Month: April 2011

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Aesop Rock’s Website and Hail Mary Mallon’s New Video

After much hemming and hawing and discussion, Aesop Rock finally took the web plunge and launched his own website. Though Aes has been active online for a minute (e.g., on the now defunct DefJunkies discussion boards, on Twitter, and on 900 Bats), this marks the official launch of his own spot online. The cat belongs to photographer Chrissy Piper. His name is Andy.

In his defense, the man has been busy with several records by him and his friends (Rob Sonic, DJ Big Wiz, Kimya Dawson, et al.). Here’s the latest from Hail Mary Mallon, which consists of Aesop Rock, Rob Sonic, and DJ Big Wiz: “Smock” (Live from the Burgundy Camry), directed by Alexander Durrant, Justin Metros, and Rico Deniro [runtime: 4:44]:

URfttPuxcL4

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Zizi Papacharissi: A Networked Self

Zizi Papacharissi is an academic powerhouse. Whatever you’ve been doing for the last fifteen years, she probably makes you look lazy. She holds a Ph.D. in Journalism from my own University of Texas at Austin, an M.A. in Communication Studies from Kent State University, and a B.A. in Economics and Media Studies from Mount Holyoke College. Since getting those, she’s been busy: She is a professor in — and the head of — the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois-Chicago, the author or editor of three books — most recently A Private Sphere (Polity, 2010) and A Networked Self (Routledge, 2010) — and countless articles and book chapters, and a frequent speaker and lecturer on issues of connectivity and community, as well as public and private concerns. Many thanks to Zizi for taking the time to discuss a little of all of the above with me.

Roy Christopher: If you had to sum it up for the uninitiated, what would you say your work is about? What are your major areas of concern?

Zizi Papacharissi: I am interested in social and political things people do online – and offline. I see little value in drawing a distinction between offline and online that treats the two as separate worlds and thus claims some of these interactions as real and others as virtual. To me, that is like suggesting that a phone conversation with some one is less real, because it becomes possible through the use of a medium. And many media historians have of course talked about how early reactions to the telephone prompted similar conversations about the complexion and reality of mediated conversations.

I do think it is meaningful, however, to think of offline and online spaces, and understand then how people traverse through these spaces in their everyday routines. People adjust and adopt their behaviors as they move from one space to another, so as to handle their interactions in a way that permits them to attain an optimal balance = happiness. Spaces draw out different aspects of our personalities and inspire us to do different things (or might leave us completely uninspired).  We also frequently design or reorganize spaces so as to suit our personalities. There are particular types of behaviors that work better or facilitate communication in certain spaces (for example, speaking loudly in crowded bars), but are utterly discouraged via the organizational logic of other spaces (yelling in a yoga class). I am very interested in how individuals develop behaviors that allow them to traverse through offline and online spaces fluently.

I do not find the term “social media” particularly useful. All media are social, in their own unique ways. To claim that some media are social implies that there are other media that are a-social, or anti-social. It also suggests social media are more social than other media not qualified by that label. I do not find that to be the case. The phrase also ascribes a certain  neutrality to the term medium, and I do not believe in that either (media are neither good, nor bad, nor are they neutral, á la Melvin Kranzberg). I prefer to think of technology as architecture — in case that was not abundantly clear already 😉

RC: danah boyd‘s equation for privacy entails context and control. With the convergence of technology and its blurring of boundaries you discuss in A Private Sphere (Polity, 2010) — especially those that define space and time, public and private, active and passive, producer and consumer — how are we to maintain control of these shifting contexts?

ZP: I agree with danah and find that this is a tremendously meaningful way of explaining privacy to the public and to policy-making communities. I have a slight preference for the term autonomy, over control. Perhaps it is because I am Greek 🙂 In A Private Sphere I use Deleuze’s work to explain how control is ultimately not about discipline. So, control, from the perspective of the individual or from the perspective of society, or institutions, is about offering a number of possibilities so that people can choose ‘freely’, while not being restricted yet still perfectly guided by a defined set of possibilities. Autonomy is about having the right to determine what those possibilities will be, to choose from them, or to refuse them altogether. Autonomy also is suggestive of self-reliance, independence, self-governance and reflexivity of the self – or individuation.

I suppose I find that ultimately, life is about philosophizing your way out of  the concept of control to a state of autonomy, and that might be why I am partial to the latter word. But in the end, you know, it is just a word. A definition.

RC: The web and mobile devices have changed the ways we connect with each other, but has social media really changed the nature of those connections? (i.e., some claim that Facebook is changing how the youth define “friendship.” I know what the literature says on this, but I wonder what you think.)

ZP: The youth has always redefined things, and I hope they never stop. It is what they do best! Otherwise, what is the point of being young?

On the topic of “friendship”, the literature shows that people handle their friendships in different ways across different spaces, and that has always been the case. We have always had friends from a number of social spheres (work, college, childhood, through mutual/spousal/ familial acquaintances), sometimes these spheres overlap and sometimes they do not, and we socialize with friends on a number of spaces, including spaces facilitated by internet platforms. Friendship means different things to different people. We also adjust and evolve our perspective on friendships as we mature through the different cycles of our lives. So everything that “the youth” is doing on Facebook needs to be understood in this context.

So, if anything, we might say that the word is being redefined, not the actual meaning of friendship, or closeness. It is a matter of language evolving, so as to reflect our practices. Weak ties can be actually be very strong, but is that really a term to be used to describe anyone? Who wants to be told:  “I do not consider you a friend, but you sure are a meaningful weak tie to me” or “Btw, I also consider you an important acquaintance.” So, as a society, we must come up with words that value and provide social context for these connections that may now be maintained and activated in more convenient ways.

Friendship  is an abstraction, a word invented to refer to and measure other emotions that are also aggregates and temporally sensitive. But friendship, or whatever it might be called in the future, is not going anywhere. It has always been a survival strategy for social beings, and will always be.

RC: Along the same lines, I’ve been thinking a lot about the way that the adoption (or lack thereof) of communication technology in general changes the idea of communication (what I’ve been calling the “Tyranny of Adoption”). For instance, the diffusion of the cellphone has made it a personal assumption, a requirement in many cases (One can see this with social networking sites and lifestreaming media as well). How do we temper the spread of technology with our personal needs and desires?

ZP: I think we need to find a place for technology in our lives. In that sense, we blend technology with our own humanity and resist or challenge the tyranny of adoption. In our everyday lives, we routinely make decisions about what works or what does not. So, we do not choose to buy and use just any car, we buy the car that will fit our needs, our budget, our personality. We also choose to not buy a car, and rely on public transport. We choose clothing, houses, appliances that are compatible with our lifestyles and enhance our lives. We may not always make successful or optimal choices, but we are driven by the need to select. At the same time, our choices are shaped  by the options we have  at hand. And our socio-cultural context may present some of these options as more appealing  or popular than others.

I am not sure that we will ever be able to fully escape the tyranny of the popular, or adoption. Afterall, the capitalist backbone of our economic system rewards the popular. But I think of it less as a tyranny and more of as a habitus. Ultimately, they may both be understood as systems of control, but I suppose a habitus also embeds the notion of reflexivity, socio-cultural context, taste – it is a richer way to think about this. So, in a sense, we might think of not the tyranny of, let’s say, Facebook adoption, but rather, the Facebook habitus, as a way of socializing us into (and remediating) schemata, tastes, and habits  about friendship.

RC: Are you working on anything, have anything coming up, or just a topic I missed that you’d like to mention here?

ZP: A lot of people these days are interested in the notion of affect, or jouissance, and affective networks. I think there is a lot of potential in thinking about affect, as it permits us to understand content creation as both play and work; to look at the internet, in Trebor Scholz’s terms, as both playground and factory.  Lately I have been very interested in the performative aspect of play online, specifically as it applies to performances of the self in everyday life. So I have been reading a lot of performance theory, and working with the “as-if” aspect of play to understand how people imagine, perform, then redact and remix identities online.

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Of Bicycles and Bipeds: Farming Flying Forms

A wing is a bridge. Flight is a ride on that bridge from take-off to landing. Dinosaurs became bipedal, balancing their large bodies on two legs via counterbalancing tails. Eventually the same biological process—or set of processes between biology and environment—morphed wings, and thereby, flight. Using this transition as a metaphor is an trip we might do well to take.

Write to the nth power, the n-1 power, write with slogans: Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant! Don’t sow, grow offshoots! Don’t be one or multiple, be multiplicities! Run lines, never plot a point! Speed turns the point into a line! Be quick, even when standing still! Line of chance, line of hips, line of flight… Have short-term ideas. Make maps, not photos or drawings…
— Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 24-25.

The approach I want to take here is what Kingslover and Koehl (1994) call “bounded ignorance.” That is, I’m going to outline a possible homology between the evolution of flight in animals and in human technologies, one that “seems consistent with available evidence” (p. 426). One could say this is how McLuhan theorized changes in the media. Kingslover and Koehl were looking at flight in insects, which does our tack no good. Insects added extra limbs/wings as needed. Drones, swarms, crowds, organizations — these are insect analogs (cf. Parikka, 2010; Shaviro, 1996). We’re interested in a transition from quadraped to biped to winged flight (cf. Paul, 2002; Chiappe, 2007). That is, we’re interested in an appropriation of existing limbs, not an adding on of new ones.

Explaining the transition in dinosaurs, Shipman (1998), writes, “First, activities of the forelimbs and tail became separated from those of the hindlimb, pelvis and torso” (p. 89). This freed up the forelimbs for other purposes, while the hindlimbs grew accustomed to holding their own. She continues, “Thus, logic, anatomy, and paleontology all support the same deduced sequence of evolutionary changes: bipedalism first; wings second; tail third” (p. 89). Not all wings were created equal. Not all wings were made for flying. Some enable related abilities such as walking on water (see Schaller, 1985). Some are made for thermoregulation (see Chiappe, 2007; as they are in butterflies in addition to flight; see Halpern, 2001). Nonetheless, the dual transition to walking on two legs and flapping wings is mirrored by the dual transition of balance on two wheels and wings, both of which usually and ultimately lead to flying.

Karl Popper (1968) called our creation of tools and externalization of knowledge “exosomatic evolution” (p. 238), adding that we don’t grow faster legs, we grow bicycles and cars; we don’t grow bigger brains or memories, we grow computers. Marshall McLuhan wrote, “The transformations of technology have the character of organic evolution because all technologies are extensions of our physical being” (p. 182). It’s a structural coupling—in Maturana and Varela’s terminology (1987; Maturana & Poerkson, 2004)—between us and our environment. Technology is a part of our nature. Software and city blocks are as natural as ant hills and broccoli. We farm adaptive forms.

Didn’t your first unassisted ride on a bike feel like flying? Riding that two-wheeled bridge of balance is like taking off on wings of your own. In more sober tones, McLuhan (1964) aligned the two activities as well, writing,

It was the tandem alignment of wheels that created the velocipede and then the bicycle, for with the acceleration of wheel by linkage to the visual principle of mobile lineality, the wheel acquired a new degree of intensity. The bicycle lifted the wheel onto the plane of aerodynamic balance, and not too indirectly created the airplane. It was no accident that the Wright brothers were bicycle mechanics, or that early planes seemed in some ways like bicycles (p. 182).

So, it stands to reason that one kind of balance begot another. Just as the bipedal dinosaur became the flying dinosaur and the bird, our own bicycles became the airplane and the jet. Admittedly, I’ve been trying to get poetic and playing language games (e.g., forms, firms, farms, etc.), but how many of our design processes legitimately come from organic means?

Line of chance, line of hips, line of flight…

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A new paper by Andy Ruina, Jim Papadopoulos, and their colleagues attempts to get at what’s behind bike stability [runtime: 3:25; with thanks to Jessy Elfy for the tip].

References:

Chiappe, L. M. (2007). Glorified Dinosaurs: The Origin and Early Evolution of Birds. New York: J. Wiley & Sons.

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1980). A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Halpern, S. (2001). Four Wings and a Prayer. New York: Vintage.

Kingslover, J. & Koehl, M. (1994). Selective factors in the evolution of insect wings. Annual Review of Entomology, 39, 425-451.

Maturana, H. R. & Poerkson, B. (2004). From Being to Doing: The Origins of the Biology of Cognition. Heidelberg, Germany: Carl-Auer Verlag.

Maturana, H. R. & Varela, F. J. (1987). The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Boston: Shambhala.

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Paul, G. S. (2002). Dinosaurs of the Air. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.

Priakka, J. (2010). Insect Media: An Archeology of Animals and Technology. Cambridge, MA: University of Minnesota Press.

Popper, K. (1968). Objective knowledge: An evolutionary approach. New York: Oxford University Press.

Schaller, D. (1985). Wing Evolution. In M. K. Hecht, J. H. Ostrom, G. Viohl, & P. Wellnhofer (Eds.), The Beginnings of Birds. Eichstätt: Brönner & Daentler.

Shaviro, S. (1996). Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction about Postmodernism. New York: Serpent’s Tail.

Shipman, P. (1998). Taking Wing: Archaeopteryx and the Evolution of Bird Flight. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Alternate Titles:

Of Wheels and Wings: Dinosaurs, Birds, and Flying Things

Of Feet and Feathers: Taking Leave of Terrestrial Tethers

Of Birds and Bikes: How Sprockets Became Rockets

Of Pedals and Pterodactyls: The Evolution of Flight

From Flapping to Flight: Winged and Wheeled Escape Velocity

From Perches to Pedals: Gliding and Flying from Birds to Humans

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[Drawing by Roy Christopher, August 6, 2007]

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Guy Debord: When Poetry Ruled the Streets

Writer, filmmaker, instigator, and revolutionary, Guy Debord is probably best known for his involvement with the Situationist International (McKenzie Wark calls him their “secretary”) and their concepts of the dérive and détournement, the former of which is one of the core ideas of psychogeography, and the latter of which went on to define the culture jamming movement. Their slogans were the words on the walls during the May 1968 uprisings in France. They published the proto-Adbusters of the time, and their spirit hangs heavy over the work of Shepard Fairey, Banksy, Joey Skaggs, The Yes Men, Kembrew McLeod, and other postmodern-day culture jammers and media hackers alike. Greil Marcus (1989) puts them in the lineage of resistance movements: Dada, Surrealism, Situationists, punk rock. Wherever we attribute his influence, Debord lived and loved in line with the thoughts he wrote.

Guy Debord on the set of 'Critique of Separation', 1960

Debord’s best known and best selling book is The Society of the Spectacle (Zone Books, 1994; originally published in 1967), and the “spectacle” concept it defined have remained a mainstay of media criticism ever since. Debord biographer Anselm Jappe (1999) wrote, “The spectacle does not reflect society overall; it organizes images in the interest of one portion of society only, and this cannot fail to affect the real social activity of those who merely contemplate these images” (p. 7). Debord (1994) himself wrote, “All that was once lived has become mere representation” (p. 12). Does that sound familiar? It should. He continues, “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (p. 12). Defined as such, the spectacle sounds a bit like fellow French thinker Jean Baudrillard’s simulacra, does it not? Debord clarifies, writing that the spectacle has two foundational attributes: “incessant technological renewal” and the “integration of State and economy” (1998, p. 11-12). Nonetheless, Debord’s work has yet to receive the widespread reverence it deserves.

One might be surprised that I implicitly seem to compare myself, here and there, on a point of detail, with some great mind of the past or simply with personalities who have been noted historically. One would be wrong. I do not claim to resemble any other person, and I believe that the present era is hardly comparable to the past. But many figures from the past, in all their extreme diversity, are still quite commonly known. They represent, in brief, a readily accessible index of human behaviour or propensities. Those who do not know who they were can easily find out; and the ability to make oneself understood is always a virtue in a writer.
— Guy Debord, Panegyric 1, p. 8.

One recent attempt to remedy Debord’s unsung unrest comes in the form of Vincent Kaufman’s biography Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry (The University of Minnesota Press, 2006; now available in paperback). Kaufmann assumes the role of “unqualified reader,” as he claims no previous fascination or familiarity with Debord. This perspective gives him and his book a unique approach among books about the Situationists. Lacking an “ideological axe to grind” Kaufman sees as imperative to understanding Debord and his life of rebellion, fortunes, misfortunes, adventures, exploration, drifting. “Perhaps it is only by boat that we can really lose ourselves,” he writes, recalling Slavoj Zizek’s metaphor for postmodern rootlessness, and Debord’s persistent pursuit of authentic experience. Of the numerous biographies of Debord and books about Situationists, Kaufman’s is among the best, most thorough, and makes a great introduction to his work and their world.

“I wrote less than those who write,” Debord once said, “but I drank more than hose who drink.” The title of his sixth and final film, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978), is a palindrome that he roughly translated to “we turn in the night and are consumed by fire.” If any one phrase could sum up the way the man felt about our media-mad, modern world, that one would do.

————-

When Poetry Ruled the Streets: This clip from Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001) features Adam Goldberg and Nicky Katt as two of the gang of four, and Hymie Samuelson as Guy Debord. [Quicktime clip. Click the image to play; runtime: 2:30]:

Click to play video

References:

Debord, G. (1994). The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books.

Debord, G. (1998). Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. New York: Verso.

Debord. G. (2004). Panegyric 1 & 2. New York: Verso.

Debord, G. (2009). Correspondence: The Foundation of the Situationist International (June 1957 – August 1960). Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).

Jappe, A. (1999). Guy Debord. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Kaufmann, V. (2006). Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Linklater, R. (Writer/Director). (2001). Waking Life [Motion picture]. United States: Fox Searchlight Pictures.

Marcus, G. (1989). Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wark, M. (2008). 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International. New York: FORuM/Princeton Architectural Press.

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Apologies to Andrew Feenberg and James Freedman for stealing the title of their book for this post. Here is a mini-documentary of Feenberg’s time in Paris in the late 1960s and his archive of posters therefrom. [runtime: 8:36]

wOFCCFm186w

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Generation BMX: New ESPN Piece

I finally have a new piece up on the ESPN BMX site. This one is about the generational differences between first and second generations of riders. Heraclitus once wrote that generations turn over every thirty years. Well, it’s about that time.
You’re right, Roy, you’re hopeless. Hopelessly obsessed with a time in your sport that died a long time ago… — McGoo
Roy Christopher executes a Backwards Elbow Glide at a Jacksonville NBL contest circa 1990. (photo by Peter Cowley)
Here’s an excerpt:
The experience of a BMXer today is much more likely to be mediated by technology than it was in the ’80s. Given the proliferation of technology into every aspect of our lives, that’s not much of an insight, but hear me out. In addition to the lack of dope video games, the riders of thirty years ago were also missing out on the parks. There were like three ride-able skateparks in the whole country. Now there are at least that many in every city of any size whatsoever. Where the past was spent riding curb cuts, banks, walls, streets, and backyard ramps, today the terrain consists of those as well as many human-made options. It makes for different riding, different tricks, and different values.
The full piece is up today. As always, thanks to Brian Tunney for the opportunity and for coordinating these things.

…

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McLuhan the Younger: Two New Books

There have been plenty of people touted to carry the mantle left behind by Marshall McLuhan — Neil Postman, Douglas Rushkoff, Paul Levinson, even Jean Baudrillard, but no one has been working more behind the scenes and under the radar to keep his legacy alive than his own son and sometimes co-author Eric McLuhan.

Eric McLuhan has amassed a significant body of work in his own right, including Electric Language (St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998), The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake (University of Toronto Press, 1997), the forthcoming Theories of Communication (with Marshall), and The Human Equation (BPS Books, 2011; discussed below), among many others.

One of Marshall’s most important and most overlooked works was co-authored by Eric. The posthumously published Laws of Media (University of Toronto Press, 1988). In this book, they tackle the Shannon-Weaver model of communication as needlessly linear (a task I’ve attempted myself), writing, “The Shannon-Weaver model and its derivatives follow the linear pattern of efficient cause — the only sequential form of causality” (p. 87). Formal cause was a lesser known but chronic concern for McLuhan.

[T]he formal causes inherent in… media operate on the matter of our senses. The effect of media, like their ‘message’ is really on their form and not in their content (Marshall Mcluhan in Gordon, W. T., 2005, p. 10).

In Media and Formal Cause by Marshall and Eric McLuhan (NeoPoiesis Press, 2011), Eric brings together three pieces by Marshall and an extended essay of his own (“On Formal Cause”) that references them, as well as historical context provided by his new introduction and a Foreword by the inimitable Lance Strate.

Aristotle’s definition of formal cause — one of four causes he defined, and the one that contains the other three — reads the “essense, idea, or quality of the thing concerned” (Bunge, iii; what Heidegger would call “the thing thinging”). McLuhan saw Aristotle’s oral orientation conflating formal and final cause. This view and the Shannon-Weaver model are the results of left-brain thinking, and we need a right-brain perspective if we are to cope with the new electronic age. “Communication theory necessarily concerns the study of the public and not of the program,” McLuhan wrote in an unpublished letter to Archie Malloch. “The ‘content’ of any performance is the efficient cause which includes the user or the cognitive agent who is, and becomes, the thing known, in Aristotle’s phrase” (p. 10). He goes on to cite his mentor Harold Innis as the first to show that the alphabet is what split Greek thought between “thinking” and “being” (p. 30). “Literacy become synonymous with Western civilization that divorced ‘subject’ from ‘object’ and thought from feeling, just as the dominant metaphors of mechanism widened the separation of  ’cause’ and ‘effect'” (p. 31). Knowledge of the alphabet distances us from knowledge of formal cause.

And understanding formal cause is tantamount to understanding our new media ecology. It was at the center of McLuhan’s work. Eric writes, “Formal cause is still, in our time, hugely mysterious: The literate mind finds it is too paradoxical and irrational. It deals with environmental processes and it works outside of time” (p. 87). McLuhan wrote, “effects precede causes” (p. 43). The bright light of the future casts shadows on the present from forthcoming events — that’s formal cause.

[Media] Ecology does not seek connections, but patterns. It does not seek quantities, but satisfactions and understanding (p. 8).

Mass media in all their forms are necessarily environmental and therefore have the character of formal causality (McLuhan to Ruth Nanda Ashen, NAC, 1975).

McLuhan mentioned predicting the present in his work several times, and an observance of “daily miracles” like his oft-studied subject Chesterton. He also approached all of this mass-media mess from what amounts to a systems point of view: figures, grounds, environments, anti-environments, sense ratios. He was trying to get outside of it all to see what it was doing from the highest possible vantage point.

So this is all about perspective. And McLuhan pointed out that perspective is a mode of perception that involves a single point of view — or fragmentation, in space and time, in painting and in poetry (Gordon, Hamaji, & Albert, 2007, p. 139).

The perspective is part of what makes The Human Equation by Wayne Constantineau and Eric McLuhan (BPS Books, 2010) so effective: the vantage point, the human as central concern, the human as center of the universe. This is “Book 1: The Human Equation Toolkit,” and the toolkit consists of numerous sets of four related concepts, tetrads, not unlike the ones in Marshall McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers’ The Global Village (Oxford University Press, 1992), and those included in the aforementioned Laws of Media. The Human Equation starts with four embodied positions — standing, lying down, sitting, and kneeling — as the basis of all extensions thereof (i.e., media, technology, etc.). Co-authored by the late mime Constantineau, that the book’s foundation is comprised of body positions should come as no surprise.

This short book is rife with odd new perspectives on our media, culture, our place in the universe, and indeed our bodies themselves — much like so many of Marshall McLuhan’s own odd shorter works.

This year marks the centennial of Marshall McLuhan’s birth, and his work is as relevant now as it ever was. Here’s to everyone who’s keeping his legacy alive, especially his son Eric McLuhan.

References:

Bunge, M. Causality: The Place of the Causal Principle in Modern Science. Metaphysics, 32, Bk. 1, ch, iii.

Gordon, W. T. (2010). McLuhan: A Guide for the Perplexed. New York: Continuum Books.

Gordon, W. T. (2005). McLuhan Unbound, #14. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press.

Gordon, W. T., Hamaji, E, & Albert, J. (2007). Everyman’s McLuhan. New York: Mark Batty Publisher.

Heidegger, M. (1971) Poetry, Language Thought. New York: Harper & Row.

McLuhan, M. & McLuhan, E. (1988). Laws of Media: The New Science. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

McLuhan, M. & Powers, B. R. (1992). The Global Village. Oxford University Press.

National Archives of Canada. (1975, July 2). Marshall McLuhan to Ruth Nanda Ashen.

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The Greatest Actor of All Time: Nicolas Cage

Few actors have had careers anywhere near as diverse and dynamic as Nicolas Cage. A member of the Royal Coppola Family, Cage has been in everything from goofy teen comedies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) to mind-blowing, block-busting adventures like National Treasure (2004). His acting agility is abetted by his willingness and ability to take on challenging roles that other thespians of his caliber wouldn’t think of accepting — and pulling them off without dumbing them down. As Roger Ebert once put it,

There are often lists of the great living male movie stars: De Niro, Nicholson and Pacino, usually. How often do you see the name of Nicolas Cage? He should always be up there. He’s daring and fearless in his choice of roles, and unafraid to crawl out on a limb, saw it off and remain suspended in air. No one else can project inner trembling so effectively…. He always seems so earnest. However improbable his character, he never winks at the audience. He is committed to the character with every atom and plays him as if he were him.

The filmic examples are seemingly endless, so instead of surveying his career in its entirety, I will concentrate on three representative films: Raising Arizona (1987), Matchstick Men (2003), and the indisputable greatest movie of all time, Con Air (1997).

Francis McDormand once said that one can’t make any money working on a Cohen Brothers film. While I’m sure that’s changed since (this statement was made pre-Fargo), I think most would agree that for an actor, working with Ethan and Joel Cohen is an honor, a privilege, and an opportunity to establish oneself artistically. No one has done this more fervently in one film than Nicolas Cage in Raising Arizona. With his career stretched out before him like a sleepy kitten, Cage took on the lead role in a film that would define one of the many facets of his style as an actor. H. I. McDunnough is a good-for-nothing, two-bit thief who falls in love with a police officer hell-bent on raising a family. After an intermittent courtship involving H. I.’s lengthening rap sheet, the ultimately infertile couple marry and attempt to have children. Seeing a news story about a couple who has more offspring than they can handle, they decide to steel one. Hi-jinks ensue, and the doomed H.I. is caught between his old ways as a thief and his new life as a family man, with the two inextricably intertwined like so many lovers’ legs.

In the similarly quirky Wild at Heart (the plot of which I always confuse with True Romance, perhaps because of their similarly Westbound plots and blonde love interests), Cage would almost reprise this role. He was to all but abandon this kind of character later in his career, save maybe Adaptation (2002) and, our last stop, Matchstick Men (2003).

What did he abandon the weirdness for? Action, of course, and Cage’s crowning achievement, Con Air (1997) is jam-packed with it. This Jerry Bruckheimer vehicle crashes and burns in the best possible way: right into Las Vegas! Where else are you going to see oddball jokesters like Steve Buscemi, Dave Chappelle, and John Leguizamo teamed-up with powerhouse hunks like John Travolta, Vin Diesel, and Ving Rhames, alongside A-list actors like John Cusak,  John Malkovich, Matt Damon, Willem Dafoe, and Nicolas Cage in the same movie? Bob Stephenson is even in here! What happened to the casting director on this star-studded screen scorcher? Fired for awesomeness? How about the screenwriter or the director?

The Ridley Scott-directed Matchstick Men (2003) tells the story of an obsessive-compulsive con man getting conned out of everything. Sam Rockwell plays the partner-cum-con (Frank Mercer) who uses a young girl, Angela (played by Alison Lohman), posing as Roy Waller’s (Cage) estranged daughter. Matchstick Men (and Adaptation, pictured below, by proxy) is less important for Cage’s role per se than it is for his role at the time it happened: dead in the middle of a string of Cage-fronted action movies. In the midst of constant reminders of his action-hero status, Matchstick Men recalled a younger, weirder Nicolas Cage, and reminded everyone of his immense on-screen strengths.

So, in brief, Nicolas Cage is the greatest actor to ever entertain a darkened theater. I dare you to come up with a stronger, more genuine, more diverse body of work.

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“…I was just admirin’ your cage.” Here’s the trailer for The Greatest Movie of All Time, Con Air (1997) [runtime: 2:23]:

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