The Breaking Time

Magnifying a subculture, pt. II (or: why are there no more feathers?)

El Circo took them.

A little while ago, Jenka Gurfinkel wrote a brilliant post linking the fashion-induced feather shortage to the emergence of the Circus subculture and style, coming out of Burning Man:

Our story begins almost 12 years ago, in a little town in Oregon, by the name of Ashland, where a group of kids came together to start a circus performance troupe called, El Circo. The group would gain recognition within the Burning Man culture for the extravagant parties they threw at the festival, featuring lavish fire performances, a large, geodesic dome venue, and a top-notch sound system that attracted world-renowned music acts to perform there. In a 2005 San Francisco Bay Guardian article on the effect that the various groups within the Burning Man community have had on San Francisco nightlife — an impact which now extends to the entire west coast’s, and arguably global, dance culture — the writer paid particular attention to the influence of El Circo...

The whole history's fascinating, and it brings up something I've touched on here before: how a relatively small subculture magnifies its influence. In the previous case, I focused on the reasons aging Hollywood narcissists show up in so many productions.

El Circo's case is very different, and more positive. But something of the same underlying process is at work, with a difference.

Now, Ashland has a population just over 20,000. Unlike Hollywood, it's not a metropolitan hub plugged into media that can quickly magnify the influence of its cultures. However, El Circo were really damn creative and instead plugged into a subculture, in the form of Burning Man, that could magnify that in its annual, temporary metropolis.

Their panache and style is unique enough that others pick it up after the citizenry of Black Rock City dispersed to their separate corners, including those in aforementioned metropolitan hubs. More mainstream art subcultures, always craving an infusion of the hot new thing, pick it up. Given time, you have Steven Tyler in feathers, pissed off fly fishers, and one tribe out of Ashland that's spurred a larger movement while changing the way people dress around the world.

There's a reason why the third word in Coilhouse's alt culture mantra is INFECT.

Now, fringe artistic subcultures gaining massive popularity is not new, despite the fact that every generation or so the same subcultures seem to forget the process occurs. However, the incubator of Burning Man is, relatively speaking, as is the way that more globalized communications decrease the necessity for El Circo or similar groups to plug in to more mainstream cultural networks to get their message out. There's other ways to magnify now, and they're seemingly less dependent on location than before.

More food for thought.

Update: Talking with Gurfinkel via Twitter last night, she added an important caveat: the tipping point for the El Circo style came after some of its designers moved to Los Angeles. Metropoli remain important, and LA in particular remains a major magnifier for entertainment/fashion subcultures, as its been for a number of decades. As with any time of turmoil, old and new methods of spreading an infection are at work at the same time.

The Rundown: Razing Arizona edition

Flank attack!

* LA boycotts Arizona. Arizona threatens to cut off power LA invades Arizona, rounds up supporters of draconian anti-immigrant law and deports them to Mexico. Ok, so I'm making that last part up (though, as Grumpy Owl points out, LA already has their marching music).

On another note, the fight over Arizona's law illustrates a number of interesting breaking points and important shifts. The first is how ill-equipped state lines mostly drawn in the 19th century are to dealing with today's environmental and resource issues. One of the major things states fight about is resources: who's stealing whose water, power, etc. Part of this is because environmental regions are hacked up, pie-style, between any number of arbitrary boundaries. The basic support system for a modern city stretches across many political jurisdictions, something that makes tackling disagreements or problems extremely difficult.

Also, notice that it's LA fighting Arizona: a city versus a state. Within Arizona, Phoenix is notable as a hot-bed of opposition to the law. As more and more people move to cities, they become greater centers of political power, often deeply at odds with the surrounding territory. Forget Red States and Blue States (one of the dumbest political memes of the past decade), look at a more accurate map and you'll see that the biggest political divide is urban-rural.

* New Social Networking Site Changing the Way, Oh, Christ, Forget It "Let someone else report on this bullshit." The Onion goes there. Spectacularly.

* Is the Drug War more militarized than the military? A soldier argues that raids in Afghanistan and Iraq often have more restrictions than SWAT teams busting in the doors of suspected drug traffickers. An interesting read.

* Robot conducts wedding in Tokyo No word yet on if the infernal machine seduced the bride beforehand. 

An interesting example of how culture can drive technology as much as the other way around. Japan has more (and often more sophisticated) robots than anywhere else in the world. This is partly because Japan's is a first-world industrial power with the resources to build such devices. However, there's also a cultural fascination that shapes what it builds with that capability, and what ends it's put to.

Speaking of...

* Because Every Country is the Best at Something Yes, Japan actually is number 1 in the world in the robotics department. The US leads in, uh, serial killers (send them to fight the robots, I smell a hit movie here). The UK leads in CCTV cameras and France in sugar beets. It's a strange world.

* The French Anti-Burqa Jihad An excellent column by Indian atheist Shikha Dalmia on the crusading and dictatorial impulses behind France's new law. Includes this passage, which could stand to be repeated often:

Nor will it do to justify this ban on grounds that it will save women from having to make painful personal choices. It is not the job of liberal governments to make personal tradeoffs painless--just possible. Giving individuals the right to exit without fearing physical retaliation provides an automatic check on oppressive traditions without taking away the crucial tool that minority communities in liberal polities have to perpetuate themselves: moral suasion. Banning the burqa or the Sikh turban or the Jewish yarmulke is tantamount to telling observant Muslims, Sikhs and Jews that they don't have a right to exist.

Despite years of sectarian bloodletting, if Indians still intuitively understand this and take a benign view of the burqa, it is hardly because they are inherently more rational. It is because their secularism has been shaped by India's dominant religion--Hinduism--whose non-monotheistic ethos allows the space for multiple faiths. In this sense, Hinduism is perhaps more profoundly in sync with liberal tolerance than monotheistic faiths.

More crucially, however, there is nothing in Hinduism that makes an individual's spiritual salvation anyone's business except the individual herself. By contrast, Hitchens, et al, who have been raised in the cradle of a Christian civilization, have imbibed a certain comfort level with the crusading notion that people can--and ought to--be saved even against their will. Hence, it does not matter if Muslim women don't regard the burqa as oppressive. They have to be given sartorial liberation in the same way that the heathens need to be given spiritual liberation.

This is a profoundly anti-liberal and anti-secular idea. Indeed, if the French and Hitchens were serious about either secularism or liberalism, instead of asking Muslim women to shed the burqa, they would be shedding their own proselytizing prejudice against it.

Amen. I've always found it interesting that the anti-Roman Christian sects ended up becoming the heir to the Roman Empire. Similarly, I can't help but wonder if a certain strand of atheism won't end up embodying the crusading and socially meddlesome mentality of its worst foes. The wheel turns...

Fashion on a leash

So a casting agency is trying not to be a casting agency but, apparently, a high-level subversion factory, despite doing work for unconventional types like Old Navy and Avon.

So they produce a "stylized take on the casting process," an oddly formal set of words that absolutely fail to describe the ominous witch's brew of arousal, group-mind claustrophobia, desperate striving and all-around deviance that is their one and only promo video, a work I also have to give credit for the best use of a Stooges song I've seen in ages.

So yes, if all of the above doesn't describe a product symptomatic of the lovely Breaking Time in which we live, I don't know what does. 

And yes, it does actually manage to be subversive: I still don't know quite what to think of the damn thing.

Surveillance technology defeated — by makeup

Looks like warpaint, does it not? Image by Adam Harvey

You've heard about facial recognition software, right? It's one of the many next steps in surveillance technology that raises serious privacy concerns due to its apparent ability to help track our every move.

Turns out it can be defeated by makeup.

The non-red-squared faces in the image above are makeup patterns that, in tests by design studio AH Projects rendered the faces underneath unreadable to such a program. 

I don't usually address technology here, but I focus on this particular incident to return to one of my favorite themes: how drastically foolish an over-reliance on supposedly quick-fix technological methods is. 

Let's review: Horrendously expensive drones kill 50 civilians for every militant, while soldiers armed with $60 bayonets kill 20 militants with no casualties. Despite all the fancy geo-engineering methods proposed, the cheapest, most efficient, least dangerous way to planet tinker is still planting f'ing trees. 

And elaborate surveillance networks are trumped by a few dollars worth of makeup.

There's a lesson here.

P.S.- Plus, in the designs above, I smell a subcultural style waiting to be born. How long before police seek a ban on increasingly popular elaborate facepaint because of the invisibility it provides?

We've got your number, Mr. Burton

Via Coilhouse comes this damn funny College Humor sketch on Tim Burton's movie-making formula. I lost it around the point where his phone only has Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter in it.

This might be blasphemy for my generation, but I've never been a particularly big fan of Burton. He's definitely a genius and has made a number of classics, but with a few exceptions (Nightmare before Christmas) his movies have never really struck a chord with me. I'll admit this is purely a personal taste, as plenty of filmmakers hew to their one style tightly enough that they're ripe targets for a similar sketch, even when I happen to like their tricks (hello, Guy Ritchie).

But the ensuing discussion over in Coilhäuser land does open up the question of when a director's particular vision (which they all have) descends into self-parody or laziness. I think Burton's veering in that direction. However, my favorite Burton film in years, Sweeney Todd, was actually strengthened, I think, by an established story balancing some of Burton's tendencies. It helped that at one point in particular he even seemed in on the joke.

As noted, I'm not a Burton devotee, and thus less inclined to cut him some slack, but I'll offer a counter example in Martin Scorcese. While some of his output (Goodfellas, Casino) is certainly open to criticisms of descending into formula, it's worth comparing the more recent Gangs of New York, The Departed and Shutter Island. They do all feature Leonardo DiCaprio and I've got my individual criticisms, but for all Scorsese's common themes, he tells a drastically different story each movie.

I'd like to hear from you film buffs out there on this topic, especially the Burton fans.

All that said, it's a good time to offer up something from Danny Elfman that is decidedly not "lalalalalalaala bumbumbum didlydidly." Enjoy.

Jodorowsky, Dali, and the Dune that never was

Moebius' concept sketches for Duke Leto Atreides, Sardaukar soldier. More here.

After reading an interesting article on Alejandro Jodorowsky's art in Coilhouse 4, I decided to refresh my knowledge of the man, limited mostly to his films and Metal Hurlant work.

So I'm poking around his wikipedia article when I find this:

In December 1974, a French consortium led by Jean-Paul Gibon purchased the film rights to Dune from Arthur P. Jacobs. Jodorowsky was set to direct. In 1975, Jodorowsky planned to film the story as a ten hour feature, in collaboration with Salvador Dali, Orson Welles, Gloria Swanson, David Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin, Alain Delon, Hervé Villechaize and Mick Jagger. The music would be composed by Pink Floyd, Magma, Henry Cow and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Jodorowsky set up a pre-production unit in Paris consisting of Chris Foss, a British artist who designed covers for science fiction periodicals, Jean Giraud (Moebius), a French illustrator who created and also wrote and drew for Metal Hurlant magazine, and H. R. Giger. Moebius began designing creatures and characters for the film, while Foss was brought in to design the film's space ships and hardware. Giger began designing the Harkonnen Castle based on Moebius' storyboards, and Dali was cast as the Emperor with a reported salary of $100,000 an hour. His son Brontis Jodorowsky was to play Paul. Dan O'Bannon was to head the special effects department.

Dali and Jodorowsky began quarreling over money, and just as the storyboards, designs, and script were finished, the financial backing dried up. Frank Herbert travelled to Europe in 1976 to find that $2 million of the $9.5 million budget had already been spent in pre-production, and that Jodorowsky's script would result in a 14-hour movie ("It was the size of a phonebook", Herbert later recalled). Jodorowsky took creative liberties with the source material, but Herbert said that he and Jodorowsky had an amicable relationship.

I believe "holy awesome bat-shit" is the correct expression. The tale only gets stranger from there.

The Mystery of Princess Hijab

Photo via Tracy Clark-Flory

"My work supports right-wing radicalism like Taxi Driver supports cabbies. I'm using the hijab for myself."

-Princess Hijab

For the past few years, a mysterious street artist, supposedly a 21-year-old Muslim woman, has hit Parisian billboards, shrouding the models gracing the slick advertisements in black hijabs. 

Her work, has at times, seemed a Rorschach test for the culture wars. Critics swore that she was an Islamic fundamentalist, intent on blotting out images of sexuality. Others saw her works as sly feminist subversion, pointing out that she often left model's legs naked and covered male figures as well as female. 

In a lot of ways, what she's doing is not that different from how enterprising fetishists mutated corsets and nun's habits to whole new purposes.

Or is it?

United State of Pop 2009

It's another year, and another brilliant mashup of the year's Billboard Top 25 from DJ Earworm. When I remarked on last year's installment, the thing that struck me most was "a plaintive, shivering yearning for an easier time."

This year, the visuals made more of an impact: bleak scenes of home or work life, broken up by wild, otherworldly parties. The popular mind wants to get the fuck away, dammit, possibly to a bizarre sonic future ruled by will.i.am and Fergie.

I also have a new appreciation for why Illuminati temptress Lady Gaga has caused such a ruckus: in this visual landscape, her quasi-fetish fantasias stand out as comparatively inventive.

I am also predicting that we will see the usual wailing about how interchangeable and plastic music has become. So I'm offering the vaccine early; here's the top songs from 1989. Popular frequently doesn't mean influential. Personally, I remain thankful for our era of audio mutation, when the lowliest drone song can become musical gold.

The Rundown: Wars and rumors of herbivores

How the Taliban Take a Village - A special forces NCO breaks down, in detail, how the Taliban take over an Afghan village. Fascinating stuff. The fact that sticks out the most is that it only takes about 25-50 fighters to control an entire valley of 2,500 - 5,000 people. Power is social, and so is war.

In Japan, 'Herbivore' boys subvert idea of manhood Sixty percent of young Japanese men in their 20s and 30s identify themselves as "herbivores," a subculture that embraces passivity while eschewing the traditional role expected of Japanese men. 

I had to roll my eyes at the end, when one of the herbivores says they don't date because they're scared of assertive "carnivore" women (please, NPR, do an article on that subculture). Boo. Nonetheless, it seems a pretty substantial shift in gender roles is taking place across the Pacific.

Ten Notable Apocalypses That (Obviously) Didn't Happen Kudos to Smithsonian for this timely, hilarious list. My personal favorite:

"Our Earth is degenerate in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching."

That's from an Assyrian clay tablet, circa 2800 B.C. "Every man wants to write a book" is the most awesome apocalyptic sign I've ever seen. Forget global warming, it's over-literacy that will doom us all.

Keep hastening the end, readers.

The Rundown: Crushing protests, rising seas and locking up Polanski

* Protest as National Security Threat The LRAD sonic weapons system made its debut yesterday against a small group of protesters rallying against the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh. Leave it to John Robb to weave that bit of news together with collapsing government legitimacy, increasing paranoia and the militarization of police. An excellent short piece that serves as a reminder of why Global Guerrillas is still essential reading.

* Rising Seas could lead to 'ghost states' The Guardian article mostly deals with island nations like the Maldives and Tuvalu that are threatened with literal physical extinction by rising sea levels. 

It's worth noting however, that as the idea of the nation-state as the default governing method for a given populace has spread, there are a number of "ghost nations" already on the globe, usually with violent effects. Kurdistan, Western Sahara, Kosovo, Somalia and Palestine all provide perfect examples, as do "ghost nations" that have managed to hack their way into existence during the last century (Israel, East Timor, Vietnam). 

* Johann Hari really, really, really doesn't like the fashion industry Just in case you were wondering. Hari can play far too much of the scold sometimes (see his ranting on the Evils of Quentin Tarantino), and in this case I think he focuses on the industry's narrow top too much. But he's got a definite point.

P.S. - He also loathes the Queen Mother. He's got a point there too. Aristocracy in general is worth despising.

* Roman Polanski raped a child Salon's Kate Harding delivers a feminist tour de force in the wake of the famed director's arrest. She re-asserts the original, brutal facts of the case in stark terms and delivers a judgement that's hard to argue with: Polanski may be a amazing artist, he may, on balance, be a good person, but his crime was vile enough that he should pay, no matter the amount of time that has passed.

I was originally of two minds on this case, and I have to admit that Mary Elizabeth Williams makes some compelling points in her rebuttal to Harding. But the sight of similarly notable directors lining up to defend Polanski has pushed me to side with Harding's argument. Pieces like Harding's are a necessary antidote to the idiotic cries of filmerati that Polanski's arrest represents an attack on free speech. If there were extenuating circumstances or illegalities on the prosecution's side, Polanski has had 31 years to bring them up and press his case.

There's a sickening subtext here I've seen trotted out whenever an artist does something reprehensible: that because someone has made compelling works of art, they are immune from justice.

Bullshit. Making pretty pictures or touching songs doesn't lessen the damage one iota when someone beats their spouse, acts like a psycho, shills for fascists or rapes a child. Polanski's made some of my favorite movies: that doesn't matter. Justice shouldn't care, and Roman Polanski should get the book thrown at him.