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Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card, is a fascinating book and an enjoyable guilty read for antiwar types with a passing interest in things military (I'm describing myself here). Nevertheless it's flawed and also kind of sick, and its cult in the military should be questioned. Here's a quick, dashed-off criticism for anyone who hasn't read the book.
(1) The book envisions a society shaped by years of war against a relentless enemy from space. The government is coldly totalitarian and kids are watched for special aptitudes and recruited at like, age 6. Family members are pitted against each other in competition for coveted slots in the military.
(2) The military training passages are well-imagined and I can see where they'd be useful in educating troops in a total-war mindset. But they're kind of gratuitous in terms of the plot, since Ender ultimately saves the world not through bonding with his buddies but with his solitary videogame-playing skills. More than one critic pointed out that the book, which came out in the early '80s, flattered the adolescent reader who was spending a lot of time hanging out in arcades.
(3) Card, the author, is a practicing Mormon and, just like our President, thinks in terms of Absolute Good and Absolute Evil, so a plot like this is not farfetched to him, but it's still an escapist fantasy, and to imagine we have enemies as implacable as the Buggers from outer space just plays into the neocon propaganda line.
(4) Gratuitous editorial: A strong, well-trained military is of course necessary when your country is threatened militarily. But otherwise, it's a dangerous thing to have because then you feel like you have to use it. Thus, you send it off periodically to keep it in trim conquering weaker countries (always in the service of humanitarian goals, of course).
(The above comments originally appeared on Jim's page, about a year ago, right after the Iraq invasion was launched and bombs were bursting in the air. I'm reprinting them here as a kind of tribute to a former co-worker who joined the Marines thinking he was going to be doing "communications" and is about to be shipped over to you-know-where.)
A few quick unrelated items: (1) dan at erase reports on a Squarepusher/Steve Reich/Aphex Twin-related live gig in the UK that sounds like a lot of fun. He's also been posting links to good online mixes, such as this
tech-house assortment [since removed--"Eucalyptus" and "Night Herbs" were the ones I recommended] and this 80s/00s electro jam. (2) The Doris Piserchia Website has been updated with a sample chapter from her 1981 novel Earth in Twilight, and a review of that novel reprinted from Nathan Shumate's website. (3) A friend lent me his Cowboy Bebop series DVDs, which are fairly mindblowing. In the .GIF at left, bounty hunter Spike is opening the Bebop airlock so he can push a refrigerator out into space. He left a lobster in there a year before and it mutated into a blue springy thing that escaped and bit all of his shipmates and put them in comas. More horrible stuff was breeding in the icebox, hence his need to space it. And his skin isn't really yellow-green except in a 16-color .GIF.UPDATE: The mixtapes mentioned above are by Sami Koivikko, from Finland, who makes tracks when he's not dj'ing. The "Night Herbs" mix is flawlessly beat-matched and contains a number of those angelic arrangements of 3 or 4 confectionary notes that probably have a more precise musical term but are what I like most about house tracks, especially of the minimal/tech variety. Producers such as Losoul, John Tejada, Paul Kalkbrenner and other favorites are included in the mix.
How cool is it that the people of Spain reacted to the terrorist attacks in Madrid by firing their right-wing government? And that the new government plans to bring the country's troops home? Let's do that here! Unfortunately we have to wait eight months before we can get rid of George Bush Jr., whose crappy leadership the Spanish have also implicitly rejected. Or maybe we don't--for the crime of lying us into war with the wrong country (and general all around corruption), how about impeaching the perpetrator? To get an idea of how bad things are over in Iraq--our tax dollars at work--please read Robert Fisk's one year recap. Here's the plan: send Bush back to the Midland Racquet Club, then pressure Kerry to end the occupation post haste. After paying reparations, we'll only be out a few hundred billion for our little adventure.
If you are a fan of Jonathan Lethem's novel Motherless Brooklyn, here's bad news for you. Sit down, have a drink, please don't bite my head off when I tell you. OK, here goes: it's being made into a film written, directed, and starring Edward ("Fight Club") Norton as Lionel Essrog, the detective with Tourette's. Oh, yeah, and it's being "loosely adapted," according to Norton's website (which I'm not linking to) to be "set in the 1950s." If you're wondering why that's bad, I mean good, please read my preReview. And while you're there, check out all the new preReviewers: since the site was last plugged here, it got listed on memepool and a bunch of "cool site" indexes and its traffic went up into the stratosphere. It is now the Internet Phenomenon this page always said it was. Joe McKay, the editor, is tooling around Gotham in a Lincoln town car, smoking Te-Amo Toro Lights, and has taken to wearing a pinky ring.
I still haven't finished Lethem's "Great Book," Fortress of Solitude. The idea of revisiting 7th and 8th grade (and summer camp!) with him, even with adult hindsight, is just too grim. The last passage I read, describing a Brooklyn street party where he's the only white kid, rang false somehow, even though the book is based on his own childhood: it read more like pop culture research than something that actually happened to anyone. Let's pray he goes back to writing intellectually suspect fiction and stops believing his own hype about being the "poet of Brooklyn" or whatever.
A book you should read, though, is Takedown, by Rick Cowan and Douglas Century. Cowan is the undercover cop who singlehandedly broke open the Mob-run garbage-hauling cartel that cheated New York businesses for 50 years. Like many people, I believed the spin that it was District Attorney Morgenthau and the out of town corporate criminals at BFI who did the hit--the book is partly to set the record straight. Until Cowan infiltrated the Mafia, at the highest levels, pretending to be an executive with a DUMBO paper recycling company, every building in NY had to pay up to ten times market rates to have their trash hauled away. The book gives an excellent history of how those conditions came about, and is as gripping and amusing as a Sopranos episode in its retelling of Cowan's story. I laughed, I cried, I broke up with my goombah 'cause I couldn't put it down.
Chelsea NYC suddenly feels like a giant actor's workshop, not that that's bad. Wander around the 20s and you'll see performance videos as entertaining as movies and TV (no, really!) but several steps removed and looking askance at the conventions of the Industry: a kind of Deconstructo-Sundance. At Sonnabend Candice Breitz shows discontinuous loops of emotional scenes from chick flicks such as Pretty Baby, You've Got Mail, and...um, that's all I recognized, while at the same time lip-synching and pantomiming the actresses' moves. She's a good mimic, capturing everything from Jennifer Lopez's wooden blubbering to that subtly self-aware Commedia del'Arte eye-pop when Reese Witherspoon says "You're breaking up with me? I thought you were going to propose!" (Note to self: rent Legally Blonde sometime.) At Elizabeth Dee, Alex Bag shows the famous, weirdly affectless P4r1s H1lton s3x t4pe intercut with fake commercials, where Bag impersonates everyone from a bearded AOL websurfer to a graveyard zombie hawking maxipads to Private Jessica Lynch pitching Halliburton services from a teleprompter--badly. Political satire has gotten better since the dazed "you can't say that, this is wartime" days. Lastly, at Mary Boone, Barbara Kruger, the Don Rickles of the art world, casts obvious LA residents as talking heads abusing one another from across the room, on large screens corresponding to each head's position at some kind of eating table (restaurant, dining room, school cafeteria, breakfast nook). Artists, filmmakers, families, couples, students--everybody's pissed at each other in Babs' world. The dialogue is funny, though. Hey-oh.
Crap houses
Here's what I dislike about the tech/geek/art community, as exemplified by the Eyebeam "reBlog." reBlog is a bunch of recycled links from a particular group of bloggers, curated by a single individual down to a coolest-of-the-cool selection. Fine, so far, but there's very little in the way of text, thought, or explanation here--just feeding the endless craving for (mostly tech) novelty. So, I see this item culled from boingboing captioned "Print houses from CAD drawings using an adobe-extruding robot." I'm not completely following this. [If I'm not mistaken, the reBlog post has since been slightly expanded.] I click the link and learn more about an aesthetic nightmare waiting to be born, which we're supposed to think is great, I guess:
A robot for "printing" houses is to be trialled (sic) by the construction industry. It takes instructions directly from an architect's computerized drawings and then squirts successive layers of concrete on top of one other to build up vertical walls and domed roofs.You know what that sounds like to me? That sounds like shit. Frank Gehry meets Planet of the Apes. Besides throwing tradesmen out of work (yeah, I know, boo hoo, progress marches on), it has the potential to turn the construction industry into McDonalds, shitting out thousands of McHouses, McFlats, McMalls, and McOffices. And, it violates what ought to be Rule One of fusing technology and the arts (including architecture): "You shouldn't do something just because you can." How about a little criticality here, art/tech people?
UPDATE: Bill Schwarz has another link on the "extruded house." This one doesn't look like Planet of the Apes, more like the stone slave huts they put up in the Caribbean years ago for people working in salt ponds and the like. And sure enough, the obligatory quote: "It's hard to imagine construction unions taking this lying down, and union opposition is expected. But [P]rofessor [Khoshnevis, the inventor] points out that we are moving towards a society in which just about everything else is fabricated by machines. Why should houses be different, he asks?" Yeah, why? Nasty damn unions, always getting in the way of capitalist innovation.
UPDATE 2: Post edited slightly so I sound like less of a Luddite, if that's possible. Jim has a good response to my outburst in the comments.
UPDATE 3 (Feb 2005): I take back everything I say about the Eyebeam reBlog since they were kind enough to indulge my tech-skepticism by inviting me to guest reBlog for a few weeks.
Cry Me a River, Tim and Sue
Tim Noble and Sue Webster, YBAs (Young British Artists) who recently showed at PS1 here in NYC, are known for three types of work: a sculpture of male and female Neanderthals reminiscent of Ron Mueck's sentimental output, flickering Vegas-y light pieces, and collections of odd rubbish that cast figurative shadows, a trick that Mac Adams, an OBA (Old British Artist, but living/showing in the States), has been working with for years. The pair is profiled in this month's Sculpture magazine, and as the following excerpts make clear, they want us to know they have problems:
Noble: "When we first started doing [the light pieces], to us, they were aesthetically insulting. You were supposed to...be confronted by them 10 feet in front of your face... [B]ut as time goes by and they get photographed more and more, you don't get the closeness. You need that slap in the face.The last two quotes were interspersed with the usual protestations that they've taken their career "off the rails" and are no longer on the "roller coaster"--as they move from MOMA affiliate PS1 to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Ah, humility.Webster: "We take reproductions very seriously so that the work can be documented and find its place in history."
Webster: "When you are young and starting out you have nothing to lose, you are alone in the studio making work and no one is looking. But then you get exhibited, and the ball starts rolling: you get booked for shows and everyone wants a piece of you. Then they try to determine when you finish the work. You can get drawn into the system, where you'll have a show in London and then one in New York, and someone says when the work gets made and even tries to influence what it is that has to be made."
Webster: "We get offers every day from people who build their careers around us. You, as an artist, are actually just producing a feed in the system. They harass you to take part in some project because it is all about them. We have to be aware of that because we could have our careers tied up for the rest of our lives producing one show and then another, but the reason we are artists is not to be part of this system."