"Examined Life"--the "Moving Head" film and the backtracking booktrack which "calls philosphy down from the heavens" Cornel West and Slavoj Žižek

I love that Astra Taylor assembled the "Examined Life" film, which interviews
public and ethical philosophers as they walk  (usually in a city or context that connects to their theme)..

I love that this surely turned out differently as a  somewhat spontaneous lab (not a scripted talking head flick, even though there are talking heads, they and their bodies are in motion) and a peripatetic exercise, and thus a "geography of place."  (see

sideways city-texts )

I love that I found the book version (the "booktrack" to a movie?) first, which features complete transcripts of each interview, including scenes edited out of the film.

Of course, I love that Cornel West and  Slajov Žižek were featured, and that their venues or vehicles were slightly different than the other stars.

West is interviewed in a car moving through Manhattan.  At one point, this is eerily similar to the Matrix scene when Neo realizes his greenview  out the car window is of a world that is

not "real"  and people who are not "really" alive (What is the opposite of simulacra? )
 West, who is  well aware of the Matrix hyperlink (He was even in the second Matrix film!) quips that someone studying in a  library is "more alive than the folks walking by us"...

Žižek's vignette...of course..set in a  garbage dump. (:
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I'm sure you have trainspotted the title to Socrates' maxim about the "unexamined life is not worth living, butTaylor adds that also draws from Socrates' way of (per Cicero)"calling philosophy down from heaven."  Bring it on...er, down.

Here's the Cornel West "chapter":  Truth below.
Some takeaways: centrality of music, why he's a "Chekhovian Christian," Jesus' anger (better yet, righteous indignation) in the temple, the "kairotic dimension of being in love,"  Charlie Parker riding on dissonance, "blues sensibility," "natural piety," As Christians, "nothing human ought to be alien to us", a "Kierkegaardian leap in Beckett's universe,"
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- Here's Žižek's chapter: Ecology (in two languages no less):  Just watch(:
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Most of the rest:
 -- Avita Ronell: Meaning:
 
Peter Singer: Ethics:
 
Appiah: Cosmopolitanism (Sadly, this is the only section not online, so here is a more traditional talk of his on the same topic):
 
 Martha Nussbaum: Justice:
Michael Hardt: Revolution:
Judith Butler & Sunaura Taylor: Interdependence:

art and true falsehood

"Art is a lie that makes us realize truth."
- Picasso, context

"Falsehood has no place in fiction"
-Arthur C Danto, context

"You Have to Pay for Public Life"

Hmm, why didn't I know abut this imagined Treble Cleft Freeway leading into the Hollywood Bowl..or

Musical roads ?

Anyway,  on to the catch of the day..

Here (page 111-141)  in a PDF of a  book of selected essays of Charles W Moore, is Moore's seminal, prescient  1965 essay  "You Have to Pay for Public Life"(from Perspecta, the architectural journal of Yale)..




If that goes offline,  the complete essay, minus a few sentences, is  here  :pp 93-103.
Also: 112-141 here  some pages missing, including the first (part of which is here).  


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Excerpt:

This issue of Perspecta considers monumental architecture as part of the urban scene. I was asked to ferret out some on the West Coast, especially in California. Perspecta’s editors suspected, I presume, that I would discover that in California there is no contemporary monumental architecture, or that there is no urban scene (except in a sector of San Francisco), or more probably, that both monumental architecture and the urban scene are missing. Their suspicions were well founded; any discussion from California in 1964 about monumental urban architecture (as it is coming to exist, for instance, in New Haven) is bound to be less about what we have than about what we have instead. 

Any discussion of monumental architecture in its urban setting should proceed from a definition of (or, if you prefer, an airing of prejudice about) what constitutes “monumental,” and what “urban” means to us. The two adjectives are closely related: both of them involve the individual’s giving up something, space or money or prominence or concern, to the public realm. Monumentality, I take it, has to do with monuments. And a monument is an object whose function is to mark a place, either at that place’s boundary or at its heart. There are, of course, private monuments, over such places as the graves of the obscure, but to merit our attention here, and to be of any interest to most of the people who view it, a monument must mark a place of more than private importance or interest. The act of marking is then a public act, and the act of recognition an expectable public act among the members of the society which possesses the place. Monumentality, considered this way, is not a product of compositional techniques (such as symmetry about several axes), of flamboyance of form, or even of conspicuous consumption of space, time, or money. It is, rather, a function of the society’s taking possession of or agreeing upon extraordinarily important places on the earth’s surface, and of the society’s celebrating their pre-eminence.

A version of this agreement and this celebration was developed by Jose Ortega y Gasset, in The Revolt of the Masses, into a definition of urbanity itself. “The urbs or polis,” he says, “starts by being an empty space, the forum, the agora, and all the rest is just a means of fixing that empty space, of limiting its outlines. The square, thanks to the walls that enclose it, is a portion of the countryside which turns its back on the rest, eliminates the rest, and sets up in opposition to it.

Ortega y Gasset’s product is the city, the urban unit based upon the Mediterranean open square, a politically as well as physically comprehensible unit that people used to be willing to die for. The process of achieving an urban focus is the same as that of achieving monumentality: it starts with the selection, by some inhabitants, of a place which is to be of particular importance, and continues when they invest that place with attributes of importance, such as edges or some kind of marker. This process, the establishing of cities and the marking of important places, constitutes most of the physical part of establishing civilization. Charles Eames has made the point that the crux of this civilizing process is the giving up by individuals of something in order that the public realm may be enhanced. In the city, that is to say, urban and monumental places, indeed urbanity and monumentality themselves, can occur only when something is given over by people to the public.

Planners have a way of starting every speech by articulating their (private) discovery that the public body’s chief concern is people. The speech then says unrelatedly that it’s too bad the sprawling metropolis is so formless. It might well be that if the shibboleth about people were turned inside out, if planning efforts went toward enlarging people’s concerns—and sacrifices— for the public realm, that the urban scene would more closely approach the planners’ vision, and that the pleasures of the people would be better served.

The most evident thing about Los Angeles, especially, and the other new cities of the West is that in the terms of any of the traditions we have  inherited, hardly anybody gives anything to the public realm. Instead, it is not at all clear what the public realm consists of, or even, for the time being, who needs it. What is clear is that civic amenities of the sort architects think of as “monumental,” which were highly regarded earlier in the century, are of much less concern today. A frivolous but pointed example is the small city of Atascadero, which lies in a particularly handsome coastal valley between Los Angeles and San Francisco. It was first developed in the ‘20s as a realestate venture with heavy cultural overtones and extensive architectural amplification. Extraordinarily ambitious “monumental” architecture popped up all over the townsite. Buildings of a vague Italian Romanesque persuasion with a classic revival touch, symmetrical about several axes, faced onto wide malls punctuated or terminated by Canovesque sculpture groups. The effect was undeniably grand, if a bit surreal, exploiting wide grassy vistas among the dense California oaks. But there wasn’t much of a town until the ‘40s. Then, on the major mall, an elaborately sunken panel of irrigated green, there cropped up a peninsula of fill surmounted by a gas station. Later, there came another, and more recently an elevated freeway has continued the destruction of the grand design. All this has happened during the very period in which Philadelphians, with staggering energy and expense, have been achieving in their Center City long malls north from Independence Hall and west from a point just off their City Hall, grand vistas at every scale, an architectural expression overwhelmingly serene, all urban desiderata which the Atascaderans did not especially want or need, and have been blithely liquidating. Doesn’t this liquidation constitute some sort of crime against the public? Before we start proceedings, we should consider what the public realm is, or rather, what it might be in California now and during the decades ahead, so that the “monumentality” and the “urbanity” that we seek may be appropriate as functions of our own society and not of some other one. 

In California cities, as in new cities all over the country (and in California just about all cities are new cities), the pattern of buildings on the land is as standard as it is explosive. Everywhere near population centers, new little houses surrounded by incipient lawns appear. They could be said to be at the edge of the city, except that there is no real edge, thanks to the speed of growth, the leapfrogging of rural areas, and the long commercial fingers thatfollow the highways out farther than the houses have yet reached. Meanwhile, in areas not much older, houses are pulled down as soon as zoning regulations allow, to be replaced with apartments whose only amenity is a location handily near a garage in the basement. 

The new houses are separate and private, it has been pointed out: islands, alongside which are moored the automobiles that take the inhabitants off to other places. It might be more useful and more accurate to note that the houses and the automobiles are very much alike, and that each is very like the mobile homes which share both their characteristics. All are fairly new, and their future is short; all are quite standard, but have allowed their buyers the agonies of choice, demonstrating enough differences so that they can readily be identified during the period of ownership, and so that the sense of privacy is complete, in the car as well as in the house. This is privacy with at least psychic mobility. The houses are not tied down to any place much more than the trailer homes are, or the automobiles. They are adrift in the suburban sea, not so mobile as the cars, but just as unattached. They are less islands alongside which the cars are moored than little yachts, dwarfed by the great chrome-trimmed dinghys that seek their lee.

 This is, after all, a floating world in which a floating population can island-hop with impunity; one need almost never go ashore. There are the drive-in banks, the drive-in movies, the drive-in shoe repair. There is even, in Marin County, Frank Lloyd Wright’s drive-in Civic Center, a structure of major biographical and perhaps historical importance, about whose forms a great deal of surprisingly respectful comment has already appeared in the press. Here, for a county filling up with adjacent and increasingly indistinguishable suburban communities, quite without a major center, was going to be the center for civic activities, the public realm, one would have supposed, for which a number of public-spirited leaders in the community had fought long and hard. It might have been, to continue our figure, a sort of dock to which our floating populace might come, monumental in that it marked a special place which was somewhere and which, for its importance, was civic if not urban. But instead of a dock for floating suburbanites, it is just another ship, much larger than most, to be sure, and presently beached (wedged, in fact) between two hills. It demands little of the people who float by, and gives them little back.  allows them to penetrate its interior from a point on its underside next to the delivery entrance, but further relations are discouraged, and lingering is most often the result of inability to find the exit.

A monster of equivalent rootlessness hoves into view from the freeway entrance to California's one established anchored city, San Francisco. The immense new Federal Building just being completed by John Carl Warnecke and a host of associated architects, stands aloof from the city's skyline, out of scale with it, unrelated to anything in the topography, no part even of the grandiose civic center nearby. 


Slick details, giant fountains, and all, it draws back from the street and just stands there. It is one of the West's largest filing cabinets, and it is unfair, of course, to expect from  it any attributes of the public realm for it, some distant bureaucrats would spitefully have removed it to Oakland.  So much for the Federal Heart of the City.



...It is interesting, if not useful, to consider where one would go in Los Angeles to have an effective revolution of the Latin American sort: presumably, that place would be the heart of the city. If one took over some public square, some urban open space in Los Angeles, who would know? A march on City Hall would be equally inconclusive. The heart of the city would have to be sought elsewhere. The only hope would seem to be to take over the freeways, or to emplane for New York to organize sedition on Madison Avenue; word would quickly enough get back..

...More recent years have their monuments as well. Indeed, by almost any conceivable method of evaluation that does not exclude the public, Disneyland must be regarded as the most important single piece of construction in the West in the past several decades. The assumption inevitably made by people who have not yet been there—that it is some sort of physical extension of Mickey Mouse—is wildly inaccurate. Instead, singlehanded, it is engaged in replacing many of those elements of the public realm which have vanished in the featureless private floating world of southern California, whose only edge is the ocean, and whose center is otherwise undiscoverable (unless by our revolution test it turns out to be on Manhattan Island). Curiously, for a public place, Disneyland is not free. You buy tickets at the gate. But then, Versailles cost someone a great deal of money, too. Now, as then, you have to pay for the public life.

Disneyland, it appears, is enormously important and successful just because it recreates all the chances to respond to a public environment, which Los Angeles particularly does not any longer have. It allows play-acting, both to be watched and to be participated in, in a public sphere. In as unlikely a place as could be conceived, just off the Santa Ana Freeway, a little over an hour from the Los Angeles City Hall, in an unchartable sea of suburbia, Disney has created a place, indeed a whole public world, full of sequential occurrences, of big and little drama, of hierarchies of importance and excitement, with opportunities to respond at the speed of rocketing bobsleds (or rocketing rockets, for all that) or of horse-drawn street cars. An American Main Street of about 1910 is the principal theme, against which play fairy-tale fantasies, frontier adventure situations, jungles, and the world of tomorrow. And all this diversity, with unerring sensitivity, is keyed to the kind of participation without embarrassment which apparently at this point in our history we crave. (This is not the point, nor am I the appropriate critic, to analyze our society’s notions of entertainment, but certainly a civilization whose clearest recent image of feminine desirability involves scantily dressed and extravagantly formed young ladies—occasionally with fur ears—who disport themselves with wildest abandon in gaudily make-believe bordellos, while they perforce maintain the deportment of vestal virgins—certainly a civilization which seeks this sort of image is in need of pretty special entertainment.) No raw edges spoil the  picture at Disneyland; everything is as immaculate as in the musical comedy villages that Hollywood has provided for our viewing pleasure for the last three generations. Nice-looking, handsomely costumed young people sweep away the gum wrappers almost before they fall to the spotless pavement. Everything works, the way it doesn’t seem to any more in the world outside. As I write this, Berkeley, which was the proud recipient not long ago of a set of fountains in the middle of its main street, where interurbans once had run and cars since had parked, has announced that the fountains are soon being turned off for good, since the chief public use developed for them so far as been to put detergent in them, and the city cannot afford constantly to clean the pipes. Life is not like that in Disneyland; it is much more real: fountains play, waterfalls splash, tiny bulbs light the trees at night, and everything is clean....

 Of course Disneyland, in spite of the skill and variety of its enchantments, does not offer the full range of public experience. The political experience, for instance, is not manifested here, and the place would not pass our revolution test. Yet there is a variety of forms and activities great enough to ensure an excellent chance that the individual visitor will find something to identify with. A strong contrast is the poverty or absurdity of single images offered up by architects, presumably as part of an elaborate (and expensive) ingroup professional joke. The brown-derby-shaped Brown Derbies of an earlier generation, which at least were recognizable by the general public, have given way to such phenomena as the new Coachella Valley Savings and Loan in Palm Springs which rises out of vacant lots to repeat Niemeyer’s Palace of the Dawn, in Brasilia. Across the street from this, a similar institution pays similar in-group tribute to Ronchamp. The most conspicuous entry in this category of searches after monumentality, though, is architect Edward Durrell Stone’s revisitation of Mussolini’s Third Rome in Beverly Hills. This one has plants growing out of each aerial arch. Apparently there was a plethora of these arches, for they crop up again along Wilshire Boulevard, as far away as Westwood Village without, however, contributing much continuity to that thoroughfare...

...A chain of Disneylands would have a disquieting effect not unlike that of the new transcontinental chains of identical motels that weigh the tired traveler with the hopelessness of driving all day to arrive at a place just like the one he started from. One can hope, too, for the day when the gradual loss of differentiated place, the gradual merging of the gray no-places and the inundation of the places of special significance, will cause the slumbering citizenry to awaken, to demand to spend its money to have a public life. But it seems unwise to wait for that.

 Right now the largest single patron available to be pressed into the service of the public realm is the State Highway Department. Freeways until now have been one of the most serious generalizers of place in the state, ruthlessly and thoughtlessly severing some communities, congesting others, and obliterating still others, marring, gouging, and wiping out whole landscapes. Yet, for all that, they loom large in the public eye as one of the biggest, strongest, most exciting, and most characteristic elements of the new California. If one had to name the center of southern California, it would surely be the place not far from the Los Angeles City Hall where the area’s major freeways wrap together in a graceful, strong, and much photographed three-level interchange (in the photographs, the tower of the City Hall rises through the distant smog). Much of the public excitement about San Francisco’s small dramatic skyline is a function of the capacity to see it, a capacity which is greatly enhanced by the bridges (themselves major California monuments), by the freeways that lead to them, and now by the freeway that comes up from the south and breaks through the hills in the nick of time for a magnificent view of San Francisco. Indeed, in San Francisco as in few places, the view which gives a sense of the whole city is one of the most valuable parts of the public realm, one of the parts that is most frequently attacked and must be most zealously defended. One of the public views’ most effective defenders could be the freeway builders, though admittedly, they have more often acted as  saboteurs, as when they tried and partly succeeded, in San Francisco, in building a freeway wall between the city and the bay.

I am writing this in Guanajuato, a middle-sized town in the middle of Mexico, crammed into a narrow canyon, with just two narrow streets (one up and one down) in the bottom of the canyon, and with a maze of stepped pedestrian ways climbing up the canyon’s slopes through the most remorselessly picturesque townscape this side of Greece. Under this runs a river, which used to inundate the city from time to time. Ten years ago a suburban portion of the river was still further depressed, and its former bed was lined with a handsome pink stone to serve as a canyon for cars, moving downhill above the river. Now, in a bold project happily called “the urbanization of the river,” this development is being continued through the center of the town to let the river run with cars as well as water, sometimes behind buildings, sometimes under the ancient vaults over which the buildings of the town center spanned the river bed. None of the picturesque eighteenth-century delights is being threatened; a whole new twentieth-century layer of visual delights, at the scale of the automobile, is being added instead. The urbanity that results from this enlargement of the public realm is even more striking than the visual charm. The pedestrian spaces remain undefiled, even unattacked, while cars grind below, as in a miniature of a Hugh Ferris City of the Future that loses, miraculously, none of the delights of the past.

 Guanajuato should offer us some lessons. The cities of California are much bigger, broader, and grayer, but then their budgets are larger, too (especially the items for freeway construction). They urgently need attention, before the characteristics that distinguish them at all are obliterated. There is no need and no time to wait for a not-yet-existent Establishment to build us the traditional kind of monuments or for a disaster gripping enough to wake the public conscience to the vanishing Places of the public realm we got for free. Most effectively, we might, as architects, first seek to develop a vocabulary of forms responsive to the marvelously complex and varied functions of our society, instead of continuing to impose the vague generalizations with which we presently add to the grayness of the suburban sea. Then, we might start sorting out for our special attention those things for which the public has to  pay, from which might derive the public life. These things would not be the city halls and equestrian statues of another place and time, but had better be something far bigger and better, and of far more public use. They might, for instance, be freeways: freeways are not for individual people, like living rooms are and like confused planners would have you believe the whole city ought to be; they are for the public use, a part of the public realm; and if the fidgety structures beside them and the deserts for parking—or for nothing—under them don’t yet make sense, it is surely because there has so far been too little provision for and contribution to and understanding of the public realm, not too much. The freeways could be the real monuments of the future, the places set aside for special celebration by people able to experience space and light and motion and relationships to other people and things at a speed that so far only this century has allowed. Here are structures big enough and strong enough, once they are regarded as a part of the city, to re-excite the public imagination about the city. This is no shame to be covered by suburban bushes or quarantined behind cyclone fences. It is the marker for a place set in motion, transforming itself to another place. The exciting prospects, not surprisingly, show up best at Disneyland. There, on the inside of the Matterhorn from the aerial tramway over the bobsled run on the inside of the plastic mountain, is a vision of a place marked out for the public life, of a kind of rocketing monumentality, more dynamic, bigger, and, who knows? even more useful to people and the public than any the world has seen yet.
Link, p 111-141

Ignatius of Loyola directs mimetic and histrionic kittens to play religiously on stage: copy-catechism

pic credit

From The Idea of a Theater by  Fergusson
 
The Histrionic Sensibility: The Mimetic Perception of Action

The trained ear perceives and discriminates sounds; the histrionic sensibility(which may also be trained) perceives and discriminates actions.Neither form of perception can be defined apart from experience but only indicated in various forms of its use...

Kittens in their play seem to be using something like our histrionic sensibility. They

directly perceive each other’s actions: stalking an imagined quarry; the bluff and formal

defiance which precedes a fight; flight in terror; the sudden indifference that ends the

play. Their perception of each other’s actions is itself mimetic, a sympathetic response of

the whole psyche, and may be expressed more or less completely and immediately in

bodily changes, postures, and movements.  The soul of the cat is the form of its body; but to some degree the soul is actual in different ways in different moments, depending upon what the cat believes, or make-believes the situation to be...When kittens perceive and imitate the actions of grown cats, the histrionic sensibility is being used for educational, moral (or by analogy) religious purposes: to explore the potentialities of the cat nature and the dimensions of the world in which the cat finds itself...

The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola  would seem to be far removed from the play of kittens; yet their purpose is to reveal, through the techniques of make-believe, the potentialities of human nature and the realities of the human situation, as Loyola understood them.   When he explains to the devout how to make present to their feelings and imaginations as well as their reason, scenes from the life of Christ, he  sketches a technique like that which the Moscow Art Theater used to train actors. His immediate purpose is similar: to reveal a scene significant on many levels, and a mode of action capable of evoking a mimetic response of the whole being pp 236-238, The Idea of a Theater, Fergusson

Quixote and Kierkegaard as mystics

 Robert A. Herrera:

Though he himself was scarcely a mystic, it has been suggested that in an age of burgeoning secularism, Cervantes' Don Quixote can be said to exemplify the mystic spirit. Like the mystic he strives to vanquish, even to destroy, that which  fallen nature considers being most valuable, even life itself, to attain a life that is more real, intense and lasting, This entails, at least in spirit, regression to the Gothic, the medieval, and has been emulated by moderns and  been emulated by moderns and contemporaries, notably (but not solely) by the followers of St. Ignatius Loyola and St. Teresa of Avila. But even these have suffered greatly from the slough of despond that followed the Second Vatican Council.


In Protestantism...voices such as Soren Kierkegaard (+1855) were heard within the deadening correctness.  This hypersensitive aesthete came to the conclusion that Denmark's State-sponsored orthodoxy was merely cordial drivel served up sweet.
The corporate, he feared, was suffocating the individual. This was a real tragedy as the cause of Christ stands or falls with the individual. The task at hand is to become a unique self, to escape from the herd and its mentality.  Kierkegaard embraces the ascetic by his either/or: either God  or nothing!  He moves in the direction of the mystical by his advocacy of silence as the essence of inwardness. The imperatives of the monastic
 are reborn: "It is unbelievable what a person of prayer can achieve if he would but close the doors behind him"  It is interesting to note that a decade or so later the archetypal atheist Nietzsche (+1900) was also engaged in excoriating the masses and their herd mentality. 

 
 Both Don Quixote and Kierkegaard, the fictional character and the existent man (who can say which is the more real?) kicked against the  goad.  They were in frank opposition to that stultifying conformity that all too often passes for religion. Kierkegaard sacrificed his love for Regina; Don Quixote fought giants that to secular eyes were merely windmills. From a psychiatric point of view both were verging on the borderline or had passed the border into psychosis. Kierkegaard made the sacrifice necessary to make his vocation possible. Don Quixote fought against the windmills
of Criptana, as he knew through the eyes of faith that they were, are, and for all eternity will be, giants. In their realization  that the demands and lures of the world must be subordinated to a higher calling they were well on their way to an elevated spirituality.--Silent Music: The Life, Work, and Thought of St. John of the Cross. pp 15-16

video of a funny art museum docent we met in San Francisco

Video below....(or click here)

Post by Tim Wainscott.

amerikan arkitecture: even realer than the fake real thing?

image source

My wife, on her first visit to Disneyland (specifically, Tiki Room):  "It's all fake!"
Me: "I think that's the point."


--
Below excerpt from pp 36-38 of   The Experience Economy (updated edition here )

... Note that the Rainforest Cafe, which combines the dining room with a retail shop and bills itself as A Wild Place to Shop and Eat," is not out to simulate the actual experience of being in a rain forest . Rather it aims to stage an authentic-and esthetic-experience of the Rainforest Cafe.

 Another wild place to shop can be found in Owatonna, Minnesota, at Cabela's, a 150,000-square-foot outfitter of hunting, fishing, and other outdoor gear. Rather than add elements of entertainment to the store, Dick and Jim Cabela turned it into an esthetic experience, centered (literally) around a thirty-five-foot-high mountain with a waterfall and featuring more than a hundred stuffed taxidermic animals, many of them shot by the two brothers or other family members. This part of the store represents four different North American ecosystems. Elsewhere, two huge dioramas depict African scenes that include the so-called Big Five big-game targets: the elephant, lion, leopard, rhinoceros, and cape buffalo. Three aquariums hold a number of varieties of prized fish, while almost seven hundred different kinds of animals in total are mounted in and around every department of the store. Truly, as Dick Cabela told the St. Paul Pioneer Press, "We're selling an experience."" So much so that more than 35,000 people visited the refurbished store on the day it opened, and the company expects more than one million visitors every year

The esthetics of an experience may be completely natural, as when touring a national park, primarily man-made, as when dining at the Rainforest Cafe, or somewhere in between, as when shopping at Cabela's. There's no such thing as an artificial experience. Every experience created within the individual is real, whether the stimuli be natural or simulated. Extending this view, renowned architect Michael Benedikt discusses the role he believes architects play in connecting people to a "realness" within their created environments: 

Such experiences, such privileged moments, can be profoundly moving; and precisely from such moments, I believe, we build our best and necessary sense of an independent yet meaningful reality. I should like to call them direct esthetic experiences of the real and to suggest the following: in our media-saturated times it falls to architecture to have the direct esthetic experience of the real at the center of its concerns

 . While architects may lead, it really falls to everyone involved in the staging of esthetic experiences to connect individuals and the (immersive) reality they directly (albeit passively) experience, even when the environment seems less than "real." Benedikt would likely call the Rainforest Cafe and similar venues "non-real," and insist that its architects address "the issue of authenticity by framing [displaying the inauthentic as inauthentic], by making fakery honest, as it were."Z3 To stage compelling esthetic experiences, designers must acknowledge that any environment designed to create an experience is not real (the Rainforest Cafe, for instance, is not the rain forest ). They should not try to fool their guests into believing it's something it is not. 

Architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable makes a similar distinction when she says "it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the real fake from the fake fake. All fakes are clearly not equal; there are good fakes and bad fakes. The standard is no longer real versus phony, but the relative merits of the imitation. What makes the good ones better is their improvement on reality. " To illustrate the difference, we'll consider two invented envi- ronments Huxtable spends considerable time critiquing: Universal City Walk and just about anyplace Disney.

 City Walk in Los Angeles is a collection of retail shops, restaurants, movie theatres, high-tech rides, and low-tech kiosks, each with a distinctive facade. Controlled exaggeration abounds, as in the four-story guitar adorning the Hard Rock Cafe. Visitors lazily stroll through a water fountain that shoots up at well-timed intervals. Guests pay an There's no such entrance fee for parking (nobody walks to anything in L.A., thing as do but here they pay admission to walk around) that's reim- artificial bursed only if they spend money at a dining or movie experience (purchases of goods merit no reimbursement). Part experience theme park and part public square, City Walk primarily imparts an esthetic experience, Huxtable confirms, as it "is being used for its own sake."" The realness of its fakery evidences itself from the very moment you park your car in the ungarnished lot. The back of the buildings greet arriving guests, who thus see the unadorned undersides of the facades as they walk in. Outside you see the inside of the mask; inside you see its outside. Adjacent buildings, unassociated with City Walk, remain visible through alleys and other off-shoots to the main drag. Its esthetic acknowledges its fakeness. Through framing, it's truly a real fake.

 The esthetic of most Disney experiences, on the other hand, seeks to hide all things fake: No one gets to see behind the curtain. Parking lots smoothly flow into shuttle buses, welcoming booths, and turnstiles. Facades seamlessly integrate into one another, lest some guest detect the trickery in the dimensional downsizing. Mickey Mouse never takes off his mask, lest we see the pimply faced kid inside. It's the fake fake that Huxtable and other critics decry, not being true to what they deem it really is. 

Or is it real fake fake? Other critics laud Disney for creating wholly immersive environments, consistent and engaging within themselves. One writes "that from whatever angle, nothing looks fake. Fabricated, yes- fake, no. Disneyland isn't the mimicry of a thing; it's a thing.... I'm convinced the genius of Disneyland isn't its fancifulness, but its literalism."" On the subject of Disney theme parks many people (including coauthors) disagree. But one thing remains clear: an esthetic experience must be true to itself and come off as real to its guests.  - pp 36-38 of   The Experience Economy 

Boggie: Parfum--a real fake music video

Related:

Dove Evolution and Michael Jackson's face

Subverting Abercrombie And Fitch: Image, Exclusion and Homelessness

"Disabled" Mannequins

• 

• 'Disabled' Mannequins Remind Us That Beautiful Doesn't Mean 'Perfect' (

•  New Attention-Grabbing Mannequins Are Modeled After Disabled Public Figures 'Because who is perfect?' advocacy group asks By Rebecca Cullers

Reach Through A Screen And Interact With Objects On The Other Side

article:
MIT Scientists Found A Way For You To Reach Through A Screen And Interact With Objects On The Other Side 

Dylan finally releases video for "Like a Rolling Stone"...and it's interactive

Check out the story:

One of the best music videos of 2013 belongs to a 48-year-old song. The interactive video for Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone," released yesterday, is a tour de force: as the music plays, you can flip between sixteen channels of simulated TV programming. But whether you're watching a financial news update, a romantic comedy, or a tennis tournament, it looks authentic except that everyone seems to be lip-synching the lyrics of the song. While many of the channels are peopled by actors, the lineup is peppered with numerous celebrity performers such as comedian Marc Maron, rapper Danny Brown, the hosts of Pawn Stars, and Drew Carey (on the set of The Price Is Right). The overall effect is head-spinning but incredibly compelling: the more you surf through the "Like a Rolling Stone" video, the more the song's contempt seems to be addressed to all of western civilization. By the time you land on a vintage live performance of the actual Bob Dylan, he feels like the only real person in existence. 

"The effect can only be surrealistic if the channels are realistic," says Vania Heymann, the video's 27-year-old Israeli director. "In reality, channel-flipping is a very passive act. You're sitting back in your house, doing nothing. We wanted to make it an active thing, reediting the song itself to make a new version."
The video took about two   continued

Let me just say, watching it on "The Price is Right" channel is spooky; chilling.  Brilliant and prophetic (see: 

Trickster Dylan: Jeremiah inside empire).   As one of Bob's friends (see the "us vs. them" 

Jeriah sneer of Dylan once said, "Watch more TV".

Official video link here; embedded below

Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford and C.S. Lewis: magic and technique

I love these three thinkers...they should have toured together.
Michael Sacasas quotes them here in a post on Technology and Magic

Ellul:

“Magic developed along with other techniques as an expression of man’s will to obtain certain results of a spiritual order. To attain them, man made use of an aggregate of rites, formulas, and procedures which, once established, do not vary. Strict adherence to form is one of he characteristics of magic: forms and rituals, masks whichever vary, the same kind of prayer wheels, the same ingredients for mystical drugs, for formulae for divination, and so on...

Every magical means, in the eyes of the person who uses it, is the most efficient one. In the spiritual realm, magic displays all the characteristics of a technique. It is a mediator between man and ‘the higher powers,’ just as other techniques mediate between man and matter. It leads to efficacy because it subordinates the power of the gods to men, and it secures a predetermined result. It affirms human power in that it seeks to subordinate the gods to men, just as technique serves to cause nature to obey.”

Mumford :

Thus although capitalism and technics must be clearly distinguished at every stage, one conditioned the other and reacted upon it.”

“It was because of certain traits in private capitalism that the machine — which was a neutral agent — has often seemed, and in fact has sometimes been, a malicious element in society, careless of human life, indifferent to human interests.  The machine has suffered for the sins of capitalism; contrariwise, capitalism has often taken credit for the virtues of the machine.”

“… indeed, the necessity to promote continual changes and improvements, which has been characteristic of capitalism, introduced an element of instability into technics and kept society from assimilating its mechanical improvements and integrating them in an appropriate social pattern.”

“Between fantasy and exact knowledge, between drama and technology, there is an intermediate station: that of magic. It was in magic that the general conquest of the external environment was decisively instituted.”

“In sum, magic turned men’s minds to the external world: it suggested the need of manipulating it: it helped create the tools for successfully achieving this, and it sharpened observation as to the results.”

“As children’s play anticipates crudely adult life, so did magic anticipate modern science and technology …”

“… magic was the bridge that united fantasy with technology: the dream of power with the engines of fulfillment.”

 Lewis:

I have described as a `magician’s bargain’ that process whereby man surrenders object after object, and finally himself, to Nature in return for power. And I meant what I said. The fact that the scientist has succeeded where the magician failed has put such a wide contrast between them in popular thought that the real story of the birth of Science is misunderstood. You will even find people who write about the sixteenth century as if Magic were a medieval survival and Science the new thing that came in to sweep it away. Those who have studied the period know better. There was very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse. I allow that some (certainly not all) of the early scientists were actuated by a pure love of knowledge. But if we consider the temper of that age as a whole we can discern the impulse of which I speak.

There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique ….

my pet S-words

This is no skubala: several of my areas of study are "S-words"
I bet no one has ever preached a sermon with an alliterative outline like this:

• simulacra
• semiotics/signs
• synesthesia
• set theory
• Sephardic
• sound theory
• Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
•  
• string theory
• Spirit Christology
• Spanish Language and Culture (my major)
• Second Corinthians
• Second Timothy
• Sermon on the Mount
• self-disclosure
•  
• sexuality/spirituality
• subversion
• structure of Matthew
• subversion
• Second Temple Judaism

"Rootlessness and Simulacra: The Loss and Recovery of Cultural Foundations"

Rootlessness and Simulacra: The Loss and Recovery of Cultural Foundations by  Andrew Tatsuko 

the power of photoshop

"Adaptation"

I posted this below on my Facebook re: my "new" DVD of an old film: "Adaptation."

(For more on this film and its genre, see Movies on the "our lives are more inter-connected than we realize" theme).

----------- 

 

 

So I unwrapped this newly purchased DVD..and saw this. It's kind of disturbing to open a shrinkwrapped product and see a handwritten note.
I don't want to get anyone in trouble, so I blocked out the names.
Hooked onto some clips in the case was this note from a supervisor (on studio letterhead) asking an employee not to use this case with the clips..
Makes you wonder about the backstory(:
Did the employee ever see the note? Did they leave it in on purpose?
Do they still have their job? (:

 

Comments:

Dave Wainscott

  Hmm..i googled the name and found that many people got the same note. Company prank? related to the movie itself( Adaptation) theme of blending of movie world/real world?

 

See links:

 http://xixax.com/index.php?topic=8367.120

 

http://forum.dvdtalk.com/archive/t-524295.html

 

Anyone else get a mildly baffling insert with their Adaptation DVD? [Archive] - DVD Talk Forum

 

"No extra charge" a review of: Adaptation

Placehacking: Woodward Avenue Church

photo credit and story

More info on placehacking

"The Matrix in Real Life" by Improv Everywhere

Because there is just Something  so

                    God-haunted  and gospel-echoing
 about

• The Matrix (see posts tagged "the Matrix")

and

• improv  (see Ron Martoia and N. T. Wright for that connection)

..I was glad to see that

 Improv Everywhere

 staged 

"The Matrix in Real Life".

Video below, backstory here

new gospel music by St. Trent Reznor and NIN

Bono was right about NIN (Bono audio: God at the 9" Nails Gig)
.. See this:

....Now we are introduced to the new Trent Reznor, and it sounds quite a bit like the old version of him — “a copy of a copy of a copy,” as he sings over the electronic rhythm section. But like digital artifacts or genetic mutations over generations, this copy of a copy introduces new elements into Nine Inch Nails’ music, and these mutations appear to be for the better.

For one thing, this record conveys a greater sense of humility, a quality his earlier works often lacked. This is most clearly expressed in “Find My Way,” a tender, heartfelt prayer that would sound perfectly natural sung by an old-time gospel ensemble. “Well my path has gone astray. I’m just trying to find my way… I have made a great mistake. Pray the Lord, my soul to take,” Reznor sings, seemingly without irony.

This is a far cry from the nihilistic

rants of his Downward Spiral days, when lyrics such as “God is dead and no one cares” were common.

He continues this theme on the album’s penultimate track, “While I’m Still Here,” explicitly borrowing a line from Hank Williams’ “Weary Blues From Waitin’.”
“Oh all the things that might have been… God forgive me if I cry,” Reznor sings in tribute to a long tradition of tragic American ballads.

At other times, he appears defiant in his embrace of life. On the unapologetically upbeat “Everything,” Reznor sings triumphantly, “I have survived everything… I am whole, I am free. I am whole, I can see.”

No doubt this more mature and decidedly less rage-filled perspective will alienate many NIN fans. But that’s not to say that Reznor has entirely abandoned his former depressive nihilism. Songs like “Disappointed” and “I Would For You” stay true to tradition, maintaining a steady veneer of self-loathing and existential angst. It’s not that these qualities ever completely disappear from his music. If anything, a sense of disappointment and depression remain the background atmosphere of all Reznor’s music. But against that background, he appears to have found a greater sense of purpose and meaning..... Link

Related:
Unlikely Light by John J. Thompson

Listen: Nine Inch Nails: "Copy of A" | News | Pitchfork

Mumford and Sons "Hopeless Wanderer" video: even better than the real thing?

1. 
   

One opinion on the video:

The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world that he did not exist."-Charles Baudelaire

This past weekend, Mumford  Sons released a new music video for their song "Hopeless Wanderer" from their album Babel. In said video, four comedians—Jason Sudeikis, Ed Helms, Jason Bateman, and Will Forte—dress up like hobo folk singers draped in banjos, acoustic guitars, and drum kits and, for the lack of a better description, rock the fuck out. At one point, Bateman plays the banjo like a finger picking fiend and smashes it like he's in Spinal Tap. Sudeikis has a mental breakdown and falls to his knees while soloing with a drum strapped to his back. All four sit and play their instruments on a boat in the middle of a lake. Forte starts to cry (and Bateman tastes his tears). Forte and Sudeikis also make out.
The video itself is, of course, very funny. And why wouldn't it be? These four dudes are some of the funniest working comedians today, and watching them rock out in an over-the-top manner is guaranteed to be hilarious. Will Forte's beard is just fake enough. Helms' tears are just real enough. The lighting is just Valencia-y enough. The video presents a self-aware and ironic portrait of Mumford & Sons, and it shows that these guys get it. They know that Marcus Mumford looks like a clerk in the Oregon Trail  games and that banjos are inherently goofy and vests are "quirky," which in this case is kind of a stand-in for "stupid" and their folk-stompy style has become so common that it's practically a cliché. They understand! Get it?! Do we get that they get it?
The answer is, yes, we get it. Everyone gets it. And the fact that we get it is the reason that this is the worst music video of all time, and another example of why Mumford & Sons are a terrible, terrible, terrible band.
Outside of this stupid music video, the music Mumford & Sons makes is cont here