Tight Sainthood -- Silent signs of no significance.

GAZE Screening #1

If you're in the Bay Area this Thursday (17 May), come along to the first GAZE film showing at the ATA in the Mission, a show organized and curated by a friend of mine. I'll be there — you'll probably be able to pick me out pretty easily….

Clueless

It's Clueless Cyclist Day, a.k.a Bike To Work Day here in California at least. An unstable posse of at least a dozen once-a-year cyclists in those tight spandex clown suits they all seem to wear totters down East 7th towards me; one cyclist almost crashes in to me, up there on the sidewalk. Guys — you can't just assume that because you can drink a cup of Starbucks with one hand in a car that the same thing will work with a bike… (rant over).

Labels: culture, local, oakland

Coincidence? I Think Not.

I search for Levi's "Christ Stopped at Eboli" on the iTunes book section and discover that the only other book in the associated "Customers Also Bought" section attached to Christ Stopped At Eboli is A. A. Milne's "Winnie the Pooh".

Labels: books, culture

RIP, The Real Jimmy Little...

An affecting program from Australia's ABC on the real Jimmy Little, who died recently: Yorta Yorta Man: Remembering Jimmy Little. Thanks to Stephen H. for the link….

Labels: australia, music

Sustainism

In Moe's I pick up "Sustainism", a book that styles itself "a cultural manifesto for the Sustainist era", but that comes across more as a collection of slogans and buzzwords presented in a riot of short attention span typefaces and colorful icon-laden layouts. The style's deeply reminiscent of the late 1990's or early 2000's, a look that so often feels like the tech-savvy equivalent of scrawled crayon kids drawings; on first reading I can't tell if it's parody or an earnest excess of hard-to-read generalities and empty banalities (it could be both, I guess).

It starts with the slogan: "Sustainism in the twenty-first century will be what Modernism was in the last." But what comes to mind when I think of "Modernism" is brutalist concrete dystopias, totalizing narratives, totalitarianisms, Fascism, Communism, Futurism, excessive consumption, stained concrete tower blocks and housing estates, the notion of unlimited and unstoppable Progress, mandatory utopias… a great way to start. The future's so bright….

The book seems to have a fetish for the word "digital" — this or that will be digital — as if that meant anything much beyond a certain way of quantifying and representing things. I guess it reflects the unrelentingly optimistic tech focus in slogans like "technologies acknowledged as social designs" or "Sustanism is the new ecology of our networked world" that just roll off the page… and thud on the floor.

It makes great play of transforming Mies's old "less is more" into "do more with less", which is fair enough, but Mies's slogan wasn't (as they'd have it) a statement of Modernism's intent, but a Modernist style that most Modernists rejected (where would those four horsemen of Modernism — capitalism, communism, fascism, and futurism — have been without excess?).

I just can't finish it: at every point I end up reacting to the bright zero-G slogans by mentally saying "If you say so…". Which is a shame, given the "sustainism" would be a pretty good one-word summary of an essential future.

Labels: books, culture, easy targets, philosophy, politics, technology

Correction Of The Day

The world from New York:

"An article on Tuesday about changing views of the dingo in Australia misstated the region of the country where a ruling is expected in the fourth inquest into the 1980 death of Azaria Chamberlain, whose mother claimed the infant was taken by a dingo. It is the Northern Territory — not the Northwest Territories, a part of Canada."

From the New York Times's correction page for today.

Labels: america, australia, easy targets, media

Bridge

Apropos of nothing at all, a little video I did over the weekend with a soundtrack by Stephen Duffy, a friend of mine:

Labels: architecture, local, oakland, video

On Message

The NYT just ran a straight-faced (and much-forwarded) article on the public relations business's attempt to spin its own message. The PR folks came up with such gems as:

“Public relations is the management function of researching, communicating and collaborating with publics to build mutually beneficial relationships.”

and

“Public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.”

This is fantastic stuff (I chose my words carefully here), but let me try:

"Public relations is managing and manipulating the public perception of your corporate or private paymaster (whoever that may be at the particular time)".

Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course.

Public relations is to communication as lawyering is to justice — in each case, something gets lost in translation (something often gets lost in the original…), despite the sometimes heroic efforts of the occasional committed individuals or groups who really do believe and act as though the justice system should be about justice (and not just legality), and public relations should be more than just marketing (and I write as something of a bemused fan of that old Jet Age "communicator" David Ogilvy).

Labels: culture, easy targets, media, politics

Talismans

Literally minutes after posting my little bit about Patti Smith's "Camera Solo", I picked up the latest NYRB and read Luc Sante's "The Mother Courage of Rock". It's a good article (terrible title, though), an enjoyably evocative read, in which he describes the Camera Solo photos as basically not particularly distinguished in themselves but "talismans" of a culture and an era (wish I'd said that…).

And talismans are exactly what they are — but would I buy what amounts to a bunch of holy relics just because they're talismanic of a certain long-gone era? That seems a little sad to me… but then I guess I'm not quite the target demographic.

Labels: art, culture, photography

In Moe's

In Moe's there's a new book of photos in the art section by Patti Smith ("Camera Solo"). After browsing it for a minute or so, I have the usual uneasy questions: what's in it that's worth the $25 price? Why this book? Why these images? What makes them more interesting than the other million or so similarly mannered images Out There in Flickrland or Tumblrland or Instagram or wherever? Why is this sort of thing important now rather than back in, say, the 1920's or 1950's when it was new? Would she have had a nice book printed rather than just a pleasant website or Flickr page produced for her if she weren't personally involved in the art scene it's so obviously an artifact of?

As with Tarkovsky's Polaroids, there doesn't seem to be anything that justifies the collection other than they're by someone famous in another field. They're by Patti Smith, for goodness sake! Which is fair enough in one sense: it's sort of interesting to see what she sees as interesting, it's interesting to see what her cultural ecosystem thinks is interesting, and the images themselves are quite nice in an unambitious sort of way.

All of which is a shame because I've always admired her ambitions and achievements, even if I haven't always liked them.

Labels: books, photography

Drive-By: Oilfield

The new, definitive, version — thanks to Stephen Duffy for the soundtrack. The normal sized version on YouTube might look a bit better, as might the full HD version if you have the bandwidth (I just wish YouTube didn't make quite such a mess of motion in videos like this. But hey, it's free!).

Labels: art, california, music, video

Number Five With A Bullet!

The NYT's 45 Places to Go in 2012 has Oakland at number 5, just after London (the one in England, not the one in Ontario).

Gawd — time to move.

Labels: culture, life, oakland

Religion vs. Belief

Jerry Coyne recently posted some notes on Steven Pinker's latest book ("The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined"). The posting concentrates mostly on (and basically agrees with) Pinker's defense of the idea that religion is at least as responsible for violent death in the 20th century as atheism, if not more so.

This sort of thing irritates me — it just feels like a self-righteous sideshow or smug righteous dick-waving. For me, the relevant dimension isn't religionists vs. atheists, it's Believers vs. non-Believers. "Believer" (upper-case "B") here is shorthand for people for whom certainty is more important than curiosity, and / or for whom personal revelation and personal authority are the most reliable sources of truth (and for whom the idea that there's a coherent and consistent absolute Truth is generally not a particularly troubling notion). That sort of attitude and divide transcends religion: you don't have to delve too far into politics, culture, economics, and history to find Believers attempting to impose their Beliefs at sometimes great cost to the rest of us, and with little or no regard for logic or evidence.

You don't start a revolution or war or crusade with the word "maybe". You don't typically kill enthusiastically in the name of a diffuse sort-of-belief in openness, curiosity, and reasonableness, you do it in the name of a burning lip-smacking belief in a just and loving One-True-God, or the self-evident righteousness of a particular splinter group's infallible interpretation of Marxism-Leninism™ (or something similar, perhaps cynically faked). Us and Them in other words, with Them as the evil or the class enemy. Religion (as usually understood) is only one way to channel that into death and destruction. It's the desperate need of a significant proportion of humanity to believe (at any cost) and to believe they're (radically) different that's at the root of the problem, rather than what it is they believe.

Labels: belief, philosophy, politics

Correction Of The Day

"Because of an editing error, an article on Friday about an Australian study that found recent technology for artificial hips and knees did not perform any better than older designs misstated, in some editions, the nationality of researchers who, in a separate study, examined differences in the reported performance of such devices before their introduction and later in registry data. They were Austrian, not Australian."

(NYT, 26/12/2011).

Labels: australia, easy targets, media

The Hall Of Mirrors

I recently started a couple of blogs on Tumblr (nothing terribly new or interesting — you can find them yourself if you know what to look for). It's something I've meant to do for a long time, but just never got around to actually doing until this year's Christmas holidays.

It's been an interesting experience for a seasoned blogger like me — Tumblr's basically an ecosystem of bloggers and re-bloggers, producers and reproducers, with the emphasis on the latter in each case. Tumblr makes re-blogging whatever you encounter a trivial exercise (a bit like retweeting); presenting someone else's work (images especially) in a completely different context, without commentary, and without the carefully-crafted surrounding text and formatting, seems to be a large part of Tumblr's raison d'etre.

I'm guessing the ratio of reproducers to producers is sometimes as high as 10 to 1 (if not more). Entire blogs exist to do nothing more than reblog other people's work in a personalised context (usually just jamming the reblogged images up against each other), a sort of display of personal logos-by-proxy and visual bling that seems to exist solely to define the identity and in-group of the reblogger. A sort of hi-tech equivalent of the posters teenagers (still!) put up on their (non-Facebook) walls, I guess (or the edgy art aging hipsters put up on their immaculate walls). I don't think it's accidental that a lot of the re-blogs I've stumbled over are ostensibly run by teenagers or people in their early twenties. Tumblr also lacks a usable native commenting system, which adds a sort of lack of interactivity to the hall of mirrors feeling.

Does all this worry me? Not really — the whole effect of reblogging or reproducing is something quite new, a sort of postmodernism-for-the-people in ways that feel pretty congenial to me. It does make me wary of putting up some of my people photos — god knows where some of those familiar faces and bodies might end up — but stumbling across a really well-thought-out wordless reblog can be a real joy.

I guess I'm sort of proud to be one of the producers, but I'm also fascinated and sometimes even enchanted by the effect of all the reproduction. Let a hundred flowers bloom and all that — understanding that it's often just one flower being reblogged a hundred times (and the flower turns out to be van Gogh's). Benjamin would be fascinated, I'm sure — and Adorno's probably spinning in his grave (Adorno's, not Benjamin's).

Labels: culture

The Death And Life Of Telegraph Avenue

Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, after the fire

A couple of weeks ago a massive fire gutted the Sequoia apartments building on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley; as of now (a few weeks later), the Sequoia's been demolished, and Cafe Intermezzo, Raleigh’s Bar And Grill and Thai Noodle II are no more — and dozens of students are (or were) homeless. For a lot of people like me, on top of the loss of Cody's, Andronico's, Blake's, Owl Drugs, etc., it feels like the end of something special for Telegraph and the surrounding Southside neighborhood. I'm not so sure — predicting the imminent death of Telegraph Avenue is one of those perennial media hardies 'round here, and it's still there despite it all. But this time it's harder than usual to be optimistic.

Telegraph and Southside have been one of the centers of my life since I moved to this part of the world. When I first wandered up through the UC campus to see what Telegraph was all about, it felt like a smaller and much sunnier version of the Camden Markets of the 1980's — street vendors selling clothes, music, food, jewelry, etc.; cheap cafes, bars, and coffee shops; bookshops and music stores; music venues; shops selling unselfconsciously edgy clothes and fashion — all surrounded by a whole bunch of funky (and worse) apartments and student accommodation. Southside was lorded over by the university, and the people on the street were a mixture of students, aging lefties, academics (I once nearly ran over Robert Reich on my bicycle when he stepped off the curb without looking), hipsters, tourists, travelers, and boring normals like me. Unlike large parts of the rest of California, people actually walked along Telegraph and the surrounding streets (and often got there on foot, too), and it was both destination and thoroughfare.

I drifted into the scene and started selling stuff (T-shirts, photos, jewelry, etc.) on the street as a relief seller or for friends, and got to know a bunch of the regulars on the street and in the stores. I shopped at places like Cody's or Moe's (for books) or Amoeba and Rasputin's (for music), got my breakfast and coffee at the Milano (and played the card shark there at night, too, for a while), ate at Intermezzo, Smart Alec's, or (rarely) Raleighs, got my hair cut at Panache or the tiny place inside the arcade between Channing and Durant, bought groceries at Andronicos (a few blocks further south), watched live music at Blake's (never my fave Berkeley venue, but never mind), bought generic clothes at the Gap (it's a tough job, but someone's got to do it), supplies and medicine at Owl Drugs, classical music at Tower Records' excellent classical music store, shoes at Bill's, etc. Even now, although I actually live in Oakland, it's still my default Saturday morning destination. A fairly congenial place for me, in other words.

But it's always been way too easy to romanticize the place: Telegraph was also Riot Central, especially with the nearby People's Park thing, and has often been plagued by random violence (even in broad daylight — I've been assaulted there at least three times over the years. Not seriously, but it's been enough to make me very wary after dark). The homeless (literally) lying around with their pit bulls outside store entrances edgily harassing passers-by in the worst years didn't exactly help the ambience either. Economic insecurity is the norm for a lot of businesses up there: the reality is that it periodically totters on the brink of becoming either a bombed-out ghost town or a cleaned-up suburban strip mall (most people seem to root for the former, often with way too much enthusiasm).

That list of places I gave earlier feels very nostalgic nowadays. A lot of those places are either boarded up, derelict, burned out, or have been empty for years (Cody's, Blake's, Panache, Andronico's, Intermezzo, Raleighs, etc.), have fled for greener pastures (e.g. the Gap), went out of business years ago (e.g. Tower), or have been shoved aside by generic corporate replacements (e.g. Owl Drugs by Walgreens, trying to be the Duane Reade of Berkeley). The Sequoia building fire just hastened the process: several businesses and a large handsome building containing dozens of (really crappy) apartments burned out, gone.

Some of the destruction was inevitable — who buys CD's any more? (Not me). Or books? (I do, but only until I get an iPad) — and the recession has been a killer. But there's more to it than that: in the City Of (Proud) Stereotypes, the various groups associated with Telegraph often seem to be trying to outdo themselves in living up to the various (warring) stereotypes they identify with. Telegraph itself just becomes so much collateral damage; people just shake their heads and walk on by (to Cal, or to downtown, or back to BART or the bus or theirs cars).

For me, one of the most telling sign of what's wrong — more than the empty stores, the boarded-up shopfronts, or the burned-out buildings — is that the average street seller on Telegraph is now (I'd estimate) well into his or her 60's. There are simply very few young faces either in front of or behind the tables or stalls (it's always a weird feeling when I'm the youngest person around). In fact, the faces I do see there are often the same faces I saw when I first got here (when I helped sell). I was at an art show opening in one of the hipper parts of Oakland the other evening where an artist I know slightly (and who's about half my age) was showing a collection of smaller commercial pieces — the sort of things that would probably sell well to non-hippies on Telegraph. When I asked him whether he'd ever thought of selling on Telegraph he rolled his eyes, smirked, and said "two words: tie-dye hell". He'd rather sell at the various state and county fairs (as would I, come to think of it).

Another telling sign is that while in decades past you'd probably naturally head up to Telegraph (or Sproul plaza nearby) to start or join protests or political action or to witness some sort of mass cultural event, nowadays you'd probably head for somewhere else (downtown Oakland, for example, way down the other end of Telegraph Avenue). Telegraph's not the center of anything much, really. It feels like an outpost — of the university, of the bustling art scene in Oakland, of the resurgent food precincts down around Shattuck or up in the Northside, of the progressive (or otherwise) politics being forged and argued in Oakland. It's still a thoroughfare, but not much of a destination.

Is it going to recover? What would "recover" mean? I don't know. But it's done it before, and the fire(s) might just spur enough of the right kind of redevelopment to avoid the worst that anyone wants for it. Some part of Telegraph seems to want to be like Santa Monica's Third Street — bright, shiny, safe, alive, popular… and absolutely dominated by large corporate outlets (Levi's, Gap, Skechers, etc. — I'm more the Venice type, myself). Another part seems to want something more along the lines of Camden Markets, but that would require a much younger and more arty and outward-looking bunch of sellers on the street. Another vision seems to be of Peoples Park writ large, a sort of scrappy street full of street people left to do their own thing in their own super-democratic "fuck you!" way (or, more cynically, a Boulevard of Broken Dreams).

But every time I get too optimistic, I just have to walk past the vacant fenced-off hole just opposite the missing Sequoia building, a striking monument to Telegraph's (and Berkeley's) inability to get its act together. Within my memory, that site used to be the (derelict) old Berkeley Inn; it's been vacant for twenty years, the victim of all sorts of politics, economic, legal, and cultural battles.

We shall see….

Labels: berkeley, life, local

De-Tox

"It [his stencil] is a homage to the indefatigable labour Tox has committed to his continuing masterpiece. This tag is merely a symptom of an epic journey to identify every brick in the city. He has traversed the city like no other and has found its transcendental value. An atavistic practice, like cutting initials into bark, painting bison in caves, or piling stones on song lines. The spray can is the quill of the urban vernacular" — Mark Newell on the jailing for 27 months of Daniel Halpin, a.k.a. "Tox", the Camden graffiti artist, letter to "Camden New Journal", as quoted in Private Eye's Pseuds Corner, Eye 1295.

Too good to be true? Probably, but if he actually said that and meant it, well, Mark old boy, can't you just admit that some of us are getting a little tired of our neighbourhoods — our walls, our windows, our cars, our trees, our art, even — being turned into collateral damage from a massive and escalating territorial pissing match? And can't you just admit some of us in those neighbourhoods are getting increasingly pissed off at artwankers like yourself egging it on from the sidelines?

"[P]iling stones on song lines"? Pissing on those song lines, more like it.

Labels: art, culture, easy targets

Water Lilies

Céline Sciamma's "Water Lilies": more an afterimage of a movie than a movie — and so much the stronger because of that. Story-showing rather than story-telling.

(But it taught me that if there's one thing that makes me giggle helplessly more than the sight of a character breaking into song in the middle of a musical, it's characters breaking into a synchronised swimming routine in a movie…).

Labels: flix

Drummed Up

Late last night, a convoy of more than twenty police cars, lights flashing, sirens screaming, screeches past, scattering traffic on the road in front of my place on its way to … well, where? We'll never know.

This morning, K. looks up at me from behind the counter at Kefa and says she saw me on the TV at the Occupation demo at the Port last night! It looked just like you! Sadly, no, I have to say, I can barely walk due to a knee injury, and sat inside watching it on the TV too (I may be out for the entire winter). I feel left out, dislocated, frustrated.

A few blocks away up on East 14th, the Occupation's almost invisible, hidden behind the class divide. No secret here: the dirty little secret so far has been how little interest or support the movement gets from people who normally wouldn't have any reason to go downtown at the best of times, let alone now. It's a class thing, in every way.

The most appropriate symbol for the Occupation seems to be the drum circle, that omnipresent knot of stoned older hippies and young skinny white guys with knotted beards and dreads, making a sort of near-rhythmic sound haze that forms the soundtrack for just about everything in front of City Hall. It seems almost designed to stop you from thinking.

Labels: local, oakland, politics

The Vision Thing

Microsoft's vision is of screens everywhere; what they hope you won't notice is that every one of those screens will contain inescapable non-stop targeted advertising. The future's so bright….

Labels: technology

Tight Sainthood

May 13, 2012

GAZE Screening #1

May 10, 2012

Clueless

May 01, 2012

Coincidence? I Think Not.

April 17, 2012

RIP, The Real Jimmy Little...

April 14, 2012

Sustainism

March 07, 2012

Correction Of The Day

March 05, 2012

Bridge

March 02, 2012

On Message

February 12, 2012

Talismans

February 04, 2012

In Moe's

January 23, 2012

Drive-By: Oilfield

January 13, 2012

Number Five With A Bullet!

January 07, 2012

Religion vs. Belief

December 28, 2011

Correction Of The Day

December 26, 2011

The Hall Of Mirrors

December 11, 2011

The Death And Life Of Telegraph Avenue

December 05, 2011

De-Tox

November 23, 2011

Water Lilies

November 03, 2011

Drummed Up

November 02, 2011

The Vision Thing

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