One-Way Street

Salman Rushdie and the Jaipur Literary Festival Controversy

2012-01-26T14:22:08-06:00

Reading a Minor League Hockey Game

2012-01-23T13:25:30-06:00

This past weekend I attended a minor league hockey game between the Chicago Wolves and the Rockford IceHogs at the Allstate Arena, located just outside Chicago. I’m not a hockey fan, nor have I ever attended a minor league hockey game before. I have only a vague understanding of how hockey plays work and no understanding whatsoever of the Wolves lineup.

However, none of this mattered. The experience was not structured to demand immersion in the subtleties of hockey. To use Walter Benjamin’s term, the game was clearly meant to be viewed in a distracted manner. Here’s how:

Attending a professional hockey game is immersive in only one sense: The arena is a self-contained space with no external visual or sonic references. From the upper deck the first view of the rink is an atmosphere, an icy haze hanging over the rink. The rink itself has a glow like a television screen. In the Allstate Arena there are no clocks reading external time. The only time in the arena is game time.

There’s no such thing as an intrinsically boring sport. No one would play or watch one. Nevertheless, hockey and basketball, both arena sports, offer spectacles as distractions. These distractions come in the form of a repertoire of familiar diversions: tee shirt toss, an indoor blimp dropping free items over the crowd, contests involving animated snack food. Aiding in these spectacles are a small number—fewer than a dozen—young women. The women are attractive yet as impersonal as chorus girls. The distractions are like television commercials, and serve the same function as far as the team’s business office is concerned. In the arena, however, they are experienced differently. Unlike commercial, the arena distractions never vary in form or outcome. They are not rituals in that they don’t convey any meaning. Their predictability is precisely the point. The crowd knows when to cheer, and they do it every time. The distractions are palliative. Cheering for the game itself is always a matter of surprise, so it involves pain in one form or another.

Another borrowing from televised sports is the shot of individual spectators in the crowd. Local broadcasts are much more likely to single out ordinary spectators than national broadcasts. In the arena these shots appear on LCD monitors. The spectators are invariably taken by surprise, even when they’re doing something specifically designed to get them on the monitors. The camera is always invisible (but not voyeuristic). The individuals in the crowd shots are disorienting to the other spectators. The subjects seem to be sitting in some remote section of the arena. At the same time, the shots make the crowd seem concrete, a collection of individuals with shared interests rather than an anonymous mass. In very large arena the crowd can seem abstract and distant, even when one is seated within it. A spectator comes to recognize the faces of the people sitting within a few seats around him or her, and that’s it.

The problem of anonymity extends to the teams themselves. Minor leagues are transitional places. The players strive to move up, and dread moving back down or, more commonly, getting released. There are collegiate stars and major league stars, but never minor league stars. Without stars, the marketing departments of minor league hockey have to rely on borrowed signifiers, which they sometimes combine to make their own nonsensical ones. A few minor league baseball teams have established local identities cultivated since the age before nationally televised sports. The AHL was founded in 1938 with the merger of some older leagues, so no doubt some franchises have established deep roots. The Chicago Wolves were established in 2001 as part of an expansion into larger markets. The franchise's tag line dissolves into semiotic mists: "More than a game." The Rockford IceHogs (nee Cincinnati Mighty Ducks) date back to 1997. The Chicago franchise is named according to the traditional metonymic logic of professional sports teams, with wolf representing a given set of fearsome qualities. No matter that wolves haven’t roamed free in the Chicago area for more than 150 years. The team's branding is really just kind of net that holds together a highly diverse collection of other corporate brands. The Rockford franchise extends the same logic beyond ordinary reference into a kind of dream logic with a software startup spelling style. Actual hogs, being hoofed animals, dislike ice. But in the logic of sports marketing, hog take to the ice to vanquish their enemies.

And vanquish them they did: The IceHogs won the game, 3-2.

Fun Friday: The Snow Storm Edition

2012-01-20T18:48:16-06:00

We're in the middle of a snowstorm here in Chicago, which means harrowing drives and shoveling driveways. It's a good time to be inside. (The pigeons above were photographed in Daley Plaza by the Chicago Tribune's E. Jason Wambsgans.)

And if you're hunkering down for the night, then the thing to do is watch Downton Abbey on Netflix streaming. Roger Ebert expresses the essential contradiction of most (including mel) English majors: most of them are liberals, but the discipline itself has a conservative streak, especially when it comes to English country houses.

although my politics are liberal my tastes in fiction respond to the conservative stability of the Downton world. The more seriously I can take it, the better I will like it. To be sure, there is monstrous unfairness in the British class system, and one of the series themes is income inequality. What must be observed, however, is that all the players agree to play by the same rules. In modern America the rich jump through every loophole in the tax code. But look what happened in the first episode of "Downtown Abbey." The Earl's presumptive heir went down with the Titanic and the title passed to a distant cousin, Mr. Matthew Crawley of Manchester, who now stood to inherit the title, the house, the land and the money--including the personal fortune of Cora, the Earl's wife. So deeply are the principles of inheritance embedded in the Crawley family that both the Earl and his wife seem staunchly prepared to give up their earthly possessions and be courteous in the process.

Be forewarned: As my wife and I discovered to our dismay, there are only seven episodes in the first season, which concludes, abruptly, with the announcement of the start of World War I. Just as the world of Downton Abbey has sucked you in, it blows up.

As long as we're in retro mode, the death of the remarkable Johnny Otis, followed by the death of one of his discoveries, Etta James, offers an occasion to look at the transition from big band jazz to rock and roll as America's pre-eminent form of popular music. Ben Greenman at the New Yorker has a nice tribute to James.

And finally--I have to hit the road now--here's an unlikely curl-up-with-a-good-book recommendation: Michel Houellebecq's new novel, The Map and the Territory. It's been called his Annie Hall, which is the last comparison you'd ever think someone would make. I'm 5% into it on my Kindle for iPad, and so far it's an engaging account of a Parisian artist trying to make sense of the culture around him. It's what a novel should do, and Houellebecq, against expectations, is a novelist equipped to do it.

Too Much Information, and Not Enough, About Margaret Thatcher

2012-01-18T06:21:00-06:00

For an American, it's hard not to look at Margaret Thatcher and not see Ronald Reagan. Both were tenacious and divisive leaders of a conservative revolution that continues to this day, with distressingly few updates along the way. Just as Reagan marked the beginning of the end of American liberalism as shaped by Franklin Roosevelt, Thatcher completely inverted the social and political agenda that had been in place since Harold Macmillan. Yet these days she doesn't inspire anywhere near the devotion American conservatives have for Reagan. Partly that's due to the differences in political cultures, partly because of personality differences. Reagan was affable and avuncular, even though he didn't show any evidence of an inner life. Thatcher, on the other hand, was the “the Milk Snatcher," a fulsomely nasty politician who grated on everybody's nerves until her own party tossed her to the back bench, where she concluded her political life as MP for Finchley, staring daggers at John Major.

From a distance of thirty years, when Reagan's morning in America has turned into the 2 AM night sweats, Thatcher's life story is fertile ground for a biopic. She rose from modest beginnings as the “grocer’s daughter from Grantham” to become a fiercely determined politician who overcame sexism and class prejudice of the Tories. This story arc figures prominently in Phyllida Lloyd's The Iron Lady, but the biopic entertains a perplexing competing story: Thatcher's development from ambitious harridan to daft old woman. Meryl Streep portrays Thatcher with her usual technical perfection, grafting the verve of her Miranda Priestly onto the lumbering physicality of her Julia Child. Streep gives no hint of chafing against the fate in which the movie casts her character. Nor is the film much interested in Thatcher’s actual policies and their effect on British culture and the economy. For that last point you have to go to Stephen Frears' Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987), especially the squatters' camp eviction scene.

Some have detected a whiff of sexism in The Iron Lady's fascination with Thatcher's sad dotage. Indeed, no one revisits Reagan's senile last years feeding pigeons in a park. Was Margaret Thatcher any more odious than Rick Santorum or Rick Perry? At any rate, Lloyd and scriptwriter Abi Morgan's treatment of Thatcher is at least consistent with the ideology the British prime minister espoused. Her doctrine of the self-sufficiency of the individual repudiated the notion that a person's life was shaped, if not wholly determined, by the social, cultural, and historical forces surrounding him or her. Thatcher's brand of conservatism always collapsed the political economy into matters of personal moral rectitude. It's a historically inaccurate but politically consistent portrait of Thatcher to downplay her political accomplishments in favor of her descent into pitiable near madness. It's too bad, really. She may have been heartless, but at least she wasn't empty, like Reagan.

The Greatest Movie Ever Made

2012-01-10T13:45:50-06:00

In one of his periodic "Critics Picks" video features, A.O. Scott looks at Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game (1939). He begins by wondering aloud if this is the greatest movie ever made. This isn't hyberole. Once, when I was still teaching film studies, I was a member of an online film theory discussion group in which Rules of the Game emerged as the consensus best film of all time. (Interestingly, it also emerged as one of the hardest films to teach, or at least to get students to understand its greatness.) Renoir's film has also been called the most perfect film ever made, as well as the only film ever made for grownups.

What makes the film so great? First of all, its timing. It depects a society "dancing on the edge of a volcano," as one critic put it, just before World War II. Renoir was known as a warm and sympathetic person and director, but Rules is a strikingly cool and critical film--perfect for the time. Another reason may seem dryly technical, which is why students don't easily warm to the film. Renoir remains the first and undisputed master of maximizing film space for narrative purposes.

Renoir's technical can be seen in the famous bedtime scene at the chateau. (Scott shows a clip.) Renoir was famous for his deep-focus technique, which allows him to stage action on multiple planes within a single shot. His contemporaries Orson Welles and William Wyler also used deep-focus, but what set Renoir apart is that he uses deep focus not to bind front and back into a dramatic whole but to call attention to something else going on in the rear of the frame that isn't directly related to the action in the foreground. He also moves his camera, expanding the dramatic space even further. All camera movement reframes our view, but to a greater extent than any other director Renoir unsettles our sense of where we should be looking. It's a stance that is at once inclusive and corrosive, elegiac and revolutionary. Little wonder they tried to burn down the theater when Rules was first released.

This technique is the basis of Renoir's critical realism, linking him to his friend Bertolt Brecht, at least in artistic intent if not aesthetic style. Renoir and Brecht were both interested in unraveling that ideal space in which everything is suppposed to be present and, therefore, instantly comprehensible to a viewer. The social relations in the film seem clear and immutable, yet, like the guests in the bedtime scene, all the pieces are flying off into different directions, until the entire social structure crumbles before our eyes.

Awakening into the Now

2012-01-03T14:37:44-06:00

It's been a while since I've read a book-length study of Walter Benjamin. Why read the commentaries when I can read Benjamin in his own words? Besides, no major re-interpretation of his work has appeared in the past ten years.

Eli Friedlander's forthcoming book, Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait, doesn't promise to shake up Benjaminian scholarship on the 120th anniversary of Benjamin's birth. Friedlander's Benjamin is a philosopher (there are other Walter Benjamins), so the book focuses on Benajamin's place in twentieth-century philosophy. Friedlander appears to know his stuff. For example, he gives a good explanation for Benjamin's attitudes toward Marxism, which were nuanced, so say the least.

Benjamin's writing is in no hurry to free itself from the semblance of 19th-century bourgeois life in Paris. Nor does it seek to judge the world in the conventional Marxist terms such as 'false consciousness' and 'alienation.' Instead, it immerses itself in the materials of the past and thickens them until they assume the configuration of an actual dream, the dream of the collective. That's why in Benjamin the critical, revolutionary moment is called 'awakening.' Awakening is made possible only via an interpretation of the dream, which for us is the past, and the expression of its truth for the present. Accordingly, awakening is also the redemption of the past, an indirect realization of the wishes of that dream that the past has become for us, by revolutionizing our present mode of existence.

A whole lot of Benjamin's beliefs about history and representation are packed into this summary. It's one thing to eludidate what Benjamin meant by awakening--one of his more original and controversial propositions--and I'm assuming Friedlander does a good job of it. (His book is published by Harvard University Press, which has published a number of books by and about Benjamin.)

As Friedlander indicates, the concept of awakening is important because it bypasses the problems with the concepts of false consciousness and alienation. However, awakening is a daring but incomplete attempt to answer the question: How do we escape from our forgetting and partiality in order to see our age objectively? It's a question we still struggle with.

Delete and Clone

2011-12-29T10:37:46-06:00

The funeral for Kim Jong-il was notable for, among other things, its relative restraint. The departed North Korean leader was known for personally overseeing the production of feverishly precise mass spectacles. However, as the New York Times reports, some of Kim Jong-Il's fanatical attention to detail continues.

[P]erhaps it was because the scene was so nearly impeccable that someone — an overzealous North Korean photo editor? — appears to have taken issue with an errant group of men, barely noticeable in a sweeping photograph of the procession in central Pyongyang, and removed them.

The change seems harmless enough, just a little tidying up, but it also shows the banality of totalitarianism, which depends, more than anything else, on rigorous deletion.

MAS Context: ABERRATION Issue

2011-12-27T15:30:10-06:00

The 12th issue of the journal MAS Context appears to be its longest and, perhaps not coincidentally, among its strongest issues. The theme is aberration and, as co-editors Iker Gil and John Szot explain, the thirteen features all address the moments when architects and designers "abandon idealistic convention in pursuit of ideas that embrace the irreverence of material reality."

The centerpiece of the issue is the protests in the Metropol Parasol, a sprawling, blob-like structure in the Plaza de la Encarnación in Saville, Spain. Its architect, Jürgen Mayer, tells Vladimir Belogolovsky, "What I try to achieve in my work is to use it as a medium to create spaces that go beyond programmatic needs and leave open areas for potential invention of program." Sure enough, the Metropol Parasol became the staging ground for the Movimiento 15M protests last May. As Ethel Baraona Pohl explains the site was chosen because it represented the excesses of public spending in Spain. At the same time, Mayer's public space proved to be an excellent gathering point for the protesters. Derided as "pure formalism," Mayer's forms were ambiguous enough to provide, in Baraona Pohl's words, "a sort of physical manifestation of social indignation and reaction."

In the U.S. the Occupy Wall Street movement has intrigued architects hoping they had somehow shaped the movement by their designs of public space, as if the movement was born of the walls surrounding its gatherings. Architect Michael Chen debunks Malcolm Gladwell’s claim that the Occupy Wall Street movement is little more than a chimera conjured up by social media. Chen claims the protesters are using social media to forge weak-link connections, allow them to organize effectively, if not efficiently, across dispersed spaces. The protesters in Zuccotti Park have invented "hash tag planning, a high-absorbency mode of urbanism" made possible by the prevalence of profile data. The protesters are more than a collection of cellphones. Profile data makes them thicker than a normal network mode, allowing for affinities with other similar profiles across the park and across the globe. The Zuccotti Park encampment contains political tactics every bit as innovative as advanced architecture.

While disaffected residents of Saville and New York took to their public squares to register their displeasure at the current state of global capitalism, the residents of Sheffield, England simply wanted to appropriate a pair of cooling towers as the symbols of their post-industrial city. Tom Keeley started looking closely at the towers at an abandoned power plant and decided they were perfect "lo-fi and scruffy" symbols for the city. His fanzine Go galvanized support for the idea of beauifying the towers, a novel idea in England, although the Germans are quite good at this sort of thing. Unfortunately, the power company, evidently owned by Mr. Burns, got wind of the plan and promptly demolished the towers in the middle of the night.

Sheffield lost its dysfunctional landmark forever, but Emilio López-Galiacho imagines some more. He creates structures that are surrealist vignettes made of industrial clutter and bodily organs, then burnshes them to the sheen of a marketing proposal. It's hard not to read López-Galiacho's images as a commentary on the current state of the real estate market: Exquisitely engineered structures turned monstrous by a terrible financial market.

An even darker vision emerges from Lebbeus Woods' essay on the ineffable, one of the subjects banished from architecture. "The ineffable is revealed only when the curtain of normalcy around us is pulled away and we are confronted with a very different world than we imagined we inhabit," Woods writes. He provides several examples of the hard-edged, harrowing side of aberration, including the 9/11 attacks. Woods isn't proposing a building style so much as trying to inject a marginalize discourse into architecture.

Similarly, John Szot attacks architecture's "inflexible idealism" by incorpating Tokyo's chaotic urban fabric into a single residental tower constructed mostly of steel and LED lights. Szot applies randomness into a building structure that continually surprises. The building is one pleasingly askew space after another, although the design also reveals domestic space to outside inspection in ways that aren't to everyone's tastes.

In another contribution to the issue Szot talks to a pair of kindred spirits, Julian Rose and Garrett Ricciardi, partners in Formlessfinder. Rose and Ricciardi are big Georges Bataille fans, which you don't find very often among architects. They share Bataille's skepticism about the visual, denouncing image-oriented architecture, that is, buildings that exist primarily to be photographed. When buildings are mere images, they lament, "the primary output of architects, the richness of physical and spatial experience is flattened into spectacle." Their aesthetic of formlessness can best be summed up by the statement, "anything can perform structurally." You don't need a column to hold up a structure. A pile of rocks will serve. This approach makes for some unlovely buildings, but that's the point. Architecture magazines are full of lovely buildings and the American landscape is still cluttered with hideous structures.

Rose and Ricciardi's buildings are not truly formless, of course. One could dismiss their call for formlessless as just another inflexible idealism, but that would miss the point of the theme of the issue. As Gil and Szot write, "there are moments in life where the ambitions of idealistic thinking block access to the profound reality lurking within the quotidian." Most architects working today try to contextualize their designs, but generally contexts are limited to other architectural forms--older idealisms--and maybe a landscape. The contributors in ABERRATION are thinking in larger, and smaller, terms. The exporations of form and materiality featured in this issue give a sense of the innovative thinking at work in small architectural firms around the world.

There are lots of architectural websites and blogs. Most of them, however, are essentially PR outlets for developer projects. With this issue MAS Context has become one of the best showcases for innovative architectural work.

Vivian Maier: Street Photographer

2011-12-20T12:27:58-06:00

If you're like me and you still have some key presents to buy, here's a suggestion of an art book with a nice backstory--and some compelling images. Vivian Maier worked as nanny and housekeeper in New York starting in 1951, then in Chicago after 1956. Somehow she found time to wander the streets of the cities with a Rolleflex camera, snapping photographs of life in public spaces in the city. None of her photographs were published in her lifetime. In fact, they were almost lost before her death in 2009. They are collected in Vivian Maier: Street Photographer, recently published by Powerhouse Books.

The book is a series of images of ragged beauty in the Dorothea Lange manner. Maier presents a Depression-era view of urban America during the post-war boom. Women and children are of particular interest for her, as are beaten down men. The class markers are striking: A hostile glance from an upper-class matron, the jaunty smile of a working-class man with a broken nose. Maier's New York and Chicago are run-down city cluttered to discarded building materials, as if cities were being remodeled. She avoids all city landmarks. Nothing says the United States except maybe a general mode of life, a style of dress or an isolated cultural detail like a boy's coonskin cap.

Maier typically shoots in a tight frame. Her best photographs are like a slice of consciousness. Her children look once cute and wary, as if a private fantasy is being disrupted. When she pulls back from her subjects, the background reflects their inner states. In one of her most staged, abstract shots, four middle-aged women stand against a limestone wall, gazing at a low winter sun, waiting for something to carry them away.

The staginess of this image indicates there's nothing naïve about Maier's work. She was clearly self-conscious of herself as an art photographer. Although many of her photographs were candid shots, Maier was no voyeur. Urban space was a studio in which she felt very comfortable. She was as patent as a nature photographer, waiting for a long time for a scene to coalesce into meaning.

My 2011

2011-12-13T15:07:17-06:00

This has been a busy year for me. Yet, looking back on my entries for 2011 it seems like only a small portion of what I actually did made it into this space. Partly it was because of my busy work schedule; partly it was because I've been trying to find new ways of capturing and presenting what I think is interesting. I don't want to turn One-Way Street into a link-a-minute blog. While most of what I write about here originates in material elsewhere on the Internet, I try to provide some commentary and context. At the same time, I'm still for a way to fulfill Walter Benjamin's ideal of a purely presentational writing without any commentary of my own. I continue to work on it even though Benjamin himself never found a good balance.

Back in January I redesigned One-Way Street to allow for a more varied presentation. The wider main column allows for larger images and greater flexibility for video presentation. I've also introduced entries written in Storify. While the application has its limits, I like the idea of presenting a story as it develops. Perhaps as Storify develops I will be able to make better and more frequent use of it.

Today I want to review some of the key blog entries from 2011. These aren't necessarily my best entries or the most popular. They're also not a "best of" list. Other people have compiled some excellent best-of-the-year lists. The most interesting one is the Million's Year in Reading feature.

The entries below captured a moment when I learned something and I was doing my best to convey what I had learned and why it was significant.

The Seven Year Itch: The rebirth of public art in Chicago. For better and for worse.
The Art of Fielding: A perfect balance between realism and literary allusion.
Hugo: An updating of the cinema of attractions, it's the film I watched with the most personal pleasure this year.
The Good and the Ghastly: Our world, half-reborn again. It's a world of commodities drained of all metaphysical trappings.
The Cronocaos exhibit: Rem Koolhaas's provocative and cogent argument against preservation.
The battle for Prentice Women's Hospital: It's still standing, but now I know why historically significant buildings get torn down.
Reveal: Jeanne Gang's elegant account of how a small architectural firm develops their ideas. Gang won a MacArthur Genius grant this year.
Roads of Water: August Contento's languid, mesmerizing look at life on the Amazon. Like no other documentary I've ever seen. The soundtrack is by Ken Vandermark.
Enrique Sobejano's lecture on architecture as landscape: A patient explanation of some of architecture's more obscure principles.
Visitation: Jenny Erpenbeck has created a great political novel about a piece of land in eastern Germany. It's a sort of Yoknapatawpha County of the GDR.