The closer we get to each other, the less likely we are to have things in common. The more we know about each other, the more likely we are to fundamentally disagree on how the world should work. The more intimate the details we share, the more likely one of us has done something unforgivable in the eyes of the other. Dig deep enough inside anyone and you’re going to find something you don’t like. As my friend Lucas Molandes puts it, the only reason you’re with the person you’re with right now is because all of your previous relationships failed.
Human relationships are messy. We get involved only when we have to. We skim across the surfaces of each other. We give and get only what is needed in each situation: filling out forms, ID numbers, driver’s licenses, log-ins, passwords, online presences, social networks. We inconvenience ourselves for institutions and one another. Even our personal opinions and comments have migrated from scattered sites and blogs to social media silos, soon to be replaced by Likes and Re-Tweets. The illusion of being in touch. Spam disguised as social interaction.
It’s global. It’s local.
It’s the next thing in Social.
Hip-hop, rockin’, or microbloggin’ —
You get updates every time you log in.
So, come on in, we’re open,
And we’re hopin’ to rope in
All your Facebook friends and MySpace memories.
There’s a brand new place for all of your enemies.
You don’t really care about piracy or privacy.
You just want music and friends as far as the eye can see.
So, sign up, sign in, put in your information.
It’s the new online destination for a bored, boring nation.
Tell your friends, your sister, and your mom.
It’s time for something-something-something.com
The numbers say that social media doesn’t replace face-to-face communication, it enhances and encourages it. The numbers say that older people are uncooling social media and driving the youth to other means of interaction. The numbers tell them what we’ve bought in the past, what we’re buying now, and predict what we will buy later. The numbers tell them where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going. The numbers know who we are and who we’re likely to become. We are the products of social media. We are what it buys and sells.
And when time like the pyramids has worn away
All the mountains and the valleys of the words that we say
We have got to make sure that something remains
If we lose each other we’ve got no one to blame
— Oingo Boingo, “My Life”
The numbers can’t tell them what it’s like to hold her hand. How nice it is when she’s here or how empty it is when she’s not. They can’t quantify the unashamed laughs of children or the smiles in the eyes of parents. There’s no database for the barely perceivable daydream-driven smirk, no pivot table for the way that curl hits that curve in her neck just so. Big data seems so small in the face of real human detail.
Getting close to someone else is a sloppy, risky mess. The things you love most can quickly become the things you loathe. Taking that chance is the best thing in the world though. And there is no app for that.
“If I am asked to explain why I learned the bicycle,” writes Frances E. Willard in her 1895 book How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle, “I should say I did it as an act of grace, if not of actual religion” (p. 73). I grew up riding bicycles, so I often take the fun and freedom they afford for granted. Having seen several adults squeal with childlike glee after riding a bike for the first time in years or the first time ever, I am reminded of my own love for what Alfred Jarry called “that which rolls.” Willard continues,
The cardinal doctrine laid down by my physician was, ‘Live out of doors and take congenial exercise;’ but from the day when, at sixteen years of age, I was enwrapped in the long skirts that impeded every footstep, I have detested walking and felt with a certain noble disdain that the conventions of life had cut me off from what in the freedom of my prairie home had been one of life’s sweetest joys (p. 73-74).
Willard was president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and didn’t learn to ride a bicycle until the age of 53. Like most of the things she tackled in her life (e.g., women’s suffrage, politics, education, etc.), she took it as a challenge. As she so boldly puts it, “She who succeeds in gaining the mastery of the bicycle will gain the mastery of life.” Bikes can empower the weakest of spirit and liberate the most muddled of minds.
In Bikenomics: How Bicycling Can Save the Economy (Microcosm, 2013), Elly Blue argues that they can also fix the recession. Starting with the myth that cyclists don’t pay for roads and motorists do. Car drivers pay for about half of the paved infrastructure in the U.S. The other half comes from everyone, regardless of our choice of vehicle. Blue lives and rides in “bike friendly” Portland, Oregon, where its growing citizenry is able to pay higher rents because they don’t have to own or drive cars. I lived in Portland for a year myself, and it’s a great town to ride in. Out of the cities I’ve lived in since getting rid of my last car in 1998 (e.g., Seattle, WA, San Francisco, CA, San Diego, CA, Flagstaff, AZ, Athens, GA, Austin, TX, Chicago, IL), it’s easily one of the most comfortable. That makes a big difference.
A quick aside: I used scare quotes around the term “bike friendly” above because it’s one of those phrases that gets tossed around during urban mayoral elections and the like by people who don’t ride bikes. I hear it regularly here in Chicago. The friendliness of your city to bicycles is not about how many miles of bike lane your roads contain. It’s about how your city’s cyclists are treated while on those roads. With that said, Portland is way ahead of most cities in this respect.
Blue concludes Bikenomics with a re-envisioning of the future as seen through increasing trends in bicycle use. From global warming and access during power outages to general health and safety, she makes a strong case for the bicycle as the best choice for getting around. As David Byrne (2009) puts it in his Bicycle Diaries, “Strangely, the recent economic downturn might be a great opportunity. Sustainability, public transport, and bike lanes aren’t scoffed at anymore” (p. 40). Here’s hoping that sentiment continues to spread.
If you’re looking for a close-up view of the machine itself, Richard Hallett’s The Bike Deconstructed: A Grand Tour of the Modern Bicycle (Princeton Architectural Press, 2014) breaks it down to the last bolt and bracket. As the former editor of RoadCyclingUK.com, Hallett knows his shifters. I’m learning and will continue to learn from Hallett’s thorough guide being relatively new to anything outside of a BMX set-up. As Isabel Marks (1901) once put it, “to the ardent cyclist no side of the sport is devoid of interest…” (p. 5). If you need to know more about the mechanical minutia of your rig or just love to geek out on gears and gadgets, this book is perfect for both.
As the sticker goes, cars run on money and make us fat; bikes run on fat and save us money. Exercise is essential, and our technologies tend to sway us away from getting enough. “The bicycle…” Frances E. Willard concludes, “will ere long come within the reach of all. Therefore, in obedience to the laws of health, I learned to ride. I also wanted to help women to a wider world, for I hold that the more interests women and men have in common, in thought, word, and deed, the happier will it be for the home” (p. 74). Everything is better with bicycles.
References:
Blue, Elly. (2013). Bikenomics: How Bicycling Can Save the Economy. Portland, OR: Microcosm.
Brotchie, Alastair (2011). Alfred Jarry: A Pataphysical Life. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Byrne, David. (2009). Bicycle Diaries. New York: Viking.
Hallett, Richard. (2014). The Bike Deconstructed: A Grand Tour of the Modern Bicycle. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press.
Marks, Isabel. (1901/2013). Fancy Cycling. Oxford, UK: Old House Books.
Willard, Frances, E. (1895/1991). How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle: Reflections of an Influential 19th Century Woman. Sunnyvale, CA: Fair Oaks Publishing.
The threshold at the edge of a subculture is often difficult to discern. The unaware and the well-versed can be sitting right next to each other, unbeknownst to the other’s knowledge, or lack thereof, until that threshold is breached. Every few years a percentage of the population learns about the violence in the Norwegian black metal scene of the 1990s, endlessly annoying those who’d already crossed that threshold. It’s a story that’s been told over and over but only incrementally ripples through the culture at large, like a rock blown to bits before it drops into a lake.
And why not tell it again? Once one gets past the tabloid terror, the music is as mesmerizing as it is menacing, the bands look as hilarious as they do horrendous, and the genre has a rich history that reaches back over 30 years.
No matter. Writer Dayal Patterson has done the impossible: His Black Metal: The Evolution of the Cult (Feral House, 2013) is a literal encyclopedia of the dark genre that is not only perfect for the clueless but also essential for the connoisseur. If you know about black metal’s tumultuous beginnings from Lords of Chaos (also from Feral House; 2003), then let Patterson fill in the blanks. At nearly 500 pages, this is the definitive source of information on all things black metal, from the roots (Venom, Celtic Frost, Bathory, Mercyful Fate) through each country’s heavy weights (Poland’s Behemoth and Graveland; Greece’s Rotting Christ; Sweden’s Watain, Dissection, and Marduk; and of course Norway’s Darkthrone, Emperor, Burzum, Gorgoroth, and four chapters on the mighty Mayhem) to post-black metal (Lifelover, Alcest, Wolves in the Throne Room). Patterson truly leaves no cross unturned.
Though it’s been thoroughly documented above and elsewhere, Black Metal: Beyond the Darkness (Black Dog, 2012) manages to bring something new to the literature on black metal. The oddities include a brief piece by Nicola Masciandaro on black metal theory, a brief oral history of American black metal, the ubiquitous Hunter Hunt-Hendrix on transcendentalism, an essay by Diamuid Hester on black metal in American writing, rare interviews with such people as Andee Connors of Aquarius Records and the tUMULt label (Weakling, Leviathan, etc.), John Hirst music manager of HMV retail stores, Adam Wright of experimental American label Crucial Blast, who’ve released some of my favorites over the past few years, including records from Gnaw Their Tongues and a harrowing three-disc release from Light. There are also essays on ‘zines (by no less than Jon “Metalion” Kristiansen of Slayer ‘zine), art (by Jerome Lefevre), those wacky, illegible logos (by Christophe Szpajdel), the look (by Nick Richardson), and the design (by Trine + Kim Design). The book also includes a selected yet extensive black metal discography. This one might be a bit much for the new or uninitiated, but it’s essential for the hardcore helvete enthusiast.
If you’re just looking for a coffee-table book full of big, scary pictures to frighten visitors to your couch, it gets no better than Peter Beste‘s True Norwegian Black Metal (Vice, 2008). This huge (11 x 14), hardback book is full of beautifully disturbing images. Peter Beste’s work here, and in his new book on Houston rap scene, is reminiscent of Glen E. Friedman‘s classic photos of the early American hardcore and hip-hop scenes. See Darkthrone’s Fenriz rocking out in his room playing records, waiting for the train, and riding the train; see Frost of Satyricon and 1349 posing in front of various churches; see Kvitrafn of Wardruna roaming Oslo, Norway (above); see Gorgoroth, 1349, and Ragnarok playing live, and the aftermath of many such shows; and see lots of cold-ass trees, mountains, and dead animals, among other such lovely horrors. It’s black, white, and red all over.
Just past all of the big pictures are a bunch of clippings from various publications, fliers, and letters chronicling the bloody rise of this scene. Editor Johan Kugelberg did an excellent job of editing together what could have been a pile of complete chaos. From the black-and-white pages of Metalion’s Slayer ‘zine to Kerrang‘s hyped coverage of Varg Vikernes’ trial, as well as a makeshift Mayhem photo album, it’s a nice little archive of artifacts from the very early days of what has become a global cult interest several times over.
So, if you’ve yet to venture into the darkness that is black metal or if you’re already wearing the paint, there are plenty of new guides to help you on your way.
For what might seem a most mundane human activity, walking has quite a body of literature. Even being such a normal, everyday act, it’s a theme that never wears out. As Karen O’Rourke (2013) puts it, “…contemporary artists have returned time and again to the walking motif, discovering that, no matter how many times it has been done, it is never done” (p. xvii). Are they making too much of putting one foot in front of the other, or is walking always already much more than that?
You’re walking
and you don’t always realize it
but you’re always
falling.
With each step,
you fall
slightly
forward
and then
catch yourself
from falling.
Over
and
over,
you’re falling
and then you catch yourself from
falling.
And this is how you can be walking
and falling
at the same time.
— Laurie Anderson, “Walking and Falling”
In The Art of Walking: A Field Guide (Black Dog, 2013) edited by David Evans, artists are shown contextualizing and recontextualizing the act of walking, sometimes by taking it outside its everyday context, sometimes by drastically changing that context. Evans’ colorful book covers Jan Estep’s Searching for Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ingrid Pollard’s Wordsworth Heritage (homage to the inventor of the modern walk), Richard Long’s A Line Made by Walking, beautiful marches, weird shoes, paint drippings, mobile shelters, high wires, GPS units, various maps, and even walking dogs. It’s part art book, part documentation, and part field guide to the possibilities of both.
What makes a collection like this work is great photographs, and The Art of Walking is full of them. Nearly 200 photos of walks and works illustrate the wide-ranging art of the bipedal and peripatetic. It’s a worthy addition to the growing literature on walking as an artistic and political practice.
In her own history of walking, Rebecca Solnit (2000) writes, “Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them… Walking is a mode of making the world as well as being in it” (p. 27; p. 5). She continues,
Walking still covers the ground between cars and buildings and the short distances within the latter, but walking as a cultural activity, as a pleasure, as travel, as a way of getting around, is fading, and with it goes an ancient and profound relationship between body, world, and imagination (p. 250).
In Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers (MIT Press, 2013), Karen O’Rourke explores not only the relationship between walking, body, world, and art but also walking and design. Using protocol as a trope through which to illuminate the differences between top-down planning and bottom-up development, O’Rourke breaks new ground between them. For example, paved sidewalks are predictions, attempts at restricting the walks of the future (top-down). Trails are of the past, worn by many previous walks (bottom-up). Maps are metaphors and often represent a bit of both, as well as the relationship(s) between body and world.
Making the workaday weird is one of the central challenges of art. Walking can be artistic, political, practical, or just a last resort for getting from one point to another. No matter our intentions, we walk this way to make our world and to make our way in it.
References:
Anderson, Laurie. (1982). Walking and Falling. On Big Science [LP]. New York: Warner Bros.
Evans, David. (2013). The Art of Walking: A Field Guide. London: Black Dog Publishing.
O’Rourke, Karen. (2013). Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Solnit, Rebecca. (2000). Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New York: Penguin.
I have an essay in Scott Heim’s new collection The First Time I Heard My Bloody Valentine. I’m super stoked to be sharing pages and experiences with musicians like Bob Mould, Christian Savill of Slowdive, Ian Masters of Pale Saints, Kellii Scott of Failure and Veruca Salt, James Chapman of Maps, Gazz Carr of God is an Astronaut, and my man Alap Momin of dälek, among many others. The book is available for the Kindle, Nook, iBooks, and other e-readers. Below is the cover, designed by Joel Westendorf.
Here’s an excerpt of my piece in the book, in which I describe the first time I saw My Bloody Valentine live, and the girl I shared the show with:
The next hour or so is difficult to describe without sounding like a complete imbecile. My Bloody Valentine makes the loudest, most beautiful noise I’ve ever witnessed. It doesn’t wash over you as much as it just plows right through your being. You’re not hearing it with your ears as much as you’re feeling it viscerally with your guts. While their records strain the constraints of recording technology, their live presence bends to no such limits. It is akin to standing near an airliner as it taxis toward takeoff or a tornado ripping through trees. It’s strong, certain, and it hurts.
This is the sixth entry in Heim’s The First Time I Heard… series. Other acts include Joy Division/New Order, Kate Bush, David Bowie, The Smiths, and Cocteau Twins.
David Hoffman once summarized George Orwell’s 1984, writing that “during times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” Aaron Swartz, Chelsea (née Bradley) Manning, Adrian Lamo, Aaron Barr, and Edward Snowden have all been pawns and prisoners of information warfare. As the surveillance has expanded from mounted cameras to wireless taps, hackers have evolved from phone phreaking to secret leaking. It’s a ratcheting up of tactics and attacks on both sides. Andy Greenberg quotes Hunter S. Thompson, saying that the weird are turning pro. It’s a thought that evokes the last line of Bruce Sterling‘s The Hacker Crackdown(1991) which, after deftly chronicling the early history of computer hacker activity, investigation, and incarceration, states ominously, “It is the End of the Amateurs” (p. 301).
The Hacker Ethic — as popularized by Steven Levy’s Hackers (Anchor, 1984) — states that access to computers “and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works should be unlimited and total” (p. 40). Hackers seek to understand, not to undermine. And they tolerate no constraints. Tactical media, so-called to avoid the semiotic baggage of related labels, exploits the asymmetry of knowledge gained via hacking (Branwyn, 1994; Lievrouw, 2011; Lovink, 2002; Raley, 2009). In a passage that reads like recent events, purveyor of the term, Geert Lovink (2002) writes, “Tactical networks are all about an imaginary exchange of concepts outbidding and overlaying each other. Necessary illusions. What circulates are models and rumors, arguments and experiences of how to organize cultural and political activities, get projects financed, infrastructure up and running and create informal networks of trust which make living in Babylon bearable” (p. 254). Sounds like a description of the tumult behind Wikileaks and Anonymous.
In This Machine Kills Secrets (Dutton, 2012), Andy Greenberg explores the infighting and odd cooperation among those out to break and build boundaries around certain strains of information. It’s a tale of rogues gone straight, straights gone rogue, and the weird gone pro. It’s a battle over stiffly defined contexts, lines drawn and defended. He writes of the leakers, “They take an immoral act out of some special, secret culture where it seems acceptable and expose it to the world of moral human relationships, where it’s exposed as obviously horrific” (p. 311). Theirs are easy acts to defend when the extremes are so evident, but what about the more subtle contexts? As danah boyd puts it, “Privacy isn’t a binary that can be turned on or off. It’s about context, social situations, and control.” Privacy is not secrecy, but they’re so closely related that the former seems to be lost in the fight against the latter. They’re also so close as to be constantly conflated when debated.
Following Matt Blaze, Neal Stephenson (2012) states “it’s best in the long run, for all concerned, if vulnerabilities are exposed in public” (p. 27). Informal groups of information insurgents like the crews behind Wikileaks and Anonymous keep open tabs on the powers that would be. After a cameo in This Machine Kills Secrets, Aaron Barr takes a more central role in We Are Anonymous (Little, Brown, 2012) by Parmy Olson. A high-end security consultant, Barr set out to expose Anonymous unprovoked, and quickly found himself on the wrong side of the line. Again, hackers are easy to defend when they’re on your side. Wires may be wormholes (Stephenson, 1996), but that can be dangerous when they flow both ways. Once you get locked out of all your accounts and the contents of your harddrive end up on the wrong screen, hackers aren’t your friends anymore, academic or otherwise. The recent DDoS attacks on several major torrent trackers should be raising more eyebrows on both sides.
Hackers of every kind behave as if they understand that “[p]ostmodernity is no longer a strategy or style, it is the natural condition of today’s network society” (Lovink, 2002, p. 259). In a hyper-connected world, disconnection is power. The ability to become untraceable is the ability to become invisible (Kluitenberg, 2008). We need to unite and become hackers ourselves now more than ever against what Kevin DeLuca (2007) calls “the acronyms of the apocalypse” (e.g., WTO, NAFTA, GATT, etc.; p. 47). The original Hacker Ethic isn’t enough when Shit is Fucked-Up and Bullshit (Wark, 2012). We need more of those nameless nerds, nodes in undulating networks of cyber disobedience. “Information moves, or we move to it,” writes Neal Stephenson (1996), like a hacker motto of “digital micro-politics” (Lovink, 2002, p. 254). Hackers need to appear, swarm, attack, and then disappear again into the dark fiber of the Deep Web.
Lovink (2002) continues: “The world is crazy enough. There is not much reason to opt for the illusion” (p. 259). Who was it that said Orwell was 30 years off? Tactical media is where we watch the ones watching us.
References:
Branwyn, Gareth. (1994). Introduction: Hackers: Heroes or Villains? In Knightmare, Confessions of a Super-Hacker. Port Townsend, WA: Loompanics Unlimited.
DeLuca, Kevin M. (2007). A Wilderness Environmentalism Manifesto: Contesting the Infinite Self-Absorption of Humans. In, R. Sandler & P. C. Pezzullo (Eds.), Environmental Justice and Environmentalism: The Social Justice Challenge to the Environmental Movement. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 27-55.
Greenberg, Andy. (2012). This Machine Kills Secrets. New York: Dutton Adult.
Kluitenberg, Eric. (2008). Delusive Spaces: Essays on Culture, Media, and Technology. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers.
Levy, Steven. (1984). Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday.
Lievrouw, Leah A. (2011). Alternative and Activist New Media. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Lovink, Geert. (2002). Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Olson, Parmy. (2012). We Are Anonymous. New York: Little, Brown, and Co.
Raley, Rita. (2009). Tactical Media. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Setting the screen for shows such as Picket Fences (1992-1996), The X-Files (1994-2003), Six Feet Under (2001-2005), Veronica Mars (2004-2007), Pushing Daisies (2007-2009), The Killing (2011-2013), and games like Alan Wake (2010), Mark Frost and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990-1991) was easily the oddest hit show in television history. Set among the trees and mountains of my beloved Pacific Northwest, the show hosted themes of dangerous dreams, reckless teens, and the paranormal, parallel, and perpendicular. With recently debunked rumors of its return and a Blu-Ray release imminent, it’s time to go back into the woods.
How in the hell this show was ever a hit is one of its many mysteries. Twin Peaks invaded the living rooms of America just as the Zeitgeist was shaking off the awkward, neon discomfort of the 1980s. The world was “wild at heart and weird on top,” in the words of Barry Gifford, and even if everyone knew it, no one was saying it. We let Frost and Lynch make our unease explicit. Collective pre-millennium tension notwithstanding, our anxiety never really relented.
Incest and child molestation are as American as apple pie. Or should I rather say cherry pie, the dessert choice of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks? Leland Palmer is the all-American Dad if there ever was one, so it’s more than appropriate that he is the one to be possessed by the evil spirit BOB, and to rape and murder his daughter Laura. This deed is necessarily something of a ritual, the founding gesture of the American nuclear family. — Steven Shaviro, Doom Patrols
Ritual abounds in Twin Peaks. Its liminality, the “between and betwixt” of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, is evident in Laura Palmer’s double life, “none-more-purposeful” (Neofetou, 2013, p. 77) Special Agent Dale Cooper’s limbo while investigating her death, the transubstantiation of BOB, and his toggling of Leland Palmer’s consciousness. The ephemeral existence of the Black Lodge is itself a flickering signifier of ritual. The coffee and doughnuts, the family dinner, even the recording and sending of messages are imbued with the gestures of ceremony.
The time of Twin Peaks wasn’t run by social media and cellphones. Secrets traveled via letters and landlines, diaries and cassette tapes. The latter of these played very important roles in the show and helped define the drama surrounding the two main characters. Laura Palmer’s secret diary and Special Agent Dale Cooper’s microcassettes respectively recorded the weaving mysteries of Laura’s short life and their postmortem unraveling. Both have been published as companions to the show. In addition, Frost and Lynch collaborated with Richard Saul Wurman to put together an Access Guide to the town of Twin Peaks. More than mere merchandising, these books prefigured the internet-enabled transmedia narrative of many 21st-century television shows.
The newly published Fan Phenomena: Twin Peaks, edited by Marisa C. Hayes and Franck Boulègue (Intellect Books, 2013), expands the between and betwixt of Twin Peaks-inspired writings by fans and crtics alike. It’s the first such collection aimed at fans rather than academics. For instance, In his Fan Phenomena essay, Andrew Howe catalogs the cultural artifacts of the series: posters, coffee cups, dolls, sculptures, and so on, while David Griffith confronts the show’s misogynist aspects with waves of feminism, what Diana Hume George (1995) facetiously calls a “double-breasted approach”(p. 109). Fran Pheasant-Kelly explores the physical spaces of Twin Peaks, and there are three Fan Appreciation interludes in between the essays. It’s a must for any fan of the franchise. Fan Phenomena collections are also available for Star Wars, The Big Lebowski, Doctor Who, The Hunger Games, Marilyn Monroe, and Audrey Hepburn, among others.
Fan Phenomena: Twin Peaks is yet another testament to the lingering legacy of Frost and Lynch’s vision of fucked-up family life as well as the power of good television.
References:
Frost, Scott. (1991). The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes. New York: Pocket Books.
George, Diana Hume. (1995). Lynching Women: A Feminist Reading of Twin Peaks. In, David Lavery (Ed.), Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, pp 109-119.
Lynch, David, Frost, Mark, & Wurman, Richard Saul. (1991). Welcome to Twin Peaks: Access Guide to the Town. New York: Pocket Books/Twin Peaks Prod./Access Press.
Lynch, Jennifer. (1990). The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. New York: Pocket Books.
Neofetou, Daniel. (2012). Good Day Today: David Lynch Destabilises the Spectator. Winchester, UK: Zero Books.
Shaviro, Steven. (1997). Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction about Postmodernism. New York: Serpent’s Tail, p. 147.
Turner, Victor. (1967). The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Turner, Victor. (1969). The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
von Gennep, Arnold. (1961). The Rites of Passage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Twenty years ago, Arthur Kroker described the predominant spirit of the times as a “spasm” (1993). What Bruce Sterling (1998) describes as “that violently oscillating 1990s state when you feel totally hyper and nauseatingly bored. That gnawing sense that we’re on the road to nowhere at a million miles an hour.” The feeling has expanded to the point where detached irony is our default emotional setting. David Foster Wallace called it “Total Noise” (quoted in Gleick, 2011, p. 403): An all-consuming cultural state that “tends to level everything out into an undifferentiated mass of high-quality description and trenchant reflection that becomes both numbing and euphoric” (Wallace, 2012, p. 301). It’s information anxiety coupled with complete boredom (Gleick, 2011). What happened to the chasm between those two extremes?
Always two things
switching.
Current runs through bodies
and then it doesn’t.
It was a language of sounds,
of noise,
of switching,
of signals.
…
On again.
Off again.
Always two things
switching.
One thing instantly replaces
another.
It was the language
of the Future.
— Laurie Anderson, United States
Constructing sameness is an essential intellectual activity that goes unobserved. — Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think
A skeuomorph is a design element that remains only as an allusion to a previous form, like a digital recording that includes the clicks and pops of a record player, woodgrain wallpaper, the desktop metaphor, or even the digital “page.” It’s obsolete except in signifying what it supplants. N. Katherine Hayles (1999) describes the concept, writing, “It calls into play a psychodynamic that finds the new more acceptable when it recalls the old that it is in the process of displacing and finds the traditional more comfortable when it is presented in a context that reminds us we can escape from it into the new” (p. 17; cf. Tenner, 2003, p. xii). Skeuomorphs meditate the liminal space between uncomfortable shifts and an uncertain future, translating the unknown into the terms of the known.
Translation is always an amalgam of hope and nostalgia, combining the yearning for home with the urge to press forward into new territories. — Matthew Battles, The Sovereignties of Invention
Just like a cramped muscle, the solution to Kroker’s metaphorical spasm is to stretch it out. In the most general sense, my central research question concerns the process by which we mediate our lives with our technologies. What I call The Medium Picture is that process, what it helps, hides, and hinders. A medium is literally a “middle, intermediary state” (Gleick, 2011, p. 153), and that is the place I’ve been investigating. Skeuomorphs bridge the threshold, obscuring the transition, and that is their purpose when it comes to adapting people to new technologies. They soften the blow of the inevitable upgrade. But every new contrivance augments some choices at the expense of others. What we lose is often unbeknownst to us.
… multifunctional lidless eyes watching, outside-in and inside-out; our technology has produced the vision of microscopic giants and intergalactic midgets, freezing time out of the picture, contracting space to a spasm. — Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects
With his finger ever on the flickering pulse, William Gibson (2012) writes, parenthetically, “(This perpetual toggling between nothing being new under the sun, and everything having very recently changed, absolutely, is perhaps the central driving tension of my work)” (p. 51). That binary belies a bulging, unexplored midsection. The space between that switch from one extreme to the other, that is what The Medium Picture is about.
References:
Anderson, Laurie. (1984). United States. New York: Harper & Row, p. 22.
Battles, Matthew. (2012). The Sovereignties of Invention. New York: Red Lemonade, p. 84.
Braidotti, Rosi. (1994). Nomadic Subjects. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 43.
Douglas, Mary. (1986). How Institutions Think. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, p. 60.
Gibson, William. (2012). Distrust That Particular Flavor. New York: Putnam.
Gleick, James. (2011). The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. New York: Pantheon.
Hayles, N. Katherine. (1999). How We Became Post-Human. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kroker, Arthur. (1993). Spasm: Virtual Reality, Android Music and Electric Flesh. Montreal: New World Perspectives.
Sterling, Bruce. (1998, October 4). Viridian Design. San Francisco: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
Tenner, Edward. (2003). Our Own Devices. New York: Knopf.
We’re all home for the holidays. Looking around the living room today at the family assembled there, most were clicking around on laptops, two were also wearing headphones, one was fingering a smartphone. The television was noticeably dark and silent with each of us engrossed in his or her own digital experience, be it a game, a TV show, or some, social metamedium. Jaron Lanier (2008) writes, ”…pop culture is important. It drags us all along with it; it is our shared fate. We can’t simply remain aloof” (p. 385). But what happens when we don’t share any of it anymore? Narrowcasting and narrowcatching, as each of us burrows further into our own interests, we have less of them in common as a whole. The mainstream has become less of a stream and more of a mist.
A friend of mine noted recently that The Long Tail has gotten so long and so thick that there’s not much left in the Big Head. As the internet-enabled market supported a wider and wider variety of cultural artifacts with less and less depth of interest, the big, blockbuster hits have had ever-smaller audiences. This wasn’t the case just a decade ago. The audiences seem to decrease in proportion to the size of the screens. I have found this splintering more and more in the classroom as I try to pick somewhat universal media artifacts to use as examples. Even the biggest shows and movies I brought up this semester left nearly half of my students out, and if I ever got into the stuff I actually like, I was greeted with little more than cricket sounds. The postmodern promise of individual viewpoints and infinite fragmentation is coming closer to fruition.
Cultural divisions as such used to be framed as high versus low culture. New Yorker writer John Seabrook (2000) argues that we have evolved past such hierarchies into what he calls “nobrow culture.” Definitely erring on the high side, Seabrook doesn’t know Stormtroopers from Sand People. Depending on which side of the high/low fence you stand, he and his ilk have “condescended and/or pandered,” in the words of Hal Foster, to you for far too long. The mixing of high culture’s concerns with low culture’s lack thereof only makes sense if there’s a market in the middle. The mainstreaming of anything requires a middle class.
The middle class is traditionally thought of as the masses of people who are above “working” class but also not quite “upper” class. By definition, membership in the middle class requires a certain amount of discretionary income. Mainstream pop culture relies on that. As that income diminishes and less of the extant money is spent on media due to an increasingly tech-savvy populous, the funding for frivolous entertainment decreases. Art and commerce have always been odd bedfellows, but their offspring are the least interesting children in history. Focus groups, product placement, and everything “brought to you by” a brand are not cool conventions. Mix that division and decline with pop culture’s obsession with its own past, what Simon Reynolds (2011) calls “retromania,” and we get reality television, ubiquitous advertising, and endless remakes and remixes. Reynolds likens the state of the culture industry to global economics, predicting an inevitable crash: “The world economy was brought down by derivatives and bad debt; music has been depleted of meaning through derivatives and indebtedness” (p. 410-420). If the rest of pop culture ends up like the demonetized music industry, then we can bury the middle class next to the mainstream.
None of this is to say that underground culture is inherently better. It’s never made much sense to describe something aesthetically in terms of the mainstream, and now it makes less than ever. Working the ends against the middle trying to get the best of both worlds, so-called “nobrow culture” ends up with the bad of both without any of the good. Watered-down, diluted, widely disseminated, what’s left of the mainstream is the cultural equivalent of the muddy, middle heartland, viewed from an airplane window. It’s flyover culture.
Wittgenstein (1953) once said there was no such thing as a private language. The presumption being that a language only works if it is shared. The same can be said of culture. It only works if it is shared. Here’s hoping we can continue to find some overlapping dirt to dig.
References:
Anderson, Chris. (2006). The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling More of Less. New York: Hyperion.
Some stories are like other worlds we visit for a little while. Some climb in our minds and manipulate our thoughts. “[O]ur brains are built to try to process everything we see as a story,” writes David Wong of Cracked.com, so it’s no wonder that some stories are so powerful. These are the ones that haunted my head this year.
Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color is easily the best movie of the year. As I wrote elsewhere, the hollow, breathless feeling I always choke down at the climax of his previous movie, Primer, was evident throughout Upstream Color. If the grammar of Primer is mechanical, spurred on by engineers spending their off hours tinkering in the garage, then Upstream Color is organic, revealing itself through rote ritual, hypnotic motion, and passages from Walden. Where Primer was wordy, stacked with dialogue and guided by Aaron’s answering-machine voice-over, Upstream Color is primarily nonverbal, a collage of scenes, snatches of dialog, subtle sounds, and spacious music.
Another collage-like experience, Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers is as beautiful as it is bewildering. Its heist scene might be the best few minutes of cinema I’ve seen in years. Brit (Ashley Benson) and Candy (Vanessa Hudgens) rob the Chicken Shack restaurant with a hammer and a squirt gun while Cotty (Rachel Korine) circles the building in the getaway car with the camera (and us) riding shotgun. Our limited vantage point gives the scene an added tension because though we are at a distance, it feels far from safe. Much like the security camera footage of Columbine and Chronicle, and the camera-as-character of Chronicle and Cloverfield, we receive a crippled information flow while experiencing total exposure. Their mantra: “Just pretend it’s a fucking video game. Act like you’re in a movie or something.”
The book of the year is The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes (Mulholland Books). Beukes’ easily digestible prose and gleefully nagging narrative betray a convoluted timeline and staggering depth of research. Drifter Harper Curtis quantum leaps from time to time gutting the girls as he goes. The House he squats in his helper, enabling the temporal jaunts. He’s like an inverted Patrick Bateman: no money, all motive. Where Bateman’s stories are told from his point of view in the tones of torture-porn, Harper’s kills are described from the abject horror of the victims. And the victims, who are all strong-willed women with drive and purpose, are only victims at his hand. Otherwise they shine with potential and promise.
In 
