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News Archives.

June 22, 2009

The Reluctant Afronaut

CREDIT: Obtainium. Excavated from the Web.

WHAT:"Solar Flare: Sun Ra's album covers were wild, inspired, and a universe away from Blue Note": my feature on the graphic-design sensibility of the jazz composer Sun Ra, Print magazine, June 2009, pps. 86-93.

WHERE: HERE.

CREDIT: "Boldly Go," by Abdi Farah. (For more about this astonishing work, go HERE.) COPYRIGHT: Abdi Farah, all rights reserved.

ATTENTION CONSERVATION KEYWORDS: Afrofuturism, Sun Ra, graphic design from Alpha Centauri, black starliners, Afrocentrist UFOlogy, space jazz from Betelgeuse.

ATTENTION CONSERVATION PULLQUOTE:

"A world away from the smoky, cellar-jam-session cool of [most jazz] album art, the handmade aesthetic, do-it-yourself ethos, and ripped-and-remixed imagery of [Sun Ra's] album covers and promo materials are of a piece with [the composer's] bricolaged cosmology. Desperate to escape what Ra biographer John Szwed calls the 'racially possessed' America of the Jim Crow years, Ra built an alternate worldview from scratch, cobbling it together from Flash Gordon futurism, mail-order Egyptology, Biblical hermeneutics, and 19th-century occultism. Long before men walked on the moon, Ra knew, in his bones, that he was part of the 'angel race.' Like a trans-racial Marcus Garvey beckoning humankind toward his intergalactic starliner, he urged space migration for black and white alike. The El Saturn graphics are a part of this sprawling star chart, a cosmic Baedeker pointing to Other Planes of There."

CREDIT: Dave Muller, "WHAT WOULD SUN RA DO?" Acrylic on paper, 2004. COPYRIGHT: Dave Muller, all rights reserved.

Posted by Mark Dery at 10:34 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 13, 2009

Mark Pauline: Heavy Metal Theater of Cruelty (Giftware #3)

PHOTO: SRL MAYHEM. CREDIT/COPYRIGHT: Scott Beale/Laughing Squid; ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Mark Pauline and his dozen-odd, mostly male co-workers have stockpiled an arsenal in the machine shop where they live and work, on the outskirts of San Francisco's Mission District. One device, the Low-Frequency Generator, is a mobile, radio-controlled, reaction jet engine, modeled after the V-1 buzz bomb whose banshee shriek struck terror in Londoners during World War II. "We ran it and people heard it almost 12 miles away," says Pauline, with relish. "They had stories on the evening news asking anybody with information about the strange reverberations felt throughout the Bay Area to call the police. You can stand next to this thing and what it does to your brain is just...sublime. You feel as if there are rats in your chest. It shakes your eyeballs so much that they black out and come on again 45 times per second, creating a strobe effect. It's the sort of phenomenon that doesn't exist anywhere else on Earth."

Another shameless wallow in '90s nostalgia: a lengthy book excerpt uploaded to SCRIBD, this one from Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century.

READ IT HERE.

BUY IT HERE.

From the SCRIBD blurb (written, again, in the Bob Dole-ian third person):

Although it was published in 1996, on the eve of the Digital Revolution, Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century stands the test of time.

To be sure, some of its references have passed their sell-by dates, but much of Dery's cultural critique of the ideologies of digital subcultures---their political myths and religious subtexts---still rings true. Escape Velocity explores the '90s digital subcultures and popular movements that both celebrated and critiqued a newly wired world: cyberpunk SF, technopagans, transhumanists, cyber-hippies, and rogue roboticists such as Mark Pauline's Survival Research Laboratories, to name a few.

PHOTO: CREDIT/COPYRIGHT SURVIVAL RESEARCH LABORATORIES.

In this chapter excerpt, "Mark Pauline: Heavy Metal Theater of Cruelty," Dery considers the hidden agendas of Mark Pauline's Survival Research Laboratories, a gang of renegade technologists who enact their dissident politics literally, reanimating castoff military-industrial machinery in the service of cyberpunk performance art.

In SRL's mechanical spectacles, amok robots and humans menaced by heavy machinery dramatize popular anxieties over the growing autonomy of intelligent machines and the seeming obsolescence of humanity. SRL has perfected a heavy metal theater of cruelty---scary, stupefyingly loud events in which remote-controlled weaponry, computer-directed robots, and reanimated roadkill do battle in a murk of smoke, flames, and greasy fumes.

A combination of killing field and carnival midway, SRL's theater of operations can be seen as a meditation on the game-like nature of military strategy, an object lesson in the theatrical unreality of war, or a black comedy about arms proliferation. "SRL shows are a satire of kill technology, an absurd parody of the military-industrial complex," says Pauline.

Posted by Mark Dery at 03:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 04, 2009

Love in the Time of Swine Flu

Couple, Mexico City. Photo: David Lida. All rights reserved.

Newsflash: the June 2009 issue of The Brooklyn Rail includes "Love in the Time of Swine Flu," my feature on David Lida, pegged on the softcover release of First Stop in the New World, his addictively readable book about Mexico City.

Teaser:

Now that the epidemic seems to have peaked, with a global body count far lower than the Andromeda Strain horror scripted by the U.S. media, reasonable minds on both sides of the border are taking a hard look at the media etiology of the panic. When American anxiety was at its height, Right Wing frothing heads like Michelle Malkin and Michael Savage helped spread the hate, blaming the Creeping Pig Death on the engulfing tide of "uncontrolled immigration" (Malkin). "Make no mistake about it: illegal aliens are the carriers of the new strain of human-swine avian flu from Mexico," Savage barked.

David Lida's affection for the city remains undiminished. In the new paperback edition of his justifiably acclaimed First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century, Lida rips and remixes the 'hypermetropolis, the ur-urb of the American continent' into a fast-moving mashup."

Even so, the book is no Travel Channel puff piece.

In the chapter on crime, 'Who's Afraid of Mexico City?' Lida describes his harrowing hours, in 1996, as the victim of what locals call a secuestro express (express kidnapping), in which a pair of goons held him and his then-wife at knifepoint on a cab ride from hell, trying his credit card at various ATMs.

Two hours is a long time under such circumstances, and we were able to engage in a little Stockholm-syndrome dialogue. The Gorilla was the most voluble. Soon after the joyride began he informed us that what was happening was not his fault but the government's, for turning its back on its neediest citizens and forcing them to steal to survive. [My wife] was quick to point out that neither she nor I had any connection with the regime. “Les tocó,” he said, in a perfect illustration of Mexican fatalism. Your number came up.

Couple, Mexico City. Photo: David Lida. All rights reserved.

Posted by Mark Dery at 02:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 01, 2009

O Come, All Ye Unfaithful

Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith, is out, and a handsome thing it is. Edited by the redoubtable Jeff Sharlet and Peter Manseau (of Killing the Buddha fame), the collection anthologizes essays with curiosity-piquing titles such as "Jew Like Me," "Zen Mind, Alkie Mind," "Agnostic Front," "I Was a Prepubescent Messiah," "Banana Slug Psalm" (is there a bandname in that, or what?), and the incomparable "Bible Porn" (sects sells!).

My contribution, a true confession about my brief-lived career as a teenaged Jesus Freak in the mid-1970s, is called "Jesus is Just Alright," a title that inspired Sharlet to write, in a note he enclosed with my contributor's copy, "I've been wanting to use that as a title for years, but never could figure out what. I'm glad you showed me the way."

Long ago, in the lost world of the '70s, when I never missed an opportunity to "witness" to the unsaved, I might have replied, "John 14:6: Jesus said to him, 'I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but through Me.'"

Mercifully, I've seen the light.

Posted by Mark Dery at 04:54 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

April 01, 2009

Nature Morte: Formaldehyde Photography and the New Grotesque (Giftware #2)

WHAT: "Nature Morte: Formaldehyde Photography and the New Grotesque," a chapter from The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (Grove/Atlantic: 1999) uploaded to the file-sharing site SCRIBD.

Wax venus (Baroque obstetric mannequin) from La Specola, in Florence, Italy. Photo: Joanna Ebenstein; all rights reserved. For more of this sort of thing, see Ebenstein's stunning wunderkammer, Morbid Anatomy.

THE OFFICIAL VERSION (SCRIBD ENTRY): In "Nature Morte: Formaldehyde Photography and the New Grotesque," a chapter from his meditation on the millenial zeitgeist, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (Grove/Atlantic: 1999), cultural critic Mark Dery analyzes the abject aesthetic he calls the New Grotesque, exemplified by the photography of Joel-Peter Witkin and Rosamond Purcell, Nine Inch Nails videos such as "Closer," David Fincher's movie Seven, and most notably the obscure subculture of medical-museum tourists whose mecca is the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia. "If the Enlightenment ushered in the 'disenchantment of the world,' as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno put it, postmodernism returns us to the age of wonder---and terror," writes Dery. "Now, as we return to a world of gods and monsters, there's a burgeoning fascination, on the cultural fringes, with congenital deformities, pathological anatomy, and other curious from the cabinet of wonder."

Drawing on Lawrence Weschler's study of the Museum of Jurassic Technology (Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder), Gwen Akin and Allan Ludwig's seminal essay "Repulsion: Aesthetics of the Grotesque," Julia Kristeva's notion of the abject, Wolfgang Kayser's landmark study of the grotesque, and Oliver Wendell Holmes's 1845 paean to "worshippers of morbid anatomy," Dery theorizes the Pathological Sublime, an aesthetic emotion that is equal parts horror and wonder, inspired by works of art (or nature) that hold beauty and repulsion in perfect, quivering tension. The Pathological Sublime is the sensation Emily Dickinson had in mind when she wrote, "'Tis so appalling---it exhilarates..."

NOTE: Author reserves all rights. However, users are free to download this PDF for their own use and to circulate it freely AS LONG AS they do not post the entire PDF online or publish the entire PDF in print. (Feel free to blog this page and link to it, though! And linking to the Amazon page for the book would be The Right Thing to Do.) No re-use or re-publication of this PDF FOR PROFIT, in any medium, is permitted.

Photo: Joanna Ebenstein, Morbid Anatomy.

Posted by Mark Dery at 11:07 AM | TrackBack

February 12, 2009

J.G. Ballard: Pathologist of the Postmodern

J.G. Ballard. Photo: Paul Murphy. All rights reserved.

My review of J.G. Ballard's nonfiction memoir Miracles of Life is out, in the L.A. Weekly.

Read it here.

"Nonfiction," meaning: scrupulously factual, a distinction one makes in the wake of bogus confessionals such as James Frey's A Million Little Pieces and Margaret B. Jones's Love and Consequences, and in light of Ballard's bestselling autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun and its less-than-bestselling (but by my lights more lyrical) sequel, The Kindness of Women, both of which are forthrightly fabulist.

Ballard's latest account of his Shanghai boyhood, his wartime years in a Japanese-run internment camp for British civilians, and his postwar exploits, playing the discreetly subversive Marcel Duchamp of New Wave SF (to Michael Moorcock's gonzo Salvador Dali) while raising three children single-handedly, may be his last, or at least his penultimate, book. As devout Ballardians know, the 78-year-old author is battling advanced prostate cancer. Ballard's longtime agent Margaret Hanbury is reportedly shopping a report from the cancer ward, Conversations with My Physician (mordantly subtitled The Meaning, if any, of Life), but Ballard's condition casts doubt on whether he'll have the strength---or time---to midwife the manuscript through the publishing process.

I've corresponded with Ballard, at intervals, ever since the mid-'90s, when he gave me the thrill of a lifetime by graciously consenting to blurb my first book, Escape Velocity, and then, no less thrillingly, lavished praise on my second, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium.

William F. Buckley loved to repeat the anecdote that, when asked by a Playboy interviewer if in he'd discovered any "novel sensual sensations," in middle age, the crocodile-smiling apologist for American empire recalled the experience of being summoned to the Oval office by Nixon for a debriefing. Buckley, a former CIA operative, had been going to and fro and walking up and down in Saigon. "My novel sensual sensation," he told Playboy, "is to have the president of the United States take notes while you are speaking to him." (The revelation that Nixon, as twitchy-eyed a war criminal as ever perverted the constitution, took notes from the conscienceless conservative would explain a lot.)

My "novel sensual sensation"---I'd call it a New Drug, a reference Buckley, who admitted to a fondness for pot, would surely appreciate---was the sight of an incoming Ballard fax spooling out of my machine, and the subsequent buzz of deciphering the quintessentially Ballardian tropes and bon mots encrypted in JGB's galloping, Hancockian scrawl. Fax technology being far inferior to the papyrii of the Middle Kingdom, most of those '90s faxes have faded into illegibility. Still, Ballard's old faxes are talismans I can't bear to throw out; I'll keep them until their loopy scribbles have vanished altogether, leaving the pages blank as the day they were born.

Recently, I discovered another Novel Sensual Sensation: admission to the charmed circle of correspondents permitted to address JGB as "Jim." I had sent a sympathy note to Ballard about his cancer, offering to take up a collection on his behalf via fansites such as Simon Sellars's Ballardian. With his usual, pitch-perfect combination of British reserve and social grace, he politely declined, saying that while he appreciated my offer to pass the hat on his behalf, he wasn't in such dire straits, at least not yet.

In response to my inquiry about who would be bringing out Miracles of Life in the States, and when, he replied (with exasperation mellowed by resignation) that the book wouldn't be coming out in America because---my paraphrase, not a direct quote---he was well and truly fed up with American reviewers' middlebrow moralizing and pop-psych insistence on Deep Feelings over astringent ideas. American critics complain that his characters are crash-test dummies; that his books are plotless film loops, obsessive-compulsive meditations on the pathologies of everyday life in postmodernity.

Ballard's point exactly, as he writes in his incomparable introduction to the French edition of Crash (a virtual graduate seminar in a few pages, richer in insights into the postmodern condition than all of Lyotard's books laid end to end):

The marriage of reason and nightmare that has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermo-nuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century---sex and paranoia. [...] Options multiply around us, and we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for life-styles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly.
[...] Given these transformations, what is the main task facing the writer? Can he, any longer, make use of the techniques and perspectives of the traditional 19th-century novel, with its linear narrative, its measured chronology, its consular characters grandly inhabiting their domains within an ample time and space? Is his subject matter the sources of character and personality sunk deep in the past, the unhurried inspection of roots, the examination of the most subtle nuances of social behaviour and personal relationships? Has the writer still the moral authority to invent a self-sufficient and self-enclosed world, to preside over his characters like an examiner, knowing all the questions in advance? Can he leave out anything he prefers not to understand, including his own motives, prejudices and psychopathology?
[...] I feel that the balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly in the past decades. Increasingly their roles are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind---mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.

Which Ballard has done, with a psychosurgeon's steady hand and a clinical eye unmatched in contemporary fiction. Of course, Ballard is no more a novelist than Freud was a scientist or Marx a political economist. Adopt the parallax view, and everything makes sense: Freud and Marx were, in fact, gothic storytellers in the tradition of Hoffmann and Stoker; Baudrillard and Haraway are among our greatest sci-fi writers (Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. argues a similar point in his essay "The SF of Theory"); and Ballard, as I note in my L.A. Weekly essay, is one of our foremost postmodern theorists:

Long before deconstructionists like Jacques Derrida were slinging around references to the "decentered" self, Ballard is talking, in his trenchant introduction to Crash (1973), about "the most terrifying casualty of the century: the death of affect" and about "the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods." Before postmodernists like Jean Baudrillard were announcing the Death of the Real and its unsettling replacement by uncannily convincing media simulations, Ballard is claiming that "we live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind"---advertising, "politics conducted as a branch of advertising," P.R. "pseudo-events," et al.---where "Freud's classic distinction between the latent and manifest content of a dream, between the apparent and the real, now needs to be applied to the external world of so-called reality." And before neo-Marxists like Fredric Jameson and Mike Davis were pondering the deeper meanings of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel and Frank Gehry's Hollywood library, Ballard is pondering the psycho-spatial effects of the built environment: the experience of swooping around a freeway cloverleaf; of walking through a cavernous, empty multistory parking garage; of waiting, alone, in an airport departure lounge; of walking the privately policed streets of an obsessively manicured exurban community. How, Ballard wonders, is our sense of our selves as social beings and moral actors---our very understanding of what it means to be a self---being transformed (deformed?) by the whip-lashing hyperacceleration of technology and the media, the blurring of the distinction between real and fake? Ballard was the first to ask how we became posthuman.

Posted by Mark Dery at 09:25 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

January 30, 2009

The Pathological Sublime: Beauty and Horror in the Age of Terror

WHAT: Lecture at the School of Visual Arts, New York City. WHEN: Tuesday, February 3, 6:30 PM.
WHERE: School of Visual Arts, Room 101C, 133 West 21st Street, Manhattan.
WHAT, EXACTLY: A 45-minute lecture, with visuals, followed by the usual bloody scrum, on:
"The Pathological Sublime: Beauty and Horror in the Age of Terror"

The eye is an erogenous zone; beauty and horror, aesthetic ecstasy and moral revulsion: philosophical binaries aren't always poles apart, in the aesthetic realm.

In the world after 9/11, the aesthetic eye is confronted---and the moral mind confounded---by images that are undeniably horrific yet in their own ineffable, ethically dissonant way, beautiful: blurry newswire images of jumpers leaping from the burning Trade Towers; the Towers themselves at the moment of impact, blossoming into terrible flowers of flame. The cognitive dissonance inspired by such images, and the outrage sparked by aesthetic responses to images so emblematic of horrific tragedy (Karlheinz Stockhausen, white courtesy phone...), opens the door to a contemplation of what Oliver Wendell Holmes called "the pathological sublime"---images or objects that confound the aesthetic gaze, flickering irresolvably between aesthetic seduction and moral revulsion.

That contemplation takes us far afield from 9/11, leading us to wonder about the awful, pitiable beauty of medical museum exhibits; the "installation art"-like crime scenes left behind by highly ritualistic killers such as the Black Dahlia murderer; the troubling persistence of Beautiful Dead Women---exquisite corpses?---in art and high fashion; and the Burkean sublimity of that 20th century icon, the nuclear mushroom cloud. And speaking of mushroom clouds, Walter Benjamin warned his readers, in 1936, that humanity's "self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic."

Do his words have special meaning for us, in the world after 9/11? Is the aestheticizing of the unspeakable the essence of the fascist imagination, which dreamed of a Nazi utopia consecrated to Aryan beauty and purified by "racial hygiene"? What are the limits of the aesthetic gaze?

Posted by Mark Dery at 01:32 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

October 17, 2008

Gordita Porn

Pardon my gratuitously exploitative title, but I had to grab you by the eyeballs somehow.

Now that I've got your attention for what my Sitemeter informs will likely be 21 seconds at best (the Attention Economy is shriveling, here at Shovelware as elsewhere), let me tug on your sleeve about two new anthologies that feature my byline:

* Hunger and Thirst, a collection of essays, fiction, and poetry on the subject of gastronomy from the San Diego-based indie press City Works, and

* Pr0nnovation? Pornography and Technological Innovation, an anthology of lectures from the first Arse Elektronika conference (which I keynoted, in San Francisco, in September 2007), published by the legendary underground press Re/Search in conjunction with conference organizers Monochrom, an "art-tech-philosophy collective" based in Austria.

First up:

The publisher's blurb half-heartedly ballyhoos the book with a decidedly listless blurb: "Technology's development (Photography, Cinema, The Internet) is often pushed ahead and funded by pornography. This book explores that connection. [...] The porno effect accompanies every new technological development. Immediately after producing his famous bible, Gutenberg used his press to print erotica. Photography was utilized just as quickly. And so the technological advances continue." Indeed they do. And as J. Danforth Quayle memorably observed, we don't want to go back to tomorrow, we want to go forward. (Cue "It's a Bright, Big Beautiful Tomorrow" from the GE "Carousel of Progress" ride at Disneyland.)

BUY IT HERE.

WHAT YOU GET: Annalee Newitz ("A Futurist's History of Sexual Technology"), Violet Blue ("Ceiling Cat Hates Your Porn---Sexual Privacy Online"), Jonathan Coopersmith on "The Democratization of Pornography" (DIY porn), Carol Queen on "Your Grandmother's Vibrator," Katherine Zakravsky's "Brief History of Cultural Genitals," and much, much more, my friends, including, not least, your friend. I've got an essay in this thing, titled "Cowgirls and Werebabes: When Porn Leaps the Species Barrier," about the "humanimal" porn of the do-it-yourself far-fringe fetish pornographer Nexus T. His illustrations, reproduced here in all their blurry, low-res, iPod nano-sized black-and-white glory, will leave big, unsightly blisters all over your mind, tender to the touch. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your Playboy Philosophy.

Next up:

The blurb on City Works's site describes Hunger and Thirst, edited by Nancy Cary, as an approximately 375-page collection of "poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and art" in which "more than eighty contributors offer up unique views of food and drink, what we hunger for, what pains us or sustains us, what brings us joy as individuals, as family, as culture." I contributed an extended dance mix version of my Salon essay on Taco Bell, the Americanization (read: deracination) of Mexican food in Southern California, and my Proustian quest, in New York, for the hybrid border cuisine of my SoCal youth.

BUY IT HERE.

WHAT YOU GET: The abovementioned 80 contributors, plus my essay, which includes:

* Soul-wrenchingly profound meditations on the soul food of SoCal culture---the hybrid consciousness of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, wrapped up in a tortilla.
* An answer to the question that has been gnawing a hole in the American mind, namely: How is the original Taco Bell sign---the proverbial lazy Mexican dozing against a cactus, shaded by a cartoonishly huge sombrero---to Mexicans as the golliwog lawn jockey was to American blacks?
* How to pronounce "Toast-AH-duh," in strict conformity with 1970's Taco Bell menus.
*A harrowing descent into the American racial gothic, with its shuddering recoil from the "abominations of Mexican cookery," most notably Mexicans' "indifference to the existence of dirt and grease" (not to mention their "appalling liberality in the matter of garlic" and their "recklessness in the use of chili colorado or chili verde").

All this, and more appalling liberality, in Hunger and Thirst and Pr0nnovation.

Posted by Mark Dery at 10:15 AM | TrackBack

September 24, 2008

Copyfight

I've got a "reported opinion" piece on the Orphan Works Act---a radical overhaul of Copyright As We Know It, brought to you by the The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombie Legislators---in the December issue of the graphic-design magazine Print.

Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford lawyer who launched the Creative Commons movement and who thinks deeply about copyright (and who, be it said, I interviewed for this article), gave it a little shout-out here.

If the subject of copyright law doesn't exactly blow your skirt up, hark to my words:

"This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to lose everything you've ever done." That's Brad Holland, from a recent interview with business consultant Mark Simon. Holland, a legend among illustrators and co-founder of the advocacy group The Illustrators' Partnership of America, was referring to the Orphan Works Act (OWA), a proposed revision of copyright law that the IPA---and the more than 60 other organizations that have joined its cause---believe will have a catastrophic effect on artists. On the fast track for a vote in both houses of Congress, H.R. 5889 (The Orphan Works Act of 2008) and S. 2913 (The Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008) would open the door to "wide-scale infringements" of creators' copyrights, according to a statement on the IPA's website. For most visual thinkers, the subject of copyright law is pure chloroform. Still, it matters as never before, so pull up a chair...

Lessig, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Alex Curtis, Brad Holland, and Hannibal Lecter all make cameo appearances in this thing.

Posted by Mark Dery at 12:18 PM | TrackBack

September 14, 2008

Brother From Another Planet

This Saturday, in Tilburg, the Netherlands, I'll be keynoting ZXZW, an arts festival devoted, this year, to Sun Ra and headlined, of course, by Sun Ra's Arkestra.

The Basics: "In a keynote speech Dery will examine the science-fictional (i.e., AfroFuturist) and techno-bricoleur aspects of Sun Ra's work, setting them within the context of African-American culture's relationship to technoculture and sci-fi mythology."

I'll riff, too, on Ra's self-taught hermeneutics and voodoo numerology, the deeply gnostic strains in his music and philosophy, the homosocial ethos that undergirded his band's experiment in communal lliving (as well as its historical relation to American utopian communities), his pop Egyptology and UFO-ology, the relationship between his often hand-drawn record covers and the notion of landscape paintings and psychedelic record cover art as evolutionary precursors of virtual reality, and Ra's sci-fi theories of race.

The Details: Here.

Posted by Mark Dery at 09:18 PM | TrackBack

July 11, 2008

Turn Me On, Dead Man

Bite the Wax Tadpole in the '80s, making hypothermia fashionable. Left: Darren Smith. Right: Mark Dery, sporting what some claim is a mullet, but which he will insist, to his dying breath, is not.

Discreetly buried on this site, at the end of an interminably long, shamelessly self-aggrandizing biographical blurb written in the Bob Dole-ian third person, is an embarrassing admission:

Long, long ago, in a universe far, far away, [Dery] pulled off a passable impersonation of a male Patti Smith during his brief-lived career as a performance poet. Since 1985, he has collaborated with the composer/multi-instrumentalist Darren Smith as one half of the music/spoken word duo Bite the Wax Tadpole.)

Bite the Wax Tadpole sprang from the homebrew cassette revolution and Manhattan's downtown music scene. Although we played a few East Village art-club gigs (with Sophie B. Hawkins sitting in on drums), we mostly toured Smith's Jersey City bedroom, recording songs on a four-track tape deck.

As I write on our newly launched WordPress site:

This was music made by men in small rooms, with all the twitchy-eyed intensity that implies. Smith, a virtuoso who had studied South Indian vocal music, Balinese gamelan, and electric banjo (with Peter Tork of The Monkees!), proved an ideal foil for Dery, a chronic word-aholic whose spoken-word performances were somewhere between William S. Burroughs's deadpan monologues and Jack Nicholson's scenery-chewing rants in The Shining. The landmarks on Smith's mental map ranged from Bartok to Bollywood, Ice Cube to Meredith Monk; Dery's influences were the Killer B's: Burroughs, Bowles, and Ballard. Together, the pair made music full of dark humor and quantum weirdness, with a dream logic all its own.

Why am I telling you this?

Because Bite the Wax Tadpole's new CD, Turn Me On, Dead Man---the title is taken from the backwards phrase in The Beatles' "Revolution 9"---is NOW AVAILABLE FOR THE RISIBLY MEAGRE SUM OF $10 (in the continental U.S.)

ORDER HERE.

Five Reasons You Must Order a Copy of Turn Me On, Dead Man :

1. Sixty-nine minutes (and two seconds!) of chewy nougat and chocolate-y goodness. It's flavoriffic!

2. A six-page CD booklet, printed on high-quality paper(!), overstuffed with lyrics and commentary on the disk's 17 songs, and featuring the ironic yet insouciant graphic design of Carlos Morera. Buy this stunningly designed artifact of the Late Caligulan phase of the Bush imperium for Morera's work alone; sell it on eBay a decade from now, when your 401k has turned to ash and you're spending your retirement as a minimum-wage barista at Starbuck's.

3. Bite the Wax Tadpole builds Vocabulary Power! Can you define "magnificat," soldier? How about "skirl"? Or "trepan"? Or "lancet"? This is the only CD intended to be listened to with a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary handy. Hell, it's the only CD featuring vocals by a writer cited in the OED! (See "technopagan.") The only collection of alt.huh? songs that includes a tune about a febrifuge. (Look it up, sailor. Or you could just...buy the CD!)

4. Forget Cultural Literacy; Turn Me On, Dead Man contains enough grad-student literary allusions, obscure historical references, smartypants wordplay, knowing riffs on pop culture, and deadpan meta-whatever to give Jacques Derrida a spastic colon.

5. Where else can you hear a full-tilt rocker about a tyrannical boss who thunders, "You're gonna be a dissected crayfish, and I'm gonna be the man in surgeon's greens wiping your entrails across my lapels"? A bizarre monologue by a worker on some David Lynchian assembly line (or is it a slaughterhouse?) that churns out an unspeakable product involving creatures with "sucking discs on the tops of their heads"? A musical suicide note, narrated by the Nazi nudnik Rudolph Hess? A techno elegy about the sinking of the Titanic, set to a sampled loop and sung by the ship itself ("A prunefaced corpse, his features blurring, sits crosslegged on the ceiling of my ballroom, warming his hands by the chandelier")? I'm just sayin'...

Did I mention that you can BUY IT NOW?

Posted by Mark Dery at 10:02 AM | TrackBack

June 09, 2008

The Desert of the Real

This just in: a Los Angeles Times essay, pegged on former White House flack Scott McClellan's memoir, about the transformation of politics into a branch of special effects, and of the White House into a Hollywood backlot. The restless shades of Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays haunt the West Wing. But beyond this obvious point, I argue that the Bush administration's faith-based worldview, the logical terminus of Ronald Reagan's belief that "facts are stupid things," marks the official beginning of our age, the Unenlightenment.

Teaser:

Like no administration before it, the Bush administration has mastered what the media critic Walter Lippmann called "the manufacture of consent"---the use of what Lippmann called "psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication," to muster mass support for elite agendas. Staging photo ops whose choreographed drama and camera-ready visuals (Mission Accomplished!) are intended to play to the emotions and overrule objections; reducing complicated geopolitical issues to black-or-white dualisms (Team America: World Police versus the Axis of Evil!); stonewalling the media, cherrypicking military intelligence, and parroting the same Karl Rove-approved talking points---the Bush administration represents the apotheosis of government by spin control. Sure, sure, truth is the first casualty of war, and politics is just war with a smile and a starched collar. But this is the stuff of which doctoral dissertations on Baudrillard are made.

(Note: the LAT website is prone to link rot---nothing stays put for more than a week or two, seemingly---so you may have to plug the article headline---"McClellan's "Matrix" moment: Bush's former press secretary has stumbled out of a White House that lets political rhetoric shape reality"---into Google.)
Posted by Mark Dery at 09:09 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

March 15, 2008

Jesus is My Homeboy

Delivering a keynote in San Diego, this coming Thursday (March 20), at "The Sacred & The Profane," a conference at San Diego State University.

Ted Neeley in JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR. The Messiah as don't-harsh-my-mellow SoCal dude.

Official Blurb:

In Case of Rapture, Car Will Be Driverless: Waiting for the End of the World in '70s Southern California

In this lecture, equal parts personal essay and cultural critique, Dery---now a godless leftist---takes us on a Proustian flashback to his days as a teenage fundie---a Jesus Freak caught up in the "born-again" religious fervor that swept Southern California in the '70s. Excavating the SoCal history of that mutant strain of ad-hoc Christianity that Harold Bloom calls "the American religion," he'll deliver a fire-and-brimstone critique of the paleoconservatism, flat-earth fundamentalism, and deep-dyed anti-intellectualism that have made San Diego, throughout much of its intellectual history, not only a theme-park mirage in the Desert of the Real ("America's Finest City") but a Mojave of the Mind.

At the same time, Dery attempts to consider the "situated knowledges" and "lived experiences" of that lost world through his 15-year-old eyes and through his cynical, unbelieving 48-year-old eyes---to cast a gimlet eye on the creepy cultism and gape-mouthed credulity of the 'Jesus People' movement and acknowledge the fact that it brought him closer to a transport of metanoiac rapture than anything since.

No glossolalia for this boy, but I did have a few Theresa-of-Avila moments of spiritual ecstacy. One thing I really want to nail is the ineffable hippie sweetness of those lost times, exemplified by Ted "Jesus" Neeley's infinitely sad gaze in Jesus Christ Superstar, a far cry from the BATTLECRY/PASSION OF THE CHRIST right-wing pugnacity of the gen-whatever alt.Christianity of our moment...

VITALS:

When: 11-6:15. NOTE: I go on at 5:00 PM. For further details, contact Nathan Leaman (619.886.8109).

Where:
Scripps Cottage
English and Comparative Literature
Arts and Letters 226
San Diego State University
5500 Campanile Drive | MC 6020
San Diego, California 92182-6020

What:

(From the official website): "Sacred & Profane: Meditations on a World in Translation

Salman Rushdie once wrote, "human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions." In this interdisciplinary conference, we invite original works that explore the way we construct meaning out of historical, theoretical, and literary works.

Panels will include an interrogation of sacred texts, ranging from holy words to canonized works; the past as a sacred text; profane texts, which may challenge our definitions of literature as well as our tolerance for profanity; and issues involved in the process of translation, from one language to another or one time period to another. We invite submissions from visual artists that interpret or explore these topics."

If you drop by, be sure to tug on my sleeve. I'll be milling around aimlessly afterward, hoisting a margarita with faculty, grad students, and you.

Posted by Mark Dery at 05:39 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

September 29, 2007

"Sex Times Technology Equals the Future"---J.G. Ballard

What: Arse Electronika 2007, a conference about pornography in the Digital Age.

Speakers: the usual roundup of sexperts, theory jocks, gadget fetishists, smoke-shoveling cyberpundits, and hairy-palmed hangers-on.

When: I'm delivering a keynote lecture on Saturday, October 5, at 11 A.M. PST. Conference schedule here.

Where: Kink.com Porn Palace, 415 Jessie St. San Francisco, CA 94103.

What I'm Talking About: "Humanimal" Porn in the Age of Xenotransplants and Genetic Chimera." Executive Summary: "Humanimal" porn is calculated to blister the mind of even the most been-there, done-that pornsurfer. Armed with image-manipulation software, morph auteurs are conjuring up images worthy of a medieval bestiary or a postmodern Decameron. The result is Dr. Moreau's idea of Web porn: Hyperreal cheesecake in which nude babes with cow ears, tails, and udders suckle each other and naked werewomen flaunt donkey ears straight out of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Is this an absurdist attempt to push the envelope of fetishism to the point where not even devotees of this obscure desire can take it seriously? Or an earnest attempt to feed the fantasies of a vanishingly obscure market niche that would have flown under radar cover in the lost world before do-it-yourself Web porn? Or is it something more profound---a campy, tongue-in-cheek exorcism of our cultural anxieties about genetic hybrids and human-animal transplants in the age of pigs with human hemoglobin and babies with baboon hearts?

Caveat: That's what I'm contracted to speak about, in any event. As always, there's a better than even chance I may just go off on some hairy-eyed rant about one of my current obsessions, such as: pathological masculinity in America, the country that brought you warporn, gorenography (a.k.a. "torture porn" in the Saw and Hostel vein), The Passion of the Christ (considered as Foucauldian fever dream), Ted Haggard, Larry Craig, and 300, that dyspeptic mix of homophobia and homophilia whose target demographic seems to be the sweet spot between Michael Savage and Tom of Finland.

Consider yourselves forewarned. And come up and tug on my sleeve if you make it to this thing. Posted by Mark Dery at 08:56 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

September 06, 2007

Having a Senor Moment

Apologies, all, for the long silence. The fall semester has begun, and the professorial life (at NYU, where I teach) has swallowed me headfirst, taking the usual Great White-sized bite out of my time at the writing desk. Nothing but tumbleweeds blowing down the desolate main street of this blog, the batwing doors of the saloon making a lonely creaking in the furnace-blast wind... I'm thinking of re-naming this The Spahn Ranch Times.

In any event, an announcement: Salon just posted my personal essay "Remembrance of Tacos Past," a cultural critique-cum-social history of Taco Bell that asks the question clouding the American Mind: How can a partial-birth monstrosity like Taco Bell's Crunchwrap Supreme survive in a country flooded by Mexican immigrants, where the Real Thing (authentic Mexican food) is easier and easier to find, at least in most big cities?

I'm especially happy with this essay---the latest in a series I've been writing about what I pretentiously call the "cultural psyche" of Southern California---because it comes closer than anything I've written to realizing my vision of a polymorphously perverse cultural criticism that seamlessly stitches together journalism and critical theory, high style and lowbrow subject matter, snark-monkey humor and Deep Thoughts, and social history refracted (where appropriate) through the prism of personal experience.

It's a social history of white Californians' projection, onto Mexican food, of their nativist phobias about "dirty, greasy" Mexicans. It's also a cultural critique of Taco Bell's deracination of south-of-the-border cuisine, and of the fraught racial subtext of the company's glib use of Mexicanismo (Mexican-ness) in the mission-style architecture of its restaurants and in TV spots featuring a talking Chihuahua with a Speedy Gonzalez accent. Finally, it's a first-person, New Journalism-style meditation on the cultural politics of my obsessive quest, as an expatriate Southern Californian living in New York, for authentic Mexican food---a search that looks, at first glance, like Proustian time travel back to the San Diego borderlands of my youth but on closer examination turns out to be one white guy's problematic use of the taco as a metonym for a mythic Mexico whose use value, in symbolic terms, is that it is everything that middle-class Anglo culture is not.

For this essay, I worked the Proustian beat, dredging up my memories of eating, in the mid-'60s, at the first Taco Bell that opened in our San Diego suburb of Chula Vista. I reflected on the curious cultural alchemy that transmuted Mexican food, in my white, middle-class mind, into my food---the soul food of SoCal surfer-dude culture, the hybrid consciousness of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands wrapped up in a fried tortilla.

Here's a preview:

I'm having a senor moment. Dinner tonight is the unthinkable: a Taco Bell Original Taco and Burrito Supreme, abominations that haven't profaned this chowhound's palate since I was a kid in Southern California, birthplace of fast food. I'm committing this foodie felony partly because I'm a la recherche du whatever: the goldenrod-and-avocado-colored memories of my '60s-'70s youth, when dinner out, more often than not, meant Taco Bell.

Growing up white and middle-class in San Diego in those days meant that "cultural hybridity," as the postmodernists like to call it, was my birthright: Mexicans might have been "wetbacks" and "beaners," but our shared historical (sometimes literal) genes, reaffirmed on school trips to the region's Spanish missions, meant that Mexican food was "our" food.

Posted by Mark Dery at 08:56 AM | TrackBack

July 03, 2007

Product Placement

Boy from Brazil: Ah-nuhld cathects the carrot.

Back from lecturing about sex, society, and Netporn in Porto Alegre, Brazil, for which I had prepared myself, as I told my audience, by screening the 1983 Playboy video "Carnival in Rio." Hosted by a helmet-haired Arnold Schwarzenegger, groping everything within reach of his pithecanthropoid arms and nudge-nudge, wink-winking (in his newly acquired frat-tuguese, which seems to consist entirely of come-on lines) about the delights of the mulatta and the bunda, the video is a cringe-inducing exercise in post-colonial cluelessness. It amounts to starring Conan the Barbarian in Black Orpheus. The section in which Our Man in Rio teaches a bemused Brazilian babe how to bite and suck a carrot---Freud-friendly close-ups of a carrot sliding in and out of heavily glossed lips, while Arnie chortles, "Good, yesss"---is enough to summon a righteously pissed Frantz Fanon forth from the tomb.

Anyway, Brazil was stupendous, a mind-stretching experience. With its cosmopolitan thinkers, fluent in colonial history and postmodern thought (at a churrascuria, my professorial hosts in Porto Alegre gave me the equivalent of a wine-fueled graduate seminar on the Brazilian cultural psyche); its stunning contrasts between amok urbanism and wild nature; and its mind-stretching juxtaposition of First World turbo-capitalism and Third World bricolage, Brazil pushed the boundaries of my thought. As a citizen of the Republic of Fear, where the air is thick with talk of terrorist threats and invading immigrants, and where the citizenry has been gulled into offering up its civil liberties as a burnt offering to the god of paranoia, I was thrilled by what Mike Davis would call the "magical urbanism" of Brazil's exuberant metropolises, and by the dark magic of its primordial matta---a smack-in-the-face reality check to laptop-toting citizens of American empire who think they've seen it all.

Some who attended my lecture have asked for hardcopy. Happily, a version of the text ("Paradise Lust: Pornotopia Meets the Culture Wars") has just been published in C'Lick Me: A Netporn Studies Reader by the Institute for Network Cultures in Amsterdam. The anthology also includes my interview with "realcore" researcher Sergio Messina, which originally appeared on this site.

In unrelated news, the latest issue (June 2007) of ID magazine includes my "Rant" column on the cult of the iPhone, in which I inveigh, on behalf of the conscientous objectors I call iTheists, against the interminable, culture-wide geekgasm that has greeted the release of the iPhone. This hallelujah chorus is hardly a surprise, given "the brown-nosing obsequiousness of most tech coverage," complicit in "the lip-biting, teary-eyed, Moonie-mass-wedding jubilation that greets the release of every Apple product." You'd think this thing was the infinitely regenerating prepuce of the Risen Jesus, for chrissakes. Give it a rest, Pod people. The geeky paeans to God's little blobject, the helpful hints to Jobs about how to make it even cooler: You're getting a little too Raelian about this thing, and it's starting to creep the rest of us out.

Posted by Mark Dery at 11:10 AM | TrackBack

June 21, 2007

Brasil '69

You are cordially invited to...

Another (!) lecture on Netporn, the subject that has captivated minds and moistened loins around the world.

This talk is part of the Frontiers of Contemporary Thought series, jointly produced by the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), the University of the Sinos River Valley (UNISINOS) and Copesul, a private chemical company located in Porto Alegre. According to Copesul's website, confirmed speakers for the series include Bernard-Henri Levy, Peter Greenaway, Pierre Levy, Marshall Berman, Christopher Hitchens, Camille Paglia, and Michel Houellebecq. I am reliably informed, by one of my hosts, that I'll speak before "a selected audience of Brazilian scholars, journalists, and decision makers." In other words, I'll have the Ear of Power as I talk, preposterously enough, about...

"Humanimal" porn in the age of genetic chimera and xenotransplants; the cultural crosstalk between warporn and gorenography (Saw, Hostel, et. al.); pathological masculinity in Dubya's America; male bonding in the military, stalked by the ever-present specter of the Queer Within; Theweleit; Sontag; Foucault; Zizek; and what happens when Matrix "bullet time" meets PhotoShopped cumshots, among other things.

When: June 26, 2007 7:30 pm

Where: Porto Alegre, Brazil Federal University Federal University Lecture Hall

Stop by and say hello, if you're in town.

Posted by Mark Dery at 09:31 PM | Comments (14) | TrackBack

June 18, 2007

The Abyssal, Revisited

Humpback anglerfish (Melanocetus johnsonii).

Any more thoughts on the questions I posed? Still curious to hear your thoughts, especially on recent sightings of the squid or octopus meme.

In the meantime, a postscript to my last post:

Kristeva gave us the Abject. Baudrillard gave us the Simulacrum. Freud gave us the Uncanny, among other unforgettable theorizations, and Kant, Burke, and company group-hacked the open-source idea of the Sublime. The Abyssal, a philosophical subspecies of the Sublime, cries out for theorization, here and now.

The Abyssal appears, in the mass imagination, as shorthand for the stygian, the cthonic---a lightless realm of bioluminescent nightmares, a Dalinian dreamworld populated by bathypelagic monsters unlike anything on land. Speaking of whom, Dali famously used the Abyssal as a metaphor for our collective dream life, delivering a lecture in a bell-helmeted deep-sea diving suit, the better to descend into subconcious (he nearly asphyxiated in mid-lecture) .

As Mikita Brottman implies, the Abyssal is its own binary, appearing in Jacques Cousteau and David Attenborough nature documentaries as a hallucinogenic fantasia on one hand, all rainbow-hued tropical fish and Day-Glo coral reefs and kelp forests, gently rocked by the waves, and on the other as an inky-black underworld populated by grotesque creatures, some of them blind, albino monstrosities. (In this context, James Cameron's bathetic Abyss represents a mythopoeic attempt to reconcile visions of the undersea kingdom as celestial and cthonic.)

The abyss often figures, in the pop unconscious, as the dark doppelganger to space exploration: the race to the stars, reversed. And what about the aquarium, which domesticates the deep-sea sublime, offering a porthole on the Mariana trench for armchair Captian Nemos? When did bourgeois aquarium owners start putting divers, treasure chests, and the crumbling ruins of Atlantis in their aquariums? And what do they mean?

Random thought: Is our persistent vision of the Deep as a darkworld populated by monsters, a counterweight to the Jungian vision of the sea as nurturing memory of intrauterine bliss, an evolutionary hangover---a dim but troubling recollection of prehistoric horrors (see Chased By Sea Monsters by Nigel Marven)?

Or does the Abyssal represent the last terrestrial frontier, the rainbow's stubborn refusal to be unwoven by human knowledge? As the noted postmodern philosopher Donald Rumsfeld reminds us, there are known knowns and known unknowns and unknown unknowns---things we don't even know we don't know---into which last category must fall the undiscovered denizens of the deep. Is it the business of the Abyssal to be the inexhaustible account from which we withdraw our wonder and horror, the last great repository of awe in a world descralized by science, cynicism, and the media? If so, then embodied myths like Architeuthis and living fossils like the coelacanth are totemic animals, giving shape to the notion that monsters may still lurk in the far corners of Google Maps, that time travel may exist, that the dead may rise again, that science has not killed magic and mystery dead.

Posted by Mark Dery at 02:10 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 15, 2007

The Abyssal

Battle of the Titans: Giant squid (Architeuthis dux) and Sperm Whale locked in mortal combat in the vasty deep...of the American Museum of Natural History's Hall of Ocean Life.

When Clive Thompson ran an item on his brain-fryingly great blog, Collision Detection, about a colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) that fishermen hauled in off the coast of New Zealand---a 990-pound, 39-foot leviathan that is half as big again as the next largest specimen ever caught---one commenter wondered, "My question is: 'Why do we find so many NOW?! I mean, [these] things existed for thousands of years, it is CENTURIES [since we began] fishing in those seas and then BAM! We start fishing them up like sardines...Isn't it weird?'"

As Tom Wolfe would say, "But...exactly!"

Of the 15 known specimens listed on Wikipedia, nine have been reported since 1979. A National Geographic.com story about the saucer-eyed colossus mentioned one explanation: Fishing boats are venturing, increasingly, into Antarctic waters, where Mesonychoteuthis is known to feed on Patagonian toothfish. Whatever the reason, close encounters with monsters of the deep seem to be on the rise, and the creatures in question seem to be getting bigger and weirder with each encounter. Time was when giant squid were the stuff of Peter Benchley beach novels, sufficient to clear the water at the Kennedy compound for weeks. When Japanese researchers filmed a giant squid in 2006, squid geeks were agog, and a video clip of the thrashing monster seemed to be everywhere, online.

But the giant squid is comic relief compared to Mesonychoteuthis, which with its razor-sharp beak and tentacles bristling with nasty-looking hooks (the better to hang onto its prey), is "not just larger but an order of magnitude meaner" than the mere giant squid, as New Zealand teuthologist Steve O'Shea told the BBC when a specimen was recovered in 2003. Kat Bolstad, a research associate at the Auckland University of Technology, put it bluntly: "This animal...is...something you are not going to want to meet in the water."

Where will it end?With the grotesque megasquid brought to CGI life in the Animal Planet series "The Future is Wild," which projected Darwinian evolution 200 million years into a posthuman future, where mammals, birds, and reptiles are extinct, but air-breathing, elephant-sized Megasquid roam the forests and tiny Squibbons (gibbon-like squid) scuttle through the trees? The series hints that Squibbons, being highly intelligent, may evolve into sentient beings, usurping the evolutionary throne from the humans who once dominated the planet. In other words, the calamari shall inherit the earth.

Deep in our imaginative consciousness, there may already be an, er, inkling that our days as top-predator are numbered. The squid meme is proliferating throughout alt.culture. At least one blog, Squid, trolls pop culture for squid sightings and has hauled up examples of squid imagery on neckties, cummerbunds, fine art, stuffed toys, and especially T-shirts. And what are we to make of the fact that the audience for tentacle hentai , a once-obscure species of Japanese cartoon porn involving wide-eyed nymphettes ravaged by giant squid, has mushroomed online, if the explosion of websites is any gauge?

One T-shirt vendor has the answer to all of these questions: "The cephalopod biomass is now greater than the human biomass. We don't know how many there are or how big they get. We are NOT ready. Play it smart." Playing it smart, in this case, means buying a T-shirt emblazoned with the words "Welcome Squid Overlords" and a cartoon image of a giant squid. Or is it colossal?

Here's where you come in: I'm writing an essay for Discover magazine on this subject, equal parts hard science and cultural criticism. (The assignment won me an audience with the American Museum of Natural History's resident specimen of a giant squid, whose pickled tentacle I got to fondle, still dripping from the alcohol bath in which the leviathan reposed. Groping a kraken! How cool is that?) I'd love to hear your thoughts, here in the comment thread, on:

Why we're so obsessed with giant squid.

Why the image of the Battle of the Titans (giant squid versus Sperm whale) haunts the mass mind.

Whether you think the squid, giant or mere calamari fritti, is emerging as the totemic animal of the Screen Age, its morphology---all brain, hands, and saucer eyes---a metaphor for our increasing reduction to brains with eyes, in Matrix culture.

Any sightings of the squid meme you've come across.

And what's up with this tentacle porn thing?

(Naturally, if I quote you, I'll contact you for proper attribution---i.e., how you'd like to be ID'd---so be sure to leave your e-dress if you comment.)

Posted by Mark Dery at 12:17 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

June 01, 2007

My Dream Date with Bill O'Reilly

Where were we? Right, the blowback from my Los Angeles Times editorial ("Wimps, wussies and W.: How Americans' infatuation with masculinity has perilous consequences," May 3, 2007).

I learned a few tough-love lessons from My Dream Date with Bill O'Reilly.

(By the way, The Radio Factor's transcripts and audiofiles are available exclusively to paid-up members of the Fox Nation. A subscription gives you all-areas access to Bill's World, not to mention a pitchfork, a chain-mail tunic, and front-row seats at Saruman's next Nuremberg rally. But for those of you interested in my gentlemanly smackdown with O'Reilly, send an e-mail and I'll send audioclips in RealPlayer format, as attachments. Of course, you'll have to have RealPlayer to play them.)

And I took a few pearls of wisdom away from the Reich-wing hate mail I received, much of it in screaming, spittle-flecked CAPSLOCK, all syntactical trainwrecks and grammatical spaz attacks, like those epic Sharpie-marker screeds that your friendly neighborhood Manson-eyed homeless guy used to staple to telephone poles when he was off his meds.

From O'Reilly, I learned that I'M MORE NAIVE ABOUT THE FOX NATION, BY AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE, THAN I EVER SUSPECTED. For example, O'Reilly called me a "communist," like, five times, deadpanning, "I'm not using that in a pejorative way...I have nothing against communists," all because I say on the AUTHOR page of this site that I'm "deeply committed to a progressive politics whose calls for social justice, economic equality, and environmental action are founded on a tough-minded critique of the catastrophic effects of multinational capitalism." During the interview, I was at pains to point out to Mister Bill that, since Buchanan, Perot, and other nabobs of nativism have inveighed against the yawning chasm between CEO and wage-slave salaries as well as the global race to the bottom of the wage pyramid, calls for economic equity and critiques of multinational capitalism aren't exactly the Mark of the Commie Beast, right about now. Naturally, my argument was just so much static to Bill, who blinked, then recommenced shelling.

I was naive enough to think that this sort of paleoconservative red-baiting was buried under McCarthy's gob-streaked tombstone, or at least under Khrushchev's. I mean, Moscow fell to McDonald's without firing of a shot, China's parvenu bourgeoisie are buying up SUV's as fast as Detroit can turn them out, and Castro's playing Peter Falk playing a paranoid, cigar-chewing banana-republic dictator in that old Twilight Zone episode. The last of America's red-hot Marxists are either cowering under Bill O'Reilly's bed or tenured members of the professoriat; not since Eugene Debs walked the earth has the Archie Bunker demographic viewed the Left with anything but cordial contempt, if not the paranoid fear and loathing of the John Bircher, and I say that as a Leftist, for chrissakes. I mean, I love Mike Davis like a brother, and Terry Eagleton is my homeboy, but compare their royalty statements to Anne Coulter's if you want a reality check about how big a neighborhood threat Marxism really poses, beyond the fever dreams of a few swoony grad students. So how can O'Reilly use an Atomic Cafe-era smear like "commie" with a straight face? Is he just playing a throwback to the era of blacklists and bomb shelters, chuckling all the way to the bank? Or is the Fox Nation so cretinous that it really, truly equates calls for economic justice with being a "loopy" (unquote) commie? Clearly, I need to spend more time in O'Reilly Country, taking the pulse of the average orc.

I also learned, when O'Reilly asked if I was gay (because my LAT essay inveighs against homophobia), that ONLY GAYS CAN DECRY HOMOPHOBIA. In other words, if a public intellectual (a pompous sobriquet, but there it is) makes the case against an anxious American masculinity that defines itself in neurotic opposition to wimps, wussies, and fags, he's got to be a homo. Incredibly, neither O'Reilly nor his legions of flying monkeys seem to have Clue One about the homophobia inherent in the presumption that anyone arguing against homophobia must, by definition, be a homosexual. Somewhere, the founding fathers of the Enlightenment are weeping tears of blood into Diderot's Encyclopedie...

Finally, I learned that WHEN YOU PASS THROUGH THE COSMIC BUNNYHOLE BETWEEN FACT-BASED REALITY AND FOX REALITY, YOU FIND YOURSELF IN A PARALLEL WORLD WHERE IRONY IS AN ALIEN NOTION AND HYPOCRISY EXCLUSIVE TO THE LEFT. After thumping his tub angrily about "secular progressives'" underhanded tactic of smearing their opponents rather than debating their ideas, O'Reilly proceeded to invalidate my ideas by...demonizing me as a loony commie. The "hysteria building around the secular progressive movement has basically said, 'Look, if you don't agree with us...we're going to find a way to put a psychological tag on you that will marginalize you,'" said O'Reilly. "The only thing that you'll hear through all the cacophony is someone calling someone a nasty name." Then he proceeded to characterize me as "a communist" who "hates Bush," just some nutty professor who's "nothing," really, "just some bloviator down at NYU who wants the United States to be a communist country." That's right, Bill. I, and my dark hordes won't rest until the red flag flaps from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and every knee bows and every tongue confesses that Karl is Lord, our godless atheism notwithstanding.

Finally, from the right-wing mouth-breathers who sent me mash notes from all over this fair land of ours, I learned that

THE IRONY OF ASKING IF THE AUTHOR OF AN ARTICLE ABOUT HYSTERICAL, HOMOPHOBIC MASCULINITY IS GAY IS LOST ON MOST CONSERVATIVE READERS, INCLUDING THE GUY WHO THOUGHT HE COULD SIDLE UP TO MY INBOX, WHEN I WASN'T LOOKING, AND SLYLY TRICK ME INTO REVEALING THE SORDID SECRET OF MY SEXUALITY WHEN MY GUARD WAS DOWN:

Sir:

I really enjoyed your article today in the LA Times. My question to you, sir, are you gay?

Alex ------

I also learned that

MY ARGUMENT IS INVALID BECAUSE WHEN YOU'RE GOING MANO A MANO WITH A TOWELHEADED JIHADI, YOU DON'T WANT A GIRLYMAN COVERING YOUR, UH, ASS

Mark,

Just read your LA Times piece. Very interesting. One quick question for which I'm sure you have an answer. If you were to go 2 on 2 with a couple of Islamofascists in a Baquba alley, would you pick a.) W., b.) Harry Reid, c.) Steny Hoyer, or d.) Dick Durbin? (Nancy Pelosi is not a vialble choice.)

You can only pick one. Hopefully, you wouldn't be flumoxed by the choice.

Regards,

John ------

No, John, I'm not at all "flumoxed" [sic]. But I can't help wondering why Pelosi isn't on our dance card. Maybe I've been cruising too many MILF sites, but I'd much rather spend a few idle hours in a Baquba alley with the leggy Speaker of the House than any of the gentlemen you mention, none of whom are my type.

Next, I learned that

The trouble with manhood "American-style" is that the wussies have indeed taken over and "balls" simply are not an important portion of the anatomy for anyone left of center in this country.

My best to you,
Sue, California

And my best to you, Sue! One thing worries me, though: Why the ironic quotes around balls? Are you implying that, while the Left has none, the Right has only faux balls---"balls," rather than true-blue balls? A scary thought! I don't know which is worse---no balls, or Stepford balls, just lurking there in the shadows between our legs, passing as the Real Thing. Spooooooky. Please keep me posted on the state of America's balls, Sue. I sleep a little better knowing you've got your unblinking eye on American manhood's low-slung undercarriage.

I also learned that I SUFFER FROM W. ENVY, because I had some mean-spirited, snark-monkey fun in my LAT op-ed with G. Gordon Liddy's approving remarks about the size of the Presidential Package in that photo of W. in a flight suit, I have "the hots for President Bush," according to some bottom-feeder on AOL. "Dery definitely seems to be in a crouch...over the presidential crotch." Maybe that's because liberal "men on magazine covers require air-brushing in the crotch area in order to create the illusion of having balls," whereas "W. didn't require any help in this area. In the pilot jumpsuit, his manhood spoke for itself. Lib men have to be airbrushed even in a Speedo in order to project their manhood. They must suffer from W. envy."

And there you have it, dear reader. The yahoos have spoken. Vox bacilli.

There is a silver lining to this cloud: According to his producer, Big Bad Bill rilly, rilly, rilly didn't want to like me, but just couldn't help himself. To his horror, he liked me, he really liked me, his producer confided. Could this be the beginning of a beautiful friendship?

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May 03, 2007

Testosterone Poisoning

First there was this ("Wimps, wussies, and W. : How Americans' infatuation with masculinity has perilous consequences," in The L.A. Times).

It features the following choice morsel, calculated to turn the nearest right-wing shark tank into bloody chum:

SO THERE'S a smoking crater where Don Imus used to sit. That's fine with those of us who never understood the appeal of his grizzled-codger shtick, which always sounded like Rooster Cogburn reading "The Turner Diaries" anyway. But if we're going to administer a ritual flaying to every blowhard who channels the ugly American id, why has a hate-speech Touretter like Ann Coulter escaped the skinning knife?

Then there was this, live from Darwin's waiting room, in my Inbox:

I recently read your sniveling article, Mark. Sounds to me like you got your panties in a wad, your freaking sissy boy. You better not bring yourself to Ann Coulter's attention, because she will rip your ass apart

John -----

Atlanta

Then there was this:

Homosexuals need to grow thicker skins. When are people going to come to the realization that most folks simply have trouble differentiating what somebody is (homosexual) from who he is. Unfortunately, many of the, so called, "girliemen" reveal themselves to be angry and hateful ultra-libs. Precisely the mirror image of those they accuse of being "homophobes." That aside, let Imus and Coulter toss insults all they want. There is a market for it. Just like there is a ready market out there for the kind of "wussy" tripe you just published in the LA Times.

Ken ------

Charleston, SC

And:

Dear Markie: If all American males were like you in 1941, half the US would be speaking Japanese and the other half would be speaking German. The America they hate gives wimps, wussies and faggots the best living environment on earth.

Dick ------

San Diego

San Diego! My old stomping grounds! The town Gore Vodal immortalized as "the Vatican of the John Birch Society!"

Anyway, you get the idea. There's more---much, much more---where that came from.

Then Bill O'Reilly's radio show called, asking me to be on today's show at 1 PM EST.

And I said yes, Bob help me.

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April 27, 2007

Satan's Fetus Stalks the Suburbs

We interrupt the unending torrent of comment spam ("Hello people, your site is best! Nice site look this: teen lesbians showering!") to flog our product.

The latest, insect-themed issue of the cultural quarterly Cabinet is in bookstores and on newsstands now, and includes my essay on the ginormous Jerusalem Cricket, which is, in fact, neither a cricket nor from Jerusalem. (As Linda Richman used to say on Saturday Night Live: Discuss.) Titled "Armies of the Night: Satan's Fetus Stalks the Suburbs," the article is at once an overheated exegesis of the J.C. as myth and symbol, an eco-political critique of SoCal sprawl, and my attempt to exorcize the post-traumatic stress engendered by a nocturnal confrontation with one of these grotesque animals, an experience no Californian who has run across a J.C. in the dead of night will ever forget. (The Jerusalem Cricket, a.k.a. Stenopelmatus, ranges widely west of the Rockies but is ubiquitous in California, where sprawl's encroachment on the insect's habitat is giving rise to more and more confrontations between the insects and shocked-and-awed suburbanities. )

Look upon me and know fear, puny mortal: Jerusalem Cricket on the prowl. Photo copyright Takwish. Contact photographer at takwish at gmail dot com.

Here's a teaser...

In a jump cut, I was out of bed, across the room, switching on the light to reveal a crawling horror: a humongous insect, thicker than a man's thumb, maybe three inches in length. It had powerful, cricketlike hind legs and a caramel-colored abdomen, ringed with amber bands. Its head was dried-blood red, with the lacquered glossiness of a candied apple. It made me think of a skinned thumb, or the swollen head of an aroused penis, shiny with precum.

The creature was obscene in its ugliness. But what was it? David Cronenberg's idea of a partial-birth abortion? A stool sample from the man-eating xenomorph in the movie Alien? A nightcrawler from the cultural unconscious?

Sweeping the thing into a dustpan, I shuddered at its weight as I carried it to the bathroom. To my horror, the creature swam against the tide when I flushed, scrabbling frantically at the toilet bowl. I flushed. And flushed. And flushed. (Die, monster, die!) At last, it disappeared down the porcelain gullet. The toilet made a gagging sound. Trembling with revulsion, I laid the heavy ceramic lid of the toilet tank across the closed seat to ensure that no six-legged freak could exact revenge, even if it did manage to clamber up, out of the sewer. Not that I slept much that night. In the dark, I could still see those beady black eyes staring back at me unblinkingly as I sent the abomination swirling into Eternity with a final flush.

Sleep tight.

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January 25, 2007

The Eyes Have It: Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen on the "Science of First Impressions"

Stuart Ewen and Elizabeth Ewen at home, NYC, 2006. Photo: Yoko Inoue. © Yoko Inoue. From my December 2006 ID magazine Q&A with the authors.

(In its December 2006 issue, ID magazine ran my interview with Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen, two of our most incisive thinkers about the politics of images and the social history of consumer culture. But that wasn't the half of it. ID didn't have room for my intro, and had to truncate the interview for reasons of space. Here's the director's cut, with all of the insights that ended up on the cutting-room floor restored.)

Amid the cultural crossfire over illegal immigration, at a moment when 60 percent of the respondents to a Quinnipiac poll applauded the racial profiling of people who look "Middle Eastern," the visual-culture critics and social historians Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen are pulling our stereotypes up by the roots.

Their new book, Typecasting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality (Seven Stories Press), is a history of stereotyping in racist science and popular culture. (Poke your browser into the Ewens' spirited, intellectually omnivorous blog, "Stereotype and Society.")

Revealing the origins of the pictures in our heads—the powerful images that shape our attitudes toward "enemy aliens," the lower class, or anyone in a different skin—the Ewens make sense of our most pernicious myths by restoring their lost historical context: the eugenics of Francis Galton, the criminal anthropology of Cesare Lombroso, and other systems of scientific racism that molded the visual imagination of the modern age.

If that sounds like 497 pages of sternly self-flagellating political correctness, it isn't. Profusely illustrated with period images, the book is an intellectual thrill ride, rollercoastering from the sad tale of the Hottentot Venus to hidden agendas in Roget's Thesaurus; from the cannibal stereotype in King Kong to the deeper meanings of the minstrel show. In Typecasting, the Ewens open our minds by opening our eyes.

Mark Dery: In Typecasting, the act of stereotyping turns out to be central to our attempts to make sense of the social worlds we inhabit.

Elizabeth Ewen: That's why we started with [the journalist and early writer on mass culture] Walter Lippmann. He says that first we define and then we see; what we see is already conditioned. Stereotypes become unconscious reflexes, ordering the world as you navigate it.

Stuart Ewen: Lippmann makes the argument that this repertory of presuppositions that we bring to interactions with other people is shaped by our culture. For instance, the first thing you see when you look at another person is this biological fiction—race—that gets in the way of other ways of seeing.

EE: There emerges this way of thinking that leads up to the ability of a culture to produce one image that represents a whole category of people. [The 18th century Dutch anatomist Petrus Camper, who classified humans according to a racial hierarchy], has this enormous array of skulls. One day, he pulls them down and fondles them and decides, on the basis of that, who has the proper facial angle and who doesn't. But it's based in each case on one skull representing entire groups of people. What it leaves out is as important as what's in the frame of vision.

SE: Every way of seeing is also a way of not seeing. One of the things that is built into the way in which [the 18th century Swedish botanist Carolus] Linnaeus defines a species is that there's a single image that becomes the encompassing ideal of what that species is.

In [the sexual researcher Alfred] Kinsey's work, the picture of a species is not about a single ideal type but about multiplicity. He's been studying gall wasps forever, but what is the ideal gall wasp? In all of the hundreds of thousands of gall wasps he's seen, none of them are the same! So, in fact, the law of nature is not the ideal type; the law of nature is that there is no ideal type.

Part of the history that we're dealing with is the systematic intellectual and aesthetic tradition in which exclusivity—the ideal type—becomes the iron law of understanding. Notions of multiplicity are marginalized from what is considered to be scientific or aesthetic truth.

EE: The interesting thing is that these images work through juxtaposition. Every image has its counter-image. When you went to the phrenology museum, you saw the busts of presidents but you also saw the busts of miscreants.

SE: What we live with today is the intrinsic outcome of a process that's been going on for some time.

The repertory of fixed impressions that is developed in phrenology and criminal anthropology gets animated within Hollywood. The movies dramatized the ability to give you stereotypes that would allow you to know who the good person was and who the bad person was in an instant.

We have a whole chapter on King Kong, the most recent version of which portrays the natives of Skull Island as much more atavistic and less comical than they were in the original. It's closer to a 19th century vision of atavism as a primordial menace lurking within dark people. The inner core of stereotype is this fear that there may be a transgression, that the degenerate is gonna run away with your woman. Stereotype is how peoples' deepest fears about themselves get projected, imagistically, onto others.

MD: Or even onto a design aesthetic, which then becomes "degenerate," to use the Nazi term of art. I'm reminded of Adolf Loos's essay "Ornament and Crime" (1908). Loos, a modernist, is horrified by Art Nouveau—the "feminine" sexuality of its writhing lines, its "primitive" love of ornamentation.

SE: Modernism was predicated on certain ideal forms. It's incumbent upon designers to think about the extent to which certain aesthetic ideals may contain some of the same premises that taxonomies of human difference have reinforced in other realms. The notion that there are ideal forms—certain typographies that are ideal for producing this, that, and the other kind of response—is a particular way of seeing that designers really need to re-evaluate.

Let's go back to this whole question, well-discussed in the book, of taxonomies that are predicated on the idea that there are ideal types—"This is what a Negro is," "This is what a Caucasian is." The notion that Stephen Jay Gould argues in much of his work on natural history—that the ideal in fact is a complete obfuscation and that variation, not fixity, is the truth about form—would be a major challenge for design, because I think fixity is part of the kit bag of design traditions: "Here is this tradition, here's that tradition."

EE: If you're a designer, I think you have to think in new ways. You have to examine where popular culture is going and what images truly represent peoples' desires outside of the framework of stereotype, because if it's true that on the one hand conservatism has this hold on the culture, on the other there's a wide variety of diversity happening.

SE: Linnaeus's system for categorizing plants is based completely on physical structures—on visual evidence. Before Linnaeus, the taxonomy of plants was based on their use within human existence.

Design and architecture need to re-connect to the utility of those forms within human lives—the way in which they mesh with human behaviors, the passed-on "finger knowledge" that people on survive on. Rather than becoming students of design, designers need to become students of society—of the human uses of things.

For example, early forms of government-built public housing utilized nature as a grid and placed people's lives within it, leaving cars on the outside, creating pedestrian walks for shopping and leisure-time activities, with public meeting houses placed in the center.

The design world is still very much married to the logic of typecasting—the logic of ideal types. For the designer to really imagine the way in which the form connects to how people live, the kind of uses they make of things (I realize this is very hard within the world of the client) would represent a revolution in design.

EE: When you teach about mass media and mass culture, one of the things that you do is you ask people to freeze the frame, to think about what's in the image. Once they understand the composition of the image, they begin to see the world in different ways.

SE: What we're asking in Typecasting is: What does each generation pass on to the next that will prepare that generation to deal with the moment when they encounter people not like themselves? Do we hand them fixed taxonomies that are designed to serve the interests of power, which is what Lippmann and most of the people in Typecasting are talking about? Or do we provide them with tools to unpack these visual narratives—to be able to see themselves in others, to imagine seeing through other people's eyes?

Posted by Mark Dery at 06:48 PM | TrackBack

June 10, 2006

On the Beach

Caveat lector: This summer, I'll be posting even more infrequently than usual (!), which is to say: about as often as Kohoutek comes around. I've got my head in the big, shaggy maw of a book-in-progress, and unlike those authors who roll over in their sleep and snore out a book a year, effortlessly, I labor mightily and bring forth a pellet maybe once every five years (if I'm lucky). My books aren't so much written as accreted, forming at the speed of your average stalactite. (Sorry, can't divulge the subject of this one until closer to my as yet unscheduled publication date. Hopefully, sometime this century...)

All of which is to say that I'll be checking in only desultorily, so if you want to be pinged when I've posted, sign up for my mailing list.

In the meantime, more Advertisements for Myself:

Looks like I've attained a Warholian level of microfame via Wikipedia. Shovelware readers should feel free to take the Pepsi Challenge and hack the page, adding any information that seems relevant. Of course, the site's editors will expunge any shameless editorializing or full-throated ranting.

Finally got a contributor's copy of an anthology that came out last year, The Legacy of McLuhan, which includes my essay "The Mechanical Bridgeroom Stripped Bare: A Catechism of McLuhanism for Unbelievers." It's high-spirited bloodletting, in which I settle my Oedipal issues with the Father of Us All (or at least those of us who do media criticism).

In other news, I wrote a profile, for The New York Times "Styles" section, of the suitably saturnine underground cartoonist Mark Newgarden.

Teaser: "For most of his working life, Mr. Newgarden, 46, has been using the visual rhetoric of gag culture to plumb the dark places in the human psyche. His cartoons are absurdist valentines to the losers who knock themselves out trying to make people laugh: the alcoholic clowns, the painfully lame comedians, the no-talent cartoonists and especially the hack humorists who ground out joke books and magazines in the 1950's and 60's, the golden age of novelty-shop culture."

More here.

Also, the June and July issues of PRINT and ID, respectively, feature articles by me. PRINT is publishing my essay on the Death---or not!---of Print, and ID is running my essay on the French banlieue (brutalist low-cost housing) as incubators---or not---of the social pathologies that gave rise to the recent immigrant riots and car-burnings throughout France. (Read it here if you're too cheap to buy the damn thing, but be aware that the online version is a pale shadow of its sumptuous hardcopy self. And read it fast, before link rot sets in.)

Speaking of France, a Parisian start-up called Verity just ran a spirited (if somewhat linguistically fractured) Q&A with me. I'm in Al Gore-Inconvenient Truth-Mike Davis-Ecology of Fear-Day After Tomorrow-Eco-pocalyptic Jeremiah mode, in the last half. Sample: "My great worry that is even the rising tides won't instill some sense of 'planetary awareness' in our Dear Leaders, to resurrect a moldering phrase from the eco-conscious '70s. Do they have an escape plan, equal parts Doctor Strangelove and Silent Running? Are they planning to hit the eject button when the going gets tough and send their gated communities, well-staffed by small persons of a brownish hue, hurtling toward the stars, in search of new worlds to colonize? Somehow, we have to deny them that failsafe, and make them understand that, like it or not, we're all in the same leaky little Poseidon lifeboat together."

Diverting beach reading, as the polar caps melt and we move our beach chairs back, back, WAY back---say, about a mile inland...

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April 06, 2006

The Savage Eye: War Porn, Video Beheadings, and the Politics of "Just Looking" in the Age of Abu Ghraib

I'm lecturing in Baltimore this Friday, at the Maryland Institute College of Art. If you're within hailing distance, bum-rush the show.

When: Friday, April 7, 7 p.m.

Where: Falvey Hall, Brown Center

What (From the official press release): Sponsored by MICA's language, literature, and culture department, cultural critic Mark Dery explores the far fringes of visual culture, from the torture porn of Abu Ghraib to the cultural collateral damage of videotaped beheadings; from the growing traffic in Victorian post-mortem photographs on eBay to the posthuman fantasies—photoshopped images of half-human/half-animal chimera—dreamed up by online fetishists; from homemade videos of wartime atrocities to the strange afterlife of 9/11 images of the Twin Towers 'jumpers, forever frozen in mid-leap.

"Because of the explicit nature of the lecture, it is recommended for mature audiences."

Details here.

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January 07, 2006

Vinyl Fetish: "Scary Cute" in I.D. Magazine

Can "pop"-ness be quantified? Is there a quality, inherent in the shiniest, rubberiest, squeakiest, squeeziest expressions of disposable culture, that can be distilled into pure essence of pop? If so, what is it? A product's giddy embrace of its instant obsolescence? An earnest attempt at mass appeal that stumbles unwittingly into kitsch or camp or brain-scalding weirdness? An unselfconscious delight in its wiles, counterweighted by a slyly self-mocking awareness of just how unconvincing its seductions are? All of the above? Where's Andy Warhol when we need him to Explain It All For Us with one of his brilliantly vapid aphorisms?

Kaiju toys, which I recently discovered while researching "Scary Cute," my November 2005 I.D. magazine article about Japanese designer toys, are the coagulated essence of Japanese pop culture. Manufactured by companies such as Bandai and Toho, these collectible vinyl figurines are based on characters from the Japanese monster movies whose heyday was the late '50s and '60s, when tyrant lizards with conspicuous zippers ruled the earth (or, at least, the onscreen dream life of a nation trying to exorcize the post-traumatic specters of Hiroshima and Nagasaki). As well, they draw on Japanese ghost stories and folktales.

Now, a feverish, mostly adult U.S. fandom is paying astronomical prices for these toys, bidding them into the stratosphere on eBay or buying them from retailers such as Toy Tokyo and Giant Robot.

I don't delve very deeply into the kaiju subset of vinyl-toy fetishism in my sprawling I.D. article, whose keyhole view of the vinyl toy subculture focuses on Western artists' inspired glosses of Japanese toys, many of which were, in turn, loving knockoffs of Western pop-culture icons such as G.I. Joe, Playmobil figurines, '70s cereal-box characters, and Big Daddy Roth's hot-rodding Rat Fink.

A Herculean effort, the article damn near killed me. I interviewed a cast of thousands, including Frank Kozik, Tim Biskup of Gama-Go fame, Nathan "World of Pain" Jurevicius, Pete Fowler (known for his Monsterism toys), and Japanese designers such as Devilrobots, Touma, Mori Chack, and Junko Mizuno.

Here's a teaser:

Japanese designer-toy artists continue to draw inspiration from the clash between Japan's Blade Runner present and its venerable traditions, producing work that marries traditional values such as the delicate balance of opposites (as in the kowaii/kawaii, or "creepy/cute," aesthetic) to a postmodern love of ironic (yet affectionate) quotation. Some, such as Touma, Mori Chack, and Junko Mizuno, take the cuddly-sinister aesthetic to new extremes, adding the frisson of punk-rock aggro. A Japop synthesis of kiddie culture, irradiated deformity, and simmering hostility, their work mocks the suffocating cuteness of much Japanese commercial culture. Touma's scowling, growling KnuckleBears cross Winnie-the-Pooh with the Terminator. Mori Chack's Gloomy Bear is warm and fuzzy yet red in tooth and claw, accidentally bear-hugging its child owners to death (or so goes the "character explanation" on the packaging). Junko Mizuno's Miznotic Fantasy dolls reincarnate in PVC the moist-eyed waifs in her ero-guru ("erotic-grotesque") manga—baby-faced women who gnaw on bloody bones or gambol naked with decomposing cadavers, exorcizing the petite, sweet-faced Mizuno's frustration at being treated like a doll.

My valentine to the rubbery seductions of kaiju figurines will have to wait for another day. In the meantime, here's a gallery of these weird little totems, whose overripe colors and glossy vinyl skins are so luscious—so visually tactile—that you want to caress them, maybe even consume them, with your gaze.

A feast for the eyes...

Posted by Mark Dery at 12:04 PM | Comments (22) | TrackBack

October 21, 2005

"Skinners of the Visible World" (Lecture, SUNY Buffalo, 6 PM, Oct. 24)

I'm lecturing at SUNY Buffalo, Monday October 24, at 6 P.M.

Details here; contact info here.

If you're in the area, feel free to crash the show. Or if you have friends in Buffalo, you might shoot them a heads-up about this event.

I'll be speaking on:

"Skinners of the Visible World*: Images of the Unspeakable and the Unthinkable in Contemporary Culture."

Synopsis follows...

When Oliver Wendell Holmes decreed, in his seminal essay on photography, that the daguerreotype enabled us to skin the surfaces of things and leave their substance to rot, in the Desert of the Real, he didn't know the half of it.

Early in the 21st century, we live amid a whirl of disembodied images, and the frenzy of media imagery is only accelerating. More and more, we find ourselves face to face with the unspeakable, and even the unspeakable: videotaped beheadings, apocalyptic weather, "war porn"—it's a livingroom Atrocity Exhibition.

I'll explore the far fringes of visual culture, from the torture porn of Abu Ghraib to the cultural collateral damage of videotaped beheadings; from the growing traffick in Victorian post-mortem photographs, on eBay, to the posthuman fantasies—Photoshopped images of half-human/half-animal chimera—dreamed up by online fetishists; from homemade videos of wartime atrocities to the increasingly Xtreme nature of the X-rated Web. What are the politics of "just looking"? What are the moral limits of the aesthetic gaze? As (unwitting?) spectators at the carnival of postmodern pathologies staged by modern media, we must make sense of these images, and of our role as consumers of them.

(*Props to Stuart Ewen for the title, shamelessly lifted from his magisterial All Consuming Images.)

Posted by Mark Dery at 02:49 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

October 16, 2005

Time Bomb

Image copyright Time; all rights reserved.

The other day, as I was musing idly, one foot in the remainder bin, the other on a banana peel, Time came calling, out of the blue. They were interested to know if I'd be willing to play a walk-on role as fringe futurist in their "What's Next" issue (October 24, 2005, on newsstands now). A few days later, I found myself in the standard-issue characterless conference room, playing brain pong with Tim O'Reilly, Malcolm Gladwell, Clay Shirky, David Brooks, Esther Dyson, and Moby. (What were they thinking?!?) <g> I have next to nothing in common with them, but it was fun nonetheless, a real thought-rattling kick in the head. Transcript here. Posted by Mark Dery at 06:52 PM | TrackBack

October 13, 2005

Crossing La Linea

Southern California freeway sign.

As mentioned earlier, the Sept./Oct. issue of Print magazine includes my feature on Mexican-American visual culture.

Photo courtesy Sal Rojas.

Last summer, I interviewed cholo, Chicano, self-styled "pocho," and expatriate Mexicano illustrators and graphic designers in L.A., San Diego, and Tijuana; this article draws on those interviews, as well as an extensive conversation with the brilliant Chicano cultural theorist Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, well-known for his seminal essay on rasquachismo, a sort of Mexican-American bricolage. (I may post some excerpts from that interview—or the whole tamale, if there's any interest.)

"Bigote con fondo chilo," courtesy Jorge Verdin.

The visuals, from nortec designer Jorge Verdin, stencil artist Acamonchi, and hardcore tattooist-to-the-stars Mister Cartoon, are too cool.

Stencil-art graffiti, Acamonchi. Courtesy Acamonchi.

Keywords: Mexican-American, Chicano, cholo, pocho, rasquache, rasqauchismo, mestizaje, graffiti art, stencil art, East L.A., San Diego, Tijuana, nortec.

As always, here's a teaser. (Note: This is a remix of the edited graphs that appear in the Print story.)

More and more, fashion, music, and design are giving props to the barrio culture of East L.A., where Mexican-Americans make up 97 percent of the population. Black-and-silver color schemes, a shout-out to East L.A.'s identification with the down-and-dirty Oakland Raiders, seem to be everywhere, these days. So does the font known as Old English—shorthand, in barrio culture, for authority, an association forged by the use of gothic script for official proclamations in colonial Mexico.

True to form, the America that ignores urban decay in the barrios (as long as their social pathologies don't spill into white neighborhoods) has nonetheless managed to mass-market that badass icon of rebel cool, the cholo, or Chicano gangmember. The mainstream sees real-life gangbangers "as frightening stereotypes: lethal, faceless, and vaguely nonhuman," writes Leon Bing, in Do or Die. But skinning the image of badness and selling it as off-the-rack rebellion is the stuff of marketers' dreams. That's why "mainstream America is learning how to say a new word: cholo," as USA Today gushed in 2003, when the trend first broke. That's why Old English lettering is cropping up on designer gringa-ware such as Gwen Stefani's L.A.M.B line, and even, madre de dios, Gap cords, modeled by Madonna. It's why celebrities such as Eminem, Beyonce, and Justin Timberlake of N-Synch (!) are making pilgrimages to L.A.'s inner-city badlands to get one of Mister Cartoon's tattoos, done in the black-and-gray "fine-line" style originated by cholo gang members behind bars.

From the other side of the neighborhood line, marketers' crossover dreams can look like cultural imperialism, to resurrect a phrase from more radical times. And for those who strike the devil's bargain of selling the look and feel of their own culture, those dreams can taste like sellout.

Posted by Mark Dery at 02:50 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

September 27, 2005

Coming Attractions: Net Porn, Brown Power.

This blogging thing is thirsty work. Give me enough Premoistened Lemon Pledge Wipes, and I'd rather clean the Augean stables.

I've been under the hammer of a dozen deadlines, hence my absence from the bully pulpit.

That's my cover story, anyway.

Truth is, I'm having blogger's block. Every time I crank up the interface and stiffen my resolve with a few belts of screw-top Shiraz, I get this paralyzing what-does-it-all-mean? feeling. I'm not overly burdened by modesty, but blogging about my Diurnal Whatever reminds me too much of one of those Book of Lists entries where they inventory the objects found in the belly of a Great White. It's scarily close to that This American Life segment about the obsessive-compulsive geek who breathlessly narrated, into a handheld tape recorder, everything he did, no matter how mind-crushingly banal, as he did it.

There's something about this medium that convinces us that our merest flights of fancy, our wispiest free-floating musings, are Revealed Truths, outtakes from Thus Spake Zarathustra. One example: I browsed on over to the blog of a whip-smart cultural commentator and best-selling author who rarely fails to shock and awe, and the guy is blogging about...snow, for the love of Mike. He's got a bee in his bonnet about the fact that people only take photos of snow when it's a beautiful cottony blanket of virginal whiteness. But snow isn't always that way, Sweet Jesus; it gets GRUNGY, it sprouts dog dirt and stubbed-out cigarettes and why, oh WHY don't people take photos of it then, huh? HUH? Are they AFRAID to reveal the awful, unspeakable truth of...Dirty Snow?!? (Imagine white-knuckled hands tugging at your lapels, here...)

But this sort of thing is oil on the ruffled waters of the Dery soul compared to self-anointed Masters of the Bloviosphere like this Jeff Jarvis guy. Style dies screaming in the man's hands. His prose is so soul-killingly beige that somewhere the shades of Strunk and White are weeping tears of blood.

And the extravagant self-regard, the Alpha Weenie arrogance that drips from the man's every oracular pronouncement on The Obvious! There's more hubris in a single Jarvis entry than all of Sophocles laid end to end. Why, when, say, the levees fail again in New Orleans, do some people feel the need to POST A NOTE TO THAT EFFECT? Is it the Cokie Roberts effect—the chattering class's presumption that it must have something, anything to say about everything? (Joan Didion famously said that she left New York because she didn't have an opinion about everything.) The newswire chatters, and out comes the late-breaking news, and the Jarvises of the Bloviosphere labor mightily to bring forth a quip about Commander in Chief, or Hurrican Katrina, or the International Freedom Center at Ground Zero, or why it's "appalling" that transit officials are suing over the copyright of subway maps (oh, the humanity...). Why, these people have an opinion about EVERYTHING. The only thing worse than this leveling wind of smug, self-important pontification is the obsequious claque of flipper-clappers that will Post A Comment, seconding virtually anything the Amazing Karnak says.

(By the way, is it just me, snark monkey that I am, or is there a delicious irony in the all-knowing, stentorian style adoped by some of these Titans of the Bloviosphere? Isn't this the selfsame monologic, "I Speak, You Listen" old-media model they're always decrying? For all their arm-waving about "citizen journalism" and "social networks" and "my readers are my editors," most of these self-appointed evangelists of the New Media Order deliver their commandments with all the self-effacing understatement of some biblical Hairy Thunderer, inscribing His Laws in stone with a fiery finger. It's the Great Men model of history, come back to haunt us. Talk about a pathetic phallacy...

Compare this Old Testament filibustering to the model inherent in the intellectually nimble, effortlessly brilliant bOING bOING, whose added value comes as much from the community of minds that enriches the editors' already supersmart posts by tacking on links that further nuance the original idea or comment ironically on it.)

That's the short version of why I've let this blogging thing twist in the wind for awhile.

And speaking of smug, self-important pontification, I'll be doing a keynote lecture, "'Sex Organs Sprout Everywhere': The Sublime and the Grotesque in Web Porn," in Amsterdam, at the Art and Politics of Netporn conference, September 30 and October 1. Come help me live out my flickeringly brief fantasy that I, too, am a Promethean Bringer of Fire. I wouldn't be anything without you, the little people.

Oh, and the Sept./Oct. issue of Print magazine includes my feature on cholo/Chicano visual culture.

Posted by Mark Dery at 10:50 PM | Comments (14) | TrackBack

July 06, 2005

In Search of Ancient Astronauts

Tomorrowland rocket ride, Disneyland, circa 1960. Courtesy The Imaginary World. © Dan Goodsell 2005.

My essay, "In Search of Ancient Astronauts: A Requiem for the Space Age," appears in the new Cabinet magazine, issue 18.

Key Concepts:

Ray Bradbury, "Rocket Summer," aeronautics workers in Southern California in the '60s and '70s, Tomorrowland, children's books on space travel, Willy Ley, Chesley Bonestell, Lester Del Rey, the Apollo moon missions, NASA snafus, "space migration," rocketeer theology, the Jetsonian church architecture of Robert Des Lauriers, Cape Canaveral and the high-tech sublime, mummified astronauts.

"In Search of Ancient Astronauts" is my latest contribution to the self-assembling book I'm writing, a drive-by cultural critique and anti-memoir titled Don Henley Must Die (I'm open to subtitle suggestions).

By "self-assembling," I mean: Written as a series of free-floating essays, orbiting around a central theme. With luck, the finished book will feel hypertextual, rather than merely...disorganized. The idea is to avoid linear chronology, which stinks of autobiography, and to embrace a connectionist paradigm, rather than the usual rhetorical structures used in essays. Think Didion and Davis starring in a nortec remake of Almost Famous. Or something like that.

In my bylines, I call this book-in-progress a search for the cultural psyche of Southern California, where I grew up in the '70s, amid San Diego's badlands, borderlands, and suburban sprawl. Several recent essays—the seed DNA for book chapters—have appeared in Cabinet, evidence of editor Sina Najafi's intellectual courage, and of the panoramic sweep of his fascinating little magazine.

(If you're unfamiliar with Cabinet, I've written a quick backgrounder here. Or you can just wander over to their site, and poke around. FYI, Cabinet is available at bookstores such as Barnes & Noble, as well as other outlets, around the country. Alternatively, it can be bought directly from the publisher.)

As always, here's a teaser to seduce you into buying the magazine:

Image courtesy Dreams of Space website. © John Sission 2005.

In Chula Vista, the San Diego suburb where I grew up in the '60s and '70s, rocket summer was an unchanging mental season for anyone whose father worked in the aeronautics industry, as my stepdad did.

My stepdad worked on the tailfins for the sleek, swept-wing fighter jet that knocked Tom Cruise out of the spotlight in Top Gun—the legendary Grumman F-14 Tomcat, which entered military service in 1972. He had a hand, too, in the engine nacelles for the DC-10, the 727, and the 737; the thrust reverser for the 747; the exhaust system for the Concorde; and the space shuttle boosters.

Little wonder, then, that my mental skies were crisscrossed with the contrails of SSTs and the fiery plumes of ascending moonships.

I lived with one foot in the future, a parallel dimension where supersonic travel, jetpacks, lunar vacations, and offworld colonies under geodesic domes were already a reality. Disney's Tomorrowland fueled my fantasies. Once a year, on Rohr night, when the park opened its gates to Rohr employees only, I thrilled to the space-jock jargon and simulated microgravity of the Flight to the Moon (brought to you by McDonnell-Douglas) and the Incredible Shrinking Man effects of the Adventure Through Inner Space (brought to you by Monsanto). By moonlight, Tomorrowland's aerodynamically cool monorail and spaceport architecture made the master-planned technocracies and interstellar odysseys in my stepdad's Isaac Asimov novels and Popular Science magazines seem suddenly, thrillingly real.

But Tomorrowland only literalized the Visions of Things to Come floating around in postwar America. Space evangelists such as Willy Ley, Wernher von Braun, and Lester Del Rey spread the gospel of space exploration and colonization through children's books that were equal parts edutainment, pulp SF, and boys' adventure story. Ley's inspiring tract, The Conquest of Space (1949), cut the die for the genre: ringingly romantic evocations of space travel, brought to life by the superreal clarity of Chesley Bonestell's artwork. Bonestell's views of Saturn Seen From Titan, The Surface of Mercury, and Exploring the Moon were stills from a movie not yet made, one that every schoolkid was certain he would one day star in. "The younger generation of rocket engineers is just beginning," wrote Ley, in 1951. "They are of the new generation to which space travel is not going to be a dream of the future but an everyday job with everyday worries in which they will be engaged." While my stepdad built the casings for the boosters that launched the moon rockets, I climbed Bonestell's dramatically lit lunar ridges, plumbed the depths of their shadowed craters. I teleoperated the spiderlike robots in Ley's Space Stations (1958), assembling a huge, ring-shaped spacelab high above the earth. I flew through the cosmic void in Lester Del Rey's Space Flight: The Coming Exploration of the Universe (1959), propelled by the jetpack in my weirdly medieval metal spacesuit, mechanical claws sprouting from my gloves and boots.

Image courtesy Dreams of Space website. © John Sisson 2005.

Like the rest of my generation, I was itching for liftoff. Tang was in our mother's milk; the course of our fantasies was plotted by books like Mae and Ira Freeman's You Will Go to the Moon (1959), whose perky text managed to make lunar colonies sound as cozily familiar as the suburbs:

You can see more from the top of this hill. Look! Do you see that house? That is the moon house. That is where you will live on the moon.

Image courtesy Dreams of Space website. © John Sisson 2005.

Posted by Mark Dery at 10:48 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

June 03, 2005

Sunshine/Noir

Sunshine/Noir: Writing From San Diego And Tijuana, edited by Jim Miller, is out, and I've got a lengthy essay in it, titled "Loving the Alien: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Become Californian." It's an autobiographical rumination on the ontological migraines I suffered as a palely loitering lit geek, growing up among San Diego's Malibus Barbies and Earring Magic Kens.

Here's the opening graph, as a teaser:

"Born in Boston and raised in New England until I was five, I felt like Robinson Crusoe on Mars when we moved to San Diego. Marooned in a suburban development, I rode my Sting-Ray down gridded streets, past lookalike tract homes. If I squinted hard, I could almost imagine I was one of the crabgrass frontiersmen in Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles (1950), homesteading in some extraterrestrial Levittown. To someone from 'Back East,' the climate was alien: It never snowed, it rarely rained, and on the hottest days the sun seemed as if it was about to go nova."

The anthology also features Sandra Alcosser, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Marilyn Chin, Mike Davis (yes, that Mike Davis), Hal Jaffe, Jimmy Jazz, Steve Kowitt, Sue Luzzaro, Victor Payan and Perry Vasquez, and David Reid.

A professor of English and labor studies at San Diego City College, Jim Miller is an activist historian, hell-bent on exhuming the bodies buried beneath the Chamber of Commerce-approved official history of America's Finest City. He's fanning the flames of what passes for dissident intellectualism in San Diego, where the Life of the Mind dies screaming (or did, at least, when I languished there, as a teenager). Along with Mike (City of Quartz) Davis and Kelly Mayhew, he co-edited the trailblazing collection, Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See, a portrait of Dorian Gray the city's real-estate moguls, jackleg politicans, and right-wing talkshow hosts would dearly love to consign to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, if only they could.

Now, through CityWorks Press (a non-profit literary press founded by the San Diego Writers Collective), Miller has published this compendium of nonfiction and fiction writings on the San Diego-Tijuana sprawl.

"In the introduction to the anthology, Jim Miller...explains the anthology's title by pointing to San Diego's paradoxes: the city's rich history is compromised by its push to grow; no other city in California has as large a gap between rich and poor; and the carefree image the San Diego tourist industry promotes is undermined by a constant military presence," writes Kelly Davis, in her San Diego CityBeat feature on Sunshine/Noir. "Such dichotomies prompt 'attempts to explore the meaning of place,' Miller writes. The anthology seeks to do just that."

Davis also wrote the sharp, stingingly funny introduction that prefaces the big, fat chunk of my essay excerpted in this week's CityBeat, an irreverent upstart that's blowing the doors off the city's other alternative newsweekly, The San Diego Reader.

Actually, it's the cover story; how cool is that?

Read her intro to the excerpt from my essay, and the excerpt itself.

Note: If you're reading this in SoCal, there's a combine book-launch party, art exhibition, and book signing for Sunshine/Noir at ICE GALLERY, 3417 30TH ST (AT UPAS), NORTH PARK, SAN DIEGO on SATURDAY, JUNE 11, at 7 PM. It's free. Perry Vasquez writes, "An exhibition of art from Sunshine/Noir will also be on display, featuring the work of Yukimi Levas-Anderson, Michael Mesa, Mario Chacon, Eugene Brown, Hendrix Knowles, Alessandra Moctezuma, and Perry Vasquez." For more info, call (619) 244-9302.

Incidentally, Vasquez, who did the cover art for the anthology, reproduced above, is an astonishing artist and cultural activist focusing on Chicano and crossborder/bicultural issues. Check out his droll, barbed work at his site, Apollo 13 .

Posted by Mark Dery at 02:46 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

May 11, 2005

Pomosexualities, robopathologies, Afrogeeks: Discuss.

UPCOMING LECTURES

Thursday, May 19:

San Francisco

"The Sexual Grotesque: Pomosexualities and Robopathologies on the Web." (Details below, after address and directions).

Rx Gallery (part of Blasthaus) Realspace, LLC 132 Eddy Street @ Mason Street San Francisco, CA 94102 1 Block west of Powell Street BART For MapQuest map and directions, click here.

TIME: 7:30pm; doors open at 7pm.

PHONE: (415) 756-8825

WEBSITE: http://www.rxgallery.com

Lecture synopsis:

Posthuman relationships with anatomically accurate androids called RealDolls, extreme bukkake, ultra-violent Japanese hentai cartoons: Depending on your perspective, the Web is a libidinous interzone—a torture garden of unearthly delights—or a sinkhole of depravity.

What are we to make of the runaway proliferation of fetishism, in the Web age? (Tentacle rape, anyone? Decapitation fantasies? Amputee worship?) Is fetishism becoming the default modality of our post, post, postmodern sexuality? If so, is it transgressive or repressive—one more example of the iron cage of techno-industrial rationale constricting our desires, or an inspiring example of subcultural sensibilities rebelling against normative notions of sexuality?

As well, what are the cultural politics of the Web-enabled "democratization of exploitation": the niche-marketing of nonstandard body types that, ironically, realizes the feminist dream of dethroning normative notions of beauty by peddling the flesh of the morbidly obese and the mind-crushingly ugly. Does this stuff subvert the Beauty Myth? Or is it simply extending its exploitative logic to the far margins of society?

"Sex organs sprout everywhere," wrote William S. Burroughs, in Naked Lunch. Even as the self-appointed morals czars of the Bush administration try to childproof the Web, exotic new toadstools spring up in its danker corners. In "The Sexual Grotesque," I'll examine the Newtonian physics of our culture—the equal and opposite reactions of official culture and the Web's sexual underworld.

Saturday May 21:

Santa Barbara

LECTURE: "Beyond Afrofuturism"

Afrogeeks conference at UC Santa Barbara
I'll be doing a keynote address from 9:15 AM-10:45 AM, along with two other keynote speakers.

DETAILS:

AfroGEEKS Conference
UCSB Center for Black Studies
4603 South Hall
University of California
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3140
Ph. 805.893.3914
Fax: 805.893.7243
Email: afrogeeks@cbs.ucsb.edu

If you make it to either event, do come up and say hello.

Posted by Mark Dery at 05:23 PM | TrackBack

Mexico City Mash-Up

With Daniel Rosenberg in Mexico City, at Cabinet magazine's "Nostalgia" conference. (Thanks for the photo, Daniel!)

Just back from Mexico City, where I lectured on nostalgia (lecture title: "The Dismemberment of Things Past") at the Museo Rufino Tamayo, as part of Cabinet magazine's "Nostalgia" conference, and, later, solo at the Casa del Lago (lecture title: "Evil Empire," a Baudrillardian critique of late-imperial America's geopolitical arrogance and excess).

Thanks to the bush-beating efforts of Pacho, director of the Casa del Lago, and Francisco Caballo of the National University of Mexico (mil gracias, gentlemen), I racked up some press. The whip-smart cultural critic Fran Illich (of Borderhack! fame) introduced my Casa del Lago lecture, then blogged it. (Fran just sent a note—July 12—to say that he reviewed my Casa del Lago lecture for Modem Radio. If you habla espanol, check out the MP3 of Fran's review, nestled in his 50-minute, techno-propelled program on digital culture.)

And a few media outlets interviewed me: La Jornada ("Soy patologo cultural; la vida en EU esta enferma, afirma el critico Mark Dery") and El Universal Online (here and here).There's also a full-page write-up, embedded in this PDF, which makes mention of my forthcoming anthology of cultural criticism. (Search for my name, to find the article in question.) Published in Spanish only by the UNAM press, it will be titled Nitrato de amonio para el alma—"Ammonium Nitrate for the Soul."

Both lectures went swimmingly, thanks to my gracious, ultra-competent hosts (Pacho, Francisco, and, at the Museum Tamayo, the extraordinary Pip Day). For me, the standout speakers at "Nostalgia" were co-panelist Daniel Rosenberg (whose forthcoming collection, Histories of the Future, sounds fascinating), Luc Sante (an inexhaustible fund of historical lore, gemlike insights, and weirder-than-fiction True Facts), and the scary-smart, deadpan-funny Sven-Olov Wallenstein. Happily, there's a chance that Cabinet and the Museo will publish the papers presented in a bilingual anthology, sometime in the near future.

The true spotlight-stealer, though, was the city itself, a paradoxical, precolumbian mash-up of blood and poetry, raw sewage and French perfume, Dickensian misery and Gibsonian futurism—a mongrel metropolis straight out of Blade Runner (complete with techno-Aztec corporate citadels to rival that movie's Tyrell pyramid).

The ancient Mexica's heliocentric cosmos has given way to the contemporary worship of ceaseless circulation, whether of liquid capital or cars. Mexicans are forever en route, orbiting the city in their cars or, more likely, immobilized in the Godard-ian traffic jams that are the city's enduring contribution to installation art.

At the Museo Antropologia, I marveled at the precolumbian fashion fetish for cranial deformation through headbinding. Just as certain demographics in contemporary culture favor, say, Buns of Steel while others worship the steatopygous Butt, some of the precolumbian peoples preferred to bind infants' skulls around the temples so that the crown of the head flared out, for a brachycephalic effect (think "lightbulb"); others bound the upper part of the skull to create a sloping forehead (think "conehead"). I once asked a neurologist, at a cocktail party, if cranial deformation produced not only a different-shaped brain but a different sort of mind, on the presumption that the artificially enlarged braincase would permit certain parts of the brain to expand to larger-than-normal proportions, while other areas of the brain would be constricted. He rattled the rocks in his glass nervously and edged toward the buffet, muttering only that the jury was out...

My only regret is that I wasn't able to indulge in the Xtreme gastro-tourism I'd anticipated, from escamoles (black ant larvae) to gusanos de maguey (butterfly larvae) to chupalines (fried grasshoppers). I'm convinced entomophagy is the culinary shape of things to come, the only sane solution to overpopulation, solid-waste crises, and increasingly extreme meteorological phenomena (brought to you by global warming). Insects are a high-protein, low-fat food source, far healthier for you than, say, beef. They're also an excellent source of vitamins and minerals, such as phosphorus and iron—not to mention our last, best hope for avoiding the Soylent Green option. And there's gazllions of the damn things: Beetles, for instance, make up the largest order in the animal kingdom; there are an estimated 350,000 named species of them, worldwide. "Crunch all you want; we'll make more."

Posted by Mark Dery at 09:11 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 10, 2005

Coming Attractions: Two Lectures in Mexico City, a Dery Anthology in Spanish, and...A Shovelware Giveaway!

April 29/30: I'm speaking at a conference on nostalgia, hosted by Cabinet magazine in partnership with the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo, in Mexico City. (Details here.) Luc Sante, Celeste Olalquiaga, and others, me among them, will be picking apart the notion of nostalgia. I'll be lecturing and sitting on a panel about time machines (!) with Daniel Rosenberg (editor of Histories of the Future) and Simon Shaffer, the author of a history of time machines. (Rosenberg did the supercool history of timelines that appeared in a recent Cabinet. Have a look.)

May 4: Anne Coulter TreasonWatch™ Alert! Card-carrying Fifth Columnist Gives Aid and Comfort to the Enemy! I'll be giving a talk (working title: "Fear Factor: The United States as Evil Empire---a de Tocquevillian meditation on America the myth, the monster, the geopolitical menace") at The National University of Mexico's Casa del Lago.

In conjunction with my visit, the University is bringing out a Spanish-language anthology of my writings, Ammonium Nitrate for the Soul: A Mark Dery Reader. It will include excerpts from Escape Velocity (already published in Spanish as Velocidad de Escape) and The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium, as well as essays on culture jamming, guerrilla semiotics, cultural resistance (such as Star Trek "slashing"), aesthetic philosophy (specifically, the New Grotesque), and the slippery politics of transgressive subcultures in a marketplace culture.

(If you're a Spanish-language reader and would like to reserve a copy, ping me, and I'll pass your e-mail on to the publisher.)

If you're in the area, do drop by and say hello, especially if you're a local. My fractured Spanish is strictly of the Ugly American party animal variety, more commonly associated with fratboys bellowing for another round of Jell-O tequila shooters. But our goodwill will bridge the language gap, I'm sure.

I'm tremendously excited about this, my first visit to Mexico City. Having grown up in the South Bay borderlands of San Diego, I'm fascinated by Mexico and all things Mexican, from the Eero Saarinen-esque architecture of Felix Candela (which I hope to see, when I'm there) to Frida Kahlo (hyped to the gills, yet well worthy of that hype, and then some) to the rasquache bricolage of the squatters' colonies (colonias) around Tijuana, monuments to misery and official neglect that nonetheless manage to be inspiring and even vibrant, in spots. Like many bobo gringos, I'm blown away by the subversive wit, supersaturated garishness, telenovela melodrama, precolumbian melancholy, and postmodern ad-hocism of the culture that has given the world lucha libre, narcocorridos, Alarma! magazine, the fotonovela, and the street graphics collected in Sensacional!, to mention only its vernacular contributions.

So, if you know Mexico City, tell me: Where should I go, and what should I see? What unfrequented corners of the Hidden City, unknown even to Lonely Planet backpackers, should I search out? Where can I find barbequed iguana, fried grasshoppers, mummified monks, saints' heads in vitrines, brutalist architecture, incense-scented cathedrals, the carnivalesque, the grotesque, or simply a nice place to savor a herradura tequila or an ice cream from La Michoacana, shaded from the noonday sun? I'm interested in places and things that will stimulate the intellect, dazzle the eye, or enchant the palate. (I'll be in serious foodie mode when I'm in Mexico, on the prowl for Xtreme Cuisine of every sort, as long as it isn't the sort of thing that will invite turista.)

Alternatively, suggest the one book I should read as my skeleton key to the deeper meanings of one of the world's deepest cities.

Clue me, dear readers. Whoever leads me to the most extraordinary find—I'll be the judge of that!—gets a copy of the "Sea" issue of Cabinet, with my essay, "Dead Seas."

Posted by Mark Dery at 02:15 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

January 17, 2005

National Psychogeographic

My essay, "Dead Seas: The Psychogeography of Southern California," appears in the new Cabinet.

This is the latest in a series of essays I've been writing about growing up in the San Diegan suburb of Chula Vista, in the late '60s and '70s.

If you're unfamiliar with the magazine, it's a wonderfully arcane compendium of critical theory and personal essays, combining the braininess of, say, October (but not its effete, '80s theory-jock snobbery) with, say, the omnivorous approach to cultural commentary of, say, The Believer. No, no; that's not right. Oh, hell, just buy the damn thing.

(FYI, Cabinet is available at bookstores such as Barnes & Noble, as well as other outlets, around the country. Alternatively, it can be bought directly from the publisher.)

Each issue has a theme; this one's is The Sea. Besides my essay, there are articles on "The Sunset Coast: The past within the present at the English seaside"; "The final voyage of Horatio Nelson"; "The Generation of the Jolly Roger"; "The science of rogue waves"; and "Utopia Beneath the Waves: Narcis Monturiol's submarine dream." Plus, there's an awesome postcard of a Kraken, the legendary giant squid of Scandanavian mythology. Too cool. Here's what you get, in this one-time, satisfaction-guaranteed-or-your-money back essay:

• Tales of growing up "in the Silurian age," in San Diego's South Bay
• an homage to the prehistoric seascapes of the Czech scientific illustrator Zdenek Burian
• an exhaustively close reading of prog-rock artist Roger Dean's '70s album covers that wrings more hermeneutic juice out of Yes's Tales from Topographic Oceans than Rosalind Krauss could squeeze out of Matthew Barney's entire goddamn oeuvre (I interviewed Dean at length for this section)
• a meditation on the influence, on Salvador Dali's soft watches and lobster telephones, of the "grandiose geological delirium" of the micha-schist formations of Cape Creus, near his home
• and some apocalyptic, here-comes-the-flood premonitions of SoCal buried under a biblical deluge, when the polar caps melt.

And here's a teaser, to seduce you into buying the magazine:

According to Dali biographer Ian Gibson, one writer concluded, on visiting Cape Creus, "that Dali could only be fully understood if one took into account this extraordinary landscape that had shaped his thinking."

An instructive phrase: "That had shaped his thinking." It makes us wonder: Which came first, the neurotic or the rocks? Do landscapes touch off sympathetic vibrations inside us because they resonate with childhood experiences, remembered or not? Dali once observed that his "mental landscape" resembled "the protean and fantastic rocks of Cape Creus." Did the vaginal clefts, phallic spurs, and fecal blobs of its tortured, metamorphic rocks mirror his sexual psyche, a battleground of (barely) repressed homosexuality, ravenous orality, and shameful anality? Or was Dali, in some weird way, shaped by the landscape he grew up in? The Situationists coined the term "psychogeography" to describe "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals." Is there a psychogeology—a study of the psychological effects of the rock formations we grew up around? Are there igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic personalities? Is there a stratigraphy of the soul, a petrology of the psyche?

Posted by Mark Dery at 04:58 PM | TrackBack

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Blog Categories

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California dreaming. (See UrbanDictionary.com.)

Dept of Hitler Studies

The Reich Stuff: Nazis in popular culture.

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Oh, baby, baby, it's a wired world.

Facetime

Interviews.

Floating Signifier

Drive-by cultural criticism.

Invisible Lit

"I have always been a voracious reader of what I term 'invisible literature'—market research reports, sex manuals, medical textbooks...By comparison with this, most writers have nothing of interest to say whatever, and an hour spent not reading them is an hour gained forever." —J.G. Ballard

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Media criticism. (Title courtesy Ant Farm.)

Natural History

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, etc.

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Psychopathia Sexualis

Human sexual response.

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Ammonium Nitrate for the Soul.

True Confessions

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Terrorists, tabloid media, and Xtreme culture: To many, America seems like an infernal carnival, equal parts funhouse and madhouse---a "pyrotechnic insanitarium," to borrow a turn-of-the-century nickname for Coney Island. Are we on the eve of an Age of Unreason?

Wannabe cyborgs, machine-sex junkies, punk roboticists. Poised between Tomorrowland and Blade Runner, the digital fringe poses the fundamental question of our time: Will technology be used as an engine of repression or a tool of empowerment in the coming millennium?

Technopagans! Brain-jackers! Amok robots! An African-American cleaning woman reincarnated as an all-powerful cyborg! Before Wired, before the Web, there was Flame Wars, the mind-ripping anthology of essays on digital culture that launched the discourses of Afro-Futurism, cyberfeminism, and cybersex studies.

No fashion-forward Anti-Corporate Rebel wants to be caught dead at the next Reverend Billy protest without a copy of the manifesto that started it all. Buy into the anti-consumption craze that's becoming the lifestyle choice of the radical chic!