Life On Uranus

Right now, American political discourse is enjoying some sort of metaphysical afterlife along with God and Punk. It’s been dead for quite some time now, but only in this current election has the stench become so obvious. Much can be said about how mass media (I won’t say bourgeois media) has transformed (I won’t say eviscerated) political discourse, in terms of how it is owned and funded by the capitalist class, or how it forces passive consumption of news and issues, or how it limits debate within ideological boundaries, or how it has privatized a traditionally public sphere of debate, yada yada… but this is a whole other story.

I started writing this post because I hate the feeling I get after watching election debates. There is an overwhelming sense of futility in paying attention to the debate itself because, ultimately, the quality of the arguments don’t matter. This is why I’ve been drinking straight Jack during the debates. It’s not about who wins the debate, but who wins the American Idol performance contest. The debates are more of a casting call. In the same way, voters don’t elect a person for president, but the image of a person. What interested me is how now, more than ever, the language of a candidate’s debate performance is informed by the debate’s visual medium of presentation. The performance game is becoming more like a screen test. Take the Vice Presidential debate, which many have called a “stalemate”, even though Sarah Palin barely managed to deliver completely unrelated memorized tidbits in response to Biden’s charges. Rhetorically, it was quite an absurd event. But those conservative people reacted to her, because she actually spoke to the American people. Unlike Biden, who looked at his opponent or the moderator, Palin had her eyes right on the Camera. She smiled and winked. It was like watching an infomercial… and we know how infomercials can convince us to buy just about anything. In that sense, Palin’s screen language was successful, she was a trained beauty queen.

So what about yesterday’s debate between Obama and McCain? I venture to say that Obama outperformed McCain during the screen tests. Whenever Obama watched McCain answer a question, he reminded me of this video of Frank Sinatra and Tom Jobim:

I was struck by Frank Sinatra’s body language: how he fondles a cigarette, leans back on his chair, smokes, and opens his chest with nonchalance. Meanwhile, Tom Jobim, leaning over his guitar, strums the songs he composed, humming and and singing in portuguese while Sinatra takes a drag of his cigarette. Although Sinatra provided the face, the voice, and the image; Jobim was the engine, well attuned to Sinatra’s nicotine rhythm. Take a look at these two-shots of Barack during last night’s debate:

I would say that Obama embodied both Sinatra and Jobim, both the cool and the rhythm. Obama attentively watched and smiled, but he didn’t lean back on his chair as the smug Sinatra did, he was poised for attack, ready to jump in. McCain on the otherhand, scuttled around, scribbled, fidgeted and compressed his face. Look at the two-shots in the video below:

Compared to Obama’s height advantage and more youthful fluidness, McCain appears more like an angry troll. His referring to Obama as “that one” was so poorly delivered, that McCain came off as a petulant teenager. To top things off, the debate ended with McCain leaving an Obama handshake hanging center screen.

So what does this reading amount to? Not much. This debate can only help Obama’s rise in national and state polls. Voting in the US has devolved into a choice between brand names instead of policy positions, too many voters relate to candidates as abstracted images of themselves, in the same way consumers choose designer labels to complement their self-image. At least, my reading attaches some semblance of a methodology in assessing these image-people. Which may be enough to calm my earlier frustration and occupy me until the Jack drains away.

- s

Many visitors liken São Paulo to an organism, with its cinder and cement follicles and thick avenues pumping grit, labor and oil. They call it a city of indigestion. But I disagree with that metaphor, for its notion of specificity, of traceable limits. São Paulo is more like a metaphysical trick, a cinematic trick, in which all its images are strikingly similar and unmistakably unique. Its streets branch randomly –almost absurdly— in nervous patterns, so that the routes in between images, its guiding algorithms, coalesce in my mind as dreams do.

And what are the textures of such dreams? The dusty pallor of concrete laid flat against the grey-blue-yellow sky opaque like construction paper… the murky rivers soaking up tattered metallurgical hopes, chemical memories, the heavy consciences of industry… the hues of dilapidation, rotting tiles, human mold, and the sweat of modernization: the marbled shanty skins of the outskirts… the collage of cars, their European visages and monogamous colors, under languishing traffic lights, and delivery boys on cheap Japanese motor bikes weaving through automotive fabric, buzzing like infernal wasps… the facades of bakeries, shops, and boutiques arranged as delicate elements in a composition… I remember all these images and their subtitles, air sprayed on the margins of edifices, sometimes even speaking the language of commercials.

I remember the flux of people, day laborers, executives, children selling peanuts at intersections, young girls in shopping centers, old women browsing fruit markets, football games in courtyards, tumultuous bars and restaurants, and the over-arching dissonance of sighs and voices seeking respite… it was night, cool and crisp. I saw the trail of street lights curve down a hill like an elegant glowing necklace. I remember meeting a girl whose eyes were faded green like frozen grass and vibrant yellow like the bands of a yellow jacket. Her name was Patricia, every Wednesday she walked to an evangelical church to pick up a free basket of provisions for her two parents, four brothers, two sisters and three grandparents. I remember how my ears swelled, my eyes burned and reddened, and my throat inflated like a phlegmatic balloon.

“That’s not change, that’s just calling some of the same something different. But you know, you can put lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig.”

- Democratic Presidential Nominee, Barack Obama

These comments by the Illinois Senator set liberals a’clappin and the McCain Campaign a’cryin “Sexism”, “Sarah Palin ain’t no piggie!”. Of course, the bourgeois media quickly took up this vapid discourse, even though Barack was talking about the McCain campaign, and the Republican nominee himself said the same thing about Hillary Clinton’s health care proposals. But is that quote actually calling Sarah Palin a pig, in light of her RNC speech?

As I wrote in my last post, the humor of Sarah Palin’s “lipstick” joke revolves around implying sameness through a superficial non-difference. In the case of the joke, the non-difference and the punchline was “lipstick”. Considering the structure of Sarah Palin’s joke, the signifiers of “Sarah Palin” were the words “Hockey Mom” and “Pitbull”. The “lipstick” was merely the non-differentiating agent, and Palin’s joke in no way implies that lipstick is unique and essential to either Hockey Moms or Pitbulls. Therefore, the notion that Sarah Palin was called a pig is utterly false. If that notion were true, that would also imply that anything wearing lipstick is Sarah Palin: Vultures, Rabbits, Shirt Collars, Tetris, Tugboats, etc.

If anything, Obama’s quip reinforces the idea of sameness that Palin was coyly pushing. In that case, any equivalence between the two jokes lies in their rhetorical usage rather than their signifiers. Obama’s quote is a scathing critique of Sarah Palin’s rhetoric, jabbing at the pretention of differentation. Even if you are convinced that the Obama quote referred to the Sarah Palin identity (although the context implicates the McCain Campaign’s borrowing of the “change” motif), Obama wasn’t saying “Sarah Palin is a pig”, but rather “Sarah Palin is full of shit”.

- s

“You know what they say is the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick.”

- Republican Vice-Presidential Nominee Sarah Palin

This unscripted quip by the Alaska Gov’ner and VP Nom drew cheers at the RNC and punning headlines all throughout the media. Not that I’m one to take anything a politician says seriously, but this impromptu joke is worth some critical assessment, not because I’m trying to prove anything about Sarah Palin, but because I think the joke isn’t funny.

Let’s begin with the speaker. I imagine that Sarah Palin was looking to bolster her own aggressiveness within the context of maternal responsibility, more vulgarly, she was going for the “I’m a hot bitch and a small town mom at the same time” impression. What better way to do this, than witha a punchline? Within the context of the speech, the joke came as she was transitioning from the nowhere USA working class credentials, to the political resume. She wanted to spice it up with the notion that the fight (rather than the flight) is essential to her.

The humor of the joke lies in paradox between the superficiality and uniqueness of the stated difference. Because the joke is all about “differences”, the sameness that it actually conveys becomes masked. Sarah Palin was just a shade of grey away from saying “Mothers are bitches”. The phrasing of the joke seeks to shift the responsibility of the content away from the speaker with a downright sophism, hence the “they say”. Sarah Palin doesn’t actually say “mothers are bitches” (although she does), they do. The anonymity of the source is as much a projection of self as it is an affirmation of content.

Then there are the terms chosen:

“Hockey Mom” - a media-fabricated label for white bourgeois women. According to Slate, the median income for Hockey Moms is around twice the national average. On the “Mom” scale, being a soccer mom is a step below, since youth soccer leagues tend to be cheaper and filled with minorities of all shapes and smells.

“Pit bull” - a domesticated dog that’s a breed of a bulldog and a terrier. Since they are tough, sturdy dogs, they have been used for ranching, hunting, rescuing, as well as cocaine sniffing. Pit bull’s have recently gotten bad press, they are used in illegal dog-fights and have been known to kill babies. Wikipedia states that “with guidance from its handlers, [Pit bulls] are obedient and show a high desire to please. However, when left without direction they can become stubborn and may become aggressive”.

“Lipstick” - although it’s been around since ancient Mesopotamia, most people associate lipstick with its modern form, that is, as a commodity that enhances superficial appearances.

Given Palin’s motivation, these qualifiers are rather odd. First, there is the choice of “Hockey Mom” rather than “Mom” (a term that’s profoundly universal). A Black mother of two in Alabama and a Orthodox Jewish mother of eight in Williamstown don’t fit the qualifier, unless their kids play hockey. They are excluded from this representation of toughness, determination, etc. Then there is the “Pit bull”… Sure, people think pit bulls are “badass” or whatever, but they are domesticated animals designed to be subservient to their masters. That Sarah Palin chose a small domesticated animal over a wild one (Bear! Tiger! Penguin!) is telling. It’s also interesting that Pitbulls aren’t even a pure breed, they are a cross. They bear the indignity of design (essence preceding existence). Finally, there’s the “lipstick” punchline. Considering the mechanism of the joke, “lipstick” carries the weight of “the difference” between white woman and domesticated animal. It’s interesting that she chose “lipstick”, a symbol for female superficiality, a commodity fetish. For the punchline, Sarah Palin could have pointed to her breasts and said “these” (although she was at the RNC), or she could have said “chap stick” (a more poetic choice), or “birth control” (but she’s evangelical), or any number of things… So what does this all add up to?

“You know what they say is the difference between a bourgeois white mother and a domesticated animal? Lipstick.”

Probably the reason why I didn’t care for the joke isn’t that Sarah Palin says she’s a bitch, but that she’s someone’s bitch. She manages to convey both bourgeois entitlement and a dehumanized submission. All with reductive and dehumanizing qualifiers. The way the media is treating Sarah Palin, and it’s own sexist treatments is an issue unto itself. What bothers me about Sarah Palin isn’t that she’s a religious conservative, or that she’s inexperienced or slightly fascist, or that I would rather die than have her as my mother… She’s bound to the paradox of a woman with a pregnant teenage daughter who flies around with a special-needs baby about to be born and returns to work three days after its birth, that’s to say, a woman who forsakes being a human mother to being a political mother… Surely, she’s entitled to seek political office while raising five kids (more power to her!). She also happens to think that she’s entitled to everyone’s reproductive rights and to ban books, but that’s another matter… What bother’s me about Sarah Palin is that she seems to be nothing more than strategic advertisement for the McCain campaign, down to the Juno-esque pregnancy and the snowmobile racing husband. She chose to become an image, a commercial. You can argue the same for Barack Obama, although I find him a much more compelling image because of its historical implications.

If Sarah Palin had been a reincarnation of Descartes, she would have probably said:

“You know what they say is the difference between a bourgeois white mother and a domesticated animal? Reason.”

Whether she wanted to or not, Sarah Palin touched on an essential question. What separates us from animals? This summer, I read “The Lives of Animals” by J.M. Coetzee. In it, a fictional character named Elizabeth Costello gives a rather radical lecture about animal rights at a university. What interested me most about her arguments was the refutation of the Cartesian argument that reason separates us from animals. This notion of reason is unprovable. Testing the “intelligence” of animals with mazes and puzzles, only forces them to think the basic thoughts we want them to, such as “how the fuck do i get to my food?”. A more essential thought would be “why am I here?”, “why has this scientist taken me from my home?” or “how do I make him return me to my home?”, which is harder to prove, if at all possible (Kafka wrote a great short story about this). It’s just an absurd methodology as if we threw people in a jungle and see how well they “reasoned” things out. That we are different from animals is so obvious to us, yet so hard to pinpoint. A classical Marxist would say that Sarah Palin’s joke has truth to it, if it’s spun properly. That is, if “lipstick” were taken to mean a totality of social processes rather than a fetish. Marx believed that the difference between us and animals was in the fact that animals at most collect while men produce. While, I think this thought goes in a good direction, it’s not an entirely satisfying answer… What about language? Or society? How would this be tested given the complex and variable relationship between self and environment…

I digress… all this for a joke? you may ask. It’s only a fucking joke!

Yeah… i guess.

- s

There is much talk within film scholarship about the complicit passivity of audiences… Complicit in that the audience’s eyes aligns with the camera’s gaze, and passive in that the alignment (the images on the screen) and its direction doesn’t at all care for the audience’s agency. In a sense, watching a film is like stepping into a different world -or better yet, like taking a guided tour of another world. Stanley Cavell talks about how there is a moment of awakening after a movie ends, the audiences realigns with reality. Walter Benjamin likens the aesthetic experience of film to that of architecture. While it seems that film theorists like to talk about the passive audience as if it’s a “film thing”, something similar can be said about audiences at a classical music concert (just try coughing during one!) or even at a play. The big danger with this whole logic, is when it begins assuming that observers are essentially passive. Such an assumption belies a Eurocentric tradition of a non-participatory audience, where they can aspire to be, at most, loud tomato-throwing critics without any bearing on the course of what they are observing. In all this, different traditions are obscured. A notable exception to this entire passive audience talk is “the Maccabean Theater”.

The Maccabees were a Jewish fundamentalist terrorist organization seeking to liberate the holy land from the foreign occupation of the Greek empire-state (well, the Seleucid Dynasty). They were ultimately successful and today they are mostly known for two Apocryphal books and a surprisingly effective energy sustainability policy (even though they blew all the energy saved on a party). Little is known about “the Maccabean Theater”, probably because it wasn’t an actual theater. The Maccabean Revolt was as much of a struggle against an occupying empire as it was a civil war between Jewish Nationalist and Jewish Hellenists. Violence against the Hellenists was widespread, it was so common that it gave birth to a curious tradition. Maccabean fighters began rounding up Hellenists on an elevated platform, forcing them to act out their profane gentile rituals, utter prayers, and prepare offerings. As the captive Hellenists acted as they were told to, the Maccabees would shoot arrows and throw spears at the actors. Some would even rush up to the platform, bloodthirsty sword in hand. These performance ritual were also cleansing rituals, fervent homages to the High Priest Phineas (Pinchas). They grew in popularity and became more and more elaborate. The forced reenactment of rituals evolved into the forced reenactment of histories and mythologies. Thus was the “Maccabean Theater” born, a theater of sentencing, a theater of judgment and execution.

Unlike the Roman gladiators, who were mere spectacles, the Maccabean Theater reached a brief peak before the newly liberated Jewish theocracy ushered its decline. None exemplified the apex of the Maccabean Theater better than Zedekiah the Danite. While many question the historicity of Zedekiah, reasoning that he represented a small amorphous collective movement, his projects sought to elevate the performance purges to a different level. Zedekiah often crafted his own reenactments, binary morality tales based on Jewish struggles. He created a reenactment of Book of Esther where all the captives played Haman. There’s evidence that suggests that Zedekiah even trained some captives to act, as the more capable actors were often killed last to greater general enthusiasm. Zedekiah reasoned, that if the audience were to play G-d’s will and punishment, the reenactments shouldn’t simply be some glorified shooting gallery. There must be a dynamic between the audience and the actors. So Zedekiah the Danite began toying with sympathetic gentile characters (how much longer will the divine arm let this sinner live?), but then he wanted to take a step further. He imagined an opulent Passover pageant, in which the story would change according to the death of each captive. This task was harder than imagined, since a vast array of plot permutations had to be planned and rehearsed. Zedekiah would have also required captives with significant acting experiences, capable of memorizing all possible outcomes and improvising smooth transitions, as a captive never really knew when the “Will of G-d” would smite again. The historical record doesn’t indicate whether Zedekiah’s plans ever came to fruition, although it’s said that one time, as a big finger to Hellenic culture, Zedekiah staged a minor comedy by Menander.

With the liberated Jewish state and the decline of heretical crimes, the Maccabean Theater became less about killing the actors and more about letting the better actors live. Crowds began sparing the better performers before killing off the inferior ones. Once the Romans took over, even the hands-on killing started to cease, as the Roman state usurped the state’s judicial power of execution, and death by stoning made a rollicking comeback among smaller religious courts. By then, the performance rituals forsook plots and stories, to become a kind of holiday variety show, where the most popular captive criminal act would be spared execution. Such was the case when Jesus Christ competed against Barabbas one Passover morning (a detail the gospels poorly address). By choosing a majestic silence over the actor’s craft, Jesus was promptly dispatched to the nailing yard, while the thief Barabbas was set free (according to Luke, Barabbas beat out not only Jesus but two others).

While largely forgotten, the Maccabean Theater of Judgment does have some spiritual children of sorts. The concept of torture as theater is probably more common than it’s been in awhile, thanks mostly to the Bush administration, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo Bay. It’s in no way limited to post-9/11 politics. Take, for example, the shitty Korean movie Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, or Jean-Pierre Meville’s 1969 masterpiece Army of Shadows. But I think what best inherits the tradition of the Maccabean God-audience is the current fad of judge based reality TV shows, such as American Idol, or the one with the fashion designing cooks. The audience retains a faint semblance of Maccabean empowerment. The leap from Zedekiah the Danite to American Idol is certainly long, but as any good Czarist would attest: the Jews own the media.

- s

…

sitting by the shore,
a generic fisherman
craves a cigarette

..

three splashing children
reinvent themselves as shapes
they once saw on screen

..

a mother, reading
paperback, anticipates
the next rendezvous

..

a boy, eyes grinning,
unwraps a milky way bar
- first time shoplifting

..

watching other kids
play, a lone girl swears to guard
the secret of eels

..

lovers in the shade
make up names for babies
they would never have

..

“What democracy?”
a man points and demands, as
his audience yawns

..

on the grass, a stoned
poet writes the tragedy
that all ice cubes share

..

a pensive woman
counts dragonflies, tracing the
limits of language

..

an old man, strolling,
recalls a Greek bakery
with last night’s hunger

..

students picnic, pour
boxed wine into plastic cups.
laughing, they forget

..

among the bushes,
an exuberant jimmy
urinates proudly

..

a tanned vagabond
ties down his whimpering dog
then goes for a dip

..

the water report:
pH slightly alkaline
with traces of lead

..

overlooking the
lake, she informs me: no one
can see us at all

…

Everyone just loves the new Batman movie. After only two weekends in theaters, The Dark Knight is the #1 movie of all time according to imdb members. Critics have been gushing with glowing reviews (though the New Yorker or A.O. Scott beg to differ). The movie’s success is evident, it is the fastest to gross over $300 million domestically. Heath Ledger is even generating Oscar buzz… but with all the hype aside, the best I can say of The Dark Knight is that it’s a “superior superhero movie”, which is pretentious-filmspeak for “the hype’s total bullshit”.

The “superior superhero movie” qualifier should be elaborated. The Dark Knight features a very competent cast with a remarkable Heath Ledger to go along with a cool chase, some neat cat-and-mouse scenes, and some Stygian Gotham atmospherics. Seeing it on an IMAX screen is definitely and all-encompassing (and loud) experience. What’s interesting about Dark Knight (and what everyone fawns over) is how it questions the superhero genre itself within a “post 9/11″ context. But that’s all it does. It questions and questions and questions as loudly and succinctly at every possible moment. Writers Cristopher and Jonathan Nolan bring up just about every liberal post 9/11 talking point: Torture! Wiretapping! Due Process! Just let the Joker make a phone call! All of this makes for a story that’s richer than usual. Only all these hot-button topics dissipate as Batman does what the genre invariably tells him to do.

The dissipation problem is more than thematic. The movie frantically weaves in and out of scene without giving each a sense of cohesion or closure. As a result, scenes with dramatic potential get the same slap and dash treatment as unnecessary exposition. There’s an entirely absurd Hong-Kong mission where Batman comes off like some glorified American James Bond. In spite of all the razzle dazzle, the final confrontation between Batman and Joker reminded me of a time I went flaccid during intercourse. You’d imagine that a $185 million dollar budget would afford some script editors… But no… Even Two-Face’s little coin flipping trick is a pallid replica of Anton Chiguhr’s.

I have always had issues with superhero movies. I just can’t accept a superhero world and the myth of exceptionalism that the genre bases itself on. In the proud American tradition, the superhero world presupposes a simple good versus evil polarity, which The Dark Knight questions without betraying the assumption. The superhero itself is equally problematic. A superhero is the sublimation of the human entity into a weapon, into an instrument of order and security. The apotheosis of the superhero requires that the individual leave behind his real identity in order to become an abstracted citizen, a symbol of a man, an image (The Dark Knight uses all the batman imitators to briefly toy with this idea). As a symbol, the superhero is essentially a fetishism. In the case of Bruce Wayne, whose “superpower” is his wealth, he spins amazing technologies out of thin air, a batmobile here, a wire-tapping infrastructure there… as if Batman and Lucius Fox built it all themselves. No one expects a superhero movie to discuss labor. After all, the superhero must be divorced from his material reality to be super. Such distinction is clearly only allotted to the exceptional, while all other hard-working citizens must depend on this symbolic exception.

Just as Batman is a symbol, so is the Joker. They mirror each other (another idea that the movie brings up to little consequence). That the Joker is the most compelling character in The Dark Knight attests both to an incredible performance by Heath Ledger and to the staleness of the other “human” characters. The Joker is a non-entity. Unlike Batman, he has no human context, no mask, only a grotesquely painted facade, making his unmotivated acts of destruction all the more palatable for its symbolism. The Dark Knight becomes the Joker’s movie. He gives the best lines, diabolically catalyzes most of the action, and brings Batman’s entire moral universe into question. Is Batman doing more harm than good? Has he brought Gotham down a road of no return? Perhaps this will be answered in the third installment. But by the end of The Dark Knight, even the Joker becomes problematic.

The problem is not that the Joker’s acts of destruction are a symbolic challenge, but that the movie insists that the Joker is a terrorist… After the movie, I remembered Baudrillard’s “The Spirit of Terrorism”:

This is the spirit of terrorism. Never is it to attack the system through power relations. This belongs to the revolutionary imaginary imposed by the system itself, which survives by ceaselessly bringing those who oppose it to fight in the domain of the real, which is always its own. But (it) moves the fight into the symbolic domain, where the rule is the rule of challenge, of reversal, of escalation. Thus, death can be answered only though an equal or superior death. Terrorism challenges the system by a gift that the latter can reciprocate only through its own death and its own collapse.

As exceptional symbols, both Batman and the Joker enjoy a quasi-omnipresence and an unlimited supply of resources. Although Batman has everything money can build at his disposal, the Joker uses real, functional structures (the domain of labor). In using these structures, the Joker becomes a truck driver, a nurse, a soldier -and always a terrorist. Therefore the Joker, the symbol of unmotivated chaos, the non-entity, is also the symbol of terrorism. And as such a symbol, terrorism becomes depoliticized, it is no longer a reaction against the dominant order or calculated political violence. It is reduced to being evil, to being the unreasonable and unmotivated desire “to watch the world burn”, and to being only vincible with weapons or superheroes.

This new batman movie posits fundamental questions about itself, and for a second, the entire superhero framework appears absurd. But that’s only for a second. Maybe these limitations are placed by the genre. How much of Batman would the studio’s allow to be deconstructed, torn from its roots and set on fire?If I ever decide to make my own superhero movie, I want to create a dashing hero experiencing all sorts of superhero adventures, blowing all sorts of shit up… there’ll be chaos and destruction… but at the end, the superhero confronts an angry mass… guerrillas? workers? students? only to be swarmed and killed, dismembered, torn apart. The antithesis of the American-brand exceptionalism: the “super power” of the collective.

- s

Fassbinder’s fabulous 1981 film “Lola“, tells the story of a small town singer/hooker (Fassbinder lifted the premise from “The Blue Angel” starring Marlene Dietrich), who goes after a reserved and untainted building commissioner after a corrupt contractor (and lover) remarks that the new commissioner is “no man for her”. By seducing the commissioner, Lola is reacting against social exclusion and oppression by seeking to affirm her “true value” through the melodramatic vehicle of “true love”. Granted, Lola and the commissioner fall in love and get married, but Fassbinder is perverse at heart. During the last scenes, the corrupt contractor buys a short honeymoon with the freshly married Lola by giving her the whorehouse she worked in as a wedding present. “You’re an expensive mistress”, the contractor quips. “That’s how it should be”, retorts Lola.

The big irony of the film is that Lola’s successful quest to reaffirm her worth amounts to a mere increase in exchange value. Lola just became more expensive, that is her empowerment.

In the new issue of “American Scholar”, former Yale English Prof. William Deresiewicz presents a stinging and insightful critique of the elite Ivy League education system and how it breeds an upper crust mentality of exceptionalism and entitlement. On the one hand, Deresiewicz laments a system which he calls “anti-intellectual” for pushing normative ideas of intelligence, work, and society, while eschewing independent intellectual development and individual choice. Being smart isn’t the same as being intellectual.

When elite universities boast that they teach their students how to think, they mean that they teach them the analytic and rhetorical skills necessary for success in law or medicine or science or business. But a humanistic education is supposed to mean something more than that, as universities still dimly feel. So when students get to college, they hear a couple of speeches telling them to ask the big questions, and when they graduate, they hear a couple more speeches telling them to ask the big questions. And in between, they spend four years taking courses that train them to ask the little questions—specialized courses, taught by specialized professors, aimed at specialized students. [...] We are slouching, even at elite schools, toward a glorified form of vocational training.

On the other hand, Deresiewicz believes the self-congratulatory bubble of elite institutions is a reflection of American socio-economic conditions. How different is the atmosphere of grade-inflation, extensions, and constant counseling at elite institutions to the padded lives of the wealthy, where they can always count on family money, connections, rehab and spiritual voyages to India to get themselves together? Meanwhile, public universities are entrenched with rigid bureaucracies and inflexible technocrats…

In short, the way students are treated in college trains them for the social position they will occupy once they get out. At schools like Cleveland State, they’re being trained for positions somewhere in the middle of the class system, in the depths of one bureaucracy or another. They’re being conditioned for lives with few second chances, no extensions, little support, narrow opportunity—lives of subordination, supervision, and control, lives of deadlines, not guidelines. At places like Yale, of course, it’s the reverse. The elite like to think of themselves as belonging to a meritocracy, but that’s true only up to a point.

Deresiewicz’s disenchantment is summarized in the following quote:

But I do know that the life of the mind is lived one mind at a time: one solitary, skeptical, resistant mind at a time. The best place to cultivate it is not within an educational system whose real purpose is to reproduce the class system.

But how inextricable is education from “the class system”? Is it that surprising that a school such as Amherst or Yale, whose endowment is funded by capitalists, would seek to train future investment bankers and politicians? Perhaps this disenchantment comes from the expectation that an “elite” institution should be mass producing young Darwins and Marxes and Sartres, but even such expectation presupposes that educational institutions are essentially social factories. As Baudrillard put it, an educational system aims “at remodeling an ideal nature from a child”. What “ideal nature” exists that isn’t defined by a dominant paradigm?

As resounding as Deresiewicz social-economic commentary is, he speaks of the class difference between elite institutions and public universities only in terms of their differences, as if an i-banker from Amherst working 80 hours a week for Bear Stearns isn’t stuck in a life of subordination, supervision, and deadlines. Classes are separated by their position relative to the means of production, not simply by annual income. Chris Rock once joked, “Shaq is rich, but the white guy who writes his check is wealthy“; while elite institutions are spawning the ruling class of tomorrow, that can’t be said for all of us. A diploma from Amherst isn’t an automatic ticket to upper-classdom, we’re still expected to sell our labor just like a middle-manager from Ohio State or a factory worker in Sri Lanka. This idea of a meritocracy espoused by “the elite” is an illusion at worse, a petty reward at best… A notch up on the ol’ rope… Exploit yourself so that you one day can exploit others. What empowerment then does an elite institution give us? Ask Lola. It just makes us more expensive.

- s

Blazing the headlines this week: Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic was arrested in Belgrade for committing war crimes during the Bosnian War in the 90s. These crimes include killing at least 7,500 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica during an ethnic cleansing campaign in 1995, shelling Sarajevo during a 43 month siege, and using 284 U.N. peace keepers as human shields -an impressive criminal resume. Karadzic will be facing the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague. Rather than focusing on the Bosnian conflict and all the craziness in Yugoslavia (Slavoj Zizek gave a fantastically rambling lecture on the overall nature of the Yugoslavian conflict and NATO’s intervention that’s worth reading), I want to digress on the absurd circumstances of his capture and his characteristic intellectualism.

Unlike Saddam Hussein, who was sucked out of a hole in the ground, Karadzic was arrested in Belgrade, living as Dragan Dabic, a bearded alternative medicine practitioner. Rather than be a fugitive, Karadzic simply assumed a new identity, playing the character of Dragan Dabic to its logical limits. Dragan Dabic successfully ran a private alternative medicine practice, living and moving about comfortably, without security, in Belgrade.

Dr. Dabic was a proponent of “Human Quantum Energy”. In fact, he emerged as a local leader in alternative medicine, giving lectures at alternative health symposiums, making appearances on TV Shows, publishing articles in magazines… He even maintained his own personal website, which offers special trinkets, including a necklace described thusly: “This necklace is for personal protection. It is worn on the chest at the height of the fourth chakra and thymus gland, the gland of youth and immune system. It harmonizes the energies of the aura and the physical body, protects from harmful rays … If you hold it in the palm of your hand for a few minutes it causes a turbulence of energy of the chakra, heats up, and vibrates even though it is not battery powered.”… The way in which a dictator that started a campaign to “terrorize and demoralize the Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat population” that left over 200,000 dead and millions displaced managed to disappear completely into the image of a friendly, well-adjusted, holistic healer that “gave lectures comparing meditation and silent techniques practiced by Orthodox monks” reaches the limit of dark comedy. It is so disturbingly absurd that the only way I can respond is by laughing.

It’s no surprise that Karadzic pulled off this kooky doctor cover; before being a murderous tyrant, Karadzic graduated from medical school and eventually became a psychiatrist. But the holistic healer guise is particularly absurd because it’s an embodiment of Karadzic’s aesthetic antithesis… Aesthetics? What Aesthetics!? Well… turns out that Karadzic is also a published poet.

Suffice to say that Karadzic wasn’t the Rimbaud type. His poems are generally very disturbing, suffused with ego-maniacal messianism, self-adoration, and destructive imagery. Take his poem titled “Sarajevo”:

I hear the misfortune threads
Turned into a beetle as if an old singer
Is crushed by the silence and turned into a voice.

The town burns like a piece of incense
In the smoke rumbles our consciousness.
Empty suits slide down the town.
Red is the stone that dies, built into a house. The Plague!

Calm. The army of armed poplar tree
Marches up the hill, within itself.
The aggressor air storms our souls
and once you are human and then you are an air creature.

I know that all of these are the preparations of the scream:
What does the black metal in the garage have for us?
Look how fear turned into a spider
Looking for the answer at his computer.

In reference to this poem and the shelling of Sarajevo, Karadzic remarks: (the translation seems to be off?)

There is a poem of mine about Sarajevo. The title was “Sarajevo,” and first line was “I can hear disaster walking. City is burning out like a tamyan in a church.” In this smoke, there is our conscious of that. And a squad of armed topola—armed trees. Everything I saw armed, everything I saw in terms of a fight, in terms of war, in terms of—in army terms. That was 20, 23 years ago, that I have written this poem, and many other poems have something of prediction, which frightens me sometimes [laughter].

Here it’s evident that Karadzic’s messianism begins as a fulfillment of prophecy, in other words, a vain sublimation of sociopathic fantasies. The God complex is even more glaring in this untitled poem:

This fateful hour stiffened and reached the sky
Like a tree it now binds all existence in its branches
I am the cause of universal distress
A certain knight called Moses secretly fears me
From this fateful hour hours pass by upward like my head
And you are bound by some chilly
By some frosty terror
It’s only the snake-like world that changed-its dirty skin
For the moment
It is only I who sprouted from the Universe like the morning star
And the Universe blushed with envy and changed colors
It is only cowards eating their cowardice
And their non-existent strength
It is I speaking and burning
I won’t be silent after all
And let the crowd go to the devil past redemption
I’ll handle you in no time
And without much ado
And right at this moment
A tomcat shall peep at the neighborhood kitty through a chink
And two lovers
Shall stand by the first casket on hand
And kiss each other as I command

If you are interested, the links to the poems feature several other poems. I’ve used my “favorite” of these in this entry… But what do these poems say about Karadzic’s aesthetic ideas?

Walter Benjamin, in his influential essay called “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” argues that “all efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.” Being that this essay was published in 1936, during the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, Benjamin links the aesthetization of politics directly with nationalistic fascism. Perhaps the earliest voice for such a war aesthetic (and fascist art) is Italian Futurist F.T. Marinetti. In a manifesto about the Ethiopian Colonial war, Marinetti wrote:

War is beautiful because it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others…Poets and artists of Futurism! …remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art … may be illumined by them.

Through the aesthetization of war, the Futurists sought to figuratively destroy the fetters of the past, the hands of history, the forms of memory. In that sense, Karadzic is the Fascist Futurist ideal: the tyrant-warrior poet that sought to destroy history and memory in the most palpable way possible, through genocide. Following this logic, Karadzic may have hoped the Bosnian War to be his Symphonie Phantastique. That such gruesome and cruel reality be equated with the transcendence of art may be a symptom of our hyper-capitalist modernity, where self-alienation (as Benjamin wrote) “has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”

- s

So my sudden burst of blogging productivity has been slowed down by a week and a half on Cape Cod with wonderful people. Although this is my second trip to the cape, it is my first time experiencing the “real” Cape Cod and lemme tell you… Cape Cod is really a sort of “Vacation Land”, but I mean vacation in the same way a heroin addict shoots up to take a “vacation”, it’s a bizarrely opiating place to be. Every house seems to be adorned with glaringly bright blue and pink flowers. Most people are chubby and dressed as casually as catalogs allows. There are bugs and sand everywhere. In Provincetown, the bugs and sad are delicately accented by many many gay men. But all the beaches close at sunset and the bars close at 1 in the morning. All in all, Cape Cod is a glowing haven for the American bourgeoisie who can afford to take a summer vacation, but seem incapable of dealing with “Europe” or a night life, it is a kind of lazy, pastel sub-culture. I’ve taken some pictures, but none characterize Cape Cod better than this one below.

Other than stepping all over these fantasies of American property ownership, I’ve been watching a lot of things: Shot-by-shot analyses of “North by Northwest” and “Notorious”… A comedy/musical hour with a fat tranny named Jackie Beat… A blind old blues guitarist at a bar… The Polo-shirted a Capella stylings of Hyannis Sound… With all this watching, you’d imagine I’d be out of the reach of trouble, after all, an audience is a passive structure. But you’re wrong. I, your faithful and timid blogger, raised some feathers, ruffled some flags and almost got into a fight with a very indignant middle-aged Christian male-type inside the “First Federated Church of Hyannis”… a church of all places! Granted, saying “almost got into a fight” is kind of an absurd thing to say, like “she almost got pregnant”, there’s either physical violence or not. Jimmy McNally provided an insightful linguistic analysis concluding that the angry Christian male was really a “pussy”, even though the Christian twice cornered me and threatened to beat me up. What would cause a respectable, bespectacled, polo-shirted cape-codding federated protestant to harass a stranger inside a church, in front of almost a hundred people?

Loud gay man sex? An abortion? Jeremiah Wright…? This time, the provocateur was art. With this week’s silly controversy over a New Yorker Cover, it’s kind of apropos to talk about art pissing people off. So here’s the story… First off, many of you know that I have a pretty heavy doodling habit. My biochemistry notes had more doodles than writing. My fiction/playwriting notebook is essentially a doodle pad with random writing scrawled in the margins. In a way, I’m way more attentive when I doodle. A lecture may be very interesting to hear, but very boring to watch. Doodling complements an aural interest with a visual one. In case of a boring lecture, doodling keeps me from falling asleep.

In any case, I decided to put the little golf pencils and books behind the pews to use during the Hyannis Sound’s a Capella concert… It made the entire concert much more appreciable than it would have been had I tried to look at singing boys in pastels from thirty pews away. Since there wasn’t any scrap paper, I drew on the inside covers of the hymnals and Bibles. I was very well aware of the potential for sacrilege, but I was feeling slightly subversive (maybe I’ve watched too much Bunuel), I thought I’d “engage” federated church members with art. Besides, there is a fine line between expression and defacement, between art and vandalism. Ask Banksy. By the end of the concert, I made four drawings (including the drawing below) in two hymnals and in one Bible.

As me and my two Jimmy’s got up to leave, the angry middle-aged Christian blocked the pew, the following exchange ensued:

“Have you been writing on the Bibles”

“Me? No…”

“Are you lying? Not that I am accusing you… but you have been accused…”

“Well… There are some drawings in the books.”

“Did you make those drawings?”

“I made one of them…”

The angry Christian insisted on seeing this drawing of mine, so I showed him the saxophone player I drew behind the cover of a Bible, pictured above. To say the least, he was certainly “engaged” by the art. He found it an unspeakable act. He threatened to show the art to the church’s administration and have me pay for the Bible’s replacement (how that drawing makes a Bible “unreadable” or “nonfunctional” is beyond me).

“Why did you draw this?” Torquemada demanded to know

“It felt right with the music.”

“Do you have an eraser?”

“No.”

The Christian huffed and puffed, but then he thought of higher meanings…

“You know,” he started “this is a very important weekend for me and I’m not going to get riled up by this… So I’m going to let this go… but if I ever see you at this church again -just talking to you is pissing me off… I’m going to kick your ass-”

“I don’t understand why you are being so disrespectful,” I interjected “I didn’t draw anything vulgar… If I choose to express myself to God by drawing, why can’t I?”

That didn’t appease the Christian one bit, he huffed and puffed again. We tried to leave, but the Christian guy cornered me again at the sanctuary door, saying he ought to “express himself to God” by “kicking my ass”. I ignored him and started walking away. He demanded that i never return and that I “get the hell out of here” before he “kicks my ass”… By then, Jimmy McNally took my hand as lovingly and queerly as he could and outside we went. We all had a good laugh over this, for a second, I was worried about getting into a fight. I am sort of relieved that I showed him the saxophone player in the Bible, rather than the drawing in the hymnal… The guy would have flipped two shits if he saw my portrait of a Virgin Mary holding a baby and a machine gun titled “Our Lady of the Guerrillas.”

- s