FYI

So the world (or the handful of seven-billionths of the world who actually see this page) knows, I ought to announce that, barring administrative or medical disaster, I'll be moving to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan this summer.  I'll be spending eight months in the planning and reporting division of the University of Central Asia. No word yet on whether I'll blog from there or not.

#ThingsIlearnedfromthelastepisodeofMadMen

I am Don Draper's drink order: "Big and Brown."

Mélanchontastic

             Look, I know the whole point of blogging current events is to offer thought and insight on the news as it happens, but since I’ve yet to get the “thought and insight” part, there’s really no point to hew too tightly to timeliness.  My tardiness is probably more horrendously apparent now, as The New York Times posted this weekend’s magazine profile ofFrançois Hollande this morning while my target is its shorter article on Jean-Luc Mélanchon from almost four days ago.

            The headline calls attention to  the popularity of the Front de Gauche’s candidate in this year’s presidential elections, dubbing it the “sound and fury" of an angry electorate.  The allusion makes a lot of sense; the candidate apparently loves Faulkner and has almost no electoral upside.  In his absolute best case, he’ll pull a lefty version of Le-Pen-in-2002 and make the run-off, only to lose to whichever of the more moderate candidates joins him there.  For all the vitriol surrounding his candidacy – the article mostly centers on a massively well-attended rally in Lille and his fringe-winning poll numbers – there won’t be much follow through.  Even in the extremely unlikely scenario where Mélanchon moves into the Elysée, one can imagine that he won’t or couldn’t really go about “raising the minimum wage 20 percent to $2,200 a month, confiscating all income above $470,000 a year and banning profitable companies from laying off any workers.” The Fifth Republic might be an elected monarchy, but it’s not that much of an absolute one.

            There’s something in the moniker that implies an emptiness underneath the words and a clear message from the reporter that we should take Mélanchon’s moving and shaking only as a barometer of popular discontent.  It’s a valid and important point, but an unfair one. There’s something deeper underneath the rhetoric.  Mélanchon’s invocation of the past, and particularly of the Revolutionary tradition, expresses something more than frustration with the present, a deeper longing to reclaim particular narrative.  It speaks to a sense of destiny embedded in a national past and a dream, however utopian, to bond again with that timeline.

            At first glance, some of the candidate’s moves might seem like the Gallic equivalent of the Tea Party, rife with empty invocations of a revolutionary past, attaching significations to historical symbols with little regard to how they work on anything but the barest emotional plane.   To the outside observer, Mélanchon’s “prise de la Bastille” might seem to be just that, the Bastille (or at least the column and opera that stand now its stead) acting as a thin historical veneer, an attempt to put words on to raging populist emotion.  But, as Arun Kapil points out in a comment to his originalpost on the event and furthers with meta-coverage in his follow-up, the day strung together a rich array of historical signifiers, using the Faubourg- Saint-Antoine streets trodden by the most radical of the sans-culottes, convening on the anniversary of the Paris Commune’s birth, all while Mélanchon invoked the names of dead socialists in a manner compared by many to that of Charles De Gaulle.  The equation adds up to a thicker narrative and appeal to heritage than the Tea Party, even at its most erudite.

            Further, as many commentators pointed out, the events of the day plucked at a revolutionary/republican/socialist fiber that has resonated over and over again at different frequencies and periods in French History since the last Estates-General.  The appeal here is not a dream (nightmare?) jump to a restore point in a drive to “take the country back,” but to a constant movement towards a better nation and world.  It’s an invocation of history with a real history.  When Mélanchon speaks of “civil insurrection,” he speaks not just his own rallies and campaign, but of May ‘68, the Commune, the June Days, the July Revolution, and any number of the journées in those first tumultuous years after 1789.  When he tells the crowds that “once again, you will have to be the crater from which the new flame of revolution erupts, lighting the fire of contagion that will become the common cause of the peoples of Europe,” he’s using a particularly revolutionary language, imagining itself as a force of nature, an undeniable violent force bound to spread across world.  He enunciates it now with a little less ambition, sticking only to the continent  - “If Europe is a volcano, France is the crater of all European revolutions!” – but the message of mounted messiahs remains the same.

            I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that one of the reasons I’m particularly drawn to how the past operates in the present is that I always had a hard time (still mostly do) believing that history actually happened.  It’s obvious, then, why I find all of this so very cool, even exotic.  For these references to have the emotional and intellectual pull that they do (and if you doubt it, read some of the professional responses collected in Kapil’s second post) indicates not only a wholly perceived conception of the past but a deep and real connection to it.  So, though I’m pretty sure I’m not a communist, I find this all very cool.

            Though not without reservation - there are and were no clean historical narratives.  I’m sure that Tony Judt rolls in his grave when General-Secretary of the French Communist Party tells the Times that “most of our militants haven’t experienced the Stalin period; this historical burden is behind us,” while in the next breath invokes the glory days of Leon Blum’s Popular Front, made possible by orders from, you guessed it, Josef Stalin.  For all the excitement, emotion and sense of destiny that can come from extended length and strength of the Revolutionary fiber - and that offers a tantalizing counterpoint to the near-nihilistic moment-politics of opportunity over here – there’s a danger of using a bluntly viewed past as a crutch.

            Take for example one of the slogans of the March 18 prise, “Vite, le 6^e République” – something of a call to insurrection, to a complete re-ordering the body politic.  Of the five republics thus far, only the first two came as a result of popular uprising (a generous accounting: the first being pretty much invited by the collapse of Ancien Regime). Even measured sympathetically, neither of them lasted a decade and both ended in dictatorships.  It can be so easy to see a chain of Revolutionary advances and to celebrate them without nuance, but to forget the messiness of their times risks ignoring the complexity of our own.*  The Revolutionary tradition can be kind of awesome, can provide the values that might undergird our approaches to the problems that threaten our future, but it can’t and won't solve them. 

*Lewis Lapham has a great essay on this subject in the latest issue of Harper's. I'd post a link, but it's not up on the web yet.

Rapidly Aging Links

Jed Perl, the king of exuberant, incisive art criticism, puts his considerable aesthetic and historical talent to the modernist moment, which, if there really is reason to history, might only have happened so that he might later write about it.

Yet another profile of a fashion blogger, this one made more interesting than the masses for its evocation of Texo-suburban-terror and the ensuing sh*tstorm.

On Islam and Easter (and, more importantly, the importance of kebabs in bridging divides).

Dan Drezner imagines exodus today (far more fun than his last ruminations on the subject)

Comparative ocean, lake, and well depths (click in image to make it readable)

Mud Men

           Those who know me well know how I’ve loved historical television “documentaries,” while those who might know me less well would simply guess it. In recent years - not coincidentally those that involved constant consumption of professional history – the crush subsided a little, but I think I’m glad to say that those emotions are trickling back.  Of late, I’ve just finished the first series of Mud Men, a History Channel Britain production, pushing through it in a manner I’ve usually only done for scripted dramas and comedies.

            That I’ve used the word “series” (British for “season”) hints at a change in the game that occurred while I took my hiatus.  While much of the consumed content of my youth appeared under the aegis of an umbrella brand – A & E’s Mysteries of the Bible and PBS’ Empires are the first to come to mind – none of it could properly constitute anything approaching season/series based television with characters and continuity, though, as one might expect, many of the specialist personages to grace the screen appeared repeatedly.  Each contribution, however, appeared as if independent from the rest.  The human beings acted less as characters than as a sort of mutant chorus, their sometimes zany charisma providing commentary to break up spates of sonorous narration and heavy dramatization.  We came to take in the past as it might have played out, our contemporaries there only to thicken the context, not to play a part,

            Newer history reality programming keeps the same primary goal but, in the person of the host, uses the two-thousand-teen personage as something of a stand-in for the audience.  Each episode begins with his or her curiosity about the subject at hand then chronicles his process of satisfying that inquisitive urge through visits to scholars, architectural pilgrimages, and video dramatizations. When he or she exhibits awe or discomfort, we’re primed to feel it too.  The set up – and this is why I like it – makes the activity a personal interaction with the material.  Whereas the narrator-dramatization-scholar model mostly acted as enhanced lectures, imparting history onto the passive audience, the host’s-journey approach acts more like a first-person-shooter video game, having the audience take on the past as it affects them  today. It makes sense, too, given that our age makes information easy, but tangible experiences of that information all the more difficult.*

             Mud Men takes the formula a leap further.  It has two hosts instead of one, the conceit being that the one, Johnny Vaughn, wanting to become a “mud lark,” (an amateur archaeologist of the Thames foreshore) apprentices himself to the other, Steve Brooker aka “Mud God,” chairman of London’s mudlark society.  The approach allows them to develop personalities and a personal dynamic beyond what a single host investigating a single question can allow.  The end result heightens the empathic experience, paradoxically ratcheting up both a sense of distance between past and present and the feel of experiencing ages lost.

            Each episode begins at a specific spot along the Thames within the greater London region.  Jonny’s voice-over (he’s apparently something of a known radio and television host over there?) introduces the show’s conceit and region’s past in one fell swoop.  The monologue ends with the hosts at shore level, where the Jonny’s apprenticeship takes focus. Steve reiterates the historical significance of the spot, what they might expect to find, then sets his ward to work with a trowel and bucket, taunting him for the paucity of his finds and inability to see the traces of objects right before his eyes.  Jonny, for his part, treats each of his finds like the Holy Grail and whines for Steve to play hot-or-cold with him when his untrained vision fails him. 

            His palpable excitement puts the viewer along the foreshore especially when it over-steps the bounds of reality. In first episode he swears a tiny brass bugle he’s found must be Roman in origin, that to have made such a find on his first day surely marks him out to but a mudlarking prodigy.  Our sense of childlike wonder heightens with Steve’s reaction, part indulgent smile, part condescending smirk. Their relationship in these opening moments takes on something of a parent-child, or at least big-little brother, relationship, at times filled with the chastisement, pride, and mutual excitement that comes from watching another grow up.  All the while, Steve remains the amateur, an experienced hand but something far less than an awe-inducing expert, partly because he’s covered in sediment and partly because he clearly doesn’t know it all – his origin story for the phrase “bite the bullet” as a method to modify another man’s munitions for one’s own weapon makes this eminently clear.

            Importantly so, for the digging duo heads next to the Mudlark Pub to meet with a heavily bearded expert on seemingly every aspect of British material culture from every moment in time about the day’s find.  Here they both take the on the posture of novitiate awe  before chasing down the stories of their objects with curator and historian experts in the field, first as individuals then as a team pursuing a typical experience of the past  in the episode’s final segment.

            Their individual journeys are fun and informative, especially as neither holds back his wonder and wit with their expert interlocuters,** but the experience reaches its height when they reconvene.  The dynamic changes entirely, as Jonny, with his endless stream of words and confident posture, consistently manipulates sad-sack Steve to take the worst of the affair.  When one of them must learn to butcher a lamb as one might have in the sixteenth century, Steve gets the privilege of handling the blade and entrails while Jonny sprints from the hut with every blast of noxious odor. When someone must enter the stocks, or experience a Tudor torture board, Steve finds himself taking the pain. Occasionally the dynamic alters – when they re-enact a Georgian duel with paintball guns, Steve keeps pulling his trigger well after his first hit in revenge for the rest – but ultimately we close with Steve wondering what exactly he signed up for in agreeing to mentor the TV host.

            Where the opening reminds us of parent and child, the close more resembles the stereotypical relationship between jock and nerd.  Heightened by subaltern emotions, the actions feel all the more dirty and humiliating.  There’s certainly fun being had, but with the constant reminder that for those who existed long ago, life kind of sucked. For whatever reason, the dynamic robs re-enactment of romantic voyeurism and renders it more human.  I’ve seen single hosts do similar things, but even the most evocative of their attempts – here I think particularly of an episode of Filthy Cities where the host trampled on oddly platformed wooden sandals through a foot of manure and compost – feel foreign compared to the sight of poor Steve (all 6’6 of him!) crammed into the boiler room of a steam-powered river boat.  At the same time, the dynamic heightens the ephemerality of the moment - we know that Steve and Jonny are “mates,” that at the beginning of the next day Steve will again be on top on the banks of the river.  The historical experience might feel less foreign, but ultimately it is; we’ll feel it for now, but then it’ll be gone, just another phase of two friends’ story in the present.

            Mud Men is often funny – lanky working class Steve made up and dressed as an Eighteenth Century dandy trying to hail a cab in Canary Wharf might be a hacky gag, but it’s a great one – and is consistently informative – who knew that the nails that held together British ships haven’t changed from the Middle Ages, making them impossible to date? – a combination which places it in the highest range of what is ultimately an educational genre. But what makes it truly excellent, an iteration of “reality” programming worth thinking about and recommending derives from the hosts and their relationship.  Jonny’s wonder and Steve’s humiliation both allow insights relating to the past, the former stressing the persistence of its presence while the latter speaks to its loss. 

            

            *I should note that there exists also a counter-trend in the same vein of reaction, where the show (here I think of BBC’s recent series on Versailles) goes full-on dramatization, focusing intensely on the historical characters’ interior personalities within and against events and uses its scholars like off-scene psychologists to thicken the plot.

            **It helps that they’ve chosen a good batch of experts, ones able to riff and banter as well as they explain.

            

To Adam

            I usually begin my Fridays downing an Al-Kimia bagel, starting an Al-Kimia coffee, and reading something on paper before firing up Q on CBC internet radio and begining to “work.”  Habitually, the words I consume are Sam Lipsyte’s but Q’s a rerun today and I’m wearing khakis instead of jeans so everything’s out the window.  I stuck with the bagel (though more tempted than usual by the super-healthy-looking-everything muffin-thing) and coffee is never really a matter of choice, but skipped Venus Drive's mordant offerings, reading instead the work of another artisan of immaculate sentences, Adam Gopnik’s essayon Albert Camus in this week’s New Yorker.

           

            One of my many mini-(day)-dreams involves composing a career-in-review essay of Adam Gopnik’s oeuvre when he enters senescent retirement and I begin to find footing on my first plateau of success.*  The Camus piece only pumped more fuel to the fantasy, with its implications for developing post-ideological thinking, the meaning of “history” after the war, and Tony Judt-y kind of stuff on what to make of Sartre.  I’ll leave that for later attempts at thought and (likely failed) stabs at composition, though, as I simply wanted to rip a couple of sentences I thought too Gopnikian, too good to leave un-noted.

           His best observations, I think, provoke envy for their ability to assert without feeling ungrounded, obviously true but as yet un-noted or un-sayable:

When handsome men or beautiful women take up the work of the intellect, it impresses us because we know they could have chosen other paths to being impressive; that they chose the path of the mind suggests that there is on it something more worthwhile than a circuitous route to the good things that the good-looking get just by showing up.

            I’d be terrified to commit those words to paper, let alone LCD, worried that I’d be opening myself to claims of superficiality, of some kind of gender bias, or just plain jerkiness to the academics that surround me.  Gopnik can do it, though, without evoking any of that, somehow allowing the veracity of sub-conscious assumptions and the need to not be an asshole through near Gallic use of the semi-colon and a mild celebration of the life of the mind.**  

            His contemplation of the thinking life, I think, is one his most redeeming traits of all of his work, for its sometimes celebration, sometimes deprecation, and constant rumination on cultural and contextual nuance:

Olivier Todd, the author of the standard biography on French, suggests that Camus might have benefitted by knowing more about his anti-totalitarian Anglo-American contemporaries, Popper and Orwell among them.  Yet in truth the big question Camus asked was never the Anglo-American liberal one: How can we make the world a little bit better tomorrow? It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight?

            I don’t know that I necessarily think the approach a “grander” one, but I’d never thought of it that way, nor seen anyone phrase it so clearly.  But for the last century at least, it kind of works, and might also explain why many find BHL so grating.

            There are other passages I’d hoped to recount, but this short missive has already taken five times longer than it should have to create and I’m struggling over whether it’d be a good idea to get another large coffee.  My friday seems to have course-corrected to its normal state so I’m thus tradition-bound to spend the rest of it in nervous non-productivity.

*Forgive the two massive assumptions, the larger being that I ever gain a bigger forum than this blog, the lesser that a compulsive thinker and word-producer (Francophile though he might be) like Adam Gopnik could enter something approaching retirement.

** It reminds me also of Maron’s description of Louis CK’s initial reactions to Jay Mohr’s stand-up: “doesn’t he get that this is for us?”

The Two Cocktail Makeover

  This article from TNI reminds me  of a conversation I had with Kate Hansen freshman year. I claimed (and still do) that fermented liquid de-hanced my physical self image - that it made (and makes) looking in the mirror something an exercise of self-criticism/loathing. Kate found that (and by extension I suppose, me) odd, and it seems she had the laws of the universe on her side:

The Two-Cocktail Makeover, as it is probably not terribly difficult to figure out, involves drinking two cocktails, looking in the mirror, and thinking you look fabulous. It’s hardly a thorough treatment plan; it’s best thought of as an occasional supplement to a dutifully existing core of self-care. (As for what defines “occasional,” I’ll leave that to your discretion. Birthdays, holidays, Tuesdays, noon.) It’s a wheatgrass shot for your self-image, not a daily vitamin. But manalive, sometimes wheatgrass shakes the health right into you, doesn’t it? (Am I revealing my hippie roots?)

And now the Two-Cocktail Makeover is science, kids. A research team based in France found that self-rated attractiveness of study participants increased along with alcohol consumption; people rated themselves as being more attractive, bright, original, and funny after downing a few. Rather, people rated themselves more favorably after believing they’d downed a few: Participants who were told they were drinking booze but who were actually given a nonalcoholic beverage gave inflated self-assessments on par with those who actually were tipsy. 

 The piece is worth a full read, mostly for the bachelorette party anecdote it sprang from (involving the lines: “No, really, you’re pretty! And I’m pretty too! I am so, so pretty! My friends are pretty, and you’re pretty, and I’m pretty. Am I pretty? I think I’m pretty.”), less so for the message of love-thyself-superego be damned uplift that closes the first section, and probably not very much for the clinical-political second half.

The North Remembers

           I had a stroke of something like genius on Saturday morning. With its theme song surging dramatically forward in my head, I resolved to re-watch the entirety of Game of Thrones’ first season before the second season’s premiere on Sunday night.  An urge to re-read A Clash of Kings, the ostensible source material for the new season, struck also, but it didn’t take long to debate the idea out my head.  Reasons of time played a part in the decision, but ultimately the media are simply too different to combine without doing injustice to both. The Song of Fire and Ice novels depend heavily on their characters’ interiority, particularly when dealing with the books’ thematic strengths – they dwell not simply on the tensions within actors’ thoughts but on how each situates themselves in the social order and, more importantly, the deep and recent pasts.  The books (particularly the earlier, better ones) demand extended interrogation and engagement, something of a very long essay that contemplates the nature and intersections of duty, contingency, honor, religion, and history in human existence.  It’s project best left for another time and venue – so Robert Silvers, if somehow you’re reading this, holler when the next book comes out!

            Separating the two proved hard in practice. Of the random notes I made as I plowed through each hour, I’d bet 90% dealt with differences between the books (which I read after season one) and the TV shows that I noticed.  As one might expect, much had to do with television lacking the depth noted above, or making up for it in awkward ways. I found the television show excelled, though, in its Lost-iness – in how it spun out long plots from seemingly tiny details over the course of several episodes and, more importantly, how the characters related to the swerves of acting and being acted upon as those plots unraveled. 

            The Ned Stark character played a key role in those developments.  Driven by easily understandable motivations – a clear sense of honor and duty, loyalty to liege lord, and protection and perpetuation of house and family – he played protagonist against a world of characters driven by any number of oedipal, resentful, or just plain selfish drives.  With Ned’s gravitas and his plot as anchor, the rest of the storylines could wave about as they would.  When (SPOILER) Ned lost his head, the loss hit hard – again like Lost, it made us wonder what this whole show has been about all along – but a sense of opening followed not long thereafter.  When the main character dies, anything can happen (and will happen, if they stick to the books – Martin has a particular genius for ground-stealing plot shifts that wrench our gaze without pulling it out of the thrones-iverse) and now everything could and would happen.  After a whole season thinking we were watching it, we realized the game of thrones had only just begun. In the final episode, we saw moves made all over the Westerosi world, foretelling chaos to come.

            Last night’s opener continued those threads, but without the energy.  Had I not read the book before, I’d have wondered at their connection.  Sure, when relevant, each of the characters spoke of how their situation played into the overall game, but only a handful exhibited the energy we’d expect of planets around a collapsed star.  Ned’s gravity kept the satellites moving in their appointed directions, ones that felt oddly unchanged by the presence of a black hole where an anchor previously held firm.

            I’m wary to judge the show-runners too much for this.  The story is a complex one and requires the stage to be precisely set for every scene and act to hit as it must and being on HBO allows them to take the time to make those moves before a knock-out combo.  Where ABC allowed Lost slow penultimate episodes to set up jaw-dropping finales, HBO’s fine (to an extent) with Game spending a half season (or more) for an hour of real payoff at the end.

             It’s a risky play – we don’t turn to television to exercise our patience – but there were hints in the opener that it will all be worthwhile.  In the absence of plot, characters must fill the void and last night’s three kings earned their crowns in filling the breach.  Stannis’ stern calm, Joffrey’s Caligula glare, and Robb’s near liquid rage at Jaime Lannister portend fury to come, one imagines everyone else in the Seven Kingdoms will have to be dragged along for the ride. The game of thrones appears to becoming a war of vengeances and vendettas.  If Ned's dopy righteousness kept season one hurtling forward, his son and his enemies' righteous anger might fuel the next.

Ikea-town

I hope to post later today about Game of Thrones, but before that I must link to this Doug Saunders article on Ikea's urban planning venture in London.  Hold on, though, it's not entirely what you think:

As the Ikea people repeatedly tell anyone who will listen, this place will not be an Ikea. There will not be Poäng armchairs adorning the living rooms and Billy bookcases covering the walls. The houses will not require Allen keys to assemble. Meatballs in lingonberry sauce will not be served at the restaurants. And there will not, the company insists, be an Ikea store anywhere in or near the neighbourhood.

Have a good monday?