“One big room / Full of bad bitches”
Posted by Nav in Cultural Theory, Music on June 7, 2011
If your reaction to the above song – Kreayshawn’s “Gucci Gucci” – is anything like mine, you’ll hate it on the first listen, then not be able to get it out of your head and will then proceed to listen to it over and over and over again. What? Totally normal behaviour and not weird at all.
‘Course, the question is this: what is it doing here? I’m not sure. Something about it intrigues me. Perhaps because it’s so alien. Or perhaps because it’s not alien enough.
But! Let’s discuss!
Register the Register/ But Inflect that Dialect
You know what’s weird? The way Kreayshawn’s register both does and does not ‘match up’ with her inflection/accent. By this I mean that the stereotypical generalizations one walks into the song with don’t quite fit. While rhyming, moments of ‘West coast valley girl’ pop up, while at others they seem to disappear entirely behind… hm, what to call it? I guess “the hip-hop inflected accent that people say isn’t about race but totally is in how it signifies, especially in terms of its layered, ambivalent, now-it-has-cultural currency-and-now-it-doesn’t-ness”? Yeah, that.
Let’s talk about bitches, bitches.
This song and its refrain of “1 big room / Full of bad bitches” seems to be the best argument – or maybe just the most recent one – for the feminist reclamation of the word “bitch”. Discuss.
More to the point, “I’m full of swag and it’s pumping out my ovaries” seems as phallogocentrically feminist as it’s gonna get, doesn’t it?
“Why you lookin’ bitter? / I be looking better”
There is a tiny, infinitesimally small part of me that wants to be an 18 year old girl so I too can adopt the weird Parkdale-Williamsburg-Oakland style exhibited by Kreayshawn’s hype girl – who I assume is her DJ/producer? I could probably look things like that that up, but it’s all waaay better as a mystery.
Cultural Appropriation
*sirens* WHITE GIRL RAPPIN’ WOO WOO *sirens*
Hm, this one is messy. To me, the thing about cultural appropriation is not the ownership of culture, but is more about how the circulation of images/ideas can either reaffirm the links between racial identity and assumptions of potential or challenge them. Another important aspect is privilege. To be able to take on or take off markers of cultural identity – but not be able to do the same with skin colour – causes all sortsa problems.
I don’t really care about issues of “stealing” culture. But the necklace of a “Native American head”, a la the Cleveland Indians logo? That throws things off. It’s one thing to repurpose a sign when its multiple valences have been altered by history. It’s quite another to do so when social and systemic prejudice against Aboriginal Americans remains unforgivably high. So, yeah, fuck that noise.
At the end of the day, though: I guess the thing with cultural appropriation is this: there is no neutral music, and there is no neutral language. So the only responsible thing to do is to address the politics that the ‘disparity’ between identity and aesthetic production that the act of the utterance itself produces.
When Das Racist rhyme about the litany of artists who have sung in “Fake Patois“, they do so in their own fake faux-Jamaican/Caribbean patois. But they also talk about a lost bit of Jamaican history: Shaun X. Bridgmohan who is “the first Jamaican in Kentucky Derby”. So, deliberate or not, the song leaves you in a perfectly appropriate suspension between the impossibility of authenticity but the significance of the discourse of authenticity.
Yeah, Kreayshawn doesn’t do that.
The female gaze
The song seems to ricochet back and forth between two ideas: one if that ‘we are so full of swag, we don’t need your items of conspicuous consumption’ – the insanely catchy “Gucci Gucci Louis Louis Fendi Fendi Prada/ Basic bitches wear that shit so I don’t even botha’” – to explicitly invoking the culture of surveillance and performance of teenage girls: “Bitch you ain’t no Barbie / I hear you work at Arby’s”.
That contradiction, however, is perfectly captured by Kreayshawn’s, um, meditation on the legitimacy of Kat Stacks, in which she seems to speak in contradictions. I didn’t understand it at all, but that’s why it’s perfect.
Again, I’m assuming Kat Stacks is a person who exists, but this is all much better when it remains enigmatic and full of possibility
Conclusion
Was this my usual attempt at recuperative analysis, a la Transformers 2? Or self-satire? Or am I just inappropriately obsessed with a song not at all aimed at me?
Yeah. It’s definitely one of those.
More to the point, isn’t this what should have happened years ago? When the signifier just detached of its own accord and started floating around, full of so much swag it removed itself from history?
Edit: Oh! I forgot a link to this: “On Kreayshawn and the Utility of Black Women“, which not only starts with a Zora Neale Hurston quote (!), but also has this line – “It’s like tumblr made a video,” said one tumblrite, speaking of the white Cali hipster aesthetics of Kreyashawn’s Gucci Gucci – which is the most perfect encapsulation ever. Seriously, look at the visual style of the chorus section – it’s a Facebook photo album, right?
Fixed Writing Machines, Bendable Bodies
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on May 23, 2011
A couple of weeks ago, I half-seriously started yammering on about ‘Project FNDL’ – that’s, er, ‘Project Fix Nav’s Disastrous Life’, for those not in the know. While it started as a bit of joke with my family (and, of course, Twitter), it became a little bit hard to ignore the frustration – perhaps even desperation – that elicited it. So, yeah, I’m trying to sort my shit out.
But lest you think this is becoming a self-help blog, I mention this in part because some of this process involves trying to find better ways to deal with my own ‘attention economy’ – and the relative place of the forms and technology on which we both read and write.
Partly, it’s been simple stuff I’ve been doing to help myself focus. That has meant Freedom. It has also meant enabling Freedom before heading out of the house – and then popping my SIM card into my trusty five year old cell phone, the simple aim being to keep the temptation away.
But, largely through coincidence, I got a tablet computer recently too. And, though I was quite apprehensive that I’d wasted my money, something that quickly became apparent was that it worked really well as a reading machine. Surprisingly – perhaps even a bit ludicrously – I found myself placing it in front of my monitor as I worked. Suddenly, I had two screens, each for a distinct purpose: a reading machine and a writing machine.
Neither, of course, is exclusively either. It’s just that each generally works better for reading or writing. So I tried it out. On the PC, I had Word, Scrivener or WordPress open; and on the tablet, just a browser or Kobo to read PDFs. And it worked really really well. (Until you gotta copy and paste a link or a quote, of course). It was a definite improvement to how I was able to focus, because of that odd mental division in which you use each device for different tasks. Somehow I was able to pay more attention to each.
But the other thing I’ve noticed about the tablet is how its portability and – well, I believe the technical term is ‘holdability’ – seem crucial. It reminds me a lot of what Tim Carmody says about his go-to way of framing reading revolutions:
My favorite reading revolution, though, isn’t very famous, even though it was conceived by the very famous media theorist Walter Benjamin. It’s the shift from vertical to horizontal writing, and then back to vertical again. He lays it out in his 1928 book One-Way Street:
If centuries ago [writing] began gradually to lie down, passing from the upright inscription to the manuscript resting on sloping desks before finally taking itself to bed in the printed book, it now begins just as slowly to rise again from the ground. The newspaper is read more in the vertical than in the horizontal plane, while film and advertisements force the printed word entirely into the dictatorial perpendicular.
This is a revolution that encompasses the entire history of the book, from manuscript scrolls on papyrus to industrial paperbacks. It also takes the broadest field of reading possible, from graffiti on the walls of ancient cities to silent movies and children’s scrawls on a chalkboard. It sets aside all of the inside baseball about technological achievements and the inherent properties of the medium.
Perhaps more than anything, I’ve noticed that this horizontal/vertical distinction in writing can also be applied to reading, particularly in the way it is also about the body. Vertical reading asks you to orient your body in relation to it. Billboards, blackboards, signs, desktop computers are all fixed things that demand you move around them. Horizontal does the opposite, adapting the form of reading to the body, as in the book, tablet, magazine etc.
This is why the laptop is still ‘vertical reading’ to me. You can place it on your legs or carry it around, but its bipartite nature means that it never quite works – you are constantly shifting yourself around it, especially for crucial, philosophically fundamental things like ‘reaching for your cup of tea’.
The tablet, and of course the bound book, do the opposite. The tiny little shifts in your body don’t affect it as, all McLuhan-esque, it becomes an extension of the body. The slight changes in angle that occur when you read on the couch, or on a chair, or in bed are all easily adjusted for, and unlike the furnace attached to a screen that is the modern laptop, it isn’t uncomfortable to hold or rest upon you.
That different relationship to the body of the tablet seems to meld the benefits of the electronic screen – like its capacity to become multiple things – with the strange ‘behavioural ease’ of a book or magazine. I guess this is why it ‘feels’ right, because all this time, the convenience of the computer has been oddly hampered by the need to sit at a desk, use a mouse, rest your hand on keys etc. It was great for writing, but once it became a tool to read as well write, it was always like we struggled somehow to make it work.
I was worried the tablet was wrong for me, but it has fit into my life (and #PFNDL) quite nicely. The size and portability, ease of browsing and apps like Flipboard make it feel like the right reading machine for the age. Meanwhile, that functionality has made the seemingly idiotic act of using your tablet on while working onyour computer seem like an incredibly natural thing, and separating reading and writing machines has really helped me. (NB: Yes, I am also aware that a book and a PC is also a convenient reading and writing machine distinction…)
So there we go. Weird, if neatly arbitrary distinctions about tech – reading machines/writing machines; adapt your body to it/adapt it to your body – seem to be a step in the right direction.
And in the imagining is something, too…
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on May 20, 2011
Though I do try to keep the ‘links to writing I’ve done elsewhere’ to a minimum, I think (or hope, at least) this one may be up of interest to SiW readers. At the Standard, I wrote about the both our past imaginings of the future but also… our inability to imagine the future, I guess? Yeah, it’s messy, but hopefully not quite so weird and vague that it’s not worth a read.
Oh, it also includes an interview with Matt Novak, author of Paleofuture! So at least there’s that.
[Guest Post] My Racist Advice Animals
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on May 6, 2011
The following post was written by Rea McNamara for the Ethnic Aisle. It’s pretty great – and some of those images will make you actually laugh out loud. Enjoy!
This is too internet, isn’t it? Advice Animals, and not just the usually pedestrian sort that flutter between the sexist and depraved, but special ~racist~ Advice Animals that I may or may not have even written my self.
It seems like such a cop-out — and yes, I did consider titling these anon single panels as the content farm-esque “25 Racist Advice Animals” or “25 Racist Advice Animals I Have Thought Of At One Time Or The Other Without Commentary” — but you know, I thankfully held back on the link bait.
And I really wanted to go deep! To write! To share stories about those racist moments of mine! Like that time I was the small town girl on the school bus who’d avoid at all cost sitting next to the sweet South Asian girl — she was the first I believe, in 1993, to have lived on Highway 27 north of the 17th Sideroad — because I was so scared sitting next to someone that confirmed this “otherness” that I had yet to acknowledge.
Oh, and you know, I could tell you whole slew of ‘em when I was constantly re-evaluating my “anti-oppression framework” in order to be “down” with the “priority” Eglinton West West kids I worked with during those after-school programs I’d coordinate at Maria A. Shchuka (Then again, that wasn’t so much racism as it was about class and privilege.)
But at least by then I was walking the tragic mulatta tight rope where I avoided at all cost those seemingly-white tendencies of reacting far too incredulously to tales of violence, or talking in that impenetrable double arts-non-profit grant speak. (“I do community arts — wait, sorry, arts-based community development with youth of various ethnic backgrounds living in underserved and at-risk communities. Now do you want sign your kid up for our drop-in capoeira class this afternoon? We’ve got granola bars and drinking boxes too.”)
You know what? I’ve already said to much. This has reached the tl;dr limit — and like I said before, I’d rather hide behind the blunt yet careless wisdom of these image macros.
HED: 25 Racist Advice Animals 25 Racist Advice Animals I Have Thought Of At One Time Or The Other Without Commentary
The Quiet Pleasures of Being Racist
Posted by Nav in ethnicaisle on May 6, 2011
The following post is part of a new project called The Ethnic Aisle, which is an attempt to collect the musings, rantings and reflections of minority voices in Toronto and the GTA. You can read about what we’re aiming for on the site’s introductory post.
Though I know ‘minority issues’ probably aren’t why you read Scrawled in Wax, it’ll only happen about once a month and, as ever, I’ll try and make it pleasant to read.
The first topic was meant to be a bit in your face, and… well, in our minds, it’s called “When I Was Racist”.
* * *
At the outset, I think it behooves me to say this: some of my best friends are white. Yeah, it’s a cliche joke now. But I just want to point out that what I set down here is not done in pride, defiance or in the hopes of offending. Instead, it’s with some reluctance and shame that I post this, in the hope that it is read with some mild sympathy for the odd contradictions, conflict and general weirdness entailed by being ‘not white’ and privileged while living in downtown Toronto.
1. Washing Dishes the Wrong Way
For some reason, there was a quiet that pervaded the house that day. Maybe my mum and brother were away, or perhaps there were no basement tenants. Whatever it was, something was different. For one, I was trying to be extra helpful.
I was still feeling guilty for having moved out. I had, at the ripe old age of 25, recently gotten a shared apartment in the Annex, and was much happier for it. But as (ugh) ‘progressive’ as my parents were, moving out in the same city before marriage struck them as… odd. They got it; they weren’t oblivious sitcom stereotypes. It was just strange and a little sad for them. So I was back on one of my perhaps too-often visits, and after dinner I told my Dad I’d wash the dishes. You know, to help out.
I had always washed dishes the way I had seen my folks do it: one at at time, with the tap trickling slightly. I knew there was another way of doing it. At camp and at friends’ houses, I too had filled the sink with soapy water, and fumbled through like I did it all the time. At home though, we just never did it that way. That’s just the way it is when you’re a minority. Out there, in regular public lives, there was a way of doing things that everyone else knew, but to you seemed strange.
‘Course, I had been out in the world! I lived on my own, and was recently back from traveling through Europe, too. I had seen things. So I filled the sink with foam and water – just like Canadians do! – and got through the big pile in no time flat.
When I was done, my dad and I just hung out for a bit. I think we started talking about English literature, which had always been a shared interest of ours. I was doing my MA in English at the time, and my dad had done his some 30 or 40 years prior. We chatted about these things often. Then there was lull.
“I’ve never washed the dishes like that,” my Dad said after a bit, pulling out a tea towel. It was still really quiet in the house.
“Yeah,” I responded. “Quick though, wasn’t it? I think that way works better for a big pile of them.”
“Yes. It does,” said my father.
“I guess,” I said a bit hesitantly “I’ve just never done it like that because it seemed like the white way of doing things.”
My father paused – a bit portentously if you ask me. It’s like in that moment we were secretly bonding over something, even if we couldn’t articulate quite what.
“Hm,” my father said. “Yes, I’ve never done it that way because of that too.”
We finished drying the dishes and put them away in silence.
A few years later, when I lived with my white then-girlfriend, I made sure to wash dishes the way my father always had.
2. Breathing a Sigh of Relief.
I had brought lemon sorbet for dessert. My friends were disappointed. After barbequed shortrib steak topped with chimichuri, eaten on a patio table on a cool spring evening, what my friends were hoping for was vanilla ice cream. Or, God, at least strawberry. But I could never seem to get these sorts of things right. Who knew what these downtown hipsters did or didn’t want?
After reluctantly consuming the tart sorbet, we headed upstairs. But soon, it was clear one of our group felt sick, and she promptly went home. That left four of us: our Mexican-Canadian host, two Caribbean-Canadians, and me.
We shot pool for a bit, then sat around chatting, before finally deciding to to head off around 11. By that time it had gotten cool, and on the walk home, we pulled our jackets around us, commenting on how unseasonably warm it had been lately. Then the inevitable happened.
“And what is with white people in shorts and t-shirts the minute it creeps above zero?!”
Here’s what you may not know. Though you can almost never generalize about ‘minorities’, this phrase is occasionally like a secret code in this city for “it is now time for us non-whites to complain about all the weird, inexplicable things white people do’. You begin with the shorts in spring comment and it goes from there.
So it started. The litany of silly complaints. Drinking milk with dinner. Of how ‘they’ don’t respect their parents or, conversely, are like friends with their folks. Stupid shit. But then, depending on the crowd, it gets more serious. So we moved on to this thing a white lady at work said about ‘that crazy hair’. Of getting yelled at in the street. Of how oblivious some of ‘them’ are about their white privilege.
Yeah, white people. What do they know? Fuck them, right? That’s what it sorta’ amounted to. But unpleasant as that is, what is difficult to convey is the flood of relief that comes with saying these things among a crowd of minorities, the sudden feeling of camaraderie that erupts into something disturbingly close to joy. Phew!, you say to yourself. I’m safe to let out my neuroses here.
Now a bit older, I tend to stay away from this. I’ve started to believe that antagonism is a last resort, and even this kind of joke-y, release-valve humour is potentially dangerous. To my ‘white friends’ reading this, I don’t secretly badmouth you every time I get together with my more melanin-rich pals. Mostly.
Still. Chris Rock, who is obviously very rich and very famous, says that he can still get nosebleeds and panic attacks in rooms full of white people he doesn’t know. And sometimes now, when life demands I show up at an event or party mostly full of white people, I can relate. There’s no good reason for it. Just shyness and awkwardness coming out the wrong way. But it’s hard not to give a racial tinge to those shortcomings – and stand in a corner nursing a beer, comforting oneself by thinking: “White people. Fuck them, right?”
In Which Information Masters You
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology, Electronic Reading on April 22, 2011
So, over at Toronto Standard (when the swanky HTML5-tastic design gets sorted, I’ll introduce y’all for real) I wrote a piece called ‘Masters of Data‘ about our changing relationship to information. For regular SiW readers, I don’t think it’ll be radically new, but it was a fun thing to do. I was also fortunate enough to speak to some cool people for the article, including friend of Scrawled in Wax Joanne McNeil, who most of you are probably familiar with.
I’m okay with how the piece turned out, but as with any article, there were some things that I wanted to talk about that didn’t make it in. Foremost among them was that, talking to all these smart people about how they keep themselves well-informed, they all circled around to a similar idea: those who are really good sifting through tonnes of information are the people who do stuff with it. They don’t just read; they write. They’re journalists, bloggers, um… tumblr-ers – well, you get the idea. It’s these people who seem to have ‘mastered the flood’. And I was intrigued.
For some reason, I’ve always tended to express how I thought of this glut of stuff online in aquatic terms – the ocean, the flood, the torrent. Maybe because of this, I started to think of it like fishing. I know, bear with me. But it seems our prior model of information was a lone person, standing at the shore of a sea of knowledge. Since the advent of print, the paperback, libraries etc. we’ve had access to massive amounts of knowledge, but only a comparatively small amount of it at once. You could get fish, but you’d either have to make do with what you could reach from the shore, or rely on those with large fishing vessels of their own to bring you their catch. In this incredibly smart, nimble metaphor, those fishing vessels are editors or authors or interlocutors. I think.
But in this awful analogy, the web gives you your own boat. You still have the same limitations, though. Being human, you can only deal with so much at once. But you can also scoot around (yeah, I just typed ‘scoot’) from one spot to another much faster than you could before. If you want, you can strap on your diving gear and go deep down into something. But you can also ricochet from one spot to the next, only staying on the surface.
The sea of knowledge has always pre-existed and overwhelmed us. But before, our only choice was to accumulate knowledge standing at the shore, slowly adding to a storehouse as it got larger and larger. The idea was that gaining all this knowledge would provide you with the perspective you needed to understand the world and life. This is why being well-read was so key; it was only through plowing through many books that you could acquire the kind of scope and comparative basis needed to understand something like a modern political trend or social phenomenon.
I don’t think that part of things has changed. The people who I think are doing smart thinking are still those who have a background in ‘deep thought’. But it seems interesting that Joanne, Mathew and Noah – and lots more – all said that there’s something about being forced to reconfigure and re-present all that information we get online that really helps. What’s more, they all said those who write are not only good at filtering all that stuff, they’re also at a cultural advantage. These ‘masters’, as I’ve called them, have a skill that lets them get ahead.
There’s something here about what the web as a persistently accessible storehouse of information does to the idea of staying well-informed or being smart. We know that the need to memorize facts and figures is less important because they’re simply there in the persistent ether of human knowledge that, quite literally, floats by our head. But the very existence of that ‘always there network’ means that it’s almost as if being well-read has to become something like ‘being well-written’. Given an almost limitless amount of information and data, it’s those who reconfigure that information into new, unexpected assemblages that get ahead. You are no longer on the shore, producing linear narratives. No, our new relationship to epistemology can be summed up by saying that you, my friend, are on a boat.
Given the omnipresent accessibility of knowledge, data, facts, one’s task is still to make sense of it. But the change isn’t just the now cliched division between narrative and database – between linear chains of meaning and non-linear networks of information. It’s that knowledge has always been a non-linear network, shaped into recognizable forms by ideology and experientially presented to us in a generally linear narrative form. What the web changes is not how humans produce meaning – which will always inevitably on some level be narratival and textual – it’s that one’s position in relation to that network has changed, as has the capacity to witness ‘units’ of knowledge outside of familiar narratives of meaning. No longer on the shore, you sit both in and atop the ocean the knowledge, dipping in and out almost against your will.
In many ways, this inversion of position is analogous to many trends in 20th century ideas. Identity isn’t something inside you; it’s something outside that you step into (if ambivalently). You don’t choose ideology; ideology chooses you. And so it goes.
* * *
A couple of years ago, my friends Majero Bouman and Dunja Baus created a holographic poetry project for a symposium honouring professor Barbara Godard. Here’s the description:
“3 Words” is a 2×2.5 foot laser lit pulse hologram. It acts as a window frame onto a 4x4x4 foot scene of suspended letters in suggestive relation. As the “reader” moves his or her body across the frame to view different angles and elements of the scene, the letters move in parallax, at times obscuring one another, at times revealing phonetic and associative elements of their arrangement in space-time.
You would step up to a window through which you view the installation. And true enough, as you moved your head, you’d see different words and arrangements of letters that, put into a new context and new relation to each other, would evoke new ideas. By putting words and letters into a virtual three-dimensional space, you could, instead of putting letters together in linear chains, assemble then in ‘unintended’ ways.
I guess all I’m saying is this: what if, rather than just one window in a temporary art installation in a dance studio in Toronto, that holographic poem was all around us all the time?
Reading has always been an act of writing. But we’ve often experienced those moments as temporally singular and fleeting. Sitting in bed with a book, we produce our relation to a narrative in that strangely rhythmic emotional pulsation that occurs as each word we read slips into the past.
But presented with a never-ending overlapped network of narratives, an array of tabs, windows, flashing notifications from Tweetdeck, and chimes on one’s phone, the inherently inscriptive act of interpretation finds its manifestation in writings that are ever slightly less evanescent. Far from the profoundly odd temporal strangeness of reading alone, our relationship is not subject-to-book, productive and creative, but a reconfiguration. We gather things in Storify. We write blog posts full of links. We take apart the lego spaceship we just built and put it back together again, knowing quite well we mean for it not to be the same.
What do I think the web has done to our relationship to knowledge? I guess I think it’s made it three dimensional and rhizomatic in a way that is both immediate and materially ‘experiencable’. Knowledge has always potentially been that – it’s always been this set of relations you could reconfigure. But you had to literally or figuratively tear pages out of books and throw them into the air. The web just makes that process easier.
The Coke Studio
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on April 5, 2011
Update: An earlier draft of this posting incorrectly labelled the singer in the last two videos. His name is Sain Zahoor.
Years ago on this blog (which, if you can believe it, has been around in one form or another for over 5 years now), I’d link to things I’d discovered through the network of connected, culturally-savvy bloggers I read. Today, I bring you something my 72 year old father sent me from his iPhone. It’s a brave new world, people!
The Coke Studio is a Pakistani television show that features live performances from an array of musicians, usually in the form of some kind of ‘fusion’ that blends certain aspects of Pakistani and Indian music with what you might usually think of as Western instruments. Sometimes, that emphasis on (ugh) “old meets new” does result in some rather cheesy 70s electric guitar. But at other times, you find some really remarkable creations.
Some examples: Sanam Marvi going all trippy with the reverb, but also showing off her incredible voice. Wait until the break at around 3:40 and wait for the track to build again.
Here’s Aik Alif Sain Zahoor who initially seems like he might be a fish out of water, but just owns that shit:
And another with Alif, but this time with Saieen Zahoor and Pakistani rock band Noori.
It’s a pretty amazing resource.
It’s also hard not feel like there’s something to be said for reminding the world that, while Pakistan might have its troubles, its traditions in poetry and music (which overlap frequently) are pretty incredible.
Yes, clearly, it’s more important that Aaron is writing things like this about what is going on in the country. But, in the meantime, a little joy never hurt anyone. Enjoy.
Update: It now occurs to me that saying “Pakistan’s music is awesome, but yeah, that place is fucked up” was a dumb thing to do. I suppose what I’d like to say is that when the only version of Pakistan you get on the news is ‘crazy people in the desert’, you forget the complex history and culture that the news elides. The kind of music presented here is, if you will, an aesthetic connection to or reminder of that complexity.
Great Movies About the Internet?
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on March 26, 2011
If you had to make a list of “Things that got huge in the 21st century and were kinda’ a big deal”, you’d pretty much have to include the internets. Maybe even the webs, too. So why, then, do there seem to be so few movies about it?
There are some great films that really grapple with some central questions about technology. Blade Runner cut to the core of what might or might not distinguish the technologized self from the organic one. 2001 wondered about technology’s role in human evolution for better and worse. But where are the great films about some of the web’s central concerns: of disembodied or virtual identity; of the restructuring of hierarchies; of the rise of non-linear thought; or, hell, I dunno, porn addiction.
I’m sure they’re out there. I just can’t think of many. Avatar is on some obvious level about embodying other identities through a technological change; but its potential seems deflated by framing it in a traditional colonialist narrative. It didn’t really present the new; it’s just used a technological plot device to reproduce a trope we could probably do without.
So SiW readers, what are the great films about the internet? Or, at the very least, the films of the last 10 or 20 years that speak to something about the web’s impact on how we think about ourselves and our relation to the world?
Here’s what I’ll throw into the ring:
- I’d like to submit something for your consideration: Me, You and Everyone We Know is the first great movie about the internet. I think this clicked for me at a specific moment in the film. Amidst this story of people attempting to connect – with virtual selves, with ideals, with expectation – there is a clip of Christine’s moment of direct honesty in her audition tape. She cuts through and stands out through some kind of concordance between her ‘true self’ and her projection on film. Shortly after, she is shown circling random letters in a book called “Going to Pieces”. To me, it was a moment in which the fragmentation of language – its reconfigurability – was put side by side by technology’s capacity to do that to self. More to the point, the film is itself an aching portrayal of, on the one hand, alienation, but on the other, points of connection between people that seem entirely unorthodox – as if the network that connects individuals has somehow been tampered with.
- Coraline. This isn’t about the web as much as it is games, but: a young girl is beckoned into another world by a smaller version of herself that appears in doll form. If she were to lose herself there, she would adopt the eyes of the other place. But instead, she must pursue a quest in which she collects red orbs, to then travel back to her own world transformed, grown, changed. There’s something here, I think – particularly the conduit between the two worlds.
- The other day on Twitter, I wondered if Ratatouille weren’t also a movie with ‘web-like’ concerns i.e. what, on the surface, looks like the collapse of the distinction between expert and amateur, but is in fact about the increased likelihood that expertise can come from new, unexpected places.
There are others. Inception is, I think, about the feeling of risk of ‘other worlds’ you can venture into. Fight Club is probably the movie about occupying a provisional, virtual self in order to move to some kind of self actualisation (a ‘trend’ that was followed in novels like Londonstani, and Kunzru’s The Impressionist and Transmission and, I’m sure, many others).
But what else? Which films capture something about some of the unique changes brought about by the web or related technology?
Considering the Concatenation of Concentration in Capitalism
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology on March 25, 2011
As the place of the things we love – books, magazines, slow, quiet films – starts to change, there is an anxiety that stalks us. We are worried that forces, both within us and beyond us, are moving to rob us of these subtle pleasures. These sentiments constantly simmer, or hang like loose threads, waiting to be tugged by news that at least seems to confirm our fears.
But it isn’t that the forms of these media that are disappearing. It isn’t that video or text or images or games are going away. It’s that their delivery is changing, specifically in that it’s being concentrated, reduced into ever smaller units.
I’m thinking this because it’s been both surprising and interesting to witness people within the world of video games – like, say, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata – start to offer very similar arguments to those we hear about long-form journalism. The ease and pace with which the web works as a delivery mechanism means you can offer atomised content, so that the time one might have spent playing a 20 hour roleplaying game is as easily taken up by a 99 cent game on a smartphone. The singular thing that offers depth, immersion, sophistication and specialization is being supplanted by a collection of more shallow, quick, disposable products. ‘Just like’ journalism or literature etc. Or something.
Whether or how one thing is supplanting another is, I think, a conversation for another time. But it seems impossible to think about these things without also thinking about how this increased pace of gratification is related to psychology and the market.
I still am a pretty firm believer that Zizek’s assertion that capitalism works by beckoning us to enjoy is a sound one, particularly in its most contemporary forms. Because people in the wealthier parts of the world have their needs met, most of our financial choices are about how we wish to, if you’ll excuse the phrase, pleasure ourselves.
Because of digital’s capacity to deliver atomised content, this process of getting what we want can undergo a form of concentration. If what we want is to enjoy ourselves – to gratify our ids, as it were – then the way digital can provide bite-size content, and lots of it, allows for a never-ending stream of bite-size enjoyment. We are awash in attention-economy hickeys.
As the size, length, breadth or depth of what we desire shrinks (psychoanalyze that statement!), our attention can, rather than becoming fragmented, instead become focused upon a successive concatenation of pleasure in which we chain together small units of things to occupy the same amount of time. The album becomes the series of songs. We watch TV series on Netflix for hours on end, episode after episode. The structure of games starts to change so that they are meant to be enjoyed in short bursts. They might last 12 hours overall, but it’s all ten minute chunks. I’m generalizing, of course, but not entirely exaggerating. A concentration of forms is happening.
It seems wrong to avoid what this has to do with desire. If our desire for the new is a psychological urge, then it seems that the potential of digital capitalism to serve that urge, and serve it quickly, may be an issue. It seems our options for dealing with it are few. We could adopt an ‘asceticism of attention’, forcing ourselves to sit down with a book or movie or game because ‘it is good for us’, of course. This is what a certain class of people – and I use the term deliberately – have done for most of the 20th century. I don’t mean that people read against their will; simply that they structured their lives against certain technological and social trends so that they wouldn’t have to.
But that is at odds with the functioning of capitalism. The market always works to reduce the resistance of the superego. Pleasure and capitalism are inherently linked. Completion, too, is pleasure. So we seek to ‘finish’ over and over again, and quickly too, rather than just once. An atomised collection of hundreds of petits morts.
* * *
I could end here. I could, with the above, imply that capitalism works to constantly chip away at the kinds of aesthetic experiences that produce reflective interiority and also suggest that the web accelerates this process. And though web cheerleader I certainly am, I do think this is a real worry – not least because of my own experiences with not only an obliterated attention span, but a strange new lack of desire to push myself through the hard art I genuinely enjoy – or enjoyed.
But I am also left thinking if this concentration of form is one half of an equation that is yet to be finished. If the units of delivery are shrinking because of their function and place within an attention economy, then what if the ‘stuff’ in that units was, to use the old metaphor, deeply nutritious rather than junk food: small packages of calorie-rich, vitamin filled, high-protein astronaut food. The food equivalent of ten pages of Joyce.
* * *
Among the many reasons reading Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake is so hard is just how concentrated they are. A few pages might require intense attention because there is so damn much in there.
This concentration is doubled – it is intense and thus requires intensity. Neither is it isolated. Far from it, it is simply a node of a network of intertextuality – a network one familiarizes oneself with after years of study (which is why I’ve never read them).
But if our forms are becoming concentrated, do we respond with concentrated content? Do we intensify the atomized as the pressure on our attention itself intensifies? Or does the network of attention required to support such concentration – that you need to ‘get all the references’ – already make this an impossibility?
* * *
Let’s take an example of the other side of concentration. One of the most common complaints about critical theory is how impenetrable the writing is – that it is nearly impossible to read. What many miss is that the jargon used makes the writing more precise and shorter. Take a look at this sentence by Spivak:
Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the “third-world woman” caught between tradition and modernization, culturalism and development.
If the significance of the terms ‘subject-constitution’ or ‘culturalism’ are lost on the reader, then this is an impenetrable mess. But when one is familiar with the terms and ideas they refer to – and not just the ideas, but the debates around them – the density of the passage is, more than anything, efficient. By compressing large concepts into the shorthand of jargon, it says a great deal, and weaves numerous complex strands together very neatly to sum up a very subtle argument about the cultural currency of the subaltern woman.
But, weirdly, it also reminds me of Arrested Development. This piece from the AV Club goes to great lengths to explain just how concentrated one lone scene from the show was:
Which brings us back to that scene at the wake, which I still haven’t fully unwound. For instance, I could point out George Sr.’s shirt, which bears the logo of the Bluth family banana stand, a running bit of self-reference dating back to Arrested Development’s earliest episodes. I could note the presence of Henry Winkler, playing the Bluths’ hapless attorney, Barry Zuckerkorn. (When he thinks George Sr.’s dead, he starts making up reasons why he can’t get his hands on the will; at the end of the episode, when the family learns that George Sr. is actually alive, he can be heard offscreen saying, “And I just found the will!”) I could talk about Jeffrey Tambor’s secondary role as Oscar, who’s been enjoying running around Lucille’s house in the buff now that George isn’t around. (Lucille: “Oscar, close it. You look like the window of a butcher shop.”)
There are just so many jokes in “Good Grief,” some of which are funny in and of themselves, but most of which require so much setup that a newcomer would likely be completely at sea. There’s a reason Arrested Development’s opening-credits sequence features arrows and extra text, all circling and connecting and explaining. Even the four fairly simple comic moments in the clip below could take a wall-sized chart to adequately explain.
All of which makes me think: do we need to think about changing our emphasis on the length of focus to the depth of focus, so that, within an attention economy where small chunks of focus work best, the content designed for those small chunks is super concentrated? That it contains layers upon layers of sophistication to make up in intensity what it lacks in scope?
There are obvious assumptions I’m making here: that depth and length are extricable; that ‘sophisticated’ is good; and that the barriers of entry to ‘good art’ should remain. All of these should, of course, be questioned.
But in the meantime, a nerdy reference: do our attentions, instead of a long, lazy, sumptuous meal, need elven lembas bread?
Valves, Grids and Soundproofed Condos
In the 1980s, James Burke hosted a BBC documentary series with the charmingly understated title The Day the Universe Changed. It was a look back at what Burke considered key moments in the ‘progression’ of ‘mankind’ – two words that, even a short 30 years later, one can hardly use without the scare quotes.
The clip above is typical, both in its bombastic rhetoric, but also in what might be its anachronism: it says the power that led to space travel is chief among humanity’s achievements, even more so than the microcomputer, a claim that might either not be very accurate – or perhaps be very prescient. The episodes all focus on one key insight, and hit all the things you’d expect for an unabashedly Eurocentric show: the Renaissance, the scientific method, Darwin, Einstein and so on.
Still – though these now seem equal parts obvious and worthy of critique, as a child I remember the thing that fascinated me most was there might be a day that changed the universe. In part, I dug it because it was reductive: it gave me simple things to hold on to and say “this one thing here changed history”. But what also set my mind-a-turnin’ (that was how we spoke in Essex in the 80s) was the idea that an entire swirl of historical change – a massive, overlapped network of consequence and upheaval – might be triggered by the events of one day. That the show never said it did was, I think, a bit too subtle for my kid brain to grapple with. I just dug the concept.
Of course now, as an adult, I can’t abide by that kind of reductionist approach because it just feels dishonest. Part of this has to do with the subjectivity of the choices involved in picking one thing. If the printing press was so crucial, it’s hard not to think of all the things that went into its creation. Who figured out how to refine iron? Who invented the cog? Or the roller? Or the pulley? Didn’t all these things count too? It all moves toward a kind of infinite regression.
But it does make me wonder if sometimes there aren’t small, obscure and overlooked inventions that allow for the things we now take for granted – some seemingly insignificant thing without which things like microcomputers or spaceships or genetic engineering couldn’t exist. What if the cog was the very core of what made us human?
The importance of small parts of larger networks is something I’ve wondered about in the past. For some reason while living in the Irish countryside, I spent a rather silly amount of time wondering about an ‘invention’ for use in green homes. A given house would have its own power generation like solar and wind, but at the point the house connected to the electric grid, there would be a box that would dynamically adjust the flow of incoming electricity. When a house was making enough, it would stop accepting power from outside, while on a cloudless, windless today (or whatever) it’d open ‘er up, so to speak. The mysterious device (‘box’ being the extent of the technical details of my imagining) would be this tiny yet crucial thing to help popularize green power, because it would make it easy and seamless to slowly switch.
Of course, something like that probably existed then. And I’m almost sure it exists now, though I don’t even know how to search for it (what would it even be called?*). But the only reason I remember it is because it was the start of me waking up to the idea that in the messy network of relations that is modern society, sometimes the things that help are those that control the flow of stuff between people and the social and economic structures they are a part of. You need valves for how you connect to things. Sometimes you want more, sometimes less; it’s the control the valve gives you that helps.
That issue is one that stuck with me. And it seems few areas are as in need of innovative solutions to help make sense and order out of chaos as cities. Among the plethora of challenges facing urban areas are how to solve a growing conflict between the luxuries of suburban living and a vision of sustainable urban life.
Now, to many people, the suburbs aren’t a ‘luxury’ at all; they are punishment, or a form of voluntary excommunication. But something urbanites often overlook is that much of the middle class suburban struggle is the fight to get your own space. Think about it: for so many, like immigrants and the working poor, the long march to ‘get a detached house in the ‘burbs’ is a dream because for years, ‘they’ (by which I actually mean ‘we’) have fought to move out of crowded, clustered living spaces in which others’ lives impinge on yours to finally have your own backyard and a house that can be as loud or as quite as one wants. The ‘emptiness’ of the suburbs is precisely the appeal because you have carved out a place for yourself where you an in more control of how much the overwhelming complexity of modern life affects you. You’ve found a valve for the flow of society into your life – and it’s one that isn’t tenable any more.
This is what you give up to live in the hustle and bustle of a city. You share space with people. You share their noise, you share their smells, their traffic, their activities. For some of us, this is a worthwhile sacrifice. But for many I know, it is not.
Which brings me to soundproofing. Yes, I know, that was rather circuitous, but here’s what I mean. For reasons of both economics (here’s a great interview with Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi on the subject) and sustainability, mass suburban living is no longer possible. As a result, we now need to figure out ways to mitigate the downsides of living in cramped, urban spaces like condos and apartments so that more and more people will want to live there.
So why are people not focusing on soundproofing? It seems innocuous, even silly; but the capacity to live one’s life freely of invasion by others’ sounds is a major part of what makes one feel in control of one’s space. Imagine how much less annoying condo life might be if you would never have the sounds of others’ lives invading your space, sleep and day-to-day existence.
Right now, the reason no developer really is pushing it is the obvious economic factor. But it seems like one of those ideas that could start in the luxury market and work its way down. It’s difficult to imagine it could add more than $10,000 to the price of a half million dollar condo to build in soundproofing material to the walls and floor. Push it, and make the windows and doors soundproof, and you might creep up to $15-20k. But even in 10 years, that’d surely halve, if not more. Moreover, costs could be signficantly reduced if the insulation currently used by builders were simply changed to one with soundproofing qualities.
We need to find a way to mitigate the downsides of urban living to make it more appealing to everyone. While I can already envision people who’d snarkily say something about the ‘sterility of boxes disconnected from the world’, it’s a naive view. In many places – especially somewhere like Toronto, that is seeing massive growth in downtown density and condo buildings – some solution is needed to make the inevitable difficulties of downtown living less inevitable. And maybe expanding the environmental, economic and social benefits of urbanization might be helped along by something as insignificant and unimportant as a bit of foam between walls.
*What would a box be called that ‘directs’ energy and was invented by me?… Why, The Navigator of course! Heyyo!
