debt and morals

John Holbo on markets and morality:

the Plato I was teaching was, to a surprising extent, about debt, reciprocity and, generally, the convertability of moral into monetary categories, and vice versa. Euthyphro on piety. It’s ‘care of the gods’, which – this is his final suggestion – turns out to be the capacity to enter into healthy exchange relations. Meno on whether being good boils down to getting your hands on the goods. Cephalus, the old man, launches the mighty ship, Republic, with the thought that justice is ‘speaking truth and paying debts’, which morphs into the lex talionis thought that justice is payback – doing good to friends and harm to enemies. Plato, like Graeber, is really really concerned to shred this stuff, if he can.

Penny Gaffs

"Penny Gaffs" were small, informal theatres which became very popular in English slums from the 1820s:

The pieces which would be presented here can be related to several of the dramatic forms which developed mostly outside the patent theatres, and which could evolve and be critical to degrees forbidden to "straight" plays: these included burletta and assorted dramatic pieces presented at the minor theatres and fairgrounds, pantomime, and the entertainments of strolling players.... A penny gaff was usually a shop adapted as a theatre in which an entertainment comprising sketches, songs, farces and drag acts would be presented when enough people were assembled.

Most of the internet is recycling a small set of eyewitness accounts. Here is a trio of full articles:

It was not a commodious building, nor particularly handsome, the only attempt at embellishmentappearing at the stage end, where for the space of a few feet the plaster wall was covered with ordinary wall paper of a grape vine pattern, and further ornamented by coloured and spangled portraits of Mrs. Douglas Fitzbruce in her celebrated characters of "Cupid" and "Lady Godiva."

Here's another overview.

Self-doubt: placed by culture, removed by mad science

Brain manipulation via electricity.
Sally Adee does what makes Wired actually good, underneath the manic trend-jumping and the boosting of dubious shiny gadgets. She takes a cyberpunk-seeming story, explains it is already happening, and points out social implications.

The cyberpunk story goes like this. Putting some electrodes on your brain can double the rate at which you learn. Why? Because it turns off the inner voice that constantly tells you how much a mess you're making of life:

Me without self-doubt was a revelation. There was suddenly this incredible silence in my head; I'eve experienced something close to it during 2-hour Iyengar yoga classes, but the fragile peace in my head would be shattered almost the second I set foot outside the calm of the studio. I had certainly never experienced instant zen in the frustrating middle of something I was terrible at.

And once you realise how much self-doubt drags us back, you can't help but wonder where it comes from:

could school-age girls use the zappy cap while studying math to drown out the voices that tell them they can't do math because they're girls? How many studies have found a link between invasive stereotypes and poor test performance?

Crazy bastard Lyotard

Apparently at some point Lyotard was channeling Warren Ellis:

The English unemployed did not have to become workers to survive, they – hang on tight and spit on me – enjoyed the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body

Blacklists in the construction industry

Shocking. The UK's major construction firms maintained a blacklist of troublemakers to be denied work -- radicals, trade unionists, or simply workers who pointed out on-site safety issues. According to the investigator at the Information Commissioner's Office:

the relationship between the Consulting Association [which maintained the blacklist] and the police and security services appeared to have been nurtured when the organisation went under an earlier guise as the Economic League, at a time when the state was keen to liaise with major building firms to discover as much as it could about Irish construction workers amid the threat of IRA terrorism.

Of course this stuff just gets easier and easier as time goes by. I'd bet money that some counterpart to the Consulting Association is right now identifying troublemakers from facebook or linkedin, selling their names to one employer or another. Perhaps the police are collaborating, perhaps they aren't -- it maybe matters less than it once did, as police records are only one information source among many.

Community organizing in London

Community Organizing, a system of social campaigining, concentrates attention on linking local residents into a political group, identifying their common interests and turning these into the goals of campaigning.

It is most associated with the civil rights movement in the United States, where the work of Saul Alinksy was crucial in giving it shape, both through his direct involvement in campaigning and through books such as Rules for Radicals. More recently, Barack Obama's involvement gave it greater prominence.

Unlike many USian ideas, this went decades without really taking root in the UK. Perhaps this is a result of it targetting local communities, rather than the free-floating trend-following activist international. Perhaps not.

But now it's starting to change. Citizens UK are pushing community organizing in London and beyond. They've had impressive success in forcing the Living Wage onto the political agenda. There's even a MA Course at Queen Mary.

For me to judge community organizing based on books and the internet seems entirely alien to its principles. Still, I can't deny loving some Alinsky's combination of community-building with tactically-planned attacks on the powers that be. In his words, "The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength."

The vampire before Dracula

I had always assumed that Dracula was the first vampire story. I was wrong.
When it was published in 1897, vampires had already spent a half-century or more in the public eye.

Most prominently, there was Varney the Vampire, a penny dreadful in 1847-9. And before that was John Polidori's The Vampyre -- a book written in the same holiday when Mary Shelley dreamt up Frankenstein.

Religion and the decline of concert-hall applause

Old essay by Alex Ross on the sacralization of classical music, particularly the decline of applause after each movement.

I have a rosy image of the hubbub of pre-20th century concert halls as a creative benefit, something which would naturally be appreciated by musicians and composers.

Not so. Many apparently loathed it. Musicians would plant people in the audience to applaud their solo. To prevent this, Gustav Mahler went so far as "hiring detectives to patrol the theater".

But for entirely eliminating applause after each movement, Ross blames conductor Leopold Stokowski. Stokowski dreamt of the concert-hall as a "Temple of Music", where the audience should " listen in spiritual silence and then return home refreshed and strengthened" [not his words]

Victorian musical DIY porn

This essay by Alan Moore has since been turned into a book. I quoted this segment on LJ years ago, but think it's worth fishing back out of the memory-hole:

Pornographic playlets could be purchased, ranging from two-person dramas through to full ensemble pieces if the neighbours were agreeable. These publications came with sheet-music, so that if one of the participants were musically inclined then he or she could sit at the piano and provide a vigorous accompaniment to whatever activity was taking place upon the hearth-rug or the horsehair sofa

Also, at the end Moore has tacked on a fairly sensible social/feminist argument for better, not less, porn:

Rather than functioning as a release for our quite ordinary sexual imaginings, porn functions as another social tether, as control-leash, lure and lash combined in one, a cattle-prod that looks just like a carrot. Dangling temptingly before us everywhere we look it leads us on. Then, in the guilty aftermath of our indulgences, it converts handily into a rod of shame with which to flog ourselves.

Tree-climbing for cheats

Something which should exist, but (as far as I know) doesn't: parks cultivated specifically to provide trees for climbing.

We have elaborate topiary -- but only with the aim of looking pretty. It would presumably be easy to cultivate trees with convenient bends, branches at arm-height, and all the stuff you'd want to make a nice climbing tree. You'd need many decades for them to grow up. After that, though, you'd have a fantastic and pretty place.

Presumably it would currently be an insurance nightmare to do this. But that wouldn't have been the case 50 or 100 years ago. So why aren't there tree-climbing parks?

[This partly triggered by Aaron Swartz's plea to replace spectacles with experiences:

The world is weirdly disappointing that way. Billions of dollars are spent making and watching people explore mysterious tunnels, chase down alleys, and fly as if by magic, but there’s hardly a single opportunity to actually do any of these things.

]

corruption as recession survival tactic

From the B&T comment on a Mail on Sunday investigative report showing the role of McKinsey in both drafting and profiting from the destruction of the NHS: "when the economy enters a long depression, securing lines of revenue from the taxpayer becomes a more important profit strategy for business."

I suspect not only is this true, but there will be some academic economics research trying to put numbers to it.

data-mining at Target

This NY Times feature covers corporate analysis of custonmer data, particularly around identifying times when people are likely to change their shopping habits. Major events like giving birth apparently shake up your shopping habits, with the result that pregnant women are a prime target for advertising:

[a Target statistician] was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a "pregnancy prediction" score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.

Since this is close to my professional life, I'm less shocked than I might be. If anything I'm surprised Target only worked this out in the last decade; I'd thought the big shops had been working in this way since the 90s or before.

But part of the joy of journalism is a kind of Verfremdungseffect: pointing up things I've placidly accepted, but which in fact are strange or objectionable.

Arab nationalist causes have ceased mattering

Nir Rosen on, among other things, the international connections of rebels and demonstrators in Syria:

"Arabic satellite channels as well as Facebook allow exiled Syrian opposition figures to observe the slogans of demonstrators on the ground so that they can in effect be led by the opposition on the street and reflect their views to the rest of the world. As a result it is safe to say that of the opposition activists and organisers on the ground (those who demonstrate, fight or provide aid to activists), nearly all back the Syrian National Council (SNC) as their representative to the outside world.

...

Even Islamist leaders of the revolution look to Europe and the US more than they do to Arab or Muslim countries (with the exception of Turkey). Anti-imperialist and Arab nationalist causes have ceased mattering to the opposition on the ground. It is the death of ideology, in a way. It strikes me as the opposite of many Egyptian protesters who reacted to decades of a pro-American and pro-Israeli dictatorship by expressing anti-imperialist slogans. But the Syrian opposition associates notions of resistance and anti-imperialism with the Assad regime and therefore the causes themselves have been discredited and their enemy has been reduced to the regime and the daily struggle for survival.

Why I need to see Cassavetes

The BFI is showing John Cassavetes' film Faces, on 19th + 20th February.

I'm somewhat obsessed by the idea of this film. I've never seen it, never seen anything by Cassavetes. Every review I read makes his films seem more urgent and powerful and alive than anything else out there. I've even been avoiding watching them via internet/dvd, for the sake of getting the total trapped immersion of the cinema.

Unfortunately the reviewer who really makes me want to see Faces is just too overwhelmed to even write about it. She keeps on edging up towards discussing him, then retreating because it's too much . But here are some simpler explanations:

John Cassavetes' "Faces" is the sort of film that makes you want to grab people by the neck and drag them into the theater and shout: "Here!"....What Cassavetes has done is astonishing. He has made a film that tenderly, honestly and uncompromisingly examines the way we really live. [Roger Ebert]

What emerges from the series of encounters it depicts is less a narrative than a succession of alternating intensities....Cassavetes films his characters with such deep compassion that even the crudest sally comes off as a gesture of love, a misguided bid for recognition. And when that recognition comes, in brief flashes...there's a shock of emotional truth we rarely get to experience in life, let alone at the movies. [Slate]

Shot in black and white and overflowing with naturalistic, seemingly unscripted dialogue (Cassavetes films only sound improvised), [Faces] was a tour de force so radically different from American movies of the period as to be sui generis....Many critics prefer their art with subtitles or not at all. Cassavetes dared to believe that art and movies were not mutually exclusive, and he never gave up on the movies' capacity to move us, to make us feel, to connect us to the world and to other people.
[New York Times]

Many of his films—as difficult as an abstract canvas—are flush with a primitive intensity that makes them, at times, an ordeal to sit through.

Watching a Cassavetes film, you feel like a witness to a familial intervention, or to an all-night orgy of dysfunctional louts. His characters—over-the-hill, alcoholic, depressed, and desperate—seem to be stabbing at life, trying to find a part of it that still breathes so they can kill it, His camera is never more than an arm's length away from these cocktailhour dysfunctionals, pummeling them until they give in and tell us the truth [Movie Maker]

Attention Economy

I'd quibble with much of this nettime post by Prem Chandavarkar, but I entirely agree with the focus on attention as a scarce resource which is becoming perhaps the main target of capital:

If we are in the information age, the
one thing that information consumes is attention, and consequently
attention becomes a scarce resource. As an economy is substantively
affected by those resources that are scarce and important, our lives
are now being affected by the quest for attention.

The scarcity of attention is exacerbated by the changing nature
of alienation (as defined by Baudrillard). Alienation was earlier
characterized by distance - a separation from the normal routines of
life. But it is now characterized by an overwhelming proximity to
everything. The construction of sheltered spaces for reflection, which
were provided by the regular routines of life, are now difficult to
come by, and require substantive and sustained effort that few are
willing to devote effort to in an attention starved world. Deprived of
space for reflection, we face the challenge of being "reduced to pure
screen: a switching centre for the networks of influence".

The Flag of Convenience was born out of altruism

Adam Curtis, in an intriguing post about cruise ships, explains why so many ships sail under flags of convenience:

All this happens because of The Flag of Convenience. It was an idea that the Americans came up with in the early days of the second world war to allow them to send help to Britain. Roosevelt was worried that Hitler might declare war on the US - so a law was passed that allowed American ships to be registered either in Panama or in Liberia.

The Flag of Convenience was born out of altruism, but it is now used for purely selfish reasons. Many of the cruise companies register their ships in countries such as Panama and Liberia, this mean they do not have to pay corporate taxes in the US and aren't bound by many labour regulations.

Libraries and the cuts

Charles Stross reports on the destruction of British libraries. As an author, he earns a few pence whenever a British library lends one of his books. Judging by this, his income has fallen by 27% in the past year:

Libraries are substantially but not exclusively used by children, the unemployed, and pensioners: mostly people without the discretionary spending power to shrug and go to a bookshop instead.

And note the first group I mentioned. I'm not a children/young adult author, but if the drop in my PLR loans reflects library closures, then we have just slammed the door in the face of a new generation of readers. I got my start reading fiction from my local library; the voracious reading habits of a bookish child aren't easily supported from a family budget under strain from elsewhere during a time of cuts. I hate to think what the long term outcome of this short-term policy is going to be, but I don't believe any good will come of it.

Text-mining in science

Academic publishers' restrictions on usage are one of those things that wind up both outrageous and commonly accepted. Here, a Cambridge academic describes his project of mining the Chemistry literature and extracting structured information on the chemicals and reactions involved. This kind of work has big potential to improve research -- but it also harms the short-term business model of Elsevier. Hence, it remains forbidden.

What kind of pervert are you

At the New Yorker, Anthony Lane reviews two films filled with sex.
Shame depicts the life of sex-obsessed Brandon, a New Yorker who fills every free moment with fucking. And in Sleeping Beauty, student Lucy earns cash by taking a sleeping pill and making her unconscious body available for the use of paying customers.

Though neither film is explicitly about fantasy, each describes a kind of fantasy. That of Sleeping Beauty -- from the viewpoint of the client -- is of easy control, availability. That of Shame is about extremes of emotion. It's Apollo and Dionysius, transposed to a world where Apollo is getting in on sex.

Sex, here, isn't necessarily sex -- it's a McGuffin which could stand for any activity which is coveted, or extreme, or intense. Anything which becomes an object of desire, which is fixated on and fantasized about, becomes twisted in a similar way. One kind of mind layers on organized parades of passive partners; another craves extremes of expressed emotion.

Nothing is so neat, of course. For a start, the taming of emotion has an apepal all of its own. Lane, coincidentally, suggests this of Shame director Steve McQueen. His earlier film Hunger:

was imperilled by the coolness of its own gaze. The wall of a jail cell, smeared with excrement as an act of protest, was filmed with such compositional care that it became, in effect, a work of abstract art, allowing us to forget what it actually was: human waste, applied with human rage, and surely unbearable to the human nose. McQueen could hardly be hipper, yet he remains, to an extent, an old-fashioned aesthete, drawn to extreme behavior in his characters not because of any trials of spirit that they undergo but because he is challenging himself to unleash the wildest material that he, wielding his camera, can then possess and tame.

And if the more you think about it, the convoluted all this gets. Not a breakdown, so much as epicycles upon epicycles, an Apollonian OCD trying to leave its grip on the chaos of human passion.

Sleepy Berlin subcultures

Momus argues that Berlin doesn't even have the money for its subcultures to sell out:

Berlin sometimes seems like a museum of youth culture styles we invented in Britain: punk, goth, Spiral Tribe crusty. In Britain there's a perpetual dialectic between alternative lifestyles and the money system, which means that within a couple of years any given subcultural style will have been turned into a big business club scene, and then, shortly after that, will be the soundtrack and the style of a bank commercial, and, just after that, will be utterly naff, dead and unmentionable. But in Berlin it seems that punk, goth, industrial and rave looks are adopted for life by people who live them as permanent subcultural styles, entirely apart from the money system. Nobody hypes them up, buys them out, and flogs them dead. The styles are "timeless and eternal", the visual corollary of a life of protest and tolerated companionable deviance. Their adepts resemble post-protestant monks and nuns who've taken lifetime vows ("I will own two big dogs and make sculpture out of junk"). It's touching but also somewhat appalling.