At least according to Beach House ’s phenomenal “Walk in the Park,” by Allen Cordell, on Vimeo:

Recently I saw Steve Asma talk about monsters; soonafter, my friend Steve Aubrey, editor of the Suspicious Anatomy, sent me the above wolfboy/zombie-esque bully video. I find the action of it mesmerizing. Perhaps all good stories end in sandwiches, metaphorical or otherwise…

In any event, fur and psychedelia are here to stay, as chimerical monsters and taxidermy and vampires and werewolves all make comebacks—and the truly monstrous (per Asma’s excellent On Monsters) recede into the cold and psychological, the realm of Arendt and To Catch a Predator.

In lighter news, the monstrous unconscious comes forward in art… and liquor. Behold! The truly chimerical—the not-alive/not-dead/not-human/not-beast—the zombierific—is now available as a seven-hundred-dollar craft beer with a button nose and a tuxedo:

Aww, thanks, BrewDog… a pet-koozie. I guess I have always wanted a stuffed dog to hold my hair of the dog*. (*There’s a “yo dawg” iteration in there somewhere, but I don’t have time to figure it out right now.)

More strange doubling…

What is X?

THIS IS HIP-HOP! from Airwave Ranger on Vimeo.

What is X?

That’s Jeff Vilencia’s first art house movie, made in 1992, courtesy Hugh Raffles (Insectopedia). Says Raffles of the whole intriguing philosophical quandary of squishing living things:

The Supreme Court decision of April 20, 2010, voiding HR 1887, the so-called “crush video law,” by an 8-1 majority, provoked an intense and immediate response, summarised in this article in The Huffington Post. Mary Tieffenbrunn wrote this piece in The News-Gazette.

What is unknown or is fragile is erotic. I can imagine a whole compendium of fragile-skinned, differently-insided squishables (and therefore objects-erotic). Sushi, meatball, eclair. And of course the the grape, the furry animal, the easy stand-in for the organ…

Gross, but who doesn’t love to squish stuff? Think of Burroughs’s exterminator tragic heroes… Roach-stamp, bubblewrap-pop, tomato-burst: These are the uneasy loves of some universal, unconscious imp with big feet. A new supervillain: SQUISHOR.

…Or Stimpy. Maybe we all are a little Stimpy in taste, somewhere in there…

Rap covers, more than rock covers, allow for the voice to take full prominence. The music is the same, pure karaoke. The orchestra is empty, and the great singer alone prevails. Or, in this case, the highly adaptive Mighty Mos Def brings his inexplicable magnetism—his jazzy nonchalance? his smiley-ness in the face of everything?—to the masked world of DOOM and Danger Mouse, two stars both less street and less pop than Def, but perhaps more engaging, at least for me.

DOOM raps the way Lovecraft writes: Both could give a fuck who’s paying attention. Both deny the real, without reason, without ideology, and proceed from there to construct a new, iller real—Sur-real. Imagination somehow frees these writers to face real terrors, to use the lingo of science to question our reliance on it, our devotion toward futurity in the face of an amazingly fucked up past.

Still, it’s nice to see Mos bring DOOM back to planet earth here. The silly mask, the faux-Asian smock, the unpracticed eliding of a few key DOOM throwaways (which elision only heightens the effect of the great couplets like “[caesura] Slip like Freudian, / you first and last step to playin yourself like accordion”)—all these only add to the mystery of the original.

DOOM, like Lovecraft, creates the basis of a new mythology within his medium, a new blend or mode of story, bravado, self-deprecation, Gothic body-signs (”This one he wrote in cold blood with a toothpick”), and scathing material objectivity about, well, the human predicament—doom.

Well-written as well as immaculately said…

“Peter Keefe, Creator of Cartoon ‘Voltron,’ Dies at 57.” An Honourable Badge Of Merit to Mr. Keefe, whose mash-up of Beast King Go-Lion and Armored Fleet Dairugger XV influenced my childhood in ways I will probably not understand until my last mortal breath is spent. Keefe brought giant man-animal-robot assemblages to the youth of America and so instigated, in his own way, the current Cyborg Era. (Or the Youtube Poop Era, you pick; see below…)

I may not agree with all of his reviews, but film critic A. O. Scott has some serious chops for metaphor, as illustrated in his take on Get Him to the Greek:

Mr. [Jonah] Hill, wide-eyed and anxious as ever, makes a fine visual and temperamental foil for Mr. [Russell] Brand. The two of them are like the Trylon and Perisphere of comedy. Mr. Brand, though hardly calm, is volatile in a cool, pseudo-self-aware, pointlessly articulate way, whereas Mr. Hill resembles one of those round cartoon bombs with a lighted fuse on top. He pleads, babbles, trembles, fulminates and—more than once—vomits, all with an expressiveness that is both alarming and strangely cute.

The Trylon and Perisphere are two of my favorite structures. Together, they served as the “Theme Center” of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Sayeth Wikipedia re: the Theme Center:

Connected to the 700 foot spire-shaped Trylon by what was at the time the world’s longest escalator, the Perisphere was a tremendous sphere, 180 feet in diameter. The sphere housed a diorama called “Democracity” which, in keeping with the fair’s theme “The World of Tomorrow,” depicted a utopian city-of-the-future. Democracity was viewed from above on a moving sidewalk, under movies displayed on the sides of the sphere. After exiting the Perisphere, visitors descended to ground level on the third element of the Theme Center, the Helicline, a 950-foot long spiral ramp that partially encircled the Perisphere.

Does that beat all, or does that not beat all? Good thing the world came together in 1939 and ushered in a long-lasting era of peace and democracy and wacky technological future-cities, instead of, oh I dunno, some of the worst crimes in history, a nuclear arms race, disco, &c.

But to return to Mr. Scott’s fabulous simile, yes, perhaps the rotund Mr. Hill is like the Perisphere, and the lanky-manic Mr. Brand much like the Trylon. My question is, who in Get Him to the Greek is Democracity? (Puffy?) And who the Helicline?

My further question is, why don’t we have no goddamn Trylon or Perisphere today? If Bloomberg wants a fourth term, he better get on the (peri)ball.

Naturally, I demand that—as we live not in boooring old Modernity but in POWERTHIRST-powered Fight Club- and Murakami Takashi-themed low-art/hi-art lofi wifi genetic-rhizomatic-iEverything Postmodernity—our new PostTrylon and PostPerisphere be more than meets the eye…

“Suburb” means “under-city,” in the shadow of the city—which in the Bronze and Iron Age meant a hill. The suburb was physically below the “real” city. It simulated the city, in the shadows. It was and remains a para-city, beside and structurally similar to, but at heart different from a real locus of social, legal, religious, and economic life.

To simulate a city, a suburb must have housing but not community, shopping but not market, praying but not spirituality… It must have the sign of the real without the thing itself.

James Howard Kunstler illustrates the problem of the suburb and the poorly designed urb in a TED talk that somehow manages to be fierce, technocratic, and progressive while never losing a humorous edge. The problems with American places—cookie-cutter homes, forgotten squares, dead malls, removed-from-the-street buildings, and isolation and waste that engender one another and prevent society rather than frame it—are so dire they elicit almost instant sad-laughter. The jokes write themselves.

[Btw, I found this talk via one of artist James Roper's many deeply engaging art-blogs. Roper has great taste in weird anatomic, sexy, psychedelic, Gothic, geometric optical matter, which is to say my kind of taste.]

Kunstler’s perhaps dangerously American-centric perspective aside, he rocks the house, offering a few solutions and noting that local living will offer or force many us to come up with more as the years march on and the hydrocarbons disappear—or appear oozingly all along the Louisiana shore, like some dread tide forecast in Revelation—whichever.

Yet for now architecture and urban planning are classical, representing spaces, streets, life, and other people as “out there,” beyond—whereas cities are naturally baroque, confusing places and bringing us together… Baroque cities go everywhere, do everything from interlinked hubs that expand up and out but fold back on themselves, never expanding without doubling purpose and quadrupling links; the baroque does not like to recognize borders, and does not start with a form, but with a content that is already too much for its form, so that the form must be refolded and repurposed (The Highline, Hagia Sophia and Topkapi), already greening (giving life to, giving commerce to) the steel and asphalt…

I would now like to complement Kunstler’s investigation of the real problems of real spaces with what I know—that being the parahelpful, the goodnaturedly impractical, and the just fucking fantastic.

Specifically, I’d like to suggest we tackle real physical problems always with one eye firmly pointed to baroque imaginary physical (and temporal) solutions. To speak in plain Amerkan: Today’s architects should be taking notes from Doctor Who.

Enter Live Journal. Yes, Gentle Reader, I too was shocked that LJ still exists and is still a hub of internet thought and counter-thought. I was also glad, for here I found, courtesy a tip from illustrator and intrepid co-author Ethan Gould, A Partial Map of Your TARDIS (Subject to Change).

Check out the Partial Map. Srsly, it’s a perfect gift from Nerd Santa Claus.

What is a/the TARDIS, I at first wondered? Gould informed me it’s a time-travel phone booth-… thing, used by the Dr.s Who (there have been several?) to do… stuff. I admit, I don’t know the show.

But that doesn’t prevent me from enjoying the Map—a complex alternative geography, a topology of time, space, levels of self, relationships with other, and pun that both stuns the aesthete’s eye and pleases the futurtect’s brain, or strokes the synesthete’s eye and punches the protomodernist’s head—whichever.

As spaces and representations-of-spaces collapse—as more people buy iPhones and Droids and so enter a world made always-partially-virtual by virtue of a constant back-and-forth between eye, hand, Google, and physical reality—we will need both the type of solutions Kunstler offers (how to use the malls that pointlessly blister the skin of our nation, how to get ourselves out and happy and doin stuff, and not locked into suburban bedrooms playing Borderlands and crying into our two-liter diet Powerthirsts) as well as the type of imagination, freedom, and excitement regarding the notion of space that this Partial Map (partially) exemplifies.

What is space—what do we want from it—a cafeteria, a cathedral, a drive-in, a disco, a passport office, a warehouse…

Really, consider space. Consider this:

Almost half the Indian population, 563.7 million people, is hooked up to modern communications, while just 366 million have access to modern sanitation, according to a United Nations study.

—Roger Cohen, “Toilets and Cellphones,” New York Times.

The question of space is deceptively simple. If we knew what we wanted out of space—how closely we wanted to be in contact with other humans, with trees, with grizzlies, with toilets, &c.—perhaps we wouldn’t have made the millions of now-uninhabited suburban dreadnoughts that sail motionlessly across America like the scattered head of a ripe drywall dandelion. Perhaps cell service would not have trumped sanitation in emerging industrial powers.

The classical problem of taxonomizing (classifying, boxing) spaces—and creating more and more iterations of each class—has trumped the question of use of spaces, enjoyment of others. The neatly virtual-classical has tried to remake itself over and obscuring the messily real-baroque.

In suburban America, humans have boxed ourselves away from one another, creating Byzantine cities, castle-towns dying as suspicious barons ward off trade and innovation, unlinked by rail, unwelcoming, never-congealing, without history, and so without future.

We may never be able to build a time-defying/space-expanding machine like the TARDIS (which serves ants, by the way, in the cafeteria) or inhabit lands like those pictured in the Codex Seraphinianus. But I think it’s good to jump-shark over the preconceptions of our reality—which we have more control over than Brutalism and the plague of big-box stores would make us think—and of our era—which is always already transforming into the next, a werewolf caught between man and beast.

Imagining impossible, baroque (constantly merging-with) geographies lets us place our consciousnesses into weird towns without those towns having to exist first. We show ourselves possibilities and discard rigidity.

Producing the new reality—fixing the problem—is another skill and far beyond the scope of my rambling. Perhaps post-World War II design has been too caught up, however, in the problem-fixin and left too far behind the emergent chaos of older cities, not to mention the wonder of the unreal.

Hilarious. My man Kool Keith—AKA Doctor Octagon AKA Master of Robots AKA a host of other names I elide here due to both space and mental health concerns—schools us all on how to rock the perfect fridge. The answer? Seltzer water. What the…

The foodstuffs Mr. Keith suggests we stock up on comprise a list that is not mad and is not an example of a Chinese Encyclopedia; the list makes perfect sense; it includes healthy shit and excludes sugary shit with mass appeal.

The madness of this list comes from Mr. Keith’s simulation of a preference for healthy food. Mr. Keith suggests that the only reason he likes healthy shit is a pragmatic fridge-protecting function. He has simulated himself a sort of Great Wall of China for his fridge, by which it cannot be effectively looted by his sugary-shit craving homeboys. He does not, “in reality,” like healthy shit, and yet he likes it in effect, pragmatically.

One day, I will co-teach a course on Kool Keith and simulation (with the ghost of Gilles Deleuze, who wears a backwards hat made from other hats, each of which is facing forwards).

A friend at work sent me the Sam Harris talk, and I sent it to a friend I used to live with by the name of Luke Rodgers. Luke is a philosopher, and if you enjoy his thoughts on Harris, I encourage you to explore his blog, everything flows.

I sent Harris’s talk to Luke in part because I wanted to confirm my own biases: I agree with some of Harris’s thoughts, yet others annoy me. Luke’s reply is as thought-provoking as Harris’s lecture. Check out this off-the-cuff philosophizing:

First, the fact/value distinction is old, but also has been under attack at least since 1805 (Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit). There are many good reasons for believing that this distinction is not rigid, but there are also good reasons for, in some cases, not abolishing it altogether, I think.

Harris claimed that the moral core of every religion is ultimately about conscious experience. I think this may be deeply wrong, and that the opposite is probably true. Certainly Kant’s philosophy specifically eschews this approach, and it seems to me that Judeo-Christian morality, conceived of as a law issuing from without, is also exactly contrary to Harris’ conception.

The question of suffering may be a good one, and some philosophers in the 20th century sought to locate this question at or near the centre of ethics (Derrida does something like this in some places). There does seem to be a “fact of the matter” here, so I think Harris is at least partially right that science can contribute to this debate.

Even though he went out of his way to try to avoid coming across as racist/imperialist, the contention that “conferences like this” are only conceivable in certain parts of the world, as though that is evidence of some moral or developmental superiority, is utterly hypocritical and arrogant, insofar as conferences like TED are, at least within the parameters of the current global economic system, only conceivable on the basis of incredible inequality and suffering in other worlds. That is to say, it can only exist in the USA because it cannot exist in so many other countries.

The overall reductionism, this century to the brain, last century to psychology/genetics, the previous century to phrenology, is a stupidity that many Western philosophers and scientists have been trading in since the early modern period. I doubt we will stop making it any time soon, though anyone who is acquainted with the history of modern philosophy (as Harris obviously is not) would be less likely to make this blunder. Harris reveals the ultimate contradiction himself when, in the Q&A period he admits that brain states cannot be reliably interpreted without reference to the larger context. That is to say, things are not reducible to the brain, that is to say his basic thesis is inherently misguided.

The question of “how humans flourish” is totally abstract, and cannot be determined outside of particular contexts. It is incapable of a universal answer. Harris’ talk about “valleys and peaks” on the moral landscape, while not absurd, here functions merely as a screen for his actual thesis of convergence which, along with the utopian idea that borders between nation-states are already disappearing (plausible) and will eventually vanish (incredible), is an old liberal myth.

The notion that “certain opinions [on morality] must be excluded” and that an objective domain of expertise on how to achieve human flourishing will emerge strikes me not only as vastly improbable, but also extremely dystopian and proto-totalitarian.

So, in sum, “yes” to weakening the fact/value dichotomy and being open the possibility that science will *inform* moral debates, but a resounding “no” to the notion that moral debates will constitute a domain of experimental science, and also “no” to the naive brain reductionism.

§

With regard to the veiling and honour-killing &c., yes, I agree. In that sense, I am ethnocentric in the sense argued by Richard Rorty (one of my favourite pragmatist philosophers), which I see as the least contradictory and most sophisticated way of avoiding the pitfalls of relativism and absolutism. I believe (though perhaps in a less jingoistic way than Rorty did) in the superiority of democracy and (certain aspects of) the individualist/liberal and secular traditions, though I also believe that I have no ultimately foundational, or non-question-begging ways of supporting those beliefs (i.e. I don’t think it’s grounded in objective reason, or anything like that).

As to brain science, yes it is indeed gaining serious weight, and it’s hard to see what will replace it and supersede it, though something probably will in the next 100 years, at least in terms of what we consider to be the science best suited for understanding human nature. On the other hand, it is still seriously deficient in many ways (deficiencies which, I think, scientists are sometimes better able to recognize than the breathless philosopher sycophants), e.g., it’s explanatory language is still at a very early stage and relatively crude, it has basically no idea how many anti-depressants work, etc.

If you can find the essay by Alisdair MacIntyre called “Hegel on Faces and Skulls” it’s a good read on this topic

Also, with regard to genetics, I expect there are still some huge surprises in store for us which are potentially game-changing. For example, until recently we thought that a large amount of DNA was “junk,” i.e., didn’t code for any proteins, and I think we’re just now beginning to figure out what that junk DNA is for.

There is some research going on right now that shows how Lamarck was right in certain ways, that is to say that sometimes a genotype can actually be modified on the fly in response to certain environmental conditions in a way that makes the change heritable.

But yes, genetics may be approaching a level of maturity comparable to physics; i.e., we may find that in 100, 200 years, certain beliefs we have now about genetics are still held true—a situation I would say is fairly plausible, barring societal collapse.

An interesting book on this topic is The Social Construction of What? by Ian Hacking, in which he develops a sophisticated way of looking at the extent to which different things may be considered “socially constructed.”

We already explored how Douthat thinks we Americans have synthesized our religions into meaninglessness, over-complicating the beautiful austerity of the monks and dervishes, giving up tradition for a syncretic post-reality that makes him shiver-n-shake. Now let’s talk politics.

In “Hollywood’s Political Fictions,” Douthat gets all hot and bothered about the state of America’s ability to represent itself viz-a-viz its 54th state (Iraq—after P.R., the Philippines, and Japan) on the silver screen.

Douthat insists we Americans reduce the complexities of war into easy-to-resolve dichotomies, good/bad, us/them, &c. This is precisely the opposite of his accusation re: religion. We complicate that; we simplify war. We (heterogeneous we) just can’t win.

“Americans believe in evil, but we’re uncomfortable with tragedy,” sayeth Uncle Ross. I think that’s reverse-true, meaning, colloquially, bullshit. I think Americans are perhaps more unused to tragedy than people living in non-empires, sure. We’ve had an unfairly sweet run, this past century.

I think some Americans are perhaps more apt to equate “the enemy” in a given situate with “evil,” but I hardly think we’ve all given up on nuances, gray areas, and, well, post-structuralism. (I realize most people don’t think, “Gee, I’m such a dope-ass post-structuralist!” But they do try to imagine the “other” side, even if they end up endorsing some patriotic nonsense. The attempt to juggle multiple language games, multiple centers of “truth” at once requires no particular schoolin’, just a certain openness of mind.)

The fact is, Americans know that there aren’t easy solutions in this life. That’s why we work hard at changing things (usually fucking them up, granted). That’s our gift and burden. We’re all too aware that the world is not simple, and that our actions have consequences. We just often mis-predict those consequences.

And even if many Americans were duped, for a time, into allowing Bush 2 to propagate wars based on the myth of easy solutions, this hardly means all or even most of us are still enamored with a simplistic, good-evil view of the current wars.

President Obama, for example, was never for the war, and now that he has to prosecute it, does anyone, even Ross Douthat, think he’s doing it simply or with a simplistic mentality? Has Obama reduced the conflict into a matter of good versus evil? (Whether you think Obama should pull out of Iraq immediately or not doesn’t matter. What does is his ability to see the conflict as nuanced, difficult, and non-Douthatian.)

Our collective non-simplicity is important to value, whether or not you agree with Douthat that the Matt Damon thriller Green Zone “refuses to stare real tragedy in the face.” Do I think, based on interviews, his other work, and Green Zone, that Damon is a smart dude who has realistic views about the American empire and its agenda in the Middle East? Sure. But does it really matter who Matt Damon is? Naw.

What matters is that I know there is no “simple” “good” or “evil” in the world. There are tyrants, sure. There are shitty situations, psychopaths, liars (Hussein, Bush…), plutocrats, oligarchs, oil men, bomb manufacturers, those who would gladly revise history (the leaders of Iran and Israel), and good ole-fashioned dumbasses. There are, as far I can tell, no vampires, no Doctor Dooms. Conversely, there are no classical heroes, only women and men who struggle to live and let live. Philosophies grow and mutate and die or are absorbed, all without strict goods and evils, without Meka-Hitlers or Jason Bournes.

Do I care whether or not Douthat enjoyed Green Zone? Naw. But I do mind that a syndicated columnist so brutally assaults reality, so often. Douthat claims “the narrative of the Iraq invasion, properly told, resembles a story out of Shakespeare.” There was a good nation, a brutal dictator, a cause for war (WMDs), and (he reiterates) a brutal dictator, “in his labyrinth.”

The minotaur of the labyrinth is a great archetype of pure evil, as in Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves and the urban-Gothic Tekkon Kinkreet. References to the labyrinth only too clearly betray Douthat’s essential problem: He’s protesting too much. Who’s the one reducing the complexities of war to a glib chunk of art? Douthat, invoker of the tyrant-as-minotaur, invoker of Big Willie S. and his clean, classical arcs (and unclean, human characters—and positively nucleic inherent moral struggles).

For all his easy-to-pick-apart bluster, Douthat does attend to one aspect of polemic that I admire—language. He calls for less poison and more “radical sympathy“—post-structural sympathy, sympathy with all the parties in a conflict, not just the Marines—and I wholehearted agree with him. I just think Matt Damon, for all his popular ninja-inspired gun-banging silver-screen antics, is more likely to create a new sympathy than Douthat, who is (perhaps like the author) trapped in a realm of addictive symbolism, a reduced realm, full of fire and the leavings of past epics.

It’s hard to get the news from poems (Green Zone is not, Douthat’s right, a good way to learn about the real conflict in Iraq; it’s a movie; it’s entertainment, big business). It’s harder still, for anyone with a poet’s brain (and liver) to eschew symbol and give up his minotaurs and five-act arcs.

I agree we should not comfort ourselves with “portraits of a world divided cleanly into good and evil.” Nor should we lambast Hollywood for not living up to the legacy of Kant. Let Matt Damon blow shit up, and let Obama and his crack team of technocrat do-gooders help Iraq pull itself out of the last decade, brick by brick, street by street, symbol by symbol. In the future, I’d like to see Iraq’s version of Green Zone.

Stephen Davies rocks the house in “Locating Ourselves Historically: Why We Are Not Living in Western Civilization.” And earns an Honourable Badge Of Merit.

The official version, for those disinclined to watch a bangin, dryly funny lecture about modernity without a heads-up:

A crucial part of the self-consciousness of individuals and the way they define themselves socially is a perception of their location in a historical narrative, however vague. For most people in North America and Europe the narrative in question is that of ‘Western Civilization’ - this is true for all parts of the political spectrum and includes those who see this narrative as one of triumphant success and others who perceive it as a much darker story. However, the picture that emerges from historical research does not support any of these accounts. Rather they lead us to the conclusion that historic Western Civilization no longer exists but has perished or been transformed. This should make us think about how to understand our historical location and lead us to see past, present, and future in a new way.

This post is tagged as “Adventure” because the future will be an adventure. We hope.

• Up In The Air, which teaches us that no one believes in Love. (I disagree with this thesis, but who am I to argue with the walking cellular mound of excellence that is George Clooney? Also, Vera Farmiga is hypnotizing, not to mention smokin’.) Points for words, and for the cowboyish commercial pilot.
• Inglourious Basterds, which teaches us that the Nazis were the bad guys. Points for lols, lulz, “The Bear Jew,” &c.
• The White Ribbon, which teaches us to fear the children, who want to murder us. Oh, God, how they want to murder us— Points for creepy historical accuracy, making a straightforwardly nice-guy protagonist work, and the Lynchian/dreamlike disappearance of the characters, amid the violence of youth, on the eve of the dream- and youth-shattering War.