What would happen if J.R.R Tolkien worked in advertising? One ad to rule them all:
One Ad to Rule Them All
Friday, February 14th, 2014Art Deco Furniture
Friday, February 14th, 2014I enjoyed this collection of Art Deco furniture, including a custom daybed with bookshelves from the New York apartment of composer and pianist George Gershwin:
Knowingly Fighting a Lost Cause
Tuesday, February 11th, 2014Poul Andersen’s science-fictional hero, Dominic Flandry, had a problem, Pseudo-Polymath notes:
Mr Flandry’s problem was he was knowingly fighting a lost cause, his people (a large human dominated stellar empire) was failing due to cultural decadence. He knew it was a lost cause, but soldiered on regardless. This post reminds me of that. As does this one. And this one.
Versions of the Yanomamo
Thursday, February 6th, 2014The Yanomamo appear again and again in the BBC film archive:
And each time they turn up they play a new role as different Western concerns and ideas about human beings and nature are projected onto them.
In the Nazca programme the Yanomamo hold the key to unlocking the mysteries of an ancient civilisation that knew more about the world and its spiritual dimensions than we do.
But the Yanomamo have played other roles.
They are very much the archetype for the Na’vi tribes in James Cameron’s Avatar. An indigenous people that has been ruthlessly exploited by Western commercial interests, but who are also somehow better than us. They are an innocent people with a clearer vision than us. A vision that we have lost because we have been corrupted and driven mad by the sophisticated and amoral society we live in.
This was the version of the Yanomamo that television gave you throughout the 1980s.
[...]
But prior to this there had been at least three other — very different — versions of the Yanomamo presented by the BBC.
Throughout the 1970s western TV producers paddled up the river with their cameras. And each time the Yanomamo were reinvented to fit with the changing and contradictory demands of those making the films.
The first is from in 1969 (but shot in 1968). It is a film called River of Death — a documentary about an odd collection of Britons, including a reporter called Arthur from the People newspaper, who want to find out about this strange people called the Yanomamo (the commentary also refers to them by another name — the Guaica). They start off in a hovercraft, but switch to small boats and arrive first at a Yanomamo village run by the New Tribe Mission — a group of American evangelicals who had been working with the Yanomamo since the 1950s.
[...]
But this is 1968 and the West’s expectations and dreams are changing. The journalists want the Yanomamo to be something else.
The documentary makers have heard that upriver there are groups of Yanomamo who have an extraordinary drug. And they want to get hold of it.
It is an odd film. There are two voices narrating it. One is the producer who sees the Yanomamo as noble savages who have been corrupted by the missionaries. The other is Arthur from The People who projects onto the Yanomamo a much older vision — they are primitive savages who know nothing about the world, have never met a white man before and ask him (so he claims) whether he’s killed and scalped his wife.
In reality, as some anthropologists have since pointed out, the Yanomamo had been regularly meeting westerners for over a century.
[...]
But four years later the Yanomamo had got their act together.
This time they give western television exactly what they want. The Yanomamo act out the counterculture hippie dream
The BBC put out a film called Sons of the Blood. It is narrated by David Attenborough, and in it the Yanomamo men do practically nothing all day except take vast amounts of psychoactive drugs. While the women do the cooking.
The commentary makes it clear that the Yanomamo are a violent people, that they fight wars. But once inside the confines of their own commune — sorry, village — they create a new kind of society based on “trust and loving”. The Yanomaomo fight wars because they are proud, but they are also a gentle people.
The film portrays Yanomamo daily life in the village as an idyllic dream world. They have no experts, they do practically no work, they just lie around in the hammocks smiling. The drugs, the films says, are central to their culture and they allow the Yanomamo to experience other realities that are denied to us, fallen westerners.
[...]
But also in the early 70s the BBC made another film called The Fierce People in which the Yanomamo played a completely different role. They were shrewd, cunning and above all highly political.
It was at that moment in the Cold War when America and the Soviet Union were beginning the process of Detente. As a result the international tension was easing — but the west was riven by the question of whether one could trust the Soviets.
The film follows a group of scientists from the US Atomic Energy Commission who have come to study the Yanomamo. A central part of their study is to examine the politics of Yanomamo society and see what it can tell us about our own political behaviour.
The film does this by examining how “primitive” peoples negotiate and form alliances. Here is a bit from the film where the Yanomamo from one village give a feast in order to make an alliance with another village.
It is a different version of the Yanomamo, but yet again underlying the film is the belief that the Yanomamo are a simplified reflection of us and our dreams and aspirations. Simplified because you can see them in their natural clarity.
[...]
But things changed quickly in the west. And only three years later a new version of the Yanomamo was required by TV.
This time they are no longer political, instead they are programmed robots. And they are used to prove scientifically a new truth about us. That we “civilised” people are also robots driven by immortal codes deep inside our bodies.
The Selfish Gene had just been published, and science programmes had got very excited by the rise of Sociobiology. Horizon made a film called The Human Animal — and in it the Yanomamo played a central role.
Village life is no longer and idyllic dream. Instead it is full of individuals attacking and defending one another in a continuous churning state of tension. The programme focusses on the work of an American anthropologist, Napoloen Chagnon — and an experiment he conducted about a particular fight in a village.
Chagnon said that the behaviour of each individual Yanomamo in the fight was really controlled by their genes. Who they chose to attack and who they chose to defend was mathematically determined by how closely or distantly related the individuals were.
The Kronies
Friday, January 31st, 2014Get with the Kronies! They’re Konnected!
The Communist Consumers Loved
Thursday, January 30th, 2014Lauren Weiner calls Pete Seeger the Communist consumers loved — but the whole movement mixed money-making and progressive propaganda:
These were borrowed tastes, but nobody seemed to mind. As Van Ronk observed, “One of the first things that must be understood about these revivals is that the folk have very little to do with them. Always, there is a middle-class constituency, and its idea of the folk” whoever that might be ”is the operative thing.” Capturing all of the contradictions, the historian Robert S. Cantwell wrote that this was a time “when the carriers of a superannuated ideological minority found themselves celebrated as the leaders of a mass movement; when an esoteric and anticommercial enthusiasm turned into a commercial bonanza; when an alienated, jazz-driven, literary bohemia turned to the simple songs of an old, rural America.”
That part about an “ideological minority” being “celebrated” by somebody had gone over our heads, too: We did not know that the folk boom was a reverberation of an earlier boomlet, a foray into American music roots, many of whose movers and shakers were as Red as a bowl of cherries. Who on our suburban street knew that Woody Guthrie, the hero of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Bob Dylan, had been a columnist for the Daily Worker? Or that the man from whom we heard rollicking sea chanteys, a Briton named Ewan MacColl, was at one point kept from entering the United States as an undesirable alien? Then there was the cuddly-looking guy with the slightly pedantic six-record set and companion volume, Burl Ives Presents America’s Musical Heritage. If my parents or any of the neighbors were aware that Ives had been summoned, in 1952, to testify before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and had identified Pete Seeger as a communist, they kept the details to themselves.
[...]
From the nation’s founding, through the beginning of the twentieth century, when the Wobblies printed their pamphlet of Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent, political themes had made their way into popular music. Without question, however, the most concerted effort at politicization came from the CPUSA. Go out and make antifascist alliances with liberals, Georgi Dmitrov ordered in Moscow in 1935, and so the communists obediently fanned out into the American labor movement and civil-rights activities.
[...]
The collective first tried bringing high-brow modernism to the masses. This involved, among other things, holding a contest for best original May Day marching song. (Copland’s entry took the laurels; Seeger countered that his was more singable and, anyway, the workers weren’t likely to have a piano handy during their protest marches.) The effort was a bust. But it led Seeger, family in tow, to roam the rural southeastern United States, exploring the music played by the regular folk and groping for a way to turn these demotic musical expressions in a politically helpful direction.
By the time Charles’ son, Pete, came of age, the record laid down by the “people’s democracy” in the Soviet Union had lengthened to include show trials, the forced collectivization of agriculture, a well-developed police state, and the takeover of neighboring countries. Nonetheless Seeger fils, the next-generation wandering minstrel, stuck with his inherited “Pan-Sovietism” through a long and successful musical career. (The historian Ronald Radosh, in a public exchange with him in 2009, elicited a rueful comment about having stood by Josef Stalin despite everything.)
Pete first took up the banjo as a twenty-one-year-old, sitting on front porches across the South and learning from the old masters of the rural tradition. Sometimes those masters balked at city slickers glomming onto their music. Bascom Lamar Lunsford, a North Carolinian who mounted what may have been the first “folk festival,” detested Seeger for his communism. (As the historian Ronald D. Cohen notes, Lunsford once introduced a folk act at his Asheville festival as “three Jews from New York.”)
Seeger and his friends were undeterred. Their duty, as they saw it, was to convert the middle class to their way of thinking. Besides, they genuinely loved the music. By Van Ronk’s casual estimate, half the folk revivalists were Jewish, and they “adopted the music as part of a process of assimilation into the Anglo-American tradition.”
By the 1940s, folk singers had become a ceremonial part of Communist Party meetings. And at nearly all of them, one would find Pete Seeger playing, under the revolutionary pseudonym “Pete Bowers,” with the likes of Lee Hays, Millard Lampell, Burl Ives, Josh White, Saul Aarons, Bernie Asbel, Will Geer, and a new arrival on the East Coast musical scene, Woody Guthrie.
[...]
“However loathsome and psychotic” J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was, according to Dave Van Ronk, they “got one thing right: The CP [USA] was the American arm of Soviet foreign policy, no more, no less.”
In 1940, folk music spoke out against the war — the war between Britain and Germany. Once the Germans invaded Russia, it was time to do something about that Hitler.
After the war, folk music evolved into “a new, coy art that was to grow in significance: ridiculing one’s adversaries for correctly discerning one’s politics.”
The Truths Behind ‘Dr. Strangelove’
Wednesday, January 29th, 2014Released on January 29, 1964, Dr. Strangelove came under attack for being implausible:
An expert at the Institute for Strategic Studies called the events in the film “impossible on a dozen counts.” A former Deputy Secretary of Defense dismissed the idea that someone could authorize the use of a nuclear weapon without the President’s approval: “Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth.” When “Fail-Safe” — a Hollywood thriller with a similar plot, directed by Sidney Lumet — opened, later that year, it was criticized in much the same way. “The incidents in ‘Fail-Safe’ are deliberate lies!” General Curtis LeMay, the Air Force chief of staff, said. “Nothing like that could happen.” The first casualty of every war is the truth — and the Cold War was no exception to that dictum. Half a century after Kubrick’s mad general, Jack D. Ripper, launched a nuclear strike on the Soviets to defend the purity of “our precious bodily fluids” from Communist subversion, we now know that American officers did indeed have the ability to start a Third World War on their own. And despite the introduction of rigorous safeguards in the years since then, the risk of an accidental or unauthorized nuclear detonation hasn’t been completely eliminated.
The command and control of nuclear weapons has long been plagued by an “always/never” dilemma. The administrative and technological systems that are necessary to insure that nuclear weapons are always available for use in wartime may be quite different from those necessary to guarantee that such weapons can never be used, without proper authorization, in peacetime. During the nineteen-fifties and sixties, the “always” in American war planning was given far greater precedence than the “never.” Through two terms in office, beginning in 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower struggled with this dilemma. He wanted to retain Presidential control of nuclear weapons while defending America and its allies from attack. But, in a crisis, those two goals might prove contradictory, raising all sorts of difficult questions. What if Soviet bombers were en route to the United States but the President somehow couldn’t be reached? What if Soviet tanks were rolling into West Germany but a communications breakdown prevented NATO officers from contacting the White House? What if the President were killed during a surprise attack on Washington, D.C., along with the rest of the nation’s civilian leadership? Who would order a nuclear retaliation then?
With great reluctance, Eisenhower agreed to let American officers use their nuclear weapons, in an emergency, if there were no time or no means to contact the President. Air Force pilots were allowed to fire their nuclear anti-aircraft rockets to shoot down Soviet bombers heading toward the United States. And about half a dozen high-level American commanders were allowed to use far more powerful nuclear weapons, without contacting the White House first, when their forces were under attack and “the urgency of time and circumstances clearly does not permit a specific decision by the President, or other person empowered to act in his stead.” Eisenhower worried that providing that sort of authorization in advance could make it possible for someone to do “something foolish down the chain of command” and start an all-out nuclear war. But the alternative — allowing an attack on the United States to go unanswered or NATO forces to be overrun — seemed a lot worse. Aware that his decision might create public unease about who really controlled America’s nuclear arsenal, Eisenhower insisted that his delegation of Presidential authority be kept secret. At a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he confessed to being “very fearful of having written papers on this matter.”
President John F. Kennedy was surprised to learn, just a few weeks after taking office, about this secret delegation of power. “A subordinate commander faced with a substantial military action,” Kennedy was told in a top-secret memo, “could start the thermonuclear holocaust on his own initiative if he could not reach you.” Kennedy and his national-security advisers were shocked not only by the wide latitude given to American officers but also by the loose custody of the roughly three thousand American nuclear weapons stored in Europe. Few of the weapons had locks on them. Anyone who got hold of them could detonate them. And there was little to prevent NATO officers from Turkey, Holland, Italy, Great Britain, and Germany from using them without the approval of the United States.
This Land Is Your Land
Tuesday, January 28th, 2014I remember This Land Is Your Land as an inoffensive, feel-good song that pre-schoolers could sing:
Its lyrics were written by Woody Guthrie in 1940 based on an existing melody, in critical response to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America”, which Guthrie considered unrealistic and complacent. Tired of hearing Kate Smith sing it on the radio, he wrote a response originally called “God Blessed America”. Guthrie varied the lyrics over time, sometimes including more overtly political verses in line with his sympathetic views of communism, than appear in recordings or publications.
The original lyrics:
This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York Island,
From the Redwood Forest, to the Gulf stream waters,
God blessed America for me.
[This land was made for you and me.]As I went walking that ribbon of highway
And saw above me that endless skyway,
And saw below me the golden valley, I said:
God blessed America for me.
[This land was made for you and me.]I roamed and rambled and followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts,
And all around me, a voice was sounding:
God blessed America for me.
[This land was made for you and me.]Was a high wall there that tried to stop me
A sign was painted said: Private Property,
But on the back side it didn’t say nothing —
God blessed America for me.
[This land was made for you and me.]When the sun come shining, then I was strolling
In wheat fields waving and dust clouds rolling;
The voice was chanting as the fog was lifting:
God blessed America for me.
[This land was made for you and me.]One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple
By the Relief Office I saw my people —
As they stood hungry, I stood there wondering if
God blessed America for me.
[This land was made for you and me.]
Animal shows aren’t about animals
Tuesday, January 28th, 2014Animal shows are far more about us than they are about the animals, Adam Curtis contends:
Over the past thirty years the wildlife programme has been dominant, led by David Attenborough. The story these programmes tell is a deeply conservative one. The central, natural, unit that the films portray is the family — and they tend to follow that social unit through repeated cycles of birth, discovery, danger and tragedy — followed by the birth of the next generation who will repeat the cycle.
The backdrop to this story is the endless repetition of the seasons — “spring returns and the first green shoots force their way through the melting snows” — which gives the cycle a natural inevitability that reflects and echoes back to us the static conservatism of our age.
But it wasn’t always like this — and for Christmas I want to tell the story of the far more larky and chaotic age of animal programmes that came before in the 1970s and early 1980s.
It is The Age of the Talented Pet. It was a way of portraying animals on TV that was not only very funny — but was also equally a powerful ideological expression of the politics and aspirations of the time. I don’t think this has been properly recognised and I would like to set the record straight.
[...]
The problem was that by the end of the 1960s more and more ordinary people didn’t want to be patronised by the upper middle class elites in Britain and kept in their place. They didn’t want to be told what was the right way to think and behave — because that somehow implied that the elites knew what was right, and so were cleverer than everyone else.
This rebellious feeling rose up among many ordinary people in the 1970s and would later be co-opted by the right under the term “aspirational”. At its heart was a conviction among those people that they were just as clever as the patronising elites.
And as this feeling rose up so did a new type of animal programme on British television. Talented pets were animals who wanted to be as clever as their owners and took great delight in showing that they could do many of the things that humans could — like talk or sing or dance or even skateboard.
[...]
From one perspective these short films — which were predominantly made by the programmes Nationwide and That’s Life — can be seen as deeply patronising to the owners of the animals. But they didn’t patronise the animals — what comes over in most of them is the sheer joy and liberation that the animals clearly feel as they behave in sometimes the silliest ways — just like humans.
[...]
But as well as being odd expressions of the new aspirations of the time, these films also express the sheer anarchic silliness of the late 1970s and early 80s.
I think that that silliness was one of the products of the economic collapse and political chaos of the post-war planned society — a free-wheeling individualism born out of a general realisation that the elites who were in charge didn’t have a clue any longer about what was going on. And it was by no means inevitable that the right would grab hold of that individualism. If the left had had the imagination and courage — they too could have taken hold of it and steered Britain in a completely different direction.
[...]
Then — in the 1980s — the talented pets receded in TV. They still exist, like Pudsey the dancing dog and Simba from Top Dog model, but their place at the top table of TV culture was taken by the epic, conservative moral stories of the wildlife programmes and series.
We have lived with that portrayal of animals for thirty years, mixed in with programmes like When Animals Attack — that was started by Fox TV in the 1990s, that also has an implicit conservative message — the eternal law of the jungle.
But maybe that age is coming to an end as the boosters for our conservative age sound ever more uncertain. And at the same time the animal programming on the BBC is weakening and being challenged by the kingdom of Youtube with its wonderful range of stupid animals doing very silly things.
If animals on TV are the innocent ideological expressions of our age — maybe it is possible to look to the sneezing panda and its allied operatives on Youtube as the harbingers of what is to come. The return of the revolutionary libertarianism that was glimpsed with the joyous, anarchic talented pets of the late 1970s, before that moment of silly freedom was co-opted by the forces of reaction and market conservatism.
The original post is chock-full of animal videos.
The Best of All Translations
Monday, January 27th, 2014The title of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World refers to Miranda’s speech in Shakespeare’s The Tempest:
O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t.
— William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V, Scene I
It’s ironic:
Miranda was raised for most of her life on an isolated island, and the only people she ever knew were her father and his servants, an enslaved savage, and spirits, notably Ariel. When she sees other people for the first time, she is understandably overcome with excitement, and utters, among other praise, the famous line above.
However, what she is actually observing is not men acting in a refined or civilised manner, but rather drunken sailors staggering off the wreckage of their ship. Huxley employs the same irony when the “savage” John refers to what he sees as a “brave new world”.
So, how do you translate the title?
Translations of the title often allude to similar expressions used in domestic works of literature in an attempt to capture the same irony: the French edition of the work is entitled Le Meilleur des mondes (“The Best of All Worlds”), an allusion to an expression used by the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz[6] and satirised in Candide, Ou l’Optimisme by Voltaire (1759).
The Dream of the 90s
Friday, January 24th, 2014Portlandia kicks off with an expository music video about how the dream of the 90s is alive in Portland:
The sequel takes it to the next level:
Science Fiction and Politics Syllabus
Friday, January 24th, 2014Daniel Nexon posts the syllabus for his class, Science Fiction and Politics:
Authors writing in the Science Fiction or Speculative Fiction (SF) genre have long explored political themes — such as the rise and decline of empires, the impact of technological change on individual liberty, the nature of revolutionary struggles, the workings of totalitarianism, and the impact of socio-political collapse on humankind.
This seminar approaches SF as social-scientific, political-theoretic, and social-theoretic text. Subjects include the politics of contact, alterity, identity, and warfare. Readings include SF novels, as well as scholarly texts on politics and social science. Students are also expected to watch and discuss films and videos.
This is not a literature course. We do not explore (much) the emergence of SF, its conventions, or its history; we do not read literary criticism of SF or cognate genres. Instead, we approach SF as many of its authors intend: as an opportunity for ontological displacement and a landscape of the imaginary that allows us to contemplate contemporary socio-political concerns.
The list begins with these works:
Jutta Weldes, “Popular Culture, Science Fiction, and World Politics: Exploring Intertextual Relations,” in Weldes, ed. To Seek Out New Worlds: Exploring Links between Science Fiction and World Politics, pp. 1-27.ONLINE
Iver B. Neumann and Daniel H. Nexon, “Introduction: Harry Potter and the Study of World Politics,” in Nexon and Neumann, eds. Harry Potter and International Relations, pp. 1-25.ONLINE
Star Trek: The Next Generation: “The Outcast” (Season 5, Episode 17)
Consider “The Outcast” from each of the four approaches discussed in Neumann and Nexon.
Daniel Drezner, Theories of International Politics and Zombies. (**If you need a refresher on IR theory, and want to see it applied to SF settings)
Edward James, Science Fiction in the 20th Century, pp. 12-53. ONLINE (**If you need historical background on SF as a genre)
The list goes on to include some works I’ve discussed before, namely Watchmen and Dune.
I’ve converted the original Word document into PDF format, if you’re interested.
(Hat tip to T. Greer.)
An Underlying Nastiness
Tuesday, January 21st, 2014Adam Curtis looks back at when British tabloids took on an underlying nastiness, and a willingness to traffic in human misery:
The News of the World was in trouble — it’s circulation was falling. Part of the problem was television, but also its tradition of titillating court reports — randy vicars caught with their trousers down — was feeling tired and out of date. So early in 1960 Sir William Emsley Carr, the alcoholic proprietor of the News of the World appointed a new editor called Stafford Somerfield.
On his first day as editor, Somerfield called his staff together and — as he described it — “pushed the boat out”.
“What the hell are we going to do about the circulation? It’s going down the drain. We want a series of articles that will make their hair curl.”
In a brilliant book about the British Press, the writer Roy Greenslade describes what Somerfield introduced — “two new forms of provocative content: kiss-and-tell memoirs and saucy investigations”
And right away he found the perfect combination of these in Diana Dors.
Somerfield persuaded her to tell the intimate secrets of her life in a series of articles for the News of the World. He had been fascinated by the Yeardye–Hamilton guns-and-sex drama and was convinced there was far more to be mined from her life. To get the story he paid Diana Dors £35,000 which was an extraordinary amount for that time.
But he got what he wanted. He sat Dors down with a journalist who recorded everything — and then, as Dors later plaintively complained, took “all the mucky bits” and wrote the story of a scandalous, violent and seedy life.
In the articles Dors described how Hamilton and her had sex parties, how Hamilton used the two way mirror to watch couples having sex — taped them and then played the tape back to the entire household over breakfast the next day. She also described the violence in their marriage, and Hamilton’s financial scams.
It was a complete humiliation for Diana Dors, and it shocked the nation. The Archbishop of Canterbury described her as “a wanton hussey”. And Tommy Yeardye then joined in — offering other newspapers his stories too.
It worked brilliantly though — the circulation of the News of the World soared. But Greenslade argues that by bringing this provocative new content into journalism, Somerfield had also introduced a new “nastiness” into the popular press.
Journalists have always been cynical and “hard-boiled” in their view of the world — but Greenslade says that underneath the froth of silly headlines there was now in the News of the World, “an underlying nastiness, and a willingness to traffic in human misery”
And he wasn’t the only one to think this. In 1969 Rupert Murdoch bought the News of the World. By now Stafford Somerfield had made the paper an enormous success and Murdoch kept him on. But a year later he sacked him. Murdoch later explained why:
“I sacked the best editor of the News of the World. He was too nasty even for me.”
The Last Gang in Town
Saturday, January 18th, 2014If you’ve watched any documentaries on the punk-rock scene of the 1970s, then Ian Rubbish’s The Last Gang in Town should feel familiar:
“Heeeeey, policeman, my boot goes in your face!”
(The Clash, by the way, were always the thinking man’s yobs.)
Ringo Starr wishes he was a Powerpuff Girl
Friday, January 17th, 2014The Powerpuff Girls return with a new look, on Monday, January 20 — as this music video featuring Ringo Starr demonstrates: