Saturday, September 30, 2006

False needs and an invitation to crisis

Thank you, oh Random Thousand readers, for stumbling across my blog. I hope that you will return and get something out of my future rants. Some of you, I have noticed, are young professionals. Maybe recently you started a career in law for Behemoth & Leviathan LLP or one of its ilk. Well, I have one thing to say to you:

You are a slave.

Oh, they give you a semblance of choice: the dog gets to choose his own leash, for instance. The Blackberry Pearl is slim, with a form factor similar to the nano's. But alas! it has a camera, so maybe you'll have to leave it home when you go to court. The 8700 is fine, but does it have a plan with your former cell phone provider? What will the firm pay for? Etc. And the firm may tell you not to worry about facetime - work wherever you want! Again, the choice is yours. Wanna personalize your office? The firm will give you a budget to do just that. They're here for you, and they don't mind coddling their young when it comes to tangential things.

You may be expecting me to commence the lambasting of our true currency, the billable hour. You would be wrong. Slavery goes even deeper than that. Sure, it's difficult to self-actualize when billing 2300 hours a year for the Fortune 250. Do the math: that's 47 hours a week billed, not including the time it takes to travel, go to meetings, trainings, and office functions, commute, and engage in caloric intake. But I want to comment on something more sinister than the daily milieu of the young professional. For it is what keeps us in this grind that really scares me.

What ensures that we will spend far too many years behind somebody else's desk are false needs, the bread and circuses of our day. In short, false needs are the means by which advanced capitalist cultures limit the revolutionary potential of their citizens. The Roman Empire used to pacify its people by ensuring that the poor had an unlimited supply of wheat and access to circus games. Our society has substituted a broader array of control devices, that can douse the individual flames of the true needs of the poor and wealthy alike (such as creativity, genuine happiness, and freedom) in a torrent of false needs: needs that can only be satisfied by advanced capitalism and did not exist before this mode of production began. Consuming the products of pop culture, which is generated by an oligopoly of media companies, makes us "content" and more sedate, despite the difficulties of our lives. It also keeps us beholden to a limited set of sources of the disposable incomes needed if we are to continue to partake in the spoils of the extensive prosperity in which we dwell.

As we content ourselves with the results, we lose our ability to spot how consolidated media plays not to our needs but those of the multinationals who control the means of production. Consolidated media helps to shape our world to suit the needs of multinational corporations, through the processes of standardization and commodification. They create "objects" that we want instead of "subjects" that we consider, that if applied would hold the potential for new social orderings and interactions. We are manipulated to desire objects that are produced rather than the subjects of true liberation. The subjects of liberation are those that lead us to question our beliefs and our ideologies, a process that is muted by consumption and accumulation.

Thus, in an advanced industrial society like ours, those whose struggles used to lead to revolutionary thought are increasingly integrated into the existing cycle of production and consumption by the tools of mass media, advertising, and industrial management. This is accomplished by the satisfaction of basic wants, wants that are derived from grotesque mixtures of our human desires with desires manufactured out of thin air. By satisfying these wants, people are distracted from argument, the culmination of critical observation and analysis. Marcuse described the process as "Independence of thought, autonomy, and the right to political opposition" being "deprived of their basic critical function in a society which seems increasingly capable of satisfying the needs of the individuals through the way it is organized." Technology and machines surpass individuals in their political clout, because they are far more capable of increasing production than we are, through the manufacture of false needs. And as we run around trying to satisfy them, our ability to think critically withers away.

And we forget that we went to law school for reasons other than the rush of the durable goods purchase, the supposed serenity that comes from sequestering ourselves in fenced fiefdoms with security gates and concierges, and the gentle caress of high thread count against our overfed fleshes.

Critics of Marcuse have asked how can the victims of false needs, those who are becoming "one-dimensional" in their modes of thinking, question their own condition? I believe that it takes an unexpected, external shock. A crisis. Something that you didn't expect to have happen to you, or didn't expect to hear or see. And it is through that crisis that a window on your condition can be opened, allowing you to question your life and renew your obligations to things other than yourself and your wants. Let me present you with a crisis right now.

What I want each of you to do is to click on the link below. You will hear and see a man on his death bed, so to speak. He is a great leader, and has infused the lives of millions with a revolutionary ideology. Watch his eyes change after he tells a crowd that they have some difficult days ahead. He knows that he is going to die. Death threats and attempts on his life are reaching a fevered pitch. But he is ready to be taken from this earth. He has connected his life with those of countless others, and through that connection, they are of a new mind and spirit. Hours after he utters the words that you are about to hear, he is dead.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZwIg0SMbs4

Ask yourself if the contentment that you feel every time you bill a thousand hours and then fritter it away on junk can in any way rival the convictions of the heart that you just witnessed, and that you have let wither away from your own life.

Now get up and plan your exit strategy.

Vaya con Dios - brooding presence

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Good morning!

One of New York's great institutions is 1010 wins. Don't know what it is? Shame on you.

1010 kHz is the frequency. Wins is WINS, for International News Service. It's an AM radio station. It's been pumping news into the cerebral cortexes of New Yorkers since 1965. And before then, it was one of the first stations in America to broadcast rock and roll, opening shop in New Jersey in 1924. It was first owned by a department store, Gimbels. And then by the yellow journalist, warmongerer, and news emperor, William Randolph Hearst. And then by a media conglomerate, Westinghouse. It's arguably the most popular radio station in the country, reaching over 2 million people a day. When I was a child, my father, driving me around in his green, 1976 Dodge Dart, religiously set his watch to the time tone that could be heard every half hour on the station. I remember when I was eight years old and he showed me how to set my watch to 1010 wins ("Hold it, wait, there it is!"). Lucky for him, 1010 was also there to broadcast his beloved Yankees games. In fact, they were the first radio station anywhere to carry all of a team's games live (Mel Allen on the play by play!).

Everyone in New York can recite the station's slogans, first used in the 1960's: "All News All the Time," and "You Give Us 22 Minutes, We'll Give You the World." But what I remember most is the station's distinct teletype sound effect at the start of the broadcast. It was unmistakable, the militaristic tones of a teleprinter sending a typed message across a pair of wires during some long-forgotten battle of WWII. The French would be speaking German if it weren't for that device. The sound can still be heard on the station today. Hearing it now makes me feel at home in New York. Every morning for about forty years, it has rung out across the land, greeting the ears of millions with its slightly exhilarating, somewhat unnerving sense of urgency.

1010 wins also represents the turning of the tide against newspaper monopolists, who placed numerous restrictions on radio stations and tried to limit their foray into the news to the role of promotional tool. The North American Regional Broadcasting Agreement changed all of that, and the station switched to full-time operation with power authorized at 10,000 watts. 1010 wins became an early experimental outlet for audience participation, using a Western Union wire to bring record requests to the attention of the station's DJ's in the pre-news era.

The switch to news followed a survey commissioned by Westinghouse that revealed that the most popular format for the news would be a "talking newspaper." The world in 22 minutes was here, a format that is interesting today, particularly given the fact that cable TV news has within the past five years settled into a "talking magazine" routine. The format should be patented as a business system, "a place on the dial where listeners could tune at any time of the day or night for the latest news at that very moment without having to wait for "straight up" or "straight down" or :55 or :25. " It is as regimented as the obnoxious teletype sound effects would suggest: headlines, weather, and traffic and transit on the 1's, repeating endlessly until its waves reach the darkest recesses of the universe. What makes this format special is that while it may sound like a loop of the same broadcast, the folks at 1010 wins vowed never to use a taped reading of the news or to reread the same copy:

"Every newscast will be different and up-to-the-second. If a particular story is developing rapidly, the new developments will be presented direct from the scene where possible. We will cover every important story from many angles - the reactions of important officials and the man in the street; analyses by our staff commentators; beeper phone conversations with eye witnesses. The emphasis will be on complete, continuing coverage of all the important news, all the time" - Ken Reed, Director of Programs and Operations

And so the 24-hour news cycle was born. In the 1960's. And you thought that it had something to do with CNN.

So I hop into a cab today on my way to work, and for five minutes, I'm taken back to that '76 Dodge Dart, heading off to school with my dad. Here's what I heard:
  • the trademarked sound
  • the slogan
  • a reference to traffic and transit on the 1's with fast-paced blips in the background
  • a blink ad for "The Prestigious Address of the Empire State Building"
  • a headline about a home invasion last night at 16th Avenue and 54th Street in Brooklyn involving a white Yukon SUV, taking place in the middle of a Jewish high holy day
  • a headline for another home invasion, this time in Nassau County. Hysterically, a victim, who was not harmed physically, says "We would leave our doors unlocked...I guess we'll be a little more cautious" (!)
  • a story announced by a snippet from a man telling us "I hate cell phones" when they're used in public. "Life imitates art," says another. The story oddly ends as quickly and abruptly as it begins, with a third interviewee waxing philosophical: "People who air their dirty laundry on cell phones are just like the people that appear on reality TV"
  • the weather: later in the day, "the clouds will break for sunshine." [I always loved how they phrased the weather!] "It will be breezy."
  • a commercial for a local dentist: "Going to the dentist can be stressful." But Pleasant Dreams Dentists will make sure that you're "safely sedated." More importantly, "we won't lecture you." You'll leave with a "smile on your face and little to no memory of your visit" (yikes!). Of course, "this commercial is not intended as medical advice."
  • a headline about a fire that caused "considerable damage"
  • a headline about a "night of violence in the Bronx" - a stabbing is graphically described at 8:45 in the morning as a "knife to the groin" by an "unidentified teenage suspect."
  • a headline about jury deliberations for the third racketeering trial of John Jr. Gotti ("the last line we can't repeat on the radio")

Good morning, New York! And take heart, for while some things in life are assured, like death, taxes, and Republican control of Congress, so, too, are the blissful sounds of 1010 wins.

Vaya con Dios - brooding presence

Thursday, September 21, 2006

Godzilla vs. the nth Monster - "weapons of horrible destruction"


As we get psyched for the invasion of Iran, it may be helpful to pause and consider the lessons of one of the only creatures on earth to have its own trademarked sound (see the audio in my profile). An April 2006 article in the New Yorker indicated that military planning efforts presently underway are based on the notion that "a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government." We've heard this kind of argument before. But there are developments in the planning phase of war with Iran that are unique in the post-Cold War era. For one, U.S. naval aircraft have flown simulated nuclear weapons delivery missions, known as "over the shoulder" bombing, in the area. More seriously, the article claimed that prior to joining the administration, the current national security adviser, under-secretary of defense for intelligence, and under-secretary of state for arms control and international security were part of a think-tank that issued a report (which they signed) calling for the military to elevate the status of tactical nuclear weapons within the nation's arsenal. Now, the administration is thinking about designing and testing new nuclear bunker busters aimed at ensuring the destruction of high value targets such as the underground centrifuge plant in Natanz. A former senior intelligence official noted that "it's a tough decision. But we made it in Japan." What would the King of the Monsters he have to say about these developments?

Godzilla has had a storied career, culminating in a movie that saw him defeat the likes of Gigan, Zilla, Kumonga, Rodan, Anguirus, and Hedorah, among others, before returning to the ocean. He's fought a venus fly trap, a cloud of smog, a giant moth...even countless versions of himself (mecha-godzilla, spacegodzilla). To the untrained monster movie viewing eye, these skirmishes mask the politics behind the beast. The original, 1954 version, "Gojira," was shot to look very much like a documentary of war, punctuated by dead bodies, orphaned children, and radiation scars - it is longer and far bleaker than what we have seen on television in the states. Gojira was inspired by the director's witness to the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was Americanized by adding shots of the actor Raymond Burr, giving the illusion that he is interacting with important characters in the story as he journeys to Japan to investigate several ships burned and destroyed near Odo Island.

Not until 2004 was the original movie widely available here. Before then, the domestically licensed movie was a highly edited version from 1956, which removed most of the references to the United States' use of nuclear weapons, including testing of even more powerful versions after the war (such as a hydrogen bomb that shocked military personnel when its explosion sent fallout across a 7,000 square mile region in the South Pacific - a fact verified by the radiation exposure of Japanese fishermen traveling on the famous Fukuryu Maru). These deletions were symbolic of our broader self-inflicted amnesia about the decision to use nuclear weapons in Japan and its consequences (efforts to remove or whitewash commemorative exhibits at the Smithsonian in D.C. and the Bradbury Science Museum at Los Alamos are instructive). But the horrific images of the monster itself in the first Godzilla movie remained largely intact, giving Americans their first view of the freak of nature, its atomic power, glowing tail, and sheer size (over 160 feet tall in the first film) evoking the image of a mushroom cloud rising from the Japanese landscape (see pictures).

And the story about a man and his technological invention survived as well - Dr. Serizawa's oxygen destroyer, which ultimately led to Godzilla's demise, was used in the movie to represent mankind's militaristic ambitions:

Dr. Serizawa: If my device can serve a good purpose, I would announce it to everyone in the world! But in its current form, it's just a weapon of horrible destruction. Please understand, Ogata!

Hideto Ogata: I understand. But if we don't use your device against Godzilla, what are we going to do?

Dr. Serizawa: Ogata, if the oxygen destroyer is used even once, politicians from around the world will see it. Of course, they'll want to use it as a weapon. Bombs versus bombs, missiles versus missiles, and now a new superweapon to throw upon us all! As a scientist - no, as a human being - I can't allow that to happen!

As we've learned to live with the bomb, the Japanese learned to accept and in some cases use Godzilla as a weapon of their own in many of the later films (in one movie released only in Japan, Godzilla travels back to World War II and helps the Japanese defeat the allied forces). And every time the fury that was unleashed by our use of nuclear weapons at the close of World War II, embodied by Godzilla, is edited out or allowed to fade, we lose an opportunity to consider the decision itself, and what it could tell us about our efforts of late to deploy tactical nuclear weapons. Barton Bernstein, a professor at Stanford University, located official estimates of how many American soldiers would have died in an invasion of Japan, the avoidance of which is one of the most commonly cited reasons for using the (at least first) nuclear weapon. Far from the one million lives that we were told the bombs saved, the estimate was comfortably below 100,000. By comparison, the two atomic bombs killed roughly 300,000 people, mostly women and children. So what really drove the decision? Was it a signaling exercise aimed at the Soviet Union? Did it have to do with the personal or financial ambitions of certain people or institutions involved with the Manhattan Project? What did the President know and when did he know it (for instance, there are some accounts that Truman was surprised to hear that the bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki)? Substitute present-day names and places associated with the push to develop new tactical nuclear weapons and use them against Iran, and you will realize that little has changed in the basic issues we face. Nor has the dominant discourse of American military might defeating new monsters with ever-more-powerful weapons (the common theme of American monster movies, which usually end with a creature's demise at the hands of a new version of an atomic weapon) given way in any noticeable fashion in the fifty years since the issuance of the Americanized version of Godzilla in 1956.

Godzilla teaches us that ideas left unexamined in the public discourse can awaken monsters far scarier than the enemies we initially perceive. That human beings can habituate to even the most powerful and destructive forces to appear on the horizon. And that a continual cycle of "bombs versus bombs, missiles versus missiles" can have unintended consequences - a "superweapon to throw upon us all." Let us remember Godzilla's cry as we, like the fabled beast, have a seemingly endless queue of threats placed before us.

Vaya con Dios - brooding presence

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Ideal First Date: Toxic Tour!


Are things going well with your buxom beauty and you're thinking of making a move? Feel that asking her to "coffee" or "dinner and a movie" won't cut it? I agree. Women expect far more than that these days. And we're competing not only with other men (and sometimes women), but images of what men might be like. I mean, when Sayid wanted to take things to another level with Shannon, he didn't say, "hey, let's go to the bunker and watch the orientation film." No, he said, "Come on, gather your things," and kept walking as she followed him to a makeshift tent. So you need to get creative if you're going to ask a woman out on a date. My suggestion? Take her on a toxic tour.

Toxic tours are organized by community-based organizations and non-profits to raise awareness of the dangerous conditions in which many of the nation's poor and minority citizens live, due to their proximity to industrial land uses. To help you plan your date, here's a travel guide to some of the nation's best tours:

3. Communities for a Better Environment Toxic Tours, http://www.cbecal.org/toxictour/pg1sec1.htm. The weather is mild but the nights really heat up as T Garcia takes you to some of Northern California's finest refineries, chemical processing plants, and brownfields. Your significant other will marvel at the personal accounts by real community members about their brushes with federal officials, contract workers, and flares so bright you'd think it was mid-day at three in the morning. If you have time, be sure to ask Denny Larson of the Refinery Reform Campaign to take you on a more personal, four to seven hour tour of what he calls the Bay Area's "most depressed, lowest income, highest unemployment community," Richmond. Stop by the Drew Scrap Metals Superfund site, the General Chemical railyard (capable of sending 25,000 residents to the hospital with a single oleum leak - ask Denny about July 1993), and the Chevron refinery. Revel in the more than 20 public housing projects built right next to the petrochemical plants. If you really want to impress your friend, mention how relieved you are that it's not December 1, 1991. Take in some local fare before heading over to Peres Elementary for a walk down memory lane. Those kids really know their evacuations!

2. Altgeld Gardens, Chicago, http://www.geology.wisc.edu/~wang/EJBaldwin/PCR/. Meet Cheryl Johnson at the office of People for Community Recovery, located on Chicago Housing Authority property on the south side of the city. The public housing development (perched on a landfill on the banks of a sewage farm) boasts ten thousand regulars, 97% of whom are black. Take in the embarrassment of riches that this toxic doughnut has to offer: 53 toxic facilities, including landfills, oil refineries, waste lagoons, cement plants, coke ovens, and incinerators (many unregulated!), and all in your backyard! Ask Cheryl about how her mother founded the first environmental organization based in a public housing development, so that her neighbors could have water and sewage service way back in 1986. People from all over the world have taken this tour, including your humble travel writer. Cheryl calls it a tour of a toxic doughnut "because everywhere you look, 360 degrees around us, we're completely surrounded by toxics on all sides." Ask Cheryl which of our nation's last two presidents has a firmer handshake. Take home a copy of David Pellow's Garbage Wars as a souvenir.

1. Norco, Louisiana, http://www.refineryreform.org/community_spotlight.htm (click on Take the New Sarpy, LA toxic tour). Meet Dorothy Jenkins, and gaze from her front porch upon the stunningly vast yet serene storage tanks, each holding 500,000 gallons of gas a few yards away. Pray for no lightning on your tour date. Talk to activists about the roots of the town as well as neighboring Diamond, both former plantations and the site of the largest slave rebellion in US history. Looking for a thrilling conclusion to your date? Head out with the local bucket brigade and take an air sample during one of the regular (at one point, an average of one per week) accidental releases at one of the neighboring refineries. Marvel at hundreds of acres' worth of monuments to our nation's addiction to oil - the pipes that crisscross River Road, the flares that can be seen from the highway as you approach from Baton Rouge, and let's not forget the noise! Hissing valves, roaring flares, PA systems, and clanking cars are some of the highlights of the tour. Be sure to stop at the Jr. Food Mart for a bite to eat and treat your loved one to something special at Bill's Dollar Store. The bayous are also steps away. Learn about the tours they used to give over in Diamond, a four-street neighborhood where some used to live several feet from a Shell Chemical plant. Like the tour in April 2001 whose guests included actor Mike Farrell, writer Alice Walker, poet Haki Madabuti, and U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters. Ask about the high school's cheerleading squad and its quizzical use of the word "explode" in its cheers.

Remember, you only get one chance to make a first impression. Taking your love interest on a toxic tour will show her that you care about the environment and your fellow man, and that you have a slightly edgy side. Women love dating men who are a little dangerous. And in the future, if the spark between you and your new girlfriend feels like it's going to fade, you can always reminisce about "that time we strolled along the flares of New Sarpy...I wanted to touch the light, the heat I saw in your eyes."

Vaya con Dios - brooding presence

Sunday, September 17, 2006

Snakes on a Stealth - update!


Apparently, New York is not immune to flying wings - run for your lives!!!

Here's the proof that they were here:

http://www.newsday.com/sports/baseball/yankees/ny-spyanks0915,0,5759427.story

...and a picture for the visual learners out there (thanks, Gothamist!)

Vaya con Dios - brooding presence

Friday, September 15, 2006

An Ode to Imogen Heap (and the vocoder)

Dear Jennifer,

You told me that I've been walking, I've been hiding, and I look half dead half the time, and I agreed with you. Back when we were young, you told me to pay close attention. You asked me if I was in or if I was out. You only gave me 20 seconds to comply. But you wouldn't have heard me even if I had built up the nerve to leave my things behind as it all went off without me - you were always too busy writing my tragedy. Ms. Heap (may I call you Imogen?), I could always count on you - I've known you for but a couple of years but it feels like a lifetime. Remember that one night when you slyly told me to sleep here, you'd sleep there, but then the heater would be down again? You were so convenient. Imogen, the threat of your love is still in the headlights. Please be there, please be there.

Imogen Heap is an insanely talented songstress who is equally at home with sequencing and sampling (which she taught herself on Atari computers, a fact that I love) as she is with her diverse array of instruments (piano, cello, marimba) or just her gorgeous voice. She was already a smash in the UK when her music began to pop up on iTunes, and off to the stratosphere she went. Her most recent album, "Speak for Yourself," has dominated the electronic music chart on iTunes for about a year now, a testimony to the power of long-tail market demand. Electronica fans (a crude and often inaccurate term I know), remember when you had to find your music in that one CD rack in Tower Records or elsewhere that lumped together everything that wasn't pop, rock, classical, or "R&B/Soul (where even hip hop was tragically placed for a minute)"? D&B, house, two-step, trance, you name it - put it in the Electronica bin! But now that we live so much of our lives on the internet, long-tail demand is the norm. That's the theory that as we move to just-in-time manufacturing, smaller inventories, a greater diversity of sources for the sounds, tastes, and goods we seek, etc., the area under the asymptoting portion of our collective demand curves (the tail) is greater than under the steep portion, where we find the "blockbusters" and "top sellers" of old. This makes life more interesting and gives fans of artists such as Imogen Heap ready access to talent that years ago may not have seen the light of day.

But what is most striking about Imogen Heap's success is how her song, "Hide and Seek," has become a fixture on iTunes on the electronic music chart. It's been hovering around #1 also for about a year. Why this song? Yes, it was on that silly show The OC. But that doesn't explain its staying power on iTunes. Maybe it's the great lyrics. Here they are:

Where are we?
What the hell
is going on?
The dust has only just
began to form
Crop circles in the carpet
Sinking
feeling

Spin me around
again
And rub my eyes
This can't be happening
When busy streets
A mess with people
Would stop to hold
Their heads heavy

Hide and seek
Trains and
sewing machines
All those years
They were here first

Oily marks appear on walls
Where pleasure moments hung before
The takeover
The sweeping insensitivity of this
still life

Hide and Seek
Trains and sewing machines
Blood and Tears
They were here first

Hmm, what'd you say, mmm, that you only meant well?
Well, of course you did.
Hmm, what'd you say? mmm, that it's all for the best?
Of course it is.
Hmm, what'd you say? mmm, that it's just what we need
You decided this?
Hmm, what'd you say, mmm,
What did she say?

Ransom notes keep falling out your mouth
Mid-sweet talk, newspaper word cut-outs
Speak no feeling, no I don't believe you
You don't care a bit, you don't care a bit
Ransom notes keep falling out your mouth
Mid-sweet talk, newspaper word cut-outs
Speak no feeling, I don't believe you
You don't care a bit, you don't care a, you don't care a bit
Oh no, You don't care a bit
Oh no, You don't care a bit
Oh no, You don't care a bit
You don't care a bit
You don't care a bit

Amazing, on so many levels. But I think the song continues its run because of the vocoder, which is the only "musical instrument" used in the song. Imogen Heap sings into a vocoder (or voice encoder), which is a speech synthesizer that records her speech, converts it to a series of numbers representing the frequencies of the waveforms produced by her vocal cords, and then uses an oscillator to recreate the frequencies. The result is simply stunning. Her voice is at once disaggregated and whole. Everywhere and nowhere. Raw and ethereal. Powerful and timid. Electronic and "unplugged." And the vocoder was the perfect instrument to use for a song about abandonment. Look at the song lyrics: crop circles in the carpet - where the furniture used to sit? oily marks on walls where pleasure moments hung before - where the pictures used to be? "You decided this?" The vocoder gives her voice the echo of a woman alone in her room, in her new world, feeling betrayed, but still strong enough to fill the space with her quiet resolve.

Surely long-tail market demand and the genius of artists like Imogen Heap will give us much more to ponder in the future...some of it hopefully in the form of vocoder-driven "electronica."

Vaya con Dios - brooding presence

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

The Bridges of Nassau County

Far from existing in a neutral state, ready for use by various publics for good or ill, technologies often emerge ready to privilege certain political or social arrangements by their very existence. To find out how this might be true for a given technology, we must look beyond the instrumental use of the thing to the meaning behind its design and how it rearranges or holds in place other technological artifacts, human interactions, or ways of thinking. Take a striking example from Long Island, NY: the major public works projects brought to fruition by Robert Moses.

Much of the built environment that those who grew up on Long Island regarded simply for its functionality, the Long Island Expressway, the BQE, the roads heading to Jones Beach, among other elements, was developed or brokered by Robert Moses, the master builder (named New York City's construction coordinator in 1946) who influenced much of the city's planning for more than three decades. While we can stand back and admire certain projects for their utility and, in the case of buildings such as Lincoln Center, their beauty, Moses' biography, Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York demonstrates how some of their designs were also political in nature.

In general, Moses led the charge to encourage the suburbanization of the region, a process reliant in large part on his highway and bridge projects (other cities hired him to design freeway networks of their own starting in the 1940's). He mocked public intellectuals such as Lewis Mumford, who tried to point out the dangers in the trend toward a homogenized suburban living experience. In 1961, Mumford described postwar suburbs as

"a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold" - The City in History, p. 486.

Moses replied that "The little identical suburban boxes of average people, which differ only in color and planting, represent a measure of success unheard of by hundreds of millions on other continents" ("Are Cities Dead," The Atlantic, 1962, p. 57). Turns out Robert Moses had something particular in mind when he envisioned the "average people" inhabiting his suburbs, because he did what he could to make sure that they would be white families with access to automobiles. Have you ever driven under an overpass on one of Moses' parkways on Long Island? Notice how they rise as little as nine feet from the curb? This is because Moses wanted to discourage the use of mass transit, such as buses, on his highways. Buses, even back in the middle of the 20th Century, were about 12 feet tall. Not only did he design the overpasses to keep buses from venturing from low-income portions of the city to the suburbs, but they also made it difficult for low-income (disproportionately minority) families to reach Jones Beach. Moses also opposed adding a stop on the Long Island Railroad near the park that Robert built.

The distribution of cities, suburbs, and exurbs and those who live in them profoundly effects our social interactions, economic opportunities for the privileged and the underclass alike, and our political orientations (much has been written, for example, about how a surge in the creation of exurbs has facilitated continued Republican dominance while Democrats have made inroads in many of the nation's close-in suburbs). But what is not given as much attention is how something as simple as an overpass can stand for more than its functional role in a large-scale infrastructure project. More than a means of facilitating the movement of traffic, it stands for a social arrangement in the suburbs of New York. It's important to give more than a cursory glance to such mundane elements of the built environment, so that we may begin to unpack the values that they are trying to promote.

Innovations in urban design and their influence over our daily lives will be a recurring theme of this blog. What examples come to mind?

Vaya con Dios - brooding presence


Monday, September 11, 2006

The Crawl

Here we are, five years after the most significant attack on American soil in the modern era (the Japanese attack on the Aleutian Islands in June 1942 was important in that it might have diverted enough Japanese aircraft carriers to tip the scales in our favor in the Battle of Midway). I remember September 11th, 2001, as a day of sorrow, confusion, and misinformation (bomb at the State Department, evacuation of Stuyvesant High School) for much of the day. After we were allowed to leave work I ended up at a candlelit vigil, and then joined my sister at her apartment to watch what felt like endless amounts of television. I was therefore introduced to a seemingly minor shift in cable news programming: widespread use of "the crawl."

A crawl is a moving line of text at the bottom of a screen, that can provide continuous information while allowing pre-recorded or live programming to continue above it. September 11th marked the advent of near-ubiquity for the crawl on television news. Fox, CNN, and then MSNBC added the crawl to their coverage of the terrorist attacks in order to provide emergency information, even offering the crawl during commercials. Before September 11th, the crawl was used mostly in sports and financial news programming, with a notable exception being CNN's Headline News.

I remember sitting there in Cambridge in awe of the events as they unfolded, particularly some of the more outlandish claims moving along the crawl at what might as well have been breakneck speed; we'd see news of a bomb left in a locker in building x or some other development, and then wait for the entire crawl to reach the same point to learn additional information. Often, it was never provided; the story was in fact not true. This was understandable, given the enormity of what transpired in the early hours of September 11th.

What is less forgivable is how the crawl remained after the dust clouds settled. The major cable news channels continued to make use of the crawl, probably in order to keep viewers with ever-diminishing attention spans glued to their stations. (Of course, the crawl was no longer used during commercials, I guess for similar reasons to why volume control devices and TiVo are so vigorously opposed by advertisers.) While our younger generations are known for their ability to multitask and there are even arguments for why an endless stream of blips and bytes might improve certain kinds of intelligence (see Johnson's "Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter"), you have to be disappointed with how shamelessly the crawl has been exploited at times in the last five years. Plenty of what appears in the crawl offers very little in the way of news. For instance, Fox begins its crawl with the current Threat Level (Elevated, as per usual) and more recently has added the Airline Threat Level (Red - drop that Colgate Total right not!) to boot. Plugs for forthcoming broadcasts, the repetition of network slogans, and the like are now juxtaposed with television news captions, stock index windows, clocks, and bizarre elements (such as CNN's "Countdown to the Ceasefire" clock near the close of the most recent Israel-Hezbollah conflict in Lebanon) to create a verbal collage at the bottom of our screens, much of it repeating what we already know or can intuit if given the chance. News events, through the use of innovations such as the crawl, can be fed to us and dropped at ever-increasing frequencies, saturating and abandoning our minds at will. And while we sit there, imagining all of these boxes and lines of text across the screen as a veritable cornucopia of news sources, we forget that they are all controlled by a central authority (a network), which is managing news cycles and choosing how to brand those cycles as a product of one network rather than the others as much as it is reporting current events.

Which brings to mind the most important question regarding the crawl and its effect on society writ large: does it increase the passivity of television viewing? It is well-established that watching television over time will take our brain-wave activity into "alpha level," which Jerry Mander has labeled the mind's "most receptive mode." How does widespread use of the crawl make us, the viewers, more or less passive? Factors cited for why TV makes us more passive include (a) lack of eye movement due to our ability to take in all of the images without much active scanning of a small TV screen; (b) the flickering TV screen itself; and (c) the fact that images on a TV screen appear as a steady stream and cannot be taken out of the stream and contemplated. How do you think the crawl changes this standard critique of television? Particularly given the fact that we watch, on average, 4-5 hours of it per day? (full disclosure: I don't own a television right now, and have to make friends with those who do : )

I don't have the scientific answer to this question. And I do appreciate some attempts on September 11th, 2006 to improve use of the crawl, at least for the minutes following 8:47 a.m. during coverage on the cable news networks. Fox actually deleted the crawl when cutting to the memorial sites, MSNBC, even though it scandalously rebroadcast the Today Show from that fateful day, used the crawl only to indicate that you were watching something they like to call a "Living History Event," while CNN listed the names and home towns of those who died. But as the networks quickly regressed to use of their new toy long before the Today Show would have ended, I had to wonder whether this little stream of words and numbers was one of the little ways in which our lives took a wrong turn on September 11th.

Perhaps some of you were fortunate enough to be watching one of these stations this morning when for a moment the crawl disappeared - these days, I, for one, will take any additional room to breathe that I can get.

Vaya con Dios - brooding presence

Saturday, September 09, 2006

What's in a name?

This blog will focus its energies on critiquing the modern world, particularly as technological advances, after brief periods of hype, recede into the background and become the structures, environments, white noise, and scaffolding around us. Its central premise is that we should not take dramatic shifts (or even more subtle ones) in pop culture and communications, mass consumerism and marketing, gadgetry, advancements in engineering and the life sciences, changes in military hardware, and the like for granted. We must open them up and consider how they will direct our futures, and the choices with which we will be left years down the road.

Hence, the name: "hit me up on my Myspace" is a common expression used mostly by those at the lower end of the coveted 18-32 marketing bracket that oft-times replaces the "call me on my cell" of old. In its simplest terms, it means "go to my Myspace page and post a comment." It's not beyond even a freestyle hip-hop artist on 106 & Park on BET to end his victorious rap battle with "hit me up on my Myspace." Hollywood productions have begun to offer Myspace pages instead of (or in addition to) websites in their ads or on their movie posters. And music artists are selling their wares (www.myspace.com/mrbt) or being cajoled into producing a new album after a far-too-long hiatus (www.myspace.com/mcpaulbarman - please go and check out his new single released on Myspace, "Ignorance," and support the man). Blogs, myspace pages, IM chats, etc. - what do they mean for how we relate to each other and address the central challenges that come attached to our humanness (1. we are mortal beings; 2. no matter who we're with, we are essentially alone in that our thoughts are encased in a physical shell separate from all others; and 3. how do we go about creating communities and existing in them, particularly given 1 and 2?). How do they tweak our expectations for how we interact interpersonally and in terms of governance?

I also like the curious results that can follow from having such a blog name. For instance, I read that some insane parents are using their babies' T-shirts to advertise their blogs (see BoingBoing, the best blog on earth at www.boingboing.net). If these miserable excuses for human beings gave their children a shirt advertising my blog, the two lines on the T-shirt would negate each other, vastly curtailing the odds of another person looking up their blog (it would read:

check out my father's blog

hit me up on my myspace

I may be the only person on earth that finds this funny, but Who cares? This is my blog and I'm glad that you're a part of it.

Vaya con Dios - brooding presence

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Which one is Brooding Presence? Vote now!

Welcome

Welcome to the best blog ever.

Brooding: "cast in subdued light so as to convey a somewhat threatening atmosphere"

This little slice of cyberspace will hover at the periphery of all that is taken for granted and left unquestioned in our society, casting aloft occasional verbal incendiary devices. Will it send ripples through the blogosphere? Perhaps not. But let's try our best, and have some fun along the way!

My pledge to you, Dear Reader:

1. I will never use my blog to post meaningless "this is how I spent my last three hours" messages.

2. I won't allow random strangers to use my blog to sell "hey I just earned $250 from my living room" schemes or settle old scores with their anonymous rants. Focus on the issues. Otherwise, I say DELETE!

3. From time to time I will post links to sites that address important causes. Click on them and do what you're told.

4. Once readership hovers above a respectable number, I will print T-shirts. T-shirts: Ain't nothin' wrong with that!

5. I will post as often as I have something to say. "Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies, but one of these mornings, you'll get a surprise" - The Electric Grandmother (look it up, youngin's!)

Vaya con Dios - brooding presence