The New York Review of Ideas » Q&A

Deciphering Cryptozoology

pkoch — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 23:58:45 +0000

On the one hand, Loren Coleman is a skeptic, firmly grounded in scientific principles. On the other hand, his particular branch of science, cryptozoology, gives equal credence to suspected bird species, say, and near-mythical creatures like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. Cryptozoology—the search for and study of animals whose existence or survival is disputed or unsubstantiated—is frequently treated as an easily dismissed bastard child of science. If that’s the case, then Coleman is the unrepentant modern father of the field. Besides authoring nine books on the topic, he also owns the International Cryptozoology Museum, which he runs out of his home in Portland, Maine. A former psychiatric social worker and university professor, he now makes his living writing, lecturing, and consulting about cryptozoology, which he’s studied since before the word existed in English. Coleman’s out to show that there’s much more to cryptozoology than chasing down Bigfoot or plumbing the depths of Loch Ness for its most famous resident.

Loren Coleman, with an old friend.

What first piqued your interest in cryptozoology?

In March of 1960, I saw a science fiction film called Half Human, by Ishiro Hondu. This was his first science fiction film after a career in documentary filmmaking, and it was about the Abominable Snowman, filmed among the native Ainu people of Japan. I saw that film on a Friday night, and when I went into school the next week, I asked my teachers what was this about the Abominable Snowman? They all told me, “Don’t waste your time,” “Don’t pay attention to it.” Even though I was only 11 or 12, I heavily questioned authority.

I started investigating crytpozoological cases then. Because I was so small, I would do this with the help of a game warden so people would actually talk to me. I investigated black panther reports in Illinois, mystery cat reports in Indiana, Bigfoot cases, giant snake reports and other strange cases throughout the Midwest…anything that was a little abnormal that newspaper people wrote up as weird animal stories. I understood them as cryptozoology.

Where’d you go to school?

I very specifically chose the university I went to—Southern Illinois University in Carbondale—because there was a folklorist there named John Allen who had been doing research on the Illinois bottomland apes.

Isn’t cryptozoology linked to a history of “fabled” animals being found walking (or swimming) on this Earth?

Yeah, in Cryptozoology A to Z (Fireside Books, 1999), I talk about them in terms of the animals of discovery—the mountain gorilla, the okapi (a member of the giraffe family with zebra-like stripes, found and catalogued by modern science in 1901), the coelacanth (a prehistoric fish thought to be extinct for 65 million years when found very much alive in 1938). Those are creatures that people knew about, that they reported, that scientists went looking for and “discovered.” They dot cryptozoology, but once the animal is found it drifts across this line into zoology, and the zoologists forget that it was ever doubted.

There have been really amazing discoveries in the recent past, like the saola, which is a rather large goat-antelope that was discovered in an area of Vietnam near the Laotian border known as the Lost World. Or the discovery of the fossils of the Hobbit, homo floresiensis, in 2003. It was a whole species of human-like beings that lived at the same time as humans.

The giant squid used to be “The Kraken.” It wasn’t until the 1880s that it became a known species, and it wasn’t even filmed alive until 2006. So some of these animals still remain mysterious.

Aren’t people in the zoological field actively seeking these animals, too?

Well, I think there are generational gaps in zoology. There were a lot of Victorian explorers who were amateur naturalists, amateur zoologists. They explored different parts of Africa and when they came across a new animal, they’d send off the bones or skins to Europe and get them classified as a new animal. It was the first wave of cryptozoology.

After that and through the 1950s, science was very reflective of the Eisenhower, McCarthy, Nixonian era in the United States. By that I mean there was a conceited notion that there weren’t any unexplored areas left in the world, and so there weren’t any undiscovered animals.

But then something very revolutionary happened in the 1960s; there was a conscious revolution around the world. We came into the Kennedy Era in which there was much more openness to talking about everything, whether it was politics, the justification of wars, or stigmas regarding sex. I think it also occurred in the natural world, in natural history. Instead of thinking that all of the animals in the world had been discovered, there was a new environmental consciousness that led to an explosion of animal discoveries from the ‘60s through the ‘90s—the megamouth shark, the Chacoan peccary, the saola. I think we came out of a period of isolation, and cryptozoology happened to benefit from it. Zoologists and naturalists started taking interest in cryptozoology, whether they called it that or not.

The current generation of cryptozoologists and writers are very much a product of the 1960s—conscientious objectors, hippies, politically left-wing, not in any way conservative and held back. We were radicals, ones who questioned authority and questioned whether science really knew all that they were telling us. So part of that questioning authority really slipped into the way we view zoology and anthropology.

Is the public more impressed by creatures like the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot than by small fries like sharks and birds?

Yeah, I call them “celebrity cryptids.” I think the word celebrity really captures it. People are interested in what Brad Pitt’s doing, not what his understudy or some other minor actor is doing. In the same way, people know the words Yeti, Bigfoot and Loch Ness Monster. So if you’re telling them about reports of a bird—a warbler, say—that’s been seen by the native peoples of the Congo, and how zoologists and cryptozoologists are studying that and think they’re going to find it (which happened last year), you don’t get people in the media or even in the general public interested in that. Because it’s not splashy, it doesn’t get a lot of press. And yet there are snakes, there are birds, there are species of dolphins that are only known from eyewitness reports. Several new species of lemur have recently been discovered. New animals are discovered all the time, and some of them are found employing cryptozoologically-based methods of using eyewitness accounts to guide an investigation in a particular direction.

If cryptozoology is involved in so many animal discoveries, why don’t we hear more about it?

My whole contention is that people mainly forget, and then they think, “Oh, some scientist discovered a new animal last year, what’s the big deal?” The big deal is that it’s found using exactly the same methods that are being used by people searching for the Sasquatch, or the lake monster in whatever lake, or sea serpents. But because we haven’t found what’s supposedly the big one, people forget that cryptozoology is successful. Of course we’ve found the big one; we found the okapi, we found the mountain gorilla. But people forget that, they almost have amnesia once these discoveries are made, and they keep saying, “Cryptozoology doesn’t work because you haven’t found Yeti” [laughs]. So it’s kind of a Catch-22.

Will cryptozoology ever go mainstream?

When I was at the university and I would write a paper about the survival of Neanderthals, which was just a way for me to look at cryptozoology, my professor thought it was an interesting idea and he gave me a grade on it, but he gave me a grade mostly upon the idea and not upon my good research and my several dozen references and all of that. Whereas now what’s happening is those people who are in universities, those people I’m talking to when I go to the Royal Albert Museum or the American Museum of Natural History, are professors in universities, are college students. So we have people in the mainstream who are interested in cryptozoology, who grew up on cryptozoology.

The Outsider

nderenzo — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 15:41:07 +0000

When David Denby released his book Snark earlier this year, he was met with groans and eye rolls from the blogosphere that he criticized. Many bristled at the critic’s suggestion that a glib, sarcastic approach is somehow damaging to the cultural conversation. You might assume that Michael Musto, The Village Voice’s gossip columnist for the past twenty-five years, would follow this trend of attacking the attacker. Ironically, “The Hunter S. Thompson of Snark” (The Toronto Star) remains surprisingly thoughtful and even a bit sentimental in his assessment of the world of snark.

Michael Musto.

You got your start writing movie reviews as a child and then theater criticism for The Columbia Spectator in college. What prompted your interest in this form of writing at such a young age?

I was an only child. I still am. I didn’t even have imaginary friends. As a result, I found that the best way to spend my time was to go to the local Cineplex or the theater. I was keeping it all for myself. That’s how I developed my snarky voice. I rolled my eyes at everything. I didn’t trust anyone. It was a healthy attitude to have as an outsider.

So was that tone something you worked on, or was it just an extension of your natural voice?

I didn’t work on it as a shtick. It just came as a defense mechanism for being an outsider. And it stuck for life.

Who were you reading at the time?

I was reading Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, a lot of what was called the New Journalism. Breathless, first person narratives.

Speaking of New Journalism, The Toronto Star once called you “the Hunter S. Thompson of Snark.” What does a title like that mean to you?

I thought it was redundant being called the Hunter S. Thompson of Snark! It’s like being called the Paris Hilton of Socialites. But I was honored to have been put in the same sentence as Hunter S. Thompson. Now I sound like one of those Oscar nominees! But he has been the basis of so many bad movies.

You’re widely considered one of the best practitioners of snark, but how do you go about defining the term? Does it actually mean anything?

I think I have a different form of snark. I’m not afraid to show that deep down I’m a fan. I’m not out to throw mud at everyone. It becomes tiresome to be snarky all the time. You look like the outsider trying to bring down celebrities. If you don’t temper that with positivity, then it becomes a parade of meanness. Some websites do snark on full throttle. Then you just come across as a bully in the corner making fun of the football team and the cheerleaders.

Do you have an unwritten code of snark ethics? Are some people off limits? Who is open to your criticism?

Anybody who does something stupid could potentially be my victim. Celebrities live under a giant microscope. I always say that if we were looked at as closely as celebrities are, we would all be considered giant fuck-ups.

So what are your favorite targets?

Hypocrisy is my favorite target. I hate when people carry on about love and peace when they are leading this closeted lifestyle. A famous person coming out could help so many people. Celebrities always say they don’t want to talk about their private lives, but they’ll talk about everything else but their homosexuality. They pimp their kids, they talk about their alcoholism. They’ll talk about everything else.

Snark has been under attack recently because of the publication of David Denby’s book on snark. Have you read it?

I have read about it, and I totally understand where he is coming from. Having a bratty point of view nonstop is not constructive. It is not constructive for bloggers to constantly be attacking people bigger than them. But I do think snark can be extremely valuable. From the beginning of civilization, there have been snarky gay people responding to their oppression, snapping their fingers at oppressors.

Blogs in particular have been considered the main forum for snark. Do you approach your print column any differently than your blog?

I generally have the same tone in my columns and in my blog posts. In the columns, I do more interviews. I don’t interview someone like Craig Bierko unless I like them. I wouldn’t want to waste their time for ninety minutes and then smear them in my column. The blog is a forum for my current frustrations. The country is plummeting into a giant toilet bowl.

You blogged recently about how you think Tyler Perry should come out of the closet. How do people respond to blogs or columns like this one?

I recently wrote a blog about Barry Manilow. I had no idea there were so many middle-aged women who still cling to the idea that he is straight. These are the same people who thought Clay Aiken was straight for so long.

Are there any celebrities you spare?

Nobody’s spared my venom, but I do like to champion celebrities. Even Paris Hilton. I wrote something saying that we need her. She’s the Mickey Mouse of the new Depression. She can help us get through it. I thought Lindsay Lohan was a good actress, and I liked Britney Spears.

I have seen you interviewed many times on television, and you come across as a charming person. Do you think critics like David Denby too often conflate a sarcastic style of humor with a mean personality?

People often ask me what the most shocking thing about me is, and I say it’s that I’m actually a nice person. People think that I’m exactly like how I sound in my columns. That’s like saying that Anthony Hopkins must be a serial killer. The tone is definitely me, it’s not affected. But I’m responsible. I’m a good friend, I’m loyal. I sound like a dog now. I’m basically that nice kid from Brooklyn, just old now.

What are your thoughts on the future of snarky media?

I’m pro-snark, so I’m okay with it. I think that’s the direction we’re going in. It’s always been a wonderful tone. In the 80s, there was a magazine called Spy. It was like the predecessor to Gawker, but it was done with a lot of wit. I was definitely victimized by them, but it was a refreshing burst of fresh air. It was coming out at the same time that Vanity Fair was running puff pieces about celebrities.

Liz Smith was recently dropped from The New York Post. What do you make of such a move?

Liz was very supportive of me from the start. Her dismissal is representative of the rise of snark. She refused to deal in snark. She loved celebrities, and she actually hated gossip. Her good gal position I guess couldn’t work in this new environment. The blogs allow anyone to be a gossip columnist. The tendency for anyone is to be snarky when you write about celebrities, to take out aggressions and frustrations on them. People are not usually super-sweet to celebrities. That’s a thing of the past. ♦

Smashing the Template

dkoo — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 12:52:26 +0000

Elliot Jay Stocks is a storyteller who works without words. Currently a successful freelance web designer based in Cheshire, England, 27 year-old Stocks has made a name himself in the global design community, cultivating a popular blog at his website elliotjaystocks.com and traveling the world to speak and host workshops about new media design at conferences such as An Event Apart, SXSW, Web Developers’ Conference and The Future of Web Design.

Visual design, in Stocks’ mind, is not a passive endeavor but a form of communication—design is part of the message, not a shiny coat over the message. If the trends in design currently tilt toward simplicity and transparency, Stocks presents a strong counterargument for using aesthetics to tell the story in a different light. The grungy, painterly aesthetic and complex visual structure of his blog—in which every visual element leads to another—demonstrate that his theories can be used to make a website a work of narrative art.

I spoke with Stocks via e-mail while he was in Norway about his theories of narrative design, and how designers can affect their own craft through the very act of design.

Elliot Jay Stocks. Photo via Flickr.

Which is more important to you as a designer: aesthetics or usability?

Aesthetics, hands down. I’m not saying aesthetics are more important than usability in general, but personally, my interests lie more in aesthetics. That’s why I’m in this business, and that’s certainly why people employ me—for my aesthetics.

Can you elaborate on this a bit?

I think it just comes down to the simple fact that safe, non-experimental design bores me, and I get sick of seeing it absolutely everywhere. I don’t think I’m that experimental, really, but it’s obvious the vast majority of designers are afraid to step outside current design trends.

You’ve spoken in the past about using narrative cues to create direction and resolution in visual design. What does that narrative focus add to a visual design for, say, a website?

Well, in applying narrative theory to web design, I was trying to look at how experimental design creates a sense of tension—a pleasing level of tension akin to the one experienced as a narrative builds to a climax—and how, if it’s wrapped up in an aesthetically pleasing design, we can reach a happy conclusion, with the status quo changed for the better.

So my application of narrative theory to web design is more about the way in which we experience design, rather than a model that says we should design in a narrative way.

Can you give some examples of how this theory plays out in a practical sense? Why would you say most design on the web is less narrative than a medium like print?

It’d be nice to see more art direction online, and see sites breaking free from the rigidity of templates. Think of the impact of a featured article in print and then its tame representation online; it’s just not comparable.

I think a lot of it comes down to the lack of art direction in web design, especially when compared with a site’s counterpart in print. Jason Santa Maria’s site is an example that’s often cited to demonstrate how this could be changed: every post looks different.

So you think print still has a future in the annals of design?

Although the web is a continuation and expansion of print design, it’s still very different. It’s not just the way we design for each—it’s about the experience.

The way you experience a printed newspaper or magazine is totally different from the way you experience their counterparts on the web. Because of that, print will always have a place.

But what about new media technologies like blogs that are having such a big impact on traditional print publishing?

I think blogs have had—or are currently having—a huge effect on traditional idea of what journalism actually is. In the nineties, when everyone had personal home pages, they were just sites. But because blogs are instantly so comparable to offline newspapers and magazines, we’ve seen a bigger shift towards citizen journalism.

On the one hand, this is great since it removes a lot of the elitism present in traditional journalism. But the flip side is that, perhaps that was there for a reason!

So, while it’s great that everyone can be a journalist, we should bear in mind that most people are not journalists by trade for a reason. Unfortunately, the quality of writing on the web is still largely inferior to that in traditional publications.

What about aggregators, which compile content from multiple professional sources?

Aggregators are changing the way in which we experience news, because the source is becoming decentralized. Potentially, this is a great thing, since the focus is then on the content and not on the source. Aggregators, by their very nature, pull from a variety of sources, and therefore we should—in theory—be heading towards a more objective system.

Hand-in-hand with your advocacy of narrative design is your argument that designers can affect the habits of their audience by intentionally degrading the experience in one medium versus another (for example, enabling certain features in Firefox but disabling them in Internet Explorer). How can designers use this “intentional degradation” to affect how people interact with design?

Intentional degradation—and, by implication, progressive enhancement [rewarding good habits with more complete design or enhanced features]—has to be considered within the context of the website, or more specifically, according to the target audience.

Put simply, you can’t let the site look bad in Internet Explorer if that browser is used by the majority of your readers.

But even so, we shouldn’t get too caught up about getting websites to look the same in every browser. Even if an IE version does degrade to something less pretty than what Safari users will see, that doesn’t necessarily matter—as long as the IE version doesn’t appear to be broken.

So you think that advocating for preferred browsers is the way to go?

I’m not advocating that we only support new browsers and drop off support for older browsers as soon as possible. Just that we remain aware of the inevitable difference between browsers, and that we design according to our target audience.

What got you talking about your theories of web design?

I used to build Flash-only websites and it was fine, but I started to get frustrated by the amount of complex code I had to write to achieve relatively simple results, and the Flash IDE [integrated development environment, or the software used to design in the Flash medium] is a real pain.

There’s something more tangible about HTML [The simple markup language that defines most websites’ structure and textual content]. And I like the idea of it being accessible to everyone, in spite of the inconsistencies across browsers.

Who or what are some of your most important design influences?

I think Dave McKean had a big influence on me as a young designer and artist. I still love his work, especially his early covers for The Sandman [the graphic novel series by Neil Gaiman] in his pre-Photoshop days.

In general, I’m a fan of anyone who sets trends instead of following them, and who embraces the idea of making the web look beautiful.

Who do you think we should be watching to bring design on the web to the next level?

Khoi Vinh, for his work at The New York Times. Jason Santa Maria, for the art direction stuff that I mentioned earlier. John Gruber, for the fact that he manages to charge a subscription fee for an enhanced version of his RSS feed [laughs].

Quick—the homepage of nytimes.com: messy or brilliant?

Why can’t messy also be brilliant? ♦

Free Market Protectionism

ffair — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 22:26:08 +0000

There was a time when “protectionism” was a dirty word, but the current economy has left room for debate. No one could be happier about this than economist and Cambridge professor Ha-Joon Chang, author of Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (Bloomsbury Press, 2008). In it, he rails against the idea that countries must adhere to a free trade, free market policy to flourish, and asserts that all wealthy nations (the United States included) used protectionism to grow their economies.

Citing Friederich Hayek and Karl Marx as influences, Chang argues that any emerging economy needs a mix of protectionist measures, free market opportunities and government guidance. He took time out during a tour marking the book’s paperback release to discuss his unorthodox theories about protectionism, and why the current economic meltdown is changing views about the best way to nurture national economies.

Do you think a lack of protectionism is the main, if not the sole, reason that developing nations are failing economically?

Protectionism alone doesn’t necessarily develop or destroy the economy. It depends on when you use it, how you use it, how you target it, how you combine it with other policies. Even when they were all using protectionist policies, countries like Japan and South Korea were far more successful than some of the other countries in Latin America and Africa because their policies were very well-designed, well-targeted. So I’m not saying that it’s just this or that.

But free markets aren’t the best way to achieve growth?

When a country is asked to swallow free-market capitalism, you are told, “Look, we have to generate more wealth before we can distribute it.” That makes sense if it does generate more growth—but does it? No. Not just in developing countries, but in the developed countries, growth rate in the last 25 years has been lower than what it was in the ‘60s and ‘70s. And this is not even counting the current downturn.

Given the economic downturn, have criticisms of Bad Samaritans changed since the book’s 2007 release?

Definitely, there is a lot more receptiveness to my ideas this time around. Today, free-market ideas are on the defensive. At least people are willing to listen to arguments coming from the other side, like mine. Some of the topics that I discuss in the book were out of most people’s radar screens only a year ago, but are at the heart of the debate today. This time, for example, I was discussing with people whether the U.S. should nationalize the bailed-out banks, but a year ago, most Americans thought state-owned enterprises—the topic of chapter 5 of Bad Samaritans—is not an issue for them.

And what role should government play?

The exact combination of government and the private sector will have to defer across countries because they all have different needs, different capabilities, different goals. But the ideology that has ruled the world in the last 25-30 years is that the government has no role to play other than basically building roads and running primary schools.

When South Korea was improving its economy in the 1960s, it was exporting goods in exchange for opening up its markets. Isn’t that counter to your idea of protectionism for developing countries?

That’s what a lot of people are confused about. Engaging with the international economy and exporting are not incompatible with protectionism. The point is that if a country wants to develop export industries in the first place, it may have to employ some protectionist policies. For example, a chapter in my book about trade policy is titled, “My six-year-old son should get a job.” The point being that I have a six-year-old son who—I don’t use this word there—is basically a total “sponger.” My wife and I pay for his food, pay for his lodging, education, healthcare, Nintendo games, and God knows what. So why can’t he work? He is certainly capable of working and earning his keep. I save money by not sending him to school and pushing him into the labor market.

So why not?

I don’t force him to work because I believe that if I invested in him for another 12-15 years, he can become a lot of things: A brain surgeon, nuclear physicist, accountant—you name it. Of course, there’s a chance that this guy will come out to be a total waste of time. But even if there’s a 20 percent chance—or even a 10 percent chance—that he will become one of those things, I’m willing to make the investment. Because I know that if I pushed him into the labor market, there’s a 99.9 percent chance that he will not be one of those things.

And how does this connect to the world economy?

Basically, a country needs to develop certain capabilities to engage with the global market, where everyone is so much more advanced than you are. Even to export pretty basic things like a cheap transistor radio, which used to be one of South Korea’s main exports. The country first needed to develop these industries on the protectionist subsidies and so on. But engaging in the world economy and protecting young producers is totally compatible.

So you’re serving your own interests by educating yourself through others who have done it.

That’s right. Isaac Newton famously said, “I can see further than other people because I stand on the shoulders of the giants.” So it would be madness for developing countries to even think that, “Oh, I can live on my own,” because you are effectively committing suicide then. During that period, you basically do things to promote these countries so that they can compete in the world economy on equal terms in due course. I mean, this kind of protection is very different from the North Korean kind of protectionism, because here you are protecting your economy so you can participate in the world economy on better terms. In the North Korea case, you are protecting your economy in order not to participate in the world economy.

News in Brief

lquateman — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 18:04:01 +0000

Funding international news coverage is expensive bordering on impossible. It is so costly, in fact, that the fear of losing original reporting on the under-funded Web has become a loud and constant source of whining from old media loyalists.

DePaul University grad student Craig Kanalley wants to make opinion quotes and eyewitness accounts easier to wrangle, even when the developing story is halfway around the world. His website, BreakingTweets.com, uses Twitter, a group of editors and a limitlessly large pool of international contributors to format news stories in an unusual, interactive way.

It starts with an editor, who writes a one or two paragraph explanatory intro about the story. Then come the tweeters, who send opinions, analysis, and eyewitness media. Editors cull the best and most insightful tweets from the bunch, as well as occasionally interjecting with their own updates.

Breaking Tweets will not give you the same comprehensive coverage you get from a newspaper with a foreign office full of professional journalists, and Kanalley realizes that. But it is free, provides eyewitness accounts, and just landed him on the UWIRE 100 list of the top college and grad school journalists.

How does Breaking Tweets fit into the greater framework of journalism/new media?

It’s a new type of journalism. I haven’t seen anyone doing anything remotely close to this besides Global Voices, but they focus more on blogs. Breaking Tweets changes the practice because it focuses on editing the Web. There is so much clutter out there but it takes it all and seeks to make sense of it. I think a well done Breaking Tweets story can be just as valuable as a longer-form traditional news story on the same subject. It gives a different glimpse into the story.

People all over the world are commenting on news stories and in some ways reporting themselves. They just need someone to sift through all of that mess and create some meaning through a filter that gets rid of the spam and nonsense.

Does the Twitter form limit you?

Not at all. Tweets are great because they are short, quick and, in many ways, just like quotes that journalists use anyway. They are instantaneous and, as a result, they work well with news in general, also across a wide geographic scope.

People also like that they don’t have to spend a ton of time going through stories. So for now we’re weeding out tweets that aren’t as compelling and trying to limit it to the best ones. Four to six tweets is ideal. It gives enough flavor for the story, especially if those tweets are from the region the news is occurring.

Where do you see the site going in the future?

The format we currently use that treats tweets as quotes has worked well, and that’ll probably be at the core of whatever we do. But in the future, our content editors will be interacting more with users through Twitter to probe for more information and eyewitness accounts.

We also want to develop our niche content better. I’d like the site to be useful to people who aren’t particularly interested in world news. We’re growing, and we’re launching niche affiliate sites soon: Breaking Tweets Sports and Breaking Tweets Entertainment. We want our comments to go through the roof, for people to be active and to tell us, “hey, give us some forums and more places to have the discussion.” Our focus is always content first and the people will come.

Tell us about Breaking Tweets tweeters. Where do they come from and how do they contribute?

Some parts of the world use Twitter more than others, and that’s our biggest hindrance. But in the future, we’d like to develop affiliate sites for specific cities and provide just tweets from that locale. For now, it’s mostly people commenting on events, but we are growing a network of followers through Twitter from all over the world and have been utilizing them as tipsters to get closer to the scene.

Eyewitness accounts can be tough because, like I said, not everyone has Twitter. Plus, you have to be careful to verify what people are saying. We do the best we can with that and at times we have to discount a certain tweet because it doesn’t appear to be authentic.

We want to make this a journalism project first. We look for people who at the very least understand how to construct a story in a journalistic way—essentially how to model stories after what we post now. It’s basically a 5-10 sentence set up and then into the tweets with occasional updates from editors.♦

The Subversive Music of Islam and the Middle East

hbattah — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 04:00:49 +0000

For many in the West, Jihad has simply come to mean Muslim holy war, but then there’s “G-had” as studied by University of Arkansas professor Ted Swedenburg, who is researching Islamic hip hop and Israeli house among other genres. He says the Middle East has been a breeding ground, not for terrorism but experimental music. On his popular blog, readers can catch up with an Israeli transvestite artist who became wildly popular among Egyptian clubbers, a Jewish Moroccan trip-hop artist who sings in Koranic verses, or Muslim punk bands that sport mohawks and produce tracks like “suicide bomb the gap” and “blow shit up.” Swedenburg, aka DJ Teo, plays many of the tunes on a campus radio show he hosts called the “Interzone.” He’s now writing a book on the subject and has discovered that the Interzone phenomenon stretches back a few decades, if not centuries. The New York Review of Ideas recently caught up with Swedenberg to discuss some of his research.

You define Interzone as a kind of music that crosses borders, can you explain that idea?

I’m trying to suggest the Middle East as not being this closed space or alien space but one that is where different trends are pulsating through all the time. I’m the trying to rethink the history of music and culture in the Middle East and emphasize the long tradition of openness as opposed to be cutting off.

Are you critiquing a bias in Western scholarship that says the region as being closed musically?

My target isn’t so much Western scholarship but rather general stereotypes that have become even more rigid of late. One example is Harold Bloom’s introduction to Maria Rosa Menocal’s excellent book about Arab Spain, The Ornament of the World. Bloom praises its accounts of Muslim-Christian-Jewish collaboration, and then says that spirit of multi-culturalism is now dead.

One of the artists you’ve studied is the Israeli transvestite Dana International. She’s a Jew of Yemenite origin who sang in Arabic and became the rage in Egypt but was eventually banned. What was the impact of that?

I think it made visible, for a moment at least, that Egyptians listen to music from Israel produced by people of Middle Eastern background. They have done so and continue to do so, and that’s true in Morocco and a lot of places, so I think it’s just a continuation of Israeli Jewish participation in the cultural life of the Middle East.

You trace this back to several Israeli artists that have sung in Arabic and had hits in the Arab world over recent decades.

In the 1970s Ofrah Hasa (of Yemeni origin) was heard all over Egypt and there was no scandal. There was no scandal with Alabina (of Egyptian origin popular in the 1990s). What’s different with Dana International is that the media was able to throw sexual perversity in. There are a lot of sensationalist media in Egypt. They want to sell papers.

But how are these artists still popular when banned or criticized by the media?

I think people can be skeptical of the media. Plus, a lot of stuff just circulates informally even though it’s banned officially. Enrico Massias (of Algerian Jewish origin) was banned in almost every country in the Arab world. But everybody in the entire Mediterranean knew his songs. People loved the music even though the guy was and is a Zionist and he made a heavily publicized visit to the Wailing Wall right after the June 1967 war. Some people don’t like that, but they like his music.

On the other hand you point out an artist with Jewish roots who considers herself Muslim. Yet by singing Islamic verses she may be accused of blasphemy. Still, you say it could been seen as progressive?

My argument was that she was just bringing Islam and the sounds of Islam into the mainstream pop-cultural arena in the West. Maybe you could use the term progressive to describe making Islam acceptable and situating it as an element inside of Western life, as opposed to something alien and outside. It says Islam is not the worst, the most horrible, most inherently violent religion in the world, but that there is a another point of view.

On the other end of the spectrum, there is Fun-da-mental, a Muslim hip-hop group whose album is titled “The benefits of G-had”. One of their songs describes bomb-making. Was this an incitement to violence?

Fun-da-mental’s angry but not endorsing bomb-making in any way, shape, or form. The song is actually about three kinds of bombs. One is the dirty bombs, someone like the 7/7 subway bombers in Britain; then there is the guy who is selling black market bombs, and then there is the U.S. bomb maker for the Pentagon. So it’s not vindicating bombing, its just saying: “look, why is the guy making this homemade bomb pure evil and why is it okay that we pay taxes so that the Pentagon can make huge bombs that kill all these people.”

So what is meant by “The benefits of G-had”?

Well, the lead singer of the group, Aki Nawaz, was born in Pakistan but raised in England. He’s using that term jihad in a provocative way. His roots are in punk so he’s trying to think about “what is jihad?” The way I would understand the benefits of jihad from the group’s perspective is that its anti-colonial struggle or anti-imperialist struggle, which is not the way its been configured in Western discourse since 9/11.

Has 9/11 had a big impact on Islamic artists?

Definitely. I think anyone who is Muslim in the West will be influenced by 9/11. At first people had to duck for cover, but pretty quickly there was a discourse of self-defense. Fun-da-mental responded with punk provocation, you know, “screw you—you guys are the greater terrorists” and why is there all this emphasis on Westerners being victimized because of three major terrorist attacks when Muslims are getting killed all over the place, in Bosnia, Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan and nobody’s talking about that? So they are responding with militancy and anger. But it’s not only 9/11, it’s Iraq and what continues to go on in Palestine. So it’s self-defense by offense.

Then you have another response, such as the French Muslim rapper Medine who released an album called Jihad. He’s critical of the French government’s treatment of Muslim immigrants and his response is that Islam is about peace and about being a good person. It’s more religious and contemplative and self reflective as opposed to Fun-da-mental, which is “in your face, screw you guys, type of thing.”

Has there been a backlash within Muslim community?

For Orthodox Muslims, of course, you are not supposed to be singing Allah Wa Akbar to a dub beat. I’m on the “Muslims in Hip-Hop” listserv; people who are orthodox say it should only be percussion, and women should not perform in public, and then there are Muslims who participate in the listserv and are doing well in the music scene. I think there is an ongoing debate on those issues. Its not surprising that people in the community try to enforce morality.

Are there some parallels here to gangster rap in the United States?

Some of the hip-hop artists in Palestine that I’ve spoken to just love Tupac and its kind of the militancy of Tupac that they relate to, though not the gang-banging type of stuff. They can relate to Tupac talking about the ghetto, his more politicized stuff. They also don’t like the cursing. One group I spoke to was pretty explicit, “We love hip hop and listen to it–we just don’t think about using foul language.”

What is the importance of studying the Interzone?

The rise of certain forms of fundamentalist nationalism, particularly in the West today, with prevalent notions of Arabs as a terrorists and fanatics and Islam as being somehow closed or blinded—I think its important to stress that there is another tendency that is maybe more authentic to what the civilization and culture has been like for hundreds of years. That is tolerance and openness and willing to borrow and exchange.

The story of Dana International, for example, is surprising in a sense, but on the other hand, there were so many Jews participating in modern Arab culture before 1948 and after 1948 that there’s continuity there. It’s only because of political changes that have taken place that it now seems surprising that an Israeli Jew who is of Yemeni origin is singing in Arabic. There are so many Jews in Israel who are of Middle Eastern background that are doing recordings like Dana and have been forever. So like part of it is there is this history of cultural sharing and this goes back even to Moorish Spain and the influence of the Lute on the guitar.

It was also really interesting to find out how much there was of that from the very beginning, even in early Arab music after the rise of Islam. In 800 AD, Persian music was the hot thing in Mecca and Medina.

You’ve also offered a critique as to how Middle East youth are being portrayed by major pundits in the West. You’ve taken aim at Thomas Friedman’s writing in particular in contrasting Israeli youth as dreaming of becoming capitalist innovators while Arab youth dream of martyrdom.

Some pundits in the U.S., like Friedman and other strategic thinkers, are thinking about Middle Eastern youth as this potential danger–that there are so many of them and they’re disaffected and that there’s a kind of stark choice between Jihadism or going with Western-dominated globalization and freedom and all those kinds things we need to offer them. That’s a false problematic binary. It’s very possible for Middle Eastern youth to like Metallica and to also support Hamas—not from a religious point of view, but from a nationalistic or political point of view. ♦

A Deeply Weird Human Being

icrouch — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:38:01 +0000

Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life, biography of mid-century American writer John Cheever, was published by Knopf in March. Bailey, who made his name with A Tragic Honesty (Picador, 2003), an exhaustive account of the life of Richard Yates, has had a busy few years. In 2005, his new home in New Orleans was destroyed in Hurricane Katrina, an experience he wrote about for Slate. He credits a Guggenheim Fellowship for getting his family back on their feet and allowing him to get back to work. In addition to Cheever, Bailey edited two Library of America editions of Cheever’s fiction.

On the Monday morning we spoke, Bailey had just finished reading John Updike’s review of Cheever in The New Yorker, his last published review following his death in late January. “Updike shit on me this morning, from the grave no less,” Bailey moaned. “Talk about a dubious distinction.” He was still smarting when we talked.

Blake Bailey.

I know you loved Richard Yates before writing A Tragic Honesty. Did a similar infatuation lead you to Cheever?

I finished the Richard Yates book in April 2002 and I was casting around for something to do next. And I certainly considered Cheever, who is one of my two or three favorite writers. But I wanted to be the first biographer of whatever subject I chose, which was kind of a fatuous, fixed idea of mine, but there it was. Janet Maslin reviewed my Yates book for the daily New York Times, and did so very glowingly. She pressed the book on Cheever’s son Ben, her husband, and he let it be known that he would very much welcome another biography of his father.

You say in the acknowledgments that the book was “technically an authorized biography.” What do you mean by that?

We had a written agreement that was drawn up by the Wylie Agency, which handles Cheever’s estate. It stated that the family could not cooperate with anyone else for ten years or whenever my book was finished, which ever came first. And they had to provide me with all materials they had: letters, manuscripts, photographs, etc. And they could not make any input of an interpretive nature. They could vet the manuscript for factual stuff—-that didn’t happen in 1962, it happened in 1961—that sort of thing.

I know Scott Donaldson ran into trouble with the family when he wrote John Cheever in 1988. Did you want to avoid his fate?

It was mostly my idea. It’s very bad judgment to proceed on any project, especially something as volatile as Cheever, if you’re going to have the rug pulled out from under you, as can happen.

What else concerned you while writing the book?

What particularly worried me was Max Zimmer [Cheever’s lover at the end of his life]. Max was traumatized by what happened between him and Cheever. He cooperated with the greatest reluctance. But once he did commit himself, he gave me all the material he had, some of it very compromising and embarrassing.

I was worried about him for a lot of reasons. One, because my heart went out to Max and I wanted to do him justice. It reflects very poorly on Cheever. And it’s not a good idea to demonize your subject. It alienates the reader, and it’s kind of a self-defeating exercise.

What choice do you have?

None, really. In biography writing, you cannot conceal anything. You have to put it all on the table. If you put it all there, the truth will come out in the wash. Again, I felt that Cheever was essentially pathetic, and ultimately sympathetic, despite the darkness of that episode.

Biography readers have come to expect a redemptive arc in a story. That doesn’t happen with your book.

It’s one of the things that pissed off Updike, I think. My whole approach was to invert the conventional redemptive fable legend, where Cheever was concerned, because I knew it wasn’t true. Yes, on the surface of things, he finally gets sober and he wins the Pulitzer and lives happily ever after. And he comes to terms with his sexual orientation and has this [laughs] redemptive relationship with this young man who loves him.

Sounds like redemption to me.

Sure, but it’s not true. Cheever was more tortured toward the end than at any point in his life. He did not really come to terms with his sexual nature, and therefore with his essential nature, until the very end, so there is that touch of redemption, but not in the conventional terms that had been hitherto accepted.

Why do you think Updike took offense at your portrait of Cheever?

Updike is pretty inscrutable, and I think he also took umbrage with the fact that I imply in the book that he’s inscrutable. And he’s being a little bit disingenuous when he says he was shocked by the darkness of Cheever’s journals. Why should he be so shocked? He saw Cheever in Boston drinking himself to death. He was greeted by Cheever naked and sodden drunk outside the symphony. What did he think was going on here? Then he saw in the letters how nasty Cheever could be on the subject of himself, John Updike, so what’s to be shocked by?

Cheever and Updike are often associated with each other. They had similar backgrounds, were both realist prose writers. Who do you prefer?

Updike doesn’t have that magic. Updike is an exquisite stylist—and Updike knew this too, as he said on the Dick Cavett show, Cheever does things very easily that I could not do with a great deal of effort. And that’s not false modesty; that is absolutely true.

Cheever’s fiction has a wide-eyed, boyish quality to it. And several people in your book mention that Cheever was a boy trapped and overwhelmed by a confusing adult world.

His most characteristic mode was bewilderment. Cheever had a very difficult relationship with the real world. He was a deeply alienated and unhappy person much of the time, and he escaped from that by living in his own world. The way he generally communicated, even with the people closest to him, was through a mandarin persona. But behind that was a person who just did not have a clue. And was deeply insecure and afraid of what was going on around him, especially anything having to do with money or practical affairs.

You say that “The Swimmer” is Cheever’s best story.

“The Swimmer” is especially interesting as a window on how Cheever proceeded as an artist. His personal material, in his best work, is always beautifully synthesized. He was very obsessed at the time with his brother Fred’s absolute and infuriating tendencies to delude himself into thinking that he wasn’t this colossal, destructive drunk who had ruined his own life and his family’s, and that everything was just wonderful. And he, in fact, was terrified that he would deceive himself into very bad alcoholism, which he of course did.

And Cheever liked to swim?

Yes! He loved to pool-jump [laughs]. He’d go from pool to pool to pool, he had all these friends with pools, he didn’t have a pool, and he loved to swim. Because of his peculiar bent of mind, magic happens, the transformative magic of Cheever’s imagination. So the seasons change. The result is “The Swimmer,” which is one of the great short stories of this or any other centuries.

Whenever anyone talks about Cheever, they link him to the suburbs. Chip McGrath’s recent Times Magazine Cheever retrospective is called “The First Suburbanite.” But Cheever never finished high school, lived through crippling poverty during the Depression, and appears from his journals to have hated most of the people in Westchester. How do you reconcile the myth and reality here?

People who are not deeply familiar with Cheever’s work will say Cheever had some kind of conventional sociological insight into the American suburbs. No. It was highly subjective and perhaps all the more piercing because of that. What intrigued Cheever about the suburbs was that decorum was everything, and to such an extent that the basic facts of life had to be denied. The fact that people had ravening sexual impulses, that people got sick and died. And all these things that made life interesting [laughs], that are the very essence of human existence are denied.

When critics dubbed him the “hero of the barbecue and Volkswagen set,” they were overlooking what his work actually contains.

Right. Well that’s mainly the fault of Cheever’s association with The New Yorker, and the fault of Cheever’s own ambivalence. On the one hand, he very much wanted the authority that came along with being a New Yorker writer. He also wanted the blessing of the establishment, be it the literary establishment or the social establishment. He deeply coveted that sort of acceptance.

Even with middle class, non-writer types. Like the story you tell of the young Cheever dressing in his only suit and riding down the elevator with his neighbors, only to go write in his underwear in his apartment building’s boiler room.

That’s very telling where Cheever’s concerned. On the one hand he very much wanted to blend in with the respectable lawyers and professional types that lived in that building, but then of course, he goes down to the basement and takes his clothes off. And Cheever liked to be naked. I hope that came across in the book.

But he never really did blend in. He spoke with that ridiculous aristocratic accent. He was a closeted bisexual and a dangerous alcoholic. Not exactly the all-American man that the critics saw.

Cheever was deeply, deeply weird as a human being and writer. But because of ineradicable association with The New Yorker, critics, especially snippy, pretentious critics like John Aldridge and Irving Howe tended to look down upon him, And that’s a shame, because they are doing it still, especially at universities and in the academy.

Out of Our Minds

mjohnson — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 04:00:48 +0000

In his first book Action in Perception (The MIT Press, 2004), Alva Noe, professor of philosophy at the University of California Berkeley, proposed that we perceive the world with our whole bodies, not just our optical faculties.

Recently the New York Review of Ideas spoke with him about his latest book, Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons From The Biology of Consciousness (Hill and Wang / Farrar, Straus and Giroux, February 2009). In it he argues that the mechanisms of consciousness lie not within the brain but in the interaction between the nervous system and the external world.

Your central claim in Out of Our Heads is that we are not just “minds in vats.” What do you mean by that?

It’s an idea that dates at least from the period of the early scientific revolution. Descartes felt that there is in each of us a thinking thing—he called it a cogito—that feels, that decides, and that each of us is this kernel of consciousness inside.

Surprisingly a certain dominant perspective in neuroscience simply accepts that Cartesian picture whole hock, with one little exception: they think that the thing inside of us which we are is the brain.

What I’m suggesting is that the best way we can understand the brain’s contribution to conscious life is by realizing that the brain is one element in a more complex dynamic between the whole animal and its environment.

But isn’t it the brain that takes in stimuli from the outside world and produces conscious awareness?

I sometimes compare consciousness with dance. I think of ourselves as perceptually engaged with the world around us, and thinking that you can explain it just in terms of what’s going on inside of us is like thinking you could explain dance just in terms what’s going on in our muscles. What I want to say is that it’s true that the world acts on us through the brain, but the brain acts on us through the world. If you remove the world—and the way in which we’re already smack dab in the middle of engaged living with other people—I don’t think you describe any interesting mental phenomena in neurological terms alone.

The proposal I’m making is that it’s not the brain alone that matters; it’s the brain as coupled to the rest of the world, thanks to the whole body. Trying to find consciousness in the brain is like trying to find the monetary value of the U.S. dollar in the composition of the dollar bill—as if I was going to run a dollar bill through an electron microscope and learn something about what it was worth. That’s just the wrong place to look. Not that dollar bills don’t play a role in the economy. They do. Actually, here the analogy breaks down because I think the stuff that goes on in the brain is, in fact, causally involved in our experience of the world in an important way. But not all on its own.

Who disagrees with you?

Mainstream cognitive science supposes that the problem the scientist faces is understanding how the brain builds up a representation of the world around it on the basis of the array of information bombarding the nervous system of the animal. And then they try to come up with models about the way in which the brain does all that work—computational models of the way it might work. There’s really very few people who break with that.

Does experimental research support their position?

The interesting thing is that in practice science does take for granted the embodied situated life of the animal. When you’re doing experiments on an animal, you’re always doing experiments on an animal with a body. But usually they anesthetize an animal, rigidly pin it so that it can’t move, and present stimuli to it while they insert electrodes into the head of the animal. That method rules out the possibility that active engagement or free movement or the alert interest and motivation of the animal play any role in even the operation of its own nervous system. All of that is just bracketed and left out. The brain is studied just as a kind of reactive device triggered by numerous stimuli. You learn all sorts of interesting stuff about the brain that way, but the question is, how does what you learn about the brain relate to the rest of our lives?

Are you saying there is no way to anatomize consciousness, to say that this series of synapses gives rise to this kind of thought or impression?

Everybody in the field agrees that at the moment we don’t have even a back-of-the-envelope sketch of a theory of how what is going on in the brain explains any fundamental features of consciousness. It’s very probably the case that, given our involvement with the world around us, there are meaningful patterns in how what is going on in our brains corresponds to what is going on in our mental lives, but that’s because we already have the background of the living animal’s engagement with the world in place to frame the kinds of things we’re looking for in the brain.
I take great interest in the phenomenon of neuroplasticity. If you surgically alter an animal like a ferret at birth, you can cause retinal cells to sprout projections into the parts of the brain that normally would have supported hearing, and these ferrets can negotiate the world visually. They can see using a different part of the brain as the visual cortex. That’s one of the things that tells me that relationships of states of consciousness to states of the brain are not one-to-one. It’s not as though there’s something about the intrinsic character of v-cells that makes them visual cells. In fact, I think it’s because of this plasticity that many different physical states can give rise to the same kind of experience, and different kinds of mental experiences can arise out of the same kinds of physical states and relationships.

People talk about the explanatory gap. If we want to understand why this kind of experience is produced by this kind of pattern of select activity in the brain, we need to ask what’s the third term that’s linking those two things together. My empirical proposal—and it is empirical—is that the best way to understand those selections is by referring to the animal’s behavioral and environmental context.

So would you say that consciousness is a biological phenomenon?

What I’m trying to make problematic is what it is to offer a biological explanation of these things. What is our biology? If I’m right that the brain’s function is so coupled to a larger context of environment, then biology needs to be pitched at this higher level.

I want to shift the paradigm regarding what the biological is. In Out of Our Heads I talk about the way in which habits and background all change the problems we think biology needs to explain. I’m struck by how un-biologically some neuroscientists think of the brain—as a computer, a Cartesian soul, not part of our biology. There is something not only false but also ugly about the conception of ourselves that people have who think that we are our brains. My view is not that the problem with the neuroscience is science. It’s science that’s straight-jacketed by some bad philosophy.

What are you working on now?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the human being as a technological species. It seems to be a basic fact about the way we cope with living that we use tools in certain kinds of ways. We make clothing, we make shelters, we create environments for ourselves. And there’s a sense that the dwellings that we build and the clothing that we wear and the implements that we manufacture are as much a part of our biology as say the hives of the wasps or the nests of the birds is a part of their biology. That is, technology is a part of biology. Once you recognize that, it really changes how you think about biology.♦

The Last Picture Show

abakkvapil — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 04:00:33 +0000

Film critic J. Hoberman has written for The Village Voice for over 30 years, and is the author of nine books, including the seminal Midnight Movies with co-author Jonathan Rosenbaum, which chronicled the phenomenon of 1970’s underground film culture. In a recent article in the Voice, “Brother Can You Spare $12”, he reflected on the Great Depression, the recent economic crisis, and the rising cost of both making and seeing movies.

How do you think the recession is going to affect the film industry—both the studios and the film going audience?

All the studios, the producers are going to be hurt because people are not buying as many DVDs. And that’s really the most important thing now. Then if there is a rebellion by the audience against paying so much money to go to the movies, the theaters will either lower their prices or some theaters may close. The most vulnerable exhibitors are in places that show more non-mainstream movies. Independent production could suffer because that depends on being able to borrow money. Studio production will probably be the last to be affected. They must be borrowing money too, but you can’t tell where the hell they’re borrowing it from because they’re all owned by big conglomerates. Things will happen, but not everything will happen at once

In your Brother Can You Spare $12 article, you wrote that people will stop going to movies, and even cancel Netflix in favor of keeping their internet connection. Could you explain this prediction a little more?

The amount of money, the discretionary income is going to contract. And you have to figure out how that is going to manifest itself. The studios are so smug now they’ve completely rewritten history. The idea that the movies during the depression were incredibly successful, that people went to the movies no matter what, just isn’t true.

I feel like that’s such a part of the 1930s mythology at this point.

The studios like it too. It’s very flattering.

Let me read you an excerpt from an article in Film Journal on repertory movie theaters—Film Forum’s head programmer Bruce Goldstein was quoted as saying, “Movies will survive…Young people are interested in seeing films they’ve never seen before, classics, in a theatre. Even if they can get the film on DVD, I think they’re really into going to see a movie in a theatre.” What’s your response to this optimistic viewpoint?

He’s putting a very positive spin on things and I hope he’s right. He told me that they did incredibly well with their Depression films [the “Breadlines and Champagne” series this February]. And it’s tough: they’re not on DVD, they don’t show them anymore on Turner. It’s amazing stuff there and its great that people show up and what does Film Forum charge, also 12 dollars? That’s a lot of money, even for a double bill.

What do you think explains Film Forum’s success?

JH: New York is an anomalous place. The movie culture here is not the same as other large cities. There is nothing comparable to Film Forum in Los Angeles, where you think there would be revivals all the time.

Do you have Netflix, or watch movies online?

No, but I will occasionally watch one on a computer. I have a big stack of screeners.

So you watch movies at home because its part of your job?

Yes.

But if you were going to be regular filmgoer, you’d go to the theater?

I’d like to. I certainly wanted to see Coraline. It was worth it to me to go see it at the Ziegfeld. I had to pay $15 to see that. Is that because you’re renting the glasses? The theory behind all these special effects things, going back to the 50s, like widescreen, stereo sound, 3D, is that it’s stuff people can’t get at home. When people go out to the movies, there’s a built in imperative to make it more spectacular.

I’m curious to know a little about the book you’re working on now.

I did a book called The Dream Life, [about film in the 60’s] and this is a prequel. It covers the periods from after WWII to 1956 or 57. My feeling is that Hollywood came out of the war mobilized and stayed mobilized for a while, including through the cold war. So it’s about Hollywood’s contribution to the cold war, sort of the making of the cold war. I’ll get very involved in the politics and the studio politics.

In your article, you write about how the 1930s film industry that persevered through the Great Depression reflects on the situation the film industry is in now. Are there any other periods of economic or political struggle that could be revisited now?

The other period that I use as a reference is 1968-74, with the recession caused by the oil crisis. But it’s mainly because of the war, just general social chaos. I think that’s good for movies. Even the period after WWII, which is the period I’m studying for my new book, there was enough money but the industry was in crisis and that created possibilities and confusion, which was healthy. And Hollywood forgets what bad shape they were in in the Sixties. Studios were losing money. That was a bad time and it wasn’t even caused by a catastrophe.

Do you think a recessionary climate will inspire a new underground film culture?

It might. I like to think there’s an upside to the bad economy. Because at least in New York, maybe the rent will go down, then the city will become a more interesting place. People can afford to live here. It may be too late in Manhattan, but it’s not too late in the neighborhoods.

There’s a film collective in Sunset Park called Light Industries that shows avante garde films in a warehouse. It sounds like a renewal of the underground film culture that you wrote about in your book with Jonathan Rosenbaum, Midnight Movies.

Light Industry certainly sounds like a continuation of that grassroots film culture. There’re a lot of places where it still exists. There was also place in Williamsburg for a number of years called Galapagos, which just moved to DUMBO. One of the guys who programs for it was a student of mine years ago.

Do you believe that movie-going still has a chance of surviving?

There’s still this communal thing, people still want to go to the movies to be part of an audience. And that hasn’t disappeared. ♦

War of the Words

jkaplan — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 23:58:49 +0000

Physical Anthropologist and Florida State University Professor Dean Falk is in the midst of waging an evolutionary battle of the sexes with the publication of her new book, Finding Our Tongues. Falk argues that it was pre-historic Woman who sparked the flint of intelligent human evolution. She theorizes that baby talk, or motherese, is unique to humans and that it holds within its high pitched, sing-songy nature the key to language itself. As a mother and grandmother herself, Falk is no stranger to using voice as a tool of comfort.

Your theory champions the idea that the mother of modern language is, in fact, the human mother. Why mothers?

Our early ancestors would have been like our nearest cousins, the great apes, and our more distant ones, the monkey, and in those groups paternity is not recognized. Survival of the infants is all up to the mother, so that mothers and infants had to be targets, you know, lightning rod foci for natural selection. Survival of the fittest had to have depended on mothers and infants and so I pursued that. If you look at comparative primate behavior and all the tool use that does exist, it’s the females. It’s the females who crack those nuts with stones more than males in the Ivory Coast, the female chimpanzees. It’s the females who recently were discovered differentially making spears and spearing bush babies. If you look at Japanese Macaque monkeys who are famous for their proto-cultural inventions, it’s the females spreading it to their kids. Eventually the males got it too, but the focus has been on mothers and their infants.

Do you consider your argument “feminist”?

I’m supportive of women and I recognize sexism, but I’m not a ranting, raving, radical feminist. However, there has been a traditional school of thought in Paleo-Anthropology that’s been going on since at least Darwin, that males—Man the Hunter and Man the Tool-Maker— have been the movers and shakers of evolution. And then around the 1970s women anthropologists and a few men realized that there are some other people around, too, other than adult males and so they started to examine women and their evolutionary role. They formed a model of Woman the Gatherer who opposed Man the Hunter; they pointed out correctly that women, in non-industrialized cultures actually produce most of the calories by gathering food while the men are out trying to hunt. More recently there has also been the recognition that grandmothers were really important for childcare, which would have allowed their daughters to produce more children. So there’s been some recent recognition that women have a significant role in human evolution.

Is there anyone out there currently offering a counter-view?

There’s another book that just came out called Adam’s Tongue by Derek Bickerton, and he’s in the other school. I did not know he was doing Adam’s Tongue and I doubt that he knew I was doing Finding Our Tongues. It’s like an evolutionary battle of the sexes.

Your ideas have created controversy with many linguists. How do you break with existent theories on language development?

First off, any discussion of language origins by its nature is going to be controversial, that’s always been the case. It was such a hot topic that The Linguistic Society of Paris outlawed all discussion of it. And there are schools of thought today. One school of thought in which I partake is called Continuists, and we believe that language evolved out of the basic vocalizations of our ancestors. There is another school called Discontinuists, and they say that ape calls have nothing to do with it; language is something totally new and different. Often, not always, those folks are linguists and linguists look at language from the top down. They look at language today in the world and then speculate how it could have evolved. They’re very mathematical, very formal, very logical. There’s nothing wrong with that; I admire it, but they discount the fossil record and the behavioral information. Continuists look at language more comparatively and go bottom-up.

You do go bottom-up in your book by claiming that language is a consequence of evolution. What evolutionary changes set the stage for speech?

We share a common ancestor with chimps. Between five and seven million years ago our ancestors, the hominins, split off from chimps and went their own way. We have fossil evidence that shows it was around this time the whole human body was refined for walking on two legs and we know the pelvis, hip area and birth canal were changed. We also know from fossils that brains were very small in the beginning and that they evolved in size through time, and that theory is irrefutable. So birth canals were getting narrower as the brains were getting bigger.

How did these physical changes allow for language development?

Birth is no problem for apes, that baby slips out. But for our ancestors there came a point when birth was really difficult, as it is today for women. The evolutionary solution was that natural selection favored babies that were very small— small enough to make it through the birth canal. Those smaller babies were developmentally delayed; there was a postponement of their gestation, they were finishing gestating until the first year of life. Because of this delay, newborns didn’t have the physical capability to cling to their mothers. I figured the initial kind of vocalization between infants and mothers had occurred because of the physical separation.

But why would humans be physically separated from their babies?

Those apes and monkeys are glued onto their mommies; they’re never put down and there’s very little vocalization between mother and infant. But, with humans that’s not the case. Babies can’t cling to us; we have to cling to the babies. At first I wondered “But why would our mothers put their babies down? Why would they?” Then I realized that it ties to the physical evolution of bipedalism and that was the epiphany; it had to do with brains and heads getting bigger at the same time that there were modifications in the human body. So I realized there was something about opening the vocal channel that had to do with the fact that our infants were at times not glued onto their mommies.

Does this mother/infant communication appear at all in chimps?

Contact calls between mothers and infants are wide across animals. But motherese, or baby talk, is what you hear when you go to the grocery store and hear mommy talking to her one-year- old baby. It’s not the way she talks to the clerk she’s checking her groceries out from. It’s very special; it’s got distinctive features and it’s incessant, it’s non-stop, it’s pervasive, it’s a continual communication. And it’s two-ways, because infants respond to it with their own body language and vocalizations and that is unique to people. Chimps don’t have that, and they probably never did.

How did this idea of pinning language to motherese originate?

The initial stimulus came from a woman named Ellen Dissanayake— I heard her present a paper a number of years ago talking about motherese and its evolutionary relationship to the templar arts like music and dance. That is where I learned in real life that baby talk is unique to people and I thought “Oh, there must be something there to do with language origin.” But I just filed it away and let it rumble around the attic. Later I picked it up and started to develop the idea; the book kind of evolved in pieces. It was a very important epiphany for me to tie in physical evolution and hominin evolution with these behaviors.

How did you come up with the evidence to back up your notion?

The book is really a synthesis of information from a lot of fields- psycho-linguistics, comparative psychology, social anthropology, archeology, physical anthropology. I synthesized a lot of information and a lot of fabulous work of other people to come up with my theory.

When you first came out with this theory in a 2005 target article in the journal of Behavioral and Brain Sciences some of your peers criticized your claim that baby-talk is universal?

Yes and I have addressed the idea that baby talk is not universal by looking at Western Samoan, Kaluli New Guinea and African-American Working-Class cultures where it was not supposed to exist and it most certainly does.

How did you respond to critics who said that you did not explain how motherese relates to linguistic grammar and syntax and others. How did you respond?

At the time I never said I would explain the grammar and syntax. What I was talking about in that article was the initial, the pre linguistic substrate. The question that I was addressing in the target article was ‘Where does baby talk come from?’ and making the argument that it was preliminary from the substrate from which afterward language would have evolved.

In what ways did this book grow out of these criticisms?

I decided to take up the challenge and go further and that is what got this book going. I also have gone into a lot more detail about the relationship between being exposed to motherese when you’re an infant and the acquisition of language. I also did several new things. I looked into what was happening in the brain when babies lost the ability to grip onto their mothers, and what was happening when those vocal channels opened and mothers and their infants started making noises towards each other. I found that Neurologists were already looking at hands and their representations in the brain. They had already formulated the hypothesis that language areas had come out of hand areas in the brain. I also looked at music and art. I started to think about what must have been going on in the brain to facilitate these behaviors.

What is the connection between motherese and music?

Music is basically a right side of the brain phenomenon, language is left; they both have to do with sounds and processing sounds in a sophisticated way. I think the two halves of the brain evolved together, and I think music and language evolved together. Babies are born without language, and by the time they’re one they’re getting it. With the acquisition of musical skills it is very, very similar to the kinds of things that happen with the acquisition of language skills.

Between motherese and art?

I think of art as frozen gestures; it’s visual, it’s something you put down and you freeze. I got really interested in seeing if there were parallels between artistic and linguistic development. I started to look at kiddie art from around the world and, lo and behold, the same kinds of things happened in the development of artistic skills that happen in the development of musical and linguistic skills. And then I went into the fossil record and asked “Where do we see art in the fossil record, and does it make sense?” Essentially the argument is that neurologically what happens in our brains to allow us to have language really is affecting neuro-networks in general and is really affecting multiple domains.

How would you like to see the conversation commenced in your book move forward?

It will direct itself and if I feel the need to respond I will. In the target article, for instance, I put stuff out there and when I got beaten up I thought “Well, I’m going to answer these people.” And that’s where this book came from.

Why does this matter to so many people?

I think people are inherently interested in their origins and so called trade books. They’re interested in the question of where they came from. They’re interested in evolution. It’s a hot topic, particularly in light of Darwin’s 200th birthday.

What practical conclusions about mothering can you draw from your research?

Looking at all primates from monkeys on up to people, it is clear that little babies have a strong and intense need for physical contact and cuddling and affection from caregivers. I think it’s worth keeping in mind when we’re parents. ♦

Man in the Mirror

fpollitzer — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 23:58:48 +0000

Tattoo artist, narcissist, and leader of the world’s “last all-inclusive organization”. NYRI gets under Brian Kelly’s skin.

I wanted to talk to you about the Brian Kelly Army, and where the idea came from. But first of all, how did you become a tattoo artist?

Tattooing was a long, complicated journey for me. A guy who was a year ahead of me during my undergrad studies opened a shop and took me on as an apprentice after I graduated. I had always thought about tattooing and had several tattoos, and this was right before everyone was a tattoo artist in 2002.

Ha ha! Did it come naturally?

I started tattooing but it wasn’t much of an apprenticeship and I wasn’t much of an apprentice. I was given some machines that didn’t work very well and left to figure it out on my own. Then another guy started tattooing in the studio, but he hated the owner. He showed me quite a bit, in between being very insulting to me. But then I had to spend years unlearning most of what the other guy taught me anyhow.

So how long have you been tattooing your face on other people?

I started tattooing my face on people almost as soon as I started tattooing. I think the face tattooing began in the early spring of 2003.

What made you decide on this particular image?

The image is based on of a photo of me wearing Elvis glasses in the Graceland gift shop. I didn’t like this photo at first, but I then used it for an image of a poster after tweaking out the contrast in Photoshop, and I later used the same image for a painting.

Is it symbolic?

The image struck me as being very iconic. When I decided to make a tattoo of my face, I had really grown to like it. And while the choice of the image was based on aesthetic decisions, it is also symbolic.

How so?

Elvis was the king of rock & roll—the first true super star—a lesson of how getting everything you want will kill you on your toilet if you are not careful. And the photo is taken in the gift shop at his house which has been turned into a monument celebrating excess.

Perhaps Elvis’s mistake was not to die at 27. Or failing to reinvent himself once he had become the king of rock & roll.

Elvis was just a poor country boy. I blame it all on the Colonel. And he was reinvented after the he left the army, as a non-threatening entertainer.

Can you tell me about your most recent recruit to the Brian Kelly Army?

The last person to join the army is Niels, a Dutchman. Though I made a bet with a drunken German not too long ago, and the winner of the bet got to tattoo the other person. Even though this drunken German didn’t know how to tattoo, I said ok, because I was certain I would win, which I did. He said he would get my face tattooed on him then. But he hasn’t yet. My mother always said, “Never trust drunken Germans,” and I guess she was right.

Is there a typical army member?

I tattooed Niels when I did a guest-spot in Rotterdam before I went to New York last fall. One of the girls who worked at the studio brought him in. I guess she convinced him to do it, because I hardly spoke to him, I don’t think he really spoke English, and I don’t speak Dutch.

And…?

And no, I don’t think there is really a typical member of the army. They vary widely in background and social class. Some of them I’ve only met the one time.

Do you have a goal in mind with this project?

The goal of the project has changed many times. When it began, I just wanted to see if I could convince people to do this. Then when people did start getting the tattoo, I began to think of a purpose for it. I thought maybe I should take over the world, but I don’t really want to be responsible for that. I have enough trouble keeping my apartment clean. And then I thought maybe I should save the world, but then I thought, “What a fucking headache.” In the end, there is no purpose, which I think is brilliant.

Like Elvis, you’re just a “non-threatening entertainer”?

The only thing resembling a purpose for this project is that I’ve turned myself into some sort of icon—celebrating nothing, for no financial gain, for no reason besides that I have decided to do so. Which I think is pretty meaningful, or maybe more of a world view. But artists do not create meaning. The viewer supplies meaning.

That’s a very postmodern statement.

If that statement seems postmodern, I guess it reflects that I have sat through too much art school. The idea of artists not supplying meaning is actually a Tom Molloy-ism. He was one of my tutors at grad school.

You have also written that you enjoy the “space between things.” What do you mean by this?

My enjoyment of the space between things is a reference to the paintings I made during the last stint of school. I wrote a thesis about my work; I extended the idea of Pop Artists using comic imagery in their paintings. The art of comics is an art of telling stories. The appearance of the image is one of the least important aspects of telling stories, but is the part the Pop Artists appropriated. I think the magic of comics happens in the blank empty space between the panels, in the “gutter” as it is called, where the viewer is left to connect the juxtaposed images on his or her own. So I created paintings that appropriated the gutter of comics into painting. Which if you follow Marshall McLuhan and I’m not sure he has it right, is a mixture of hot and cold media. The medium is the message. The subject of those paintings is really the empty gap between the panels of the images. It gets very complicated. And to make the answer shorter, I’ll say that I like the space between everything, especially girl’s legs.

How do you feel every time you sign up a new member?

How I feel when I get a new member has changed as much as everything else does.

Does it surprise you?

At first I was really surprised and excited and would run around and tell everyone I knew at least five times. But before I left Minneapolis I was doing so many of them, it had begun to lose its novelty. It’s sort of a lot of work for twenty dollars. But I do still enjoy doing the tattoo, especially when I am somewhere that I haven’t done one before. I’ve made a commitment to myself to do this tattoo for the rest of my life for the same price. Depending on what country I’m in, the price shifts when the currency changes.