Category: Reviews

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Why Societies Need Dissent by Cass R. Sunstein

In Why Societies Need Dissent, Cass R. Sunstein illustrates the powers and dangers of dissent through a clear and concise exposition of three basic phenomena: conformity, social cascades, and group polarization. His epistemological view of conformity shows how we tend to learn less first-hand than from what others think and believe. Social cascades occur when a meme, carried by early-adopters, reaches its tipping point. Group polarization shows how extreme views become more extreme in group deliberations.

Why Societies Need DissentAccording to Sunstein, dissent is essential, but not always good. Your average contrarian can contribute a great deal to an argument by offering a differing point of view, but this can also be counterproductive for the community. Still, communities need constructive dissent and need to find ways to reward it. “In the real word,” writes Sunstein, “people will silence themselves for many reasons. Sometimes they do not want to risk the irritation or opprobrium of their friends and allies. Sometimes they fear that they will, through their dissent, weaken the effectiveness and reputation of the group to which they belong. Sometimes they trust fellow group members to be right.” Conformity carries its own rewards. Dissent does not.

Why Societies Need Dissent is an excellent overview of a concept that doesn’t get enough serious consideration or positive attention. Plus, you’ll look bad-ass reading it on the bus.

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Dig! Directed by Ondi Timoner

Ondi Timoner’s Dig! is the story of a musical revolution, which may or may not have happened, depending on your perspective. The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Worhols were friends before either had any modicum of fame, and they were determined to change the world — or at least the world of music. They took separate paths toward this change, and the onset of two types of fame turned them into rivals of the oddest sort. Continue reading “Dig! Directed by Ondi Timoner”

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Underground Sounds

“Big wheel, big spin, big money, no whammies
Don’t save me a seat when you get to the Grammys” — nomadboy

So, against my better judgment, I watched the Grammys the other night. This viewing experiment reminded me both of how much I love music and how far away my tastes are from “Grammy material.” I made a quick trip to Lou’s Records in Encinitas, California prior to the show, and my purchases there should prove more than my point. Continue reading “Underground Sounds”

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Literary Conversations and Interviews with Filmmakers

The University Press of Mississippi has been quietly putting out an amazing catalog of books for years now. One such set is their Literary Conversations Series (edited by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw) that consists of interviews and essays with modern literature’s most fascinating authors. I got Don DeLillo, Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, and Jack Kerouac, but the series also includes Tom Wolfe, August Wilson, Robert Penn Warren, Gore Vidal, Ray Bradbury, Gloria Naylor, R. Crumb, Audre Lorde, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, among many others.

Ridley Scott InterviewsThey also put out a similar set called the Conversations with Filmmakers Series (edited by Peter Brunette). These include Ridley Scott, Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Jean Renoir, Tim Burton, Charlie Chaplin, Francis Ford Coppola, Terry Gilliam, and many more. Since each of these books focuses on a specific person, but spans the length of his or her career, one really gets a sense of their attitudes, ambitions, processes, career development, career pitfalls, and, of course, personal tribulations. If you’re interested in any of these creators’ work, then the appropriate book here is indispensable. Hell, even if you’re not necessarily interested in the subject, they’re good. I mean, have you ever seen a bad episode of Behind the Music?

Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Roman Polanski from 1984:

Franz-Olivier Giesbert: After all that you have gone through, you still look only thirty years old. What’s your secret?

Roman Polanski: My curiosity, without doubt. I’m always trying to learn something new. A language or a musical instrument. Old age is an illness that sets in when you don’t want to learn anything new.

Amen.

So keep an eye out for these volumes. They’re all certainly worth checking out.

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Love All the People: Letters, Lyrics, Routines by Bill Hicks

This is it, folks: the definitive collection of Bill Hicks stuff all in one book. Interviews, letters, lyrics, live routines, etc. are all compiled inside. For the uninitiated, Bill Hicks was the best comedian to ever jump on stage and bless the mic with his wisdom. Constantly railing against governmental idiocy, corporate control, censorship, and the indolence of America, among other things, Hicks took on all the evils of the world and the enemies of the open mind. You’ve heard him — even if it came from someone else’s mouth, you’ve heard his brand of intelligent, caustic wit. Nothing and no one is safe in the range of Bill Hicks’ comedy. Continue reading “Love All the People: Letters, Lyrics, Routines by Bill Hicks”

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Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing by Benjamin Nugent

Better than even Kurt Cobain, Elliott Smith provides a case study of the effects of fame. Though his rise was just as mercurial, the changes wrought were more profound and more eerie. Benjamin Nugent treats this flight to fame with a delicate touch, showing as many sides of Elliott as he was able to access. The result is a book about the pitfalls of the rise to public attention, its effects on friendships, and a man who fought against everything to maintain the one thing he truly lost: control. Nugent’s book follows Elliott from his growing up in suburban Texas, where his tumultuous home life pushed him inward and toward music, to his beginnings as a performer in Portland, Oregon, then through his chaotic brush with mass consciousness, to his unfortunate suicide in Los Angeles. Continue reading “Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing by Benjamin Nugent”

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How To Draw a Bunny Directed by John Walter

Ray Johnson has been called the “the most famous unknown artist in the world.” He was an unsung Pop Art innovator, collaging, mailing, and performing his way through the mid-twentieth century New York art scene. As artist Billy Name says in one of the interviews in the film: “Rauschenberg was a person making art, so was Andy (Warhol). Ray wasn’t a person. Ray was art… That’s why he’s an artist’s artist.”

How to Draw a BunnyHow To Draw a Bunny documents Ray’s life as best as it could be done. Many were acquainted with him and his work – and many over long periods of time – but no one seemed to know who Ray was. His entire life was a performance. And so too, it appears, was his death (the mystery surrounding his apparent suicide opens the film). He never went to openings, never had his own art show, despised galleries, was meticulous about his prices, and truly worked outside the art system his entire career.

Ray Johnson started or helped start many of the techniques and trends for which other artists are known: the use of copy machines and collaging; using images from advertising, brand logos, and pop culture icons; and mail art, or as he called it, “correspondence art.”

How To Draw a Bunny is a fun collage in itself: a collection of interviews of artists who knew Ray, including Chuck Close, Christo and Jean-Claude, James Rosenquist, the aforementioned Billy Name, and Ray Johnson himself; many great photographs; and, presented mostly in black and white, the film maintains the opening mood of mystery throughout. It’s a fun and intriguing look at an artist about whom one may not have heard, but will certainly be better off with his acquaintance.

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Under the Overpass Written and Directed by Gariss

In this short but fascinating film, a wheelchair-bound homeless man, Michael, begins his day when he wakes up under an overpass, slowly maneuvers into his wheelchair, and heads to a local coffee shop. After cleaning up the sidewalk out front, collecting his pay (a cup of coffee), he makes his way to another overpass where he sips his coffee, and pulls out his flute. Unbeknownst to the hurried passersby, through his music, Michael is transferred to a world with able legs: legs able to run, jump, and leap with joyous abandon. Continue reading “Under the Overpass Written and Directed by Gariss”

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The Laws of Cool by Alan Liu

Even with as many texts as have come out exploring and explicating our so-called information age, there has yet to be a more exhaustive account of just what the hell has happened than Alan Liu’s The Laws of Cool (University of Chicago Press). Nevermind the misleading title. This isn’t another exposé on “cool hunting” and finding out what the kids are into. This lengthy tome is about how most of us came to be knowledge workers in the factories of information.

The Laws of CoolTo call this book “exhaustive” is an understatement. I can’t stress the reaches of Liu’s research or the sprawling implications of his book enough – and reading it is quite the lengthy process. Every time one thinks that Liu has found his bounds, the next chapter opens another door on which one wouldn’t have even thought of knocking. Yet, it’s a cohesive work, written with unwavering wit and erudition.

Exploring the Foucauldian climate of the corporate control culture, set off by IT and the mainframe, Liu shows how managers came to be “seduced by the system” (as Ellen Ullman put it in her book Close to the Machine). They used the abilities of their information systems to keep tabs on their workers – even where there had previously been no problems. His use of temperature-related tropes (e.g., “hot,” “cold,” “warm,” and especially “cool”) is confusing at first, due to the previous uses of such terms (i.e., as slang or as in McLuhan’s ubiquitous probes). These temperatures eventually come together to illuminate the weather of the twenty first century workaday, from the stifling of hot emotions by the cold machine to the warmth of friends and family and the cool of today’s assimilated, yet über-hip “knowledge workers” (“We work here, but we’re cool,” quoth Liu).

Taken whole, The Laws of Cool is a high relief, topographical map of the workscape of the early twenty first century. Couple this with Ken Wark‘s A Hacker Manifesto and you have a crash course in post-Marxist labor studies.