Category Archives: commentary

Is Philosophy Dead? Weekend Entertainment for Saturday, August 3rd

03 Saturday Aug 2013

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Weekends are the worst days of the week for reading blogs and adding podcasts to the listening queue. Monday is nearly the best because the Sunday evening premium-TV sexplosion pushes the culture forward and gives it new fizz for one more week. Monday is Increment Day. If I were religious I suppose Sundays (or Fridays, or Saturdays) would be full of online entertainment because of the soapbox potential for religious writers. I wouldn’t know. But for the rest of us consumers of media, Saturdays and pre-evening Sundays are the dead time of our week. We have to drink and riot sometime, I suppose.

So I’ve decided to make everyone’s weekends worse with my own guaranteed Saturday posts. It isn’t really worse for you, the reader, because you don’t exist. This is 2013, and unknown blogs are a few AU past passé. I’m fairly certain that the only hits I get are robotic or accidental. That said, ritual practice is what the Sabbath is all about and as an atheist I’ve missed out on that benefit of incrementing my week with a regular bit of writing.

Yes, Philosophy is Dead

I listen to podcasts from the BBC. I have several months’ worth of In Our Time episodes piled up on my hard drive that I dole out to my phone. I consume In Our Time… religiously. Well, not religiously. I binge on it, which is a way to practice religion but not a healthy way. But while I can take or leave many of the BBC’s other shows—I’m finding Bertrand Russell’s Reith Lectures from 1948 numbingly slow going, despite their historical interest—I do tend to at least give a chance to episodes of less well-formed shows like In Science (an as yet terrible replacement for the excellent Material World) or The Infinite Monkey Cage.

The Infinite Monkey Cage is often annoying in the same ways as In Science. In the show from December of 2010, “Is Philosophy Dead?“, the monkeys (a celebrity physicist, two comedians, and a pop-philosopher) line up against Raymond Tallis, an implacably rigid foe of cognitive science. Throughout the episode Tallis is forced back repeatedly to the point that philosophy is not dead because science will never “understand” consciousness. Without any cognitive scientists to consult, of course, there isn’t much active refutation of Tallis’s points. This is interesting for a situation where Tallis is essentially making the same point as theologians did six hundred years ago when they pointed out that natural science (still termed natural philosophy at the time) would never understand the movement of the cosmos around the Earth. The Infinite Monkey Cage could have made use of at least one advocate for science that was both engaged and hostile.

What makes this episode an illustration of why Philosophy-Capital-P is indeed dying, or at least dissolving into an introductory text to other disciplines, is the lack of rigor its practitioners can have in using its own terms in public discourse—this lack of rigor may be instead an expression of their contempt for the public audience. When “doing” philosophy back and forth to each other, philosophers’ usage of terms are deemed important enough to write entire books about them, but in public discourse Tallis is throwing around the word “understanding” as if it didn’t require a 100,000 word dissertation to fully explicate the particular gyrations Tallis puts the word through.

During this show Tallis uses “understanding” to refer to the conscious integration of an idea and goes further to claim that science does not, and cannot, ever understand consciousness. This is fine for as far as that goes but seems to belie the fact that modern and post-modern scientific advances rely on mathematical formulations that cannot be consciously “understood” in any sense, much less the sense Tallis is using. Just look at the field of quantum mechanics. Very few (none?) “understand” quantum mechanics in the way Tallis seems to demand. So science isn’t necessarily attempting to “understand” anything in the way that Tallis uses the term.

“Understanding” in Tallis’ sense can only be the conscious integration an idea so that its contemplation and manipulation is relatively automatic. This is achieved when the study of a subject results in the capacity to come up with a workable solution to a problem without turning the problem into an mathematical exercise and rigorously doing all the sums. The form of understanding Tallis is using, from studies done by cognitive scientists, seems to rely on internalized heuristics and emotional measures of confidence. So a baseball outfielder understands the motion of a baseball’s trajectory through practice and is tested on the field every game. He doesn’t do differential equations. The fielder develops his heuristics by chasing the emotional validation he gets from a successful test. So being able to catch the ball is a measure of the fielder’s gestalt, studied, but essentially practiced understanding. I’m sure Tallis would argue that conscious understanding has nothing to do with heuristics but he doesn’t really offer the kind of Vulcan Mind Meld short version of what he’s talking about… which proves my point.

When it comes to mathematical ways of understanding we already understand a few of the pieces of consciousness and we will come to understand more. At some point we’ll begin building consciousnesses. We’re already beginning to build heuristics about what a consciousness would look like using existing brains as models. It appears that much of the difficulty is in understanding the physical structure of brains that already exist. So far, experiment is restrained by technological limitations, not mathematical definitions.

Understanding the Death of Philosophy

Understanding in the sense I ascribe to Tallis really is the original product of philosophy. Philosophers laid down general rules and heuristics to the elite (with specially dumbed-down versions for the masses) which they can use as assumptions whenever they are tempted to duplicate the heavy lifting done by the philosophers. In this heuristic sense, understanding is the wisdom received from people who’ve worked things out in detail and (hopefully) tested their work.

In 400 BCE, this was the revolutionary product of the philosophers as they began their thousand-year-long assault on religion. For roughly the last three to five hundred years (after the ascendancy of philosophy over religion) understanding has been produced increasingly by scientists, engineers, and other technical people. The contribution of philosophy to understanding that has happened most recently is classified as mathematics and computational theory. Tallis specifically claims these as continuing to be parts of philosophy. For him, philosophy remains the superset of knowledge.

But it’s funny. People working on the edges of mathematical logic and computational theory don’t seem to apply their findings directly to the things that people who call themselves philosophers do. They have opinions about things like the ultimate meaning of everything, free will, materialism, and questions about the nature of consciousness and cognition, but the only concrete contributions that new mathematical and computational theories tend to make is in mathematics and computational theory. Experimental science is informed by the math but strikes out ahead of it and often finds much room in apparent mathematical contradictions. The math is narrowed down by experiment, not the other way around.

For the bleeding edge, then,  mathematical theory can be used to form heuristics for exploration. Presenting the heuristic sense of a body of mathematics to practitioners and finding possible wiggle-room is an area of philosophical reasoning that is useful, but subordinate to both the mathematics and the science. Imposition of heuristic divinations by philosophers on the hard sciences still happens, but more and more rarely. The crucial place where philosophical divination currently likes to steamroll the investigations of working practitioners seems to be in the field of economics. There the heuristic rulemakers still attempt to rule from the editorial pages of the Edwardian era.

Philosophy’s Zombie Unlife, or, What Is the Further Function of Philosophy?

First, philosophy cannot, as Raymond Tallis hopes, put itself forward to offer absolute statements about the limits and future of a scientific field. In this case, using what I assume is a kind of blanket application of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem—he offers no specifics—Tallis simply states that science cannot understand consciousness.

So what can philosophy do? Philosophy can only function to provide a framework for heuristic understanding of knowledge for laymen, students, and practitioners of a field attempting to educate themselves about the bits they aren’t directly investigating. Philosophy mediates between the novice and the mathematically-stated state of the art. Philosophy does not make management decisions about what is or isn’t possible. Philosophy provides heuristics made-to-order for the world and not the other way around. The function of philosophy, in a word, is to educate.

So the further work of philosophy is to create new heuristics and revise existing heuristics to facilitate gestalt confidence in a scientific subject for laymen, students, and practitioners. This includes mathematics but crucially cannot lose itself in the desire to self-referentially climb the pole of mathematical understanding to reclaim primacy. Philosophy, as a system of heuristics for inducing confident understanding, cannot be supplanted by mathematics simply because so much of mathematics does not lend itself to generating heuristics.

The applicability of mathematical concepts themselves cannot be so easily determined for experimental fields without the actual experiments being performed. Philosophy mediates this, but philosophical predictions that apply conclusions of one field to another have stepped outside the realm of heuristic integration and education and into divination. As heuristics, these divinations can be useful but they are only heuristics. They serve to educate and impart gestalt understanding but they can also be graded as to usefulness. A heuristic that says “understanding consciousness is impossible based on my meta-logical understanding of mathematics applied to cognitive science where the mathematics and meta-logic isn’t yet well understood” is a terrible heuristic, but that is essentially what Raymond Tallis is attempting to do. Without a good heuristic framework for understanding its conclusion the heuristic itself is not useful in any way. It communicates nothing and educates no one.

A good general heuristic would be one of the many that is already being used in the field of cognitive science: consciousness already exists in the human brain. The physical structure, state, and health of the brain seems to have a great influence on the state of consciousness, so it seems that further investigation of the physical brain will yield more understanding of consciousness.

Final Words to Philosophers

You don’t have much time, so be useful.

Seriously, though, public philosophers must be educators and communicators. They are lovers of wisdom, and public lovers of wisdom should command at least some respect. It’s not like you’re in Marketing. Also, as articulate and respected public lovers of wisdom, philosophers should take the field of education away from the increasingly right-wing bureaucrats of the public and private educational systems and the “educational materials” industry. Or conversely, if you are a teacher tired of being talked down to by an increasingly necromantic and corporate administration, recast yourself as a philosopher and develop heuristics to share with your students and your fellows.

Making Excise Taxes Progressive

22 Monday Jul 2013

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Income taxes were a paper-era hack. In order to tax economic activity more fairly at the beginning of the 20th century, an excise tax would have had to apply to the trades on Wall Street as well as wholesale activity throughout the economy. Apart from the never-ending wailing by the powerful about taxation, it would have failed because it simply wasn’t possible to track and do the accounting for large numbers of transactions in the pre-electronic era.

So instead the progressive income tax was introduced, taxing the people who have more economic activity using the crude sorting rule of income. It isn’t perfect (or maybe even good) but it was easier in the paperwork era to make one or two hundred million people responsible to file dossiers on themselves every year than it was to track tiny payments of excise tax on billions or trillions of transactions. But we aren’t in the paperwork era any more and the first step in taxing economic activity more directly and more fairly is to tax financial transactions.

But the first task, of course, is to overcome the mountain of FUD and defensive bullshit spewing from elites about how such taxation is unworkable. Fortunately, mainstream economists are on the task:

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/op-eds-&-columns/op-eds-&-columns/edward-snowden-and-financial-speculation-taxes

Charles Stross’s Neptune’s Brood

09 Tuesday Jul 2013

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A little has been made in economic circles of how Charles Stross portrays interstellar finance in his new book, Neptune’s Brood. In the first of the series, Saturn’s Children, Stross established the physical mutability and psychological constraints of Freya, a transhuman sex-bot. In that story Stross took on more than just sex after it’s become obsolete. Stross took on slavery, inherited class and feudal control, and he illustrated how we are all at the mercy of our rulers’ damaged obsessions.

In this sequel Stross has a new protagonist, the banker Krina. With her Stross pivots away from the robot apocalypse of the near future. He skips forward thousands of years and brings the story back to the economic headlines of our world today. Krina’s story spans currency areas, economic expansion, economic depression, wage slavery, sovereign debt, banking regulation, and takes the story to the poor schlubs who audit the books after everything has gone wrong.

This story too often dominates our own news and Stross explores the world of finance with some subtlety. Stross also touched on these issues in Rule 34 but in this new novel he delves more deeply into the mechanisms and blends them into the sauce of space opera. The chief example of blending is the way Stross resolves transactions where a transaction must wait years for interstellar laser communications to transmit digital signatures. It’s fiddly science fiction at times but it’s grounded in real situations. Understanding it is worth the effort.

The book’s appeal is heightened by the constant peril faced by the protagonist, Krina. Compared to humans, Stross’s transhuman Krina is a cyber-superhero. Like the other transhumans of her universe, she is physically strong and able to shrug off the fatal effects of vacuum, radiation, and toxic atmospheres. Krina can back up her consciousness and transmit herself across the stars into new bodies. She can regrow practically any damage to her body by consuming partially-processed raw materials—or in extremis, another person (see Stross’s short story Bit Rot, the only plausible medical premise for zombies I’ve seen). Over time and with help Stross’s characters can be re-engineered into any imaginable form and can live essentially forever.

But Stross’s characters face a well-modeled web of new tensions. The protagonists of both books address the possibility of mind control, mind wiping, doppelgangers and compelled interrogation, but in Neptune’s Brood there’s less sado-masochistic sex slavery and even less discussion of the long-ago lost world of “meatsack” humans. Instead Stross falls back on how survival works in any world. His characters have to eat. They have to make a living. His protagonists have adventures, yes, but they are adventures that are mediated through their work. Their actions are often dictated by their bosses and institutions. When Freya and Krina express their own agency, their professional and economic survival are in the foreground. Stross has his finger on the thready pulse of our own times.

The cover of Neptune’s Brood is a change. The covers of some of Stross’s novels have been afflictions, Saturn’s Children Space Cleavage, for one, The Apocalypse Codex This Guy Looks Like a Jerk for another. But there’s hope: the new UK covers for the Laundry Files are an improvement; they err on the side of abstraction. The cover for Rule 34 was very cyberpunk-y and did justice to the character without exploitation. The cover for Neptune’s Brood continues the trend away from the cheap art that depicts latex or a chain-mail-bikini. The mermaid of the cover of Neptune’s Brood is naked, yes, but is fig-leafed by its frame, rendered well, and has a posture and expression of purpose.

I know the backlash against bad sci-fi/fantasy covers may seem prudish, but giggle-inducing crappy covers don’t allow for content that is well done and thought-provoking. The West is a couple decades past the point where we needed to Stick It To The Man by putting silly soft-core pornography on the cover of a book. The Man stuck back by giving up on prudery, then dumped books from the checkout aisle. So it’s a good thing that Neptune’s Brood can be put out where people can see it. Checkout customers have economic ideas that need updating.

There will always be room for new ideas in genre…

19 Wednesday Jun 2013

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…a review of Mur Lafferty’s The Shambling Guide to New York City

Like some (many) other aspiring writers I follow Mur Lafferty’s I Should Be Writing entries on her blog. I’ve also followed the podcasting she’s done for Escape Artists. She’s had a few stories published so she’s past the aspiring part, and with last month’s release of SG-NYC being the first in a new series she begins the long slog through the next few milestones of her writing career.

I picked up SG-NYC at Powells last week and finished it yesterday. For a new series of urban fantasy it’s marvelously planned out. SG-NYC is the first of a series that will mirror an apocryphal series of travel books written for the underground of the world’s monsters “coterie”. Like the True Blood franchise, it’s a new premise for urban fantasy, but it goes much further than just the regular variations of beasties and emotional turmoil. Unlike the True Blood franchise the heroine is allowed to stretch her intellectual legs and be more than just a meal. Also, there are giant robots golems. And where there’s giant robots, there’s always room in future installments for giant-robot-on-giant-robot romance. Here’s hoping.

Consideration of Things Present; or In Guiding the Slippery Now

10 Friday May 2013

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Feeling Now

What is it about now that is different from then and what comes? I had this thought Monday, walking home in a slightly happy daze after getting out of a movie. What is it about this moment, I thought, that makes it this moment? Isn’t the entire universe and all of time encompassed by a single electron zipping forward and back, giving the universe its shape and making all moments part of a timeless whole? Or is that just glib sci-fi nonsense cribbed from Michio Kaku?

Back to the moment: walking home in the cooling, breezy evening under shade trees and a cloudless blue sky…

Now is different from then and the future, so what can I say about now? Scientifically, I can’t say much beyond the idea that science is built upon data recorded as it whizzes by the moment or is dug up later in a different moment. Looking at that data hints at predictions we might make for other moments in the future or other traces hidden elsewhere. We collect data from those predicted moments or traces to compare them against our hypothesized predictions. As future predictions or revived traces slide through our personal now we refine our hypotheses or even craft a theory.

But is there anything to be said, scientifically, about my personal experience? I don’t have the budget to record molecular or quantum activity inside my head as the future passes through my now, so no, this is going to slide out of science and into philosophy and psychology.

So what is it about now that I am feeling? I feel a feeling, to begin with. Now is always a new beginning starting with how I feel right now. I have felt in the past but I don’t feel a past feeling now. Now is how I feel. Now is a feeling that is more than a description of my state, it is my state. Crisis or chemistry can dominate a feeling and give it a strong label: sad, happy, hungry, enraged, fearful, horny, sated, but even during these skewed moments the rest of the feeling is there, overshadowed by the major chemical characteristic but as a whole every feeling is much more than the label.

For past feelings, our memories can be impossible to recall without using the shorthand labels. Adding scents and sounds and images can be enough to bring back a spookily similar overall feeling. A ghost of the past feeling, the past moment, rises out of the physical structure of our brain whether it’s welcome or not. That ghost has better resolution than any label or prose description. So with PTSD sufferers the problem is a kind of involuntary time travel of a past state into the present. A pervasive record of a feeling becomes a too-slowly-fading structure in our brain.

But even when those structures are influencing our now, we only have the single now we are feeling.

Illusion of Now

I don’t want to turn this into a review of Iron Man 3. Other people have done a good enough job of hitting the high points and getting to the thumbs-up consensus. What interests me is the weird phenomenon of complex, effects-heavy superhero-genre films being put together with enough effort and ability that even an anti-genre elitist like Kenneth Turan can give his reluctant approval. All I can say is that I’m glad the local one-screen theater isn’t showing Oblivion. That vehicle seems to have been choreographed as well as Iron Man 3 while showing so little empathy for a wider audience that it’s difficult to take seriously as an idea, much less as art.

Film is built of moments. Prose does this too but leaves more of the work of creating the feeling up to the reader. Movie directors don’t have this luxury. They must manage the moments for a specified period of time for an ever-expanding toolbox of performance apparatus. A state-of-the-art movie consumes dozens or hundreds of worker-years to produce one and a half to three hours of content. Every moment is managed and the result is a machine of sound and images—and in a theater in Nagoya, 4DX wind and stink—to generate those specific, repeatable feelings.

So when a movie manages to craft a pervasively credible stream of experience that feels like it might be the experiences of interesting human beings, that movie gets good reviews regardless of the genre.

A re-playable sequence of feelings is the goal of film-making and music and poetry and prose. But as I walked home yesterday afternoon after watching the matinee I was getting more stimulation from my environment and the flowing liquid now of the real-world than I got during the film. Perhaps the film created a mental stage for a pleasant feeling in my brain or perhaps a real individual experience will always expose a fundamental pointlessness in art.

Showmanship of Now

The question I had while returning from the movie was how to save the now I was feeling for re-creation later in front of the keyboard. I was walking in a compositional ooze of writing flow without being able to record the words. So I memorized the initial sentence and was later able to recreate a semblance of the moment.

Is that enough? Is the recording and regurgitation of moments a substitute for a personal now? Should I just do my best to spend as much time in the moment as I can and forgo writing about it? A wordless now is a fine enough experience in itself.

But it isn’t only about my personal experience. Nor is it about running and re-running a tape of created feelings as a kind of drug. It is also about communicating one person’s moment to another person. Transmitting or receiving a now between separate people is what makes us people. With that, art loses its pointlessness and the question turns back toward message, craft, audience, and reach.

When I consider that a now can be built, however, I drop out of the now and into the expectations and history that a now-seeker fears. Now is unstable, or at least our consideration of it. But perhaps a large part of the joy of now is the ability to drop into a now-considering state after a sojurn outside. Our consideration can’t only consider now lest we starve.

Cloud Atlas and the filmic gauze (3 of 3)

29 Saturday Dec 2012

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I didn’t publish this back in November because I’ve decided that commenting on pop culture and other people’s work doesn’t really sit well with me. But I want to get it out of my queue, and nothing kills a piece of writing better than publishing it.

I’ve already said some caustic things about the novel (see a few posts down, or up or sideways, however you’re navigating):

“Hopefully in the Wachowski Siblings’ movie it will be the structure, images, and characters that shine through and not the gloomy stereotype of a future.”

And that’s what we got. They even explicitly cleaned up the unreasonable gloominess of all but the most prosthetic of the six stories. Andy, Lana, and Tom Tykwer dissolved the structure as well, switching to an intercutting of the different stories based on context rather than David Mitchell’s nested dolls. While David Edelstein (“You’re Better Off Reading the Book”) disliked the changes made to Mitchell’s darlings, I found that the Wachowski’s changes worked quite well (given the density of the material remaining after the inevitable cutting) and managed to make palatable the most obviously false notes of the novel.

Mainly, though, I noticed that old people love them some sci-fi when it’s conceived by one of their own and shamelessly packaged for and aimed directly at them. The horde of retirees in the audience may have been motivated by a similar desire as my own—be cheap and see the matinée on the Sunday after the film’s release—but the characters who were most easily identified as from our world were also all from the boom generation: the vital heroes of a 1970s thriller and the rattling retirees of a 2010s farce. It’s not a coincidence that elements of the stories also seem drawn largely from a bin of boomer context. In strict chronological order they are:

  • the mendacious and racist Enlightenment— as exposed by boomers in the Civil Rights era
  • pan-sexuality— acknowledged by boomers (with ambivalent caveats) during their grumpy middle age
  • two explicitly boomer stories— empowering fantasies of “fighting the man” by boomers past and present
  • a reactionary vision of middle-future dystopia— as endlessly wanked about by boomers
  • an idyllic beachcomber’s paradise Somewhere Else at the very end— what it all means for boomers

As a film, the density of the remaining material follows the traditional mismatch between the narrative size of novels and movies.

Without having read the novel some of the dialogue would have been incomprehensible, especially Mitchell’s simple patois of the far future. The action was pretty understandable despite this. While I can understand why some readers of the novel would be disappointed with the change from Mitchell’s structure to reg’lar old, filmic intercutting, the joy of watching a film for just a few hours is often in the way a set of disparate moments can be edited together. A novel has a much more difficult time mining this dynamic across several sessions of reading.

At the climax, the Wachowskis maximize this effect when every central character in every story says, indignantly, “I will not be subjected to criminal abuse!” including twice over from the character of Timothy Cavendish, once played by Broadbent as the character experiencing his life now and once played by Tom Hanks playing an aged Tom Hanks in the movie adaptation of Cavendish’s autobiographical novelization, in the 3d-HD-ultra-something-or-other movie of 2020-something being viewed as banned entertainment far in the future. This got a laugh from the bluest of hairs in the audience. They got it and I enjoyed the moment as well.

Given the source material and the limited narrative space of a movie adaptation, the Wachowskis made the right choice in cleaning up some of the down notes and ambiguities, limiting the cast to recurring actors (even though the bit where “white people have freckles and future Koreans must look like androids, while future Korean androids are played by actual Asians” was never anything but jarring). The major false note was the homage to their own work in the action fight sequences of future-Seoul followed by a firefight that looked like it was lifted from an old episode of Stargate SG-1.

Abandoning Mitchell’s measured and recursive structure was a solid choice for the movie. Mitchell’s structure would have made a movie version seem interminable. Those who think otherwise might be dreaming of an eleven-episode television series instead. It’s a solid success for the siblings and Tykwer when it could have been so easy to let Mitchell’s unformed vision guide them to disaster.

Homeland

15 Thursday Nov 2012

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I was never into 24 when it was on. I’d already drawn my conclusion about the torture-porn ticking-time-bomb fantasy so I felt no ambiguity about the show’s main emotional draw.

My starting point is that if our hero has a terrorist in custody and believes that the prisoner has information that is needed to save lives, then the hero should know the state of the art of interrogation and act accordingly. As in: don’t give into the terrorist’s fantasy about being martyred through abuse. And if you go off-book and abuse a prisoner, don’t whine about how the politically-correct justice system won’t allow you to be a properly unaccountable psychopath. In a real-world ticking-time-bomb scenario (has this ever happened, in the entire history of counter-terrorism?), I’m sure the judge will be understanding. Own up to your mistake for the sake of civilization. It’s not like you’re going to be tortured or abused during your probation.

Homeland isn’t about torture, though. It isn’t about terrorism or the power of the aristocrats who treat the State like the family business. Homeland’s thriller context is a simple cloak of fantasy around the relationship between an organically nutty single person and a horribly abused and damaged married person. The show owes its success as much to that dynamic as it does to the cloak and dagger. The fact that the show’s context is stuck in 2005 adds to the draperie of delusion.

It’s important to note that the show is not a delusion playing out in Carrie’s manic brain. Not quite, anyway. That would be too obviously indulgent. In that scenario, Saul Berenson is Carrie’s shrink, (really, Carrie’s shrink is her sister? That fails the delusional smell test on so many levels), the CIA is Carrie’s occasional sanitarium and is also Berenson’s main place of employment. Brody is the poor bastard with severe PTSD and post-concussion syndrome who Carrie is obsessed with and who breezed through Berenson’s care recently (and who Carrie met in group). Looked at cynically, this framework of Carrie’s self-delusion works as a realistic context but doesn’t really have the kind of punch needed to bring in ratings. So that’s not what the show is about.

In the actual show, everyone is deluded, except maybe Brody’s daughter. Not only is Carrie a real (ex-)CIA agent who keeps working cloak-and-dagger jobs, but all kinds of other unlikely things happen as well, including a young and vigorous Dick Cheney who never fell out of the public’s willful suspension of disbelief. The unreality that cloaks all these characters is a major part of the genius of the show. People fall all over themselves to cite the delusional facts of the show in their commentaries, but the real indulgence is watching all the character’s delusions simultaneously instantiated as reality. Also hot, crazy people get it on and don’t quite get away with it.

So maybe I should give 24 another chance. If it’s about something else—the story of a guy who slowly finds himself becoming an violently abusive dad who alienates himself from society and loses himself in work, but not really, so the guy’s guilt doesn’t have to be real—that might actually be interesting.

“A Scause for Applause”

01 Thursday Nov 2012

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I don’t know if I’m just in an especially receptive mood this morning, but Trey and Matt are at their best when they are being most topical with a short lead-time on an issue. Long simmering cultural issues like Mormonism and Scientology lead to funny but schmaltzy equivocation from the team—it’s almost as if they need to be stopped from thinking too much. Last night’s South Park was a masterpiece. In classic form, they didn’t even mention Lance Armstrong by name, but elevated him to Messiah status. That is all. Watch it.

Salon Pokes the Movies: Is Movie Culture Dead?/The Movies are Finished

09 Tuesday Oct 2012

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Late last month, Andrew O’Hehir measured the decline in movie culture as a lack of buzz, or at least as a lack of buzz compared with TV in the last decade.

Today, Salon featured Scott Timberg’s interview with The New Yorker‘s David Denby. His new book is titled Do the Movies have a Future? The general tag for Timberg’s piece is that movies aren’t for adults anymore and their aesthetic value is lost in a sea of genre excitement based on tits, prosthetic penises, and other fantastical effects.

Both these ideas are generally correct. The culture is moving on to longer, more involved mediums of storytelling. TV serials give us more exposure to interesting performers and premises. As an example, look at the fascination with Homeland, an unlikely genre premise that was done to death on 24 and countless thrillers but has been reanimated with emphasis on the psychology of the characters and the performance of Danes and Lewis. Premises have also been enhanced to novelistic complexity in shows like The Wire and Breaking Bad.

What O’Hehir and Denby miss is that the movies have always been, fundamentally, the most limited version of cinema, destined to end up at the back of the bus of cinematic adulthood. When television came along, the assumption in the film industry was that it would be downmarket, less cerebral and more slappy. And for a few decades the prophecy was self-fulfilled: television became “TV” and was limited to amnesiac episodes of generally immature crap while the auteurs went to the movies to work out their ideas over two and three hours rather than fifteen-minute TV acts.

The variable that has changed for some TV shows—not for the amnesiac shit like Jersey Shore and Honey Boo Boo that promises a payoff only in the inevitable perp-walks—is that they are now long form. Almost infinitely long. So long that when a series ends the production team is completely unable to do a proper long-form ending. I feel sorry for the showrunners of Lost and Battlestar Galactica. They got stuck in the transition and then were dumped on by their ungrateful fans. Those fans had signed on for Gilligan’s Isle of Horror and Robots with Vaginas and they loved what they got. But after their expectations were exceeded, they matured and decided they wanted more than just Gilligan’s Isle of Horror and Robots with Vaginas. They wanted Gilligan and Robots to make sense. Not knowing that they were going to be doing quality work for a long time, the genre-breaking quality was doomed from the beginning.

The ultimate restraint on adult complexity, all talent being equal, is length. Many long works can be low quality crap (best-seller lists are full of them) and many short works can be obscure masterpieces of quality. But the median of artistic possibility is governed most directly by the length available.

Length in Cinema

Amnesiac television remains the shortest cinematic medium. In the 1950s shows were ten to fifteen minutes between commercial breaks. Then TV shows expanded into daily collections of acts separated by commercial breaks. Now in their shortest form TV shows have  been cut back down in the form of music videos and the commercials themselves.

Public broadcasting and original programming on cable were able to dispense with commercial breaks in the 70s but were unwilling to get away from the general limit of one hour. This allowed the development of coherent serials which didn’t rely on the amnesia enforced on each daily dose of a show’s formula.

In the 90s DVDs changed our perception of TV into cinematic novels constructed in tightly-formatted regular chapters. Even after the DVD market died this is how many people still watch their shows. Web-based non-TV-channel distribution will allow the length of “chapters” to vary until we see a full duplication of the possibilities of novels in cinematic form.

-ish.

The Poetical-Lyrical Divide

Some key differences remain between novels and cinema: cost of production and what I think of as the poetical-lyrical divide. On the surface, written poetry and sung lyrics are similar mediums, but if you turn a poem into a song there isn’t much for the music to do and lyrics without music seem childish.

So, novels with actors (HBO’s Game of Thrones) will do best when they lose the nerdy details of the novels in favor of the celebrity and pathos of the actors and production. If you consider an acclaimed cinematic series (Homeland, True Blood, Dexter) outside the context of the production and performance you’ll be left with an image of nakedly implausible schlockiness. Cinematic series that attempt to defy this divide will increasingly fail to become popular: Mad Men, Treme. Novels that go the other way, substituting schlock for complexity, will do the same as they’ve always done*** except that now they’ll be competing more directly with Here Comes Snooki Choo-Choo!.

Compared with cinema, books will still win on cost. The future of movies is pretty set: a short form for schlock or lyrical vignettes, but the future of books relies on containing the smartest option… without falling too far behind the accessibilty of tits-n-splosion cinema.

***(See volume #84002 of the ongoing series, My Bosoms are on Fire with Passion for my Billionaire, or #65470 of the series Chappy McKeel Builds Leverage in the Paramilitary Explosion Center)

Moist and Fragrant Fruit of Villainy / Cloud Atlas 2 of 3

24 Monday Sep 2012

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I’ve been thinking about this post for nearly two weeks now, bad for my status as a blogger I know, which is funny in itself. This post began as a glib and valueless bit of snark about Mitt Romney’s inability to simply buy the election. Then as September 11th evolved, Mitt-ish events climbed up a tree and began throwing poo at everyone. As a result, this post has had to evolve in my subconscious before I could address it properly. To take my mind off it I’ve consumed Scinemax’s Strike Back, loading up my forebrain with soft-core sex and explosions.

I also read David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas as part of another blogligation. There are parallels in what I have to say about both things—Mitt Romney and Cloud Atlas, not my speculation about whether we’ll be treated to Rhona Mitra in the the buff.

Cloud Atlas and Conventions of Literary Futurism

Cloud Atlas is a fine book with some flaws. Its structure is its most distinctive feature and it is David Mitchell himself that makes the best non-spoiler comment about it, in the voice of Robert Frobisher:

Spent the fortnight gone in the music room, reworking my year’s fragments into a “sextet for overlapping soloists”: piano, clarinet, ‘cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor: in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan’t know until it’s finished, and by then it’ll be too late, but it’s the first thing I think of when I wake, and the last thing I think of before I fall asleep, even if J. is in my bed. She should understand, the artist lives in two worlds.

The structure is not a flaw except in the shameless way it requires the reader to complete the book to figure out if it’s any good, or at least not too annoying. The book is, in fact, not too annoying, but that’s because only three-elevenths of the story is set in the future. Like so many works of literary futurism, Mitchell’s take on the future is a tragically sad bit of angsty, tearjerking humbuggery.

Margaret Atwood and seemingly every other future vision that gains acclaim in the literary world presents technology as magically self-defeating when it is mixed with human agency. Our moral flaws will lead us to a techno-doom where the best we can hope for is to sink into an illiterate, unremembering de-evolutionary twilight. Because of… slavery, plague, and cannibalism? These are sins and afflictions that have only been undercut in a lasting way by technology, libraries, and human communication, but in the future they get worse?

Mitchell follows in these footsteps. Sigh.

Democracy’s Denouement Deemed Robotic and Out-of-Touch

Carefully limited communication and controlled presentation of information have been the foundation element of another, less literary trope. On Fox News, the bravest face they’ve been able to put on their latest losing endeavor is to embrace the world of Mitt Romney’s “gaffes.” “Own it!” they cry. Regarding the very latest, they declare that the 47% is indeed lazy and doesn’t pay taxes—directly in the face of evidence to the contrary and confusion about which 47% is being referred to at any one moment. For example, the 47% that (in theory) don’t pay income tax are not the same 47% that are committed to Obama. White working poor are overrepresented in the first group but underrepresented in the second. If the number “47” is really a thing, it is a coincidence. Conflating these various populations is similar to the idea of not having to worry about the thirty thousand people killed by guns every year because the same thirty thousand people have already been killed in traffic accidents. *

*Note, I’m not claiming that 30k people are being killed every year by either cause. If they were, however, they would be separate populations. And yes, I realize that the mutual exclusivity of these populations is the exact opposite fallacy. Think of it this way: if it were possible to be both killed by gunfire and a traffic accident in one year, being killed by gunfire would not necessarily mean you’d have to be killed in a traffic accident. My point is that there are many wrong ways of looking at a number.

Going back to the most recent September 11th exercise which spawned my extended spasm of paralyzed amusement, Fox and Romney both pushed the meme “Obama apologized for the 1st amendment!” in the middle of an ongoing, tragic international crisis. This was a hastily designed fantasy for insertion into our moral consciousness. Instead of taking hold in the larger world, the idea paused during its consumption in other channels. The charge became news in itself: contemplated, considered and ridiculed, becoming a complete reversal of the intended propaganda. Typical for this campaign cycle, Romney and his fellow travelers have not been able to convert their corporate power and wealth directly into corporeal power. The attempt to do so is becoming more nakedly transparent.

I’ll leave aside the possibility of a conspiracy by the librul media to distort everything Romney does into a caricature of badly-calculated and cockeyed flailings. I’m going to assume for the sake of argument that Romney is what he appears to be: a well-connected finance operator who has swum far away from his native audience of like-minded investor douchebags, political operatives and doting but blinded fellow Mormons.

 Malthus Takes a Holiday

From the point of view of a writer of science-fiction, the hilarious failure of the Corporate CEO-King in the real world poses a dilemma: how do we take seriously the ever-raining cyberpunk twilight of franchise municipalities and walking organ farms?  Why instead is the Romney Future turning out to be the finely-combed tip of a cold and putrescently melting berg of incompetent LaRouchiite zombies who rant about mud people and the fall of Gold from Holy Grace? Why is Papa Song sucking so badly at his job?

One issue is the fact that a common trope of the future, the inevitability of Malthusian collapse, is being found wanting in the real world. It was found wanting in the 19th century in England; it was found wanting in the mid-20th century in Europe, Russia, Japan and the United States; it was found wanting in China, Korea, Turkey and Iran in the late 20th, and the Malthusian Apocalypse is found wanting everywhere else which has educated the other half of its population and given it the right not to be baby-slaves.

So Malthus and his collapse isn’t looking so inevitable as he did twenty or thirty or two hundred years ago. Yet in Cloud Atlas he appears in the corporate future as a revered prophet in statue form. It’s appropriate that the evil corporate state put it there but the statue should be a forgotten target of ridicule—or just target practice—and not a warning.

I Blame George Lucas

Because why not? Yes, his dystopias seemed hip and edgy in the 70s but it turns out that like every other evidence-averse, reactionary democracy-hater working in fantasy and science fiction, he’s a frightened amoral zombie making up cockeyed bullshit to warn us of an even worse horde of frightened amoral zombies hot on his heels. Or robots with magic underwear.

Since then, to guarantee an audience the future has to be crappy with acid-spewing aliens popping out of every cavity and neutral, atmospheric endings turned ludicrously happy or “properly” edgy and depressing.

And somewhere in there vampires became killable. Was that Lucas? Or was it Ann Rice gone wild with world-building? Vampires (the past) should be known, respected, and feared while people (the future) should be imagined to continue existing, being born, living, and dying, regardless of the plastic-to-ichor ratio of their flesh.

I Don’t Blame David Mitchell

Whaddaya gonna do? The book needed eyeballs and it was published eight years ago when corporate idiots seemed destined to be in charge forever, so if less than a third of the book makes me feel manipulated and grumpy, I can live with that given its redeeming features.

Cloud Atlas is a cleverly crafted work with engaging structure and images and several interesting characters. That may be the reverse of the typically successful formula but it works here. Hopefully in the Wachowski Siblings’ movie it will be the structure, images, and characters that shine through and not the gloomy stereotype of a future.