So I have been meaning to get back to this topic of music videos for a while.
Months ago, I was reading an analysis of an Aphex Twin video written by Tom Gersic. His essay was the original impetus for the commentary on Ganxtaville I did a while back. For what follows here. I want to trace some common themes and interesting connections between a series of music videos that come from disparate periods and genres. I think that there is an aesthetic that can be outlined. So here we go.
One of my favorite videos of all time is Peter Gabriel's Shock the Monkey. One of the things I like best about it is how the images and the "narrative" of the song don't quite sync up. Gabriel "performs" the song, singing along with the music, but this is not a performance video. Instead, the song lyrics are woven into a disorienting set of images that menace the viewer (and Gabriel himself) both through their content and their disconnectedness:
Now, getting from here to Aphex Twin might take some work, but I see a line that can be drawn between them. At first it might seem like these are apples and oranges. However, I think Gabriel's video is a precursor in some key ways. It sets the stage, but there are some other elements as well to consider.
First of all, I recommend watching the following short clip from John Carpenter's late-model horror classic, The Prince of Darkness, as it gives a good example of another aspect of this aesthetic that I will define in a moment:
What we see above is a style with some identifiable features: 1) disturbing, unexplained images 2) shot in handheld video, with 3) diegetic but sub-audible or garbled voices speaking. It's freakin' creepy. I remember the first time I saw this film in the theater in high school with all my crazy pals. We laughed at a lot of it (it's pretty laughable) - but this part was disturbing.
Another example is the handheld footage incorporated into M. Night Shyamalan's Signs, when we first get a glimpse of one of the aliens. The combination of documentary-style with the uncanny is effectively disorienting (I don't have a clip to show, but the DVD is readily available). Both of these movie moments created a very particular feeling in me.
So that's one piece. Then, one night a couple years ago, I was traveling for my job with Outward Bound, and was staying the night at a hotel in Chattanooga. I couldn't sleep, and turned on the TV, and was flipping channels when I ran across the beginning of Paul Hunter's video for Marilyn Manson's The Dope Show:
As you can see, there is a resemblance to the aesthetic in Prince of Darkness I described above. But even more, there was a resemblance in the creepy feeling I had watching it. Needless to say, I did not sleep well in that motel room that night.
One last piece I want to add to the mix is the old David Bowie video for Ashes to Ashes. I think the similarities to the Manson video will be immediately obvious. The blown-out colors in Bowie's version are due to early video effects pushed into hot overdrive, but you can easily see how it influenced what's going on in the Manson video. Plus, note the strange chorus/entourage in black here that parallel the weirdos in Manson's limo. Also, this video is contemporaneous to Shock the Monkey, and offers a similar style of non-performance-performance and disturbing disconnectedness:
So now several pieces are in place. 1) In Gabriel's video, we have the "little people," attacking and biting Gabriel and menacing him inexplicably, and inexplicable interactions with presences who are not really "there," but move from film/video presence into "reality" with the "true" characters. 2) We have the documentary-style menace of John Carpenter - slanted handheld video and diegetic sub-audible voices, 3) we have the androgynous skinny-creepy creature of the Manson video, who seems alternately menaced and menacing in the "narrative," and 4) we have, in Bowie's video, the character of the "old woman," who in the Bowie video walks beside him on the "shoreline." We can see all of these elements resurfacing in the Aphex Twin clip.
Keeping these elements in mind, take a look now at the Aphex Twin video for Come to Daddy:
This is not, of course, to imply that Chris Cunningham's work here is not original and striking. On the contrary, it is a synthesis of the highest order, drawing all such elements together and bringing them forward in astonishing ways.
I don't have any grand conclusions to draw from all this. I just think these sorts of close readings are cool. A sort of genealogy, if you will, of these twenty-five years or so of visual music.
Hope you enjoyed them like I have. Thanks for watching.
21 December 2007
04 November 2007
01 November 2007
14 October 2007
"This is the Remix"
(The following post contains some explicit language and such)
One of my favorite moments from Kill Bill 2 (and trust me, this was a film wherein I had a lot of favorite moments) was the monologue in the final act where David Carradine's character, Bill, compares our protaganista, Beatrix Kiddo, to Superman:
"Clark Kent is how Superman sees us." This is the point I want to linger on for a moment here. I want to linger over it in the context of a music video. (I think I'm going to spend several posts talking about music videos. It makes for a good distraction from the screaming agony that is dissertation rewriting.) The video in question is one I first encountered several years ago, when I was living in Berlin. It was played on German MTV all the time the summer I was there.
The video is DJ Tomekk's "Ganxtaville Part III" (again, there is some explicit material here):
Now. let's take a look at this a moment, in light of this insight from "Kill Bill" mentioned above. What, in other words, does this video indicate to us about how American culture is seen from the outside world? What can America learn about itself from this "alter ego" shown to us by this northern European gaggle of hip-hop wannabes?
1. The Mob is multicultural - The early scene, seen in reprise throughout the video, in which the cast is dressed in 1930's gangster drag, recalls James Cagney and the G-Men, or Kevin Costner and "The Untouchables." In "Ganxtaville," apparently, organized crime has no racial tensions. Sort of a nice thought, actually.
2. Doing the "We're driving the car" motion and the "We're bouncing the car and/or we're patting the ass" motion is cool, and makes you look tough and gangsta - They don't, of course. But in this alternative vision of America, everybody thinks they do. These motions look ludicrous, and if you walked into Bed-Stuy or Watts and did these motions you would be shot and mugged, your hubcaps would be stolen, and you would be shot again. But here, in "Ganxtaville," they are a rite of passage into macho-manhood, apparently.
To their credit, they do get the authentic "We're raising the roof" motion into the video, as well. Yes, in America, we actually do that motion, and yes, it looks as ridiculous as it does here in "Ganxtaville."
3. Aluminum baseball bats are cool, and make great fashion accessories - Don't ask me. But they're all over the damn place in "Ganxtaville."
4. Women in bikinis like to writhe near, and suck on popsicles around, dumpy looking white guys like DJ Tomekk and MC Murda Weapon (The skinny guy in the glasses and the pudgy guy in the jogging suit) and will wash their cars gladly - In the real America, they don't. Unless you pay them hell of money. So maybe this is true in both America and "Ganxtaville." That might explain a lot about how, and why, these incongruous writhing women came to be in the video. Yes. They are, in fact, European porn stars. Hence doing such things with dumpy guys (and worse) is sort of de rigeur for them.
5. A brief excursus about this guy, MC Murda Weapon - He's pudgy. He's dumpy. When he does the "we're driving the car" motion, he looks especially silly. Yet he has chosen this incredibly "tough" moniker. I mean, Murda Weapon? That implies tough. So he's definitely making the attempt to be "hard" and "street." The difficulty arises, though, in the fact that he's German. His handle, which sounds tough and hard in English, is a translation of the German name "Tätwaffe" - which to untrained American ears is virtually indistinguishable from the phrase "tit waffle." And I'm sorry, but that is not tough at all. Painful, yes. Tough? No.
6. Note at 1:17 - The inexplicable, mirror shaded, uniformed officer of the law. He seems to be watching all this, unaffected by its implications. It's clearly an intentional shot in the video. I just have no idea what it means.
7. The Mexicans - Ditto these guys. In "Ganxtaville," the Latinos and the hip-hop crowd intermingle in a way that simply doesn't occur here in America. I mean, sure, there's some good Mexican gangsta rap, like Control Machete and such, but you don't really see Snoop Dog and L'il John hanging with them hombres. I mean, there's Dirty South, and then there's Really South. ¡Ándale!
But, anyway, there they are. Bouncing cars. Gang signs. Rap video. Only in "Ganxtaville."
So here is America, as seen through the eyes of crazy insane Danish DJ's and German Gangstas. I honestly do not think this is a caricature; I believe it is an homage. I'm just not sure to what. But, as they say in "Ganxtaville," kein Stress. Peace.
One of my favorite moments from Kill Bill 2 (and trust me, this was a film wherein I had a lot of favorite moments) was the monologue in the final act where David Carradine's character, Bill, compares our protaganista, Beatrix Kiddo, to Superman:
"Clark Kent is how Superman sees us." This is the point I want to linger on for a moment here. I want to linger over it in the context of a music video. (I think I'm going to spend several posts talking about music videos. It makes for a good distraction from the screaming agony that is dissertation rewriting.) The video in question is one I first encountered several years ago, when I was living in Berlin. It was played on German MTV all the time the summer I was there.
The video is DJ Tomekk's "Ganxtaville Part III" (again, there is some explicit material here):
Now. let's take a look at this a moment, in light of this insight from "Kill Bill" mentioned above. What, in other words, does this video indicate to us about how American culture is seen from the outside world? What can America learn about itself from this "alter ego" shown to us by this northern European gaggle of hip-hop wannabes?
1. The Mob is multicultural - The early scene, seen in reprise throughout the video, in which the cast is dressed in 1930's gangster drag, recalls James Cagney and the G-Men, or Kevin Costner and "The Untouchables." In "Ganxtaville," apparently, organized crime has no racial tensions. Sort of a nice thought, actually.
2. Doing the "We're driving the car" motion and the "We're bouncing the car and/or we're patting the ass" motion is cool, and makes you look tough and gangsta - They don't, of course. But in this alternative vision of America, everybody thinks they do. These motions look ludicrous, and if you walked into Bed-Stuy or Watts and did these motions you would be shot and mugged, your hubcaps would be stolen, and you would be shot again. But here, in "Ganxtaville," they are a rite of passage into macho-manhood, apparently.
To their credit, they do get the authentic "We're raising the roof" motion into the video, as well. Yes, in America, we actually do that motion, and yes, it looks as ridiculous as it does here in "Ganxtaville."
3. Aluminum baseball bats are cool, and make great fashion accessories - Don't ask me. But they're all over the damn place in "Ganxtaville."
4. Women in bikinis like to writhe near, and suck on popsicles around, dumpy looking white guys like DJ Tomekk and MC Murda Weapon (The skinny guy in the glasses and the pudgy guy in the jogging suit) and will wash their cars gladly - In the real America, they don't. Unless you pay them hell of money. So maybe this is true in both America and "Ganxtaville." That might explain a lot about how, and why, these incongruous writhing women came to be in the video. Yes. They are, in fact, European porn stars. Hence doing such things with dumpy guys (and worse) is sort of de rigeur for them.
5. A brief excursus about this guy, MC Murda Weapon - He's pudgy. He's dumpy. When he does the "we're driving the car" motion, he looks especially silly. Yet he has chosen this incredibly "tough" moniker. I mean, Murda Weapon? That implies tough. So he's definitely making the attempt to be "hard" and "street." The difficulty arises, though, in the fact that he's German. His handle, which sounds tough and hard in English, is a translation of the German name "Tätwaffe" - which to untrained American ears is virtually indistinguishable from the phrase "tit waffle." And I'm sorry, but that is not tough at all. Painful, yes. Tough? No.
6. Note at 1:17 - The inexplicable, mirror shaded, uniformed officer of the law. He seems to be watching all this, unaffected by its implications. It's clearly an intentional shot in the video. I just have no idea what it means.
7. The Mexicans - Ditto these guys. In "Ganxtaville," the Latinos and the hip-hop crowd intermingle in a way that simply doesn't occur here in America. I mean, sure, there's some good Mexican gangsta rap, like Control Machete and such, but you don't really see Snoop Dog and L'il John hanging with them hombres. I mean, there's Dirty South, and then there's Really South. ¡Ándale!
But, anyway, there they are. Bouncing cars. Gang signs. Rap video. Only in "Ganxtaville."
So here is America, as seen through the eyes of crazy insane Danish DJ's and German Gangstas. I honestly do not think this is a caricature; I believe it is an homage. I'm just not sure to what. But, as they say in "Ganxtaville," kein Stress. Peace.
05 August 2007
Plus, in real life, Kiefer totally put the smackdown on a Christmas tree.
So on Friday night Kira and I and some friends went and saw the opening-night showing of The Bourne Ultimatum (a film for which, all through the anticipatory months, the proper title eluded me. Consistency is so vital to my subconscious that I only ever remembered it as The Bourne Ubiquity. So it goes). Let me say, front and center, that I really, really enjoyed the movie. I am a fan of the Bourne franchise and I think they managed to maintain the smart action and intrigue of the first two very well. I recommend them all. They hold up to multiple viewings and are worth your time.But as we left the theater, a question started to form in my mind, and it has kept me a little preoccupied in the days since. So I offer my quandary to the Universe:
Who is more of an absolute badass: Jason Bourne, or Jack Bauer of 24?
This is not as simple as it might seem at first gloss. Yes, of course, Jason Bourne is a mentally-reprogrammed human killing machine, a $30 million rogue assassin with reflexes honed to a keen razor edge. Yes, Jason Bourne can slip effortlessly in and out of identities and countries and has the smarts to completely befuddle the American intelligence establishment.
But, at the beginning of Season Two, Jack Bauer cut a man's head off with a hack saw.
Now, don't get me wrong. On screen we see Jason Bourne accomplish some amazing things with simple household objects.
He stabs a man with a pen, knife-fights with a rolled-up magazine, blows a house to smithereens with a toaster, and in this most recent movie he hands a man his ass using a coffee table book and a hand towel. You get the feeling he could invade a small country single-handed armed only with the most recent issue of Martha Stewart's Living. Clearly, Jason Bourne brings a whole new meaning to the phrase "domestic violence."However, Jack Bauer cut a man's head off. With a hack saw.
Jason Bourne was a government killer. He speaks seemingly uncountable numbers of languages. He has more fake identification than an entire high school graduating class. He can take on an entire room full of armed men and survive.
Nevertheless, Jack Bauer removed a man's head with a hack saw, put the head in a bag like a bowling ball, and handed the bag to somebody after driving across town with it in his car. On network television.
I heard a story once. It goes like this. While Bruce Lee was still alive and teaching kung fu in Hollywood, there was only one student of whom he admitted being afraid. He feared Steve McQueen. He was afraid of Steve McQueen, it is reported, because, in Lee's words, McQueen "simply would never, ever stop." Knock him down, he gets up. Unrelenting. It was unsettling.
To admit this, of course, does not in any sense diminish the total badassness of Bruce Lee. It simply highlights a little-known but universal state of affairs: no matter how bad you are, there is one thing you will come across in your career as a badass that might, just might, give you the freakin' willies.
And so, as I said above, mad props to Jason Bourne, or whatever his real name is. He is certainly bad.
But, at the end of the day, I still think I'll put my money on the hacksaw.
Categories: film, television
18 July 2007
Business as Usual
So I was listening to NPR yesterday morning and heard the hue and the cry being issued over at the Dow Jones corporation like shares of common stock over the takeover bid being hoisted up the flagpole by rogue pirate Rupert Murdoch. He might take over The Wall Street Journal.
The fear is great. Editorial standards may be compromised. The independence of this flagship of journalism may be steered instead to serve the biased business interests of Murdoch's vast financial empire. And, most clearly, there is a fear that whoever might mount a successful takeover bid - be it Murdoch, Mordor or Moloch - will in the end slash the company and leave it in tatters and ruins, a shell of its former glory. NPR's David Folkenflik can be heard probing the gravitas of the situation, asking after the concerns of the Bancroft family, Dow's major shareholders, and wondering aloud if this "exemplar of American journalism" will be sullied.
Give me, as they say, a break.
To blanch at such possibilities is, to my lights, simply to confuse a corporate mouthpiece like the Wall Street Journal with something of actual value to the Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness in the day-to-day existence of the majority of American citizens. You know, things like drinkable water, clean air, secure jobs, and affordable health care. The folks at NPR's business desk seem unable to think of this newspaper in terms other than that which one, in days gone by, would have considered reserved for national resources (which can - but should not be - strip mined) or national ideals (which can - but should not be - compromised).
But this takeover is not of that class of debacles. It is precisely the sort of thing the "independent" editorship of the Journal has been championing since...well, there's never been a time they haven't championed it, actually. Leveraged buyouts making the way for tyrant CEO's to radically gut once-proud and -prosperous companies leaving mountains of pink slips, decimated communities and worthless pension funds in their wake is the very gut and gristle of what the Journal lauds on its pages. Simply look at Flint, Michigan or listen to glib economists gush about sneaky corporateering to the likes of Tony Robbins or on financial websites: the business of this country is business, and this is what savvy businessmen do.
So, as for me and my house, there will be no tears shed for a lost Eden of journalistic independence unstained by the apple juice of Murdoch's business interests. Murdoch, for my money, is just the most recent and the most visible of the snake-oil salesmen who have been running this country since the Boston Tea Party: a bunch of Anglos who are thinking with their pocketbooks, disguised in native drag to make us all buy the ruse that they actually belong here, dumping our Life, Liberty, etc. over the side of the ship in the name of their representation and happiness.
Let the Wall Street Journal hang, say I. And may its readership - who so often seem beyond the touch of conscience or consequence - tremble in the shadow of its swaying. Now that would be an exemplar to American journalism. Wouldn't you agree, Mr. Folkenflik?
The fear is great. Editorial standards may be compromised. The independence of this flagship of journalism may be steered instead to serve the biased business interests of Murdoch's vast financial empire. And, most clearly, there is a fear that whoever might mount a successful takeover bid - be it Murdoch, Mordor or Moloch - will in the end slash the company and leave it in tatters and ruins, a shell of its former glory. NPR's David Folkenflik can be heard probing the gravitas of the situation, asking after the concerns of the Bancroft family, Dow's major shareholders, and wondering aloud if this "exemplar of American journalism" will be sullied.
Give me, as they say, a break.
To blanch at such possibilities is, to my lights, simply to confuse a corporate mouthpiece like the Wall Street Journal with something of actual value to the Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness in the day-to-day existence of the majority of American citizens. You know, things like drinkable water, clean air, secure jobs, and affordable health care. The folks at NPR's business desk seem unable to think of this newspaper in terms other than that which one, in days gone by, would have considered reserved for national resources (which can - but should not be - strip mined) or national ideals (which can - but should not be - compromised).
But this takeover is not of that class of debacles. It is precisely the sort of thing the "independent" editorship of the Journal has been championing since...well, there's never been a time they haven't championed it, actually. Leveraged buyouts making the way for tyrant CEO's to radically gut once-proud and -prosperous companies leaving mountains of pink slips, decimated communities and worthless pension funds in their wake is the very gut and gristle of what the Journal lauds on its pages. Simply look at Flint, Michigan or listen to glib economists gush about sneaky corporateering to the likes of Tony Robbins or on financial websites: the business of this country is business, and this is what savvy businessmen do.
So, as for me and my house, there will be no tears shed for a lost Eden of journalistic independence unstained by the apple juice of Murdoch's business interests. Murdoch, for my money, is just the most recent and the most visible of the snake-oil salesmen who have been running this country since the Boston Tea Party: a bunch of Anglos who are thinking with their pocketbooks, disguised in native drag to make us all buy the ruse that they actually belong here, dumping our Life, Liberty, etc. over the side of the ship in the name of their representation and happiness.
Let the Wall Street Journal hang, say I. And may its readership - who so often seem beyond the touch of conscience or consequence - tremble in the shadow of its swaying. Now that would be an exemplar to American journalism. Wouldn't you agree, Mr. Folkenflik?
09 July 2007
14 June 2007
Riding with the Driver
So I was walking through Hillsboro Village yesterday morning - it was early and my car was being fixed at the local repair shop - and I was walking out of the art gallery at the end of the street when I was the recipient of some free-wheeling evangelism.I say "free-wheeling" because said evangelizer was in motion, leaning out of a car window as it went through the heart of the Village block there. Also free-wheeling because it was sort of "gamble" evangelism, guerrilla evangelism. Shot-in-the-dark evangelism.
Here's how it went down.
I own a lot of t-shirts, and (as many of you know) a goodly percentage of these are Superman t-shirts. So I had one on yesterday, and its hard to miss - big red "S" and all. And as I walked out of the gallery this dude leaned out of the car window and shouted - near as I can tell - "Hey, bud, even Superman needs Jesus!"
As is my wont, I reacted as I usually do. I raised my fist triumphantly and shouted back, "Amen."
But then I was given to ponder, as his car continued to slowly pass me by. I noticed
the "Got Jesus?" bumper sticker on the back of the car, and noted as well his goatee and the foreign make of his sedan. Who was I dealing with, exactly? A born-again Emerger? A backsliding Baptist who feels guilty he got drunk last Friday and is trying to do penance? What assumptions was he making about me, anyway? What assumptions did I make about him?I wonder sometimes what sort of image I present to the world. What does the casual observer see when their eyes behold me. I honestly have no idea. In my life I have run a curious gamut: atheist, to eastern-spiritualist, to christo-pacifist, to evangelical protestant, to somewhat-traditional-somewhat-crypto-somewhat-militant-catholic. No matter where I've been, or thought, and no matter where I've landed, I guarantee you there's always somebody somewhere still thinks my ass needs to be saved.
Not that I mind that. Somebody somewhere is likely right, at any given moment.
But what about this moment, yesterday? This drive-by proselytizer, this missionary in a Mazda? The interaction was so brief, I still don't know exactly what was happening. Was it merely an affirmation of the lordship of Christ, even over cartoon characters? I can get behind that (just please let's don't sing about it, please). Was it some sort of Isaiah gig, denying the reality of the false powers and the idols of the world (as represented by that trademarked and TIME/Warner besmirched "S" I was sporting on my pecks)? I can get behind that, too.
Was it a gesture, an assumption, that I was lost? Needed to hear the Good News? Perhaps. But how effective is such a shouted, probably mis-heard soundbite over traffic noise and a million other distractions? Wouldn't it have been more classy to stop the car, in a sort of reverse-Eunuch-on-the-road deal, and actually get to know me for a minute, find out where the scripture was sticking in my craw, if at all?
I think of the old story the radio evangelist Bob George tells, about how he would grill his young son after school, whenever the boy mentioned a new friend. "Did you tell him about Jesus?" George relates this story to illustrate the danger of evangelism-by-the-numbers, of when "spreading the good news" feels more like the point-spread in a football bet. (He doesn't ask his boy that question anymore.)
I guess what I'm saying, both to that long-gone guy in the car and now to all of you, is this: Yes, when the time comes, even the stones will shout. The cars will shout, too, of their own Accord (sorry), and proclaim the real Order of the world and who is in charge. Everything will. Every tongue confessing, every knee bowing.
But we don't live in that time, yet. Here and now, it is not enough to shout a platitude. Here and now, the way forward is the same as its been for the last two-thousand years: the conversation on Mars Hill, the feet dusty from the road (not the accelerator), one cloak, no pouch. Slow time and needy interactions - mutually needy. Not the kind of "I've got the answer you've got the need" jazz that so often gets passed off as compassionate Christian "being in the world but not of it."I hope, when my moments come - to witness, to "spread the Good News," to even (God forbid) join the ranks of the martyrs - I hope I'm moving slow, and doing a lot of listening, and hearing where this soul is coming from before I start trying to act all high and mighty about where its going. I hope.
And I read somewhere that hope might not be in vain - so maybe there's hope for me. And for the guy in the car.
That'd be super.
12 June 2007
Of the Six Things That I Love, Here are Five.
1. The San Antonio Spurs
2. Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies
3. Liz Phair's mouth (see left)
4. Bartlett Pears
5. Pope John Paul II
Thank you very much. You're on your own. Goodnight.
30 May 2007
Unfortunately, you can't exorcise Maxwell's Demon
So, its a curious thing about ovens. Have you ever noticed?
Let's say you want to heat up a nice tasty batch of chocolate chip cookies. Mmmm mmmm good. So you preheat the oven to 350 degrees, drop the dollops of dough on the non-greased cookie sheet, and pop them in for 10 (gooey) to 12 (crunchy) minutes.
Now, the yumminess before us likely distracts us - at this point - from paying much attention to this matter that I now want to foreground, but let's tarry a moment and ask the question as the cookies cool:
What's going on with the oven?
The oven is cooling too, you see. 350 degrees is hot (that's why you own "oven mitts"), and it takes a while to cool down. In fact, I bet if you went back a half-hour later the inside of the oven would still be at least a little warm to the touch. The heat is dissipating, going elsewhere, but it takes time.
This is thermodynamics in a nutshell.
Here, on the Earth, we are basically moving a more-or-less static amount of heat around. In daily life, it looks like this: You turn on an air conditioner, and the heat in your home is transferred outside. You eat the cookies, and your body chemically burns them to nourish you. When you feel the wind or watch a rainstorm, you are seeing the effects of these temperature differentials at work on a slightly larger scale. On an even larger scale, as the Earth passes through the cold void of space, we lose some of the heat held in the envelope of our atmosphere - an amount that is more or less equivalent to the heat we collect from the thermonuclear reactions of the Sun burning some 93 million miles away. The amount of heat stays pretty much the same, it just moves from place to place, so some areas are temporarily hotter than others.
So our planet is a pretty efficient heat-exchanger, both on the macro scale (we lose heat at about the same amount as the Sun gives us heat) and the micro (Honey, turn on the AC, please).
I watch television so rarely that I am always amazed (agog? apoplectic? anguished?) when I am in a situation when I can spend a few minutes channel surfing. That happened today (I'm staying in a hotel for a work conference) and I happened across a show called Sunset Tan.
Now, on a lot of levels, this show is a study in thermodynamics. It is, if you will, all about moving heat from one place to another. In just the few minutes I watched it, this much was clear.
I was particularly struck by the nine year old girl, brought in by her mother in order to be perfectly tanned for school pictures (the young lady, by the way, got the "cocktail" package - both the bed and the spray - the same one that Britney had gotten earlier that day. "You want the same as Lindsay Lohan, don't you, honey?" asks the mother. Enthusiastic nodding). "This is L.A.," the bronzed twink ex-busboy manager opines, "You've gotta have the darkest tan."
Later the show dissolves into the sort of interpersonal acrimony so resplendent these days in reality TV (the regional manager who bitches out the store managers for not being available "24 hours, seven days a week" even though none of the managers can get the regional manager to return their text messages or phone calls was an especial treat). I have no idea if these people are real, or if this is just subtle parody - but I guess in L.A. there is no way to tell. I mean, in a land of that much sunshine, the fact that one would go to a tanning salon at all sort of begs the question, doesn't it?
The fact that reality TV shows like like American Idol have managed to turn the cold shoulder of rejection and failure into a hot career opportunity is itself a fine illustration of a key thermodynamic principle. In any closed system, unless external energy is added, differences and extremes will eventually equalize and become indistinguishable. Like the Earth upon which American "culture" happens, a state of stability is reached.
This is a roundabout way of admitting that - even though I really want to - I don't think I can, in good conscience, blame American popular culture (as reflected in L.A.-based reality TV) for the problem of global warming. And it breaks my heart that I cannot. But I can't. Reality TV simply moves the heat around. It does not significantly increase our atmospheric temperatures - no more than the hot air in Washington, at any rate.
Instead, I offer this explanation for the current climactic crisis. Not a popular one - in fact, I have not heard it ventured or discussed elsewhere. So it may simply be my kookiness. That being said, however, the theory does attend to these matters of thermodynamics that have preoccupied this little meditation.
Let's return for a moment to that oven with which we started all this, and the time it takes to cool. Like the atmosphere of the Earth, the lining of the oven is a relatively efficient insulator. Left to its own devices, the oven hovers at just-about room temperature. However, when you add a great deal of heat to it, it holds it for a long period of time. When energy is added, the heat dissipates relatively slowly. When you bake the cookies, it takes time for that 350 degrees to go elsewhere.
Now imagine what would happen if you heated that oven to 700 degrees. Then 1400 degrees. Then 2800, and then... you get the idea.
It would take a bit of time for that heat to go somewhere, wouldn't it? And while the temperature difference between the inside and the outside of the oven was equalizing, the room would heat up, and then, from the room, to the outside, and so on. Eventually, you wouldn't notice the heat differences because they would seem relatively equal. We are, after all, dealing with relative temperature extremities. Even 2800 degrees is a somewhat reasonable temperature for the Earth, and so we are, at the end of the day, still only moving heat around a bit, not significantly adding to it within the system.
But what would happen if the temperature in that oven was heated to, say, a couple of million degrees?
Now suddenly we are dealing with a different order of magnitude. This is not a natural temperature for the insulated envelope of atmosphere around the Earth - in fact, the only natural object anywhere near us that generates that kind of heat is the Sun, and it is not actually near us (except in cosmic terms). If you put that kind of energy into your oven, and then opened it, I guarantee you it would really heat your kitchen when you opened the oven door, and likely the whole neighborhood and town, to a temperature that would make things like molten steel seem as innocuous and gentle as, say, a tanning bed.
And because the Earth is, like your oven, a pretty good insulator, the heat you released from you kitchen would linger around a while, heating a greater and greater area as the enthalpic and entropic forces of thermodynamics equalized across the system. The difference being that a couple million degrees goes a lot farther in its effect once equilibrium is again reached.
What I want to point out - and what I haven't heard mentioned in any of the discussions of global warming so far - is that during the middle part of the last century our country (and several others) did exactly what I have just imagined here, with our oven, in the form of nuclear testing in the atmosphere and, later, underground. Not just once or twice, but literally thousands of times.
Though each of the blasts had their own characteristics and differences, one common feature to most, if not all, of them is this: the initial burst of prompt and thermal radiation coming from the fissile core is, at its coolest, about twice the temperature of the surface of the Sun (for some fission bombs it goes as high as three times the Sun).
The United States alone has detonated over a thousand fission devices of various types, not to mention the fissile cores of commercial and military nuclear reactors across the planet. Each of these is generating a glowing spark of new heat into the relatively efficient insulation envelope of the Earth. Not, in other words, simply moving heat around, but creating new heat - vast and unimaginable amounts of it - in isolated but iterated and reiterated instants for almost forty years.
Where on Earth do we foolish mortals (who now wield the hammers of the gods) expect all that heat to go? We have equilibrium with one (one!) comparable heat source that balances the loss of heat in our atmosphere and its over ninety million miles away.
It has always seemed strange to me, having survived the paranoia of the Eighties, that we were so afraid of the effects of nuclear war when we had been, for an entire generation, effectively having one right here in our own country - in Nevada, in New Mexico, in the South Pacific, and high in the stratosphere.
That last one I mentioned - a test called Starfish-Prime - had a measurable effect on the Van Allen radiation belts that interact with the Earth's magnetic poles, in addition to crippling human-made satellites and disrupting communications and electronic equipment across the northern hemisphere. The forces created in nuclear blasts - the electromagnetic and ionizing - are well-known to linger and bounce through the Earth's atmosphere and magnetic fields for years after a blast. Why should we expect the thermal effects to be any different?
They aren't any different. The great actuarial table of thermodynamics is against us. In a closed system (like the relatively efficient insulator of the Earth's atmosphere) heat stays around, becoming general and ubiquitous, until it bleeds away. Slowly. And if you add insane amounts of heat to such a system - even if it doesn't seem to heat everything at once (because these things take time) it will. Don't just trust me: I am merely quoting the experts.
At the turn of the century James Clerk Maxwell asked what would happen to an imaginary closed system if you could put a demon into it - one that would be able to sort out the high-energy molecules of a gas from the low energy ones. The demon would be able to sort out energy problems without creating more energy problems - would be able, in other words, to deal with heat without creating more heat. A wonderful, if wholly imaginary, solution (and one that would make those in the present administration, perhaps, blush with hope): salvation without sacrifice; an instantaneous reversal of our slow and dedicated penchant for destruction (self- and otherwise).
In times such as these, such a creature might be useful. Some might argue we should find such a demon and make a deal with it. Others might observe that it may well have been such a deal that got us in the present mess in the first place.
Perhaps it is already too late for those sorts of eleventh-hour bargains. Too late, at any rate, for a "quick fix" that doesn't involve some very, very hard sacrifices. It's a devilish reality, even compared to the treacheries of an L.A. tanning salon.
So that's my theory. You can disagree with my conclusions, and I am happy to debate it over a plate of chocolate chip cookies (I prefer gooey). Though I rather think, from here forward, we might be wise to eschew debate in favor of something more effective. Like prayer.
Let's say you want to heat up a nice tasty batch of chocolate chip cookies. Mmmm mmmm good. So you preheat the oven to 350 degrees, drop the dollops of dough on the non-greased cookie sheet, and pop them in for 10 (gooey) to 12 (crunchy) minutes.
Now, the yumminess before us likely distracts us - at this point - from paying much attention to this matter that I now want to foreground, but let's tarry a moment and ask the question as the cookies cool:
What's going on with the oven?
The oven is cooling too, you see. 350 degrees is hot (that's why you own "oven mitts"), and it takes a while to cool down. In fact, I bet if you went back a half-hour later the inside of the oven would still be at least a little warm to the touch. The heat is dissipating, going elsewhere, but it takes time.
This is thermodynamics in a nutshell.
Here, on the Earth, we are basically moving a more-or-less static amount of heat around. In daily life, it looks like this: You turn on an air conditioner, and the heat in your home is transferred outside. You eat the cookies, and your body chemically burns them to nourish you. When you feel the wind or watch a rainstorm, you are seeing the effects of these temperature differentials at work on a slightly larger scale. On an even larger scale, as the Earth passes through the cold void of space, we lose some of the heat held in the envelope of our atmosphere - an amount that is more or less equivalent to the heat we collect from the thermonuclear reactions of the Sun burning some 93 million miles away. The amount of heat stays pretty much the same, it just moves from place to place, so some areas are temporarily hotter than others.
So our planet is a pretty efficient heat-exchanger, both on the macro scale (we lose heat at about the same amount as the Sun gives us heat) and the micro (Honey, turn on the AC, please).
I watch television so rarely that I am always amazed (agog? apoplectic? anguished?) when I am in a situation when I can spend a few minutes channel surfing. That happened today (I'm staying in a hotel for a work conference) and I happened across a show called Sunset Tan.
Now, on a lot of levels, this show is a study in thermodynamics. It is, if you will, all about moving heat from one place to another. In just the few minutes I watched it, this much was clear.
I was particularly struck by the nine year old girl, brought in by her mother in order to be perfectly tanned for school pictures (the young lady, by the way, got the "cocktail" package - both the bed and the spray - the same one that Britney had gotten earlier that day. "You want the same as Lindsay Lohan, don't you, honey?" asks the mother. Enthusiastic nodding). "This is L.A.," the bronzed twink ex-busboy manager opines, "You've gotta have the darkest tan."
Later the show dissolves into the sort of interpersonal acrimony so resplendent these days in reality TV (the regional manager who bitches out the store managers for not being available "24 hours, seven days a week" even though none of the managers can get the regional manager to return their text messages or phone calls was an especial treat). I have no idea if these people are real, or if this is just subtle parody - but I guess in L.A. there is no way to tell. I mean, in a land of that much sunshine, the fact that one would go to a tanning salon at all sort of begs the question, doesn't it?
The fact that reality TV shows like like American Idol have managed to turn the cold shoulder of rejection and failure into a hot career opportunity is itself a fine illustration of a key thermodynamic principle. In any closed system, unless external energy is added, differences and extremes will eventually equalize and become indistinguishable. Like the Earth upon which American "culture" happens, a state of stability is reached.
This is a roundabout way of admitting that - even though I really want to - I don't think I can, in good conscience, blame American popular culture (as reflected in L.A.-based reality TV) for the problem of global warming. And it breaks my heart that I cannot. But I can't. Reality TV simply moves the heat around. It does not significantly increase our atmospheric temperatures - no more than the hot air in Washington, at any rate.
Instead, I offer this explanation for the current climactic crisis. Not a popular one - in fact, I have not heard it ventured or discussed elsewhere. So it may simply be my kookiness. That being said, however, the theory does attend to these matters of thermodynamics that have preoccupied this little meditation.
Let's return for a moment to that oven with which we started all this, and the time it takes to cool. Like the atmosphere of the Earth, the lining of the oven is a relatively efficient insulator. Left to its own devices, the oven hovers at just-about room temperature. However, when you add a great deal of heat to it, it holds it for a long period of time. When energy is added, the heat dissipates relatively slowly. When you bake the cookies, it takes time for that 350 degrees to go elsewhere.
Now imagine what would happen if you heated that oven to 700 degrees. Then 1400 degrees. Then 2800, and then... you get the idea.
It would take a bit of time for that heat to go somewhere, wouldn't it? And while the temperature difference between the inside and the outside of the oven was equalizing, the room would heat up, and then, from the room, to the outside, and so on. Eventually, you wouldn't notice the heat differences because they would seem relatively equal. We are, after all, dealing with relative temperature extremities. Even 2800 degrees is a somewhat reasonable temperature for the Earth, and so we are, at the end of the day, still only moving heat around a bit, not significantly adding to it within the system.
But what would happen if the temperature in that oven was heated to, say, a couple of million degrees?
Now suddenly we are dealing with a different order of magnitude. This is not a natural temperature for the insulated envelope of atmosphere around the Earth - in fact, the only natural object anywhere near us that generates that kind of heat is the Sun, and it is not actually near us (except in cosmic terms). If you put that kind of energy into your oven, and then opened it, I guarantee you it would really heat your kitchen when you opened the oven door, and likely the whole neighborhood and town, to a temperature that would make things like molten steel seem as innocuous and gentle as, say, a tanning bed.
And because the Earth is, like your oven, a pretty good insulator, the heat you released from you kitchen would linger around a while, heating a greater and greater area as the enthalpic and entropic forces of thermodynamics equalized across the system. The difference being that a couple million degrees goes a lot farther in its effect once equilibrium is again reached.
What I want to point out - and what I haven't heard mentioned in any of the discussions of global warming so far - is that during the middle part of the last century our country (and several others) did exactly what I have just imagined here, with our oven, in the form of nuclear testing in the atmosphere and, later, underground. Not just once or twice, but literally thousands of times.
Though each of the blasts had their own characteristics and differences, one common feature to most, if not all, of them is this: the initial burst of prompt and thermal radiation coming from the fissile core is, at its coolest, about twice the temperature of the surface of the Sun (for some fission bombs it goes as high as three times the Sun).
The United States alone has detonated over a thousand fission devices of various types, not to mention the fissile cores of commercial and military nuclear reactors across the planet. Each of these is generating a glowing spark of new heat into the relatively efficient insulation envelope of the Earth. Not, in other words, simply moving heat around, but creating new heat - vast and unimaginable amounts of it - in isolated but iterated and reiterated instants for almost forty years.
Where on Earth do we foolish mortals (who now wield the hammers of the gods) expect all that heat to go? We have equilibrium with one (one!) comparable heat source that balances the loss of heat in our atmosphere and its over ninety million miles away.
It has always seemed strange to me, having survived the paranoia of the Eighties, that we were so afraid of the effects of nuclear war when we had been, for an entire generation, effectively having one right here in our own country - in Nevada, in New Mexico, in the South Pacific, and high in the stratosphere.
That last one I mentioned - a test called Starfish-Prime - had a measurable effect on the Van Allen radiation belts that interact with the Earth's magnetic poles, in addition to crippling human-made satellites and disrupting communications and electronic equipment across the northern hemisphere. The forces created in nuclear blasts - the electromagnetic and ionizing - are well-known to linger and bounce through the Earth's atmosphere and magnetic fields for years after a blast. Why should we expect the thermal effects to be any different?
They aren't any different. The great actuarial table of thermodynamics is against us. In a closed system (like the relatively efficient insulator of the Earth's atmosphere) heat stays around, becoming general and ubiquitous, until it bleeds away. Slowly. And if you add insane amounts of heat to such a system - even if it doesn't seem to heat everything at once (because these things take time) it will. Don't just trust me: I am merely quoting the experts.
At the turn of the century James Clerk Maxwell asked what would happen to an imaginary closed system if you could put a demon into it - one that would be able to sort out the high-energy molecules of a gas from the low energy ones. The demon would be able to sort out energy problems without creating more energy problems - would be able, in other words, to deal with heat without creating more heat. A wonderful, if wholly imaginary, solution (and one that would make those in the present administration, perhaps, blush with hope): salvation without sacrifice; an instantaneous reversal of our slow and dedicated penchant for destruction (self- and otherwise).
In times such as these, such a creature might be useful. Some might argue we should find such a demon and make a deal with it. Others might observe that it may well have been such a deal that got us in the present mess in the first place.
Perhaps it is already too late for those sorts of eleventh-hour bargains. Too late, at any rate, for a "quick fix" that doesn't involve some very, very hard sacrifices. It's a devilish reality, even compared to the treacheries of an L.A. tanning salon.
So that's my theory. You can disagree with my conclusions, and I am happy to debate it over a plate of chocolate chip cookies (I prefer gooey). Though I rather think, from here forward, we might be wise to eschew debate in favor of something more effective. Like prayer.
25 April 2007
Aaaarrrrrrrrrggggggggghhhhhhh
So my copy of Word apparently didn't agree with some aspect of my virus protection software, and so my computer simply destroyed irreparably the third chapter of my doctoral dissertation.
Soon, oh so very soon, my laptop will be running Linux.
Meanwhile, I have a resurrection to perform, if you will excuse me...
21 April 2007
You Never Know
So I was searching on YouTube just now for Feyerabend (either my old band or the man himself - I had no idea what to expect) and I found this.
Reminds me of the old days - the movies and the music we made in the early days of Frozen Taco. Glad to know things like this still exist.
18 April 2007
Would you let this man take your daughter to the movies?
i sing of Slavoj fuzz and sniffwhose twitching heart rejoiced at, say,
the Lacanian objet pe-tit a
(with apologies to e.e. cummings)
I know this probably makes me something of a heretic, but I feel the urge to admit publicly that I am really much more of a fan of the mid0career Bob Dylan than I am of either his early recordings or his recent PR resuscitation, lingerie ads and all. I am thinking in particular of the mid-80's, slightly-post-Christian phase albums like Empire Burlesque and Infidels.
It's not, of course, that I dislike the early Dylan. It simply strikes me that when everybody (and I mean everybody. English professors and everybody) start going on and on about how much of a genius you are, it might make for a body of work that is easy to mistake. And by mistake I mean, perhaps, not listen to (or not really) even if you have listened to it many, many times. Genius is like that. Genius is where this happens.
I think Dylan knew this. I think that this was behind much of his career self-sabotage, beginning but certainly not limited to the episode where the amps were turned up and everybody booed him off stage.
So I think this is partially why I love those forgotten albums so much. Nobody listens to them (well, I do) and certainly nobody owns 'em (well, I do) and absolutely nobody would tell you with a straight face that they were in fact the only Bob Dylan albums he owned (Yup).
This is not merely me being some sort of perverse music snob (though perhaps it is some of that). The albums, in one sense, are terrible. Dylan looks thoughtful on the cover of Empire Burlesque sporting a blazer he could have easily borrowed from Phil Collins. You can hear overproduction, bad Yamaha synthesizers, and an unfortunate outbreak of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers on some tracks. I fully admit all of this.
But these albums also have tender moments, where the backing band is the Textones and not Tom Petty, and the lyrics simply shine in their masterful brilliance. "Sweetheart Like You" and the insanely sublime "Jokerman" from Infidels would be easy redemption for me, if I wanted to grasp for them at this moment. But I will not.
No. My all time, without a doubt, absolute favorite Bob Dylan song is all the overproduced, Yamaha-infused, Phil-Collins-coated terror I alluded to above. I simply cannot get past how much I admire and esteem "Tight Connection to My Heart."
I just think it is a great song. I sing it in the shower and I cover it sometimes when there is a piano around or I am on stage. And it totally doesn't fit with what you are supposed to love about Bob Dylan.
And this is sort of how I get into the whole notion of Zizek's reading of the Lacanian Real as a disruption of the ideology we're all swimming in that should be shaping who we are entirely, only there is this constantly outbreaking perverse love that just interrupts the whole smoothness of it all and makes you stand in horror and banal joy at the fact that you really do like the back-up singers, the Yamaha synthesizers, even the Phil Collins jacket.
Like the hopeless protagonist of Hitchcock's Vertigo, we are always attempting to dye the hair of our object of desire to make things "right." Which, for me, would be the moment where I say "Yeah, I'm a big Dylan fan" without mentioning the perversity I have now admitted to you all. But there's always that Bell Tower, looming, pulling each of us toward what we least want to admit - the loves we fathom but do not contemplate, except in those moments when the CD shuffles in just the right combination, and Empire Burlesque makes the rotation again.
22 January 2007
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