finnb.net /b
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) “Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.” I conclude now that I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,
who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.
Last night I had a dream; the details are hazy, except that I glanced idly at a book on a table in the midst of other things. I remember the book vividly: Three Communities of Negotiation: Ages, Cities, Guilds. I was aware, in that wonderful dream Cubism where you see all sides of something simultaneously, that this book was a study of new social orders and systems of production happening online, or in some vast new space of human gathering that comes after MMOs. What struck me about the book was its cover: from an academic press, about a "new media" topic, it wasn't designed to look new. The cover was taken from what looked like a ukyio-e illustration, with part of the column of a torii gate washed orange in the sunset and open to sea, a close dream-analogue to the Miyajima gate at high tide.
The line of the horizon in the background, the edges of mountains and islands. Something about the cover spoke to civilization, the building of edges and boundaries, and open space, the movement of elemental powers. Polis and nomos.
It made me realize that part of the problem with the design of academic books about technology is that they lack atemporality. A turn to the look-and-feel of the new, the now, and the fashionable creates nothing so much as an aura of instant antiquity; things made in this mode (think of rave fliers and the cyberpunk aesthetic) look older than statues of the Pharaohs in a matter of years. And this casts a pall over conversation about technology and culture, subtly skewing it to the present, putting it in the same shallow bath of bubbly cream that tech journalism and microblogged memes inhabit. We can have a much older, slower, richer, weirder conversation, and our book design can encourage it. The very old meets the very new, nomos and polis, ancient and modern.
It’s what Marshall McLuhan said to Gerd Stern and Michael Callahan after they drove him to the airport following an USCO show in 1964. “Those days, you could walk out to the plane; it was a little propellor plane with stairs going up into the tail. I remember Marshall walking up the stairs and us standing below and seeing him disappear into the plane. But then we saw his legs, his feet came back a few steps, and he leaned out and said, ‘Disregard the content and concentrate upon the effect.’” 1
In his wonderful oral history of his time with USCO, Stern brings it up again: “‘Never mind the content; look at the effect.’ In all of the multimedia work that we did, that was the principle that I had taken out of McLuhan and that I was trying to put into practice.” 2
What’s in it, yes: but first what it does.
From “Special Effects” by Michelle Kuo in Artforum, May 2008, p. 133 ↩
Bonus: McLuhan’s thoughts on toasters, in Stern’s words from that same oral history: “Now we met Marshall, and we recorded him. He was somewhat taken aback by the performance because he was kind of a Victorian gentleman, despite his very forward ideas about media transforming twentieth-century consciousness. We got along well. I remember he said he was the kind of person who didn’t even like pop-up toasters; he liked the kind of toaster where you have the two sides, and you open them up, and you turn them around, and you would close it again. That was his kind of technology, even though he was writing about the most forward kind of media experiences.” ↩
I’ve had a dream twice now:
We are living on another planet — like old theories of the surface of Venus, a planet of ultrajungles. On this world, the canopy is hundreds of meters deep, or rather there are layers and layers of canopies and subcanopies and parasitic semi-canopies going down to the inky-green darkness at ground level. Throughout this jungle, but growing steadily more intense farther down, rapid chains of predation and parasitism, complex food webs, reign; humans really can’t live at ground level in that green-black shade of eyes and pheremonal reflexes, clouds of flowers more dangerous than sharks, oozes and flashing lights, unknown dangers.
Instead we live in cities; the cities are black and glittering and compact, self-contained, and walk on legs higher than the canopy. Up in the sunlight, the bellies of the cities brushing the surface of a green skin of faceted leaves rising and falling in all directions (mountains are visible in the distance, slopes sheer out of the jungle). The legs are slender and black. The cities resemble distorted spiders, their bodies minute relative to long and impossibly skinny legs. The legs find their way through endless copses of dark trees, grasses filled with shivering vines, far below. The cities glitter and slowly make their way across the planetary jungle to some unknown destination.
(In getting into academia as a career, I became fascinated by its history and its future — particularly if there might be better or other ways to do some of the things universities do (over mobile phones and cheap hardware, for instance). These thoughts haven’t led anywhere yet, but I’ve learned a lot about the continuities of academic life, the deep history of people gathering around a book and a teacher who explicates it, and the differences: Bologna, the first university in the West, owned no buildings or property; professors lectured in their homes or rented rooms, and the streets were the corridors. The students constituted a governing body with its own laws and privileges, who hired and fired their professors and had a complex relationship with the city as a whole. Thinking about “university towns,” the “ambient university,” or a university that’s a constant virtually anonymous collective labor, like open source software. Christopher Alexander envisioned universities as distributed throughout thriving cities, and far more open to outsiders, both as students and faculty: the “marketplace of ideas,” in the sense of bazaar and not stock exchange. Thinking about the organization of Foo Camp.)
(As an aside to that, 2008 was the year that the imminent collapse of newspapers as a business became very real — a little to my surprise, because I was sure that textbooks would go before newspapers. Academia is full of weird information-scarcity holdouts, like closed journals and textbooks that still rely on proximity to a physical place to provide access. Surrounded by the busy air of network-enabled university culture, they look like Triassic refugees.)
(In 2008 finance went truly haywire again — or rather the percolating haywireness that’s been underlying finance for years came to the surface. At the same time that severely over-leveraged banks were imploding like damaged submarines, the World of Warcraft crew provided two-factor authentication for their users’ accounts, making their access more secure than that of almost any consumer-level online banking experience. I mention this because it brought two ideas together that have been much on my mind recently: a technological history of networked finance, and new forms of finance evolving on the network. The latter: I have a weird, unlikely, gut suspicion that significant new currencies will emerge from online communities, especially MMOs — with all kinds of interesting problems for managing and taxing the flow of money across borders. I wonder how well you could get by in a big American (or Korean or Chinese) city entirely by bartering MMO goods with other people for real-world goods and services — and how well you’d be able to do in, say, five years. The former: I’ve been writing about spam, and that hammer gives me a nail-view of lots of places where network effects and model-use discrepancies have led to crazy unforeseen consequences. I’ve been thinking about trying to write a little book about quants and their eldritch universe of statistical arbitrage models and black boxes doing automated trades far faster than any human analyst. Maybe starting with the Black-Scholes equation and the Capital Asset Pricing Model in the ’70s and looking at the rise in transnational trading systems and going from there.)
“Inside the Nevers complex, certain floor surfaces were placed on an incline, as was the main seating area of the nave. These inclines represented the first real implementation of Architecture Principe’s most famous concept, the ‘function of the oblique’ … It represented a return to a bodily interaction with an architecture that confronted the inhabitant with visual opacity and elicited physical effort (one would be required to combat imbalance and to climb and descend the inclines). … The oblique became, by necessity, a total environment. Furniture could not easily be placed upon it, therefore the oblique surfaces themselves became the furniture, rising or dipping to accommodate a table surface or a place to sit. The human body became, instead of a neutral place from which to observe a distant world, a physical presence — unbalanced, weighted, and constantly subject to the forces of its own momentum.” (This from Larry Busbea’s Topologies.)
The work of Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins: “In addition to the floor, which threatens to send the un-sure-footed hurtling into the sunken kitchen at the center of the house, the design features walls painted, somewhat disorientingly, in about 40 colors; multiple levels meant to induce the sensation of being in two spaces at once; windows at varying heights; oddly angled light switches and outlets; and an open flow of traffic, unhindered by interior doors or their adjunct, privacy. All of it is meant to keep the occupants on guard. Comfort, the thinking goes, is a precursor to death; the house is meant to lead its users into a perpetually ‘tentative’ relationship with their surroundings, and thereby keep them young.” A study with no desk or place for a flat surface, as round as an egg. Switches placed at ankle height.
Finally, from Simon Sadler’s The Situationist City: “As a dramatic reversal of this contemptible domestic Taylorism, Günther Feuerstein submitted his 1960 proposals for ‘impractical flats’ to SPUR, the German section of the Situationist International. By declining labor-saving devices, devising torturous routes through his apartment, and fitting it with noisy doors and useless locks, Feuerstein refused to allow his own home to become another cog in the mechanized world. It would no longer protect him from the environment nor the sensations of his own body: ripping out his air conditioning and throwing open his windows, he could swelter, shiver, and struggle to hear himself think above the roar of the city; later he might bump and hurt himself against one of the myriad sharp corners in his flat, and sit at his wobbly table and on his uncomfortable sofa.”
The pilot is Gabriele d’Annunzio, whose deplorable, fabulous life took dilettantism to a kind of cosmic scale: poet, novelist, elected official, aeronaut and early bomber, decadent aesthete, militant anarchist, Fascist stooge, occult dabbler, journalist, playwright. He collaborated with Claude Debussy, dated Eleonora Duse, and mentored Mussolini. (Other ultra-dilettantes: Anita Berber, Ernst Jünger, more?)
He tried to etymologically connect planes to prior orders of (Italian, national) technology, replacing alien terms from other languages and the awkward “macchine volanti” with his velivolo, coined in his 1909 novel Forse che s’, forse che no — Maybe So, Maybe Not — and inspired by archaic terms (“consecrated by Ovid, by Virgil”) for a ship under full sail.
How we deal with the alien character (national, cultural, social, economic, personal) of new technologies. The not-invented-here problem. Le bulldozer. The Japanese of Edo, after Perry, opening fans over their heads as they passed beneath the telegraph wires. Marinetti, who watched from the ground at Brescia as d’Annunzio flew overhead, worked on a dictionary (Primo dizionario aereo italiano) to provide a technical vocabulary completely expunged of foreign terms. He opposed the sail connotations of velivolo (“We would reserve the term … strictly for glider-like aircraft”), trying to substitute apparecchio.
(After d’Annunzio and his private army of loyalists took the island of Fiume and declared a thoroughly temporary anarcho-corporatist republic, Marconi visited aboard his yacht Elettra and let d’Annunzio use the yacht’s radio apparatus. “Recognition of the ‘Italian Regency of Quarnero,’ recently proclaimed by d’Annunzio, is asked from all the nations of the world” (in the Times) — for “Quarnero” read “Carnaro”. Ancient and modern.)
The Digger Switchboard: “The Switchboard is a volunteer service designed to facilitate communication among people throughout San Francisco, and specifically to serve as an informational and referral source for the Haight-Ashbury community. … The Switchboard provides a 24-hour-a-day service through which individuals can obtain information about community activities, services, housing, jobs, etc., and leave or receive messages. They maintain a list of runaways whose parents have attempted to contact them, and through posted and newspaper notices circulate the names of individuals for whom messages have been received. Through the summer and fall of 1967 they also acted as the answering service for the Free Medical Clinic.”
The (unrealized) USCO Transformer: “And it wasn’t feasible then, but we talked about the big project to end all projects. We called it the Transformer. It would have been a huge database that anyone could tap into. It was sort of like the Web, although the Web has far surpassed anything we were thinking of. But it wasn’t possible in those days with the technology.” This from “Special Effects” by Michelle Kuo, in the May 2008 Artforum, p. 133, talking to Michael Callahan.
Thinking about prototypes of the social web.
Like Community Memory, begun in Berkeley in 1973 with a timesharing system connected to a teletype in Leopold’s Records. “The line from San Francisco to Berkeley ran at 110 baud — 10 characters per second. The teletype was noisy, so it was encased in a cardboard box, with a transparent plastic top so you could see what was being printed out, and holes for your hands so you could type. It made for some magic moments with the Allman Brothers’ ‘Blue Sky’ playing in the record store. Musicians loved it — they ended up generating a monthly printout of fusion rock bassists seeking raga lead guitars.”
“And out of it also emerged the first net.personality — Benway, as he called himself.”
Machines of loving grace, like the Brautigan poem: “We are Loving Grace Cybernetics, a group of Berkeley people operating out of Resource One Inc., a non-profit collective located in Project One in S.F. Resource One grew out of the San Francisco Switchboard and has managed to obtain control of a computer (XDS 940) for use in communications. … The idea is to work with a process whereby technological tools, like computers, are used by the people themselves to shape their own lives and communities in sane and liberating ways.”
“‘Somebody posted asking where you could get decent bagels, which at the time was a near impossibility,’ says Lipkin. ‘But within a day or so someone who was a bagel maker offered to teach him how to make them. I was so surprised by that — someone offering to teach and engage a stranger.’” (This story mentions Jude Milhon’s involvement — she, as alias St. Jude, of the brief great Mondo 2000.)
“The world’s attic is being sorted” is a line from a recent interview with William Gibson, with reference to everything from eBay to YouTube to mapping sites to the archival photo-annotation projects on Flickr. All the stuff, the words (Google Books, great library projects), the photographs, the places, the film, no matter how obscure — because it’s not obscure to somebody — is being made discoverable (“discoverable,” that wonderfully odd contemporary adjective given new life by mobile phones, an openness to being found). There is steadily less that is obscure, and the areas that remain so are more glaring as a consequence, with the secrets of governments and history sitting there on the horizon of knowledge like the Coalsack nebula, burning bright around the edges with conspiracy theory and speculation.
(Gibson used to work as a buyer in thrift stores for upmarket antique dealers, looking for precisely the kind of neglected objects whose prices are being normalized by the network right now — which I guess is the source of my favorite aspect of his work, the melancholy, precise attention paid to old, forgotten, and lonely objects. His clean gridded cyberspace was built on a deep sabi patina of defunct pinball machines, damp-stained magazines, the nylon of a sleeping bag gone almost colorless with age.)
I had one of those moments recently where something very specifically modern cuts across your life in the most minor and unimportant way. I thought, for the first time in maybe ten years, of a couple of very quirky, stylized, obscure short comedy films that my art teacher in high school had shown the class on one of those slack days just before a major vacation. I remember a hand-labeled VHS cassette. I remember a dog, and one sequence: a Zen teacher talks about a table, at the subatomic level, having no edge, and a student slides a cup off the table with a crash.
Three years ago, this would be the end of a (fairly boring) story. But one search (“zen dog movie”) and three clicks later, I’m watching Jonathan Parker’s comedy short “Zen Dog” and the companion “Hugo & Hilda Get Engaged.” There are polka dogs, a dog, a few minutes of an afternoon I spent in a classroom maybe ten or twelve years ago. This would not have been entirely impossible in 2003, but it would have been infinitely too much trouble for the momentary frisson of memory it provoked. I wonder how history, how the past, collective and personal, will be experienced by people in a decade, in two, in three.
So. The blog’s back up. And I’m feeling a lot more alive — knocked out 26,000 not-necessarily-bad dissertation words in January, most of which will have to go because they led to a superlative meeting and insightful comment that gave me, finally, the bedrock topic, a weirdly underwritten area with lots of interesting aspects to research and think the fuck out of. I don’t mind losing some of the words (I’ll put them up, a bit edited, on the site at some point); it’s a pleasure to have finally climbed a ladder even if I have to kick it away afterwards.
Kicking ladders away, jettisoning the prior stages of the rocket (as above, in a beautiful analogue-by-way-of-digital still from Sans Soliel) seems to be the name of the game right now. But not destroying, no scorched earth: letting go, not giving up. (“We do our work and go,” say Burrough’s Nova Police, lurking in the background under their grey fedoras.) Instead, it’s the salto mortale, the acrobat’s leap from one wire to another at high noon. And what’s most important to the leap is letting go at the right time, letting go of old projects, old dreams, old plans, into space, into writing.
The salto mortale death-leap was William James’ affectionately mocking term for the gap philosophy tends to assume between word and thing, mind and body, thought and act, as though it were obvious that some gulf existed between our within and without — when it’s really no trapeze swing to watch a movie, feel claustrophobic, get the flu, or act coy, but the merest flash of space seen between the scissoring legs of a traveler. It’s the thin integument where consciousness rubs against cognition. For James, consciousness felt like a different kind of death-leap, the bird leaping forward into the empty air: “Like a bird’s life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings. The rhythm of language expresses this, where every thought is expressed in a sentence, and every sentence closed by a period. The resting-places are usually occupied by sensorial imaginations of some sort, whose peculiarity is that they can be held in the mind for an indefinite time, and contemplated without changing; the places of flight are filled with thoughts of relations, static or dynamic, that for the most part obtain between the matters contemplated in the periods of comparative rest.” Resting places, fluttering wings, sustained thermals; orienting to the dark spots in our understanding the way a warbler turns to the patch of shadow magnetic north casts on its visual cortex.
The flash of thinking, remembering, walking in the texture of a city or the rivers and forests: one kind of leap, into a splash of sunlight, “the color of magenta, the odor of attar, the sound of a railway whistle, the taste of quinine, the quality of emotion on contemplating a fine mathematical demonstration, the quality of feeling of love, etc” (writes Charles Peirce, a close friend of James’, trying to describe “Firstness,” experience before acting, talking). The moment of leaving the branch, before the wings spread: this substrate of feeling where walking, writing, coding, cooking, talking meet, a search space of flights and perchings.
((L and I went on a day trip last weekend to the Steiner community of Newton Dee, up the river. It was very beautiful out there; the air is full of the smells of grass, wintry soil, trees and hay (it’s a small-scale working farm), and leans against you like a cat. The community has the slightly feverish attention to detail I’ve always liked about groups devoted to cultish architects — think Wright, or Saarinen, or, going further back, Orson Fowler’s octagonal houses — and because of my childhood (Waldorf school FTW) I have a nostalgic soft spot for Steiner’s Goethe-Farbentheorie-derived mystical palette, angular apertures, and oddly hipped rooflines. We looked at cats sleeping on catchment bins, and cows eyeing us from the hay; we had carrot soup and watched the occasional sunlight on the fields.))
Walter Benjamin, my ongoing obsession, claims to have heard this story in Enrico Rastelli’s dressing room, and from the man himself. (All this is recounted in a piece for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.) Rastelli was the greatest juggler who ever lived (you can see one of his performances on YouTube) and was internationally famous when Benjamin was writing about him. Benjamin’s charming frame tale, with the juggler relaxing after a show in his costume and talking with the down-at-heel intellectual, is deliciously implausible in a way for which there isn’t a good contemporary analogue.
The story, Rastelli’s story, goes that a great juggler of the past had a superlative act with a climax involving a large ball that would come, magically, to dance about the juggler, bounce up steps to him, roll from arm to arm, and leap from the ground to land on his fingertip. The ball contains a “boy dwarf” secreted inside, like the covert player in Maelzel’s Mechanical Turk, who uses “compression springs” to move the ball like a living thing. To keep this secret secret, the juggler and dwarf always enter the theater by separate ways.
This great juggler is summoned to the court of the ruler of the Turks, in Constantinople, to perform. And he does, brilliantly; it ends when he “stretched out his little finger … and the ball … settled on his fingertip with a single bound.”
It is only when he leaves the palace that a messenger catches up with him, with a morning message from the dwarf, apologizing: he is ill, he cannot perform today.
The image of the empty ball landing on the fingertip in a single bound is something Benjamin comes back to. In 1932, in the marvelous “Ibizan Sequence” (a series of notes and meditations for the Frankfurter Zeitung) — see also an alternate version of this passage he was working out in his Spanish diaries from the same year — he has a section on practice, übung. Quoting:
“The fact that in the morning the pupil knows by heart the contents of the book he has put under his pillow the night before, that the Lord inspires His own in their sleep, and that a pause is creative — to make space for such things to happen is the alpha and omega of all mastery, its hallmark. This, then, is the reward before which the gods have placed sweat. For work which achieves only modest success is child’s play, compared to the success conjured up by luck. This is why Rastelli’s stretched-out little finger attracts the ball, which hops onto it like a bird. The decades’ worth of practice that came to before does not mean that either his body or the ball is ‘in his power,’ but it enables the two to reach an understanding behind his back. To weary the master to the point of exhaustion through diligence and hard work, so that at long last his body and each of his limbs can act in accordance with their own rationality: this is what is called ‘practice.’ It is successful because the will abdicates its power once and for all inside the body, abdicates in favor of the organs — the hand, for instance. This is why you can look for something for days, until you finally forget it; then, one day, when you are looking for something else, you suddenly find the first object. Your hand has, so to speak, taken the matter in hand and has joined forces with the object.”
I love it! It’s that moment of perfect inattention, after the years of disciplined attention. The tree catching its own oranges as they fall from the branch. As Giordano Bruno’s motto has it: Vincit Instans, the instant triumphs, the sentence gels, the idea takes shape, the arrow shot blindfolded hits its mark.
But where did Benjamin (or, being charitable, Rastelli) get this idea of the “boy dwarf” in the magic ball? I’ve always wondered. I wrote this post because I came across an account in Cabinet of LaRoche’s Bola Misteriosa, or Wunderkugel:
“1889: First documented appearance of the acrobat LaRoche’s Wunderkugel or Bola Misteriosa act. A hollow two-foot steel ball would ascend, apparently of its own accord, a narrow twenty-four-foot spiraling ramp and then descend just as perilously. At the end of the act, LaRoche would emerge from the sphere to reveal that he had in fact been propelling it by constantly shifting his center of gravity.”
And while I don’t want to imagine a two-foot steel ball containing an acrobat landing on someone’s finger, it feels like something that the juggling writer (who once compared himself, as a radio writer and reader, as a pharmacist of time, engaged in balancing minutes of this and that in the scales) might have come across and, loving everything that afforded objects the lively, active capacities he felt in them, incorporated it into a tale of a profession.
The patina, the mood: the hyperreal yellows and reds of cast phenolic, the milky faults in aging sheets of Acrilite, the light-deadening texture of Bakelite (which always looks like it’s in soft focus), the sharp gloss on translucent green casino dice, the glowing, single shade of the sky in 8-bit video games. The joy of the synthetic, the throwaway, paper dresses, artificial grass.
Reading Michelle Murphy’s Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty, about the development of contested medical/epidemiological categories like Sick Building Syndrome, “environmental illness,” and Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, with lots of interesting material on the history of office spaces, climate control, white- and pink-collar labor activism, and alternative medical practices. The problems of dealing with risk and damage in an environment where they were much harder to quantify — an office, that is, rather than a coal mine or a steel mill. Rather than a lost hand or a case of black lung, there were much more nebulous problems of toxicity, allergy, long-term exposure, reproductive damage, special cases. And I started thinking about Kafka. Kafka’s day job was at a worker’s comp insurance firm, a job he was devoted to; he developed the first civilian hard hat and put a lot of attention into improving safety practices in the lumber industry. It’s plausible that if he were alive today he’d be dealing with the kind of ambient, bio-technical unease that Murphy analyzes in office buildings … and doesn’t that seem somehow perfect? From that perspective, a story like “Der Bau,” “The Burrow,” with its air of vague, increasingly intense, intangible wrongness, seems like it could have sprung from the immediate experience of SBS. (It’s in the paint. It’s in the ventilation, the carpeting, your clothes, the disinfectants used in the bathrooms. Something’s wrong.)
Last night, LA and I went to a concert in honor of the centenary of Edvard Grieg’s death. He came to Aberdeen, once, and stayed in the Palace Hotel and walked around in the Union Terrace Gardens, watching the brass band. He never came back — the trip made him intensely seasick — but there’s something about the thought of him passing through that’s oddly haunting. The music spoke to a dream of northern-ness, Thule, dark days and impossibly bright and transitory summer nights, particularly an astonishing Oystein Rudi on the Hardingfele, the “Hardanger fiddle,” an instrument new to me, with resonant understrings that create a shivering, echoing sound.
Daydreaming about the Hardingfele somehow turns to another night out, Saturday, to see the final cut of Blade Runner. On the big screen, I noticed for the first time that Roy Batty has tattoos along his torso and arms: small geometric shapes, black triangles, circles, numbers. For no particular reason — though he was delivering his “shoulder of Orion” speech at that moment — I thought of them as astronaut’s tattoos, marking planets and stars and the Tannhäuser Gate, astronomical passages. Something in the inhospitable years of night reflected in the ink, and the northern dark I’ve always associated with whalers, with a fantasy of Queequeg’s many small squares mapping a life under Southern Cross and aurora borealis.
(“Stigmataphoron” is a thing bearing tattoo marks. Signs of passage.)
I mentioned how dry and pre-snow the air felt a few days back; it was intensely clear, as well, as though the air had been removed and some new and more precise medium, like the liquid used for detecting theoretical particles, put in its place, and things seen were intensely vivid.
That’s not the case anymore: the temperature rose, so rain instead of snow. The air is soft and full of smells again: the sea, the grass, the birches, diesel smoke, the granite and the cobbles.
On the way across Seaton Park last night, by the Don, I saw kayakers practicing at the river’s landing, which lies right where an island in the river begins, so they can string wire from a post on one bank to a tree on the bank opposite. Their coach had set up a light on a pole, like the kind you see at construction sites at night, and was powering it with a small generator. Something in the damp air seemed to make light thick and dreamy, and puff up the warmer colors, while keeping it contained: it didn’t travel very far. The lamp’s halogen brightness fell on the trunks of the trees on the river’s far side like the glow from a chandelier, and stopped there; the first few trunks were glowing and between them, even around their trunks, was perfectly black. So the kayakers, pulling away from the tiny dock, were at the bottom of a bowl of light, from the tree trunks, across the wires and the water, and up the bank to the lamp. The overall effect was bizarrely like that of a pocket theater, some dreamlike and fragile Cornell box. Or a stop on the river out of the world: dark before, dark behind, and here a little spot with people getting in and out of boats.
(Goethe, Hans Christian Andersen and Lewis Carroll all managed miniature theaters. And Walter Benjamin had a hashish fantasy of a house full of tiny, waxen figures: by changing the lighting and decor he would produce a history of the interior.)
A few days ago I learned the smell of snow — not the smell of a snowy landscape, that is, but the quality of the air that would lead Lucy to say “it smells like snow.” The key to the smell, I think, is how dry the air is. When I was a kid and going camping with my dad, I thought that quartz rocks in the hot sun were the driest things in the world: putting your hands on them seemed to suck the moisture from your skin. The smell of snow takes place in air with that feeling of rustling, mineral and inorganic dryness; each note in the air (salt from the sea, a little smoke everywhere because the smell of smoke carries so well in that air) is by itself, and displayed in this solitude as though in a block of solid Lucite. Things with dense and mingled scents seem very subdued, unable to move in this air, as soil underfoot and the mud of a riverbank seem not just cold but odorless on the day that smells like snow.
All of Paul Otlet’s extraordinary Traité de documentation online in PDF
“In the Christian version of Hippocratic theory, God had created man in the original Garden with all the foods and medicines he needed to keep him eternally in perfect health. But when Adam and Eve were expelled, these medicines and diseases were scattered throughout the world. Physicians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries hoped that with the discovery of America and Asia and Africa, all of these scattered medicines might be recollected in one place, the healing plants of the Old World reconciled with those of the New. So the garden would not just be a guide to philosophical contemplation, or to religious ecstasy, but in fact might be the basis for a new foundation for medicine.”
Richard Drayton, “The Origins of the European Botanical Garden,” in Cosmograms
In Glasgow. Statues. Iron suspension bridges lit with blue neon. Mackintosh touches all over the city: biomorphic iron squiggles in fencework and walls, long skinny rectangles of Art Nouveau stained glass assembled around a floral arc. The Mackintosh font, as sweetly awkward and top-heavy as a willow or one of the tall, rail-thin, phlegmatic men around here, who drape themselves over the wrought-iron fences and look into the narrow greensward with long, drooping faces while talking on their mobiles.
Did I mention statues? Every red sandstone building crawls: Poseidon. Italia. Minerva. Walter Scott, Robert Burns. James Watt, looking taciturn with his paper and compass, clearly a little annoyed that he’s at street level while some novelist is on a ten-meter plinth. Did steam count for nothing? Allegorical visions of prosperity, mercantile commerce, stonemasons and random angels and carytids hanging out on buildings like friends-of-friends at a party.
The river Clyde. Even the bedframe is metal. Leather couches in sweetly decrepit cafes, and lychees and plums from the Indian market eaten on the street in the misting rain. White radiators, coal scuttles, young women in the dominant look of the moment — colorful (teal or magenta) flat shoes, like leather slippers, and hose, boring skirts, and layers of shirts, jumpers, thin jackets on top, and a floppy hat like a mutant golf beret. Obelisks. Buildings canted and layered together.
Fantastic food, against all stereotypes. Cajun chicken baguettes, lentil soups, goat cheese ravioli. Working on The Paper and the Dissertation Test Chapter, drinking mocha, feeling very much alive.
So, there’s this interview on Ballardian in which Simon Reynolds talks about why J.G. Ballard and Brian Eno are “the two greatest British thinkers of the second half of the 20th century.” And he’s right. But this is a topic I run across all the time in my attempts at scholarship: there’s canonical figures, the recognized writers and thinkers who described an era to itself … and then there’s the people, often without proper academic or cultural credentials, who really got it, not just for their historical moment but for the future. Like the “stalkers” in the wonderful SF story Roadside Picnic (and Tarkovsky’s movie adaptation, Stalker), they know the covert pathways into the alien Zone that is the instantiation of the future in the present. If you trust them, they can take you there, but, like the Strugatskys’ and Tarkovsky’s Stalkers, sometimes they don’t make it back.
(Ancient and modern. One of the more interesting aspects of technology studies is the way you become aware of the different time scales running through your everyday life — the most contemporary tools and practices being designed to affordances and tolerances and habits that run back through seemingly-archaic practices to the urgrund of human anatomy and cognition. Like the work of Jaak Panksepp on dopamine and seeking behavior influencing video game designers, or — as Bruno Jacomy emphasizes in his wonderful L’Age du plip — the radio-frequency remote keyless entry device for your car (called, in French and onomatopoetically, “le plip”) sits on a ring with a car key, whose essential dentition was developed for the Yale lock in the mid-1800s, and perhaps a European housekey, whose outline goes back centuries.)
(The promise of Jon Hassell’s Fourth World was always that this technique could be pushed to extremes: the most ancient and most modern, warp and woof, a polychronic art.)
Since we’ve got no pictures, let’s have two little true stories about not having pictures.
Before Gutenberg got into the printing business, he manufactured pilgrim mirrors. About an inch across, pilgrim mirrors were made of glass with a handle of tin and lead. Sold at holy sites to pilgrims, you would hold the mirror up to the relic of a saint and the mirror would absorb the glory. You could then go home and show people the mirror which had beheld the relic. A camera with no film.
During the American Civil War, certain traders did a business in the rural towns from which soldiers were conscripted. The trader would bring a prop camera as a symbol of their work, and a case full of pre-printed tintypes, portraits of the faces of various men. You, the mother, sister, daughter, spouse, betrothed or lover of the soldier, would go to the tradesman with the fake camera. He would open the case, and you would select the tintype that most resembled the man you were about to lose. You would buy it to remember him by. And then he would die, of gangrene or artillery, at Antietam or Shiloh, and you have this image of some other guy who looked roughly like the one lost, higher cheekbones, maybe, a different nose — and the years go by and the one in your memory comes more and more to resemble the tintype. A camera whose pictures slowly substitute themselves for life.
Isotropic and heliotropic. Some plants are heliotropic; they follow the sun, turning their empetaled faces. (And tourists, who like photographers are hooked on light, love to go to the Heliotropics, where the shadows are deep and lush, the leaves and lips glossy, pearlescent.) Isotropic space: a place where movement in any direction is equally likely, over a smooth zero-impedance globe. I offer a discounted package tour to the Isotropics, where you can cultivate the direction-independent way of life, passing with a beautiful indifference through plazas, arcades and garages, steppes and sheets of sooty ice, ecstasy and dread and boredom and hangdog amusement without ever taking off your floral-print shirt or putting down the cocktail with the little umbrella in it.
A poem that Haley sent me by postcard months and months ago:
Mustard-oil light
maroon light
the light of a magnesium flare
light from a meteor
Evanescent light
ether
light from an electric lamp
an extra light
Light from a student-lamp
sapphire light
a shimmer
smoking-lamp light
Ordinary light
orgone illumination
light from a lamp burning olive oil
(Jackson Mac Low)
[Simone Weil was in my dream on Friday night; the previous time she appeared was in the Llanganates, in Ecuador, to tell me to go to EGS, which I later did. As in my previous dream, she was much happier than she was in life, for which she had a passionate, fiercely intelligent, and scornful attention. She wore what appeared to be a Mao jacket; she had a bowl cut and round-frame glasses. We were at a party, one of those big, cheap mid-70s New York parties, too many people crammed into the small white-walled rooms and open windows of somebody’s decaying apartment on the Lower East Side somewhere. The kind of party the Talking Heads might have come to after a set at CBGB’s. Simone was witty and sweet. She gave me an empty wine bottle (dark, almost opaque glass) from which the voice of Shelley Jackson spoke, very quietly, in fluting tones.]
Fragment. Nietzsche the cosmopolitan, the Good European who spoke bad French and worse Italian and never saw Paris or London or Prague or St. Petersburg … he meant to go to the International Exposition of Electricity in Paris but didn’t make it; if he had, he would have seen Edison’s name spelled out in electric lights. He longed for elsewhere, for “my children’s country,” a land — like Israel to Moses — that its prophet would not live to see. (He wrote to his sister Elisabeth that it might be better to miss your homeland than to live in it.) (As Erwin Rohde said of him, “It is as though he comes from a region inhabited by no one else.”)
He looked to gap of dissatisfaction, our failure to be content, our restlessness and unappeasable desires, as the point of escape from nihilism, from the unstrung bow that does not feel the richness of experience and of longing. His image: the hive that is overloaded with honey, beyond surfeit or abundance, a state of gratitude and generosity that exceeds any logic of calculation. A striving with no apparent lack to fill, as a new way of understanding living. Neediness is needed; his phrases, provocative, enigmatic, inspire in the reader the desire to understand that is Nietzsche’s point of resistance against boredom, despair, acedia. The pale criminal. The spirit of gravity. A prophet speaking to a cat. A science of joy. The eternal recurrence. The glacier exchanges its grey for roses, a tightrope is stretched from point to point, moonlight falls from one door through another.
He never traveled to America but he wrote about it, like Kafka.
In a letter to Lou Salomé, he sketched a fantasy of moving to Mexico. He had seen Oaxaca on a map in a library in (probably) Venice. He would go there, he would live, his health would come back; he would drink water that tasted like limestone, he would not be lonely, perhaps he would play dominos and start drinking coffee again. Rain in the courtyard. A dog sleeping by a door. The inn of the birds.
Vague as a dream, which it was, of course. But somehow we wish it were so. One can imagine him, in the last years before what was probably syphilis inevitably claimed him, a gringo as strange as a man fallen from the moon, working on that promised book on European nihilism, A Journey Among the Ruins, speaking bad Spanish and Nahuatl. Writing correspondence, a steel-nibbed pen, the sound of the Pacific outside.
When, on the 20th of March, 1995, the Aum Shinrikyo cult released sarin gas in the Tokyo subways — the worst attack on Japanese soil since the end of World War II — the society as a whole seemed to go into a kind of toxic shock. (I say all this, of course, as a gaijin outsider who only lived there a year and doesn’t speak the language.) Reading Murakami Haruki’s beautiful, gripping nonfiction book Underground, one has the impression of attacks that were the psychological equivalent of the megaquake that haunts the darker reaches of Japanese fiction: an eerie experience of permanent and violent national dislocation. You can never trust the ground beneath your feet for years afterwards. I remember the footage, the first time, and then the repeats when I was living in the country and the Asahara trial shuffled towards its verdict: the people laying faceup on the subway platforms, trying to breathe; the Aum followers, wearing metal headgear to keep in telepathic contact with Asahara, hauled kicking and screaming from their compound by the riot police …
Master documentarian Tatsuya Mori moves through that in thirty seconds. In a brilliant move, he starts his study of the inner world of the cult (which changed its name to Aleph, “A,” in 2000) a year after the attacks, when the first trials are beginning. He uses virtually no stock footage, no news: he stays tight on the daily life of the beleaguered core of true believers, unconnected with the attacks, who gave him unprecedented access. The only intrusion on straight handheld camera work and interviews are the occasional titlecards, which mark the passing months.
What this movie really documents isn’t the history of Aum (thoroughly studied already) but this crew of disciples and their almost unimaginably strange situation. Most of them seem like likable lost souls (“We seem to attract a lot of depressives,” one follower says), young people who’ve given up so much for their esoteric beliefs that every new setback becomes another test of faith. Hiroshi Araki emerges as the main character: a 28-year-old self-described “country bumpkin,” looking like a Japanese Bill Gates (complete with bowl haircut and big glasses), who finds himself as the PR flack for a universally despised terrorist death cult.
The documentary has an arc, about whether Araki will visit his ailing grandmother (part of Aum’s doctrine — like most radical religions, including early Christianity — demands separation from everyone outside “the order”). But this is a movie with value in the details: the sprinting packs of TV journalists, the cluttered war room where what remains of Aum prepares press conferences and tries to manage their coverage, the wack-job ultra-right protesters with megaphones, the homebuilt electrodes and taped prayer talks, the body-picket vigilantes, the piles of cult paraphernalia (at its peak, Aum had an estimated 40,000 members worldwide), the magical thinking — like the guys who think they expel bad karma through sores in their feet, or the disciple who recalls fish and birds congregating to hear Asahara speak.
It’s not a picture about sympathy for the devil. It’s a very simply made, strangely affecting study of the most isolated class of people in the world: the permanent temporal exiles who prepared for an apocalypse that never came.
The Marquis de Sade, convict, jurist, Jacobin turned bourgeois, and pornographer, was committed by his family to an insane asylum in 1803, at the age of 63. While there, he wrote plays, historical romances, a history of the Albigensian Crusade, and a text called The Days at Florbelle that took up 200 notebooks. This last was burned, along quite a lot of his other papers, at the request of his son. Literature, in all honesty, probably didn’t lose much — these weren’t the journals of Lord Byron consigned to the flames, but apparently a reconstruction and expansion of the libertine concentration camp de Sade first established in 120 Days of Sodom.
Jesus Ignacio Aldapuerta, born in Seville in 1950, wrote violently confrontational Sadean fiction. He died in a house fire in 1987. However, there is a small subcircle within those who are familiar with him, who hold (basing their claim on rumored sightings and inconsistencies in dental records) that his lover’s body was taken from the smoking wreckage of the apartment. Aldapuerta, so their version goes, is living in Peru (or Chile, or Argentina), where he has dedicated himself to recreating The Days at Florbelle.
Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch — pacifist, Darwinist, popular journalist, Schopenhauerian pessimist — is now almost entirely remembered for a single story, Venus in Furs, the suprasensual (his term) love story of Severin and Wanda, which stands as the working definition of masochism. It’s a chip from a mosaic, though, out of context: Sacher-Masoch had embarked on a cycle, The Heritage of Cain, an epic of the ruination and perversion of Western civilization by men in love with control. It was to be written in six books, six stories apiece. In 1895, he was committed to an asylum (the public, at his family’s request, was told that he died, a confusion that persists to this day; he died in 1905), leaving the project unfinished. It was —
Love [completed]
Property [completed]
The State
War
Work
Death
We thus await the last faked death, that someone can reconstruct and complete Cain, even as Aldapuerta is presumably now at work on Florbelle, to the sound of pigeons in the eaves.
A recent encounter with long-missed friend, photographer John Flournoy brought to mind Giorgio Agamben’s meditation on photography and the end of the world. That’s him in the middle, above, talking to Tombie Rautenbach. (Julian Semilian, whom I miss every time I drop a glass or buy roses, is gazing off to the right.) The picture was taken — I don’t know who by — in August of 2005 at EGS.
What Agamben says in seminar, possibly the day the picture was taken, is to look at one of the first photographs of a person, Louis Daguerre’s 1838 exposure from his window over the Boulevard du Temple. It’s a famous photograph, partially for its secret: the street was actually crowded, but due to the long exposure time of Daguerre’s process, the only person visible is a guy who stopped to get a shoeshine.
Agamben is on the topic of closure: when is something finished? What is potential, and the potential to continue? Roland Barthes famously looked to photography for the “effect of the real,” the quality that something was there, something happened then; he took it to be of the past in the Latin sense, perfectum, utterly finished. Agamben, beautifully, paradoxically, begins to argue the contrary: human time, the time of memory and the experience of hope, constellates the past and the future with the present. Photography participates in memory, and memory is about the unfinishedness of the past — whether its reenactment, its latent possibilities for current action (a promise, a grudge, an open space), or its endless neurotic return.
He goes further, though. He establishes a kernel of deep temporal experience in the idea of Messianic time — from Judaic theology by way of Scholem and Benjamin: that at any given moment the Messiah might return, and that this return, the beginning of the reign of justice, would give possibility back to the past; every closed case, suppressed voice, and banished people, “all that has been lost, forgotten, or has been thrown into the sea,” will be opened, remembered, and heard. Agamben takes out his saw and gauze and performs a daring graft before our eyes, the branch of one tree onto the trunk of another: the proper time of photography is this day of judgment, the opening of the universal court, the very last day.
Not “something was there,” but something is like it will be on the last day. In its saved form.
In the work of Gris, says Benjamin, quoted by Agamben in the seminar room, characters are often represented in a gesture, the gesture they will have in the last day. It is what reproduces them, what will represent them. It can be the most ordinary, instantaneous gesture.
See Daguerre’s photograph of the Boulevard, Agamben continues. This is the image of the end, the man frozen getting his shoes shined: the crowd is there, but you are the one judged, the only one, and in this utterly normal moment.
It is not simply this-was-there, but something more: that this person was unforgettable.
Raising the flap on the pinhole camera, Agamben lets a single beam of light fall on the film inside, a ray from the last moment. As Kafka taught us, the Messianic ETA, because it could come at any time and will telescope all of history when it does, is always happening; there is a parallel court which is permanently in session. These photographs of ordinary gestures are entered as evidence that these people were unforgettable.
I realized a few days ago that I didn’t need a camera, for a weirdly demographic reason: When I go to an event, or even a place, I can rely on strangers to take pictures of it and post them. Sometimes I’m even in the pictures, by chance, mostly in the background. I’m an 18-36 white, middle class, college-educated G8-country-citizen with a geeky sensibility, and that’s a demo that’s saturated with digital cameras, and they all post to Flickr or Photobucket, and because demography is (creepily) destiny, we tend to do similar things. I love the cafe Nova Express (near Beverly and Fairfax here in LA), and so I have some snapshots of it taken by other people. I go to Machine Project for the MIDI Challenge, and here are my pictures of it, taken by somebody else. Tagging and searching makes my default demographic into a big, distributed camera.
Stranger still, somehow, is the continuous feed of snaps from lost lives. There’s several distinct breaks in my life, and I miss people from all of them, but now I have the kind of snapshots I would have shot (though mine would be more out-of-focus and underexposed, probably) were I still there. I have a phantomatic camera that records every late night I’d be spending with Chieko or Eri or Edzart or Niilo + Brianna, Rick + Marissa, Tomo, Matt, Tag, Mika, Josh, Alex, Aart, Emmie, were life not the way it is.
From J.G. Ballard’s Super-Cannes: “He gestured to the surveillance camera: ‘Think of it as a new kind of togetherness.’”
The disguise of the human signature, the aspects of humanity that can be identifying and therefore dangerous — like the enlarging market for thermal suppression, technologies that mask the heat signature of a living mammal and hide it from the infrared sensors of augmented soldiers and unmanned military drones. The alteration of biological attributes that have become liabilities.
There is already a new physio-technical practice of learning to walk differently in response to gait recognition. The human stride is a very distinct biometric, and primitive software already exists that sorts for gait patterns by security camera. (It’s being partially funded by DARPA, of course.) In the biometrics-surveillance field, it’s popular because — to quote the excellent “Gait Recognition Final Report” (PDF file) from the Imperial College in London — it can be done unobtrusively, from a distance, with low resolution, and is “difficult to conceal.” Concealment methods are already being explored, though — in clothing and shoes, particularly, but also in covert gait training. You have to teach yourself to walk like someone else, or like many others.
Of course, this is just a more modern form of a range of criminal practices, from fake moustaches to bloody, primitive cosmetic surgery and homebrew acid mixtures to burn the fingerprints off of hands … but think of all the other signatures to which our sensors have become sensitive — “chatter” (the rhythm and community mapped by signals exchange), keywords, voice recognition, facial biometrics, pheremones, patterns of consumption and taste. So we change our patterns, all the aspects of the human sphere, the lived world, our habits and habitat. We communicate face-to-face, speak through muffled phones, cultivate private slang, keep everything vague, change hairstyles and clothes, transact in cash, burn the paperwork, keep no routines. If you do not want to be seen, wild irregularity becomes a survival trait. (There were a couple of very well-designed assassination plots against Hitler. They were put together by competent people close to him. They failed largely because he maintained an irregular schedule: he wouldn’t show up at an event he was to appear at, going somewhere else instead; when he did show, he always came either early or late, and almost always left before he was supposed to.)
This is what distinguishes disguise from camouflage. Disguise is the addition or subtraction of prominent elements, like a wig or an eye color. Camouflage hides shapes by generating hints of many other possible shapes: it fills the visual field with a specialized type of noise. Different types (and camo is, to a unique degree, an ecologically-specific visual form), like alpenflage, palm frond, MOUT, and flecktarn, are full of the ragged bits of things other than a human profile that might be in that place. Camouflage is DPM, disruptive pattern material.
Camo was first developed to hide the human body from scrutiny from the air; it came into being as a kind of portable landscape at the moment that landscape itself began its decline as a form of visual protection. In fact, camo reached its early success in the creation of fake countryside to hide military installations (the case of Solomon J. Solomon, who, in 1918, became convinced that much of the countryside of Flanders was an elaborate fake).
But optic domination from the air is old news now. (I live in Los Angeles, where helicopters, low-flying aircraft, and the networked cameras of ATSAC and the TAC make the atmosphere almost chime with visual intelligence.) The current culture of surveillance is all about signals, distributed systems, databases and data-mining, low-fidelity and always on. What is the new camouflage for this? The generation of hints of many other possible people, with names, families, intentions, purchasing patterns, gaits, tics, ways of life. A thick cloud, like radar-fooling chaff, of other people who exist only at this moment or that of passing into the continuous stream of surveilled signals that rushes through every life. Everyone who wants or needs to remain covert becomes a walking Victorian novel of alternate types and personalities … hiding, somewhere, in the noise. Camouflage for an era of crowds.
The communist Shakers of Mt. Lebanon held all property in common, making traditional gift-giving an impossibility. Rather, they celebrated holidays by giving spiritual objects, sometimes in the form of drawings: “Trumpets of Joy.” “Chains of Gold.” “Anchors of Safety.” “Gems of the Morning.” The community so gifted was a tree of shining leaves.
The Ephrata of eighteenth-century Pennsylvania took their poems and hymns, which were based on the imagery of the most poetic Hebrew scriptures, as offerings to one another as well as God: “Zionitic incense” was the name for these gifts. The Ephrata, the “community of the Solitary,” shared with rural, religious woodcarving sects like the Viet Stoss a conviction that wood, the stuff of the Ark of the Covenant, was a holy material; their structures, Saal and Saron, were made entirely of wood — nails, hinges, doorknobs, utensils, the sacramental cup …
Some of Yoko Ono’s art, based around instructions and imagination, came from her childhood experience of starving in wartime Japan, when she and her brother would “exchange menus in the air,” gifting each other with fantasmatic banquets: conceptual foods, made of ice, water lilies, rice, butterflies. She gives us instructions for wrapping our gifts of Trumpets of Joy and Ladders of Sand: “Deep in the woods, tape the sound of snow falling. This should be at evening. Cut up the tape and use it as ribbon for gifts.”
“Pull the curtains to the sill,
Darken the rooms, cut all the wires.
Crush the embers as they fall
From the dying fires:
Things are not going well.”
On Monday, July 18th, 1955, poet, writer, filmmaker Weldon K. made two phone calls. The following day his car was found abandoned on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge, keys in the ignition. His apartment was searched: the wallet, watch, and sleeping bag were gone. No note. No body was found. He was survived by his cat, Lonesome.
Anton Giulio Bragaglia raised a large tent, and built a cloth-walled labyrinth in it. He invited the spectators in at night, and pursued them on a motorcycle.
