ads without products

The task before us, it has just occurred to me, is deeply analogous to the problem faced by those who make ads for high definition television sets and services - ads that will be seen on the very low definition sets that they wish to replace… The problem, of course, is that you can’t really show the virtues of the product that you’re trying to sell - the high d become low d on the viewer’s set.

They try metaphor, jokes and metaphor…

Denied the ability to present the thing itself, at other times they present instead the viewer, the viewer’s engrossed apparatus of sight. Didn’t Deleuze, in his work on the cinema, call shots like this “affect images”? If we cannot see what they are seeing, we can at least see them seeing what they are seeing, and feeling what they see….

One of the more sophisticated tricks is simply to suggest that you actually are seeing the new image - to hyperbolize what is already possible in order to give a sense that the change has momentarily arrived…

…but of course, this can lead to conceptual distortion and the problematic suggestion that it’s not the set that needs changing but simply the programming available for it. If we stuck with what we have no, but filled it with neon-piping and just the right sort of chiaroscuro, perhaps we might save ourselves a trip to the electronics store after all.

It is odd. Obviously, I’ve not seen every hdtv ad ever made. But one would think that someone would figure out that it would be far easier (wouldn’t it?) simply to demonstrate the deficiency of the screen that the viewer has rather than to suggest, indirectly, what the viewer does not yet have. Hold a page of text in the middle distance, and ask them to read it. Fill the screen with a painting, and ask the viewer to examine the brush strokes. But, on the other hand, it is also easy to understand that the promise of the new and better, even if it remains invisible, only promised but not yet delivered, would have more hold that the exposure of what’s missing now.

It is our problem as well - how to relate to the apparatuses of communication and representation, how to deal with the fact that they may well be ill-equipped to represent what needs representing.

More to come…

Almost hesitant to post, lest someone notices and I won’t be able to finish, um, archiving these, but all four episodes of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing are up on YouTube. Here’s the first of 16 separate slices:

I’ve never been able to get or see a full copy before. I’ve called libraries, specialists stores, trolled the distant reaches of the p2p world. And now, finally, here it is…. Happy May Day to me, and to everyone. Couldn’t have asked for more…

(via wood s lot, where you can find a link to a site with links to the rest…)

Beyond even Mr Centerpiece here, just the look at the shot. I remember, back when I was in college and we did the eurail-pass thing, we ponied up for a deluxer room in Roma once because we wanted the air conditioning. Deluxe came with a tv too. The shit on it though - Berlusconi’s channels, I suppose, or maybe RAI too. All guys in chicken-suits surrounded by bimbettinos, all chortling, and a dude in a bad suit serenading a pig with the spotlight on. Forty midgets in a phone booth, my secret secret talent, look at what my neighbors dog or daughter can do.

Felt like the end of everything, watching it. The final lurch back in to the marsh. 

And now that’s home and everywhere. Except, in the US, the president begs onto it rather than simply owning the network. Or I guess it depends what the definition of “own” is.  

(I’ve been having trouble getting the videos to embed correctly in this one. They work for me if I push play. I wonder how they work for you. If you have trouble, leave a comment and I’ll keep working on it!)

I read a graduate student’s seminar paper today (finally - but hey, at least I read them!) where Freud’s definition of the uncanny was trotted out in just the way that I used to trot it out back in my graduate seminar papers. You remember the bit about the collapse of the heimlich and the unheimlich, the “something added” that makes the merely unfamiliar or familiar qualify for full uncanniness and the great stuff about fiction (”in the first place a great deal that is not uncanny in fiction would be so if it happened in real life; and in the second place that there are many more means of creating uncanny effects in fiction than there are in real life”), and the disappointing “solution” presented at the end (”whenever a man dreams of a place or a country and says to himself, while he is still dreaming: ‘this place is familiar to me, I’ve been here before’, we may interpret the place as being his mother’s genitals or her body”)

It’s a great essay, and it’s understandable why we love to rehearse the description - even though everyone is already familiar with it - in our student papers… But the ending is too pat to really serve as a good explanation of anything at all. It is easy to deploy it, like so many canonical theoretical moments, as a surrogate or placeholder for analysis. (Which might be what I am doing here - we’ll see.) And thus we’re left with a feeling of “uncanniness” and an excellent formulation of the question from Freud, but we’re at a bit of a loss to describe the answer.

So I’ve been preoccupied tonight with what makes uncanny things uncanny - the special whatness that triggers the deep shiver.

For instance, for me any way, I find ambient television noise in the background of video recordings (whether my own or those that I find on-line) at once deeply disturbing and totally alluring. Please don’t laugh at the video that I’ve found it in tonight.

I remember when I was a kid - back in the having-a-bedtime portion of my life - I would fall asleep almost every night to the dull murmur of whatever baseball or hockey game my father was watching downstairs. The audio portion of these two sports - and not any others - still mesmerizes me a bit, gives me a great sense of comfort. But advertisements are far more disturbing when they register only ambiently. This is especially true (as in the video above, from what I can tell) when it comes to sleazy-local ads for strange products. (I find these disturbing even when they’re not only half-heard, only ambient. One of the recurrent episodes when I find myself most disturbed by the fact that I no longer live in NYC is at dinnertime, when the TV streams ad after ad for the local shit jewelry shop, some disgusting looking suburban Italian restaurant, the law offices of Pinchcash and Chasebody and so forth…)

There are even few cultural artifacts that come to mind when I start probing this topic. The infamous video game series Grand Theft Audio brilliantly, to my mind, features a very realistic “radio” function that plays while you drive around in your boosted ride, and one that trades heavily in inane talk radio noise and ridiculous but mimetically accurate local ads. This feature is demonically well-attuned to the foreground work that you’re doing in the game: crunching over bystanders, trolling for drugs and prostitutes, scanning the roads for another driver to rage on etc…

More distantly, there is Orwell’s 1984 and in particular the movie version of the book. This clip not only starts with a scene in which we hear the murmuring background from the TV and the foregrounded interior monologue of Winston Smith, offers at the 2 minute point an uncanny turn on the uncanny, where the screen addresses Smith directly (imagine the talk radio ad that mentions you by name), and, at four minutes, has an extended section where that metallically strident female voice, so influential to later dystopian flicks, rattles on and on about victories military, industrial, and ideological….

The easiest answer - and like most easy answers for nebulous questions of culture and aesthetics, an insufficient answer - to the key to the effect that this ambient auditory fill has on me is one that would be true to Freud’s findings in his essay. In this reading, the ossified vitality of the ads, just now obsolete as they appeared yesterday, the day before, in which we can hear the pitch-punch of a previous right-now, is a marker of finitude and death. It capsulizes the presentness of the past - the bath of this-after-that that fills our rooms even when we are not paying attention - and in doing so exposes its transitory nature, the fact that the machine just keeps talking, talking, talking the slip of the now under the curtain of just now away from our attention. There is, perhaps, nothing so everyday - and no everyday so touched with the absurd violence of the rapid passage of time - as the ad chatter preserved in the amber of digital video. Time seems to pass so quickly now that “amber” doesn’t seem at first the wrong word to use to describe the preservation via digital video of a moment that likely occurred within the last few months.

But this answer, the Freudian answer, is insufficient in the way that most hardline Freudian answers tend to be. It structuralizes that which is undeniably historical. A characteristic effect of the times emerges as a symptom of life in general, a universal of representation and the feelings that representation provokes. The avatars of Freud’s uncanny - the double, for instance - have always been and will always be avatars of the same effect. But when it comes to something like the background noise of the television in user-produced video clips, we can be sure that we’re dealing with something a bit more specific to our particular moment in time, in history, in the sweep of technological development. Another example will perhaps make this clear. Think of the redoubled strangeness and fascination of certain media moments that we keep replaying - the allure of watching and rewatching the CNN footage just before the news broke on 9/11. Check out this clip, which renders the whole effect as vividly as is perhaps possible, as we break, without transition, from a ditech.com ad, so familiar yet so dated now, into The End of the World.

In the wake of 9/11 and all of the other terrorist attacks and sudden catastrophes of whatever sort that have occurred during the last few years, we have all become astute anticipators of “breaking news” - of what used to go by the phrase “We interrupt to bring you a special bulletin…” It is hard to pinpoint the extent to which our very faculties of perception and anticipation have changed. What is it that we are waiting for when we keep the television on in the background, and how will we react to it when it arrives? Is all programming, even the benignly banal stuff that comes in the form of advertisements that no one intentionally listens to, that everyone hears, even when staring the set dead in the face, indexed to its potential (or is it inevitable) interruption?

One last video clip, this time the final scene of the Sopranos.

Chase and his writers struggled throughout the portion of the series that appeared after 9/11 to somehow speak to the psychic (and televisual) significance of the attacks. Tony’s cash flow tightens as the nation slips into recession, the attention of the FBI agents who had been assigned to his case is drawn away into counter-terrorism, characters chatter nervously about what might be coming in through the ports, and there is even a subplot, never brought to a conclusion, about some Muslim guys who are in the market for a huge amount of guns. But nothing in the show so successfully incorporated the immense of effect of the event more vividly than the formal moves in the last scene. While much ink and html has been spilled in panicked interpretation the “message” hidden in the jarring fade to black - which had, one imagines, hundreds of thousands banging their set top boxes thinking that their cable had gone out at just the wrong time - fewer have discussed the relationship between this sudden fade to black and the progressively foregrounded volume of the background noise in the scene, Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” played through a tabletop jukebox, which gradually comes to swallow almost the entirely of the audiospace of the program as it plunges towards its inconclusive end. The writers’ dramatic ploy here, which trades on the audience’s anticipation that when heavy ambient sound is encountered, it is almost inevitable that the sound will cancel itself out in a sudden interruption of violence, presents a tacit theory of our relation to recorded ambient sound today. The background song comes to foreground; someone, we are sure, is about to get whacked. It is no wonder that, in the comment boxes of Alan Sepinwall’s Soprano’s blog for the N.J. Star-Ledger, the second most often advanced reading of the final scene, after the basic “Tony was killed by the guy who went into the bathroom,” was that the gun-buying Muslims had set off a nuke that faded the entirely of Northern New Jersey, rather than simply the space of the show, to black.

The paranoid anxiety that suffuses the American everyday thus comes around to meet Freud’s uncanniness at the pass, as does indeed seem to be death that, at least in this case, is responsible for the strange effect of these deployments of ambient audio superfluities. We begin to detect a certain circularity to the arrangement, in which the form of something like the final scene of the Sopranos is intentionally touching a nerve exposed on September 11th, which in turn was exposed in the “unexpectedness” of the event against the backdrop of all the floating tech-bubble placidity and end of history-ness in the air the time, a sense in turn informed by a certain narrative sensibility, which in turn was informed by various historical events and so on right down the chain. But despite the fact that the effect - or our sensitivity to the effect - comes from somewhere, it nonetheless is clearly a symptom of our times and marks a subtle but important shift in our sensibilities. If Roland Barthes famously described the “reality effect” that makes the realist fiction of the nineteenth century realistic as the situation in which certain objects in a narrative hold no purpose other than to announce, via their very purposelessness in the story, “we are the real,” today, what feels uncannily real has come to say something else, something like “we are, being what we are, bound to come to an abrupt end.”

Imagine the scene. You are flipping through the channels and land on a movie that you have never before seen. It is a recent movie, from the look of the characters and the space they are inhabiting. It is a family - a mother and a father, and two kids of school age - and they are getting ready for their day, eating breakfast, and the like. A television is droning on in the background. It is tuned to a news channel, and alternates between silly reports on celebrities in prison, “health updates” on the latest treatments for anxiety, financial reports on market turbulence, and advertisements for the newest idiotic blockbuster and sexual performance enhancement pills. It is, perhaps, a scene from a life not altogether unlike your own. Gradually, the sound of the blathering television rises up to overtake the happy household noises, the voices of the children, the loving back and forth of the parents, until it is all you can hear. The camera focuses in on the television screen - the talking heads, ads with middle-aged people walking on the beach, live reports from the stock exchange. Everyone is happy, or trying their best to be - everyone is safe and secure in the sense that today will be a day like any other day. And then…

What happens next? What do you anticipate? Savy-viewers would always have anticipated that something was about to happen - it is a fundamental imperative of narrative development. But you, living when you do and living as you do, know down deep what genus of experience will come with the next frame, what it is that the television on your television will bring into everyone’s living room all at once.

Have you ever seen this BBC report of the Battle of Orgreave? I believe it is the one discussed here; apparently it reverses the order of events at the beginning of the sequence: in reality, the cops charged, then the strikers threw. (The voiceover, if you listen carefully, seems to strain to negotiate this temporal gaming. The strikers throw, the police charge, then the police are hit, then strikers are injured…)

(Note: this post is meant to relate pseudo-dialectically to the post before. Assume this is also the case for all future posts… Or perhaps this is just more guilt, more ass-covering, sublimated as avantgarde blogstyle).

Shit. In the office pool, I had “Video will be announcement of his resignation from the Bush administration due to the fact that he was unable to make ends meet on a mere $168,000 per annum.”

I know I’m just being dim about this, but I’ve never been able to understand the "no loitering" stuff w/r/t film / tv crews. Is there really a law? Or is this the usual NYPD bullshit, where they threaten under just about any circumstances, to "hold you for 24 hours without charge. We can do that, asshole."

What a great situationist law it would be to render it legal to loiter wherever you like during filmings of any sort. Make it illegal for crews to intimidate pedestrians etc. I guarantee the result would be better movies / tv shows. In fact, this might be my first quasi-answer to the question that I posed here.

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In the wake of the Sopranos finale, I must have sifted through a hundred web launched interpretations of what the final scene… Hey, it’s not everyday that a scholar of modernism with a formalist bent is able to feel like the field of his expertise has made it onto the heavy rotation list of the scroll running across the bottom of the screen that is culture. Of course the interpretations were largely rubbish, an index of poor literary training and the persistence of the very attitudes that modernist Entfremdung effects were aimed at slapping. Occasionally you could find a surprisingly sharp reading from an unlikely corner - the Star-Ledger reader who can barely spell who nonetheless writes something sharp about that fade to black.

Many readings fell in between the two poles. One very memorable one was Wax Banks’s effort, which went for a big kill, only to stumble on its own evidence. He saw

Tony and Carmela as a dark ethnic undereducated mirrorworld Bill & Hillary - the physiques, the complicity-in-adultery, the complex negotiated (and negotiable) attitudes toward social welfare, the calculated united-front marriage, the mysterious deaths of friends and coworkers (I kid). The finale’s final scene made that nasty little parallel clearer than ever before.

You can go check out the evidence issue on the site if you like. But whatever it’s problems, and however frustrated I was with the interpretation as an over-reading at first, the idea has stuck with me over the last week. After all, it’s no wonder that a serious show like this one, bent on a quasi-Balzacian analysis of American culture and political economy (actually… I think the last few episodes made it abundantly clear that it was more Flaubertian than Balzac-inspired, and gloriously so…), that found its start in January 1999 would be preoccupied with Clinton and Clintonism. It starts with schizophrenic relationship of both Tony and Bill to their backward backgrounds - they can’t stop diving back into it, can’t stock speaking the patois, but fit in on the golf course better than the BBQ hut or the sausage shop. That McMansion that Tony drives up (distinctly up, right) to in the opening credit sequence may well be the long-term result of Reaganite policy changes in the 80s, but it was during the Clinton administration that they truly started to fill every acre of rural space left in northern NJ. And of course it goes deeper than that: the more-than-complicit relationship to violence and exploitation that comes of a deathstruggle to simply stay on, no matter what the price. The constant threat that Tony will lose his spot at the top (as well as, in his case, his life) formed the operative tension of the show, right down to the last scene. And like Tony, Clinton never knew whether the killing shot would come from the other family or from someone in his own outfit.

Above all else, the Sopranos from the very start was a show that presented itself as a workplace fiction that couldn’t stop going home to check on the wife and kids. Or it was a family-centered sitcom that couldn’t help but bring the issue of where the money for all the SUVs and Ivy-League educations home. Of course, it wasn’t either - it was both at once. And I don’t need to tell you, however you feel about Clinton, that the mould for this conceit was cast during the sinister and stupid era of the Clintons, whose marriage was the driving political issue of my late adolescence and early adulthood. And true to form, if GWB’s initial campaigning and presidency borrowed heavily from the born-again playbook (where alcoholism + refound salvation = a higher approval among key, dry constituencies than if he had never hit the bottle, never fallen, in the first place), it was the language of therapy, marriage counselling, recovery and relapse that Bill and Hillary both drew on so cynically and so effectively in order to slide by the nets set by their worst antagonists - themselves. (In one of the last episodes, Tony’s shrink’s own shrink and mentor warn her that sociopaths tend not to benefit from therapy, at least not in the intended way. Rather, they learn to use the lessons of therapy as rhetorical tools in order to become all the more effective at the game of socio-pathology… Could it get any clearer than that?)

So anyway, Wax Banks is right. It’s there. And how could it not be. Well and good - a more interesting politico-cultural story to allow yourself to spend sometime with than most of what floats to the surface when lit types try to jump the aesthetic / real politics divide nowadays. The stuff of B list conference papers - maybe I’ll write one myself. And not much more. Or so it seemed for a day or two.

And just when I thought it was safe to put the Sopranos to rest for a bit, I get, as it were, pulled back in.

Just too much, this. It’s not really a mystery that the Clintons would watch the show - they are, I imagine, exactly the target demographic: high-performing NYC area pros, middle to late middle age, high income bracket and educational attainment, etc etc. And at this point in the game, where fund-raising is still the predominant issue at hand, the Tony fan is their core demographic as well. No need to finesse the Iowa ethanol-head or the yankee-cranky New Hampshire schoolteacher yet. So it’s a smart ad on that level. (Apparently, the song that they choose as the campaign anthem is some Celine Dion number. I’ll bet if you asked my folks their favorite musical performer, Celine would come out #1. They’ve seen her in concert a bunch of times, and dad, like me, has never missed an episode of the Sopranos…)

But what is a bit baffling and amazing and disgusting all at once is that, despite all that I’ve said, following Wax Banks’s lead, above, the Clintons would nonetheless consent to embrace this conjunction, sit in the diner seats with the fucking Journey song playing in the background. The folks they are impersonating in this ad are, after all, gangsters. Gangsters, yes, with marital problems, who have achieved institutional and financial priority by nefarious means, and all the rest, but in the end gangsters - what are we to make of tbe easy adoption of something that one would think would be the last thing that the Clinton family would get in bed with, given all the stunning connections above between themselves and our friends from Jersey?

And further, if David Chase’s final turn in the show was meant (this is my sense of it anyway) to bring the viewers, so enchanted by the show’s violence, to some sort of sudden awareness of the strange paradox wherein they are horribly disappointed by the fact that their favorite show failed to kill off their favorite character in its final scene - that not only are they gluttons of televisual violence, they have further determined that this guy that they know and love really in some sense deserves to have the contents of his skull splattered all over his wife’s face in an ice cream parlor, Hillary’s ad, in the act of appropriation, sends this whole issue in a totally new direction… In sitting in the booth of the gangster, Hillary and Bill are not simply much informing us of the wide-spread desire to do them harm, but rather the impossibility of doing them harm, the fact that they are free, despite all of the associative sludge that is conjured up by this ad, to do whatever the hell they want to and still pull through. They use the funny but inappropriate ad about being knocked off precisely because they will not be knocked off. They can take the risk of appearing in plain sight only because it is not a risk - they, like the American public, are completely shameless. What is so great about being shameless, of course, is the ability to hide in plain sight. We catch them out precisely because they have chosen to be caught out, to make a game of it, because the stakes are the stakes of a game, and nothing more.

In short, the final fact of the matter, and the fact that we are being slammed with even harder with than we were with the final fade to black of the Sopranos, is the fact that if Hilary wins the 2008 election (as of now, that’s where I’d put my money, unfortunately) and if she serves two terms, the position of American executive will have been shared between two rival families, and two families alone, for a full 28 years. A father and a son, a husband and a wife. This thing of ours indeed… And any one want to take odds on the last name of the top candidates in 2016?

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AJ (comfortably clear of his dark preoccupation with “yeets” and the war on terror and the sources of his parents’ wealth) is kicked back on the couch with his underage model girlfriend, cracking up as they watch exactly this:

I imagine what drew Chase’s / the writer’s interest to this clip is the hidden-in-plain-sight nature of the R & T Correspondents Association dinner. The significance of clips like this one (as with Bush’s infamous “Dude, who stole my WMDs” performance) is not of course of the “hey, this is what they’re really like when they’re unguarded on stage” variety. Everyone knows that the material will be taped and disseminated, and this is what informs what’s so horrifically amazing about this material. The dissemination of this stuff - the fact that, seriously, the joke is on you about WMDs, the fact that given the opportunity the head propagandist will smear on black face and hop around the stage - this stuff is meant for distribution, meant to send us a message about what power really means, what it means to have the press in your backpocket, and what it means that you have to (or had to) give Imus a handjob on the air if you wanted to be elected president, or even NJ or CT senator.

Just as the Sopranos was always about forcing us to confront the all too visible sources of wealth that landscapes the green, well-trimmed lawns and lifts the entry-way atriums of the NJ mcmansions, so obvious and insistent from the start that the entirety of culture is bent on making or allowing us to forget it, “MC Rove” crystallizes the political structure that grows in that soil, where we see what we see and we know what we see and we can even say what we see, but that’s it. The screen goes black - there will be no denouement, no final twist. Nothing is slouching towards bethlehem to be born.

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Absolutely amazing moment today on tv. I had heard that Cormac McCarthy was going to be on Oprah to discuss The Road - which seemed like an unlikely and interesting thing to see so I taped the show. But as it turned out, the McCarthy section was by far less interesting than the first segment, which featured Michael Moore discussing his new movie about the American health care situation, Sicko.

The moment when it felt like the ground was giving way beneath my feet comes about 1:30 into this video (which is bound not to last on-line, so get it while the getting’s good)…

(The video is, as I predicted, now gone…)

Here’s a transcript of the exchange in question:

O:

OK this is what I was going to say about the film - that I got it in a way that I hadn’t gotten it before. Now don’t you love when that happens. When you just go “Ooo! I got it!” Because you know the word “socialism” really stirs up…

MM:

[Scarily] Socialized Medicine…

O:

Socialized Medicine

MM:

[Scarily] Ooo…

O: And then when you showed the example of [how] we have socialized activities in this country. The fire department - we don’t pay for a fire department. We don’t pay for the police department. We don’t pay for public schools.

MM:

And it’s universal.

O:

We don’t pay for the library. And it’s universal - universal is for everybody.

MM:

Right.

O:

And so the very idea of extending that to the care of people is really something that I have to honestly say that I hadn’t thought about it because I’m one of those people, “I got mine,” so I wasn’t thinking about who didn’t have theirs. Really. Right.

MM:

And we don’t expect the fire department to turn a profit. It would be an appalling thought, and the reason we don’t is because it’s a life and death issue. Well, health care is a life and death issue.

O:

Yeah.

MM:

And that’s why turning a profit has to be removed from the system.

Good Christ, that’s amazing. The slow but distinct re-discovery of what that word, “socialism,” might mean by a figure obviously not associated with words like that. The discovery that we already very much have elements of it all around us, elements that we would never willingly part with. The emergence that a better synonym for “socialism” would be “universality,” rather than “Stalinism” or “gulag” or “bread-lines” that it’s usually equated with, when it’s mentioned at all, in the US. The revelation of the fact that “socialism” in fact provides very simple, but persuasive answers to issues that only at first seem incredibly complex, impossible to repair, and as if natural, inevitable features of our sociopolitical landscape.

In short, I think this little episode renders abundantly clear why exactly socialized medicine is such an important - perhaps the important - issue today in the US. Just as the right has own Overton Window games that they’ve long played with school prayer and vouchers and the like, a nation with a public medical system funded by even a large fractional amount that the US currently spends on health care today would be a nation on its way, I believe, toward a whole branching set of public sector reinvestments.

And it further, Moore’s appearance on Oprah puts to shame ten thousand cute and clever forms of aestheticized intervention - simple, spirited explanation may have set us on a path toward improvement that no act of detournement or deconstruction, no dialectical ruse, nor metatextual abyssalism could accomplish.

This is a sobering, yet inspiring thing to realize, if you’re someone who does what I do for a living.

I’ve really liked Michael Moore for a long time, but he is now officially one of the patron saints of this blog.

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You’ve heard about what is going on in Venezuela with the tv stations, yes? (The link there is not an endorsement… Too tired to sift through to find a fair report…) But did you notice this?

Radio Caracas’ soap operas such as The Ex and My Cousin Ciela are popular, regularly attracting more than 50 per cent of Venezuelan viewers.

Two opinion polls have shown that more than 70 per cent of Venezuelans, including many of Mr Chávez’s own supporters, are opposed to the decision not to renew the licence. Arturo Sarm-iento, a Caracas businessman who runs Telecaribe, an independent regional television station, and supports the government’s policy, admits the measure will “have a huge political cost”.

[...]

A public-service channel, Venezuelan Social Television (Teves), is to replace RCTV. [...] Elsewhere in the world, with few exceptions public-service stations have not won a sterling reputation for slick popular programming. Lil Rodriguez, the channel’s new president, hardly encouraged optimism when she announced last week that “we don’t intend to make Teves really boring”.

Teves is planning to develop its own soap opera based on the lives of Simón Bolívar, Venezuela’s nat-ional hero, and Manuela Sáenz, one of his lovers, but until that is ready viewers will have to make do with a range of cooking, travel, music, opinion and other documentary shows, as well as an opinion programme.

One hell of an article, there waiting for someone to scoot down to Caracas and write, about the emergence of a new sector of socialist mass aesthetic form. I’d for one would love to know what comes of it, and what goes into it…

Here’s the question: say you were a socialist head of state of wherever you currently live, and had decided to pull network X off of the air and replace it with Your Own Social Television Network. What programming would you schedule as not to make it “really boring”? Mine would feature, of course, lots of ads without products, but I’m still thinking about what would provide the filler stuff, the actual shows, that folks would skip over with their TiVos to get back to the publicités…

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1. Today was a good day. The park with my wife and daughter, lunch at a nice place and outside because it’s finally getting warm enough to do that. She had a bit of a tantrum about riding in the stroller from the park to the cafe where we ate, but it subsided. I looked in the bookstore, but there weren’t any magazines or books that I wanted to buy.

2. Later, I watched a hockey game, read a few pages of an advance copy of William Gibson’s Spook Country while my daughter played in the backyard. My wife got home from shopping - bearing hot dogs - and I fired up the grill for the first time this year. Very dad-ish, yes? My daughter has never had a hot dog, and wouldn’t eat one this evening, despite the fact we lathered it in cheese. I think she is thrown by the name. She loves dogs, and periodically would say “ruff-ruff” as we ate them and laugh a bit, but still refuse to eat them.

Whenever I grill hot dogs, I wince at every bite worried that I will encounter a raw spot inside.

3. We watched the Sopranos this evening. I think it was the first good episode of the new and last semi-season. When the jokes work, you get the sense that Chase is writing (whoever is listed in the credits), and that the episode, in turn, will work.

And it did. And in particular, it returned to one of my favorite themes of the show, and a theme very close to my heart. The ambivalence of Tony’s relationship to his son - and his semi-son Christopher - pivots on a deeper ambivalence about masculinity, violence, class transition, and self-improvement. And shame. To put it this way seems very abstract - sounds like guild speak, no? Try it this way instead: Just as he wants Christopher not to be an alcoholic but finds something deeply distasteful and unmanly about his success in not drinking, he would like his own son, Anthony Jr., not to repeat his mistakes, not to go into the “family business” of profitable violence, but can’t help hating his son for his, what, effeminate softness and affluent idleness. He wants, in short, his son to be tough like him without experiencing the situations that make that sort of toughness possible or even necessary.

I grew up with just this sort of mixed message from my own father, and I bear the fruits of it today in spades. I’m not going into to detail, but trust me on this one. (Themes like this, generally not well aired in mass culture, are the reason that this show has a lock on a demographic that is both unusually wide and extremely narrow at once…) It is, I think, an experience that a lot (most? all?) children of men (and women?) who “came from nothing” and “fought their way out of poverty”… and whose children live very different lives - and live in very different neighborhoods - than the one that they have lived.

My father took his first steps to making his (and mine) in the world through violence, though of a different sort that the Sopranos. He was a hockey and football hero from a shit town and from an imploded and very poor family, and likely channeled lots of his own father’s abusiveness into his athletic performance. These skills (this violence) made, in the long run, a successful career path open to him, and it was one that structurally resembles that of the various enforcers and captains on the show… (hint: if my work is strangely preoccupied with labor issues - downsizing, deskilling, intensification, Taylorism - you do the oedipal math to figure out where he ended up…)

4. Things become even more interesting when Anthony Jr.’s invigorating turn to the dark side occurs not through committing an act of violence himself, but through watching (as, of course, do we) someone else perform an act of particularly gruesome violence on another person. The last few episodes have been slightly-preoccupied with the question of who has “popped their cherry,” in terms of ultraviolence, and who hasn’t. Anthony seems to have joined the club - but somehow, now, all it takes is what might be called televisual participation rather than the real thing.

5. After the show, I scroll through the rss reader and come to this. Let it be said I do not recommend clicking through to view the videos. I have a pretty high tolerance - both viscerally and ethically - for viewing this sort of thing, and lord christ has there been a lot of it to view the past several years. Just being honest, I generally find those deeply resistant to viewing this sort of material to be a bit quaint or even hypocritical. I generally back up into a rationalization about the necessity that the impact of violence around the world register - register, perhaps, in particular upon people like me, who write about culture and politics for a living. I have viewed military attacks on civilians, beheadings, and of-course the state run executions of VIPs.

But this one stopped me in my tracks. I viewed the first linked video, which seems to be the gruesome aftermath of the whole affair. The second video, I am guessing, is really the first in the sequence - a lot of yelling and not much to see except for tight-packed men’s shoulders. In the third, we finally get what we are here to see. She is quickly pulled, head locked under a man’s arm, into the center of the crowd. A crowd, of course, of men. She is standing, she is screaming, and then she is not. She has been pulled to the ground, or hit by something and then fell.

This is where I turned the video off. I did not want to see her head get crushed by stones. There are, it is terrible to report, a total of 6 videos in the sequence. I can’t even imagine what happens in the next three in the sequence. Or I can very much imagine it, but this time, don’t want to see it. I can’t really explain why this one is different from the others, the ones that I made it all the way through. It is nightmarish.

6. I have nightmares every night. In fact, I think I only have nightmares. I can’t remember having any other sort of dream for the longest time. On some level, I think, I take this as a normal facet of adult-life. It does not, on the surface at least, affect my waking behavior. I am not even particularly troubled by this fact. I am not even sure that I dislike having nightmares. Obviously, the question becomes are these things that I am dreaming actually nightmares at all?

In fact, it wouldn’t at all be fair, but if you were to tell me that you often or even occasionally have dreams that are not nightmares, I would almost automatically think, on some level, that you were a something of a simpleton.

And I now suddenly realize that this is a good explanation of the origin of my particular academic interests. I write about the necessary relationship between fictional form and social disorder. I also, more recently, have been fascinated by texts that attempt to work beyond this seemingly essential relationship.

7. I have posted on these sorts of videos and images before. The dead children during the bombing of lebanon, etc etc. After partially viewing the stoning, I went outside to have a cigarette and thought about what I might write about this one. I can’t remember now what I said about the previous ones. Any angle I might try to take, and the head swims. To politically particularize this is to lose the visceral reality of it, to mine it for an abominable use-value. Not to politicize it is perhaps even more horrible - to see this event, and all the others like it that happen all the time, both in view and out of it, “clickably linked” or not, as ineffably random or simply markers of a depraved and in-actionable “human nature.” I do not know what to say, and so I say this. Which is abominable. I could have remained silent, which is abominable. And, worst of all, perhaps, is to resolve all of this into a clever, safe crux - which is exactly what I am doing right now as I type these words. My own inhumanity chases me at exactly the speed that I type these words now. The more I say, the worse it gets… But to say nothing would be worse. And there’s the crux, the cleverness, the barbarism, the intensified barbarism of the self-conscious critic of snuff again. A knot that only tightens as you type.

8. I wonder how many of you clicked through and viewed the videos, and of those who did, how far you got with them.

9. NB: I provided you with the link, but ordered you not to follow it. I hoped that you wouldn’t see it, yet I advertised its contents. I want you, my reader, to be both humane and hard, aware and not. I want you both inside and outside of the dark chamber at once, don’t I? And then I link you away to distract you from the problem at hand….

Have you followed the link? Which link did you follow? Did you follow it down to the end?

10. I am not sure that this post, in a sense, isn’t above all else a reenactment, a fan-fiction repetition, of Christopher’s situationally-complex paean to l’art d’être un père that he offers, drunk once again, toward the end of tonight’s episode of the Sopranos.

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So, I’m getting ready to do something with the Club Silencio scene in Mulholland Drive, which might just be my favorite moment in film, and I’m looking around to see what’s been said about the scene… And I find this:

Without reference in the screenplay, the surrealistic Silencio sequence was shot in late 1999 as a finale to the original TV-Pilot. The idea around Club Silencio is a results of a deal between Disney’s Touchstone Television and David Lynch. The company contributed 2,5 million dollar more to the Pilot project (to a total budget of 7 million) with the proviso – which Lynch grudgingly accepted – that he shoot extra footage to be used as a “Closed ending.” Disney’s Buena Vista International intended to recoup the company’s money by releasing the longer version as a film in Europe.

That there is one hell of a confluence of the demands of the market and artistic genius… And one hell of a “closed ending.” I wonder what the Disney folks thought?

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Fantastic series, from simone leuck at the equally fantastic polar inertia, of cuban television sets photographed in their native environment.

Figuring out what to take away from these images is as hard, in a sense, as any of the questions that I’m usually at work on. Or, perhaps, these are in fact illustrations, partial ones of course, of exactly the problems that I am generally at work on.

For one thing, there’s the persistence-despite-apparent-obsolesence of the sets themselves, which, like the famous American cars left over from before the revolution, are metonyms of the temporal situation of the socialist experiment in Cuba.

I tried to watch a little Cuban tv tonight via this site, but I’m pretty sure what I was getting (some sort of travel documentary) wasn’t actually live.

Anyway, it’s hard to articulate what exactly it is about this sort of thing that I find so alluring. The phrase “the aesthetics of publicness” keeps coming to mind - that is perhaps another way to describe what it is that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately…

(For a discussion of pseudonymous blogging and the tendency to circumlocution and half-hintery when it comes to one’s “project,” among other things, see here…)

One other good reminder on polar inertia - a partial transcript of the infamous “kitchen debate” between Khrushchev and Nixon from 1959:

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Geoff Dyer in Ways of Telling: The Work of John Berger:

The series Ways of Seeing was first broadcast in the Spring of 1972 on BBC2 late in the evening. The audience was small but since the ’switch-off rate’ was extraordinarily low (i.e. once people began watching they continued till the end), the makers of the series were able to persuade the BBC to broadcast it again at prime time. The influence of the series and the book that Berger wrote after this hesitant start was enormous. Throughout the 1970s it was the key text in art colleges in Britain and in the USA; for many students and teachers alike it represented a turning point in their thinking about art. It opened up for general attention areas of cultural study that are now commonplace - decoding advertisements, for example - but which in 1972 were either virtually unknown or existed only in embryonic stage within the academy. (Many of the ideas of the series had already appeared in articles and essays by Berger: it is the transition to television and best-selling paperback that is important.) Taken together as Peter Fuller has said, the series and the book have had ‘a greater influence than any other art critical project of the last decade’, and probably, I would add of the post-war period.

The world, of course, has changed. And (in terms of my own personal interest in the idea) literature is much less photogenic than art. What are you could to fill the screen with, a Powerpoint presentation of lines of poetry? But still, Berger and his Ways of Seeing represent an instance of popularization without selling out, writing for the market. Can’t help but wonder if a similar sort of endeavor might be possible today, what it would take, what it would cost etc…

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