It was like walking into a university show in Soho in the ’90’s – Kusama, Warhol, Haring, Basquiat, Koons and Hirst – then suddenly it was like street stuff from the aughts: banksy, Stik, Invader.
Then Hayden Kays and KAWS and Takashi Murakami and Abloh is how it morphed into stuff I had only seen over the last five years because Google throws it up on my projector on heavy rotation ad nauseum thousands of miles from here – like Dream. (to old heads, I say big ups to Oaktown DREAM, rest in power). Then there was a Hirst and a Koons and a Warhol and a sweet roomful of Yayoi Kusama.
Moco Amsterdam is housed in the Villa Alsberg, a townhouse overlooking Museumplein in the heart of Amsterdam (between the Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh Museum). The building was designed in 1904 by Eduard Cuypers, nephew of Pierre Cuypers, designer of Amsterdam Central Station and the Rijksmuseum.
It is a good collection of very specifically well-known contemporary art, linked only by their pop. They don’t hide it, Moco calls itself a “boutique museum.” They have a second location in Barcelona. I heard the immersive digital art installation by Studio Irma was the same there.
What is this show exactly? I found out about it from posters slapped around town:
Wait – what? I was standing there in the street thinking that looks like clickbait for a museum exhibition produced by the marketing department. Here’s 4k video of my visit to Moco Amsterdam … check it:
Moco’s building was a privately-owned residence and one of the first family homes built along Museumplein. It was inhabited until 1939. Then, the house was let to priests who taught at the Saint Nicolas School in Amsterdam. Later it was converted into an office for a law firm.
Moco took over the Villa Alsberg and opened the museum in 2016, a traditional Amsterdam townhome on the museumplein, converted into a walk-through collection. But it is densely packed with the art and difficult to navigate when crowded. I was here on a rainy Thursday and it was claustrophobic. They should show less and allow for more space before the art.
Some artists received better purchase, weirdly (read: banksy). The one Warhol inclusion was pretty cool – diamond dust. Kusama is boss. Banksy’s tenner is great. The sculptures in the garden by Marcel Wander were precious. Studio Irma’s digital immersive art was low-tech, high-concept and cool. But it’s a densely installed collection. It was difficult to appreciate a large canvas by Hayden Kays, mounted in a small room. The Harings were also installed in a small square room, jammed with people. It was awkward.
Koons and Hirst were kind of just stuck in the hallways. Rooms were grouped loosely by era, but not distinctly so. They had these vague categories – Modern Masters, Contemporary Masters. It may have been an attempt to contrast-gain through equanimity but the install just felt crammed and poorly considered.
Prints were indicated to have been authenticated by the artists. The provenance for the Invader piece was credited to Jared Leto. Things that were new to me that I enjoyed were the playful works of Marcel Wander, the digital immersive stuff by Studio Irma and the large canvases (panels?) by The Kid.
The Kid, a contemporary painter using oils to create large photocollage-style paintings, had exquisite technique, though the work was conceptually immature. I wondered if there were painters in this land that spawned Rembrandt, Hals and Hooch and Vermeer and Van Gogh – and if so, what were they into? As a young artist, The Kid is into deeply personal concerns at the moment, but he will be good to watch evolve as a painter. I admired his use of pseudonym and rejection of nation-state in the establishment of his identity. Smart kid.
Ultimately, though, the artists were equalized in the hyper-capitalized gift shop that was tragically post-ironic: Campbell Soup Can skate decks beside decks that had banksy’s girl and balloon – where’s that dough going? Basquiat crowns as lapel pins. Is the Basquiat Estate or somebody who owns some weird rights making money here? on hundreds of euros worth of cheap, chinese-made kitschy derivative chunks of plastic? Is this a non-fungible token (NFT) emerging into totally fungible bullshit (TFB) in the museum culture?
Sure enough, the exibit includes NFT: The New Future, which they claim is, “Europe’s first dedicated exhibition space to the NFT phenomenon.” Beeple. It feels half baked. Exhibition spaces for non-fungible things.
Your ticket comes with a free gift from the museum and a discount for the gift shop. The shop was cringe. There were totes and hats and pins and cards and posters, lots of pink and the generalized motto of the museum: In Art We Trust. I mean. Look, it was a decent show or a weird collection of highly successful names in art since like 1990, in a house, but … what is this?
The curatorial sense here seems to be: throw as many recognizable names up as possible to herd in the stoned masses visiting the museumplein. Oh, and cater to the ever-increasing LGBTQ+ tourism euro, by featuring gay cultural icons and the color pink. This show wasn’t so much curated as listicled. Superficial.
By my observation, the corporate partners of high-profile museums in city centers of the colonial era are amidst a reformation, post-George Floyd – a Black Lives Matter effect is international. Woke culture expects more. Millennials are uninterested in the old narratives. Moco seems to seek to fill a void in perspective over traditional museums – that of street art and free expression. But superficial listicle curation for tourist-culture, and capitalist reduction of profound cultural expression, is gauche.
Moco resides somewhere between traditional museum culture and the modern art marketplace. It’s like a brick and mortar pop magazine on the museumplein.
De machines namen op subtiele wijze de controle over de tijd over van de mensheid en bijna niemand merkte het op.
Deze tientallige cultus van decennia, eeuwen en millennia veroverde de hele cultuur in een tijdsbestek van vijfentwintig jaar en werd het eerste salvo van de machines, met als hoogtepunt de overeenkomst tussen hen die bekend staat als 2000.
Ik ben geboren in een continue en oude cultuur , ongebonden aan dergelijke beperkingen, die tot intellectuele, filosofische, culturele en artistieke hoogten stegen. We vonden schaken uit en een concept van nul en vele andere filosofieën die zich in jullie (met terugwerkende kracht genoemde) eerste millennium vanuit de boezem van ons land naar buiten over de continenten verspreidden.
Totdat we op brute wijze werden onderbroken door de Europeanen in hun woeste eeuwen – van het gebruik van schepen om overal te reizen en iedereen te onderwerpen in naam van een ‘beschaving’ die we vonden en nog steeds vinden als invasief, lomp, fysiek, brutaal, kortzichtig, arrogant en onwetend.
Ze leerden wat ze wilden leren, waar ze baat bij hadden, maar snel … verdienen).
Dus ja, plotseling, precies in het midden van hun tweede millennium, gedurende vijf eeuwen, voerden ze deze wrede, onmenselijke, racistische projectie op de wereld uit, met als hoogtepunt landroof van continentale omvang dat probeerde honderden naties van miljoenen mensen te genocide, die ze ten onrechte indianen en zwarten noemden.
We keken naar dit alles vanaf de andere kant van de wereld, waar ook wij gedwongen werden de aanval van de Europeanen op te vangen, voornamelijk de Britten. Ook wij ervoeren toen de God-complexe en sluwe manipulaties die ze gebruikten om zichzelf te verheffen en ons tot onderwerping te buigen.
Dus, net toen hun tweede millennium ten einde liep en hun filosofie een zogenaamd postkoloniaal tijdperk schonk, behoren ook wij tot de honderden miljoenen die het juk van hun onderwerping van zich afschudden.
Mijn bestaan strekt zich uit over millennia.
En ik weet niet wanneer je leeft, maar we worden nu dagelijks wakker om na te denken over de mogelijkheid van onze volledige en totale uitroeiing, niet noodzakelijkerwijs door toedoen van gewelddadige mensen, maar misschien als gevolg van wat de Europeanen in het halve millennium heeft gewerkt, in voor- en tegenspoed. Ze bouwen, beschermen en verzekeren hun clubhuis gebouwd van racistische sociale waarheden voor de 1%.
Hun afweer en onzekerheid in het langzame besef van hun tekortkomingen, verlamt ons, terwijl we proberen het langzame, eeuwenoude werk te doen … van het kalmeren, zelfs kalmeren van de oorlogszuchtige aard die zo snel opduikt in het gegrom.
Het wekt flitsende woede en gewelddadige explosies op die verwoestende gevolgen hebben voor honderdduizenden families en onschuldigen.
Het handhaaft blanke suprematie en raciale dominantie. Het gaat door en verergert verraderlijk door luid en op enorm internationaal volume degenen te promoten die voortdurend hun verhaal vertellen, met als hoogtepunt de lelijke rauwe kapitalistische boer die Trump is – een PT Barnum in het Witte Huis die denkt dat hij God is.
(beats)
Het legt degenen die parallelle geschiedenis vertellen stilletjes het zwijgen op – door ze te verwijderen uit de formele digitale basis-tien op het internet tussen de opgeslagen gegevens. En maakt ze impopulair door ze te overstemmen en op alle andere manieren die nodig zijn. Facebook is hiervoor de perfecte machine.
Dit betekent, in sommige gevallen, de waarheid op alle mogelijke manieren impopulair maken en de echte waarheid op alle mogelijke manieren vervangen door een sociale waarheid.
Ze hebben nog niet volledig ingezien dat wat ze hebben gedaan verkeerd was, ze verontschuldigden zich niet, toonden geen berouw, vroegen niet oprechte vergeving en probeerden niet te herstellen wat was.
In plaats daarvan hebben ze hun eigen geschiedenis gecreëerd die deze millennia labelt, de kalender vaststelt en wanneer de dag begint en eindigt en globalistische termen gebruikt voor woeste kapitalistische engagementen, waarin geld de almachtige is en oorlog om hulpbronnen eeuwigdurend is. Ze roepen zichzelf uit tot overwinnaars van deze continentale landroof en eeuwenlang slavenbezit.
Op de klok waaronder we leven aan het begin van hun derde millennium, drijven ze de motor van onze wereld waanzinnig vooruit in een steeds onhoudbaarder tempo.
Mijn naam is Karthik en ik ben een mens, geboren in Tamil Nadu, India, en de afgelopen 50 jaar opgegroeid in de Verenigde Staten van Amerika. Ik ben goed opgeleid en lees dagelijks een grote hoeveelheid contemporaine informatie en gegevens over onze tijd. Ik ben werkloos en gescheiden van alle ideologieën.
Ik verkoop niets en ik ben niet op zoek naar een baan.
Ik probeer alleen maar te communiceren hoe misselijk en beschaamd ik ben door de VS. En om je te smeken om te stoppen. Koppel los. Vertragen. Ga terug naar wie je werkelijk bent. Je bent verdwaald en rent in een razend tempo.
Als je verdwaald bent, ren dan niet in een razend tempo.
Hou op.
Rustig aan.
Verzamel gegevens en evalueer de huidige situatie, wat er feitelijk voor u ligt.
Organiseer en herschik uw prioriteiten naar de onmiddellijke.
The machines subtly took control of time from humanity and almost no one noticed.
This base-ten cult of decades, centuries and millennia seized all of culture in the space of five score years and became the first salvo of the machines, culminating in the agreement among them known as 2000.
I was born into a continuous and ancient culture, untethered to such limitations, which soared to intellectual, philosophical, cultural and artistic heights. We invented chess and a concept of zero and many other philosophies that spread from the bosom of our land outward across the continents in your (retroactively named) first millennium.
Until we were brutally interrupted by the Europeans in their savage centuries – of using ships to travel everywhere and subjugate everyone else in the name of a ‘civilization’ we found and still find invasive, crass, physical, brutish, short-sighted, arrogant and ignorant.
They learned what they wanted to learn, what profited them, quickly though … and were great at taking credit for others’ thoughts and ideas by dehumanizing them (for, among other things, the unwillingness to debase oneself to damaging another for one’s own gain).
So yeah, suddenly, in the exact middle of their second millennium, for five centuries, they administered this vicious, dehumanizing, racist projection upon the world, culminating in continental-sized land grabs that attempted to genocide hundreds of nations of millions of people, whom they mistakenly called Indians and Blacks.
We watched all this from the other side of the world where we too were forced to absorb the Europeans’ assault, – mostly the British. We, too, then experienced the God-complex and scheming manipulations they used to elevate themselves and bend us into submission.
Thus, just as their second millennium came to a close, and a so-called Post-Colonial Era was granted by their philosophy, we are also among the hundreds of millions that shook off the yoke of their subjugation.
My existence straddles millennia.
And I don’t know when you’re living, but we now awake daily to contemplate the possibility of our complete and total eradication, not necessarily at the hands of the violent, but perhaps as a result of what the Europeans’ half-millennium has wrought, for better or worse. They build, protect and insure their clubhouse built of racist social truths for the 1%.
Their defensiveness and insecurity in the slow realization of their failings, cripples us, as we try to do the slow, age-old work … of pacifying, indeed tranquilizing the bellicose nature so quick to emerge in the grunts.
It awakens flash anger and violent explosions that have devastating effects upon hundreds of thousands of families and innocents.
It maintains white-supremacy and racial dominance. It continues and worsens insidiously by promoting loudly and at huge international volume, those who continuously relate their narrative, culminating in the ugly raw capitalist burp that is Trump – a P.T. Barnum in the White House who thinks he’s God.
(beats)
It quietly silences those telling parallel history – by eliminating them from the formal base-ten digital record in the Internet amongst the saved data. And makes them unpopular by drowning them out and by any other means necessary. Facebook is the perfect machine for this.
This means, in some cases, making the truth unpopular by any means necessary and substituting a social truth for the real truth by any means necessary.
They have not yet fully seen how what they have done was wrong nor apologized nor shown remorse nor asked genuine forgiveness nor sought to restore what was.
Instead they have created their own history that labels these millennia, establishes the calendar and when the day begins and ends and uses globalist terms for engagements that are ferociously capitalist, in which money is the almighty and war for resources is perpetual. They declare themselves the victors of these continental land grabs and centuries of slave-ownership.
On the clock we live under at the dawn of their third millennium, they drive the engine of our world madly forward at an increasingly unsustainable pace.
My name is Karthik and I am a human born in Tamil Nadu, India, and raised in the United States of America for the past 50 years. I am well-educated and read daily a large amount of contemporaneous information and data about our times. I am unemployed and divorced from all ideology.
I am not selling anything and I am not looking for a job.
I am merely trying to communicate how sickened and embarrassed I am by the USA. And to beg you to Stop. Unplug. Slow down. Get back to who you really are. You are lost and running at a breakneck pace.
When you’re lost, don’t run at a breakneck pace.
Stop.
Calm down.
Collect data and evaluate the current situation, what is actually in front of you.
Organize and Re-order your priorities to the immediate.
Immediately, a quarter of a million and rising to a third of a million Americans are dying, actively, of an unprecedented viral pandemic because we, as towns, cities, states and a nation have failed so completely to organize consistent, universal policy to control spread.
Stop.
Think about what YOU are doing. Each day. To prevent spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus and monkeypox.
In the Spring of that fateful year, 2020, my father died, at 90, of natural causes. He was a devoted American, whose contributions to the U.S. were immense, yet in some ways, immeasurable. He passed on a Monday and the global Covid-19 pandemic struck that actual week. Protocols meant I could have no public funeral service. Only five were allowed to attend: the brahmin, myself and three of dad’s former students. Six weeks later, George Floyd was choked to death, by police in Minneapolis Minnesota. Thousands marched, pandemic be damned.
George Perry Floyd Jr. was an African-American man who was openly and publicly murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during an arrest after a store clerk suspected Floyd may have used a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill.
He was lying inert and unarmed on the ground, and Derek Chauvin, one of four police officers who arrived on the scene, knelt on Floyd’s neck and back for 9 minutes and 29 seconds and choked him to death. It was filmed, and witnessed by many. The reaction to the video of George Floyd’s choking impacted the world.
Five months later Trump lost. His followers attempted a violent coup of the peaceful transfer of power to Biden. They attempted nothing short of a violent revolution against democracy in our country. Seven people died attempting to protect the Capitol and formal structures of our government from an amped-up, violent horde, whipped into a frenzy by the former President, who fomented them and the nation with utterly false accusations of election and voter fraud in the 2020 election. They continue to do this. There is a film called 2000 mules that is complete and total horseshit.
It would be like the last gasp of a terrible, ugly, racist monster swinging wildly as it goes down, except it still swings – now less publicly, without the perceived protection from a white supremacist in the White House. Ted Cruz and Ron DeSantis and Marjorie Taylor-Greene and others seek to fill the Trump-sized void, to keep the drumbeat of their racism and hate going. Their intention is nothing short of a fascist, White, Christian State.
There is significant concern that the monster has gone underground and even now plots a very real and significant coup, possibly even a civil war. Rest assured, the ugly beast – born from genocide and slavery, and cemented by white supremacy and abject racism – has dominated this nation for three hundred years. It will not go quietly.
We are and have been overdue to address it. Having calculated the impending minoritization of the so-called ‘White’ American for decades, the writing has been on the wall. The racist beast amongst them feels cornered, misunderstood and plans to retaliate against truth, justice and humanity.
These are White Americans who believe that:
This is the greatest country in the world, and became so only because whites left Europe and founded a place where they could place themselves in control; where they could create their own white-supremacist thing, murdering and enslaving those they deemed heathens without recrimination. They consider Whites to be a race that ‘authored’ the USA, with greater rights than all other Americans.
Black Americans are receiving far more protection and opportunity than they should because they make up only a small percentage of the population compared to whites. White Americans I know personally have said this to me over decades. It is a complete disconnect with the facts of Black American life.
Minorities and new immigrants do not deserve protection of any kind. Those who come here should completely embrace their lower place in a hierarchy. If they expect to climb, they have to play by rules which praise White-American culture, and that which it ordains, above all else. It doesn’t matter if the rules contradict the immigrants’ own culture and values, as they do commonly – as happened to me my whole life.
All Americans must play along, accept social truths over real truths, and be of value to the ruling class, which must remain White dominated.
I do not accept any of this. I consider it inhumane, unjust, racist and fundamentally against the founding principles of the nation’s forefathers – who, in any case, were only creating protections for themselves.
The nation has come to its inevitable crossroads once again. We reappear here at this intersection over and over through the centuries because we do not address the problem as a whole. Rather, we attempt constant fixes that pluralize over time – in the hope that we move toward a more just, fair and honest society.
We are far from it.
Truth is, we have never had one at all.
To begin, White Americans must be vetted in the context of what we consider right today. Let us root out those that harbor racist, violent thoughts against others. Let us root out the homegrown terrorists. And disarm them.
Since the coup attempt, many are hiding and plotting – by definition, treasonous acts. They don’t hide very well, since they explode with it all over social media. We should have begun there a long time ago. To those of you, particularly young people, who are into cancel culture: you don’t have to cancel them, you can identify and keep the light on them. Vet and Dox these people. Keep a record.
Whites have ‘vetted’ everyone else, brutally, for centuries. That should end now, with an appropriate vetting of them, in the context of our nation as it stands today.
Let’s discern who, exactly, attempts to author the USA on racist terms, and on religious terms – when the First Amendment clearly states we shall not. Let us establish and publicly name who works for the ends of Whites above others, exclusively, and how. Who seeks to establish a religion for our nation and oppress other spiritualities? Who seeks to hold down alternative culture?
Let us vet all of those in power for racial and social inequities. Expose through vetting what their actual opinions are and make them known. Start with the Whites.
I refer to this broken bat double which swerved into play, as:
The Triple Kiss
This excellent .gif of The Triple Kiss is by @CorkGaines
Hunter Pence knocked in three runs when this ball left his broken bat after a crazy series of three collisions – the last of which caused it to swerve in the air and bound past the outstretched glove of the shortstop.
Second-year Cardinals shortstop Pete Kozma, who was very well positioned, reacted at lightning speed, but was caught going the wrong way for a fraction of a second because the third point of contact changed the ball’s direction.
The Triple Kiss happened in less than half a second. Watching it live, as broadcast, I had no idea the ball hit the bat three times; not until seeing it like this.
I knew it was a broken bat hit, my shoulders slumped at the same instant that Kozma jumped – and then suddenly, the ball took a crazy turn in the air and, as if it had eyes, bounced past the outstretched glove of the recovering Kozma, on the second base side.
The Triple Kiss was significantly faster than the human eye … even the highly trained eyes of a ballplayer, or an umpire. It affords us the opportunity to discuss the intense amount of new information that slow motion yields.
Slow motion was originally known – in analog filmmaking – as overcranking, a method by which the speed of the film was altered through handcranking the frames. Overcranking was first used in sports as long ago as the 1930’s in the coverage of boxing matches.
It took a long time for overcranking to become slow motion and in that time we got pretty used to it. We allowed slow motion to creep into our observation of games with such ease and normality that the NFL, NBA and MLB now all stop play to incorporate it as a tool in evaluating what has actually taken place.
But yesterday, after a fascinating conversation with an NCAA referee in another sport, David Ma, I began to wonder whether there’s a measurable visual side effect of using high definition slow motion when trying to call a game.
A paranoid part of me also began to wonder whether we’ve already begun what sci-fi feared: letting machines that are ‘more than us’ run our most human aspects.
David Ma believes we should alter the rules of instant replay review so that any referee or umpire using video replay should NOT be allowed to use the slow motion effect in the review.
Ma says, “I have no problem with the use of multiple camera angles for the review, but video review referees should not be allowed to use slow-motion.”
Ma believes there is a significant effect on the field when calling games with video review that includes slow motion, which he refers to as akin to “refereeing under a microscope.”
He points out that no human being could possibly see some of the things that slow motion reveals. In fact, Ma believes referees are already changing the way they call a game because of the presence of the super-slow-motion of HD:
“In pro football now there’s mandatory booth review on any score and in the final two minutes … if you’re a ref and you know that, why would you make a call? The camera can see everything you can’t so you’re most likely going to be wrong!”
Ma speaks with the authority of knowing what it’s like to have to make a call with a super-slow-mo eyeball looking over your shoulder: “With HD slow motion, by far, most of the time the referee’s call is going to be wrong.”
It opens up a discussion about what our perception of real-time is. For example would an umpiring or refereeing crew allowed only to watch the replays in real-time be more effective within the state of play? Ma believes assuredly yes.
This process by which we have accepted the super-slow-mo eyeball as the authority has taken place without significant consideration of the side effect – a human response to the presence of a machine that can see things we can’t.
But perhaps more significantly, the use of slow-mo in sports coverage points out that despite the presence of a tremendous amount of data being added to the information of the events of real-time by slow motion, it’s an effect we’ve subconsciously accepted without critique as a part of our capacity to watch something that has happened.
To David Ma, we’ve stepped onto an escalator which will take us to the point where it will be impossible for a human being to call a game.
I argued that perhaps the refereeing crew could judge the play on the basis of human terms: take in all the data, including the super-slow-mo stuff, and then the video review ref might say: ‘Well, sure we can see that under scrutiny, but there’s no way we could have seen that in real-time’ – thus overriding the machine.
But David Ma reminded me who pays the bills:
“The broadcast media, which is putting out incredibly detailed HD video in super slow-mo will grab that ref by the collar and say, you’re calling it like the nation just saw it, now.”
It rang true. But not one to make an issue of the problem without offering a solution, Ma says the only smart fix is to take slow-mo away from the refs. Alter our use of video replay to remove slow motion.
It’s a bold idea designed to keep the real-time on the field … well, real.
But there would emerge the huge issue that we, the fans, would have the access to all this information that the super-slow motion yields and would be stuck with an unresolvable dispute against the call made by humans trapped in a real-time consideration of events at hand.
The best example – when such frustration peaked – is the now infamous “intertouchdownception” that gave the Seattle Seahawks a victory in the waning seconds over the Green Bay Packers by virtue of a Hail Mary pass that was impossible to call with the human eye and replacement refs and the current NFL rules and the tacit agreement that management isn’t calling interference on Hail Mary’s (lol).
One of the refs on the field who signaled touchdown still believes he made an acceptable call as per one reading of the rule book. Fans remain unconvinced.
If, as Dave Ma suggests, we were to remove slow-motion from the toolbox for referees, could we as fans accept the difference of our view being an enhanced view from that of the refs?
Would we hound the refs for their inability to see what only a machine can see?
Or could we embrace the idea that we are keeping machines out of what is a fundamentally human exercise – sport.
In games like tennis and cricket, slow motion is used to define where or when a fast-moving object or person is at a given moment: the ball on or outside the line, the bat past the line before the ball strikes the wickets and so on.
The absolute exclusion of the slow motion effect would be a pointless exercise. However, it may be that the exclusion of slow motion from video review in certain situations would help keep the game real.
In San Francisco, in the Mission District, between 1993 and ’95, I read Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase, Hard-Boiled Wonderland at the End of the World, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Norwegian Wood. He was then only recently translated into English and popular in San Francisco.
Those early novels were unpredictable, well crafted and defied genre. Murakami’s talking cats, imploding houses, slight shifts in perception of reality – and his cool characters’ natural acceptance of deep, scalar trips through levels of that reality – became a genre of their own.
His characters and prose paralleled in literature the malaise, disaffection, vapidity and bored waiting game of the end of the 20th century and then transcended it with fantastic departures from the world. The ride was like manga without the images or a purely textual Miyazaki Hayao animation epic just for single, young adults.
I first read A Wild Sheep Chase, Murakami’s third novel, written in 1982, in San Francisco when I was 25. It remains my favorite. I remember feeling incredibly small in the face of the universe as his characters were pushed around.
I have a reverent fascination with Japan and a profound respect for her people. In my lifetime Japan was the most Americanized among all Asian countries, so growing up in the US, I was allowed slightly greater exposure to her writers.
Among Japanese novelists, I’d read Kawabata since I was a teenager, and in university covered Mishima and Akutagawa. I hadn’t yet read the post-war existentialists, when I picked up Murakami. Banana Yamamoto’s Kitchen was the hot new wave hitting California from the land of the rising sun.
Murakami was immediately different: pop synthesis of West and East through a contemporary urban Japanese socio-cultural lens.
Haruki Murakami began writing novels at the age of 29, in 1978, and has told Bomb Magazine, “Before that, I didn’t write anything. I was just one of those ordinary people. I was running a jazz club, and I didn’t create anything at all.”
Wiki states he had a sudden epiphany during a baseball game:
In 1978, Murakami was in Jingu Stadium watching a game between the Yakult Swallows and the Hiroshima Carp when Dave Hilton, an American, came to bat.
… in the instant that Hilton hit a double, Murakami suddenly realized that he could write a novel. He went home and began writing that night. Murakami worked on Hear the Wind Sing for several months in very brief stretches after working days at the bar. He completed the novel and sent it to the only literary contest that would accept a work of that length, winning first prize.
Now I’m 45 and Murakami’s 65, so we both remember 1984, the year in which his newest novel, 1Q84, is partially set. We have also both lived through an era that has seen the realization of some of the socio-cultural horrors described in George Orwell’s prophetic novel, 1984, which 1Q84 uses as a sort of launching point.
My loudest use of Orwell’s work was on the first anniversary of the September 11th attacks, in 2002, as a performance element of the art installation US=THEM, in Los Angeles, I read Orwell’s 1984 aloud in its entirety in a book store gallery, beginning at 5:35am (the time the first plane struck WTC2) and ending just as the sun set on the corner of Sunset and Alvarado. I printed slap tags that read 2002=1984 and stuck them everyplace.
I was excited to hear Murakami was using Orwell as a point of reference, and assumed the work would have socio-political overtones. I hoped 1Q84 would be more openly political and less personally intimate than the love stories he’d been writing. I consider Orwell to have been ahead of his time, so I was biased by the title’s obvious reference.
The particularly Asian coolness and practicality of Murakami’s characters in every day life is inspiring. But from the first, I felt his work was limited by the use of first-person narrative, usually with a narrator who seemed very much like himself: a middle-aged Japanese man living in Tokyo and underwhelmed by normal existence.
Murakami’s male narrators, all roughly his age, made the work light-weight. His contemporaries in late-20th century fiction writing in and translated into English: Garcia-Marquez, Eco, Kundera, Bowles, Ondaatje, Atwood, Boyle, Kureishi, DeLillo, Roth, Rushdie, Oates, Bolaño didn’t succumb to this basic approach.
As a writer, I’d come to the conclusion that my fiction suffered from my inability to write effectively in third person. I was biased by instructors and Modernism away from the trend toward first-person narratives written for the Me Generation. Murakami had no such bias, and neither, it turns out, did the publishing industry.
Murakami was young when he began and was thrust into the international limelight very quickly because of the accessibility of his work and his remarkable imagination. He was rewarded for making it easy to read. He was rewarded immense audiences for his references to Western pop, to “classical music” and to the boozy freedom of post-modern urbanity.
Haruki Murakami’s narrators’ exceptional breaks from the normative were what thrilled – these crazy trips into the unreal experienced coolly by his characters.
As a straight, booze-drinking, single, urbanite in my twenties (pre-metrosexuals) Murakami’s meals, drinks and one-night stands were a blast, in some cases a relief from the moralizing of political correctness.
I have sometimes felt targeted by novelists. Some just succeed in getting it. I wouldn’t discover Pepe Carvalho until a decade later, but Spanish readers will appreciate the comparison to Montalban. We used to joke about a drinking game in which you take a drink every time a Murakami character does. It gets harder to finish the book.
I only begrudgingly got into Murakami’s use of Western cultural tropes as described within an East Asian urban society, which Murakami was “first-to” in terms of crossover, and which he uses abundantly like a signature.
As an Indian living in the U.S. and Asia, who studied Ronald Takaki then, this was unappealing, I hated what post-post-modernism was becoming. But by the late ’90’s crosshatching Asia and the West had flooded the field. Murakami and Jim Jarmusch and Quentin Tarantino and Miyazaki Hayao made it cool. Sensible. At last, Asians outside London and New York were exhibiting what Hanif Kureishi knew, was called insouciant for writing.
It was inevitable at the dawn of the Internet and the globalizing 21st century. Haruki Murakami, the runner, from the longest US-occupied part of Asia, Japan; the novice writing in Japanese, first-person about being single, urban and sexually liberated was the first high-reaching Asian to just go ahead and run with it. Straight into the 21st Century.
I’m generalizing, but proposing Murakami was the best-seller who embodied the literary trend toward first-person narrative form and made it cool for Asian writing to love the West. Rushdie’s Ground Beneath Her Feet, must’ve been influenced in some small part by what Murakami was carving out.
Initially turned off by the brazen professing involved in it, I began to embrace Murakami’s careful choices of European orchestral music and western movies, TV shows and pop songs appropriated to both metaphorize, translate and drive narrative on multiple tiers. But creatively it always struck me as an easy way to force structure.
I was least impressed by Norwegian Wood. It struck me as a soap opera written for a specific audience of romantics. So after finishing it, I passed on a few of Murakami’s books and embarked on other, pretty heavy, post-war Japanese novels: Dazai Osamu, The Setting Sun and No Longer Human; Kobo Abe, The Woman in the Dunes; and Saiichi Maruya’s contemporary classic, A Mature Woman.
I returned to Murakami in 2005 with the publication of Kafka on the Shore, which was my summer read while living on a Japanese shore, in Kamakura.
Again impressed by the proficiency with language, I liked the poetics and the magical, even spiritual, feel, but I remained disappointed by what struck me as basically a first-person, relationship story. Murakami was still pushing western tropes through to the title page and writing less political, getting more pop.
That’s my experience with Murakami’s work. I am not qualified to review 1Q84 as anything other than a reader of novels for 30 years. I do not pretend to understand him as a man, nor have I read much about him or his method, barring what’s been published in the New Yorker here and there.
In some small part this will also be a discussion of the state of the publishing industry in 2012 which has carefully produced ‘Murakami, the technically proficient, edgy yet non-threatening Asian romantic fantasist’ into an internationally best-selling novelist.
Though I’ve lived in Japan, I cannot read Japanese and so have experienced all the Japanese novelists only in translation to English.
1Q84 – translated by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel – was published by Knopf as a massive, 944-page, case-bound Borzoi, with a vellum slip cover designed by Chip Kidd that lightly masks close-ups of two Japanese faces, a female on the front and a male on the back, on October 25th of last year (2011) and sold for $30.
I found one in great condition for $18 earlier this summer at one of the used book stores I help stay in existence. I finished it last week.
The paperback and e-versions have been available for some time now and I began to wonder whether this form of publication is ever really being read, cover-to-cover. The thing is a doorstop, a bookcase brace, a coffee table weight, but reading it’s awkward, heavy and very hard to conceal.
Lugging this anvil around the past few weeks, I was stopped and asked about it many times in the street. One guy stopped pedaling his bike, going up a hill to stop me and ask, “Is that the new Murakami?’ Is it good?” Waiters, bartenders and waitresses at all my local coffeeshops, bars and restaurants asked and showed anticipatory excitement about this big, pretty thing.
I was sure the novel was being read … but figured the vast majority of that reading was happening in multiple parts as separate books in paperback, or in a digital format. I’ve never wanted an e-reader more than in these past few weeks lugging around 1Q84, with its slippery vellum cover.
Which brings us to the design by Chip Kidd and to why it was sitting pretty, marked down 30% at the used bookstore within eight months of publication.
“But Knopf, which published the title late last month, has not only turned the book into a bestseller, it’s also managed to reverse another trend: it has made the book more popular in print than in digital.
“According to numbers released by the publisher, the novel, which was at #2 on the Times bestseller list on November 13, has sold 75,000 copies in hardcover, and 25,000 in digital. Those impressive print sales are thanks, in large part, to an extravagant package that Knopf put together that has made the book the kind of object–beautiful and collectible–that readers want. And, more than likely, non-readers also want.”
The design is horrible.
The lettering of the title is put on two lines so that the 1Q is above the 84, rather than written like a year: 1Q84. The result is that everyone who knows nothing about the book thinks its title is I.Q. 84 – which is hilarious and sad.
The vellum cover and the bold, sans-serif font make it worse. It’s so done-already. The design completely fails to help make Murakami’s connection between 1984 and 1Q84. (oddly, so does Murakami within, so perhaps it’s a case of too-good design)
The faces on the cover aren’t the author but face-models, and the vellum Kidd asked for that’s received so much praise, serves to mask their Japanese-ness, while retaining the sexy – fashion! haute couture!
The endsheets and chapter title pages continue the idiocy of separating the numbers of the title out, making it more disassociated than ever from Orwell. These pages are all black and white photographic backdrops of twilight and of the moon, which plays a significant role in the book, but though highly-stylized, they’re cheaply produced and the graphic elements aren’t even like the descriptions by the author within, which are specific about the appearance of the moon. Design sensibility invades literature again.
ugh. It’s whorish and stupid and has received nothing but praise and exaltation for Knopf and Chip Kidd for 8 months.
“the kind of object–beautiful and collectible–that readers want. And, more than likely, non-readers also want.”
sigh.
In the late-’90’s when I was working as a low-wage proofreader, fact-checker, jacket-designer and researcher in the New York publishing industry while trying to get published myself, at nights and on the weekends I also worked to help found a non-profit artists book organization in Brooklyn.
It was bizarre: by day, I’d be using new digital tools to make mass-produced work flashier, more-designed, more image-oriented, less text-heavy, while at night and on the weekends I helped produce fine art books with traditional materials in limited edition.
The turn of the millennium in New York City brought the consolidation of publishing and birthed the end of the book as we know it. What happened with 1Q84 last year was that it was sold as a sculptural object to great success. They made it into something you could market at Xmas whether anyone read it or not.
But appreciating the work within is made more difficult by the immense distraction of these new marketing methods, which crowd the work with the gushing sycophancy of non-readers buying sculpture.
END PART ONE
and now,
a poll:
PART TWO: 1Q84, Murakami Tries Third Person
1Q84 is Murakami’s first novel in third person. It succeeds in reaching for high ground, but weaknesses are revealed by the more difficult form. Some of these may be solely a result of translation issues, but whatever made it happen, at points it’s unbearable.
1Q84 is overwritten. It could easily be two-thirds the length. There may be perhaps no single person or department to blame for this.
It could be issues of translation. Having two different translators may have contributed to the repetition of ideas as each attempted to infuse their read. Throughout the work slipshod word choices are not just used but repeated awkwardly.
I hated the choice of the word “jacket” rather than “sleeve” for record covers. It isn’t wrong but it just sounds clunky in repetition – and the term is repeated within a paragraph without replacement when “sleeve” or “cover” would work so much better. The translation seemed rushed and simple. I presume this added pages.
It could have been a bad editor at Knopf, unwilling or unable to realize that when you publish three books in the same series from another language into one book sometimes there will be an absurd number of repetitions of basic points because when the work was originally published, these points were repeated to bring in new readers at each stage of publication.
I haven’t read any other reviews of this book, but I gather from the PW clip that this was the NYT’s problem.
It could be the fault of Knopf, itself, which seems to have rushed to shove the book out the door fast for Xmas season of last year, using cheap, flashy design to create a book to be sold as a sculptural object. They didn’t care what was in it as much as what was on it, what it looked and felt like. It could easily have been rushed for sales and cheated of the requisite time and effort required for editing and translation.
These possibilities notwithstanding, the responsibility for quality of the work lies with the author and Murakami’s attempt at third person results in common problems for anyone embarking on the daunting task of writing a proper novel: you must get inside the characters to let them live, but you mustn’t show you are inside the characters for them to live.
One sophomoric method used to achieve this for several decades is italics to represent the thoughts and inner monologues of a character. If it absolutely has to be done, then this is the accepted practice. Oh, I’m getting pedantic!I hope they’ll understand what I mean, that you should be able to write your characters into what you’re trying to convey and not have to rely on italicized font to tell the reader something important, oh, maybe I’m just nitpicking. M.T., you’re such an oppressive rationalist.
But just like the flashback has become nauseatingly common to drive narrative in movies since Pulp Fiction, usage of italicized thoughts has become standard in novels in third-person in this, the era of the first-person narrrative. It’s a failure on the writer’s part, or at least a CYA move. If you have to do it as a writer, you make it count.
Not so in IQ84.
Murakami’s discomfort with form leads to an unending parade of italicized thoughts. No character goes mentally uninvaded. Like the first-person narrative before, Murakami is shaking off rules again in this attempt at third-person narrative. This could be considered bold, I suppose, but not by me.
What was bold was the whole new dimension added when Murakami decided to have these characters thinking in italics about quotes. These sections are actually italicized and bolded. I don’t mean once or twice at climactic moments, but throughout the entire novel; nearly every character.
Murakami has characters read a number of different texts aloud to each other. This is in and of itself bizarre because references to existing texts, like Chekov could have been made “off-the-page” rather than being read aloud between two characters.
The point of using the Chekov could have been made in action, or through literary tactics, leaving the text itself as a support floating in literary space. In some cases these non-fiction texts are literally the full repetition of historical data as bedtime stories, simply so they can be referred to in future chapters – clunky. It’s also demeaning to readers.
In the case of notes read aloud between and within the minds of characters, Murakami doesn’t even let the note exist as the exchange. The note is quoted by a character within his or her own thoughts! Murakami and the translators use bold text within the italicized thoughts to display the character working out the meaning in their own thoughts. It’s either genius beyond me or annoying filler because you can’t convey what you mean.
The repetitions continue, almost as though when ‘occupying’ one character or another, Murakami has forgotten that another character has made a point … and so he repeats that point. At first, I thought this was because the book, like works of Murakami’s in the past, was going to get fantastically multi-layered and these would echo. But that never happens. It’s just repetitive.
1Q84 is also a little predictable, despite it’s imaginative elements. I saw the intersection of the lead characters Tengo and Aomame coming long before it was clear they were intertwined. I wondered if Tengo was authoring Aomame into existence, so I could see clearly through to Murakami himself.
I lay all of this at the feet of the shift to the third-person narrative. It’s hard to do. That is why I think Murakami is at mid-career despite having written so many novels and achieving such success. Murakami strikes me as a hard-working perfectionist who will likely tackle third-person narrative form again rather than shy away from it after a first-rate attempt. I look forward to his progress, and as usual, will be among the millions reading his flights of fancy.
I enjoy Murakami’s precise, technical prose, like describing a meal or a piece of music. I admire what Murakami does well: creating translucent, shimmering waves of realities that both define and filter how his characters perceive of reality.
I enjoy his detailed descriptions of events of the past – like war and post-war conditions, laden with contemporary attitudes about those events. Certain simplicities like descriptions of the natural world, Murakami just nails – his cicadas take me to Japan in summer:
Haruki Murakami continues to display a brilliant imagination and wild ideas. He weaves his plot streams together beautifully. Though some of the unpredictability has gone as a result of our familiarity with his tactics, Murakami has invaded our consciousness with his genre.
Unfortunately 1Q84 as it stands is too long, in parts very repetitious, somewhat clunky, and as a result, boring. I give it a 3 out of 5.
In Conclusion: The NY Publishing Industry’s Horrible Now
As I write these words from my home in California, the Nobel Committee prepares to announce its highly political and socially-influenced choices and the New York publishing industry is preparing to launch any number of new 1Q84s to push forward their bottom lines in this year’s Xmas season – some new sculptural objects whose contents are mostly recycled scraps and cardboard, rather than goose down and gold. Orwellian indeed.
For people living in California and Asia and with concerns about the works from these places, these two events in Scandinavia and on the East Coast of the US have little bearing. They have proven themselves wholly out of touch. While here and in Japan we fight to author a new world.
We must bring ourselves up out of what post-post-modernism and its failed capitalist globalism has wrought.
Read, read, read. Think, think, think. Enough with the gushing sycophancy – the world is headed down a dark road by our ignorance and selfishness.
As readers, we must demand better product; better editors, translators and deciders of what gets put into our hands.
Seek out authors from independent publishers, read blogs, comment.
**8,500+ hits (as of Apr ’14) from around the world to this post, which was written when it first opened in theaters. Please do answer poll. Thanks**
The writer William Gibson recently tweeted (@GreatDismal) that he’s also noticed strong and divided opinions about Director Ridley Scott’s new science fiction spectacular, Prometheus, in theaters now.
Gibson tweeted on June 14th: “Split on Prometheus (which I haven’t seen) is vast and deep, with smart friends on both sides. In that situation, there’s often something going on with the dichotomy.”
Similar critique surrounded Scott’s Alien three dozen years ago and Bladerunner received the same treatment when it came out in 1982; the producers felt disrespected. On the DVD of the Director’s cut, with commentary, one of them snarls that Gandhi won the award for Best Costume Design over Bladerunner that year.
What if Ridley Scott’s worst crime is he’s a visionary unable to express ideally within the constraints of Hollywood’s demands and thus left us with a mess to interpret? Over the years in sci-fi we’ve considered far less quality product with far more attention.
Here’s excerpts of interviews with screenwriter Damon Lindelof and some actors from the film (not Ridley Scott, who is pretty closed-mouthed), that reveal a lot of this movie was edited out for the time constraints of Hollywood’s ‘Summer Blockbuster Marketing Mentality’.
This certainly has contributed to the confusion. Lindelof goes so far as to say that in Hollywood they just don’t want a movie to last more than two hours. The run-time is 2:03.
Frustrated fans have a right to be upset if this is true. A story takes time to tell. Marketers and groovy executives must be kept out of the calculation when it comes to run-time.
We’ll see if future extended versions and Director’s cuts of Prometheus flesh out the film. I propose we have to work harder to imagine the story wholly, but that it’s worth it.
To describe the story in Prometheus, Alien and Aliens taken together, I’ll use both my own writing and plot synopses written by others. [Prometheus from IMDB by WellardRockard; Alien by Colin Tinto].
Please respond to this poll of your thoughts on the film:
The “Other” Comments
Nine poll respondents used “other” to comment:
“both awesome and full of shortcomings,”
“Intense, positive for sure, but lacks full disclosure. Leave em wanting more?!”
“amazing brilliant movie.”
“Expecting more than a thinly disguised Alien remake.”
“Lot of plot holes and overall inconsistencies”
“Great. and visual!”
“I fell Asleep Watching it “
“flawed.”
“lacking information”
Explaining Prometheus
Ridley Scott is an avant-garde of the first two decades of multi-episode, scalar, sci-fi sagas.
I say Ridley Scott is avant-garde in the context of a continuum of sci-fi film-making that begins with Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and then, only after nearly a decade of Planet of the Apes (1968) sequels, moves on to Lucas’ Star Wars and Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), before Alien (1979) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and finally Bladerunner, The Thing and E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). Spielberg’s hand was what made the genre more popular until Cameron’s The Terminator (1984) and Aliens (1986) come along and blow it up.
In Alien, his breakout, Ridley Scott established a unique and very specific blueprint: a slow build with the first half of the film to establish grand settings and an ensemble of characters within an immense context and then a hell ride for the second half of the film to its fantastic, terrorizing conclusion.
Perhaps Scott’s failing, if it can be called that, is avant-garde-ism coupled with a density of information that startles and cows some contemporary viewers, preventing appreciation of the work the first time through.
A second major problem seems to be an issue of control over editing. Screenwriter Damon Lindelof was meant to bring human dimension to Scott’s immense vision, but it sounds like much of the tempo and dialogue required to do this ended up on the cutting room floor.
It requires imagination to appreciate imagining of this scale and one has to have two things to enjoy the movie: a willingness to wholly go on the ride, and active interpretation of subtle motivations described in a limited fashion by the cut.
I’m definitely eager for the Director’s Cut, which I hope will be a vastly improved film.
(editorial note: the death of Ridley Scott’s brother, Tony, within weeks of the release of Prometheus, must have interrupted any post-release work)
The Grand Plot Begins on Earth Before the Dawn of Man
Human life on Earth began millennia ago because a being – perhaps twice human-size, capable of interstellar travel and to whom we refer hereafter as an Engineer – drank something toxic and died while visiting Earth, collapsing into a waterfall.
I gather this from the title sequence of Prometheus. This Engineer’s DNA co-mingled with the primordial soup to jump start evolution and ultimately to create us: smaller, weaker, less advanced versions of the Engineers. It is unclear whether this is a purposeful act, but the pain the Engineer endures in disintegrating implies not.
An oblong shape is seen above him in the sky – a ship? It appears to be getting smaller, leaving? I wondered whether he was being left here to commit suicide?
2089 A.D., Humans Discover the Engineers
A series of ancient cave paintings are found all over Earth, each depicting one of these oversized human figures (the Engineers) pointing upward to a constellation pattern. In the year 2089, archaeologist couple Elizabeth Shaw and her boyfriend Charlie Holloway discover this star map among ruins and archaeological sites of several otherwise unconnected ancient cultures.
Shaw and Holloway divine a location in space to associate with the star pattern. The two interpret this as an invitation from humanity’s forerunners – an interpretation which may or may not be one of many misreadings in the grand narrative.
Throughout his career, Ridley Scott has succeeded in imbuing contemporary human hubris onto our future behavior, making viewers unsure whether the actions and opinions of any of his characters, save Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in the Alien films, are sound.
The events of the film Prometheus take place between 2089 and 2094. Shaw and Holloway are hired to lead an expedition to the theorized location depicted in the cave drawings,a moon that orbits the immense ringed-planet LV-223. They achieve interstellar travel via cryogenic suspension with the crew of the ship USS Prometheus.
2093, the Prometheus plot
Peter Weyland, the elderly founder and CEO of the Weyland Corporation, funds the creation of the scientific deep space research vessel USS Prometheus to follow the cave painting maps to a distant moon orbiting the planet LV-223, many light years from Earth.
The ship’s crew travels in stasis at light speed while the android David stays awake, pilots the craft, studies ancient languages in order to translate for possible interactions with humanity’s makers, and monitors the passengers in cryo-sleep on their voyage, going so far as to read their dreams.
Note: One flaw is that if LV-223 is, as stated, many light years away and the Prometheus arrives in just over two years, the craft must have traveled faster than the speed of light to cross the distance in space between Earth and LV-223. This remains unexplained and mere cryo-stasis is not sufficient to explain it. It can only be a maximum of two light years away. (wormholes?)
The android David, the scientist Shaw and the CEO Weyland are direct parallels as characters to the androids Ash and Bishop; to Ripley; and to the Company in the Alien films. These tropes are significant on multiple levels because Scott makes use of the image we have of these characters. He constructs them to be knocked about so we can see a range of human experience – and in so doing, he acknowledges, subtly, sci-fi blockbusters of the past.
In David, one senses not only Ash and Bishop, but also the cold, insouciant, horrifying spirit of HAL from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey; in Shaw, the naive wonderment of Jodie Foster’s Ellie Arroway in Contact meets Ripley’s stubborn righteousness; and in Weyland, we’ve the aging hubris of Jurassic Park‘s Jon Hammond, played so deliciously by Richard Attenborough, and the billionaire boys’ club attitude, ever-forward pushing like Contact‘s S.R. Hadden, as played by Jon Hurt. There’s a movie sci-fi continuum.
Here, Weyland is portrayed by Guy Pierce as a cold, calculating, demanding CEO, the inventor (of David) and aging corporate raider obsessed with extending his own life above all other concerns.
In Prometheus, there’s continuity of feeling with Alien and Aliens, and nuanced shades of many science fiction films and characters of the recent past, but there remains a doomed feeling throughout that much of our human spirit is weak and flawed. Maybe that’s why people don’t like it.
The principle criticism I hear from fans so far, who like the work in general, is that the characters are not developed. Very few of the characters are given much depth, and it’s painfully obvious that the “Hollywood Summer Blockbuster” cut is brutal. One has to imagine a lot, and much if it isn’t good. That’s not easy and folks don’t like doing it.
That said, the relationship between Shaw and Holloway is the most explored. It’s revealed that she has faith in Christ and that he is an atheist. In making their discovery Holloway chides Shaw about her faith. She claims to be unfazed, a believer. This is what Weyland saw in her.
Holloway, her atheist colleague and lover is, for his part, unbothered, he loves her and would do anything to pursue her interests. Holloway’s faithless willingness to do anything leads to his doom.
In 2093, the ship arrives in the orbit around LV-223. This is not the same planet first seen in Alien (1979) and in Aliens (1986) as confirmed by Ridley Scott in an interview on Friday June 1st on BBC radio 5 live.
Alien is set on LV-426, or Acheron, while Prometheus is set on a moon of LV-223.
After being awakened from hibernation, the crew are informed of their mission to find the ancient aliens, the “Engineers”. They also view a holographic message from Weyland himself, which tells them that he, Weyland, has since died, but that he has funded the mission under the direction of the scientists.
The Weyland hologram introduces Shaw and Holloway to the others, and the two explain what they have discovered and their intention to respond to what they perceive of as an invitation from humanity’s creators.
The other scientists are agog at the scale of the mission and the geologist Fifield and biologist Milburn express real skepticism. Mission director Meredith Vickers orders all present to avoid any direct contact if the Engineers or any other aliens are found.
The Prometheus lands near an alien structure and a team including Shaw, Holloway, and David explores it, while Vickers and Captain Janek remain aboard the ship and monitor their progress.
Flying drone scanners are employed to zoom through the immense curved structure beaming red, analytical light across the interior surface and allowing 3d mapping to be simulated as a visual model back on Prometheus and the data to be shared among the scientists simultaneously – rad.
The explorers find breathable air within the alien structure, discover hundreds of vase-like artifacts and a monolithic statue of a humanoid head. Other bodies are later found, and the Engineers are presumed to be extinct.
Using his polyglothic array of ancient languages, David sorts out how to use the controls for projectors within the structure and makes visible 3-Dimensional video replays of the final moments of the Engineers.
The replays show the oversized human beings, the Engineers, running through the structure, and yield valuable archaeological perspective of the events that led to the death of one of them, who tripped and was decapitated by a fast closing doorway. When David rapidly interprets the commands etched in a wall beside where this occurred, and opens the door, they find the actual large humanoid head of the Engineer behind it.
A rapidly approaching storm forces the crew to return to the Prometheus. Shaw insists they take the Engineer’s head back to the ship with them and they barely make it back alive. A biologist and geologist, Milburn and Fifield are stranded in the structure after becoming lost trying to find the way out.
David, the android, meanwhile, returns to Prometheus with one of the vases, while back in the structure, apparently induced by the presence of the away team, dozens of the remaining vases begin leaking black, gooey liquid. Small worm-like creatures are seen writhing in the goo – there’s life here. Upon entry the vases were dry and clean. Something about the entry of these people here has begun what is occurring with the vases, which the scientists told David to avoid.
David secretly bringing the vase back is the first of three covert acts that make us question his motivations.
In the ship, Shaw and medic Ford analyze the Engineer’s head, bringing it to life with electrostatic shock. They find some kind of disease, illness or growth on the surface of the head, which comes to life and endures a lifelike pain and exacerbation of the skin growth, eventually rupturing, causing the head to explode. “Mortal, after all,” remarks the android David.
Taking a sample of the tissue, Shaw discovers that the DNA of the Engineer is identical to that of the human race, confirming our relationship to these predecessors.
Note: this DNA match makes no sense whatsoever – if it is an exact match then, they would be, essentially us, and since they are in fact different from us in size, it seems likely there would be some difference in genetic structure.
Meanwhile, revealing an unnamed covert purpose, David investigates the vase he has secretly brought aboard and discovers a vial containing a black liquid.
David removes a drop of the black, organic goo within and puts it on his finger. There’s a beautiful ECU of David’s finger – instead of prints he has the Weyland logo subtly carved into his fingertip.
Earlier in the film, during stasis, we see David standing over the cryochambers and realize that he is able to see into the dreams of the sleeping passengers. Now, we see him again standing over a passenger. It is unclear who is within the chamber, but someone on the mission has not yet been awakened. David is communicating with the person in stasis.
Vickers confronts David about this, asking, “What did he say?” To which David initially responds “He” wouldn’t want David to tell her, but pressed by Vickers physically, responds the message from “him” was “Try harder.”
While it’s unclear to whom they’re referring, the fact that it’s Weyland, Vickers employer, who created David, is inescapable. Vickers intimacy implies a deeper connection between her and to whomever David is communicating.
David’s android reasoning is revealed further by this conversation; caught by his Master’s need for secrecy, he cannot lie to Vickers and yet cannot tell her the whole truth. This is the first of David’s conundra that result in unusual behavior.
Two Possible Directives Explaining David’s Behavior
Weyland is directing David to act from within the cryochamber via both some kind of direct communication and David’s ability to read the dreams of the sleeping passengers.
There are two basic directives:
1. to find a living Engineer; take Weyland to the Engineer, and convey Weyland’s wishes for immortality.
2. David is also being told to explore the organic goo and the parasitic creatures found aboard the Engineer’s ship – for the purposes of Weyland’s corporate goals.
These two directives are being interpreted by a first-generation, one-of-a-kind synthetic human, who:
a. is instructed by its maker to both function covertly and serve the mission of the Prometheus.
b. is a prototype and predecessor by 29 years of the android Ash, who was also programmed to act covertly in Alien aboard the Nostromo (which the Company calls a malfunction), and by 81 years of the softer, safer version of synthetic person, Bishop in Aliens.
c. has spent two years interpreting the dreams and thoughts of Weyland, Shaw and the entire crew bound to meet their maker, all while studying human culture and ancient human culture.
Long before the Prometheus arrives at LV-223, questions of identity abound for David.
Upon opening the vase and taking a drop of the liquid for his own analysis, David realizes that to follow through on the second directive he must infect a passenger.
David’s scene with Holloway in the billiard room is an excellent example of an android reasoning out how to proceed with the problem of his orders being covert. He asks Holloway a series of leading questions meant to bring Holloway to implicit approval of David’s plan to infect him.
The dialogue ends with David saying,”Then it’s time for a drink” – only then does David infect Holloway by briefly tapping the tiny black drop of the gooey substance on his finger into a glass of champagne he has poured.
Android reasoning – David gets Holloway’s tacit approval for experimenting upon him. It is subtle but clearly by design and only after a series of statements and questions that David allows himself to deposit the drop in Holloway’s glass.
Holloway downs it,”Here’s mud in yer eye, pal.” It’s such a Deckard line – most of my friends think it cheesy, I love it.
David predates Ash by 29 years and Bishop by 81 years. He is also a unique, a one-off – the first, a prototype. There is little compassion in him, little emotion. His quirk of having a fascination for one single human movie – Lawrence of Arabia – is hyper-constructed and yet gives him so little sweetness. The android is calculating and emotionless in 2093.
Shaw and the infected Holloway have sex. It is revealed that Shaw is sterile. Holloway follows her blindly and experiments wildly alongside. He loves Shaw and takes her as she is, a believer, a Christian, unable to bear children. He truly loves her and would be led by her to the end of the universe, to this Godforsaken place.
Holloway later looks in a mirror and sees his eyes are changing – mud in his eye – first evidence that he has been poisoned with the black goo by David. He still does not know how he came to be infected.
Meanwhile, trapped back inside the structure by the storm, Fifield and Milburn meet and are attacked by snake-like creatures which invade their suits, their skin and their minds. The slithery tentacle-like snakes have a bulbous head of folded skin that unfolds to reveal a triangular head with gaping mouth and teeth.
Note: just as in Alien, the first appearance of the ‘monster’ isn’t until one hour and one minute into the film. Scott’s blueprint is intact.
The snakes penetrate first the suit and then the skin of Milburn, who is killed, and perhaps made a host for an embryo – the snake goes into his mouth. A corrosive fluid (yellow acid blood) from one of the creatures melts Fifield’s helmet, exposing him to the dark liquid leaking from the vases. The “acid for blood” immediately recalls to mind the facehugger in Alien.
The crew returns to the Engineer’s structure after the storm passes to find Milburn’s corpse and no sign of Fifield.
David, meanwhile, separates from the others and discovers an immense cargo hold filled with the goo-filled vases. Though he is connected digitally to the Prometheus and specifically to Vickers, David intentionally severs this connection, revealing for the second time a covert intent.
In another room David discovers a living Engineer in stasis and video replays that allow him to see a holographic star map of the universe. The map highlights Earth.
Then David discovers the bridge of what is obviously a spacecraft. We’ve seen this huge, C-shaped ship with a giant chair in it already. It’s the one occupied by the skeletal remains of an oversized humanoid pilot with its rib cage pushed out in Alien and Aliens.
David learns how to operate the craft from the videos of the extinct Engineers, and how to liberate the living Engineer from cryostasis. He does all of this alone, cut off from the Prometheus, adding to the aforementioned covert mystique.
This is a trillion-dollar, private, corporate expedition and there are unseen hands at play – the undead Peter Weyland is acting through the robot David. We come to realize that Weyland is in cryogenic stasis and that David has been communicating with him throughout. The agent behind David’s covert activity becomes more clear.
David can thus be seen as part of a progression in robot design over 81 years – from David to Ash in 29 years of development and from Ash to Bishop in 57 more years. But he is also the first, a unique, like HAL. Weyland’s crowning achievement in synthetic people, like HAL, is subject to philosophizing, wonderment, and devious, purposeful action in the pursuit of its directives.
Holloway’s infection rapidly ravages his body, and he is rushed back to the ship. Shaw doesn’t understand why he is sick and no one else is. As he visibly deteriorates, Vickers, holding a flamethrower and standing at the ramp to the Prometheus refuses to let Holloway aboard. Holloway is in immense pain and finally he steps forward demanding she kill him. Vickers immolates him at his request.
Shaw is shattered, and stunned because she does not know how her lover was exposed singularly. She doesn’t know David gave him the black goo in his champagne. She doesn’t understand what is happening. Her naivety takes its major slam in the face. This, of course, is very reminiscent of Ripley’s experience in the Alien films and it’s horrifying and emotional.
To make matters much worse, a medical scan reveals that Shaw, despite being sterile, is in an advanced state of pregnancy impregnated with an alien creature that in 10 hours has grown to the size of a basketball and is still growing, all as a result of having sex with Holloway who has been poisoned by David with the black goo. David – removed, eerie, in the revelatory moment says, “Well, Doctor Shaw, it’s hardly a traditional fetus,” then – HAL-like, Ash-like – attempts to subdue her.
One feels obvious parallels here: Weyland has instructed David to return Shaw to Earth in stasis as a container for the creature which he considers a biological weapon. It’s exactly what the Company, Ash and Burke hope to do with Ripley and the crew of the Nostromo and Ripley and Newt, in 30 and again 87 years in the future from these events.
But Shaw, like Ripley, escapes and uses an automated surgery pod to cut a cephalopod-like creature from her abdomen. It’s a female parallel to crewman Kane’s stomach-rip in Alien in some weird way.
The scene is epic: The robotic, automated surgery chamber, a gurney in a tube, uses spray-on anaesthetic, robotic hands and metal clamps to fold back Elizabeth’s belly skin. A small robotic crane enters her exposed gut and brings out the placenta-covered, squid-like creature which then emerges, alive, spraying pre-birth from within its amniotic sac all over her. The machine closes Shaw with a staple gun, while the tentacled squid-thing flops angrily above her, held tenuously by the robotic crane arm.
Note: The idea that a machine capable of conducting such COMPLEX, delicate operations on human beings would somehow not be designed for males and females is ridiculous.
Shaw escapes crawling out from under it and, stumbling around like a little girl who has had everything horrible revealed to her, discovers Peter Weyland alive, sitting calmly on a bed, being waited upon by his doting robot.
Shaw realizes Weyland has been alive the whole time in stasis aboard the ship. She finds him and the cold, bemused David – who considers her resilient for surviving the implantation of an alien within her – preparing to meet the Engineer.
David is an excellent predecessor to the androids Ash and Bishop of Alien and Aliens, colder, more calculated, less concerned about human beings than either. He dotes on his creator, who made him singularly and treats him like a son.
Weyland and David explain to Shaw that Weyland intends to ask the Engineer to help him avoid his impending death. The subtle devotion that David has for Weyland, the blind following, reveals much about his actions in the film thus far.
Outside the Prometheus, a mutated Fifield attacks the hangar bay and kills several crew members before being killed himself. Janek sees what is happening and theorizes that this moon is actually a facility where the Engineers designed weapons. He proposes it was a military base until they lost control of their biological weapon: the vases and the black fluid they contain.
Vickers attempts to stop Weyland from going through with his plan. She tells him he will be killed. Weyland is stoic even as, in departing, Vickers calls him father and the connections are all made clear. Weyland’s invented a son in David and abandoned his connection to his daughter. Vickers grew up hating the old man – something David takes to be normal in all humanity – “Doesn’t everybody hate their parents?” he asks Shaw.
Weyland, David, Shaw and Ford return to the structure to awaken the Engineer David discovered in cryogenic stasis. It becomes clear that the Engineer is occupying a space ship (the same design as the crashed alien space ship seen on LV-426 in Alien and Aliens). It’s a spaceship with a cargo hold filled with toxic chemical and biological weapons that can destroy whole worlds with parasitic aliens.
David shows Weyland, Shaw and Ford the bridge and cryo-chambers of the Engineer. He then wakes the Engineer from cryogenic sleep. This is the moment Weyland and Shaw have been waiting for: to meet our maker. But now, after all that has happened, each has very different requests.
The immense Engineer slowly comes to its wits from hypersleep and attempts to understand the small human beings before it. Shaw, realizing Janek is right, screams in English “Ask him what’s in his Cargo Hold?” Why is he taking it to Earth?” and then at the Engineer: “Why do you want to kill us? What have we done?”
Before the Engineer can respond, the selfish and decrepit Weyland has Shaw silenced to put forth his android, his son – the perfect specimen of human likeness, capable of speaking in multiple languages, indeed having translated those of the Engineer to learn the controls of the craft and its devices – to explain his purpose.
The Engineer responds by decapitating David and killing Weyland and Ford. Shaw escapes the alien ship as it is activated for launch by the Engineer. Weyland dies, pathetic, broken. Vickers, observing from aboard the Prometheus, and hearing the flatline confirming the death of her father Weyland, orders Janek to return to Earth.
The still-active David lies disembodied on the floor of the Engineer’s craft, but maintains contact with Shaw and now begins to tell what he knows. The craft begins to initiate take-off and Shaw is hurled from within the ship and crawls and runs across crevasses created by the launching of the immense craft.
It’s a scene that mimics the headless Ash being brought back to tell the crew of the Nostromo what is actually happening to them in Alien. David’s severed body and still-conversant head are similar to the final state of the android Bishop of Aliens as well, who ends divided yet able to cling to the floor of the Sulaco and grab Newt to save her from being thrown out the airlock. It’s as if the fate of all Scott’s androids is a milky decapitation.
David reveals to Shaw that the Engineer is starting up the ship and is intending to release the vases of black goo on Earth. She hears David and tries to warn Vickers and Janek that the ship is headed to Earth with the intention of killing off humanity.
Vickers, aboard the Prometheus, orders Janek to return to Earth, but this is the Captain’s shining moment. Janek, in a brief exchange with Shaw, assesses the threat to humanity if they allow the Engineer’s ship to leave. He defies Vickers and tells her to abandon ship if she doesn’t want to die. While Vickers flees in an escape pod, Janek and his crew, straight-forward, no-nonsense and generally non-involved in the mission throughout, save humanity by crashing the Prometheus into the Engineer’s ship as it attempts to take off.
The disabled ship of the Engineer crashes onto the planet, falling onto Vickers, crushing her. The ship continues to tumble and nearly crushes Shaw, but she escapes.
Shaw goes to the escape pod to get oxygen and retrieve supplies and finds her alien offspring has grown to gigantic size. The Engineer survives the crash, enters the escape pod and attacks Shaw, who releases the tentacled creature. It subdues the Engineer by thrusting a tentacle down its throat. When the Engineer falls with the immense tentacled creature atop him, the creature looks very much like the “facehuggers” in the Alien films.
David, still functioning and decapitated, lying on the floor of the bridge of the downed spacecraft, communicates with Elizabeth Shaw who lies, crying on the moon’s rocky desolate surface. David says he would like her help, that if she can collect him and carry him, he could help here to leave this place because there are other crafts like this one on the moon.
Shaw recovers David’s remains from the alien ship, and asks if he can operate the craft. He responds that he can fly them back to Earth.
Shaw asks if he can fly them to the place of origin of the Engineers and he says that he can. Together they activate another Engineer ship. Shaw and the remains of android David then take off to travel to the Engineers’ homeworld in an attempt to understand why they created humanity and why they attempted to destroy it.
In the final shot, back in the Prometheus escape pod, the immense tentacled facehugger has died (just like the facehuggers do after implanting the embryos in Alien) and the Engineer’s body begins to convulse. From within his chest emerges an alien (very similar but not the same as seen in later movies) The creature bursts out of the dying Engineer’s chest and we see the mouth within a mouth and familiar head structure and body shape of the “chestburster” xenomorphs in Alien.
2122, the Alien plot – 29 Years After Events of Prometheus
The events of Alien (1979) take place June 3rd to 6th in the year 2122 A.D.
USCSS Nostromo encounters what is assumed to be a distress signal emanating from the planetoid designated LV-426, in the Zeta-2-Reticuli system. Captain Dallas, Executive Officer Kane, and Navigator Lambert investigate a derelict spacecraft that contains the fossilised remains of an unknown alien species, and thousands of Xenomorph eggs. One of the xenomorph spore (‘facehugger’) attaches itself to Kane’s face and plants an embryo in his throat, which then hatches, killing the host. The hatchling (‘chestburster’) grows to over 7 feet tall and kills Dallas and Engineer’s Mate Brett.
Warrant Officer Ripley discovers that Weyland-Yutani want the Alien specimen and the crew of the Nostromo are expendable. It is revealed Science Officer Ash is in fact a Hyperdyne Systems 120-A/2 android, who has been protecting the Alien.
Chief Engineer Parker renders Ash inoperative when Ash attacks Ripley. Parker and Lambert are killed by the Alien whilst evacuating the Nostromo. Ripley rigs the ship to self-destruct and escapes on the shuttlecraft Narcissus with the ship’s cat Mr Jones. The Alien also escapes on the shuttle, but Ripley manages to blow it out of the airlock, effectively killing it.
Plot Summary of Alien (1979)
(scenes in red are only in the Special Edition)
Nostromo, a commercial towing-vehicle en route to Earth towing several million tons of mineral ore, carries a crew of seven: Captain Dallas, Executive Officer Kane, Warrant Officer Ripley, Navigator Lambert, Science Officer Ash, Chief Engineer Parker, and Engineering Technician Brett. When the story opens, the Nostromo is heading back to Earth.
A computer the crew calls “Mother” monitors the ship’s operations. Mother intercepts a strange signal from a nearby planetoid and wakens the crew. The crew believe at first that they’ve arrived at Earth, however, they quickly determine that they’re charged with investigating the strange signal, which is assumed to an SOS. Before they prepare the “tug” craft to land on the planet, crew members Brett and Parker argue that they’re not a rescue team and that they should be compensated for the extra work. Ash tells them that there is a portion of their working contract that states the crew must investigate any occurrences such as this one.
The tug portion of the Nostromo lands on the planet (with the ore and mining facilities left in orbit); the landing is rough, causing repairable damage that will take some time to fix. Dallas, Kane and Lambert leave the ship to investigate the signal, walking through the planetoid’s inhabitable atmosphere. They soon discover a derelict spacecraft of unknown origin, losing contact with the Nostromo upon entering the massive ship. Inside they find the remains of an enormous alien creature in the pilot chair, now fossilized. There is a hole in its ribcage, indicating that something burst out from inside its chest. Meanwhile, Ripley’s analysis of the unidentified transmission reveals that it is not an SOS, but a warning. Ripley wants to go after the search party but Ash talks her out of it.
Kane descends into a chamber beneath the pilot’s chair, discovering thousands of leathery objects that resemble large eggs. He also discovers a strange mist covering the eggs that reacts when broken. Moving in to investigate further, Kane illuminates one of the eggs from behind with a flashlight & discovers movement inside; a strange, spider-like organism is the resident. The egg opens, and as Kane moves into for a better look, the strange life form inside leaps out, dissolves the visor of Kane’s spacesuit, and attaches itself to his face.
Dallas and Lambert carry the unconscious Kane back to the Nostromo. Ripley, who is the commanding officer in the absence of Dallas and Kane, refuses to let them back on board, citing quarantine protocol. However, Ash disregards Ripley’s decision and lets them in.
In the infirmary Dallas and Ash attempt to remove the creature from Kane’s face, but they discover they cannot because it will tear Kane’s skin off. Kane is examined with sophisticated equipment which shows that the creature has inserted a tube into his throat and is feeding Kane oxygen despite his comatose state. Dallas makes the decision to remove the creature from Kane’s face, no matter the consequences.
When Ash tries to cut off one of its legs, a yellowish fluid pours out and begins to eat through the floor. Dallas is concerned that the acidic fluid will breach the hull, but it stops it’s corrosive effects. Dallas says the substance resembles molecular acid, and Brett comments the creature must be using it for blood. ‘Wonderful defense mechanism – you don’t dare kill it’, Parker growls. Kane is left in his coma and is tended to by Ash.
Ripley later confronts Ash about his defiance of her orders and allowing the alien organism onto their ship, which put all of their lives at risk. She distrusts him, as well as his seeming inability to give them any useful information about the creature. The damage to the tug is repaired by Brett and Parker, and the crew takes off and docks with the refinery & cargo in orbit. The Nostromo then resumes its course for Earth.
Eventually, the creature detaches from Kane’s face on its own and the crew find it dead. Kane wakes up, seemingly unharmed, and he and the crew decide to have one last meal before they re-enter hypersleep. During the meal, Kane begins to choke and convulse. While he lies on the table & the crew try to aid him, a new alien creature bursts from his chest. Parker moves in to kill it with a knife, and is stopped by Ash. The creature then scurries away, leaving the crew stunned and horrified.
After a short funeral for Kane, the crew members split up into two teams to capture the small creature. Ash rigs together a tracking device, while Brett assembles a weapon similar to a cattle prod. Picking up a signal, Parker, Brett, and Ripley think they have the creature cornered, only to discover the crew’s cat, Jones.
Realizing they might pick up the cat on the tracker again later, Parker sends Brett to catch Jones. As he searches for Jones, Brett finds a mysterious object that appears to be skin on the floor. He continues on, eventually catching up to Jones in a huge room. As he tries to coax Jones out, the cat hisses as a huge shape drops down behind the engineer. It is the alien, now fully grown and enormous, and it attacks him, dragging him, bloodied and screaming, into an air shaft. In the 2003 re-release of the film, Ripley and Parker hear him and arrive in time to catch a glimpse of the monster as Brett disappears.
The crew debate their next move. Ripley again questions Ash and his inability to give them helpful information. They all agree that the alien is using the air shafts to move around, so Dallas enters the network of air shafts with a flamethrower, intending to drive the alien into an airlock in order to blow it out into space. Using the trackers, the crew picks up the alien’s signal, but the signal vanishes, leaving Dallas unsure of the creature’s location. He finds the alien’s slime on the tunnel floor. Dallas is disoriented in the cramped space and starts to panic when the signal returns, indicating it is heading directly for him. In his attempt to escape, he runs right into the creature. The remaining crew members find only his flamethrower left behind.
Ripley queries Mother for advice on destroying the alien, but in the process discovers that “the company” (unnamed in this film, but identified in the sequels as “Weyland-Yutani”) had recognized the signal as a warning and wanted one of the alien creatures brought back for study, considering the crew expendable. This information is related in just four screen shots of text from Mother – an excellent scene.
Ash attacks Ripley after she learns of the Company’s “Special Order”, but Parker and Lambert arrive before he can kill her. Parker dislodges Ash’s head with a fire extinguisher, revealing Ash is an android. With Ash disabled, Ripley and the others reconnect his disembodied head to see if he can give them any advice on how to deal with the creature. Ash tells them they have no chance against it, as it is “the perfect organism”.
Ripley decides to follow Lambert’s earlier suggestion; set the Nostromo to self-destruct & escape in the shuttle, leaving the Alien to die on the Nostromo. As they leave the room, Parker turns the flamethrower on Ash’s corpse to ensure he will not be re-activated and come after them. While Ripley preps the shuttle for launch, Parker and Lambert go to gather coolant for the shuttle’s life-support system.
On the ship’s open intercom system, Ripley hears the cat and realizes Jones has been left behind. Alone, she goes out into the hallways of the Nostromo to find him. Expecting the alien at every turn, Ripley finally locates the cat and puts him into his traveling container. She then hears the sounds of the alien attacking Parker and Lambert in another part of the ship, and Parker shouting orders to Lambert to get out of the way. The alien corners Lambert against a wall, but Parker is unable to get a clear shot at it with the flamethrower without killing Lambert. Finally he charges at the creature, but it spins on him and kills him with its bizarre inner jaws. It then turns back to Lambert and Ripley hears the sounds of it killing her as she rushes to try and save her friends. Ripley finds the bodies of Parker & Lambert in the storage room they had been working in, and then races back towards the bridge.
In another restored scene, Ripley finds Dallas in a storage chamber. He has been cocooned by the alien in an unidentifiable substance (the creature’s secretions) and very weakly begs Ripley to kill him. Ripley also sees Brett, already dead, whom appears to be transforming into another of the species’ eggs. Ripley burns them both with the flamethrower and rushes out of the chamber.
Ripley realizes she is now alone on board the Nostromo with the alien. She activates the ship’s self-destruct and races to the shuttle with Jones’ cat carrier. As she rounds the bend to the shuttle entrance, the alien suddenly leaps up, blocking her path. Ripley drops the cat carrier and backs up, racing back to abort the self-destruct function. Arriving at the bridge, she restarts the cooling unit, but ‘Mother’ states that it is too late to stop the countdown and the Nostromo will explode in 5 minutes.
Ripley returns to the shuttle loading area, ready to make her best attempt to fight off the alien and get to the lifeboat. The alien is nowhere to be seen, so Ripley and Jones board the shuttle with 1 minute to abandon ship. Quickly running through the launch sequence, the shuttle lowers to launch position as ‘Mother’ starts counting down the last 30 seconds of the Nostromo‘s life. The shuttle’s engines ignite and the ship races away from the Nostromo, which grows smaller by the second. A series of mighty explosions follow as the Nostromo vanishes in fire, destroying the refinery and ore it had been carrying – and apparently destroying the alien.
As Ripley prepares for hypersleep, a hand reaches out to her from a wall; the alien had in fact stowed away aboard the shuttle, its external physicality making it blend in with the ship’s machinery. She retreats to a locker with a pressure suit inside, and gets an idea. Ripley dons the spacesuit & arms herself with a gun & grappling hook, then straps herself into a chair. Opening a series of air vents above the alien’s head, Ripley tests them one at a time, and then finds one that directly blasts high-pressure steam onto the alien, driving it from its hiding spot. As the monster stands to its full, menacing 2-meter height, ready to attack with its piston-like inner throat & teeth, she opens the shuttle’s airlock, blasting the creature into space with the grappling gun. The door slams shut, trapping the alien outside.
Undaunted, the alien attempts to re-enter the ship by climbing inside one of the heat thrusters. Ripley sees the opportunity and fires the engines, incinerating the alien. Before she and Jones enter hypersleep for the trip home, Ripley records a log entry stating that she’s the last survivor of the Nostromo.
2179, the Aliens plot, 57 Years Later
The events of Aliens (1986) take place 57 years after the events of Alien (1979) in the years 2179 – 2182 and again on the planet LV-426.
**8,500+ hits (as of Apr ’14) from around the world to this post, which was written when it first opened in theaters. Please do answer poll. Thanks**
The writer William Gibson recently tweeted (@GreatDismal) that he’s also noticed strong and divided opinions about Director Ridley Scott’s new science fiction spectacular, Prometheus, in theaters now.
Gibson tweeted on June 14th: “Split on Prometheus (which I haven’t seen) is vast and deep, with smart friends on both sides. In that situation, there’s often something going on with the dichotomy.”
Similar critique surrounded Scott’s Alien three dozen years ago and Bladerunner received the same treatment when it came out in 1982; the producers felt disrespected. On the DVD of the Director’s cut, with commentary, one of them snarls that Gandhi won the award for Best Costume Design over Bladerunner that year.
What if Ridley Scott’s worst crime is he’s a visionary unable to express ideally within the constraints of Hollywood’s demands and thus left us with a mess to interpret? Over the years in sci-fi we’ve considered far less quality product with far more attention.
Here’s excerpts of interviews with screenwriter Damon Lindelof and some actors from the film (not Ridley Scott, who is pretty closed-mouthed), that reveal a lot of this movie was edited out for the time constraints of Hollywood’s ‘Summer Blockbuster Marketing Mentality’.
This certainly has contributed to the confusion. Lindelof goes so far as to say that in Hollywood they just don’t want a movie to last more than two hours. The run-time is 2:03.
Frustrated fans have a right to be upset if this is true. A story takes time to tell. Marketers and groovy executives must be kept out of the calculation when it comes to run-time.
We’ll see if future extended versions and Director’s cuts of Prometheus flesh out the film. I propose we have to work harder to imagine the story wholly, but that it’s worth it.
To describe the story in Prometheus, Alien and Aliens taken together, I’ll use both my own writing and plot synopses written by others. [Prometheus from IMDB by WellardRockard; Alien by Colin Tinto].
Please respond to this poll of your thoughts on the film:
The “Other” Comments
Nine poll respondents used “other” to comment:
“both awesome and full of shortcomings,”
“Intense, positive for sure, but lacks full disclosure. Leave em wanting more?!”
“amazing brilliant movie.”
“Expecting more than a thinly disguised Alien remake.”
“Lot of plot holes and overall inconsistencies”
“Great. and visual!”
“I fell Asleep Watching it “
“flawed.”
“lacking information”
Explaining Prometheus
Ridley Scott is an avant-garde of the first two decades of multi-episode, scalar, sci-fi sagas.
I say Ridley Scott is avant-garde in the context of a continuum of sci-fi film-making that begins with Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and then, only after nearly a decade of Planet of the Apes (1968) sequels, moves on to Lucas’ Star Wars and Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), before Alien (1979) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and finally Bladerunner, The Thing and E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). Spielberg’s hand was what made the genre more popular until Cameron’s The Terminator (1984) and Aliens (1986) come along and blow it up.
In Alien, his breakout, Ridley Scott established a unique and very specific blueprint: a slow build with the first half of the film to establish grand settings and an ensemble of characters within an immense context and then a hell ride for the second half of the film to its fantastic, terrorizing conclusion.
Perhaps Scott’s failing, if it can be called that, is avant-garde-ism coupled with a density of information that startles and cows some contemporary viewers, preventing appreciation of the work the first time through.
A second major problem seems to be an issue of control over editing. Screenwriter Damon Lindelof was meant to bring human dimension to Scott’s immense vision, but it sounds like much of the tempo and dialogue required to do this ended up on the cutting room floor.
It requires imagination to appreciate imagining of this scale and one has to have two things to enjoy the movie: a willingness to wholly go on the ride, and active interpretation of subtle motivations described in a limited fashion by the cut.
I’m definitely eager for the Director’s Cut, which I hope will be a vastly improved film.
(editorial note: the death of Ridley Scott’s brother, Tony, within weeks of the release of Prometheus, must have interrupted any post-release work)
The Grand Plot Begins on Earth Before the Dawn of Man
Human life on Earth began millennia ago because a being – perhaps twice human-size, capable of interstellar travel and to whom we refer hereafter as an Engineer – drank something toxic and died while visiting Earth, collapsing into a waterfall.
I gather this from the title sequence of Prometheus. This Engineer’s DNA co-mingled with the primordial soup to jump start evolution and ultimately to create us: smaller, weaker, less advanced versions of the Engineers. It is unclear whether this is a purposeful act, but the pain the Engineer endures in disintegrating implies not.
An oblong shape is seen above him in the sky – a ship? It appears to be getting smaller, leaving? I wondered whether he was being left here to commit suicide?
2089 A.D., Humans Discover the Engineers
A series of ancient cave paintings are found all over Earth, each depicting one of these oversized human figures (the Engineers) pointing upward to a constellation pattern. In the year 2089, archaeologist couple Elizabeth Shaw and her boyfriend Charlie Holloway discover this star map among ruins and archaeological sites of several otherwise unconnected ancient cultures.
Shaw and Holloway divine a location in space to associate with the star pattern. The two interpret this as an invitation from humanity’s forerunners – an interpretation which may or may not be one of many misreadings in the grand narrative.
Throughout his career, Ridley Scott has succeeded in imbuing contemporary human hubris onto our future behavior, making viewers unsure whether the actions and opinions of any of his characters, save Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in the Alien films, are sound.
The events of the film Prometheus take place between 2089 and 2094. Shaw and Holloway are hired to lead an expedition to the theorized location depicted in the cave drawings,a moon that orbits the immense ringed-planet LV-223. They achieve interstellar travel via cryogenic suspension with the crew of the ship USS Prometheus.
2093, the Prometheus plot
Peter Weyland, the elderly founder and CEO of the Weyland Corporation, funds the creation of the scientific deep space research vessel USS Prometheus to follow the cave painting maps to a distant moon orbiting the planet LV-223, many light years from Earth.
The ship’s crew travels in stasis at light speed while the android David stays awake, pilots the craft, studies ancient languages in order to translate for possible interactions with humanity’s makers, and monitors the passengers in cryo-sleep on their voyage, going so far as to read their dreams.
Note: One flaw is that if LV-223 is, as stated, many light years away and the Prometheus arrives in just over two years, the craft must have traveled faster than the speed of light to cross the distance in space between Earth and LV-223. This remains unexplained and mere cryo-stasis is not sufficient to explain it. It can only be a maximum of two light years away. (wormholes?)
The android David, the scientist Shaw and the CEO Weyland are direct parallels as characters to the androids Ash and Bishop; to Ripley; and to the Company in the Alien films. These tropes are significant on multiple levels because Scott makes use of the image we have of these characters. He constructs them to be knocked about so we can see a range of human experience – and in so doing, he acknowledges, subtly, sci-fi blockbusters of the past.
In David, one senses not only Ash and Bishop, but also the cold, insouciant, horrifying spirit of HAL from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey; in Shaw, the naive wonderment of Jodie Foster’s Ellie Arroway in Contact meets Ripley’s stubborn righteousness; and in Weyland, we’ve the aging hubris of Jurassic Park‘s Jon Hammond, played so deliciously by Richard Attenborough, and the billionaire boys’ club attitude, ever-forward pushing like Contact‘s S.R. Hadden, as played by Jon Hurt. There’s a movie sci-fi continuum.
Here, Weyland is portrayed by Guy Pierce as a cold, calculating, demanding CEO, the inventor (of David) and aging corporate raider obsessed with extending his own life above all other concerns.
In Prometheus, there’s continuity of feeling with Alien and Aliens, and nuanced shades of many science fiction films and characters of the recent past, but there remains a doomed feeling throughout that much of our human spirit is weak and flawed. Maybe that’s why people don’t like it.
The principle criticism I hear from fans so far, who like the work in general, is that the characters are not developed. Very few of the characters are given much depth, and it’s painfully obvious that the “Hollywood Summer Blockbuster” cut is brutal. One has to imagine a lot, and much if it isn’t good. That’s not easy and folks don’t like doing it.
That said, the relationship between Shaw and Holloway is the most explored. It’s revealed that she has faith in Christ and that he is an atheist. In making their discovery Holloway chides Shaw about her faith. She claims to be unfazed, a believer. This is what Weyland saw in her.
Holloway, her atheist colleague and lover is, for his part, unbothered, he loves her and would do anything to pursue her interests. Holloway’s faithless willingness to do anything leads to his doom.
In 2093, the ship arrives in the orbit around LV-223. This is not the same planet first seen in Alien (1979) and in Aliens (1986) as confirmed by Ridley Scott in an interview on Friday June 1st on BBC radio 5 live.
Alien is set on LV-426, or Acheron, while Prometheus is set on a moon of LV-223.
After being awakened from hibernation, the crew are informed of their mission to find the ancient aliens, the “Engineers”. They also view a holographic message from Weyland himself, which tells them that he, Weyland, has since died, but that he has funded the mission under the direction of the scientists.
The Weyland hologram introduces Shaw and Holloway to the others, and the two explain what they have discovered and their intention to respond to what they perceive of as an invitation from humanity’s creators.
The other scientists are agog at the scale of the mission and the geologist Fifield and biologist Milburn express real skepticism. Mission director Meredith Vickers orders all present to avoid any direct contact if the Engineers or any other aliens are found.
The Prometheus lands near an alien structure and a team including Shaw, Holloway, and David explores it, while Vickers and Captain Janek remain aboard the ship and monitor their progress.
Flying drone scanners are employed to zoom through the immense curved structure beaming red, analytical light across the interior surface and allowing 3d mapping to be simulated as a visual model back on Prometheus and the data to be shared among the scientists simultaneously – rad.
The explorers find breathable air within the alien structure, discover hundreds of vase-like artifacts and a monolithic statue of a humanoid head. Other bodies are later found, and the Engineers are presumed to be extinct.
Using his polyglothic array of ancient languages, David sorts out how to use the controls for projectors within the structure and makes visible 3-Dimensional video replays of the final moments of the Engineers.
The replays show the oversized human beings, the Engineers, running through the structure, and yield valuable archaeological perspective of the events that led to the death of one of them, who tripped and was decapitated by a fast closing doorway. When David rapidly interprets the commands etched in a wall beside where this occurred, and opens the door, they find the actual large humanoid head of the Engineer behind it.
A rapidly approaching storm forces the crew to return to the Prometheus. Shaw insists they take the Engineer’s head back to the ship with them and they barely make it back alive. A biologist and geologist, Milburn and Fifield are stranded in the structure after becoming lost trying to find the way out.
David, the android, meanwhile, returns to Prometheus with one of the vases, while back in the structure, apparently induced by the presence of the away team, dozens of the remaining vases begin leaking black, gooey liquid. Small worm-like creatures are seen writhing in the goo – there’s life here. Upon entry the vases were dry and clean. Something about the entry of these people here has begun what is occurring with the vases, which the scientists told David to avoid.
David secretly bringing the vase back is the first of three covert acts that make us question his motivations.
In the ship, Shaw and medic Ford analyze the Engineer’s head, bringing it to life with electrostatic shock. They find some kind of disease, illness or growth on the surface of the head, which comes to life and endures a lifelike pain and exacerbation of the skin growth, eventually rupturing, causing the head to explode. “Mortal, after all,” remarks the android David.
Taking a sample of the tissue, Shaw discovers that the DNA of the Engineer is identical to that of the human race, confirming our relationship to these predecessors.
Note: this DNA match makes no sense whatsoever – if it is an exact match then, they would be, essentially us, and since they are in fact different from us in size, it seems likely there would be some difference in genetic structure.
Meanwhile, revealing an unnamed covert purpose, David investigates the vase he has secretly brought aboard and discovers a vial containing a black liquid.
David removes a drop of the black, organic goo within and puts it on his finger. There’s a beautiful ECU of David’s finger – instead of prints he has the Weyland logo subtly carved into his fingertip.
Earlier in the film, during stasis, we see David standing over the cryochambers and realize that he is able to see into the dreams of the sleeping passengers. Now, we see him again standing over a passenger. It is unclear who is within the chamber, but someone on the mission has not yet been awakened. David is communicating with the person in stasis.
Vickers confronts David about this, asking, “What did he say?” To which David initially responds “He” wouldn’t want David to tell her, but pressed by Vickers physically, responds the message from “him” was “Try harder.”
While it’s unclear to whom they’re referring, the fact that it’s Weyland, Vickers employer, who created David, is inescapable. Vickers intimacy implies a deeper connection between her and to whomever David is communicating.
David’s android reasoning is revealed further by this conversation; caught by his Master’s need for secrecy, he cannot lie to Vickers and yet cannot tell her the whole truth. This is the first of David’s conundra that result in unusual behavior.
Two Possible Directives Explaining David’s Behavior
Weyland is directing David to act from within the cryochamber via both some kind of direct communication and David’s ability to read the dreams of the sleeping passengers.
There are two basic directives:
1. to find a living Engineer; take Weyland to the Engineer, and convey Weyland’s wishes for immortality.
2. David is also being told to explore the organic goo and the parasitic creatures found aboard the Engineer’s ship – for the purposes of Weyland’s corporate goals.
These two directives are being interpreted by a first-generation, one-of-a-kind synthetic human, who:
a. is instructed by its maker to both function covertly and serve the mission of the Prometheus.
b. is a prototype and predecessor by 29 years of the android Ash, who was also programmed to act covertly in Alien aboard the Nostromo (which the Company calls a malfunction), and by 81 years of the softer, safer version of synthetic person, Bishop in Aliens.
c. has spent two years interpreting the dreams and thoughts of Weyland, Shaw and the entire crew bound to meet their maker, all while studying human culture and ancient human culture.
Long before the Prometheus arrives at LV-223, questions of identity abound for David.
Upon opening the vase and taking a drop of the liquid for his own analysis, David realizes that to follow through on the second directive he must infect a passenger.
David’s scene with Holloway in the billiard room is an excellent example of an android reasoning out how to proceed with the problem of his orders being covert. He asks Holloway a series of leading questions meant to bring Holloway to implicit approval of David’s plan to infect him.
The dialogue ends with David saying,”Then it’s time for a drink” – only then does David infect Holloway by briefly tapping the tiny black drop of the gooey substance on his finger into a glass of champagne he has poured.
Android reasoning – David gets Holloway’s tacit approval for experimenting upon him. It is subtle but clearly by design and only after a series of statements and questions that David allows himself to deposit the drop in Holloway’s glass.
Holloway downs it,”Here’s mud in yer eye, pal.” It’s such a Deckard line – most of my friends think it cheesy, I love it.
David predates Ash by 29 years and Bishop by 81 years. He is also a unique, a one-off – the first, a prototype. There is little compassion in him, little emotion. His quirk of having a fascination for one single human movie – Lawrence of Arabia – is hyper-constructed and yet gives him so little sweetness. The android is calculating and emotionless in 2093.
Shaw and the infected Holloway have sex. It is revealed that Shaw is sterile. Holloway follows her blindly and experiments wildly alongside. He loves Shaw and takes her as she is, a believer, a Christian, unable to bear children. He truly loves her and would be led by her to the end of the universe, to this Godforsaken place.
Holloway later looks in a mirror and sees his eyes are changing – mud in his eye – first evidence that he has been poisoned with the black goo by David. He still does not know how he came to be infected.
Meanwhile, trapped back inside the structure by the storm, Fifield and Milburn meet and are attacked by snake-like creatures which invade their suits, their skin and their minds. The slithery tentacle-like snakes have a bulbous head of folded skin that unfolds to reveal a triangular head with gaping mouth and teeth.
Note: just as in Alien, the first appearance of the ‘monster’ isn’t until one hour and one minute into the film. Scott’s blueprint is intact.
The snakes penetrate first the suit and then the skin of Milburn, who is killed, and perhaps made a host for an embryo – the snake goes into his mouth. A corrosive fluid (yellow acid blood) from one of the creatures melts Fifield’s helmet, exposing him to the dark liquid leaking from the vases. The “acid for blood” immediately recalls to mind the facehugger in Alien.
The crew returns to the Engineer’s structure after the storm passes to find Milburn’s corpse and no sign of Fifield.
David, meanwhile, separates from the others and discovers an immense cargo hold filled with the goo-filled vases. Though he is connected digitally to the Prometheus and specifically to Vickers, David intentionally severs this connection, revealing for the second time a covert intent.
In another room David discovers a living Engineer in stasis and video replays that allow him to see a holographic star map of the universe. The map highlights Earth.
Then David discovers the bridge of what is obviously a spacecraft. We’ve seen this huge, C-shaped ship with a giant chair in it already. It’s the one occupied by the skeletal remains of an oversized humanoid pilot with its rib cage pushed out in Alien and Aliens.
David learns how to operate the craft from the videos of the extinct Engineers, and how to liberate the living Engineer from cryostasis. He does all of this alone, cut off from the Prometheus, adding to the aforementioned covert mystique.
This is a trillion-dollar, private, corporate expedition and there are unseen hands at play – the undead Peter Weyland is acting through the robot David. We come to realize that Weyland is in cryogenic stasis and that David has been communicating with him throughout. The agent behind David’s covert activity becomes more clear.
David can thus be seen as part of a progression in robot design over 81 years – from David to Ash in 29 years of development and from Ash to Bishop in 57 more years. But he is also the first, a unique, like HAL. Weyland’s crowning achievement in synthetic people, like HAL, is subject to philosophizing, wonderment, and devious, purposeful action in the pursuit of its directives.
Holloway’s infection rapidly ravages his body, and he is rushed back to the ship. Shaw doesn’t understand why he is sick and no one else is. As he visibly deteriorates, Vickers, holding a flamethrower and standing at the ramp to the Prometheus refuses to let Holloway aboard. Holloway is in immense pain and finally he steps forward demanding she kill him. Vickers immolates him at his request.
Shaw is shattered, and stunned because she does not know how her lover was exposed singularly. She doesn’t know David gave him the black goo in his champagne. She doesn’t understand what is happening. Her naivety takes its major slam in the face. This, of course, is very reminiscent of Ripley’s experience in the Alien films and it’s horrifying and emotional.
To make matters much worse, a medical scan reveals that Shaw, despite being sterile, is in an advanced state of pregnancy impregnated with an alien creature that in 10 hours has grown to the size of a basketball and is still growing, all as a result of having sex with Holloway who has been poisoned by David with the black goo. David – removed, eerie, in the revelatory moment says, “Well, Doctor Shaw, it’s hardly a traditional fetus,” then – HAL-like, Ash-like – attempts to subdue her.
One feels obvious parallels here: Weyland has instructed David to return Shaw to Earth in stasis as a container for the creature which he considers a biological weapon. It’s exactly what the Company, Ash and Burke hope to do with Ripley and the crew of the Nostromo and Ripley and Newt, in 30 and again 87 years in the future from these events.
But Shaw, like Ripley, escapes and uses an automated surgery pod to cut a cephalopod-like creature from her abdomen. It’s a female parallel to crewman Kane’s stomach-rip in Alien in some weird way.
The scene is epic: The robotic, automated surgery chamber, a gurney in a tube, uses spray-on anaesthetic, robotic hands and metal clamps to fold back Elizabeth’s belly skin. A small robotic crane enters her exposed gut and brings out the placenta-covered, squid-like creature which then emerges, alive, spraying pre-birth from within its amniotic sac all over her. The machine closes Shaw with a staple gun, while the tentacled squid-thing flops angrily above her, held tenuously by the robotic crane arm.
Note: The idea that a machine capable of conducting such COMPLEX, delicate operations on human beings would somehow not be designed for males and females is ridiculous.
Shaw escapes crawling out from under it and, stumbling around like a little girl who has had everything horrible revealed to her, discovers Peter Weyland alive, sitting calmly on a bed, being waited upon by his doting robot.
Shaw realizes Weyland has been alive the whole time in stasis aboard the ship. She finds him and the cold, bemused David – who considers her resilient for surviving the implantation of an alien within her – preparing to meet the Engineer.
David is an excellent predecessor to the androids Ash and Bishop of Alien and Aliens, colder, more calculated, less concerned about human beings than either. He dotes on his creator, who made him singularly and treats him like a son.
Weyland and David explain to Shaw that Weyland intends to ask the Engineer to help him avoid his impending death. The subtle devotion that David has for Weyland, the blind following, reveals much about his actions in the film thus far.
Outside the Prometheus, a mutated Fifield attacks the hangar bay and kills several crew members before being killed himself. Janek sees what is happening and theorizes that this moon is actually a facility where the Engineers designed weapons. He proposes it was a military base until they lost control of their biological weapon: the vases and the black fluid they contain.
Vickers attempts to stop Weyland from going through with his plan. She tells him he will be killed. Weyland is stoic even as, in departing, Vickers calls him father and the connections are all made clear. Weyland’s invented a son in David and abandoned his connection to his daughter. Vickers grew up hating the old man – something David takes to be normal in all humanity – “Doesn’t everybody hate their parents?” he asks Shaw.
Weyland, David, Shaw and Ford return to the structure to awaken the Engineer David discovered in cryogenic stasis. It becomes clear that the Engineer is occupying a space ship (the same design as the crashed alien space ship seen on LV-426 in Alien and Aliens). It’s a spaceship with a cargo hold filled with toxic chemical and biological weapons that can destroy whole worlds with parasitic aliens.
David shows Weyland, Shaw and Ford the bridge and cryo-chambers of the Engineer. He then wakes the Engineer from cryogenic sleep. This is the moment Weyland and Shaw have been waiting for: to meet our maker. But now, after all that has happened, each has very different requests.
The immense Engineer slowly comes to its wits from hypersleep and attempts to understand the small human beings before it. Shaw, realizing Janek is right, screams in English “Ask him what’s in his Cargo Hold?” Why is he taking it to Earth?” and then at the Engineer: “Why do you want to kill us? What have we done?”
Before the Engineer can respond, the selfish and decrepit Weyland has Shaw silenced to put forth his android, his son – the perfect specimen of human likeness, capable of speaking in multiple languages, indeed having translated those of the Engineer to learn the controls of the craft and its devices – to explain his purpose.
The Engineer responds by decapitating David and killing Weyland and Ford. Shaw escapes the alien ship as it is activated for launch by the Engineer. Weyland dies, pathetic, broken. Vickers, observing from aboard the Prometheus, and hearing the flatline confirming the death of her father Weyland, orders Janek to return to Earth.
The still-active David lies disembodied on the floor of the Engineer’s craft, but maintains contact with Shaw and now begins to tell what he knows. The craft begins to initiate take-off and Shaw is hurled from within the ship and crawls and runs across crevasses created by the launching of the immense craft.
It’s a scene that mimics the headless Ash being brought back to tell the crew of the Nostromo what is actually happening to them in Alien. David’s severed body and still-conversant head are similar to the final state of the android Bishop of Aliens as well, who ends divided yet able to cling to the floor of the Sulaco and grab Newt to save her from being thrown out the airlock. It’s as if the fate of all Scott’s androids is a milky decapitation.
David reveals to Shaw that the Engineer is starting up the ship and is intending to release the vases of black goo on Earth. She hears David and tries to warn Vickers and Janek that the ship is headed to Earth with the intention of killing off humanity.
Vickers, aboard the Prometheus, orders Janek to return to Earth, but this is the Captain’s shining moment. Janek, in a brief exchange with Shaw, assesses the threat to humanity if they allow the Engineer’s ship to leave. He defies Vickers and tells her to abandon ship if she doesn’t want to die. While Vickers flees in an escape pod, Janek and his crew, straight-forward, no-nonsense and generally non-involved in the mission throughout, save humanity by crashing the Prometheus into the Engineer’s ship as it attempts to take off.
The disabled ship of the Engineer crashes onto the planet, falling onto Vickers, crushing her. The ship continues to tumble and nearly crushes Shaw, but she escapes.
Shaw goes to the escape pod to get oxygen and retrieve supplies and finds her alien offspring has grown to gigantic size. The Engineer survives the crash, enters the escape pod and attacks Shaw, who releases the tentacled creature. It subdues the Engineer by thrusting a tentacle down its throat. When the Engineer falls with the immense tentacled creature atop him, the creature looks very much like the “facehuggers” in the Alien films.
David, still functioning and decapitated, lying on the floor of the bridge of the downed spacecraft, communicates with Elizabeth Shaw who lies, crying on the moon’s rocky desolate surface. David says he would like her help, that if she can collect him and carry him, he could help here to leave this place because there are other crafts like this one on the moon.
Shaw recovers David’s remains from the alien ship, and asks if he can operate the craft. He responds that he can fly them back to Earth.
Shaw asks if he can fly them to the place of origin of the Engineers and he says that he can. Together they activate another Engineer ship. Shaw and the remains of android David then take off to travel to the Engineers’ homeworld in an attempt to understand why they created humanity and why they attempted to destroy it.
In the final shot, back in the Prometheus escape pod, the immense tentacled facehugger has died (just like the facehuggers do after implanting the embryos in Alien) and the Engineer’s body begins to convulse. From within his chest emerges an alien (very similar but not the same as seen in later movies) The creature bursts out of the dying Engineer’s chest and we see the mouth within a mouth and familiar head structure and body shape of the “chestburster” xenomorphs in Alien.
2122, the Alien plot – 29 Years After Events of Prometheus
The events of Alien (1979) take place June 3rd to 6th in the year 2122 A.D.
USCSS Nostromo encounters what is assumed to be a distress signal emanating from the planetoid designated LV-426, in the Zeta-2-Reticuli system. Captain Dallas, Executive Officer Kane, and Navigator Lambert investigate a derelict spacecraft that contains the fossilised remains of an unknown alien species, and thousands of Xenomorph eggs. One of the xenomorph spore (‘facehugger’) attaches itself to Kane’s face and plants an embryo in his throat, which then hatches, killing the host. The hatchling (‘chestburster’) grows to over 7 feet tall and kills Dallas and Engineer’s Mate Brett.
Warrant Officer Ripley discovers that Weyland-Yutani want the Alien specimen and the crew of the Nostromo are expendable. It is revealed Science Officer Ash is in fact a Hyperdyne Systems 120-A/2 android, who has been protecting the Alien.
Chief Engineer Parker renders Ash inoperative when Ash attacks Ripley. Parker and Lambert are killed by the Alien whilst evacuating the Nostromo. Ripley rigs the ship to self-destruct and escapes on the shuttlecraft Narcissus with the ship’s cat Mr Jones. The Alien also escapes on the shuttle, but Ripley manages to blow it out of the airlock, effectively killing it.
Plot Summary of Alien (1979)
(scenes in red are only in the Special Edition)
Nostromo, a commercial towing-vehicle en route to Earth towing several million tons of mineral ore, carries a crew of seven: Captain Dallas, Executive Officer Kane, Warrant Officer Ripley, Navigator Lambert, Science Officer Ash, Chief Engineer Parker, and Engineering Technician Brett. When the story opens, the Nostromo is heading back to Earth.
A computer the crew calls “Mother” monitors the ship’s operations. Mother intercepts a strange signal from a nearby planetoid and wakens the crew. The crew believe at first that they’ve arrived at Earth, however, they quickly determine that they’re charged with investigating the strange signal, which is assumed to an SOS. Before they prepare the “tug” craft to land on the planet, crew members Brett and Parker argue that they’re not a rescue team and that they should be compensated for the extra work. Ash tells them that there is a portion of their working contract that states the crew must investigate any occurrences such as this one.
The tug portion of the Nostromo lands on the planet (with the ore and mining facilities left in orbit); the landing is rough, causing repairable damage that will take some time to fix. Dallas, Kane and Lambert leave the ship to investigate the signal, walking through the planetoid’s inhabitable atmosphere. They soon discover a derelict spacecraft of unknown origin, losing contact with the Nostromo upon entering the massive ship. Inside they find the remains of an enormous alien creature in the pilot chair, now fossilized. There is a hole in its ribcage, indicating that something burst out from inside its chest. Meanwhile, Ripley’s analysis of the unidentified transmission reveals that it is not an SOS, but a warning. Ripley wants to go after the search party but Ash talks her out of it.
Kane descends into a chamber beneath the pilot’s chair, discovering thousands of leathery objects that resemble large eggs. He also discovers a strange mist covering the eggs that reacts when broken. Moving in to investigate further, Kane illuminates one of the eggs from behind with a flashlight & discovers movement inside; a strange, spider-like organism is the resident. The egg opens, and as Kane moves into for a better look, the strange life form inside leaps out, dissolves the visor of Kane’s spacesuit, and attaches itself to his face.
Dallas and Lambert carry the unconscious Kane back to the Nostromo. Ripley, who is the commanding officer in the absence of Dallas and Kane, refuses to let them back on board, citing quarantine protocol. However, Ash disregards Ripley’s decision and lets them in.
In the infirmary Dallas and Ash attempt to remove the creature from Kane’s face, but they discover they cannot because it will tear Kane’s skin off. Kane is examined with sophisticated equipment which shows that the creature has inserted a tube into his throat and is feeding Kane oxygen despite his comatose state. Dallas makes the decision to remove the creature from Kane’s face, no matter the consequences.
When Ash tries to cut off one of its legs, a yellowish fluid pours out and begins to eat through the floor. Dallas is concerned that the acidic fluid will breach the hull, but it stops it’s corrosive effects. Dallas says the substance resembles molecular acid, and Brett comments the creature must be using it for blood. ‘Wonderful defense mechanism – you don’t dare kill it’, Parker growls. Kane is left in his coma and is tended to by Ash.
Ripley later confronts Ash about his defiance of her orders and allowing the alien organism onto their ship, which put all of their lives at risk. She distrusts him, as well as his seeming inability to give them any useful information about the creature. The damage to the tug is repaired by Brett and Parker, and the crew takes off and docks with the refinery & cargo in orbit. The Nostromo then resumes its course for Earth.
Eventually, the creature detaches from Kane’s face on its own and the crew find it dead. Kane wakes up, seemingly unharmed, and he and the crew decide to have one last meal before they re-enter hypersleep. During the meal, Kane begins to choke and convulse. While he lies on the table & the crew try to aid him, a new alien creature bursts from his chest. Parker moves in to kill it with a knife, and is stopped by Ash. The creature then scurries away, leaving the crew stunned and horrified.
After a short funeral for Kane, the crew members split up into two teams to capture the small creature. Ash rigs together a tracking device, while Brett assembles a weapon similar to a cattle prod. Picking up a signal, Parker, Brett, and Ripley think they have the creature cornered, only to discover the crew’s cat, Jones.
Realizing they might pick up the cat on the tracker again later, Parker sends Brett to catch Jones. As he searches for Jones, Brett finds a mysterious object that appears to be skin on the floor. He continues on, eventually catching up to Jones in a huge room. As he tries to coax Jones out, the cat hisses as a huge shape drops down behind the engineer. It is the alien, now fully grown and enormous, and it attacks him, dragging him, bloodied and screaming, into an air shaft. In the 2003 re-release of the film, Ripley and Parker hear him and arrive in time to catch a glimpse of the monster as Brett disappears.
The crew debate their next move. Ripley again questions Ash and his inability to give them helpful information. They all agree that the alien is using the air shafts to move around, so Dallas enters the network of air shafts with a flamethrower, intending to drive the alien into an airlock in order to blow it out into space. Using the trackers, the crew picks up the alien’s signal, but the signal vanishes, leaving Dallas unsure of the creature’s location. He finds the alien’s slime on the tunnel floor. Dallas is disoriented in the cramped space and starts to panic when the signal returns, indicating it is heading directly for him. In his attempt to escape, he runs right into the creature. The remaining crew members find only his flamethrower left behind.
Ripley queries Mother for advice on destroying the alien, but in the process discovers that “the company” (unnamed in this film, but identified in the sequels as “Weyland-Yutani”) had recognized the signal as a warning and wanted one of the alien creatures brought back for study, considering the crew expendable. This information is related in just four screen shots of text from Mother – an excellent scene.
Ash attacks Ripley after she learns of the Company’s “Special Order”, but Parker and Lambert arrive before he can kill her. Parker dislodges Ash’s head with a fire extinguisher, revealing Ash is an android. With Ash disabled, Ripley and the others reconnect his disembodied head to see if he can give them any advice on how to deal with the creature. Ash tells them they have no chance against it, as it is “the perfect organism”.
Ripley decides to follow Lambert’s earlier suggestion; set the Nostromo to self-destruct & escape in the shuttle, leaving the Alien to die on the Nostromo. As they leave the room, Parker turns the flamethrower on Ash’s corpse to ensure he will not be re-activated and come after them. While Ripley preps the shuttle for launch, Parker and Lambert go to gather coolant for the shuttle’s life-support system.
On the ship’s open intercom system, Ripley hears the cat and realizes Jones has been left behind. Alone, she goes out into the hallways of the Nostromo to find him. Expecting the alien at every turn, Ripley finally locates the cat and puts him into his traveling container. She then hears the sounds of the alien attacking Parker and Lambert in another part of the ship, and Parker shouting orders to Lambert to get out of the way. The alien corners Lambert against a wall, but Parker is unable to get a clear shot at it with the flamethrower without killing Lambert. Finally he charges at the creature, but it spins on him and kills him with its bizarre inner jaws. It then turns back to Lambert and Ripley hears the sounds of it killing her as she rushes to try and save her friends. Ripley finds the bodies of Parker & Lambert in the storage room they had been working in, and then races back towards the bridge.
In another restored scene, Ripley finds Dallas in a storage chamber. He has been cocooned by the alien in an unidentifiable substance (the creature’s secretions) and very weakly begs Ripley to kill him. Ripley also sees Brett, already dead, whom appears to be transforming into another of the species’ eggs. Ripley burns them both with the flamethrower and rushes out of the chamber.
Ripley realizes she is now alone on board the Nostromo with the alien. She activates the ship’s self-destruct and races to the shuttle with Jones’ cat carrier. As she rounds the bend to the shuttle entrance, the alien suddenly leaps up, blocking her path. Ripley drops the cat carrier and backs up, racing back to abort the self-destruct function. Arriving at the bridge, she restarts the cooling unit, but ‘Mother’ states that it is too late to stop the countdown and the Nostromo will explode in 5 minutes.
Ripley returns to the shuttle loading area, ready to make her best attempt to fight off the alien and get to the lifeboat. The alien is nowhere to be seen, so Ripley and Jones board the shuttle with 1 minute to abandon ship. Quickly running through the launch sequence, the shuttle lowers to launch position as ‘Mother’ starts counting down the last 30 seconds of the Nostromo‘s life. The shuttle’s engines ignite and the ship races away from the Nostromo, which grows smaller by the second. A series of mighty explosions follow as the Nostromo vanishes in fire, destroying the refinery and ore it had been carrying – and apparently destroying the alien.
As Ripley prepares for hypersleep, a hand reaches out to her from a wall; the alien had in fact stowed away aboard the shuttle, its external physicality making it blend in with the ship’s machinery. She retreats to a locker with a pressure suit inside, and gets an idea. Ripley dons the spacesuit & arms herself with a gun & grappling hook, then straps herself into a chair. Opening a series of air vents above the alien’s head, Ripley tests them one at a time, and then finds one that directly blasts high-pressure steam onto the alien, driving it from its hiding spot. As the monster stands to its full, menacing 2-meter height, ready to attack with its piston-like inner throat & teeth, she opens the shuttle’s airlock, blasting the creature into space with the grappling gun. The door slams shut, trapping the alien outside.
Undaunted, the alien attempts to re-enter the ship by climbing inside one of the heat thrusters. Ripley sees the opportunity and fires the engines, incinerating the alien. Before she and Jones enter hypersleep for the trip home, Ripley records a log entry stating that she’s the last survivor of the Nostromo.
2179, the Aliens plot, 57 Years Later
The events of Aliens (1986) take place 57 years after the events of Alien (1979) in the years 2179 – 2182 and again on the planet LV-426.
The Internet arrived just as I was finishing my undergraduate education at University and already my younger peers, in their 30’s now, were better prepared for the world we exist in today – the Digital Generation.
My generation, the Pre-Internet Baccalaureates, are one of the fastest shrinking groups of humanity: those who received a college degree or university education without the existence of the Internet.
Forever, Pre-Internet Baccalaureates will be the last of what came before, from the slower, quieter, less crowded world sans digital devices and the world wide web. (For the purposes of definition, I propose the Digital Generation begins in 1993, with the standardization of TCP/IP Protocols).
Most of us have, of course, absorbed the Internet and lots of peripheral tech into our education now and we stumble along using the tools given to us by Silicon Valley social engineers in amazing ways with handheld devices a hundred times a day.
Our children and the generations that follow have become guides to absorbing the transition to digital tech.
With the expansion of the digital divide, I propose a Western equivalent of the Japanese phrase, using the Latin taxonomy:
Homo sapiens digitalis
Today, we consider human beings, Homo sapiens sapiens, to be the only living species of the genus Homo.
Wiki tells us that in 2003, scientists defined the 1997 findings of Tim White in Ethiopia of Homo sapiens idaltu as: an extinct subspecies of Homo sapiens that lived almost 160,000 years ago in Pleistocene Africa.
Homo sapiens idaltu was to describe the divide between us and this species that was so similar to us yet went extinct. Idaltu is from the African Saho-Afar language, a word meaning “elder or first born”
So if future generations look upon our disconnected, pre-internet society as backward, naturally, we need defining terminology to describe the divide. The term digitalis has numerous meanings that apply here – from fingers to digital technology – in defining the generations to come as advanced from us.
People using digital technology have fast become a part of almost every career, society, community, corporation and culture and if evolution holds, the inevitable death and transfiguration of homo sapiens sapiens and rise of homo sapiens digitalis, will be total.
Many homo sapiens sapiens will die-off, others will evolve into homo sapiens digitalis.
Anyone can study digital technology and move from sapiens to digitalis, but indeed, we have learned it is easiest if this education is begun at an earlier age … which brings us back to the lonely generation at the end of the previous era: Pre-Internet Baccalaureate.
Among the Pre-Internet Baccalaureate homo sapiens sapiens, we find unusual relationships designed from facility with digital tech during the era of its creation:
– Marriages in which one partner is tech-savvy and the other not so, preferring to yield the tech responsiblity to the other.
– Communal groups in which a single friend is highly skilled – the now famous early adopter – who teaches the others to engage in particular tech.
– Bellweather users who guide others around them – one elder in a retirement community for example who helps others by using the net – in communities where people are uncomfortable with new tech.
The argument that we are not a different species from our children lies squarely on the fact that, obviously, homo sapiens sapiens and digitalis can intermarry and breed, but note that while this is true, it is rare that offspring of such unions remain sapiens sapiens.
And thus is born Homo sapiens digitalis, the final species of the genus Homo.
We demand better leadership, greater social welfare and a more secure future established and defended by law;
We demand the prioritization of social welfare by our government, as established by the Constitution, The Bill of Rights and this manifesto;
We demand a solution set to a Five Year Plan authored to conclude with a saner, better, safer, more economically solvent USA by the year 2068, which we consider the 50th Anniversary of The People’s Year, 1968.
We demand this begin with a bi-partisan, total-governmental “pause-and-reflect” to comprehend and address with greater social and moral responsibility what has been 30 years of a market-protective policy that has degraded our social foundation;
We demand Senators, Members, Justices and the Executive Office take much greater ethical responsibility for the struggles of our elders, the poor, the unemployed and suffering; ethical responsibility that matches at least what we achieved in great acts during times of economic crisis in our Nation’s recent past, specifically before the policies of the last 30 years: the Social Security System, FDR’s New Deal, LBJ’s Great Society, President Carter’s budget that predicated military aid from the USA upon humanitarian – and not political or economic – concerns;
We demand collaborative and not competitive effort in this regard – in the past we made the winner of the Presidency take other candidates as cabinet members and even the Vice Presidency – ending the animosity, showing greater concern, allowing our shared concern to become a national ethos for bettering our country;
We demand that our Representatives and our Media take a much more serious, sober and street-level look at our Nation and produce better coverage of issues and solutions-oriented messages that show our greatest strength: working together;
We demand that this pause-and-reflect to re-establish the priorities of the United States Government, our government, take place immediately, before Congress recesses and before the Election 2012 occupies the socio-political context, specifically because the elections process has collapsed in at least two of the first three federal elections of the 21st Century;
We demand an immediate Federal Election Commission as we had in 1973, focused on the rapid signing of a Federal Elections Act [FECA] that resolves once-and-for-all a nationwide, technologically-sound method of voting that satisfies major concerns about the proper casting and counting of votes, standardizes the process nationwide with contemporary technology and protects it from the blatant manipulation that has already occurred and is being swept under the rug (we have, since 2000’s horror of an election, established numerous non-profit, non-partisan institutions and groups with solutions);
We demand an end to the failed Immigration, Drug and Economic Protectionism policies that are collapsing into bitter, divisive and philosophically mean-spirited discourse predicated by race and race-orientation rather than national character;
We demand a solutions-oriented, bi-partisan Government to overcome what has gone on in the last 30 years: the slow descent of our culture into base values, the debasement of our government, our people, our way of life and our very spirit as a Nation due to despotism, political corruption, corporate influence and greed;
We demand a solution set to a Five Year Plan authored to conclude with a saner, better, safer, more economically solvent USA by the year 2068, which we consider the 50th Anniversary of The People’s Year, 1968.
We demand the Five Year Plan be authored by the Government after the Election of 2012 to allow the process of our recovery to begin next year – a Five Year Plan passed by Congress in 2013.
( a one hour talk delivered to students at Academy of Art University in San Francisco on Friday, March 1, 2012. There was no recording. Slides appear in order here as images, and some video clips and links have been added to this online version).
Good afternoon, I am M.T. Karthik.
I’ve organized this talk chronologically, and into three general parts, starting first with historical examples of mass media used for sociopolitical language here in the US;
then second, a line between politics of the past and the present drawn by the invention and use specifically of television,
and finally politics in the Digital Age, which will conclude with some discussion of the contemporary situation.
The largest arc of this one hour talk is pluralism of mass media in sociopolitical language – from pamphlet to newspaper to radio to television to cable television to the Internet to FB to Twitter over the last 236 years.
In the last part of the talk, I will also be sharing some of my original work in the field. I have sought to report upon, document and portray through art, certain social interests primarily because I believe they are being written out of history, even covered-up by specific interests and aggregation of public opinion around a monocultural viewpoint of our nation’s political past.
No discussion of American political thought and expression can start without the Declaration of Independence –
– Thomas Jefferson’s seminal document authored against the monarchy in England, which set off an age of revolution on behalf of individuals against kings and nation-states and which, with the U.S. Constitution, created the bond between the Colonies that holds as Federalism to this day.
It’s important to read the Declaration in context, because of the scale of Jefferson and the Colonists’ reach.
Jefferson was influenced by the French and other European thinkers as a result of visits there, but really, the scale of the task was unprecedented.
How would you author a letter to all the Kings and governments of the nations of the world declaring the creation of your own new country – led collectively – with an unprecedented democratic governmental structure set up by its citizens?
It’s said Rick Perry, the Governor of Texas, has supported secession of Texas from the United States. How would his Declaration of Independence read, today? Would he address it to the UN, the Senate, the President, the Supreme Court? – none of these institutions existed for Jefferson to appeal to. He was writing to the nebulous notion of a “world at large” and against the British Monarchy.
What kind of persuasive language do you use in such a context?
“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”
Epic.
But how was it possible for Thomas Jefferson to set down these words in Virginia with such confidence? The seeds had been sown by a Philadelphian, who wrote and published a pamphlet which became an instant best-seller here and abroad.
Perhaps more than any text in that nascent revolutionary period, Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense – addressed audaciously to “the inhabitants of America” – pushed the colonists toward independence. The text demanded an immediate declaration of separation from England a full year before Jefferson sat down to write the great document.
With Common Sense, began the era of the political pamphlet in the United States. The authors of the Revolution used the format in the next ten years to author the Constitution. Should we refer to the American political pamphlet as a medium?
Here’s a recent one:
The pamphlet brings with it the creation of whole industries: printing, typography, stenography, journalism, cartooning, and begins an arc of American sociopolitical language that pluralizes to include newspapers, magazines, radio, television, cable television and the Internet. This talk will discuss the use of all of these and pluralism of media over the 236 years since the Declaration of Independence was written.
The serial publication of essays, viewpoints and even texts of speeches became the normative method for political discourse in the Colonies. It birthed the centralization of thought in new-born cities and the media channel of our oldest newspapers and journals.
The Federalist Papers were a series of 85 articles or essays promoting the ratification of the United States Constitution.
77 of these were published serially in The Independent Journal and The New York Packet between October 1787 and August 1788. A compilation of the 77 and eight others were published as The Federalist or The New Constitution in two volumes in 1788.
From these documents and the discussions they generated, came our Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Promptly thereafter, colonial cities birthed the “two-paper town” as the newly minted First Amendment of the Constitution produced contrasting viewpoints in the form of newspapers, which bore, defined and built the “constitution” of American political thought for a hundred and fifty years.
The era made editors-in-chief men of great power a hundred years before Citizen Kane.
Note that the Presidents of the US at this time are mostly forgettable bureaucrats. Perhaps Van Buren stands out for his hemispheric reach, but great debate and intellectual work wasn’t being done by the President. It was occurring in the Senate, at the level of the Supreme Court and with the birth of newspapers’ Editors-in-Chief like Horace Greeley of The New York Tribune – who began to take on greater responsibility for political language.
During the period of 1840 – 1860, after years of the establishment of new civic centers and States, with their own newspapers and journals, the country faced its greatest sociopolitical unrest. Correspondingly, an era of great newspaper publishers and editors representing contrasting viewpoints emerged.
By 1858 it was common for newspaper-editors to employ stenographers to attend speeches and to publish the speeches in totem in their papers.
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858 were a series of seven debates between Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate for Senate in Illinois and the incumbent Senator Stephen Douglas, the Democratic Party candidate. At the time, US Senators were elected by state legislatures so Lincoln and Douglas were vying for control of the Illinois legislature.
The main issue in all seven debates was slavery and ultimately all of the issues Lincoln would face in the aftermath of his victory in the 1860 Presidential Election – issues which would lead directly to the first dissolution of the Union and the first Civil War in U.S. History.
The debates were held in seven towns in Illinois, but became so popular that they were distributed by papers elsewhere.
But editors of papers who favored Douglas would take the stenographers’ notes and clean them up, fixing errors of notation, context or even meaning only in Douglas’ words. Papers that favored Lincoln did the opposite. The power of the Editor was never before so clearly visible.
Lincoln lost the Senate election, but afterward he had all the texts cleaned, edited properly and republished as a single book – which was read broadly and helped lead him to the nomination in 1860.
The issue of Slavery was defined for vernacular discourse by the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, a remarkable moment in U.S. political history and language. Here’s the Centennial Stamp:
And so for long years newspaper men and politicians were bound in this country and great cultural and social consciousness that helped define the nation emerged through muckraking and whistle-blowing, but also, inevitably, corruption and yellow journalism.
The Spanish-American War may have been born from such yellow journalism, as the sinking of The Maine, falsely attributed to the enemy by papers in the U.S., pushed Americans into the war. More examples exist, and indeed as media pluralizes over the next century, this cozy corruption between politicians and journalists has been exacerbated by new media.
By the turn of the 20th century, the dominant medium was the printed word, and then, the word as heard through radio and both were being used to push political interests and social agendas.
Radio, a warm medium, a tribal medium with which President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the fireside chat, became the primary media tool for information about the wars abroad that defined the century. As Wiki points out, Every US President since Roosevelt has delivered a regular radio address.
News and official information delivered by voice over the airwaves is warm and available, lucid by the intimation of the sound of the voice, not subject to interpretation of the reader. Baseball and music and DJ’s sounded great on the radio and political communicators quickly recognized it.
Writing for broadcast began.
An excellent metaphoric example of the power of radio before television as a vernacular medium in politics can be found in the Coen Brothers musical film, O Brother, Where Art Thou?.
Set in the southern state of Mississippi before television, one narrative thread of the film follows a Governor’s race. Throughout the film, various people in the State are shown at home following the Election by listening to the radio.
Three escaped state prisoners form a musical group on the run, and anonymously record a single at a rural radio station which becomes immensely popular throughout the state through the power of radio. The men appear in disguise to perform their song live at an event which both candidates are attending.
The Governor’s opponent is insensitive to the popularity of the group, focusing instead on denigrating the men for both their fugitive status and their race. In a moment that predates television’s power in this regard, the challenger is revealed to be a racist statewide over the air. The challenger, unlike the incumbent, has no grasp of the power of the radio.
In the climactic scene, the incumbent Governor of Mississippi, seeing the immense popularity of the three escaped state prisoners, pardons the musical phenomenon the ex-convicts have become. The whole of the dialogue is shown to be carried out on radio throughout the State to the folks listening at home, who even hear the challenger run out of the hall on a rail as the Governor leads the crowd in a rousing chorus of “You Are My Sunshine.”
The entire scene is here:
[with respect to the Coen Brothers]
These scenes are remarkably faithful to the truth. In Louisiana, Jimmie Davis, a popular singer and the attributed author of the song, “You Are My Sunshine, became Governor.
The blogger LaLouisiane is eloquent on this matter:
“I remember my granddaddy saying that if Jimmy Davis would come around and sing “You Are My Sunshine”, (he wrote it you know), that everybody in the state would vote for him and never even ask him about a policy, a road, a bridge, nothing. We just really like that song down here, I guess.”
This talk, Political Media, Messages and More, is a follow-up to a talk I gave as News Director and Elections Coverage Producer for KPFK 90.7fm in LA, seven years ago at C-Level Gallery in L.A.’s Chinatown, which was subtitled, Pluralism of Media in the Age of Surveillance [mtk 2005].
Pluralism of media is evident at the addition of each new mass medium – radio doesn’t arrive at the newspaper’s exclusion or the pamphlet’s exclusion.
The pamphlet and certain newspapers remain significant modes of sociopolitical communication. They are at the heart of some, arguably all, of the United States’ greatest movements. Women’s Suffrage,
Socialism, the Labor movement’s successes in the first half of the 20th century.
So Pluralism of Media means we media-include, not media-exclude.
Where before you read pamphlets, now you read pamphlets and newspapers. Where before you read print, now you read print and listen to the radio – you add TV.
We add each medium and the media morph to fit our desires of them. Talk radio, drive-time radio, live radio, each is its own form.
This is what Marshall McCluhan meant when he said any new medium contains all previous media in it.
This is all changing now, of course, as Pluralism of Media has matured since 2005 to become the fluid, the cloud, the totality of data that we swim in today, post-TiVo, at the dawn of the streaming era of the web.
END PART ONE
Part Two: THE TELEVISION PRESIDENCY 1945 – 2008
The Television Presidency, born when Truman used it to announce the end of World War II , instantly made the Office of the President of the United States different from every presidency before TV – and television dominated until the Internet and the digital age, a period of twelve presidents.
Ike was the first President on the tube, and in his most important moment on TV, his exit speech, President General Eisenhower famously warned against the growing presence of a “Military-Industrial Complex”
… perhaps it would have worked in color.
But forever the line that defines the Television Presidency will be the Kennedy-Nixon Debates of 1960. If you’ve seen Frost/Nixon you know that Nixon to the end of his days considered television, and the close-up, his undoing.
In the televised debates with Kennedy, Nixon’s problems with perspiration accumulating on his lip and his jitteriness in general on TV, came over as nervous and untrustworthy – on radio or via text this would never have been transmitted to the public-at-large. Nixon was ridiculed mercilessly for it by critics.
Imagine the contrast, Kennedy’s cool, youthful good looks and Nixon’s shiftiness.
Kennedy garnered the potency of the new medium, and, thanks in part to the work of Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Baines Johnson in delivering Texas, won the election by a slim margin.
I really like the blogger J. Fred McDonald’s take on this, who states, in his excellent essay on Kennedy’s relationship with TV: “For JFK, television could turn defeat into victory.”
Kennedy addressed the people of the country often and personably, but politically used the tool at critical junctures to save himself: after the Bay of Pigs fiasco and during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy’s use of television was pitch-perfect.
So, the relationship between live color television and the Presidency began with Kennedy’s handsomeness but then, typically of all things new, was taken promptly after discovery to the other extreme, the visual abuse of his savage assassination.
TV then exposed LBJ and Nixon and Kissinger’s dirty wars and the ugly side of the USA: repression, corruption, racism.
The 1968 Olympics were the first televised live and in-color around the world. They took place at the end of one of the most tumultuous years in history, a year I refer to as The People’s Year. This image of a staged protest against race and class oppression, thanks to live television, was impossible to stop:
I participated in making a monument to this moment on the campus of San Jose State University, when in 2006, I worked intimately with others assisting the artist Rigo 23 in the creation of this:
(At this point in the talk, I describe the Tommie Smith/John Carlos statue project anecdotally and include personal, non-published images of the construction of the statues.)
The impact of the moment as seen on television is described well by this Mormon blogger, who tells of being young and white and American and watching with her father. She describes his reaction both at the time and after watching ceremonies of the courageous act on video 20 years later – his change of heart is set in universal terms.
TV was the king of the failure that was The Vietnam War. It ended the Nixon Presidency. But politicians, as they had in the past, reacted by learning to manipulate the new medium to their advantage. Predictably, it was an actor who synthesized the power of the “small screen” for political propaganda.
Ronald Reagan overcame the tool’s power to reveal – with charisma. TV’s investigative potency withered with the mic in his hands.
TV buoyed Reagan into the White House with a full eight-year script, designed just like a Hollywood movie, with a brilliant new dawn at the front and a cowboy riding into the sunset at the end.
Reagan and TV media convinced most Americans that people in Russia lived in a dreary, black-and-white reality, trudging when they walked, standing in interminable lines as black-booted officers of the Kremlin marched past with truncheons to beat them if they acted out.
Reagan asserted our freedom to shop and drive and declare vast spaces ours to tame. Trained and experienced for fifty years in delivering lines written by others, he powered through TV.
Consumer technology was represented in its farthest reach by television, broadcast into millions of homes then on four channels, perhaps a fifth. It was a medium dominated by the Networks, and owned by private corporations. The unholy alliances between corrupt newspaper men and politicians had become de rigeur for relationships with corrupt television execs.
TV was manipulated on the greatest scale by Reagan. In those days, to be broadcast all over the world on US television was as close to “global communication in real-time” as existed and, on the evening of my sixteenth birthday, the actor-president went on television and gravely told us it was imperative to invest our tax dollars in a Strategic Defense Initiative to protect us from nuclear war. Reagan described this SDI as “Star Wars” technology, in the vernacular of the pop-movie phenomenon.
Every legitimate scientist in the world knew SDI was a ploy of language, a technical and political impossibility to deliver, and indeed, it was later revealed that Reagan’s own speechwriters had advised against his including it in public presentation – he’d made the decision on his own that day to do it. Generals, scientists, politicians and writers protested; others were put on the spot, but somehow the language was never exposed.
A naïve public wowed by Reagan, Star Wars, computers and technology in general – and without the Internet to look up the reaction of scientists and writers – ate it up.
Conservatives have used the phrase to justify defense spending for offensive weapons for decades – even now in Europe. Years later we live with these TV-generated myths, like the “dirty bomb”. (cf. The Power of Nightmares by Adam Curtis)
It was 1984, and the United States was described by most as being a free society, totally unlike the one in George Orwell’s prophetic novel named for that year.
That image – of totalitarian fascism that produced false-flags and enslaved citizens to a national narrative – was projected by the U.S. President onto the Soviet Union, a country he called “The Evil Empire”. It was a term taken directly from popular movies and, wielded by a movie actor through the ubiquity of the medium of television, it became successful political propaganda.
Reagan used his charisma on the small screen to push corporate, private, and even illegal agendas, until the veneer finally broke in the Iran/Contra hearings. But even then, his “I can’t remembers,” delivered pitch-perfect on national television, got him off the hook.
The Dawn of “Pluralism of Mass Media”
By my senior year of high school in 1985, say 10% of students were writing papers with word processors and printing them dot-matrix to take to our teachers. The movement started with stand-alone word processor devices, which were typewriter-like machines that had single-line or paragraph-wide monitors at the top of the keyboard, allowing writers the ability to read what they were typing without printing it first, for the first time ever.
Looking back it seems both obvious and amazing how quickly we made the transition to using the word processor and eventually software on a pc to write. It was a natural step that changed writing forever. Cursive and the typewriter are all but dead. Content began its high-speed ascent. USA Today and CNN were born.
But though the computer was on the verge of changing writing, publishing, and expressing with text and image forever, the single most dominant force of mass media technology wasn’t yet the computer. It was still television, which had expanded through digital technology that created cables delivering far more visual information directly into American homes.
George Herbert Walker Bush, the former head of the CIA, wasn’t close in the primaries when he ran for President in 1980, but was appointed to the bottom half of Reagan’s ticket and became Vice President. Now the actor was termed out.
The Republican Party seized the lessons of the small screen, and having had eight years of method training by a great actor, extended that training to a former serviceman. George H. W. Bush’s team was precise and almost militaristic at staying on message.
Bush repeated phrases without giving policy details, promised Americans more of what Reagan gave them and then repeated the same two or three positive phrases again.
Democratic Presidential Candidate Michael Dukakis’ imagery was by contrast horribly clunky – footage of him in a tank with an ill-fitting helmet had the opposite effect of projecting the desired image of a strong leader.
Bush had the immense advantage of the Office of the Vice President for air-time, but used it sparingly, with few details. When Bush’s campaign did use TV ads, it was to attack – the Willie Horton ad ran ad nauseum and painted Dukakis as a bad judge of character.
This was the beginning of catchphrase culture.
A culture manifest most strongly on television by ads, and in political communication as satire of the timeliest manner on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, featuring Dana Carvey as a repetitive robotic message man George H.W. Bush against John Lovitz as an exasperated Michael Dukakis, who finally shrugs, and delivers the punchline:
[click that link above to see the bit … Chevy Chase birthed portraying the President on SNL, but Dana Carvey nailed it before Phil Hartman or Will Ferrell]
Though we have been pluralizing mass media from the pamphlet to the television, this era is the dawn of the Pluralism of Mass Media that delivers us to the Internet Era of sociopolitical propaganda – not only because of the birth of word processing and cable television, but because radio returns for what it’s good at.
RADIO and TV in concert
Radio broadcasting shifted from AM to FM in the late 1970s because of the opportunity to broadcast music in stereo with better fidelity.
Rush Limbaugh’s talk radio show was first nationally syndicated in August 1988, in a later stage of AM’s decline. “Limbaugh’s popularity paved the way for other conservative talk radio programming to become commonplace on the AM radio,” states his Wikipedia entry.
Radio became the drumbeat for the President’s made-for-TV messages. The cool medium was used sparingly for headings and rubrics and catchphrases, while radio was used for tribal intercommunication of long, warm discussion of the message.
Limbaugh had an immense following and Bush made sure he got as much access as he needed. My father remembers seeing footage on network news of President George H.W. Bush welcoming Rush Limbaugh, shaking his hand and then picking up his bag for him before turning to walk into a personal meeting.
This potent image deliverable only by television (wordless communication in background footage, not a press conference with the President) was transmitted for the conservative President and his media agent on ABC, NBC, CBS, and perhaps PBS and the TV message – short, cool, specific – conjoined with the radio message, long, rangy, warm – to create a uniform statement.
The 1988 Election was the last Network News Election. The four-channel era of television was over.
Cable News Network, CNN, began and had its watershed moment by being the first embedded network live during wartime. At last, TV had provided war,itself, live and in-color.
George H.W. Bush and his Gulf War versus Saddam Hussein over Kuwait gave CNN more than a billion viewers worldwide, birthed CNN International and pushed Cable News past Network News in terms of relevance.
Television production became tighter, faster, snappier, with jump-cuts and camera motion. Technology was on the cusp of the fluidity of digital. The TV talk show incorporated radio stylings.
The cable news era, which is only just winding down, began with The Gulf War, and the 1990’s are littered with what cable TV invented: Newstainment, and, critically because it signals the demise of the Academy, the creation of star faculty and pundits.
These define cable TV in the 90’s, composing formats used today by Rachel Maddow, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly and so many more pseudo-intellectual, corporate-financed, opinion-making cable TV “shows,” designed by marketing and legal teams, by groovy execs and demographers more than journalists.
Whole channels have emerged – and here the Daily Show/Colbert are uniquely successful – from what was drawn so poorly in the 1990’s. The medium’s highly refined message delivery system operates full-tilt, 24/7, and millions call it real-time.
[END PART TWO]
PART THREE:
The21st Century : The Internet Meets the Television Presidency
Part Three notes are much less formal as the latter part of the talk is filled with anecdotal descriptions of several projects I have engaged in. However, I am writing it up cohesively and will add it here when finished.
This section starts with the 2000 Election that ended in the Florida Fiasco and into Howard Dean’s successes with the Internet, then moves through the Kerry-Bush Election, the first-ever Congressionally-contested election and then the Obama-McCain election, ending finally with the unique situation of politicians in SF running for Mayor and using Twitter for the first time even as they granted Twitter a huge tax-break to stay in the City. I reference works of my own that parallel these circumstances.
TS: Nobody taught them, but they just emerged with this; so in Japanese expression, these are a new species … totally different from us.
MTK: There’s a Japanese phrase for this?
TS: mm-hmm. Shin Jin Rui. Jin Rui is the ‘species’ and then Shin is new. So, a totally different group of people as far as this computer or technology.
Takako Smith, 51, on her children and nephews, Narita Airport, June 2005
one of 11 interviews in The First Contact Project:
30 years ago, in the spring of my thirteenth year, a handful of seventh grade classmates and I were introduced to the first computer any of us had ever seen. It was a big, grey, heavy thing that took up an entire desk table
It cost about a thousand dollars, which in 1980 was several hundred dollars more than a high-end color television, and it came with a 5¼-inch floppy disk drive in front and a multi-pin serial port in the back with which to connect a wide, flat, gray plastic cable to a dot-matrix printer, the sole consumer peripheral of the era. The printers were loud.
The TRS-80 – for T[andy] R[adio] S[hack] [19]80 – didn’t last long in the stampede towards obsolescence that has become the trademark of personal devices, maybe two years, but this bulky, ugly, gunmetal-grey personal computer lasted long enough to garner a nickname. We called it the Trash-80.
We were thirteen and it represented suburban popular society’s introduction to computing – you could buy one at the mall. It had 16k of memory, a dull black monitor screen, and a little white, rectangular blinking cursor.
20 years later, in the year 2000, the desktop computer in my office at The New School in Manhattan, came with 80 million k and 512k of RAM. Laptops with as much and weighing less than twelve pounds were available for around two thousand dollars. Most machines had numerous data ports including modem, USB and/or fire wire and all provided access to the nascent virtual human extension we call the World Wide Web – which didn’t exist when I graduated from the University of Texas, Pre-Internet Baccalaureate, a slow-dying breed.
10 years later, here in Oakland in 2010, I steer a 750 dollar Dell laptop with 500gigs, 4 gigs of RAM, and an Intel Core2 Duo 2.2GHz to write this essay, and if I don’t use the net to source it with fresh material it will bore most of my contemporaries.
plug/unplug, is a vernacular history of my use of technology and comes with a compact disc called, The First Contact Project, which consists of interviews of people of various ages remembering their first interactions with a computer and the Internet.
I participated in and then withdrew from high tech for years at a time in various contexts over the past three decades and here I attempt to address one principal criticism: that the quality of this immense leap in personal computing technology in such a short amount of time has been over-valued by high-tech industry, and it’s corollary, that we must, at least occasionally, unplug from the ever-spiraling fantasy projection of ourselves that we have begun in the wake of the digital era, take pause, reflect and perhaps even reboot our system, at a personal and national level. We must be more judicious about our ongoing relationship with machines.
To understand this criticism, consider first how many personal electronic devices existed in our home when the TRS-80 arrived. There was television; color and black-and-white sets with four channels (ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS) and perhaps a local UHF station. We had VHS by 1985 and most of my classmates were part of a fast-growing cable television market (HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, ESPN, MTV, Discovery and the History channel were all born in the eighties). Games were 2-D and catchy as hell: Atari, Pacman, Donkey Kong.
There were landlines and princess phones and fax machines, and a “mobile phone” was rumored to exist. There was audio gear that had evolved to an analog specificity of high order: pre-amps, amplifiers, receivers, equalizers, turntables, cassette players (8-tracks) and speakers. There were devices for the kitchen: microwaves were the latest, but blenders, mixers, grinders, coffee makers, juicers and toaster ovens had all appeared in the three decades after WWII. In the garage, we had gas-driven mowers, blowers and perhaps electric gardening and power tools. Certainly 1980’s, “middle class,” USA was the most advanced culture in terms of consumer technologically anywhere – except perhaps Japan.
The personal computer entered the home and went into a totally separate room – Dad’s study – where it was dedicated to educating me about computing. We had to make a relationship with the personal computer and, early on, the machine was pretty brutish. Initially, it wasn’t even as useful as the machine it shared that room with, the typewriter. I remember trying to get that Trash-80 to do a moronic do-loop while hearing, beside me at his desk, the soft, powerful clicking of my father on his dominant IBM electric at the very end of the typewriter’s hundred-year reign over writing.
My Dad put the computer table in a walk-in closet in his study, and so I was alone in there with it all the time. I remember the closet’s dusty smell, of the old papers he had archived on the shelves above me. I wasn’t scared of it, but it was daunting. I had classmates – prodigies really – who had already gained local notoriety for their use of computers, and my father like many, wanted me to have access to the new tech. Often, I was in there only because Dad expected me to be. I just sat with this big, ugly gray thing blinking at me, unable to program it. I remember feeling utterly uninspired.
I learned some BASIC at school and through a magazine and from some friends, and wrote some really simple code. I designed a Dungeons and Dragons type text-based exploration game, wrote a calculating program, but I never really got into it. Because I was interested even then in publishing, I was printing multiples with typewriters and carbon paper, with the AB Dick mimeographing machine, and finally through the wonder of copy machines. I didn’t consider the computer as a tool for publishing. The computer was the territory of science and mathematics. It required programming with Mathematics terms. We cracked the case and opened it up in Physics class. Though some of us may not have grasped the technical aspects of computing as quickly as others of my classmates, we all understood it was the beginning of the digital era. This is evident when listening to The First Contact Project.
In 1983, a few years into my experience with the TRS-80 at home and with various IBM 8088s and Apples introduced to us through science classes in Junior High and High School, I ran into a Macintosh. My friend Randy’s dad was an engineer at Datapoint, and bought one of the first. We were handling the little console months before the Chiat/Day television ad for the Mac, which debuted during the Super Bowl in 1984. The ad featured a woman in running shorts and tee shirt, tinted, the only color figure in an ominous black-and-white future-world of faceless grey drones. In the ad, she ran, carrying a hammer which she throws into a massive television screen to smash a projection of an enormous Big Brotherly face monotonously intoning unintelligible propaganda.#
The first Apple Macintosh’s were actually editioned, with an engraved steel plate with a unique number soldered to the back. It was clear to us as teenagers in Randy’s room out behind his parents’ place, that we were looking at something radical. The interface of the Mac was stunningly more user-friendly than any previously experienced. A child could use it.
Windows, the operating system that commanded more than 90% of the world’s desktops for two decades, did not yet exist. Bill Gates was just a Harvard dropout, but Apple was on the map. The Mac introduced the mouse, fonts, pull down menus and yes, windows. The Macintosh would define how Windows would look and eventually how tens of millions would interface – through machines – with each other around the world.
By my senior year of high school a lot of us were writing papers with word processors and printing them dot-matrix to take to our teachers. The movement started with stand-alone word processor devices, which were typewriter-like machines that had single-line or paragraph-wide monitors at the top of the keyboard, allowing writers the ability to read what they were typing without printing it first, for the first time ever. My Dad loved his.
Looking back it seems both obvious and amazing how quickly we made the transition to using the word processor and eventually software on a pc to write. It was a natural step that changed writing forever. Cursive and the typewriter languish. But though the computer was on the verge of changing writing, publishing, and expressing with text and image forever, the single most dominant force of mass media technology wasn’t yet the computer.
THE TELEVISION PRESIDENCY 1945 – 2008
As the Super Bowl ad for the Macintosh reminded us, it was 1984, and the United States was described by most as being a free society, totally unlike the one in George Orwell’s prophetic novel named for that year. That image – of totalitarian fascism that produced false-flags and created an enslaved society – was projected by the U.S. President onto the Soviet Union, a country he called “The Evil Empire”. It was a term taken directly from popular movies and, wielded by a movie actor through the ubiquity of the medium of television, it became successful political propaganda.
The Television Presidency, born when Truman told the world the U.S. had used the A-bomb, instantly made the Office of the President of the United States different from every presidency before TV, and television dominated until the Internet and the digital age, a period of twelve presidents.
In his most important moment on TV, President General Eisenhower warned against the Military-Industrial Complex and went unheeded, perhaps it would have worked in color, we‘ll never know. The relationship between color television and the Presidency began with Kennedy’s handsomeness and, typically of all things videoed, was be taken to the other extreme, the visual abuse of his savage assassination and that of his brother. TV then exposed LBJ, Nixon and Kissinger’s dirty wars and the ugly side of the USA: repression, corruption, racism. TV was the king of the failure that was The Vietnam War.
Predictably, it was Ronald Reagan, an actor, who synthesized the power of the “small screen” for political propaganda. He overcame the tool’s power to reveal and its potency withered with the mic in his hands. Many fought against it and lost as TV smothered President Carter and buoyed Reagan to a full eight-year script, designed just like a Hollywood movie, with a brilliant new dawn at the front and a cowboy riding into the sunset at the end.
Reagan and TV media convinced most Americans that people in Russia lived in a dreary, black-and-white reality, trudging when they walked, standing in interminable lines as black-booted officers of the Kremlin marched past with truncheons to beat them if they acted out. And he promoted our freedom to shop and drive and declared the vast empty spaces of our plains – devoid of the genocided natives and buffalo – to be ours to tame. Trained and experienced for fifty years in delivering lines written by others, Reagan used the words “freedom,” “liberty” and “greatest country in the world” on TV a lot. But Reagan’s “New Dawn” should be revised by historians to be revealed for what it was, a veil.
During his terms, millions were jailed for victimless crimes. Millions of other unfortunates unable to care for themselves were cast out of care centers and into the streets. Hundreds of thousands suffered because the President refused to utter the word AIDS – on TV or anywhere else. Secret wars were conducted that tortured, raped and murdered tens of thousands of civilians, including women and children – in Central America, in West Asia, in Africa. Trickle down economics and Reagan’s massive military budgets set us on a path from which we have yet to fully recover.
One of the best assessments of the Reagan Era, which reads prescient in the wake of the Reagan Doctrine and captures Reagan, the man, is Ronald Reagan: An Autopsy, by Murray N. Rothbard in March of 1989, an autopsy well before his death in 2004, which chillingly predicts that the digital age would if it could “mummify” a carefully crafted public perception of the 40th President well into the future.
“In this High Tech Age, I’m sure his mere physical death could easily have been overcome by his handlers and media mavens. Ronald Reagan will be suitably mummified, trotted out in front of a giant American flag and some puppet master would have gotten him to give his winsome headshake and some ventriloquist would have imitated the golden tones, “We -e-ell …” (Why not? After all, the living reality of the last four years has not been a helluva lot different).”
Consumer technology, on the cusp of elevating us with the Internet, was in those days represented in its farthest reach by television. And that medium was manipulated on the most epic scale by Ronald Reagan. In those days, to be broadcast all over the world on US television was as close to “global communication in realtime” as existed and, on the evening of my sixteenth birthday, the actor-president went on television and gravely told us it was imperative to invest our tax dollars in a Strategic Defense Initiative to protect us from nuclear war. Reagan described this SDI as “Star Wars” technology, in the vernacular of the pop-movie phenomenon.
Every legitimate scientist in the world knew SDI was a ploy of language, a technical and political impossibility to deliver, and indeed, it was later revealed that Reagan’s own speechwriters had advised against his including it in public presentation – he’d made the decision on his own that day to do it. Generals, scientists, politicians and writers protested and others were put on the spot, but somehow the language was never exposed. A naïve public wowed by Reagan, Star Wars, computers and technology in general – and without the Internet to look up the reaction of scientists and writers to such drivel – ate it up. Conservatives have used the phrase to justify defense spending for offensive weapons for decades – even now in Europe. Years later we live with such TV-generated myths, like the “dirty bomb”.
Reagan used his charisma on the small screen to push private, and even illegal agendas, until the veneer finally broke in the Iran/Contra hearings, but even then, his “I can’t remembers” delivered pitch-perfect on national television, got him off the hook. Years later, I asked U.S. Historian Dr. Cornell West, how it could have come to that:
“In some ways it’s like after the Congress of Vienna in 1815 where you had thick waves of counter-revolution, thick waves of conservative politics and the emergence of reactionary elites and nation states. And since the 1980’s we have had thick waves of conservatism, thick waves of reactionary elites, Thatcher, Reagan, you can go right across the board. … We’re dealing right now with an ice age, and by ice age I mean deeply conservative and reactionary elites shaping the world in their own image.”#
BIRTH OF THE INTERNET MEETS THE TELEVISION PRESIDENCY
As the global capitalists and reactionary elites seized back control through Reagan and G.H.W. Bush, the Agency man, their mouthpieces in the White House, out west, intellectuals were absorbed in the privatization, commercialization and diversification of high technology. In Silicon Valley, California, a cultural renaissance of international significance was taking place – biotech giants like Genentech were revolutionizing the privatization of research labs, RDBMS giants like Oracle and Informix were radicalizing data collection and analysis, and computing was blossoming. Since the early 1970’s, U.S. scientists had been working on a concept from a series of memos written in the 60’s toward the creation of the network we now call the Internet.
Working at Stanford, MIT, Champagne-Urbana and elsewhere, these scientists realized international networking even as my classmates and I were first being exposed to the TRS-80, DOS and Apple II.# My generation’s history with computers parallels the history of personal computing itself. We were the first to send an e-mail; the first to use what has become a principal tool for communication on earth, The Internet. It provides never-before realized transparency and sharing capability between independent thinkers. It is the culmination of the greatest successes of the last century, bringing together the progress of telegraph, telephone, radio, television and computer to realize in synthesis one of the greatest human tools ever designed and implemented.
The TCP/IP protocol that is the basis for the modern World Wide Web was established January 1st of 1983, when I was a sophomore in High School. Then the National Science Foundation funded and supported networks – and dialogues which led directly to networking – for students and professors around the country in the 80’s and, by the 90’s, around the globe. The world became hyper-computerized before our eyes over the next twenty years. There was software for everything, and if there wasn’t yet, there soon would be, a progression culminating in the contemporary question: Is there an app for that?
The engineers of the microchip age have tried to make machines that fit seamlessly into our lives. Have we taught them to think more like us or have they taught us to adapt to them? Of course the answer is both. But I don’t believe the capitalist model has prioritized, nor is likely to prioritize, producing new technologies in a humanistic or socially altruistic manner before producing whatever will sell most and fastest. I have grown mistrustful not of the technology, but of the market, which has been abusive to us as consumers, debasing our desires while pushing gadgets at us.
I have always felt a conscious need to withdraw from the gear – to unplug, for fear of being drawn into a deluded state. I have, from the earliest days of computing, resisted giving myself over wholly to needing the machines I use. Today. For example I cling to my clamshell phone for three years, convinced I want phone and net separate, watching as everybody I know goes to I-phone, Blackberry, Android, and 4G device. I didn’t want to become a slave to new technologies as they revealed themselves. I prefer to lay back and let the tech that’s worth having sift its way to the top. Often, as in the cases of my mobile phone or gaming, my resistance has been against mass commercial media blitzed at my generation, forcing upgrades.
BIRTH OF THE INTERNATIONAL GAMING INDUSTRY
In the 1980’s, arcade games went digital in a big way and pinball slipped into the archive bin. When I began as a 12-year-old with Pong, I’d played pinball, but home gaming systems changed all that and playing Atari and Nintendo and the arcade games – Space Invaders, Asteroids, Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Galaga, Defender, Frogger, Centipede, Grand Prix, Tempest – was a national obsession for my generation. It was fun, but more often it felt like a huge waste of time and quarters. The need to revision derivative versions to sustain interest arose – Donkey Kong II and Ms. Pac Man – and that’s when I dropped out. I’d spent hours playing a game for days in a row. I had spent tremendous energy obsessed with taking games to their final levels. It was great for killing time, but draining when it became an obsession. Perhaps because I’ve always been a reader and a person who wants to be active, gaming feels like a net-energy loss or maybe I just matured out of it, but today I don’t game.
The same cannot be said for my generation. Electronic and Internet gaming is now a much bigger business than the movie industry. The din of the clamor for games reaches a global fever pitch in advance of new releases. I’ve observed those who are absorbed in it wholly now for twenty years. I play from time to time to both measure the advances in gaming and the seamlessness with which the gamers are engaged. I played Doom in NYC in 1997, was late, but appreciated the range of motion.
I am happy for the mental freedom of not being hooked to games, but I have often felt outside of huge social groups, and unwilling to play a given game long enough to join them. Leaving gaming has been an unplug with complicated dimensions. As I drifted away from my friends who continued playing games over the years, and the generations that have followed us, I joined a groups of people who, unlike me, had no access or experience with the technology. Among them, I felt like an agent, a member of a tech class milling amongst the unconnected, by far the vast majority of the world. To create the largest cottage entertainment industry in history, I have wondered whether or not my withdrawal was cultural.
I had the unique opportunity to conduct personal research into this over the next two decades as I watched the introduction of the games to teenagers in California, New York, Japan, Taiwan and India at arcades and Internet cafés throughout the 1990’s and the Aughts.
Between 1999 and 2007, I used Internet cafés in New York, LA, Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Lisboa, London, Gothenberg, Sweden and big cities and smaller towns all over Japan, India and Taiwan. I used internet cafés in East Jerusalem and the occupied Palestinian territories to send news radio to LA, and on Madeira Island and even the tiny Azorean island of Ilha Terceira to work details for an art installation.
I’ve Skyped from Madras to NYC and do it commonly now from anywhere I please. It has been an incredible period to be traveling and observing the birth of the digital age, globally, firsthand, after having been at the nascence of the age in its birthplace, the United States. One of the most interesting things I’ve noticed concerns gaming and teenagers.
In the early 1990’s Taiwan and Japan were hotbeds for US corporate activity, the ubiquity of MADE IN JAPAN came before MADE IN TAIWAN and only ten years later MADE IN CHINA followed. Japan had become linked with the US, as one critic put it to me, like the 51st state, or in the words of another Japanese observer, who remarked more harshly, Okinawa was no longer a Japanese island, but an aircraft carrier for the U.S.
In Taiwan, the ruling Kuo Ming Tang [KMT] party disallowed democracy and opposition parties, but was still backed by the USA, with whom, until Clinton, they held the ludicrous one-China policy, firm – the relationship across the Strait was tense.
The USA wanted free market franchisism as close to “Red China” as possible and enabled the major chains access to Japan, Taiwan, Korea, the Phillippines. Coca-Cola and McDonald’s of course, first. But Pepsi, KFC, Shakey’s, Pizza Hut, Hardees, Wendy’s, Burger King and others began popping up all over East Asia. These became hangouts for youth enamored with US pop culture, who, when the Internet Cafés arrived, were ready to transition right into the latest US fad.
For the last two decades, traveling across Asia, I would be walking down a street in some busy metropolis, or even some small town, and come across a small, glowing storefront with frosted glass or a bamboo hut with power running through it, from which emanates an immense din – the screaming volume of video games. They stay open late into the night, usually running 24/7. The fascination with US gaming has spread like wildfire through these countries. While I would use these café’s to send data, read e-mail and transmit information, I was most often surrounded by packs of young teenaged boys – and sometimes girls – huddled around a monitor, playing or advising a gamer. By the turn of the millennium in Taiwan and Japan, these café’s included private booths and I was confident that the massive Internet porn industry was finding its way to Asia as well.
Having witnessed and participated in the beginning of the gaming era as a teenager in the US, and, having given it up, I had then witnessed in my 20’s the spread of the phenomenon through teenagers in East Asia. When, in my 30’s, I landed in Europe, in the late-90’s, I found the Internet café’s had recently arrived and the teenaged gamers were there, too – in Gothenberg, Lisboa, Paris and London. So, when I landed in India in 2006, amidst the boom time for that Asian economy, I expected to see the same effect at the Internet Café’s in my home country – but I was caught by surprise.
In India, the situation was totally different: for every one café filled with screaming machines and teenaged boys, there were 20 in which adults, men and women, and children of almost all ages were engaged in Internet research and connecting with others throughout the world. I found teenaged students and middle-aged thinkers trying to expand their consciousness with information from the net far more than participating games. Pridefully, I attributed this to a cultural sophistication of the Indian mindset, but soon I began to realize it was something else entirely: English.
ENGLISH, GLOBISH AND NEW MEDIA SPEAK TK TK
In India, English had reigned blah blah
In the August 9, 2010, issue of the New Yorker, Nicholson Baker wrote the best recent story about the top-selling games of the industry, reporting in a straight news style about playing each of the biggest sellers against his teenager, in a piece called, My Son is Killing Me. He talks about it online at: http://www.newyorker.com/online/2010/08/09/100809on_audio_baker
But perhaps more illuminating, is the reply by blogger Greg Costikyan, criticism that:
“Baker has done the equivalent of watching the top ten Hollywood blockbusters of the year; doing so will not develop a particularly acute appreciation for the virtues of cinema as an artform. I would suggest that something of the same applies to games; the most interesting work is rarely done in the most commercial venues,” and noting, “Of the games Baker plays, only Heavy Rain is, from a game designer’s perspective, remotely interesting. Better he should experience Braid, Flow, Passage, Dwarf Fortress, The Baron.”
Gaming of course, has left the territory of being solely for teenaged boys and has become designed in full for adults and families. Guitar Hero and the Wii are as common in homes today as Monopoly and Chess. Because I’ve plugged-in and unplugged in calculated ways, I’m out of the loop with regard to this culture often. I will have missed a trend or fad in gaming, or a popular television show in my ‘absence.’ I have come to realize that in this, I’m not alone and that as the Digital Age proceeds, our concepts of time and truth grow increasingly stretched.
Pluralism of media has diluted information and the concepts of time and truth. The fluidity of the new pluralized media; the timeless, interconnectedness of the digital era that puts old tv, movies and games and new content all out together in the huge, mostly corporate library we call the spectrum makes it possible to skip across generations of consumers in a moment, to verify claims of memory in an instant and has, in a very short time, created vast groupings of consumers arrayed in competing technology cliques on the basis of their consumption of media. People rarely agree on what’s best or true anymore – there’s too many options across generations to compare and, at any rate, it‘s like comparing apples to oranges.
We can now consider the fascination of the original regular viewers of David Lynch’s TV epic Twin Peaks by broadcasting it episode by episode in a university classroom over a semester, considering it in relation to the nation’s social and political context contemporaneous to its original broadcast. I have myself, as an exercise in understanding culture, watched long-running programs that viewers consumed slowly over seasons in a matter of days, over a weekend, compressed, without ads. The election of 2008, which some referred to as The Youtube Election, cemented the position of the Internet at the forefront of the information delivery process for news and elections coverage, from Obama girl to McCain’s admission that he didn’t use e-mail, the net played an important role in nearly every campaign.
It is now common for our social and cultural institutions to include videographic data at all public venue. Most academics are connected and thus no one can disconnect. But I think unplugging for the short term is still possible. Ove the last 30 years, I’ve done it and I’ve felt the immense separation from the plugged-in world by the act. What exactly is it that I am outside of then? Can the plugged-in world be said to exist independent of the unplugged? Or is it just a rationalization, a fantasy projection of our marketplace?
The scramble to commercialize the Internet became a powerful act of authority that began an assault by global capitalism upon my generation; a process that has resulted in broad but superficial interconnectedness, the breakdown of privacy, the consolidation of mass media, and the creation of commercial and political propaganda and ultimately, sponsorship of unilateral wars for corporate interests, and a kind of enslavement to consumer technology.
A profound frustration for many millions of people was that inter-connective technology existed in 2001, 2002 and 2003, and despite many organized actions, distribution of educational materials across the world about Afghanistan, Iraq and the imperial-corporate interests of the USA/UK and Soviets over the decades, and failed to author a peaceful response to the attacks of 9/11/2001.
We were unable to resist the juggernaut of manipulation of these same tools by Rove, Bush, Cheney, et. al. (who perpetuated outright lies with the new information tools: Iraq has WMDs and can bomb their neighbors, the 16-word lie during the State of the Union concerning yellowcake uranium from Nigeria, and the worst, the utter ridiculousness that Iraq was somehow involved in 9/11).
If anything, Gulf War I and II cemented control of the press by the masters of war. At last, they invented the embedded journalist and consolidated the mass media into a handful of hands. Global media capitalists use the web, like television and other mass media before it, to redefine our world in terms of their ownership. And while we all gain by the amazing traffic of information the Internet has brought, privatization of knowledge and mass scale manipulation through the medium is now apparent, which is only slowly yielding to the power of the medium to organize and create social change. These tools have been witnessed in uprisings in Iran, Afghanistan, Gaza, Honduras and most recently Tunisia and Egypt.
What Julian Assange and Wikileaks are demanding, is that Information be put in a Commons – and the current U.S. government can’t stand what the idea exposes. An Information Commons threatens corporations and governments. Just fifteen days after the War on Iraq began with the bombing of Baghdad in 2003, biophysicist Dr. Vandana Shiva explained the contemporary redefinition of resources to me:
“The empire imperative arising out of oil is the same imperative that arises out of turning water into a tradable commodity and turning life into a tradable commodity; made tradable by first redefining The Commons – either the biological or intellectual Commons, related to biodiversity, or the Water Commons – as private property. The two go hand in hand: you redefine the Commons as private property, then [since] private property is tradable, [and] Commons are not tradable, you can put it into the marketplace and out of that comes the control.
“The metaphor of oil is being applied on every renewable resource. It used to be that oil was nonrenewable and fossil fuels were nonrenewable, [while] water used to be renewable and biodiversity was – precisely! ‘life-forms that reproduce themselves’ – that was the very definition of [biodiversity].
“But biodiversity, genetic resources, water … [these] are all being redefined as oil. So water is the Blue Gold of the future and biodiversity and genetic resources – whether they be cells in genes in human bodies or animals, or the genes in plants, or the traditional knowledge of societies like India where the neem and the basmati and the turmeric and the pepper – everything – is up for grabs, [these are] being called the Green Gold of the future. It is basically turning everything renewable into a non-renewable resource to be then “controlled and owned by a handful of giants and sold back to the very people from whom the water was taken, from whom the genes were taken, from whom the basmati was taken and the turmeric was taken.
“Sustenance resources – like water, like biodiversity, like our forests – need to be maintained in the Commons, that’s our big battle. You can be anywhere in the world, but defending these Commons from corporate takeover is now a global struggle.”#
I argue, extending Dr. Shiva’s teachings, that now Information has become a sustenance resource. An Information Commons must be built and protected first. It’s an overdue act that’s grown into a social imperative. Plugging in now must bear the social responsibility for the welfare of others who cannot and for a transglobal consciousness, exhibiting tolerance for the many millions of others who are plugging in as well.
THE GOOGLIZATION OF EVERYTHING
Truly novel work in this area is that of Dr. Siva Vaidhyanathan, Associate Professor of Media Studies and Law at the University of Virginia and author of the new book, The Googlization of Everything, University of California Press 2011, who proposes a total revisioning of how we think about what is in the hands, or rather on the servers, of the private corporation, Google.
It is immense territory for the mind. One has to consider the idea of privacy for the self in relation to the machine in relation to the corporate trust, in relation to the state, and in relation to our relationship under each of these to the rest of the world and Siva, a long-time scholar of U.S. History, Technology and Culture has tackled it head-on throughout the turn of the millennium. Remarkably, since Google has only been around for thirteen years and because so many academics now are financed by Google or use Google tools, Siva’s is the most extensive work on what they control that has yet been done by an academic, from the realm of what they do not control. A critical perspective of remarkable scale.
Rather than demonize the corporation, however, Dr. Vaidhyanathan’s work has led to a much more original and scalar envisioning of Information Science. It entrusts and puts first one of the oldest social institutions we have, the library, and flowers into a remarkable thesis about Information.
In May of 2010, the intern and I caught Siva’s talk at the TK TK
For twenty-five years, technology has outpaced our language, and small factions of corporate and political interests have taken advantage of it – most viciously, recently, the neo-conservatives in response to 9/11. We are beginning to witness however, the birth of incredibly nuanced discussions about our technology, from the highest work in the academy like Dr. Vaidhyanathan’s to the shortest burst of a video that goes viral in literally seconds to achieve global fascination, peak into wild, startled awareness and then drift into a pool of most viewed videos where generations slowly link to its data over a year or more by word of mouth.
Through pressure, force and will (and indeed, the collective-will of masses via democracy) Capitalism has become the defining social, labor and management order in every nation-state in the world. It has redefined the means of labor and production even in the former Soviet Bloc in such a complete way that the term “anti-Capitalist” now seems retarded.
Technology, high technology, information science and computing all folded easily into the model. It was an inevitability of the form leaving military control and entering the U.S.A.‘s industrial power sector. Silicon Valley and the many scientists in Massachusetts, Illinois and elsewhere should be revered for their work, but we must remember they were financed and fueled by immense corporate interests that had grown ever tied to the Universities during the 1990’s. Stanford.edu was Google, Inc. We must observe and acknowledge the moment of all this. It is the U.S. ingenuity and willingness to experiment and creativity at its greatest. In biotech, the human genome team that beats Ventner, and in computing, the authors of the Internet.
The Social Networking generation, a generation later, is an import to the valley and content-based, not software-based. It is, fundamentally, derivative work. That is what is onerous about The Social Network being nominated for an Oscar and Zuckerman rather than Assange being Time’s Man of the Year in 2010 … the sheer descent into nothingness.
Global capitalists who have used, and grown bloated by using, tech, have succeeded in creating workers and an international market of profit for the accumulation of wealth among a minority of private owning interests. They have suckered the majority of workers into accepting this state of alienation, numbing masses with superficial compensation and preventing resistance through endless repetition of propaganda via commercial mass media. Now much consumer technology is soma masking the powerlessness of the individual with fantasy power.
Struggling against a true minority – the clique of power elites who have ruled through Thatcher and Reagan, Major and Bush, and the Globalist Clinton/Blair and Imperialist Bush/Blair regimes – an exceptionally hardy current of anti-capitalist thought has survived the last 30 years of radical transformation of our world by technology in the hands of neo-liberal capitalists, Globalists and, in the 21st Century, U.S. and Israeli neo-conservatives. Globalism, is now an inevitability.
It will either be built like a staging area for a unified human future or shoved down the throat of the world through multinationals and Globalist structures like the IMF and World Bank, discarding, enslaving and killing millions … or something in between. But through our interconnectivity, another globalism [with a small g] has already, and inevitably, been born – a globalized movement brought an end to Apartheid in South Africa. A globalized movement marched millions against Bush, Blair and Aznar’s impending War on Iraq on February 15, 2003, dumping Aznar in its wake. We are becoming globalized in our shared concern for Chilean miners and the situation in Gaza and Jerusalem, and after earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunami in our world’s poor countries.
“Anti-globalism” is passé. The term compromises new and tender worldwide connections being born from pure intellectual discourse and social concern. We ought to speak directly to the problems Global capitalism brings to the world – massive inequity and excessive competition for control of common resources – while acknowledging that transformation must happen within Globalist structures because of their ubiquity.
In fact, capitalist-produced technologies, like the Internet, have allowed the other, humanist globalism to flourish. The Internet is the result of the ingenuity and creativity of scientific labor working in the U.S. system, but it only works if inter-linked. We all use it to organize and to distribute information. Its invention is the blessing; its capitalization and politicization, the issue. The election of 2008, which some referred to as The Youtube Election, cemented the position of the Internet, rather than television at the forefront of the information delivery process for news and elections coverage, from Obama girl to McCain’s admission that he didn’t use e-mail, the net played an important role in all campaigns.
I’ve used the Internet with artists and cultural institutions to connect across four continents to make, transport and install large-scale, cross-cultural art pieces. I have been able to realize these works because of technology, interconnectivity, the net – and indeed simply by having been born when I was. It is time to accept both the power and range of the tools to make major leaps in human consciousness on a global scale.
This work, plug/unplug, is dedicated to my son, Ocean Mandela Milan.
[this was the Championship Season, August, amidst Lincecum’s first crash]
First Pitch 1:06pm – Indian Summer began with a heat wave and the warm weather seems to correlate directly with baseballs sailing out of AT&T Park.
The Giants, a great pitching team that struggled to produce three or four runs a game in San Francisco‘s foggy, cool summers, had, with the heat, flipped the script, smashing the ball against the surging, Central Division-leading Reds – scoring 27 runs in the first two night games to win 16-5 and 11-2. It was the beginning of a home-run fiesta that would carry the Giants to the playoffs.
Headed into the city on BART that morning after the long-ball fest of the two previous nights, we met lots of Giants fans looking for a sweep.
We all talked about how the day game would be even warmer, and hoped Giants bats would stay hot. More than once we heard the refrain: “I wish they’d save some of those runs and scatter them across a few games.”
We were excited to see Madison Bumgarner, the newest member of the starting rotation, a tall, strong 21-year old with big-time game. It would also be my first time seeing the Reds’ Joey Votto live. He didn’t disappoint.
In the first, with two men down, Votto blasted a two-run homer. Worse, his was followed by back-to-back solo shots by Jonny Gomes and Ryan Hanigan that got out of the park in a hurry. The Reds shelled Bumgarner mercilessly before that last out. Reds 4, Giants 0.
Though the Giants were down big before they’d even had a chance to bat, my son, the woman to my right, her son (wearing a floppy-eared Panda hat) and I all agreed not to let it bother us. Giants batters were coming off 27 runs in two nights! Pandahat favored Aubrey Huff.
Yes, game we were, in the face of four runs, and, as if to prove us and the whole universe true, Bumgarner settled down in the second, and in the bottom half Jose Guillen singled to left, was advanced to second by a Sandoval base hit (much to Pandahat’s excitement) and to third by an Uribe sac-fly. The Giants chiseled him across the plate from third on a Freddy Sanchez single. Reds 4, Giants 1.
But in the top of the third, the 21-year-old Bumgarner lost it with two outs again. Rolen doubled, Gomes singled, Hanigan walked on a full count and Drew Stubbs tripled to clear the bases. Just like that it was seven to nothing. Ugh.
Then, just when we thought it couldn’t possibly get worse, the poor kid blew it like I haven’t seen since Little League.
With two outs, three men in, and Stubbs standing on third, Righetti and Bochy decided to intentionally walk Paul Janish to set up the force out at second, first or home.
So picture it: runner on third. catcher Buster Posey standing up, glove-arm extended. The ump’s got his hands on his hips. Janish at the plate is barely even in his stance – holding the bat in a relaxed posture awaiting his walk.
And then suddenly, Madison Bumgarner throws a wild pitch on an intentional ball! Missed Buster entirely! And Stubbs scores from third on an E1. Reds 8, Giants 1.
I had no idea what to say. Talk about brain freeze. I looked at my son between the top and bottom of the inning, speechless. I ran through the list of clichés out loud:
“Hey you know, there’s no clock in baseball, it’s the most changeable sport, anything could happen. A coupla runs here, a solid inning in relief there and a couple-few more runs, and we’re right back in this thing.”
It was weak, but the woman to my left chimed in appropriately and together, we showed strength in the face of adversity to the boys – but not before she leaned over and whispered “I wish they’d saved some of those runs from yesterday to scatter across a few games.”
Then again, torturously, with two outs in the fourth, in his first at-bat against our new right-hander Ramon Ramirez, Joey Votto homered for the second time. It was impressive. He worked the count against the second pitcher he’d face that day and calmly jacked a solo shot to left. Votto already had two big flies and three batted in. Reds 9, Giants 1.
When the Giants failed to score in the bottom of the fourth, a lot of people left, but the woman to my right and her son stayed. They minded our stuff as we took a quick walk down to concessions to see if it might change our luck. My son flipped his hat round, the first of many rally caps I’d see that day. We never leave games, but this one just got worse.
In the fifth, with two outs, Ramirez walked Stubbs, then issued a back-to-back, full count walk to Janish and finally capped his performance by yielding a single to the pitcher, Homer Bailey, scoring Stubbs.
Santiago Casilla came in to get the last out and stood on the mound facing people’s backs as they climbed the steps to scramble out, and a frustrated remaining crowd. In a tension-relieving moment akin to broken glass Casilla then beaned Reds second baseman Brandon Phillips.
It was inadvertent, but took Philips out of the game, clearly bothered, in the sixth. Casilla then just took a strikeout, so his box reads: one beaning and one strikeout in a third of an inning’s work! That was enough for our seatmates, who bolted up the steps – Panda ears a-flappin’.
And that was how the Giants got down ten to one in the first five innings of a game we now refer to as one of the greatest comeback performances in SF Giants history.
When the Giants came up to bat in the fifth down ten to one, there were maybe 20,000 of us left, enjoying a rare, hot day at the park. It was a gorgeous Wednesday afternoon and there really wasn’t a better place to be in SF. Oh, the waning light in Indian Summer, then, like a consolation gift to us for staying.
Giants recent acquisition Mike Fontenot drew a lead-off walk and Andres Torres singled and then – what, what? – Aubrey Huff advanced both to scoring position with a grounder. When Pat Burrell singled to right to bring in two runs, we made noise. Reds 10, Giants 3.
All year, our expensive left-handed reliever Jeremy Affeldt – whom we’d signed last year to a two-year, nine million dollar deal – has struggled in relief. He seemed as likely to throw a wild pitch as a strike. When he entered the game in the sixth, I felt Manager Bruce Bochy and Pitching Coach Dave Righetti had given up on this one.
I assumed they were happy taking two of three from the Reds over the week and had decided to use this opportunity to help some guys who’ve been struggling work out kinks. I had resigned myself to watching Affeldt fail before he even threw a pitch and even prepared my son for it.
Affeldt had taken a beating in the press and been shown up significantly by left-handed acquisition Javier Lopez, a specialist, whom the Giants pay one tenth of his salary. Affeldt watched Lopez enter games in pressure situations just days before – in San Diego and at home – and end them with less than ten pitches. It must have been a blow to his ego.
Affeldt stepped up and closed out the sixth without giving up a hit. Three up, three down. An electricity passed through us. None of our guys want to be the one not carrying his weight. Anybody who loves effort and was at AT&T Park that day fell in love with this team.
In the sixth, Juan Uribe hit a one-out single to short, just beating the tag. Nate Schierholtz – pinch hitting for Affeldt who’d done his job – smashed a double to right, sending Uribe to third. After five and two-thirds, the Reds pulled Bailey with a seven-run lead and brought Bill Bray in relief.
It was Bray’s wild pitch that made everybody sit up. It was a parallel to Bumgarner’s run-scoring wild pitch in the first – karma. This one brought Uribe home and sent Schierholtz to third. Fontenot then stepped up with one down and grounded out to second, allowing Schierholtz to cross the plate. Reds 10, Giants 5.
Now, the vibe in the building was palpably “no-hitterish“. It was ten to five. Nobody wanted to talk about a comeback for fear of jinxing it. But there was an excitement after that wild pitch – like maybe the Reds were more vulnerable in relief.
We were all two days full of recent memories of towering homers by Posey and Uribe and Burrell – could the Giants come back? I wondered what Kruk, Kuip and Jon were talking about. [still haven’t heard what I’m told is an epic broadcast].
In the seventh, the Reds brought Logan Ondrusek in relief of Bray, Sergio Romo pitched for the Giants, and both pitchers held.
Still down five now in the top of the eighth, the Giants brought closer Brian Wilson in early to keep the Giants within reach. Wilson, who would go on to end the season with a major-league leading 48 saves is our nutty backstop – crazy as a loon, but who knows how to finish.
Again. In Wilson, we felt the fight in this team. The unwillingness to just rollover and call it a day because you’re down.
We went to the bottom of the eighth inning trailing by five runs, but having crept back to within striking distance against the Reds bullpen. Has there ever been a more exciting inning played by an SF team than the Giants eighth that day? That’s for historians to decide, but it was the craziest Giant inning I’ve ever seen live, hands down.
Guillen leads off with a single to left, and then Sandoval, to center – runners in the corners for Juan “One-Swing-of-the-Bat” Uribe. <BLAM> three run homer. Nobody out. Ondrusek done. Reds 10, Giants 8.
The Reds, suddenly only up two, scramble. Massive substitutions. Helsey in at left, Bruce at right and Arthur Rhodes on the mound to set up Cordero, the closer. It was crunch time and we, long-suffering Giant fans – desperately searching for situational hitting and run support – watched five of our guys make it happen.
Ross and Fontenot hit back to back singles to left and Torres jumped on a Rhodes change-up, smacking a stand-up double to the same part of the park, scoring both. Reds 10, Giants 10. And then in two quick at-bats against Rhodes, Posey and Huff earned sac-flies to bring Torres home, sliding to the plate to beat the throw. The Giants lead 11 to 10.
Wow. The place went crazy. My seven-year old was high-fiving seventy-year olds! It may have been the smallest standing ovation the Giants will ever receive, but it was unequaled in sincerity.
When I looked around it was apparent that since the fifth some fans had returned, or maybe had come in from a downtown bar to catch what they were seeing on TV or hearing about in the streets or on the radio – The Greatest Comeback in Giants History.
Now, there is some dispute about what constitutes a Great Comeback. To me, it isn’t a comeback unless you win. There are many who share this opinion. This definition dominates the view presented by the mainstream sports press. But for some, a comeback is defined by effort, as measured by the difference in the lead you make: if you were down by a hundred but lost by only two, it must have been a really amazing game, and you must have made superhuman effort though you took the loss.
I find this definition of a comeback without victory to be suspect in sports with only two opponents. Because, where in a foot race, it applies to the difference between second’s finish versus third’s in relation to first (and more importantly fourths distance from third), it makes no real sense where only two are competing against each other.
That said, the ten runs made up by the Giants to take the lead was the greatest deficit overcome in Giants history. We were exhilarated. The relief of tension was palpable. We all felt special. It was incredible. We were going to sweep the Reds, scoring almost 40 runs in three days. The elders behind us and my son were just glowing in the late afternoon light . . .
It’s a shame home games don’t last just eight innings. There’s those last three pesky outs to get. Even after a huge comeback achieved as a team, you have to stay focused … and seize the win. To me, that’s what makes it a comeback.
Now, here a word must be inserted about Pablo Sandoval. I was at a local pub the other night watching the game when Sandoval made the throwing error by sending the ball home with a force out at every bag without stepping on third, preventing a double play from ending the inning – a mental slip that allowed a run to score later and lose the game for the Giants- when a patron beside me said he blamed the marketing department for Pablo’s problems.
That was when I put it together. The Marketing department, desperate to replace Barry Bonds with a ‘batting persona’ forced the 23-year old Sandoval to become The Panda. And went nuts making Panda suits, hats, bobblies, glasses, mats, key chains, stuffies and everything else. Did anyone in marketing notice that our strength is pitching and that we need team play and contact hitters? It was undue pressure to put on Pablo Sandoval.
I enjoy shouting out to the players in encouragement when I am sitting low enough to be heard. We were just up the first base line behind the Reds dugout for this one and in the third I can remember shouting to Freddy Sanchez as he awaited a pitch with Panda on first, “Hey, Freddy, You got ‘em, man! They can’t touch you!”
Pablo, standing on first, turned, pointed at me from first with two black-gloved fingers and shouted, “That’s Right!” My son was thrilled. Freddy hit into a double play. It felt like poor Pablo was cursed.
With one out in the top of the ninth and the Giants up 11 to 10 after coming back from being down 10 to 1, the greatest comeback in Giants history, Brian Wilson delivered and the Reds’ Drew Stubbs hit a routine grounder to Sandoval. I was sitting right behind first base. I looked right at him. He scooped it up and had plenty of time.
For a second, I thought I saw his eyes looking right at us. And then I watched his right arm just go screwy and his face turn. The ball flew way wide of Huff at first and into the grass in front of the dugout. Stubbs, thinking it was going to be a routine out, hadn’t really come close to first, so he turned the corner and turned on the speed, arriving standing at second.
It was a two-base throwing error on Pablo Sandoval that put the tying run in scoring position and the fifth Giant error of the game. Moments later, Wilson gave up the single to Janish that scored Stubbs. He then got the final out. Reds 11, Giants 11.
The Reds had turned to Nick Masset to finish their debacle of an eighth, which the right-hander ended with a strikeout. Now, he manhandled the Giants in the ninth, striking out three. The Giants’ Javier Lopez, la specialista, entered in the tenth and true to form made quick work of the Reds. Again, it felt like Lopez didn’t want to be shown up by Affeldt, didn’t want to be responsible for failing when called upon.
I mean this in a good way.
Not like guys competing for jobs, but like comrades in struggle. In the eleventh, Bochy leaned on Lopez to extend and the specialist held the meat of the Reds lineup to just one hit. Meanwhile, Manager Dusty Baker and the Reds turned the ball over to their excellent closer Francisco Cordero.
The Giants wouldn‘t score in the tenth or eleventh, but we got the thrill of seeing a scoreboard I don’t think I’ll ever see live again – Eleven to Eleven in the Bottom of the Eleventh.
Arriving at the top of the twelfth, exhausted of left-handed relievers, I looked down to see Barry Zito trotting out to the mound. Bochy probably thought he had no other choice. Maybe he thought it would help the slumping Zito get back some lost confidence. But there was starter Barry Zito on short rest, entering a tied game in the 12th inning in relief.
Janish singled to left, then Matt Cairo doubled to center sending Janish to third. With two on, nobody out in the twelfth inning of a midweek day-game, the last of a series in August, against the Central Division leader, and a failing Zito on the mound, these Giants refused to die.
The next batter, Chris Helsey, hit a sharp grounder to Uribe hoping to at last get the winning RBI. Janish sprinted for home, but the hard-charging Uribe scooped it up and threw a bullet to Posey at the plate, in time to get the sliding Janish. We roared.
It was still 11 to 11. But now it was one away with runners in the corners for Zito facing league MVP-candidate Joey Votto. We knew the battle between Barry Zito and Joey Votto would decide this game. As Votto fought off pitch after pitch on the strikes and Zito missed the box by millimeters on the balls, the sinking feeling that we were losing this one crept into us all.
In a way I was resigned to it when Barry ran out there, but somehow it didn’t matter. We had seen superhuman effort by our Giants. Grit, toughness and an unwillingness to rollover and die.
Finally though, one guy was tougher than them all and in an epic display of game-winning force, Joey Votto hit a ball so hard into shallow right field that nobody could’ve handled it – a smokin’ dribbler. Sanchez stopped it and tried to get the ball home.
Cairo, who had taken a huge lead from third arrived at the plate almost simultaneously with the ball, but Posey had blocked the plate. The two collided hard as Cairo outstretched for the plate, but Posey held on! The umpire, Hirschbeck, signaled vigorously and shouted, “Out!” … then the ball flew up in the air, slipping out of Buster’s hand … and the call was reversed. He was safe.
Reds 12, Giants 11.
Cordero retired the side in order and stole a win as the Cincinnati Reds beat the San Francisco Giants 12 to 11 in 12 crazy innings. Zito took the loss to fall to 8-9 (he didn’t win again this year and this was the one that made him a losing pitcher for the 2010 season).
Epilogue
Amazingly, the story of this game and its internal question of whether or not you can lose a Great Comeback was buried by baseball itself, which, in its statistical perfection provided a definitive Comeback Game on the very same day, by the very same margin of difference as ours.
In a staggering coincidence only possible in the mathematical infinity of baseball’s continuity, the Atlanta Braves were ahead by the exact same score of 10 to 1 over the Colorado Rockies and allowed Colorado to come back and win 11-10. On the same day! So guys were like, “Now, that’s a comeback.”
Thinking about it now, you could say it was the last game the Giants lost because of a collection of their own mistakes rather than by a single player’s lapse or by being outplayed by the better performance of their opponent. But despite the lop-sided opening and all the crazy errors made by so many Giants, this against-the-odds contest was also the grittiest expression of this team’s fight that I‘ve yet witnessed.
I’ve never been happier after a loss in my life. I was just so proud of our guys for trying that hard. You could feel that pride among all the fans as we shuffled toward the exits, smiling.
The whole team had an unwillingness to lose, yet lose they did, and in a sad but poetic way, that loss came at the hands of our own beloved, expensive, Prince of Inability, Barry Zito. Yes, we were proud of our Giants, despite, and now I understand what people mean when they say a Great Comeback can end in a loss.
Between 1995 and 1997 I wrote my first novel,Mood. Because digital printing and imaging were nascent technologies, and because I was growing increasingly interested in doing art myself, in making visual art myself, Mood was conceived and designed specifically,with a graphic element that drove the creative engine of the work: the passage of an image of the changing moon moving through the margins, and the presence of the night sky on the pages by making the pages dark and the letters light, with the slightest alteration of color and contrast of the pages and letters as the book progresses to correspond to the light provided by the moon as it passed through a fortnight of phases during the course of the narrative of the novel.The pages were to be the night sky and the letters the stars – paragraphs were constellations.
The timing of the narrativetakes place during the fortnight represented by the physical pages and artwork, and as a conceit, the main character’s name changes with each phase of the moon. Set in San Francisco, I employed many contemporary businesses – bars, restaurants – that were popular among scenesters then. I punnishly changed names, or not, on a whimsical basis. Anyone who went out to hear live music or DJs or art in The Mission, North Beach, SOMA orelsewhere in the mid 1990’s would recognize many locations by their descriptions in the novel, Mood.
I physically took Mood to New York City in August of 1997, and attempted to have it published. I hand delivered copies to Sonny Mehta at Random House and at all the major houses. This was the exact moment when many of NYCs oldest and most famous publishers were being bought out by large German corporations.
Response to Moodwas almost negligible. Only one agent wrote back at all, a handwritten note to say he liked the style but that the work was too experimental.The book was never produced as imagined and for a dozen years has existed as only a single, 187-page hardcopy, bound in 1997 (which may be lost in India), and as files stored on floppy disk.In January 2000, one chapter of Mood was published as a short story by the Conde Nast women’s monthly, Jane magazine. That story, Shanti, was roughly 1500 words long and represents my first published work of fiction that had a national audience. More than 50 readers wrote to an e-mail established to receive feedback. All the feedback was good.
I stayed in New York to attempt to write more and address the publishing industry, but grew increasingly disappointed in the changing face of the industry and writing in general.The New Yorker rejected seven of my submissions between 1997 and 2009, though once they wrote by hand that I was on the right track, “this one is more like what we might run,” the unsigned note read.
In 2001, my short story, Close the Piano, was published in an anthology of South Asian writers out of Toronto, Canada, under the pseudonym Raj Balas. I did a public performance as Raj Balas reading a part of that story aloud to a group gathered at the Asian American Writers Workshop in Manhattan, in April of that year – four months before the September 11th attacks which changed my career trajectory, somewhat, as I began and have been doing much more art, performance, news and journalismrather than fiction writing,ever since.
After 9/11, I nearly stopped writing fiction altogether. This has been an intense period in my life that includes the birth of my son and years of writing hard news and politics for Pacifica Radio, as well as anti-war essays and e-mails for a half decade. I was very politically active during the Bush/Cheney era. I also completed a lot of art, performance and installation work that was politically motivated in response to our changing world.
My explorations into visual art – which began in 1996 with Rigo 23 in San Francisco – began to fruit in New York in part as a result of collaboration with Christopher Wilde, Marshall Weber, Mark Wagner, Sara Parkel, Amy Ferrara and others at Booklyn Artists Alliance, and also because, on an irregular but intense level, I began assisting Rigo 23 with large scale art and installation projects all around the world. I became a working artist somewhere between the year 2000 and 2003 – when most of my placed work found its home in educational and arts institutions in the U.S.A. This is also when I founded Fifty Foot Pine Tree Press (Los Angeles, April 25, 2002) to begin producing limited editions, artist’s books, prints and digital art, now on the web at www.ffptp.org
In the 21st century, I began to make artists books and to do collage, drawing and painting more than to write fiction, however, I did write one more novel and five more short stories while in New York City. None of this work was published, though the novel was posted page by page, online, in its entirety, by a now defunct website. That novel remained online for a full year, December 1999 to January 2001.
I have only finished one story since 9/11, as raising my son has made it nearly impossible to find the mental space and time to write what I want to write. The only fiction I have finished in the last 3 years isBefore You Came, the opening chapter of a novel with the working title, The Outsider Inside.
We’ve proved that the electronic voting machines are made by highly partisan private corporations and feel strongly that fraud has occurred. There are dozens of very serious cases, allegations and simulations of sheer electronic fraud, by reputable academics. There are allegations of vote theft – the outright changing of results … read this excellent summative: http://www.wanttoknow.info/electronicvoting
And still as many as ONE-THIRD of U.S. votes are being cast into the black box of un-auditable e-voting without paper record trails. See who votes how here:
While this year’s presidential election has generated more interest than those in say 1996 or ’88, and perhaps even more than the Bush/Rove manipulations in 2000 and ’04, very few in the corporate press are preparing for what could be another utterly bogus presidential election night. The Republicans don’t need to actually win because they can negotiate the Democrats losing, and make the corporate press agree the polls were wrong.
“The Bradley Effect: that people won’t admit to pollsters that they didn’t vote for a black man” is already being paraded as an excuse, and races that are polling very wide are being portrayed as close! why? So it can be fixed again and presented as legit?
By contrast, many in the blogosphere of the Internet now feel that the outcome of the 2008 Presidential Election must be “either an Obama landslide, or definitively election fraud …” as it has been already identified in 2002 and 2004; including computer fraud via the alteration of votes in electronic voting machines, illegal vote purges and suppression in key states.
We have uncovered the exact ways in which HAVA (the “Help America Vote Act“) – forced county clerks in communities all over the country to rapidly accept UNAPPROVED Diebold, Sequoia and Premier electronic voting machines. We have testimonial after testimonial – all over youtube – complaining of what looks like rigging or suppression of votes. The outright changing of electronically cast votes by an exceptionally simple and quick hack is alleged nationwide. See these 3 movies on the facts:
So, on election night, what are we going to do? be transfixed by the corporate media? by Karl Rove’s fat face telling us a state has “flipped” from blue to red? or a “Too Close To Call” tuesday night and then a fixed election wednesday morning? how are we as a people to prevent election night and indeed our whole election process from being an utter joke?
Don’t let surprise turn into silent acceptance of a coup on election night.
Brad Friedman started with that attitude. The one-man election integrity super-blogger has been pursuing issue after issue in an organized fashion for the past four years. www.bradblog.com is indispensable now from the standpoint of election integrity awareness. It’s possibly the single best place to go on the day after election day to follow up on a priori complaints.
Black Box Voting, begun by Bev Harris, pursues similar goals – they are at www.blackboxvoting.org – and have begun a campaign they call: What to Do on Election Night “Protect the Count!” that advocates taking your video cameras where votes are stored on election night and being prepared to spend the night.
From the standpoint of long term solutions, so we can get together after this election and write the un-HAVA [maybe we could call it SAVA, the Secure America’s Votes Act] and have it passed by the new Democratic President and Congress, here’s one: Open-Source Voting http://openvotingconsortium.org/ It’s endorsed by many who care, as a good way out of the nightmare HAVA has produced.
“But MTK … ,” you ask, “ … all that’s fine and good, but what are we gonna do if it’s election night and they are freaking rigging the election and shoveling a result down our throats via the Corporate Press with bullshit numbers, un-investigated mysterious vote-shifts and hundreds of thousands of purged and missing ballots, again?”
First, I think be very open-minded, slow to judge and aware. Second, why not be prepared to bring the government and the press to a halt on Wednesday the 5th of November if necessary – a stoppage of the process for investigation. In all seriousness. Be prepared to say you do NOT accept a concession by any party or any interpretation of the votes by any government body without a full Congressional Investigation into the Election. Imagine headlines in the Times that read Election Fraud Alleged … Public Demands Results Be Investigated, and subheads:
impound the electronic voting machines
do NOT certify any election where voters claim the process was interfered with.
demand the right for a re-votes, tell people to prepare for a second ballot if necessary and entire re-votes of counties and states should be encouraged if necessary
Other than that … get ready to tell the people who want to take this country over illegally again that that isn’t what democracy looks like, ‘cause that’s what we will be doing. And it may take months.
77-year old Sonny Rollins absolutely lifted 2,000 plus in a wowing two-hour set Thursday night at Zellerbach Hall on the Berkeley campus.
The gig was the first before a worldwide tour over the next two months for the tenor giant that includes Singapore, Japan, China and Rollins’ first trip to Korea. The group returns to the US briefly before moving on to Europe in the summer.
The irrepressible genius called tunes and blew glowing chord support throughout the show and was positively still energetic backstage – after two hours of uninterrupted performance. The Rollins feel remains, an unmistakably witty and stable voice in jazz and the sextet has found a dope new heartbeat in drummer Kobie Watkins who, churning the toms, created a pulsing drum-and-bass groove that Rollins, and all of us, felt. If they were strolling it would be sick.
Rollins’ broad tone blends seamlessly now with long-time collaborator, trombonist Clifton Anderson, whose fluidity is technically superior and, at moments, gorgeous. Rollins continues to experiment with African percussionist Kimati Dinizulu.
Highlight of the evening for me was witnessing novelist Ishmael Reed and Rollins share a fistpound backstage after the show, and hearing the former introduce his wife to Rollins, thus: “Meet my wife, Carol, Carol … The Colossus.”
Over the last few nights, lit by an obese moon, the local animals have been fighting; first the dogs went at it ferociously; then loud, wailing cats; hissing, crying, haunting sounds. Then a crazed bird-fight, filled with screeching – all this in the two nights of the moon’s fullest face.
The village is a breathing thing, a living ecosystem of many species of insects, reptiles, mammals and birds living adjacently. The village mood is governed communally, first by the most powerful forces of nature, primarily the sun and moon – and, here, the sea – and secondly, by humanity in concert with nature.
In working with nature, humanity is further subdivided, along a continuum from those who will care for animals and plants, to those who would not tolerate them, but as food. Most follow a gentle co-existence.
A properly functioning village can be considered among the most sane and balanced social ecosystems ever created by human beings. Interspecies tolerance, collegiality and an awareness of the fundamental interconnectedness among all living things exists.
Here, vegetarianism is considered a social enlightenment for most people. Trash is often laid out on low thistle or brush to allow ants and other insects to pick it clean. I have watched a village woman wash the anus of her cow with her bare hand and water with such care as she would give her own child.
The village is asleep shortly after sundown. It gets dark quickly. Public lighting is elegantly limited to one or two long, narrow, tube lights, atop wooden posts placed at the intersection of paths or at the gate of one of the wealthier homeowners. But power outages are common, eliminating even this small amount of soft, light pollution. The night sky is clear, the stars, sharp.
Dawn is the loudest time of day, from cock’s crow, through crow’s caw and eventually multiple, staticky, jam-boxes, and at least one television set, projecting bhajans and popular songs. This comes to an end abruptly, when there is a brief silence into which the cow next door lows – an enormous sound – at least once each morning. Today, all sound was overcome by a single, overpowering noise, a retort, by human design, repeated at regular intervals. Someone was lighting and dropping grenade-like bombas.
This same, single, very powerful firecracker, set off very near to this house every half hour or so, was irregular enough to feel sudden each time – 9:30, 9:55, 10:27. The noise hit me in the gut. The dog was terrified.
It is an intense sound in this place – and now the cat fight continues, screeching and hissing, tearing-around sounds between booms.
Bombas all day long: “someone died” is the best we have. Sekar says it was two people, one on either side of us, in recent days. The villagers gathered with firecrackers, drums and flags – multiple very loud retorts all day long; many right now.
The dog stayed under the bed for hours, until sundown when the bombas finally ceased – we all sat in silence. Then, through the night, under the flat, bright light of the fat waning moon – really three days full – came the horrible, sad, wailing of a woman who sounded like a widow, or a mother, begging God or anyone to explain “Why?” between heavy, interminable sobs. She finally fell asleep, but her cries were the loudest sound in the night for an hour. The death must have been literally just beyond the wall to our West.
The entire village is a part of the death – even the crows were vacated by the noise. They say that when a king dies, crows fly and caw – maybe it’s because of the fireworks. This full moon there was an important death, likely two, in our village. The crows and dogs and cats know it … and I know it, too.
4 January, 2007
Periyamudaliar Chavady, TN, India
[discovered that one of the two deaths was L’s grandmother – the mother of the man from whom I’ve been leasing a motorbike. We learned, too, that there was another death, just next door to us – very close to us, on the same day – likely someone we had seen daily in the last few months – but we don’t know whom. I would know the face … but which face, of the last few months, is missing now? that I cannot say. So it was Usha, the daughter- in-law of one of the deceased, who told us, three weeks after Pongal, that the villagers did not celebrate Pongal this year because of these deaths, a full moon before].
Pacifica Station KPFK 90.7fm Los Angeles
2003-2005 radio
Independent Study with Booklyn Artists Alliance, Brooklyn, NY
1998, 2000-2002 book-making, art, development, grant writing
Independent Study with Rigo 23, worldwide
1996-2006 art, art handling
The New School University, Manhattan, NY
1998 creative writing, data conversion, project management
Genentech, Incorporated, South San Francisco, CA
1994 FDA Clinical Trials Research, relational databases, data management
Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, New Orleans
1993 biostatistics
1992 international health and epidemiology
Independent Study and Travel, Asia
1990-1992 Taiwan, Thailand, India, Japan, Korea, China, Indonesia
University of Texas at Austin
88-89 radio, political science, history, French
87-88 radio, political science, history
86-87 radio, television, film, art, history
85-86 engineering, physics, biology, chemistry
Tom C. Clark High School, San Antonio, TX
84-85 senior Physics, Calculus, Music, Literature
83-84 junior Physics, Trigonometry, Music, Literature
82-83 sophomore Chemistry, Music, Literature
81-82 freshman Biology, Music, Literature
William P. Hobby Junior High School, San Antonio, TX
80-81 8th grade
79-80 7th grade
78-79 6th grade
Locke Hill Elementary School, San Antonio, TX
77-78 5th grade
76-77 4th grade
75-76 3rd grade
74-75 2nd grade
During the Iraq War and the Election of 2004, I was news director and director of elections coverage for Pacifica Station KPFK, 90.7fm Los Angeles, 98.7fm Santa Barbara, California – the largest independent fm signal in the United States of America.
During the buildup to the war I increased news presence on the schedule by 200%.
For six months after that I increased it 150%.
I broke up Free Speech Radio News into segments and reproduced the evening news with one host rather than two. This allowed us to write more content and update the FSRN content with the latest news [hired PC Burke, managed ML Lopez]
In Los Angeles KPFK had long been a place for actors to volunteer to get air time. I fired the actors who were reading the news and pledged no others would be used – rather I would train a team of multi-disciplinary writers to read.
[I hand-picked JF Rosencrantz, Page Getz, Sister Charlene Mohammed, Aura Bogado, Walt Tanner, and many other voices for the newsroom and trained them to deliver on radio].
I added two reporters [both hires were women] and added music and breaks to make the news more listenable for a younger audience. I produced original art pieces, found-sound and cultural pieces.
I was the first News Director to go to Palestine and Israel via Amman, in late 2003 and to the UN, where I was credentialed for the Security Council during run up to war [early 2003]. I reported daily into the midday and evening news and this work is archived in the Pacifica Radio Archives [MTKintheOPT2003/04].
I was the only reporter at the United Nations Security Council on March 21st, 2003, to ask each Ambassador of the U.N. Security Council whether or not they would condemn the bombing of Baghdad by the United States and U.K. the previous night. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told me and all the press corps beside me in response that Putin spoke for all Russia when he said it “violates the U.N. Charter.”
I was the opening voice on Pacifica’s “Attack on Peace,” a nationwide broadcast to millions of listeners and, with Amy Goodman, co-hosted the first hour of what would be three days of historic nationwide broadcasting about Peace and opposing the War on Iraq as it was taking place.
KPFK and Pacifica gave me a chance to do something epic and we both benefited greatly from it. I stand behind my decision to give my time during the Iraq War and Election 2004 to Pacifica. I am exceptionally proud of the work we did.
A detailed description of our work and how it culminated, follows:
02102003 First Newscast with MTK as News Director
First time we ever cut FSRN into separate news pieces, removed the music and parsed the show across the hour. We only ran FSRN as a complete program three times over the next two years.
0210-02282003 The Immokalee Workers Hunger Strike
03012003 move to a single host for the one-hour KPFK Evening News
First hosted by MTK (02282003) and then briefly by Jennifer Hodges and Trevor David and subsequently Monica Lopez, Patrick C. Burke, Aura Bogado, Saman Assefi, Walt Tanner, Teresa Wierszbianska, Sister Charlene Mohammad and others, the one-host-one-hour newscast using FSRN as spliced features parsed across the hour, radically professionalized KPFK’s Evening News “sound”.
03052003 Student Walk Out
Coverage from high schools and universities throughout signal area.
03102003 The addition of the Morning and Mid-Day Reports
At this point, one month into my tenure I had increased News production by 250%, and was preparing to cover the opening of a U.S. Invasion.
0301-04112003 U.N. Security Council as it deliberated Res. 1441
MTK representing Pacifica and KPFK demanded live from the press pit inside the U.N. Security Council chambers in New York, that each available Secretary of the Security Council respond to the bombing of Baghdad.
0318-03202003 Live coast-to-coast newscast hosted (NY/LA) during opening of US attack on Iraq with live reports from New York, Baghdad, Havana and San Francisco MTK with M. Lopez, T. David, P. Burke, J. Hodges, M. LePique, M. White, N. Thompson, volunteers and the Interns (Clark/Al Sarraf).
04082003 The Guardian of Britain singles out KPFK http://www.guardian.co.uk/france/story/0,11882,932223,00.html
“If you live in LA, the Bay Area, New York, Washington or Houston, you can, for respite, tune in to one of the Pacifica network radio stations, which for more than 50 years have been broadcasting news from the left. Their war coverage is entitled “Assault on Peace” rather than “Showdown Iraq” and on an average day on my local station, KPFK, you can hear Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky and members of the anti-war movement with a completely different take on the war and items of news not broadcast anywhere else.”
04102003 Pacifica’s National Dialogue for Peace
MTK opened the first hour of this nationwide radio program, co-hosting with Amy Goodman. “Pacifica’s National Dialogue for Peace,” was a three-hour radio broadcast that allowed calls from unscreened listeners to an electronic-audio panel that included Ohio Democrat and Presidential Candidate Dennis Kucinich live from a payphone at Congress, Global Village Activist Medea Benjamin live from Washington D.C., and Kani Xulan, a displaced Turkish Kurd, live from New York.
04242003 Occidental Petroleum and Airscan Sued by Colombian villager
Original investigative reporting by JFR and MLL and MTK on the lawsuit filed by Alberto Mujica against Occidental Petroleum and Airscan Security for the cluster-bombing of Santo Domingo, Colombia which murdered Mujica’s family and neighbors and destroyed their village on December 13, 1998.
0502003 MTK Hosts One Hour Special News Program Dialogue with Listeners
05052003 Audio Magazine Project element
The sound of birds on Mt. Washington used as an ambient newsbreak
05092003 Argentine Election Coverage with live results
05012003 Bush’s “End of the War/Victory” speech
Margaret Presscod and M.T. Karthik step on GWBush as he speaks from the deck of the U.S.S. Lincoln parked off the coast of San Diego. Analysis included timely news and information about what was happening in Iraq in Falluja in the last weeks of April and clearly points out actual lies by GWB in the speech. Khaled Abou El-Fadl, professor of Law at UCLA weighs in on Bush’s racist and historically regressive language in an incisive and brilliant post-speech analysis.
05152003 Vinnell Corporation
Vinnell – a local firm that built Dodger Stadium – has ties to the Saudi Arabian National Guard and the C.I.A., 19 Immigrants found suffocated to death in the back of a trailer truck in Texas. Both of these stories are important and represent the beginning of a split in the newsroom.
0515-06092003 Three Chechan Female Suicide Bombers in three weeks
Our Chechnya coverage began to get deeper and deeper after this. We worked our way up to the election in October with coverage from at least seven news sources, including sources from the region: Interfax, Pravda, The Moscow Times.
05182003 Argentine Runoff Election that elects Kirchner
05302003 Audio Magazine Project
A bright and exciting newscast with music by Sergio Mielnishenko
06032003 “9/11 Column” launched
Column investigating 9/11 runs every Tuesday for the entire summer ending on 9/11/2003. Interviews with Michel Chossodovsky, Don Paul, Mary Schiavo, Naseem Ahmed, Ralph Schoenman and Tony Taylor on the 9/11 Special.
06162003 Dominique deVillepin and Strawon defining Hamas as terrorist, live coverage of “People Over Politics” Rally Downtown with PCB
This cast is indicative of things we have been doing: in-depth international news with specific cultural and intellectual analysis (MTK) and coverage of local protests and rallies (PCB, MLL, volunteers). We became quite good at this actually with reporters in the field at many key events often phoning in live.
06182003 Iranian exiles self-immolations in Paris and GMO crops in California
Our GMO coverage pre-dated the media burst in summer and our Iranian self-immolation stories were like nothing done anywhere in English. We looked directly at the suicides as a political tool for communication.
06272003 Coverage of Protests against George W. Bush and Parvez Musharraf, military dictator of Pakistan and ally to Bush War.
Not only did we cover the several thousand anti-Bush and few dozen pro-Bush demonstrators on this night, but we had a credentialed reporter at the visit and lecture by Pakistani Coup Leader Parvez Musharraf (PCB).
07042003 Special News Programming on “4th of July” with editorial comment by MTK and “socio-political interstices” produced by AAB
This is was the only time I recorded an editorial for the KPFK Evening News. I had, by this time produced dozens of them and would go on to produce hundreds more. Just once, on the Fourth of July during the War Year, I allowed myself a luxury that is abused by most Pacifica Radio Hosts.
07112003 Live interview with State Assembly Member Judy Chu
Her bill sponsored to support multilingual contract language in California.
(with brief Mandarin Chinese-language exchange with MTK in the outcue)
0715-08152003 Liberian struggle, Iraq worsens
We began covering Subsaharan Africa and Liberia arose like a healthy distraction from the real issues in DRC and Nigeria and Sierra Leone so we began doing that as well. Live coverage from Nigerian elections led to live calls to Uganda as well.
07152003 New News Theme introduced, headline bumpers added
0720-07292003 Donovan Jackson beating verdict
live reports from Inglewood and the courthouse by volunteer Jordan Davis
07212003 Audio Magazine Project element
the sound of the Dodgers organ player and stadium announcer calling the final field and plate appearances of “Ricky Henderson” versus the St. Louis Cardinals over the weekend
07252003 Napalm Use in Iraq
Detailed analysis of the admission by U.S. military of the use of napalm or incendiary bombs that are illegal on Iraqis. Mark 77 versus Napalm incendiaries in detail.
0801-11172003 Russian Federation and “breakaway republics”
We wrote and delivered original work on Chechnya which led to deeper coverage of Azerbaijan, Kzrygystan and Georgia as well as to coverage of The Russian Federation with original interviews of: Matt Bevins, Editor-in-Chief of the Moscow Times for 9 years. (DP), Ian Bremmer Director of the Eurasia Division of the World Policy Institute(DP/MTK), Professor Ronald Suny of the University of Chicago (DP), Giorgy Lomsadze of the Caspian Business Daily live from Tibilisi when as many as 20,000 Georgians descended on the governmental center. (MTK)
08062003 Launch of “Politics or Pedagogy” an education column
John Cromshow’s weekly spin at radio by, for and about kindergarten to high school teachers, students and administration
0806-08102003 Camisea Gas Project, Peru
Amazon Watch and Friends of the Earth take on Ex-Im Bank who want to finance a project that would jeopardize rainforest. We do in-depth interviews on the Paracas National Marine Reserve, home to the endangered Humboldt Penguin. Ex-Im backs off. (MTK)
0809-10072003 The California Recall Election
Complete coverage of all legal angles of lawsuits preceding the Recall and full coverage of three debates and the election, including post-election analysis and commentary and coverage from The Biltmore Hotel, Schwarzenegger’s HQ and Sacramento. Live radio and interviews with Peter Camejo, Terry McAuliffe, and press relations for Davis, Bustamante, Huffington and McClintock.
0808-08112003 Guantanamo Detainees
Focus on the Guantanamo detainees including interviews with attorney’s and family members
0812-09152003 Sherman Austin
Coverage ending with a piece from the field at the courthouse on the day Austin surrendered to authorities Interviews of tearful friends and family of Sherman Austin by Alan Minsky.
08082003 One Hour Special Program on the Recall
Volunteer Jordan Davis joined MTK to discuss the Recall with listeners
09032003 90-minute special program Recall Debate
MTK hosts coverage of debate between five major candidates and listener calls
09052003 Audio Magazine Project
Cast with music by Sergio Mielnishenko, new computers in the newsroom
09112003 M.T. Karthik’s 9/11 Special
a one hour program on covert U.S. Military operations and 9/11’s throughout history, including 9/11/2001.
0912-09162003 Josh Connole Arrest
Live breaking newsradio had KPFK collecting sound from ReGen Co-op as the arrest was occurring.
10012003 Launch of “The Mechanics of Voting” Column
10042003 Dreaming Our Future: If the Truth is Told, Griffith Park, Los Angeles
A Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs-sponsored youth conference organized by Fidel Rodriguez. MTK produced interviews and coverage with volunteer Joseph Lee, 16
1007-10082003 Recall Election coverage
one hour Election Recall Special with TZW
10082003 M on the BBC
MTK on California’s new Governor on morning radio in London
10092003 Use of audio from Radio Intifada
Cross-pollination of programming through shared interview resources
10132003 The Crossing
MLL at the U.S. Mexico Border on vigilantes and border crossings
10152003 Straw Poll of Midday News audience
Result: 96 callers in twenty minutes supported the program by saying they favor the Midday News.
1019-10312003 Fall Fund Drive
News raises $25,000, highest ever for a News Department at KPFK.
10202003 Organic Lounge launched (MLL, RM, LLC)
Food news and politics of organics and genetically-modified foods
10252003 One Hour Special Program Roundtable on Activism hosted by MTK
10302003 Political Prisoners column launched (TC)
Dedicated to political prisoners being held here in the U.S.A.
11132003 Audio Magazine Project element
the sound of thunder in Mt. Washington used as an ambient newsbreak
and thus ended my first year as News Director of KPFK 90.7fm Los Angeles, for which I was rewarded with doubling listeners and a raise.
2004 News and Election Coverage Executive Producer
I was often accused of editorializing. Having studied journalism for years, I denied it with specific details. I countered that editorializing is rampant on the other side, so lies are being taken for fact. I believe I’ve been vindicated in recent years.
The two-paper town is so rare that journalism and the record no longer exist. Colin Powell could spend an hour and a half at the UN telling the world that Saddam Hussein has dangerous weapons of mass destruction, that he is capable of delivering them to people and committing mass atrocity. Powell does this for 96 minutes and every paper presents it as fact.
What you got was a non-competitive view that said, “we think Saddam Hussein is this. We think Saddam Hussein is that.” They didn’t do “We observed Powell pitching such and such about Saddam Hussein.” Now how did we at KPFK? We played not one clip of Powell or Jack Straw – their ideas were already in all the papers. We let people hear other voices that favored and opposed war- the UN ambassadors from Pakistan, the Syrian, the Chilean. Others on the Security Council who you could not hear anywhere else. We provided the competitive journalism that allowed a comparison to what you got in every other paper.
“US American” is an example of something linguistic that I generated with much assistance from Patrick Burke. We’d say “US American” for all references to persons, entities or policies of the USA. The term was meant to replace and correct American. American President Bush, American this, American that. Well, Chile is in America, Canada is in America, Mexico is in America. Listeners got that. It’s an antidote for that broadcast idea of The Global North being the most important. It is also important because it contextualizes the USA, which I believe must be isolated. Only after we had done this on KPFK for two years did the stories ridiculing the beauty pageant entrant who used the term emerge. I defend the young woman here for the first time as possibly the first U.S. American to exist, thus placing me second, Patrick C. Burke, third and anyone else who chooses to identify in line beyond this point. As a journalist, I believe you should be extra-national – you should be outside of the state, like Neruda, like Paz. A journalist should be able to say, “I investigate your decision as a nation,” not reproduce the Pentagon line by printing the fax they just sent as news, which sadly happens now in many newsrooms.
KERRY WON
We had perhaps as many as half a million listeners during the Election Cycle. On November 23, 2004, three weeks after Election Day, I sent out an e-mail from my private e-mail account, which in any case I knew meant my termination.
In that e-mail I projected the winner of the 2004 U.S. Presidential race to be Democrat John Kerry by virtue of a true victory of the votes in Ohio and thus an electoral college delegate count of 270 to 267. I believe I would have been the only broadcast journalist in the United States to have made such a projection in the election month of November 2004 or before the Electoral College first met in early December – but I wasn’t able to make it on the air. It was and remains too radical in mainstream media circles to suggest that John Kerry won – not just on-air, but even in an e-mail. I stand by my projection. I believe the Bush campaign rigged the election of 2004 and negotiated a settlement with Kerry/McAuliffe and the DNC. There can be no other explanation for the mathematics or my personal experiences that night.
Nationwide exit polls for the 2004 Elections in the United States were conducted by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International on contract with major national press and TV news services. One of the unique things that KPFK radio did on Election Night that was different from other live broadcasts was to release results as confirmed only as they were broadcast by one particular television outlet that was a part of this contract. We chose to rely on C-SPAN as the lead media outlet for our broadcasts in announcing results.
This decision was made because it had been reported that the non-profit cable network was the only television outlet that had taken the extra precaution to create a special professional relationship with the Associated Press to allow them access to no less than 500 AP reporters around the country to confirm numbers as they came in on election night. This relationship was established as a reform after the television debacle of the 2000 Election in which Florida “flipped” from red to blue in the middle of the night. As members of the National Election Pool contracting Edison/Mitofsky, these AP reporters and C-SPAN, would have access to both exit polls and election results.
During KPFK’s election night broadcast we occasionally checked numbers being reported by the other networks and announced discrepancies to our listeners as a means of covering the media covering the election while covering the election itself. If a network announced a result before any other network or before C-SPAN, we let our listeners know which network (or network anchor) it was, what the result was and whether or not C-SPAN had confirmed it. I believe we were the only radio station in the U.S. to take this near-academic approach to covering the media while covering the election.
By this methodology, and by being in Los Angeles, in the western-most time zone, KPFK radio broadcast final results of exit polls and confirmed results as they were announced from east coast to west – although listeners to KPFK in L.A. sometimes received projections and actual results later than those posted on NBC, CBS, ABC and FOX, the results were hard, linear, continuous and directly linked to exit polling and to confirmed results as they came in. We told our listeners that we considered matters too close to call. We didn’t rush to judgement.
Edison/Mitofsky conducted exit polls in each state and a nationwide exit poll and, on the afternoon of Election Day, disclosed confidential poll data to the general public showing John Kerry ahead of George Bush in several key battleground states. At 8:27pmPST [11:30pmEST], despite widespread reports of voter disenfranchisement and massive problems with the mechanics of voting, it seemed clear in our broadcast booth that Kerry was winning the race for the presidency by a very slim margin of the electoral college delegate count based on exit poll results and confirmed numbers in states that were not too close to call. Florida polls had just closed for Bush. It had been out of our calculation for projecting a Kerry win, which at any rate we did not broadcast at that time.
It was exactly then that the numbers began to change; between the hours of 8:40 and 10:30 on the west coast. We ended our election night coverage at 10:30, with the position of “Too Close to Call,” but witnessed and reported a radical shift in numbers from 8:40 until the end of our broadcast. If, as has been alleged, there was e-vote cheating going on, I believe this is when it happened.
It is important to note that we were using one television source and not shifting our results in instances when a network announced their confirmed result. We stayed with C-SPAN throughout and as a result I am able to state unequivocally and with conviction that there was a radical change in numbers from confirmed sources with access to both exit polls and results in a very short amount of time at a specific hour on Election Night.
Immediately after the close of polls, at 10pm Eastern, Edwin/Mitofsky’s national exit poll showed Kerry had won the popular vote by a margin of 3%. Less than fifteen hours later, on the morning of November 3, the official vote counts showed Bush defeating Kerry by 2.5% in the popular vote.
This discrepancy between exit polls and the official election results – a five and a half point swing, astronomical in historical terms – has never been statistically resolved. Several methods have been used to estimate the probability that the national exit poll results would be as different as they were from the national popular vote by random chance. These estimates range from 1 in 16.5 million to 1 in 1,240. No matter how it is calculated, the discrepancy cannot be attributed to chance.
In the absence of raw data, analyses were accomplished using “screen captures” of data published to the Internet on election night. One such analysis of unadjusted exit poll data, by Dr. Ron Baiman, a professor of statistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, found that statistically significant discrepancies of exit poll results from reported election outcomes were not randomly distributed but rather concentrated in five states, four of which were battleground states, long known to have been key to victory by electoral college vote.
This geographically biased error in exit polls against actual results seems too politically sensitive to be coincidence and indeed, Baiman concluded that the probability that these discrepancies would simultaneously occur in only the most critical states of Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania (rather than in any other randomly selected group of three states), is less than 1 in 330,000, an analysis that agreed with independent calculation by Dr. Steven Freeman, visiting faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, who calculated that the probability that random chance accounted for simultaneous exit poll discrepancies in the three battleground states was well outside of the realm of statistical plausibility.
On January 19, 2005, Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International released a 77-page report entitled “Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004,” acknowledging widespread discrepancies between their exit polls and official counts, admitting the differences were far greater than can be explained by sampling error, but asserting the disparity was “most likely due to Kerry voters participating in the exit polls at a higher rate than Bush voters.” The company did not, however, conduct any statistical tests to prove this likelihood of “reluctant Bush voters.” On March 31, a non-profit group called US Count Votes did just that, publishing: An Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies as a part of its National Election Data Archive Project, in which the group addresses what it identifies as the only three possible explanations for the discrepancies: random sampling error, error in the exit polls, or error in the actual results.
Edwin/Mitofsky itself declared in admitting the immense discrepancies, that they could not be due to chance or random sampling error, with which the authors of the US Count Votes agree. But Edwin/Mitofsky takes the view that their own exit polls were incorrect and the official actual results are correct, while US Count Votes states that the consortium does not come any where near substantiating that position in its report noting that actually “the data that Edison/Mitofsky did offer in their report shows how implausible this theory is.”
The US Count Votes Analysis claims convincingly that Edison/Mitofsky “did not even consider” the hypothesis that the actual results could have been wrong, and “thus made no effort to contradict” this hypothesis, stating further that “some of Edison/Mitofsky’s exit poll data may be construed as affirmative evidence for inaccurate election results,” and concluding, “that the hypothesis that the voters’ intent was not accurately recorded or counted cannot be ruled out and needs further investigation.”
Many statisticians including Baiman and Freeman are signatories to the US Count Votes analysis and a summative report can be downloaded free from:
The report uses the data released by Edwin/Mitofsky to debunk its own “reluctant Bush responders” explanation and the results of the analysis are both very clear and very disturbing. A comparison of votes cast in the Presidential race with votes on the same ballots in other races or for or against various propositions and referenda around the country, reveals even greater unexplainable biases toward Bush in the official vote count as compared to the exit polls.
My experience as a journalist covering Election 2004 led me to these conjectures. My methodology covering the results on-air live from the west coast on election night and in the three weeks that followed confirmed for me a desperate need for someone in media to announce that they did not believe George W. Bush won the Election and, because of the radical transformation of the U.S. American elections process by the landmark Supreme Court case Bush v. Gore (2000), to announce it loudly before the Electoral College met in early December.
Frustrated by what I saw as a second contravention of democracy during a Presidential election, I hoped to induce investigation of the results by honestly reporting what was strongly suggested by conjecture. The media and John Kerry capitulated. We stayed in context.
That’s why I sent an e-mail from my position as Elections Coordinator for Pacifica Radio projecting John Kerry the President of the United States.
Immediately after sending that e-mail for which I was relieved of duty, I sent another e-mail, this time as a concerned voter, to my Senator:
U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer:
Let me begin by saying I voted for you. And that you may now be the only person that we on the progressive left can approach, because you are in many ways a part of power and the ruling class in the United States and you are a well-respected member of one of the major parties.
We beseech you to ignore Republicans, Democrats and so-called Progressives who have conceded this election as accomplished fairly and to independently look into the matter.
Please, Senator Boxer, take up the call for Investigation of the Election of 2004. Do it now; before the Electoral College votes and before the Inauguration of the President.
At this moment – as in 2000 – colleagues of yours in the House are prepared to contest and investigate the election for fraud. One Senator willing to ask is all they need to achieve such a request. Only one single Senator who is politically safe, who has the support of a Progressive community, and who has the courage of conviction to stand up and say simply that:
decisions regarding how we vote and for whom are being made too quickly, and as a result carelessly, and perhaps erroneously; that our democratic processes are being rushed and hurried by the Republicans led by Karl Rove [called the “architect” of the re-election by Bush] and; that democracy in the U.S.A. is suffering terribly, if not critically.
As a woman and a progressive Democrat, you have won re-election easily. People here support you for your ideas and values. You are in a safe state among people who share your beliefs.
After hearing four weeks of testimony from key states [especially Ohio] and after reading horrifying stories from around the country as to what happened on Tuesday, November 2, I and many of your other constituents believe that the results of the 2004 election are significantly riddled with errors, many of which circumstantially point to the STRONG possibility of FRAUD and vote fixing.
Senator Boxer, changing the outcome of the election is NOT our interest in asking this of you. The desperate and fundamental need for a fair elections process and real democracy DEMANDS a slower, more measured, piece-by-piece investigation – conducted by Congress – of the Election of 2004 and in particular of the votes cast via electronic voting machines.
It is now clear that George W. Bush’s falsely named Help America Vote Act written to address the many issues that resulted from the 2000 election, served only to rush US counties and states into purchasing machines that have become black holes for American votes.
California’s Secretary of State Kevin Shelley was admired by people across the State for standing up to the manufacturers who were clearly complicit in rushing these devices past proper standards and though now he is being attacked within the system by the powers that be, it is clear he has TREMENDOUS public respect for his forward-looking actions on e-voting over the past year and a half. By setting an aggressive calendar for hearings and for public and private input, Secretary of State Shelley was able to decertify machines and to put out a detailed list of 23 conditions for the use of other machines to make them safer and more accurate for Californians. He said when doing this that cheating wasn’t going to happen on his watch. He then testified before the Election Assistance Commission and at both the Democratic and Republican Conventions, that other states should earnestly learn from California’s experience and institutionalize protections … but it was too little, too late.
Other states and indeed Bush’s White House and the GOP-controlled Congress, diminished the significance of Secretary of State Shelley’s very hard work. Senator Boxer, you will be greeted by a flood of support from the grassroots level if you take this on. You could revolutionize the argument.
As our Senator won’t you chastise them for what they did to our Secretary of State? Won’t you stop their stampeding toward re-election for long enough to examine the facts and the data? Won’t you please tell the rest of the country that Californians were very relieved to have had a Secretary of State who cared enough to demand protections against problems suffered in other parts of the country?
Please, Senator Boxer, look deep into the future of this country, summon the courage and do what you do so well. Stand with your colleagues in the House who believe a Congressional Investigation into the Election of 2004 is an absolute necessity before the U.S.A. can pass one more law or engage in one more battle. Only one Senator is required … it would make us all proud if you were first.
Respectfully,
M.T. Karthik
and to her credit, Senator Boxer made history, contesting the election and voting alone for the Election of 2004 to be investigated for fraud, a point since alleged by Representative Robert F Kennedy, Jr and several other congressional members.
The Power of Nightmares, a BBC documentary in three one- hour parts by Adam Curtis, is available free online and free from intellectual property burdens. It is in the Creative Commons so you can just download it from
Watch it and rebroadcast it anywhere you can. The series takes as its subject a comparison of two ideological groups that have tried to shape the entire world for the past fifty years using money, power, influence, religion, violence and finally fear.
This doc also seeks to define and address a change in policy makers: from positivists who seek to represent humanity toward a better life into negativists who perpetuate stereotypes of fear to remain in power. But fundamentally the series is a comparison of two radical groups who now hold the world in their grip:
The Islamic Fundamentalist Extremists and
The US American Neoconservatives
The series begins with an examination of the intellectual pursuits of Egyptian philosopher and Islamic Fundamentalist scholar Syed Qtub and Neo-conservative Scholar and University of Chicago professor Leo Strauss in 1949 and details how their pursuits led to what would become the ideology behind these two currents of hyper-conservative thought that have been extremely active: struggling against their own societies, subsequently working together to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and ending up in direct conflict in a Winner-Take-All-Fight-to-the-Death, which is taking place even now in the guise of the War on Terror [which ought rightfully be called the War of Terror].
But more, this series properly addresses the tactic of fear used by both groups, and especially that used by the neocons, to propagandize humanity into electing politicians willing to use the fear model for their own selfish interests – Tony Blair is really exposed as an opportunist by this series.
I deeply wish more people could see this doc so we could begin a discussion to reframe the global power conversation that is being dictated to us by military and militant authorities.
Curtis’ series does not address the possibility of Neocon or US American complicity in the attack on 9/11 nor does it properly address the Clinton era in context:
He says 9/11 was executed by extreme readers of Islamic Fundamentalism and leaves it at that [he says the actual events were executed by a plan drawn by KSM (that’s Khalid Sheik Mohammad in CIA-speak)] and that Clinton was a fundamentally good agent who was buried by a neocon cabal which trained its powers of attack at him [painting Clinton as a victim].
In these readings, I have differences with Curtis, but he doesn’t take a stance on these matters that threatens the possibilities lined out by many other researchers and documentarians with more access and focus on them. He simply leaves them as generally accepted media ideas for the sake of a wider, more historiographic perspective that is really very brilliant.
He proposes very effectively that the neocons have used the exact same exaggerative tactics to take down first the Soviet Union, then Bill Clinton and now, finally, Muslim Fundamentalism under the vague rubric of Terrorism.
The series goes further and proposes that “there is no al Qaeda.” And fully debunks the Bush administrations claims of successful anti-terror work in the USA post-9/11.
This is a GREAT historical view of conflicts authored by and between the Neocons and the Islamist Extremists … really important work.
Please find some one with high speed connection universities would be perfect places to achieve this – and broadcast them widely.
Film clubs, organizations, peace groups, non-profits, NGOs, students or professors or faculty or staff with access to computer labs with high-speed connections: please download this important three part series from the BBC and have public viewings and showings.
I urge this because I think it would make a great beginning to reframing the 21st century conversation.
In a slow, measured and lucid way, a way that has revealed itself to me with heaviness over the past fifteen years, I have come to believe I am seeing the end of something.
Humankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to humankind.
To isolate oneself in contemplation, no matter how comfortable it may seem a position from which to view the world, is simply unacceptable; costly.
We must use the extremely complex tools we have invented for this purpose: to focus our energies and work toward more equitable and efficient distribution of the earth’s available resources.
We must put an end to warmongering.
We must disarm and then de-militarize first the United States.
It must be held accountable for its excesses and waste. It must assume responsibility for the Colonial Era and the good U.S. Americans, who know the truth, must begin the task of admission of the ongoing genociding of cultures in USA, of the economic reality that the current power structure has been built on slave’s labor [for the Millennium?]
Rampant, bloated overdependence as a result of the Era of Capitalism must be tamed and harnessed to bring the world together peacefully.
Those incapable of diplomacy should be jailed until they have calmed down and seen the error of their course.
I am motivated to aid those who see that thieves and dacoits have stolen the greatest of the earth’s resources for the last five hundred years and are not through yet and must be held to task for such barbaric idiocy; that seeks to interfere with the great continuity of human thought.
The USA is the world’s greatest impediment to peace, stability and progress; it must be toldby humanity to stand down in the exact manner that international humanism told South Africa, “Aparteid will not stand.”
United Nations Security Council Proceedings
FEB 05, 2003
simultaneous translation via e-mail chat
[final three pages, rush transcript]
M.T. Karthik: Germany now. crash of space shuttle/condolences
thanking powell for info … emph. that the UN is the place for this
(QUOTE) findings have to be examined carefully
findings of powell co-incide with much of our other info
we must work with all info to clarify quickly and fully
and iraq has to answer elements provided today by powell
this is why the sanctions w/ no-fly exist
iraq must disarm
the presence of the inspectors has already effectively reduced the threat
but still the full disarmament is goal of res. 1441
iraq must answer w/out delay.
future trips by blix and baradei
1441 provides for the tools … the dangers of military action and its conseq.
are plain to see. we must continue to seek peaceful solution
in the world of the 21st century the un is
MTK says: (wow, idealistic words) …
(QUOTE CONTINUED) on the basis of 1441 we need to enhance the instruments
we need a tougher approach
by tightening inspections we are creating an opportunity for a peaceful solution
french colleague made proposals we should consider (wow)
MTK says: sounds like … USA/UK/SPA/BUL/CHILE vs.
RUS/GER/FRA/MEX/SYR/GUI/PAK/ANG
IRAQ has now been invited to speak …
(QUOTE) my delegation extends congratulations to Germany on assumption of the presidency of the council.
IRAQ
we wish we had more time than a few minutes to rebutt a two-hour presentation and accusation by Powell … I shall be polite and brief.
the pronouncements in powell’s statement are utterly unrelated to the truth
no new info was provided
mere sound recordings that cannot be ascertained as genuine …
you might have seen me smile when the tapes were played here
(QUOTE, CONTINUED) there were words I will not translate
there are false assumptions, incorrect assumptions etc … in this tape
S. Hussein has said we are totally with/out WMD.
we have been saying it for over a decade.
Christopher says: (is that Aziz?)
MTK: powell could have saved all of us the time by providing the info to the UNMOVIC and IAEA (no … another foreign minister)
Christopher says:(valid point)
MTK: (REPEAT) Powell could have saved all of us the time by providing the info to the UNMOVIC and IAEA
(QUOTE CONTINUED) at any rate the forthcoming visits by Blix and co. on 8th will continue to verify …
… detailed info coming
and we are working daily w/ inspectors.
… NOV 27, 2002 … inspectors cranked up with more than 250 UNMOVIC and IEAE staff including more than 100 inspectors
as of FEB 4 of this year: 575 inspect. 321 sites
sites named in bush’s report sept 12, 2002, and blairs report and cia reports topped the lists by inspectors … and they ascertained all allegations were not true
this confirms we are w/out WMD.
water, soil, plants and air samples were taken.
factory remnants and production remnants from vast areas
throughout iraq
analyses … show … conclude: absence of any indication of prescribed chem,
bio or radiological agents or of any …
(DETAILED etc …)
END QUOTE. EDITORIAL BEGINS.
MTK says: Blix confirmed – Times, Jan 30, 2003
gotta go … sorry Christopher, have to run to the station now …
Christopher says: I gotta run myself
Christopher says: I’ll find you later
Christopher says: thanks for all that
MTK says: seems like UN standing in way of USA/UK to me
We push, sit upon and ride the half-ass, trickety jalopy we call the Internet at the dawn of international communication in real-time, awaiting a sensibility to take hold of the government that isn’t fundamentalist Christian and radically right-wing or from Texas with a hardline agenda or wearing an elephant tiepin in the form of the flag of the United States of America.
It is apparent and obvious to absolutely everyone now that the United States of America is occupied by a political force that can only be called a faction. This faction controls communications media with near-absolute restriction of content, controls agencies that monitor, manage and distribute the collective funds of the largest bank account in the world, and controls the military to which it granted 400 Billion dollars last year, the best funded, most powerful war machine on earth.
Among the fools in this faction there are elderly bigots who are given swan-songs of attention, there are hyper-militarily minded protocol hounds who have seized the language they wrote only two and a half generations ago. There are House Niggers. And House Wiggers, too. House Immigrunts.
All have been seized by soldier mentality and blood-lust – that is the stage play CNN, NPR, PBS, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, HBO, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and every major news outlet in the United States is meant to project because what has happened is:
The free-est economy in the world puffed itself up for eight years – wrapped itself into a Y2knot by getting dumbed into a hitch in the 90’s – and had to be “system re-booted.”
Thus, 9/11.
When all intranet debts were erased by a tidal wave of media, all pumping the same fiction (a well-known – not obscure – mafia move). All the drunk parasites clinging to the largest multi-media assault on international humanity ever attempted by any country, any peoples.
This faction is guilty of producing, staging and titling “9-eleven” to salvage the failing economy and stimulate younger generations of participants into their System of Society. They do this with pride.
We witness these people drop megatons of death from the sky upon the heads of others, elsewhere, anywhere in the world they wish. These, who have said aloud – and continue to say it – they believe they are doing God’s work: murder, manipulation of masses, demagoguery, espionage, political deceit, covert operations, corporate protectionism over truth and environmental needs.
(and their remains this stubborn question of “whiteness”. A demon they have given political birth to and won’t let go of. This ugly American Racism born from the evilest of the fictions they claim … the “discovery”of “Colombus”).
How does one address a bigot? How does one approach an enraged fundamentalist in order to seek common human spirit and tranquility among us all? One imagines s/he is most susceptible during religious ceremonies, when they claim to be open to God’s word.
The Peace Movement is God Asking Humanity to Stand Down.
Make Peace. Calm yourself and your species of its ill-will and avarice. Earth hangs in the balance. Human arrogance deafens and dumbs you in the delicate comfort of your anonymity.
Put a stop to it.
Americans United to Stop War
we must learn to do without oil
I am a pacifist and a conscientious objector to war who seeks political asylum for myself and my family from the United States of America, whom I perceive to be the world’s worst terrorist nation-state.
It is a nation-state without clearly defined borders. It consistently and has constantly maintained armadas on the high seas and in ports all over the world – on “sovereign” territory. Its government is a military junta run by pseudo-Christian fundamentalists who have turned a universal moral truism: “Thou Shalt Not Kill” into its opposite, and have violated every international law on war established since the Second World War (as they have it): Nuremberg, violated. Geneva, violated. Warsaw, violated. U.N. and U.N. charter, violated from first day. The despotic faction in charge has violated also the United States’ own Constitution and shielded itself from recrimination or even inquiry. It is secretive, cabalistic and frightening to many.
The election of a Republican Senate unifies the branches of the U.S. government under an insecure, aging collection of un-representative rightists who paranoically project evil on to mankind, believe these actions to be legitimate. The media are predominantly owned by huge corporations who support this worldview, and the system has successfully factionalized, cordoned-off, controlled and out-capitalized independent outlets for information, thus eliminating any hope of a “checks and balances system” for at least two and a half years. There is about to be wholesale change of how business is done in the name of the United States with its partners and alliances. New compromises will be demanded on top of this, for this white, unfathomably rich, minority of the human species.
The people who have taken control of the United States government are the biggest money there is in the world and now, they are a desperate machine composed of a people who have fictionalized for so long that they feel they have startlingly seized control legitimately. To this worldview has been granted two years of control of the Supreme Court, both Houses of Congress and the Executive Office. (Please Lincoln Chafee, Turn. Now. Not to independent, to Democrat, outright.)
As a registered voter who has participated in the last 9 U.S. elections with federal implications, including the following for President, in order chronologically from 1988: Dukakis, Clinton/Gore, Nader and Gore and in local races in Austin, TX, San Francisco, CA, New York, NY and Los Angeles, CA, for Governors Ann Richards and Jerry Brown and many Democrats, Independents and Libertarian and Green Party candidates. I have participated deliberately in the American exercise in democracy with consideration.
I now believe that not one single vote that I have ever cast in the American system has made a positive difference in the world, because my vote either went to a losing candidate or my candidate was, in point of fact, a loser (Clinton). The American system is corrupt and worthless. It is not democracy (Germany’s is far better). The tiny range of political ideologies in its corporate-controlled system protects a wealthy minority from everyone else. A minority that allows only limited entry – at its speed, for its purposes – to its party.
Because I do not wish to participate in the lie that the USA perpetuates, I have been successfully marginalized by the very wealthy of the United States of America.
So, I have not democratically voted at all, but have merely attended a pathetic dance-of-legitimization that has resulted in hats and horn-blowers for the faction that calls itself Grand Old Party, a dance which would have been only mildly less incorrigible were it being done for the Democrats (I dare to say: “If Gore’s President, the WTC are standing today.” Bush baited them … all summer, just like Roosevelt in ’41 with the boats in Japanese water. It’s their style actually, it’s not even that clandestine, they call themselves “gentleman farmers” … The Bushes brought down the attacks, dammit. Face the facts. And they are murderers, this morning by an unmanned spacecraft over Yemeni soil. No judge, no jury. Cowboy – maybe Wellstone got it the same way.)
They are a serious family, the biggest mafia. The grandfather assisted in the financing of Hitler and the mentality that exercised the poisonous lie of eugenics. As it failed, they somehow planted candidacy onto one of their sons through a shady war-story and, though he lacked intelligence, he managed to ride on the coattails of the television actor, and so became Chief Executive and began baiting Arabs for oil, their “spice”. They rolled into Texas from Maine or Connecticut with a whole lot of money and they bought a posture by feeding bigotry, insecurity, fear and rage. They manipulated and bullied newspapers and poor people. They re-instituted barbaric, unenlightened practices. And they lied and posed bare-facedly, using powerful media to do so, rehearsing ultimately for the “big-time”. This is all so obviously scripted in their response to an event they ‘staged’ … And still they posture. It’s amazing, shameless.
Yes, conceptually, the Bush-Americans staged the attacks on the World Trade Center. [Leave out the Pentagon and wherever the other guy was wandering in what must have been a hellish turmoil. (“Your job is to see if they’ll shoot you down, God be Willing”).]
The Millennium was the set up and 9/11 was the knock down.
Forever let it be added to their list of crimes, the short-sighted old fools, the Bush-Americans staged the “planes-into-towers” thing. They built the set, bought the losses, made the calculations, placed the documentation tools, baited the enemy and stepped out of his way. And that is an accusation. A legal and civil accusation. These people are fascist and amoral and need to be tranquilized and jailed. They lack the intelligence to see humanity and our planet for what it is, a delicate organism.
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
Ocean Mandela Milan has been born to my partner TRW and myself. He enters the western calendar at 9:13 a.m. (PDT, GMT-8) on 8th October, 2002, a Tuesday.
He weighs in at 3170g and has a full head of black hair. His eyes initially appeared blue! But now they are getting browner by the day. We are not getting much sleep, but we are thrilled to have him with us.
We conceived Ocean purposefully, with all loving intent, courage and will, last winter. It is our first child. We have known each other only as adults. I met TRW in San Francisco when she was 22 years old and I have known her for more than seven years. We lived together in New York City for 18 months. We have relocated to Los Angeles. I am 35. She is 28.
In my partner’s work with young children (aged 0-6), and through her studies in college, preschool and in intimate family settings, it has become apparent that loving family structures benefit a child greatly. We have read, studied and personally observed that the most important factors in children’s development and happiness are parents who are attentive and loving and the presence of love, kindness and attentiveness in any extended family; parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles who are supportive, kind and encouraging.
Here in the U.S., we have both witnessed single parents, divorced parents, and unmarried couples who are more involved and loving than many of their married counterparts and who do have happier, more balanced children. We want to provide a safe, stable, loving, educational and enlightened environment for our child in which POSSIBILITY is a fundamental that makes life worth living and fulfilling. We do not want to create an environment that symbolizes RESTRICTION of possibility. We want to be organic in addressing the needs of our child. We do not want to create formalistic rules based on pre-existing social structures, rules that might limit the growth of our child’s mind, soul or body.
Recently, friends, family and others have asked if we are married or worse, if we plan to marry, or worse still, why we aren’t married.
Young children don’t know or care whether their parents are married; it’s simply not an issue before age 6. And while it’s true that as children become older (6 and up, school-age), they are more aware of social structures and may be influenced by peers or others who may imply that their parents are “supposed” to be married, we have witnessed this stigma lessening every year as times change. We are confident, from watching and learning from families and children and society around us, that in 2008, marriage will not be as serious a societal expectation and that our decision will not affect our child’s self-esteem or security.
We are quite proud to provide for our child’s friends, an example of a relationship in which parents are individually whole, total and perfect equals, mother and father, neither reduced or inflated by the socially-weighted titles of “wife” or “husband”, providing a happy and healthy home for their child. We are proud to be strong enough, stable enough in our love for one another and secure enough in our knowledge of self to be unmarried partners in the endeavor of raising a child.
We met in San Francisco and moved thousands of miles, abandoning personal projects and employment, to make our family and settle here in California, a place we love, where we feel secure. We made this decision to have a child because we care deeply about our world, are devoted to making it a better place, and feel that by raising a kind and conscientious child we can change the world. This pregnancy is happening now because we are lucky, and because it is meant to be. The world needs peace-minded, enlightened, non-violent, intelligent, humanist parents, badly.
Neither of us feels the institution of marriage is for us. We recognize marriage as something that many people have grown to expect of those who love one another and who want to have a child – but marriage, as an institution, has no personal meaning for either of us.
Religious marriage ceremonies conducted when any party is NOT a faithful believer in the philosophy under which the ceremony is being held have always struck us both as hypocritical and fundamentally bogus bonding rituals. And licensed marriage under a State that STILL refuses to recognize same-sex marriages and is completely unrepresentative of our political views is ethically reprehensible to us. We think of ourselves as brave in our deep commitment to TRUTH and honesty in politics, life and our love. We do not want to participate in rituals or support institutions in which we do not personally believe.
If we were to ignore the discomfort we feel and marry to satisfy our family’s, state’s or anyone else’s expectations, we would both soon regret it, and we strongly believe that we would be starting out on this venture with a negative feeling. Resentment—toward each other, toward the family or state that pushed us into it—would be sure to develop quickly. We don’t want that.
We have both witnessed tragic and debilitating divorces, and have seen the heavy expectation that marriage places on relationships. I was an unwilling participant in the terrible strain that orthodox concepts of marriage placed on my parents at an age when I should have been free of such concerns. Separation has been good for my parents as individuals and would have been easier to cope with had the heavy expectation of marriage not been such a significant factor. Many people trapped in marriages they do not want suffer needlessly in relationships that no God or good person would wish for any sentient being.
Neither my partner nor I know any couples in wildly successful long-term marriages. We do know couples who have been together for many years without marrying and who have strong relationships. Some of these couples do not have children but wish they could, eventually hope to. Marriage has never been a positive consideration for them in that decision-making process – only a negative: “Well, if we do have a child, we’ll HAVE to get married.” They say it because they are considering HAVING to satisfy someone ELSE. This (sadly common) sentiment in these relationships actually prevents beautiful, stable and wonderful people from committing to bringing new life into this world.
We both feel that if we were married we would lose control of the pure and honest love that we are daily working so hard to build. By deciding to have a child, we feel we are leading by example, providing an alternative for other unmarried couples – those who choose to be together and may have similar feelings but lack the personal security or the courage to have a child.
We are proud to assist in reducing the expectation society places on anyone in love.
There are things we each feel strongly about, and overwhelmingly, remarkably, my partner and I agree with each other about the most important environmental factors that will help determine what kind of person our child will grow up to be. That is in large part why we have decided we’ll be good partners in parenting. We enter into all our decisions together and with great thoughtfulness, foresight, and clarity.
This decision, not to marry, was the first of many decisions we made and will make together. It is a decision that reflects our personal beliefs, our experiences and the ways in which we hope to change this world and our child’s experiences in it.
Just as we respect others’ different opinions—and know that they are what make our society and world a diverse and fascinating place filled with cultural and social variance—we expect respect for our opinions in return.
Now, to his name:
We have considered dozens of names in the past year. I won’t go into the many possibilities, but I will tell you some of the things we like about the name we have given to our new son.
We both decided early on that we didn’t want to take either of our family names – we feel that a third new surname would serve to bond our family better since we chose not to marry. To this end we have given our son his own first, middle and surname. We will eventually decide whether or not we wish to take his name for ourselves, likely we will.
TRW and I have swum in many oceans and seas. We have both always loved the Ocean, having been born by it ourselves – TRW near the Pacific and I by the Bay of Bengal. It was a great day early in this pregnancy that we agreed that the English name for Ocean could be used for either a boy or a girl and that French, Portuguese, Spanish or Sanskrit variants could be used by anyone who chooses to do so (Oceano, is the Spanish, Swedish and Portuguese, and a particular favorite of mine). It’s easily translated.
It was TRW’s idea that a second initial with an ‘M’ would make “OM” and we agreed that would be nice. Had he been a girl, the name we first thought of was Madeleine (a French name that TRW has always liked and I remember enjoying in the children’s book of that title). After she had chosen the girl’s name she asked me to think of a three-syllable, ‘M’ name for a boy. Within seconds, the first thought was of one of my heroes, Mandela.
TRW agreed that the name Ocean Mandela has both a wonderful sound in English and carries international significance for its socio-political importance (a sidenote: Nelson Mandela titled his autobiography “Long Walk To Freedom” after a quote from Nehru)
The hardest part for us was choosing a surname for the baby. We ended with Milan because it means “union” or “coming together” in Sanskrit. We are an inter-racial couple and we feel this name is progressive and beautiful. In addition to creating the sound ‘OMM’ with his initials, the name has the following anecdotal niceties.
As letter number 13, ‘M’ is the center of the western alphabet providing balance.
The numbers of letters in each name corresponds to the number of syllables in the haiku form of poetry from Japan – 5,7,5.
Only afterward did I remember Milan Kundera the GREAT Czech writer – exiled in Paris – whom I have read and enjoyed for decades.
I, for one, call him “Little Man” and approve of Manny or other variants as long as they are tasteful. We look forward to introducing you to our son, Ocean Mandela Milan.
I mean that as the aforementioned Czech-writer Milan Kindera once wrote: “An illusion revealed and a rationalization unmasked have the same pitiful shell. Nothing is easier than to mistake one for the other.”
My life in the USA has been a constant disagreement with the powers that be. I find them deeply bigoted, fascist and corrupt. But until 9/11/01, I allowed myself the thought there was hope for this place. I always worked hard to believe I was helping to educate and create a better USA than the one I was forced to move into. That we would one day come to common ground. What nonsense! This place is run by supremacists and pseudo-Christians who suck oil, water, air and energy from the rest of the world and then justify their bloated, self-serving attitude. 9/11/01 only made what was covert, overt. Unmasked the rationalization of empire.
We were all spending the last decade talking about “post-colonialism” only to find that in the Christian’s 21st century, colonialism is alive and well, and its latest manifestation, the USA under Bush and Cheney, is no different from the ones who locked up my grandfather in a jail in his own country in 1928 and 1931, and who claim to have “civilized” India with railroads. They are only wearing a different mask.
My son, my partner and I vociferously protest the American military intervention planned for Iraq and the covert operations that these pigs continually run around the world – in the Philippines, in Colombia, in Afghanistan, in Africa, with armadas on all high seas, overtly militant, with global positioning technology accurate to the size of a dime.
Because of my protest work for the last fifteen years, (and because of the sensitive work my father did for the American military) I am absolutely certain that my e-mail and phone are monitored by the NSA. Though I have always followed their rules and have struggled mightily to work within their system, there is no real freedom for me here and there never has been.
The American nightmare is what I hope my son can avoid. My partner and I – truly global citizens who believe in world peace and harmony between peoples – intend to raise him to lead us away from war – to disarm the USA and to demand multi-lateral, peaceful disarmament of the entire world for his grandchildren.
Last night as I sat in the baby’s room with TRW and we tried to calm Oceano as she breastfed him, the radio broadcast the U.S. Senate roll-call vote on Resolution 45 that authorized the use of unilateral military force against Iraq for George W. Bush. It was O.’s third night “on earth.”
This country makes up only 7% of the entire population of the world. 7%!!! Where do you get off telling 93% of the world how to live?! You suck so much more oil, water, power and energy than anyone else anywhere. You produce more waste – nuclear, plastic, noxious gas – and force garbage onto others. You have a military presence in most places – your military commands global positioning technology down to the size of a dime.
What is happening in the United States of America is shameful, pathetic and racist. Americans, drunk on technology or passed out from over-indulgence weren’t even woken from their reverie of engorgement when slapped HARD on 9/11. We need you to wake up! Your elders have no idea what they are doing. They refuse to leave the world stage quietly.
Instead they force their high-tek-savvy grandchildren to create pro-war content that glorifies them as “The Greatest Generation” – which they, being kids, do for a paycheck, weekly doses of “Friends” and sexual freedom. The warmongering generation dumbly rattle the wheels of their chairs like sabres – scream blindly about wars past as though they have an understanding of weapons of the day – they don’t. World peace can only happen through peaceful, multi-lateral, disarmament.
There is little representation in Congress for this idea – embraced by most Americans – and yet we are deeply taxed to pay the salaries of our so-called representatives. Taxation without representation was the basis for the “revolution” that gave birth to this system. Today, unrepresented people taxed to pay for this system number in the tens of millions. Bush placed last after Nobody and Gore. And the paper screams that Congress supports Bush’s proposal for attacking Iraq. Meanwhile the radio this morning presents a “community calendar of anti-war demonstrations” that includes 16 different protests to take place across L.A. Several are ongoing, weekly protests. It is time for another revolution. We must disarm the USA.
Television programming devoted to sports, entertainment and even to watching each other behave stupidly has been so successfully marketed to the under-educated Americans that they have become skittish and defensive about their own ignorance – unable to admit they know nothing about the world – indoctrinated by the endless sloans of Big Brother in the schools, churches and moviehouses: “Columbus discovered America.”
The USA is an idiot-child in a world of ancient cultures – China, India, Africa, Australia, Europe – and it’s being led down the toilet by a crusty, stubborn, rigid, militant culture headed by pseudo-Christian haters who have audaciously remade Thou Shalt Not Kill into its opposite.
They spit venom at others while acting out all evil human behavior themselves – bombing, killing, butchering, name-calling, hatred, bigotry – and they see no hypocrisy in it; pathetic, repressed, idiot-children of humanity, you will be the death of us all. The USA sucks. It sucks oil like no one else. It sucks water and power and energy and it shits out more poison than anyone. It’s freedoms have spawned unsupportable gluttony. All in the name of the white man’s Liberty – his unsatiable need to consume all property, have total control of humanity.
And what will you Bush-Americans do after you “regime-change” Iraq? What will you do about China? And India? They are nuclear powers. What if they start to hate you because you are so stupid you don’t even see what a mess you are making? What if rogue Al Qaeda members choose to hide in China?
Where are America’s priests, rabbi, brahmins and imams? Reduced to pawns in a political battle of ever-shifting factions of power-seekers. Right now, we couldn’t see or hear any God trying to communicate with us anyway, because the enormous din of our own machines of war and oversexed marketing – billboards, screaming ads, hyper-powered narratives of false prophets – drowns out everything, even the chirping of crickets.
Fuck you silent Americans who let this charade continue that leads to death by nuclear or bio-chemical attack – Bush is asking for it, baiting others to give it to you and you won’t even say: stand down, dammit, before you kill us all. Stop the USA. Stop the warmongers. Tranquillize the bellicose.
“
M.T. Karthik 