Procrast-Nation

Going over a stack of books from my college library regarding the history of television and communications theory has turned up, one or two very useful books, and a couple books of completely misguided or worthless nonsense. Communication studies, or media theory as its sometimes referred to, is a strange field in that it doesn’t really have any single parent discipline, or any single discipline which it would claim its predominantly a subset of (like psychology, which I would argue is as much related to literary/social criticism as it is to any scientific tradition.) It borrows freely from literary criticism, anthropology, sociology, architectural criticism, and science history (especially Thomas Kuhn) in equal doses. As such, the usefulness of any work done within the field is mostly a measure of the imaginative and perceptive qualities of the writer. I’m going to throw in a quick overview of one of these books with each of these short probes.

Hal Himmelstein’s 1981 survey of television/video criticism On the Small Screen was of limited use-he points out the basic problems of establishing a body of television criticism similar to the current body of literary criticism-television mostly ignores boundaries of careful aesthetic construction, and its voluminous output makes surveying it in its entirety or anything close nearly impossible. Issues of artistic worth are mostly besides the point in television, so a new critical language less based on evaluation of merit and more based on reading into motifs and distribution (the form of the medium as opposed to its content) must be established. Himmelstein goes over all of this in his introduction and then goes over a number of middling critics. McLuhan could and did say what Himmelstein says here in the space of a paragraph. Himmelstein also spends far too much time on the high-low culture debate, something which ceased to be useful with the advent of mass media besides as a way to keep young students from wasting all their time on post-modernist wallowing. This book was of limited use to say the least.

For today’s mass media product, I’m going to look at the front page of the popular news aggregation website Reddit. (more…)

Having finished a particularly fruitful rereading of Marshall McLuhan’s first published work, The Mechanical Bride, I felt compelled to test out some of the ideas he put forward in this work. For those unfamiliar, the book is a compendium of short one or two page essays based on print advertisements and comic strips from the early 1950s. The essays are acidic, caustic commentaries, and reading even one of them would dispell the absurd notion that McLuhan was heralding some electronic utopia; his notion of the “global village” wasn’t one of utopian togetherness but of the rolling back of individual identity and critical thought/sophistication in the era of mass communications. In order to ‘retribalize’ as McLuhan frequently called it, a certain amount of civilization must be rolled back and diminished. In an age of absolute media saturation such as the one in which we are currently entrenched, full sober awareness of the implications and roots of all cultural products we’re confronted with is simply an impossibility, and isn’t especially appealing-the most comfortable position in the retribalized culture is one of a shared and simplified opinions. We go from cliche to archetype. Art vacillates between two extremes; the art of the extremely personal and almost confessional in nature, which gives us a portrait of the artist, and the art of the purposely depersonalized which instead gives an abstract portrait of its intended audience. It is this latter type of art which I hope to explore here.

So in the spirit of Mechanical Bride, I’m going to try to do a critical dissection of a different piece of mass produced culture from recent times each day for the next month, in hopes of eventually coming to some more full understanding of what America consists of.

For my first mass media art object I chose to observe the music video for the song “OMG” by Usher, video directed by Anthony Mandler. (more…)

I did a post earlier about this collaborative fictional story project I have been working on for a long time.  To learn more about it, follow this link:

http://procrast-nation.com/?p=129

Anyway, the following is a brief travelers guide to help navigate this monstrosity.

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The history of cryptography is thick and interesting, but I won’t have much time to devote to it in this post. What I can say is that cryptography is the study of mathematically protecting information and also that it grew, unlike for example the study of conic sections, from practical concerns rather than from theory, beauty, or fun. Ancient attempts at cryptographic functions were notoriously bad, but continued to exist even into the early twentieth century. Throughout the early to mid-twentieth century, the primary concern of cryptographers was making previous solutions robust to fast automaton introduced by the birth of the computer industry. The field of cryptography has since branched several times and become both a mature and a mammoth field with applications everywhere. The dark side of the story is that in a few of the most widely used and most important applications of cryptography there has in fact been very little growth and maturity. These stunted few rely on little more than thousands of years of practical experience (why can I say this so lightly will be explained later in the article).

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First off, Happy New  Year - I am honored to have the first post of 2010. I would like to premise this post with the following statement, that should probably not be obvious. I have basically wanted to write some book reviews since I joined the blog team, and am very excited to try my hand at it with this work. If I like how it comes out I will follow it up, and the reader would do well to consider this, itself, a follow-up of my last post. On to the post.

For those unfamiliar, in Norah Vincent dressed as a man and infiltrated various institutions of male, American society and followed up with a semi-intellectual reflection on her experiences. Vincent has an interesting perspective to offer, and consequently I have been trying to get my hands on this book for a while. Therefore it can go without saying how happy I am to finally get a chance to talk about it.

What is most interesting about this work is seeing where Vincent, as a queer woman, was interested in exploring within the world of men’s lives. Through this we get to see what it is she considers men, and what she chooses is kind of stereotypical: white, lower class men. She reaches this by exploring a men’s bowling league, strip clubs, a monastery, becoming a door-to-door salesman, and finally by infiltrating a “Men’s Group” self-help group. All-in-all,  this is not too surprising, it is a pretty stereotypical image of men in various aspects, but also are aspects most men are curious about. I must say I would feel uncomfortable in all of these situations, at least a little bit, which really brings  my problem with  book.

The divide is not just between men and women, Vincent picked out too particular a grouping of men to explore for that to be the case. Although some of the points and discoveries Vincent makes within the book are extremely interesting gender differences, in a lot of cases they are the differences between a middle-class writer and general lower class men. Finding which two are at odds in the book can be difficult, and I personally feel I can only do it because I am a middle-class man. Therefore I know whatt I have in common with Vincent, and I know what I do not.

A lot of these issues could have become more clearly resolved for what they are if Vincent tried to enter similar groups as a woman. Certainly the point is that a few of these establishments would not take her as a woman, but that is still just a hypothesis. We only have her word, which is based on her sheltered life, heresy, or a layer of common sense. This book, although it outright claims to not be scientific, still participates in the tradition of scientific experimentation and therefore should be willing to take that to the most basic level - show us the control set. Without this sort of backdrop, a lot of the revelations are just too weak. There needs to be some sort of foundation in the real world, something experiential, or else the common point for the reader is just too small, if even existent.

That said, if this book was not as a interesting and stimulating a read as it was it would not be worth finding the time to criticize it. The actual experiences, the relationships, founded by Vincent in her disguise are compelling in how personal they are. The insights reached as an outsider to these groupings, regardless of who that outsider is, are always a joy, and certainly Vincent does not delve too far from her original purpose, to explore and expose a world to people that would otherwise not explore it. At times this process is humorous, or bitter and sweet and highly emotional or spiritual. At other times it brings about physical feelings of revulsion (here is looking at you, Sexuality chapter). When all is said and done, reading this book is a rewarding experience and I sincerely thank the author for providing it.

I recently came upon a collection of painted Coca Cola print advertising, which is, as far as print advertising goes, extremely simple, pared down and effective. This effectiveness and minimalist nature I believe might give us some insight as to the psychological nature of print advertising and its place within the pantheon of visual art. (more…)

Currently I am reading Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights: A History and must say it is rather fantastically interesting and easy to read, if not a tad repetitive and simple at times. One of the major arguments Hunt makes in this book is that a change in perception of both of the body and of human individuals, where a trend towards seeing other people as individual thinkers and actors, possessed by no one but themselves, led to a greater degree of human empathy. This new, individualistic and empathetic viewpoint contrasted the older style in which every person was owned by various communities - that of the village, of the state and of law, and of god. This sort of thinking led directly into the addressing of human rights - if every person possesses themselves, it goes without saying that those individuals are entitled to rights. If those people were not of their own possession, then certainly there would be no universal, human rights.

My analysis is somewhat simplified, but it leads to a point that stuck out in my mind. This sort of viewpoint leads to an increasing sense of materialism — if people are viewed as possessing themselves, what they are actually possessing is really their physical body. The mind and spirit are both parts of this body. If not, then they are separate from this physical world, etc. Boring argument. The main issue is that this view leads most naturally to a protection of physicality when we itemize these rights. We have to protect our bodies, the actions our bodies can take, our possessions, and our ability to obtain more possessions. Spirituality and cognitive thought are protected too, to some degree, but they are done so primarily through protecting our physical selves. We cannot be killed and tortured for believing the wrong way, this sort of thing.

This is all logical as this is the only way we know to protect individuals when we think of these things in these ways. However, the obvious problems with this mindset are pretty obvious too: since our rights focus on the material realm, we will focus on the material realm. Since we focus on individualism, our lives are oriented, naturally, towards the material. Since my stated rights say I am free to pursue happiness, free to pursue property, free to consume and free from religion, I come to value all of these things. Life becomes empty consumerism.  Religion becomes less and less important to our lives, as we are not owned by any god, we are owned by ourselves. Reverence for the government, if there ever was any, similarly shifts — the government does not own me, so what do I own the government? Morality and justice all shift.

…Which brings to about where we are today. Nothing I said here is new, these are all criticisms of modern society that have been around forever. My main interest, however, relates more to the fact that this stemmed from the sort of change in view of self that led to the extensions of rights. This life style, and these problems, are fundamentally tied to freedoms that can no longer be questioned. Even Marx, who so criticized this sort of modernity, fundamentally was based in this perception of individualism and human rights - he simply took it to the next level.

Basically, I just find it really funny that the way in which people have responded to the issues of the day tends towards furthering empathy. Modern ideas of communes, of free love, etc, are based on the idea that we are all fundamentally the same and should love and respect each other for it. That in order to combat the faults with this new culture we need to rely more heavily on ideas of sympathy and empathy — the very concepts that led to the problems to begin with! Such ideas suffer the following two issues, however:

1) Empathy and Sympathy allows us to more greatly relate to each other, but in doing so also stress we are different people. In this way the concepts provide us a basis for moral judgement, but also the basis for competition.

2)To emphasize perfectly with everyone would be to view everyone as the same. If there is no difference in how we value different people, we at once may be able to more fairly run a society, but at the same time we lose values of love and hate. The emotive response that triggered the goal of change is therefore lost as well.

Therefore it seems what these sorts of groups are really after is a complete rejection of the modern social state and a return to “village” like mentality. In other words, the sort of morality that stems over-zealousness and competition by completely humbling us with a shared status - the shared status of being owned by a greater power of the community. The same is true of those who turn to religion to escape these problems - the turn to religion is to feel their physical sense attached to something greater, to be owned by god or some other spiritual concept.

Although none of these movements have the same force as the initial movements as outlined in Hunt’s book, and likely will not gain such a force, it just seems really funny to me. Giving up our individual freedom to a collective is tantamount to giving up all of the freedoms and protections such a view grant us and have given us over the last 3 centuries, an issue that may or may not be overlooked. Quite frankly, if I you do not own yourself, but the community does, they can do whatever they want to you. An example of a right granted us by the change in view, the (attempted) abolition of torture is quite poignant here. The way things have become, it is not appropriate to torture an individual as they belong to themselves. If the community owned all of us, or any other body or concept owned us, it would be perfectly acceptable to torture anyone of us to keep the rest morally in line.

My apologies for potentially misusing or misreading Lynn Hunt’s excellent book, this is more of a rant than anything meaningful. At least I got out my non-garbage post out of the way for the next set of 500! Good job, guys.

Neil Sedaka is perhaps the ultimate pop cipher. His songs, while catchy, reveal nothing personal, no emotions, and in fact have an irregular lack thereof in most cases. Yet this is something which engages more than the cliched confessionals or declarations of most pop singers. There is a compelling void.

Take, for example, his smash hit “Breaking Up is Hard To Do”. Never have such utterly meaningless sentiments been uttered in the realm of pop culture ephemera (except perhaps when The Turtles ended a proclamation of love with the word ‘etc.’.) What does the song mean? The narrator doesn’t love this woman…such little feeling exists as to make us doubt there was any in the first place. Why doesn’t he believe they should break up? Since it’s ‘hard to do’. He pleads with her-don’t break our posture of laziness and convenience! Stay with me since the alternative would be mildly difficult and might leave me ‘blue’ (a feeling no one above the age of 17 has ever legitimately felt)!

The finger wave at 1:28! The hollow stare of regret the model on the left makes at exactly 2:08…This video only underlines the banal pathology that underlies the song. The dancing cover girls, the awkward sway and ceaseless smiling! We have gazed into the abyss, and it has indeed gazed back into us…

And then there’s “Calendar Girl”…

Where to begin! First, in a song composed of nothing but blatantly uninvolved come-ons, one line stands out. “April/You’re the Easter bunny when you smile”. This can only mean…what can it mean? She has buck teeth? She leaves her eggs out in the yard for children to find once a year? Our relationship to popular music is so uncritical that a line like this most likely passes most listeners uneventfully.

Then his bizarre dance from 0:19-0:22 or the blatant up-skirt peak at 2:23…his gaze is nothing short of reverent! Ever upward…

Also, what the fuck is on July’s head???

Yet the most confounding cultural artifact isn’t Neil Sedaka’s (if not for lack of effort) but a cover by “Freddy Bee”. The strippers’ looks of emptiness are more affecting than that of the the children in Salo, the singer so coked up and monstrous, a dinosaur as soon as he was born. David Lynch’s red room before it ever existed…

In 2003 a rap sensation like none other burst onto the scene, a one man hip hop revolution to eclipse all others, a messiah of rhyme. Y’all might think I’m talkin’ bout when Kanye West dropped The College Dropout, or when 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’ hit the streets, but all the insiders knew the real score. There was only one MC with a flow so fresh the opposition wilted in its presence, a persona so big it could eclipse Biggie, and swagger nobody was dumb enough to fuck wit. I’m of course talking about Jin. (more…)

This is a transcription of a talk I’m giving tomorrow morning on portions of Thoreau’s Walden. The actual transcript has been doctored a bit to be better experienced textually, and most of the slideshow pictures haven’t been retained as they were pretty much filler to begin with. You’re just getting the good stuff. Keep in mind, the other person tasked with presenting this book to the class wasn’t even sure who Ralph Waldo Emerson is and used Thoreau’s denunciation of tawdry popular literature as a chance to list off her “beach reading” recommendations. I go to a public university, so I figure you have a right to know where your tax dollars are going…Anyhow, lengthy talk after the jump! (more…)