Shunji Iwai’s Swallowtail Butterfly (1996) is a film about foreigners (mostly Chinese, but also European and American) in Japan. Most of these foreigners communicate with one another in English, which they know better than they do Japanese. The main character, Ageha (Butterfly) is a teenage girl, daughter of a dead Chinese prostitute, but who was born in Japan and only speaks Japanese and English. In the course of the film, we also meet Japanese-born children of Americans, white and black, but whose main language is Japanese, and who don’t speak English very well, if at all.
So the film is multi-lingual and multi-ethnic (though there don’t seem to be any Koreans, Japan’s largest minority group), giving the lie to the myth of Japanese homogeneity.
Swallowtail Butterfly is about these immigrants’ hopes of making it — their successes and failures — in the Japanese bubble economy of the late 80s/early 90s (I think). At times it has an almost documentary feel, at other times it is highly stylized and anti-realistic, as it flirts with the gangster thriller and with expressionist modes, as well as referencing music video (Iwai’s background, before he moved into film). Handheld camera is used throughout, supplemented by various filters and other visual effects. The film seems edited more for rhythm than for narrative, though its various narrative strands do converge towards the end.
What’s remarkable about Swallowtail Butterfly – as well as about Iwai’s later film All About Lily Chou-Chou (which I wrote about here) – is the way it drifts in and out of various moods or affects, as well as various genres. There are horrific moments (as when racist Japanese cops beat up and kill a Chinese man), and over-the-top film fantasy moments (as when the immigrants blow up several truck-loads of gangsters with a bazooka), and moments when time seems to stop (as when Ageha overdoses on heroin), and moments when time seems to expand into eternity (as when Glico, the Chinese prostitute turned singer, delivers a stunning rock ‘n’ roll version of “My Way” – played straight, and not in the mode of the Sid Vicious critique), and moments of sheer lyrical abstraction, pain and joy passed through the sieve of Iwai’s restless camera and savvy pop soundtrack. The film begins and (almost) ends with Chinese funerals, in which money – the Japanese yen for which the immigrants have come to Japan – is burned in a potlatch that consumes both the hypocrisies and racism of Japanese society, and the grief, rage, and desperation of which the immigrants’ lives are composed.
Shunji Iwai’s Swallowtail Butterfly (1996) is a film about foreigners (mostly Chinese, but also European and American) in Japan. Most of these foreigners communicate with one another in English, which they know better than they do Japanese. The main character, Ageha (Butterfly) is a teenage girl, daughter of a dead Chinese prostitute, but who was born in Japan and only speaks Japanese and English. In the course of the film, we also meet Japanese-born children of Americans, white and black, but whose main language is Japanese, and who don’t speak English very well, if at all.
So the film is multi-lingual and multi-ethnic (though there don’t seem to be any Koreans, Japan’s largest minority group), giving the lie to the myth of Japanese homogeneity.
Swallowtail Butterfly is about these immigrants’ hopes of making it — their successes and failures — in the Japanese bubble economy of the late 80s/early 90s (I think). At times it has an almost documentary feel, at other times it is highly stylized and anti-realistic, as it flirts with the gangster thriller and with expressionist modes, as well as referencing music video (Iwai’s background, before he moved into film). Handheld camera is used throughout, supplemented by various filters and other visual effects. The film seems edited more for rhythm than for narrative, though its various narrative strands do converge towards the end.
What’s remarkable about Swallowtail Butterfly – as well as about Iwai’s later film All About Lily Chou-Chou (which I wrote about here) – is the way it drifts in and out of various moods or affects, as well as various genres. There are horrific moments (as when racist Japanese cops beat up and kill a Chinese man), and over-the-top film fantasy moments (as when the immigrants blow up several truck-loads of gangsters with a bazooka), and moments when time seems to stop (as when Ageha overdoses on heroin), and moments when time seems to expand into eternity (as when Glico, the Chinese prostitute turned singer, delivers a stunning rock ‘n’ roll version of “My Way” – played straight, and not in the mode of the Sid Vicious critique), and moments of sheer lyrical abstraction, pain and joy passed through the sieve of Iwai’s restless camera and savvy pop soundtrack. The film begins and (almost) ends with Chinese funerals, in which money – the Japanese yen for which the immigrants have come to Japan – is burned in a potlatch that consumes both the hypocrisies and racism of Japanese society, and the grief, rage, and desperation of which the immigrants’ lives are composed.
Running Out of Time (1999) is another brilliant film by Johnny To (whom I’ve written about before). A man with just a few weeks left to live (Andy Lau) plans and executes an elaborate robbery/scam, motivated ultimately by honor and revenge, the need to settle scores with the gang leader who betrayed his father. In the course of events he develops a kind of emotional bond with the cop who is trying to catch him (Ching Wan Lau).
The themes might seem familiar from John Woo, but this is a very different sort of film. To’s fractured action editing and oblique lighting, together with the way he has of inserting odd digressions into the plot without slackening the pace, create a kind of jittery poetry, both frenetic and cool, never quite settling down into any sort of fixed and recognizable sentiment (I think this is yet another example of what Jenny calls “emotionless affect”).
This sort of not-quite-feeling is a quality of To’s elaborate visual style; but it’s also perfectly embodied in Andy Lau’s charismatic outlaw, charming us even at the point of death. Knowing that he will be gone soon, periodically spitting up blood, he seems detached from his own ferocious desires, machinating his plot with an insouciance worthy of Cary Grant. Indeed, the way an insistent consciousness of mortality somehow comes across as insouciance is a big part of what makes the film work for me: such a connection or transformation seems utterly outrageous, yet at the same time it seems so perfectly right. The prospect of death is a source of dread and mystery, perhaps, only because death itself is so shallow; there’s nothing behind the curtain.
I don’t mean to say that Running Out of Time is a philosophical film: it’s too committed to the thrills of the action genre to have any such pretensions. (It also has some of the attributes of a video game). But To’s images, and Lau’s performance, nonetheless do embody a kind of thought. And a new thought at that. A thought that could only be thought in our age of globalization, of multiplying images, and of the ubiquitous electronic extrusion of our brains. Not profound thought, but lateral thought, networked thought, thought that is visceral yet superficial, skidding across the surfaces of our eyes and ears and minds.
Running Out of Time (1999) is another brilliant film by Johnny To (whom I’ve written about before). A man with just a few weeks left to live (Andy Lau) plans and executes an elaborate robbery/scam, motivated ultimately by honor and revenge, the need to settle scores with the gang leader who betrayed his father. In the course of events he develops a kind of emotional bond with the cop who is trying to catch him (Ching Wan Lau).
The themes might seem familiar from John Woo, but this is a very different sort of film. To’s fractured action editing and oblique lighting, together with the way he has of inserting odd digressions into the plot without slackening the pace, create a kind of jittery poetry, both frenetic and cool, never quite settling down into any sort of fixed and recognizable sentiment (I think this is yet another example of what Jenny calls “emotionless affect”).
This sort of not-quite-feeling is a quality of To’s elaborate visual style; but it’s also perfectly embodied in Andy Lau’s charismatic outlaw, charming us even at the point of death. Knowing that he will be gone soon, periodically spitting up blood, he seems detached from his own ferocious desires, machinating his plot with an insouciance worthy of Cary Grant. Indeed, the way an insistent consciousness of mortality somehow comes across as insouciance is a big part of what makes the film work for me: such a connection or transformation seems utterly outrageous, yet at the same time it seems so perfectly right. The prospect of death is a source of dread and mystery, perhaps, only because death itself is so shallow; there’s nothing behind the curtain.
I don’t mean to say that Running Out of Time is a philosophical film: it’s too committed to the thrills of the action genre to have any such pretensions. (It also has some of the attributes of a video game). But To’s images, and Lau’s performance, nonetheless do embody a kind of thought. And a new thought at that. A thought that could only be thought in our age of globalization, of multiplying images, and of the ubiquitous electronic extrusion of our brains. Not profound thought, but lateral thought, networked thought, thought that is visceral yet superficial, skidding across the surfaces of our eyes and ears and minds.
Francois Ozon’s Swimming Pool, like his earlier Under The Sand, takes an empathetic view of a middle-aged woman, played by the great Charlotte Rampling.
At the start of the film, Rampling’s character is brooding, angry, and repressed. She’s a successful crime novelist who finds herself a victim of writer’s block. And the film is both an allegory of the writing process, and a psychological thriller somewhat reminiscent of Polanski (in this respect, it reminded me a bit of one of Ozon’s earlier films, See the Sea).
At first, Swimming Pool is all nuance: Rampling’s gestures and pauses, her body language and facial expressions. Gradually, a story emerges on the screen, just as one does in the pages Rampling’s novelist character types out on her laptop. A strange tension develops between Rampling and another, much younger woman, as stereotypically French as Rampling’s character here is stereotypically English.
The film becomes an exploration of spaces and boundaries: of relations of intimacy and violation, suspicion and trust, between the two women. This gradually becomes something more, a complicity at once creepy and liberating; then it dissolves – or metamorphoses – into something quite different, as the stubborn, violent unreason of intractable fantasy gives way (or gives birth?) to the pliable, pacified objectivity of a finished work of art.
Swimming Pool is a grippingly mysterious film, less on account of the surprises of its plot twists, than because of Ozon’s and Rampling’s portrayal of the impalpable, the unsayable and unshowable, the in-between.
Francois Ozon’s Swimming Pool, like his earlier Under The Sand, takes an empathetic view of a middle-aged woman, played by the great Charlotte Rampling.
At the start of the film, Rampling’s character is brooding, angry, and repressed. She’s a successful crime novelist who finds herself a victim of writer’s block. And the film is both an allegory of the writing process, and a psychological thriller somewhat reminiscent of Polanski (in this respect, it reminded me a bit of one of Ozon’s earlier films, See the Sea).
At first, Swimming Pool is all nuance: Rampling’s gestures and pauses, her body language and facial expressions. Gradually, a story emerges on the screen, just as one does in the pages Rampling’s novelist character types out on her laptop. A strange tension develops between Rampling and another, much younger woman, as stereotypically French as Rampling’s character here is stereotypically English.
The film becomes an exploration of spaces and boundaries: of relations of intimacy and violation, suspicion and trust, between the two women. This gradually becomes something more, a complicity at once creepy and liberating; then it dissolves – or metamorphoses – into something quite different, as the stubborn, violent unreason of intractable fantasy gives way (or gives birth?) to the pliable, pacified objectivity of a finished work of art.
Swimming Pool is a grippingly mysterious film, less on account of the surprises of its plot twists, than because of Ozon’s and Rampling’s portrayal of the impalpable, the unsayable and unshowable, the in-between.
A brilliant epigram by Warren Ellis (from his Bad Signal email list):
“If you believe that your thoughts originate inside your brain — do you also believe that television shows are made inside your television set?”
A brilliant epigram by Warren Ellis (from his Bad Signal email list):
“If you believe that your thoughts originate inside your brain — do you also believe that television shows are made inside your television set?”
I still think, even more, that we are doomed if Kerry is the Democratic nominee. In his victory speech tonight, Kerry looked and acted like he had a stick up his ass (a common metaphor, but in this case it seemed almost literally apt). Not only did he obviously not believe any of the things he was saying, he didn’t even seem capable of pretending to believe them. He’s too lame even to be phony.
Dean, on the other hand, was emotionally involved, with his people, and also with the larger TV audience. Not that this will do him much good. I agree with Jacalyn that Dean is in trouble in large part because the media read things like his now infamous whoop as that he is “acting too ‘lower-class’/ too black/too much like white trash.”
It’s not that I am saying that any show of emotion is automatically good. After all, who was more emotional (and thereby more crassly manipulative) in his political speeches than Hitler? I am saying, rather, that it’s more on an affective level than an ideological one that elections are won and lost. And too few political commentators notice this, or are willing to admit that they are aware of it.
It may be that nobody the Democrats have can compete with what Jenny, who writes very well about the politics of affect, describes as Bush’s display of ” feeling that doesn’t slip over into ‘a’ feeling….Bush is the conservative/political cousin to the iPod commercials, insofar as they both tap into emotionless affect in order to ‘work.’ ”
Now, I think that Bush is able to appear this way, precisely because he is a sociopath, as Mark Crispin Miller cogently argues. But that doesn’t make the task of beating him any easier; and though I still think that the career military man, General Clark, is the one most likely to be able to do it, I remain uncertain as to whether he can pull it off. But I know that Kerry doesn’t stand a chance.
Most idiotic comment of the evening, by somebody on CNN: “Women like Kerry because they feel protected by him.”
Most outrageous claim by a candidate: Lieberman, claiming his 5th place showing as a victory, because he was almost in a tie for third place (Kerry and Dean, he said, don’t really count, because they come from states directly adjoining New Hampshire. It’s a good thing nobody reminded Lieberman that, even if Connecticut doesn’t border New Hampshire, it, too, is part of New England).
Sharpton brilliantly one-upped Lieberman when he said he was thrilled to get a few hundred votes in New Hampshire, when he didn’t even campaign there.
I still think, even more, that we are doomed if Kerry is the Democratic nominee. In his victory speech tonight, Kerry looked and acted like he had a stick up his ass (a common metaphor, but in this case it seemed almost literally apt). Not only did he obviously not believe any of the things he was saying, he didn’t even seem capable of pretending to believe them. He’s too lame even to be phony.
Dean, on the other hand, was emotionally involved, with his people, and also with the larger TV audience. Not that this will do him much good. I agree with Jacalyn that Dean is in trouble in large part because the media read things like his now infamous whoop as that he is “acting too ‘lower-class’/ too black/too much like white trash.”
It’s not that I am saying that any show of emotion is automatically good. After all, who was more emotional (and thereby more crassly manipulative) in his political speeches than Hitler? I am saying, rather, that it’s more on an affective level than an ideological one that elections are won and lost. And too few political commentators notice this, or are willing to admit that they are aware of it.
It may be that nobody the Democrats have can compete with what Jenny, who writes very well about the politics of affect, describes as Bush’s display of ” feeling that doesn’t slip over into ‘a’ feeling….Bush is the conservative/political cousin to the iPod commercials, insofar as they both tap into emotionless affect in order to ‘work.’ ”
Now, I think that Bush is able to appear this way, precisely because he is a sociopath, as Mark Crispin Miller cogently argues. But that doesn’t make the task of beating him any easier; and though I still think that the career military man, General Clark, is the one most likely to be able to do it, I remain uncertain as to whether he can pull it off. But I know that Kerry doesn’t stand a chance.
Most idiotic comment of the evening, by somebody on CNN: “Women like Kerry because they feel protected by him.”
Most outrageous claim by a candidate: Lieberman, claiming his 5th place showing as a victory, because he was almost in a tie for third place (Kerry and Dean, he said, don’t really count, because they come from states directly adjoining New Hampshire. It’s a good thing nobody reminded Lieberman that, even if Connecticut doesn’t border New Hampshire, it, too, is part of New England).
Sharpton brilliantly one-upped Lieberman when he said he was thrilled to get a few hundred votes in New Hampshire, when he didn’t even campaign there.
Can Xue is one of my favorite living writers, in any language, although (as well as because) I do not think I really understand her. Three of her books have been translated into English: the short story collection Dialogues in Paradise, Old Floating Cloud, which consists of two novellas, and the one I just reread, The Embroidered Shoes, which contains ten short stories and a novella. (As far as I know, Can Xue has published a lot more in Chinese, but these are the only texts of hers that have been translated into a language I understand).
It would seem obvious to say that Can Xue’s fiction is “dreamlike” and “surreal,” but words like these don’t get us very far. The stories contain lots of description, and are vividly poetic, and preternaturally clear, in their details. Yet these details are often highly irrational, or impossible; and they refuse to coalesce into anything like a linear narrative. There are obsessively repeated (but continually varying) images of disease and decay, of insects and other vermin, of flowers blooming and withering, of twisted family dynamics and unpleasant altercations with neighbors.
There’s something unique, too, about the tone of the stories: their everydayness. None of the narrators or characters find their “surreal” circumstances to be in the least unusual or strange. They describe a man who has suction cups on his hands, allowing him to hang from the ceiling, or a boy who raises poisonous snakes, or a woman who spends all her time in a glass cupboard, as if these were the sorts of people you met every day. They evoke metamorphoses of the landscape, so that familiar landmarks disappear, or abysses open up at their feet, as if they were merely talking about changes in the weather.
Most of these images are harsh and troubling. The stories are also filled with that dreamlike sense of never being quite able to reach a goal that nonetheless always seems to be imminent, just beyond one’s grasp. But I wouldn’t describe Can Xue’s stories as nightmarish or despairing. For they are filled with a certain wonder of metamorphosis: a sense of ongoing change that is more important than any of the goals that are never reached (for to reach them would bring the metamorphoses to an end). These stories are about loss, suffering, and mortality, but in them such events have a kind of quite beauty to them, since they are more about living on or going on, than they are about finitude and finality. There’s no finality here, and hence no narrative closure; but a kind of impersonal, insomniac vigilance that ever renews itself.
And in the end, I am not sure that anything I have just written about Can Xue’s fiction makes any sense. But what I love about this fiction is the way it continually, delicately evades whatever constructions one would want to place upon it.
Can Xue is one of my favorite living writers, in any language, although (as well as because) I do not think I really understand her. Three of her books have been translated into English: the short story collection Dialogues in Paradise, Old Floating Cloud, which consists of two novellas, and the one I just reread, The Embroidered Shoes, which contains ten short stories and a novella. (As far as I know, Can Xue has published a lot more in Chinese, but these are the only texts of hers that have been translated into a language I understand).
It would seem obvious to say that Can Xue’s fiction is “dreamlike” and “surreal,” but words like these don’t get us very far. The stories contain lots of description, and are vividly poetic, and preternaturally clear, in their details. Yet these details are often highly irrational, or impossible; and they refuse to coalesce into anything like a linear narrative. There are obsessively repeated (but continually varying) images of disease and decay, of insects and other vermin, of flowers blooming and withering, of twisted family dynamics and unpleasant altercations with neighbors.
There’s something unique, too, about the tone of the stories: their everydayness. None of the narrators or characters find their “surreal” circumstances to be in the least unusual or strange. They describe a man who has suction cups on his hands, allowing him to hang from the ceiling, or a boy who raises poisonous snakes, or a woman who spends all her time in a glass cupboard, as if these were the sorts of people you met every day. They evoke metamorphoses of the landscape, so that familiar landmarks disappear, or abysses open up at their feet, as if they were merely talking about changes in the weather.
Most of these images are harsh and troubling. The stories are also filled with that dreamlike sense of never being quite able to reach a goal that nonetheless always seems to be imminent, just beyond one’s grasp. But I wouldn’t describe Can Xue’s stories as nightmarish or despairing. For they are filled with a certain wonder of metamorphosis: a sense of ongoing change that is more important than any of the goals that are never reached (for to reach them would bring the metamorphoses to an end). These stories are about loss, suffering, and mortality, but in them such events have a kind of quite beauty to them, since they are more about living on or going on, than they are about finitude and finality. There’s no finality here, and hence no narrative closure; but a kind of impersonal, insomniac vigilance that ever renews itself.
And in the end, I am not sure that anything I have just written about Can Xue’s fiction makes any sense. But what I love about this fiction is the way it continually, delicately evades whatever constructions one would want to place upon it.
I don’t have that much to say about Satoshi Kon’s Tokyo Godfathers. The sappy plot – melodrama, but not over-the-top enough for my kind of melodramatic bliss – means it’s not anywhere near as interesting as Kon’s first film, the weird and science-fictional Perfect Blue. (I still haven’t seen his second film, Millennium Actress). Still, the animation was really good: the characters have that iconic simplicity that (as Scott McCloud has argued) is the special power of comics and cartoons; while the Tokyo cityscape is vivid and dynamic. Tokyo Godfathers is certainly an improvement on 3 Godfathers, the John Ford/John Wayne flick on which it is loosely based. (Believe me, 3 Godfathers is not one of Ford’s greatest moments. And Kon’s couple of lachrymose bum and stereotypical drag queen is far preferable to Ford’s couple of the Duke and Pedro Armendariz, with the former snarling to the latter at every opportunity, “Don’t speak Mexican in front of the kid’).
I don’t have that much to say about Satoshi Kon’s Tokyo Godfathers. The sappy plot – melodrama, but not over-the-top enough for my kind of melodramatic bliss – means it’s not anywhere near as interesting as Kon’s first film, the weird and science-fictional Perfect Blue. (I still haven’t seen his second film, Millennium Actress). Still, the animation was really good: the characters have that iconic simplicity that (as Scott McCloud has argued) is the special power of comics and cartoons; while the Tokyo cityscape is vivid and dynamic. Tokyo Godfathers is certainly an improvement on 3 Godfathers, the John Ford/John Wayne flick on which it is loosely based. (Believe me, 3 Godfathers is not one of Ford’s greatest moments. And Kon’s couple of lachrymose bum and stereotypical drag queen is far preferable to Ford’s couple of the Duke and Pedro Armendariz, with the former snarling to the latter at every opportunity, “Don’t speak Mexican in front of the kid’).
William J. Mitchell‘s new book ME++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City is an extremely useful survey and discussion of new technologies, but (how do I put this) not an inspiring one. The book makes a powerful and exhaustive inventory of new network technologies, particularly wireless ones, and discusses how these technologies are changing everything from our sense of self to the way power works in our society. Mitchell is careful not to get too carried away, in the manner of so many futurologists: the devices and techniques he is writing about are not all commonly available yet today, but they are all grounded in current practices. That is to say, Mitchell extrapolates only to the extent that he describes the situation in which today’s bleeding-edge technology has become the norm, an everyday experience within the price range and technical know-how of the average consumer. (By this, he seems to mean anyone at the economic level of the inhabitants of North America, Western Europe, and Japan).
What’s especially good about Mitchell’s account is the way that he embeds his accounts of cell-phone texting or RFID chips or GPS systems in the history of human culture, technology, and architecture. Goggles that display hyperlinked data are not anything radically new, so much as they are continuous with a whole series of inventions, or of human tweakings of the environment, from the mastery of fire, to various forms of clothing, various means of writing (making symbolic marks), and various architectural programs. New technology is thereby demystified, and even its “virtual,” delocalizing components are grounded in a dialectic between the body and its surroundings. Mitchell is also frank and thoughtful about the dangers, as well as the advantages, of the new wireless digital technologies: he spends as much time talking about their potentials for surveillance and control, as he does about the new forms of freedom that they might open up. Rejecting both utopian fantasies and dystopian prophecies, Mitchell offers instead a sober calculus of possibilities and dangers.
Why, then, am I ultimately disappointed with this book (which is what I meant when I said I didn’t find it inspiring)? I think it is because Mitchell remains on the level of the catalogue, or listing of separate observations. He fails to do (and probably has no interest in doing) what Deleuze and Guattari define as the task of the philosopher, theorist, or intellectual: to create new concepts. He shows us how new conditions and new forms of life are emerging, conditions and forms for which our current patterns of thought are no longer adequate; but he doesn’t take cognizance of this inadequacy (not even in his own language) and he doesn’t even begin to think about how it might be remedied. The result is a kind of enforced blandness. I suppose that is better than your typical “gee-whiz” celebratory attitude, but it leaves me dissatisfied. Mitchell avoids corporate hucksterism over the effects of new media and new technologies, but only at the price of substituting a kind of bureaucratic, policy-wonk mentality.
William J. Mitchell‘s new book ME++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City is an extremely useful survey and discussion of new technologies, but (how do I put this) not an inspiring one. The book makes a powerful and exhaustive inventory of new network technologies, particularly wireless ones, and discusses how these technologies are changing everything from our sense of self to the way power works in our society. Mitchell is careful not to get too carried away, in the manner of so many futurologists: the devices and techniques he is writing about are not all commonly available yet today, but they are all grounded in current practices. That is to say, Mitchell extrapolates only to the extent that he describes the situation in which today’s bleeding-edge technology has become the norm, an everyday experience within the price range and technical know-how of the average consumer. (By this, he seems to mean anyone at the economic level of the inhabitants of North America, Western Europe, and Japan).
What’s especially good about Mitchell’s account is the way that he embeds his accounts of cell-phone texting or RFID chips or GPS systems in the history of human culture, technology, and architecture. Goggles that display hyperlinked data are not anything radically new, so much as they are continuous with a whole series of inventions, or of human tweakings of the environment, from the mastery of fire, to various forms of clothing, various means of writing (making symbolic marks), and various architectural programs. New technology is thereby demystified, and even its “virtual,” delocalizing components are grounded in a dialectic between the body and its surroundings. Mitchell is also frank and thoughtful about the dangers, as well as the advantages, of the new wireless digital technologies: he spends as much time talking about their potentials for surveillance and control, as he does about the new forms of freedom that they might open up. Rejecting both utopian fantasies and dystopian prophecies, Mitchell offers instead a sober calculus of possibilities and dangers.
Why, then, am I ultimately disappointed with this book (which is what I meant when I said I didn’t find it inspiring)? I think it is because Mitchell remains on the level of the catalogue, or listing of separate observations. He fails to do (and probably has no interest in doing) what Deleuze and Guattari define as the task of the philosopher, theorist, or intellectual: to create new concepts. He shows us how new conditions and new forms of life are emerging, conditions and forms for which our current patterns of thought are no longer adequate; but he doesn’t take cognizance of this inadequacy (not even in his own language) and he doesn’t even begin to think about how it might be remedied. The result is a kind of enforced blandness. I suppose that is better than your typical “gee-whiz” celebratory attitude, but it leaves me dissatisfied. Mitchell avoids corporate hucksterism over the effects of new media and new technologies, but only at the price of substituting a kind of bureaucratic, policy-wonk mentality.
A year ago, before anyone had heard of Dean, the story was that the Democratic party insiders had already decided on Kerry as the nominee. And today it looks like that’s what’s going to happen. Dean just “peaked too soon,” as Richard Nixon might have said. He wasn’t able to endure the relentless negative campaigning that blanketed Iowa over the last few weeks. (Negative campaigning, and exaggerated scrutiny, of the sort George W Bush never received from the press, and that Kerry probably won’t receive until after he is nominated).
Now, I’m not a big fan of Dean, and the fact that he’s a psycho in the mold of John McCain may indeed be a handicap. He might well not be able to win, but he would have at least an outside chance, the kind of long odds a risk-taking gambler would put down money on.
(For what it’s worth, I still think that General Clark has the best winning chances of any prospective Democratic candidate. The smoothie Edwards might have a chance, too, just because he’s a Southerner, though I doubt that his phoniness is good enough to really carry things off. But then, neither Clark nor Edwards is going to get the nomination, any more than Dean will).
Kerry probably has the nomination sewed up; he probably had it sewed up, as I said, a year ago. But he has no chance whatsoever of beating Bush. He has loser written all over him: he’s a tired, colorless hack in the exact mold of Mondale, Dukakis, and Gore. When will the Democrats ever learn? They would rather lose every election from now until eternity, than allow a single breath of fresh air to enter the chamber of mummies that they laughingly call a “party.” And we pay the price, in the form of one-party rule by the predacious Bush clan and their sycophantic retainers.
A year ago, before anyone had heard of Dean, the story was that the Democratic party insiders had already decided on Kerry as the nominee. And today it looks like that’s what’s going to happen. Dean just “peaked too soon,” as Richard Nixon might have said. He wasn’t able to endure the relentless negative campaigning that blanketed Iowa over the last few weeks. (Negative campaigning, and exaggerated scrutiny, of the sort George W Bush never received from the press, and that Kerry probably won’t receive until after he is nominated).
Now, I’m not a big fan of Dean, and the fact that he’s a psycho in the mold of John McCain may indeed be a handicap. He might well not be able to win, but he would have at least an outside chance, the kind of long odds a risk-taking gambler would put down money on.
(For what it’s worth, I still think that General Clark has the best winning chances of any prospective Democratic candidate. The smoothie Edwards might have a chance, too, just because he’s a Southerner, though I doubt that his phoniness is good enough to really carry things off. But then, neither Clark nor Edwards is going to get the nomination, any more than Dean will).
Kerry probably has the nomination sewed up; he probably had it sewed up, as I said, a year ago. But he has no chance whatsoever of beating Bush. He has loser written all over him: he’s a tired, colorless hack in the exact mold of Mondale, Dukakis, and Gore. When will the Democrats ever learn? They would rather lose every election from now until eternity, than allow a single breath of fresh air to enter the chamber of mummies that they laughingly call a “party.” And we pay the price, in the form of one-party rule by the predacious Bush clan and their sycophantic retainers.
Bruce Sterling’s short story collection A Good Old-Fashioned Future offers seven vignettes of the near future, with an emphasis on globalization and mobile stealth technologies. The stories – originally published between 1993 and 1998 – manage to be (for the most part) dystopian yet anti-apocalyptic, as well as wildly hilarious, and to throw out new ideas with a profligacy that more than makes up for their occasionally corny plot lines. The promiscuous, postmodern mixing-and-matching of cultures is accompanied by new forms of mutating sociality, from the Japanese “network gift economy” of “Maneki Neko” to the Wende (a sort of chaotic convergence of temporary anarchy, involving simultaneous rioting by all sorts of groups from artist-anarchists to Moral Majority bigots to soccer hooligans) that convulses Dusseldorf in “Deep Eddy.” In addition to the usual subcultural types muddling through bizarre circumstances which to them are utterly mundane, there are also characters like The Cultural Critic, a sort of hyper-Friedrich Kittler figure on the far side of postmodernity (he has the best quotes in the book: “the enormous turbulence in postmodern society is far larger than any single human mind can comprehend, with or without computer-aided perception… every vital impulse in human life is entirely pre-rational”). Not to mention the hack Bollywood film director who is shooting pictures in Britain to take advantage of the depressed economy there, in the wake of a Mad Cow epidemic that wiped out most of the population. There’s no “cyberpunk” attitude here, only Sterling’s gift for making the wildest scenarios seem alarmingly plausible.
Bruce Sterling’s short story collection A Good Old-Fashioned Future offers seven vignettes of the near future, with an emphasis on globalization and mobile stealth technologies. The stories – originally published between 1993 and 1998 – manage to be (for the most part) dystopian yet anti-apocalyptic, as well as wildly hilarious, and to throw out new ideas with a profligacy that more than makes up for their occasionally corny plot lines. The promiscuous, postmodern mixing-and-matching of cultures is accompanied by new forms of mutating sociality, from the Japanese “network gift economy” of “Maneki Neko” to the Wende (a sort of chaotic convergence of temporary anarchy, involving simultaneous rioting by all sorts of groups from artist-anarchists to Moral Majority bigots to soccer hooligans) that convulses Dusseldorf in “Deep Eddy.” In addition to the usual subcultural types muddling through bizarre circumstances which to them are utterly mundane, there are also characters like The Cultural Critic, a sort of hyper-Friedrich Kittler figure on the far side of postmodernity (he has the best quotes in the book: “the enormous turbulence in postmodern society is far larger than any single human mind can comprehend, with or without computer-aided perception… every vital impulse in human life is entirely pre-rational”). Not to mention the hack Bollywood film director who is shooting pictures in Britain to take advantage of the depressed economy there, in the wake of a Mad Cow epidemic that wiped out most of the population. There’s no “cyberpunk” attitude here, only Sterling’s gift for making the wildest scenarios seem alarmingly plausible.