Archive for the ‘theory’ Category
Saturday, August 4th, 2007
The movie begins with a man of strong character, possibly even a man of good humor, driving a car or preparing to jump out of a plane. If he's a family man, he's at home doing something decidedly manly - chopping wood, or fixing the roof. If he's a rugged professional, he's off at work in the forest or on an oil rig. This man is the hero of our story, and for the first third of the film, we'll come to understand a bit about his haunted past, his loves and losses, and why he's so relentless in the pursuit of his ideal world.
Meanwhile, in a warehouse or underground facility - maybe in space, if it's that kind of movie, or in a government office somewhere - there's a sullen and slightly insane man who's managing his henchmen, or gathering henchmen, or just gathering resources to go it alone. This man either has a master plan, or is comfortably situated in some nefarious enterprise. He is the villain of this story. The movie will go on to reveal, point by point, some elaborate plot or failing criminal scheme, but that's not the story's point - it's the juxtaposition of these two men that drives it forward and keeps us in our seats, eyes darting at every gunshot and explosion, every thrown fist.
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Posted in America, media / news, theory | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, March 1st, 2006
- It is difficult to find a definition of free verse that doesn't center on what it isn't. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, for example, describes free verse as "the prosody of avoidance of meter." Doesn't tell you much. It's as if free verse's identity is entirely reactive - it's an absence, a negative form. That's an enormous oversimplification of how things really are, but the popular concensus is that free verse, unlike the verse forms that came before it, derives its identity by rejecting previous formal models instead of incorporating them.
- The rejected thing remains. It's revenant, which is to say, it always and again returns in some form. It's spectral, ghostly, a shadow beneath and within the contemporary poem. Previous generations hyper-consciously rejected form; it was necessary for them to do so, because they often had been rigorously trained to write formally. Our generation generally lacks such rigorous training - it's been replaced with an "intuitive" sense of cadence, taught to us over many hundreds of contemporary poems. We are drawn to certain rhythms and sounds as the ones that comfort us, or excite us, or make us angry. We share a popular poetic ear that's considerably different from the ear of a century ago. Often, when someone writes with a century-old sense of cadence, we call it inauthentic, forced or artificial. If that sense of cadence should appear in a line or a phrase within free verse, we detect it as a dead thing, an aural spectre, asserting regularity where our ear expects variation. The poem is haunted by past poems, all the way down to its foundations of cadence and sound, all the way to its spine.
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Posted in poetry, theory | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, October 6th, 2004
We may now conclude that the tendency of all recent technology is towards the distribution and allocation of information. Let's refer to this as "last order technology"; I prefer this over "information technology" because much of the technology in question (such as cars or clothing) aren't designed primarily for the distribution of information, though this is its byproduct.
By "last order technology," I mean any technology that can be "programmed." By "programming," I mean the act of creating, modifying or distributing instructions to be executed by a piece of technology. This covers everything from your gorgeous computer to your microprocessor-controlled thermostat. Each of these is in some way tied into the elaborate and subtle process of information distribution, which is last order discourse - the digital discourse, which began long ago and well before computing.
Our last order technology has a different interpersonal structure than other technologies. Consider these two models:
The Cotton Gin
1. The manufacturer. Makes parts and assembles the product.
2. The owner. Acquires and places product for use.
3. The user. Uses product.
The early automobile
1. The manufacturers. Parts construction and distribution.
2. The distributor. Parts assembly and product distribution.
3. The user. Driving, driving, driving.
(sales people and the like deliberately omitted)
Last order technology has an added surprise or two:
1. The manufacturers.
2. The distributor.
3. The programmer.
4. The user.
The cotton gin's relationship with society turned on a distinction between ownership and use; the automobile's relationship involved distribution and use; and last order technology's relationship relies on distribution, programming and use. There is another layer to the last order technology relationship, in which the programmer resides, works, expands and controls.
In last order technology, the first two categories (manufacturer and distributor) are now largely dominated by corporations; we must acknowledge that it is simply the culture of corporations to favor revenue over human well-being (nobody makes money from well-being, unless they're selling snake oil). The position of the user is (largely) passive; we could all, of course, reject Microsoft as a fascist organization with a questionable human rights record, but what would we do for word processing? This leaves the programmer as mediator between the corporate culture of manufacture and distribution and the consumerist culture of the end user.
Allow me to make a crazy, totally outlandish, but deeply inspiring claim: the invention of the programmer, in addition to technological complexity, arose from the need to democratize technology. Programmers exist in part to ensure that lowly end-user jerkweeds like you and me understand what the hell is going on when we turn on a machine. They exist to provide us with intuitive interfaces (Microsoft) and to oppose those interfaces and the corporations that own them when they compromise the intellectual and cultural commons that make programming great (open source programming). Therefore, programmers must be moral beings. We must police the technology for which we program.
Simple rules, hard to follow:
1. Advancement must never outpace programmer guidance. Don't deploy it before somebody understands how to run it, tweak it, mess with it, crash it.
2. The programmer has the right to refuse. We have the right to say, "No, I won't tweak your ICBM."
3. The programmer has a moral right to disclose. This isn't to say that your programmer can dump your clients' credit card numbers onto some web page; rather, if you're designing some super-virus in a computer simulation, the programmer has the right to reveal that information. What's more, we have the inherent right to reveal source code, even when we're under contract, if the situation merits such a thing. If you make me program a planet-busting megadeath device, I have the right to publish that code to the internet because you're a sick and twisted fuck.
4. The programmer has the right to distribute self-made technology to the people. If I make it, it's mine; if I make it, it's yours.
Someone must: (a) understand technology as it arises; and, (b) mediate between the distributors of that technology and the technology's consumers. We're it.
And when I say "we," I mean you and me. You're are smart, and you program every day. Ever punch a number into a telephone? Set a VCR's clock? Tune a radio? You're a programmer, just like me.
And in other news, lying in bed naked is, like, the best thing ever.
Posted in computery stuff, theory | No Comments »
Saturday, July 31st, 2004
And one more thing. "Generation X" is a misnomer. Let's define the term as "anyone who spent their teen years in the 1980s," which seems like a fair definition to me, because a whole hell of a lot changed after 1989 (the end of the Cold War, the weird "Gulf War" armchair view of combat, the introduction of the internet, etc). But when we say "Generation X," we're almost certainly not thinking of people who grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation, or Spanish-speaking children of migrant workers, or kids who grew up in Compton and became sanitation workers. Those people may have had their teen years in the 80s, but the term doesn't apply to them; it applies to middle class, technologically privileged, mostly white kids growing up primarily in suburbia. These kids had access to cable television (those of us who didn't had almost no exposure to MTV), could afford to purchase music, and watched The Cosby Show and saw parallels (however distant) to their own lives. "Generation X" isn't a generation at all; it's a select group of people who had the privilege to subscribe to a set of cultural ideas.
Posted in America, rant, theory | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 2nd, 2004
I think sitcoms are some of the most fascinating television, sociologically speaking. Every piece of entertainment tells us something about what resonates with the culture - the trick is to figure out why something resonates. Conspiracy theory is especially interesting for this kind of analysis - what is it about alien abduction that captivates the imagination to the point where many of us really believe it's happening? What about the JFK assassination, secret societies, or hidden military bases? Whether or not these things are true is beside the point; the interesting thing is why we're talking about them at all, why they have such a grip on us as a culture.
Situation comedies evolve in an interesting fashion. The first sitcoms are probably The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy; both are similar in that they reflect fairly realistic relationships, but they're distinct in that The Honeymooners illustrates an actual common working-class situation, whereas I Love Lucy illustrates a relatively exotic situation (the wife of a Cuban big band performer). Into the '60s, sitcoms begin to move towards the fantastical and surreal; shows like The Addams Family and Gilligan's Island, neither of which have much connection to reality at all, become wildly popular. In the '70s and early '80s, we return to "realistic" sitcoms, many of which turn on sexual humor or oddball familial situations; Three's Company and Bosom Buddies are the flagships for the sexual contingent, while The Odd Couple, Different Strokes and Family Ties lead the familial contingent.
From most of these shows, we can learn a few basic lessons about the popular view of human behavior:
1) Most people can be boiled down to "types" of people - the smart one, the goofy one, the rebel, etc.
2) Most people are fuck-ups.
3) The few people who aren't fuck-ups usually run the show.
4) Everyone is innately good and will do the right thing eventually.
5) Everything works out.
Keeping these rules in mind, it's interesting to compare Night Court and The Addams Family. They're essentially the same show.
There are a few rare exceptions to these rules prior to the 1990s, though even the exceptions tend to adhere to one or two of the rules. The grandest exception is All In The Family. Archie Bunker, race relations, generational conflicts and working class crises revolutionized sitcoms at the time; there was simply nothing like it. All In The Family seemed to make up for all of the failings of The Honeymooners, and introduced actual character development and confrontation of social issues into the sitcom industry. The other grand exception is M*A*S*H, which was the first sitcom to regularly intersperse war, tragedy and death with its comedy.
The most recent great revolution in situation comedy was, of course, Seinfeld. Seinfeld capitalized upon many things developed by previous sitcoms - character development, environmental cues, social anxieties - but turned almost all of the rules on their head. After Seinfeld, the rules for sitcoms often go like this:
1) Most people aren't types, but they don't change much over time.
2) All people are fuck-ups.
3) The people who run the show are best at covering up their fucked-uppedness.
4) People will try to get away with anything.
5) Nothing works out the way you planned it.
Seinfeld makes many of our best contemporary sitcoms possible; its aesthetic is responsible for Sex and the City, Everybody Loves Raymond, That 70s Show and a ton of other "smart, hip" sitcoms.
So, here are a few random questions about sitcoms:
- The Honeymooners is a show primarily about the working class. Who was watching it? Was the show successful because the working class watched it and found a connection with it, or because the upper class watched it and had a few laughs at the working class' expense?
- What sexual anxieties are reflected in Three's Company?
- Why were we so interested in the adoption of black children in the early 1980s?
- Seinfeld is a largely anxiety-driven show. What anxieties are constant? Are the neuroses of the characters realistic, or do they relate to real everyday anxieties? Do you find yourself laughing at them, laughing with them, or laughing because you're one of them?
- Sex and the City is often referred to as a "post-feminist" show, and lots of criticism has been written describing the show as pro- or anti-feminist. In what ways is the show empowering, and in what ways does it detract from empowerment? Are these real people? Does the show strike you (as it does me) anti-lesbian or somewhat racist?
- Do you feel that sitcoms are getting better at describing reality? Is their subject matter getting narrower, or broader?
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