Ideas about Photography, part 2: the practical space

On the heels of my last post about photography, I've thought a bit about modeling the relationship between photographer, camera, and subject, and I took a shot at plotting it in classic two-dimensional space. I wish I could make some exciting claim... like, this is the decisive way to model the photographer's art, and all other theories can be reduced to this structure... but obviously none of those things are true. This is just one theoretical shot in the dark, the type of thing that Marshall McLuhan might have called a probe... which is the most creative and least rigorous way of doing theory and analysis.

I've perused some of the key literature on photography, like Flusser's Towards a Philosophy of Photography and Susan Sontag's On Photography. I know that the former theorist really emphasized the black-box nature of the camera itself, claiming that the essence of photography was to be found in the photographer's relative ignorance of the physics and optics that actually capture his image. Sontag seems to take the idea of "capturing" the subject more literally, claiming that photographs possess an inherent aggression, and that photographing a subject is appropriating it, certifying it, collecting it, and at the same time protecting the photographer from its full psychological force.

My own ideas are a riff on my last post, that in photography, the key issues are 1) choosing our subjects, and 2) determining our final products, whether by composing the images or by carefully curating them. These are the two axes of the conceptual space. The vertical axis is the choice of subjects: we either find subjects by discovering them out in the world, or we create subjects on our own terms, employing craft and artifice within a controlled space. The second axis, the determination of the image, is centered around the idea of CAPTURING, and it's split between composing images before the shot, or curating them after the shot.

Here's the basic quad:

Interesting to note: the spectrum that goes from "curate" to "compose" correlates to the shift from film photography to digital photography. When you only had 36 shots in a roll of film, it was extremely important to frame your composition carefully, and manage your exposure with precision, so you didn't waste a shot. Those were the days of Ansel Adams, zones, and the rule of thirds. Most of the image-determination took place before you clicked the shutter button.

The inverse of that is the curation model that's come to prominence in the era of infinite storage, crowd-sourced galleries, and snapshot Polaroid kitsch. These days, you shoot as many photos as you can, using a few loose rules of composition... know your aperture and shutter speed, experiment with exposure, and try to isolate and differentiate your subject. Once you take hundreds of exposures, you've got a new job: go back with a severe critical eye and figure out which ones are actually worth further attention. Intensive curation (and post-processing) has taken the place of obsessive composition, rendering the latter an anachronistic fetish.

I think the various traditional "types" of photography can be differentiated by their position within this space. I've plotted them, below, and it makes for a nice little constellation of techniques and approaches. Here they are:

There are some exemplary types, mapping to each of the four quadrants. Landscapes are the ideal case for the traditional craft of film photography: you, the photographer/explorer, go out into nature to discover a stunning vista or a sublime subset, and then you put all your technical skills and craftsmanship into composing a single perfect photo, captured in your 35mm frame.

Fashion portraits are essentially the opposite: instead of discovering the landscape in its natural state, you create a scene and sculpt your models, and you direct them in their gestures and positions. Then, like a vigilant moon, you orbit around them, trying to capture a natural moment or a sharp glance, taking as many shots as you possibly can (as a fashion photographer, you should always max out your camera's capacity). You'll depend on your curatorial skills to select the best exposure after the session is over.

The most artificial type of photography is the food photograph, in which the photographer creates a perfect sculpture of the food (often inedible) and then painstakingly composes the shot to bring out the shapes and textures, with grave attention to depth of field and isolation of the subject. In the opposite quadrant -- discover and curate -- is the street photographer and photojournalist, the visual scavenger who scrounges for the perfect, fleeting moment, and then pursues it like a hunter, hoping beyond hope to catch it and harvest a perfect exposure in the heat of the moment.

Last time I wrote about photography, I said something rather silly, which went like this:

"Street photography has a sort of visceral thrill, and a sense of purity, the very honest and unadorned ethos of aestheticizing the gestures and postures and details of everyday life. At times, it feels like this is what other types of photography (especially Fashion Photography, the most glamorous of the photographic disciplines) aspires to."

This was an honest sentiment, but it was also the result of my recent interest in street photography, so it's a bit self-validating. It completely short-sells the creative and compositional aspects of photography... the act of arranging a scene to be shot, and the act of composing the actual picture within the frame, both of which were part of photography long before ye olde point-and-snap. Oddly, looking back at my quadrant, I've decided that there is a different type of photography that really exemplifies the spirit of the medium, and it's not one that I expected. It's actually the high-speed photograph, like those amazing shots of bullets going through light bulbs! Imagine that!

After all, it's both an exercise in perfect composition (choose the right light, arrange the elements, organize the frame) and an exercise in perfect timing, which can only be achieved by sifting through thousands of imperfect exposures produced by the experiment. It's also a triumph of both discovery and creativity: the photographer creates a perfect scene, but then has to discover an elusive fraction of a millisecond within the physical unfolding of the action.

Also, it's aggressive, per Sontag: the photographer is forcibly extracting a cross-section from the middle of a lightning-fast burst of movement. And it's highly mechanized, as per Flusser: it's so precise, it can rarely be managed manually by the photographer, and usually requires an extended mechanical apparatus to initiate the action and release the shutter.

This is the essence of photography. Who knew?

Or maybe this is a great example of how rational over-analysis can lead an intellectual douchebag into a totally misguided conclusion. Contrary to the evidence, I still take all my claims with a grain of salt.

In conclusion, I leave you with two of the only high-speed captures I've ever personally attempted, which I think resulted in some of my better photographs. Thank you for reading this rumination on photography. Jesse out.

EDIT: Paragraph 3: That is obviously not the horizontal axis, it is the vertical axis.

PressPausePlay - a short reflection on a film about the creative climate

PressPausePlay is a documentary that I caught this weekend about the digital revolution in the arts and culture. It's from directors David Dworsky and Victor Köhler, and if you dwell on the same stuff I do, you might want to check it out. It's mostly dedicated to celebrating the accessibility of digital media, and trying to get a grip on the changes it's bringing about. They got some interesting people to address this topic... Moby, Robyn, Hot Chip, director Lena Dunham, Napster daddy Sean Parker, and authors like David Weinburger and Andrew Keen.

It's free on their website, if you wanna just go take a couple hours right now. Go ahead, I'll wait here and drink my soda.

Okay, so... buried in the unrelenting optimism about the future, there is some anxiety in PressPausePlay, and honestly, the interviews that speak to this anxiety are the most interesting of the bunch. Doomsday prophets are always kind of captivating, giving voice to our fears, and the few interviewees who really sounded freaked out about the whole thing are actually kind of existentially reassuring. At some point, one of them says, "Every artist I know is scared by this," which is actually really nice to hear.

I think the anxiety comes from a very specific question, and a few of the interviewees approach it from a few different angles. The question is... how are we going to get along and keep culture in shape if the system of filters and gatekeepers has collapsed? And I think it's a really valid question, and the only real answer is, "Wait and see?"

When I say "gatekeepers," I mean a lot of different things. First of all, there are the simple resource scarcities of yesteryear, something that's often called a "barrier to entry." Once upon a time, filmmaking was so expensive that you needed to know people... producers, other filmmakers, or very wealthy family members... to get anywhere near the industry. Second of all, there are the credible critics, people vetted by major publications, armed with graduate degrees in the arts and publications in journals, who were hired to tell us all what was really the good shit, and what was just shit. The days of blogs have severely damaged the landscape of professional reviewing and criticism, and the incredible surplus of new work is overwhelming the ones who still have any cultural clout.

This all makes it very hard to confidently differentiate between brilliant work and crappy work. One of the documentary's talking heads said that we may be getting to a point where all the good work is drowned in the noise. Another one said he doubts the old great directors -- people like Scorsese and Coppola -- would ever have risen to the top or been discovered in the current climate. Their early shorts weren't genius, and in the current media glut, they would have been swamped to the point of frustration by amateurs competing for the same money and attention. Some of the cultural authorities in this documentary were driven to say, "Look, most people just aren't talented and shouldn't be making art." One of the most interesting of the critics claimed that this loss of sobriety in media and discourse would lead to a new cultural dark age, where cultural production rises so much that cultural literacy just falls entirely flat.

There's a question implicit in all this that nobody quite got around to asking (although some of them answered it, in a roundabout way). Whether you're really anxious about this is contingent upon what you think of those cultural gatekeepers, those filters, those critics, those barriers to entry. They are losing their influence. The question is: were they actually selecting based on merit, and thereby fulfilling a very important cultural function? Or were they actually selecting based on privilege, institutional bias, and luck? Because if the latter is true, then losing them will be one of the best things to happen to art... because even if an absolutely democratic process of selection is stupid, illiterate, and prone to distortion by advertisers, at least it's authentic. At least our art will match our preferences and our interests and desires, even if those aren't exactly high-brow or well-informed. At least our art will be a reflection of us as a collective, be that for good or ill.

Of course, between these two... gatekeepers are a positive force vs. gatekeepers are a useless burden... the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. And to be honest, I doubt the cultural landscape will ever be a flat ocean of white-noise. New mechanisms will arise to help shape the landscape of art and media, and we'll figure out how to make them work in service to culture. I guess, deep down, I'm just a dumbass optimist about the whole thing. That's fine with me. I may as well have faith in something.

Zodiac (2007), Chinatown (1974), and the heart of the noir city

At the heart of the noir city, there's a spider's web of influences and motives that never quite resolve, never quite explain themselves, never present a clear target for the apparatus of justice. It's this lack of identity, this lack of certainty, that makes the noir city such a terrifying place for us helpless human beings, who strive for clarity, balance, and closure. Humans try to consolidate their power and their organization within the city, but this only empowers the city to tear it away from them, laughing, casting its shadow.

The fact that "justice" is itself a diffuse, teetering bureaucracy of internal contradictions doesn't help; in that sense, it's just another part of the urban structure, which envelops everything within its domain.  In trying to organize the truth within the noir city's labyrinth, the justice system simply amplifies its power, like a vaccine in reverse -- the virus is innoculated against the body. The judge who signs the warrant can be bought, the sergeant who carries it out can be undermined and turned aside by his own rules. In this hostile space, the regional departments compete, and the multitide of divisions collapse, burying the truth.

The outsider in these situations may be able to reclaim some power, but not much.  Yes, being independent of a department is an advantage.  Being free of jurisdictions and bureaucracies empowers the ambitious citizen to make his own inquiries and draw his own conclusions.  But disorganization and formality is only the city's outermost defense.  The true irresolvable force, the cancer at the center of the decay, is the rotting heart itself, the empty, uncertain soul of the metropolis.

J.J. Gittes discovers noir LA by wandering through its empty reservoirs and dry lake beds, using his "investigation" as an excuse to take a lot of curious walks. Though he is an outsider (a private dick as opposed to a beat cop), he generally falls in line with the city's cynicism, following people around town, taking photographs, and profiting off his clients' troubles.  But Gittes has a bad habit: he occasionally takes a personal interest in his clients and tries to save them from the city's tentacles. In this, he is a true outsider, an idealist... a guy who falls stupidly in love with women and trouble, who picks at scabs and turns buried secrets into open wounds.

I rewatched Chinatown (1974) because I'd just seen Zodiac (2007), and the dark tangle of intrigue and bureaucracy in the latter reminded me of the indecipherable architectures of the former. It's hard to overstate how different the Chicago of Zodiac is from the LA of Chinatown, the former being a crowded, murky, confrontational fortress of institutions, the latter being sun-drenched and empty, wealthy and lonely and in a state of gilded deprivation. Chicago is flushed and choleric; LA is dizzy and dehydrated. But both cities are big, cynical centers of misanthropy, and both of them are hard on their heroes. Robert Graysmith is to Chicago as Jake Gittes is to LA: a pesky savant, an outsider looking for the inside track, stirring the mud as he indulges his own obsession.

Of course, Robert never gets the stamp of approval that we all want: an arrest and conviction for his suspect. The city doesn't yield up closure so readily, and sometimes, a glimpse of the truth is all you're ever going to get. But Robert does achieve something heroic, even if he goes unrewarded: he confronts that sinister underside of the city, stepping up to it and staring it in the face on multiple occasions. He finds his way into the basement of a Projectionist who seems unmistakably significant in this whole Zodiac affair; he meets a woman who recalls a dark, shadowy figure at her bohemian painting parties; he looks into Leigh Allen's eyes.

In Zodiac, the city is an empty morass of connections and uncertainties.  At least in the LA of Chinatown, it comes down to a few specific people, a few brazen confessions. But what a rotten heart it is! At the heart of the city are the Crosses, one of its most powerful clans, embroiled in incestuous relationships and opportunist plots to destroy farm families and reclaim the land for the wealthy. Gittes unearths the Cross's bizarre culture of transgression, appeasement, and favoritism: Mr. Mulwray, the business partner, is sleeping with his wife's sister-daughter? The connections to Noah Cross are so dense, so intractable, that his motives seem to determine the whole structure. Did Cross and Mulwray really sever ties over the ownership of the water supply?  Or are all these wealthy, broken degenerates still in cahoots, working in uneasy but unbreakable cooperation to protect their fucked up family?

Good-looking, bad news

So Gittes discovers the truth. Kind of. He's turned up the soil wherefrom this rotten tree has sprung. But once he sees its face in Noah Cross, once he tastes its tainted fruit in Evelyn Mulwray, his power ends. He can't hold these people accountable, nor expose their poisonous influence. Their crimes converge and dissolve on a street in Chinatown, where nothing's really reconciled. And maybe this is a worse fate than blissful ignorance: knowing the darkness that lurks within the noir city, and knowing that you can't do shit about it.

Where Gittes found an impenetrable knot, Robert Graysmith finds something else: the erasure, the uncertainty, that the noir city presents as its final face, beneath the masks of violence and domesticity.  He discovers, in Chicago, a troubling fact: the fact that actual, physical events, in all their brute violence and cruelty, eventually disappear, leaving only a facile layer of information. Four years later, Graysmith is still asking, "Who committed these murders?" A better question may be, "Did these murders actually happen?" and even this is more or less irrelevant, because the murders are gone, diluted in history. All that's left of them are anecdotes, clippings in binders, casings in envelopes, handwriting samples, marks on certain detectives' records, an "open" case file.

Robert Graysmith rages against that emptiness, that void, by drawing together what information he can, but more importantly, by finding the people who were involved in the slayings: Linda del Buono, Rick Marshall's friend the movie poster artist, and finally Leigh Allen. Through them, he finds actual anecdotes, the traces of real experiences, so much of which has disappeared after four years.

Robert Graysmith never really sees as much of his picture as Jake Gittes sees of his own. But Robert wins a small battle against the vast forces of the city's unexplored labyrinth -- in the absence of any confirmation, Robert Graysmith comes to his own conclusion. He approaches his suspect in a hardware store and looks him straight in the eye, and at this moment in the film, we can see Robert Graysmith make a leap of faith -- the leap from suspicion to belief.  This is only victory a man like Graysmith can retain in the face of overpowering uncertainty.  This leap of faith may be nothing but appeasement, but at least there's that.  J. J. Gittes never has anything like that.


SIDE NOTE: I think Zodiac, the film, actually presents us with a possible resolution, though it's never quite spelled out for us. Consider: during the extended climax of the film, Robert Graysmith confronts two different men. First, the projectionist, who admits to making posters that seem to match Zodiac's handwriting. This confrontation happens in the basement of a house, the deepest cavern Graysmith reaches in this affair.  And there's someone else in the house... someone who flees before Graysmith can identify him.

The other person Graysmith confronts is the perennial suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen, who seems connected to the killer in every possible way: he has the right boots, he has a watch with the symbol, he lived near the first victim.  But Leigh Allen is exonerated by... his handwriting!  And the DNA samples from the letter.

Maybe I'm the only one who thinks this, but to me, this suggests the simple conclusion: Leigh murdered the victims, and the projectionist wrote the letters on his behalf. No connection between these individuals was ever uncovered, and yet, they fit together, like perfectly-shaped puzzle pieces in a picture that's never assembled. Leigh may even have been in the house when Graysmith was there; if he had seen him, it would have brought the whole affair into focus, but he missed him, and so the truth once again eluded him.

Anyway, that's my leap of faith.  I follow Robert Graysmith in coming to my own conclusion, at least in terms of the movie's version of these events, and I'll stand by it until something upsets it.

Where Photography is Going

Today I read something called "Is the Art of Photography Dying Due to Digitalization?"  It's not a particularly new idea, but it's part of a conversation that needs to be ongoing, as conditions are changing faster than discourse can keep up with them. And the concern being voiced in this essay is still urgent.

Man Ray

As much as I'd like to simply shrug, wave it off, laugh, dismiss it, and tell this author that (s)he obviously knows nothing about photography if (s)he can't appreciate its eternal artistic value, I can't.  Why?  Because the author is right in pointing out that photography is changing.  As the technology improves, it provides easier access, and it changes the value placed on images.  This, in turn, changes the expectations, the methods, the purview of the discipline as a whole.

Because, like this essayist, I've heard people play with my DSLR (the cheapest Pentax DSLR I could find) and say, "It's so easy to take great pictures with this!"  And as much as I hate hate HATE to admit it, their untrained golden-hour snapshots often look pretty high-level, as long as they're using a camera capable of capturing the light robustly. So part of me entertains, and fears, this idea: that maybe, for all photographers' self-importance about framing, and the rule of thirds, and being experts in "writing with light," blah blah blah, it turns out that there's nothing between a serious (potentially professional) photographer and a random person on the street, except for maybe a $600 camera.

The article seems to suggest that, in becoming automatic, fully democratic, and highly accessible, the process of taking a photograph is losing its artistic value. As thousands of people are able to buy high-quality cameras, and these cameras become very smart about automatically calibrating and manipulating photos, there is no barrier to creation, so millions of people are suddenly taking, and sharing, billions of photos.  Brilliant amateur work starts to appear, and people stop seeing great photography as the domain of specialists and professionals.

Diane Arbus

So maybe the democritization of photography is leading to the breakdown of the photographer meritocracy.

I think there's something else, though: photography is changing because it's becoming an art of selection, rather than composition. Good photographers in the digital age know: the key to getting a great photograph is getting thousands of bad ones. This wasn't possible when you had to pay for film, and it was clumsy and took time to load, and had to be selected for the light and the speed of the subject; at that time, a photograph was created like a story or a painting is created. The situation and the intended outcome were considered, creative decisions were weighed, and commitments were made before the shutter ever clicked.

Now, the shutter clicks a hundred times -- we try every exposure setting, every film speed, every focal length -- for every shot or scene that looks even remotely intriguing.  Composition isn't so much a concern any more.  Instead, the creative process takes place in the office, operating LightRoom or Adobe Bridge.  Instead of composing a single great shot, we're selecting the incidental great shot from the SD card full of random crap.  We're doing a lot of deleting, both on location and upon later review.

This is a significant change, because it makes the art of photography more like the general process of idetifying images you like.  And like it or not, picking out a great picture has never been seen as a specialist activity -- pretty much every person has the prerogative to say, "This shot is awesome!" and/or "I don't really like that one much." They don't have the training to recognize good from bad?  Who cares? Everybody has a right to an opinion. And this is now synonymous with the discipline of photography -- it's just selection from a gallery of snapshots.

I do think this is happening.  I think it looks like a bad thing, initially, especially to people who are invested in the meritocracy: photography professors, magazine editors, purveyors of extremely expensive professional photography systems.  But ultimately, it's not a bad thing, because the new democratic landscape will be built upon that meritocracy.  There will be specialization: portrait and product photographers, event photographers, artists who focus intensely on one technology, technique, or subject. The standards and the economic value of photographers' skills will change -- it may even take a big hit, as barriers to entry come crashing down. But we'll eventually find new ways to determine merit, and new ways to manage the flood of new talent at the lowest levels of the talent pool.

Sebastiao Salgado

One thing for sure: photography is on the leading edge of two cultural battles being fought right now.

The first is the wrestling match with Content, which has ballooned in volume over the last few years; photography, along with art and writing, has suddenly burst the dam of cultural access, and we're all desperately trying to manage it using little content delivery buckets, like blogs, and social networks, and self-publishing tools. It's the battle of finding SOME way of auditing and distributing all this content, however subjective, low-brow, or crowd-sourcey it is.

The second battle is the economic one, where we're trying to figure out how to deal with this excess of cultural production: who gets paid for this stuff? Has art, in its excess, dropped out of the need- and value-based economy altogether?  Is it going to be the test-case for a post-scarcity economic model?

Jay Smooth and the Distributed Personality

Jay Smooth provided a video meditation on Gil Scott-Heron's death, by way of the media aftermath of that event, and it's poetic and insightful, as with all of Jay's work.



I wanted to respond to this with my own thoughts on the subject. I understand where Jay is coming from, in terms of being frustrated with the amount of bile and hostility that seems to spontaneous jump from digital interaction. Seems like trolling is sort of a standard mode of online interaction at this point, doesn't it? And once it starts -- especially from people who often sound well-informed and reasonable -- it's extremely hard not to get pulled into it right along with them, trying to do your own part in regulating the discourse and making opinions (about opinions about opinions) known.

At the same time, I'm a full-on collectivist futurist technophile floozy, so I can't disapprove of this extra layer of mediation that we're all subject to, even in the sort of calm, tolerant, high-level form that Jay's skepticism seems to take. I think there's a reason for this kind of turbulent crossfire second-guessing that happens constantly, in every sort of online dialogue, that creates both these total rhetorical asshats ("trolls") and, on the other hand, those people like Ze Frank, Roger Ebert, Jason Kottke, and Jay Smooth himself: the people whose voices, for the first time in history, are really finding the cultural capital that they deserve.

It seems to me that the Internet is a sort of higher-level processing unit, emerging from all of our consciousnesses, all interfacing simultaneously. It's a larger consciousness, not necessarily exceeding, but at least reflecting, all the confusions and multitudes of our individual minds: our repressed desires, our frustrations at ourselves (which, as part of the Internet, take the form of frustrations at one another); our mixed feelings about very personal things, our submerged prejudices and twisted senses of humor, our crippling second thoughts. And because it's public, open, and accessible from pretty much anywhere at this point, it makes all those things totally transparent, in a way that they aren't when we suppress them in our own personalities.

The id is particularly strong in the Internet. I've been to porn sites, I've seen flame wars, I've witnessed smart people descend into terrible, destructive lapses in logic... I've seen it everywhere. It's only the appointed, contractual watchfulness of community admins and the restraint of the more rational members of these forums that allows this latent chaos to deflate each time it erupts.

So I love seeing Jay Smooth's own conflicted process as he reads other peoples' tweets, and gets frustrated at their limited ways of appreciating a hero whose work is very personal to him. He seems to scare himself, to some degree, with his own frustrations, and he handles it by returning to Gil Scott Heron's music and discovering an answer: a sort of zen withdrawal, a realization that he can't be fully embodied in a digital world, and that he can't idly let that world define him.

And yet, I'm here offering the flip side to this equation. Those frustrations, that instinct to reject others' inadequate appreciations, that possessiveness and bitterness, is a part of Jay Smooth's personality, just as it's a part of each person's. We can escape the Internet for a few minutes at a time, but we can't escape that darker side of ourselves. The people who follow those instincts blindly are n00bs; the people who intentionally incite them are trolls.

But Jay responds as I hope more and more people do, with an inner strength and insight that I think the larger Internet is slowly developing. He steps back and lets his love, his appreciation, his roots in his younger self, speak to the world and defuse his own hostility. This gentleness, too, is an integral part of his personality, and it's a part of him that emerges in this video. Just as we see all parts of the strange and conflicted human race in the information layer, that digital substrate, so we see a full portrait of Jay Smooth in this video: the id, with its competitiveness and resentment, eventually dissolved by the superego, with its rational, uninhibited love for Gil Scott-Heron, and then his ego, his inner mediator, relating the whole process back to us, his audience.

It's a noble act for him to lay this bare for us. It's a beautiful thing to watch. And it's also a noble legacy, issuing from the teachings of the late Gil Scott-Heron.

Film Tropes and Twists in the age of Information Overload

Nathaniel at Film Experience Blog makes a passing remark about Von Trier's bizarro Nazi situation, and then turns his attention to a more interesting issue (Thank God): is it possible for us to be taken off-guard by a movie these days?

Nathaniel's right, these are changing times. Django Unchained's script has already leaked and been circulating, and in no time at all -- literally with the simple perusal of a fellow blog -- I know it's going to be perhaps his most controversial movie yet. In terms of speed and density, discourse has outpaced the ability of the audience to engage their cultural artifacts. Movie reviews will offhandedly remark that "the twist was (effective/implausible/predictable)" and think they're being opaque, but they're not. Even knowing that there's a twist in a movie will alter your entire perception of the film.

This is a curse that seems to have uniquely affected M. Night, although in very arcane ways. His career peaked right at the moment when basing a movie on a "twist" was still possible, and this was a big dramatic mechanism for him, especially in his early movies. Since those groundbreaking revelations in The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, people have lost their appetite for his retroactive game-changing reveals, and his whole artistic identity took a hard blow. People were lukewarm on The Village, cold on Lady in the Water, and positively hostile toward The Happening. Honestly, I thought Lady in the Water was interesting, constructing a subtle fairy-tale ecosystem, hermetically enclosed within the ruins of crass vacation motel kitsch.

And M. Night hasn't been able to recover his artistic footing. He seemed to be flirting with self-conscious irony in the marketing of The Happening, but it did nothing for him (not many people even picked up on it). He tried to move into zeitgeist CGI popcorn blockbuster territory with AirBender, but nobody bought it. I think it was just too big for him. And while I still think the whole Facebook "Send M. Night back to film school" meme was unnecessary and mean-spirited, I still acknowledge that these were unfortunate twists for a twisty director.

Of course, Nathaniel's making the same point about Von Trier's work (did you ever think you'd hear M. Night in the same analysis as Von Trier?). He's pointing out that, though AntiChrist didn't depend on twists and surprises, it DID depend on the visceral reaction you get out of seeing something sudden and gruesome happen on a cinema screen. Same, I think, with Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void, which I just rented this past week. It's on NetFlix Instant -- what more clearly signals that a film's lost its "arthouse shock" credibility? At any rate, I suffered the entire time from Information Fatigue. The visuals were bizarre and breathtaking, but I also kept thinking, "Wasn't there supposed to be more sex? When do we see the fetus? Is it time for the shocking climax yet?"

This also describes the reasons that I've been indifferent toward a lot of the "mind-bend" movies on tap lately. I'm Still Here, Catfish, Exit Through the Gift Shop -- these all sounded seriously fascinating, but I never pushed myself to go see them. Knowing, ahead of time, that they all depended upon self-sabotaging twists and revelations gave me the sense that I wouldn't get anything real valuable out of the experience of actually watching them. Like the rest of the wired-up world, I can't really be caught off-guard any more, and even suspecting that a film is trying to sucker-punch me has the automatic effect of turning me off to it.

Nathaniel frames this as a lack of appreciation for the unknown, and he wonders "if this will cycle back culturally to valuing secrets". I don't think that's really the root of the problem. I think it's (as I said above) sheer speed and density of information that's shining this punishing light into the dark spaces of discovery, and I don't think it'll go away. Information is kudzu, climbing all over everything, and there's no reason to think it will suddenly backtrack and become respectful.

I think, instead, the medium will have to adapt to the environment.

After all, there are some aspects of the film-attending experience that are immune to information-dilution. The key quality that's going to survive information-overload is the pure sensory experience, the synthesis of visual and sound that only activates at the moment of apprehension. It's something that Aaronofsky has really been straining to perfect, and it's worked out well for him... you could describe Black Swan or (even more so) Requiem for a Dream shot-for-shot, and you still wouldn't take much away from the immediate visceral experience of actually watching the films.

Cinematography and sound-editing are going to be EXTREMELY important in the future, perhaps more important than writing or timing. You can prepare yourself for a twist or a jump-cut or a shocking scene, and by preparing for it, you'll blunt its effect on you. But you can't prepare yourself for an incredible, surreal, perfectly toned close-up or photographically-composed landscape... at least not in the same way. Films like Blue Valentine and Never Let Me Go can sustain a heavy assault of spoilage, and they're still beautiful films that draw in the eye.

And here's the thing -- I think even the slow wits in Hollywood studios are starting to understand this. The great films of previous decades -- Deliverance, Blade Runner, Terminator II -- were relentlessly plot-driven, labyrinthine in their shifts in momentum, exercises in pacing and expectation and unexpected dialogue. Newer blockbusters, films like Avatar, Bourne, and now Thor, don't try to play on anticipation and disclosure like those older films did. They allow their plots to form organically, around tried-and-tested myths and tropes, so that they can be concerned with the immediacy of experience, the shaking of the camera and the complete sensory immersion in Asgard or Pandora.

Critics will groan over the lack of creativity in writing, about the utter failure of originality in the era of the adaptation, but subconsciously, they'll appreciate the increased emphasis on the senses: Zack Snyder's slow motion, Christopher Nolan's formal experiments in montage and sequence, Tarantino's use of well-known tropes to create truly inspired single moments. And even as they complain about those plots, they will also spoil them for us, and in the future, it won't particularly matter.

On Dating Tall Men: Rationality and romantic/sexual selection

Okay, so Kay Steiger wrote a blog post called "Dating Tall Men", arguing that when women relentlessly select tall men over short ones, they're actually exhibiting a form of old-school bigotry.

Naturally, a lot of people don't like this. After all, it's a widespread method of selection among women, and nobody likes having their romantic and sexual criteria questioned. We're pretty protective of that particular liberty! And here's this Kay Steiger woman, calling a very common sexual requirement "irrational." Among the responses is this one by Andrew Sullivan, who says that sexual selection isn't a rational process, and shouldn't be – that it needs to be discriminatory – so Kay needs to put her PC pitchfork away.

But here's the thing -- this blog post makes perfect sense, as long as you look at it with a little subtlety. Granted, the Internet is bad for that kind of thing, but that's why you've got Benefit of the Doubt here to give you some perspective. Miss Steiger's argument is entirely justified from a pragmatic perspective, and it's even credible from a theoretical perspective, if slightly overstated.

Among the commentors, and even in Sullivan's response, there's a general claim that sexual preferences are in-born (one of the commentors calls it "hard-wired"), so we can't change them any more than we can change our height. But a couple things here. First, even if our preferences themselves were genetically determined (yay evo psych![/sarcasm]), our behavior isn't pre-determined, and self-control can do amazing things. But also, as Kay says toward the end of her post, our preferences – our ways of perceiving and judging the opposite sex – aren't just hard-wired, built into our neurons from birth. They're also conditioned by what we're told is acceptable, whether for health reasons, or simply as a nod to convention. You can try to write off all the nuance here, but it's all of these things at once.

So, in short: contrary to Andrew Sullivan's flippant dismissal, sexual selection is not "irrational." It's not done entirely by conscious calculation, but it is relentlessly rational, built on a whole massive algorithm of biological, evolutionary, and cultural "reasons." Kay Steiger: 0, Andrew Sullivan: -1. Having made this fairly banal observation, let us continue!

And I've got no data to back this shit up (lol! Do I ever?!?), but I'd guess that the "height" bias among women is one of the more socially-conditioned preferences. I'm sure there are evolutionary reasons for it, but as Kay said, these reasons aren't terribly important in the modern age, when we don't need to be protected from predators and we don't need to inherit the most physically dominant genes. On a behavioral level, I'm guessing the bias against short men is kind of like many mens' bias against muscular women, or mens' bias for small waists and big boobs. I mean, it's plausible that there's a natural component to it, but it's mostly the result of a constant bombardment of underwear ads and Bond girls in the media. It's something that's worth looking at critically.

It's a little bizarre to me that people like Andrew Sullivan seem to be suggesting that we totally abandon any critical thinking about our own romantic and sexual preferences. After all, that's the process that's allowed people to start dating across, for instance, racial lines, and the process that's created new spaces for homosexual couples. Call it PC if you want, but it's really a genuinely positive cultural thing that's been happening to human society over time.

Now, don't get defensive... I'm not in the business of blaming people for following their gut instinct. Our reasons will always be somewhat opaque, even to ourselves, and some people won't be able to get over their lack of attraction for short men, or for women who are over a size 2, or for Caucasians with freckles. Or their preference for men with beards who sweat a lot. Or their preference for people with visible scars. Or whatever. I mean, you've still gotta have your criteria, for whatever reasons you have them, and a woman who likes tall guys isn't de facto immoral (which is where I can see that Miss Steiger may have overreached a little). But there's no reason we shouldn't ask where our preferences are coming from, and try to work through them a little.We've been achieving positive outcomes in the face of natural tendencies for a long time!

I know I shouldn't take it for granted that you're a progressive or a rationalist, dear reader, but I know my expected audience... and I think the logical, progressive, rationalist position is that if we can recognize our socially-conditioned, convention-driven reasons for something, we can often get over them. This will create a stronger, more adaptable, more tolerant society, and it will also broaden our own individual pool of potential mates. So it's not just navel-gazing here... there's a real pragmatic reason to consider the issue that Kay Steiger is addressing.

To the Void: User-driven content creation, and the need for an artificial audience

A friend's band just released their first album, via Kickstarter. They're called Hurrah! A Bolt of Light! They play pretty rad alt-rock with a teeny bit of folksyness to it. You should check them out.

Today, in More Intelligent Life, Joe Morgan blogged about how Berlin is the new hotness for emerging musicians and music technology, and for a whole segment of culture connected to it. He ended the write-up with this observation:

"While the average music-obsessed teenager is unlikely to be able to emulate the sounds produced by Richie Hawtin on his or her iPad, tapping into this ubiquitous urge to create could become big business in the next stage of the music industry’s development."

These two things, taken together, put my mind on an unexpected track, as follows: does it seem to anybody else that the opportunities for creative production are growing much faster than the interest in consumption of its products? Like, there are currently a LOT of blogs out there. There's an explosion of DIY film and video production, with video-blogs, web series, fan-made music videos, short films, feature films, etc etc etc. There's a burst of music production opportunities, too, as Joe Morgan suggests, above. We're at a point in history when the tools are available to do pretty much anything, and to find pretty much any talent, or develop any personal passion, that might be latent in your personality.

Now, I unequivocally think this is a good thing. Access to communication technology can only enrich our cultural environment, and whatever it takes to make it work, I'm confident we'll adapt.

That said, I am a little nervous about the way access to tools is amplifying the universal love for attention. There really is a broad, universal desire to create something, and a parallel desire to find and captivate an audience. So there are more and more content-creators, an explosion of amateurs both talented and otherwise, some slipping into niches, some desperately searching for big breaks or back-doors to fame and fortune. But for all the rise in people expressing themselves, is there a corresponding rise in people willing to listen to these new voices, willing to help parse them out, give them a few minutes, and offer a fair shake to unproven work?

The ideal solution, of course, is that citizens of the media-scape learn to be mindful. To whatever degree a person creates things, he or she should also be willing to seek out, critique, and reward new work from others, both in the same platform, and in other areas. Blogs are helping with this phenomenon quite a lot, I think, creating bridges between niche communities and mainstream trendsetters, and linking small personal communities with larger communicative spaces.

However, I'm not sure this will ever happen to a degree that will take care of the asymmetry between new creators and new audiences. After all, technologies are enabling people who are both extremely prolific and unfortunately self-centered, and it will always take some extra work and open-mindedness to go out and discover the work of new artists. It's a question of economy, you know?

For this reason, I think there's an emergent market here, for whatever programmer wants to jump in: the market of artificial audiences.

You really just have to supply one app... call it "appreciative critic"... and sell it to anyone who's tired of releasing their blog posts and photographs and installation art into the void. It could look like a robot, like those uncanny-valley things, or it could just be a voice over your phone... or something that used the camera on your mobile device to scan something, and then gave feedback in a pop-up window. The first generation can just randomly generate some responses: "Oh, this is your best work yet!" and "I'd look it over again before posting it anywhere."

Down the line, though, AC (that's my shorthand for Appreciative Critic) should learn to scan for patterns, make constructive comments, and generate praise based on actual characteristics of the work. And after a few more releases, maybe it can actually provide meaningful critiques of new work! I think we'd end up creating artificial intelligence without even realizing we were doing it.

Engineers, semioticians, linguistics programmers, Ray Kurzweil? Somebody wanna get on this? If we can't all become highly responsive and open-minded consumers, we'll have to go ahead and create them, won't we?

A couple more observations on politics and discourse

First: if we're going to try to get this "well-informed, balanced discourse" thing going after the Stewart Rally and the election-day fisticuffs, we can start with some worthwhile articles from reputable sources that address some of the myths echoing around popular discourse:

Here's one on how Obama saved Capitalism, to his own ultimate political disadvantage.

From Bloomberg Businessweek, Obama is meeting his legislative objectives, and very few people are noticing.

And now a more personal response to these unstable political days.

After the Comedy Central rally, I happened to pick up one of my old Media Studies sourcebooks, Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy. It argues an elaborate theory that for two thousand years, Western civilization conditioned itself into being an extremely visual society (which he also associates with being individualist, linear, chronological, and structured in our thinking)... he asserts that the Gutenberg press brought about the apex of this form of culture. He then argues that for the past 100 years, we've been reverting into an auditory culture, which he associates with spatial, non-linear, and simultaneous ways of thinking.

And he says that panicked, terror-stricken behavior will be a product of this shift in perceptual mode, if we're not prepared for the changes. His description of this rocky transition is strikingly familiar:

And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. It is easy to perceive signs of such panic in Jacques Barzun [a cultural historian/philosopher] who manifests himself as a fearless and ferocious Luddite in his The House of the Intellect. Sensing that all he holds dear, stems from the operation of the alphabet in and on our minds, he proposes the abolition of all modern art, science, and philanthropy. This trio extirpated, he feels we can slap down the lid on Pandora's box. At least Barzum localizes his problem even if he has no clue as to the kind of agency exerted by these forms. Terror is the normal state of an oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the same.

So, M.M. offers warnings of anti-intellectualism, and a prophecy that our culture will be engulfed in panic and terror, a knee-jerk reaction to the sudden explosion of our mutual awareness (aka loss of privacy, high visibility, and ubiquity of trivial information). And now here we are, scared of terrorists next door, homosexuals infiltrating our childrens' heads, and rats with human brains. It may be a little late for this world, Marshall, but if you can see this from the next, I hope you're saying, "Yup, that's what I figured."

Rally to Restore Sanity: A meta-political landmark. I hope.

Happy political Halloween! Instead of spending a day working on a costume or watching artsy horror movies from the 60's and 70's, I went to the Rally to Restore Sanity. It was a last-minute decision, made on the fly because I knew it would be a cultural landmark, and I saw the opportunity. At least, I hope it will be seen as a cultural landmark. It was a little microcosm of liberalism, in all its beauty and its vulnerability.

I didn't see all the mad performance pieces at the front; I couldn't hear Yusef or Ozzy or Rahzel. I didn't catch the keynote until I got to a video after-the-fact. You may think that this gave me a narrower insight into the dynamic of the event, but au contraire! It gave me a better one! Because, no matter how diplomatic John and Stephen tried to be, the tenor of the rally would be set by the attendees. If they had been Black Bloc and revolutionary insurrectionists, or even straight-edge punks chanting slogans, the politics would have been pretty one-sided, no matter how the speeches themselves were handled. By wandering among the signs and participants, I got a feeling for the mood of the crowd and the tone of the event as a whole, rather than for the specific performances, which (being affiliated with a major media network) are obviously going to be sanitized.

What I found was pretty impressive: the rally as a whole -- both the on-stage rhetoric and the expressions of the crowd -- were strikingly on-message. Leftist solidarity and socialist advocacy were generally absent, and almost all the signs were meta-political, targeting the language and media of politics, rather than the divisive issues that make up its content. The fears of people like Timothy Noah at Slate, who felt the event automatically had a strong liberal bias that made its message of moderation disingenuous, were pretty much unfounded. And the massive crowd was universally calm, cordial, well-behaved, good-humored, and easy to get along with, even in stressful positions (like shut out of a full metro car, even when they'd been waiting for hours to get downtown).

Now, here's where I'm coming from. I'm a guy who indulges the unhealthy habit of reading highly partisan blog posts from time to time (on both sides of the aisle) and then reading the comments to each of them, wherein the tantrums of the few trolling attention-whores tend to drown out any useful dialogue going on. I get this feeling from the mainstream outlets themselves, too, at least in the past year or so: that participating in the democratic discourse is always a losing proposition, because any argument is automatically hyper-politicized, linked with dozens of bad (usually irrelevant) arguments, and invalidated by proxy. Every attempt to participate is turned into a shouting match, and thus, expressing any political position whatsoever is enabling trolls and reactionaries, and is therefore self-defeating.

So this rally was genuinely refreshing. John and Stephen (and Yusef and Ozzie and the guy next to me with a big "Use Your Inside Voice" sign) had a cohesive message, contrary to some of the nay-saying that's gone on since the rally... and it's a cohesive message I can get behind: discourse needs to be civil. In so many words, we were trying to say, "We respect, and expect, maturity and restraint from our political media, and we will reward it." And there were a lot of people saying that. And it's actually one of the first large-scale, mass-media sentiments I can get behind, because it outflanks the hyper-politicized culture-war rhetoric. Stewart and Colbert stepped back, took the whole situation into account, and fashioned a message that responds to it at a higher level than mere partisanship. It's a little more complex, and it's far more gratifying.

Of course, with the palpable relief comes the fear that many of us leftists (and also tons of moderates) probably still have, especially after yesterday's election: the fear that this whole thing will be overlooked, because it's not sensational enough to be interesting. Unfortunately, no matter how high-level the thinking is, Stewart and Colbert are still subject to the media conditions that created this shitty situation in the first place.

Fenzel from Overthinking It puts it rather nicely:

The rally isn’t going to solve Stewart’s problem with the press — it’s not even going to come close to solving the problem. The economic fundamentals are too heavily stacked against it. The profit motive for media organizations to keep going the way things are dwarfs what they can make just producing news. They can make a lot more money — for their own books, for their own pockets, and through various complex business relationships — selling de facto editorial control of news outlets to private companies (that will turn profits by influencing government policy) than they can make selling time to the Pine-Sol lady and the Scooter Store.

So while I can call this event a "landmark," it won't even be a footnote if it doesn't have some effect on the material conditions that govern these things. And it will be hard, especially if you follow a Marxist framework, like Fenzel seems to... it won't have much effect on the economics of the situation.

But here's where my hopes for the rally come in.

First, it's important to note that shows of solidarity have a powerful effect, if they can resonate with the media. The Tea Party has proven this -- their power isn't in their spending or their economic force, but rather in their visibility, and their ability to reframe the political environment. This rally was indeed a response to the Tea Party (a common theme on the signs), and it makes reframing the discursive environment its explicit business. The exposure from this rally may give everybody -- not just leftists or teenagers -- an essential tool that they didn't have before: a new sensitivity to media sensationalism, which might have been affecting them for a long time without their even knowing it. Maybe, because of this rally, a new crop of people will be able to roll their eyes and change the channel when someone accuses a university professor of "hating America," or a Christian teenager of being a mindless conservative drone.

I especially hope Stewart and Colbert reinforce the younger generation's resistance to outrage and sensationalism, because they're both the most vulnerable to bad discourse, and the its most powerful potential foe. They need to build up a media immune system, and if their influence works out right, Stewart and Colbert could act as vaccines against the festering media conglomerates.

Also, as a progressive, I have some hopes (didn't mean to give away my political persuasion, but there you have it). I think the conservative perspective is currently dominating the media environment because it's created a foundation of outrage and reactionary rhetoric, and this has served its message very well. This is one very important reason for the partisan shift in yesterday's elections. Though the rally came to late to have any effect on the elections, I hope they can do something new: provide a parallel foundation for the leftist platform to be consolidated and articulated. If a discursive framework of moderation, diplomacy, and constructive, hopeful, humorous, self-aware dialogue can be laid, then the progressives may stand a chance of forming a cohesive platform, based on our core values: compassion, economic and social equality, and market capitalism supported by universal social programs providing for basic civil rights (both negative and positive, outlined in documents like the Bill of Rights and the UDHR).

Kanye West's Runaway, post 3: Who is this guy?

This is my final post about Kanye's recent music video opus Runaway. You can go to the first post to see the video and check out some other blogs' reactions; the second post discusses some precedents for this type of narrative music video treatment.

You got the story on where this fits in... today, I'll talk more about what sets it apart. And I want to start with the opinion of one of its commentators, The House Next Door's Oscar Moralde.

Moralde gets one particular thing right -- like many music videos, this short film stands on the virtue of its individual moments. The extended ballet sequence was particularly visually effective, I think, as the dance itself was beautiful. It was an interesting creative decision: this is the moment when the debutante dinner is watching Kanye the most closely. Thus, this moment represents the spectacle of Kanye's act, and in the middle of an orgy of spectacle, he chooses something restrained and expressive to draw the audience's gaze. And he doesn't half-ass it... it's about 10 minutes long, at the exact center of the 30-minute video. I love the sequence, and I love its contrast with Kanye's persona.

Is it all too grand? Is it all too cheesy? I think this is what some of the commentators think, but this isn't a paradigm that demands great restraint. After all, the "art film" pretense is just a gloss -- this film is made with a musical sensibility, rather than a cinematic one. Where the fine arts of cinema and theater are always looking for new stories to tell and fresh, transgressive ways of telling them, music is more cyclical. In the pop music worlds (rock, rap, country) we don't criticize artists for writing yet another song about love, or another self-praise anthem backed by ironic retro samples. And we have a good deal of tolerance for high drama in music, to the point of celebrating some truly epic melodramatic songs (The Killers and Guns n Roses, I'm looking at you guys). These tolerances bleed over into the world of music video, as well... we appreciate and celebrate lots of music videos weighed down with high drama, repeating the same cyclical structures: performance, abstract, story, performance.

Convention has its place, and the the "cliches" of Kanye's short film are fairly purchased by its musical nature. Just listen to the songs: "Can we get much higher?" ... "Turn up the lights in here baby" ... "Lost in the World." In the music, the self-importance, the epic drama, is a part of the package, and it's not only tolerable... it's necessary. This is where the video is rooted. This is why the project fits together.

Certainly, this video opus is excessive, but it's also very authentic. Kanye put himself into his video piece, including all his self-importance, his feeling of isolation, and his ambivalence about his industry patrons. He also acknowledges that he's kind of a ridiculous centerpiece for a sweeping drama... Oscar Moralde may interpret his lines as simply bad, but for me, they worked great as humorous asides in a very self-important work of art. When his neighbor at the dinner asks if he realizes his companion is a bird, he says, stupidly and drolly, "I never noticed that."

This little clip of dialogue is turned into a strange moment of discomfort and recognition when the patronizing neighbor makes a xenophobic remark. The cheesiness of this moment is mitigated by the awkward line that precedes it, which has already brought some levity to the moment. The recognition of injustice doesn't manifest as shock or heroic indignation, so much as a tiny crack in Kanye's total obliviousness. This makes him a strange character, an idiot-savant center of attention who doesn't fully understand what he's bringing to the table (so to speak).

You can claim he just looks stupid because he's actually stupid, but I don't really buy this. "Felliniesque" is certainly an overstatement, but the guy is shrewd, and he presumably knows what messages he is sending. Seen in this light, his character is a sort of hip-hop Forrest Gump, and his lines, like "First rule in this world, baby: don't pay attention to anything you see in the news" represent intentionally simple-minded wisdom. Life is like a box of chocolates, baby.

This kind of sounds like his Twitter personality, too. He's got GW Bush's pithyness and Joe Biden's tact. And he knows this. "Let's have a toast to the douchebags" is as much a self-criticism as a snipe at his peers.

This self-criticism is part of the general tone that makes this video unique. It may be decked with the trappings and ostentation of big-money hip-hop videos (the Michael Jackson parade! Jesus!), but Kanye's character isn't exactly a hard-ass baller. He's got a cool car and a nice crib, but rather than counting his bitches, he's falling in hopeless, almost adolescent love. Rather than taking over the party, he's asking whether he even wants to be a part of it.

Now, this is on top of the rather uncontroversial "central metaphor" of the film, which is that the phoenix represents Kanye's career, which is being reborn from its own ashes. Now, everybody kind of takes that metaphor for granted, because it's so easy to sum up, as I just did. But if you actually look into it, it's not so simple. The 2009 VMA's were Kanye's Taylor-Swift-boat, but is he equating this process with crashing down into a cesspool of critics, in anticipation of rising up again to return to his fame? Considering the video is about love and loss within this transitional period, and that Kanye himself appears as a companion and a guide through this "lower world," I don't think this metaphor is so cut-and-dry. There's a sense of alienation and uncertainty to the phoenix's predicament, but not a sense of failure or trial-by-fire. In fact, she seems to approach her situation with hope, and with some measured joy. You could say the metaphor is underdeveloped, or you could say it's loose and ambiguous... but it's not so simplistic that you can wave it away as below consideration.

Part of the mixed message, I feel, is that Kanye actually appreciated being lost and dismissed as an artist (now, it's arguable whether this was ever really true, but we'll play along). On Earth, where the phoenix is exiled, there's all sorts of pettiness and sniping and unfulfilled promises... but there's also hope for love, some excellent dancers, fireworks, and the epic paper mache heads of music legends. And Phoenix, when she finally leaves, doesn't seem triumphant or ecstatic to return to her place in the heavens. Indeed, she seems to be tortured by mixed feelings, knowing that she's leaving behind a sad Kanye. And Kanye himself knows that, however broken he found his career to be, his challenges after a "renewal" will probably be all the more stressful (mo' money, you know the story).

There has always been a bit of adolescence and a bit of vulnerability to Kanye, even at his moments of purest arrogance. All of these things come across in Runaway. It may be audacious, self-centered, and grossly over-the-top... but I'd like to give Kanye my props, knowing that he's an artist who will try some crazy shit when it suits him. This is who he is. Hear, hear.

Kanye West's Runaway, post 2: Man, you referenced the wrong history

This is my second post on Kanye West's recent music video epic, Runaway. In the first post, I discussed the general story framework, and the critics' reactions. I also linked to the video, so click through to see it. Tomorrow, I'll talk about some interesting thematic elements that make this a unique media artifact.

Today: where this project fits into recent mass media history.

Kanye is a big star, and he knows how to make headlines. Just recently, he got a pop music meditation written about him by Taylor Swift and performed at the VMA's, and no matter how you judge that, it's proof that he's made an impression. His Twitter account is followed madly for its insight and comic touch. He's had a funny relationship with SNL, leading to an interesting performance on the show recently. At this point, he's in danger of overexposure. But he's not the first guy to take over the mass media for a while... and his most recent output, that batshit insane music video, is not the first project of its kind, either.

The House Next Door mentions Michael Jackson, who did this sort of thing from time to time. Of course, the MJ line in the song and the paper mache MJ in one of the scenes is a reference to Jacko, who was the progenitor of this narrative-montage format. In terms of message, Runaway is a far cry from Moonwalker, which was strictly a hero fantasy with no sense of irony or self-criticism at all. However, in tone and scale, Runaway strongly resembles the object of comparison, and given how few such projects have really come together, I think this comparison works to Kanye's credit.

This video also strongly reminds me of Madonna's historic Like a Prayer. It's partly the color palette and the thematic ambition; it's partly because of the image of a mythical figure coming to life as an object of desire, and because of the use of classical performers as a backdrop to a pop performance. Madonna was also exploring her own media condition as a theme. Her piece was shorter and much more focused; Kanye is ready to say something about everything. Again, I see this as an asset.

I'm sorry if it just sounded like I said Jesus is a myth, by the way. I meant "mythical" in scope and cultural influence.

There are a couple more notable resonances between these two videos. As with Madonna's black Jesus, Kanye includes a racial theme, where the female protagonist appears to be of mixed race. Kanye also references white oppression in the form of a child in a Klan hood -- a reference that Madonna shares in her controversial video. However, unlike Madonna's video, Kanye doesn't come across as making an activist statement: many of the black characters are the wealthy exploiters, in a clear shot at the big money of hip-hop. It's never clear, along racial lines, who perpetrates the oppression.

Madonna and Kanye also both use the female body as an element of the spectacle, with lots of cleavage in both cases. Obviously this is for different thematic purposes: Madonna's liberated sexuality was transgressive, a feminist response to the controlling power of conservative media, reinforced by her relationship with the black character. By contrast, Kanye's media environment is not conservative, and his use of the female form isn't exactly taboo-breaking at this point; in his case, the almost nude model is garbed in a fashion designer's fantasy of divine wings. Kanye is celebrating the permissiveness and spectacle of his media, using this powerful and remote female presence as a symbol of innocence and desire. Make of this what you will -- it probably deserves a few words from a good feminist critic.

Of course, there's almost a touch of Lady Gaga in her fashionable excess, isn't there? Gaga, who's been mixing narrative and fashion for a few media cycles now, and who is notably influenced by Bjork. The phoenix (non)-costume is reminiscent of Bjork's iconic swan dress from the 2001 VMA's. The phoenix is Runaway's nod to the fashion world, which goes hand in hand with hip-hop and with the global media spectacle as it evolves.

How about another one? As I've written about Runaway, I've realized it also feels like Guns n' Roses' epic rock and roll videos, like November Rain, from back in 1992. Again, it's the themes: love and loss, the return to oblivion as a signal of redemption. It's also some of the techniques. Like Axl Rose, Kanye performs his piece on a piano before a captivated audience; like Slash, he then stands on that piano to deliver the climax.

The context here -- Madonna, MJ, GnR -- demonstrates one of the notable quirks about Kanye: he has the sensibility of a rock music video artist, even as he has the sense of irony and "arrogance" (read: self-praise) of the hip-hop artists who inform his sound. Apparently, when he talked about this video, he talked about it being "Felliniesque," which is a little silly. Hype Williams probably doesn't know who Fellini is. But Italian art cinema just wasn't quite the right context for this project ("Them Italians sure know how to make what the ________s want").

A better context would have been this history of epic music videos, that don't subscribe to the same standards of subtlety and taste. It may have a lot of ideas and references spinning around in there, but this is not intended to play out like literature. It's all about the spectacle, like those giants of the form: Jackson, Madonna, Bjork, Axl and Slash. And watching the videos above, I think Kanye's intense, ostentatious approach is going to prove an asset in the long run.

Luckily, despite all the nostalgia, there's also something here that's uniquely Kanye. I'll cover that tomorrow, when I discuss this particular video's subtexts.

Kanye West's Runaway, post 1: Not terribly well-received

I happened to catch Kanye's new music-video-cum-short-film opus Runaway on Vimeo the night it came out. I didn't even realize it would be a phenomenon. I think I was lucky in this regard -- I didn't have to see it so much as a media artifact of fame and arrogance, as just a video project, as with everything I see randomly on the Vimeo front page. But now the blog responses have started coming in, and I feel compelled to provide my own bit of discussion.

It's a mythic hip-hop saga of a playah (Kanye, who may or may not be playing himself) who runs across a fallen Phoenix, descended like an angel in a ball of fire. They go through the standard stewardship ritual, where he introduces her to the world in its beauty and tragedy, by way of some baroque music video set-pieces. Of course, he falls in love with her, and then (in the oldest tragic love-story trick in the book) has to let her go.

If you've got a free 30 minutes, watch it below:



First, I ran across the reaction from Monika Bartyzel at Cinematical, to which I responded: what? Your only reaction was to be totally sarcastic and unsympathetic? Haven't you ever seen a music video? Un-subtle symbolism is not a crime against sensibility... it's just a guy going crazy with the expressive tools at his disposal. Surrealism was no less blatant; neo-realism wasn't much more opaque about its deeper implications. If you insist on sputtering vitriol, please give it some substance!

Second, the reaction from Oscar Moralde at The House Next Door. This one is less hostile -- still delivered with an undertone of condescension, but it makes concessions to the imagery and the ambition. His initial problem seems to be that the video is arrogant and self-aggrandizing, and that it's got the sensibility of a film student. I submit that these complaints aren't that serious, either... rappers are generally expected to be adept in the art of self-praise, and cultural reference is one of their stocks in trade. And perhaps he's not exactly a mature, restrained filmmaker, but don't a lot of artists make their best work in their student period? Wouldn't you rather have the ambition of a student who's preoccupied with great works of art, rather than the routine of a rap video with no interest in showing anything but bling and bitches and booty, or (in the case of early gangsta rap) a bunch of dudes engaged in a pot-smoking rager?

[EDIT: I re-read Moralde's piece, and it's much more well-rounded than I give it credit for. He actually does discover some beauty and noble purpose in the video, and honestly, along with his criticism, his take is probably even more balanced than my own. So thanks for that, Oscar -- just wanted to put it out there.]

Okay, so needless to say, I don't buy these criticisms. In fact, I rarely buy criticisms without some sympathetic acknowledgment of what the artist was trying to do, or what makes their vision unique. And in Kanye's case, we have a guy aligned with the rap scene (complete with help from Hype Williams) but who wants to capture an epic tableaux of love, passionate, and self-destruction. It's got the pomp and circumstance and self-importance of the rap game, which is one of Kanye's essential themes, but it's also got a consciousness of myth and the universal human story.

In my next couple posts on the topic, I'll talk about two things: tomorrow, visual precedents for this kind of treatment; Wednesday, the oddities of theme and character that make this video uniquely Kanye.

Banksy stacks The Simpsons with different levels of messaging

Banksy's recent opening sequence for The Simpsons is striking and discomforting, which is a small triumph right from the get-go, as far as I'm concerned. However, more brilliant is the way Banksy has used this forum to navigate a gauntlet of corporate pressure and open critique. He's done this by subverting his own message with sarcasm, which provides just enough of a hook for FOX to let the ad run; it may make the sequence more diffuse in its targeting, but it also makes it much more effective, if only by giving FOX a reason to put it on the air.

WTF am I talking about? Check out the sequence:



Well, let's start with the most obvious reading of the intro: that it's an exposé and a direct, open attack on FOX and The Simpsons' overseas outsourcing policies. I'll call this the CRITICAL READING -- the interpretation that Banksy has used this forum to make a direct comment on FOX's corporate immorality.

This raises an obvious first question: how did this get past the FOX executives? It doesn't matter how powerful Matt Groening is in the FOX heirarchy... the network would never PAY a video artist to create a direct attack on its own policies, and then air it on a high-visibility network show. They also wouldn't give such a dangerous artist completely free license; they would only hire him on particular conditions of review and approval. So how'd Banksy make this work?

Presumably, if this sequence was too literally on-target, it wouldn't have run. If FOX was actually perpetrating human rights abuses for the purposes of creating FOX animation and merchandise, and it wasn't a public issue, and the network was trying to keep quiet about it, then they wouldn't have touched this bit of subversive commentary by Banksy. So there must be something else going on here, something that subverts the CRITICAL READING that's initially evident.

Well, guess what? There IS another reading out there. After all, this information about FOX outsourcing from Korea... this is already public, and the public has already had a chance to chew on it and gripe about it. So the suggestion that The Simpsons outsources its labor isn't so dangerous. People who realize this are seeing this opening sequence as being a satire of media hype, a wry hyperbole of critics' misinformed ideas of foreign labor. This reading, seeing the segment as more tongue-in-cheek and humorous, is what I'd call the SARCASTIC READING.

And it's an adept turn of message that the SARCASTIC READING subverts the CRITICAL READING. Certainly, this was enough of a selling point for Banksy to get the network to agree to air this segment. They know The Simpsons has always been edgy and self-critical, so when Banksy tells them that his opening sequence is actually making fun of the critics for being so sensitive about this "sweatshop labor" outsourcing thing, they buy it. They understand that the segment is controversial, but not outright dangerous to them, so they agree to run it. It's good for all parties.

It's important to note that even with the specific FOX-focused criticism slightly declawed, this intro sequence still makes a statement. For one thing, many people won't notice the sarcastic reading and will just come away with the critical reading. For another, there is a higher-level critical reading that isn't preemptively invalidated: the reading that this intro is a general critique of American consumerism and lack of global awareness. People may follow this insight to a dead end with regards to FOX, but at least they will have taken a moment to consider where their products come from. And there will be lots of people -- the smartest of them -- saying, "Well, maybe FOX isn't the worst offender in terms of exploitive labor, but there are definitely American companies out there who are actually just this bad." ... "And honestly, we don't know about FOX, either. Maybe this is closer to the mark than we realize."

Banksy is walking a deeply ambivalent line between co-opting the instruments of mass culture, and selling out to them. His ability to simultaneously skewer FOX and its critics shows just how complex his messages can be. As much as this attests to his skill at working with the information apparatus, it still begs the question: for whose benefit is this media artifact created? You're sending a valuable message, but is it enabling the offender? Which is more important: what you say? Or on whose behalf you say it?

Rock and Roll Done Right: Nostalgia with Chris Cunningham and Courtney Love

I had almost forgotten my old tastes in music before I ran across the two videos I saw last week, minor but strangely poignant clips from creative minds that I greatly respect. I had forgotten what it feels like to look into the cultural slipstream and see how history flows through us, from the past into the future. And I had mostly forgotten about Chris Cunningham and Courtney Love, before these two videos turned up and reminded me how interesting they always were.

The first one was Chris Cunningham's beautiful, subdued, abstract visual piece, exhibited this past month at the MoMa. It's called New York is Killing Me, and it's an audio-visual remix of a song by Gil-Scott Heron. The original was a multi-channel work, shown on three screens simultaneously (must have been a hell of an experience). It's bluesy, and dark gritty ambient, and for some reason, I feel like the bastard child of those forms is some sort of rock and fucking roll, a kindred spirit to Joy Division. You can see a clip at Cunningham's website.

Now, this is a pretty chilled-out clip for Chris. He's famous for the ferocious, cerebral insanity of Come to Daddy and Rubber Johnny, the kind of work that makes you grit your teeth. New York is Killing Me is more of a meditation, reflecting the broader, more cunning nature of urban oppression. Gone is the twitchy, glitchy effects work, replaced with a steady hand and an eye for juxtaposition and composition. This is about the landscape, without and within the mind.

The other one, posted later in the week at The House Next Door, is a little Courtney Love moment, among her more photogenic: she sings Lady Gaga's Bad Romance to a tiny crowd in what looks like the back room of a bar. Take a look:



There are so many evocative elements and undercurrents in this video. It all adds up to something strangely beautiful in its nostalgic sincerity. Courtney is part of a whole lineage (arguably its Godmother) of female rock stars cum publicity monsters, succeeded by people like Amy Winehouse and Lady Gaga. Between Love and Winehouse, we seem to have adapted to bad behavior enough that we could laugh at Amy, whereas we tended to sneer at Courtney... and with Gaga, we have come to see outlandish public appearances as a sort of performance art. I support this. Lady Gaga is great at what she does.

But here, Courtney is not being an inane fuck-up, which is what she's arguably most famous for. Instead, she's exhibiting those things that made us appreciate her (or forgive her). She's not puking or getting naked -- she's performing a song by the new Mad Diva, obviously not completely knowing it (reminiscent of Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious), but ready to share it with the crowd she's part of. She was unstable, but this wasn't what made her great... what made her great was her work with Hole, her razor-sharp, well-written albums and studio tracks, and her general unwillingness to compromise anything about herself. Here, after Joaquin Phoenix self-destructs for show, we get a performance by the real shit, the model train-wreck.

And doesn't she look like she's having the time of her life, singing her ambivalently sarcastic tribute? When Courtney stands up and gets a ripple of love from the crowd, it's a quietly epic moment. It feels like she's bearing her soul, in the same strange, private way that Cunningham seems to be doing in his MoMa piece. These are rock and roll icons with their accolades stripped away, so we can see why they're so untouchable: because they love this shit, and they're 100% sincere about it.

There's something else about these short films: both of them remind me of New York City. The open, endless urban sprawl, interlaced with subterranean rhythms, is an essential part of the texture of Cunningham's video. Now, I know Courtney's video was shot in Paris, but it still has that sweaty, claustrophilic, center-of-the-universe sense that you get from the back room of a bar in a big city, whether it's the Givenchy Party or the Knitting Factory. So the face of the city is reflected in the faces of these artists, which is why it's such a great idea to put the right kinds of visuals with your aural stimulation.

I can watch these a bunch more times, and turn the sound up as high as it goes, and it empties me out and leaves me feeling raw and monolithic. It's good to know that Chris Cunningham is still realigning the audio-visual forces of rock and roll, and it's great to be reminded that Courtney Love's presence screams and echoes in the history of crazy bitch rock and roll. But these little intellectualizations are ultimately irrelevant... the real point is to feel the blood pumping through these media artifacts, drowning out the anesthetized world.