Interpretation as Keyword
July 31, 2007
As you may have noticed, Old Roads has gone through a major redesign (and please forgive some browser issues that we are straightening out). Martyn's Blog has been transformed into Old Roads Blog.. which seemed more descriptive. A further change in the official title of the site may have gone unnoticed. What we provide "interpretations of places, books, and other texts". The line used to read "comments". OK, it's a small change, but it reflects some recent reflection on what this site is about.
We strive to cover a wide range of texts—defined broadly as any cultural product that can be experienced sequentially. A street, a book, a film, a song, even a political speech.. they are all texts that can be read.. and thus interpreted. The idea of providing "comments" seems a passive activity.. a process of footnoting texts. Our goal is to provide an interpretation that stakes out a meaning for the text.. not in an attempt to control or simplify, but to identify the reading that the text itself is leading toward. "Comments" points to the identification of unclear details and explanations; "interpretation" is about following a text and learning to sense the meaning toward which a reader is being guided by an author or cultural system. This emphasis on interpretation emphasizes engagement with the process of a text.
Interpretation strikes us as a way to give some coherence to the topics treated at Old Roads Blog, which are admittedly various. Texts here will not stand out as great objects, nor as pop-culture icons or moral lessons; they are artifacts from a specific time that have an original reading context. They then gain interpretive traditions as they pass through time and continue to be read (whether streets or books). Our vision of interpretation takes into account these layers of historical interpretation.. which is often where cultural meaning is located and where the fun of our interpretive work becomes apparent.
This point helps to clarify my philosophy of teaching. My overriding goal is to nudge students into the process of reading a text (and that often means convincing them of the text-nature of buildings and streets). That process of active interpretation through engagement with the movement of a text is my central goal and should be the purpose of all my assignments.
An Alliance of Women:
Equinox Flower by Ozu
July 30, 2007
I am not yet sure what I think about Ozu's color films in comparison with those in black and white. Color brings out another layer of formality in his style. He is always careful with respect to the design of scenes.. but the use of color adds a noticeable layer of composition. At the same time there are flashes of humor in these late color films (I am thinking especially of Equinox Flower and Good Morning) that would seem out of place in other films.. and this constitutes a certain loosening of style.
Whatever the changes brought on by the change to color, Equinox Flower (1958) uncovers another facet of family life (Ozu never runs out of them). In this case we see the changes coming to postwar Japan through highly gendered points of view. Two male characters hold on tightly to their traditional roles as lawmakers within their house. Against them is a tide of female characters who are bent on opening up new space for their own choices.
One scene that comes up often in Ozu films is the work of the dutiful wife in taking up the clothes of the husband as he comes back from work. It is a cultural form that always strikes me as strange.. and puts me in mind of 50s era images of the American wife running to greet her returning husband. In Equinox Flower this scene is extended with the addition of an unmotivated few seconds in which the wife carefully spreads her husband's clothes. The emphasis serves to settle the household as a traditional house.. with husband in charge as he should be. The remainder of the film will slowly chip away at that vision of the husband.
A key scene comes when two daughters of the same age get together and bemoan the pressures they face in making their own life. One proposes that they form an alliance to help each other out in facing these pressures. They seal it with a funny pinky shake. This formal alliance is supplemented by a series of other unspoken alliances between female figures.. mother helps daughter, sister helps sister, and mother helps friend of daughter. There are clearly changes coming in postwar Japan, but the women, without exception in this movie, are willing to engage with the possibilities of this new world.. and to do so within networks.
The daughter, on being confronted by her father and mother with their knowledge of her impending marriage, stakes out the clearest statement of the values of the new world. This is a position that will be modulated as she relies on family and friends.. but it is a fundamental assertion that the film presents as a done deal.
The men are concerned about this new world of their daughters.. and they talk about it when they meet. In this second office scene Chishu Ryu offers one possible reason for the actions of their daughters. Although through the eyes of their daughters and wives we begin to sense that the deepest problem stems from their own unyielding sense of authority.
It is not as simple as to say the men are holding on to the past. This brief golf scene belies that idea. Earlier in Equinox Flower we also find that the father has a good sense of the bars of Tokyo and has a distaste for the idiots running around during the war. He and the other men are moving into the new world.. but they maintain a vision of this new world that allows them to maintain their position of authority. It is as if they think the new world will still revolve around them.
Near the end of the film we another ritualized scene that is common in Ozu films: a reunion of one kind or another. Chishu Ryu stands to deliver a traditional Japanese poem, and as the lines slowly come it is impossible not to connect these values with the situation of men as glimpsed in the film. The theme of the poem is martial.. but there is no hint of real Japanese nationalism. That is gone, as everyone accepts. More lasting is a sense of manhood and authority.. a warrior ethic and obedience. It is an ethic that keeps the men from finding their footing in the new world.
The film ends with a delightful scene in which the father is tricked into going to visit his now married daughter (whose wedding he disapproved). Here he explains the situation to his wife and tries hard to present the decision as his own.. and something he will decide about. This is met by laughter from his wife.. and that is where Ozu has taken us by the end of the film: the authority that seemed so solid at the start of the film is now open to laughter..
Farther On - Jackson Browne
July 28, 2007
Playing with Rory makes me think sometimes of the movie Memento. You may remember that the main character in that movie has no short term memory.. and so every person that he meets is a stranger. Those who knew the character in the past always have to reintroduce themselves. At one point a character notes dryly that he has experienced more fulfilling relationships than this one. Rory recognizes people no problem, but it is odd to think about spending a lot of time with someone who will recall nothing specific about our time. In a week she will not turn to me and say: that was so funny that one afternoon when nobody was around and you made me laugh!
The events may be lost to Rory, but I also know that something incredibly important is going on in her head. She is gaining trust and learning to respond to the world. The moments are blank in her memory, but at the same time they are formative. Looking into her eyes I wonder about the people who looked into my eyes before I could remember them.. and played with me, encouraged my trust, and gave me the love I needed. This process of raising little Rory, more than anything I can remember, has reminded me of the love I have for my own parents.. and their love for me stretching back into the haze of my memory.
In "Farther On" from Late for the Sky (1974) Jackson Browne captures some of what I have been feeling:
To those gentle ones my memory runs
To the laughter we shared at the meals
I filled their kitchens and living rooms
With my schemes and my broken wheels
It was never clear how far or near
The gates to my citadel lay
They were cutting from stone some dreams of their own
But they listened to mine anyway
Rory comes into our lives at the beginning of our professional lives.. but she will grow up looking forward into the beautiful blankness of her own life. That is just the way kids are; they don't get the real context until a long time afterwards. That was true for me especially.. and I probably count as someone who has been full of schemes. I owe a lot to those who listened to my dreams, even as they worked on their own.
Jackson Browne.. especially in his early songs.. has a dark streak. I can't think of anyone else who could end a debut album with a song as preternaturally retrospective as "My Opening Farewell". In the opening stanzas of "Farther On" he picks up some of these themes:
In my early years I hid my tears
And passed my days alone
Adrift on an ocean of loneliness
My dreams like nets were thrown
To catch the love that I'd heard of
In books and films and songs
Now there's a world of illusion and fantasy
In the place where the real world belongs
Still I look for the beauty in songs
To fill my head and lead me on
Though my dreams have come up torn and empty
As many times as love has come and gone
Ah yes, the ocean of loneliness. It is sort of embarrassing now to talk about it.. but what could be more descriptive of those years that congregate on both sides of 20? There were the books and songs I turned to over and over to figure it all out. Jackson Browne was not someone I discovered at that time; he is someone whose music evokes those years and wraps a little wisdom around them.
I love the way he can recognize the illusions in "books and films and songs".. but still not disavow them. His dreams have "come up torn and empty".. and it is clear that those dreams were stirred by the illusions peddled in these unnamed works.. but still he pushes on and looks for the beauty of song "to fill me head and lead me on". It is a Romanticism that has doubled back on itself yet still accepts the central vision.
I'm not sure what I'm trying to say
It could be I've lost my way
Though I keep a watch over the distance
Heaven's no closer than it was yesterday
It is a little disconcerting in any creative work to find yourself half-way or more through it, only to find a line such as "I'm not sure what I'm trying to say"! The east retort would be: well, figure that out before you ask me to listen. But the greatness of Jackson Browne's early work is the palpable sense that he is thinking personal things through in the songs.. and that he does not have an answer in mind. These early songs sketch a broad emotional territory. (This is the reason Browne gets classified as "earnest guy music" in our house.)
But the angels are older
They can see that the sun's setting fast
They look over my shoulder
At the vision of paradise contained in the light of the past
And they lay down behind me
To sleep beside the road till the morning has come
Where they know they will find me
With my maps and my faith in the distance
Moving farther on
This ending cuts a little close to home, this vision of the "older" angels following an explorer.. the angels undoubtedly humored by his certainty of something up there in the distance. Who would want to stop moving farther on? But it is different now with two people I love more than anything in the world. It is still fun to move farther on.. and to spread out the maps.. but that is all. It is fine to move toward the horizon, but I will try not to confuse anything out there with happiness.
Secularism and Everyday Experience
July 26, 2007
What better pairing could be imagined? Woody Allen and Billy Graham! Both come off quite well.. and Billy Graham in particular, while stating clearly his convictions, is affable and funny. I find it hard to imagine a contemporary Christian leader pulling this interview off with a sense of humor. Imagine James Dobson answering these questions.. the distaste would be obvious.
The interview encapsulates a central question concerning religion: what is secularism. I find it a central question because there is a fair amount of agreement over the near universal sway of religious thinking among cultures around the world.. and one powerful explanation for this is the idea that religion is somehow natural to human beings. We need a perceptual lens to process and explain the world, and such a lens can be defined as religion. But if religion is a universal, what does one do with secularism, which seems on its face to be a lifestyle defined by a lack of religious commitment?
One answer would be to propose that secularism is a godless religion.. that is to say, it involves a kind of faith and could be classified as a worldview. I don't like that answer.. because I don't think it actually matches secular experience.
This video interview between Woody Allen and Billy Graham begins to get at this issue of secularism. On the one hand Billy Graham is a stellar example of a religious-minded person. When a question concerning pre-marital sex comes up, he immediately makes reference to the "rules" that God has given.. making an analogy to baseball. Graham's instinct is to move from a question about life to a larger frame of reference.. that movement is typical of the religious-minded person. The more frequently such a frame is invoked, the more religious we will be inclined to call a person.
Does Woody Allen have a similar frame? Someone who wished to argue that secularism is some kind of religion would have to show where such a "religion" is located. Allen's point of view is characterized by a lack of reference to any kind of frame. His opinions about life and relationships are determined by his sense of what is reasonable in life.. with no reference to a rule book. Perhaps the argument could be made that his self and good feelings have become a religion.. but the point that makes sense of Woody Allen's statements is that there is no rule book.. and it seems philosophically perverse to label that position a hidden rule book.
Reading the essay on religion in Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures I came across a comparison that makes sense of the contrast between Graham and Allen. Geertz speaks of religion as one mode of interacting with the world:
But no one, not even a saint, lives in the world religious symbols formulate all of the time, and the majority of men live in it only at moments. The everyday world of common-sense objects and practical acts is, as Schulz says, the paramount reality in human experience—paramount in the sense that it is the world in which we are most solidly rooted... [119]
Bringing this to bear on the interview above, we could say that Graham is highly successful at applying his religious frame on a large swath of experience. But even with Graham this religious frame will at times give way to just ordinary life. Going to the grocery store presents no great ethical issues and there is hardly a need to invoke the rule book. In this case life flows in a rather secular manner. Woody Allen could be said to live much of his life in this everyday world.. resisting the desire to invoke a rule book and sticking with a rather pragmatic view of the world. Secularism thus stands out as something all its own.. not a religion or a worldview buttressed with symbols. It is a willingness (at least an attempt) to live without any such frame of reference.
Dearborn Viewed Online
July 25, 2007
In two weeks I will be heading to Dearborn, Michigan to work on a project that has been sitting in my head for a while. I have spent a fair amount of time in the Middle East, but I have comparably little experience with Islam in the United States. Dearborn, Michigan is the location in the US with the highest concentration of Arab-Americans (both longtime residents and recent immigrants).. and if I am going to get a sense of Islam in the US, then this is a logical place to visit.
One of the miracles of the internet is the amount of incidental information available about places. There are maps and city websites.. but more importantly there are lots of scenes drawn from life. Before I head to Dearborn I am going to explore through blogs the different paths to learning about Dearborn offered by the internet. This first post will concentrate on videos from YouTube (my playlist is available here).
The above picture is of the singer Dominique Hourani from the American Arab Festival 2007 in Dearborn Michigan. Never in my time in the Middle East have I seen this kind of public "sexy" appeal. There are plenty of music videos that look like this.. but this does not translate into public performances. The videographer quickly pans the audience and we glimpse who is out there:
It is a mixed gender crowd composed of Arab Americans. That crowd, I take it, is exactly the point of the Arab American Festival: to construct and celebrate a sense of identity. Given this performance, it is evident that the identity will be one that celebrates American-ness.
A similar American development is seen in a rough video made at an event put on in Dearborn by the Muslim Student's Association. Two rappers rap away, and then we note in the foreground women wearing the hijab or head covering. Analysis of this video must center on the mixtures of quintessentially American pop-cultural forms with cultural signs that continue to mark an identity that is not just American.
This mixture of American and Arab identities is not the only model represented in YouTube. A relatively large number of short poor quality videos captured the Quran reciter Sheikh Mishary al-Afasy during his appearance in Dearborn. Many videos posted by Muslims in other cities further document this celebrity. I say "celebrity".. and al-Afasy has a a devoted following (just search for him online), but it is a celebrityhood that goes mostly under the radar in America. Quran recitation is not going to compete with hip-hop anytime soon..
One lengthy (26 minute) video on YouTube features an interview with a leader at the Islamic Center of America (Shi'a in orientation) in Dearborn. The video begins with a brief still photo of the mosque and then turns to the interview:
The contents of this interview were not particularly interesting (just a review of the meaning of Islam), but this brief view of the composed and thoughtful Imam puts a face on the Islamic leadership of the area.
One YouTube video consists of a continuous stream of storefronts, taken from a moving car. The area looks slightly run down and the only real difference between this street and thousands like them in the US is the presence of Arabic on a fair number of the signs. Perhaps that is all I will find.. a normal street with enough Arabic to mark it as different. But my hope is to locate some concrete ways that the emerging identity of Arab American is working its way into the built landscape of this city.
The Eternal Alley:
Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz
July 23, 2007
Naguib Mahfouz begins his novel Midaq Alley (1947) with an arresting image of change. In the coffee house—a central meeting place for the men of the alley—we meet an old poet who presumes to ply his trade:
He played a few introductory notes just as the coffee-house had heard him play every evening for twenty years or more. His frail body swayed in time with the music. Then he cleared his throat, spat, and said: "In the name of God." [4-5]
The scene is familiar to readers of Lane's Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. We are witnessing a traditional mode of entertainment.. the vehicle through which stories such as those of the 1,001 Nights have come down to us. But Mahfouz will have none of it, and the poet is summarily kicked out of the coffee-shop. The owner speaks curtly to the poet:
"We know all the stories you tell by heart and we don't need to run through them again. People today don't want a poet. They keep asking me for a radio and there's one over there being installed now. So go away and leave us alone..." [5]
The poet never reappears in the novel. The scene stands out as an odd one, disconnected from the plot, but it allows Mahfouz to position himself with respect to traditional storytelling. Radio is in, and as the novel was by no means a traditional literary form in Arabic, we should align the novel with radio.. displacing traditional forms that nobody listened to anymore.
For all the confidence that the novel is an exciting form that people will want to read (Mahfouz writes a straightforward narrative that is hard to put down), there is an underlying stasis in the social world of the alley. A novel that begins by kicking out a traditional poet and turning on the radio is nevertheless fearful of moral change. I find that contrast difficult to reconcile: it is almost as if Mahfouz wants to lay claim to a modern method but then describe the same old alley and its social world.
The concept of the alley is hard for Americans to grasp. This last week I was reading The Great Arab Cities in the 16th-18th Centuries by André Raymond, and I was led to once again consider the importance of local structures such as the alley. Note the following map of some streets in Cairo around 1800:
That map is not going to be confused by anyone with New York City, and it is important to think about why that is. Grids allow for an openly accessible network of streets. The city is viewed as public and the streets are correspondingly useful to all. The above map shows a city which has major thoroughfares, but which then splinters into a number of small alleys that go nowhere. These alleys are not public space.. not meant to be useful to everyone.. but are the small fortresses of private life. Writing about the situation in Cairo, Raymond comments:
...these quarters formed unities that were often completely closed. They were placed under the authority of shaykhs who, given the limited dimensions of the quarters (generally a maximum of 4 or 5 hectares, often much less, with a population of 1,000 to 2,000 inhabitants, that is, 200 to 400 families), were able to exercise effective and efficient control over the entire population... [15]
This is the essential backdrop for Midaq Alley, and we go wrong if we imagine some American neighborhood (which generally includes a lot of people who barely know each other). The point about Midaq Alley is that it is a world unto itself.. providing the social bounds within which its inhabitants live and eventually die. We have seen that Mahfouz understands the changes being introduced by the modern world, but still the alley system holds. Having reached a climax, Mahfouz writes: "This crisis too, like all the others, finally subsided and the alley returned to its usual state of indifference and forgetfulness..." (244).
I would be curious to trace in Mahfouz his confidence, rising or falling, in the continuity of this Egyptian geography/way of life. From my contemporary vantage point it would seem he overestimated the timelessness of this way of life.. writing as he did at the beginning of the steep population curve that would utterly change his city.
Muscoda: A Small Town in Wisconsin
July 21, 2007
Wisconsin is unlike any place I have ever lived since it has real waterways. Southern California's rivers are seasonal and short and Georgia's Chatahoochee River is hardly inviting. I was reminded of this Wisconsin trait as I drove across the state yesterday on my quest to reach the Effigy Mounds National Monument, located just over the border in Iowa. A good portion of my trip was along the Wisconsin River, which I followed until it flowed into the Mississippi River. Much of the Wisconsin River flows through areas that remain natural and it would be easy to take a canoe down a stretch of river and camp out on its sandy banks (in fact I spotted a group doing just that).
When I conceptualize Wisconsin I do so by means of roads, which connect all the main cities within a web of map lines. Traveling along the Wisconsin River I thought about the way rivers once functioned as the freeways that connected the most important places. Early settlements in many states followed the snaking line of a river.. and the mental map of early arrivals would have been formed by rivers more than overland roads. Today we hardly notice rivers.. our best clue as to their whereabouts being the little sign one passes before crossing a bridge: "Crawfish River". Where that river goes and where it came from is mostly unknown.
Along the Wisconsin River were a number of small towns. The one with the funniest name had to be "Gotham".. which was by no means the shadowy crime-infested world where Batman works. Another town was named Muscoda (pop. 1,400). I stopped for lunch here and got a chance to think about small towns in Wisconsin.
The town was off the beaten path.. and I assume that auto and bike tourists are an important source of income in the summer (i.e. people like me who were mostly out for an enjoyable ride). I make a habit of walking through historic downtowns taking note of the kinds of businesses that survive in them still. In Muscoda I saw the requisite bars, a hair salon, an "energy store" that had exercise equipment, a chiropractor, a couple of small cafe's offering food, and finally a hardware store. Small downtowns survive by offering goods and services that do not compete with WalMart.
In Muscoda and other small towns I was surprised how few national chains there were. Of course the gas stations were recognizable, but McDonalds and Cracker Barrel had not yet moved in. It is refreshing to get off the larger freeways with their common national pit stops. and see something different.. even homemade signs.
The Salaried Life:
Early Spring by Yasujiro Ozu
July 18 & 19, 2007
Early Spring (1956) is the darkest of the films by Yasujiro Ozu that I have yet seen. Many of the scenes are washed in gray and there is no personality like that of Setsuko Hara to add a note of radiant goodness. The film can be understood as an exposition of the salaried life. Our glimpse into this life comes through the slowly developed story of a husband who cheats on his wife, but at the end learns something about the value of marriage in finding personal meaning within a life controlled by faceless corporations.
No one has much good to say about the salaried life. It promises a steady income, and in the small home of the main character (played by Chikage Awashima) we see the modest fruit of this way of life. This same economic level will be explored more humorously by Ozu in Good Morning (1959), but here we see the emotional dead ends to which this life leads.
The affair, begun almost accidentally as these two meet and enjoy themselves during an outing with other workers, seems at the beginning to be a way to let some light into the gray salaried life.. but the untenable nature of this relationship becomes clear when his boss asks him to accept a transfer and leave Tokyo to work for three years in the small town of Mitsuishi.
Some of the most significant scenes in the film are not directly connected to the plot. Near the end, as the main character is about to depart for Mitsuishi without his wife (who left him over the affair), we are shown a brief conversation in a bar.. the old man shown above volunteers his reflections on a lifetime of work as a salary man:
bartender: But you're a very hard worker.
old worker: I'm not so sure about that. I'm nearing the retirement age.
bartender: How many years have you worked?
old worker: It's exactly 31 years. I feel very tired.
bartender: Big retirement pay?
old worker: Hardly. That's the point. I hoped after retiring to open a small stationary shop near a school. Thought I'd just relax. But the retirement allowance won't be enough. That's what we got waiting for us. Just disillusion and loneliness. I've worked 31 long years to find life is just an empty dream.
Since the main character and the people around him are young workers.. at the gray beginning of a long career.. this dialogue with an old worker casts our eyes to the distant future. Ozu gives no real hope for the future and no reason to suppose that these young people will turn out any different than this old worker.
It is here in this gray view of life's possibilities that the importance of marriage takes a firm hold in the film. The main character obliquely talks over his marital problems with an older character that he trusts (played by the sagely Chishu Ryu). I have excerpted the important elements of their talk:
The advice here is to be good to a wife.. and the reason: no one is dependable as a wife. This is evident from the fact that the woman with whom he is having an affair could not possibly move to Mitsuishi, revealing that relationship to be an illusion. Further, a salary man needs a wife as a shelter from the coldness of the company.. which cannot care about an individual. Only marriage and family provides hope for personal meaning.
The two men look up to see a rowing team shoot past them. The leader of the boat calls out the strokes, and as a team they power through the calm water. It is a scene of teamwork and group accomplishment.. and no doubt we are meant to think about the regimented life of work in a company.
The older man, looking over at the rowing team, comments:
Those young men are in their "early spring". But the point Ozu has been making throughout this film is that people move on past their springtime.. and encounter disillusionment. Coping with this means holding on firmly to the bonds of family.. and the personal meaning that can come in that private space.
In the final scene of the film the young couple is reconciled and willing to start over again.. putting the affair behind them. It is a human moment. They are together, but not close.. and the screen is still dominated by gray.
Aurora vs. the Paparazzi
July 19, 2007
and for good measure here is a picture of Aurora enjoying her avocado:
Social Identities
July 17, 2007
One of the questions I persistently run up against is the nature of identity. I don't mean our sense of self.. the way I am an individual named Martyn. What interests me is how I have multiple identity commitments. I recognize too that there are many people in our world who have complex and even contradictory identities. There are gay Southern Baptists. There are people of mixed racial/ethnic backgrounds. These identity commitments seem obvious enough.. and I never have trouble convincing students of the existence of levels of identity. But how to define these identities has been more problematic.
Kwame Anthony Appiah's work The Ethics of Identity ends up spending most of its space debating the place of these identities within our polity. I get bored by policy discussions.. if you haven't already figured that out. But following Ian Hacker, Appiah settles on four qualities that define a social identity:
1. Availability of terms in public discourse (66). The formation of identities demands labels that separate people into distinct categories. Those labels are important.. and they do something in a society. They create consciousness of difference.. and therefore identity.
2. Internalization of labels as parts of the individual identities of some people known by those labels (68). I take this to mean that some people have to actively identify themselves according to common labels.. or else we do not have an "identity".. but just a social fiction.
3. Identity has a narrative component (68). Identities.. whether that of a Mormon or a Jew.. bring with them a certain model for life. These models are often embedded in books and films, but other times they are just an unspoken mental picture of an ideal life.
4. The existence of patterns of behavior with respect to people of a given identity (68). This follows naturally from the other qualities. If a person identifies himself/herself with a certain label, then others who fall into that label will be perceived as part of an in-group.. and treated differently as result.
If identities are defined by these qualities, then it is clear that there is nothing settled about social identities. They are as changeable as vocabularies. When reading older texts it should thus be possible to read not just to locate material facts, but also to read for cognitive facts: what were the identity commitments of this person. The labels a person uses to describe himself or herself.. along with the labels applied to other people.. are crucial clues as to the possible identity commitments of that period. I like to think of this as an archeology of perception.. and it is a practice that works quite well with travel narratives in particular.
Ancient identity commitments will often be unexpected.. and often simpler.. than we expect. One of the chief errors that I notice in students who read ancient texts is the willingness to impose current identity categories on the past world. A habit that leads unfailingly to confusion.
True Faith, New Order
July 16, 2007
This is the 12' single of New Order's "True Faith". For me it was an album to set on the turntable in my room. It sat there and spun at 33 1/3 rpm.. just like my Bauhaus and Smiths records. I reclined on my bed and listened. I never danced to New Order.. and that has left me with the sneaking suspicion that I did not have the genuine New Order experience.
Many of the songs that I have written about in this series of interpretations are easy enough to place in terms of context. They were meant to be listened to in my leisure. They stand or fall through the ability of their melodies and lyrics to grab me in that empty space. New Order demands a second level of interpretation.. a contextual level. We will appreciate those songs best when we listen to them not as singer-songwriter also-rans, but as products expertly sculpted to fit into a particular setting.
It is refreshing to listen to New Order because much of the artistic heaviness of singer-songwriters drops away. There is no sense that the music could change the world.. or save your soul. That heaviness of purpose has been delegated to the physical experience of dancing and club culture in general. Music becomes a playful accompaniment to that primary experience.
For a sense of the club atmosphere in which New Order thrived, check out their video for "Confusion".. which is set in New York City, but still gives a sense of the home turf of New Order.
New Order was a major supporter of a nightclub known as the Haçienda in Manchester, UK. It was a legendary venue that flourished in the late 80s and early 90s. Former DJ Dave Haslam describes the scene:
By the end of 1987 the famous Hacienda queues were there from Wednesday through to Saturday, each night having its own identity. At 9pm the queue would be round the building. Ironically considering what as to happen in the club within a year or so, it was a friendly crowd...
A conclusive change came in 1988. Ecstasy use changed clubs forever; a night at the Hacienda went from being a great night out, to an intense, life changing experience. The new sounds of house and techno seemed to survive the club’s poor acoustics; cluttered music sounded a mess bouncing off the walls of the club, but thudding beats, piano lines, and minimalist bleeps rocked the room. The music sounded even better on drugs.
In 1987 my "True Faith" single came out. People were then lining up to get into the Haçienda. I was in junior high and living in Redlands, California. New Order found its niche in nightclub settings, but for me it was an album to be listened to very carefully.. like all my records. Perhaps the analogy here should be to some woodworker who, commissioned to make some pragmatic object, discovers a way to infuse creative interest into his craft. That creative lining is what I attached myself to when I was young.. and what I will talk about now in this interpretation.
"True Faith" begins with a few shimmering lines of optimism that I have always found hard to shake:
I feel so extraordinary
Something's got a hold on me
I get this feeling I'm in motion
A sudden sense of liberty
You can well imagine that those lines have a primary reference to the experience of the nightclub. The high of movement and motion and liberty is embodied in an exhilarating beat. The progression of the song will steadily darken this opening.. but the hook for the song is right here: the shining vision of movement and liberty.
The next lines keep us on the dance floor, but now we are made a little more conscious of the real world that is being left behind in the embrace of this alternative world:
I don't care cause I'm not there
And I don't care if I'm here tomorrow
Again and again I've taken too much
Of the things that cost you too much
In the references to something "taken too much" and things that "cost you too much" a hazy image of recreational drugs begins to develop. "Again and again" makes it sounds like there is something compulsive going on.
The chorus is all about the morning sun. The morning sun is itself something that would have resonance for clubbers at the Haçienda (who would be immortalized in the film 24 Hour Party People). Nightclubs by definition keep people moving until late late in the night. In such a setting the morning sun would not be something one wakes up to see, but something one reaches after hours of dancing and clubbing.
I used to think that the day would never come
I'd see delight in the shade of the morning sun
My morning sun is the drug that brings me near
To the childhood I lost, replaced by fear
I used to think that the day would never come
That my life would depend on the morning sun
The key line is that third one: "My morning sun is the drug that brings me near...". Of course literally the drugs are introduced solely as a metaphor. The morning sun IS LIKE a drug. That construction seems to be a deliberate misdirection, since what New Order is talking about is manifestly drugs. It makes much more sense to say: "The drug is like the morning sun that reminds me of the childhood I lost". But that natural progression is reversed and we are left with elusive verses that try to make us think they are about nature.
The third verse is a repeat of the first one, so the only other lines we have to consider are those in the second verse:
When I was a very small boy,
Very small boys talked to me
Now that we've grown up together
They're afraid of what they see
That's the price that we all pay
Our valued destiny comes to nothing
I can't tell you where were going
I guess there was just no way of knowing
We have already encountered in the chorus a lament for lost childhood, and now that lament is broadened. Once we could be close to people, but now we are frightened and separated. This combination of drugs and lament for lost childhood is also present in Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb".. which I suspect to be behind the progression of thoughts in "True Faith":
When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse,
Out of the corner of my eye.
I turned to look but it was gone.
I cannot put my finger on it now.
The child is grown, the dream is gone.
I have become comfortably numb.
Again, something was right in childhood and now its gone. That sense of loss is also positioned as a reason to take drugs. What is different about New Order's version is that we should not see a lone man shooting up heroin (as we see in The Wall). We should instead try to imagine a hectic and euphoric dance floor where people as a group work out there fears, get back to childhood, and look for the exhaustion of the morning sun.
Aurora Caught Napping
July 16, 2007
The Words We Use to Talk
About Our Inner Worlds
July 14, 2007
This past year I had the experience of talking through Sufi mystical systems with a young man who may someday be a Lutheran minister in the Missouri Synod. I found it disorienting to talk about a religious system within the context of another system.. trying to align terms or find dissimilarities. The experience illustrated for me the importance of the words we use to talk about the events that happen inside our minds.
Sufism emphasizes (like many mystical systems) the gradual, approach to God. There are technical terms to describe the stages of this approach. We could say that being a Sufi means to talk about internal experience with certain words. Note the following passages from the Sufi/psychologist al-Qushayri (d. 1074):
A certain shaykh said: "The journey of the seekers ends with victory over their selves. When they are victorious over their selves, they have arrived. The master... said: "He means the retreat of the control of the mortal human and seizing of control by sovereign reality. If a servant can remain in such a condition, he possesses fixity." [Early Islamic Mysticism, pg. 136]
The "journey" points to the approach to God. The journey is presented by al-Qushayri as a loss of the self's control over one's self. By the end "sovereign reality" has taken control. This final state is then affixed with a technical term: "fixity".
The Lutheran young man read this material through his own vocabulary of internal events. In this case it was dominated by the concept of sin and justification.. and a wariness of mystical turns. It is possible to imagine someone drawn to the monastic life.. like Thomas Merton.. finding common group with Sufism. But a confident Lutheran seems miles away; for the most part the vocabulary does not coalesce.
How should we think about these different vocabularies of the internal world. One way would be to figure out which one really does describe the internal events of the mind. But it strikes me that these vocabularies are all correct. The words themselves construct the cultural lens through which the world is perceived and through which individuals makes sense of internal events. No linguistic system can ever be "correct". Whether we are talking about Sufis or Lutherans.. or Freudians or postmoderns—the systems create the perception of life.
These religious/cultural psychological vocabularies can be termed a folk psychology. Jerome Bruner writes:
The... view I am proposing is that it is culture, not biology, that shapes human life and the human mind, that gives meaning to action by situating its underlying intentional states in an interpretive system. It does this by imposing the patterns inherent in the culture's symbolic systems—its language and discourse modes, the forms of logical and narrative explication, and the patterns of mutually dependent communal life. [Acts of Meaning, pg. 34]
What I take from Bruner is that human beings have a certain number of raw internal states and a level of intentional acting, but these internal things are always bound up within a vocabulary of meaning and explanation. That vocabulary for understanding our interior world—for creating a folk psychology—is a product of religion.
What does this do to the study of religion? Clearly, it is not a matter of deciding which vocabulary is correct.. every vocabulary works. The ancient Egyptians held views about psychology that we would consider to be absurd, but clearly ancient Egyptians functioned. But further, this view of religion allows us to place theology in a proper context. Theology provides the terms and concepts that allow us to understand how a particular historical individual viewed and experienced the world. As such, theology is indispensable. What can be ditched is the idea of constructive theology in which modern theologians sit around mixing and matching ideas to come up with some new way to understand the world or scripture. Such theological work forms no folk psychology.. and its fate will be to gather dust. I would rather watch a few episodes of Oprah Winfrey than read a brilliant tome of constructive theology.
A Moral Tale by Eric Rohmer:
Claire's Knee
July 11, 2007
There is something Henry James-like about Eric Rohmer. It must be the talkiness of his characters, the interest in watching a psychological situation play itself out.. and the elusiveness of actual sex.
How can Claire's Knee (1971) be considered a moral tale? The main character Jerome (Jean-Claude Brialy) is about to get married and during a brief stay in Geneva he meets up with a former lover. Things are quite cold between these two, but she pushes Jerome to explore a relationship with a high school age girl named Laura.. and that flirtation leads to a meeting with her sister Claire. The theme of older guy almost having an affair with very young girls is probably not a promising theme for a contemporary American film.. but it has the virtue of throwing the viewer off balance. The characters will not fall into the expected slots of a romance.
Claire is the one who is most alluring to Jerome. And despite his continual analysis of the situation through a coldly rational lens, he acknowledges to his former lover that he is fiercely attracted to this young girl. So what to do? One can count several strong moral reasons why he should do nothing: he is about to be married, she is very young, and she is in love with someone else. But Jerome comes up with a solution.. the morality of which we will need to think about.
The solution comes in a scene set under a makeshift shelter from a storm. Jerome is alone with Claire and begins to probe for weaknesses in her relationship to her boyfriend.. and those probes turn into outright attacks on his callowness.. and then the attacks conclude with a revelation: Jerome has seen the boyfriend cheating on her with a friend. That revelation takes the wind out of Claire, who breaks down crying. It is here that Jerome reaches out his hand and caresses her knee. That is all that happens..
What are we to make of this scene? Jerome explain himself to his former lover.. and defends his actions.
How can he argue that "the results are highly moral"? He contends that his action was perceived as consolation, and therefore were within moral and social bounds. But he received erotic satisfaction at the same time, thus freeing himself of his lust for this girl. To his thinking, this was the perfect rational denouement.
When this scene is summarized in a popular web format, it comes out like this:
[Jerome] then... develops an obsession to fondle her knee, a seemingly perverse fixation but in Rohmer's eyes, it seems rather innocent. Jerome is on the verge of temptation but is rescued by the careful decisions of his own conscience and his commitment to his fiancée. I think everyone here learns through failure that sometimes it is necessary to step back and get a handle on the possible consequences of your actions.
That is a reading of the film that largely buys into Jerome's rational constructions about love and desire. The actions of Jerome literally demonstrate a "moral" about the necessity of considering the consequences to actions.
But this flat reading of the film neglects the darker side of Jerome's action. He consciously works to tear down the naivety of a young girl's love.. and in the process wounds her to the point that she is reduced to tears. Jerome can later laugh this off as being "good for her".. but the viewer may not be so sure. Maybe what we have is a depiction of simple psychological aggression on the part of an older man.
In the final scene, after Jerome has left (feeling quite proud of himself).. we see Claire and her cheating boyfriend back together. She is at first doubting, but we see her soothed by the story of her boyfriend. The movie ends with these two young lovers reconciled and looking out across Lake Geneva.
The viewer is always aware that this is a shallow relationship. But the deeper moral.. one for which Rohmer has provided interpretive tools.. is to beware of rational justifications for satiating one's desire by tearing down the naive world of young lovers.
Performing Islam in Cairo
July 10, 2007
I am about half-way through Edward William Lane's An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. It is a masterpiece.. and there are few cultures that have received as comprehensive and lively a description as the one given to 19th century Egyptians by Lane. Which is not to say it would be confused with an account by a modern anthropologist.. but modern academic works do not generally strive to really put life into an ethnography. Lane is all life and clarity.
Reading the Account I remembered an essay by Derek Gregory ("Performing Cairo: Orientalism and the City of the Arabian Nights"). Gregory emphasizes that "Lane's descriptions amounted to an intensely physical anatomy of the day-to-day practices of ordinary Egyptians." More than you probably think possible, Lane talks about the hand motions, the stock phrases, and the habits that make up everyday life in Egypt.
The following is one example out of many:
Every person, before he sits down to the table, or rather to the tray, washes his hands, and sometimes his mouth also, with soap and water; or, at least, has some water poured upon his right hand. A servant brings to him a basin and ewer..., of tinned copper, or of brass... and the water, being poured upon the hands, passes through this cover into the space below; so that when the basin is brought to a second person, the water with which the former one has washed is not seen. [142]
Reading exact descriptions such as this I find myself wondering if a similarly detailed one could be made for life in the US. To some extent I think it would be possible. After attending two weddings since the beginning of the summer, I could write a fairly detailed description covering generic elements. With a little thought I could think of some stock phrases and physical motions.
Something would be lacking in that effort to describe modern American customs. American life does not fall into so many physical and verbal scripts. This is one aspect of learning Arabic that I always found difficult: the many phrases that must be used in certain situations. It is a language that is rich with scripts, as Lane notes: "The ordinary set compliments in use in Egyptian society are so numerous, that a dozen pages of this work would not suffice for the mention of those which may be heard almost every day". The physical movements of daily life have a similar script-like quality.
My point is in contrast to Gregory's essay.. which would tend to see Lane's treatment of the manners and customs of the Egyptians as a result of the idiosyncrasy of Lane himself. His description of Cairo would therefore be more a matter of narrative style. Cairo is being viewed as a stage, and Lane is describing performances. But it seems to me that Lane is catching something that was actually there: a highly scripted physical culture. This kind of exact description would not work as well when it came to describing, say, American street life or marriages because the social scripts are not as strong.. leading to more variation.
Why all these scripts in Egyptian life? One obvious source is the hadith of the prophet Muhammad. The following is a single hadith on the topic of ablutions:
I saw 'Uthman bin 'Affan asking (for a tumbler of water) to perform ablution (and when it was brought) he poured water from it over his hands and washed them thrice and then put his right hand in the water container and rinsed his mouth and washed his nose by putting water in it and then blowing it out. Then he washed his face thrice and (then) forearms up to the elbows thrice, then passed his wet hands over his head and then washed each foot thrice. After that 'Uthman said, "I saw the Prophet performing ablution like this of mine..."
One way to approach the hadith is to see them as a storehouse of social scripts.. which end up creating a performance oriented culture. That is, a culture whose individuals have internalized a set of concrete actions and words. In such a script-loving culture, even actions that get no mention in hadith pick up a normative script.
Automatic Coherence in Aleppo
July 8, 2007
The Image of an Ottoman City: Imperial Architecture and Urban Experience in Aleppo in the 16th and 17th Centuries by Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh brings up an important point.. one which has broad application to the interpretation of a broad range of cultural texts. At issue is how to explain the coherence of the central corridor in Aleppo. Watenpaugh first notes the opinion of a previous scholar of the city:
Jean Sauvaget in his 1941 study of Aleppo forcefully argued against the notion of a broader urban plan governing single acts of patronage. He attributed the homogeneous appearance of the central monumental corridor to a fortunate coincidence, which was "fallacious" in that it produced an impression of planning while it was in fact the result of unplanned, haphazard growth. [53]
This argument makes sense.. to a point. Since complexes were the result of individual acts of patronage it is reasonable to deny the presence of a plan. There were no building commissions or urban architects that molded projects into a coherent form as the decades passed. This lack of a central plan does not equal randomness.. and that is where Sauvaget went wrong.
Watenpaugh does not argue for a plan, but points out another way coherence can be gained:
A series of actions taken by a succession of patrons can have a collective meaning independently of each individual action's circumstances. Even if there was no master plan, no civic or municipal body to devise such a plan, the coherence and continuity of the building habits over the 16th and 17th centuries suggest the maintenance of a practice, the awareness of a local tradition, and the will to uphold it. [54]
This is a smart way out of a bind. To explain coherence one does not need to show some shadowy and determinative plan, one simply has to understand the diverse mechanisms that can bring about coherence. A psychological mechanism that appears to have been at play in Aleppo is unity of sensibility. A series of 10 patrons who share some important aesthetic and practical assumptions about urban areas will tend to build projects that complement each other. At the completion of the building projects promoted by them there may well be a "central monumental corridor" that was not an atomistic mess, but a coherent group of structures.
There are many situations in life where it is useful to keep in mind the automatic construction of narratives. When Emily and I attended Quaker meetings back in Atlanta I was always fascinated by the ways that individual messages built upon each other.. until at the end I could sometimes discern a broad theme. It could be simply a trick of my own imagination, but I believe it would be more accurate to refer it to a subtle psychological gravitation toward coherence. One person's message pushes someone else to frame their message within that new context.. and the third person frames their theme according to the last two messages. Messages can be quite different.. and some people seem unconscious of context.. but an overall theme often does come about. Nobody planned it; human beings just do that: they deploy themselves in ways that seem most coherent for a given context.
In talking about this with Emily tonight I mentioned the game of starting a story and then passing it to a group of friends so that each can add a paragraph to it. Emily pointed out how her idea was always to make the story curve in a radically different direction. That practice comes from a strong notion of individuality. The Ottoman constructions in Aleppo worked just like a version of that game with conservative players. Each individual patron added materially to past constructions. The crucial difference from the game, though, is that shared cultural values made each succeeding patron build as closely as possible in the direction and style of the preceding patrons. If one patron in this line had been Russian, say, instead of Ottoman, then the pattern would have been badly broken. But that is the point: similar people with similar sensibilities will unconsciously create a text that has coherence. Such coherence can leave the later interpreter scurrying to locate a master plan.. but in fact there was none.
Skylines and Identities
July 6, 2007
The skyscraper has a special role in the process of city creation: it creates a city as a city in the imagination of the public. Think of a large city, now think of the symbolic building that sets the city apart.. makes it more than a clump of tall windowed bla-bla-bla structures. The importance of this symbolic tall building is evident on sports broadcasts where at the start the audience gets the obligatory view of the skyline from a circling blimp. The distinctive skyscraper is a visual handle for the imagination.
I started thinking about skyscrapers last week as I finished a fascinating book: The Image of an Ottoman City: Imperial Architecture and Urban Experience in Aleppo in the 16th and 17th Centuries, by Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh. There were of course no skyscrapers in Ottoman times. They were faced with a peculiar challenge in the 16th century: how to stamp an Ottoman identity upon cities that had recently been added to their empire. The answer was not to raze the cities and start over.. making it a truly Ottoman city. The strategy was instead to adopt the previous framework but add significant structures that re-focus and re-imagine the city.
For the pedestrian strolling in Aleppo at the end of the Ottoman period, all the minarets would have been, in a sense, contemporary. The most prominently visible ones, however, date from the sixteenth century when the large institutional complexes, which they surmount, were constructed. The distinctive Ottoman silhouettes of these complexes—their low hemispherical domes and graceful pencil-shaped minarets—redefined the skyline of Aleppo. [27]
The Ottoman's had a distinctive visual style.. most evident from the spectacular skyline of Istanbul (seen below in a postcard image):
You can see those pencil-shaped minarets and distinctive domes. To create an Ottoman identity this style of mosque was repeated at visually important sites within newly added cities. A city like Aleppo would have had many mosques and minarets from earlier time periods, but, as Watenpaugh argues, the visitor would have been most struck by the presence of distinctly Ottoman architecture. This architecture is not simply "beautiful".. it does some cultural heavy-lifting as it symbolically marks a city as being Ottoman.
These distinctive mosques were built through a patronage system that allowed wealthy officials to tie down a portion of their wealth in perpetuity in order to support a charitable institution.. like a mosque. So the construction of Ottoman Aleppo was not a centralized project, but the inevitable result of a system that encouraged expansive construction.
So back to the skyscrapers. I would argue that something quite similar is going on in modern cities. The skyscraper is a visual marker for what we in America consider a "city". (European cities have a different visual language, and therefore resist skyscrapers.) The point is not for every city to construct an exact replica of the Empire State Building.. rather to construct a unique form of the skyscraper. These buildings, sitting on our skylines, visually proclaim: "city".
So why do Asian cities excel now at skyscrapers? I am sure the price of land has something to do with it.. and the resultant push upward. I would think that more important is the symbolic value of the skyscraper. When Kuala Lampur or Shanghai constructs an imposing skyscraper, these cities are not claiming to be part of America.. that would be absurd. They are positioning themselves as part of the globalized economy. The skyscraper has gone from being a symbol of American urban identity to being one for engagement with the global market.
If this is correct, the skyscraper now functions a lot like an Ottoman mosque. It is a marker that a city belongs to a certain global regime. Skyscrapers arise from an odd system of corporate patronage. Corporations are a lot like Ottoman officials, their true responsibility being not to a local economy but to shareholders scattered everywhere. Nevertheless there is mutual benefit to be had for a corporation in cultivating of a relationship with a city.. and the result are structures that are not just functional, but add to the prestige of a city.. and finally create a symbolically loaded skyline.
Go Red for the Fourth of July:
Ry Cooder and My Name is Buddy
July 5, 2007
Despite my private moaning that the album is a thing of the past.. overrun by singles and ipod shuffling.. great albums continue to appear. Instead of beating a retreat, albums have blossomed into multi-media projects. Elaborate art work, DVD footage, and web tie-ins have all allowed artists to project their work into multiple contexts.. allowing for lusher musical fictions to take shape. A recent example of this phenomenon is My Name is Buddy by Ry Cooder.. an album that develops the story of Buddy Red Cat, Lefty Mouse, and the Reverend Tom Toad. In this case the pencil sketches and additional short stories built around each song add something extra to the album.
My formal interest in the album is overshadowed by my sheer enjoyment of the project. If ever there were an Old Roads album, this is it. Notionally the album is a return to the Depression era world of Woody Guthrie. Folks are leaving home and heading to the West, organizing themselves into unions, and getting harrassed by the cops. The album does not merely employ these themes, but consists of songs written in historic styles. Sometimes you hear Woody Guthrie, but other times the Carter Family, the blues, or religious speechifying. Ry Cooder has given us an archeology of old American musical styles. That would be interesting enough, but then he manages to make these old themes address our own political moment.. and with a sharp edge!
For me the most daring move of the album was to unflinchingly embrace "Red" values. The banner song of the album is "Red Cat Till I Die":
Now, you think you're hard-boiled, you're just yellow inside
My daddy always warned me, now I know he's right
You're just cowards hiding behind a little tin star
The people are starting to realize what a bunch of clowns you are
And in case that isn't enough of a thumb in the eye of the political establishment.. try the final stanza:
But I'm a red cat till I die, I a red cat through and through
I won't fight your rich man's war and kill poor folks for you
You can't make me do things I know it's wrong to do
I'm a red cat till I die, I'm telling you
All of this could be applied to the Depression.. but here and elsewhere the lines clearly break out and address our contemporary world. For Cooder "Red" does not bring with it specific doctrines that can be tied back to Marx; the word is a convenient historical identity that can be resurrected to mark opposition to political authority.
One of the most clever of the songs on the album is "The Dying Truck Driver".. which is a dead ringer for a the gently harmonizing sound of the Carter Family. The story is laid out in a linear fashion.. and the basic set-up is simple enough: while passing through the San Joaquin Valley our furry left-leaning friends run into a dying man, who they judge to be a truck driver. It is a replay of the Good Samaritan.. cast into Guthrie/Steinbeck land. Upon further inquiry it turns out that the truckdriver was struck down by a surprising culprit:
It was no vigilante gang, nor ranch-boss thugs this time
But the meatloaf special dinner I had on Highway 99
A comely waitress served me there, she cooled me with her fan
But fatal meatloaf has struck down this old truck driving man
It seems like a strange parable at this point. Watch out for the mealoaf?? But the significance of that meatloaf becomes clear in the final stanza:
Now, the workingman must be well warned whenever headlines scream
"Your rights must yield, the bombs must fall to save democracy"
The flag they fly, their stew of lies served up at voting time
Like poison under the gravy on Highway 99
The meatloaf turns out to be a great object lesson for the Fourth of July. Cooder is serving up a plate full of Americana to his listeners.. songs delivered in the American idiom. He also warns us about that plate of Americana: it could be poisonous. In other words, he is not out to take away the meatloaf or any other pleasure of America's past. He clearly respects the truck driver who, dying, calls on what he thinks are angels to bear him up to Jesus. The problem is that those bits of Americana and religion can be turned into something quite different.. and more dangerous. Words like freedom and liberty.. even Jesus.. can be turned to mean their opposite. Cooder thus stakes out in "The Dying Truck Driver" a position on the American past. One that, incidentally, is useful to keep in mind while listening to the album, which is both an embrace and a push back to American values.
Me, You, and Our Heroes
July 3, 2007
The film Me, You, and Dupree is obviously not standard Old Roads material.. but allow me an extended comment. Matt Dillon plays a guy who gets married and then gets promoted at the real estate development company of his father in law. He has an idea for an eco-friendly small community.. named "The Oaks at Monte Vista" (or something like that). His father-in-law (played by Michael Douglas) claims to like the idea, but then transforms it into a mega-development. The above scene shows Matt Dillon reacting violently to the model of the proposed project. He is angry at seeing a faceless housing development, which is nothing like the one he had proposed.
The father-in-law is the bad guy of the story.. greedily maximizing the development and imposing a dull geometric order onto it. This could simply be an example of Hollywood imposing a liberal order onto the film.. but I think it reflects something deeper than that: as a culture we actually do dislike the guy who is out solely for profit and designs faceless places. The contradiction is that any trip though the suburbs of our large cities reveals faceless housing developments that are only slightly less profit-hungry and faceless than the one Matt Dillon reacts against in the film.
To me the mystery is why we can't recognize ourselves in films like this. Somehow "we" are the ones who would rather live in an eco-friendly small community.. not the ones who buy into the faceless development.
A few years back I thought something similar when I saw The Incredibles.
In this case a family of superheroes with natural talents goes up against a jealous young upstart who is inferior because he has no natural talents—he gets everything from his own technological artifice. The valorizing of what is "natural" over what is derived from technology has a long pedigree in American film.. and without thinking we root for the naturals (i.e. the "incredibles"). But if there has ever been a civilization that relies on technology.. it is us. So why can't we see ourselves in the bad guy for The Incredibles? There is a certain willful blindness at work..
The English Language in Hotels
July 3, 2007
Under the guise of welcoming guests to take popular "guest room amenities", the guest is in fact being warned that if he steals anything his credit card will be charged.. and at an exorbitant rate. In today's business-speak it would be too jarring to outright warn a customer against stealing the towels and pillows. (Strictly speaking, I doubt that this is legal.. as I have always understood that the customer must authorize each charge.. and posting some plastic sign in the bathroom hardly gives authorization.)
This is an example of a line that is taken nowadays by just about every hotel. In order to save water and use less detergent the customer is asked to signal which towels should be replaced and which left as they are. It is a decision that does not quite add up to Saving the Planet. The benefits of these actions to the hotel are obvious (less money on water and detergent, less labor). In these conditions the appeal to environmental concerns make those very concerns seem ridiculous.. or so it seems to me.
I find business-speak getting more and more annoying..
