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If you're mulling over a last-minute holiday gift, please consider donating to the Washington Youth Garden, a program associated with the National Arboretum. Someone very close to me knows a lot about the program and says every penny is well spent. [begin rant] I realize our economy is dependent on consumer spending at Christmastime, but when you have influential Republicans such as Grover Norquist saying "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub,” someone is obviously going to have to take up the slack. My own beliefs on charitable services are that they should be publicly funded, and if private, that the donee receive the gift without being forced to accept Jesus Christ as his or her personal savior (the so-called "faith-based" plan). Churches should just give and not expect zombie-like allegiance from recipients. Why is that so hard? [end rant]
Here are the best two quotes to emerge from media coverage of the Iraq war so far, right up there with "We had to destroy the village in order to save it," from an unnamed and possible fictitious major in the Vietnam era. These are better because they're completely attributable. Please mention them to at least one person today, ideally from the Bush camp, so you can watch her or him sputter.
Quote 1 (from Diane Sawyer's ABC interview with the President):
SAWYER: But stated as a hard fact, that there were weapons of mass destruction, as opposed to the possibility that he could move to acquire those weapons still --
BUSH: So what’s the difference?
Quote 2: "With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them." --Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman, quoted in the New York Times.
Lucas makes savvy, witty use of the medium with her disc, exploring a nebulous realm between the camera and the playback turntables, sound and physical space, performance and documentation. The camera is mounted on a DJ's turntable, spinning and rewinding as the artist looks down on it. Her head bobs into the frame from different compass points as if she were moving back and forth from a mixing board or record crates. The spatial orientation isn't entirely certain to the viewer, though; the rotating image makes you think at times that you're being tricked, and that the "ceiling" is actually a wall, with the sight line of the camera aimed towards it from a normal, standing position. Either way, the occasional synchronous rewinding of image and sound (and a kind of intermediate zigzag pattern that is a cartoon of rapid forward and backward movement) suggests that the artist is scratching the video as it is being filmed.
As it turns out, Lucas's visualization of "video on vinyl" exceeds the capabilities of Sengmüller's actual technology. In a live VJ-ing performance on the Vinyl Video website, you can see the VJs adjusting the speeds of various records, fading 2 discs, and moving the needle around to different points on the record but never backwards-scratching the image. In a sense, Lucas has created the ideal dj tool for this technology: VJs could put her disc on the platter and "air scratch" so people think they're manipulating the time-sequence of the piece. Which is kind of a shame, because it would be interesting to see what a VJ would do backward-scratching in real time Lucas's own, prerecorded facsimile: the image would run forward, of course, but the overall potential for spatiotemporal confusion would edge towards the head-exploding. Even without that capability, the smeared content can be sped up, slowed down, and skipped around in, with the space of the piece relative to the viewer becoming even more uncertain.
With the deadpan Lucas as your towheaded starship trooper guide, "Scratch It" simulates a trip down the Ketamine hole in a clubland-style funhouse. Walls spin, time and space refracts, the techno score plinks and howls. DJ Spooky has spoken of "dub architecture," but what he's shown by way of example--writhing 3-D computer graffiti tags floating over shots of building interiors--falls short of the cross-disciplinary cutting and splicing that phrase conjures. Lucas scratches space the way Lee Perry deforms recorded musical performance: instead of echoes and filters, she uses perceptual and conceptual slippages among camera, performer, and background.
Another Lucas project taking place in an ambiguous narrative space is here.
New York City just unveiled the plan for the new Fascism Tower--oh, sorry, Freedom Tower--that will once again disrupt the balance of the lower Manhattan skyline and give terrorists everywhere a goal to destroy. Yay! Just what we needed. Our Republican mayor and governor think the design for the "1776" foot tall building--the World's Tallest, until it's destroyed--is super-grand. The architect, Daniel Libeskind, and the developer, Larry Silverstein, agreed on the height of the building, just not the design and usage of the top 30 (largely ornamental) floors. Somehow we have got to adjust our notion that pride and patriotism always means a monster phallus.
According to press accounts Libeskind "compromised" with Silverstein's architect on the final design (the latter wants bird-slaughtering, supposedly power-generating windmills on the top floors): now, our only hope is that Libeskind plans to pull a Howard Roark and will blow up the building in the dead of night once it's completed (Roark, a character in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, did that after a developer incorrectly completed his design.*) Also, this is all contingent on shyster Larry getting the double payment he is seeking from insurance companies for his claim that two buildings were destroyed on 9/11. He needs 7 billion, not 3.5, to complete the project. C'mon, courts!
UPDATE: NY Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp gets paid the big bucks to write meaningless phrases. Here's the essence of his lead today about the newly unveiled World Trade Center design: "Sir, what you have produced is, if I may say so, a...piece of architecture."
Here's what they'd get if they hired me:
"Pointing its taloned middle finger at the sky, the new design says, 'Fuck you, we need a big building complex downtown and this is what you're going to get.' The most intriguing aspect of the project is that it is both fascist--with menacing sharp angles and a haughty disdain for the scale of the surrounding buildings--and treehugging, with the top floors devoted to power generation by wind. The latter is really just a sop to environmental sentiment, however--besides killing untold numbers of birds, the giant fans will only supply a portion of the building's greedy power suckage."
Times editors: "Tom, what you've written here is a...piece of criticism. Now, get out."
*UPDATE 2/DISCLAIMER: In the movie version of The Fountainhead, no one dies when Roark blows up his own building. He is put on trial for a property crime, makes a stirring speech to the jury about the glories of American individualism, and is acquitted.I Meet My Match
A kid who I assume to be in high school but claims to be a college student starts talking to me in the video department of a crowded midtown store today. He asks if I'm browsing the anime titles for myself or a gift. I say myself. From that moment forward I am deluged with quantum packets of fan data, my feeble responses batted aside like beams from a pencil flashlight. "Didja know a live action Astroboy is coming out?" "A live action Gigantor?" "Live action Sailor Moon?" "Do you know about the Neon Genesis manga that takes place in the alternate universe where Shinji's living a normal life with his parents? He still pilots Eva, though. Did you know he sleeps with Rei? You know what Rei is, right?"
"Yes, she's a vat grown entity derived from the blood of an Angel."
"And what else?"
"And DNA from her father."
Derisive snort. "Her father?"
"Sorry, her mother."
"Anyway, remember how Shinji likes Kaoru in the series? In the manga he hates him, hates him."
"Is Kaoru gay, like in the series?"
"Yeah, but when he comes onto Shinji in the manga, Shinji gets mad and pushes him away."
Midway through our conversation the kid's father comes up behind him, taps his shoulder and says, "I'm going to that cafe downstairs so I can have a drink." I'm trying to browse the DVDs but the kid keeps going, breaking my concentration, talking about Tenchi Muyo, Ninja Scroll, the Battle for the Planets box set ("also known as G-Force; also Gatchaman"). "Cowboy Bebop is amazing animation for 1998. Amazing. Cartoon Network is trying to get them to extend the series more, but they won't. Did you hear they're expanding Adult Swim?" "Did you know that in Japan they have stores full of anime several floors high? Just anime!" "Oh, here's a box set I'm going to have to download at my school. Downloads suck, some virus always gets in." "Oh, the manga shelf! Gotta go, nice talking to you."
After he left, the spirit creature inside me was exhausted. I reported back to the Oni Dimension: "All is well on Earth."
The Capture of Saddam: A Sketch
The time traveler's hosts took him to a public eating place. Three television screens hung in the corners of the room, just below the ceiling. Each screen showed the same rapidly shifting images--repetitive, incantatory shots of talking people surrounded by colored windowframes and ribbons of scrolling letters. The traveler could make no sense of it.
Periodically a video sequence appeared on the screen in which a man in rubber gloves poked his fingers into another man's mouth, then aimed a flashlight into it so that the oral cavity glowed red. The probee resembled a crazed hermit. The screen would cut back to the talking people, then some shots of crowds, then back to the man being probed. After watching the rubber glove segment about ten times in twice that number of minutes, the traveler couldn't stand it any more. "What is happening here?" he asked.
His hosts looked at each other conspiratorially.
"Do you want to do this?" said Betty.
"Sure," said Bob. "You see, Qwarlo, many of our people's lives are quite meaningless. They work terrible dead end jobs with no hope of advancement. If they should be so unlucky as to get sick, they can quickly become pauperized and homeless. To keep them complacent, the corporate state amuses them with tales of frightening villains--in reality potentates from far away countries that would never have any impact on their lives, but who are made to seem like menaces to all. The man you see on the screen was recently captured after twelve years of being marketed as the Great Satan. He was unquestionably a bad guy, but our government supported him for years before deciding he was more useful as a heel."
"Why is that man sticking his fingers in his mouth?"
"Ostensibly searching for poison capsules or contraband, but since it's being filmed, I'd say the main purpose is public humiliation. Every successful TV series needs a climax, and since this man did not die in a shootout upon apprehension, the public needs to see him treated like an animal." Bob was trying to keep a straight face.
"Why do they keep showing the same clip again and again?"
"Again, the excuse would be that 24-hour news repeats things for the benefit of people just tuning in, but the reality is this is government propaganda. The constant repetition reinforces the idea of overwhelming state power, and provides a kind of 'bread and circuses' entertainment for the vast majority of the public."
The traveler looked appalled. "I realize this is my own distant past, but I can't believe things were ever this corrupt and barbaric."
"Welcome to modern times, Qwarlo," Betty said.