what america is

in march of this year i remember noting how warm it was. it was nice - sun on my skin, walking outside without a jacket. i thought that this is what it would look like: summer starting earlier and earlier until we reach the long summer at the end of the world. summer was long, stretching out an endless campaign until i was numbed to its depravity and senselessness.

this morning in minneapolis we had our first frost. for a few weeks i've enjoyed on my walk to work leaves lingering in the trees that looked like weightless flecks of gold, but they're gone now. around augsburg, the landscapers were weed whacking the flowers that the frost killed.

we know what america is now

kanye the mystic

my first few listens to the life of pablo left me disappointed that there wasn’t more kanye on it. in retrospect, i think what i meant was more of kanye rapping. i’m often guilty of not taking him seriously enough; this album is probably kanye’s most introspective, most reflective.

my position first changed when my friend gabe pointed out the lengths to which kanye had gone to obscure his voice. he seems to be almost hiding, composing collages of sounds behind the scenes. but then he doesn’t make the sounds either, does he. kanye’s great ability from my beautiful dark twisted fantasy on (as my friend adron told me) was to bring together great artists.

like with beyonce’s music, this mode of production draws the auteur question of filmmaking into music. this is a distinctly digital way of working, unique to a mode where recordings are assembled into music on computers. how much responsibility can we give kanye for the final product? is he actually creating, or is he just curating sounds?

kanye is a tastemaker. if not necessarily in fashion but in music his ability to make these collaborative albums renders kanye a kind of henry the navigator for the sonic landscape of the next few years. this tastemaking ability reminds me of two people: his wife, kim kardashian, and the man to whom he has frequently compared himself, steve jobs. both of these people take what has been made by other people and assemble it into something that people never knew they wanted until they had it.

consider, for tastemaking proofs, frank ocean’s distorted voices across blond(e). or perhaps look at the way frequent kanye partner justin vernon’s voice slowly transitions from vocoded distortion at the start of 22, a million, into clarity at the end. consider, again, the mystical adornments on the album cover.

there is something mystical about pablo. it begins with the ultralight beam, which can be understood as pure experience of divine and simultaneously as the overwhelming spotlight of fame. the troubling overlap of these things: the pursuit of mystical truth (resonating with aesthetic truth) and the pursuit of fame. can they be distinguished?

this tension pulls the album into its deeply introspective space. in doing so, it seems we retreat back to the very earliest episodes in the kanye myth. understanding the album requires an entire genealogy. there are many references to college dropout and late registration throughout the album, culminating in the story told on thirty hours. this story seems outside the kanye canon, about a long-distance relationship that didn’t work out. kanye’s verses, smooth at the beginning, break down into an aimless freestyling.

the beating heart of the album is probably i love kanye, though. an ironic reflection on the persona he has constructed, delivered in a raw beatless way. the attempt to reconcile celebrity culture and aesthetic mysticism is driven by his wondering about what is left when he attempts to transcend this persona, and whether or not he is trapped by fame.

impermanence and the digital word

i’ve been crawling through walter ong’s Orality and Literacy for a while now, savoring it a few pages at a time. this is one of many luxuries being out of carleton has provided (though the tradeoff, that i have to wear business casual for 40 hours a week, has me wishing i could go back.)

one thing that has alternately amused & frustrated me is Ong’s focus on western scriptures and literature. i suppose it’s only to be expected - he was a jesuit priest and his book was published in the 80s. but my rudimentary knowledge of buddhist history gives me the sense that the development of this religion both tests and demonstrates for ong’s ideas.

the historical buddha lived sometime around the 5th century BC. we don’t know for sure, because nothing was written down. for four hundred years, the sayings of the buddha were maintained through recitation. the role of monks was always to maintain the teaching of the buddha for as long as they could. as the religion developed, becoming institutionalized and state-sponsored under the ashokan empire, its practices of recitation grew more sophisticated. no one monk could recite the entire canon - instead, it was scattered among many monks.

the stability of recitation that buddhists achieved meant that sutras could be effectively treated as texts. this enabled a kind of abstract analysis that ong associates with textual study, and resulted in the creation of the abhidhamma. where the sutras are essentially colloquialisms, the abhidhamma are the product of sustained, systematic philosophical thought. they take the teachings which were orally situated in the lifeworld of siddartha gautama and render them abstract, infinitely applicable, replicable. but this philosophy is still essentially oral in character: its written form isn’t treatises and arguments, but summaries and lists - what ong might call a memory aid.

once the scriptures get written down and buddhism develops into a more literatre religion, shit gets WILD. this is the origin of mahayana buddhism: the greater vehicle, which states that there are an infinite number of buddhas and bodhisatvas teaching in an infinite number of universes which are eternally going through cycles of growth and decay, anyone can write a new sutra and say it was revealed to them by a buddha, and so on and so forth. essentially: an already fruitful culture of oral abstraction, given widespread literacy and prosperity (and cultural contact with hellenism), rapidly blossoms into something bold and strange.

but even before this blossoming was the doctrine of impermanence. it’s pretty straightforward, as far as doctrines go: there is nothing permanent. everything material is subject to change. (the corollary being: don’t get too attached to what you’ve got.) as a metaphysical position it seems closely linked to, specifically, the transience of the spoken word. Ong attributes Plato’s philosophy of permanent metaphysical forms giving rise to our physical world to his literacy, but the illiterate religions of south asia took a different route

text isn’t as stable in 2016 as it was in plato’s day. the digital word can change when you’re not looking at it; it is produced and discarded on a whim. the physical referent for the word isn’t ink held on paper - it’s a sequence of stored charges that can only be interpreted by an elaborate device. we have very suddenly come into this paradigm, where written language can be treated with the disposability of spoken language. it has brought us to this churning boil of an election; who knows what other repressed demons it will bring forth.

authentically irrational

“we were struck with the fact that, in all the mass of material from which the record is composed, there is hardly one authentic document!”

the novel dracula ends on this ominous note. the vampire is eradicated, england is safe, and transylvania has become a pleasant tourist destination. but the authenticity of the record of the conflict is left hauntingly ambiguous.

“the vampire is dead, you idiot,” a man made entirely out of straw attempts to tell me. “that’s all that matters.” you don’t know how wrong you are, straw man. after all, documentation is central to dracula. the entire novel is composed of documents composed by the main characters. they’re created chaotically at first but the latter half of the novel sees them regimented and used as the first line of defence against dracula. documentation, in this novel, is control.

this regimentation, however, also changes the form of the documents they produce. they move away from modes that more thoroughly or purely capture their subjective experience: Jonathan Harker writes a diary in a shorthand script that only he & his beloved can read; Dr. Seward speaks into a phonograph that records his voice on wax cylinders - but is totally unsearchable, and illegible without mechanical interpretation.

one part of the action of regimentation is mina’s transcription of these documents. she converts unreason into reason with her typewriter, translating every encoded word or emotion-imbued phoneme into the controlled, interchangeable letters of type. she also duplicates the records several times.

replication and interchangeability: the hallmarks of reason. atheistic materialism organizes desire through these rational principles. if it can’t be replicated and sold somewhere else, to anyone else, then it can’t exist. but like jonathan harker, reviewing the copies without origin, ppl have grown anxious about authenticity.

to a degree the idea of a product or place or experience being ‘authentic’ is a construction of savvy marketers. but they didn’t make the anxiety about authenticity; they’re only responding to it.

the craving for what is authentic is a craving for what cannot be or has not been replicated; something that has an origin beyond the black box of mass production. it is a desire for a feeling of location that reflects subjectivity. it is a desire for a truth born out of history, not engineered by marketers. it is irrational and undefinable precisely because it exists to demarcate a space where reason cannot enter and begin making copies.

recommended reading Annihilation (Jeff Vandermeer) Mass Authentic (Rob Horning) Village Atheists, Village Idiots (Sam Kriss)

haha, oops

hmmm looks like there's no good post for today! sorry about that. i don't want this to become a habit but it's friday and i've got nothing to post. so here's guy fieri in his aged manifestation, ready for death to take him

if you're wondering what happened to the content i was planning to put up here today, please refer to this explanatory diagram:

partial visions from my subtle body

there are things you cannot photograph with an iphone camera. its makers cannot embed a human eye in a metal frame, or generate a mind from silicon. the capitalists of silicon valley will never create a fleshless human. even their algorithms are parodic homonculi dumbly failing to anticipate whimsy. such creations are always tools, never individuals. a human draws humanity not from a mind, but from relations between mind and body, body and other, other and mind.

what, then, happens to the moonlight that is delicately striated by my window blinds? i point my third eye at it and i am blind. i put it away and sight returns: here is beauty draped over my wall.

i am a compulsive photographer, rather than a professional. my unconscious desires attract me to more or less the same things as in illustrations: clear lines, dense patterns, bold colors. my instagram displays the better results of this habit, but only scrapes the surface. most of the photographs i take are filed away mercilessly, never to be seen again.

the pleasure of these photographs is not their memorable qualities, or any intent of mine to review what i have taken. perhaps in the immediate afterglow i might stop to admire the emergence of beauty in this new object, retrace the lines and colors with my eyes. but it is the act itself that feels good. taking a picture, i steal false permanence from an always shifting world. chaotic ephemera is stablized into structure, pointlessly, endlessly. it is like building a cathedral which is governed only by math, not physics, and which stretches out endlessly into intricate wings and arches.

but what, then, happens to the color of light pollution glowing orange against the clouds? the warmth of an entire city, dimly reflected into my eyes. what happens to subtle beauties that my camera does not care about?

i suppose that’s what my keyboard is for

communication and reality

if you haven’t guessed by now i’m a bit fascinated by communication technology at the moment. i suppose its understandable, given how much of the strangeness of 2016 feels like its the result of everyone having the internet in their pocket. or does it just feel that way because i get all my news through my pocket internet?? who knows

did you know that cities in germany with at least one printing press by 1500 were 29% more likely to be protestant by 1600 than those without? That’s just one example of power structures rapidly changing in sync with rapid shifts in the information infrastructure.

Another is the enlightenment - only here the technology is the same, still the printing press, and what’s changing is the values driving what becomes widespread. What’s published in the enlightenment isn’t following the old, religious/feudal value system of the church. Now it follows the value system of the market: popular demand decides what gets the widest distribution, what has the broadest impact. This is the era of the novel, and it culminates in those great revolutions of popular demand, American, Haitian, French. This is the information paradigm out of which our american government emerged.

at the beginning of the 20th century you see the rise of what Walter Ong calls ‘secondary orality’ - the ability to record and transmit the human voice at great distances and to large audiences, a transition Ong links to the rise of fascism. I don’t know anything about that, but I can tell you this: a popular art form makes a transition to ‘high art’ when its medium has becom outdated and irrelevant. this was the anxiety of the modernist novelists. print was no longer the central technology of mass communication, but they had still deeply internalized its forms. (this is also the description of the modernists that leads into my argument for lovecraft as a modernist, but thats for another time.)

Now we see a new shift, from the centralization of television to the hyperliteracy of the internet. the affordances and weaknesses of this new medium will shape the next century, assuming it doesn’t get promptly replaced by something else. This, i guess, is why i’m so interested in learning more about it: i want to read the future.

a too-long post about slenderman

what’s the most important thing to come out of 2009? was it the bailout that saved our economy? swine flu? the movie “zombieland”?

if you guessed any of those things dear reader, you are WRONG. the most important thing from 2009 was slender man. yes, from the video game. yes, from the creepiest event ever to come out wisconsin. but more important: from 2009!

slender man emerged from a somethingawful thread in 2009 and i’d love to talk about that some time but right now i’m going to focus on the first big Slender Man Thing: Marble Hornets. Like most slender man things, Marble Hornets is hard to formally classify. it’s not a movie, though it mostly exists as videos. it’s been called an ARG, but there’s no real ‘game’ element. the closest that acronym gets is at Reality: marble hornets has a lot to do with reality.

in this way marble hornets shares a lot with lovecraft: in this story, something is wrong with what is real. something else marble hornets shares with lovecraft? it can really suck sometimes. it’s in that strange category of unintentional artwork where the creator(s) didn’t really know what they were making - and the result is something strangely expressive, unhindered by flaws or form, and more or less irreplicable. (it follows that when i’m talking about marble hornets, i’m talking about “Introduction” through “Entry #26.” the full sequence is helpfully compiled here into a playlist by youtube user SiestaYonJyuGo

these videos are strange, alarming things. their horror is not of gore, but of disorientation. they present a world which has become dissociated and unreal. they use a camera, but the images it produces are flickering abstractions, fragmented and not meant to be pieced together. distortions in the audio and visuals are a constant in the videos - they’re a sign of slender man’s presence. what they really are is an awareness of medium.

the story is told almost entirely as images and text - there is little dialogue, and what dialogue there is is almost always secondary to the images & text. the audio is important, but only for its asemic content - it’s purely affective jabs of white noise and distortion that tell you when slender man is near. when slender man is near, you are reminded that you are watching a video. you are reminded that this is not real.

the characters themselves seem to be aware of a certain kind of unreality. in addition to the abstract camerawork, they are often writing, making marks. for jay, the character who runs the youtube account and uploads the videos, his voice only comes through in what he has written around the videos: white text on a black screen, giving sparse context. he has a dark double, in the form of the masked man/totheark, who uploads videos with meaningless or garbled text, white on a black screen. along with them, we see alex (who exists one narrative layer down from jay and totheark) scribbling on pages - he creates words, asemic writing, and abstract images of slender man. he never moves towards realism.

why such a strained relationship with reality? the same reason as lovecraft - and as the writers of gothic novels a hundred years before him. the creators of marble hornets are expressing the first wave of what has become by 2016 a widespread anxiety with a rapidly changing communication paradigm. consensus reality is based in paradigms of communication - but during periods of flux, consensus reality breaks down, as do mediums of communication. marble hornets sits at the intersection of the contextless memes native to the web (and out of which it was born) and film. it doesn’t have traditional scenes or narrative - instead it matches text with abstract, fragmented images shot in an overtly amateurish (but secretly fairly skilled) way. the disorientation it produces is the disorientation of being a heavy internet user, and being on the receiving end of context collapse all the time.

the most important thing alex scribbles is the operator symbol. this is a circle with an x through it. it has no clear meaning - it shows up throughout the series, scratched on the sides of buildings or flickering through totheark videos. It is an empty signifier, an arbitrary hyperlink inscribed into analogue space. This place is connected to that place - how, why? - it doesn’t matter.

this pairs with the series’ visual fixation on buildings and structures that resist interpretation. from the scenery of Introduction to the red tower to this inscrutable concrete structure, there’s a heavy element of ruin porn in this series. but it’s not for nothing: these are structures that ostensibly have some function, but its been lost or forgotten or its just not visible in the camera - the medium cannot capture it, cannot communicate it.

this accelerates towards the end of the sequence, when doors begin acting strangely. first we see a tape of alex exploring a burned out building - climbing stairs, then ending up in the basement. then doors start taking jay to the wrong places: he gets caught in repetetive loops while exploring a deserted house, unable to get where he’s going. The physical structures of the world begin to resemble the textual structures of the web, linked together senselessly in a semiotic web with no center or content, only feeling: fear.

marble hornets is a creature intensely in and of the web - slender man the frankenstein’s creature of our era. this post is already too long, but things marble hornets also deals with: why are men’s selfies always so bad, what is it like to be observed through social media, disconnect from nature, nostalgia culture, the presence of the body in textual media, the manifold doubling of characters, human memory vs. recorded memory, authenticity, meaninglessness, encryption, possibly more?

as a palate cleanser, here’s a silly little slender man video i made in 2012, and here’s a random collection of still frames from marble hornets videos i took while writing this

Takiyasha the Witch and the Skeleton Spectre

The rebellion against the emperor failed. Mitsukuni has returned to the ruined palace of Sōma to search for surviving conspirators. Who does he find but the witch-princess Takiyasha, daughter of the warlord Taira No Masakado. For her defense, she summons a tremendous skeleton spectre, and Mitsukuni readies himself for battle.

That’s at least one interpretation of the tryptich up there. It works! It’s serviceably mediocre, like me. But maybe there’s a better interpretation? let’s go on a magical blog journey to find out.

The triptych of Ukiyo-e prints would have been made from three separate woodblocks. The skill of the artist allows one to read it easily as an uninterrupted landscape - but each panel also stands on its own.

In the first panel, Princess Takiyasha looks up from her scroll and out into the next room. Her expression is difficult for me to interpret, but it doesn’t seem like malice - she seems surprised. Framing her in the ragged texture of a broken screen suggests a privacy that has been disrupted by her father’s failure and death. Just outside her room is the hat and makeshift pillow of a traveller.

In the second panel, Takiyasha is eye-to-socket with the skeleton spectre. The skeleton is overwhelming, but it also seems quite still. It’s not a question of the artist’s skill - Kuniyoshi is capable of very dynamic compositions. The real question is who the gentleman in red is. He is not, despite my suggestion, Mitsukuni’s friend or ally. They seem to be at the end of a quick but brief altercation.

The third panel is consumed by the spectacle of the skeleton’s body. Note that behind the skeleton is not the night sky - just an empty darkness. Perhaps such details would only interfere with the details of the skeleton.

Here’s my reading, then, given all that. Mitsukuni, passing near Sōma on his way “somewhere else,” decided to sleep there for the night. He lays down to rest in an unassuming location but before he can fall asleep, Takiyasha enters. She is still living here and sleeping in her old room. She doesn’t see the Samurai just past her ruined blinds; she is reading something. She has let her hair down.

At the sight of this uncontrolled, unprotected woman Mitsuki is posessed by lust. This distracts him from the rebel sneaking up on him, the man in red. Even with the element of surprise, the rebel cannot match Mitsukuni’s skill - but he comes close. He disables his foe without standing or drawing his sword: Takiyasha looks on astonished, the man in red looks up with malice. But Mitsukuni is looking at death. It came close this time, close enough that he is overwhelmed by it. Death has torn open the temporal world, exposing Mitsukuni to the infinite darkness beyond.

or maybe it’s the first reading, what do i know anyways

notes on the end of summer

Takiyasha the Witch and the Skeleton Spectre by Utagawa Kuniyoshi

i've been watching a lot of the explore.org bear cam at work since an atlantic article linked to it. i googled "environmental writing jobs" the other day, which is probably one of the sadder things i've ever googled.

things will probably pick up. but this work, so far, is dull, and fairly scarce. there's worse fates than spending hours at work learning history from wikipedia. my coworkers are nice, and people seem to like this tweet.

the weather has just turned cold for the first time since the solstice. it'll get warmer again, but you can taste the fall on its way. frank ocean dropped his album at the perfect time - blonde is perfect fall music. it's the end of summer, the end of relationships, the end of youth. it's driving away from it all with infinity opening up ahead of you.

i don't actually drive much, though. i'm riding the same bike i had at carleton, which is not so broken that i can't ride it, but it's broken enough that it's not really worth it to fix any individual defect. the wheels go, the pedals push, the brakes stop - more or less. it takes me where i need to go. sometimes, on the way, i see something that makes me feel a frank ocean kind of way.

the bear on the livestream right now has a hilarious ass. i want to pay more attention to the majesty of nature or something, but i can't stop looking at its ass.

the ACTUAL ufo post

hi okay remember when i didn’t talk about UFOs like, at all last week? sorry about that. this week is officially UFO week. and by “this week” i mean “it’s friday & i gotta write another one of these dang posts because setting arbitrary goals for myself is the only way I can get anything done, so i’m gonna do it about UFOs for real this time.”

I said some weak shit about the vastness of the difference that is possible in an alien encounter. and that definitely is a thing! but that’s more of a thing for “first contact” stories, like the impressive looking The Arrival. while a “first contact” story proposes a particular relationship between the mundane and the sublime,* the “paranormal experience” story proposes a different one.** by examining the “paranormal experience” story we can begin to see the outlines of the relationship between science fiction and scripture.

The earliest text we have that says anything about the Sublime was written by a Roman named Longinus at some point between the first and third century. It’s noteworthy not just for its effect on English literature at the end of the 18th Century, but also because one of Longinus’ examples of sublime writing is the Book of Genesis. He quotes Genesis 1:3, “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light,” and states that the writer “both understood and gave expression to the power of the divinity as it deserved.”

so the sublime is tangled up with religion. everything above and beyond humanity is sublime, and in a Christian context, god is everything above and beyond humanity (and a couple other things ofc). when Longinus’ treatise starts circulating in the renaissance, the first thing to come out of it is Baroque art. you get the gist.

but the enlightenment kills religion. this is hyperbole, but not that far off. beginning in the 17th century religious insitutions are replaced by secular institutions. mass communication through sunday preaching is replaced through the mass communication of the market vis a vis the novel. the sublime is displaced from god into the gothic.

Later, towards the end of the 19th century, as the materialistic positivism of empiricism expands and undermines the immaterial and the religious, an american psychologist makes a rather desperate intellectual move. william james invents mysticism and tells the world it has always existed. a mystical experience is defined by its ineffability, and as such is thoroughly anti-material. but it is also empirically valid as an altered state of consciousness. it’s essentially a logical structure that throws a wrench in the gears of materialism & which you can’t prove exists or not! as a response to modernity it’s pretty chill.

i would also argue that the mystical experience is an experience of the sublime. classically it is overpowering, overwhelming, delightful yet terrifying, self-obliterating and self-affirming. it is beyond everything mundane and it brings a new perspective for the mundane. the mystical is where human meaning breaks down but something is left; what is left is sublime.

while dracula offers a somewhat parallel response to modernity as the mystics, it’s lovecraft’s fiction where something like mystical experience is first rendered science fictional.*** this is the form of the paranormal investigation: much like the mystic, the investigator undertakes a series of mental transformations leading sublime experience of revelation. this is marvellously blended with the form of the police procedural by the x-files.

here is where the UFO becomes sublime: the abduction experience is very much like a mystical or visionary experience. one is passively taken up by a higher power, sometimes seeing a bright light, but unable to adequately describe it. the similarity is so strong that its been noted by religious scholars (don’t ask who i forgot.) it is that part of the sublime which is experience beyond reason or conceptual understanding, incomprehensible but real.

*where the sublime’s translation into the mundane is the source of novelty in the world
**it follows that different modes of science fiction are demarcated by the different relationship between mundane and sublime that they express.
***there’s two dang posts & my whole rotten comps in that sentence tho

lets talk about UFOs

in which i make lots of promises & barely keep them

but first lets talk about the aesthetics of the sublime. if you thought I was going to break my pattern and not sloppily overthink something this week, well, you were wrong. THE SUBLIME (it always takes the definite article so that you don’t confuse it with the 90s ska band, a difficulty that Edmund Burke presciently anticipated when he wrote his definitive treatise on the sublime in 1756) is a feeling that is overpowering, frightening, but also delightful. the sublime is dangerous but appealing, like a dude riding a motorcycle down the freeway with nothing but a t-shirt on. in Joseph Addison’s words, it is “an agreeable kind of horror.”

folks, you can learn all sorts of fancy words from reading wikipedia. i love it! anyways, all that could be made up for all i know, except that i already learned about Burke and the sublime in a ~college class~. later, someone handed me a piece of paper, so i think it must be true.

WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH UFOs? well i learned about it in a class on gothic novels. ever heard of goths? eye shadow, pentagrams, etc? same idea. gothic novels were spooky books popular at the end of the 18th century. they expressed a lot of the anxieties that a lot of people were feeling after the rapid cultural change of the Enlightenment. they ALSO became the first testing ground for literary expression of the sublime. they’re almost always set in southern europe, especially in the mountains (mountains=easy mode sublime) and around spooky old ruined castles (old things have a kind of temporal sublime (in contrast with the spatially located sublime of a mountain) that is expressed in how far beyond a human lifespan it has and will endure.)

we’re still talking about castles and not aliens. don’t worry, they’re related: after all, the gothic was the first genre of genre fiction, and it contains the seeds of later genres. case in point: before appearing in retrospective to be the first work of science fiction, _Frankenstein_ was originally a terrifically experimental work of gothic fiction. most of what would now be considered science fictional about it can also be approached as a deep, thoughtful exploration of the sublime in relation to humanity’s capacity for creation.

(i would like to take a quick detour into asking that the whole world shut up about frankenstein as a scientist who played god & was destroyed by his own ambition; theres a lot more going on there. leave victor alone!!!!!)

this is what comes to define science fiction in opposition to “literary” fiction. where austen’s novels bring literature firmly into the space of the domestic and mundane, _Frankenstein_ orients itself relentlessly towards the sublime, rejecting the domestic altogether. science fiction is the body of literature that continues this embrace of the sublime possibilities of a universe that we know more and more about. (tho its not necessarily antithetical to the domestic & beautiful.)

WOW was i gonna talk about UFOs??? i sure got off on a tangent. short version: aliens, beings from other worlds, embody the vastness of space and likewise the vastness of possibility in the universe. the gulf is so wide that it is impossible to make any real knowledge of them before contact, so the moment of contact is sublime: anything is possible. they could be dangerous or friendly, ambivalent or just impossible to communicate with. maybe even impossible to recognize. those boys are sublime!

man i wanted to write about ufo mysticism and the x files and stuff but this post got away from me. maybe next time!

miyazaki and western surrealism

The 1970s was a golden age for surreal scifi, a genre which i fuckin love. From Zardoz to La Planète Sauvage, Bakshi to Moebius to Jodorowsky’s doomed dream, a lot of good shit came out of this period. But the capstone of the era was made in the 80s; its a remarkable collage of the ten years or so preceding it in surrealist scifi. This is Hayao Miyazaki’s first movie, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.

Nausicaa is an odd movie, and not actually very good in comparison to Miyazaki’s later work. Like most miyazaki films, is at its most powerful on the visual level—but it draws thoroughly from Western surrealists and little resembles his later work. It has more of the surreal medievalism of Moebius’ far futures; faces framed by jewelled hoods, pseudo saxon swords and helmets, Arzach’s steed becoming Nausicaa’s glider and the Valley’s gunship. There is a sprawling, beautiful wilderness—but filled with the bizarre forms of La Planète Sauvage. Nausicaa literally opens with a dude riding the bird-horse from Bakshi’s Wizards.

The opening scene serves as an adequate visual metaphor for how this surrealism functions: an almost familiar landscape is covered in layers of beautifully textured obstruction, rendering its forms abstract and defamiliarized.

This visual boldness, unfortunately, doesn’t make Nausicaa any better as a heroic epic: it lacks the weight that the form needs. (Conjuring this weight, incidentally, is George Lucas’ great gift; but that’s a different post.) But it does contain pieces of his later two epics: Castle in the Sky and Princess Mononoke. Some of the visuals are so similar across the films that you can almost imagine Miyazaki going back and mining Nausicaa for good ideas that were poorly executed—one example would be the world Nausicaa enters beneath the toxic jungle and the swamp where Ashitaka first sees the Forest Spirit:

You can see between those two images how much Miyazaki’s skill as an artist and a storyteller improved between these movies. But later films lack Nausicaa's vision of a sublime world. This it inherits from its surreal predecessors: the world that is not anthrocentric but greater than humanity, overwhelmingly vast in its history, its inhabitants, its possibilities.

In his later work, Miyazaki shifts towards setting his stories in the mundane world. This trend starts with Laputa, which is split between the mundane world on the ground and the sublime world of the flying castle; at the end of the film Laputa sheds its human elements and escapes the earth entirely, leaving our heroes trapped in mundanity. Miyazaki then experiments with domestic stories about magic hidden within the mundane and domestic. Once he finishes with that, he brings what he learned of weight and place and tells his masterful epic Princess Mononoke. The film effectively rewrites Nausicaa but is set in a relative mundane, vaguely historical world, where the sublime only acts through the distant presence of the forest spirit.

notes on the geography of ithaca

      Hunters in the Snow, Pieter Bruegel the Elder

“I'd known, even horizontally and semiconsciously as a baby, something different, the tall hills and serpentine one-ways of upstate NY. I'm pretty sure I kept the amorphous mush of curves and swells as a contrasting backlight somewhere down in the lizardy part of my brain.” -David Foster Wallace, “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley”
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ithaca sits surrounded by hills; the tops of the hills are flat. this is because they are not true hills, which rise up from the earth. they are plateau remnants; and the valleys are scratchmarks left by the fingers of glaciers when they reached down from the north.
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the hills in ithaca are split open with cracks where merciless water flows. the shattered sides of the gorges crumble at the touch as though the hills could dissolve at any moment. beneath every bridge in cornell a net is spread to deter jumpers, and ducks swim peacefully in the water below.

there are always more secrets hidden in these folded hills. when i am home i hike with dad, our small anxious dog, and our large blind dog. i think of the extradimensional geometry of string theory with every discovery of something i had never seen before. we go as far from civilization as we can and hidden among the trees we find colonial graveyards, old stone walls, abandoned logging roads.

minnesota stretches out flat until farms meet clouds at the horizon. driving becomes a shifting study of parallax and perspective. the skyline of minneapolis rises out of the flat land like mount fuji exposed against the open sky. in ithaca the hills hold you in pockets with only a sliver of sky. the other side of the valley is laid out like an abstraction of a landscape, flat houses and barns, farms and forests in a formless pattern. but this is a map of somewhere else: your perspective is only a single point in the image seen by someone on the other side.

ithaca sits surrounded by the names of dead places and people. odysseus will never return here. nor will the cayuga people reclaim the lake that carries their name. it stretches north to the horizon from ithaca, as if reaching to ontario where the displaced survivors of the sullivan campaign took refuge.

the haudenosaunee reached minnesota, in their imperial phase as english proxies. hiawatha’s name is still spoken here, more often than i ever heard it in ithaca.

something about minions and emotional signifiers

i saved this fuckin fossil to my hard drive in 2010

Sony is set to release next year a movie about a common set of images that depict a single, legible emotion set on a nonspecific shape. Which is funny, because I thought the Minions movie already came out in 2015.

The minions movie/market phenomenon was/is such a blatantly corporate money grab that it’s almost too easy to make fun of. I don’t even know what the movie is about; I’ve never even seen the trailer. But what’s really interesting is how indistinguishable minions are. They’re nothing like, say, Star Wars Merchandise, where the characters are easily distinguishable and the narrative firmly set. Minions, as far as I can tell, are differentiated by slightly different proportions and goggle styles. Beyond that, they’re just a vehicle for the expression of funny faces.

So they’re animated emojis, basically. An emoji is a particle of expression, conveying an easily legible emotion. They’re a feature of the blending that happens online between the image and the word, two modes of visual communication that have spent a long time apart. It’s not a totally unprecedented blend: comics, illustrations, illuminated manuscripts, and plenty of other forms have used the potent combination to good effect. But like many other forms of communication in this, the age of aquarius, it has become astonishingly easy. Memes are the most obvious forms but it carries throughout the web—I’ve found that instagram posts do better with cutesy captions than without text; I’ve been starting these blog posts with a picture for the same reason; and crucially our textual discourse is now filled with emojis.

The emoji represents an interesting kind of blend between text and image, very different from (but still related to) the common meme of text-over-image. Here it is an image with an almost (but not quite) textual containment of meaning. A word has a discrete referent; an emoji expresses a discrete emotion. This fixedness actually seems to be a plot point in the upcoming movie—the protagonist is an emoji who is not fixed on any one emotional display. Charming.

Now that our emotions have such easy signifiers available corporations are circling like sharks with the scent of blood. After movies, who knows what they’ll get into. But if there’s one thing that’s wonderful about the internet, its the ease with which corporate signifiers can be recognized, repurposed, or abandoned by real humans just trying to talk to each other. Anyways, here’s my favorite work of art from 2015: a minion committing seppuku.

the flappy bird post

I love Flappy Bird. It might be my favorite video game ever, though I don’t play much so I’m not sure how far you can trust my taste. But (as I have insisted to several of my very patient friends) I think that it’s more than just a silly little experiment of a game with nothing to offer beyond a low-grade addiction. From an aesthetic perspective, I think it is as epoch-marking as the original Super Mario Bros.

That’s just not an arbitrary comparison with (arguably) the most famous video game of all time, though. Flappy Bird and Mario share the same DNA. Visually, Nguyen appropriated the iconic warp pipe as the principal obstacle for flappy bird to navigate. Mechanically, each game is centered around precisely timped jumps.

But they diverge. The Mario games offer discrete challenges, each one situated in its own landscape. There is stable ground beneath your feet, something to retreat to and rest on between moments of challenge. In Mario, the player is expected to learn and grow as the game goes on, mastering each challenge just to be faced with another step. Finally the game offers completion, a state of total mastery over the elements, symbolized in this case by the rudely patriarchal acquisition of a woman of status.

The struggle of Flappy Bird is infinite. You are born, given a brief period of free practice, and then immediately set to jumping through hoops. The object that could transport you across worlds has become the principle object. The challenges are not designed: they are mindless, randomly set. You can never see further ahead than the next hoop. There are no enemies: death comes as a result of any interaction with the landscape, no matter how slight. There is nothing to rest upon: you must continue your struggling flaps until you are brought to death by your own clumsiness. The world of Flappy Bird is indifferent to your accomplishments.

I’ve never been much of a platform-game player, though. I always get frustrated with the challenges and quit. But Flappy Bird brings me into an almost meditative state of calm. When I’m doing well, it’s a quiet state of flow. My highest scores have come from when I started playing with some anxious train of thought running in my mind that distracted me from the game, and I don’t notice the choices I’m making as I play. I am as disengaged from Flappy Bird as Flappy Bird is from his surroundings.

Where Mario is a game of touching the world and mastering it, Flappy Bird invites disengagement from the world around you in favor of a soothing state of flow. You pass between obstacles almost without noticing them, until eventually one finds you: game over. But it’s easy to restart, and it’s not like you lost any accomplishment.

skeuomorphic modernism

this is a mess

Following graduation I’ve come back home to Ithaca for the summer (where “home”=“the place where I grew up”) and it’s helped me understand an architectural trend I’ve noticed recently. It’s particularly visible to me here for a couple of reasons: I grew up here, so new buildings stick out; Ithaca, as a prosperous but relatively isolated collegetown, has its own idiosyncratic culture; and a recent loosening of zoning laws has brought on a wave of new construction downtown.

The defining feature of this architecture is a development of modernism that maintains its formal elements: asymmetries, cube shapes, airiness and oppenness. But visually it centers traditional building materials like brick and wood in a decorative (not structural) way. The shining steel and huge windows of earlier modern architecture becomes ornamental peripheries.

An older building in Ithaca: brick structure, symmetry, some ornamentation, cloth awnings, arches over windows.

Modenism in Ithaca: smooth stone exterior, asymmetry, no ornamentation, awnings, or arches.

Skeuomorphic modernism: brick exterior, asymmetry, no arches, cloth awnings become steel sunshades, overt modernist elements become secondary ornamentation.

De-emphasizing the synthetic components of modernist architecture in favor of older materials is a spatially situated authenticity claim. Modernism is defined in part by what it is not, an attempt to situate buildings solely in an aesthetic space with an ‘anywhere’ quality. The new style tries to maintain the aesthetic features of modernist forms while projecting the appearance of being definitely, organically ‘here’ by using the same textures of wood and brick that old buildings use. This is an illusion—I’ve seen similar styles in Minneapolis and in photos of other cities.

The phenomenon is related to the one described in True-ish Grit, which talks about post-industrial cities selling their decay as an authentic backdrop for social media. (I promise I’m not deliberately mirroring Real Life Mag, they’ve just been putting out too much good shit.)

I think that this increased focus on authenticity of place is a response to anxieties resulting from the fluidity of information enabled by the internet. Semiotic information is no longer tied to space; its final spatial holdout in the printed word has been undercut by the digital word. Detached from its physical place, from the speaker or the text, words now are only attached to other words. But even as smartphone absorption seems to make physical space irrelevant, we try to make the physical spaces where we use our phones feel more real. But this style of architecture is the product of the likewise detached forces of global capitalism, which is why it seems to peddle the same sort authenticity regardless of place.

It’s the mirrored spacelessness of the internet and of money that produces this skeuomorphic architecture which comforts through decorative anachronism. It stands out in Ithaca because this cookie-cutter authenticity feels inauthentic against the backdrop of Ithaca’s actual local culture--anachronistic bohemians and bleeding-heart liberalism.

digital dualism and the novel

                                       X-Files S2E04

So I might just be an underqualified rando, but now that I have a ~platform~ I’ve got to use it for something, and that something might as well be a subject where I am vastly out of my depth. So let’s talk about digital dualism. You can thank the generous public scholarship of Nathan Jurgenson and his peers for giving me a lot of silly ideas about this (and other things). Hopefully I’ll be able to synthesize some of that here without talking to myself too much.

It was through several of Jurgenson’s essays that I was first introduced to the idea of digital dualism, a pejorative term he coined to describe reactionary trends of thought among baby boomers (Sherry Turkle et al.) against contemporary communications technology—the internet, social media, smartphones. The archetypal digital dualist sees these technologies as inhuman and unhealthy, and can often be found calling for disconnection and a return to what they see as more authentic lifestyles. Jurgenson contrasts this dualism with his theory of augmented reality, where the digital and the physical are meshed together in a reciprocal relationship and each constructs the other.

His steadfast advocacy for this position is why I was surprised by one of the first essays published in Real Life Magazine, which Jurgenson recently launched as editor-in-chief. Gemini Haptics by Michael Thomsen is an insightful and interesting piece that sets up a workable foundation for arguments of digital dualism. This is not to say that I would expect Jurgenson to be close-minded about the opportunity for conversation-it just wasn’t what I expected. The essay is quite pretty, and much smarter than I am.

The crux of the piece rests on a philosophical argument about perception—that instead of being strictly representational, our senses only exist in relation to the physical actions that they enable. As he puts it: “we see, in other words, what we can do.” Computers detach us from the physicality of our senses—the same mechanical actions on a touch screen accomplish vastly different material ends, and are distinguished only by the semiotic content of the interaction. The mental state that emerges from this Thomsen likens to the “machine zone” that slot-machine gamblers enter, a state of mind where repetitive mechanical actions produce a comforting dissociation and the illusion of control.

As a student of literature I lingered during undergrad on the early English novel as it emerged in the 18th century. It’s a fascinating time when the form was still emerging into popularity and no one really had a clue what they were doing. This is the period when the lovely experiment Tristram Shandy was written. Studying the rise of the novel, I encountered the writing of what I could playfully call “literary dualists.” These writers—typically older men—share many of the anxieties of our own digital dualists. In their words reading novels promotes narcissism, laziness, and sexual immorality; and renders their readers incapable of distinguishing between fantasy and reality.

The novel and the smartphone are obviously tremendously different mediums of communication. But I often find that a valuable response to digital dualists is to ask if anything in their argument changes if you substitute one for the other. The novel causes its reader to comfortably dissociate from their surrounding environment. A simple repertoire of repetitive mechanical gestures—scanning a line of text with the eyes, turning a page—provokes in the mind a vast range of different experiences depending on the semiotic content of the page in front of them. Reading a novel allows an individual to fit themselves within the superstructures of gender, nationhood, narrative, and molds us into individuality. Depending on who you ask, Western notions of individualism began with the novel.

I suspect it is the visible privacy with oneself that elicits the critiques of dualists. The state of absorption of the reader (whether reading a phone or a book) appears to be an uncanny kind of stasis in the eyes of a third party. The third party cannot also read the phone or book, the private space generated in the mind of the reader, so they are excluded. They feel physically disconnected from the proximate individual who is mentally connected to words that were written into another phone (or computer) somewhere far off.

Thomsen’s critiques are not of something new then, despite the fact that he speaks in terms of computers, of “a medium of dead quanta, the lifeless motion of charged particles through their semiotic cages.” He casts it as a frighteningly new thing, but as much could have been said about literacy in any period.

These screens, our new mediums for language, have brought on an intensification of mass literacy. The endless web of text that is hyperlinked to more text, along with the emerging power of hyperlinked actions where text or images can be linked to material effects, is certainly novel. Maybe the main reason why this causes so much anxiety is because we are emerging out of the age of television, when literacy took second-place to imagery. Touchscreens bring a balance between the two, and also correct for the TV’s biggest failing: in order to buy something that you had seen on TV, you had to leave the TV.

context collapse koans

It seems very silly to start a blog in 2016. No one reads blogs anymore. They're an anachronism. All that's left are niche projects with no popular viability. The role that blogs once played in cataloguing the library of babel that is the web has been taken over by corporate interests.

In a way, that’s comforting. No matter what I write here, no one will give a shit. This text won’t go viral. It's not optimized for anything. It will remain comfortably obscure.

Obscurity was a common feature of the internet I grew up using in the mid-2000s. Before the corporate force of social media began packaging every bit and byte for easy consumption and delicious advertising dollars, it was difficult to find things. You had to have a link, or know a guy. There was a social component, but it wasn’t facilitated by an algorithm or a network. You had it or you didn’t.

This was how blogs were structured. So I suppose I’m already starting out from a position of nostalgia, though I’m only looking back about ten years. But nostalgia seems a bit grotesque when you consider how much effort these days is put in to mining nostalgia for its monetary value. I’m almost doing the same thing, but my clock is set a little ways forwards.

The internet that was was a place with only nominal interconnections. It was a wild west of one-block towns filled with interesting characters. People generally found a comfortable space and stayed there. The internet that is is a vast open wasteland. Massive interconnected metropolises of social networks have swallowed it all up. Facebook centralized the internet in a way no one could have dreamed of.

But I don’t want this blog to be a wankfest of nostalgia for the internet that was. Mostly I just want a small, private-ish soapbox where I can work things out. It’s nice to shout into the void a little.

I don't really know what I'm going to do with this space, though. It will be messy for a while--maybe for its entire life, short or long as that may be. I'll probably just write about aesthetics. That sounds pretentious as hell but it's usually what's on my mind. I want to understand the relationships between our strangely changing world and the things we make.

Context collapse is a sociological idea about the dynamics of sharing on social media, where any content can be spread far beyond the place of its origin. Koans are a feature of Zen Buddhism, meant to produce insight in the students who hear them. I put them together because I thought it sounded nice.

I am not presenting a polished product for easy consumption. There’s plenty of that already. I am targeting quantity over quality. There will be something new here every Friday.