Hi everyone. I’m having a small meetup this Thursday to discuss the future of the book. Please come to Noir at the Charles Hotel in Harvard Square at 7. More info
Twitter Copywriters and the l33terati
Today on the internet, I’m trying to figure out the origin of the “If you lived here, you’d be home now” sign. The kind that 80s development utilitarian high rises in the fartherst corners of the city limits sometimes display outside.
Seems like it’s a Boston thing. I first came across the phrase reading Susanna Kaysen’s memoirs of MacLean when I was eleven or twelve. And I clearly associate it with the apartment complex by the often gridlocked Storrow Drive on-ramp to 93 South. A friend of my mother once lived there. It’s the Kevin Bacon of real estate in New England and iconic enough for Mass General Hospital to use as a landmark on their directions page. This article suggests it started as a 60s citywide campaign to reverse the flight to the suburbs.
It’s like “A diamond is forever,” classic and to the point. It’s so clever it could be twittered. Something you memorize without thinking.
Since I started the blog in April of last year, I’ve had a halfworked post titled “l33terati” waiting as a draft. It’s not that I can’t quite figure out what to do with it, as I’ve certainly posted plenty of “blog essays” without any real point or unifying theme. It’s that the idea behind it is entirely false but something I really want it to happen. It’s my own fiction. I want for there to be a generation of authors whose love of writing was born from years of geekery, starting in chat rooms and message boards.
So in my post-long alternate history of book culture in the aughties — “l33terati” — there’s a generation (1978-1986, mainly) writers with a rough, punchy way of writing that is not without aesthetic merit. The fiction doesn’t take place on the Internet necessarily, but the narrative is clearly influenced by it. It is a literary movement that is a total rejection of the purple teased out prose of MFA-speak that needlessly prattles on about memories of grandmother’s house and the smell of sugar cookies and carpet cleaner or whatever.
So there is no geek literary movement. There are geeks that write, some even embrace their geekiness, but no work is about to oust “Eat, Pray, Love” or “The Corrections” as the dominant publishing ideal. Maybe the reason “l33terati” never happened is all the geek writers value tl, dr above everything else.
If there is a “l33terati,” they aren’t writing novels or even short stories. They are writing flash-super-super-flash fiction or flash-super-super-flash creative nonfiction. That quick evocative half-poetry, half-advertising that is “A diamond is forever” or “if you lived here, you’d be home now,” well you can find it on Twitter every day.
This generation considers the way words look and sound together, without necessarily a care for their actual meaning. I think of the time I spent deliberating on a handle for my AIM account when I was a teenager. I was really proud of how clever it was (and I won’t tell you what it is, least anyone uncover the sprawl of terribly embarrassing high school lonesome usenet posts Google has idexed…forever.) It was like that for most teenagers in the 90s, a mix of emo and self-promotion in the “losthelecopter,” “vixengoverness,” “cakelike” and others. Back there there were no photos or real names, so the handle was the way you stood out in an internet community. There were straightedgers who had their handles between x — “xdollfacex” or such. And if you took a conventional handle, one with your age, hobby, or hometown, well that was another form of signaling.
I’m not quite sure how to write this, but I think technology makes
young people proficient in copywriting, more so than literature. The ultimate pop culture reference of the year: Don Draper, as he proclaims the new Kodak invention isn’t a wheel… but a “Carousel.” It seemed like a Twitter epiphany:
“”Technology is a glittering lure. But there is the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash if they have a sentimental bond with the product. My first job, I was in house at a fur company. This old-pro copywriter, Greek, named Teddy … Teddy told me the most important idea in advertising is ‘new.’ It creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of Calamine Lotion. We also talked about a deeper bond with the product — nostalgia. It’s delicate but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek, nostalgia literally means ‘the pain from an old wound.’ It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship; it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called ‘the wheel’; it’s called ‘the carousel.’ It lets us travel the way a child travels, around and around, and back home again to a place where we know we are loved.”
I studied economics in college and my favorite professor said we should never turn in a report longer than two pages. Anything more than that would be digressing from the assignment. While, I’m well aware my writing could be smoother and flow more pleasantly, I count myself as lucky to never be bogged down with “qualifying the signify” academic-ese, I’d inevitably need to un-learn. Actually, when I come across academic papers seeped in such language, I think it looks so… middlebrow. Like a kid playing dress up.
Which reminds me of the lecture I attended at Frieze last month, “Scenes from a Marriage: Have Art and Theory Drifted Apart?” It’s worth listening to the podcast, especially to hear the scuffle between the panelists and an artist who sees nothing wrong with using words like paint or clay. While I sometimes appreciate an artist’s vague language, when an academic speaks without clarity, I see it as their own shortcoming. It’s bluffing, it’s failure to communicate. You might as well say nothing at all.
The Boston Globe writes about the Davis Square Tiles Project, which tracks down the students who 30 years ago put up painted tiles at Davis Square T station’s brick entrance wall. (via.) “’How many people walk by those tiles and think they were made by some third-grader this year?’ said Sabino Lagattolla. Lagattolla, who drew a sailing ship under a beaming yellow sun when he was in second grade, is now a 38-year-old network engineer, living in Hudson with a wife, two children, and another baby due in November.”
Kathryn Bigelow is finally getting her due (Steady Diet of Film, Slate, Salon, etc.) This month Harvard Film Archive has a retrospective of her work (see her in person July 2nd, introducing Hurt Locker.) In addition to Near Dark, Point Break, and Strange Days, among others, Bigeow also directed part of the prescient Scientology critique Wild Palms.
Most of us, would prefer to die at home, with family. Yet “the majority of us die in hospitals and other institutions, often in pain.”
Radio Boston is airing an extraordinarily moving series on end of life care. It makes me not want to get old in Boston. “Aggressive medical care at the end of life accounts for one third of all Medicare spending, yet such spending and extensive treatment can too easily decrease a patient’s quality of life during this period, and thus, their quality of death.”
At 5 tomorrow (Sat, April 25,) I’m giving a talk about some of the ideas I hammered out here in a panel on “Fiction and Media Change.” It is part of the super-interesting MiT6 (Media in Transition) conference at MIT this weekend. Immediately following is a panel on The Future of Publishing with Gavin Grant, (Small Beer Press), Jennifer Jackson, (Donald Maass Literary Agency), Robert Miller, (HarperStudio) and Bob Stein, (The Institute for the Future of the Book), moderated by MIT CMS Geoffrey Long.
Video is Justice
I dragged the text file that was Cell Phone Camera Forever out of the trash before posting it last January, because I was second-guessing up to that moment whether it wasn’t too obvious or incoherent. Since then, it is still one of the most popular posts on this website. It seems none of us quite know what to make of our cheap, immediate access to creating media. Does anyone really want, what Momus called, a “1:1 ratio of experience to writing” (replace “writing” with your media of choice)?
A 1:1 ratio of experience to writing means that you’ve become an efficient journalistic machine: nothing you do ever goes to waste. Every single thing you experience gets written about somewhere. It doesn’t have to be experience in the real world; it almost seems like I write, now, about every website I visit too.
I need to revise the ultimate point in that post. A camera can be an interruption, it can create a barrier between you and the moment in your life you mean to be enjoying. Mrs. Tulip give a great example of this:
Two schools I have taught at in the past couple of years ban camera use at their high school musical night. One of the reasons is because students look out to the audience to see if mum and dad are watching. If they see only a sea of lenses instead of adoring eyes they are met with technology rather than soul.
We are obsessed with recording life from our point of view, even when it is only 30 cm from the next person’s POV. The Mona Lisa is photographed by every visitor to the Lourve when we have ready access to pristine images of her taken in optimum lighting etc.
We humans are strange creatures.
But the ubiquity of pocket-size video and point-and-shoot cameras is something we shouldn’t ever take for granted. It brings people to justice.
By now you may have seen the horrific footage of London police assaulting 47-year-old newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson, who was walking home from work by the g20 protests before he was attacked, had a heart attack, and died. (More.) The video was filmed by a bystander who “attended the protests near the Bank of England out of curiosity.”
While there was some whispering on Twitter and message boards that Tomlinson was beaten with a truncheon, until the video was released, his weak heart seemed to suffice as the cause of death.
Most people generally trust that while authorities aren’t angels, they don’t act widely out of character. It just doesn’t make sense that they might beat, to the point of possibly inducing a heart attack, an old man who doesn’t even look like he was protesting anything. Well, now you can see for yourself.
If you are at all interested in the subject of sousveillance for human rights, take a look at WITNESS. The organization was founded in 1992, the year after George Holliday heard commotion outside his apartment and took his brand new camcorder to record police savagely beating Rodney King. The odds of having a camcorder on hand, (let alone at all) were pretty slim fifteen years ago. But today nearly everyone can document an abuse of power as it happens.
[By the way, Massachusetts has an obscenely antiquated law against what it calls "wiretapping," “intended . . . to prohibit all secret recordings by members of the public, including recordings of police officers or other public officials interacting with members of the public, when made without their permission or knowledge.” I believe New Hampshire and Pennsylvania have similar laws. Stupid, unjust, and yet on the books.]
Images from Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Phantom Limb series.
Update 4/17/09: Very interesting response from William Shaw at RSA’s Arts and Ecology Centre blog: “having met Rodney King a couple of times while I was working in South Central Los Angeles, I wouldn’t envy anyone who becomes part of the info-maelstrom. The film of Rodney King’s beating became a focal point for civil rights activism, but King himself was not a man who ever asked for the attention, who felt tragically responsible for the deaths that happened in the ensuing riots, and who appeared to be just as much a victim of the all attention he had as of that original police assault.”
The Problem with Shepard Fairey
Shepard Fairey’s much hyped Institute for Contemporary Arts show, “Supply and Demand”, probably never would have happened without the new president. But that famous image fails as anything more than a reminder. It is not that it borrows so obviously from communist propaganda design, but because it doesn’t transcend its source of inspiration.
There is nothing about it to communicate that this is about 2008, and there’s an election in America, a country deeply fearful, frustrated, and cynical. It is as it looks: a Dear Leader-like swoon….which could work only if you interpret it at it as a self-mocking, self-aware rub at “drinking the Obama kool-aid.” However, the poster came out early in the primaries, before thousands of people stood in queues to hear him speak. Fairey himself admits the famous Che Guevara image was a major source of inspiration.
True, it is an inspired choice of image of Obama. He is captured exactly as we like to think of him: looking caring, but just a bit distant and analytical. That is precisely why people who really like Obama tend to really like Shepard Fairey’s Obama poster.
Now that the right person for the job ended up the White House, it’s worth pointing out Tony Puryear’s poster of Hillary Clinton was a hell of a lot better:
Puryear is also taking inspiration from propaganda posters, but by using a photograph, rather than illustration, it moves beyond its source. It mocks the Communist propaganda that was the inspiration. You can see the lines on Clinton’s face, she looks relaxed. She radiates warmth as much as power and intellect. She’s a human being, not an icon.
There is a twist to the Clinton image. But with Shepard Fairey, what you see is what you get.
Before the Boston show opened, Fairey came to town to wheatpaste images, mostly around Harvard Square. The first one I noticed, was outside the Gap. At first glance, I thought the Gap commissioned it. It’s next to the door and looks “urban” but in a way that wouldn’t scare the suburbanites off from buying socks and down jackets. It is intricate, but so totally inoffensive, it is virtually indistinguishable from contemporary jeans advertising. Positioned by a store front, it only looks like an extension of the store.
Image of Fairey in front of the Gap from ICA’s Flickr
What’s the point of street art that only encourages more foot traffic at the Gap? Was the Saks campaign pro bono too? I don’t have a problem with artists doing commercial work to pay the bills, but if and when you do work for free, why not make something that doesn’t look like the Gap commissioned you to do it?
And before someone comments that the wheatpaste is all about the juxtaposition and its placement in the city and the street — hold on.
It communicates nothing in the context of this space. For the non-Cantabrigians: Harvard Square is Boston’s equivalency of Santa Monica. Nor is it more of the They Live-inspired non-advertising like the Andre the Giant stuff.It’s a poster in front of a Gap that looks like the Gap paid him a few grand to put up.
If you aren’t easily frustrated by visually interesting things which can only be considered at surface level, you may enjoy his ICA show. Otherwise you’ll likely get annoyed by many parts of it.
An entire room is filled with about 40 screen printed images of Joe Strummer, Tupac, Lou Reed, Ian MacKaye, even, good lord, Henry fucking Rollins. As the ICA explains, “Fairey’s graphic style, which takes celebrity portraits and transforms them into iconic cool, is a perfect fit for the music industry.” There’s nothing to the images. The design is nothing above what you’d see in Spin magazine. Is it an attempted visualization of the “favorite music” section in Fairey’s Myspace profile? Or is he really this low concept?
Another room has as a quote, “I use figures in my work who I feel are used and abused as symbols, but without telling the viewer how to feel about them.” And to be honest, the image of Angela Davis is just that. He illustrates her from a unique angle. It’s a dramatic image, but, while I wrote down in my notebook to praise it, I now can hardly remember what it looks like or why I liked it in the first place. Nor can I whole-heartedly recommend my favorite piece in the show — Commanda. It’s an image of a veiled ambiguously Asian/Persian woman holding a spraycan furtively, with the cap facing forward about to be pressed. It’s nice. It’s clever. It’s kinda like something Banksy would do but with lots of pretty embellishments.
As a political street artist, it’s hard not to compare him with Banksy. But Banksy couldn’t possibly create work as moving as he does without staying well-informed of politics. Fairey’s work makes you wonder if he even quite knows what’s going on in the Middle East or what Guantánamo Bay even is. What Fairey communicates about politics is apathy and a vague directionless feeling of dissent. The ornate details that set him apart may add prettiness but no depth to his work.
I was tempted to title this post “Rubylith without a cause,” because that seems very much like a Shepard Fairey pun. Like his fake currency that says says “No Cents” on it. Or the title of the show: “Supply and Demand.” Is this all a commentary on the recession/international economics/ geopolitical risk? Naw, man.
A gallery assistant played up Fairey’s attention to detail, pointing to how precisely the rubyliths were carved with an X-acto. And that’s about right, Fairey does seem to be a perfectionist. But a workhorse isn’t always a great visionary. And his art mostly deals with politics, the limits to his vision are made obvious.
You can find art right down the hall that combines beauty, ferocious attention to detail, and a clear, eloquent, unmistakable political message: Paul Chan’s 1st light (hands down the ICA’s finest piece in their permanent collection). It’s not like artists can’t be both. While a hardworker and gifted graphic artist, Shepard Fairey’s show is verging on boring.
RESOLVED: That the City Council go on record declaring Sunday, January 25, 2009 as Junot Diaz Day in the City of Cambridge. (via.)
I spent most of today and yesterday with the wonderful John Adams miniseries, reminding me to finally look up the origin of the name of his hometown Braintree, MA. It was named after the town in Essex. The most interesting (and likely) theory is it comes from the “abundance of walnut trees growing in the area.”
-
A collection of interesting ideas curated by
Joanne McNeil. About ➚
Sponsors
