Browse the charts, or better, tune in Top 40 radio, and you will find that Taio Cruz “came to dance, dance, dance, dance,” that Enrique Iglesias and Pitbull like “the way you move on the floor,” that Usher admits the “DJ Got Us Fallin’ In Love.” As a phenomenon, this music is neither very interesting nor particularly relevant. I never thought Hip Hop, a form that is laudable in many respects would look to or indulge in disco, a style that is looked back on with almost universal derision.

The problem, just as it was in the 70s, is the site of the music. The 70s saw the site of music swing towards its extremes. On the one hand, it located itself in the garage. The children of the first generation born into Rock & Roll took their second hand instruments and their worn down ideas of music and turned them into something in which the rawness, like a fresh wound, was the source of inspiration and innovation. The question was: could a poor kid from nowhere make a noise ugly enough that when he tried to out-scream it, an audience could find its own blunted catharsis? On the other hand, there was the music industry, which had finally come to terms with its role as a behemoth decider of culture, alongside movies and television. This music was born in the studio and destined for the nightclub; from all sides, you had to pay to play. Artists compromised. Producers closed ranks. The velvet rope became a part of the public consciousness, and the music became a lesson in disconnectedness. Patti LaBelle asked 1,000 sweaty scene-sters if they would like to sleep with her tonight.

The amazing thing about Hip Hop is that these two forces are not opposed as they were in the 70s. They now form a continuity. The music that started in the ghetto, on the street corners and in the Friday-night house parties has become very nearly its opposite. I wonder if Run DMC would recognize Lil’ Wayne. In Run DMC’s first effort, on a track called “Sucker MCs,” they found their baseline in  “Live at the Disco Fever” by Luvbug Starski. Starski, a master appropriator, stages his homage to another street-corner form, Doo-Wop, in the legendary South Bronx club whose name, inspired by Saturday Night Fever, would later be appropriated less sensitively by bad movies and even worse compilers. It would seem that Run-DMC were post disco, and pro Disco Fever (the club).

The difference is subtle but significant.  Disco Fever was one of the first times that the music, Hip Hop, had ever been enfranchised, brought indoors, sheltered and appreciated. Run DMC, through Starski, are acknowledging a moment of creation in the midst of a moment of creation, their first album. The early history of Hip Hop is filled with these kind of doublings and homages, creating a web of meaningful interconnections. Lil’ Wayne, in the title track of his recent, Right Above It, creates a link to the ghetto as well, with very different results. Wayne’s ghetto is the one found in the movie Slumdog Millionaire, the one viewed from air-conditioned comfort in the midst of Dolby Surround Sound, the one that isolates him from sweat and desperation. He is on the less interesting side of the velvet rope, in the rarefied environment of new money millionaires. In one of his biggest hits to date, a collaboration with Fat Joe, Wayne makes “it rain on them hos.” The rain here is $100 bills. The locale is the photo studio, and Wayne sits atop a shipping pallet of the bills, while his hos dance near him, but importantly, never in physical contact. He touches the bills, the bills touch the girls, and this is some kind of bizarre completion of a sexual act. Am I wrong to think of Patti LaBelle, singing in French to the patrons of Studio 54?

It would be tempting to trace this transition from lo-fi to hi-fi, from street corner to studio, from tape sold from a car’s trunk to celo-wrapped disc. It would be tempting to locate the exact moment when Hip Hop changed, but it is more important to know that it did, and to try to understand it now that it has. It would be easy, and wrong, to write it off as a wrong turn, a branch of evolution that has little potential. Just as people who wish it were so believe that disco died along with the club and drug scenes that supported it, it would be small-headed and unfairly biased. Disco changed; it shed its most cliché markers and carried on, eventually becoming the hair bands of the 80s, the rave scene of the 90s, and so on. You can still find it today, if you know where to look. So, what then for Hip Hop?

Hip Hop is in its adolescence, and disco may be considered youthful indiscretion, but I prefer to think of it as an awkward stage. There is a part of pop music that will always be about fantasy wish fulfillment. Travie McCoy is making big numbers with “I wanna be a Billionaire.” Likewise, this club-centered site for Hip Hop is presenting an aspiration for the vast majority of its audience. Many people who could never afford to own a “409” still happily sang along with The Beach Boys from the back seats of their parent’s grocery getters. Who doesn’t want to be a big shot with access to the VIP and the ability to “drop stacks” on any frivolity? Hip Hop will eventually outgrow these dreams. Do you remember when the urban streets looked more like a yacht club than most actual yacht clubs? How about when Hip Hop stars dressed and sang about brands that would embarrass the most oblivious Euro-trash? In a few years, we will look back and wonder if the club scene was really that good at the beginning of the century. By that time, Kanye West will be safely contained as a national treasure, and a new generation of artists will be singing about a new generation of things to want. It is most likely that the club will be displaced as the site of the music.

This would tend to minimize the importance of the culture at this moment, but I would like to suggest that it is something more significant than just fantasy wish fulfillment. Hip Hop is big. It has achieved a centrality that is impossible to ignore. In some ways, the music is a celebration of this fact. Many genres celebrate the icon of the working class hero, the struggle to the next rung of the ladder. What happens when you hit the top, when your Hip Hop star is a legitimate mogul? industrialist? venture capitalist? What happens when they are the owners? While Lil’ Wayne is presenting an aspiration, he is also celebrating an achievement, and while Run DMC might not celebrate the content of the message, they would never minimize the achievement. Moving from the street corner to the penthouse is no small feat.

From this perspective, the club is a special place. It is a zone where the once dominant culture has been displaced entirely. It is a microcosm where the ladder is complete from top to bottom and upward mobility is not a concept but an established fact. There is a democracy to the club, once you make it past the velvet rope, and so it is a model for a worldview. We learn by seeing, and in the club, you can see the top, and you can see that they are not so different from us, the sweaty hordes. It sounds like a small thing, but it is the small thing that leads to big things. Who will be better served: the kid who listened to Run DMC’s “My Adidas” and understood something about authenticity or the kid who listens to Lil’ Wayne’s “A Milli” and sees a path to becoming a “young money millionaire.”

Hip Hop’s disco phase may be a hard one to embrace wholeheartedly, but you would do well not to ignore or avoid it. It is easily as important as the Obama presidency. Pop music tells us something important about ourselves. Are we reliving the 70s? Clearly, some of us are.

Songs Cited

Cruz, Taio. “Dynamite.” Rokstarr. Prod. Benny Blanco Dr. Luke. Island, 2009.

Iglesias, Enrique. “I Like it.” I Like It. Prod. RedOne. Universal Republic, 2010.

Joe, Fat. “Make it Rain.” Me, Myself & I. Prod. Scott Storch. Terror Squad, 2006.

LaBelle. “Lady Marmalade.” Nightbirds. Prod. Vicki Wickham Allen Toussaint. Epic, 1974.

McCoy, Travie. “Billionaire.” Lazarus. Prod. The Smeezingtons. Fueled by Ramen, 2010.

Nirvana. “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Nevermind. Prod. Butch Vig. Van Nuys: DGC, 1991.

Run DMC. “My Adidas.” Raising Hell. Prod. Russell Simmons Rick Rubin. Profile Records, 1986.

Run DMC. “Sucker MC’s.” Run DMC. Prod. Russell Simmons. Profile/Arista Records, 1984.

Starski, Luvbug. “Live at the Disco Fever.” Live at the Disco Fever. Fever Records, 1986.

The Beach Boys. “409.” Surfin’ Safari. Prod. Murry Wilson. Capitol Records, 1962.

Usher. “DJ Got Us Fallin in Love.” DJ Got Us Fallin in Love. Prod. Shellback Max Martin. LaFace, 2010.

Wayne, Lil’. “Right Above It.” Right Above It. Prod. Kane Beatz. Young Money, Cash Money, Universal Motown, 2010.

Wayne, Lil’. “A Milli.” Tha Carter 3. Prod. Bangladesh, Cash Money, Universal Motown, 2008.

For weeks, now, online news outlets have been running live streaming video of the Gulf Coast oil leak, courtesy of British Petroleum. And I don’t mean, by this, that the oil leak itself is courtesy of BP—which, of course, it in large part was and is (but also of the whole bloody system that produces and sustains something like BP in the first place)—but that the live streaming video has been provided by BP itself, as a part of the company’s damage-control performance of a commitment to keeping the public abreast of the situation. The idea seems to be to counteract the negative publicity that has resulted from the oil spill itself and the unprecedented environmental and economic damage that has attended to it with a show of unprecedented corporate transparency. But if the live streaming video of the underwater leak is its sign and symbol, BP’s turns out to be an odd sort of transparency, indeed no matter what time of the day or night one tunes in to the underwater video feed, what one sees is always the same: a hopelessly muddy image, as though photographed through a mud-covered lens, of a kind of muddy muddiness gushing into muddily muddy water. If there were any doubt about the muddy opacity of all of this transparency, it was erased once and for all when, just the other day now, we were treated to muddy underwater footage of actual mud being pumped into the underwater oil well in yet another effort to somehow staunch the spewing. It’s difficult not to wonder if, in predictably cynical fashion, BP located precisely that point of view from which seeing absolutely everything meant seeing absolutely nothing at all—just mud in mud through mud—and promptly installed their show-the-public-everything cameras exactly there.

Unfortunately, for BP, deception is rarely so simple. Every effort to conceal inevitably reveals, and perhaps this is only doubly the case when, as in the present instance, what is concealed includes the very work of concealment itself. I am thinking of a passage I re-read, not a couple days ago, from Don DeLillo’s 1989 send-up of postmodern America, White Noise. At lunch with his colleagues from the Department of American Environments, the novel’s protagonist, Jack Gladney—irreparably monolingual chair of The-College-on-the-Hill’s department of Hitler Studies—brings up a recent Friday night spent with his family watching television footage of disaster, catastrophe, and calamity from around the world. He is unsettled by, more than the mere ease with which they played spectator to the suffering of others, the degree to which that suffering mesmerized them, held them almost lustily captive. “We’d never before been so attentive,” muses Gladney, “to our duty, our Friday assembly” in front of the television set.

Alfonse Stompanato, chair of American Environments and The-College-on-the-Hill’s resident popular culture guru, is not surprised by the scene Gladney describes. “It happens to everybody,” he tells him. “It’s because we’re suffering from brain fade. We need an occasional catastrophe to break up the incessant bombardment of information…Words, pictures, numbers, facts, graphics, statistics, specks, waves, particles, motes. Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them.” Given how little 1989 really knew about this  “the incessant bombardment of information” to which he refers—1989, after all, was before the internet had entered into the drama of daily life, no less taken center stage—I can’t help but wonder if Stompanato shot a bit wide of the mark in his efforts to explain the captivation of Gladney’s family before the televised spectacle of disaster. Perhaps closer to the heart of the matter, in fact, was the caveat he added immediately to his explanation: “As long as they happen somewhere else.”

For in the 1989 of White Noise, wasn’t that just the thing: that the machinery for the dissemination and reception of “information,” as it were, was still structured such that to be witness to the spectacle of disaster in itself meant that it was not happening here, that it was not happening to you? Perhaps the punctuation-like clarity Stompanato attributes to these “TV disasters,” as he describes them in DeLillo’s novel, had less to do with any supposed interruption of the “incessant bombardment of information”—after all, the images of “lava, mud and raging water” that Gladney describes came to him and his family through the television tubes, just so many more specks, waves, particles, and motes—than with the (if only momentary) crystal clarity of the distinction the very phenomenon of disaster as spectacle still drew, now twenty years ago, between us and them, here and there, apart and a part? In the world of prototypically postmodern disorientation DeLillo describes in White Noise—shopping malls, supermarkets, televisions sets, airports—one can imagine the spectacle of disaster, of “catastrophe on television,” providing its witnesses with a few passingly delicious moments of situatedness, of knowing, if not precisely who (or where) one was, at the very least where (and who) one was not.

Only twenty years on (a historical nanosecond), circumstances have changed more, I imagine, than DeLillo or his professor characters, as plugged in as they may have been to the impossible acceleration of late twentieth-century life, could possibly have imagined themselves. There are, of course, innumerable ways of describing these current circumstances. In an essay forthcoming in Soft Skull Press’ The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, my friend and occasional editor Benjamin Kunkel describes them, better than I could, in terms of the rise of the “digitosphere” and the “always on, un-turn-off-able internet.” In terms closer to those suggested by DeLillo’s Stompanato, we might here say that now, as opposed to then—in large part as a result of the internet-age rise of social and user-generated media—we have overwhelmingly become the source and the primary producers of the stream of “information” with which we are only more incessantly than then bombarded. The exponentially increased accessibility of the means of production and reception, in combination with the instantaneity of dissemination, makes this true even—and perhaps especially—when we find ourselves right at the heart of a given disaster, calamity, or catastrophe (the Twittering-gone-wild that followed the 2009 elections in Iraq comes to mind as only one example). This new era may have been initiated with the collapse of the World Trade Centers in 2001: a certain New York-based network television anchor’s confusion when the first tower fell (“I’m not sure exactly what’s happening,” I remember him saying as it imploded, and I was yelling at the television, “It’s falling down, you idiot, it’s falling down”) was, as well, the first time I can recall events outpacing their reformulation as that particular form of information called “news.” But it may have at last found its abiding symbol, and symbolic embodiment, in the now months-long video stream of BP’s underwater oil leak: a conflagration of muddiness in muddiness through muddiness the real world correlate of which is the irreparable muddying of the crystal clear distinction the spectacle of disaster in and of itself once drew between us, who bore witness, and them, who underwent—between those of us who stood at a distance, watching, and those others who were right at the bloody core, suffering.

We’ll have to wait on history, of course, to know just what we have become in these last twenty years, and why, and whether for good or evil, or better or worse. At the same time, it only takes a couple of seconds in front of the computer screen, watching this live streaming video of mud in mud through mud, to come to rather unsettling the realization that when the suffering to which we bear daily witness may well be our very own, it ceases to be mesmerizing and, instead, becomes just mesmerizingly boring.

A lot like white noise.

]]> http://zgpress.com/?feed=rss2&p=41 0 http://zgpress.com/?p=36 http://zgpress.com/?p=36#comments Sun, 11 Jul 2010 02:54:35 +0000 Rosetta Brooks http://zgpress.com/?p=36 Radio Alice was a free radio station in Bologna from 1973-1977. Rather than attempting to objectify events in the world, they set out to create a flow of sounds, information, messages and poetry, silences and abuse. Like the manifestations of Dada, transmissions were seen as immediate cultural subversions.

Bifo, who worked on Radio Alice was interviewed by Carlos Ordonez at the recent conference on Autonomy (’After Marx, April’) in London. The interview was conducted in English.

The autonomia movement in Italy during the seventies emerged from the new proletariat of disaffected and unemployed youth, workers and intellectuals creating a radical opposition to institutional politics.

‘Autonomy has no frontiers. It is a way of eluding the imperatives of production, the verticality of institutions, the traps of political representation, the virus of power. In biology an autonomous organism is an element that functions independently of other parts. Political autonomy is the desire to allow differences to deepen at the base without trying to synthesize them from above,to stress similar attitudes without imposing a general line, to all parts to co-exist side and side in their singularity.’

Sylvere Lotringer ‘The Return of Politics’
‘Autonomia’ issue of Semiotext(e)

Q: How did Radio Alice begin, and what experiences did it attempt to address?

Radio Alice started in February 1976 with people who came from the experience of Poterio Operia, a leftist revol~tionary group and people involved in the movement of Autonomia. We did not think of Radio Alice only as a political means but, first ofall, as a possibility of organising the experiences of a homogenous community. We were speaking of little groups – feminists, gays, workers. I emphasize this \’little group\’ character because we did not conceive ofthe radio as a political organisation that has to \’state decide\’ who can speak or can\’t speak. We considered the radio as the point ofintersection ofdifferent experiences – every experience being different from the other. We did not think about attempting to homogenise these different groups and points of view.

Q: How was the radio organised? ZG-#4-(Future-Dread)_Page_11.jpg

We had a weekly assembly of the different groups who were working in the radio, and we organised a general programme for the week. Anyone who wanted to propose something for the programme could come along. Of course, the programme rejerred, in general, to the social and cultural areas that were somewhat homogenous. The starting point for the radio was the different social experiences of the autonomia and, on the whole, the people who listened to the radio were engaged in this social area. Another way of organising the transmission was with the use of the telephone which was connected directly to the radio station. This created a special kind of interchange of information.

Q: So you used the telephone as a means of bringing people together?

If you wanted to say something to the people listening, you could. The people working on the broadcast also transmitted their own messages. We had a political bulletin each lunch time for an hour and after that, we had direct political information coming in for callers. We also organised \’listening groups\’ and this created the possibility ofa continuous feedback involving a lot of these small, listening groups. For instance, one listening group of students occupied a technical school and immediately called us in order to speak of the occupation. Immediately after, we received a lot of other Calls from other schools asking for information and questions about the kinds of problems the group faced. This gave rise to the possibility of not only the circulation of information but also the circulation of struggle.

Q: Was there a critical examination of news as a phenomenon?

I am opposed to the idea ofalternative news which attempts to expose the bourgeois news as lies. You see, I do not have truthful information opposed to the non-truthful ofthe bourgeois press. I have my information. That is all. And I prefer to diffuse or mix my information. I don\’t know if that is the truth; I do not believe that it is the truth; I do not believe that the truth exists at all. I believe that there are a lot ofpossible forms of information, every information being connected with a form of life. I choose a form oflife and I diffuse the kind ofinformation connected with this form of life – that is all.

Q: Did you explore the forms involved in radio as well as the content? .

We gave special importance to the problem of form. I prefer to say to the problem of the language we chose. For instance, all the Free Radio\’s in Italy generally have aframework except for the political bulletin and even that was loose. This kind ofdestruction of the framework gave rise to the possibility of speaking all kinds of different \’languages\’. When we destroyed the framework it opened out all other possibilities, but ofcourse, you still have to choose between the different possibilities. We rejected any kind of censorship, political or aesthetic. (The idea was that we were an artistic object).

Speaking about the forms of language we used, what I liked was information that was simulated (false information). One time, the police went to the biggest square in Bologna where young people meet, and arrested a lot ofthem under the pretext that they were dealing in drugs. It was a period of attack by police due to pressure from the owners of businesses in the centre of Bologna who wanted a clearing-up operation to get rid ofthese young people. I was at the Radio and I called the head of police – the sherrif – telling him that I was a journalist from a big newspaper in Bologna. I told him that I realised he had arrested 35 people and I wanted to know whether he would continue to go on with these politics because the town had been asking him to get rid of these dirty people from the squares for a long time. He said yes, and that he had been waiting for a long time to do it but he would be arresting more people the next day. I then asked whether the arrests would just be confined to drug dealers or to extremists as well because it was surely not enough just to arrest the drug dealers. He agreed and was so happy to speak to a big journalist. But then another section ofthe police who was listening in to Radio Alice, went to the office ofthe sherrif to tell him what was happening, so that ended the call. But that was aform of real information. We were obliging the sherrif to tell the truth by us telling a little lie.

In Bologna in 1977, there was a movement in schools, in the universities and in some of the factories and a zone of the city was occupied. The police came into the university and killed someone in the movement and for three days the town was occupied and barricaded. In the period of the riots, Radio Alice was one of the means of communication, organisation and information for the people. The way this coordination worked was that people on the barricades, for example, would go to the telephone and call the radio to say ihai ihey needed more people there as they were tired. People from another place would then come and relieve them. Radio Alice was not only the walkie-talkie of the riots: People were also ringing in to say that we were extremists or killers and that we should criticise the movement on the streets. It was 20 hours a day of free speech about what was happening on the streets. On the second day ofthe riots the police entered the radio station and destroyed everything. The press supported the police action by saying that Radio Alice was instigating the riots by the use offalse information. All the people arrested from the radio were charged with using false information and ofinstigating the riots by means of false information. We had a long theoretical discussion about the conception of true and false news and said that every newspaper is giving news that is true from one point of view. The news is not the reproduction of reality but the production of events, of facts, of reactions etc. so to tell something which is explicitly or evidently false may be the means ofproducing the effects connected with a truth – our truth.

Q: To what extent do the people at Radio Alice feel that they were accountable to the movement?

The radio was open in such a way that any group disagreeing with something that had appeared on the radio, could come andput their own point ofview. One time afeminist group who did not like a transmission, came and occupied the station for half a day in order to put out their own transmission. But ofcourse, this was an extreme example. We did not aim to be representative of the autonomia movement but we aimed to represent ourselves and I think that all the people coming to the radio had the same aim, to be representative of their own point of view.

Q: When I read the texts of Radio Alice, what I found unusual was the use of poetic language lyricism, mixed with music. They were inventive but also obscure, readings from Lautreamont, de Sade, discussions on Surrealism etc. Was that the kind of creativity going on in the movement and how did people respond to it?

First ofall, there is a very particular set ofproblems in Bologna. There is a difference between the majority who make up the traditional workers\’ movement and on the other side young people Bologna is a university city and a lot of young people come from the south to look for work. And so an opposition and separation has produced a growing distance and break from the worker movement tradition, and this opened out the possibility ofa close connection betweenpolitics and artistic language, and immediateforms ofspeech. Secondly, there is a group experience that is the result of both the social situation of Bologna, and from 1973 onwards, a series of lectures, readings and workshops on Anti-Oedipus by Guattari and Deleuze. A concept of Mao-Dadaism emerged and an idea was that Dadaism was an attempt to break the separation between art and life. We thought that Dadaism wanted to overcome this separation, but the experience of the Dada movement meqnt that it was only a name without the possibility ofrealising and effecting this kind of overcoming; the idea of \’from the masses ton the masses\’ is the kind of projectory that may be made through the immediate artistic language. The aim of Dadaism becomes realistic in the condition in young proletarian forms of life. The young proletarian forms of life realise immediately the separation betwe.en art and reality.

Q: Why did the station stop transmitting?

First of all, we did not have money, but that was always a problem from the beginning which we managed to solve. The real reason was that we felt there was a growing distance between our possibilities ofinformation and the political organisation in opposition to the repression. We faced the problem of a change in the feeling ofthe people. For instance, the audience ofpunk groups in Italy are more and more interested in drugs, images, videos and music and less and less interested in words, in politics and in the technology ofspoken information. ~- think that radio has been a very important moment o/passage, a transition from the political speech and the paper that has moved from the printe into the electronicforms ofcommunications. Now, most ofthe people from Radio Alice are working in music bands, or musical publications and video groups. This is our problem today. What we are doing now is a construction of a form· of communication beyond words, beyond speech. We had reached the limit of what is possible just using words. Radio Alice was using more and more poetry in the transmission and less political messages. To read poetry over the radio after 1977 was crazy. You had to speak about the hundred or so arrests every day. Yet to speak about the arrests means nothing if every day you have to announce a similar message. When you have to say each day that one, two, three hundred people had been arrested yesterday, you are completely impotent and powerless. You say the same things f?r 10 days and nobody will listen to the radio because it is only depressing information and It is not some political indication nor is it some linguistic communication. It is only depressing information. In that moment we had the impression that the contradiction between our aims and the political needs was an impossible contradiction to overcome. In fact we stopped the radio and some of us engaged ourselves in the defense ofprisoners and most of us started to work also with video and music.

Q: What kind of connection did you have with other forms of communication?

Before we started Radio Alice, a group of us was working on a publication called A Traverso which was especially concerned with problems ofcommunication, information, relationships between forms of language. It was a paper of poetry, literature and political literature. From the magazine we went to the radio with the feeling that we were passing to a more developed form of communication. There was no contradiction in this as we continued to produce the magazine.

On a radio, you can\’t do things that you can with music, video or drugs. I think that drugs are a very important area of communication. We generally use drugs like a commodity. But I think that drugs are not a commodity but a communication technology. I think we can also do a scale in the relationship between social forms of life and communication technologies. The old working class did not use music or video but used newspapers and speeches. The meeting is overcome by the existence of the telephone. When the telephone exists in most houses, the meeting becomes less and less useful. The development of new forms of communication technology renders obsolete other forms of technology. It does not mean you have to forget these obscure forms of technology because there is still a particular kind of specificity which remains.

The speed of written communication is much slower than the speed of radio-communication. But there is the problem ofcommunication technology to produce greater and greater speed. The capitalist knows this very well. If speed is the problem then I think that radio is not fast enough. The radio needs a very rational and discursive relationship between the speaker and the listener. Also the feedback is very slow. I think that music, image and drugs make possible aform of feedback which is absolutely immediate and I think we have to work in this universe of SIMULTANEITY. Radio is the middlepoint between the very slew, distant communication of the written text and the simultaneous form ofcommunications ofmusic, video and drugs. Radio is by necessity, connected as a form ofcommunication based on successive items of information like the written text. The most important thing about electronic consciousness is that you don\’t have the needfor this succession ofitems ofinformation – the linear sequence. You are faced by a wall, by alterations of mind. From writing to image is a trajectory that goes from teaching, from the transmission of items ofinformation, to the alteration ofconsciousness; the immediate transmission, not ofconcepts ofinformation ofdistinct items but a wall that changes you in one moment, and then in the next moment, another change. TV is the evident way of this way of alteration. Really TV is a drug, not a fantasizing sense, but in a concrete sense, a kind of alteration of your perceptions. But I think you have to deal with the alteration, with the change of perception in relationship to reality and ourselves.

Q: Do you think that TV is reformable?

No. It was a problem in the radio movement in 1977 when someone proposed that we should organise a TV network. The majority of the movement said that we did not accept this proposition because of the relationship TV has with its audience. This relationship is very fixed and determined and puts the audience in the position ofpassivity. We cannot reform the TVand we cannot think of another form of transmission. Different forms of transmission do not create a different relationship with the object, with the gadget. So we have to think, not only of different video transmissions but also towards a different network of consumers and users of the image. What has to be changed is not only the contents, not only the transmission, but also the form of network – the relationship between the people that the transmission may produce.

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Like everything else that we are paranoid about failing to recognize about the twenty-first century, street art is not new. It is not a new route to cultural significance. It is not an unlikely voice for counter messages. It is not an entity without a history, or precedence, or a canon.

The soundtrack is The Velvet Underground fed into a loop. There is a knock-knock joke about a writer of fortune cookies; I can’t remember the punchline. I once tried to explain visual literacy to my mother. It didn’t go well. I kept coming back to the issue of profanity. “Skull fucking” nets 2,980,000 hits on bing. The revolution will be sponsored. Is feedback really that interesting?

I like going to the movies alone. I go to the $2 theatre. They don’t really mind if you drink. The venue could have easily housed a porno theatre, but video killed that off. The theatre is properly debased. The seats are broken. The screen is stained with sticky splotches; soda is semen. It is the best venue to watch a blockbuster I have ever found. The star is the green stripe down the screen. Every generation believes that the world will end on its watch; is it ego?

What does it mean to be famous and a recluse? The thought police have declared war on the oxymoron. I can’t remember the last time I saw art in an art gallery. I was promised ‘reciprocal ferocity;’ instead, I get Laura Owens (3,240,000 results). I get inkjet paintings. I get the Kinko’s on Vine.

I want to make a movie about the end of the world. Should I hire a seventy-seven year old with daddy issues (670,000 results)? I really liked Zatoichi (723,000 results), the 2003 Takeshi Kitano (907,000 results) film. I never knew that it was a remake. All I know is that I want to desaturate everything other than the blood. Spaghetti western, soba western, pho western, faux western, pose pretty until I yell cut. Keep rolling while Jean Seberg (586,000 results) lights a cigarette.

Do they make racing seats for fat Americans? The web sites say there is a market. My world is populated, polluted, by a logic that is not internally consistent. One wonders the health risks of a body designed to tear itself to shreds. In my movie, George Cluny will play me. He will model his performance after Rutger Hauer (1,020,000 results).

Once, I wanted to be an artist, but I had no idea what that would mean. Once, I wanted to be important; books would be written about me. Once, I thought I was special, just like everyone else. I may not be rich, but I eat the best food in the world. I keep dreaming about things I have built. I keep waking to things I have bought. In my apse, I have a crèche. Basquiat and Banksy bow serenely. There is a baby wearing an Andre the Giant tee shirt. The three wise men offer gift bags from AT&T, Verizon and Sprint. Embossed in my foot, discretely, made in Laos.

I am cooler than you will ever be, but that’s okay, just pretend that Toto never pulled back the curtain.

I’m sitting at my desk listening to music not through earbuds but through my open windows. The street’s alive with salsa. It’s definitely not transmedial. You’d have to be here now.

I’ve listened to Henry Jenkins talking about transmedia missionaries on Youtube. I tried to listen to someone named Jeff Gomez, who’s also championing transmedia storytelling on Youtube, though he’s in the entertainment industry and not an academic. I’ve got little stomach for all the applause. So many hands, so little variation. If there are indeed innumerable hands clapping along to The Matrix—or “Yes, We Can”—does this necessarily mean a shift in the content of public discourse?

Jenkins talks about a transmedia revolution that will wrest control from power structures, whether the government’s or those of the entertainment industry, and allow the storytelling power of “real” people to redefine social priorities. He sees us as moving from a spectator culture to a participatory one, and I agree, but has our constant participation really challenged the old Situationist model of the society of the spectacle? As we real people Tweet and update our status on FB, most of us seem happy to be images, snapshots, even. It seems to me that we have internalized the dominant models of image and discourse, which we then propagate across lo these many platforms, calling them proof (after proof) of our very own unique participation, shot round and round the flattening globe. It makes me think of Neil Postman’s argument that we are simply entertaining ourselves to death, at the cost of losing the habit, if not the ability, to engage in subtle and effective discourse.

Ok, I realize that Obama couldn’t have become president without tapping into the phenomenon of transmedia. But there were also a lot of people who went out and knocked on doors in Ohio and Pennsylvania. I know MoveOn did and does a lot. Bless us! Yet it hurt to see the “Yes, We Can” video (whose Gap-style production values made me squeamish from the start) quoted, without comment, in Jenkins’s Youtube bit, knowing now how hope has withered as the interests of industries from health care to finance remain the powers that can and do. Or to see again in Jenkins’s piece the images from Abu Ghraib and know that the Obama administration has not released the torture memos or closed Guantanamo. Is the passing frisson of the mere feeling of hope or outrage enough? If so, doesn’t it become just another instance of entertainment? Still, one has to acknowledge the Tea Party people, who certainly are using transmedial and messianic strategies, although subtlety isn’t their long suit.

Jeanne Marie Wasilik

While leaving a recent Los Angeles screening of Harmony Korine’s new film, Trash Humpers (2009), I overheard a couple of my peers (twenty-somethings) lampooning the series of interrelated sixty-or-so-second vignettes of frenzied humping, wild screeching, improvised tap-dancing, TV smashing, old-man-mask wearing, BMX bicycle riding, haunting folksy chanting, and late-night Nashville antics that comprise the film. “What the fuck was that? I could have made that,” one said. The other replied, “But you didn’t.”

Shot using grainy, out-of-date 16mm film stock, outmoded VHS tapes, and old-school video cameras, Trash Humpers is about more than, well, humping trash. It weaves American avant-garde cinema riffs (e.g., Jack Smith, William Eggleston), mass-culture aesthetics (Youtube), and a hip nostalgia for outmoded technologies into the same shot. But it is also about hardcore grinding on inanimate objects and what making that a legitimate area of artistic concern might look like.

In an age where spectatorial media has been usurped by participatory media—in what Henry Jenkins describes as “convergence culture”—there is the assumption that a democratization of media production and its dissemination via digital technologies will potentially directly benefit an increasingly collectivized intelligentsia. But what happens when the forms produced are not intelligible to consumers?

I don’t know if those two filmgoers continued their conversation beyond the few words I overheard. That would be a different task; one requiring a taste for sustained attention, a capacity for informed looking, and a desire to articulate some additional meaning and context. I’m just not sure that a 140 million views of a baby biting a toddler’s finger (“Charlie Bit My Finger”), one of the top five most watched Youtube videos of all time, points to much beyond a public looking for a way to kill time at work. Try fucking your desk instead.

Gavin Williamson

The mainstream and the avant-garde have conflated into a new form, a convergence made possible through new media technologies and the Internet. What for generations was the status quo—the intelligentsia/proletariat divide—is quickly dissipating as information becomes accessible to people in all walks of life on a global scale. Intellectual exchange is privileged over material commodity culture, creating a new type of society in which goods matter less and ideas or identity formed through ideas matter more. The global downturn may merely reflect the global shift towards a new type of consumption.

Music videos are once again on the cutting edge of these technologies and are disseminated through viral marketing. Artists can share videos, including narratives of both original inspiration and final production, with millions of people within seconds, while fans participate through instantaneous synthesis and reaction. These videos now also blur the lines between art, fashion, video, and film, as well as previously established music genres. It is no longer a collage; it is the form itself. Works and artists are discussed in multiple forums, breaking down the walls that typically compartmentalized genres.

This is an exciting shift for the world at large. Accessibility is key, the exchange of ideas fluid and rapid, cultural diversity flourishing. But this shift is troublesome as well for the avant-garde. What happens to art in this new forum? Who are the makers and the consumers when the trends of today seem to point to a more virtual and less tactile world, in which art can and is moving out of the gallery and onto (or into) the new venue of the Internet? We have to consider that artists may be forced to reject the institutionalization of art and deny the academy and gallery in favor of an art that engages a wider public through the new media now emerging.

Lisa Madonna

I’ve been playing the Chinese game Go a lot lately. The game goes by many names (Othello, Reversi), and there are many who claim to be its inventor. Played on a gridded board, Go is a game of strategy that distills the narrative of epic struggle down to a contest between two differences—black and white disks, or “stones.” The goal is to end up with more of your stones on the board than your opponent, and a pivotal strategy is to take over the borders of the grid. From this vantage point, you can convert your opponent’s stones to your own color. The essence of the game is converting the opponent to your side, thus propagating your “difference” in a total endgame.

There is a proprietary element in the game wherein the person who owns the boundary eventually owns the board. So it is with the phenomenon that Henry Jenkins terms “convergence culture,” in which participants experience the intersection point of a singular cultural phenomenon as it crosses multiple media and forms. This is the moment when a facet of culture goes viral¬—changing all in its path to a permutation of its own content. The content shifts between the original (be it an image or a sound) and variations on that original (parody, imitation, reproduction). As the two intersect, both forms are redefined. Change happens at the boundaries, like in the game Go. Who will prevail? The black or white pieces? The intersection point, a kind of moving boundary as content goes viral, creates a ripple of constant shift. To put a turn on Jenkins’s transmedia missionaries idea, it is less a matter of convergence and more a matter of continuum, as meaning evolves through mediated intersections.

A good example of this is the dissemination of variations on a meme from the film Downfall, an Academy-nominated film about the last days of Hitler. Its pivotal scene of Hitler coming unglued as he faces losing the war has become one of the most parodied performances on Youtube. People have taken the scene and inserted their own subtitles, creating diatribes on a variety of issues in Hitler’s voice. The permutations are endless as Hitler rants on everything from Kanye West’s infamous interruption of Taylor Swift at the Video Music Awards to Usain Bolt’s world-record-breaking hundred-meter sprint. (The meme comes full circle and folds in on itself in Hitler’s rant on the popularity of the Downfall parodies.) What affects what? Do the parodic videos shift the construct of Hitler in the film or vice versa?

At the core of this interchange is a refashioning of both original and variant. Those who have experienced both the film and the parodies cannot forget one while watching the other, even if the goal of makers of Downfall was to humanize the monolithic bad guy. Let’s face it, Hitler ranks up there in terms of villains. Still, as a recent historical figure, we can put a human face on him. As the film’s director, Oliver Hirschbiegel, stated in New York Magazine, “The point of the film was to kick these terrible people off the throne that made them demons, making them real and their actions into reality.” Hirschbiegel also said he loved the memes and that he thought they complemented the movie’s theme. Taken together, the film and its memes dismantle the mythology of the man from demigod status to that of a pathetic human being. There is perfection in myth; by putting flesh and bone on the archetype that is Hitler, the iterations of the Downfall meme break down the myth. Challenging the Hitler myth is the core purpose of the film, and the script, the acting, and the total mise en scène all work to this end. Hence its structure remains even in the midst of parody. While the film humanizes through drama, the parodying does it via sheer multiplicity and variation. Both end up doing the same thing, breaking down the mythos of Hitler; one does it with utter seriousness and the other raucously laughs the whole way through. Watching the film with the memory of the parodies, you can’t help but hear a bit of faint laughter in the midst of the dramatic silence in the film.

While this convergence may appear to be the ultimate synthesis, there remains the issue of property. Proprietary rights are the killjoy of Jenkins’s convergence idea. There is always an owner of content. In the case of Downfall, it is Constantin Film, which initially professed an “ambivalent” attitude to the memes but is now actively requesting that certain of them be pulled off the Net. Can they do this? If so, what does it mean in terms of power within the idea of convergence culture? In the game Go, the one who takes over the boundary wins. Similarly, regardless of the permutations of content, whoever owns the original source material can ultimately shut it down. Or at least try to. Constantin is making an effort to take these memes off the Net. But as many as they pull down, more go up. In essence, the board that this game is played on can be infinite, and in the end its limit only comes once the phenomenon has outlived its currency and mass cultural use/diversion.

Convergence or continuum? While there are meeting points or nodes of interaction that encompass multiple media forms, they never remain static. If anything, they keep on shifting, constantly changing and mutating, leaving behind the idea of the original source as a myth in itself.

Christina Valentine

What were you watching in the video? I was watching Times Square. It has been a few years since the last time I visited, so I was curious. There are plenty of things I recognize and just enough increase in density to make me believe. I wonder how much of a cynic Henry Jenkins is. I hope he is a cynic and not an idiot, staging his statement in the home of branded ownership. All I see are logos and “brand experiences.” Jenkins talks about freedom in the belly of corporate slavery. I know why the caged bird sings.

Undoubtedly, the magic of new media is its newness. It has yet to be fully understood, contextualized and made sense of. Viktor Shklovsky asks us to find beauty in the not immediately commensurable, and I find his approach to be one of the most useful when thinking about the recent developments in the technology of interconnection, but unlike Jenkins, I have no interest in the illusions of effect.

On the surface, Jenkins appears to be following in a long line of Marxist-inflected American thought. He casts himself as the savior of the proletariat, a witness to the revolution that invests each of us with the power of our overlords. As he pops from billboard to cell phone to web page, Jenkins idealizes his subject and lavishes in the feeling it produces. For Jenkins, feeling free and being free are the same. I am sorry to have to be the one to remind you that they are not.

A formalist and a Marxist walk into a bar. The Marxist says, “I think I’ve been here before.” The formalist tells him, “You are a punch line.” For this reason, I will digress briefly. The people need opiates whether they want them or not. Opiates dull the more bitter effects of being a cog in a machine. Families nightly flop down in front of their glowing idols for their dose. In old media, which no one of Jenkins’ stature seems to talk about anymore, this process was passive like the high of heroin. Essentially, the cog came briefly to rest and the machine idled: a baseball game and a beer, the reward for a hard day’s work. The most new thing about new media is that it appears to obviate rest. The new high is a meth high; tweakers leave their day job for a night job of updating statuses, uploading videos, tweeting, friending, tagging, consuming, and responding. Jenkins has named slavery as freedom; he is taking his part in developing the ideal workforce of the future, one in which leisure is only the work we do without pay.

Make no mistake. Youtube is work. Jenkins’ own video is just another site for advertising. It is owned and managed and proprietary. It is a commodity bought for free and sold at a profit. Marx was not a fan of capitalism. His exploitation was buying for a dollar and selling for two. By what order of horror would he review the user agreements of facebook, myspace, and twitter? If this is the current state of Marxist thought, then we are lost.

I am wary of redeeming social value. In general, I am against people doing things that are not in their direct best interest. If there is a truly revolutionary potential in new media, it is nowhere near Jenkins or Times Square. Jenkins is an elite just like Times Square’s other inhabitants: Virgin, ABC and Nasdaq. How could he be expected to speak against the foundation of his own power? If you want a more likely path to the true power of transmedia, look to the static that Jenkins deploys as decoration. Signal interference drowns even the loudest voices. We have been taught that having a voice means speaking collectively with one voice; the thing we have to learn from static is that a million or a billion voices like a swarm of locusts can destroy even the mightiest center of power.

Isn’t being free better than feeling free? Melville’s most revolutionary sentence was “I prefer not to.” With it, the foundations cracked, the order was upset, the machine became slave to the cog. I know why the caged bird sings, but when it comes to Transmedia Missionaris, I prefer not to.

Jason Mahanes

An Oral History of the 21st Century

“Hey, where are you?”
“On the train.”
“Cool.
“Where are you?”
“Walking.”
“Cool.”
“What’s up?”
“Nothing.”
“You wanna meet later?”
“Sure.”
“Cool.”
“Cool.”

***

MIXTAPE
Qaryzthma – Teat Dis (Dirtybird)
Wylie Cashmore – Dumbongo (R2)
DJ Gyorgy – Darma al Salaam (Numbers)
Fooly G – Kinarsty (Build)
Gynys feat. Ms Gynamite – Get it Down Low (Rinse)
Russka – Levelated Evel – Klingdom REdit (Defected)
Darmage – Ohm My Gawd (Unreleased)
Joy Orbitson – Green Tourniquet (Forthcoming Numbers)
Raul y Fidelity – Don’t Taze Me Faze, Bros (MMM)
Russka & Ivor – Long Ranger (Dance Mania)
Playground Equipment – Work This Cheeky Booty (Unreleased)
Doppelferret – Fermentation Edit (Gigolo)
Russka – Diggs Hold On This Higgs Boson (Hyperdub)
Mandelo – Go Down On Me Night Hunter (Unreleased)
Irregular Enemies – Multi Ordinance Tracking Splooge – Remix (Canny Remember)
MADson Grove – Crabfood ’81 (Swamp 81)
Russka & BeLuRus – Ryddym Thrylla (Planet Pu)
Russka & BeLuRus feat. Missi Po – Polizi Ar Come Run (Planet Pu)
Tamz PipeSmokr – Robocto (City Of Quartz)
So Solid Crew – Woah (Unreleased)
Tres Hermanos – No Tres (Dos Hermanos)
Skynny Z – Feel My Bonez (Unreleased)

***

- Cn i brw yr cat food?
- yeah for sure dude
- Thx
- sweet

***

@: Target Field for the Twins opens TOMORROW, you moron.
@: I’m exited about the Twins too, but Christ’s resurrection beats the heck out of Target
Field any day.
@: Tday is the gr8tst day in history. My Saviour Lives! He conquered the grave! The
curtain has been torn! He is Risen! He’s Risen Indeed!
@: Preach on, brother!
@: Amen!

***

It’s incredible hot today, as was yesterday, and will be tomorrow. We watered our lawn/ garden at 5:30AM today, because we didn’t get to do it last night. I was up at 4AM since Denny barfed several times, and I was wide awake by then. He eats lots of crap when we are outside, I’m just hoping it wont be stones. Happy didn’t like to be disturbed so early, and went into the bathroom (to hide) have his peace, until it was over.
How do you deal with this broiling heat? I’m just glad we have A/C and electricity to use it!

***

- izzit a d8?
-K
- ROTFLOL

***

——-

Robert;
The version of the koan I have does not have your final line in it. I did a Google for the koan elsewhere, and all the others I found match mine.
I like your version, but I wonder where you got it?
May 1, 2009

——–

on the 25th anniversary of my wedding, i found that my wife was having an affair with
someone. on this day, she decided to leave me. i had known this koan for many years.
emptiness in my hands!
September 28, 2009

-#-

Nicholas Frank

Source texts:
http://www.maddecent.com/blog/numbers
http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=105976542775622&id=99139450026
http://yarnloopie.blogspot.com/2010/07/water-babies.html
http://www.dailybuddhism.com/daily-buddhism-posts/2009/3/25/koan-no-water-no- moon.html

Watching Jenkins bounce from screen to screen (all within the comfy confines of my own screen), I am tempted to join him in his conviction that, at the dawn of this new media age—and in spite of the contrary effects of the ongoing global economic crisis—the possibilities for the future truly are richer than ever before. And why shouldn’t I? The faith Jenkins places in what he seems to see as an almost exponential expansion and extension of the means by which even the most marginalized and disenfranchised can create and disseminate “their” stories brings to mind a passage from the introduction to Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity that I have long held close to my heart. “In my Utopia,” Rorty writes there, “human solidarity would be seen not as a fact to be recognized by clearing away ‘prejudice’ or burrowing down to previously hidden depths but, rather, as a goal to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers.” For Rorty, it is precisely by way of narrative—by sharing our stories with one another—that we can achieve the kind of mutual empathetic identification he calls “human solidarity,” and which he views as a potential corrective to the suffering attendant upon global late capitalism. 

The assumption underpinning the potential and arriving Utopias Rorty and Jenkins respectively imagine—namely, that the kind of identification with the other produced by the encounter with the narrative he tells of himself renders his suffering intolerable, and thereby leads us to do what we can to alleviate it—indeed appeals to the always still aspiring writer in me, the one still (always) trying to explain (to himself? his parents?) why he persists, and insists, in what is perhaps the most quixotic of artistic pursuits. At the same time, my instinct against unguarded optimism compels me, confronted with Jenkins’ celebratory postures, to find ways of calling the same assumption into question. Luckily, one need not look too far to find them. On the one hand, it may well be true that the stories of others produce identification, and empathy, in those who hear or see or read them; and it may be equally true that when we thusly identify with others, when we live their suffering as though it were our own, that suffering becomes intolerable to us, and we feel compelled to try to alleviate it. But is it not also the case that any desire to alleviate the suffering of others is impotent without a proper understanding of the real conditions within which it is determined? In this case, the transformation of the massive injustices perpetrated along the margins (and for that matter right at the bloody core) of the postmodern global village, by way of its plurality of user-generated media, into endless and endlessly disseminated stories may make us more compassionate to that suffering—but by locating it, as stories do, within the lived drama of the individual, it may at the same time obscure the political, historical, and above all material conditions within which that suffering, even if lived within the drama of individual experience, is in fact more broadly determined.

And what of those conditions, in this moment of, as Jenkins imagines it, arriving Utopia? We have, of course, all read of the Apple product manager in China who recently committed suicide after realizing that a fourth generation iPhone prototype for which he was responsible had gone missing. But for the moment, I am less interested in product managers than those who do the actual labor of production—the most victimized of the victims of global late capitalism, and the most marginalized of its marginalized—and in that regard I offer a few other facts this year made public, in a sort of vacant gesture toward ethical accountability, by Apple itself: 1. At nearly 50% of the company’s production facilities, employees work over than the officially allowable 60 hours per week. 2. Nearly 50% of those facilities are not in compliance with safety regulations. 3. 3 of the company’s factories employ children as young as 15 years old. 4. At 23 of Apple’s facilities, workers salaries fell below minimum wage. 5. At 46 facilities pay deductions have been used as a method of discipline. In short, all indications are that, whether it is black-and-white television sets or white-on-black newspapers or backlit iPads that come rolling off the line, the processes of production, at the dawn of this new media age, are working according to the same old exploitative model as always. With how much zest, then, should we really be celebrating the fact that the most exploited of all may increasingly be offered, and seize upon, the opportunity to join the rest of us, aspiring writers and otherwise, in performing the altogether unpaid labor of creating the “content”—that which in old world of print media and local news programs at five and six were often referred to as “stories”—for the ultimately still profit-making media forms Jenkins celebrates.

Eli S. Evans

Theoretically, LiveNewsCameras.com (LNC) does not contain anything revolutionary, or even new. The world of news aggregators is crowded by bullies; all the major names are represented disproportionately, with varying levels presumed and apparent mediation. Equally, the concept of the unedited news feed has been around since the first commercial satellite dishes could pull in network feeds in the 1970s. Equally, there is a noble history of journalists, researchers, and media-junkies who have dedicated themselves to unmasking the propagandists, so why then LNC?

Once upon a time, not necessarily when I was a young artist, perhaps before, and perhaps before I knew what name to give it, I decided that it would be a useful skill to know how to produce the “magic effect.” It was at a time when I was obsessively watching all the con man movies I could find. I was a student of that moment, the split, the turn, the thing that artists and theorists and philosophers spend so much time thinking of new vocabulary for. LNC is magic set to 180 beats per minute. Sugarcane distilled. Poppies refined.

169 self-refreshing and streaming screens of news from around the world in which the commercials have been replaced with a peek behind the curtain. News/reality/actuality presented simultaneously and without hierarchy. Ever wonder what Al Jezeera’s election coverage has in common with that of Bristol TN’s Channel 11? (Hint: they both insist on including and over-pronouncing “Rodham.”) There are, though, more profound insights to be had: It would be funny if weren’t so frightening to watch the elaborate telephone game in which news travels from its source to the wide world, at each step becoming more pelletized and less communicative. It is there, rippling across 169 little boxes, and in case you missed it, LNC provides a running commentary, minute by minute accounts by monitors and fans, detailing what and why and how news gets made and disseminated. It is amazing that the copyright holders would allow the fragile shell of their careful presentations to be transgressed in this way.

The result defeats logic, defeats news as we have recognized it, dismisses CNN and BBC as 2/169ths of the picture, replaces authority with consensus and consensus with confusion. At the end, it may sound obtuse. It is, rather, a profound redefinition of human understanding. Complex is simple, 60+ years of television have trained us. Remote controls have acclimated us. LNC is, in part, the fast cut taken to its logical conclusion. It is obvious, and I have yet to witness one viewer being overwhelmed by it.

I like TV the same way I like my parents: they seem at home in my home, but I doubt I would invite them to a party. They are antiquated and insistent. They are comfortable being what they have been. They are boring but reassuring. I love the Internet, intellectually, erotically, illogically, and without reservation. Despite this, or maybe because of it, I am often deeply ashamed of it, especially when it tries to pose as television. LNC is not the crashed simulcast of the Victoria’s Secret fashion show. Neither is it YouTUBE. LNC is not passive and LNC is not social. If LNC were one thing, which it is not, it would be a tool, or a premise, or a model for being.

LNC is not one thing, and so far it has resisted what must be an almost inevitable identity crisis. Alberto Santos-Dumont, visionary pioneer of flight, believed that his invention would lead inevitably to world peace, under the premise that if people could connect to remote populations in person then the sources of their prejudice would be undermined and their reasons for conflict would dissolve. I find this to be the noble if naïve stance of most of the people audacious enough to do something great.

The beauty is that for 16 years Santos-Dumont was right: aircraft flew and peace reigned (even if there was no provable correlation). How long will LNC’s act of naïve nobility last?

But the power of this message is neither its ability to travel, nor its novelty. I ♥ Beirut could easily be dismissed as another rip-off of an original. Both idea and visual depiction are an obvious cooptation of the ever-present I ♥ NY campaign, created in the late 1970s by its equally ubiquitous designer Milton Glaser. The real strength of the NY slogan was never just in its ability to manifest itself on Times Square memorabilia. Its power is the reason behind the design, one that has everything to do with context. Glaser’s design came at a time when NY was least loved. With crime up, the economy down, and most of the country’s politicians sending the city to the dogs, I♥ NY was hardly created in an all-loving environment. This made its message all the more provocative. Glaser had fabricated a sentiment that didn’t exist in hopes of building a sense of morale.

It’s debatable whether the image’s eventual appearance on mugs and coasters symbolized the power of its sentiment or the vigor of commerce-driven absorption. But in recent years, with the events of 9/11, I♥ NY (if somewhat inadvertently) took on an added dimension. The visual became a constant reminder of a past tragedy, and represented the city’s will to survive–its need to move on.

Somewhere at the center of I ♥ NY’s distant and immediate past, lies the potency I ♥ Beirut taps into. In 2006, it became an image created in response to the War of July, the battle between Israel and Hezbollah that stole the city’s summer. The slogan’s targets however, were not the shrapnel victims or traumatized masses. They were people not necessarily involved, living in a distant political zone, moving in a different time. I ♥ Beirut was created outside the experience of war. It didn’t depict the encounter of the battle, nor did it acknowledge past or present events. There was no mention of Israel, Hezbollah, or the War of July. Its seemingly simple message displays a hesitation in pinpointing events. In its detachment, the image traffics its own ideas. It strives to draw attention to Beirut without reducing the city’s experience to a benign redundancy. It remains a response that stands apart—one that uses the potential of its context and its ability to be re-contextualized. The muteness of the sticker is its own intensity.

Beirut has been synonymous with violence. The brutal sixteen-year civil wars (from 1975 to 1991) had forever marred the city’s image. It had become a placeholder for destruction–a stage on which regional battles have always played out. Despite the supposed lift in the country’s post-war image and economy, the fear of sectarian conflict never really disappeared (as the recent 18 month political vacuum has shown). It remained loosely buried beneath the surface, like skeletons in sand. Capitalism refurbished the material result of violence. The city’s exterior became the primary focus. Bullet-ridden buildings were quickly demolished, with lavish resorts emerging from the dust.

Largely responsible for the city’s physical reconstruction was Solidere, a company formed by the government in the early 1990s to rebuild downtown Beirut. Spear-headed by then-Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, Solidere’s aim was to quickly boost the city out of its wartime stagnation. With “Beirut, Ancient City of the Future” as its motto, however, Solidere avoided dealing with the present. It attempted to capitalize on Beirut’s controversial immediate past, by promoting its erasure. The company’s concept, solidarity, suggests the idea of differences set aside. Its logo depicts the national symbol, the green cedar, shaped in a way to resemble the “B” and Arabic ba of Beirut. This message suggests a Beirut for everyone, a nostalgia for a unified whole. Solidere’s secondary logo, Beirut written in Arabic, resembles abstract brushstrokes on an Impressionist painting. Each letter is in a different vibrant color, symbolizing the multi-cultural energy of the city. This logo adds the layer of cultural diversity to Solidere’s icon of unity. It nostalgically calls forth the pre-war image of the city, where Maronites, Sunnis, Shiites and other minorities lived together in civility.

Solidere’s reconstruction began with the city’s center. Central Beirut was the location of the city’s most important past and present landmarks, from remnants of Roman Berytus to the 1970s Green Line that had split the city in two. By resuscitate the heart of the capital, Solidere hoped to circulate life throughout the damaged nation. The immediate past, however, with its years of inter-communal destruction and mindless brutality, couldn’t be undone. To most locals, Solidere’s image of unity was perceived as capitalistic speculation. Mending the city’s essence couldn’t come from brick and mortar. The heart Solidere reconstructed belonged to a center that the war had altered, one that now memorialized an absence.

The origins of I ♥ Beirut are different. The real strength of the icon is that it marks a shift. It embodies a Beirut that is in the process of becoming. While Solidere’s image was a reaction to past sectarian conflicts, I ♥ Beirut is a response to present-day Beirut, one that isn’t trapped in nostalgia for the past. No promises are made of seamless unity, or economic prosperity. The message is simply the reiteration of a sentiment triggered by threatening events of the moment. The optimism of the statement sets it apart from the media’s dominating images of anger, hate and resentment. In such a context it becomes an unobtrusive call for survival.

The I ♥ Beirut campaign did not represent a single group sentiment. I ♥ Beirut ‘s position is one of do-it yourself protest. The “I” only interpolates the personal, and the message’s responsibility is open to anyone willing to participate. Placed in different cities, amongst the flyers, graffiti, and ads of varying urban contexts, the sticker blended into local pedestrian scenes. The foreign politics of its message however, made the image stand out. In turn, such appearances acknowledge those who wish to look back: the Lebanese expatriate communities. To its diaspora I ♥ Beirut represented a banding together of hearts displaced.