In the glass

Pre-eminent documentary filmmaker Errol Morris contributes something to the NY Times every now and again.

He's just come out with a fascinating retrospective of iconic images from the 43rd presidency, as curated by representatives of three of the major still photography proprietor: AP, AFP and Reuters.

Some of the commentary is of interest, some of it is forgettable and/or predictable. I'm afraid that many of the images are best reviewed as they were first viewed: without much interpretation.

In general, I find that the AFP collection blows the others away. However, the standout image for me is this AP shot, from Crawford, Texas, which I had never seen before:



There's so much to see here, between the varied poses of the supporting cast (esp. Rice), the lines of perspective, the horizon, the evocative setting (interrupted by the microphones). The president dominates this photo in his casual attire and confident poise. There has been from the beginning something very compelling about Bush's Texan-ness, something the Republican strategists sniffed from the get-go and then failed to capitalize on, and this shot sums up for me precisely that essence. As one facet among many, this Bush is--dare I say it--dead sexy.

The other worthy bit from Morris' piece is his closing thought, as nabbed from Oliver Wendell Holmes:

"Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., writing in 1859 (about 20 years after the first daguerreotypes appeared), called photography 'a mirror with a memory.' He writes,

'The man beholdeth himself in the glass and goeth his way, and straightway both the mirror and the mirrored forget what manner of man he was…'"

Kinds of technology

A while back I submitted this blog to a website that tracks a few basic statistics about it. Having this information available does a couple of things for me: First of all, it makes me a little embarrassed to be blogging, as I get so few visitors. Secondly, it provides me with a good laugh by tracking the google search phrases that bring my random google searcher to one of my posts.

I wanted to take the opportunity to review a few choice selections, in no particular order. Some of them are pretty surprising--I had to go to google and enter a couple of these search phrases myself to confirm that they will actually route you to this blog:

1. "the onion magazine"
I must be one of the few that finds these things funny.

2. "recent top stories"
Shockingly, this blog shows up as the third result for that phrase.

3. "too many sermon podcasts"
I feel for this guy. Perhaps he's part of an emerging constituency of internet browsers who are turning to google for some kind of therapeutic release.

4. "quotes baden powell nation of wasters"
Unfortunately my blog was unable to provide an intrepid browser with the following quote from "Recovering To Success: A Book of Life-Sport for Young Men," by an author named Robert Baden-Powell, who I have never heard of:
"'The world can be made safe for democracy, but democracy will never be safe for the world until the mental loafer is saved from himself.' There are mental loafers and wasters just as much as there are physical wasters, fellows who let themselves be guided by cheap newspapers, persuasive orators, and rotten literature and cinemas."

5. "what does frim look like"
You won't find any pictures of me on here. But you could get close by looking up the old post that discusses my celebrity look-alike.

6. "how to get a frim but and tight legs" (sic)
All time favorite.

7. "kinds of technology", "three kinds of technology", "what are the kinds of technology", and the altruistic "what kinds of technology will help the poor"
This theme, in its many variations, brings in a steady stream of random cyber-guests. What shows up on google is an old post that was made up of a quote from Ted Kaczynski's technology manifesto. My best guess of what these browsers are looking for is quick-n-dirty ideas to work into an essay, maybe for some introductory-level college class in engineering or technology theory. The following answer, provided by Yahoo(!) answers, should do for these purposes: (1) Instructional technology (2) Assistive technology (3) Medical technology (4) Technology productive tools (5) Information technology. However, if you, dear reader, happen to be one such befuddled youngster, please note that in my newly legitimate, google-result-endorsed, blogger opinion, there is no conventional over-simplification of the "kinds" of technology that can justify your question. Technology encompasses all kinds of human creations and therefore contains an infinite amount of possible uses and categories. Certainly there is no authoritative single way to divide technology into "kinds". But, I happen to think Ted's theory is worth repeating. He breaks down technology into two functional categories: tools which can be used independently and those which are dependent on other tools to be used, requiring an ever more complex system to be sustained.

8. "my hands feel heavy"

Communism, bad ideas, science fiction

In which we wonder on a couple of excerpts from the wonderfully wonder-free first chapter of Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, in which we witness Kurt boiling a world of frustration into a bubbly, gelatinous stew of absurdity:

"When Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout met each other their country was by far the richest and most powerful country on the planet. It had most of the food and minerals and machinery, and it disciplined other countries by threatening to shoot big rockets and them or to drop things on them from airplanes.

"Most other countries didn't have doodley-squat. Many of them weren't even inhabitable anymore. They had too many people and not enough space. They had sold everything that was any good, and there wasn't anything to eat anymore...

"...A lot of the people on the wrecked planet were Communists. They had a theory that what was left of the planet should be shared more or less equally among all the people, who hadn't asked to come to a wrecked planet in the first place... Meanwhile, more babies were arriving all the time--kicking and screaming, yelling for milk. In some places people would actually try to eat mud or such on gravel while babies were being born just a few feet away. And so on.

"Dwayne Hoover's and Kilgore Trout's country, where there was still plenty of everything, was opposed to Communism. It didn't think that Earthlings who had a lot should share it with others unless they really wanted to, and most of them didn't want to. So they didn't have to."

And then a page later:

"The bad ideas were delivered to Dwayne by Kilgore Trout... Here was the core of the bad ideas which Trout gave to Dwayne: Everybody on Earth was a robot, with one exception--Dwayne Hoover.

"Of all the creatures in the Universe, only Dwayne was thinking and feeling and worrying and planning and so on. Nobody else knew what pain was. Nobody else had any choices to make. Everybody else was fully automatic machine, whose purpose was to stimulate Dwayne. Dwayne was a new type of creature being tested by the Creator of the Universe. Only Dwayne had free will.

"Trout did not expect to be believed. He put the bad ideas into a science-fiction novel, and that was where Dwayne found them. The book wasn't addressed to Dwayne alone. Trout had never heard of Dwayne when he wrote it. It was addressed to anybody who happened to open it up. It said to simply anybody, in effect, "Hey--guess what: You're the only creature with free will. How does that make you feel?" And so on.

"It was a tour de force. It was a jeu d'espirit."

August 9, 1945

We loved our bomb. We had such affection for the tidy, miraculous work of our hands. We wanted to give him a nickname, an enduring testament to our cleverness. We called him Fat Man.

On the ground, 73,844 Japanese people called him sudden death. 74,909 more called him a lifetime of physical suffering.

Today, 62 years later, we might call him a reminder to pray for a world in which the destruction of innocent human lives on a catastrophic scale is still considered an effective means of conflict resolution. (Only if diplomatic measures fail, mind you).

The desire to pick up weapons that we're not really prepared to handle is only one manifestation of our giddy faith in technological control as the solution to all problems. Let's get off the frenzied, promise-laden bandwagon of the Next Big Thing and learn to use, with love and patience, the means we already have in front of us.

Two kinds of technology

Here's a nice distinction between two kinds of technology from Theodore Kaczynski's "Industrial Society and Its Future":

"We distinguish between two kinds of technology, which we will call small-scale technology and organization-dependent technology. Small-scale technology is technology that can be used by small-scale communities without outside assistance. Organization-dependent technology is technology that depends on large-scale social organization. We are aware of no significant cases of regression in small-scale technology. But organization-dependent technology DOES regress when the social organization on which it depends breaks down. Example: When the Roman Empire fell apart the Romans' small-scale technology survived because any clever village craftsman could build, for instance, a water wheel, any skilled smith could make steel by Roman methods, and so forth. But the Romans' organization-dependent technology DID regress. Their aqueducts fell into disrepair and were never rebuilt. Their techniques of road construction were lost. The Roman system of urban sanitation was forgotten, so that only until rather recent times did the sanitation of European cities equal that of Ancient Rome.

"The reason why technology has seemed always to progress is that, until perhaps a century or two before the Industrial Revolution, most technology was small-scale technology. But most of the technology developed since the Industrial Revolution is organization-dependent technology. Take the refrigerator for example. Without factory-made parts or the facilities of a post-industrial machine shop it would be virtually impossible for a handful of local craftsmen to build a refrigerator. If by some miracle they did succeed in building one it would be useless to them without a reliable source of electric power. So they would have to dam a stream and build a generator. Generators require large amounts of copper wire. Imagine trying to make that wire without modern machinery. And where would they get a gas suitable for refrigeration? It would be much easier to build an ice house or preserve food by drying or picking, as was done before the invention of the refrigerator."

Other good sections are the part where Kaczynski profiles leftists as "oversocialized" individuals and the part where he talks about the profusion of increasingly empty "surrogate activities" in an industrialized society in order to feed the natural human desire to accomplish meaningful work.

Off World announcement!

I've been having a lot of mental lapses into absurdity as of late. Last week I was sitting in a car stopped in traffic on I-76, staring out the front window. You could say I was contemplating the skyline. That's when I was struck by the absurdity of billboards. It was the scale that got me first--realizing how enormous a billboard has to be in order to convey a roughly magazine-size readable image at a distance. Consider with me how much physical space has been utilized in order to colonize our fields of vision. It got me thinking about a Gnostic/Platonic mind-body split in which psychological space becomes much more valuable than physical space.

Great architectural constructions have always played on psychological space, but it seems to me that the meaning of that visual space was always a logical extension from the meaning of the actual physical structure: A palace or cathedral was much bigger than it needed to be in order to create in the viewer a sense of grandeur, which is a utilization (a sort of exaggeration) of physical space to make a psychological impression. But what about when a massive structure is erected exclusively to pass on a photograph or written message, completely severed from any physically useful purpose?

The strange dis-proportionality of it all illustrates a general disregard for the physical environment (as in most cities). More broadly, billboards point to a physical existence that is subjugated, discarded, dominated by the world of ideas. Yet another cyclical pattern of careless abuse and fragmented meaning, another competitive relationship enacted between worlds that were meant to be constructively integrated.

Or in the case that my reactions seem more ridiculous than the billboard itself, at the very least we can pause for a moment to think about the great expenditures of creative energy and capital invested into capturing little pieces of our mental space for a few seconds.

Kevin Kelly, provocateur

Kevin Kelly is a writer and senior brain at Wired magazine. I first came across him by reading his essay "Scan this book!" in one of Jeff Shafer's issues of New York Times Magazine that was sitting on the dining room table in 329 last spring. I was inspired to go back and look up this article after realizing that it had significantly implanted itself in a central part of my brain--I think I've referred to it in about 25 conversations since the time I read it.

In "Scan this book!", Kelly explores the meaning and ramifications of Google's ongoing project to digitize all books. Here is my html version of the article, which is really a travesty considering the (characteristically) beautiful layout and accompanying photography from the magazine version. It's probably worth searching out a physical copy at your local library. (It will be found in the May 2006 issue).

He's got other technology-related essays on his personal website and some shorter stuff on his blog.

Here is one such short piece that I will recommend: "The Rise and Fall of the Copy"

As they have done for me, his writings may very well force you to edge topics you may have formerly relegated to the category "irrelevant sci-fi inquiries" into your everyday perspective on the world.

I just deleted my Facebook.com account one final time

John Perkins and my DSC-P72

Genre photos! Media cliches! They're all around us! Have you noticed? This month it seems that every time I turn around I am assaulted by photo sets of empathetically-(tearfully?)-smiling Christian white kids surrounded by a small crowd of black street urchins (who they appear to have just befriended).

What are the photos saying about us?

If the digital point-and-shoot camera is apt to become the poor man's creativity crutch, the digital SLR can easily become the rich man's "Art" crutch. But neither device is merely for art, it also has the potential for documentary, which gives it street cred and accessibility. And relevance!

Who is this strange beast, the Christian Day-Tripper? He/she parades around the (third) world, building little cinderblock houses and capturing an obscene number of confused little black children inside of a camera, eventually returning home to broadcast this evidence of association across all forms of digital image technology in order to share the experience of their poverty in some small way. In some small way indeed, since we viewers are not really capable of experiencing their poverty at all. For that matter, are we really even capable of experiencing “the other half” when we travel abroad for a week, a month, a year?

The likely, terrifying possibility is that there may be a whole lot of personal pleasure getting mixed in to something that was supposed to be service. Who’s really getting served? Might it be the one who stops in to visit, who documents their association with the poor, and who steps off the plane on the return to their comfortable hometown deafened by a moral fanfare?

I’ve never been on a real mission trip, but the only thing I ever hear is “Well, you know, I gave up so much to do this, but in return I received far more than I gave.” Well maybe this is actually true, maybe we Christians are actually receiving more than we're giving. Maybe our mission trips are really gathering trips. Maybe we are really stealing from the poor a second time over, this time of the authenticity implied by the poverty we imparted to them.

I've got a hypothesis about the commodity, the new treasure that we’re digitally mining out of the third world: It’s that new, post-modern, coveted value known as “The Grime Factor.” Just as fashion has progressed from plastic-slick, technology-fetish costumes of the 80s into faux-ripped Abercrombie & Fitch authenticity, the rest of our interests are quickly growing tired of that ever-present, oh-so-commonplace polished, industrial gloss. Enough opaquely computerized keyboard bleeps, give me real drum kits floating in a sea of gentle vinyl pops! Better yet, go ahead and resample old soul records on that new Kanyeyed Peas track—-oops, I mean "record": The sampling's worth at least two points, since vomiting up black music from the 70s exploits “the other” twice over: The second time blaxploitation rolls around we'll call it vintage. And OMG, second-hand shops are so funky-fresh! Forget the orgasmically-minimal international style, we want classic lofts, you know, renovated stone fronts that scream “this building has character!” After all, for all we know poor black folks probably lived in this very building this at some point!

Let's be honest with ourselves: We’re apathetic, alienated, disaffected, over-disinfected rich people, alternately bored of and devastated by the world we've created for ourselves, seeking to associate with another world. We’re bustling around on our kitchen linoleum, which by the way seems to be starting to wear. We’re making calls and placing ads, trying to get rid of the old Mies van der Rohe dining set as quick as possible because the fact that it is horrendously sterile-looking just dawned on us. Unfortunately we just can’t find anything to replace it with, so milking culture from the tiny, chafed teats of the poor man that we keep in a cage in the garage will have to do for now. Better yet, maybe we can find an old loft in to move into, along with the new-vintage couch.

Why should we delude ourselves about the good we're doing on our short-term missions projects? Why should we stroke our overworked little social consciences like this? If we think about it, we may find that we are actually, literally benefiting from our "third-world encounters."

So rather then deny this fact, why don't we start applying Christian ethics to this situation:

In the best-case scenario, we’re taking because we perceive that we are in need. Which is fine for us to admit. But if this is the case, the first thing we should do is to admit this to the people we’re taking from:

“You have something I need: Perhaps it’s spiritual vitality, perhaps it’s a breath of fresh air outside of our pleasantly-stifling sphere of consumption, perhaps it’s a stimulus for deeply-rooted nostalgia about the wholesomely simple pleasures of our agricultural past (we’ll just gloss over those nauseatingly fixed cultural roles that it was built on for now). Let’s trade: I’ll try my best to re-distribute my amassed wealth and privilege, hopefully lessening my drain on the earth’s resources and people I am oppressing, like you. In return you give me a day-to-day life that has more space, is more sane, is less drunk on the quickly souring Kool-aid of industrial progress.”

Absurd? Yes, indeed! but at least it's a start at moving away from the condescension to the “third-world” that is necessitated by the lie that we’re primarily selfless in our efforts. The most significant thing your average youth group short-term missionary is offering the "third world" is the commodification of poor folks’ way of life as an accessory to wealth, as a bullet point alongside a six-figure future income.

In the best-possible-case scenario, we might even find that in attempting to re-access real authenticity and humility, we actually are able to offer our poorer neighbors some resources of value.

And as hesitant as I am to admit it, perhaps short-term missions have a value, perhaps it makes some backwards ethical sense to spoon-feed digital deaths and pre-packaged, frozen, third-world moments to the rich in order to finance this blunt, systematic exchange of resources.

It’s fine if mission trips do have a value, but first, at the very least, it is time to admit that the value is not only passing from the rich man to the poor man, but also vice versa.