My Old School

Taking a spin on the trusty old Google I find my old film professor Phil Solomon has been up to something new. I knew him for films made from heavily treated and painstakingly re-printed 8mm footage, films full of magical, tactile textures, of which these jpgs are but a sorry shadow (go here to see what this sort of thing looks like in motion):

In the eight or so years since I was in school, it seems he’s gotten up to something else entirely — a series of non-narrative (and violence-free) digital videos made using landscapes and characters from the Grand Theft Auto games*:

My first reaction was that old jealous “I wish I’d thought of that” feeling. It’s a brilliant concept, and if anyone can carry it off with sensitivity, it’s Phil. I’ve spent many, many hours playing these games, often freely roaming around the landscapes, soaking in the weather, the light. I should have been capturing footage, not hijacking police cars.

The move to video is surprising enough—he, like most everyone on the experimental side of the Colorado film department, was a die-hard celluloid addict, an old-school film-in-a-bucket type. But it’s the decision to use video games as a starting point that’s almost shocking—not so much Dylan goes electric as maybe Elliott Carter making ringtones, or Gerhard Richter doing Windows desktop icons.

Here he is talking to an Ohio newspaper about a show and installation in Columbus, more or less summing up the whole series. Now all that remains is to actually go and see the things.

 

*—yes I know there’s a whole genre devoted to this sort of thing but I don’t think I’m being overly snobbish in saying this isn’t exactly Sims sitcoms or Warcraft porn.

Knowing your audience

If you, like me, are one of the approximately seven people who:

A) consider themselves unbelievers
B) find the Nü Atheism of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris et al absolutely insufferable
C) want to read about four thousand words of what John Gray has to say about it all

…then by all means go on over here and take a look. It’s pretty much the last word on the subject, plus about 4,282 others on the decline of secularism, the end of liberalism, and the death of the Enlightenment. I had it in my mind to write a pithy little post commenting on those bus ads, but he does it better than I could, which is why he’s a professor at the LSE and I’m, well, something else.

On nice things, and why we can’t have them

Imagine my despair at only finding out that Montreal Canadiens tough guy Georges Laraque has a blog now, when he’s forced by his team’s PR policy to take the thing down. Which is too bad, as “people with weird jobs” is probably one of the most inherently interesting genres of blogging.

If you’re not familiar with the concept, Georges Laraque is a man who is employed by a professional hockey team in the capacity of “enforcer”; he’s there not to score, or to defend, but to fight with members of the opposing team.

In general I’m opposed to the idea of fighting in hockey, and although that’s a very unpopular opinion among hockey fans now, I think history, eventually, will be on my side. One day in the 2040s we’ll be watching whatever the 2040s equivalent of Mad Men is, and hockey fights will be among the period-correct barbarities that we’ll snicker at, knowingly. Still, I find the concept of hockey fighting as a sport within a sport endlessly fascinating, and I’ll miss this little window into that world.

Here’s what a professional hockey fight looks like. Note the audio during the replay, where Laraque politely asks his opponent if he wants to “go,” and then wishes him luck. And if you still wonder why this sort of thing is best left to the professionals, there’s this, about which the less said the better.

Goodbye to all that

One of the best things about it being December is that there’s no need to read the political blogs anymore. If the past is a foreign country, then October is a weird place where people care what Josh Marshall and Kevin Drum think.

December is for Will Smith solving a Rubik’s Cube on television, Rod Benson cryptically twittering about whether he’s headed back to the Dakota Wizards, and me waiting around for the Premier League transfer window to open so Arsene Wenger can refuse to buy a proper wide midfielder or a center-back to replace William Gallas and thereby go on to get edged out of the top four by Villa or worse, but at a budget price (see basically six months’ worth of Arseblog for citation).

It’s also for finding your cat’s twin sister on the ASPCA website, reading about David Foster Wallace’s undergrad philosophy thesis¹, downloading On The Hour from iTunes, and buying an awesome new issue of n+1 which features an extended interview with a hedge fund manager who speaks so fluently I think he might actually be a fictional construct. It’s sort of disgraceful-slash-brilliant that the hipster press is doing a better job covering the financial world² than the actual financial press.

 

1) — obviously the theme here is the ascendancy of the timeless concerns of a Kottke over the quotidian ephemeralities of a Moulitsas or an Yglesias.

2) — see also This American Life.

Science!

If you’re going to read only one of Ben Goldacre’s excellent Bad Science columns, let it be this one.

Also: I know the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator isn’t exactly the height of scientific rigor, but I was impressed that this thing pegged me for an INTP solely based on a statistical analysis of my blogbound witterings.

Marxists under the bed

Sorry to go all Saint George on you but it just so happens I’m re-reading George Orwell’s collected journalism and I’m up to 1944:

It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.

My recollection on this is probably faulty (thanks to the recency illusion), but I don’t remember the word “Marxist” being thrown about quite so loosely before about October. In fact I was still a bit worked up about “Marxisant” only about three weeks ago. But now it seems it’s absolutely commonplace to hear Barack Obama described as a Marxist. Today those who only go so far as to call him a socialist seem extraordinarily sober and measured in their criticism.

This is a helpful development in so far as it’s useful in identifying which commentators are probably best ignored for the next four years, if not forever. But it’s another useful word, one that actually used to mean something, that’s now on the verge of being ruined. I would just point out that to call Obama a Marxist is only to enrich our language with a superfluous synonym for “someone who wants to raise the top marginal tax rate from 35% to around 39%.”

Orwell again:

All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.

It was already too late for “Fascist,” and now, at least in the United States, it’s too late for “Marxist.”

That’s nice

Someone has sprung another mind-leak.

Bush’s Treasury is about to open the way for sharia law to be imposed upon America’s banking system.

I’m sure that’s literally true. But apparently that’s the least of our problems.

Millions of Americans remain lion-hearted, decent, rational and sturdy. They find themselves today abandoned, horrified, deeply apprehensive for the future of their country and the free world. No longer the land of the free and the home of the brave; they must now look elsewhere.

Oh, the poor things. Meanwhile, take it from me: those of us who are weasel-hearted, indecent, irrational and flimsy, we’re fucking ecstatic.

[Via Unspeak]

Slow news month

I wonder if it’s a general fact of American life that everyone, at least everyone with political opinions, goes completely insane for a few months in advance of every presidential election, or if it’s something new. Even in 1996 I sort of hazily remember watching something about the Bosnian war on television at very nearly the last possible moment and coming away from it feeling like I had to register a protest vote for Ralph Nader instead of Bill Clinton. This was the one and only time I have ever been ahead of the political curve.

This time around, frankly, I was skeptical about the wisdom of nominating a woman and/or a black man to put an end to the Democratic party’s decade of uselessness. From the looks of it history is about to prove me a cynic. I see looking back over the archives that I was on record during the Republican convention as having said that the race was as good as over. And if I remember correctly it was about two weeks later that I actually started believing it.

Anyway the point is I’m sure everyone will be back to normal on Wednesday. I predict a quiet day around the newspapers and the blogs, with almost nobody, on either the losing side or the winning, saying anything totally ridiculous and embarrassing and un-live-downable. I certainly didn’t post anything melodramatic in the days after the 2004 election on the now-deleted blog I used to have, which no you will not ever ever see.

Maybe he is, or maybe he isant

You have to pinch yourself – a Marxisant radical who all his life has been mentored by, sat at the feet of, worshipped with, befriended, endorsed the philosophy of, funded and been in turn funded, politically promoted and supported by a nexus comprising black power anti-white racists, Jew-haters, revolutionary Marxists, unrepentant former terrorists and Chicago mobsters, is on the verge of becoming President of the United States.

Even the utterly bats Melanie Phillips can’t quite bring herself to describe Obama as a Marxist. The worst columnist in the world settles for “Marxisant,” which sounds a bit French and therefore rather thoughtful. Unfortunately as a descriptor of a centrist American politician it’s still pretty fuzzy. She seems to be using it in a debased form as a general-purpose slur on anyone who’s even slightly left-of-center, meaning something like “seems a bit Communist but yeah I’d like to keep this one out of the libel courts if at all possible.”¹

Slightly more helpful is this New York Times review of a book by Arthur Marwick:

[...] he labels ”Marxisant,” a catch-all term for various ideologies that share “a broad metaphysical view about history and about how society works, derived from Marxism.”

Still has the whiff of a slur about it, frankly, especially with that gratuitous “metaphysical” thrown in there, which tends to be used as a synonym for “sorta bullshit.” But really, what serious view of history or of society can possibly get away with ignoring Marx? You can say what you want about whether or not the oppressed workers ought to rise up and seize control of the means of production, but it’s thanks to Marx that we account for class interests as a motivator for social change, which is a pretty fucking big contribution to our general understanding of the world, even if it feels forehead-smackingly obvious now.²

But if that’s what “Marxisant” means then it’s not at all easy to see why it belongs in a list which also contains “racists” and “Jew-haters.” Maybe Obama’s world-view is informed by ideas about class struggle which are derived ultimately from Marx. I would sure hope so, because the alternative would make him more or less a sociological and economic flat-earther. But it’s a long way from “takes account of the historical lessons of Marx’s thought” to “bent on violating the purity of our precious bodily fluids.”

Not too far for “about 1,250,000″ other commentators, though³:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=obama+marxist&btnG=Google+Search

 

1) For a more concrete definition there’s this nice little riff, which still seems to identify it more as a label for poseurish faux-Marxist academics than for insufficiently right-wing political figures.

2) Just as, to name another world-changing conceptual revolution, Newtonian physics now feels so instinctive and intuitively true that it’s almost unthinkable that there was a time when it wasn’t so.

3) Yes I know this is not exactly rigorous or anything but the point is you don’t have to look far to find someone calling this University of Chicago-educated centrist Democrat a Marxist if not a socialist, Communist, etc.

Nail that to the church door

While you were furtively photoshopping LOLCats¹ The Poor Man was busy obsoleting² whole genres of bloggy discourse.

1) — Don’t get into that stuff.
2) — Yes it’s a verb, want a citation?