempt any kind of invasion: “Mr. President, I fought a jungle war… and if I could have been there when our ships were attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin I would have said, ‘Don’t do it.’” It’s a soft play on the consensus opinion that Vietnam Was Bad, but it ignored the widely-held belief (more or less proven in 2005) that the “Gulf of Tonkin Incident” was as fake as the Maine.
• In an episode concerning the dangers (or lack thereof) of marijuana, the specific phrase, “doesn’t display the addictive properties of cocaine or LSD” was used more than once. LSD is among the most un-addictive drugs yet uncovered from both a physical and psychological standpoint. Ironically, the crux of the show revolved around the statements of the Surgeon general and “the duty of a doctor to tell the truth.”

Now, I’m not entirely sure whether these are nudge-nudge/wink-wink inside jokes for those in the know, or simply the natural result of having Peggy Noonan on as a consultant. The overall awe-shucks tone of the show suggests the latter.

This makes it a bit harder to suspend my disbelief and really inhabit the world of the show, but in a sort of Brechtian sense it heightens my appreciation for just how confused and unconsciously hypocritical our political discourse remains. The Verfremdungseffekt is strong. Also, as it is something of a time-capsule, it’s interesting to see how mainstream pop-culture re-defines and re-digests the political process.

I’ve been reading more lately, which is good. In addition to dumping my Netflix subscription in favor of The New Yorker and Harper’s, I’ve digested a few books, which I’ll talk about briefly and (ahah!) interconnectedly.

Air Guitar
A collection of short pieces by Dave Hickey, subtitled “Essays on Art & Democracy,” this book is just fantastic reading if you like $5 and even $10 words, distrust academia and other elite discourses, and enjoy thinking about art and culture with a political bent. The text occasionally diverges into minutia of fine art that lost me (I don’t know from painting) but in almost all cases the thread returned to terra firma, and I didn’t really feel like I missed out on the true meaning of Hickey’s prose because I have no idea what Cézanne was really all about.

Harper’s recently had a great excerpt from an upcoming book by Slavoj Zizek in which the Slovenian guru (who I encountered because a really pretty girl making a documentary wanted to talk to me about Music For America once) chides various leftist tactics around the world, in particular the “retreat into criticism” and the “politics of infinite demands.” It made me wonder if Zizek has ever read Hickey, who’s an art critic and not a “Critical Theorist,” but whose writings as such contain, to me, some of the most insightful and generalizable observations about politics I’ve ever read.

On Bullshit
This is really a single essay cleverly packaged as a small book, but it’s fantastic, a serious and scholarly inquiry into the ubiquity of bullshit. I also have the similarly-sized companion essay On Truth, but have yet to crack it. Surprisingly, the direct contemplation of bullshit is unclaimed intellectual territory, but it feels vital, and as someone who probably aught to shut up or say “I don’t know” more often — and in failing to do so produce my own quotient of BS and then some — reading through it provides an interesting guide to introspection.

One of the most intriguing takeaways from the book has to do with how the essence of Bullshit is not really about whether or not someone makes true or false statements, but whether this person is even concerned with the truth in the first place, or whether they are instead attempting to convey a sense of their own situation and state of mind, regardless of what the facts may be. The parallels to the current vogue of “balance” in journalism comes immediately to mind, but so does the often mind and spirit-killing discourse of organizational politics (as exemplified by, say, the HBO series The Wire), wherein interlocking and overlapping personal agendas obscure and compromise the putative “real goals” of the entity in question.

The Looming Tower (Not pictured)
Zack gave me this to read, a highly researched non-fiction account of the origins of Al-Qaeda and the events leading up to the 9/11 attacks, including the bureaucratic infighting which prevented the FBI and CIA from putting the pieces together. Some of it was remedial, but it certainly challenged several assumptions I’ve made about all this — principally that there wasn’t really any preventing the attacks; this is clearly untrue — and definitely deepened my understanding of Middle Eastern politics and radical Islam.

It’s a tragic read, particular in light of how the past six years have gone. Made me angry again, and feeling a renewed commitment to drive the development of open-source organizing techniques. Far moreso than any technology I piddle around with, the means and methods used in this kind of active wide-reaching loose-tie collaboration need to be refined, packaged and promoted, because, in brief, the Empire will always lose, even if it wins (as we’re seeing.)

Spook Country
It’s no secret that I was a sci-fi kid growing up, played D&D and the whole bit. The literary work of William Gibson is one of the true gems of the genre, and I like to think the level of his writing and quality of his insight helped to elevate my mental state up from comic book clashes between good and evil, helping me become the worldly dude I am today. He’s also an interesting author in that he started out writing about a fantastically distant (though utterly recognizable) future, and now sets books published in 2007 in the year 2006. Reality caught up with his vision, I suppose.

Spook Country continues the present-tense world he began exploring in Pattern Recognition, and feels much the same. I’m not done reading it, but I like it so far, and especially the way it tugs at various contemporary questions about the evolving nature of power as derivative of information, both in the mechanistic and mystic senses. Gibson’s greatest virtue as the “father of cyberpunk” is that he’s always been fascinated with humanity, the mythic elements of personhood, with the voodoo powers we organically possess. His most piercing insights are not about technology, but about how technology (and other things) acts as an agent in the evolution of human consciousness.

Interconnectedly?
It’s a bit of a stretch to put all these chunks of writing into a neat little pattern, but they all contain elements of the stuff I’m really interested in.

To wit: the failures of our current establishment or “system,” and the way in which a more evolved human consciousness, supported by superior technologies of organization, can do it better. That’s really what “the revolution” boils down to for me. Less bullshit, better organization, less oppression and institutionalized inequality, more fun, free time, health, happiness, etc.

One of the shows I’ve been enjoying over the past couple months (thanks eztv!) is AMC’s Mad Men, a stylish serial drama full of moral ambiguity set in the NYC advertising industry (Madison Avenue, hence the title) circa 1960. Aside from just generally being smart and well-executed, I’m occasionally actually inspired by the marketing presentations that the protagonist Don Draper gives.

They remind me of the best of Larry Lessig’s powerpoints, but because the whole point is that Draper is being brutally emotionally manipulative — both in the context of presenting a modern marketing strategy, and also in the sense that he’s closing the deal with a client — they resonate with my artistic side even more. Truly the greatest performance work I’ve done has been essentially along the same lines: stacking up rhetoric with music and stage-imagery to seduce the audience in one way or another.

There’s something you can definitely feel as a performer when this is working, when the crowd is in your pocket. I’ve felt the same thing in business meetings and selling vacuum cleaners door to door, the energy of control when another human will folds itself into your own. It’s probably the rawest power I’ve ever experienced, and mostly since I’ve used it for good, it’s been a good thing. Lot of responsibility though.

Anyway, the season finale of the show had a particularly great sequence like this, and it’s got me mentally cutting up the music I listen to, looking for theme-clips, thinking of images, ways of explaining. Explaining what exactly is an open question. Hopefully we’ll find out.

Well, I’ve been stewing, and now I’ll be spewing.

We of Cinema
A while back I got this great DVD from Brazil called City of Men, something of a follow-on to the brilliant film City of God, which delves into the lives of children in a particularly infamous favela.

The series is significantly more positive than the movie. It doesn’t shy away from grit or violentce, but it does manage to pull out a lot of beauty by taking a wider angle and showing the holistic culture and community. It’s really fantastic. You can buy it from Amazon if you like.

One of my favorite aspects of the series is the way in which many episodes include “live” camcorder shots of/by the kids, archival footage (which may or may not be real), and also documentary-style interviews. This form represents next-gen postmodernism at it’s best: a reconstructive narrative. One of the more humorous moments comes in an episode where the two protagonists take a trip to Brazillia to hand-deliver a letter to President Lula, under the auspices of an NGO who’s director has the kids film things in the favela. They’re riding on the bus with the camcorder, talking about how important it is to get on tape so the director can “make her gringo bosses happy.”

In reality, the series comes from just such an organization: the Nós do Cinema project in Rio, which is overseen by Kátina Lund, co-director of City of God. Basically they started doing media and acting training in the favela in order to build the cast for the movie, and the organization was such a hit with the people that they kept it going afterwards.

The two principle actors in City of Men Douglas Silva (Acerola) and Darlan Cunha (Laranjinha) were participants in this program. Both played central characters in City of God. They, along with most of the other child actors, are quite talented, and it’s really something to watch them grow up over the four years of filming.

I really like the idea of Nós do Cinema. It is in keeping with the absolutely fantastic Brazilian pedagogical tradition of Paulo Freire, who’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed I discovered by way of Auguso Boal and his Theatre of the Oppressed, which I studied a bit at NYU. In brief, Freire (much like my man John Dewey) asks us to ditch the “banking” concept of education — in which the role of student is to be “filled” with “facts” — and stresses the need to develop indigenous forms of intelligence, critical thought and articulation.

For me, these ideas echo many of the more positive aspects of my own non-traditional education; they have come to form a core set of values for me in evaluating the world around me and in thinking about how to improve the human condition.

The Means of Communication
I’ve repeated the notion so often that it feels tired to me, but it seems undeniable that future human progress depends on the continued democratization and decentralization of our means of communication. We need to talk more and more meaningfully to more of eachother. This isn’t your average cliche call for increased dialogue; I believe we actually have a chance to make a quantum leap in terms of our global communication, and significantly improve the whole world situation in the process.

To be sure, human progress also depends on a lot of other more tangible things — things closer to the Old Man’s means of production — being more equitably and efficiently parsed out as well. However, I and many other see strong rights and freedoms and powers around information to be fundamental, even necessary, pre-coursers to a more equitable distribution of material wealth; media justice as a means for social justice, if you will.

Indeed, without the critical ability to independently communicate, we’re condemned to being herded (for better or for worse) by our social elites, and I don’t think that’s where we want to be. Recent history shows the weakness of elite/centralized control structures from the Soviet Politburo and their sham command economy, to our own decadent political establishment in Washington and the corruption and failure that’s come from ever-greater corporate consolidation.

Indeed, there are few if any established institutions which have not seen their credibility degrade in recent years, including the press and religious institutions. And not without reason: they’re failing us. If we’re to navigate the perils of the 21st Century with any hope of making the world a better place, let alone preventing catastrophe, it’s inarguably necessary to explore new forms of organization and interaction. What we have now is not working.

People are not stupid. They know that things are getting worse in the world, but I think most people — myself included — feel largely powerless. And, individually, we are. Certainly there are all manner of important individual acts that run along the theme of “think global, act local,” and yes it’s a good thing to conserve and recycle, to be kind and engaged with your own community. However, more is needed, and the first step towards getting more is to overcome that sensation of individual helplessness by connecting with like-minded people to engage in larger-scale projects.

What Do We Imagine?
One of the reasons City of Men impresses me is how well it communicates a distinctly different culture to my own, better than any foreign film I’ve seen. And in spite of the omnipresent threat of drug-traffickers, crushing poverty, disintegrating families, etc, the cultural “message” of the show is overwhelmingly positive and attractive.

I think a lot of this comes from the strong sense of community that’s carried though the show, the sense of camradre and shared ownership of the physical and social environment. The US is very much a dog-eat-dog place, excessively individualistic, competitive and fearful to the point of paranoia and genrally lacking in public/community space. We’re missing that quality of fraternity, to go with our liberty and (supposed) equality. Traded it in for the pursuit of happiness we did. Kind of a shame.

Something as simple as Acerola’s favela funk-dancing group doing a little routine about peace and love stikes me as something that would seem out of place, if not laughable, in a mainstream American context. As someone who’s a big proponent of both peace and love, this is a little disheartening.

It strikes me in my art-heart that a lot of our problems are bound up with the crass commercialization of our culture. Human beings, including those who create, tend to have a 360-degree range of experiences and expressions. While everyone’s got their own style and I’m all for darkness, blood, sex and profanity, it’s the need to fit into economic niches or appeal to marketing segments that drives the mindlessly low common denominator of so much contemporary culture.

On the other hand, if people didn’t buy mindless inhumane and degrading products at such reliable rates, this wouldn’t be an issue. There are cycles at work in culture, just like in family life, and they can spin either upward or down.

So the question really is, what do we imagine, and who are “we” in imagining it? Recently, the we has been a pretty small cabal, and the what has largely been whatever will sell. That’s changing, and increasingly quickly, as the media industry becomes one of the first to come apart under the pressures of massive consolodation, like some black hole imploding.

Like the T-shirt says, it’s fun! In spite of “the coarsening of our public discourse,” as the circle of participation has widened and more people from more walks of life have become cultural producers — whether we’re talking independent film, hip-hop, blogging, or Nós do Cinema — there have been some great results. I find a lot more to like in the contemporary cultural scene than I do in the sanitized past of Hollywood and Broadway, and it seems harder and harder to pass of rank bullshit in the public square these days.

This trend of decentralization, the decline of gatekeepers and rise of independent producers, also brings to life the great hope of a more equitable cultural balance: a civilization which truly exists in a state of conversational interconnection rather than some kind of internally constructed hegemony. It’s been a long road out of serfdom, but it seems like we’re getting close to a watershed.

Jaded skeptic that I am, I still hold out an innocent, faithful belief that people will do right more than they’ll do wrong. It seems to me that the more we get people into making culture for, of and by themselves, the closer we’ll get to a just and equitable world, and the better chance we’ll have of living in peace.

I took yesterday mostly off of work. My bestest friend who is a girl Julia is visiting our household for a couple days, and so we made Hungarian Goulash and then abducted Mark to see 300, which is awesome.

I’ll have more to say about other things, but I want to put one thing out there. Anyone who sees that movie and doesn’t want to grow a beard is a pussy.

While I’m dishing about movies I watch, here’s another: Idiocracy, by Mike Judge (Office Space), starring Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph. It’s totally great, and totally you’ve never heard of it because Fox Studios and Judge are alleged to have had some kind of feud over the movie’s content.

Fox seems to have tried to bury the film, slashing the post-production budget, giving it a very short/limited release, and failing to market it in any way.

The only reason I can think of for a movie studio to intentionally not try and make money is if there’s beef:

Since the announcement about Idiocracy’s very limited release, Judge has refused all interviews, so it’s impossible to confirm any of this with him. However, I remember hearing him speak to a University of Texas class in February about his future filmmaking plans. He wanted to make inexpensive films that wouldn’t be financed or produced through a studio, citing Christopher Guest’s films as an example of what he’d like to do. He was working on a script but wouldn’t divulge details.

“I’m only going to make a movie again if I own it or have final cut,” Judge told the class, obviously unhappy with the Idiocracy experience.

Anyway, you should check it out, because it’s quite a worthy comedy. The gist of the plot is that Wilson and Rudolph do a little Rip Van Winkle, and 500 years in the future, people have become much dumber. It’s a simple but serviceable setup for the salvos of social satire that follow.

Much like Office Space, the little touches really make the film, such as the quick close-up you get of the future’s money: instead of any “E Pluribus Unum,” it has the words “Haulin’ Ass, Gettin’ Paid.” I loved that so much I took a screen-grab.

The film is peppered with these rather intelligent riffs on stupidity. You can guess why Fox wasn’t thrilled:

Thanks to Frank for the recommendation of Brick, which takes an improbable melange of genres — the high-school drama and film noir — and hits it out of the part. It’s just very well-done cinema. Recommended!

So, I saw this somewhat amusing documentary called Dig!, about the Dandy Warhols (old Portland band, made it big w/European ringtones) and The Brian Jonestown Massacre (junkies from California). It’s an interesting time capsule of 1990s Americana, which we watched back on Vagabender in Tuscon. We’re making fun of it in this audio dispatch with the “You’re out of the band!” and “I can play 400 instruments!” lines.

In it, main ego-man from BJM comes off like a borderline messianic kook, which is by other accounts more or less accurate.

The thing you don’t really get from the documentary is how fucking good his music is. Clearly overblown sense of self? Yes. Also a sonic genius. Since I don’t have to deal with the personality, I enjoy the product.

Home tattoos.

This is one of the oldest things we as people do: we cut our hair and draw on our body (and pierce things) and (eventually) wear specific clothing as a means of signaling our cultural identity and expressing ourselves.

Now that I’ve got one…