drowning in the why, starving for the how

This is a feeling I often have when teaching my “modernology” class–which is about how people in Japan have developed ways to understand and get to being modern. Modern in a myriad of ways–from sitting on street-corners and drawing people in kimonos and putting them in bar graphs compared to people wearing “western” clothing, to measuring the GNP, to listening to insects to hear if they still sound like they “did” in 11th c. imperial manuals of poetry, to tracking who practices inter-racial international marriage with whom.

The “5 Ws and an H” stuff is hard to come by, and I can understand why, given the focus on stereotype that drives what seem to be the same 5 stories about Japan, written in the rapidly dwindling number of papers that have foreign bureaus.

Students–I mean undergrads here–are often remarkably stubborn about releasing their a priori judgements. Many if not most of which come from  ideas derived from wartime and Occupation-era military anthropology–all those “shame” versus “guilt” studies, the mandatory kissing in movies to show democracy, and on and on. So this statement, in a book I’ve been reading about the Free Software and Open Source software movements, rang true, recommended by my friend J. This is from Chris Kelty’s Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software.

It would be interesting to apply this to, say, cell-phone novels, or video-game music like Katamari Fortissimo Damacy, whose plot is driven by a breakway incident of binge-drinking…

… it is in Free Software and its history that the is-
sues raised—from intellectual property and piracy to online po-
litical advocacy and “social” software—were first figured out and confronted. Free Software’s roots stretch back to the 1970s and crisscross the histories of the personal computer and the Internet, the peaks and troughs of the information-technology and software industries, the transformation of intellectual property law, the innovation of organizations and “virtual” collaboration, and the rise of networked social movements. Free Software does not explain why these various changes have occurred, but rather how individuals and groups are responding: by creating new things, new practices, and new forms of life. It is these practices and forms of life—not the software itself—that are most significant, and they have in turn served as templates that others can use and transform:
practices of sharing source code, conceptualizing openness, writing copyright (and copyleft) licenses, coordinating collaboration, and proselytizing for all of the above. There are explanations aplenty for why things are the way they are: it’s globalization, it’s the network society, it’s an ideology of transparency, it’s the virtualization of work, it’s the new flat earth, it’s Empire. We are drowning in the why, both popular and scholarly, but starving for the how.

her version of the sherwood forest

In the Washington State University library, her version of Sherwood Forest, Corliss walked the poetry stacks. She endured a contentious and passionate relationship with this library. The huge number of books confirmed how much magic she’d been denied for most of her life, and now she hungrily wanted to read every book on the shelf. An impossible task, to be sure, Herculean in its exaggeration, but Corliss wanted to read herself to death. She wanted to be buried in a coffin filled with used paperbacks.

From Sherman Alexie, “The Search Engine,” p. 5, in Ten Little Indians.

There are nine stories in the book. “Nine is a much funnier number than eleven.” True enough. Eleven is dogmatically prime and kinda tries too hard, whereas nine is two primes, like his character Jackson squared, someone also down with the idea of ceremony (a word that appears frequently in characters’ internal monologues).

Also great: more than one absurdist love story about basketball.

the case study seesaw hammock house

I stumbled onto this very fun installation on the way to a very serious concert at the Redcat by Yasunao Tone, an electronic musician, art writer and all-around charming fellow. Part of the charm is that although it is supposed to be kind of miniature–extracting 1 feature out of an idealized California house, in the manner of the postwar Case Study houses–it takes 2 attendants to get it going, kind of palanquin-like.

It’s kind of like a lazy-person’s seesaw. Or a 2-lazy-people’s seesaw, really, as you really need another bum on the other hammock to make the weights work. The attendants remove some sandbag weights, and depending on your respective balances, they move them around, to make it roughly balanced. Then you can push-me and pull-you, tho it is a straight up and down motion, not the arc of a seesaw. Still, it made me laugh like crazy and was immensely fun, especially in such a ’serious’ space.

The installation, by the architecture/space firm Atelier Bow-wow, has 2 other components, which are even more silly/wonderful. One is an area that is like a porch w/stadium seating, filled with some barbecues. The other is a large reclining pit, with pillows, from which you watch (a video projection of) a sunset.

The ABW gets its name, I think, because of its interest in “pet architecture,” which is to say, the built equivalent of pocket parks, “charming, small and humorous,” like pets, as one of their books says.

square and flat no more

Harold Gregor, Ilinois Flatscape 101

I stopped by a couple of museums today, to case the joints on the last day of a couple of exhibitions. My second stop was the Museum of the American West, for the shows on “maverick art” and “bold caballeros/noble bandidas.” (The latter should be up for a couple months more.) The maverick exhibit–a mix of avant-garde strands of trad arts, vernacular arts, and frontier-y things–had a good number of landscape paintings, among which was this landscape, rendered as if from an airplane, in the dimensionality of an aerial view, in these strange bright harvest colors.

Harold Gregor was a renowned figure in my town, which despite its apparent sleepiness, has an undertow of skilled and cerebral materialist artists working in and around it–painters, ceramacists, woodworkers, other craftspeople. This piece was an interesting transition piece between old-school Illinois representation, and that of today. It reminded me of  JB Jackson, basically the guy who founded vernacular landscape studies in the US. If you have ever listened to The Magnetic Fields’ The Charm of the Highway Strip, you have listened to a concept album modeled on the thinking of JBJ. JBJ had some salty words for my stomping grounds. Basically, he said, “people come to resemble the landscapes they live in. The midwest is square and flat.” It figures, the salt, he was from New England.

This season’s red-blue intrigues in my home state, mingling upstate and downstate elements, have brought some new geometries to my eyes, apart from the 2-D flatness. Here, a roundup, more or less inorganically mixed (oops, betraying my metaphoric downstate roots there) set of new shapes…

–the cone:

I have literally been kept up nights by Michael Pollan’s account of how ag policies in the 1970’s, under the Earl Butz regime, have changed the food landscape. Actually, the story goes back to the 1850’s with the advent of commodity corn and the grading of corn in ways to make yield the sole criterion for which growers grew…but anyway. Above a “portable escalator” (57) that carries corn into the piles that are currently all over the prairie, with so much surplus corn. These policies, and new technologies of mono-culture farming, have made yields like crazy, but have made it harder to make a living, or to use all  the stuff. Thus, high fructose corn syrup. Given that the US population only increases about 1% a year, in most years a sorry rate of growth, food manufacturers have to keep finding more uses and desires for corn products to keep up consumption and profits. Don’t even get me started on how all this number 2 corn is destined for its biggest consumer, cattle–who are supposed to be ruminants, or grass-eaters, actually, and who do not suffer a corn diet easily.

–the wave:

…to be continued

Sarah Palin and the five stages of grief

This little narrative said it all to me: succinct, hopeful, yet with a soupçon of pending doom. Eric Muller is a law prof who writes a really great blog on civil rights and research on racial classification in the US. It was his recent book, American Inquisition, that clarified to me that there were (was?) not one, the War Relocation Authority, but several separate agencies in charge of interning Japanese Americans during WW2. Anyway, remember the Elizabeth Kübler-Ross cycle of grief, from the ’70s? It is supposed to describe the steps you go through in dealing with a terminal illness, or a big change. I remember reading her big book as a kid, because we had that kind of thing laying around the house. Also, because I have a fatal curiosity for “step”-psychology and anything involving a bubble test, preferably in the context of perfume and cosmetics (“if so, you are a floral, if not, a woodsy…”).

M

y Five Stages:

1. Astonishment.
2. Perverse joy.
3. Disbelief.
4. Anger.
5. Abject terror.

I’ll be stuck at stage 5 from now until Election Day.

Ditto. And I would add step 4.5, “utter mortification at that woman claiming the mantle of feminism.”

Here is the Wiki, with links to excerpts of the Kübler-Ross.