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Street Tough

Thoughts about and from Čapek's The Absolute at Large

Looking for some fun speculative sci-fi satire? I recommend Czech writer, Karel Čapek's The Absolute at Large (1922). I finished reading this after watching (again) Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972). This is a more fitting combination than it might sound. I think we often consider sci-fi to be about science, or, as Susan Sontag claimed, about disaster. But what all three of these examples show is how sci-fi also spends a lot of time thinking about religion, spirituality, and god/God. All three approach this subject differently and each to great effect. Čapek's approach is more humorous and satirical, but that doesn't diminish the potency of his point, rather it enhances it. For Čapek, the human debate about deity and the demand for absolute truth is rather ridiculous, not because God is dumb, but because our approach to and conception of deity is absurd, as is our insistence that everyone conform to our conception of the Divine (the Absolute). The problem of religion has little to do with religion and more to do with people. In the end, Čapek blasts humanity and its institutions way more than he does religion.

Here are a few passages I found especially great:

It is a foible of our human nature that when we have an extremely unpleasant experience, it gives us a peculiar satisfaction if it is “the biggest” of its disagreeable kind that has happened since the world began. During a heat wave, for instance, we are very pleased if the papers announce that it is “the highest temperature reached since the year 1881,” and we feel a little resentment towards the year 1881 for having gone us one better. Or if our ears are frozen till all the skin peels off, it fills us with a certain happiness to learn that “it was the hardest frost recorded since 1786.” It is just the same with wars. The war in progress is either the most righteous or the bloodiest, or the most successful, or the longest, since such and such a time; any superlative whatever always affords us the proud satisfaction of having been through something extraordinary and record-breaking.

--

                “Look, here, sir,” he [Captain Trouble] said after a while, “what are they squabbling about over there, anyway? Some boundary or other?”

                “Less than that.”

                “Colonies?”

                “Even less than that.”

                “Commercial treaties?”

                "No. Only about the truth.”

                “What kind of truth?”

                “The absolute truth. You see, every nation insists that it has the absolute truth.”

                “Hm,” grunted the Captain. “What is it, anyway?”

                “Nothing. A sort of human passion. You’ve heard, haven’t you, that in Europe yonder, and everywhere in fact, a . . . a God, you know . . . came into the world.”

                "Yes. I did hear that.”

                “Well, that’s what it’s all about, don’t you understand?”

                “No, I don’t understand, old man. If you ask me, the true God would put things right in the world. The one they’ve got can’t be the true and proper God.”

                “On the contrary,” said G.H. Bondy (obviously pleased at being able to talk for once with an independent and experienced human being), “I assure you that it is the true God. But I’ll tell you something else. This true God is far too big.”

                “Do you think so?”

                “I do indeed. He is infinite. That’s just where the trouble lies. You see, everyone measures off a certain amount of Him and then thinks it is the entire God. Each one appropriates a little fringe or fragment of Him and then thinks he possesses the whole of Him. See?”

                “Aha,” said the Captain. “And then gets angry with everyone else who has a different bit of Him.”

                “Exactly. In order to convince himself that God is wholly his, he has to go and kill all the others. Just for that very reason, because it means so much to him to have the whole of God and the whole of the truth. That’s why he can’t bear anyone else to have any other God or any other truth. If he once allowed that, he would have to admit that he himself has only a few wretched metres or gallons or sack-loads of divine truth. You see, suppose Dash were convinced that it was tremendously important that only Dash’s underwear should be the best on the earth, he would have to burn his rival, Blank, and all Blank’s underwear. But Dash isn’t so silly as that in the matter of underwear; he is only as silly as that in the matter of religion or English politics. If he believed that God was something as substantial and essential as underwear, he would allow other people to provide themselves with Him just as they pleased. But he hasn’t sufficient commercial confidence in Him; and so he forces Dash’s God or Dash’s Truth on everybody with curses, wars and other unreliable forms of advertisement. I am a business man and I understand competition."

--

“Everyone believes in his own superior God, but he doesn’t believe in another man, or credit him with believing in something good. People should first of all believe in other people, and the rest would soon follow.”

-- 

“A man may certainly think that another religion is a bad one, but he oughtn’t to think that the man who follows it is a low, vile, and treacherous person. And the same applies to politics and everything.”

I'd also recommend reading Čapek's brilliant play R.U.R. - Rossum's Universal Robots (1920). I first read it in my high school sci-fi class and only recently rediscovered and reread it. I loved it in high school and love it more now.

Enjoy yourselves some sci-fi!

The Face in the Lens: Anonymous Photographs - Robert Flynn Johnson

The Face in the Lens: Anonymous Photographs by Robert Flynn Johnson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Robert Flynn Johnson's collection of anonymous photographs makes the case that collecting anonymous photographs is as much an art (or at least a skill) as many of the photographs themselves. While many of these photos really do show artistic and technical skill, their potency is enhanced, or at least expanded, by their inclusion in this collection. Alone, many of these are fine photos, but together they create something even more fascinating - the collected comments and observations of photographers unknown, showing people now (mostly) passed away.

It is an odd feeling to be looking at a moment (staged or spontaneous) in a person's life, when you know that the subject of the photo as well as the photographer are now gone. It reminds me of Ossian Brown's brilliant collection Haunted Air, though in the case of The Face in the Lens the focus is much broader. But the feeling of looking into the past and seeing the photographic ghosts of anonymous people is somewhat eerie, but also intriguing. Photos say a lot, but they leave a lot up to the viewer, as Alexander McCall Smith's somewhat quirky introduction demonstrates. We're seeing history, but it's a history full of gaps, where we insert our own ideas and feelings from our perspective today. Johnson, through compiling these photos as he has, has created his own individual version of history, which is not bad, but is just the nature of telling history.

Part of the joy of this collection is in how varied the photos are and the noticeable lack of artistic aspiration in so many of them. Often the goal was simply to capture a significant moment for documentary, genealogical purposes rather than to do something artistic. What's cool is that sometimes both happened, which Johnson attributes to the nature of photography as an art reliant on technology - the camera can sometimes really help you out, even when you're totally ignorant of how to properly use it. Likewise, the subject of the photo can sometimes be as 'artful' in their body language and manner than any performer or model, suggesting that people really do have a natural impulse and feeling for what is aesthetically pleasing and/or what is genuine and real - this is true even in some of those stiff, posed photos where people were having to stand waiting forever while the picture was taken. Real life often presents the best performances you've ever seen.

Johnson has compiled a fine collection of anonymous photos and makes me wonder what he has in his collection that didn't make the cut for this book. What pictures does he have that still remain unknown to people and what pictures are floating around out there yet to be uncovered? I start feeling a tad weird thinking about my own photos being collected like this. What stories would people create about my photos? What would that say about the subject and what would it say about me? And what about you?

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Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked our Sexuality - Gail Dines

Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked our Sexuality by Gail Dines

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Gail Dines’ Pornland is the first book I’ve read about pornography and I think it was an excellent place to start. Using very clear language and thought-provoking analysis, Dines breaks down porn in ways that I found convincing and accurate. Admittedly, my personal layperson thoughts about porn and its effects on popular culture, business, sexuality, race and gender were often quite similar to Dines’, though obviously in a less-informed, critically organized and researched form. Pornland has confirmed and expanded my own thoughts and concerns about pornography, which I guess makes me a biased reader inclined to read her book with less critical rigor than I should. But I didn’t read this for a class or to become a pornography scholar; I read it as a thoughtful, concerned citizen who believes pornography might best represent everything wrong with modern society.

Dines’ historical account of when porn was first brought into the mainstream via Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler illuminates how the porn industry operated then and now first and foremost as a business intent on making the highest profits possible. As a business, it represents everything wrong with capitalistic business practice, for it focuses solely on profit margins at the expense of people – profits supersede the interests (health, safety, well-being, etc.) of both the consumer (mostly men) and the employees (female performers). They are selling an industrially manufactured product from the assembly line, where churning out as many units as possible is the order of the day. This mass-production method debases people and sexuality, reducing them to mere objects and mechanics. No deeper social, emotional, psychological, or spiritual connection is desired.

According to Dines, the industry works really hard to sell its product and garner customers. How porn is advertised to the public is crafty indeed. Playboy capitalizes on their sleek, debonair approach, which has served Hugh Hefner quite well. The sleazy humor used by Hustler claims porn consumers are greasy white trash when in fact their main consumer isn’t that at all; nor is founder (and millionaire) Larry Flynt. When it does portray itself as a prosperous celebrity occupation, as with porn star Jenna Jameson, it conveniently omits any indication that being a porn star is actually a terribly miserable occupation. Porn survives, like so much of consumer business today, by advertising their product in an intentionally deceptive package – basically, they lie to us. Since people are always influenced by the culture in which they live, it is no wonder we begin listening to and believing porn’s messages, which come in all forms: Cosmopolitan and Maxim magazines, child clothing lines designed to make prepubescent girls “hot” and “sexy,” Carl’s Jr. ads containing messages so sexually explicit you wonder if food even entered the advertisers’ minds, or music videos of scantily-clad divas writhing around in some form of orgasmic ecstasy. These are a few examples of how porn has seeped into our culture. Sex sells, and porn has taken full advantage of this fact, with their primary objective being money and rabid consumerism.

21st century consumerism has reached terminal levels of gluttony, with porn being one of the grossest transgressors and supporters of rabid consumption. The point of the product is to get you to consume more and more, and with pornography addiction numbers piling up it seems that the industry has been wildly successful. What Dines successfully shows is how the harsh treatment of women, the open and unapologetic racism, pseudo-child porn’s manipulation of women to look younger, to name but three, all show that pornography, in a very real and rather literal way, consumes people. People are the product and while these raw materials are abundantly available, due to their savage exploitation their shelf life is very short.

Dines’ descriptions are vivid and explicit, pulling few punches as to the aggressive, racist, sexist, sadistic aspects of the industry. She also doesn’t avoid naming large corporations benefiting from porn – amazon.com & google.com are getting quite a bump from searches and sales; hotel chains like Marriott and Holiday Inn generate quite a sum from providing porno movies. And Dines points out the flaws in arguments that porn isn’t so bad because it can’t be proven that watching porn causes men to rape women – like rape is the only crime against women worth caring about. She is (rightfully) an unapologetic feminist who argues that feminism is about gender equality, which is completely absent in porno movies, and that so-called female sexual liberation celebrated by Cosmopolitan and Sex and the City is actually about pleasing and being subservient to men – something that would make those second waves feminists who fought for sexual liberation roll over in their graves.

Dines’ arguments and analysis show contemporary society to have reduced sex to nothing but the physical appearance and performance, with the brunt of the pressure and pain put to women, though men are obviously damaged by this reductive view as well. I'll add that this is true at my own university, BYU, which claims and at least appears to not have a porn or promiscuous sex problem to the degree of other universities, which is not to say there isn’t a problem – there is, but hopefully to a lesser degree than elsewhere. BYU has (unacknowledged) problems with sexist attitudes and beliefs that exist within the porn industry in more radical form. But women still aren’t spared the suffocating pressure to be physically attractive – the hot and sexy factor is still a huge determinant in whether a woman gets dates and is accepted into male circles. Women constantly have to live up to the expectations of the men (and strangely the expectations of other women) around them, which naturally leads to the problems Dines addresses: eating disorders, unnecessary plastic surgery, excessive exercise, depression, poor grades and general feelings of inadequacy.

In conclusion (“finally!” you exclaim), Pornland is an excellent read. My only wishes were that the book’s conclusion discussed solutions to combating pornography in more detail. As it was, the conclusion was mostly an advert for the group Stop Porn Culture, which she helped found. And I had wished for some discussion about what she felt a healthy sexual relationship entailed – the book after all is about “how porn has hijacked our sexuality.” Aside from brief statements about sex being wonderfully important for strengthening a couple’s relationship, there is no in depth assertions of what couples can do to have a healthy, porn-free relationship. People need positive reasons to pursue the type of relationship I believe Dines wishes people to have. Identifying and proving that porn isn’t good for us is an important message, and she does it really well, but some encouragement on the other end would have made this already good book that much better. But as it is, this is a fine examination and condemnation of pornography.

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Kodachrome

You should go here sometime. But beware of the locals.

A Visit to Tiny Telephone

Tiff and I were fortunate enough to attend John Vanderslice's special performance with the Magik*Magik Orchestra at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco. The concert included the entire White Wilderness album, a lovely collaboration between JV and Magik*Magik, just released this year. They also performed orchestral versions of many JV songs from his backcatalogue. It truly was a unique concert experience, and though I seem to say that with every Vanderslice show I see, this concert really did stand apart from those other fine shows. But the memories didn't end with the concert, for near the concert's end Vanderslice invited the audience to a free tour of his recording studio, Tiny Telephone, the following morning. Naturally, Tiff and I wanted to go, and since we had the whole next day available to us, we went. (Luckily, it didn't take much to persuade Mom to come with us.)

  John Vanderslice - Sea Salt by IndieRockReviews 

The tour of Tiny Telephone was a wonderfully memorable experience for a few reasons. First, it further solidified my deep admiration for John Vanderslice as a musician and person. He's a good person with remarkable talent; the genuine article, as they say.

Second, I learned a lot about sound and recording that I hadn't really thought about much before. Sound is cool and recording an album is a really complex process - at least it is when you wanna do it well. Tiny Telephone encourages analog recordings rather than digital, and for good reason: too much of digital recording is crap. New digital technology should be awesome, but most of it isn't. Unfortunately, our new technology has mostly made studio recording lazier, which only encourages lazy listeners - we get used to hearing poor quality recordings and lose our ear for good sound.

Third, I was charmed by Vanderslice's account of the development of Tiny Telephone and the small community of artists neighboring the studio. According to him, the neighborhood used to be a lot more dangerous than it is these days. The change came in part because of the small artist community that filled in the collection of shabby-looking back alley buildings where Tiny Telephone is located, inviting a much safer atmosphere. Additionally, the once-dangerous park next to Tiny Telephone received a skate park from the city, which has helped reduce crime. Maybe other parts of the country have gotten over the stigmas against skaters and the narrow beliefs that artists don't contribute to society, but in my community some of these naive beliefs still prevail. But the neighborhood where Tiny Telephone resides seems to show that artists can do a lot for a community and having skate parks (and other similar community amenities) doesn't increase crime, it reduces it because kids,and adults, have a place where they can gather and engage in constructive activities rather than wander around with nothing to do but get in trouble. This story was a modest example of community action to improve the neighborhood; something we could all benefit from.

There's much more I could say about my visit to Tiny Telephone. But for now I'll just show off some of the pictures I took while there. Vanderslice was kind enough to allow me to snap some photos and I was rather happy with the results.

Note how much the dude in sunglasses looks like T-Bone Burnett.

Thanks to Mom for taking this picture.

 

For more on our visit to Tiny Telephone, check out Tiff's post at The Art of Place.