Manchester Is Not Paris – The Alcohol Years By Carol Morley

It seems appropriate that I should be writing this review of The Alcohol Years with a slight hangover. Carol Morley’s (2000) documentary is about a hangover to beat them all. Not only did she forget some of the events of a drunken night out, the experimental film-maker managed to lose track of pretty well a whole period of her life.

The film, about her late teens/early 20s in Manchester in the 1980s, is how she reconstructed herself out of other people’s memories and accounts, 15-20 years later. Many of the people Morley interviewed (off-camera, with no indication of what she asked them) were ex-lovers. So the stories they tell on film, in a set of seemingly one-sided conversations, are infused with sexual tension, or lack of it, or jealousy, or indifference, or love, or in one or two cases possibly, with hate. As you might expect conversations with exes to be.

I first saw The Alcohol Years when it was shown late at night on channel four, not too long after it had been made. It formed a lasting impression on me, and seeing it in the cinema in 2012 brought it all flooding back. Carol Morley was at the screening I attended, and in the introductory talk she said she herself had not seen it for years. So she was remembering a film about her memories! Meta.

One or two of the ‘characters’ in the film are indeed very memorable. A man is one of the first to speak (I don’t know his name, this is not a typical ‘talking heads’ documentary. The viewer is allowed to get to know the people on film gradually, as they might a character in a fictional drama). He is (well he was in 2000) in his mid 30s I’d say. He has dark hair and wears glasses. He looks as if he has swallowed a lemon. This man is angry. He seems to be angry with Carol for daring to make the film at all. For coming back to her past, to people and places she left in a hurry, without any warning or explanation. He seems to be angry that she has dared to make a film about herself. 

Why don’t you look at the world around you? he asks accusingly. Why don’t you make a film about that? Why does this have to be about you?

I remember when I first watched the documentary, taking an instant dislike to this man. I thought he was very rude, to someone who was actually doing something that seemed brave to me. Facing up to her past. Facing her exes. But he thought Carol was cowardly, by refusing to sit infront of the camera, refusing to be the one who was interrogated. I just thought she was clever. Twelve years on, I actually found him quite funny. Because in the youtube/Big Brother/facebook world we now live in, making a film about yourself is a VERY normal thing to do. In fact, one might ask somebody why they DIDN’T. So this sour-faced man ( or maybe he isn’t sourfaced anymore, let’s hope not) was placing the film very much in a specific time. He made it historical.

And The Alcohol Years is full of history. Manchester, so much to answer for, has a rich recent history, especially around the music industry and scenes. Footage shot in the Hacienda and the GMex centre, and interviews with Manchester musos such as Pete Shelley from the Buzzcocks (who had been in love with Morley) and Dave Haslam the DJ, brought that history to life. Even in 2000 when the film was made, the Manchester I knew, the one that caused me to apply to go to university there in 1990, was already faded and worn. Now it seems like a distant memory. The scenes of dark alleyways and grimy clubs and pubs are part of a pre-regenerated Manchester. It is much lighter now, cleaner. And arguably less interesting. ‘Manchester Is Not Paris’ , the slogan on the postcard (above) that advertised the film when it first came out, was said on screen by Alan Wise, when he described going for breakfast with Morley to a local greasy spoon, ‘the morning after’. He was older than Carol, a kind of ‘sleazy’ not hugely attractive man, who served to suggest that the young Morley was not always the most discerning of ‘experimental’ film makers. But he had some great lines. I just wonder if nowadays, Manchester, like most Western cities, IS Paris. You can get cappuccinos on Deansgate much the same as you can on the Champs Elysees.

Dave Haslam, who is a bit of a local historian* of all things Manchester and music, made some pertinent observations in the film. He said that Manchester is a city that is very good at mythologising itself. And he added that Carol Morley was mythologising her own life, as well as making a film about Manchester.  He, of all the interviewees, seemed the most self-aware, and the most aware that the film would be a permanent record of something. I got the feeling listening to him, that in his sections, Dave was talking to the future. He also seemed to be talking to a fellow artist. A lot of the people in the film treated Morley like a ‘slag’, an ‘ex’, a ‘fuck up’. But Haslam seemed to have always identified in her a fellow spirit and a quite driven, creative person. I suspect he might have been the least surprised of all the interviewees,  to find out that Morley has now made her first feature-length docu-drama, Dreams Of A Life.

But the ‘slag’ reputation is also fascinating, emerging as it does from these individuals’ accounts of their memories of Carol. I distinctly remember when I first watched The Alcohol Years, wondering what it would have been like, to hear the words that these people were saying about you, to your face. Hurtful words. Years later, now I fancy myself as something of a ‘sexuality expert’, I notice a few things about their words.

One is that it wasn’t just Morley’s promiscuity that caused people some discomfort. Though one of her exes, a woman, said Carol was ‘a role model for promiscuity’ in such a damning tone that I flinched in the cinema. Her bisexuality also caused some of them problems, and especially a few of the women she spoke to.

The ‘role model’ woman asked Carol at one point how many people she’d slept with (we never got to hear the answer of course. Like I said, she’s clever). Then she corrected herself and said ‘how many men? I don’t care about the women.’  It is as if for a woman to have sex with women is ‘not really sex’. It doesn’t count. This reminded me of Mark Simpson’s work, and his comments on trysexuality. He says women are more free than men to experiment with same-sex sex. If a man does it he is labelled as ‘gay’. Simpson and I have argued about this a few times. I agree up to a point. But I think Carol Morley shows that for a woman to step out of whatever box she has been put in (whether it is ‘lesbian’ or ‘heterosexual’), it is still not accepted wholeheartedly by many. In fact, Carol Morley shows that the ‘slag’ stereotype and the ‘greedy bisexual’ stereotype are alive and well – or they were in 2000. I personally don’t think that has changed.

Has Carol Morley changed? I guess we’d have to ask her that. Though again, in the introductory talk at the screening I went to recently, she said The Alcohol Years is about how we only really exist via other people’s versions of us. So maybe I am as well placed as anyone to answer that question. My view is yes and no. On one hand of course she has changed. It is clear that she could not sustain herself in the lifestyle depicted in the film. She has grown up and moved on. But The Alcohol Years provides us with an early glimpse of what is most definitely an impressive talent. I haven’t seen Dreams of A Life yet, but all reports tell me it is excellent, and is only a continuation of and a development of the ideas and skills shown in The Alcohol Years.

So if Morley was a role model in the 80s (for promiscuity, drinking, being young) she still is one now. But a role model for honest and challenging documentary film making. Long may she continue to be so.

*thanks to Dave Haslam for the top image, which he had filed in his archives. I told you he is a historian!

In Defence Of… Cultural Studies

The Reader Is The Writer

On her interesting, but sometimes rambling blog, The Autobiography Of A Soul, Elise Moore has written about cultural studies. Her piece is ostensibly about the work of the late, great, film critic, Pauline Kael, but it soon becomes clear it has another purpose. To lament the ‘death’ of the old-fashioned study of literature, and the onslaught of media and cultural studies in the academy (and everywhere else).

Moore writes:

‘Once the canon had been put on trial for the harm it had done women, colonial subjects, and minorities, it was difficult to justify why the standard works of Anglo-American literary studies should still be taught. The Cultural Studies approach took care of that: high culture, like pop culture, was significant for sociological reasons. Really, though, the canon is just a relic of the old way of doing literary studies: for the purposes of semiotic analysis, one text is as good as another. Courses in genre and popular fiction have already been introduced, and the logic of Cultural Studies dovetails beautifully with the new corporate-capitalist model for universities, in which students are simply consumers. Mostly they’re going to pay to take courses in the sciences that may lead to careers, but a few might pay to study the things they love: pop culture and new media. To, basically, get an education by being entertained. Which isn’t necessarily far removed from the attitude of the first students to take literary studies. I remember reading somewhere, probably on the internet, that when the novel was first introduced as a subject of university study, the old guard was appalled, since the novel had been considered a form of entertainment.’

In saying ‘for the purposes of semiotic analysis, one text is as good as another’ Moore is accusing cultural studies, and the study of semiotics, of relativism. In reviewing a recent (sociology) book, I read a very similar accusation, this time in relation to ‘poststructuralism’, and, like Moore’s assertion here, it did not come accompanied with any references or evidence. It seems to be just a truism that is making its way into people’s minds. Well. It’s not true!

‘Semioticians’ such as Roland Barthes, Foucault, Derrida and Lacan, are some of the most ‘discerning’, opinionated writers I have ever read. Sure, their opinions are not limited to literature. The word I might use to describe them is ‘interdisciplinary’. But they are not relativists.

In his brilliant essay on the Eiffel Tower, Barthes treats the famous Parisian landmark as a ‘text’. So, in that sense, Ms Moore is right. His semiotics are not showing much respect for the ‘majesty’ of the ‘book’ or the ‘novel’ or the ‘poem’ as something more worthy of study than anything else. BUT. He has not chosen any old building to study. He has not walked out into the 7th arrondissement and picked out whichever edifice he first encounters. No. He writes about the Eiffel Tower because it is an amazing, important, mythical, aesthetically imposing structure.

And that’s the problem. According to Moore, semiotics ‘ignores aesthetics’. And ‘semiotics is an inadequate substitute for aesthetics because it ignores the dimension of pleasure’. Roland Barthes, author of The Pleasure of the Text, might disagree.  In his stunning book A Lover’s Discourse, he wrote:

“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.”

For me, the writing of Barthes, and that of Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, is pleasure made flesh. The words themselves become solid entities, that I ‘rub against’, as a frotteur might rub against his beloved Tour Eiffel. In a world where ‘sex’ has become commodified, democratised, sanitised, the dirty, rough, beautiful, aesthetic writings of Barthes et al, are one of my few intense pleasures left!

Susan Sontag agreed. In her heartfelt love letters to Barthes, she called him a ‘radical aesthete’ and celebrated the tension in his work between his sheer joy or ‘jouissance’ (as he called it in a psychoanalytic way), of writing and reading, and his more political, critical project.

In amongst her ‘aesthetic’ assertions, Moore says something very political herself. She claims that ‘the logic of Cultural Studies dovetails beautifully with the new corporate-capitalist model for universities, in which students are simply consumers. ‘ I found this comment a tiny bit insulting. That is because my (late) step-father was one of the founding members of the original cultural studies department, Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. One of the early words I learned as a young child was ‘university’. But I pronounced it ‘wistywersity’. And not long after the ‘Centre’ joined my lexicon.

Birmingham really was the ‘centre’ of the emerging Cultural Studies discipline in the 60s and 70s. My step dad worked with one of our great living ‘intellectuals’ Stuart Hall.  But their department, despite its ground-breaking research, and its ‘star’ graduates including Dick Hebdidge, Paul Gilroy and Angela McRobbie, was forced to close in 2002. Why? Because its intellectual rigour, its inclusive policy in the recruitment of students, and its ‘semiotic’ approach to critical theory had no place in ‘new corporate-capitalist model for universities’.

I have written before that the intellectual is O.V.E.R. But I see absolutely no link between the subject of Cultural Studies and that demise. Indeed, my step-dad and many of his colleagues were literature students and teachers once. Raymond Williams, who was one of the ‘fathers’ of cultural studies, was a novelist, as well as a literary and cultural theorist. And no novelist thinks one text is of the same aesthetic value as another!

Yes, ‘Media Studies’ has become one of those ubiquitous, what some call ‘mickey mouse degrees’ at universities across the globe. And some media studies degrees are not very good. There is potentially an argument that Media Studies has ‘watered down’ semiotics, but that is not an argument against semiotics, just the way it is sometimes taught and learned.  I have taught media studies myself, and I cannot think of one thing about the subject in and of itself that would speed on the death of the intellectual. I CAN think of things like students having to take out loans to pay for their degrees, the lack of inspiring alternatives for young people, so that university becomes more like school, a necessary rite of passage that has to be endured, and the explosion of the internet and related technologies which seem to make it harder and harder for all of us to think.

It will come as no surprise to Elise Moore, or indeed to anyone else reading this, that one other living ‘intellectual’ who I admire and whose work I advocate, is Mark Simpson. I have named him ‘a Roland Barthes for the i-pod generation’, because he is one of very few writers I know who has continued the discipline of ‘semiotics’ as Barthes practised it, and as was celebrated and continued at the Birmingham Cultural Studies Centre.

Simpson is a good example of how semiotics and aesthetics are never far apart. His important essay Sporno takes the male sporting body and shows how it is a ‘sign’ that becomes a ‘signifier’ when it is photographed, filmed, placed on the sides of buses and billboards. Having read his 1994 book Male Impersonators, whilst Simpson doesn’t refer all that often to Barthes himself, the ‘cultural studies’ theory is all there in that seminal work that led to Sporno. And in a recent talk Simpson gave in London, where he explained how Tom Of Finland was a ‘blueprint’ for the metrosexual buff boys we know and love today, I was enthralled by his ‘semiotic’ understanding of his subject. I could not help but picture Barthes himself, stood in that lecture hall with his powerpoint slides, demonstrating convincingly, the importance of the ‘image’ to the ‘text’. And the importance of both to what we internet-agers now dismissively term, ‘RL’.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=fyBcXKbFXt8

I don’t see a conflict between ‘literature’ and ‘cultural studies’, partly because of my own background and how those two lived side by side in my own household growing up. Partly because I see how they have been combined by academics such as David Halperin, a theorist and teacher of literature, who applies a ‘cultural studies’ and ‘semiotic’ analysis to much of his work. And does so in a most ‘aesthetically pleasing’ way. Another cultural studies academic who values (and indeed writes) literature is Jonathan Kemp. He spoke at the same event (above) as Mark Simpson, where he related the ‘aesthetics’ of the male body to cultural theory.

I have said too, that we are now witnessing, not just Barthes’ prediction of ‘The Death of The Author’ but also the death of the reader. Nobody reads. But that is not Cultural Studies’ fault. My discovery of the work of Mark Simpson has reminded me of the importance of the Cultural Studies I have been immersed in since I was a small child. I think there are only two Simpsonists in the world at the moment, but they are as intellectually sound as any literature boffin. I also think, inspired by Simpson, and Barthes, and Foucault, that my novella Scribbling On Foucault’s Walls is a testament to the literary, aesthetic value of cultural studies.

Elise Moore said her last piece may be her farewell post on her blog. I hope it isn’t. But I also hope she takes a bit more account of those theorists who do not fit into her existing literary mindset. She might realise just how beautiful some of them are.

Wilhelm It Was Really Quite Something

 

This is Mark Simpson on Morrissey, his long-term lover and anti-life partner, at the Spectator Arts Blog

——————————

Because the 80s is the decade that actually ended the 19th Century – the 90s was just an after-party clean-up operation – it’s also the decade that never came to an end itself. In fact, the 80s just won’t go away.

Economy in (‘Big Bang’) recession. Tories in power. Cuts on the table. Riots on the streets. Royal weddings on the telly. The Falklands becoming a fighting issue. And my mother complaining about Morrissey. (‘I see that chap you like so much has been in the papers again. Ridiculous man! And he still can’t sing!’)

As Madonna might put it, it’s all a bit reductive.

Everyone has been enjoying moaning about Morrissey lately – just like the good old days. In case you somehow missed it, at a performance in Argentina last week, his band appeared in t-shirts printed with the charming message ‘WE HATE WILLIAM AND KATE’ (remember 80s protest t-shirts?).

Perhaps worried this might be overlooked back home, the former Smiths front-man also offered this bouquet to his Argentine fans about those bitterly contested, sparsely-populated rocks in the South Atlantic: ‘Everybody knows they belong to you’.

The Times, Mirror, Telegraph, Sun and Mail all dutifully denounced Morrissey’s big mouth.The Guardian for its part ran an earnest discussion between two music critics titled: ‘Is Morrissey a national treasure? (The answer seemed to be ‘yes – but a very naughty one.’)

Not bad for a 52-year-old crooner currently without a record contract. But then, just like that other 80s diva keen on hairspray and frilly-collared blouses, we’ll never entirely be rid of him.

The British experience of the 80s is forever dominated by two very difficult personalities. Both from the north, both unafraid to speak their mind, and both possessing a gender all of their own.

And while one was a working class militant vegetarian anarchist Sandie Shaw fan with a flair for homoerotic imagery, and the other a bossy petit bourgeois social Darwinist and devotee of General Pinochet who famously outlawed the ‘promotion of homosexuality’, both of them were radicals on a revenge trip.

But, while Margaret Thatcher owned the 80s, Steven Patrick Morrissey stole its youth. Or at least, the youth that didn’t want to be a part of Thatcher’s 80s. The Smiths were not just an ‘alternative’ band: they were the alternative that Maggie said didn’t exist.

In fact, The Smiths were reviled by almost everyone at the time – Fleet Street, the BBC (they were effectively banned from daytime Radio 1), the record business (they were signed to a teeny-weeny Indie label), and indeed most of the record buying public (their singles struggled to even get into the top 20).

But they have become the heart of a decade that didn’t have one. They are now the band that everyone liked – two or three decades after the event.

Including, most famously, David Cameron, who used The Smiths and Morrissey as a Tory rebranding and detoxifying tool at least as important as those melting glaciers he went to gawp at. Declaring The Smiths his favourite group not long after gaining the leadership of the ‘Nasty Party’, he was even pictured, if memory serves me right, with a copy of Morrissey’s 2005 album Ringleader of the Tormentors on his desk.

Cameron, the former Carlton PR, was telling us that the Tories were now cool and sensitive, that they had assimilated the social and cultural anti-Thatcher reaction.

But Morrissey, whatever you may think of him, isn’t a man to be assimilated lightly. Especially by a Chipping Norton Tory.

When, in 2010, his estranged former Smiths collaborator Johnny Marr tweeted that he ‘forbade’ David Cameron from liking the Smiths, animal rights activist Morrissey endorsed him, adding:

‘David Cameron hunts and shoots and kills stags – apparently for pleasure. It was not for such people that either Meat Is Murder or The Queen Is Dead were recorded; in fact, they were made as a reaction against such violence.’

No-one can be genuinely surprised that someone who called an album The Queen is Deadis fiercely anti-Royalist. No-one can be shocked that the man who sang ‘Irish Blood English Heart’ is no fan of the remnants of the British Empire.

And let’s not forget his famous 1984 quip: ‘The sorrow of the Brighton bombing is that Margaret Thatcher escaped unscathed’, or the track ‘Margaret on the Guillotine’ for his 1988 album Viva Hate.

Unless, that is, they hoped that Morrissey had mellowed with age and become some sort of singing Stephen Fry with a quiff. Morrissey’s views haven’t changed. Morrissey hasn’t changed. He hasn’t grown up.

Still an adolescent curmudgeon, an otherworldly prophet from Stretford, he’s just older and thicker around the middle. He did after all promise us again and again that he wouldn’t change, couldn’t change.

It’s we, his fans, who have changed. If we’re embarrassed by his antics it may be because we’ve finally become the people we used to hate.

Mark Simpson is the author of Saint Morrissey

http://www.spectator.co.uk/arts-and-culture/night-and-day/7714548/morrissey-hasnt-changed.thtml

To Have No Face

‘I write in order to have no face’ - Michel Foucault

From a recent discussion at http://jackofkent.com about ‘outing’ bloggers:

‘But no matter how badly you feel someone has treated you in words, unless those words have broken some law or touched upon some significant issue of public interest, none of this justifies breaking our common expectation of privacy. It’s not very hard to find out the private details of pretty much anyone these days, so it doesn’t require a lot of intellect and it’s not a particularly admirable pursuit. While I don’t condone people writing deliberately nasty stuff to others online, to sinking to their level by publishing their personal or professional information as some kind of revenge is just childish. Let’s hope everyone can learn from this situation a little more mutual respect.’ – @white_mischief

Reese Rants: Quiet Riot Girl Responds

I discovered a relatively new blog recently, called Reeses Rants. One of the things I find interesting about it is that the author, Lucy Reese, set it up as part of her MA studies. But she tells us on her blog that she enjoys writing on this platform so much, that she goes way beyond the demands of the course and writes it for pleasure. Which, as a compulsive blogger myself,  I think is pretty great.

I wanted to link to her blog to show that people are reading it, and interacting with her work.

Also her latest post caught my eye. It is about blogging and identity, a subject that is very dear to my heart. She critiques a paper by an academic, who claims that the internet allows people to move ‘beyond’ identity positions such as gender, class, age, and perform online identities quite freely:

‘This paragraph – at the start of Merchant’s essay – was a bit of a worry in itself: Merchant (2006: 235-6) writes:

The rise of a new capitalism (Gee, 2004) with a global reach has given rise to a system in which it is less likely that goods are produced and consumed locally, and more likely that production is coordinated across locations and that goods are marketed to consumer types, rather than geographical locations. This sort of arrangement requires the development of particular communicative tools, but more pertinently leads to the emergence of new social identities; identities that are more accurately defined by lifestyle, media consumption, and affinity spaces than by the more traditional markers of race, class, gender and place.

The idea that there are consumer “types” outside of race, class, gender and place just doesn’t wash with me, fitting as it does into the Nu Labour/neo-liberal ideology of “choice” – I am who I am because I am wearing Adidas rather than Nike or because I shop at Waitrose rather than Asda.’

I agree with Lucy up to a point. We never really get beyond race, class, or gender, though maybe we do transcend place more easily via the internet. Language less so. An example of the power of gender identities online is how, when I openly ditched feminism, I immediately got accused of being a ‘man’.

But I think both the internet and consumerism have changed the playing field more than she acknowledges. For example I wrote after the UK riots last summer, how people have come to define themselves via brands such as Adidas, and how people’s actions in the riots affected brands:

http://quietgirlriot.wordpress.com/2011/09/08/no-logo-when-branding-goes-bad/

Someone else who has written about the importance of consumerism and the modern media (including the internet) to forming our identities, is Mark Simpson. His 2011 book, Metrosexy is all about how masculinity is now mediated and commodified, and how brands maketh the man. Whilst Simpson does not claim we have gone ‘beyond gender’ as a result, he has warned that we are nearing the ‘end of sexuality as we have known it’.

So I think Lucy Reese underestimates the power of consumer culture in changing how we identify ourselves as humans.

There is something else that her post reminded me of, to do with blogging and ‘identity’. That is how much of my identity I invest in my online existence, and how much online interactions have influenced my sense of self.

I have written before about how my world-view and my life have been transformed by the work of Mark Simpson, who I got to know via the internet. And how I have had various ‘identities’ imposed upon me by people online, due to my ‘relationship’ with his work. ‘Mark Simpson’s Pitbull’ and ‘Ardent Simpsonista’ are two of my favourites.

It was through reading Simpson that I was able to finally pluck up the courage to reject feminism, and it is his work on metrosexual masculinities that has given my writing and my lust for gender theory a new lease of life.

So when I clicked on his blog to see a white screen and the hostile message: You Are Banned, recently, I was devestated. Me, the human flesh and blood person was utterly distraught by something that someone else did hundreds of miles away, in the dashboard of their blog.

It has been a stark reminder to me of the complex relationship between ‘real life’ and internet identities.

Lucy is a ‘real life’ friend of Mark Simpson. In some ways she knows him much better than me. But in others, I think I have got a handle on him and his work more than any other person I know of. And that could be one of the things that has led him to ‘ban’ me from the personal space that is his blog.

Even hundreds of miles away, alone in the confines of my study, I encroached too far onto his personal space.

Concepts such as ‘freedom of speech’ and ‘censorship’ normally are applied at the level of state laws, or corporations – those brands again – controlling their products and their customers. But I think those terms go deeper than that. On a  one-to-one level people can ‘censor’ each other and themselves. Stop them from speaking.

Mark Simpson has failed to stop me speaking. I use a proxy server now to access his blog. Rather, ironically it is he who has gone rather quiet lately, including on his own blog which he has not updated for over a fortnight.

Maybe Lucy can infect him with some of her enthusiasm.

Blogging is real life to me.

I hope it gets better soon!

The Psychology Of Ruin Porn

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/design/2012/01/psychology-ruin-porn/886/

It’s the sort of image, imbued with loss and layers, that architecture buffs drool over. A wheelchair sits center stage, its orange vinyl back echoed by a round tabletop that leans against a wall, painted in a familiar shade of institutional green. A mattress, flattened and grimy, lies tossed onto a floor that’s littered with fallen plaster. In the foreground, an overturned metal trashcan speaks volumes. A mirror reflects the whole sad scene.

It’s romantic, it’s nostalgic, it’s wistful, it’s provocative. It’s about time, nature, mortality, disinvestment.

Pursuing and photographing the old is an addictive hobby. Dozens of blogs and online galleries share strategies for entry and showcase ever-bulging collections of moss-covered factory floors and lathe-exposed school buildings.

There’s no shortage of theories as to just why these images (in this case, a long-shuttered mental asylum) fascinate us. They “offer an escape from excessive order,” says Tim Edensor, a professor of geography at Manchester Metropolitan University who studies the appeal of urban ruins. “They’re marginal spaces filled with old and obscure objects. You can see and feel things that you can’t in the ordinary world.”

 

They’re marginal spaces filled with old and obscure objects. You can see and feel things that you can’t in the ordinary world.

 

Len Albright, a 31-year-old Princeton post-doctoral student who’s tagged along with ruin explorers in Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh, believes the experience is “more about the sense of ownership than anything else.”

He describes the derring-do involved in scaling urban ruins. “There’s this whole strategy for figuring out how to get in,” he says. “They start by hiding in the tree line at the edge of the property, checking for security guards. Then one of them dashes to the wall of the building. He starts looking for unlocked doors or busted out windows. There’s a lot of creeping and crawling, almost like a military operation.”

But for Matthew Christopher, the man who snapped the photograph described above, it was — at least in the beginning — more about curiosity. Only as he stood amid the eerily silent hallways and peeling ceilings of a similarly crumbling institution did he truly understand its role in the history of mental health. “When I visited the abandoned Philadelphia State Hospital, and then some of the others, I was able to connect the dots, to see the progress of treatment through the years,” Christopher says. “Architecture and the ethos of the times became linked for me.”

Reading about the field couldn’t compete with actually seeing the buildings and complexes firsthand. “I realized this was real, not abstract,” he says. Christopher became so intrigued with that first experience ten years ago that he switched from studying mental health to photography, eventually shooting some 300 abandoned asylums, schools, and factories.

“It was a case of that old cliché, ‘a picture speaks a thousand words,’” he says. “When I’d try to talk about the presences that seem to linger in these places, people would look at me like I should be in an asylum myself. When I showed them pictures — they’d suddenly get it.”

A long artistic history backs him up. Renaissance painters romanticized Greek ruins. Piranesi’s etchings memorialized Roman antiquity as it was being torn up. Photographer Eugene Atget sought out whatever bits of a rapidly-disappearing Paris he could find in a post-Haussmann era.

Now, Christopher has his own portfolio in the form of a website, abandonedamerica.us(subtitled “an autopsy of the American dream”), and he’s studying fine art photography at Rochester Institute of Technology.

As part of a disparate cadre of urbanists who have embarked on the road to ruins, he’s opened himself to some flack.

Critics accuse photographers like him of objectifying empty buildings as pretty stage sets filled with juxtapositions, fading colors and dramatic light. Those who are driven by the frisson of scampering around abandoned places, on the other hand, are often lambasted as criminal trespassers. Edensor thinks such invectives give these intrepid romance-seekers short shrift. “In the best photography, there’s a silent comment on economic disinvestment through an attempt to capture the sensations and memories that remain,” he says. “The conscientious explorer, on the other hand, seeks to create a relationship with the past, to produce a history that’s not been museumized or curated by experts.”

The two factions have, at times, gone to war. Urban explorers view photographers as passive watchers, unwilling to get their hands dirty. “Explorers move away from the porn metaphor, because it’s all theirs to experience — not to watch,” says Albright. “You poke your head into a hole, climb up a ladder, peer under a desk. You’re trying to put together a story.”

But photographers say they too put up with the slight dangers that come with the territory — Christopher has the Tyvek suit and breathing apparatus to prove it. More seriously, he contends, explorers can seem selfish, interested only in their own jollies.

“I’d like the viewer to step back just a bit and to see the horror story that’s implicit in the image,” he says.”These pictures document physical conditions that are the direct consequences of failed economies.”

With their more rebellious stance, explorers would probably issue a big meh to that idea, posits Albright.

“I’ve interviewed people who have been to the same building 20 or 30 times, they just love it so much,” he says. “But when I asked them if they’d like to organize a cleanup or a preservation effort, they’d be indifferent. They might think that’s fine for someone else to do … after awhile, though, they’d be off to hunt for the next abandoned building.”

All photos courtesy of Matthew Christopher.

Keywords: Chicago, Cleveland, Ruin Porn, Preservation

JoAnn Greco writes frequently on the built environment, and is a contributing editor at PlanPhilly.com. All posts »

http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2012/01/12/the-atemporality-of-ruin-porn-part-i-the-carcass/

http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2012/01/20/the-atemporality-of-%E2%80%9Cruin-porn%E2%80%9D-%E2%80%93-part-ii-the-ghost/

Last Of The Gang To Die

In a compelling article by Mark Simpson from 2009, the discoverer of metrosexuality interviews the infamous American thinker, Gore Vidal. I’d have loved to have been a fly on the wall during that encounter – the two men share a way with words not often found in contemporary culture. But Simpson’s interview is quite humble, as he plays the loyal fan to Vidal’s towering ‘star’:

‘Clad only in his wit – and an armour-plated ego – Mr Vidal has, during his long and prolific career as a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, (failed) politician, commentator, movie special guest-star, (gleeful) gadfly, and America’s (highly unauthorised) biographer, taken on The Land of the Free’s finest literary warriors, who had no word for ‘why’ or ‘because’, but plenty for ‘faggot’ and ‘pinko’. Vidal broke the balls – and outlasted – tiresomely macho brawlers like Norman Mailer: he compared ‘The Prisoner of Sex’ to ‘three days of menstrual flow”; later, when he was knocked to the ground by Mailer, he retorted, still on the floor: ‘Words fail Norman Mailer yet again’.’

Simpson doesn’t name Vidal as an ‘intellectual’ as such, but the portrait he paints of the writer is definitely one of an old-school intellect, from a previous era where ideas mattered more than facebook profiles. His description of Gore Vidal, particularly his appreciation of how provocative Vidal has been, reminds me of a book I am currently reading about the Jamaican ‘intellectual’, Stuart Hall. Hall was instrumental in establishing the discipline of cultural studies, in the 1960s and 70s, the discipline that Simpson, inspite of himself, practises. This passage includes a definition of the intellectual taken from Edward Said’s lectures and subsequent book on the subject (1993, 1994).

‘Stuart Hall is the pre-eminent figure in Cultural Studies today. Nobody else enjoys the same prestige. This derives as much from his charisma as from his writings. Hall’s leadership of the influential Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham in the 1970s, and his oratorical role as a public intellectual, contributed immensely to the ascent of Cultural Studies. I do not mean this to be taken as a slight on the published work. On the contrary, I hold that there are contributions in Hall’s writings that are seminal for the study of popular culture. Yet as Hall would surely be the first to acknowledge, he can hardly be classed as an original theorist. His forte is to synthesize, clarify, popularise and sometimes to provoke.

These are qualities of elucidation. In his refreshing book on intellctuals, Edward Said defends the Socratic ideal of the intellectual as the unparalleled agent of independent social criticism in civil society (1994:17). On this reading, the job of the intellectual is to aggravate cliche, combat dogma and delineate a space that does not answer to power.  In as much as this is so, Said identifies the intellectual as an agent who intervenes in the public sphere, expressing issues of public conscience, injustice and the misuse of power. Said, in fact, rejects the traditional conservative ideal of the intellectual as the avatar of taste, hygenienically insulated from the public by virtue of superior knowledge and greater cultural capital. For Said, the independent intellectual is the highest form of public man, ready to enunciate truths and perspectives which, when circumstances demand, disturb convention and intimdate power.’

I like this definition of an intellectual, maybe, in part, because I see aspects of myself in it. Particularly how I am (I think) ‘ready to enunciate truths and perspectives which, when circumstances demand, disturb convention and intimdate power’. Mark Simpson of course, is, or was, in his ‘heyday’, this kind of intellectual too. His first book (1994), now re-released on Kindle, Male Impersonators is an example of the ‘elucidation’ and ‘synthesis’ that characterises Stuart Hall’s work. Simpson’s treatment and excavation of Freud in the book, to uncover the homosexual subtexts in contemporary masculinities is nothing if not ‘disturbing’ of convention and ‘intimidating’ to the repressed power of straight men.

One of Mark Simpson’s  most provocative works, Anti Gay (1996), was a defiant up yours to the gay establishment, one that caused him to be ostracised from mainstream gay culture and mainstream media. The book led to indignation, and anger, and some delightfully quotable reviews:

MARK SIMPSON… IMBUES THE BOOK WITH THE VAPID APPEAL OF A COMPASSIONLESS MARGARET THATCHER’ – City Life

‘SIMPSON IS FAR TOO MUCH A MAVERICK AND TOO ACERBIC’ – Diva

‘MARK SIMPSON… COMES ACROSS AS UNACCOUNTABLY SMUG’ – The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review

TO TRADITIONAL GAY FUNDAMENTALISTS MARK SIMPSON IS THE ANTI-CHRIST’ – Vogue

‘ There is no unified body of non-heterosexuals to represent. There are only factions or fashions that are either followed or ignored – which is why the media’s portrayal of a community split into gay and anti-gay supporters in the wake of Mark Simpson’s collection of essays is a joke. I almost hate to agree with anything Simpson has to say, but there is some truth in this reduction of the press to a listings service. All a person or thing need be is gay or considered gay, regardless of merit or interest, and it will get published. As John Weir protests, ‘if Melissa Etheridge burps, she gets covered.’- On and Off The Scene BY Jessamy Harvey (London Review of Books 1996)

‘The overwhelming (and I have to say repulsive) cynicism of the editor of this volume, Mark Simpson, is quite frightening coming from one so young. If he’s this dyspeptic now, I hate to think what he’ll be like when he’s fifty.’ -Terry Anderson, Pink Triangle 1997 http://www.pinktriangle.org.uk/glh/164/simpson.html

In my own experience of being an advocate for Simpson’s work, I often get a lot of the flak that is really aimed at him – from academics, journalists and gay activists. For these days the ‘elucidation’ of Simpson’s theories is something I am more actively involved in than he is himself. But they are still just as ‘incendiary’ as ever. And it is that provocation that I admire so much in him and his ideas.

The problem, from my perspective, is that this form of agent provocateur intellectual is falling from grace, and being swamped by the ‘discourse’ of the internet, including facebook, twitter, tumblr and youtube. The very idea of ‘ideas’ itself seems outmoded in this fight for attention and ‘likes’ or ‘reblogs’. I maintain my version of the ‘intellectual’ as a kind of memorial to it. Death at the Mall is partly so called because it identifies the ‘death’ of all things I hold dear in the age of looking and shopping. An age that Simpson, ironically, being such an old-fashioned intellectual, has analysed with insight and accuracy  like nobody else. Maybe whilst Gore Vidal is still on this earth we can maintain some vestiges of an ‘intellectual’ identity remaining, but once he’s gone I think it will be well and truly O.V.E.R.

Elise Moore, blogger, ex-playwright and self-identified ‘intellectual’, is less pessimistic than me.

I wrote previously about how I like her blog because it is such a clear example of someby ‘clinging on for dear life, as Leonardo de Caprio clung onto that iceberg in Titanic, to the idea that blogging, and intellectual discourse are not completely and utterly dead in the frozen water’.

She describes the shifting context in which ‘intellectuals’ operate, but rather than saying the postmodern world is killing them, she seems to think they are adapting to the new conditions:

‘ To write and to be an intellectual was once, recently, to craft a persona that had nothing in common with one’s mundane private self; that was, perhaps, precisely an escape from it; to craft a self that was smarter, sharper, more elegant and eloquent. I dearly love all of these critics as much for their personas – or their variations on the critic-persona they bequeathed to us – as for their prose and ideas, but it seems to me that as a medium, the blog is far too informal to support such persona-building, which requires an absolute separation between public and private self. ..

Can you picture Sontag with a blog? In a blogging world we could never have had a Sontag or a Trilling; they would have had to democratically puncture their elitist personas. And that would have been a shame. But we did have them, issuing from the world of 20^th century literary journalism; and now we have a different model, which, while no doubt throwing up its own celebrities (and more of them), may never allow for the level of intellectual celebrity of the great 20^th century American critics, simply because there are too many of us. But there’s nothing wrong with changing the face of intellectual inquiry en masse.’

Ms Moore’s blog profile consists of a quote from Oscar Wilde, which shows she is identifying herself, not as a public, combative intellectual, but as a more introspective ‘artistic’ critic and intellectual:

“That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one’s own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography, as it deals not with the events, but with the thoughts of one’s life; not with life’s physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind.” Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist”. But I read this with the necessary ‘scepticism’ that accompanies any reading of Wilde. As the image above shows, his belief that ‘life is too important to be taken seriously!’ means he was always satirising life, ideas, and most of all himself.

The fact The Autobiography Of  A Soul has few readers, and up until recently (when I abandoned it due to ‘intellectual’ differences with Ms Moore) only one regular commenter, I think it is fair to say that her romantic view of the intellectual critic as artist, is passe. That’s not a specific criticism of her, for, as I said above, the whole concept of the ‘intellectual’ is old hat now, in tumblr generation. So to be arguing over the finer points of which model of the intellectual is superior really is missing the point.

If something cannot be expressed as an internet meme, it probably can’t be expressed at all. As I have written before,  ’ ‘ONLY JOKING!’ could be the subtitle of any ‘serious’ article or statement made by anyone. If nothing means anything, nobody has to mean what they say. Right?’

In fact,  ’seriousness’ itself has been parodied by the meme army much more succinctly than Wilde or Simpson could ever do:

Simpson, despite his own ‘seriousness’ as a theorist and a writer, has also critiqued the ‘seriousness’ of some intellectual figures. In a lovely piece about Susan Sontag and her final book before she died, Where The Stress Falls, Simpson wrote:

‘But, just like the ‘vulgar’ Paglia, Sontag made her reputation in part by lending cultural capital to things which were not at the time considered worth it, such as camp, cinema and Roland Barthes in her now classic 1966 collection Against Interpretation. In fact, it was Sontag’s interest in that silly Frenchy which arguably set her up, giving her the edge on her (long forgotten) rivals. She was one of the main conduits by which Barthes’s obsession with taking superficiality seriously reached Anglo academe and became intensely fashionable in the 1970s and 1980s, and in many ways prepared the way for the post-modernism and irony which is such anathema to  Sontag today.

As Oscar Wilde once put it: “A moralist is someone who lectures on the vices of which he has grown bored.” In a preface to a new edition of Against Interpretation, included here, she makes a moving public confession: “What I didn’t understand… was that seriousness itself was in the early stages of losing credibility in the culture at large, and that some of the more transgressive art I was enjoying would reinforce frivolous, merely consumerist transgressions. Thirty years later, the undermining of standards of seriousness is almost complete.”’

The mention of Barthes is relevant to Death at the Mall, not least because I have named Simpson himself ‘a Roland Barthes for the iphone generation’. And my advocacy of his work could be compared to Sontag’s of Barthes. But my quest seems much more hopeless than Sontag’s, partly of course, because I am no Susan Sontag. But also because the 21st century, despite it showing both Barthes and Simpson’s ‘predictions’ to have come true, has no time for cultural theorists. My Barthes is bound to remain unappreciated.

Sadly, Simpson’s awareness of the end of the intellectual, and the impossibility of ‘serious’ intellect being taken seriously in the 21st century, seems also to contribute to a certain lassitude of late on his part. And, though it pains me to say it, my investigation into his work is possibly going to be a retrospective.

I’m reminded here of Morrissey for some reason, and Simpson’s only book-length investigation into a single artist or writer. I think Morrissey and Simpson have something in common, in that their work is often quite light of touch, and, like Wilde’s who they both admire, full of ‘satire’ and playfulness. But really, they take life, ideas, and themselves, incredibly seriously indeed. The chapter in Saint Morrissey (my favourite as it happens), that gives away Simpson’s (and Morrissey’s) sincerity and seriousness for me, is the one where he considers Morrissey’s relationship to northern literature and film, in particular the work of the late great Shelagh Delaney.

When Delaney died in November 2011 Simpson re-released his chapter from Saint Morrissey, Dump her on the doorstep, girl. He also wrote a sincere goodbye to the playwright and inspiration to his ‘hero’.

Delaney has left us, Vidal is clinging on, as if to spite us all, Morrissey is beginning to resemble a kind of belligerent lounge singer, living in LA and doing comeback tours and box set compilations. But one thing is for certain, the ‘intellectual’ is if not completely deceased, well on the way to breathing his last serious breath.

———

Refs: Rojek, C (2003) Key Contemporary Thinkers: Stuart Hall Polity

Said, E (1994) Representations of The Intellectual Vintage

Simpson, M (1994) Male Impersonators: Men Performing Masculinity Cassell

Simpson, M (1996) Anti Gay Continuum International

Simpson, M (2004) Saint Morrissey

Sontag, S Where The Stress Falls

The Metro-morphosis Of Narcissus

‘In classical mythology, Narcissus was a hunter who fell in love with his own image that he saw reflecting off water from a river.  He eventually fell into the river and drowned in the image of himself.  The myth became a metaphor for intense self-love and pride to the point of destruction.

In his influential and controversial essay On Narcissism, Sigmund Freud defines narcissism as “the attitude of a person who treats his own body in the same way as otherwise the body of a sexual object is treated.”   Now, before you get all “Freud is a perv” on me, it should be noted that the terms ‘sexual’ and ‘object’ have slightly different connotations in Freudian theory than they do in everyday conversation.  ‘Sexual’ is Freud’s way of describing anything that contributes to an investment in an organism’s life.  Social behavior, love, eating, communication–it’s all sexual.  An object is anything that is not the self.  Sexual objects, then, are the focal points of sexual energy apart from the self–i.e., the opposite of narcissistic objects.  We love ourselves but not in the same way that we love others.

One aspect of narcissism that the previously mentioned study completely ignores is its ubiquity.  It only speaks to narcissism as a pathological tendency.  As far as I know (and I could be completely wrong) Freud was one of the first thinkers to suggest that narcissism is, on a certain level, universal.  And if it is universal, it must be necessary.  If we accept Freud’s definition of narcissism, then it follows that narcissism can be adaptive.  Notice that his definition focuses on attitude and not behavior.  I would argue that this attitude of taking one’s self as a love object is necessary to exist in any meaningful way.  It is only when this investment in the self becomes completely dominant over all other investments that problems arise.’

By Thomas Wendt (@Thomas_Wendt)

This painting by Salvador Dali is called ‘The Metamorphosis Of Narcissus’. If you look carefully you can make out the figure (golden coloured) on the left, staring  into the pool, an echo of the more classical painting by Caravaggio at the top. I am not going to analyse the surrealist’s work; my academic art appreciation days are over. For now we live in a culture where self-taken photographs are the main portraits we see around us, hung in the virtual galleries of facebook and tumblr.

Here is a photograph taken in the mirror by a contestant on American Idol, apparently, making reality TV and individuals’ self-loving photography  merge in a postmodern mash up. I like the way the edge of the mirror serves as a frame within the frame of the image. I note the golden (tan) glow that resemble’s the colours in Dali’s painting, and I like the way he puts his hand behind his head in a famous pin up pose.

As  Mark Simpson and I have recently written, narcissism, briefly removed from the psychiatrists’ bible, the DSM last year, is now back on the books as a personality ‘disorder’.

Simpson echoes Thomas Wendt’s feelings about how ‘normal’ narcissism is, when he says:

‘Perhaps, being somewhat cynical, the objection to de-listing NPD was driven precisely by the ubiquity of narcissism. It’s certainly a growth market.’

Of course,  Simpson has identified the importance of narcissistic urges in postmodern culture before.  A couple of years ago he observed:

‘We live in an age of Dorians, admiring themselves in webcams, phone cams and online profiles. If there’s a picture in the attic you can be sure it’s been photoshopped.’

In 2008, Professor Metrosexuality examined an advert by Dolce and Gabbana, where a man and a woman seem to be about to meet for a date, but instead of each other, they greet clones of themselves:

‘What, then, is D&G Time? What is the era, the epoch it heralds and meters and so accurately, so tastefully accessorizes? Well, a cloned, digital world in which the driving force, the coiled spring at the heart of the jewelled mechanism, is not heterosexual reproduction, or even homosexual coupling, but rather, narcissistic perfection. Narcissistic perfection achieved through fashion, consumption, cosmetics, technology, surgery and really good lighting. A utopian-dystopian, twinsome future in which men and women date themselves instead of each other that has already arrived.

It’s a measure of how far and how quickly we’ve come that only a few years ago this ad would have been regarded as ‘sick’ by almost everyone, not just a few homophobe holdouts.  But the brazen auto-strumpetry of D&G Time broadcasts that narcissism is no longer a pathological condition – it’s thecontemporary condition. That’s to say, it’s no more pathological today than desire itself – since narcissism and desire are much the same thing, particularly since we’re now surrounded by such shiny, pretty accessories as D&G jewellery.’

Since Simpson wrote his excellent piece inspired by D and G – ‘twinsome devils and the narcissus complex’ visual culture has become full of ‘ twins ’:

I agree with Simpson that the ‘driving force’ of this clone culture is narcissism. But, also from reading Simpson, I am interested in how the result of our self-love being reflected back at us in advertising and pop culture imagery, is that we are being presented as ‘androgynous’, as ‘gender neutral’, as  gender bending,  transexy composites. Stars such as Andre Pejic are models for the present and the future, where everyone:  men, women, and people who identify as neither can be everything, to themselves.

It reminds me of that famous line (which has also appeared somewhere in Simpson’s oeuvre):

‘ I’m more man than you’ll ever be, and more woman than you’ll ever get! ‘

- Car Wash (and Rent, and other sources)

It was in his 1994 ‘lost classic’ Male Impersonators, though, that Simpson really nailed the metro-morphosis of narcissism in contemporary consumerist culture. He wrote:

‘This is the secret behind the growth of male narcissism in Western society. Nineties man’s love affair with his own image, which is itself a misrecognition (to love one’s image is not to love oneself), is but a faint echo of what he takes to be his idealised form reflected from the billboards and cinema screens.

The products and accessories offer a link that appears to marry the three kinds of ‘self’ together that modern media separates: the idealised form (the model using the product in adverts), the reflected images (looking in the mirror while using the product), and the actual body (wearing the product or applying it to skin, hair, teeth etc).  Ideal, body and image thus come together in a consummation of a love that only money can buy. Of course, this is not a consummation at all: all three types of self are kept distinct, and the imperfection of image and body next to ideal ensures that desire is never satisfied and the consumer never loses his appetite.’

But these days, people are able to create more and more ‘perfect’ images of themselves, with the help of photoshop, instagram, facebook, etc. The user/consumer has more control these days, and companies have to work much harder to ensure ‘the consumer never loses his appetite’. Thomas Wendt, who is remarkable in that he is both a ‘semiotician’ using the old school Barthesian definition, as is Simpson, but he also works in marketing/advertising and so understands consumer narcissism as an ‘insider’ in the business that exploits it has something to say about this. He writes:

‘Primary narcissism is essentially an unconscious process.  The infant is not aware of his or her relationship to the world and others.  Secondary narcissism is preconscious–although the formation of the ego-ideal is not entirely conscious, it has the capacity to become conscious.Perhaps the influence of social media creates a third narcissism, or tertiary narcissism, which is a completely conscious and active process.  The individual asserts active power over his or her ego ideal when creating, for example, a Facebook profile.  Everything in the digital media space can be thought of as a tertiary narcissistic process: profiles, status updates, blog posts, comments, etc.  All these activities work to build an individual’s ego-ideal within a space that is relatively controlled by that individual.  I say relatively because the individual certainly does not control every aspect of his or her online presence; at least, it would be very difficult to do so.I think that the relationship between narcissism and social media is reciprocal: social media’s relationship to the individual is greatly influenced by the concept of narcissism and vice versa.

It might be time to rethink the negative connotations of narcissism and examine how this idea of tertiary narcissism can be adaptive.  If one can take an active stance in regard to ego-ideal formation and maintenance, then perhaps identity formation is becoming more controlled in the digital-social age.I suppose the question is whether this amount of control over identity and sense of self is really adaptive or not.  Do we really want that constant burden to manipulate our identity rather than just letting it happen?  Is digital identity adaptive, or does the fact that it is controlled make it a sort of false form of identity and selfhood?’

I don’t know the answers to Thomas’s questions. I wonder if Mark Simpson does. He has definitely reffered to an ‘adaptive’ element of metrosexual narcissism, especially at the level of  consumer culture, if not in terms of each person adapting and using narcissism themselves:

‘Narcissism is outside of tradition. It’s literally self-referential. So narcissism is both a product of and a helpmeet to rapid change – producing ‘individuals’ in identical loft apartments.’

I do think that some people are taking ‘control’ over their ‘narcissism’ for themselves and turning it into capital. Mikey Sorrentino, love him or hate him, is exceptionally talented at ‘winning’ the game of Metrosexy narcissism. He began as a contestant/actor on a reality TV show, Jersey Shore. Rather than be chewed up and spat out by the media company that hired him, as most reality tv participants are, he turned himself into a ‘brand’. ‘The Situation’ reduces him to his six pack, but also gives him a USP in a world full of six packs. Mikey stands out from the crowd. And now his  GTL catchphrase – gym, tanning laundry, the metrosexual mantra of young men across the globe, has become a profitable business. He sells fake tan, and runs tanning salons, he produces work out videos, and he markets ‘laundry’ bags and gym bags.  He also operates on twitter, facebook and youtube, showing that his ‘narcissism’ is, if not adaptive in Wendt’s terms, then at least very much controlled by him for his own purposes.

Ours is definitely and possibly permanently the Dorian Grey age, as Simpson put it. And now these Dorians are also becoming entrepreneurs of the self. Some of them are making money out of their enterprise, others not. The ‘idealised images’ we see in advertising and film, are now much easier to reproduce on our own at home.

But when we look in the mirror will we ever like what we see?

Back in the 20th century, Mark Simpson said no:

‘We’ve totally buffed sex and desire until there’s nothing left but our own reflection. And it ain’t pretty’

(Attitude 1997, Published in  Sex Terror 2002).

Letters Of Note

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/11/when-are-you-going-to-release-my-film.html

This letter from Terry Gilliam is concise and to the point.

When are you going to release my film, Brazil? It asks.

The context of the letter is that Gilliam is known as a director who has been riddled with problems throughout his career. It stands as a symbol of all that, and a reminder that film-making is not as easy or as glamorous as it looks.

Letters of Note is an amazing website that collects letters from famous and not so famous people, from the past – either distant or recent, and publishes them online.

It is a tribute to a dying/dead art form, but also a living, breathing, contemporary celebration of communication.

L O N are raising money to make a book – another dying artform.

Their campaign is here at UNBOUND:

http://unbound.co.uk/books/17

I hope people can donate and support this wonderful collision of the old and the new world.

An Overdose of Meaning

The Byzantine Iconoclasts wanted to destroy images in order to abolish meaning and the representation of God. Today we are still iconoclasts, but in an opposite way : we kill the images by an overdose of meaning. – Baudrillard

Like most people, I found out about the policeman pepper-spraying the student protesters at UC Davis, California, via the images of the event.

As the website Sociological Images told us: ‘images and videos of the pepper spraying incident have flooded the internet. One video has received over 1.7 million views on Youtube; another shorter clip has almost 1 million’.

The event became over-powered and replaced by the mediation of it. Without the initial photograph, and then its reproduction online, we might not think of the pepper spray incident as important at all.

The Scientific American was impressed by this process:

‘When U.C. Davis police officer Lt. John Pike pepper-sprayed a line of student protesters last Friday, his actions were recorded in replicate. Dozens of cameras captured video and still images, and soon swarms of photographs seeped across the internet. If there was ever a more-recorded single event in history, I am not aware of it. Yet, from the cloud of pepper-spray photographs, one has come to dominate. It is this image, taken by Davis psychology student Louise Macabitas, from the west side of the blocked path:

This is the photo that birthed the Pepperspray Cop meme. After spending time looking at this and dozens of similar captures, I think I know why.

• A low perspective elevates Pike’s head above the crowd, leaving an indelible impression of dominance & authority.
• Pike is in mid-stride, adding motion to a still image, and the outward-pointed foot puts the Casual in the “casually pepper-spray everything” meme.
• Pike’s face is visible, more so than in images taken from a higher angle.
• The spray itself is unmistakable in silhouette.
• Every person is identifiable as either Police, Onlooker, or Protester. The story tells itself.
• See that police officer back-right? His stance, and his high head, reinforce a detached arrogance on the part of the police.
• The expressions of the onlookers- at least not those in the standing paparazzi- convey a mix of surprise and disbelief.

Leaving politics and sociology aside, the image compels on its own merits. It is at once both complex and simple. There is a lot to look at, but each element adds into the same narrative. As Megan Garber notes:

…the photo’s narrative is built into its imagery. It depicts not just a scene, but a story. It requires of viewers very little background knowledge; even more significantly, it requires of them very few political convictions.

A remarkable image. I hope that eventually Ms. Macabitas receives due recognition for it’.

I find it fascinating how the imagery of this moment of police violence has been taken and separated from the event and analysed as a photograph, as a work of art. It’s not the first time this has happened of course. This incredible photo from the Vietnam war in 1972 featuring the naked girl Kim Phuc, won a Pullitzer prize for the photographer, Nick Ut. It has featured in many books, galleries and museums since. But the Kim Phuc photo was also used to publicise the horrors of the Vietnam war. It became an emblem of the anti-war movement. Does the pepper spray photo have a similar, political value? The writers at Sociological Images think it does: ‘I think this meme is itself a form of visual protest. The variations on the original image reinforce the perception that the police officer’s actions were inappropriate and an abuse of power. The use of famous scenes and works of art creates a cartoonish depiction of inequality and injustice, of someone using their power unjustly against those who obviously have less power — children, kittens, the unemployed, etc. (via the Pepper Spraying Cop tumblr)’.

I am not so sure. The sophisticated social media internet, which is dominated by what I call the ‘tumblr generation’, means the relationship between ‘reality’ and ‘representation’ has transformed in recent years. Baudrillard’s early 90s take on this, well before the internet got underway, was incredibly controversial at the time, partly because he used the Gulf War (1991) to illustrate his point. But I think his ideas hold true today:

‘For  Baudrillard thinks that language has broken free from its moorings and now proliferates out of control. The best one can do is show how every proposition can be shown to be no more true than its opposite. The ‘evidence’ of the Gulf War taking place can also ‘prove’ the opposite. That what took place was not a war at all, but something else — the spectacle of a massacre. Or that the ‘place’ that the war ‘took’ for those of us who watched it on TV was an imaginary place, an orientalist fantasy of mad Arabs and imperial splendour. The war took the space of our televisual imaginations.’

Now our ‘televisual imaginations’ have been replaced by internet imaginations, and through the endless production and reproduction of ‘memes’, the possibilities for art/photography/film to have political meaning I think has lessened. As I said here at Death At The Mall before:

‘It is in this age of ‘meaninglessness’,  and ‘kitchified…tragedies’ that the internet ‘meme’ has flourished, particularly, unsurprisingly, on tumblr. The UK riots were captured and butchered on ‘photoshoplooter’ tumblr, a spoof, in itself of the other ‘serious’ tumblr, ‘Catch A Looter’ aimed at indentifying participants in the riots by posting photos on tumblr.

And feminists, those well known believers in ‘debate’ and ‘rational discussion’, produced ‘Privilege Denying Dude’, who was supposed to represent the arrogance and misogyny of white middle class men. But their ‘irony’ was lost on me, because I actually found myself agreeing with much of what PDD said!  And, if you are reduced to using internet memes to make your political points, haven’t you lost the argument? Or am I just behind the times? ‘

There are a number of results of this ‘meaninglessness’ of imagery in relation to politics and political action. It is complex. I am not saying there is no relationship between the two at all – there are too many examples of youtube videos ( most recently the one of the racist British woman on a tram that led to her arrest) which have resulted in protests, criminal convictions etc for me to argue otherwise.

The first effect of this ‘overdose of meaning’ I think is that most representation of violence, war and trauma becomes concern porn. Middle class people watching that video of the woman on the tram may have phoned the police, but the main reason they watched it was to establish themselves as good, ‘concerned’ citizens in comparison to the bad woman who uttered the tirade.

Another result I think, of this mediated imagery overload, is that the value of people’s individual responses and ‘real life’ discussions about events and politics becomes very limited. If you can Retweet a link to an atrocity, why bother going to a meeting or even writing a blogpost about it? I know #ows is a real life, real time movement, but there are many many more people who claim to support it simply sending hashtags round the twittersphere than there are camping out in city squares. Also, I have found the level of debate amongst occupy activists to be dire.

There has been a kind of triumphalism from Occupy protestors when they have successfully ‘shut down’ meetings or talks by their ‘opponents’. For example the British Conservative minister David Willets was forced to abandon a talk at Cambridge university recently, and occupy activists in America have shut down a number of meetings and events. Their own meetings and events have been severely lacking in any kind of political analysis. 1968 this is not.

http://heresycorner.blogspot.com/2011/11/two-brains-v-no-brains.html

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2011/11/28/whose-capitol-our-capitol

A kind of enthralling but also depressing example of this lack of ideological backbone to the occupy movement is a youtube clip of Judith Butler addressing OWS. They do that ‘human mic’ thing and her usually complex and subtle discourse gets reduced to a kind of show and tell event. I ended up spending the duration of the video admiring her leather jacket, her ‘look’, rather than listening to what she had to say. To underline my point, Butler has been described  by (internet) activist fans as being the dreamiest in the video:

I am forced to abandon the 21st century and its tumblr memes, and to return to Baudrillard, who saw all this coming back in the 1990s. He wrote:

‘Today everything takes the look of the image – then all pretend that the real has disappeared under the pression and the profusion of images.. What is totally neglected is that the image also disappears under the blow and the impact of reality. The image is usually spoiled of its own existence as image, deyoted to a shameful complicity with the real. The violence exercised by the image is largely balanced by the violence done to the image – its exploitation as a pure vector of documen-tation, of testimony, of message (including the message of misery and violence), its allegeance to morale, to pedagogy, to politics, to publicity. Then the magic of the image, both as fatal and as vital illusion, is fading away. The Byzantine Iconoclasts wanted to destroy images in order to abolish meaning and the representation of God. Today we are still iconoclasts, but in an opposite way : we kill the images by an overdose of meaning.’