Super Fine Magazine

The Day of the Triffids

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 23:46:00 -0600

“Three blokes go into a pub. One of them is a little bit stupid, and the whole scene unfolds with a tedious inevitability.”
-Bill Bailey

There’s this sci-fi novel from the ‘50s by John Wyndham, called The Day of the Triffids. Oh man, you say. Got to be hokey. It concerns a Londoner named Masen, who, thanks to his association with the occupational hazard of working with “triffids,” (smart, violent, poisonous, slow-moving, walking plants possibly engineered by the Commies and spread during a botched smuggling run) misses out on a meteor shower (theorized to be a malfunctioning, secret orbital weapons system built by one of the superpowers) that blinds everyone who witnessed it. He stumbles across a presumably beautiful, sighted woman of the “right age,” and they proceed to come into contact with two groups trying to save a city full of the blind, who are slowly being picked off by the triffids.

One group, led by the militant Beadley, plans to seclude the sighted (together with blind women of childbearing age) in a country to replenish the human race over the long term. Here Wyndham realizes how masturbatory that one pattern would be, so he changes it up: the protagonists get the speech from Beadley’s camp only to be captured by faction number two. Led by a charismatic man named Coker, this group’s imperative is to save as many of the blind as possible. Coker kidnaps the sighted and chains them to blind handlers who ensure that they find food for the group. This eventually becomes untenable, given the scarcity of the sighted, the movement of the triffids, the outbreak of disease, and the protagonists’ escape. Torrance, a minor asshole (named only in the last pages of the book) who shoots a couple of blind people in various states of illness early on, emerges as the strong-arm lieutenant of an authoritarian group engaged in setting up enclaves in fortified areas around Britain, outfitting them with soldiers, land, and women, in exchange for some system of tribute.

Can you name these three in this simple narrative? Wyndham pegged it, and any middle school student who hasn’t got their face glued to their damned electric jeejah knows it intuitively, because they’re the three authority figures that control them: government, business, and the aggregated people. For a child, these are more commonly known as “Why can’t I do that?”, “Why can’t I have that?”, and “Why? Why mommy?” (etc. ad nauseam)

The first two interests can be roughly approximated, as Wyndham did, by the models of socialism and feudalism, respectively, which is in fact a pattern seen throughout journalism.

Independent of the notion of government as a business, the government wants stability. Anything to keep things the same (the obvious compromise with the demands of business being the demand for constant growth). Wyndham uses Coker’s faction to illustrate the “welfare state”, a favorite target of American right-wing pundits. Don’t rock the boat, for god’s sake: even if it’s shortsighted and unsustainable, just keep trying to maintain everything the way it is. Also, they’ll jail/kill you, so watch out. The upshot is that in fair weather, everyone gets their basic needs taken care of, which frees up their time for leisure, or more likely, business.

Business is, of course, Torrance’s offer. He tries to coerce Masen to get in on his new enterprise. The catch is, he has to invest one of “his” women, but in return, he gets rank, returns, and continued benefits. The problem lies in the fact that business interests behave, in the extreme, exactly opposite to governmental ones: where the government seeks stasis, business seeks motion.

There’s an interesting interaction here. Human needs are—insofar as the time spent on them doesn’t immediately result in profit—ignored and viewed as a detractor. States are generally interested in the welfare of their people, even if ours has been channeling tremendous funds and resources into creating reactionary voters and sustaining very poor behavioral habits. Opponents like to portray the “welfare state” in the extreme as the defeat of production and progress, the idea being that the expedient-driven sheeple would, if coddled, work less and less until they starved themselves. Or something. Yet it accelerates profits for businesses to ascribe an equal or greater degree of shortsightedness in the people, if only to get them to buy faster—hence the demonic progression of marketing. Both of these engines consume the people in the advancement of their goals.

The market and the welfare state act reciprocally, each one seeking to divide the other by increase, into nothing. The welfare state asks, don’t you have any compassion? Don’t you care about sharing a good life? The market asks, don’t you want to earn? Don’t you care about working toward some sort of growth?

None are invalid concerns. The problem is that in the state’s relentless pursuit of stability, we can be killed by CIA death robots or tortured and disappeared forever if we are in the wrong place, or worse, the wrong color at the wrong time. Due to the market’s relentless concentration of profit at the top of the heap, we live in a world where technological advancement and its greater efficiency doesn’t mean a damn for your over-timed under-paid workday: you stare at the same repetitive task for the same number of hours no matter what, and damned if you fall ill or have a problem with being booked just-in-time like you’re a subroutine in a Java applet. Progress, in the feudal business world, means progress for the top. Progress, in the paranoid-neurotic enforcement world, means the silencing of all deviation from a stable state. True, this model is childishly simplistic. States and markets infect each other constantly, and there’s no end to the horrors created when they collude. Not every government is some sort of panopticon aiming to freeze novel thought, and not every business is run by the Koch brothers. More significant, though: what about the people who don’t live by expedient? Certainly not everyone does; it’d be a pit of endless despair if everyone turned out to be philosophical zombies. What did everybody want to be when they were six?

“The purpose of an undergraduate program is to sift out the disinterested so the rest of us can get some work done.”

Most haven’t the faintest idea of what they want to be when they do grow up: what they want is what comes with it. A business executive. A charismatic politician, way at the top. A genius scientist. Sports stars, astronauts (often also genius scientists). We crave the office without accepting the activity or the mental challenges that come with it. This blind drive, coupled with errors and slips, forms the sides of a pyramid named Success, a pyramid whose bricks are held together by our ability to collude, compromise, and relinquish. Neither state nor business interests want to disturb the arrangement if they can afford it—hence the overall decreasing trend in social mobility in a society as it matures.

In the book, the libertarians win and everything is hopeful; a “cosy catastrophe,” as Brian Aldiss, sci-fi historian, calls it, meaning that it’s an apocalypse one can enjoy. There’s not much wrong with that; nobody’s twisting your arm to read it, and it wasn’t that bad a rag either. Yet it’s the political statements that make it interesting, especially now, in an age of economic collapse and what Peter Thiel (the PayPal guy, known for stopping donations to Wikileaks) calls “a [technological/progressive] desert.”[1]

The beauty of this trivial triad is that when you nail down one side, the others automatically slide into place. If you’re a socialist, you subordinate both business and people to government. If you’re a capitalist, you subordinate both government and people to business. If you’re a populist, you subordinate business to government, and government to people. If you’re a libertarian, you subordinate government to business, and business to people. Strong partisans of each will cry that they have been grossly misunderstood, and then smoothly switch to attacking the other for subordinating X to Y, an unforgivable error. However, it’s mostly procedural. Each is convinced that making one the axis around which the others rotate will best serve an ultimately existential goal, the achievement of a great task (which everyone loves: look at the ocean of maudlin gushing over the passing of Steve Jobs, holy shit), from “peace in our time” to the “emancipation of the people.” Each is convinced that their choice upholds the highest value. (There is another level of analysis above this, which concerns continua of empathy and good faith, but I’ll let that lie for now.) As a result, the triad spins and blurs. Will we eat each other before things get better? Can we walk a straight path from any A to B through the overpowering fields generated by this raging sociopolitical/existential dynamo? Can any sense to be made of it, or are we blinded by the struggle? At least there aren’t giant freaking plant monsters trolling us, too.

"La Duda" by Forastero + Mixtape

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 23:27:00 -0600

“La Duda” came out of the process of discovering new musical mediums. The trumpet and saxophone were always my instruments, but as my tastes shifted away from acoustic and ska towards electronica, I was no longer able to play and create the music I liked. About a year ago I started playing with Garageband and ever since, my saxophone has sat forgotten in my closet. “La Duda” began as an exercise to re-train myself in using minor chords and 6/8 time signatures, but when I saw that the product was compelling, I invited Mayilu to help transform the audio—which started as just six looped instrumental tracks—into a coherent song. This is what came out of our collaboration. You can listen to or download La Duda below, or go to my Soundcloud page to hear it along with my other work.

La Duda (Feat. Mayilu) by ForasteroMusic

Also, check out my mixtape to hear some of the electropop artists that I draw inspiration from: Melancholy Music To Dance To. Electropop brings together club music, discord, and the appealing melodies of pop. It had it’s heyday in the late 80s but seems to be coming back for round two. It’s been all over radios in Europe for a couple of years now and artists like Robyn, Kelly Rowland (featured by various DJ’s), and David Guetta have been making it happen in the US. This mixtape includes Swedish, Israeli, Spanish, American, and British electropop artists you can listen to partying with friends or alone, melancholy.

Create a playlist at MixPod.com

(just click on GET TRACKS)

By Forastero, electro enthusiast, DJ, and Brit pop follower.

One Minute High Brow

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 23:26:33 -0600

One Minute High Brow

A Fire Burning on the Tips of Our Fingers: A History

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 23:18:00 -0600

People used to say that the 1960s were a total awakening of social consciousness. We were breaking away from old-fashioned traditions. We were experimenting with sexual desire, expanding our minds with drugs, looking toward gaining more freedom of expression. In my mind, it was the time where we were becoming more in tune with our human instincts, traits, and ideals. And then the 1970s were supposed to be to the culmination of our personal desires, right? As hedonistic as our desires might have become during these two time periods, it also became a nightmare for a lot of people. To them, their traditions and values were being tampered with and their own version of utopia was being ignored.

In the late the 1970s, a religious movement was brewing inside the churches of Robert Grant. Founder of a movement called the Christian Voice (later the “Moral Majority”), Grant had the brilliant idea of bringing back religious hegemony into the political system. It was indeed a brilliant, innovative, ingenious, and dangerous idea, stemming from a fear of losing democracy to self-centered, and immoral individualistic endeavors. On one hand, a religious polity would instill family virtues seemingly lost decades before, while on the other, it would alienate problem individuals—those who, arguably, needed the most attention. Grant truly believed that bringing the church back into American politics was going to solve the decade that helped transform America’s social problems.

Working with the power of President-elect Ronald Reagan and the influence of reverend Jerry Falwell, Grant successfully brought the religious right back into the forefront of American politics. Reagan was elected because America faced a horrendous economic crisis in the early stages of 1980, and proceeded to deliver a stunning blow to democratic candidates by beginning his quest to bring America back to prominence by lowering taxes on big businesses.

He started with a visit to General Electric. General Electric complained that if they were not taxed as heavily, they would be able to produce more, thus providing the American public with more jobs. Backed by this promise of new job creation and taking a page from Grant’s book, Reagan began to devise a plan to bring back family values into the community. Thus, while pro-big business thought seeped into the mentality of most Americans, religion created a world of good versus evil, us versus them. To trace this rhetoric, we really have to begin to pull our focus into the mid nineteen seventies. Donald Rumsfeld, an acting neo-conservative and secretary of defense during President Ford’s administration, started a campaign to paint Soviet Russia as an evil entity.

It sounded good to the majority of the public, especially since people were afraid of the loss of their own communities, and the loss of their belongings. It seemed as if religious validation had finally become one with the emergence of capitalism and big business. In fact, on paper the 1980s were beginning to look a lot like the 1950s, so much so that there even seemed to be a reemergence in American propaganda. For instance, the fashion industry promoted cardigan sweaters and khaki pants, greaser clothing, and slicked back hairstyles. It got so bad that even movies began to reflect and talk about how wonderful and clean the 1950s were, that old version of “utopia.”

The fear and paranoia this created in the 80s helped fuel the conservative state. It didn’t help that the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989 due to its own internal turmoil: Reagan treated the collapse of the Soviet Union as American Capitalism’s greatest victory. It also didn’t help that after the collapse, people began to consider Reagan the last great American president. It certainly didn’t help that tech companies and brand names began to take off under the driving force of big business, nor that credit cards proliferated exponentially, giving mass amounts of currency to those who “needed things” (brand name “things”). It didn’t help that wishing to be called rich became the norm.

Reagan preyed on the slowing market to make it so that it was no longer negative to think that big business conglomerate ideology was evil. Riding the innovative wave of personal computers, VCR’s, microwaves, and other electronic gadgets, life became that much more interesting again. We began to believe in these things and we began to believe in how they could help change our lives for the better.

As money and material possessions were prized, alienation began to slip, from being used to demonize the “other” to include people who didn’t fit the model of the driven consumerist. For example, homosexuality had made some progress after the 60s and had come to be more accepted in middle class America. African Americans had made headway and were beginning to be looked at as positive role models within communities. All these issues came crashing down because of apathy and ignorance. The media machine focused on HIV and fear tactics to push homosexuality back into the dark. Stories of drugs and domestic violence began to negate society’s growing positive view of African Americans after the Civil Rights Movement. A lot of these issues not only alienated groups, but also planted a sense of xenophobia in the minds of millions. They have since gone on to tear at families in communities across the country.

Reagan’s hyperbolic moral consumerism of the 1980s has endured and is now embraced and promoted by today’s corporations. As we face many new lifestyle changes, a new culture that breeds through brand names and branding processes such as, LinkedIn, and Twitter, one cannot help but realize that we have grown up with our identities based around them. We identify with Apple and the symbol through which it reproduces. We identify with Safeway, Costco, and Microsoft. Politically conservative attitudes have not only destroyed our right to freedom of religion, but have made it so that our belief systems now push big business rhetoric back onto the public.

So how does this tie together? How does religion, ethnicity, and business go hand in hand in turning our culture into a fearful place where we our very hedonism is dedicated specifically toward material excess? Modern times promote modern ideologies. Maybe if we knew our neighbors better, we wouldn’t do some of the shit that we would normally do unto strangers. If we better recognized our human trappings and we didn’t condemn them, we wouldn’t be as skeptical of death, sex, or faith. If we knew that overproduction produced competitiveness and competitiveness created selfishness, we wouldn’t be trampling over one another during crazed escapades like “Black Friday.” If we were taught perhaps that excess breeds laziness and furthers a need to produce more and more to meet greater and greater demand, we wouldn’t accept economics classes as common place.

Therefore for things to change, it is up to those who have been scrutinized for the past thirty years to rise up and create a world that we can all cherish and look forward to. With all that has gone on, all the alienation of multiple races, religions, and creeds, one must not diminish the idea that we are still equal in justice and rights. We have the right to take back what is ours, we have the right to freedom of assembly, and we have the right to see things through. Whether you’re black, brown, yellow, white, gay, straight or celibate, you have the right to ask yourself, “Is this it?” Is this what life should be? Or should we be less afraid of the unknown?

by Andy Peterson: tech explorer, anarchist at large.

Chirp Radio

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0500

This past Sunday I had my first exposure to the Chicago Independent Radio Project (or CHIRP Radio). We were making our way out of some early September drizzle into the Congress Theater in Bucktown, and CHIRP was both tabling in the atrium and making its DJs visible on the main stage. I have been reading about community media and especially community radio as bastions of democracy, and encountering CHIRP at a community event (the Vintage Bazaar) was therefore serendipitous. That’s right, folks, I couldn’t just enjoy the music— I also had to think about civic imaginaries while I was at it.

“Civic Imaginaries?” Yes. Civic imaginaries. I recently circulated, via twitter, a quote from Clifford Geertz which read, “”The scene is Indonesia; but the goal… is an understanding of how it is that every people gets the politics it imagines.” For Geertz, the scene is almost always Indonesia/Bali, and there is not much controversy in asserting that there is a link between the politics that a polity can imagine and political reality. If Geertz is right in asserting a link between imagination and institution, there are plenty of questions to be asked: are we talking about a collective imagination? If so, then how do individual imaginations color or become transmitted to others in the group? Can imagination be an emergent property of a group, or is it something essentially rooted in the individual? and if imagination effects a people’s institutions, how do institutions reciprocally impact imagination?

There’s a line that caps Mos Def’s “The Embassy”: “I work with the embassy On behalf of imagination industry.” The character in the song could be an employee of either a government intelligence agency (“High status, intrigue and mystery”) or could be an artist not too distant in character from Mos, who enjoys mounting a stage on occasion in masked costume. Perhaps this ambiguity is an insinuation that there is not much of a difference between a powerful musical star and a government official when it comes to impacting the imagination. Political or artistic, it’s all part of the imagination industry.

Where CHIRP and other community radio stations sit in relation to the imagination industry is that they open new possibilities in whose voice can be amplified. I am unsure of the internal politics of CHIRP (and all radio stations, large and small, have internal politics), and so I cannot speak to how open and unregulated a CHIRP DJ can be. Because they have not yet acquired a permit from the FCC they only stream online (at chirpradio.org), but that also handily allows them to avoid many FCC requirements. They seem to voluntarily abide by some of the rules— for example, I regularly hear station identifications from CHIRP, and I have probably missed any profanity. However, I happily doubt that CHIRP DJs bother with radio edits after I enjoyed a rather violent cuckold-revenge tune this afternoon (with a chorus of “grab my shotgun, grab my knife” or some such).

Amongst the obvious restrictions I haven’t heard anything that would seem terribly binding, and one rule, in particular, has a noticeably positive effect. Once an hour, somewhere in a set, there will be music from a Chicago-area act. These tracks fade in and out of the mix, side-by-side with other underplayed but excellent tunes. When I do not recognize the artist on tap there is a good chance that they are a local act. Perhaps I should be ashamed that I haven’t heard of many such artists, but instead I find myself impressed with CHIRP. I’ve listened to more local acts through CHIRP in the last few days than in the last several months, barring my heavy exposure to buskers at the Jackson CTA stop.

That CHIRP plays quality music and has a good local connection provides more than musical enjoyment. CHIRP, and other community radio stations, instantiate a more democratic voice, an amplified sound that is more truly public- of the the polity- than a voice provided a media group that operates in multiple (if not international) markets. Indeed, community radio is beautiful in that it is less market-driven in its approach, period. Money may need to flow in and out in order to keep the station in space, equipment, and bandwidth, but acquiring cash is not the central goal. The goal is to let local imagination breathe, to let color grow organically rather than in a way imposed by a different group. Impacts on our imagination flow from groups and individuals, and imagination has powerful social effects. Public arts communities help people’s imaginations take on a shape more true to the individuals that comprise a community and help us relax in the face of structural control.

by Don Everhart

image via The Decibel Tolls

Transhumanism: It’s Not About You, Bitch (and the Singularity Doesn’t Love You Either)

Sat, 20 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Transhumanism is one of those world-changing, conscious-altering Big Ideas that comes in a colossal, normally opaque package that offers ostensibly only two choices: 1) ignore it and keep doing what you’re doing, or 2) accept it, and it turn, your own limited ability to fully understand what the hell is going on with it, particularly from this side of whatever transfer/transcendence gradient it represents. In other words, it’s a Monolith idea. It’s also pretty tied in, especially as a popular notion, with the idea of the Technological Singularity, which basically requires transhumanism to be anything but eschatological, so I’m just going to start with that and see if I can’t make it easy to deal with. In order to do this, I’m going to need a straw man, one that represents the popular misconception.

My favorite transhumanist wanker is the media persona of Ray Kurzweil, “That Singularity Guy” —megadosed on a complicated regimen of vitamins (over 150 different pills daily), trying to play some second- or third-level life metagame on a trajectory toward the point of escape velocity, the point where one year of life extension research nets you more than one year of extended life, and never drops below that point again (unlike the Earth, it’s a theoretically infinite gravity well, death is). If you don’t know who Kurzweil the man is, he’s an electrical engineer, futurist, and advocate of the Technological Singularity, which is one level of totality shy of Frank Tipler’s Omega Point, on the scale of raptures. He’s a sharp guy—it seems like he always aims at the highest-level application of what he works on, culminating in a high level of activity in systems engineering, including AI trading software, pattern recognition systems including OCR, A/V synthesizers, and of course, neuroengineering ventures. Lately it seems he’s been doing a lot of writing and speaking, which, writing as a snotty, underachieving student, sounds like a hell of a lot less awesome than pushing out seriously destabilizing (read: #winning) technologies. My expectations might be artificially inflated, and I hear the real, earthshaking ventures these days are already pushing the limits of intelligibility (or secrecy), so there’s probably a bias there.

I think that the actual human Kurzweil is probably a decent enough person in real life—I’m not going to go digging too deeply in order to score him on some kind of Compassion, Philanthropy, Profiteering, Hedonism radar graph; it suffices to say that nearly all the criticism directed at him is related to his evangelism of the Singularity. (Here’s a nice, civil email correspondence: http://home.comcast.net/~sresnick2/kurzweil_email.htm) But there’s this persona he projects through it, which is a good place to start.

Namely, “That Singularity Guy,” an aging man who has sunk his claws into life and, with no apparent concern for how you end up in his totally awesome view of the future (if you don’t get it, too bad), is hanging on so he can live forever and have nearly everything (eventually). There’s something about that that seems overwhelmingly selfish on a primal level, throwing away everything else about the fullness of a limited, painful existence or anything offered by any of the other religious, philosophical, or scientific explanations up to and including death and the decomposition of your phenomenological state into the larger flow, stripping all of that away in order to make it through the eye of the needle, the limit of an experiential calculus, the ring of Ouroboros, ever increasing in radius but never escaping its own jaws, clamped on its tail. Let’s be fair, though: if you were 63, had children, had already produced a ton of useful inventions and solutions, wouldn’t you feel like you’d certainly paid your dues and had the right to be left to a pursuit of this nature? Still, it’s a hedonistic undertaking (and not the type that leads to humanism in the limit).

So what is the Technological Singularity? There’s gigabytes of information on the topic, so I’ll give it to you short and sweet: if technological development is accelerating exponentially, and that development process is now beginning to affect the development of systems that we identify as intelligent or cognitive, and if this trend continues, eventually cognition, AI, whatever you want to call it, will transcend us meat puppets and disappear into the horizon, and by disappear, I mean envelop everything and change it forever. Everything that appears to slow it down locally, every decrease, is ultimately microscopic when compared to the eventual rate of increase, including our brief catastrophes and lifespans. In other words, you’re either dead before that happens (your molecules are fuel), you become a less transcendent, unknowing component of that larger system (your metastable, meat puppet state), or you’re on that boat, accelerating with it through (you guessed it) transhumanist modifications.

It’s not distributed nicely either, in the near term. Here’s a statement of Moravec’s (another Singular Transhumanist) Paradox:

“The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard. The mental abilities of a four-year-old that we take for granted – recognizing a face, lifting a pencil, walking across a room, answering a question – in fact solve some of the hardest engineering problems ever conceived…. As the new generation of intelligent devices appears, it will be the stock analysts and petrochemical engineers and parole board members who are in danger of being replaced by machines. The gardeners, receptionists, and cooks are secure in their jobs for decades to come.”[2]

-Wikipedia, “Moravec’ Paradox”

In other words, the last island of human expertise will be most likely be mind-numbing drudgery (but hey, at least pushing rivets and counting cans is out, right?). It’s a (mostly) unspoken axiom of labor philosophy that if you don’t have a job with real utility, you lose a lot of validation. In this case, you can most likely expect to be human veal, like in “The Matrix” only without even the cute half-justification of being a living energy cell.

a post-Singularity world: biomechanical, automagically reconfigured superstructure formed from Planet Earth. (Biomega, Tsutomu Nihei)

You know what’s wrong with this picture, if you’re a human being with interests? The only creature with a philosophically worthwhile experience (in other words, one worth your time) left in this particular post-Singularity world, the bio-nano-techno-widget-enhanced ninja pictured, is not gonna be you. Not a chance. You are the slime coating the substrate, and so am I. Given the unstable, unequal way rewards and punishments are handed out in the world today, it’s a safe bet that even the path to an ultimately maximally philosophically rewarding existence for Intelligence or Consciousness in the Universe is most likely going to be through a few huge meat grinders (I mean, biological processors). Whether it’s by euthanasia, seemingly mindless societal thrashing, or by anti-Luddite pogrom (sorry, I meant optimization program), it’s no picnic.

The problem is scale. Industrial and technological development has produced effects on larger and larger scales. This makes sense—technology is the ultimate human amplifier, from the 1000:1 leverage disc brakes in your car, to megaton nuclear explosives, to database structures to which the invested worth of business empires are trusted. We talk about the incredible efficiency of, say, the Tokyo train network, but that’s a metric of how well it can serve a group. China’s economic and industrial development is staggering, but when we say that, we have to keep append, in a whisper “with a widening income gap/standard of living,” meaning that it’s a great place if you’re an emergent organism like a city, but a terrible place to be a human being, odds are. Doctors may be developing all kinds of novel cures for diseases in the US, but it’s meaningless to the millions who lack health insurance or money to purchase even a diagnosis. Surveillance states are supposedly beginning to automate and spread threat detection over staggering numbers of subjects, creating a well-oiled security apparatus, but if you’re an unlucky false positive (or even a true positive IDed by an angry system), you might not come out of a box for a long, long time—you might even disappear entirely. Depending on who you talk to, our massive agricultural developments have screwed us climatologically—that’s a planet-scale problem that is the direct cost of a nation-scale solution.

Note here that I haven’t spoken once about body modification, life hacking, human augmentation, or any of the other boutique individual transhumanist baubles. This is because, like the advances named above, the overwhelming majority of transhumanist technological development is created to operate on us, with high efficiency, with blinding speed, at higher and higher scales. That’s where the money is. The feedback loops that govern these interests are not connected to individual wants in any trustworthy fashion, and that’s exactly what fuels the current of popular backlash these days. The only individuals who actually receive a significant portion of any of the promised benefits of progress are way at the top. Everyone else gets ‘optimized’ by the system, as components. Oh, you say. More whinging about the fate of the proletariat. Exactly—this is not new, and neither is its future progress. Acceleration only exacerbates the issue. Sure, delaying an exponential or even slowing its rate of increase does nothing over a large enough scale, but if you’re a living being falling behind an adaptive curve like that, your brief span will find no consolation in that.

More fundamentally, the fact is, transhumanism has nothing to do with human beings. Or rather, it has to do with human beings for about five minutes, and then the game changes. Vernor Vinge, another of the Singularity’s most ardent evangelists, believes that the “Posthuman Era” will be something we will have to work hard at to “survive,” mostly because if the scale of life processes are increasing, and their speed is increasing at an exponential rate, then we will become negligible pretty fast. How many cats, dogs, coyotes, lizards, javelinas, deer, and skunks have you seen on the shoulder of an interstate highway? Certainly the human-automobile-government combination is an unfathomable form of existence to them, and theirs was insignificant to ours. At worst we’ll be useless and at risk of turning into so much roadkill, and only slightly better is the fate of being augmented by processes not under our control. Hell, we have people who don’t even want to be vaccinated, and we get to hear about runners hating amputees with advanced prosthetics instead of seeing a new section of the Olympics laid out for them—we’re clearly sensitive on the whole to minimal levels of augmentation, so you can bet that being externally ‘transhumanated’ would be extremely uncomfortable on levels ranging from deeply primal to fundamentally philosophical.

So what do you and I, the nameless Joes and Janes, do? I mean, short of a Byzantine plot to get all the way upstream of this, which, salmon can tell you, is not available to all, and short of just throwing up your hands. Basically, you have to do what you should already be doing: you should be hacking everything. Your preconceptions and prejudices, your reality, the systems that you’re connected to, that surround, and above all, yourself. In other words, Ray Kurzweil, is right, not “That Singularity Guy”—the popular misconception of the Singularity as this great, rapturous thing that picks everyone up while we poke each other with augmentation technology is false. But that’s not what Kurzweil is saying, although it’s not his fault, he’s a victim of science journalism. What he writes himself, is that in the run up to a Singularity things are going to get really weird, and probably tough in many novel ways that are, paradoxically, going to require some of those same augmentations to get through. As far as I can tell, he’s trying to stay alive in order to help out with the flood, not just to surf the wave it comes in on.

In other words, transhumanism, and “Singularitarianism,” as Bruce Sterling likes to call it, are not about us, and that’s a problem, one that’s been closing in ever since we formed the first complex social systems that were bigger than any one of us. But if we work hard, and cleverly at it, it can be about us. Those of us who are high on technological development need to stop acting like the “humanism” part of all this comes for free, like some kind of “invisible hand” argument for meta-evolutionary processes, because let me tell you, evolution definitely doesn’t give a shit about you, all problems with that personification aside. Humanism has never come for free, and it doesn’t even come ready-to-use with biological humanity. And neither will transhumanism.

It’s worth mentioning that Bruce Sterling and the school of thought he’s a part of here, don’t agree with the idea of the Singularity in the form I reference here, because it’s ill-defined and not very useful. On the whole, he believes that we’re living in an era that might not be going anywhere in particular right now, everything inundated with a sense of, if anything, atemporality. If that’s the case, than it’s all the more reason to put in the efforts I’m talking about above. Sterling, though, is a way better speaker and writer than I am, so if you’re interested in that, go look him up.

Apologies to the esteemed Mr. Kurzweil and any other thinking organisms who were inadvertently harmed by the publication of this filthy tripe. Tsutomu Nihei is also the artist responsible for the “Right to Arm Bears/Bear Sniper” picture, a beautiful crystal of the Internet that appears in Biomega v. 1.

(By the way, exactly why is it that The Long Now presentation about this topic can’t even muster an autotranscript of Bruce Sterling’s speech about the Singularity? Seriously, the ideas are great but are you guys so into slow shit that we have to listen to a presentation at audio speeds? It’s like some sort of twisting, inverted spiral of irony here. In either case I recommend it, available here: http://longnow.org/seminars/02004/jun/11/the-singularity-your-future-as-a-black-hole/)

by Trevor Alexander

Grains of Sand: Photos of the War Dead

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 10:53:38 -0500

There are three currently prevailing opinions regarding media images of dead soldiers that run along a continuum. One group feels that the images should not be published, particularly without the express permission of the families involved. This group asserts that the dead individual’s prior consent should be required for their image to be made public. I will refer to this group as the “honor” camp. At the other end of the continuum, the “realist” camp states that all should be revealed, no taboos should be honored, as the reality of war must be exposed to all constituents for whom it is fought. The last group, somewhere in between, warns that overexposure to war imagery results in a deadening of emotional responses and a public more disassociated than one not exposed at all. These are the “pragmatists.”

The “honor” camp uses appeals to religion (generally Protestant-military rhetoric), emotion, paranoia (alleging damage to security and boosting the morale of the enemy), solidarity (either within the service, country, or ideology), and ad hominem attacks. The majority of those who are vocal in these beliefs are pro-war. The “realists,” on the other hand, are generally anti-war, appealing to reason, solidarity, and emotion. While it is true that these groups engage in the fallacy of bifurcation and do not reference blanket arguments, their argumentative style is in line with that of the Internet comment boards which are their most popular venue. The “pragmatists” do not directly engage either side, although they lean to the side of the “realists.” Their arguments appeal strictly to reason. All of these groups count servicemen, veterans, and their family members amongst their numbers.

Another thing all these groups share is a particular kind of preoccupation with the quantity of pictures released. All those seriously engaged in the discussion agree that the presentation should be respectful, but where they differ is in the quantity. The “honor” camp insists that every single picture of a dead soldier, or even events that associate with that death, are strictly taboo. Their issue is with the individual present in each picture. The “realists” assert that the pictures as a whole form an image of a complex and ultimately horrifying event, and therefore should be released without restriction. In other words, for “realists” the “picture” is not a single photograph, but the entire collection. For “pragmatists,” the problem of quantity is solved through a continuously varying value based on the desired effect.

So what are these soldiers? Are they numbers? Are they the sum of their political effect? Are they pixels in an impossibly huge picture in motion? Are they government property? Are their deaths government property, as argued time and again?

One thing is sure. The war is our property. We purchased it, and they pay for it. We pay for it also, again and again, even after the war is over, until the economy spins up for the next one. It’s a Ponzi scheme where the investment is human lives and the market is a meat grinder. We share a responsibility as voters, bystanders, human beings. Wrapping up the evidence of this in a holy taboo is unacceptable. At the same time, spraying this digitized blood all over the Internet and front pages would consist in an uncontainable flood of biblical proportions. Yet attaching the exposure value to a dial, as the “pragmatists” imply, would be just as bad, if not morally darker still. Whose hand would be on the dial (whose is on it now?), and for what purpose?

One nascent solution is the relinquishing of the photos to the public domain, without advertisement or endorsement. The US government reacted violently to the recent massive leak of diplomatic cables, but maintained the opinion that the leaks themselves were uninteresting and ineffective. Although this is a good defense tactic, it has a kernel of truth to it—without the massive international effort of journalistic bodies to research and analyze the cables, who would read them? Who has time to? How much time do we have for outrage, whether it be at the supposed invasion of the bereaved or the scale of the war? When does a grain of sand become a heap? When does a dusty, bloody soldier turn to a row of white crosses in a manicured meadow?

The answer lies with us, not with the number of photos or the degree to which they are distributed. They are not journalistic objects. They are not holy icons. They are not political tools. Not if we refuse to allow them to be so. They are monuments, whose meaning we must come to terms with. Release the photos. All of them. Date them. (Fine, wait a month for their intel value to decrease, and then post them.) Put them someplace where we will always be able to confirm what it is we did. Then at least we will be free of this useless argument about whose feelings are hurt or what political effect it will have or whether or not we are seeing the whole picture. Individuals can then be judged by what degree they acknowledge the elephant in the room, rather than by what degree they attempt to clothe the emperor, knee deep in the dead.

by Trevor Alexander

(image via The New York Times)

Convo: The Living Earth Show

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 23:56:37 -0500

The Living Earth Show’s first major feat was to formally change the Urban Dictionary definition of “Ballsagna”. The second was their inaugural show as a group at the Community Music Center in San Francisco, where they presided deftly over five new works for percussion and guitar. And their third and perhaps mightiest feat is this very interview with Super Fine Magazine—the group’s first ever with any publication.

From my time spent with Andy Meyerson (percussion) and Travis John Andrews (guitar), I discovered a group cascading towards a post-classical aesthetic encompassing very broad influences and artistic trajectories: the group’s name is taken reverently from the lyrics of a Ween song, yet the group gladly slaves away at the notorious arduousness involved in learning Ferneyhough. While others merely speak of overhauling classical music’s traditions, The Living Earth Show has taken the matter of the continuance of their specific art into their own hands; they perform works written only for their instrumentation (and almost entirely commissioned by them), by composers with the fattest of CVs. While even Andy and Travis claim that what they are doing is “not anything new,” the conviction and steadiness says otherwise. This is to be applauded especially in the face of a Californian cultural environment that often enjoys pooping on the arts for cheap laughs, and is totally indicative of the sort of nascent ensemble that is utterly determined to change the status quo and redraw the borders of classical music’s obstinately static artistic territory. I managed to sit down with The Living Earth Show in their heavily-carpeted rehearsal room in San Francisco, amid heaps of amps and enough percussion to last the winter. And this is what I learned:

Me: First of all, congratulations on a dangerously good inaugural show. But let’s first focus on how you got into chamber music. How was it that you two acquired a taste for the aural?
Travis: When I was younger I saw the MTV, and I freaked out and badgered my parents and they got me a guitar when I was like 7. You know, that’s where the cool music was, or at least that was the stuff that was fun to learn. So I sought it out.
Andy: I guess that’s sort of identical for me. I started playing drums because I heard Green Day on the radio. Me and every other fucking percussionist. The music that got me into it is the music that always resonates with me the most. That type of [mid 90s alternative rock], I never stopped listening to it. The way I measure every show I play, every show I watch, is from that spectrum.
Travis: Well I agree with that too. I think nothing is more loathsome than when people kind of take a fickle stance and turn their back on music that got them interested in the first place. I think that’s a despicable characteristic.
Me: So you don’t think there’s such a thing as thinking of your past musical self as naïve?
Travis: Yeah, on one hand, I don’t want to be the last guy at the party all the time, you know, still thinkin’ something’s cool and really enjoying it. But you don’t turn your back on old friends, so why are you going to do it on music?
Andy: I’ve actually made it a point never to have a guilty pleasure. If there’s ever anything I’ve liked, I’ll steadfastly own up to it forever.
Travis: This is like the most I’ve agreed with you…ever, like actually right now.

Andy: Really?

Travis: Yeah, this is really the most we’ve ever been on the same page.
Me: Wow, I’m glad we brought this out.
Andy: Yeah, I never really change what I like. If artists change, I’ll dislike their change, and then probably dislike them as people. But the music that I liked back then I’ll always like.

Me: “Living Earth Show”. Quite the vivid name. Can you give us the story of the title of your group, from conception through final product?

Travis: Ween
Andy: It’s a lyric from a Ween song.
Me: But was that the original name for the group?
Travis: Weeell…it was Ballsagna. Spelled, you know, like lasagna. And then for a brief moment it was Man Hours, which I was really into.
Andy: It’s funny because every time we’ve played a show, like 5 minutes before we go on stage, we’re like, we should just change our name and be Man Hours.
Travis: It’s so indicative of what we do. Every time you’re handed a new piece, you’re like fuck, how many man hours is this going to take to learn? And then you think about, well we spend a lot of time together…
Andy: It’s a lot, a lot of man hours. *giggles*…man hours…
Me: *More giggles* So back to your current name, is there any particular significance to that lyric?
Andy: Eh, a fair amount. Do you know the band [Ween] at all?
Me: Not very well.
Andy: Remind me and I’ll send you some. They’re wonderful.
Travis: It was just another thing we agreed upon.
Me: That’s two!
*Giggles from Andy and Travis*
Me: But in this process [of choosing a name] you actually got the definition of ballsagna changed?
Travis: [Andy] did, because you, like, urban dictionary bombed the definition.
Andy: That was one of the things that was negative originally. I forget what the definition was…I think it was something pretty vulgar, you know, because duh.
Travis: Well it is ballsagna.
Andy: Because we couldn’t really have it so the first Google thing…Because oh! The urban dictionary was the first Google hit. And so, if we’re applying for grants, that’s not the coolest thing.
Travis: Ok, I just want to say this now, since we’re in the process of it. It is really cool, and then you made it a little bit more pg-13.
Andy: That was the point.
Travis: Yeah I know that is the point. But you did take something that was once really cool, and then bowdlerized it a little bit.
Andy: That was the point, yes.
Travis: And I just want to say for the record right now that like, that I was pushing for the group to be called “Molten Hot Smegma”.
Andy: You were not pushing that hard!
*laughs*
Andy: The list of names we both brought to the table for this discussion is sooo good.
Me: So there’s an actual list that’s there for posterity?
Andy: Yeah, there is there is. And I’ll use all of them. So, I will, before I die, be in a band called Larry King and Queens. I will.
Me: Ok
Andy: I will be in a band called Tom Petty and the Fartmakers. Just…that will happen.
Travis: Big Dick and the Foreskins
Andy: Sarah Palin’s Gay Friend
Me: *Laughs* You memorize everything, don’t you?
Andy: There were some other good ones. I feel like this is one of the things we’re both quite good at.
Me: Well, you’re musicians. You have to know when you see a band name.
Travis: Yeah, I think there was like a desire to do something that was at least slightly subversive, so it would still be kind of funny down the line. And the fact that [The Living Earth Show] comes from a song called “She Fucks Me” was still kinda…giggle worthy.
Andy: Giggle worthy. Yeah, we essentially talked to a few people who we trust. Like, composers who are pretty established.

Me: Which name are you talking about now?
Andy: Ballsagna. We were dead set on it. Todd Reynolds was like, “honestly, no you can’t get away with this…there’s no reason to drive your audience away.”
Travis: I think it inspires loyalty, frankly.
Me: So there still might be a Ballsagna in your future?
Travis: A record…
Andy: Or something. The best of.

Me: It is rare to witness two “classical” performers have so much fun on stage, which probably couldn’t have been accomplished without total memorization of the music. Will this aspect of your playing be a trademark of the Living Earth Show? And do you think that in general it’s time chamber groups stop bitching and start memorizing?

Travis: I mean that was from the get-go. We were like, we’re just going to memorize everything…It’s more enjoyable. At least I think I’m more capable of playing better in an ensemble if I’m not really worried about the page or if I’ve internalized the music to the point where I can just really focus on what the sound is in the room.
Andy: Me too. There’s a tendency for me anyway to mentally hide behind a music stand. It’s less my responsibility if it’s on a page in front of me. So I feel more responsible for what I’m doing if I’m just there and there’s no music stand, so I can see what’s going on and communicate. You can use every second visually in some way to make the music better, and if you’re spending that looking at music, it’s wasteful.
Me: Yeah, people are always complaining about how performers aren’t connecting with their audience in the classical world. Maybe the music stand is just a big old metaphorical barrier?
Travis: Yeah, it extends the clothing too, because I can have those dreams, like the naked school dreams without any trepidation whatsoever. *laughs*
Andy: But groups do [memorize music]. I don’t think we’re doing anything that’s unheard of in any way.
Travis: Most people that come up playing nowadays—they’ve either done a little bit of jazz or done some rock before they actually matured into playing chamber or classic or whatever the fuck you want to call it. But you kind of look like a jag-off if you show up at the rock gig with a music stand. You know what I mean? So if you don’t do it there, why would you do it here?

Me: It probably won’t be long before the guardians of musical nomenclature begin assigning labels to what you do. Would you like to right now, right here preempt these critics and label yourself? Or do you in fact wish to remain label-less?

Andy: *Indiscernible string of words*
Me: Can you say it slower?
Andy: Chill wave. Glitch-hop.

Travis: Apple Core.
*laughs*
Me: Chill wave? Glitch-hop?
Andy: Glitch hop. Apple Core. Eh…that can’t be the last one. Chill Wave Apple Core Glitch Hop.
Travis: Gultch Rock
Andy: Glo-fi, bedroom…hop.
Me: Would you like to leave it at that?
Andy: Yes.

Me: Ok. The questions get harder from here on out. Guitar and drums, in the context of art music, are still a fairly new invention. What sorts of timbral advantages are offered by the guitar-percussion combo?

Travis: It can really be like zeroed in to just electronics, because it’s much easier for the two of us to electronically manipulate what we do.
Andy: I’d say there are just as many disadvantages as advantages. Because it’s such a stereotypical rock combination, there’s I think a pretty big tendency to write like that. We’re sort of fortunate in that everything we’ve gotten has been out of that realm, like very much interesting music that happens to be for the instruments we play. We’re not the first group to put an electric guitar and a drum set in chamber music, and a lot of the things that come of that can sometimes be like pretty stereotypically rock-influenced classical music.
Me: But you guys aren’t going in that direction?
Andy: No. It’s just the instruments we happen to play.
Travis: I don’t mind though. I’m not going to like hold a banana and then tell everybody this is not a banana.
Andy: I don’t know if there are any timbral advantages…
Travis: I have a shit ton, really. Just because I can more easily I think than any other instrument just change my sound.
Andy: And I can just hit other shit.
Travis: Well that’s true too, yeah. So I think there are plenty of advantages.
Andy: Yeah, plenty of advantages.

Me: If you could tattoo the name of one living composer/artist anywhere on your body, who would it be and where?

Travis: Ooohhh god that’s a good one.

Andy: That is. Gimme a sec.
Me: If a living one is too hard, you can go with dead. But, let’s go with living.
Travis: You know what would be really good? Is like you know the Tommy Lee “Mayhem”? Like that one kind of arching on your stomach? I would get a Wolf Mother one, just because it would be eternal motivation, because like, you look down at your stomach, and just get really pissed off.
*laughs*
Andy: So I’m going towards like iconic tattoos that bands have. So like Bradley Nowell has Sublime tattooed on his back.
Travis: Yeeah! But that’s…his band, obviously.
Andy: That’s true.
Travis: So that’s kind of…
Andy: Well he’s dead.
Travis: I wonder what that looks like now?
Andy: It’s been a while.
Travis: I mean, for what purpose would you…I mean would it be for glorification of said band, or are you the type of guy who would just do it because you think you would like them forever? Like that episode of The Simpsons where Homer had Starland Vocal tattooed on his back.
Andy: I don’t know. There’s a couple different ways I would do it. Like one would be because I think it’s really funny right now, which is a bad idea. One would be a band I will always like…I would be much more inclined to do album art, from albums I like.
Travis: Yeah, but that’s not the question. I mean, that’s like…you’re removing one of the defining parameters of the question.
Andy: Exactly, exactly. So it has got to be an artist I’ll always like…um…
Travis: I think it’s really safe to select a band or an artist that has already had kids. Because that’s the most disappointing moment in an artist’s career arc.
Andy: Yeah, then it’d have to be like a Wilco logo or something.
Travis: I felt that way about Sky Blue Sky. I was like “God damn, someone had a kid, didn’t they.”
Andy: They’ve had kids for a loong time.
Travis: Yeah I guess so, but…your tattoo please.
Andy: So going that way, maybe Wilco. Like that’s a band I will never dislike.
Travis: You do like Methods of Mayhem though, so maybe you should get a Mayhem…
Andy: So that’s the other thing—I don’t trust myself to do that. There’s a lot of things I think would be really really funny. Like any sort of Methods of Mayhem tattoo would be reeally funny. Like just hysterical. Um, yeah yeah…I don’t know.
*laughs*

Me: A lot has been made recently about how classical music must cross genres and get out of its comfort zone to survive in today’s genre-crossing, uncomfortable musical ecosystem. Even in your own concert, you crafted a finely balanced program with pieces commissioned by composers young and old written in pretty disparate styles, from ballet to electro-theater battle music. Given this viewpoint, where does TLES go from here? What conventional or unconventional performance spaces would you like to perform in? What sorts of collaborations/commissions do you see yourself taking on going forward?

Travis: One thing that I think is interesting about that question was about what spaces would you like to play. You ever go down to the Academy of Sciences? And I’m not joking—you go down to the Academy of Sciences, in the aquarium there’s this gigantic sea bass, and it is like prehistoric. It looks like it’s made out of clay. And my dream—I’m not saying this as a joke, like I’m not saying this in a jocular fashion—I really just want to rock that fish. Like I really wanted to be the fish musician— I wanted to be the fishician.
Andy: The musfician?
Travis: I didn’t care. I would clean up the floors at the Academy of Sciences, if just like, you know, when we shut down, I could just kind of wheel my half stack up next to that fish—just fire it up, all low and sludgy and slow. Honestly, that would be my favorite place to put on a show is actually next to that fish tank at the Academy of Sciences. That’s like one of those things where I could take a year off, if I got to do something that cool in an environment like that. I really like the Academy of Sciences. I think it’s a great space.
Andy: It is.
Me: Andy? Any place you’d like to play?
Andy: Naw. Um…I don’t know. Honestly, the places I want to play? Anywhere people can hear us. There are venues I think would be fun to play at…I’ll think of a more interesting answer because I’m sure I have one…well, my view on weddings is similar to this. For like wedding planning and ideal gigs, anywhere that’s not on solid ground. So either in an airplane, on a boat, underwater, outer space. Anywhere that’s not solid ground. *knocks on the floor*
Travis: A barge…
Andy: Well the barge—there’s that Bargemusic. That would be a fun fucking place to play in New York. Bargemusic—it’s a venue in New York, under the Brooklyn Bridge.
Travis: Ha!
Andy: They host chamber music.
Travis: Really?
Andy: Yeah.
Travis: All right. *laughs* Bargemusic…
Andy: It’s called Bargemusic.
Travis: That’s really sweet.
Andy: It is.
Travis: Do you have to play like Barcarolles? Because that seems like that would be the appropriate music for a barge…would be a Barcarolle.
Andy: No, they play like chamber music there. Like Morton Feldman and shit.
Travis: That seems unfitting.

Me: By the way you guys did a phenomenal job at your show. I didn’t get to say it when I saw you, so you accrued a lot of dick sucking interest these past few weeks
Travis: Really?
Me: Well, figuratively

Andy: That’s why we do what we do, Phil.

The lively banter you have just experienced is translated directly into musical form in performances by Andy and Travis. The Living Earth Show YouTube channel may be perused here, or, if geography plays to your favor, you can see the group live in San Francisco on June 10th at the Blender 2.0 (1592 Market St) or in Oakland on June 20th at the Garden of Memory (4499 Piedmont Ave.). As the world begins to witness major reforms in how classical music is performed and disseminated, be sure to keep an ear out for two guys plucking and banging at its forefront. You don’t want to be the last person at the string quartet concert when everyone else has moved on to a more…earthy instrumentation.

Interview conducted by Phillip Mayer.

Image via http://thelivingearthshow.com/

It’s a Miracle Things Don’t Fall Apart When Remembering Greatest Game Ever Played

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 15:16:00 -0500

We must Remember the Titans! The Greatest Game Ever Played was won by Shia LaBouef. The movie called simply Real is about the soccer team of the same name. Miracle refers to the time the US beat the Commies at hockey. With all the posturing in their titles, one might ask – what do sports movies feel like they have to prove? With the trailer for Things Fall Apart, however, one also wonders – just who are they trying to impress?

The title co-opts that of perhaps the most commonly-assigned and widely-read novel in post-colonial literature, which in turn takes its name from a line in “The Second Coming,” one of the most widely-anthologized poems of the twentieth century. Building on these allusions to Chinua Achebe’s story of an African tribe straining under struggles internal and external and Yeats’ aghast stare into the horrors of modernity, the movie adds what appears to be a tear-jerker about the (possibly limited) curative (or at least, dignity-bestowing) power of football re: cancer.

As for the trailer’s actual content, it claims the movie features lead actor 50 Cent in “the most critically-acclaimed role of his career” before – as the Onion AV Club noted – the movie has actually been screened for critics. Also, the production company is named “Hannibal Pictures.” The logo for Hannibal Pictures is the Creation of Adam from the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

Sports movies have often been grandiose, but their titles haven’t always been so full of shit. Chariots of Fire is a fitting Biblical allusion given its characters’ religiosity. Pride of the Yankees does not claim Lou Gehrig was the Pride of New York or Pride of All Baseball. Ditto for Brian’s Song, which is not called Brian’s Song was the Best Ever Let’s Sing it Now Shall We. Add to these plenty of descriptive titles (The Babe Ruth Story), titles that – while evocative – do not necessarily make value claim about the subject (A League of their Own), and, for some reason, movies named after horses (Secretariat, Seabiscuit).

Less common today, however, is the unambitious genre picture that has the common sense and modesty to call itself Coach Carter (2005). Bolstered by such borderline pretentious 1980s titles as The Natural (1984) and Field of Dreams (1989), the shift in title style appears to have begun to blossom in the late 90s. The titles in the first paragraph are representative of this period; all of the examples in it, save Real (2005), were produced by Disney-owned studios. These names are marked by hyperbole, unearned sentiment, and mythic posturing. Curiously generic, they could well describe anything; they have meaning only insofar as their connotations of power, power that they claim emanates from the sporting event itself. While a title like Knute Rockne, All American (1940)positions its subject in relation to both athletics and American values, the Miracle of the 2004 movie (a title shortened from ‘miracle on ice’) is the hockey victory of the 1980 Olympics itself, out of which we discern the presence of God’s Own Hand endorsing the American Dream and spiting the communists who do not believe in Him. Other outsized titles include Without Limits (1998), the sexually euphemistic-sounding Glory Road, and, to a lesser extent, Million Dollar Baby (2004).

With Things Fall Apart, however, it may be possible that we are standing at the brink of a new movement in sports movie titling that encompasses all the posturing of the second, but adds an awkward yearning for respectability. If so, the film is continuing a trend led by Invictus (2009) – a reference to a poem whose title is in Latin – though that could arguably stretch back to the 1930 soccer film The Great Game, race to conquer central Asia.

Sporting thrives on what is nominally ambition – but only within boundaries set by the rules of the game. One can run the 400 meter dash as fast as possible but may not run more than 400 meters. And, as David Foster Wallace (hereafter referred to as DFW) – whose final, unfinished novel The Pale King was released earlier this month, and who was himself a youth tennis star – wrote in “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” the narratives that internally sustain sports may themselves make an advantage of simplicity:

“How, at the critical moment, can [great athletes] invoke for themselves a cliché as trite as ‘one ball at a time’ or ‘gotta concentrate here,’ and mean it, and then do it? Maybe it’s because, for top athletes, clichés present themselves not as trite but simply as true, or perhaps not even as declarative expressions with qualities like depth or triteness or falsehood or truth but as simple imperatives that are either useful or not and, if useful, to be invoked and obeyed and that’s all there is to it.”

Now, the thing is – this shouldn’t necessarily be taken as an insult. Much of DFW’s work and personal life involved a struggle to reconcile complexity and simplicity, and he did not necessarily discount the value or fantasy of the simple imperatives. As he told the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College, “in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance.” Melodrama utilizes comfortable conventions and recognizable boundaries to enable audiences to explore challenging emotions. The elements may be contrived, but that feeling can be useful and may be real.

In the self-contained narrative called ‘sports’, all this melodrama is more or less aesthetically cohesive. But when one explores the requirements of practically applying the narrative, the results can be disturbing. DFW described the cost behind the single-minded sporting pursuit in “Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness” (originally published in 1996 in Esquire as “The String Theory”):

Oh, we’ll invoke lush clichés about the lonely heroism of Olympic athletes, the pain and analgesia of football, the early rising and hours of practice and restricted diets, the preflight celibacy, et cetera. But the actual facts of the sacrifices repel us when we see them: basketball geniuses who cannot read, sprinters who dope themselves, defensive tackles who shoot up with bovine hormones until they collapse or explode. We prefer not to consider closely the shockingly vapid and primitive comments uttered by athletes in postcontest interviews or to consider what impoverishments in one’s mental life would allow people actually to think the way great athletes seem to think.

We all have limited time on this mortal coil, and I’m not here to criticize someone who would choose to be a great tennis, basketball, football or whatever player at the expense of other pursuits. Not everyone can do what strong athletes do. Not everyone can do anything, and no one will do everything. But I would like to point out a danger the narrative encourages is the enticement to believe hard work comes easy, that challenge to one part of life come without risk and cost in others.

In a line of dialogue in the Things Fall Apart trailer, Coach Ray Liotta demands “You want to do it on your own terms – that is the question.” He thus grammatically mangles the first line of perhaps the single most famous soliloquy in all of literature, fraught with self-doubt and ambiguity, into an imperative to follow the “take arms against a sea of troubles” side of the speaker’s great debate. While Denzel Washington’s coach fires his team up by describing how the mythological Titans challenged the gods, he forgets to mention that they failed and were imprisoned as a result (see also, the Titanic [the ship] [not the movie]).

The examples of Hamlet and the Titans aren’t factual – they’re art – stories that multiple cultures, for hundreds of years, have used to explore challenging ideas and emotions. They have added meaning because of the weight, that history, the sum of all connotations that allusions to them create. The foremost connotative aspect of a work of art is literally the first thing we see – its handle, its title – which may take some meanings while leaving others. The mix of power and uncertainty that can be suggested by a single word like Rocky is as impressive as it is understated as it is descriptive. The word is shared by mountains, ice cream, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show – yet it remains versatile and evocative. As a single word, it may mean any of these things, any combination of these things, or its simplest denotative meanings. As a title, it is near perfect.

By contrast, a sports movie with a bad title drains a word of nuance, treating it only as a source of power. That’s a kind of abuse of the language, an exploitation, that leaves the words more devalued than the works enhanced. To name something Things Fall Apart today seems either ignorant of the phrase’s connotative and allusive weight or to be trying too hard to indulge lazy cultural shorthand. Titles like it seem to suggest the movie is making a claim on the grandest allusions, as if reputation in itself bestows power and familiarity bestows relevance. In effect, they try to claim a world title without showing up to practice.

Matt Voigts admits he has not actually watched many of these movies. He lives in Iowa.

(photo via The Inspiration Room)

Nuclear Emo: World Media Gets in a Big Reactionary Circle Jerk—Engineers Everywhere Facepalm

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 01:38:00 -0500

Before you get your panties all up in a bunch about nuclear power, remember that the cause of this accident was human corruption, selfishness, and neglect, like all industrial accidents. Not that I’m here to defend nuclear power. I’m here to lay out the bastards who put this on everyone, to the tune of 14.6 trillion yen (the estimated cost to merely recover economically). They happen to hail from both sides of the Pacific.

In 1975, a(n American) GE employee auditing the GE Mark 1 reactor design used at Fukushima resigned in protest at the coolant problem. A second employee falsified inspection records in 1989, at the request of Tokyo Electric Power. Yet again, GE whistleblowers exposed this and other flaws in the reactor when they “complained to the Japanese government.” As stated in the claims leveled by the Fukushima Communist Party, TEP lied to government officials and the public about a nuclear plant damaged by an offshore quake in Niigata in 2007. As icing on the cake, Wikileaks recently exposed records showing that “Japan was warned in 2009” about its reactor problems. Absolutely sick, right? Even in a country in which there was no tradition of yellow journalism or corporate distrust, the playbook against it is exactly the same. I guess they imported that along with the uranium.

US foreknowledge is painfully apparent in their reaction. They increased the evacuation radius to almost double the Japanese one, offered priority transport off of Honshu, and apparently started distributing iodine pills. Iodine pills? What, are they going to get bombed? In either case, the US is clearly operating from a lower-confidence position than that of Japan.

Just so we know where I stand: I hate the nuclear lobby, because they’re a for-profit institution whose ethical part is fed from the same stomach. I hate the anti-nuclear lobby because they live in a world where they think their fight is meaningful in itself—as though being anti-nuclear were the same, politically, as being anti-war. In other words, I hate them because they’re the same—they’re singleminded, ugly creatures who fail to fix either of the problems they purport to solve. (I don’t hate the humans. I hate their movement.)

Anti-nuclear advocates highlight the dangers prevalent in nuclear power, negatively reveling in a mythos of the taint of anything nuclear, as though it were some kind of Original Sin. For example, you can’t even call it Nuclear-Magnetic Resonance. You have to call it Magnetic Resonance Imaging to keep from scaring the patient. It’s true that the WASP upper echelon military, which was responsible for the production and use of the A-bomb, lent the whole issue an eschatological air from the start. Even the physicist Kenneth Bainbridge gave forth a moral reaction in witnessing what he and his colleagues had created. Immediately after the Trinity test, he said, “Now we are all sons of bitches.” We are, but that doesn’t mean we need to play out some kind of Christian revelatory dichotomy until the world splits in half.

Not that I’m taking shots at Christianity alone. A writer for the left-wing e-zine AlterNet managed to produce a page-long article with only two paragraphs of creative thought, and then goes on to drag out the whole “Story of Prometheus”, an English paraphrasing of the old Greek legend. It’s a bald-faced, sophomoric guilt trip that wastes the reader’s cognitive man-hours, and I’m sure Daniel Quinn is not impressed.

There’s a whole separate story to the use of the A-bomb and the weaponization of nuclear reactions. Observation of the current design of nuclear reactors gives one the impression that they’re like some kind of fell, Lovecraftian beast, always waiting to blow, barely held in line with voodoo control rods and coolant-shot veins. According to the Google Tech Talks on the subject, the design of reactors that resembled the Bomb in this way was due to the military and political establishment that had grown strong as a result of its success in the war (and its success in the Cold War that followed), creating a climate that was toxic to the discussion or development of reactors that do not function in this way at all. You don’t have to build a reactor this way, and you shouldn’t—it goes against the basic principles of stability that I’ve been studying in systems engineering for three years.

Even so, current nuclear reactors are not top killers of human beings. I doubt there’s been a study correlating increased cancer risks in order to define fractional death rate increases in every zone neighboring a reactor, but I’m willing to bet that outside of Chernobyl the numbers aren’t enough push it up to the top. This is certainly due in large part to regulatory oversight, exactly what I support—controls on the humans. But we kill unimaginably greater numbers of people with cars, insufficient healthcare, war, or any of the other items on progressives’ to-do lists. I agree that nuclear safety should be up at the top of the list, along with the other ones (Every item is at the top of the list. Every one is top priority. There is no other ethically acceptable position). But that’s exactly my point—nuclear safety is not a problem with nuclear power or nuclear reactors. If you’re gonna ban use of the strong nuclear force by human society, why don’t you ban oxidation reactions, the source of many times more deaths in the firebombings of Tokyo and Dresden alone than the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well? That’d solve your climate change and war problems right there. We’d be reduced to walking across the valley to beat the fuck out of each other with sticks again. At least then the problem would be naked and obvious again: human moral functioning.

Oh yeah, I hate the fucking mass media, too. Even a Japanese author, writing for AP, penned pure mainstream:

The unbelievable sight of rich Japan — famous for trains running like clockwork, state-of-the-art gadgets, concern for safety and order — laid low by a freak force of nature beyond human control has been a terrifying wake-up call. On Friday, Japan’s government acknowledged that the triple blow of quake, tsunami and nuclear disaster completely overwhelmed even its elaborately laid out, and fastidiously practiced, emergency response systems.

Fastidiously practiced? Bite your fucking tongue. Residents of Fukushima, real left-wingers with more balls than you, have been hounding Tokyo Electric and the Japanese government’s regulatory negligence for decades, and you think you can get on the boat now by sucking up to the national perception while pushing the new reactionary politic?

The problems that led to the Fukushima reactor debacle are the same as the ones that lead to mercenaries and spooks committing war crimes in other countries, the ones that lead to oil eruptions in the Gulf of Mexico, the ones that lead to toxic damage including cancer and bone dissolution from vinyl chloride, and massive economic crises. It’s no coincidence that these are all ethical failures of large businesses or political groups that necessarily have financial interests. “End of the Nuclear Age”, my ass. Wait five years, ten years, and see what happens.

Lastly, I know this is asking a lot, but think of the future. Not thirty years from now. Not the generation after we’re dead. I’m talking about the future that scientists like Dyson think about every time they get reminded of the cold reality that we’re not gonna survive if we don’t get out of the planetary womb we’ve been wrecking for the past ten thousand years. Got it fixed in your mind? It doesn’t matter if it’s ten billion years when the sun burns out, or however many years it takes for a meteor impact to be 99% likely, or whatever. There’s an Armageddon to suit your taste.

Now listen carefully. There is no external technological advance that will stop us from killing ourselves, no matter how long you wait. The only thing that increases with the advance of technology is the scale and the speed. Yeah, there’s the chance that the Nerd Rapture, the Technological Singularity will birth a Machine God to take the wheel from our hands, but more than likely it’ll be a being produced by evolutionary processes as are we, and therefore have no qualms about breaking eggs in order to get its reproductive omelette.

This means that even if the percentage of human deaths out of the population per year continues to shrink as it has, given a net increase in human population, the average absolute number of human deaths per year will grow without bound. Sticking to the theme, negligence in the use of human technology could kill millions at a time, ushering in an era when people call a number like that lucky. Look at the Challenger, or the Columbia. You don’t hear people rushing to ban the Space Shuttle, do you? Oh sure, we remember Laika the dog, or that guy the Soviet space program bounced off the atmosphere to send him hurtling toward certain death (I don’t even remember his name, but I’m sure Wikipedia does), and condemned it when it suited our political purposes. But what’s the difference between an engineering failure there and an engineering failure in a nuclear reactor? I mean, other than the fact that the reactor might not kill you right away. Now multiply the death risk by whatever positive power of 10 you like, and you have what engineering accidents will be like in the far future, when it starts really meaning a damn for the survival of humanity itself.

Coming back to now. We will continue to entrust our lives to these machines. It doesn’t particularly matter in the scale of things which kind of machine it is. Lately a few of them have been fingered as being capable of turning the whole planet into a wasteland. Probably true (why not? You can do anything with enough effort and time), but it’d be all our fault—and it’d only be a wasteland for us. The bacteria that live in the coolant pipes of nuclear reactors, and the primordial creatures hanging around the seafloor vents would survive and probably make up the difference in another couple hundred million years. In other words, we’re not dealing with nuclear technology, or technology in particular. We’re dealing with our own conceit and selfishness, and wagering this particular incarnation of the biosphere that incorporates us, on it. We need to fix ourselves, and in a hurry. If we continue to act this way, like squabbling, corrupt schoolyard kids, human beings will suffer and die in numbers that will require even humanities majors, filthy politicians, and reactionary journalists to relearn how to write numbers in large-exponent scientific notation.

Real journalism from the Australian:

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/fukushima-nuclear-plant-owner-falsified-inspection-records/story-fn84naht-1226023073141

Annoying Japanese AP writer clumsily moralizes about the earthquake and nuclear power:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/ap_on_re_as/as_japan_earthquake_global_tragedy

AlterNet writer gets it closer, but still fails to make the direct ethical appeal:

http://www.alternet.org/world/150267/tsunami_and_nuke_disaster_how_human_arrogance_intensifies_suffering?page=2

US pulls citizens out to 80km while preaching “faith” and “solidarity” with Japanese government (Japanese):

http://jp.wsj.com/US/node_201488/

Google Tech Talk on Thorium Remix (anime-length, for the Tweeples):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWUeBSoEnRk

Megaengineering - Dyson spheres:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere

Human extinction:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_extinction

The data I have on the US reaction to the disaster is from US Embassy emails, which I can forward upon request.

by Trevor Alexander
(image via Ars Technica)

Pac Man, Flow, and Erving Goffman

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 23:31:00 -0600

“You don’t play the ghosts, you play the pattern.”
-Renee Shane-Boyd

The best advice I received on Pac Man strategy, even in two years of working in an arcade in high school, came from my band instructor. She also once claimed that she majored in Music Education in college, but minored in Pac Man. And on that rare, once-a-year occasion when the whole school band (well over 100 of us) visited an arcade, you could see and hear her abusing Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde.I have a lot of experience with the various Pac Mans. My favorite would have to be Ms. Pac, but really there’s never been any harm in dropping a few quarters into a cabinet if you’re passing one by in a bowling alley. Most places think of the games as classics, so they’re probably one of only a few machines to still be priced around a single quarter for a play. And if you get going into the right flow, if you’re really only playing the pattern, that play can last for quite a while.

It is against this backdrop of experiences that I downloaded Pac Man Championship DX. It’s a 30th-anniversary edition with a plethora of game modes ranging from score attack to time attack on a variety of maps with customizable settings. It automatically ranks you on a leader board composed of every other player of the game on your system’s network, which one reviewer declared was a competitive reminder that you are “never, ever good enough”. But being “good enough” at Pac Man is the province of individuals gifted with a great deal of time and dedication (or, possibly, addiction), while my interest in the game has more to do with the physicality, the phenomenology, the experience of Pac Man.

Yes, I did just mention the “physicality” of Pac Man. What I mean by that is the flow of the game, the pulse of switching challenges and attacking them again and again when you have the feeling that you could have done better. The leader board influences this a bit— surely I, with my decades-long Pac Man fever (hey! Two count for a plural!) can do better than 24,000 out of 36,000! Yet there’s no real reason why I should immediately replay a particular challenge instead of moving on and returning later. With each successful completion, you unlock the next time trial, the next Ghost Combo, or maybe just better your ability to play the pattern “in the dark”, where only a small section of the maze is illuminated by Pac Man, the ghosts, and the dots.

Part of the original and continued success of Pac Man consists in its ability to induce a flow state. It’s jarring to die, even when you diminish death’s consequence by racking up extra life after life. Death may also be strategic, however, as when playing time attack. It’s faster to bump all the ghosts pack to the maze than go around them. And this is the brilliance of this 30th-anniversary edition— it’s many, many game modes lie on a sliding scale requiring different mixes of cognition and feeling. When I’m trying to get through only a few fruit and a collection of dots in less than a minute, it’s about efficiency and strategy. When I’m going for a 10-minute timed score attack, though, it’s about the flow, running through the pattern and accumulating a swarm of ghosts that I can chomp to pump up that score. These modes barely require description or an understanding of the goal— you get all the feedback you need by playing the game and seeing your ranking.

But playing the game isn’t an exclusively internal process. As with all video games, when you live with someone else you end up with a Goffmanian mix of front and backstage performance. Pac Man DX is particularly susceptible to this, because so many people know how to play the role of a spectator when it comes to Pac Man. Like the player, they also bring decades of experience. But with its pulsing graphics, soundtrack, and exponentially larger numbers of ghosts, watching Pac Man DX when you’re used to Ms. Pac Man is a potentially jarring experience. There’s a visual overload if you’re spectating, which stands in contrast to viewing the sparse screens of the original games. If you’re playing, you have synergy between your front and back stages as I’ve described— I don’t play the whole screen, I play the pattern. But for a spectator, that synergy is harder to come by. They might be left viewing the entire screen, without a strategic way of running through that information. No wonder my girlfriend prefers that I play it when she’s out of the room.

Yeah. That must be it.

by Don Everhart

(photo by Patrick Hoesly)

Musicology as Gonzo journalism or Giving credit where credit’s due

Sun, 06 Mar 2011 15:18:00 -0600

This is not a scholarly journal. Therefore, instead of leaving you to guess, I feel it’s important to state outright that I am writing this piece while under the influence of some fine New England ale. I find myself pleased that both that confession and the content of this article would likely insult and infuriate at least seven or eight of my former professors while amusing maybe one or two.

Musicology is the scholarly or scientific study of music. Gonzo journalism is a style of journalism that is written subjectively, emphasizing style and emotion over clarity and accuracy and frequently includes the author as part of the story. The former has its roots in the 18^th century and was mostly codified by German and Austrian scholars over the following hundred years or so. Hunter S. Thompson basically developed the latter, although he did not coin the term.

Even those of you who are only familiar with Thompson’s work through the film version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas will understand that applying the idea of an unreliable narrator to the work is somewhat of an understatement. You will also understand that it’s also basically unimportant in that context to grasp each and every precise detail of the story. If the point of a scene is to show you that everybody in the room is a vacuous, terrible and unimportant human being, does it really matter if the author himself provokes a response and then depicts them as actual monstrous creatures?

Where this sort of author insertion and intent to influence the readers’ perception of events becomes an issue is when there is a claim of objectivity and accuracy to the content. Musicology, more specifically historical musicology, purports to accurately document the history of western music from Medieval times to the present (attempts to really do anything with ancient Greek treatises on music beyond acknowledged speculation have been fairly silly for the most part). That I’ve already pointed out that this discipline is essentially a Germanic innovation should really begin to make you think about your understanding of the history of Western classical music.

If you ask most educated people, even those without much of a musical background, who the greatest composers of all time were, they probably wouldn’t hesitate before mentioning Ludwig van Beethoven (born in Bonn, Germany), Johann Sebastian Bach (born in Eisenach, Germany) or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (born in Salzburg, Austria). Notice a common thread? I shouldn’t be surprising or offending anyone when I say that, from a socio-cultural perspective, the Germans and Austrians are a very proud people with a rich cultural heritage. Since they were the authors of the first comprehensive music histories, of course they emphasized their compatriots above all others. Heinrich Schenker, who is now one of the most widely taught music theorists in the world, only admitted one non-German/Austrian into his pantheon of “great” composers (the Italian baroque composer Domenico Scarlatti, in case you were curious).

The problem here is that, while nobody should question the tremendous talent and importance of these figures, there were other very important composers of comparable influence and ability that don’t get their due. Mozart elevated opera to a level never before achieved, but the genre wouldn’t exist but for the tremendous work of Claudio Monteverdi (see L’Orfeo) some hundred plus years prior. Beethoven’s most enduringly popular works are his nine immense symphonies – but they would have never have been but for the innovations of Sammartini and Pergolesi. And Bach, the greatest of the Baroque composer, was never an innovator, but rather possibly the finest summarizer of all time, and owes much to the aforementioned Scarlatti, Vivaldi, Corelli, Couperin, Lully and others from Italy, France, England, Spain and elsewhere.

Far from being objective research, and therefore true anthropology, one simply cannot separate the views of traditional musicology from the jingoism and chauvinism of its progenitors. This wasn’t a problem in Fear and Loathing, where all Hunter S. Thompson wanted to get across were raw emotions, untempered by higher brain functions. But when the point is, supposedly, to trace the route of innovations in form, harmonic language, instrumentation, etc. through the centuries, it’s foolish and, well, wrong to marginalize the contribution of all but a few central European nations.

by Evan Runyon

(photo via cigcardpix)

Libraries & Technology: The Digital Divide and the Future of Libraries

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 22:06:00 -0600

The popularity of eBooks and eReaders like Kindle and Nook, accessing library websites from mobile devices, and the few insane library directors who have completely gotten rid of their books are fueling the debate about the future of libraries and library space. What often gets overlooked is that many Americans don’t have access to this technology, either because of their economic situation or where they live. One New York Times article states that “an estimated 14 million to 28 million Americans have no way of getting access to the internet.” An even larger number cannot afford mobile devices or even a personal computer.

So, yes, for those of us with laptops, smartphones, eReaders, and internet access, libraries are checking out fewer books in favor of providing digital information and remote access. However, there are many of us who don’t have the gadgets or even the internet access. The American Library Association’s Public Library Funding & Technology Access Study for 2009-2010 states that two-thirds (!) of library branches report that they are the only provider of free public computer and internet access in their communities. Rural areas often have no access to broadband, whether citizens can pay or not, though there are efforts to change this. Even in urban areas, where broadband is widely available, the computers in the public library are the only way for many residents to get online, because they can’t afford a computer of their own and/or internet access. Though libraries need to innovate to remain relevant, in keeping up with technology and the needs of patrons with access to mobile devices and fast internet, they can’t leave behind the many people who don’t have them.

On the other hand, experts on libraries and technology like Eli Nieberger are of the opinion that if libraries rely on the old ideas of what a library is, they will die. I find myself agreeing with him. Though the extinction of libraries in their current form will not come quickly, it will come, and probably in our lifetime. This is terrifying to librarians (especially older ones), who, while claiming to be open-minded, are really stuck on the idealized libraries of their childhood. Many librarians from older generations despair over the increasing popularity of DVDs and eBooks over print books and lose sight of what libraries are becoming and can be for future generations.

As I stated above, many library patrons only have access to the internet through their libraries, and patrons use the library’s fax machines, printers, copiers, and scanners. Some libraries even have game consoles like the Wii. Many Americans cannot afford all or even some of this technology for personal use, but libraries can purchase and maintain these technologies through collected taxpayer funds. Patrons can then come to the library and use this technology. In the future, this may be the deciding factor in the survival of libraries. Instead of focusing on offering books and information, libraries can provide access to technology that might not otherwise be possible.

by Leah Farrell

(photos by Seabamirum [top] and Sylvar [middle])

New Feature! Introducing TABLE OF CONTENTS!

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 18:43:00 -0600

Every time I sat down to write my first article for the food section of SUPER FINE MAGAZINE it turned into a manifesto. Frankly, I don’t know enough about food yet to be qualified to write a meaningful manifesto. My writing cannot compete with the works of my mentors who have so strongly influenced my views. If a manifesto is what you’re looking for, be sure to read Mark Bittman, Michael Pollan, or Carlo Petrini for a solid foundation on which you can build you own opinions about and relationships with food.

My goal for this column isn’t to write a magnum opus. Instead, I hope to provide some tips and insights that I have picked up over the course of my love affair with food. Hopefully, I can demystify the complex food culture and allow you to feel more comfortable in the grocery store and in the kitchen. In the end, I hope my column will shed some light on the nature of food and encourage you to take culinary risks, no matter how small. Maybe the next time you are in the store, you’ll grab that Sicilian eggplant you have no clue how to cook or you might deviate from your normal Merlot and try that grape varietal you can’t pronounce.It seems natural to discuss a wine grape varietal that I’m crazy about in my first column. Enter Nero d’Avola.

NAME: Nero d’Avola
WINE: Red
LOCATION: Sicily
WEIGHT: Medium to Full
SIMILAR TO: Syrah or Malbec
PRICE: $8-15
TASTE: Plums, Black Fruit, Peppery
YEAR: Not relevant - age does not impact the quality with this wine.
ABOUT THE NAME: Nero d’Avola means “Black of Avola” in Italian; these jet-black grapes are grown in Sicily’s Avola province

Nero d’Avola is anything but pretentious; this wine is what it is. While many other grapes, a Zinfandel, for example, can work well in many different styles depending on how you treat it, Nero d’Avola really only makes one kind of wine - straightforward with a lot of big fruit. Though you will occasionally see bottles priced over $20, I have had great luck with some of the very-reasonably priced bottles starting at $8 or $9. Harvested and crafted to produce a similar wine year in and year out, this is a wine meant to be enjoyed young so don’t worry as much about the vintage when purchasing a bottle. While it’s not yet a household name, this wine is becoming easier to find and most well-stocked wine stores will carry at least one bottle.

Besides being a consistent and extremely well-priced bottle for the value, I also love this wine for its versatility. Unlike most Italian red wines which seem to require food, Nero d’Avola can work almost as well on its own. If you are looking to pair it, however, I can think of nothing better than serving the wine with a homemade pizza. Give me some prosciutto , a few roasted red peppers and some sun-dried tomatoes and if I haven’t finished the bottle by the time pizza comes out of the oven, I’m in heaven. As I said though, Nero d’Avola isn’t pretentious, so if you don’t have time for that homemade pizza it can absolutely elevate the flavor and experience of that slice you grabbed on your way home or that frozen pizza that supposedly contains 6 different “cheeses.”

by Andrew Torrens

(photo via pullthecork)

East Asian Rap Beef 2010

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 16:13:00 -0600

“Is this a private fight or can anyone join in?”
-Old Irish Saying

December of last year I was jamming to Foxfire’s (狐火[kitsunebi]) lyrics on YouTube, clicking through the “related videos”, when suddenly I got hit with this URL in the middle of the lyrics. A link to a news article. I’ve never been hit with a hip-hop hyperlink before, but I got on it:

Rappers in Japan Call for An End to Racism Between Japan, Korea, and China

Background
For those who aren’t familiar, China, Korea, and Japan have been having it out for hundreds of years. Unlike the European nations, however, there was never a shift to oppressing differently-colored humans at a different technological level on the other side of the planet. Because of this, there was never a reason for them to pretend politically that they had figured out how to get along. In particular, China and Korea never succeeded (or attempted, depending on whose story you read at what time) in colonizing Japan, and moreover, Japan was unkind in its imperial rule (complete with conspiracies to provoke war, massacres, and violations of human rights). So Japan, fangs pulled by MacArthur (see Article 9 of the Constitution, renouncing belligerent war), has this conflicted role like that of the protagonist of A Clockwork Orange—it’s their turn to turn the other cheek.

With all three countries being close, sharing various cultural traits and linguistic characteristics, they’re inseparably bonded. This rubs up against Japanese nationalism which is a form of ethnic pride—if you’re Korean and you live in Japan you’re “在日[zainichi]” (resident in Japan), even if you were born there. It’s not as nice a label as “half”, which I most often see applied to half-Anglo Japanese—”zainichi” seems to come with a little hostility, and it doesn’t help that North Korea’s Taepodong missiles and submarine kidnappings of Japanese citizens aren’t just headlines on screens in lands out of range.

The Chinese presence in Japan is nothing to scoff at, either. The Yokohama Chinatown is a dizzying blast of neon lights and tight, lantern-lit alleys, surrounded by dim canals and gray streets. But the only time China really comes up in the sensationalist mass media (referred to as マスゴミ[masugomi], or “mass garbage”) is when there’s a scandal, usually involving food: “Suppliers had been shipping food made of cardboard”, or “food that was toxic”, etc. Not a gesture of respect, but not a Nanking Massacre either. So the perception of the Chinese is fairly one-sided as well, particularly to those Japanese who are not in contact with them outside of their TV screens.

To top it all off, recently there has been a scandal over disputed islands that lie in between Taiwan, China, and Japan, southeast of Okinawa. They’re referred to as the “Senkaku Islands” in Japan, but no one budges even on the name. Recently (September 2010) a Chinese fishing boat fishing illegally in the region crashed into a Japanese Coast Guard boat, and the skipper was promptly arrested. The Chinese government demanded the release of the skipper and there were rumors about halting rare earth exports to Japan (which would mean no more computer systems). The Chinese government arrested four Fujita employees who were operating in China two weeks later, and released them another two weeks after Japan sent the skipper back. Crazy protests followed in Taipei and other cities in China and Japan, things were vandalized, flags were waved, torn, bitten. The Coast Guard member who leaked the collision footage was arrested for uploading it to YouTube after CNN aired him out.

Round 1: Fight!
http://is.gd/11vEKu
Enter Haiiro de Rossi (Japan) and Takuma the Great (Taiwan-Japan). Their lyrics, in Chinese, Japanese, and English, are sincere and idealistic, lyrics that scream ‘without borders’. As far as technique goes, I can’t speak for Takuma’s Chinese flow but Haiiro de Rossi never, ever lets the beat drop. Their writing hit the mark as well—the top two comments on the YouTube video are a reactionary opinion piece blasting Haiiro de Rossi/Takuma the Great, China, Korea, and the US, and a rebuttal to another comment stating that being able to express nice-sounding concepts sincerely is what makes rap into hip-hop—not the antics of gag rappers.

Round 2 – Dissent
http://is.gd/BJiA3Z
One rapper thought ‘props’ and ‘dislikes’ were not enough to express his dissenting opinion. Show-k, a Tokyo rapper known for publishing a rap entitled “Nippon-jin Stand Up”, which advocates the abolition of Article 9, nuclear armament of Japan (which refuses to manufacture, transport, or possess nuclear armaments), and a hardline stance against China, stepped up to the plate. He entitled his ‘answer song’ “We’re the Same Asian ~Real Version~”, and hammered away with conservative lyrics that mention the plight of Tibetans and Uighurs, as well as the hypocrisy of information censorship in mainland China.

Round 2a – Secret Miniboss
http://is.gd/JOKfi1
Anyone who’s ever been to a real arcade knows what happens when you start wrecking shop at Tekken or Street Fighter—a crowd starts forming, and there’s never only one challenger. Foxfire, a lone desperado from Fukushima, operating in Tokyo, leaps into the fight to blast the state of social and news discourse in Japan, and chastise the right (by extension show-k). Strangely enough, this piece was uploaded roughly a week before show-k’s “Real Version”, but correctly anticipates the reaction that was to follow.

Round 3 – Rebuttal
http://is.gd/OWWFjh
Haiiro de Rossi, not to be dismayed, published an answer song the same day, whose lyrics politely allege that show-k’s argument was perhaps based on a misunderstanding. Also he said that MCs who can’t rap about ideals are meat.

At the same time, neither side forgets their talking points. Haiiro de Rossi wants to talk about individuals, and show-k wants to talk about nations. True, the argument descends into ad hominem attacks and stubborn fronting, but hey, it’s a rap beef—and more importantly, it’s a rap beef about international politics. Can you imagine Eminem and Dr. Dre rapping about Guantanamo Bay and the military-industrial complex? I’m not up on the Western hip-hop scene, but this is unprecedented.

Round 4 and 5 – Second Rebuttal and KO
http://is.gd/H7xHKI
http://is.gd/udjwxK
The exchange continues for two more videos, ending with a resounding victory by Haiiro de Rossi. The top comments on the last video are pure admiration at producing a final rebuttal the same day as show-k’s second piece, and agreement that clicks aren’t props.

The general trend of the videos highlights a delicious quality about Japanese beef—show-k’s first piece is for the most part very polite, never explicitly insulting Haiiro de Rossi, appealing mostly to reason. Haiiro de Rossi’s rebuttal starts out with a thank-you and ends with him calling out show-k as a right-wing YouTube rapper with no real backing. Show-k’s second rebuttal plays over a lighter, definitely jazzy production, and begins with small talk. The thread throughout the whole piece is condescending: “Whoa, hey buddy, no need to start swinging. ‘Cause, you know, I’m right and all.” In contrast, the beats under Haiiro de Rossi’s two songs get abruptly darker—the last piece is downright scary, and totally excellent. Haiiro’s last piece has no small talk, and is constructed of pure hostility. By the end of the beef, hawk and dove have completely switched places. It’s totally sweet.

And as for Foxfire? Well, Haiiro de Rossi told him to “keep his neck out of it” back in Round 3. Haiiro de Rossi apologized on Twitter later, but that’s okay—you can’t keep a guy like that down.

So what’s the point, other than that it’s an entertaining, fairly highbrow rap beef? Well, even if you ignore right-wing wailing about how China is going to take all of our worthless dollars and our freedom, even if you don’t care about East Asians and whether or not they get along, it’s a guarantee that there are suits in the government watching this carefully. Nearby Okinawa is a favorite spot for US military bases (and corruption and crime resulting from that arrangement). If the Senkaku islands became the object of military action, the US administration has indicated that it would step in. Nearby Taiwan, which dances jerkily to the tune of its pro-(China)reconciliation and pro-(US)independence parties, spends 24 hours a day under the threat of missile attack by China. The US is, as ever, tied up with South and North Korea. Japan is the only country that is unconditionally friendly to the US (as a nation, not as a people), and it is the lynchpin to all these problems (wait till you hear about their problems with Russia). A paranoid, right-wing Japanese public would make things very uncomfortable on this side of the world.

On the other hand, the notion that among the (apparently) lethargic Japanese youth there are artists with progressive vision and passion to beef over it is optimistic news. In this age it comes in a form that’s easy to nod your head to.

by Trevor Alexander

If you do have an interest in Japanese hip-hop, hit me up on Twitter sn: _unabara_. It’s a vibrant, jazzy world out there, in the year 1 AN (After Nujabes).

Links:
We’re the Same Asian Series - http://is.gd/K8l62P
Senkaku Collision Incident -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Senkaku_boat_collision_incident
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Di8406Z474 – ship collides at 2:22, attempts to flee
1000+ missiles pointed at Taiwan - http://www.chinapost.com.tw/taiwan/china-taiwan-relations/2010/07/22/265570/China-may.htm
Nanking Massacre - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_massacre Manchurian Incident - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchurian_incident
Colonization of Korea - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_colonization_of_Korea
North Korean Kidnappings of Japanese, South Koreans - http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/GB26Dg01.html
Uighur - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uighur
Tibet - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tibet

(photo via rhythmless-perspective)

Why it's Okay to Like (or Love) Glee

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 22:45:00 -0600

There are surely going to be those of you out there who roll your eyes as soon as you see Glee in the title of this article. And that’s okay. Roll away, my friends. I’m just here to ease the guilt for those of us who are embarrassed of our Tuesday-night indulgence.

People who know me wouldn’t necessarily describe me as a serious person, and that’s because I try to keep things light. Life is crappy enough as it is, so why dwell? When everyone is screaming that the world around us is imploding/exploding/melting/smells like feet, it’s great to sit in front of your TV and watch a bunch of stupid teenagers singing. Why not believe, if only for 60 minutes once a week, that problems can be fixed with a song? I love to think that way, because even if it isn’t always true, maybe sometimes it is. I’m not suggesting that Israel and Palestine get together and sing Lady Gaga’s Poker Face, but really you never know what could happen.

In high school I was the Glee Club kid, but I was more like Lauren, the fat girl, except not fat and not nearly as cool. But I was sassy. Well, no, I was a bitch. I also would have been in love with Finn (tall scrawny boys with confused expressions are a weakness of mine). I was in 3 singing groups and musicals and my friends and I broke into song in the hallways, much to the annoyance of our fellow students. Looking back, it was very silly and totally embarrassing, and I freaking loved it. When I’m not singing, even now at the ripe old age of 23, I feel just a little bit empty.

But it’s not just those of us who have a little Glee kid in us that are drawn to the show, it’s all kinds, because blah, blah, blah music is the universal language. However cliché that is, it’s true for the most part. Experiencing music communally makes people happy, even if they are just singing along to a TV show. They feel a part of something and are expressing themselves. These are human needs, at least after food, shelter, and protection from hungry bears are covered.

Yes, Glee’s storylines can be a little schizophrenic, the character of Sue has her low points (including the track suit stripes on every single outfit, come on), there isn’t a whole lot of reality in the show, etc. It’s the lack of reality, however, that makes it appealing. The fact that Rachel can walk down the school’s hallways singing Katy Perry’s Firework is ridiculous if you’re looking for real-world situations, but it’s nice to imagine. I sure do.

by Leah Farrell

(photo by fuckyeahgleelove)

Words to Live By: Guiding Principles in Songs (and a Movie)

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 23:29:00 -0600

I recently noticed how much of my prosaic philosophy corresponds to innocuous song titles and lyrics (and a Movie quote). Although the implications of this are deep, in this article, I will not expound on how our identities are formed by the constant buffeting of structural variables. Instead, I will lay out a couple examples of this phenomenon for your perusal, and allow you to draw your own conclusions. As always, I invite you to share your own experience and comments.

1.”Todo cambia, todo” – Mercedes Sosa “Todo Cambia”

I begin with a bit of banality. It is well known that everything always changes. Big deal. I agree, but don’t let the banal obscure the profound. It can be enriching, from time to time, to ponder the fact that everything we know is mutable and transient – perpetually shattered and recombined into new forms. The human order slides towards discord. Furthermore, one might note that what we conceive of as precious is invariably fragile, transient. To some degree, love emerges from fear.

2. “Everything In Its Right Place” – Radiohead

In stark contrast to the first quote, this lyric is about my personal quest for order. In my petite studio apartment, I obsess over tidiness and harmony, not in a feng shui way, but in a Stalin way. It’s not about energy flow, it’s about a control: I’m a totalitarian about my body and environment. On occasion, jeans slip down to one or the other side of the hanger; anarchic socks and shirts scatter across the floor; food sours in the fridge; fingernails rebel intrinsically. In short, everything needs to be put in its place – its right place. And I go on organizing, battling fruitlessly as the dust accumulates with ambivalence, sure of its inevitable glory.

3. “I Need a Woman!” – Federico Fellini’s Amarcord

Federico Fellini’s Amarcord I know I’m not the only one who, when single, feels like roosting in a tree and yelling out an impassioned but fruitless, “I need a companion!” This is at least what the “mad” Uncle Teo does in Fellini’s slow-moving, autobiographical memory flick. I find his words appearing on my lips from time to time.

4. “Get it Together” – Tm Juke feat. Bread & Water from Maps from the Wilderness

TM Juke is a UK-based producer of hip-hop, soul, and electronica music. Bread & Water is ostensibly a rapper or hip-hop group about whom I have no information. The track speaks, to me, about the failure and insecurity that stalk all of us at one time or another – about times of despair when you feel you just “need to get it together.” The song conjectures that we’re all prone to such moments on occasion, and counsels modesty, detached self-appraisal, and eradicating sources of negativity. Without abandoning hope for advancement , Bread & Water recommends being cool with the status quo. Although this is obviously easier said than done, this song helps soothe the demoralized ego.

5. “I Feel it All” – Feist

Far from a Buddha-like detachment, I routinely find myself walking on affective embers. At such times of emotional super-sensitivity, I may yearn for an emotional tranquilizer or an effective distraction. Of course, I would never actually dope away my sensitivity. I’d rather “feel it all” than “feel nothing.” Which leaves us with one of those ubiquitous Goldilocks conundrums: Not too hot, not too cold… just right! But that facile formula doesn’t take away the pain during the down-in-the-dumps days. Neither does Feist, but her message does contextualize emotional stress and control in the locus of sensitivity.

by Bradley Turner

[PARLEY] "On activism and outrage: The importance of recognizing the Man"

Sat, 12 Feb 2011 23:36:00 -0600

[This is a response to “It’s Not Pro-Democracy – It’s Anti-Expert” by NHN]

Not long ago I had lunch with a friend, and the TSA came up as a topic. Now, if a topic has ever been hashed over by the internet hype machine echo chamber, it is the Transportation Security Administration. There is a reason for this, of course— most of the time, internet users are firmly ensconced in private or semi-private locations which are arranged for the users’ convenience and comfort. Much of modern American existence is so structured.

Thus, moving through a TSA checkpoint is a jarring experience: everything seems sacrificed for the sake of some arcane and arbitrary rule set that is suddenly imminent in the traveler’s experience. This is the root of all this hullabaloo, right? That Americans are so generally comfortable that endless complaints are issued at any discomfort more sustained than the ten minute wait at a busy Starbucks?
    Or is it rather the case that discomfort over TSA procedures is symbolic over a larger feeling of disempowerment in modern America? Even if the TSA had a public review process that took place before new equipment and procedures were initiated, it is doubtful that critical comments would truly be taken into consideration. Indeed, the internet has coined a self-conscious new term for letters to congresspeople and bureaucratic agencies: slacktivism. What a disempowering act that is, the creation of a disparaging term for previously acceptable modes of democratic communication! If you hit that “sign the petition now!” button from Planned Parenthood or Moveon.org, this term declares that you aren’t really participating in anything. You are gesturing emptily.
    In other words, Americans are free to complain, unofficially or through established channels. But that’s all the substance there is to it: it’s just a steaming pile of empty complaints. Is this activism in the modern era? A suggestion box where all of the notes that aren’t marked with approval are immediately thrown out? To turn my friend’s question on its head: what role does the electorate get to play in its governments decisions? Does a modern system remain in which the people truly have a voice?
    I contend that many modern movements that gain high levels of internet exposures are rooted in this perceived disempowerment. What is at root here are not body scanners or “slippery slope” objections but the concern that we have already arrived at the bottom of the slope. We think in terms of slacktivism, and its prevailing message is that political action without practical consequence is empty. Unfortunately, with an unresponsive government it can feel as though all political action is now empty. Activism is dead, long live slacktivism.
    A recent case in point is the conversation over Stacy Armato’s actions at a TSA checkpoint. When people like Armato are perceived to have been done wrong by a government agency, not to have done wrong, themselves, the question is partly one of the actual substance of what her action constitutes and partly one representation and mood. I contend that the question as to whether Armato’s actions were just is a small one compared to the question of why her case holds power. For one thing, I doubt that it is out of some residual puritanical concern for privacy. That seems unlikely, as many of the people supportive of Armato’s actions in resisting TSA officers’ confiscation of her breast milk and subsequent publicizing of her ordeal are of a liberal bent when it comes to social attitudes. I suggest that it is rather because the TSA represent, to put it in so few words, the Man.
    Perhaps I myself am succumbing to poor framing by invoking the idea of the Man, that vaguely authoritarian entity who is representative of those who would put us down. All the same, I think that the Man can be a useful heuristic tool in getting to the bottom of why scenes of airport resistance attract the attention they do. I do not wish to sidestep the issue of the substance of the scene, and whether Armato was correct in her actions, and I will take it up head-on further down. But before doing so, I want to follow my own advice (“Emotional Framing”) and look at the frames and representations at work, asking why it is that we are concerned at all with Armato’s case. Many people opted out from using the backscatter scanners when the were introduced at many airports just prior to Thanksgiving in 2010, but few individual stories resonated as far as this one. So, I ask again: what gives this scene power?
    Part of it, no doubt, lies in the sensational details. Backscatter machines exposed those who stood in them quite literally, raising the specter of TSA agents with prurient interests. Then this story appears, concerning not only that but breast milk, a precious (to put it in Kubrickian terms) bodily fluid. Furthermore, Armato appeared to be within the bounds of reason: she knew the regulations governing bringing bottled breast milk through TSA security checkpoints and onto aircraft, and thought that she was not doing wrong. And perhaps this is where the real identification of the TSA with the Man begins in this story: Armato was no activist, stripping nude or wearing a costume or otherwise intending to disrupt the checkpoint. Instead, hers was an unintentional disruption. If the Man can put us down, even when we follow his arbitrary, seemingly un-American and un-democratic rules, then what choice do we have but to denounce him as, well, the Man?
    The spread of Armato’s story has to do with larger moods of disempowerment throughout the American public. I do not think the mood is so low as during the second Bush administration, when it seemed as though even honest democratic action in the form of booting representatives out of congressional office was not enough to ensure that poor policies were not enacted or rescinded. However, the cultural climate in the United States continues to be one of frustration, in which seemingly nobody gets their way. Obama and blue dog democrats swept in as a consequence of the 2008 elections, and by the 2010 elections many had been tarred as the bums that must be thrown out, bums responsible for perpetuating or enlarging the distance between people and their government.
    NHN acknowledges Armato as a representative of this desire for direct democracy, and criticizes that desire on the grounds that it is, itself, undemocratic. He is right to argue that American democracy does not consist of giving yourself over to the rule of your neighbor, but rather giving yourself over to a government of your duly elected representatives. Here is where the substance of Armato’s actions, and the actions of the TSA, come into play: we have now an idea of what their actions might represent, and who is (as a collective) doing the representing. Every piece of analysis, every drop in the internet text, audio, and visual bucket, crafts a perception of this case as one of a citizen in conflict with an unpopular agency, an agency that most of us who have flown recently view with a wary eye. So, is this just? Is it just for an individual citizen to act out our frustrations with the agencies born of our representative government? Or are these actions of frustration to be constrained by time and place?
    Why shouldn’t they be so constrained? We have many constraints that attempt to promote security, and the TSA is supposed to be in the business of crafting and implementing them. The time and place for legislating the TSA, NHN claims reasonably, is within the legislature. Furthermore, the place for regulating the legislature is at the ballot box, after a long and vocal electoral campaign. This is representative democracy, simple as that, and Armato sure doesn’t seem as though she has a better idea. So much the worse for her that we must operate within the constraints so established: perhaps her story will encourage people to agitate for change during the next election cycle. After all, what were the real consequences of the TSA’s actions in her case? Tears and some spilled milk?
    I think that this takes away the wrong message from this case. If we pay attention to Armato and the TSA, it is because we feel disenfranchised. It is simply not enough to attempt to change our government through the vicissitudes of electoral process. We pay attention to Armato because her case catalyses action, if only the action to engage in public discussion or to add our electronic signatures to petitions. It is the case that bureaucracy is meant to be a way of, as NHN writes, representing “the harmonic alignment of meritocratic administration with the democratic spirit”. The bureaucracy itself is an institution designed with an eye towards action, no matter how atrophied they become. All one has to look at are those ineffectual legislative houses to understand that parts of the government that take action need some distance from the electorate in order to function.
    Yet this doesn’t really go any distance towards addressing that mood of disaffection, does it? What should we do, write it off as a mass cultural phase, something the American people will just mature out of? I think not. I may not have a proposal on hand regarding repairs to our democracy that would alleviate the mood responsible for belittling our hopes of engaging with government. However, I do know that the representation that is Armato’s case is significant. We need new ways of making our government hear us, and we must avoid denigrating attempts at their creation. Sensationalizing an episode at a TSA checkpoint may not be the way forward, but there is no doubt that progress on the front of direct democracy is demanded and required.

by Don Everhart

(photo via federaltimes.com)

[PARLEY] It’s Not Pro-Democracy – It’s Anti-Expert

Sat, 12 Feb 2011 23:28:00 -0600

[This is a response to “On activism and outrage: The importance of recognizing the Man” by Don Everhart]

Not long ago a story came out describing the events surrounding a woman held at airport security. Apparently one Stacey Armato had refused to forfeit breastmilk to the x-ray, and as a result she was held in contempt of terminal. It was on this subject that a friend and I found our way to a debate on the virtues of democracy vis-à-vis bureaucracy, and the popular complaint as it pertains to security in our republic. Mind you all of this occurred before we had understood the pertinent TSA guidelines or the many facts relevant to the specific altercation in question. We nevertheless came to an interesting dispute over the role of the people in developing the procedures to which we are all ultimately subject.He maligned the TSA as a corrupt bureaucratic apparatus, guilty of collusion with airliner profit interests and of the needless infringement of our civil liberties. The fact that it composed of administrative and legislative powers impenetrable to the common passenger makes the situation not only unacceptable, but in stark contradiction to our democratic doxa. Meanwhile I found myself defending the establishment and going after the passenger in question. I condemned a diffuse sense of entitlement, a stylish penchant for unruliness and that all too incessant whininess ill fit to the clear and present dangers of today’s America. Let me expand on my view before that much admired American anti-establishment instinct kicks in and I lose out on any possibility of retaining ideational allies.

First, I must admit that exasperation and impatience over the increased security measures is normal. Everyone wants to get through to the gate quickly and with a minimum of hassle. When Armato refused to comply with TSA security, however, she was not simply expressing said justified exasperation – she was refusing to cooperate with security measures and in the process questioning the authority of the TSA, the FAA and, by extension, the American government. In defying the authority of these bureaucratic institutions she effectively privileges her own personal authority to dictate the rules and functions of airport security, at least as they pertain to her as a passenger and potential threat. It goes without saying that, perhaps unfortunately, flying in an airplane and getting through security in a timely and efficient fashion does not appear on the Bill of Rights. As such, the idea that she could use her own democratic authority as a citizen of the country to undermine the institutions our representatives appointed – as per their own democratically legitimated authority – bears no legitimacy itself. The idea that she has the right to take the authority of the TSA security agents in deeming what the procedure would be implies that she has a right to not be searched in a certain way, and that she also has the legitimacy to write the security protocol, despite the fact that no one elected her. Her on the spot legislation of security measures consequently falls outside of the purview of democracy within the American context. But let me press the point further. Not only was her protest with the expectation of passage to the airplane unlawful, but if codified or accepted it would clearly result in an abhorrently insecure state of affairs. If she is able to deem things unacceptable, what could stop someone else, or everyone else, from piecemeal undoing the entire security apparatus itself? I will come back to this point, but first let me quiet some objections.

“What about privacy? What about Big Brother?!” These are important questions to ask in any liberal and free society, but one that we have had no problem reconciling with security measures in the past. The truth is that by showing up to the airport, one surrenders his/her sphere of privacy. Arrival at the airport implies consent to searches for the sake of security. This is why notions of a slippery slope in regards to security searches do not apply. Those images of black bags and night-raids are not being risked by stepping up security measures at the airport because you still have to show up to the airport to submit to screening. Additionally I couldn’t care less how people feel about their naughty bits being seen through the body-scanner. Notions that this is some new type of violation are bunk. Just as the metal detector scans for metals on the body, these scanners search for illicit materials of every substance. Simply because the technology has advanced does not constitute a movement along the slope towards more invasive. You have to show up to be scanned, and then they search the body for illicit materials just as they always have. Moreover I have no patience for the puritan instincts that occlude this process; after all it was excessive puritanical thinking that made these new security measures necessary in the first place. Bashfulness is not a right, but life is, and I would not tolerate encroachments on securing the latter out of consideration for the former.

In response to the misplaced allegation that these increased security measures perpetrated by the government-appointed bureaucracies risk a slippery slope to despotic intervention, I offer another slippery slope, one we risk with the popularization of Armato’s defiance. If the individual can refuse to submit breast milk to x-ray and still demand to move through, what else is exempt? If the body-scanners are an invasion of privacy, why aren’t pat-downs, metal detectors, bomb-sniffing dogs or passport checks? By which criteria are they determining invasion? If a person can refuse to submit to scanning via some notion of the sustained personal bubble, how can we take security precautions at all? Is it not the entire purpose to temporarily penetrate the personal bubble in order to ensure the safety of everyone involved? By refusing to cooperate and still demanding to get through Armato asserted some popular understanding of individual rights in such a way as to undo our security precautions. If this sort of thing were allowed, then popular assertiveness would threaten the entire enterprise of taking security precautions in general. Thus it cannot in principle be supported without risking chaos in the terminal. None of this is possible. Of course, for the sake of efficiency and logic, such a state of affairs will never come to pass, and an organization – complete with formal regulations – will always hold authority at the airport. But this is what makes the idea of popular defiance in the terminal so ludicrous. It will not amount to anything.
The less thoughtful of my critics will allege that body scanners and x-rays do not help security. “There’s no need to confiscate breast-milk!” They’ll say, “That’s why it’s not part of regulation! That’s why it’s a violation.” This does nothing to address my point, which is that in the interest of security the private sphere is permeable. In other words, the fact that it does not help security in no way diminishes the temporary (and wholly voluntary) privileging of security. Instead it starts a new debate on the most optimum security techniques, which might more justly invade the private sphere.

My argument hinges on the premise that bureaucracy is preferable to populist interventionism. I can already hear the scoffing. “Bureaucracy? The term is synonymous with inefficiency and undemocratic, and even necessarily corrupt practices!” That this popular understanding is unjust is conclusion I leave to another paper – in this section I will rather argue that, not only is bureaucracy well suited to the task of security, but for the very same reasons it is far superior, and even more democratic, to the more widely involved populist approach.

My interlocutor calls for a more involved populace. He says that the widespread belief that our protests go unheeded contributes to “slacktivism” and engenders greater potential for unconstitutional and illiberal infringements. It sounds as if he would have our voices be more heard, our views on the political “rightness” of these procedures heeded, and the institutions meant to protect us reshaped. To this I respond that, not only are bureaucracies more desirable than such a schema, but they are in several ways more democratically legitimate.

The bureaucracy represents the harmonic alignment of meritocratic administration with the democratic spirit. The standard definition of bureaucracy is a large organization with formalized rules organizing positions hierarchically and delimiting their jurisdictions; additionally the bureaucracy provides secure employment to extract honest and dedicated labor from its professionalized and specialized workforce. Largely unfounded stereotypes on the inefficiencies of bureaucracy aside, one cannot in good conscience justly assert that the bureaucrats are uninformed in their works. The TSA certainly fits this model, and beyond this meritocratic structure its status as a federal agency subjects it to those representatives we elect to government, increasing its republican virtue. It hires people who know the field of airport security and uses them to draft formal codes and regulations we all abide at the checkpoint, and this entire apparatus answers to the civilians we appoint to watch over our interests in adherence to the Constitution. By refusing to cooperate and still expecting to get through, Armato was essentially saying either that she is above these codes, or that she knows what constitutes the necessary security measures better than the experts appointed by our government. The question arises – why should I listen to her? Who is she? If she is allowed to legislate at the checkpoint, who else is? If everyone can write the regulations to which they submit themselves, then the entire security enterprise is once again undone. I gladly choose instead to submit to the security measures thought up by the person specially trained and professionally inclined to the enterprise, not the dental hygienist, the teacher, the plumber or the housewife who – bereft of any expertise on the matter – nevertheless shows up with a few ideas. Thus, the democratic impulse to question bureaucratic authority is neither couched in our democratic history nor advisable from a policy point of view.

“But what happens to democracy in the terminal? Do we establish a principle that democracy is a harmful force?” People are free to submit complaints to them, but the idea that the masses should be able to decide these things directly is not consonant with meritocracy or specialization in any way. Indeed it inhibits the republican principles which shape the fabric of this nation – that we should appoint specialized guardians who dedicate their energies to the fulfillment of their duties by means of their discerned and proven expertise. Just as we elect our civilian leadership following this principle, our leaders appoint figures to these bureaucratic apparatuses, bound to meritocracy by their own political interests in good results. The fact that these bureaucracies are subject directly to the will of elected officials means that the electorate indirectly controls them, one generation removed, just as it confines every action of the government. Thus although the TSA may not be structurally democratic, it can nevertheless be labeled spiritually democratic because it is subject to elected officials, and if people so chose they could appoint as their guardians those individuals who seek to alter the bureaucratic structures and regulations. Indeed they could even vote to obliterate bureaucracies by this means, however unwise such a move would be.

With the current bureaucratic state of affairs we are able to maintain the people’s voice without sacrificing specialized experts. The “direct democracy” of public refusal to adhere to security guidelines while still expecting to proceed to the plane is not truly democratic – lacking constitutionally delineated authority – it is rather merely anti-expertise. Next time Armato wants to voice her objections, she should do so without challenging the democratically legitimated and functionally meritocratic institutions our elected representatives have appointed. Perhaps she could vote for a candidate who promises to reorganize or obliterate the TSA, or even run as that candidate herself! In the mean time I would be spared from witnessing her uninformed and arbitrary view on the necessary security precautions, and we could thereby perpetuate the democratic influence on our security procedures without sacrificing the measured hand of the expert.

by NHN

(photo by Inha Leex Hale)

New Feature! Introducing PARLEY!

Sat, 12 Feb 2011 22:57:43 -0600

PARLEY will be a new (and hopefully very regular) feature that will focus on a new topic each time and its subsequent oppositional arguments presented by two or three of the Super Fine writers. We aim to cover a wide range of topics and explore a variety of perspectives, aiming not to be limited to one field of interest or another. Eventually, we would also like to showcase arguments and replies put forth in different forms be they in text, visual, or audio form. The goal of this feature is not necessarily to persuade the reader one way or another but rather for them to form their own ideas. We invite your comments and formal replies. Talk to us, we like that!

image by Francis Carnaúba