Book Review

I, Robot

by Isaac Asimov

     Isaac Asmov had a good idea of where the relationship between humans and technology was heading back in the 1950s. This is clearly demonstrated in his book I, Robot. Halfway in between a short stories collection and a novel, it is a book that uses recurring characters to portray the evolutionary trajectory of robots and the people who work with them to build a more highly advanced society.

Each story represents a step in the progression of robots in their development. These stories are framed as reminiscences of a robot psychologist named Susan Collins as told while being interviewed by a researcher. Dr. Collins herself is the main character in several of the stories.

It is fitting that a book about the development of technology would begin with the theme of childhood and so this is what I, Robot does. The first story is about a child and her relationship to a rather unsophisticated robot. Being a sentimental type of a story, this book would have gone downhill quickly if Asimov had not taken it up to another level. The engineering team of Donovan and Powell are introduced at this point. The stories “Runaround” and “Catch that Rabbit” are the types of problem solving stories that were common in the Golden Age of science-fiction. The team are faced with a dilemma and they have to use their scientific reasoning skills to solve their problem. Both stories confront the issue of robot irrationality; their robots are intelligent enough to work independently according to programming commands but sometimes the programming causes contradictions that cause the robots to stop working effectively.

“Reason” is also a story where Donovan and Powell face a potentially deadly dilemma; one robot has put his reasoning faculties to work and, like early human beings, arrived at religion as an answer for his own existence. The robot’s new religion bears an uncanny resemblance to Islam. No doubt, this was a joke on Asimov’s part. The two engineers try to use rationality and empirical science to prove to the robot that his religion is the product of faulty reasoning but the robot’s primitive mind is unable to draw the right conclusions. At this point the robots become a reference point to the humans that create them so that Asimov can make statements about human nature.

In the remaining stories, Dr. Susan Collins takes over as the main character. Some of her stories continue on with the problem solving structure that Asimov utilized so masterfully. By this stage, the robots have begun taking on some distinctly human characteristics. One robot learns how to lie for the sake of not hurting the feelings of the scientists at the corporation that created him. In another story, one robot becomes dangerous when he feels humiliated and envious, In “Escape” a fully self-conscious robot designs a perfect space ship and plays a practical joke on the engineering duo of Donovan and Powell by sending them off into outer space without explaining to them what is going on. These stories are not just about artificial intelligence though; they make statements about human nature and the limitations of the human mind. Dr. Collins is in constant conflict with her colleagues who think she is psychologically disordered. These same colleagues are unable to solve problems because their own emotions and shortsightedness interfere with their reasoning abilities.

This book ends with the stories “Evidence” and “The Evitable Conflict”. The former story is about a robot who becomes so human-like that it is impossible to tell the difference between man and machine. He runs for public office and gets confronted by a sleazy politician who wants to expose his secrets in order to win the election. The latter story is about how artificial intelligence has grown to become so powerful and so perfect that it runs the world as a smoothly functioning cybernetic utopia. The robots have become so perfect that they have found a way to identify agitated humans and remove them before they begin to introduce too much disruptive noise into the system. This is not a nightmare scenario though, as the robots have made the world function so perfectly that people feel no need to rebel against anything. Isaac Asimov’s take on a technopoly could be criticized for being overly optimistic. Maybe he could have taken a tip from John Milton’s Paradise Lost and come to the conclusion that conflict is a necessary part of human societies because without it we stagnate and never make any progress or even find meaning in the lives we live.

This cybernetically efficient conclusion is the logical outcome of a book of this sort. Asimov’s sentences are as smooth and polished as the components of a brand-new engine. He wrote stories that are clear, compact, complete and easy to read without lacking depth or complexity. There are no rough edges or frayed corners and even the descriptions of the messiness of human emotions is direct and without any unnecessary details. Maybe I, Robot is a little too polished. Its perfection is an imperfection at times.

In his day, Isaac Asimov had a clear understanding of the direction artificial intelligence was going in and he used his imagination to examine where it would end up. Along the way he raises important points about human society and whether we can even comprehend the technology we create. The fact that computer programmers don’t entirely understand how algorithms work after their software has been wound up and set to go just shows us that Asimov had some kind of prescient insight that a lot of other writers never had. Even if today’s robots and AI don’t look and act exactly the way Asimov predicted, this book still forces its readers, in a sane and healthy way, to question what our relationship to technology really is. These questions are still relevant today.

Asimov, Isaac. I, Robot. Fawcett Crest, New York: 1968.  

 

Book Review

Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism

by Elaine S. Hochman

     At the end of World War I, during the heady days of the Weimar Republic, a new art movement was born. It was called Bauhaus and its founding member was Walter Gropius. Elaine S. Hochman, in her book Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism, gives an historical account of this seminal avant-garde school. She says, however, little about the art they produced and instead orients the narrative to the internal and external political problems that they faced.

Long before the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder got coined to describe the aftereffects of combat, Walter Gropius felt traumatized after fighting for Germany in the trenches of World War I. He nearly got killed several times but he turned out to be one cat that never used up all his nine lives. After his tour of duty ended, he thought there must be more to life than war and set out to found a new art movement. He went to the conservative but cultured city of Weimar and took over an already-existing school and renamed it Bauhaus. The approach was less theoretical and more practical in its method of artists experimenting in a workshop setting to bring out their inner states of emotion. In the beginning, Expressionism, Constructivism, and De Stijl were the main inspirations. Though the school did not teach classes in architecture at first, Gropius believed that all art forms signify and culminate in that discipline since its public display made art available to all people. Bauhaus was all about the transformation of society by making art available to every ordinary man or woman on the street. The school attracted some prominent avant-garde artists like Luwig Kircher, Vassily Kandinsky, Josef Albers, Mies van der Rohe, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy who all came to be employed as teachers.

The Weimar Republic was an experiment in liberal democracy and it got off to a turbulent start. The centrist political parties had a difficult time holding the government together while communists, anarchists, and right-wing extremists fought in the streets. The Bauhaus was publicly funded and government battles were fought over what to do with the socialist utopian art institute. Meanwhile, internal strife involving different factions of the faculty and the students made internal management a dilemma as well. Eventually the city of Weimar told them to leave. Hochman’s account of Weimar politics is not always clear; a conscientious reader might want to look up some information about what was going on at that time in Germany to make the book a little less muddled.

In another region of Germany, the city of Dessau invited Gropius to open Bauhaus there. Dessau was a run-down place with high unemployment and rising rates of poverty. The mayor wanted to rebuild it and thought an up-and-coming art school would attract the attention and funding that they desired. It was there that architecture became a prominent part of the Bauhaus curriculum. The school came up with a plan to design student and worker dormitories that were cheap, easy to assemble, aesthetically pleasing, and functional. But the apartments turned out to be awkwardly designed spaces for living and the local population did not take kindly to the special treatment they thought the Bauhaus associates were getting. The political and managerial strife started up again and Walter Gropius was forced to step down. When the Nazis came to power, they closed the school permanently.

Bauhaus artists found a new life in America. They had a major influence in design and architecture. Ironically, their socialist ideals of making mass produced household goods and cheap, functional architecture found fertile ground in the capitalist system of the U.S.A. Anytime you see the smooth cladding of a skyscraper, a factory manufactured suburban house, or the products in a branch of IKEA or Bed Bath and Beyond, you are witnessing the long term effects of Bauhaus.

Hochman’s book gives a detailed account of what went on with Bauhaus. It is primarily a book about politics and educational management. Unfortunately, there is very little she says about any of the art that Bauhaus produced. For such an influential art movement, she does not give it adequate attention, and actually almost no description, of what the art of Bauhaus looked like. She provides no analysis of the architectural style they became famous for nor does she say much about the household consumer goods they also brought into the marketplace. Her thesis is that the activities of Bauhaus reflect the events and attitudes of the Weimar Republic but that should be revised since the book is more about how Bauhaus was thrown back and forth, sometimes violently, by the different political teams of that era without any regard for the practices, intentions, or theories of the Bauhaus artists themselves.

For what it is, Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism gives a detailed account of what happened with this avant-garde art movement, even if it is a dry read. It is, however, not a good introductory text. With so little attention given to their art, it is something that will appeal more to people who are familiar with Bauhaus and the Weimar Republic already.

Hochman, Elaine S. Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism. Fromm International, New York: 1997.

 

Larry Flynt, ‘Hustler’ Founder and First Amendment Activist, Dead at 78

His famed legal battles — which he took to the Supreme Court — are memorialized in the 1996 film ‘The People Versus Larry Flynt’

Read the full article on Rolling Stone

 

The Brotherhood

 

The Brotherhood

documentary film about the Universal Brotherhood

Holy Ghost People

 

Holy Ghost People

documentary film about snake handling Christians

directed by Peter Adair (1967)

Book Review

Mannix, Dan. Memoirs Of a Sword Swallower. Ballantine Books, New York: 1964. Dan Mannix’s Memoirs Of a Sword Swallower has got to be one the greatest books chronicling carnival sideshow life. The narrator, named Slim in this account, starts as a young college student whose interest in the occult leads him to visit a traveling carnival. When watching a performance, a fire eater accidentally sets himself on fire. Slim volunteers to learn the trade and replace the injured man. What follows is the story of the carnival and the lives of its performers.

Slim is possessed of an insatiable curiosity for those he travels with. He recounts the details of their life stories and reasons for choosing to live as transients. The sideshow is run by Krinko, an Indian fakir also known as The Human Pincushion. He sticks pins through his flesh, eats glass, and climbs a ladder made of swords. There is also a fat lady, a tattooed man, a cowboy performer from New York City and his fourteen year old girlfriend, and the Ostrich, a Viennese man who can swallow just about anything and regurgitate it. This is lowbrow entertainment at its best.

Slim’s mentor is an old trickster with a long beard named the Impossible Possible who runs a gambling booth that is set up to suck as much money out of the marks as possible. The Impossible Possible has worked in all aspects of carny life and has lots of stories to tell. He is a bit of a psychologist too, explaining to Slim that being a conman means feeling a bit of sympathy for the people he rips off. He also complains about people who try to cheat on the carnival games, explaining with a straight face that he dislikes dishonest people while his whole livelihood revolves around tricking everybody to make money. But this is an insight into carny ethics. There is a definite line between the carnies and their marks and that line delineates loyalty to their own tribe. Everybody on the other side is fair game and the carnies take sides with each other whenever there is a conflict with the outsiders, no matter what the dispute is about.

Slim himself is an unusual character. He is taller than everybody and tries to learn all the stunts that they perform. He starts as a fire eater then moves on to sword swallowing and swallowing neon lightstoo. Other tricks that he attempts are less successful, especially the mentalist mind-reading performances which are too easy for the audience to see through. But his quest to master all aspects of carny life are what give this book is structure. By learning all the tricks of the trade we learn how each stunt is done. While some are fraudulent, others are actually not deceptive and incredibly dangerous as well.

What really give this book its charm is not just the way in which Slim’s education unfolds; as he encounters all the different transients he has each one tell their own story and philosophy on life. All of them love being traveling performers because it gives them a chance to live the way they want to. They are proud of their outsider status and share a supportive community for the misfits of American society. America has always been a country of mass conformity but along the way it has also produced some of the most fascinating counter-cultures in the history of humanity. This book is yet another testament to how liberating it can be to live outside the margins of the dull, gray mainstream full of lifeless people sluggishly shuffling along because they can’t think of anything better to do with themselves.

Memoirs Of a Sword Swallower is a first-rate account of a vanishing aspect of American culture. With its vivid portrayal of the traveling life, it is sometimes light and sometimes dark. It is sometimes sordid, sleazy and even violent but it is never sensational or sentimental. Dan Mannix simply wrote, with honesty, about what he encountered while working with the carnival. There probably is no other book about the carny lifestyle that is this complete.

Mannix, Dan. Memoirs Of a Sword Swallower. Ballantine Books, New York: 1964.

 

When the Frequency for Tuning Instruments Became a Grand Conspiracy Theory

Conspiracy theories are like blockbuster Hollywood movies. Instead of the painful, confusing tedium of historical detail that meets us when we try to understand the world, they offer spectacle, clear dichotomies of good and evil, the promise of redemptive resolution. If only, say, we could rid ourselves of scurrilous figures behind the scenes, we could get back to the garden and make everything great. Or, if only we could change the frequency of standard musical pitch from 440 Hz to 432 Hz, we could throw off the yoke of Nazi mind control, experience pure meditative bliss, open our root chakras, and…. Wait… what? 

Read the full article on Open Culture

 

Here’s What Happens to a Conspiracy-Driven Party

The modern GOP isn't the first party to embrace huge conspiracies. But the lessons should be sobering

Read the full article on Politico

 

Sun Myung Moon: Emperor Of the Universe

 

Sun Myung Moon: Emperor Of the Universe

documentary film about the Unification Church

Book Review

The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

     Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain is a broad, sprawling epic of a novel that details the education of Hans Castorp, a naive young man who travels to Berghof, a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, to visit his cousin for three weeks. At least, he intends to visit for three weeks but that short time turns into a seven year residency. Hans Castorp encounters several people while there, each one representing a different facet of European life before the start of World War I. The themes of life, death, illness, music, and how they all interact as manifestations of time are examined through the characters as he listensto each one speak.

The resort village of Davos-Platz is the setting. That is the same Davos where economic forums for the most elite political and economic leaders of the world hold regular conferences to discuss the regulation of the world and how they can foster economic growth. Of course, this novel has nothing directly to do with that but Berghof is a place where the rarefied essences and values of the European continent are brought together. The fact that these essences encounter each other in a sanatorium may be an indication that Mann thought of Europe as being a little sick in its time. Maybe it is just a little sick since Berghof also has the ambiance of Elysian Fields with its natural setting and the daily routines that revolve around relaxation, eating, and leisure time. Caught somewhere between Heaven and Hell, Berghof is a comfortable corner of Purgatory. It is the post-Descartes mind and spirit of Europe, cut off from the ordinary lives of those in the flatlands below, a contrast that is referred to often throughout the book. Hans Castorp is definitely a man of the flatlands and his placement in the Magic Mountain is accidental and irregular; he is a common man who does not fit in where he has landed. But there he is, finding comfort where he doesn’t belong. He exists in an in between state like his temperature which is too high to indicate health but not high enough to indicate sickness.

The people Hans Castorp encounters in Berghof symbolize the European values of the times as Mann conceived them. In this way, they bear some resemblance to the Higher Men that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra encounters in his ascent. The first important person he meets up with is his cousin Joachim Ziemssen. Castorp arrives at Berghof to visit him and ends up getting more entangled in the society of the patients then he had intended. But his main purpose for visiting is to see his cousin. Joachim represents duty. He speaks very little, does everything he is told, and follows Hans Castorp around no matter where he goes. There is not much more to him than that. He is like a familiar spirit that does all the work that his master magician commands him to do.

That is significant because Mann wrote this novel under the influence of not just Nietzsche but also Goethe and there are some references to Faust throughout. Zarathustra blended with the Higher Men to contemplate wisdom but Hans Castorp is no Zarathustra since he accumulates information rather than achieves wisdom. In this regard, he is more like Faust learning from his mentor Mephistopheles. The Italian character of Settembrini encounters Hans and Joachim while they are strolling in the woods. He is first introduced under the name Satanas and later referred to as lucifera, the Latin name for Lucifer the Light Bringer. In one passage Hans Castorp is relaxing in his darkened room when Settembrini enters, turns on the light, and begins lecturing the young man. Settembrini takes on the role of teacher and philosophical mentor to Hans Castorp.

Settembrini the contrarian represents post-Enlightenment humanism. He is a freethinker, an individualist, and a revolutionary. He believes in the equality of all men and all nations. He is also a Freemason and an encyclopaedist who has taken on the job of compiling all the literary works that deal with themes of sickness. Like all people, he is full of contradictions. For example, he preaches about individual liberty and freedom of choice but tries to shelter Hans Castorp from ideas that contradict what Settembrini believes. At times he seems to be on a mission to indoctrinate the younger pupil who does not have enough intellectual prowess to think for himself.

There is one man that represents everything Settembrini opposes, or at least that is the idea. That man is Naphta. The two men argue constantly but there are times when the two contradict themselves and defend ideas that the other supports, albeit dressed up in a different vocabulary. Their argumentation goes in circles like a merry-go-round. Naphta is an ethnic Jew who belongs to the Jesuit order and has sympathies with Marxism and Communism. Despite these odd contradictions, his philosophy is surprisingly coherent since he represents collectivism and totalitarianism. He believes the masses crave slavery and domination. He also believes that those closest to God have the right to rule through cruelty, war, tyranny, and brutality. In a lot of ways, Naphta predicts the rising tide of fascism that would reach its peak in World War II while Settembrini anticipates the triumphant system of liberal capitalism that won in the end. Ironically, Naphta, despite his Jesuit vow of poverty, is a materialist who lives in comfort and luxury while Settembrini, in his threadbare clothing, lives a humbler existence with less amenities while professing the benefits of wealth. Uncertainty is a theme that runs through the whole book.

Two other characters of note are the sanatorium’s two doctors, Dr. Krokowski and Director Behrens. Krokowski bears a passing resemblance to Rasputin and represents the fledgling practice of psychoanalysis. In one of his educational lectures, he explains to the patients that physical illness is a manifestation of repressed sexual desire. This concept is a perennial theme throughout the book. In one passage, a woman describes coughing and sneezing in a way that is highly suggestive of orgasmic release. Also notice the times when Hans Castorp’s temperature rises and how the thermometer is described. Towards the end of the story, Krokowski shifts his interest from psychoanalysis to Spiritualism and begins conducting secret seances with the patients. Here the age old connection between sexual frustration and supernaturalism is given full but subtle expression.

On the other hand, Director Behrens is all about the science of the body. His medical practices are questionable and there are many suggestions that he is using sickness as a way of imprisoning the patients in Berghof. Every visitor who comes to the sanatorium gets the same introduction in which Behrens tells them they are anemic and after Hans Castorp decides to take up longer residence there until he is cured, Behrens tells him that is doing a good job of learning how to be a patient. The mercurial and unpredictable director is like another teacher to Hans Castorp; when he and his cousin Joachim visit Behrens’ quarters, they are introduced to a bit of orientalism by being led into a room decorated with Middle Eastern and Asian décor. They smoke tobacco and drink liquor while Behrens gives them a long-winded explanation of human anatomy and physiology. While the reader may ask the question of whether Hans Castorp’s mild illness is the result of all the smoking he does, it becomes obvious that Behrens symbolizes the modern rise of scientific medicine and evolutionary biology. The exotic setting is an indication that knowledge of the human body is just as exotic to Hans Castorp as Persian carpets and Egyptian snuff boxes.

Hans Castorp binge reads anatomical textbooks during his relaxation time before encountering the woman he desires, Clavdia Chauchat, during a carnival party on Walpurgis Night, in further reference to Goethe’s play Faust. Clavdia is an exotic Russian patient whose French husband is stationed in remote Dagestan. He is infatuated with her because she reminds him of a Kyrghyz boy he was acquainted with as a child. Is his love for her a result of sublimated homosexual urges? The reader can never be sure. During the carnival party, Hans Castorp tries to seduce her by paraphrasing passages from his anatomy textbooks. Clavdia is amused but the worldly Russian doesn’t fall for the naive and awkward German. In this passage, Hans Castorp shows that he can collect knowledge but he does not know how to use it effectively. He is a collector but he is not a curator.

Clavdia Chauchat leaves the sanatorium the day after carnival but returns later with the imposing figure of Mynheer Peeperkorn. This aging sea captain holds lavish parties with food and champagne that last throughout the night. He is an incarnation of the Dionysian principle and represents the supremacy of the emotions. Hans Castorp has gathered around himself a group of friends but Peeperkorn takes them all under his wing. He leads them along the way that a conductor leads an orchestra. None of their idiosyncrasies or arguments matter when Peeperkorn is around because his passion for hedonistic pleasures overrides anything they think.

Hans Castorp’s peak as a student of life comes later in the story when he gets lost while skiing during a snowstorm. He passes out in the snow and has a dream and epiphany that summarizes all he has learned since he came to the Magic Mountain. But the profound sensations of the dream are deflated because the realization he has, that death is an intrinsic part of life and not extraneous to it, is really just a reiteration of something Settembrini told him in an earlier chapter of the novel. Later in the story, Hans Castorp has another realization while listening to music on a phonograph at the sanatorium but ultimately, it is just the same realization he had during the snow storm. Thus, Hans Castorp gathers information but never develops wisdom. He leaves Berghof after seven years without developing a world view of his own. His situation appears to be a result of his never having made any consequential decisions for himself. He never chooses to leave Berghof and he never makes a decision about what to do with all the information he has accrued. Such is the collective dilemma of modern Europeans at the turn of the 20^th century.

The Magic Mountain is an endlessly intriguing novel. It is symphonic in its structure with each section being a separate movement while the themes and threads are subtly woven together in a streams of language and ideas that rise and fall like waves of literary music. But this scope is also the novel’s biggest flaw. Sometimes it is just too long and detailed for its own good. The arguments between Naphta and Settembrini, for example, could be cut in half while still getting their point across. This book was not designed for the 21^st century reader. But that also makes its rewards all that much better. You have to work hard to gain anything of value in this world and while this novel may be overly broad and wide, the insights and play of ideas make this long haul of a read worth the effort of those brave enough to take it on.

Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain. Vintage International, New York: 1996.

 

Book Review

Rockabilly

by Harlan Ellison

     At the start of Rockabilly (later reprinted as Spider Kiss) by Harlan Ellison, the rock and roll crooner Stag Preston is finishing a concert. He spots an attractive young girl in the audience and wants to sleep with her. He approaches his public relations agent, Shelly Morgenstern, and demands that he approach her with the message that the famed singer wants to see her backstage. The PR man is not happy about this but goes along with it anyway. So the stage is set for this novel about the relationship between the two men. On one hand, this is the story of Stag Preston’s rise and fall and on the other hand it is about the existential crisis that Shelly Morgenstern has in his relationship with the rock star. The latter theme is actually the more prominent of the two.

Morgenstern is a New Yorker who works for Jack Freeport, a sleazy businessman who sometimes involves himself in the entertainment industry. Shelly Morgenstern overhears Stag Preston playing guitar and singing while sitting in on a poker game in Kentucky. He immediately recognized the talent and takes him to meet Freeport who also realizes that they have something big on their hands.

Stag Preston proves to be truly gifted and becomes a teen idol. He later stars in a movie, furthering his fame and making people realize that he was a natural actor, too good to be in such a schlocky movie. But off stage and off camera he is a complete lout, hard-drinking, violent, obnoxious, irresponsible, and addicted to fast and easy sex with naive groupies.

Shelly Morgenstern’s job as public relations agent is to manage Stag Preston’s image. In reality, this turns out to be little more than a highly-paid babysitting position that involves getting the infantile musician out of all the trouble he makes. Morgenstern gets pushed to the limits of his tolerance after some embarrassing incidents. One is when Stag gets a teenage African-American girl pregnant; FReeport insists on paying for an abortion and a non-disclosure agreement that cost him more money than he wants to pay. But more importantly, Morgenstern is disgusted by the racist comments that Stag Preston makes about her and the sexist way he thinks of her as less than human. Another time, Stag Preston gets all drugged up and allows himself to be filmed for a porn movie with two women. The man who arranged the situation threatens to release the film footage to the public if hush money isn’t paid in regular installments. The worst episode comes when a teenage girl dies because Stag Preston tried to rape her.

While the action of the story is provided by Stag Preston, the moral commentary is personified by Shelly Morgenstern. As the plot progresses, the PR man becomes increasingly morally conflicted about his relation to Stag. He is dependent on the rock star’s career to maintain his comfortable lifestyle but he feels like he is defending the actions of a monster to do so. He feels like he is a leech or a parasite but also knows that Stag Preston does not have the mental capacity to manage his life on his own. Shelly Morgenstern gets severely depressed and his dilemma is whether or not he should continue his relationship with Stag.

Halfway through the book, Shelly compares himself to Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein and Stag Preston to the monster. Notice that the monster was created by the doctor and in parallel, the agent Shelly Morgenstern created the career and image of Stag Preston. Here we can take into consideration that Shelly Morgenstern is obviously modeled on the author, Harlan Ellison. By following this line of reasoning, we can interpret this novel as an examination of the relationship between an artist and their art. It examines the responsibilities a writer has when creating a character. Stag Preston’s public persona is one of being charming and wholesome; this persona was created by Shelly Morgenstern while in reality Stag Preston is an oaf, a loser, and a sorry excuse for a human being. The image does not fit the reality and Shelly Morgenstern is responsible for managing the image. So if Shelly is a stand-in for Harlan Ellison, we get the existential dilemma of the new author standing at the crossroads of his future career. The young and obviously talented Harlan Ellison, knowing that he had potential, could have been considering whether he wanted to follow one path of writing trashy pulp novels at the margins of the noir genre and making some easy money or the other path of using his skills to take a more nuanced and meaningful look at the human condition. The way that Shelly resolves his own conflict in the end says a lot about where Harlan Ellison would be going as a writer in the future.

Rockabilly is an energetic novel but it certainly has its flaws. The trajectory of Stag Preston’s career and artistic development is glossed over and related in a rapid succession that sometimes has the feel of amateurish journalism. The relationship between Stag and Shelly is not always well-drawn either. The two men at several points say that they are good friends and, despite his misgivings, Shelly sometimes claims to admire Stag. But most of the dialogue involving the two is argumentative; they fight all throughout the book. The warmer side of their relationship is never fully realized and it is hard to understand why the two think of each other as friends. A passage or two detailing the affection they have for one another would have given the story a necessary depth and complexity, the absence of which makes the story a little hard to believe at times.

Harlan Ellison would go on to write bigger and better stories but Rockabilly is well worth reading. Its depiction of the celebrity lifestyle and the entertainment industry is brutally frank and at times disgusting. Stag Preston is a rock star archetype and his personality would later show up in real-life characters like Jim Morrison, Keith Moon, and Sid Vicious. Ellison’s foreshadowing of things to come is uncanny. This novel is a truly American story. While that may be a discredit to its characters, it is a credit to Ellison’s talents as a writer, even at such an early point in his career.

Ellison, Harlan. Rockabilly. Gold Medal Books/Fawcett Publications Inc., Greenwich, Connecticut, 1961.

 

Happy Inauguration Day 2021

Goodbye donald trump

worst president ever

 

Bauhaus: The Face Of the 20th Century

documentary film (1994)

 

Phil Spector, Famed ‘Wall of Sound’ Producer Convicted of Murder, Dead at 81

Revolutionary producer behind some of pop music’s most enduring songs dies from natural causes while serving prison sentence

Read the full article on Rolling Stone

 

Blank Space QAnon. On the Success of a Conspiracy Fantasy as a Collective Text Interpretation Game

QAnon – the movement according to which Donald Trump wages a secret war against satanic and pedophilic elites – is not just a run-of-the-mill conspiracy belief, but functions as a collective text interpretation game. This is also the reason for his ridiculous success, which now includes the German Reichsbürger [people who believe that the German Reich still exists and that the Federal Republic of Germany is a company with no legal basis registered in Frankfurt] and the Corona denier scene. The fact that QAnon’s origin story was collaged from literary and popular cultural sources – among them a collective novel published in 1999 also by the co-author of this article – does not throw off its followers.

Read the full article on Giap

 

New York Dolls Guitarist Sylvain Sylvain Dead at 69

R.I.P. Sylvain Sylvain

“His role in the band was as lynchpin, keeping the revolving satellites of his bandmates in precision,” Lenny Kaye writes of pioneering musician who had been battling cancer

 Read the full article on Rolling Stone

Vintage Carnival Videos

 

Jello Biafra Takes on Trump, ‘Nazi Punks’ Then and Now, and His Former Band, Dead Kennedys

What’s so unfunny about disruption, hate and misunderstanding? Ask Anti-Trump activist and punk-rock avatar Jello Biafra, who says, "I always thought, Hey, what if horror lyrics were about real monsters?"

Read the full article on Variety

 

Worst Revolution Ever

Attacking the U.S. Capitol is not an act of patriotism. Obviously.

Read the full article on The Atanltic

 

20 Lessons from the 20th Century About How to Defend Democracy from Authoritarianism: A Timely List from Yale Historian Timothy Snyder

Timothy Snyder, Housum Professor of History at Yale University, is one of the foremost scholars in the U.S. and Europe on the rise and fall of totalitarianism during the 1930s and 40s. Among his long list of appointments and publications, he has won multiple awards for his recent international bestsellers Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin and last year’s Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. That book in part makes the argument that Nazism wasn’t only a German nationalist movement but had global colonialist origins—in Russia, Africa, and in the U.S., the nation that pioneered so many methods of human extermination, racist dehumanization, and ideologically-justified land grabs.

Read the full article on Open Culture

 

Parents Are Outraged by a Kids' Show About a Very Long Penis

The public Danish broadcaster producing the show claims that it’s meant to explore the body in a fun and embarrassing way.

Read the full article on Vice

 

The Story of Skinhead

The Story of Skinhead

BBC documentary with Don Letts

(2017)

 

Book Review

The Concept of Dread

by Soren Kierkegaard

     This has to be one of the worst books every written. Soren Kierkegaard apparently wrote The Concept of Dread in his younger years as a writer. Reading this short and indigestible tract is equivalent to breaking off the ends of asparagus stalks, not the tips which you can gently cook and easily eat in a wide variety of ways, but the bottom parts that are hard as wood, fibrous, and nearly impossible to chew. Lacking in any clear purpose, direction, or relevance, this is one work of literature that can be spat out into the garbage so you can move on to something more nurturing and digestible.

It is not easy to tell why Kierkegaard wrote this. He never explicitly states his reasoning behind the matter. He apparently wanted to write something about psychology, or at least he keeps mentioning psychology and saying that it has severe limitations, something he claims to demonstrate. But the definition or purpose of psychology is never examined. He says its is inferior to religious dogma but he doesn’t get around to saying why dogma is more useful. In fact philosophy, in the truest sense of the word, is meant to do away with dogma, a system of beliefs that does not require proof or systematic thinking. After reading The Concept of Dread, you can possibly deduce that Kierkegaard preferred dogma to evidence based reasoning because he had no talent for logic or methodical thought. He never argues a point. What he says is true because he says it is true and you are stupid if you don’t agree with him. End of argument.

You could invoke Wittgenstein’s claim that philosophy is meant to be descriptive of reality rather than argumentative, an assertion that has merit when used in its proper context. But if that is what Kierkegaard was up to here, he fails miserably to convince through description. The descriptiveness starts with Adam, alone in the Garden of Eden. Kierkeagaard objects to the story of Adam and Eve being interpreted as an allegory or a myth; we have to take it as historical fact. Why? We can’t know because he never gives a reason for this. But let’s be nice readers and take him at his word for the sake of following his discussion. Adam, the first man, was paradoxically outside the human race while being the human race at the same time. Why is this important? Who knows? Did Adam have language? He didn’t need it because he had no one to speak to until Eve came along. Only God spoke to them but God is omnipotent so would he even need to use language to communicate with them? Couldn’t he just implant information in their heads without the medium of speech? Kierkegaard raises this question but never attempts to answer it. And that pesky serpent didn’t actually speak because snakes, by nature, don’t talk.

So when Adam is confronted with the possibility of committing Original Sin he hesitates because he feels...GASP!...a moment of dread. Yes those butterflies in his stomach were a paralyzing anxiety that made him see a future full of infinite possibilities that could result from his desire, decision, and consequent action. But Adam has faith and takes a leap, crossing over the abyss of anxiety and commits Original Sin. And we, the descendants of this mythological first man, have been doing the same thing ever since. This is a profound insight by Lierkegaard’s standards. But this is the same dread felt by every teenage boy the first time he tries to kiss a girl. It is the dread you feel before going to a job interview. It is the dread you feel the first time you score a bag of weed or use a fake ID to buy beer at a convenience story. No doubt, it is the dread that Evel Knievel felt every time he revved up his motorcycle engine before jumping his bike over a line of parked cars. Yes, people get nervous before they do something risky. It is a mundane insight by most people’s standards. 150 years after Kierkegaard wrote The Concept of Dread we have self-help books with titles like Feel the Fear and Do It Anyways. Thanks Soren, you really did the world a favor by writing this book. It’s not easy to comprehend what the field of psychology was like in the mid-19th century but certainly they were farther along than this. He doesn’t advance his thought much beyond this simple assertion and his claim that psychology is inferior to dogma is undercut by the obvious fact that he didn’t seem to know much about psychology to begin with.

How does he claim to know what Adam was feeling at that time? Did he travel back in time and ask Adam about the matter? He couldn’t have been relying on someone else’s testimony because no one was there but Eve and the snake. By Kierkegaard’s admission, the snake couldn’t speak and it hasn’t been established that Adam could either. Is any of this important anyways? Nope. Kierkegaard doesn’t grasp the idea that philosophizing and quibbling are two different things.

There is also a wonderful mess of insights we get from the rest of the book too. Original Sin entered the world through Adam but it is possible that Original Sin was first a part of God; after all, if it entered the world, it must have entered from someplace, it had to exist first in order to enter. Every human is a sinner but each one has to start the chain of sin themselves; humans are born as an eternal chain of recurrence and sin starts anew with each one. “Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy”, says Edward Norton’s nameless charcter in Fight Club. Great idea, Kierk, old buddy...where did you get it from? Socrates, right?

We also get a long digression into the description of time and eternity, though it’s not explained what purpose this serves in developing the thesis, though it’s not quite clear what the thesis is. Time is the measurement of eternity’s flow through the present into the past. A moment is a segment of eternity but it is a segment that lasts forever. Eternity only extends into the future because once the present becomes the past it no loner exists. But doesn’t that mean that eternity has a boundary and a limit, making it, therefore by definition, not eternal? “Shut your mouth”, shouts Kierkegaard from his grave, “logic is nonsense when being confronted by the truths of belief and dogma.”

Towards the end he claims that people who have faith are able to overcome dread but people who oppose faith because they fear it become locked up inside themselves because without faith, they are unable to make the leap of faith that overcomes dread. What logic! Did Kierkegaard personally know of anyone who fit this description? How can he claim this to be a universal truth when he spent so little of his life around the other human beings that he despised so much? The guy didn’t have many friends and apparently he didn’t want any either. He probably never even traveled outside of Denmark. These concepts of faith, dread, and fear of faith are vaguely expressed and some concrete examples of what they mean would have gone a long way in clarifying matters and proving they have any validity. Kierkegaard lacked an epsitemology and his wrtigins suffer terribly because of that omission. Of course, he believed faith mattered more than facts so why bother with proof?

Don’t forget that spirit is what binds the soul to the body and Hegelian philosophy, science, paganism, and anything that isn’t Christian is twaddle, an oddly annoying word that gets used often whenever Kierkegaard makes an ad hominem attack on anyone he disagrees with. To be fair, this overuse of “twaddle” is probably the fault of the translator. But even so, at an intellectual level intellectual level it’s like calling someone a poopy-face or saying, “Yo mama’s so hairy you got rug burn when you was born.”

The book actually gets easier to follow towards the end. The theme of “dread” that is supposed to be the thread tying the whole book together but it is not strong enough to do this. The comprehensible parts of the book are random and don’t complement one another. The Concept of Dread is formless, sloppy, lacking in structure, without clear purpose, and never presents any ideas that are relevant to anything in the real world. If you are not a Christian, then it is based entirely on a false premise. You may want to be a good sport, keep an open mind, and try to see this from the point of view of someone you disagree with but that does not add up to much when the author does such a poor job of stating what his purpose even is. Even if you are a Christian there is a definite possibility that you won’t understand or accept what Kierkegaard is yammering on about because he does such an insufficient job of writing clear and meaningful ideas.

Some people say reading Kierkegaard will help you understand the Nazi Martin Heidegger but if you can understand Heidegger at all, reading Kierkegaard doesn’t offer much assistance. Heidegger, the fascist sympathizer who studied under the Jewish Husserl and had and had an affair with the Jewish Hannah Arendt, was possibly nothing more than a master of obfuscation anyways. Bertrand Russel accused him of using complex language to hide the fact that he had nothing to say (I only partially agree with this) and even the Nazis snubbed him, calling his philosophy gibberish, when he petitioned them to be the prime philosopher of National Socialism while applying for the position of rector of an elite Nazi university. (If you are a Kierkegaard defender, don’t whine at me about this digression since Kierkegaard also goes on long, irrelevant sidetracks in several of his books.) Reading Kierkegaard in light of Heidegger is like reading one of those footnotes that doesn’t do anything to enhance the main text.

Over the last 30 years, I have read a lot of philosophy. I have read other books by Kierkegaard too. Abstract thinking is not foreign to me. Other reviewers say they like this book but can’t explain it. Some reviers explain it but their explanations make no more sense than the original text does. I’m calling bullshit on The Concept of Dread. It reads like something Kierkegaard wrote in haste without putting much thought into what he wanted to say. He probably never bothered to proofread it, revise it, or edit it. If he were alive today, he might even be surprised it is still in print. Skip over this pile of detritus and go straight for Fear and Trembling. I don’t agree with that book but at least it is comprehensible and can be understood, analyzed, and debated in a meaningful way.

Kierkegaard, Soren. The Concept of Dread. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey: 1973. 

 

The Troublemaker

On a Wednesday afternoon in February 2007, I shared a booth with a man named 26 inside the Travelers Club International Restaurant & Tuba Museum in Okemos, Michigan. We’d picked a spot far enough from the door to give us some respite from the winter blast, and dozens of African masks and beautiful battered tubas lined the walls above us. Police reports have listed 26 as 5' 7" with a “thin” build. In person, it was a little hard to tell how thin he was. He wore a blue crocheted sweater, fraying and loose, and an oversize baseball cap with the logo of the Weather Channel covered his scraggly hair, which was wild and wiry but not yet gray. He wore large rings on almost every finger and projected an amiable fragility

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Book Review

High Priest of California/Wild Wives

by Charles Willeford

     In the mid-1980s, RE/Search Publications put together this nice-looking edition of Charles Willeford’s High Priest of California and Wild Wives that also includes a short play version of the former title. The two novels are both centered around a tough, independent male who, despite all his actions, well-intended or not, end up confronting the traditional institution of marriage. While working within the idiom of pulp, noir, and hard boiled detective fiction, these short novels offer a more nuanced portrayal of this subject than you might expect. As nuanced as the stories may be, both are pessimistic in the end.

High Priest of California tells the story of Russell Haxby, a used car salesman in San Francisco who meets a naive woman named Alyce in a dance hall. She takes him back to her apartment and they start circling around each other in a game of seduction. Haxby is the obvious chaser and Alyce is the obvious catch but there is something different about the way she eludes his advances. Haxby is an experienced womanizer and he has never met a woman who resists him in such unusual ways.

Alyce is a strange woman, hopelessly naive, living a dull and sheltered life. She collects stray cats and keeps them in her apartment, never allowing them to go out. Haxby is turned off by this and the way he reacts to the symbolism says a lot about how he treats her later in the story. Knowing that Alyce’s goal is to capture a man and keep him under her control, Haxby nonetheless tells her he loves her and wants to marry her. The cats also symbolize a secret about Alyce that gets revealed later in the story.

The pair of Haxby and Alyce play off another couple in the narrative. Ruthie is Alyce’s roommate and she is involved with a middle-aged man named Sinkiewicz. Ruthie met Sinkiewicz when she worked as a nurse for his bedridden wife. Sinkiewicz is waiting for his terminally ill spouse to die so he can inherit her money and marry Ruthie. Compared to Haxby, Sinkiewicz is dull and sheepish; like Alyce’s cats, he is contained and kept under control by Ruthie. His life amounts to little more than running back and forth between Ruthie, the stronger woman, and his wife, the weakened, catatonic wife who can never get out of bed. Ruthie and Sinkiewicz are one representation of marriage that identifies why Haxby hates the idea of commitment.

The unattached and domineering Haxby contrasts sharply with the married, subservient Sinkiewicz who has more in common with with Alyce than appears at first. Later in the story we learn that Alyce is also married. Her husband Salvatore is an elderly man whose brain is rotting from untreated syphilis. Alyce runs his life because he can’t take care of himself. He has been infantilized, emasculated, symbolically castrated by his illness. Alyce dominated his life; she contains and controls him the same way she imprisons her cats in the apartment. But Alyce is not happy in her marriage. Stanley is a burden and for Haxby he is both an obstacle and yet another symbol of the weakened state of a man imprisoned in a marriage. Stanley is like Sinkiewicz, a man enslaved by his relationship but Stanley is also like Sinkiewicz’s wife, sick and dependent like an unwanted appendage that can not be removed. The trio of Haxby, Alyce, and Stanley mirror and shadow the trio of Sinkiewicz, his wife, and Ruthie. The way these characters play off each other while they interact creates a complex web that gives this easy-to-read novel a great deal of depth and dimension. This structure of characters who dance around one another is slightly reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

Russell Haxby is a sociopath. He wants to sleep with Alyce and his plan is to get Stanley permanently out of the way so he can do so. Simultaneously he acts as savior, liberator, and malevolent predator. He will do anything he can, be it bribery, flattery, honesty, dishonesty, or violence to get what he wants. But this behavior is not limited to how he treats Stanley; he treats everyone in the book with the same lack of discretion. Haxby controls every character in the whole story. He moves the people around like checkers on a checkerboard, as if he is playing a game with himself as his own opponent. Haxby manipulates everybody, always knowing the right thing to say but Stanley, being stubborn and stupid, proves to be his strongest opponent.

Sinkiewicz and Haxby contrast with one another because Haxby is in almost complete control of his life. A lot about his true nature is revealed during the time he spends alone in his apartment, a room that contrasts sharply with the living quarters of Alyce and Ruthie. Haxby lives in his bachelor pad, complete with classy furniture, a mini-bar, records, lamps, and a desk. He thinks of it as a palace but this grandeur is deflated by the fact that it is a former servants’ chamber, located over a garage, and its windows give him a view of nothing but the backs of other houses. It is physically comfortable but psychologically dark and lonely. The only people who visit him are a cleaning lady and delivery boys. He spend his time reading complicated books and translating Ulysses into language that is easy enough for ordinary people to understand. This shows that Haxby is not only sociopathic but also possessed of a need to prove that he is more clever than everybody else. This is related to the reader in his comments about James Joyce, the way he treats the other characters, the way he tricks customers into buying cars while cheating his boss, and his strange habit of physically assaulting random strangers on a number of occasions. But Haxby’s life is empty and unfulfilling. His power over other people is saturated with an underlying melancholy. He also isn’t quite as smart as he likes to think he is; he throws his copy of Ulysses across the room when he gets frustrated with Joyce’s dense prose. Towards the end of the book, he stays in bed for two weeks, stuck in a rut of depression.

Willeford portrays the married life as being a droll and mediocre prison but he also portrays the life of an aging bachelor as being dismal as well. In the end, we are left with no satisfactory options.

In Wild Wives, Jake Blake is another type of man altogether. As a private eye his business is failing. As this short novel starts, a high school girl named Barbara Allen is teasing and hitting on Blake in his office while her brother Freddy is off someplace else. She begs Blake for him to give her a job as his assistant. He wants to get rid of her so as a prank he sends her off to look for thieves in a department store. This harmless joke proves to be fatal to him later in the story.

Her older brother Freddy is involved in a gay love affair with an art dealer who lives in the same building as Jake Blake. When the detective pays the dealer a visit, Freddy gets jealous and assaults him outside this lover’s room. Jake Blake, being the tougher of the two, beats Freddy up and leaves. Freddy, along with his sister Barbara, will be a part of Blake’s downfall in the end.

These two sordid subplots get resolved later but along the way the main story revolves around Jake Blake’s affair with Florence Weintraub. She claims to be the daughter of Milton Weintraub, a famous architect who has hired two bodyguards to follow her around and keep her out of trouble. Florence is a nymphomaniac and a whole heap of trouble for every man she sleeps with. She hires Blake to help her lose the bodyguards so she can be alone with him for some hot sex which ends up happening on a the balcony of a restaurant.

Even though Jake Blake is a private detective, the story really has no mystery. The biggest secret of the book is about who Florence Weintraub really is and why she is being tailed by the two hired goons. This secret gets explained halfway through the story when Jake Blake goes home with Florence and encounters Milton Weintraub. After Blake learns that the architect is truly not her father, the older man winds up dead on the living room floor. Florence and Blake take off in her car in hopes of getting some money she has stashed in Las Vegas and then flying to Mexico. From that point on, Jake Blake gets himself out of many bad situations only to find himself in worse situations as the story goes on. Jake Blake is the type of macho character who is smart enough and tough enough to get himself out of any trouble but every time he does that, he winds up in a bigger hole than he was in before. He was figuratively born with a noose around his neck and the noose gets tighter and tighter as the events of the novel unfold.

Like High Priest of California, Wild Wives is structured around the theme of marriage and family. Jake Blake and Florence Weintraub get married in Las Vegas under assumed names. Their marriage is based on a reversal of gender stereotypes; Florence is after Blake because she wants to have sex with him and he is only interested in her money. He certainly doesn’t complain about the sex though. They invert the roles of her previous marriage where she married a man for money and he wanted nothing else from her but sex. They hated each other and were incapable of staying together. Likewise, soon after they marry, it is obvious that Blake will never be able to stay with her either, especially after he sees a newspaper story about the crime that happened the night before. Marriage is dangerous for either of them and Jake Blake can only think about getting rid of her in the most honest and expedient way possible.

As mentioned before, the other family nightmare for Blake involves Barbara and Freddy Allen who come back to haunt him in the end. When they show up with their father and a police chief named Pulaski, they prove to be his doom. Family life for the Allens is depicted as being full of dirty secrets, dishonesty, and plots against innocent people.

Jake Blake is actually a somewhat sincere man. Even though he has an affair with a married woman and, in the end, does a cowardly policeman’s job for him, he really is a moral person. His intentions may not be entirely honorable but compared to every other character in the story, he is a paragon of virtue. Like most hard-boiled detectives, he sticks to a code of ethics no matter what but this code of ethics is not powerful enough to save him from his fate. Wild Wives is a darkly humorous tale of a tough guy pursuing his own destruction. The reader may not even realize how comedic this story is until after they finish the last page. You could imagine the Coen Brothers making a great movie out of this. It would probably be a surprise if they were not already familiar with it.

Both Wild Wives and High Priest of California use marriage and family as structural themes for their noir idiom. Wild Wives is a satire of pulp detective fiction and High Priest of California is a pessimistic character study of a postwar American man. It might be wrong to overstate the family motif by calling either of them social commentary but the social commentary is there, giving these easy-to-follow-stories more emotional and psychological depth than you would ordinarily find in literature from this genre. Genre styles of fiction always have their handful of authors that turn the style into art; for pulp noir fiction, Charles Willeford is one of them. 

Willeford, Charles. High Priest of California/Wild Wives. RE/Search Publications, San Francisco: 1987.

 

Phantom

Phantom

short experimental film by Toshio Matsumoto

(1975)

 

Everything Visible Is Empty

Everything Visible Is Empty

short experimental film by Toshio Matsumoto

(1975)

 

Between Time and Timbuktu or Prometheus 5: A Space Opera

television film

based on the writing of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

directed by Fred Barzyk

(1972)

 

Lung

Lung

short animated abstract film by Robert Darroll

(1986)