Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts

07 March 2007

The Century of the Self



Falling once again into the ostensive trap of blogging, I would like to point people to an excellent BBC4 documentary up on Google Video. Entitled The Century of the Self it chronicles the influence of Sigmund Freud's nephew Edward Bernays on the field of public relations. The man was amazing. Almost singlehandedly he convinced American women to start smoking. The video is in four parts, just follow the links: 1 2 3 4.

We've watched the first part so far, and I was particularly struck by the reengineering of the American worker as the American consumer. There is something ennobling about work, but after 9/11 we weren't told to work hard, and save money, and pay off our debts. We were told to go spend money, for the good of the nation. If anyone has a high-schooler studying American History, or teaches high-schoolers (Mom), this would be an excellent supplement. This is the kind of information that is sadly missing from public education. I mean, when was I going to be told that Goebbels thought that FDR was nifty?

23 February 2007

The Corporation


corp.jpg

Sorry for the momentary break in our 100% puppy program, but the other night we watched The Corporation, and I felt it might be worth recommending to interested individuals. I'm sure the title makes it fairly clear that the message was rather anti-corporate. There was a fair amount of spin, naturally. For instance, in the coverage of the Bolivian Water Wars over the privatization of Bolivia's water utility, the assertion that it was illegal to collect rain water was presented without any qualification. Granted, this information was part of an interview with one of the protest leaders, and should be taken in context. Unfortunately it served to obscure a truth that was no less outrageous. While it was in all likelihood not illegal to collect rainwater, Bechtel did have the right to appropriate smaller, community water projects that had been paid for with community or private funds, to install water meters on those projects, and charge residents for the installation of the meters. I guess when you expect to extract a 15-17% profit from a 3rd world water utility, you'll do whatever it takes.

One of the key benefits of incorporation is the fact that the corporation is treated as a legal person. In the film this legal fiction is employed as a literary conceit, building the case that if a corporation is a person, that person is psychotic. It occurred to me that this concept of legal personhood, and the way in which that personhood is manifest, is rather like the occult concept of an egregore, or "thought form" (as it turns out, whoever wrote the Wikipedia article had the same idea). This reminded me of a podcast I heard about a guy who, operating under the assumption that an egregore is an independent entity and can therefore be acted upon in the same way as an individual, cast a love spell on Fox News (so if Fox News isn't giving you the same "fair and balanced" conservative propaganda that you've come to expect, blame it on Jason Louv). There seems to be something to this, and the term egregore may just be a wacky name for a very real phenomenon. Several of the interviews in The Corporation are conducted with CEOs and board members of large corporations that have committed immoral acts under their watch. The one commonality linking all of the interviewees is their sincerity, their belief that they are moral men, concerned for human rights, the environment, and justice. Think for a moment of Bill Gates (not featured in the film). Based on his charity work I think it would be fair to assume that he is a moral and concerned individual, dedicated to improving human life on a very fundamental level. Yet the company he founded is a petulant monster. Are we to assume then that Bill Gates is not in fact a moral individual, but is himself a petulant monster in disguise? Not necessarily. The incorporation of Microsoft (and any other corporation for that mater) is the legal and metaphorical "embodiment" of an entity whose primary purpose is to make money. That is not its sole purpose, but those secondary purposes serve to differentiate it from its competitors (i.e. it is a software company, not a hardware company; it engages in legal commerce, rather than robbing banks or trafficking drugs), and are therefore ancillary. The act of incorporation is the delegation of responsibility and liability to a collective entity with little or no motivation to act responsibly or morally. The corporation desires to make money, and it will do so through any means possible, as long those means do not compromise its ability to continue to make money, provided it doesn't get caught. Turning such a behemoth around requires a concerted act of will (contemporary magic is often thought of in those terms), essentially, the addition of new input into the component elements of the egrigore, or the inoculation of radical new values into a corporate culture.

JR let us borrow the movie, and has had some thoughts of his own regarding corporations. He thinks they should all be reincorporated as not-for-profits, though not necessarily with 501(c) status. I think that shareholder status should be extended to more stakeholders (starting with employees), and that aspects of direct democracy be put into practice at critical points in the day-to-day operations of a company. I can only imagine what it would have been like back at old VMSC if the entire company voted on whether or not to take on a particularly obnoxious client. It would have put an end to the constant blame game, since all of us would have been responsible for taking the son of a bachelor on.


12 February 2007

Thinking Online: Humanzees, Dimetheyltriptamine, and my Alien Abduction Story

When I was two we moved, briefly, to Dallas for a summer internship. We moved there for good the following year. All my memories from the time of the internship seem to happen at night. After being put to bed I would often lay awake for an hour or so. I had a pair of wind-up toy robots which I called Reddy and Bluey. As I lay there in bed Reddy and Bluey would start to walk across the room, along with other toys. I wasn't so bothered by the robots, since they were wind ups, but the Legos, that was a little strange. Eventually these nighttime hallucinations became more elaborate and began to inform my dreams thematically.


My bed was tucked into a corner of the room, touching the walls on the right side and at the foot. One night a group of monsters, or aliens as I thought of them, surrounded the bed and began to walk around it. The aliens had strange faces, all different, and were two dimensional (which makes me think the whole event may have been caused by cars driving around in the parking lot with their lights on), allowing them to slide smoothly between the bed and the wall. They were actually quite similar to the urSkeks in The Dark Crystal, but that film was released in 1982, and this happened in 1979. When the aliens appeared I was unable to move, but I did manage to call out to my parents in the next room, who's answer was something along the lines of "We'll worry about it in the morning." This particular hallucination set off a series of alien dreams quite similar to classic abduction stories coupled with absurd dream logic. In them I was continually on the run, or being carried around by men in silvery suits and helmets with dark faceplates. I may have been in a ship in some of the dreams, but in the one I remember most vividly I was in an oneiric version of our apartment with an altered floor plan. I was sitting on my parent's bed in their relocated bedroom playing with my sock-monkey (I think his name was George). At some point the room became illuminated by a red light that had no obvious source, as though it came from the floor (I was fascinated by lava). One of the spacemen popped up from behind the bed, but apparently couldn't get me as long as I stayed in the center of the bed and didn't go near the edges. I continued playing with the sock-monkey, and during our game he misbehaved in some unspecified way. I punished him by throwing him off the bed, which broke the magic circle, and meant that the aliens could get him, and me. One jumped up on the bed and began to carry me off. I tried to call out, but couldn't speak. I have no idea what happened after that. I seem to remember being carried down the hall, perhaps onto the ship, or maybe I woke up.


Never did I imagine these were actual abductions, I took them for what they were, hallucinations and dreams. I had another batch of similar experiences when I was a teenager--sleep paralysis, autoscopic hallucinations, I even spent an entire night inside Pavel Tchelitchew's Hide-and-Seek. Those experiences along with the "abductions," have formed part of my personal mythology, somewhat along the lines of Joseph Beuys's personal mythology, I just don't give lectures on them or present them as facts.

The other day I had a chance to rethink these experiences thanks, in part, to the network structure of the internet, and something I would like to call "thinking online" (though "daydreaming" might be more appropriate). I was researching human-ape hybrids, of all things. I'm fascinated by hybrids, by the fluidity of genes, and their ability to cross our imposed boundaries of species, and even genus. For a short time I had a cat that was an F1 Bengal. Bengals are actually an inter-genus hybrid of the the common house cat (Felis catus) and the Asian Leopard Cat (Prionailurus bengalensis). Like most cat hybrids the first few generations of males tend to be sterile, and huge, as is the case with ligers and tigrons.

Six or seven million years ago the line of apes that was to become genus Homo split off from the relatives of modern chimps (genus Pan) and for 1.5 million years they were separate species. At that point the two groups reunited and hybridized, the evidence being found on the X chromosome. This would seem to indicate that the hybridization resulted in fertile females and sterile males (as is the case with the aforementioned cat hybrids). In the 1920s Soviet scientist Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov began a series of ethically dubious, and ultimately unsuccessful, experiments to create a human-ape hybrid. One of the motivations behind such a hybrid is that the resulting creatures would be suitable for dirty, dangerous, and degrading work that "real" humans would like to avoid (umm, robots?). In my googling on the topic I came across a number of interesting stories, including that of Kelpie Wilson, author of a novel about a human-bonobo hybrid. During the writing process she became so obsessed with the idea that she came close to procuring bonobo sperm and trying the experiment herself. I also stumbled across the image on the left on a white-supremacist website (which I refuse to link to). Taken in the 1930s, it is of a North-African man, called Bassou by the Berbers who lived nearby. Information on Bassou is nearly impossible to find, most of it on white supremacist websites of dubious origin and despicable intent. Apparently he lived alone, could not speak, and lived on fruits and insects. It is my opinion that he was simply a lonely, probably microcephalous, human being. Not a hybrid, as alleged.

Many of my searches on poor, maligned Bassou did include the word "hybrid," which generated results including the alien-human hybrid theories of Dr. David M. Jacobs. The fact that a professor of history at Temple University would endanger his career on that sort of thing piqued my curiousity, naturally. Eventually that led me to the Wikipedia article on "self-transforming machine elves." Machine elves are entities encountered by Terence McKenna while tripping on dimethyltriptamine, and in some ways are similar to the classic grey aliens of Roswell fame. Supposedly these machine elves create reality as we perceive it through their constant dance. About twenty percent of all people who take DMT as a drug (it is actually a naturally occurring substance in the human body, related chemically to seratonin and melatonin) experience hallucinations much like McKenna's, and nearly identical to the experiences had by alien abductees. Naturally occurring DMT has also been linked to such things as sleep paralysis and a feeling that one is not alone (when one in fact is). Those phenomena felt mighty familiar when I read about them. What amazes me now is not so much the experiences, which in a way are quite run-of-the-mill, but the fact that frivolous research on humazees could lead to a tenable explanation for one of the central mysteries of my childhood.

20 January 2007

Manufacturing Consent



Q-Referring back to your earlier comment about escaping from, or doing away with capitalism. I was wondering what scheme, what workable scheme you would put in its place?

NC-Me?

Q-Or (unintelligible, laughter).

NC-Well, you know I. . . (talking over one another)

Q-What would you suggest to others who might be in a position to set it up and get it going?

NC-Well, I mean, I think that what used to be called, centuries ago, "wage slavery" is intolerable. I mean I don't think people ought to be forced to rent themselves in-order to survive. I think that the economic institutions ought to be run democratically by their participants, by the communities in which they exist, and so on; and, uh, I think, through various kinds of free association.
_____________________________________________________

I first saw Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media about six years ago. I'd recently returned to the US from Spain, was working as a private gardener, fund raising for an environmental lobby, and working on my BFA. When it came to the part transcribed above, I started crying (I might have been a little stressed out for some reason...). Jami and I watched it again tonight (J had never seen it), and I was struck by how much (and how little) has changed since 1992 when the film was released. Several times in the film Chomsky expresses a desire for greater public access to media, essential asking for blogs and podcasts. I noticed, just a few minutes ago, that even he has a blog now. I'll be curious to see what he thinks of the new medium.

The picture above is from a part in the film where a photographer is getting him to pose against a fence. As he's trying to arrange himself he notices a bit of something (food I hope) on his finger, and licks it off. Funny.

An unrelated item, has any one noticed our nifty Rory (our dearly departed Manx) favicon?