We're calling from the Pleiades, and we'd like to make a request...

So I was listening to NPR this afternoon and, as an aside to a story about water on the Moon, they happened to mention "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft, " a rather unfortunate hit for The Carpenters back in the 1970's. Here's a little taste of that magic, for those who don't remember:



Whew. Okay. Heavy, I know. The reason I'm even bothering to post about all this is that the NPR story mentioned The Carpenters as if they were the originators of the song. Not so. In fact, their version of the song was a cover of the original version, written and performed by KLAATU.

Now, I know. You've never heard of KLAATU. Nobody has. But back in the day, when KLAATU was, you know, doing its thing, there was a pretty massive rumor that they weren't a band at all. The rumor was that, instead, they were a front for a secretly reunited Beatles project. Srsly.

It was a nice pipedream for a culture exhausted by Watergate and such. The wish for something awesome, even secretly awesome, like the Beatles being back together, was a powerful opium for the masses. It would lull us into accepting just about anything. Even KLAATU. Even The Carpenters. So it goes.

"The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding."

When I grow up, I want to be Malcolm Gladwell.

I just got done reading his recent book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, and it is one of the best written and most enjoyable reads I have had in quite a while.

Gladwell first came onto my radar late last year, when I saw a clip of him on The Colbert Report. He seemed very subdued and soft spoken, and very out of place in the full glare of Colbert's rapid-fire wit. Despite this, I sensed that Gladwell had a sharp mind, and I was won over by the quiet forcefulness of his ideas. Plus, he had this crazy hair that I thought was pretty cool.

So my brother in law gave us Blink for Christmas, and I picked it up a couple of weeks ago for some "distraction reading" (the types of books I pick up to fill gaps in days when I'm not writing myself or reading something specific for my class preparations). When I do this type of reading, I often put the book down pretty quickly, as I get easily bored with a lot of popular titles.

Not so in this case.

Having spent several years as a science correspondent for the Washington Post, and later as a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine, Gladwell has honed his writing to a fine journalistic edge. He has already penned several bestsellers, and seems to have no limit to the amount of popular books he can produce.

Gladwell writes in a very conversational, engaging style. It almost feels as if he is perched in the chair next to you as you are reading, and the two of you are just tossing ideas around. The ideas, in this case, are more interesting, however, than those that pop up in your average casual conversation.

Blink is preoccupied with the human capacity for what Gladwell calls "thin slicing." This is his term for the instantaneous, gut level decisions that we make, that often turn out to be much more accurate and incisive than those decisions over which we expend a great deal of time, research and deliberation.

As but one example, my favorite portion of the book was the chapter entitled "Paul Van Riper's Big Victory," in which Gladwell becomes a fly on the wall for a set of war game exercises conducted by the American military in 2002. The event was intended to be a showcase of the latest in reconnaissance and strategic technologies. Think about those Air Force recruitment commercials you've seen lately -- "It's not science fiction; It's what we do every day" -- that sort of stuff. The Big Idea was that during the war game simulation, the armed forces would use all this new technology, and veteran commander Van Riper would play the part of a rogue general in the Middle East theater. It was supposed to be a rout.

However, as Gladwell's account unfolds, things did not turn out the way the military brass anticipated. The very technologies that were deployed to keep the commanders abreast of every last detail of field operations quickly overwhelmed both the high-level and mid-level officers, leading to hesitations. Meanwhile, Van Riper and his fictitious factions of zealous rogue armies very quickly exploited every tactical advantage, leading to some rapid, stunning, and quite embarrassing defeats for the American forces in the war game.

Gladwell points out that information, in itself, is neither a good nor a bad thing to have. It is, instead, knowing which information is essential in a given exchange that makes the difference. This is as true on the battlefield as it is in the worlds of fine art, education, music, and taste-testing.

During the course of the book, we are introduced to leading psychologists who demonstrate how this "think slicing" capacity we have leads us to make really excellent (and truly horrendous) decisions. Along the way, we encounter a researcher who (supposedly) can read faces so acutely that he can judge, just by looking at someone, their motivations and sexual orientations. We also learn that most people, when put under pressure, reveal reflexive tendencies toward bigotry and racial profiling that are unintentional, but nonetheless very measurable.

Gladwell does not just present these facts, but frames them in a series of ethical questions that helps the reader to see that these sorts of insights into the human mind might actually, if applied, make the world a slightly better place. "This is the real lesson of Blink," he writes. "It is not simply enough to explore the hidden recesses of our unconscious. Once we know how the mind works -- about the strengths and weaknesses of human judgment -- it is our responsibility to act" [276].

What I enjoyed most about the book was Gladwell's seemingly endless ability to make interesting connections. How did he find all of these people? It seems like he spends his time traveling to various locations, following one lead and then another, having fascinating conversations and gleaning these nuggets of vital knowledge. It strikes me as a very similar approach to the one taken by the folks at RadioLab, only there it's sound and here it ends up on paper.

This book is the real deal. It's informative and inspiring. I got done reading it and the first thing I thought was, "I want to write like that. I want to have conversations like that."

Seriously. Even if I never will achieve his cool hair, I still want to grow up to be Malcolm Gladwell.


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Pick a card, Scully....any card.

I heard about this fellow, Professor Stephen E. Braude, thanks to the Wisconsin Public Radio program To the Best of Our Knowledge (if you download RealPlayer, or have a compatible player already installed, you can listen to the audio here). He's a real-life Fox Mulder (even to the point of talking about the man who could do Polaroid "thought-o-graphs," like in "Unruhe," from season 4).

My favorite quotation from the clip below: "If we've learned anything from the history of science, it's that human kind is not a very good judge of the empirically possible." Mulder couldn't have said it better himself.



You can find out more about Dr. Braude's professional work in philosophy here, and his work in parapsychology here. If you want to do some further reading, I've pasted an Amazon link to his book below, as well.




Disclosure: I am an Amazon.com affiliate If you choose to purchase products through links on this blog, I will receive a commission.

Bend the Hundred Acre Sinister

Kira and I have moved to a new apartment, and this entails, among many other things, a reorganization of books. As I was about this task today, I was suddenly pleased to note that, among the many volumes of fiction we own, Vladimir Nabokov sits dangerously close to A.A. Milne on our fiction shelf.

There are pleasures, and then there are pleasures. This morning, with that, the universe provided the latter. Thank you.

Say hi to your mother.

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.

Diverting away from the narrative

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.

"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.

Would you let this man take your daughter to the movies?

i sing of Slavoj fuzz and sniff
whose 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.