I've seen every episode of Breaking Bad, or, to be more precise, I've seen a little under 3/4 of Breaking Bad. The missing little bit over a quarter comes from all the fast forwarding I have done watching seasons 3 and 4 on my computer. To me, in any given episode something like half of it is worth skipping (usually the home bits with the White family, Skylar in particular), but the episode on last night had almost nothing worth skipping, and Skylar herself has gotten more interesting as a character the badder she herself has broken. I still think the show isn't great, and the picture of the drug empire Gus has established is odd, for example, he is associated with some German based multinational, but has one, one, guy he really trusts to guard him. Unlike on the not as equally flawed Wire, whitepeople's favorite show ever, the writers of Breaking Bad don't seem to understand how massive drug cartels work, and aren't interested in creating the ensemble cast necessary to do so. This of course makes sense because it did not start out as a show about cartels and multinational drug conglomerates, but the flaws in the conception of the drug empire are always slightly glaring. On the Wire, for example, it took them almost an entire season to know even what Avon Barksdale looked like, and he never touched anything, not money, drugs, or guns.
As a necessary side note, I have to, as a whiteperson, tell some sort of Baltimore story, which thankfully I have because I grew up in the DC suburbs an hour away from charm/crack city. When I was in high school, Baltimore was where you went when you hit 18 for strip clubs, and where all the cheap punk shows were, always in slum neighborhoods that you did not want to be out in at night, or even during the day most of the time. This was in the post crack wars era when things were hardly safe, not that they are now. I have been offered enough drugs at Lexington Market, where the signs in the bathroom strictly prohibit showering in the sinks, to know that the city still has its problems. The oddest thing about the city is the extent to which the weeds have overgrown the city. I have a friend who grew up in a federal period three story beautiful town home, and two blocks from his house they have excellent crack you can buy. The 'safe' whiteperson neighborhoods abut the crack slums in a way I have seen in no other city. There must be some sort of iPhone app to exploit this, I'm thinking some sort of color map that gradates green to red (or, perish the thought, black) mapping out the streets. Whoever develops this, I just want the credit for the idea.
As a show, Breaking Bad suffered from the typical third season slump. I know from a screenwriting friend, that most shows have their first and second seasons planned out, and then have no idear what to do after they get picked up for a third. Clearly with Breaking Bad, they were ready to stop the show at the end of the second season and kill Walter off, leaving his family with however much money he had at that point. The third season of Mad Men (and the fourth) was terrible compared to the first and second, as was the third season of Deadwood. Both decided that the protagonists of their respective shows (Don Draper and Al Swearengen) were more interesting as some sort of crippled anti-hero, and were basically stripped of their verbal and physical power. Did Don say anything worthwhile in the whole of season 3? Anything as good as "I don't have a contract." Breaking Bad's main problem is, of course, that its protagonist is its antagonist, and it has taken the show basically two seasons to work towards creating someone we, as an audience, can get behind. Gus obviously isn't a real option, as excellent as he is, and finally, in the past couple episodes, Jesse has emerged as something worthy of audience backing. I give the writers of the show the limited credit they deserve for finally figuring out how to go about brining Jesse to the front. Because I don't care about it much, I won't talk about how coordinated the story lines were, or how excellent the final shot of the episode was, looking down on Walt in the womblike crawlspace under his house, crying in a fetal position, bald like a baby. I will only say that as an audience member, our desire for the good to end happily and the bad unhappily as Wilde so aptly defined fiction, seems to finally be being satisfied. The show has created such a terrible sob in Walt that watching him cry like a bald little baby after being tazed by a cattleprod was deeply satisfying.
Monday, September 26, 2011
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
What exactly is your position on the position of having positions about positions?
At work today, we had a meeting about meetings, or, more specifically, we had a meeting to talk about the 'norms' of our meetings, which means we meet to talk about how we are going to talk about what we talk about in our meetings. With all this talk of the normative and meta-reflection about reflection I felt for a minute like I was in some sort of Platonic dialogue like the Alcibiades I, talking to Socrates about talking to Socrates.
I find the idea of talking about 'norms' interesting, it evidences a strong disconnect with both the phenomena and the noumenona that surround us. It also gets at the one way I ever intend to make any money, using my limited but sufficient sensitivity to things to do what my mother tells me is called group-dynamic consultation, essentially figuring out how and why groups of people do not function as they should, and fixing them. Talking about 'norms' implies one either has none or one does not like the ones one has, but it begs the question of how talking about something that operates on the noumenonalogical can be fixed by talking about it, or, even worse, agreeing on a new set of norms. It would be akin to talking about standing distance (how far or close you stand to a person) and deciding as a hive of individuals to change the standing distance. Would, or better yet could, anyone actually follow it? There is something profoundly ephemeral and mercurially about group dynamics, working on all sorts of unconscious levels, and the solution to things that are beneith the phenomenaligical can't be to rationalize, systematize, and explain them. As the Tao says, or doesn't say, the act of naming strips a thing of its name. We do not live in a world of objects that can be named and have properties, at least I hope not.
The meeting about meets was bookended by an announcement that the staff had to take 'climate' survey to figure out the. . . climate of the school (I thought it seemed partly-sunny, but the supercomputer I use to calculate the probability of the weather was down, so I had no confidence in my answer). The idea of categorizing and systemizing one's feelings about the 'climate' of a place, the same background state that permeates all of our interactions, our 'norms' evidences the same technocratic desire to control being, that our sense of existence is to control existence. The survey's replace what was previously seen as intuition, or, mono no aware as the Heian Japanese put it, the sensitivity to things and ability to be moved. We do not live in an era of poets and intuitives, where a highly attuned individual could be sensitive to the ontological feelings of his culture, but a technocratic era where smashing and hollowing out idols is done not with a tuning fork, but a blunt hammer. Where impositions come from the top, or are trolled from the masses by people who could not understand the answers because they do not understand the questions. There is some idea, deeply ingrained in Western thought from Plato to Freud, that even if you asked a person a question and they answer honestly, they are not being honest because they do not know themself, do not have access to the real answer. Can we know what influence our parents have on us, or our friends, or our teachers? Or why certain groups work well together and others do not? Would we even want to? Will a quorum on any of these things get at the answers, or will the answers be somehow meaningless because it is treating things of the immaterial as if they are something to be picked up, moved, and altered. Tolstoy said the only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless, or as the Tao puts it, know not-knowing: supreme, or can you control our breathe, gently like a baby?
I find the idea of talking about 'norms' interesting, it evidences a strong disconnect with both the phenomena and the noumenona that surround us. It also gets at the one way I ever intend to make any money, using my limited but sufficient sensitivity to things to do what my mother tells me is called group-dynamic consultation, essentially figuring out how and why groups of people do not function as they should, and fixing them. Talking about 'norms' implies one either has none or one does not like the ones one has, but it begs the question of how talking about something that operates on the noumenonalogical can be fixed by talking about it, or, even worse, agreeing on a new set of norms. It would be akin to talking about standing distance (how far or close you stand to a person) and deciding as a hive of individuals to change the standing distance. Would, or better yet could, anyone actually follow it? There is something profoundly ephemeral and mercurially about group dynamics, working on all sorts of unconscious levels, and the solution to things that are beneith the phenomenaligical can't be to rationalize, systematize, and explain them. As the Tao says, or doesn't say, the act of naming strips a thing of its name. We do not live in a world of objects that can be named and have properties, at least I hope not.
The meeting about meets was bookended by an announcement that the staff had to take 'climate' survey to figure out the. . . climate of the school (I thought it seemed partly-sunny, but the supercomputer I use to calculate the probability of the weather was down, so I had no confidence in my answer). The idea of categorizing and systemizing one's feelings about the 'climate' of a place, the same background state that permeates all of our interactions, our 'norms' evidences the same technocratic desire to control being, that our sense of existence is to control existence. The survey's replace what was previously seen as intuition, or, mono no aware as the Heian Japanese put it, the sensitivity to things and ability to be moved. We do not live in an era of poets and intuitives, where a highly attuned individual could be sensitive to the ontological feelings of his culture, but a technocratic era where smashing and hollowing out idols is done not with a tuning fork, but a blunt hammer. Where impositions come from the top, or are trolled from the masses by people who could not understand the answers because they do not understand the questions. There is some idea, deeply ingrained in Western thought from Plato to Freud, that even if you asked a person a question and they answer honestly, they are not being honest because they do not know themself, do not have access to the real answer. Can we know what influence our parents have on us, or our friends, or our teachers? Or why certain groups work well together and others do not? Would we even want to? Will a quorum on any of these things get at the answers, or will the answers be somehow meaningless because it is treating things of the immaterial as if they are something to be picked up, moved, and altered. Tolstoy said the only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless, or as the Tao puts it, know not-knowing: supreme, or can you control our breathe, gently like a baby?
Monday, March 21, 2011
I wouldn't say I'm a a film buff, I'm more of a connoisseur...
"Yo, this is a sick movie. We should watch this movie!"
-Spoken by one of my students, after having watched 15 minutes of said the movie. When asked by both myself and his classmates what the hell he meant, given that we had been watching the movie for the aforementioned 15 minutes, that I had paused it multiple times to ask questions, point things out, and check for clarity, and that I introduced the movie before starting it, he said he thought it was just a trailer for it.
-Spoken by one of my students, after having watched 15 minutes of said the movie. When asked by both myself and his classmates what the hell he meant, given that we had been watching the movie for the aforementioned 15 minutes, that I had paused it multiple times to ask questions, point things out, and check for clarity, and that I introduced the movie before starting it, he said he thought it was just a trailer for it.
War, what is it good for? Buying property for cheap on the Mediterranean aparently
Just how much are condos going for in Tripoli these days? Cheaper than they were a week or two ago, so if you are looking for beachfront property, Libya is looking like a good bet, Tripoli if you are cautious, but you can probably scoop up something on the real cheap in Banghazi right now, as long as you are willing to clean shrapnel and the remnants of white phosphorous bombs and carrier missiles. As much as I hate anything I write here to be the least bit relevant, this whole mini-war or stealing of someone else's toys does allow me to partially vindicate, or better elaborate the position I brought up in the posting on fair trade (I am wholly ok with talking about contemporary political things as long as it has to do with me and what I think and what I feel).
Probably because it was the most boring, or least funny, I got the most (a whole 2) comments about the role force and will plays in the concept of fair trade. One person, the best read and smartest I know (smart enough to know she could, if she wanted to, comprehend Finnegan's Wake. She's also read Being & Time, in Nazi I believe, and reads attic Greek) thought I was flirting with an odd sort of blend of Nietzsche and Ayn Rand, which I found extremely odd for simple gender reasons alone. Rand is like the female Nietzsche, or, she is to girls what Friderich is to boys (I once quipped, as an undergrad to a female classmate who was quite taken with John Galt and who was named Dagny after Dagny Taggart that the reason her mother loved Atlas Shrugged so much was it was the first time she thought. The obvious implication, which little Dagny did not appreciate at all, was that it was the first time she thought as well. It was a sufficiently chauvinist comment to rid the table of her presence which was generally to the enjoyment of everyone else at said table. Quite surprisingly, I actually had the reputation of being something of an asshole as an undergraduate, which was probably generally true, though I was a jovial, Fallstaff-ish ass(hole) in my own defense. I once, for example, got a classmate to leave a table after just sitting down after she had attended some multi-hour meeting about saving Tibet by asking her if she, "saved Tibet yet." Obviously, a whole bunch must have been in my tone, which my wife has almost always told me is often off. The girl who was trying to save Tibet would spend hours and hours on the phone with some Tibetan monk named Lop-Sang or something like that, where he would tell her how much he liked and loved her. It was always my point of view that little Lop-Sang really did love her, carnally, she contended that he took vows of celibacy so he wouldn't even think like that, but my point was that there really isn't much to do in Tibet, and that being a monk is like a default career, like becoming a lawyer for whitepeople. She would then recount his deep abiding 'spirituality', whatever that means, and I would point out that it is really easy to be celibate and spiritual in Tibet where the women are all 4" tall and don't really take any sort of care of themselves, but it gets a little harder in America when you have all these very well-kempt, attractive liberal Jewish girls svitzing over your 'spirituality.' I just hope old Loppy picked up the western habit of wearing underwear under his robes). I don't really see much difference than Ayn Rand and Nietzsche, except that one of her books adds up to all of his, and he had better facial hair. The other reader, equally smart, seemed to think I mischaracterized Thrasymachus in the Republic, and over-attributed the role his interpretation of justice plays.
Given that it has been a decade since I've read the Republic, and I was a stupid undergraduate reading too much Nietzsche when I did read it, the reader is probably correct, or, at the very least, the text is a little fresher in her mind as she is reading it now. That said, from my poor-ish memory, I do seem to recall that Thrasymachus is left un-answered by Socrates, and walks away seemingly annoying at all the sophistry/dialectic. He has an idea about justice, and even if he is willing to admit that sometimes the strong do not know what is good for them, any Socratic contention does not seem to be able to shake his basic idea. I connected Thrasymachus with the later challenge offered by the whole ring of Gyges problem, but even if they are not connected, Socrates answers neither of them. The entire dialogue seems to offer no reason to not act not good (awkward Socratic phrasing, I know), and seems to me to be more about the monstrosity of being made or compelled by the state to act good, or whatever that state says is the good. Nobody wants to live in that city of words.
My point about Fair Trade was not that force rules, which everyone from the Greeks onward readily recognized, Nietzsche just stripped it of anything but will to power, but that the West engages in this odd act of self-binding by using force to bring about what it sees as justice, often at its own expense. It was the slavish self-constraint that interested me, the world's super-power trying itself up because it sees it as 'right', and because who else could? So now, we have the same country that is forcing itself into fair-trade, or forcing itself and others into fair-trade, openly violating the sovereignty of another nation, waging warfare on it. Of course, some vague, unfounded idea of universal human rights (or universal dog rights, or universal tree rights) comes up, but lets get real, nobody follows the Geneva conventions for a reason; to the victors the spoils, or, as Curtis Le May put it when asked by a reporter if he thought he committed a war crime after firebombing Tokyo, burning a quarter of the city and killing over 100,000 civilians, "depends if we win the war or not."
When Aristotle talked about the law in his Politics, he said it was part force, part convention, and that within that convention, some portion of it was reason. He never qualified things because that would be boring, but the fact that the founding fathers found him too idealistic, and his regimes too weak should speak volumes about his formula of the law. So I don't know if it is Right (or right) to bomb whoever we want to bomb and make trade fair for whoever we want to make it fair for, but I know that we can and where there is a will, there is a way.
Probably because it was the most boring, or least funny, I got the most (a whole 2) comments about the role force and will plays in the concept of fair trade. One person, the best read and smartest I know (smart enough to know she could, if she wanted to, comprehend Finnegan's Wake. She's also read Being & Time, in Nazi I believe, and reads attic Greek) thought I was flirting with an odd sort of blend of Nietzsche and Ayn Rand, which I found extremely odd for simple gender reasons alone. Rand is like the female Nietzsche, or, she is to girls what Friderich is to boys (I once quipped, as an undergrad to a female classmate who was quite taken with John Galt and who was named Dagny after Dagny Taggart that the reason her mother loved Atlas Shrugged so much was it was the first time she thought. The obvious implication, which little Dagny did not appreciate at all, was that it was the first time she thought as well. It was a sufficiently chauvinist comment to rid the table of her presence which was generally to the enjoyment of everyone else at said table. Quite surprisingly, I actually had the reputation of being something of an asshole as an undergraduate, which was probably generally true, though I was a jovial, Fallstaff-ish ass(hole) in my own defense. I once, for example, got a classmate to leave a table after just sitting down after she had attended some multi-hour meeting about saving Tibet by asking her if she, "saved Tibet yet." Obviously, a whole bunch must have been in my tone, which my wife has almost always told me is often off. The girl who was trying to save Tibet would spend hours and hours on the phone with some Tibetan monk named Lop-Sang or something like that, where he would tell her how much he liked and loved her. It was always my point of view that little Lop-Sang really did love her, carnally, she contended that he took vows of celibacy so he wouldn't even think like that, but my point was that there really isn't much to do in Tibet, and that being a monk is like a default career, like becoming a lawyer for whitepeople. She would then recount his deep abiding 'spirituality', whatever that means, and I would point out that it is really easy to be celibate and spiritual in Tibet where the women are all 4" tall and don't really take any sort of care of themselves, but it gets a little harder in America when you have all these very well-kempt, attractive liberal Jewish girls svitzing over your 'spirituality.' I just hope old Loppy picked up the western habit of wearing underwear under his robes). I don't really see much difference than Ayn Rand and Nietzsche, except that one of her books adds up to all of his, and he had better facial hair. The other reader, equally smart, seemed to think I mischaracterized Thrasymachus in the Republic, and over-attributed the role his interpretation of justice plays.
Given that it has been a decade since I've read the Republic, and I was a stupid undergraduate reading too much Nietzsche when I did read it, the reader is probably correct, or, at the very least, the text is a little fresher in her mind as she is reading it now. That said, from my poor-ish memory, I do seem to recall that Thrasymachus is left un-answered by Socrates, and walks away seemingly annoying at all the sophistry/dialectic. He has an idea about justice, and even if he is willing to admit that sometimes the strong do not know what is good for them, any Socratic contention does not seem to be able to shake his basic idea. I connected Thrasymachus with the later challenge offered by the whole ring of Gyges problem, but even if they are not connected, Socrates answers neither of them. The entire dialogue seems to offer no reason to not act not good (awkward Socratic phrasing, I know), and seems to me to be more about the monstrosity of being made or compelled by the state to act good, or whatever that state says is the good. Nobody wants to live in that city of words.
My point about Fair Trade was not that force rules, which everyone from the Greeks onward readily recognized, Nietzsche just stripped it of anything but will to power, but that the West engages in this odd act of self-binding by using force to bring about what it sees as justice, often at its own expense. It was the slavish self-constraint that interested me, the world's super-power trying itself up because it sees it as 'right', and because who else could? So now, we have the same country that is forcing itself into fair-trade, or forcing itself and others into fair-trade, openly violating the sovereignty of another nation, waging warfare on it. Of course, some vague, unfounded idea of universal human rights (or universal dog rights, or universal tree rights) comes up, but lets get real, nobody follows the Geneva conventions for a reason; to the victors the spoils, or, as Curtis Le May put it when asked by a reporter if he thought he committed a war crime after firebombing Tokyo, burning a quarter of the city and killing over 100,000 civilians, "depends if we win the war or not."
When Aristotle talked about the law in his Politics, he said it was part force, part convention, and that within that convention, some portion of it was reason. He never qualified things because that would be boring, but the fact that the founding fathers found him too idealistic, and his regimes too weak should speak volumes about his formula of the law. So I don't know if it is Right (or right) to bomb whoever we want to bomb and make trade fair for whoever we want to make it fair for, but I know that we can and where there is a will, there is a way.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
I'm not an asshole, I just act like one on television
So based on David Bianculli's review, I watched the first couple of episodes of NBC new show Next Great Restaurant, and it took only those two episodes to help me re-realize why I am refuse to watch almost all network reality TV. I don't know if it is their budgets, their casting, or their audience, but cable televisions reality programming (minus MTV) has just that dusting of panache necessary to keep me from feeling manipulated. Or, their manipulation is just subtle enough that I am kosher with it. At least on Bravo and whatever network Project Runway is now on, they just show you that they are using Glad Press-n-Seal, I don't have to hear the facetious opinions about how great the stuff really is. Next Great Restaurant really is great if you can bear through its bluntness to see the deep, ontological problems it presents about our country.
The show has yuppies and whitepeople of various flavors (some ironically making fun of Southerners, because hey, why not poke fun at the people in our country with all the guns fighting our wars for us who can actually fix and make things. Others talking about how it is their dream to open a healthy, portion-controlled restaurant, and they didn't really want to be a lawyer after going to Harvard Law School, after finishing up in the Peace Corps. One of the putzy yuppies' dream is to open a grilled cheese fast food chain; it's no Kierkegaardean defining commitment, but who am I to question to ontology of someone that wants to melt cheese on bread for a living) pitching their 'concept' about their chain of fast food restaurants. One would think that say, food, would be their concept, but apparently that isn't teleological enough for most of America, so they have to have an idea being the idea. Needless to say, I never knew our country was so Platonic, but hope springs eternal as the saying goes.
The basic premise, which is a mash-up of various other reality tv shows (BBC's The Resturant and Dragon's Den in particular), is ten 'people' have to compete to open the proverbial next great resturant. Their 'prize' is a small, three resturant franchise in three prominent American cities (New York, LA, and, of course, Minneapolis) with financial backing coming from 4 investors who also serve as the judges of the show and its producers, which means they are making money hand over fist, with ample references to their own restaurants (try to go 5 minutes of watching the show without hearing how Steve Ellis owns Chipotle. In fact, next weeks 'challenge' takes place in a Chipotle, because how else to learn about creating a resturant than working as an order-taker at a fast food place). The show amplifies the speed of things by advertising that by the end of it, if it actually makes it through sweeps, you will be able to go into one of these restaurants, and reinforces this by showing you how long until the winning restaurants open. From a cultural criticism perspective, there is almost too much in it to talk about, but, needless to say, everyone has a sob story or some sort, because success can only come to those who've lost of a mother, or job, or dog or whatever. The irony of crying and shvitzing about how your mother died when you were 16 against the backdrop of Japan become the new Chernobyl and Pakistan having devastating flooding all last wet season is a little hard to take, but never underestimate people and television to make mountains out of molehills, and to universalize the most personal, and really, small troubles. We aren't talking about living Job's confronting God in the form of the whirlwind, but that doesn't seem to stop them from engaging in malignantly narcissistic behavior. A particular highlight from the episodes so far is their selection of an Indian man who wants to start a chain of southern Indian restaurants, but did not give him access to any Indian chefs, so he had to have a Swede cook for him, Apparently finding an Indian chef was simply outside the resources of NBC Universal. Half the people can't cook and don't know anything about cooking, and see the creation of a franchise as just another type of techne.
The show really gets at the sped up pace of modern life, and the lack of connection with place or past. With all the talk of concepts and logos and the techne of running a resturant, there is almost nothing about being with the world and within the world. To the show, its contestants, and its judges, New York is LA is Minneapolis is Shanghai, as long as the logo is good enough. It is odd to desire a lack of place, but this is, I suppose the modern condition. Or, put another way, the modern way of being is to either not have a way of being, or to have a way of being so flexible that you can be anything. Machiavelli had the great insight that man is infinitely more malleable than the ancients ever thought. For Plato and Aristotle, there was a Natural Right and it dictated certain ends. Machiavelli, having seen Christianity ravage the West for hundreds of years, coming out of a hierarchical, stratified Catholic culture, saw that you really could make man into anything you wanted, that, as Pascal would say a century later, custom is man's nature. Lots of ink has been spilled about how unreal reality tv is, but I don't think those that see it this way are sensitive to the ontological shift that has taken place in the past decade. This is what I suppose the post-modern hyper-realists like Baudrillard talked about, but it isn't the reality of something that never really was, it is the amping up of something actually there, hyper-reality in the sense of being more real than reality. So if you are a putz, reducing hours and hours of tape down to 4 minutes of screen time doesn't simulate putzness, or put putzness upon your being, it purifies your putzness. The casual view, most viewers, correctly do not draw any distinction between reality and reality tv because one does not exist.
The show has yuppies and whitepeople of various flavors (some ironically making fun of Southerners, because hey, why not poke fun at the people in our country with all the guns fighting our wars for us who can actually fix and make things. Others talking about how it is their dream to open a healthy, portion-controlled restaurant, and they didn't really want to be a lawyer after going to Harvard Law School, after finishing up in the Peace Corps. One of the putzy yuppies' dream is to open a grilled cheese fast food chain; it's no Kierkegaardean defining commitment, but who am I to question to ontology of someone that wants to melt cheese on bread for a living) pitching their 'concept' about their chain of fast food restaurants. One would think that say, food, would be their concept, but apparently that isn't teleological enough for most of America, so they have to have an idea being the idea. Needless to say, I never knew our country was so Platonic, but hope springs eternal as the saying goes.
The basic premise, which is a mash-up of various other reality tv shows (BBC's The Resturant and Dragon's Den in particular), is ten 'people' have to compete to open the proverbial next great resturant. Their 'prize' is a small, three resturant franchise in three prominent American cities (New York, LA, and, of course, Minneapolis) with financial backing coming from 4 investors who also serve as the judges of the show and its producers, which means they are making money hand over fist, with ample references to their own restaurants (try to go 5 minutes of watching the show without hearing how Steve Ellis owns Chipotle. In fact, next weeks 'challenge' takes place in a Chipotle, because how else to learn about creating a resturant than working as an order-taker at a fast food place). The show amplifies the speed of things by advertising that by the end of it, if it actually makes it through sweeps, you will be able to go into one of these restaurants, and reinforces this by showing you how long until the winning restaurants open. From a cultural criticism perspective, there is almost too much in it to talk about, but, needless to say, everyone has a sob story or some sort, because success can only come to those who've lost of a mother, or job, or dog or whatever. The irony of crying and shvitzing about how your mother died when you were 16 against the backdrop of Japan become the new Chernobyl and Pakistan having devastating flooding all last wet season is a little hard to take, but never underestimate people and television to make mountains out of molehills, and to universalize the most personal, and really, small troubles. We aren't talking about living Job's confronting God in the form of the whirlwind, but that doesn't seem to stop them from engaging in malignantly narcissistic behavior. A particular highlight from the episodes so far is their selection of an Indian man who wants to start a chain of southern Indian restaurants, but did not give him access to any Indian chefs, so he had to have a Swede cook for him, Apparently finding an Indian chef was simply outside the resources of NBC Universal. Half the people can't cook and don't know anything about cooking, and see the creation of a franchise as just another type of techne.
The show really gets at the sped up pace of modern life, and the lack of connection with place or past. With all the talk of concepts and logos and the techne of running a resturant, there is almost nothing about being with the world and within the world. To the show, its contestants, and its judges, New York is LA is Minneapolis is Shanghai, as long as the logo is good enough. It is odd to desire a lack of place, but this is, I suppose the modern condition. Or, put another way, the modern way of being is to either not have a way of being, or to have a way of being so flexible that you can be anything. Machiavelli had the great insight that man is infinitely more malleable than the ancients ever thought. For Plato and Aristotle, there was a Natural Right and it dictated certain ends. Machiavelli, having seen Christianity ravage the West for hundreds of years, coming out of a hierarchical, stratified Catholic culture, saw that you really could make man into anything you wanted, that, as Pascal would say a century later, custom is man's nature. Lots of ink has been spilled about how unreal reality tv is, but I don't think those that see it this way are sensitive to the ontological shift that has taken place in the past decade. This is what I suppose the post-modern hyper-realists like Baudrillard talked about, but it isn't the reality of something that never really was, it is the amping up of something actually there, hyper-reality in the sense of being more real than reality. So if you are a putz, reducing hours and hours of tape down to 4 minutes of screen time doesn't simulate putzness, or put putzness upon your being, it purifies your putzness. The casual view, most viewers, correctly do not draw any distinction between reality and reality tv because one does not exist.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
We shall fight Godzilla on the beaches, we shall fight squid-aliens on the landing grounds, we shall never surrender, or eat ourselves after the nuclear apocalypse
Every year, invariably, three or four alien takeover movies come out with basically the same plot structure, characters, and ending. Sometimes, the aliens are giant squids, sometimes giant robots, sometimes giant mech-squid robots. It doesn't really matter. Some of these movies are farcically serious reflections about fate and belief in a higher power (a higher power that isn't the aliens with their faster-than-light time travel) as in the case of Signs, some are comic reflections by weirdoes like in Mars Attacks!, and somearen't about aliens at all, but some vague 'alien' thing like communists (Invasion of the Body Snatchers), but really, what they are all about, the phenomena beneath the lasers and spaceships and tentacles is the wrath of god that just hit Japan (We will not even break the surface of god's near cosmic sense of irony that they only nation in the world to have two thermo-nuclear bombs dropped on it will now have a couple of its thermo-nuclear reactors start spewing radiation into its water supply). It is bad news for a nation that worships nature more than any other on the planet, but it also exposes modern, post-enlightenment man's deep seeded impotence and fear of nature, suppressed and externalized into Godzilla and space crabs.
The Japanese might love nature, but they love a controlled, human (and humane) version of it. Human rust and roughness. Their sabi-wabi aesthetic is posited on the ability to portion out the area in which the moss or trees can grow uncontrolled. The Japanese are the most technologically advanced nation on the planet, and thus confronted their own impotence far earlier than the west did, but we got around to it eventually, and seem to have really run with the genre; I cannot help but feel Katrina helped spur this on, though it is as dark, vague, and unfounded an intuition as I can make. Roman Polanski, for all his peaderastic greatness, once said man trying to understand god is like a dog trying to understand a car, and I hate to be practical and S-ish (as in sensory on the Myers-Briggs personality index), but how exactly would we fight an alien race that can travel faster than light? Or, to put it another way, how would the Kombai fight an F-22 stealth fighter jet with their sticks and utter lack of bronze age 'technology'? Everyone acknowledge the comical farce of these movies, like in Independence Day where a Macbook uploads a virus to 'destroy' the aliens when a nuke can't, but because most people are not interested in phenomenology, or, really, because they don't want to think about it, don't ask the obvious question: what can you do when nature decides to destroy our Towers of Babel? Modern man lives as outside the cycles of nature as possible, most people, myself included, cannot tell you when you harvest beets, and I love the earthy sweetness of them. We live in a post-Sauron/Saruman world where nature is to be beaten and raped into submission, yet despite all of this, deep down we all know we have no control over the air and earth around us. The delusions of probability provide us a false comfort, but really, as Heracleitus said, time is a child playing a game of draughts, our lives are in the hands of a child. That deep, pre-Socratic intuition into the nature of the world around us, that plague, or Athens might any day destroy your city and turn you into a slave, simply cannot be escaped. The eventual triumph in all of these movies of man over aliens/nature is about as escapist as you can get, but it is also inconsequential. Of course we have to win, have to find some technological solution to confront an enemy with a will and a way, to not would invalidate our entire view on the nature of the world. The only movie I know of recently to confront nature directly, Eastwood's Hereafter gets around staring the whirlwind of God directly in the face by injecting some vague, spiritual after-life mumbo-jumbo into it.
Ron Rosenbaum over at Slate has written about the rash of post-apocolyptic literature and films to come out recently, and while I see some connection to the alien-takeover movie, these pieces of art seem to be more realistic than a film like say, Independence Day, or the upcoming Battle for LA. Those movies also seem to be more about suburban man's utter dependence of the world around him, not his inability to control nature. In the post-apocolyptic genre, man is left in the dark ages, not facing an existential crisis in the post-modern world, and must cope with being trust into Hobbes' state of nature. Rosenbaum links the inevitable cannibalism in these films with the idea of us destroying ourselves with nuclear fission, and while that idea does really link to Oppenheimer's brilliant quip from the Gita after detonating the Trinity bomb ("I am become death, destroyer of worlds") to me, the key thing in these films is the state of nature that reigns; the cannibalism seems to be just an offshoot of being in that state. Life in these movies seems to be very close to what I imagine it was like being in Germania in Tacitus' time, except we aren't Romans, we are men who are in touch with our feelings, attached to things material and immaterial, and unable to acknowledge the will in the world. These movies never take place in say, rural, tribal Africa, because, lets be honest, what would be different? There are a number of tribes in the Amazon who do not have metal smithing, are they really worried about what they'll do when their espresso machine no longer works?
So, as you watch the floating fires in Japan, and the planes and freighters and cars bobbing around the water like they are toys in god's bathtub, and as you hear the staccato click of the geiger counters increase as that island nation is damned by the kamikaze that saved them twice in the 12th century when Genghis-Khan tried to over-run them, think about what you would do if you are an ant, and a little boy decides it would be fun to flood your entire civilization. Do you cling to a little piece of dirt with your ant family? Do you finally allow the ideological differences you have with the other ant colonies to fall by the wayside so you can fight this giant with his deluge of water? Or do you acknowledge your existential powerlessness when face to face with the leviathan and behemoth?
The Japanese might love nature, but they love a controlled, human (and humane) version of it. Human rust and roughness. Their sabi-wabi aesthetic is posited on the ability to portion out the area in which the moss or trees can grow uncontrolled. The Japanese are the most technologically advanced nation on the planet, and thus confronted their own impotence far earlier than the west did, but we got around to it eventually, and seem to have really run with the genre; I cannot help but feel Katrina helped spur this on, though it is as dark, vague, and unfounded an intuition as I can make. Roman Polanski, for all his peaderastic greatness, once said man trying to understand god is like a dog trying to understand a car, and I hate to be practical and S-ish (as in sensory on the Myers-Briggs personality index), but how exactly would we fight an alien race that can travel faster than light? Or, to put it another way, how would the Kombai fight an F-22 stealth fighter jet with their sticks and utter lack of bronze age 'technology'? Everyone acknowledge the comical farce of these movies, like in Independence Day where a Macbook uploads a virus to 'destroy' the aliens when a nuke can't, but because most people are not interested in phenomenology, or, really, because they don't want to think about it, don't ask the obvious question: what can you do when nature decides to destroy our Towers of Babel? Modern man lives as outside the cycles of nature as possible, most people, myself included, cannot tell you when you harvest beets, and I love the earthy sweetness of them. We live in a post-Sauron/Saruman world where nature is to be beaten and raped into submission, yet despite all of this, deep down we all know we have no control over the air and earth around us. The delusions of probability provide us a false comfort, but really, as Heracleitus said, time is a child playing a game of draughts, our lives are in the hands of a child. That deep, pre-Socratic intuition into the nature of the world around us, that plague, or Athens might any day destroy your city and turn you into a slave, simply cannot be escaped. The eventual triumph in all of these movies of man over aliens/nature is about as escapist as you can get, but it is also inconsequential. Of course we have to win, have to find some technological solution to confront an enemy with a will and a way, to not would invalidate our entire view on the nature of the world. The only movie I know of recently to confront nature directly, Eastwood's Hereafter gets around staring the whirlwind of God directly in the face by injecting some vague, spiritual after-life mumbo-jumbo into it.
Ron Rosenbaum over at Slate has written about the rash of post-apocolyptic literature and films to come out recently, and while I see some connection to the alien-takeover movie, these pieces of art seem to be more realistic than a film like say, Independence Day, or the upcoming Battle for LA. Those movies also seem to be more about suburban man's utter dependence of the world around him, not his inability to control nature. In the post-apocolyptic genre, man is left in the dark ages, not facing an existential crisis in the post-modern world, and must cope with being trust into Hobbes' state of nature. Rosenbaum links the inevitable cannibalism in these films with the idea of us destroying ourselves with nuclear fission, and while that idea does really link to Oppenheimer's brilliant quip from the Gita after detonating the Trinity bomb ("I am become death, destroyer of worlds") to me, the key thing in these films is the state of nature that reigns; the cannibalism seems to be just an offshoot of being in that state. Life in these movies seems to be very close to what I imagine it was like being in Germania in Tacitus' time, except we aren't Romans, we are men who are in touch with our feelings, attached to things material and immaterial, and unable to acknowledge the will in the world. These movies never take place in say, rural, tribal Africa, because, lets be honest, what would be different? There are a number of tribes in the Amazon who do not have metal smithing, are they really worried about what they'll do when their espresso machine no longer works?
So, as you watch the floating fires in Japan, and the planes and freighters and cars bobbing around the water like they are toys in god's bathtub, and as you hear the staccato click of the geiger counters increase as that island nation is damned by the kamikaze that saved them twice in the 12th century when Genghis-Khan tried to over-run them, think about what you would do if you are an ant, and a little boy decides it would be fun to flood your entire civilization. Do you cling to a little piece of dirt with your ant family? Do you finally allow the ideological differences you have with the other ant colonies to fall by the wayside so you can fight this giant with his deluge of water? Or do you acknowledge your existential powerlessness when face to face with the leviathan and behemoth?
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Are those Abercrombie sweatpants, or are you just happy to see me?
Of all the 'choices' in the mall, the most offensive is no doubt Abercrombie (the very fact that I referred to it as Abercrombie, and not its proper name, Abercrombie & Fitch itself is offensive, and evidences how its offensiveness permeates everything, even one's very language without knowing it). Everything, from its post-modern club within a beach house, within a bungalow within a mall design, to its vaguely racy flirts with sexuality reeks of it, but what really reeks the most is the store itself. The place smells like a the boys side of a dorm room on a Friday night when everyone is 'pre-gaming' and there really is a legit 15 foot radius of smell that surrounds and exudes out from it.
Malls fill (or should fill) any normal, rational adult with a basal rate of disgust. They are generally populated with the two most unlikable ages of man, three legged man (the old) and almost two legged man (it is hard to call the ambling, sitting, and slouching of teens and tweens full blown walking), they flatter American's deluded love of choice (whenever a new store is put in, or is going to be put in, the posters do not say something like, "Coming soon, another store of the same slightly sexual clothing for girls", they always say, at least in the good, smart malls, "Coming soon, more choices"), and worst of all, like Abercrombie (& Fitch), they generally interact with you in an assaultive manner. Try making your way through a mall without having every sense as well as your physical body assaulted, and you'll be engaging in a task of Sisyphian magnitude. At the food court (I love the vague echo of both an actual exterior space, a courtyard, as well as a kingly court, fully of exotic foods and entertainment), you are assaulted by sample after sample of mediocre food that one would never eat outside of said kingly court (as an interesting side note, Panda Express, once a mall standby for its $5 plates of Orange god knows what meat now has stand alone stores. My brother, for one, loves them, though why one would eat food they have to eat at a mall outside of a mall is beyond me). At almost all the stores you are assaulted by sycophantic help (my sister-in-law, for example, was harassed about a $400 'leather' jacket that was 30% off. Her polite rejection was too polite, because apparently she could have saved another 30% if she was willing to open a credit card), but the worst, and in most case the funniest assault are the pop-up booths in the middle of the mall, where you can get anything from hair to your face embroidered on you underwear to a massage, because who doesn't want a relaxing massage while hundreds of strangers walk by.
In my case, I was assaulted by one of those hand-lotion face-crap booths. My sugar was low (I am diabetic) and I was eating some chocolate covered gummy bears that I bought at another booth for far too much money, because my sugar was low and I wholly misunderstood whatever credit card interest rate like pricing scheme the place operated under. So, I was meandering down the mall 'road', wondering what exactly I am going to do with $15 of chocolate covered gummy bears, when another booth person, clearly perceiving my weakness having already bought from one booth, offered me a free sample of lotion. I said yes, of course, at which point she started to rub my hands not with the free lotion, but with wet sand to ready my hands for said free lotion. The sand was special sand from Israel (because we don't have any sand here in America) with things in it that gave it its special properties (maybe this specialness of sand is the reason why the Jews were so happy that Moses made them wander the desert for 40 years after running away from their owners on an overground railroad). So while I was having my hands rubbed by this Israeli woman with Israeli sand she proceeded to ask me how my day was, why I was at the mall, and what I did. I told her I was a teacher, at which point she perked up because her mother had been a teacher before going into engineering. I retorted, with my usually modesty that masks my massively inflated ego and sense of self, that I did not have the mind to be an engineer, at which point she said something like, "well, we all cannot be smart" which, to be honest, almost sold me on whatever crap was in the sand that she was trying to sell me. So after massaging my hands with sand for a minute (how long the stuff needed to work itself into me) she wanted me to marvel at how soft my hands are, apparently because of the specialness of the sand. They were, to her credit, quite soft, but when I pointed out to her that I am pretty sure that if I used any abrasive material, like, I don't know, any other sand, the effect would be the same. She was not wholly happy about my deduction, but lotioned me up anyways and I was sent on my way. Of course, I now had throbbing, greased up hands that completely prevented me from eating my gummy bears for my low blood sugar, which was the whole reason I was in the mall in the first place, but at least I knew I am not as smart as an engineer.
is an almost residentless 'city' that is actually falling off the side of the little hill it is on (that window in the background looks out onto the air where used to look into a home), but you would never say a mall, filled with people, is more alive than this place, that is, unless you have a ugly, distorted soul like Eisenman.
On a sidenote, today in class one of my male students had Abercrombie sweatpants and a female student on him, and she needed to get off because class was ending in 5 minutes and he needed to be able to walk.
Malls fill (or should fill) any normal, rational adult with a basal rate of disgust. They are generally populated with the two most unlikable ages of man, three legged man (the old) and almost two legged man (it is hard to call the ambling, sitting, and slouching of teens and tweens full blown walking), they flatter American's deluded love of choice (whenever a new store is put in, or is going to be put in, the posters do not say something like, "Coming soon, another store of the same slightly sexual clothing for girls", they always say, at least in the good, smart malls, "Coming soon, more choices"), and worst of all, like Abercrombie (& Fitch), they generally interact with you in an assaultive manner. Try making your way through a mall without having every sense as well as your physical body assaulted, and you'll be engaging in a task of Sisyphian magnitude. At the food court (I love the vague echo of both an actual exterior space, a courtyard, as well as a kingly court, fully of exotic foods and entertainment), you are assaulted by sample after sample of mediocre food that one would never eat outside of said kingly court (as an interesting side note, Panda Express, once a mall standby for its $5 plates of Orange god knows what meat now has stand alone stores. My brother, for one, loves them, though why one would eat food they have to eat at a mall outside of a mall is beyond me). At almost all the stores you are assaulted by sycophantic help (my sister-in-law, for example, was harassed about a $400 'leather' jacket that was 30% off. Her polite rejection was too polite, because apparently she could have saved another 30% if she was willing to open a credit card), but the worst, and in most case the funniest assault are the pop-up booths in the middle of the mall, where you can get anything from hair to your face embroidered on you underwear to a massage, because who doesn't want a relaxing massage while hundreds of strangers walk by.
In my case, I was assaulted by one of those hand-lotion face-crap booths. My sugar was low (I am diabetic) and I was eating some chocolate covered gummy bears that I bought at another booth for far too much money, because my sugar was low and I wholly misunderstood whatever credit card interest rate like pricing scheme the place operated under. So, I was meandering down the mall 'road', wondering what exactly I am going to do with $15 of chocolate covered gummy bears, when another booth person, clearly perceiving my weakness having already bought from one booth, offered me a free sample of lotion. I said yes, of course, at which point she started to rub my hands not with the free lotion, but with wet sand to ready my hands for said free lotion. The sand was special sand from Israel (because we don't have any sand here in America) with things in it that gave it its special properties (maybe this specialness of sand is the reason why the Jews were so happy that Moses made them wander the desert for 40 years after running away from their owners on an overground railroad). So while I was having my hands rubbed by this Israeli woman with Israeli sand she proceeded to ask me how my day was, why I was at the mall, and what I did. I told her I was a teacher, at which point she perked up because her mother had been a teacher before going into engineering. I retorted, with my usually modesty that masks my massively inflated ego and sense of self, that I did not have the mind to be an engineer, at which point she said something like, "well, we all cannot be smart" which, to be honest, almost sold me on whatever crap was in the sand that she was trying to sell me. So after massaging my hands with sand for a minute (how long the stuff needed to work itself into me) she wanted me to marvel at how soft my hands are, apparently because of the specialness of the sand. They were, to her credit, quite soft, but when I pointed out to her that I am pretty sure that if I used any abrasive material, like, I don't know, any other sand, the effect would be the same. She was not wholly happy about my deduction, but lotioned me up anyways and I was sent on my way. Of course, I now had throbbing, greased up hands that completely prevented me from eating my gummy bears for my low blood sugar, which was the whole reason I was in the mall in the first place, but at least I knew I am not as smart as an engineer.
The worst thing about malls though, is their deadness. They are static by design, and while I ironically use the language of architecture to describe them, they use the same language in their patterns (here I am borrowing heavily on the ideas, aesthetics, philosophy and the terminology of Christopher Alexander, probably the best living architect. Alexander became loved by computer programmers in the early 80's because he talked and wrote about the patterns he saw both in nature and in civilization, things like how city streets branch like trees, ebbing and flowing. I actually came across him in a philosophy class taught by a philosophy professor/computer programmer where the assigned text was Alexander's Timeless Way of Building, and in case you were wondering what he means by 'way', the way of the tao is what we are talking about. If you want to know how Taoistic Alexander is, he closes the book talking not about building anything, but about how when you cut strawberries, the thinner you slice them the better they taste because of the increased surface area. And if you want to know what Alexander has done with all of his money, he owns one of the finest collections of early Turkish rugs in the Western world, and has written about them in a book titled A Foreshadowing of the 21st Century Art: The Color and Geometry of Very Early Turkish Carpets that is out of print, but costs a paltry $400 used. I hope one day to be able to own the book, but much more affordable is his Timeless Way of Building, which I recommend as highly as a person can recommend a book. I actually no longer have a copy, or I no longer have a good copy because I gave my good copy to a former student who I thought would understand and be enriched by it the most, and I can no longer find my bad, excessively highlighted undergraduate copy as it is buried in a box in my attic. Alexander is most famous for getting into an argument with another architect, Peter Eisenman, where Alexander said Eisenman was "fucking up the world" by making ugly, inhumane buildings. In the same debate, Eisenman claims proportion and symmetry make him uncomfortable which should give you some idea asto the state of the souls of the people designing, or fucking up, the world around us). It is the deadness of malls, their lack of the 'quality without a name' that makes them the most assaultive in their post-modern echo of streets and town centers. They have no connection with the natural world, no connection to humanity, and no ability to change or alter. Even Detroit, being taken back by nature in some parts, is alive because it is nearly impossible to kill something built with the pattern language all architecture speaks with, and this place
 |
| Civita di Bagnoregio |
is an almost residentless 'city' that is actually falling off the side of the little hill it is on (that window in the background looks out onto the air where used to look into a home), but you would never say a mall, filled with people, is more alive than this place, that is, unless you have a ugly, distorted soul like Eisenman.
On a sidenote, today in class one of my male students had Abercrombie sweatpants and a female student on him, and she needed to get off because class was ending in 5 minutes and he needed to be able to walk.
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