Television: 30 Rock, Alec Baldwin and the Zone

Tina Fey & Alec Baldwin (30 Rock)

When 30 Rock came on almost 3 seasons minus a writer's strike ago, there was the temptation to dismiss it as lightweight based on the logical, though erroneous, equation that whimsical, freakish comedy must come from whimsical, freakish, undisciplined, spontaneous, flying by the seat of your pants comedy writing and writers. And if that is so, then one couldn't be faulted for misconstruing 30 Rock scripts to, perhaps, what happens when court reporters are present when SNL writers take benzo trips.

There is a Tod Browning side to 30 Rock; like a Macy day's parade of asylum inmates, the show is full of ideas that appeal to that same instinct in all of us that slows down on the highway to take in the details of a pile up. Like in the season 2 episode where Tina Fey's character is surprised to find a leftover pop tart beneath her couch but eats it anyway, only to find out later that her new room mate, Pete, and his wife have not only been sneaking into her apartment for lunch time sex but have found a way to use pop tarts as a sex toys -- ewww!!!

30 Rock stays on the burlesque side of the carnivalesque, yet it relishes the props of the carnival: dwarfs, clowns, drag, the retarded, the mentally handicap, skewed sexuality and genders, bawdy humor, etc. Thus in the carnival aesthetic, 30 Rock finds:

...a grotesque realism, which turns conventional aesthetics on its head in order to locate a new kind of popular, convulsive, rebellious beauty... the anticannonical... the antigrammatical... (Shohat & Stam).

That might be a little bit over the top for 30 Rock, but you know what I mean. The genius of 30 Rock, however, resides in how the smart writing that keeps Liz Lemon tripping over her suppressed freakishness and other charms, keeps the rest of the carnivaleque, the anticannonical, the antigramatical and, at times, just plain old madness -- i.e., Kenetth's birthday party -- from spilling over into indulgence and problems with plot and episodic structure, and this is where I believe Alec Baldwin's character, Jack Donaghy, serves as a structural ploy that makes the show work.

While Liz's character is still finding herself and stumbling now and then into the freaky cellars of her soul, her threadbare jaded, oil silk boss, Jack Donaghy, uses his own freaky cellars to store wine and most likely Azerbaijan porn. Jack is Borgie and Gekko barely contained in a suit. His been there, done that liberalism capped by his Republican imperial street smarts and absolute belief in the God of capitalism gives the show its anchor; we rest assured that Jack is always 18 moves ahead and will fix anything that the show's madness--both 30 Rock and TGS with Tracy Morgan-- can break.

In other words, Jack, in terms of the plotting of most 30 Rock episodes, is really a walking deux ex machina, but a good looking one in $2000 Salvatore Ferragamo shoes. His character is a structural ploy which allows the show to devote the time it takes to pull off a carnival world of aberrations, mannerisms and quirk, because his character, like a frat boy quashing a beer can on his head, towards the end of the episode will wave his executive wand and help condense or eliminate all the plotting/logic it would have taken to solve maybe the twist in the A or B storyline into snippet of absurd business and compromise.

But then there is Alec Baldwin's acting. When it comes to Baldwin--the one and only true Jack Ryan by the way--it appears he is not handicapped by a movie star's limited range even though he his, himself, a bona fide movie star.

Baldwin does not disappear into roles the way Sean Pean or a Daniel Day Lewis would and do. On Broadway as the liberal yet repressed and traumatized Ed in Entertaining Mr. Sloane or on in film as "put the coffee down" sales agent Blake in David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross or on television as the conniving, bi-curious Malcolm on Will & Grace, Baldwin is essentially the same star; recognizable as Alec Baldwin in all of those roles, but yet able to disappear, with credibility, into all these roles, characters and persona, making all of them, memorably, his own.

So, my guess to how he makes it work boils down to the impeccable timing of his delivery. He doesn't necessarily channel a character the way other actors can, but somehow, through phrasing, his use of pauses and that oil slick cue and timing, he gets across to an audience the unique code to each character he plays. Like a jazz artist, it is the choices he makes, as in where on the scale to place a word or the pause, that help him get across not the character as such but more or less the sense of that character's unique logic and cognition.

Even when he plays Jack Donaghy playing in therapy scene every member in Tracy Morgan's family in season 2 or, in this season, when he plays a villain from his girlfriend's mother's Mexican telenovela who bears a striking resemblance to who else but Jack Donaghy, Baldwin, even in parody mode, still manages to phrase and deliver in a way that eventually pulls you in and sells the character, absurdity and all, to you.

Those two emmy winning scenes, however, still pale in comparison to Baldwin's Hulu superbowl commercial:



Maybe Baldwin really is an alien and all this is just how aliens roll. Either way, Alec Baldwin (and 30 Rock) is in the zone.

Media: Even I Could See This Kindling Coming

Two weeks ago I was writing here in my vacuum about the Kindle 2, and in parting some of my thoughts were:

3. The Reader: Some of us love books so much that we really don't give a rat's ass who reads it to us on our way to work -- KITT or James Earl Jones, it's all the same to me. But i'm sure others will beg to differ.

4. Technology: Until a 3rd party device comes along that will allow those $7 books on the kindle to be downloaded and read out loud on an Ipod, I doubt audio books have anything to fear.

5. Rights: Aren't the rights to the book and the rights to the audio reading 2 separate things?

Roy Blount Jr., president of the Author's Guild, just penned an op-ed in The New York Times that would make any copyright lawyer salivate:

Kindle 2 can read books aloud. And Kindle 2 is not paying anyone for audio rights....

Audio rights are not generally packaged with e-book rights. They are more valuable than e-book rights. Income from audio books helps not inconsiderably to keep authors, and publishers, afloat. What the guild is asserting is that authors have a right to a fair share of the value that audio adds to Kindle 2’s version of books.

You may be thinking that no automated read-aloud function can compete with the dulcet resonance of Jim Dale reading “Harry Potter” or of authors, ahem, reading themselves. But the voices of Kindle 2 are quite listenable.

There’s even a male version and a female version. (A book by, say, Norman Mailer on Kindle 2 might do a brisk business among people wondering how his prose would sound in measured feminine tones.) And that sort of technology is improving all the time. I.B.M. has patented a computerized voice that is said to be almost indistinguishable from human ones. This voice is programmed to include “ums,” “ers” and sighs, to cough for attention, even to “shhh” when interrupted.

Strike 2. But Amazon's legal department isn't stupid. It appears their loop hole out of this pickle will be to re-define Kindle's text-to-speech function as feature for blind readers, to which Blount says, "No way!!!":

On the National Federation of the Blind’s Web site, the guild is accused of arguing that it is illegal for blind people to use “readers, either human or machine, to access books that are not available in alternative formats like Braille or audio.”

In fact, publishers, authors and American copyright laws have long provided for free audio availability to the blind and the guild is all for technologies that expand that availability. (The federation, though, points out that blind readers can’t independently use the Kindle 2’s visual, on-screen controls.) But that doesn’t mean Amazon should be able, without copyright-holders’ participation, to pass that service on to everyone.

The guild is also accused of wanting to profiteer off family bedtime rituals. A lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation sarcastically warned that “parents everywhere should be on the lookout for legal papers hauling them into court for reading to their kids.”

For the record: no, the Authors Guild does not expect royalties from anybody doing non-commercial performances of “Goodnight Moon.” If parents want to send their children off to bed with the voice of Kindle 2, however, it’s another matter.

That last line was priceless. Well, let the bum rush begin.

Somalia: The Revolution Will Be YouTubed

ABCs by K'naan. Album: Troubadour. Label: A&M / Octone Records, February 24, 2009.

Somali rapper K'naan dropped his first studio album a few hours ago. Like a true African he pays his respects here to the elders of the form as he, literally, tips over a 40 by tag teaming with Brooklyn and Chubb Rock to take back Ebbets field, if you catch my drift.

Madagascar: "Just Follow the Money" -- Deep Throat

There is no doubt foreign investment is coming to Africa in a big way, but it is shocking at how disruptive anticipated injections of FDI can be. From Somalia to Madagascar we see examples of political players initiating and perpetuating conflicts as they jostle for position to catch the bride's FDI bouquet or use it as an issue to leverage some other form of political power. 

Last week, analysts, the BBC reported, said Madagascar's decision to lease the vast quantity of land to South Korean firm, Daewoo, was a background factor to the recent surge of political violence in the country:

Last year it was reported:

Daewoo Logistics, a South Korean company best known for its automobile production, has secured rights to develop 1.3 million hectares in Madagascar; 1 million will be used to grow corn and 300,000 will be used for palm oil production. This scheme will enable Daewoo to produce 10,000 tons of corn in 2010 and 5 million tons of corn annually – more than half of South Korea’s annual need - once the land is fully developed, which will take about 15 years. Daewoo plans to manage its plantations directly and use labor from South Africa. The area that Daewoo will be planting in Madagascar is approximately equivalent to 240 large US farms. Currently, South Korea imports corn primarily from the US. In 2007 the US harvested approximately 37 million hectares of corn, and is expected to harvest about 32 million in 2008.

Now the BBC reports that Daewoo is backpedalling:

"We are not in a rush to push for the plan and want it to be delayed because weak corn prices and difficult financing conditions have made the deal less attractive," said Shin Dong-hyun, who is in charge of the project at Daewoo. "Political instability in the country has also reduced its merit...we have done everything we are obliged to do under the contract and are awaiting a response from the Madagascar government to take the next step."

So it seems while President Marc Ravalomanana has strongly backed the deal, which would create hundreds of jobs for Madagascan farm workers, professional DJ and major of Antananarivo Andry Rajoelina has used the issue instead to legitimate an opposition movement and swell up his ranks by saying the Daewoo deal meant too many farmers would lose control of their land.

"...Follow the Money."

Africa: Russia Feeds the Junkie's Habit

props: Free Market Fairy Tales

Rosoboronexport is Russia's McDonnell Douglas and Boeing all in one, and according to this IPS report the state owned exporter of all things arms and armament plans to increase its export of Russian armament and military equipment to Africa over the next four to five years. The report states:

Rosoboronexport's deputy director, Viktor Komardin, told IPS in an interview that, "in the last few years, positive changes have become evident in Russia's military and technical cooperation with African states. "In spite of the intense competition in the market, the export of armaments by Russia since 2001 has attained a steady growth and in 2008 it reached a high volume. The expansion of supply volumes manifests itself in the growth of Russian products in different countries and regions on the continent," he asserted

The African soldier or rebel soldier disrupts, displaces and kills, which means there will always be a lucrative market for anyone who wants to help him do those things well. The IPS report states African states purchased 1.1 billion dollars worth of arms from Russia between 2000 and 2007. And how are these states paying for $1.1 billion worth of arms one might ask. I just love how Rosoboronexport's general director Anatoly Isaykin words the answer:

Russia was ready to offer potential customers in Africa "alternative and flexible" forms of payment for military equipment. This includes the creation of joint ventures in the fishing industry, mining and oil industries, exclusive rights for exploration of natural resources in African countries and deliveries of traditional goods such as diamonds, cotton and coffee. "These offers give our African customers additional opportunities to acquire Russian-made military equipment," Isaykin added.

A "recent energy deal in Algeria," this newsweek report from 2007 confirms, went "hand in hand with $4 billion in arms sales from Moscow." From 1.1 to 4 billion in 2007 alone is a big leap. So even if the numbers fuzzy, we still a pretty good indicator that Africa's big or small arms market is a growing boon for suppliers willing to take "alternative and flexible" forms of payment.

The capitalist doctrine of "free markets" assumes we all make up a realm of self preserving individuals trading in our own best interests. But the fact is that in the absence of many socio-economic fundamentals in Africa, the term "best interests" soon becomes any and all means to attain or hold on to power, hence, coming from a capitalist context the term "best interests" in relation to many African conflicts and players becomes meaningless.

The interested party always deems its interest the "best" and all kinds of interests are "best" in all kinds of contexts. If that relativity holds then the inability for a state or group, due to exceptional social and economic conditions, to give meaning to the term "best interests" means that theoretically that state or group should not be allowed to trade in a free market because it is in no condition to define what its "best interests" are. But capitalism does not work that way and it's doubtful it would use such a theory even if it could. In the meantime, as long as there exists no criteria by which to judge whether or not a group or state has the ability to ascertain its "best interests," then the only criteria to go with is its ability to pay.

Under that aegis, Rosoboronexport's job is then to sell arms to those who want them. Rosoboronexport's job is not to define what Africans' "best interests" ought to be and whether or not the arms being sold are in line with those interests.

So the question is are the Russians aiding and abetting conflicts in Africa? Of course they are.

But unlike a bartender who can refuse to sell anymore alcohol or a referee who can stop a boxing bout when both bartender and referee deem the customer too wasted to continue, capitalism on the other hand says there is no way to make that kind of call, especially in the free arms market. Rosoboronexport's spokespersons are therefore absolved by capitalist logic, and if you think of the following spokesperson as a bartender in a town where there are only bad drunks and he is facing fierce competition from other bars and therefore can't afford to turn away any drunk, then, when same logic is applied to arms sales, there is no need for the Rosoboronexport's spokesperson to even deny Russia's role in African conflicts since capitalist logic chucks it up to free market competition:

...the arms trade is in fact part of many countries. Besides Russia, the majority of Western countries and China and Brazil are involved in it. "I believe that if Russia, or any other country, stops selling arms to Africa, this will not result in an immediate end to the conflicts as some argue. The parties involved in these endless conflicts in Africa will easily find other sources of purchasing and securing arms. "I am sure that the arms trade deepens the conflicts further, but it is by no means the primary cause," Bondarenko added. The conflicts are the outcome of a mixture of Africa society's internal problems - ethnic and religious differences, the struggle for power and weak economy - and the interests of western corporations in Africa, he maintained. There are vivid examples of conflicts centered round diamond and other mineral extraction in western and southern Africa.

By the way, if you are in for some dark humor it's worth checking out Free Market Fairy Tales . The site runs an African infantry man of the year competition and collects pics of so called "Infantry men," critiquing everything from their poses to their combat gear.

Friday

 

Hunting for Witches by Bloc Party. Album: A Weekend in the City. Vice Records, 2007.Staring at the Sun by T.V. On Radio. Album: Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes. Touch & Go Records, 2004.

Two front men of Nigerian descent face off here: Kele Okereke of Bloc Party and Tunde Adebimpe of TV On the Radio.

Listening to Bloc Party takes you on a bender, the kind where you're left genderless and sexually equivocal, not to mention bloated; like you attended too many spoken word parties or took the equivalent dosage of politics, poetry and culture studies through a catheter. But since it tastes like a very good strawberry milkshake spiked with mushrooms brought to the party by someone bullied, thus supposedly harmless, you are like, "who cares -- let's cut a rug." Meanwhile T.V on the Radio, like a head on collision between the Smashing Pumpkins and Radiohead, have managed to come up with a visual and sonic universe that's uniquely theirs and into which listeners enter on TVOR's terms.

Germany: Galactus Will Be So Pissed at These Guys

There is something eerie about what these guys have just mashed together and how accessible it is. Okay, I get that there will a projection of Google earth unfolding earth's terrain to co-ordinates fed to it by their C# computer prog which reads and translates what's coming from the wii board's sensors, generated by the weight/tilt, actions/reactions of whoever is surfing on it. To wit, what Matthiew and Simon have done is turn Google earth into a giant arcade and re-imagined a wii board and its rider as its joystick. Because of the cannibalization angle, i'm not even sure you can call this a mash up.

The fact that, in interaction with a 3D map, I can be on a long distance call with my girlfriend in, let's say, Portugal, and at the same time do a "silver surfer" over her house or hover over her street, even if its not in real time, is still pretty mind boggling.

But back to the eeriness. My guess is it all stems from how these guys bring back the specter of Baudrillard to hunt the crap out of us:

Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the [Google] map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.

This representational imaginary, which both culminates in and is engulfed by the cartographer's mad project of an ideal coextensivity between the map and the territory, disappears with simulation ... The real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models - and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times. It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more than operational. In fact, since it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all. It is a hyperreal: the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.

...Never again will the real have to be produced: this is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection which no longer leaves any chance even in the event of death.

A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated generation of difference.

Meh!

Mali: The Revolution Will be YouTubed

M'Bifo by Rokia Traore. Album: Bowmboï, Label: Nonesuch, 2004

Aesthetics: The Politics of the Comic Image

I don't know if political communicators have Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics on their night stands, but whether they do or not, McCloud's idea that the ability of comic/cartoon images to communicate is rooted in the same iconic need that strips our mental images down to that bare minimum necessary for signification.

In the political realm, the parying down of a candidate's features down to the basic impressions needed for his or her recognition lends to McCloud's reasoning that cartoons, like the mental images we use in thinking, focus our attention through simplification. By eliminating superfluous features, they amplify the features that remain as we see in this campaign poster Tzipi Livni, head of Israel's Kadima party.

So, while a face drawn with great detail can represent only one specific person, a face drawn with few details comes closer to the level of a mental image; as in the kind of mental images we reduce or adjoin our abstract ideas to -- i.e., green = conservation, red = danger, caution or stop etc.

In the case of Livni, the reduction of her image to the cartoony facsimile closer to a mental image makes it easier to equate this minimum of resemblance to her own variation of an Obamaesque call for optimism and hope, captured in the play on her name to spell "believni." (Tzipi wasn't the only one ripping of the O)

Rather than conjure up ways or catch phrases for a politician to explain abstract ideas such as optimism and hope, in the present political clime, we simply reduce the politician, visually, to the mental equivalent that allows said politician blend with--or cognitively substitute his or her image for-- the abstractions or ideas he or she is promising the voters.

But since this is about communication, there is also a case to be made for reception. According to McCloud:

When two people interact, they usually look directly at one another, seeing their partner's features in vivid detail...Each one also sustains a constant awareness of his or her own face, but this mind-picture is not nearly so vivid; just a sketchy arrangement...a sense of shape...a sense of general placement... Something as simple and basic as a cartoon... Thus, when you look at a photo or a realistic drawing of a face, you see it as the face of another... But when you enter the world of the cartoon, you see yourself... The cartoon is a vacuum into which our identity and awareness are pulled, an empty shell that we inhabit which enables us to travel into another realm. We don't just observe the cartoon, we become it!

I guess what McCloud is saying is that the more we dial the specificity down without jeopardizing the bare distinguishing feature essential to a logic that gets across the cognition of resemblance or analogy, the closer we get to the iconic. In other words, the parying of a person's distinguishing traits down to the essential trait that anchors its logic of signification brings whoever views the pared down cartoony image to the crux of how it re-presents; it takes the viewer to the level of the sign or symbol (a symbol is a conventional sign) where one is brought into interaction with that re-presentation/substitution that lets the image mean what it means, or what, by extension, it is purporting to mean.

That interaction is integral to how a pared down image communicates; it is an interaction into which, according to McCloud, "our identity and awareness are pulled" because I think what is erased from the image assumes we have the knowledge to fill in the gaps, and that assumption, in itself, certifies what we know and thereby legitimates our identities and subjectivities, which are anchored to what we know (it's kind of similar to what I was saying at the tale end of this post).

But what I'm saying here is that pared down cartoony images make for good politics because they communicate in a way that depends on what the viewer already knows about the world and, as a result, it legitimates that viewer's subjectivity and the identity built on it. The more pared down the image, the more the gaps to be filled (very McLuhanesque, right?), the more the need for closure, the more it ascertains what we already know, and by ascertaining what we know the more, like a mirror, the more it signifies us back to ourselves.


The completely pared down cartoon image as in the smiley or non smiling face draws us all in because, in recognizing what it represents, the parts that have been left out of it makes the correct assumption about what we know about the world -- period.

And even though politicians cannot strip their images all the way down to a smiley face, they can still render in their images enough gaps to make that right assumption about what we know and, thus, tap into that self signifying power we all derive from the process.

USA: Miracle on the Hudson -- The Sequel

Using the Miracle on the Hudson, Dan Roam, author of The Back of a Napkin, visualizes how Barack is going to "pilot" us out of this mess.

click to enlarge

Props: from Dan Roam's blog

Friday

How I Could Just Kill A Man by Cypress Hill. Album: Cypress Hill. Label: Ruff House, Columbia, 1991. Covered by Rage Against the Machine. Album: Renegades. Label: Epic Records, 2000.



B-Real's whiny vocals scratching their way over DJ Muggs horror music cues, seismic bass fault lines, and psychedelic landscapes is still one of the most seductive things that's ever come out of the West Coast. 3 ethnic rage anthems blasted out of the 90s: Insane in the Membrane, I Could Just Kill a Man, and House of Pain's Jump Around -- all produced by Muggs. You now take one of them, plug it into Tom Morello's guitar and De Rocha's mic and watch RATM make perfection hit the fan. Oh, and don't forget the African connection.



"Here is something you cant understand, how I could just kill a man."

Nigeria: Lagos to Seattle -- The Critical Architecture of Rem Koolhaas

I met Rem Koolhaas in Lagos in 2000, a few months before he went on to win the pritzker prize for architecture.

He had brought his Harvard architecture PhD class working with him on "The Harvard Project on the City" to Lagos to study why and how, with all evidence to the contrary, the city works. Koolhaas, even as part of an hand full on architecture's cutting edge, is the quintessential outlier. A crusader of the crazy theory that modernist forms of control and planning are illusions and, instead, he seeks to celebrate cities that lack a maker.

Cities like Lagos and emerging cities like Pearl River Delta area of China, according to Koolhaas, operate like self regulating organisms whose only plan is to improvise their survival, and for Koolhaas there is a failure on the part of traditional architectural approaches to look beyond the slums of such cities to comprehend what's happening. Rem says:

Anguish over the city's shortcomings in traditional urban systems obscures the reasons for the continued, exuberant existence of Lagos and other megacities like it. These shortcomings have generated ingenious, critical alternative systems.

Many people complain that Rem observes places like Lagos, spews out beautiful design books, but solves nothing. Karl Sharro over at culture wars puts it quite bluntly:

Despite this flash of insight, Koolhaas still hesitates to offer any vision of how Lagos can deal with its problems, how it can build on this existing structure, 'the original model' as he calls it, and get back on track, so to speak. When quizzed about that by Funmi Iyanda, the presenter of a popular TV breakfast show The New Dawn, Koolhaas squirms his way out of giving any meaningful response. This is an astounding level of restraint from an architect, and is indicative of the profession's state of helplessness. After four years of 'research' in Lagos, Koolhaas, arguably one of the key voices in the architectural zeitgeist, still has nothing to offer. To do so would interfere with the mystification he is trying to bring back to our understanding of the city: it is beyond our grasp and, more importantly, beyond our control.

I can see where Sharro is coming from but he (or she) left out something vital to the way Koolhaas thinks. Koolhaas's restraint, at times frustrating, is rooted in the suspicion and guardedness that comes with a postmodern attitude. Remember that this is a guy who's always railing against the modernist premise of order and control. You can't expect solutions to urban problems from an architect who doesn't want to fall under the modern spell that we can come up with solutions to social problems based on objectivist models of human behavior; in other words, these guys don't want to end up like George Hellmuth, Minoru Yamasaki, and the Pruitt-Igoe housing project.

Anyway, in terms of Lagos, the Harvard Project on the City led to this, this, this and this -- I was involved in the very early stages of the last one :-)

That said, it was fascinating to watch Rem's former OMA U.S. partner Joshua Prince-Ramus explain at TED the design evolution of the Seattle Central Library:



Watching Prince-Ramus' presentation reveals why Koolhaas studies emerging cities in the developing world.

Even as they break with the high modernist myth that an overall order or grid akin to an international style can solve all problems and their chagrin at the ideology of the modern as a whole, Koolhaas and Prince-Ramus, when all is said and done, are still hard core modernists -- albeit, critical ones. Their buildings deal with very specific human problems revolving around convenience, change and adaptation rather than social problems or buildings embodying some kind of vision of social engineering disguised as urban planning.

It appears what they do is try to isolate and foresee, in relation to a specific project, where the control approach or rational/erasure approach of high modernism is going to fail the non-objectivist, unpredictable vagaries of human behavior, needs, and expectations. Thus, their critical modernist architecture and buildings are not bulkheaded skyscrapers of cement and glass, who, like immovable lolly pop ladies, try to, based on the architect's modernist agenda, direct, determine, or funnel people through engineered answer to a social problem. Rather, this is a critical architecture that tries to make nimbler buildings; structures whose design and function compensate and make room for something high modernism refuses to acknowledge -- what it does not yet know. At the end of the day, what we have here is a kind of architecture that confronts the fact that when it comes to nature, human beings, and the future, no one knows Jack -- or Jill

So it becomes clear why Koolhaas studies and praises the improvisational chaos of urbanities in the developing world. In cities like Lagos are modern frameworks that have long ago been outstripped by population growth and infrastructure decline. Where else can you see, in the starkest and most fluid terms, the everyday, living, breathing criticism of, and improvisations to escape, the arrest and inevitable bankruptcy of modern planning.

DRC: The Revolution Will Be YouTubed

L’amour n’existe pas (live) performed by Koffi Olomide and Cindy le Coeur. Album: Bord Ezanga Kombo(Album sans titre), Diego Music, 2008.



No matter what one thinks of soukous and its mandated entourages of rump rolling, butt shaking girls, whenever Olomide has a chance to slow it down to a Tcha Tcho (from his 1990 album) and lets that Papa Wemba influence flow through, dude, you just have to put down what you're smoking and give the man is due -- the cat can croon. Even the CMJ New Music Report calls him Paris' "sultan of swoon."

However, Cindy le Coeur's voice is what makes the opening duet work. She's Koffi's Lisa Hannigan.

Zimbabwe: Tsvangirai Joins the Evil Empire

Open an X File and file this under "bizarre"....

USA: Rage Against the Code

Youtube is currently screening Raymond Gayle's documentary Electric Purgatory: The Fate of the Black Rocker (2006) for Black History Month. This doc deals with the same concerns but covers some more cultural real estate than James Spooner's 2006 Afro-Punk.

Derrick Martin's schooling on all the rockers that came through Little Richard alone is worth the price of admission. ?uestlove of The Roots, however, goes on to break down the few modes of representation available to black rockers within the strict limits of American mainstream comprehension. ?uest muses:

There are really only 4 or 5 departments that black musicians can fit themselves in to get mass acceptance. There is no such thing as normalcy. U2 can be normal; you know... just a normal group -- they play rock. Other cats can be normal but when you are dealing with black men, especially playing rock music, you either have to be...

1. ...a vicarious scary fantasy, and i'm going to use hip hop examples cause, basically, hip hop is rock, you know the whole rebel image and everything. Look at 50 cent. People are more interested with the 9 bullets that went through his body than the fact that he is a credible MC. So you either have to scare a muthafucker or you can be...

2. ...apolitical, ambiguous -- Prince, Michael Jackson, the mass acceptance of the 2 big twin towers of the 80s.

3. ... or you can be the pop single. It worked for Living Color -- "Cult of Personality." A song that's catchy, its pop, the album goes platinum. Be really politically correct; entertain; sorta shuckin' and jivin'. Too many minstrel examples in hip hop to even start naming names. But just turn on MTV. It doesn't have to be black face. Black face just gets replaced by diamonds and Bentleys, but it's still shuckin' and jivin'.

4. ... and the last route you can take is the artistic merit route but artistic merit from [black men] really falls on deaf ears unless you've got something else going on... [which ties into...]

5 ... also there's the "mandingo factor"; you gotta be on some sex, vicarious fantasy; the over sexed black man shit. Unless you got that or something going on you can't survive on art alone.

What ?uestlove is saying is that, at times, a black musician's character, history and subject matter is too layered to fit into any of those 5 routes without losing something that's vital to that musician's identity or to what he or she or a band is trying to express. White rockers don't seem to have that problem because they have more possibilities or routes to play with, and with enough possibilities; a wide enough range; or with loose enough parameters of enunciation, comes normalcy -- hence, whites simply play rock -- period.

If we want to get into the ideological reeds here, it seems to me that the inability to conceive of the black rocker in the American mainstream, even by black audiences, is a postcolonial problem. It comes from a systemic invisibility, which categorically offers the postcolonial phenomenon, individual, or object to the space of symbolization—and hence the world—as a non-existing or inconceivable category.

If we go by Foucault, then, this “inability” to re-present, cognize, comprehend, and thus accept newness in terms of postcolonial emergence stems from the fact that human beings do not operate within a conceptual free market of ideas. The space of symbolization does not automatically generate the representations necessary for the recognition or acceptance of “new” objects, images, and ideas as the need arises.

In the cultural mainstream the sight of a black rocker or rock and roll band presents an heterogeneous multiplicity: a profusion of contradictory themes, beliefs, and representations that assaults what the rational process of representation or meaning production needs for the expediency of re-cognition. In other words, the way we reason and the cementing, over time, of certain routes of cognition (ideology) like those routes to acceptance ?uestlove talks about, function to counter or contain heterogeneity. In containing the possibility of alternatives and multi-dimensionality when it comes to blackness, these ways of comprehension and entrenched routes to it, function to limit the possibilities of interpreting and comprehending the "new" especially when it comes to blackness.

A limited range of enunciation makes it easier, as Foucault is likely to say, for particular relations, rather than others, between conceptual objects to emerge, become emphasized, and a regime of preferred meanings established for the objects and the relationships between them --- i.e., rock and roll and whiteness.

What sits at the intersection of the expediency necessary for us to re-cognize representations and the entrenched routes of reasoning that develop can be called codes. Codes are the rules that fix the relationship between the world as signifier and the world of the signified. Codes imbue the constancy, the redundancy, and all the pre-conceptual preferences used in the creation, organization, and presentation of knowledge. Thus, codes are rules that precede our cognition and are, indeed, the persistent rational principles or characteristics of organization that ensures re-cognition in the most efficient ways possible. Simply put, codes, using Sesame Street parlance, tells us what belongs with each other and what doesn't belong. But that's not all -- there is more to codes.

Our identities are also at stake within these codes. By suppressing all kinds of multi-dimensionality codes produce certain coherences and relations, rather than others, between the world of objects. We put our trust in these relations which form the tapestry we refer to as knowledge, and it is to this certain alignment of knowledge; this constancy of relations imbued by codes, that our subjectivities (our place in world of objects) become anchored to.

Other interpretations of things or heterogeneity disrupts not only the code but also the tapestry and constancy of relations that make up what we know, and thus if our identities, individualities, and sense of who we are are based on what we know, then difference, multi-dimensionality, heterogeneity, or simply the possibility that there exist other possibilities, becomes an assault on how we understand the world in relation to ourselves and, in turn, an assault on who we are.

Zizek, using antisemitism in Germany in 1930s as an example, gave in The Sublime Object of Ideology, perhaps, the best explanation for how much our lives are at stake in the subjectivities or social positions codes and certain alignments of knowledge afford or guarantee us.

The proper answer to anti-Semitism is therefore not “Jews are really not like that” but the anti-Semitic idea of [the] Jew has nothing to do with Jews; the ideological figure of a Jew is a way to stitch up the inconsistency of our own ideological system. That is why we are also unable to shake so-called ideological prejudices by taking into account the pre-ideological level of everyday experience.

Zizek calls it "stitching up of an inconsistency of our own ideological system." An inconsistency that arises from the threat something, formerly suppressed, now poses to what we know and, in turn, the threat it poses to our sense of self, privilege, and place in the world.

Media: Will the Kindle 2 Take On Audio books?

It seems expensive audio books may be getting a run for their money as Amazon and Jeff Bezos launch Kindle 2 today with a new text-to-speech function:

Amazon introduced several new features for the Kindle. A new text-to-speech function allows readers to switch between reading words on the device and having the words read to them by a computerized voice. That technology was provided by Nuance, a speech-recognition company based in Burlington, Mass.

Over at Motley Fool, Munarriz says the "text-to-speech" feature that allows the Kindle to read aloud any book, magazine, blog, or newspaper is a "huge point":

Style freaks may love the ergonomic enhancements, but I think the "read-to-me" option will really push the Kindle into the mainstream.I'm not saying that we're all audiobook junkies who hate physical reading. I also realize that speech synthesizers are a joke compared to rich human voices. However, the real sticking point with many potential Kindle owners is that they don't always have a lot of time to read. A Kindle may work for mass-transit commuters on the bus, trains, or subways, but what about the majority of us who actually drive, bike, or walk to work? We can't afford to stare at a screen. There's a reason why Sirius XM Radio has roughly 19 million subscribers. It's no surprise to see more cars adding audio jacks for Apple iPods. Even Cracker Barrel stocks audiobooks at its general stores. In short, drivers love audio. So while the new Kindle's "read-to-me" feature may be experimental, I think it'll prove a major selling point.

If you are a book slut who works for a living then audio books, in addition to the printed page, are the only way to make a dent in your reading list. Or like me, you will be faced with a situation where your reading lists start having lists. Audio books, however, are exorbitantly priced and, yes, some of us will like to see Amazon pull an Itunes on the audio book market. Below are thoughts towards the kindle 3:

1. Awkward: You can't take your Kindle out for a jog.
2. Entry point: What used to be a month's rent is still a lot to drop on a kindle
3. The Reader: Some of us love books so much that we really don't give a rat's ass who reads it to us on our way to work -- KITT or James Earl Jones, it's all the same to me. But i'm sure others will beg to differ.
4. Technology: Until a 3rd party device comes along that will allow those $7 books on the kindle to be downloaded and read out loud on an Ipod, I doubt audio books have anything to fear.
5. Rights: Aren't the rights to the book and the rights to the audio reading 2 separate things?

Sequential Art/ Film: Let There Be Shadow

An inking tutorial from Mike Cho's blog and excerpts from the documentary Cinematographer style.

There are 3 things that lighting has to do. It has to provide for sufficient illumination to record the image on film. It has to make up for the difference in contrast between our eye and the film. It has to enhance the illusion of a third dimension in a 2 dimensional medium. Okay, that's what it has to do, but what it can do... -- Bill Dill

It can affect you emotionally. It can help tell the story. You have to know what story you are telling before you start to think about how to light it. And you have to think whether you want the audience to see everything clearly or whether you want to hold it back a bit from the audience: whether you want to throw the actors into a little bit of shadow -- Remi Adefarasin

My favorite thing in using lights is that I like relativity: light to dark; big to small. My favorite kind of thing is you have somebody standing by a window, talking to somebody standing in the corner. The someone standing in the corner is in the dark. So you are cutting from this guy at the window to the girl who is standing in the corner in the dark. ...Not adding but taking away is better. It's like something is not working they throw another sandbag into a boat and they keep throwing in sandbags till the whole boat sinks; you don't put in more, you take way. Usually when something doesn't work is because you are doing

to much -- Gordon "The Prince of Darkness" Willis.

I think good cinematographers don't really use light. They use shadows. The light is creating shadows. I would like to insist that the shadows are more important than the

light is -- Vilmos Zsigmond.

Something that changed cinematography was the kino flo. All of a sudden practical locations was something that was embraced; even more so, ceilings went back unto sets, people weren't flying them anymore and you saw less unnatural backlight and lighting changed. People were able to put a light that didn't have to travel to create softness 3 feet away from a person and all of a sudden you have this quality of light that looked very natural -- Matthew Libatique.

Mali: The Revolution will be YouTubed

Ai du by Ali Farka Toure. Performed by Vieux Farka Toure at Joe's Pub, NYC. February, 2007. Album: Talking Timbuktu - Ali Farka Toure with Ry Cooder.



If only, after he invited her up, Diane Lane hailed that passing cab, then, perhaps, she would not have heard this song and maybe everyone would have kept their clothes on. But then we wouldn't have Adrian Lyne's rather nice retelling of Chabrol's Le femme Infidel now, would we? Lyne, bar none, is the master when it comes to a cinema about domesticity, sexual morass, and marital infidelity.

Ali Farka Toure -- R.I.P.

Africa: What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?

One of prof Blattman's TAs points out the congruity between anticolonial grievance and a meeting of the People's Liberation Front of Judea in the funniest film ever made -- Monty Python's The Life of Brian (1979). Clip and dialogue below:

REG: They've bled us white, the bastards. They've taken everything we had, and not just from us, from our fathers, and from our fathers' fathers.

LORETTA: And from our fathers' fathers' fathers.

REG: Yeah.

LORETTA: And from our fathers' fathers' fathers' fathers.

REG: Yeah. All right, Stan. Don't labour the point. And what have they ever given us in return?!

XERXES: The aquaduct?

REG: What?

XERXES: The aquaduct

REG: Oh. Yeah, yeah. They did give us that. Uh, that's true. Yeah.

COMMANDO #3: And the sanitation.

LORETTA: Oh, yeah, the sanitation, Reg. Remember what the city used to be like?

REG: Yeah. All right. I'll grant you the aqueduct and the sanitation are two things that the Romans have done.

MATTHIAS: And the roads.

REG: Well, yeah. Obviously the roads. I mean, the roads go without saying, don't they? But apart from the sanitation, the aqueduct, and the roads--

COMMANDO: Irrigation.

XERXES: Medicine.

COMMANDOS: Huh? Heh? Huh...

COMMANDO #2: Education.

COMMANDOS: Ohh...

REG: Yeah, yeah. All right. Fair enough.

COMMANDO #1: And the wine.

COMMANDOS: Oh, yes. Yeah...

FRANCIS: Yeah. Yeah, that's something we'd really miss, Reg, if the Romans left. Huh.

COMMANDO: Public baths.

LORETTA: And it's safe to walk in the streets at night now, Reg.

FRANCIS: Yeah, they certainly know how to keep order. Let's face it. They're the only ones who could in a place like this.

COMMANDOS: Hehh, heh. Heh heh heh heh heh heh heh.

REG: All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?

XERXES: Brought peace.

REG: Oh. Peace? Shut up!

Remove Eric Idle, John Cleese, Michael Palin and whoever was in that scene and replace them with Herbert Macaulay, Frantz Fanon, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Nnamdi Azikwe, Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta and so on and the joke just keeps on giving.

So are these anticolonialists who struggled for the emancipation of their people simply well educated children biting the imperial hands that gave them the gifts of civilization? In other words, was the whole African anticolonial/independence struggle simply a mass exercise in ungratefulness?

Silly question. But what are blogs for if not to muse over silly questions.

There is an innate connection between the march of civilization and human dignity. It seems the more technologically astute one becomes, the more civilized one gets, and in turn the more dignity one can afford or is afforded one as the case may be.

However, the problem is, all of us, in terms of technology or that ability to bend nature to our will, don't move along at the same rate. Some, through a combination of factors ranging from demographics to geography to weather to culture (laziness comes last -- read: Diamond or even Gladwell) are situated more favorably at the nexus of conditions and needs that enable them achieve breakthroughs, bend their environment to their wills faster, expand commerce, explore, industrialize, fuel even more expansion, and take labor and land away from those who are, by comparison, not as technologically astute as they are and who, hence, appear not as civilized or as dignified as they have become. By the way, determinism is a bitch, ain't it?

Now, what the "silly question" audaciously assumes is this: when that person, in terms of his technology and the civilization and humanity that technology bequeaths or accrues, finds himself ahead in civilization miles and can now bend nature into gun barrels aimed to get labor and take over the lands of others to serve his expanding needs while giving the one he dispossesses the fruits of the civilization that unfolds, then all those gifts should, in turn, negate the right of the dispossessed person to struggle for the course to gain back his humanity and dignity. 

You're kidding me, right? Sorry, but that assumption is false and insulting and thus the question itself shouldn't even be asked.

Yes, I will be the first to agree that rights to dignity and self worth are innate and God given, but in a world of scarce resources they are God given rights that have to be fought for and maintained. That's why human dignity is closely related to human labor and, in many practical ways, our dignity is tied to our ability to gain increasing levels of mastery over our environment -- i.e., technology. When a person lacks this kind of mastery in comparison to another, and thus suffers a loss of dignity and humanity, no gifts of civilization (aqueducts, irrigation, railways, missionaries, the Bible, roads, schools etc) from another person can substitute for the right to gain that dignity back by whatever means possible. If, in the Monty Python clip, the People's Liberation Front of Judea call off their struggle, resolving that the gifts of civilization the Roman's have given them thumps the innate need to struggle for the right to their own self worth, then they have, in other words, admitted to themselves that they are less than human, which they are not. Francis Fukayama sums it up like this:

Man differs fundamentally from the animals, however, because in addition he desires the desire of other men, that is, he wants to be “recognised.” In particular, he wants to be recognised as a human being, that is, as a being with a certain worth or dignity. This worth in the first instance is related to his willingness to risk his life in a struggle over pure prestige. For only man is able to overcome his most basic animal instincts – chief among them his instinct for self-preservation – for the sake of higher, abstract principles and goals...

...But in addition, human beings seek recognition of their own worth, or of the people, things, or principles that they invest with worth. The propensity to invest the self with a certain value, and to demand recognition for that value, is what in today’s popular language we would call “self-esteem.” The propensity to feel self-esteem arises out of the part of the soul called emos. It is like an innate human sense of justice. People believe that they have a certain worth, and when other people treat them as though they are worth less than that, they experience the emotion of anger. Conversely, when people fail to live up to their own sense of worth, they feel shame, and when they are evaluated correctly in proportion to their worth, they feel pride. The desire for recognition, and the accompanying emotions of anger, shame, and pride, are parts of the human personality critical to political life.

script props: pythoninsanity.

Film: Belated Thoughts on Wall-E the Stalker

Wall-E (2008) - wrt/dir Andrew Stanton

Though they did a great job with The Incredibles (2004), I think it is easy to see why the folks at Pixar are not particularly interested in animating humans. Humans are harder to animate (hair and wrinkly clothes) and, as a rule, Pixar seems to prefer animating things that have a limited physical range of expression or a naturally stunted emotional vocabulary. For it seems the harder it is for a character to emote (e.g. Wall-E's 2 clunks trying to hold Eve’s plastic digits), the more precious and powerful each facsimile, anthropomorphic gesture becomes. Come to think of it, isn't that what animation is all about; anthropomorphizing things we would never have attributed emotions to?

But what was all the fuss about? Wall-E is pretty much the standard, even for a Pixar film, Hollywood mush, with a serious structural/character motivation problem to boot.

Basically, the inciting incident in a film is the event that impacts the protagonist's life and changes his or her life's trajectory. But then that protagonist, like all human beings do when faced with change, tries to deny this impact or avoid its implications, and a story doesn't get lift off till the protagonist accepts the change, the path that change has placed his or her feet upon, and the consequential adventure that unfolds from walking down that path.

In the case of Wall-E, the inciting incident hits when Eve the bio-seeking cute-bot arrives on earth and Wall-E immediately falls in love and he automatically accepts both the change that impacts his trajectory as well as the change agent. And when the love/acceptance of that change and change agent is threatened--i.e., her ship returns to take her back to space--Wall-E without second thoughts accepts the consequential adventure of holding on to this cute-bot that has changed his life even if it means following her into spacey ends of the universe.

That story structure/character motivation Andrew Stanton has gone with is unusual because it tends to be reserved, and for good reason, for serial killers or horror movie characters that are fueled by obsessions, or for Forest Gump characters that are missing a few marbles and aren't bothered by the nuances of how the object of their desire actually feels about them.

By choosing an inciting structure in which Wall-E automatically and obsessively embraces the change agent, Stanton "Forest-Gumps" Wall-E and the only way to avoid allusions to Travis Bickle is to make clear to the audience that what fuels Wall-E's obsession is really as innocent as rain and not some twisted, obsessive kind of desire -- and that's where the devise of the musical comes in.

From the musical Wall E watches/listens to all the time, Stanton tries to imply that Wall-E's obsession to go to the ends of space to hold on to Eve is, in a child-like way, just so he can hold her hand like the actors held hands in one of the scenes from the musical.

I think Stanton cinematically hits Wall-E's motivations home, however, in terms of the emotional plot line, the lack of dialogue leaves that motivation somewhat ambiguous and so its point doesn't quite make it through and sort of falls short of the bleachers.

Leaving no room for ambiguity, Stinkylulu nails some of my concerns about Wall-E's inciting structure/motivation problem:

Stalker narratives passed off as sublime romances tend to test my patience. Sure, WALL-E's totally sweet and he does all kinds of heroic things but he's basically a stalker. What's worse is that the whole romantic narrative really feels like a Mona Lisa or Taxi Driver kind of thing, where the anti-hero loser guy tries to save the worldly prostitute and for what? [More]

I'm not saying The Reader or The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is any better, but Wall-E for best picture -- c'mon!!! In any other context, after M-O scrubs off all the Pixar cuteness and Disney fairy dust from the screen, Wall-E can easily be seen for what he is -- a stalker robot with an IQ deficiency.