"If you fake the funk, your nose will grow." — Bootsy Collins
I have continued my exploration of the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead by reading Science and the Modern World (1925), together with the first half of Isabelle Stengers’ commentary…
I have continued my exploration of the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead by reading Science and the Modern World (1925), together with the first half of Isabelle Stengers’ commentary…
Continue reading “Whitehead (continued)”
What Genes Can’t Do, by Lenny Moss, doesn’t quite deliver on its title’s promise of a thorough critique of genetic determinism. The book is much more limited in its scope than the title would suggest. But within its own boundaries, the book does argue cogently and make some important points. Moss is a philosopher with a background in cell biology; he’s able to go into detail on both the history of biologiy, and on current work in the field…
What Genes Can’t Do, by Lenny Moss, doesn’t quite deliver on its title’s promise of a thorough critique of genetic determinism. The book is much more limited in its scope than the title would suggest. But within its own boundaries, the book does argue cogently and make some important points. Moss is a philosopher with a background in cell biology; he’s able to go into detail on both the history of biologiy, and on current work in the field…
Continue reading “What Genes Can’t Do”
Chen Kuo-Fu’s Double Vision, a Taiwanese/American co-production, mixes genres to brilliant effect: it’s a combination of serial killer/police thriller, supernatural horror, and family melodrama, with a bit of cross-cultural-misunderstanding comedy thrown in for good measure. A Taipei cop with a traumatic past, whose life and career are a mess (veteran Hong Kong actor Tony Leung) tries to solve a series of murders with both high-tech and mystical Taoist overtones, with the help of an American FBI man (David Morse). The cinematography is fluid and elegant, and the plot is genuinely shocking as well as creepy, as it continually shifts its ground (and the genre expectations it arouses), moving from police procedural to splatterfest to subdued melancholy to an absolutely hallucinatory and delirious conclusion. The overall affective tone of the film is pessimistic and anguished, though it also manages to project a balance between spiritual yearning and extreme skepticism in a way that I’ve neve felt or seen before. (This is tied in as well with the film’s theme of inevitable misunderstandings between American and Chinese culture; my own cultural preconceptions obviously limit my understanding of the film, but this is something that the film explicitly addresses with Morse’s character). All in all, this is a rather grim film that nonetheless gives a great deal of pleasure through its continual inventiveness and surprise. It fuses art and pulp to provide continual astonishment. Double Vision is sufficiently original that I have trouble describing it any less abstractly that I have here. All I can say, really, is that it provides both intensity and wonder; what more could I ever ask from a film?
Chen Kuo-Fu’s Double Vision, a Taiwanese/American co-production, mixes genres to brilliant effect: it’s a combination of serial killer/police thriller, supernatural horror, and family melodrama, with a bit of cross-cultural-misunderstanding comedy thrown in for good measure. A Taipei cop with a traumatic past, whose life and career are a mess (veteran Hong Kong actor Tony Leung) tries to solve a series of murders with both high-tech and mystical Taoist overtones, with the help of an American FBI man (David Morse). The cinematography is fluid and elegant, and the plot is genuinely shocking as well as creepy, as it continually shifts its ground (and the genre expectations it arouses), moving from police procedural to splatterfest to subdued melancholy to an absolutely hallucinatory and delirious conclusion. The overall affective tone of the film is pessimistic and anguished, though it also manages to project a balance between spiritual yearning and extreme skepticism in a way that I’ve neve felt or seen before. (This is tied in as well with the film’s theme of inevitable misunderstandings between American and Chinese culture; my own cultural preconceptions obviously limit my understanding of the film, but this is something that the film explicitly addresses with Morse’s character). All in all, this is a rather grim film that nonetheless gives a great deal of pleasure through its continual inventiveness and surprise. It fuses art and pulp to provide continual astonishment. Double Vision is sufficiently original that I have trouble describing it any less abstractly that I have here. All I can say, really, is that it provides both intensity and wonder; what more could I ever ask from a film?
In the Science section of today’s New York Times, there’s an interesting and (as usual) problematic article about the evolution of human beings’ “ability to enjoy music”. All human cultures seem to value and make music; this is a problem for evolutionary theory, because music “does nothing evident to help survival.” How could it therefore have evolved?…
In the Science section of today’s New York Times, there’s an interesting and (as usual) problematic article about the evolution of human beings’ “ability to enjoy music”. All human cultures seem to value and make music; this is a problem for evolutionary theory, because music “does nothing evident to help survival.” How could it therefore have evolved?…
Continue reading “Evolution of Music”
Hideo Nakata’s Ringu is an effectively creepy horror film, which well deserves its cult reputation. The power of the film comes from its minimalism and restraint, as well as the fact that we the viewers get to see the (strange, disjunctive, and oddly haunting) video that kills anyone who watches it. The film’s double ending – an apparent resolution, followed by a twist in which the danger is still active – is in itself a genre cliche, but both “endings” are emotionally resonant. The corpse’s emergence from the well is quite beautiful. The overall theme of electronic media as vectors of contamination is also poetically apt (and it seems to be in the air right now: a similar scenario, of a video that kills whoever watches it, can be found in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest; the same theme, only with a song instead of a video, is the basis of Chuck Palahnuik’s Lullaby. But the particular twist of Ringu, which I won’t mention here in order not to ruin the experience for anyone reading this who hasn’t seen it yet, has a special resonance).
Hideo Nakata’s Ringu is an effectively creepy horror film, which well deserves its cult reputation. The power of the film comes from its minimalism and restraint, as well as the fact that we the viewers get to see the (strange, disjunctive, and oddly haunting) video that kills anyone who watches it. The film’s double ending – an apparent resolution, followed by a twist in which the danger is still active – is in itself a genre cliche, but both “endings” are emotionally resonant. The corpse’s emergence from the well is quite beautiful. The overall theme of electronic media as vectors of contamination is also poetically apt (and it seems to be in the air right now: a similar scenario, of a video that kills whoever watches it, can be found in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest; the same theme, only with a song instead of a video, is the basis of Chuck Palahnuik’s Lullaby. But the particular twist of Ringu, which I won’t mention here in order not to ruin the experience for anyone reading this who hasn’t seen it yet, has a special resonance).
The Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) is one of my all-time favorite writers, so I was glad to come across Three Novellas that had not previously been translated into English. Bernhard’s fiction usually consists of long paragraphs consisting of fragmentary sentences just piled on, one after another; the sentences are usually made of multiple layers of indirect discourse, speakers reporting on other speakers reporting on other speakers. Thus in the third and best of these three novellas, Walking, the narrator recounts to the reader what his friend Oehler recounts to him about what he said to the psychiatrist Scherrer about what Karrer, who has gone insane, said to him (Oehler). These convolutions in the narrative voice are accompanied by convolutions in the events narrated, as the multiply layered narrators circle around what they cannot directly describe, mixing anecdotes, rants, digressions, and obsessive repetitions. The overall effect is at once gruesome and hilarious: the narrators insist that life is unbearable, that suicide is the best and only way out, that Austria in particular is a nasty and unlivable country, filled with Nazis and charlatans and ignorant vulgar bullies with a violent, resentful enmity against true and original thought. But these monologues are comic more than tragic because they are so obsessive and so over-the-top. Reading Bernhard is exhilarating, and makes me laugh out loud, even though at the same time his fiction more than confirms my most negative, doom-ridden, and misanthropic feelings and thoughts. Bernhard’s books work because they implicate their narrators, and their readers, in everything they are ranting against: finally they are about the incapacity of thought – or of writing – to realize itself, to cohere with itself, to coincide with itself. Consciousness is always riddled with otherness: the otherness of the body, and of language, as well as of other people and society and nature. This makes thought a painful process, the more excruciatingly painful the more exacerbatedly turned back upon itself; but it always does turn back upon itself, like an itch that one cannot help scratching, even though this only makes it itch more in the long run. So Bernhard’s fiction, beyond its critique of the falseness and superficiality of Austrian culture, dramatizes the impossibility of mastering thought, of mastering one’s own discourse, of being triumphantly masterful and creative, which is what the myth of art and creativity in modern society comes down to. And yet Bernhard’s fiction is itself wonderfully creative, precisely by expressing, and wallowing in, this abject impossibility. Reading Bernhard means inoculating oneself against the nauseating myths of creativity, genius, mastery, moral uplift, etc. – one has to reject these myths, not because art is worthless and meaningless, but precisely because art matters, and Bernhard gives us an account of how and why it matters. The exhilarating laughter of excruciating pain and disgust.
The Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) is one of my all-time favorite writers, so I was glad to come across Three Novellas that had not previously been translated into English. Bernhard’s fiction usually consists of long paragraphs consisting of fragmentary sentences just piled on, one after another; the sentences are usually made of multiple layers of indirect discourse, speakers reporting on other speakers reporting on other speakers. Thus in the third and best of these three novellas, Walking, the narrator recounts to the reader what his friend Oehler recounts to him about what he said to the psychiatrist Scherrer about what Karrer, who has gone insane, said to him (Oehler). These convolutions in the narrative voice are accompanied by convolutions in the events narrated, as the multiply layered narrators circle around what they cannot directly describe, mixing anecdotes, rants, digressions, and obsessive repetitions. The overall effect is at once gruesome and hilarious: the narrators insist that life is unbearable, that suicide is the best and only way out, that Austria in particular is a nasty and unlivable country, filled with Nazis and charlatans and ignorant vulgar bullies with a violent, resentful enmity against true and original thought. But these monologues are comic more than tragic because they are so obsessive and so over-the-top. Reading Bernhard is exhilarating, and makes me laugh out loud, even though at the same time his fiction more than confirms my most negative, doom-ridden, and misanthropic feelings and thoughts. Bernhard’s books work because they implicate their narrators, and their readers, in everything they are ranting against: finally they are about the incapacity of thought – or of writing – to realize itself, to cohere with itself, to coincide with itself. Consciousness is always riddled with otherness: the otherness of the body, and of language, as well as of other people and society and nature. This makes thought a painful process, the more excruciatingly painful the more exacerbatedly turned back upon itself; but it always does turn back upon itself, like an itch that one cannot help scratching, even though this only makes it itch more in the long run. So Bernhard’s fiction, beyond its critique of the falseness and superficiality of Austrian culture, dramatizes the impossibility of mastering thought, of mastering one’s own discourse, of being triumphantly masterful and creative, which is what the myth of art and creativity in modern society comes down to. And yet Bernhard’s fiction is itself wonderfully creative, precisely by expressing, and wallowing in, this abject impossibility. Reading Bernhard means inoculating oneself against the nauseating myths of creativity, genius, mastery, moral uplift, etc. – one has to reject these myths, not because art is worthless and meaningless, but precisely because art matters, and Bernhard gives us an account of how and why it matters. The exhilarating laughter of excruciating pain and disgust.
Shuman Ghosemajumder has a very sensible proposal for file sharing. Basically it comes down to unlimited downloads and sharing of music files for a flat monthly fee; the fee would compensate creators and copyright holders. This is more or less the model currently used by emusic, of which I am a subscriber. The emusic service is worth a lot more to me than the $10/month I pay as a subscriber; I can get albums I want easily, in unencrpyted mp3 format, without the annoying searches and problems of download times and falsely labeled files that I encounter on the services that the RIAA is trying to suppress. The sole problem with emusic is that it only carries music by certain (not all) independent labels. Shuman’s proposal would generalize this sort of model to all recorded music. I am inclined to think that the record companies would be better off in the long run if they adopted such a business model (together, perhaps, with a small tax on blank media such as already exists in Canada in return for the legalization of personal file copying). But the record industry will never do such a thing as long as they maintain their current gangster mentality (the current RIAA lawsuits are essentially shakedowns of people who can’t afford to pay; and I suspect that, if push came to shove, the industry would sacrifice profits in order to maintain absolute control over their “product”). I suppose we can only hope….
Shuman Ghosemajumder has a very sensible proposal for file sharing. Basically it comes down to unlimited downloads and sharing of music files for a flat monthly fee; the fee would compensate creators and copyright holders. This is more or less the model currently used by emusic, of which I am a subscriber. The emusic service is worth a lot more to me than the $10/month I pay as a subscriber; I can get albums I want easily, in unencrpyted mp3 format, without the annoying searches and problems of download times and falsely labeled files that I encounter on the services that the RIAA is trying to suppress. The sole problem with emusic is that it only carries music by certain (not all) independent labels. Shuman’s proposal would generalize this sort of model to all recorded music. I am inclined to think that the record companies would be better off in the long run if they adopted such a business model (together, perhaps, with a small tax on blank media such as already exists in Canada in return for the legalization of personal file copying). But the record industry will never do such a thing as long as they maintain their current gangster mentality (the current RIAA lawsuits are essentially shakedowns of people who can’t afford to pay; and I suspect that, if push came to shove, the industry would sacrifice profits in order to maintain absolute control over their “product”). I suppose we can only hope….
I’ve never really liked the movies of the Coen Brothers. All their films are formally exquisite, but way too snide and condescending, in an annoyingly facile and self-congratulatory way. Fargo is probably their best film; I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it, and they maintained a better balance between suspense and sarcasm than they usually do. But it still feels slick and empty afterwards. Maybe I’m just being a curmudgeon about Joel and Ethan Coen; everyone else seems to love them.But something just doesn’t connect for me; it’s not that I object to cynicism, necessarily, but it annoys me how they are too cynical to even own up to their own cynicism.
I’ve never really liked the movies of the Coen Brothers. All their films are formally exquisite, but way too snide and condescending, in an annoyingly facile and self-congratulatory way. Fargo is probably their best film; I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it, and they maintained a better balance between suspense and sarcasm than they usually do. But it still feels slick and empty afterwards. Maybe I’m just being a curmudgeon about Joel and Ethan Coen; everyone else seems to love them. But something just doesn’t connect for me; it’s not that I object to cynicism, necessarily, but it annoys me how the Coens are too cynical to even own up to the consequences of their own cynicism.
Warren Ellis‘ Switchblade Honey is a Star Trek parody; Ellis warns us in his Introduction that “this isn’t me at my most blisteringly intellectual.” So it isn’t Transmetropolitan or Global Frequency. But it’s a hoot. I admit it, I get off on seeing starship crews smoke and drink and curse and wonder whether the human race is even worth saving.
Warren Ellis‘ Switchblade Honey is a Star Trek parody; Ellis warns us in his Introduction that “this isn’t me at my most blisteringly intellectual.” So it isn’t Transmetropolitan or Global Frequency. But it’s a hoot. I admit it, I get off on seeing starship crews smoke and drink and curse and wonder whether the human race is even worth saving.
The Tooth Fairy, by Graham Joyce, is a compelling and ultimately poignant coming-of-age story. Oh yes,and it’s also a weird fantasy novel. We follow the protagonist, Sam, and his friends from age four until they graduate from high school. The time is the 1960s, the place a working-class British town in the middle of nowhere (more or less). We get many of the usual, as well as some highly unusual, heterosexual-male childhood and adolescent traumas, having to do with parents and friends and authority and school and masturbation and girls and drugs; but we also get something more, because Sam is haunted by the Tooth Fairy, a foul-mouthed gender-shifter who originally appears to collect a fallen-out baby tooth, but keeps on coming back, insinuating to Sam, seducing him, repelling him, messing with his life, causing tragedies in all the people about him, and generally tormenting and obsessing him far beyond what his actual situation would seem to call for. Joyce leaves it an open question to what extent we should regard this apparition as “real,” and to what extent we can see it as just a kind of psychological projection. But the presence of the Tooth Fairy transfigures this otherwise more-or-less naturalistic story, giving it a haunting intensity that has absolutely nothing to do with the putrid, pseudo-poetic nostalgia that so often ruins adult reminiscences of childhood and adolescence. Instead, Joyce achieves the effect of a primordial beauty and terror amidst what is otherwise , and simultaneously, quotidian banality.
The Tooth Fairy, by Graham Joyce, is a compelling and ultimately poignant coming-of-age story. Oh yes,and it’s also a weird fantasy novel. We follow the protagonist, Sam, and his friends from age four until they graduate from high school. The time is the 1960s, the place a working-class British town in the middle of nowhere (more or less). We get many of the usual, as well as some highly unusual, heterosexual-male childhood and adolescent traumas, having to do with parents and friends and authority and school and masturbation and girls and drugs; but we also get something more, because Sam is haunted by the Tooth Fairy, a foul-mouthed gender-shifter who originally appears to collect a fallen-out baby tooth, but keeps on coming back, insinuating to Sam, seducing him, repelling him, messing with his life, causing tragedies in all the people about him, and generally tormenting and obsessing him far beyond what his actual situation would seem to call for. Joyce leaves it an open question to what extent we should regard this apparition as “real,” and to what extent we can see it as just a kind of psychological projection. But the presence of the Tooth Fairy transfigures this otherwise more-or-less naturalistic story, giving it a haunting intensity that has absolutely nothing to do with the putrid, pseudo-poetic nostalgia that so often ruins adult reminiscences of childhood and adolescence. Instead, Joyce achieves the effect of a primordial beauty and terror amidst what is otherwise , and simultaneously, quotidian banality.