MTV's 16 and Pregnant

According to MSN News, MTV is making a reality show called 16 and Pregnant. The programme was apparently inspired by the popularity of Juno (a film I hated) and will feature pregnant teenagers whose experiences are documented on camera and aired on MTV.

As any mother who takes her job seriously will explain, getting and being pregnant are the easiest parts of being a mom. The real challenges (and rewards) come afterward, along with late-night feedings, diaper changes, fevers, diarrhoea, trips to the emergency room, headaches, tears, frustration, a thousand tiny betrayals and reconciliations, frequent disagreements with one's partner (if he's around), disruption, improvisation, constant second-guessing, and, most of all, an often crushing and nearly overwhelming sense of total responsibility for the life of another human being.

A better idea for a show would be to send cameras to document the lives of 19 year old single parents of toddlers, who work all day at dead end service sector jobs while mouth-breathing daycare staff raise their kids for them, or their conversations with patronizing social workers who don't have an iota of genuine feeling for these women or their children. Maybe the show could also interview young fathers who have abandoned their kids and ask them how it feels to know that their children will grow up wondering why their fathers didn't love them, or that they are unlikely to ever meet their grandchildren, who also stand a decent chance of growing up fatherless.

Of course, MTV would never encourage today's teens, pregnant or otherwise, to grow up and take life seriously. Teenagers and childish twentysomethings can be persuaded to buy all kinds of crap they don't need, while hard-nosed adults who actually have to think about where their money goes probably give far less of it to the vacuous, opportunistic fashion peddlers at MTV.

I wonder if we'll see 16 year old girls getting pregnant in order to have a shot at making it onto national television. Let's hope today's young women are smarter than that.

(Image from Jupiter Images)

Juno Was a Lousy Movie

SOAPBOX ALERT: I usually try to avoid both preaching and critiquing movies at TPM, but sometimes a guy's just gotta harangue. So here I go:

Juno is only barely a movie about bringing new life into the world. It's primarily a postmodern moral experiment to see if ironic, near-weightless characters can have their cake and eat it too. To achieve this, it has to abandon the traditional stuff of reproductive drama, like territoriality, responsibility, and the powerful, conflicting bonds that exist between lovers, parents and offspring, in favour of an idealized grrl-topia where men behave like passive, indulgent milquetoasts or sexual predators, and mothers-to-be are somehow empowered by acting like selfish, irresponsible babies themselves.

The infant that arrives at the film's end is passed off to Garner's character with hardly a tear (says Juno in the voiceover: "She was never really ours, anyway"), and comes off more like an afterthought or prop than an actual human being. This child is inexplicably delivered from a promising domestic situation in which both parents are present (and in love!) along with three biological grandparents and a committed step-spouse, and into the hands of a single mother who has demonstrably poor taste in men--the equivalent of this in poker would be to throw out an entire royal flush for a queen and a joker. No one with any real-life childbearing experience could write a movie in which allegedly sane people think and act this way.

Juno tacitly encourages young women to think that pregnancy is all about them. It isn't. Juno also falsely suggests that giving up a baby after carrying it around for 9 months isn't much harder than getting one's appendix out. Whether one is pro-choice or pro-life is irrelevant--everyone should be pro-responsibility and pro-reality, and Juno is neither. It is a travesty, a celebration of narcissism and immaturity, and it's sad that real teenagers who don't know any better are going to take cues from this ridiculous film.

Blinkered selfishness and intelligent self-interest are not the same thing at all. The sooner more feminist-influenced artists figure this out, the sooner they'll stop making shitty movies like Juno.

(Image from www.dorkgasm.com)

Happy Victoria Day

Since 1977, the spirit of Queen Victoria has probably kept more Canadians home from work than whiplash and sciatica put together. I plan on staying in my pyjamas until at least noon, and I'm raising a coffee and Bailey's to the old girl right now. Cheers!

Ornithorynque

My daughter Caitlin taught me a new word: ornithorynque. Name and animal compose a weird and fantastic totem.

(Image from www.ryanphotographic.com)

Goodbye, Albert Hoffman (1906-2008)

Albert Hoffman died of a heart attack on April 29, 2008. He was 102. Hoffman was the first scientist to synthesize LSD. He also conducted research into the chemical composition of chitin.

Psychedelic technology, including drugs, has likely played an important and poorly understood role in human evolutionary history, and I think there is a place in the future of humankind for responsible psychedelic aesthetics and epistemology. However, the widespread use and abuse of LSD and similar drugs since the 1960's has resulted in numerous injuries and deaths. It's also helped propagate a superficial, irresponsible culture of "junk spirituality" that arguably paved the way for the worst excesses of the New Age movement. Hoffman, in any case, was a scientist rather than a drug guru. His gift to posterity is ambivalent but potentially very valuable as well.

(Alex Grey's wonderfully kitschy painting appears courtesy of www.reason.com)

Caitlin and Chloe Talk Gnostic

I overheard this hilarious bit of conversation between my daughters Caitlin (8) and Chloe (6) as they sat on the floor drawing this afternoon. It came right out of the blue:

CAITLIN: Mother Nature is God's wife.

CHLOE: If we have God in our hearts, then he had a ton of babies. In God's world, boys get pregnant.

CAITLIN: They'd be like, "Is it Mother Nature Junior, or God Junior?"

(Image from www.membres.lycos.fr)

Milton's Satan

...Thus far these beyond
Compare of mortal prowess, yet observed
Their dread commander: he above the rest
In shape and gesture stood proudly eminent
Stood like a Tow'r; His form had not yet lost
All her Original brightness, nor appear'd
Less than archangel ruined and th'excess
Of Glory obscur'd: As when the Sun new ris'n
Looks through the Horizontal misty Air
Shorn of his Beams, or from behind the Moon
In dim Eclipse disastrous twilight sheds
On half the Nations, and with fear of change
Perplexes Monarchs. Darken'd so, yet shone
Above them all th'Arch Angel: but his face
Deep scars of Thunder had entrenched, and care
Sat on his faded cheek, but under Brows
Of dauntless courage, and considerate Pride
Waiting revenge: cruel his eye, but cast
Signs of remorse and passion to behold
The fellows of his crime, the followers rather
(Far other once beheld in bliss) condemn'd
For ever now to have their lot in pain,
Millions of Spirits for his fault amerc't
Of Heav'n, and from Eternal Splendors flung
For his revolt, yet faithful how they stood,
Their Glory wither'd. As when Heaven's Fire
Hath scath'd the Forest Oaks, or Mountain Pines,
With singed top their stately growth though bare
Stands on the blasted Heath. He now prepar'd
To speak; whereat their doubl'd ranks they bend
From Wing to Wing, and half enclose him round
With all his Peers: attention held them mute.
Thrice he assay'd, and thrice in spite of scorn,
Tears such as Angels weep, burst forth: at last
Words interwove with sighs found out their way.

"O Myriads of immortal Spirits, O Powers
Matchless, but with th'Almighty, and that strife
Was not inglorious, though th'event was dire,
As this place testifies, and this dire change
Hateful to utter, but what power of mind
Forseeing or presaging, from the Depth
Of knowledge past or present, could have fear'd,
How such united forces of Gods, how such
As stood like these, could ever know repulse?
For who can yet believe, though after loss,
That all these puissant legions, whose exile
Hath emptied Heav'n, shall fail to re-ascend
Self-rais'd, and repossess their native seat.
For me, be witness all the Host of Heav'n,
If counsels different, or danger shunn'd
By me, have lost our hopes, but he who reigns
Monarch in Heav'n, till then as one secure
Sat on his throne, upheld by old repute,
Consent or custom, and his Regal State
Put forth at full, but still his strength conceal'd,
Which tempted our attempt, and wrought our fall.
Hence forth his might we know, and know our own
So as not either to provoke, or dread
New war, provok't, our better part remains
To work in close design, by fraud or guile
What force elected not: that he no less
At length from us may find, who overcomes
By force hath overcome but half his foe.
Space may produce new Worlds; whereof so rife
There went a fame in Heav'n that he ere long
Intended to create, and therein plant
A generation, whom his choice regard
Should favor equal to the Sons of Heav'n:
Thither, if but to pry, should be perhaps
Our first eruption, thither or elsewhere:
For this Infernal Pit shall never hold
Celestial Spirits in Bondage, nor th'Abyss
Long under darkness cover. But these thoughts
Full counsel must mature: Peace is despair'd,
For who can think Submission? War then, War
Open or understood must be resolv'd."

He spake: and to confirm his words, out-flew
Millions of flaming swords, drawn from the thighs
Of mighty Cherubim: the sudden blaze
Far round illumin'd hell: High they rag'd
Against the Highest, and fierce with grasp'd arms
Clash'd on their sounding shields the din of war,
Hurling defiance toward the vault of Heav'n.

(Paradise Lost 1:587-669. Image of Gustave Doré's woodcut from www.all-art.org)

We're Apes

No One Wants to Look Dumb

Faze (v.): to disturb, daunt, or unsettle, from the Middle English fesen, meaning to frighten or drive away.

This word is not spelled p-h-a-s-e. If a young child, a supermarket cashier with a grade 6 education or a non-native speaker of English made a mistake like this, I wouldn't bat an eyelash. To find it on MSN News, a site that has recently taken to advertising itself with the arrogant slogan "No one wants to look dumb," is just irritating.

If you don't want to look dumb, MSN, perhaps you should encourage your editorial team to crack a book once in a while.

(For the record, it's not pronounced "fizz," either. Image from thechaly.files.wordpress.com)

Black Box Pluralism

"Despite its claims, 'pluralism' is in itself, paradoxically, a unifying perspective, but a rather procrustean one. What it does is reduce all cultural differences to a sort of grid of cultural black boxes laid out over an infinite plane, boxes whose external form is safely measurable but whose contents are incommensurable and thus unknowable, and which are, as it were, the fundamental monads or quanta of reality. Geometrically it resembles the characteristic grid-design of the American city, or the relationship between departments in the American multiversity. Though pluralism forbids any attempt to perceive one cultural box as containing another, and thus revealing a comparable and measurable internal structure, it is itself a kind of gigantic box containing all other boxes as its subordinate material. Thus, like relativism, it contains a subtle hegemonic ambition of its own.

"One way of describing what is the problem with pluralism is to say that if the universe is curved, even a simple sphere, no grid of equal rectilinear blocks can cover (or 'tile') it without overlap. Specialization, and the definition of smaller and smaller cultural units, might be seen as the desperate resource of an intellectual culture trying to solve exactly this problem. If the world's squares are small enough, perhaps the distortions of the world's curvature will somehow go away" (Frederick Turner 1991, Tempest, Flute and Oz: Essays on the Future pp. 30-1).

(Image from blog.jovoto.com)

The Cremaster Cycle: Treading Water in a Sea of Retarded Sexuality and Bad Poetry

Matthew Barney's film series, the Cremaster Cycle, is a cognitively retarded and symbolically barren exercise in tedium and bad taste. Barney's take on biology is more of a superficial pose than a serious exploratioin, and the sexual logic underlying his artistic vision is not evolutionary (i.e. human) but rather postmodern and Freudian. He throws around terms like "system" and "entropy," but makes no effort to link his use of these concepts to the notion of complex dynamical systems as they are now understood to occur in nature and culture (see James Gleick's Chaos and A Blessed Rage for Order by Alexander Argyros, both of which predate the Cremaster Cycle, for an introduction to this topic). Sport, likewise, appears in his work as a pseudo-theme, but since there are no distinct players or rules (not even the dynamic, evolving ones described by game theory), the treatment, again, is superficial.

What I can't understand is why Barney gets such rave reviews--his work appears on the covers of art history textbooks, and people seem to be throwing money at him to slop vaseline all over the Guggenheim (only an American artist could be so self-consciously Eurotrash). I guess the sophistos and trendoids of the moneyed academic art world have mistaken his vagueness and obscurity for depth, so no one wants to be the poor benighted rube who asks why the emperor isn't wearing any clothes.

The film series' only (dubious) value, it seems to me, is as a study of how an ill-conceived "closed aesthetic system" quickly succumbs to entropy, resulting in artless and sterile mutations like a grotesque half-sheep/half bagpipe or a rubber tire from which a pair of testicles dangles uselessly. It may be argued that this is the point, and that Barney's work succeeds as a depiction of aesthetic schizophrenia and metaphysical failure, but it's surely foolish to praise bad art for its ability to express bad ideas. Serious art, whatever its form and content, gives expression to enduring human themes like hope, promise and gravity--ideas which are absent from Barney's inane films.

Here's a link to a documentary-length interview with Barney that shows some of his work, and here's another to a Cremaster trailer. See if you can figure out what he means by terms like "mythology," "narrative," and "character"--I don't think he even knows.

Rather than releasing his films in a low cost, mass-market format like everyone else, Barney has pressed a limited run of 20 DVD's and auctioned them off in gussied up packaging for over $100,000 each. The unwashed philistines and non-cognoscenti will have to settle for a 30 minute excerpt from Cremaster 3, or maybe they will be able to find Neville Wakefield's overpriced book in a public library. Walter Benjamin, (the Marxist author of "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" whose ideas about art and mass production have influenced 3 generations of "anti-establishment" elitists) would be impressed, no doubt, but I suspect Barney's marketing strategy has more to do with the fact that on some level he realizes that the common consumer, who is unburdened by a Yale education in postmodern pretension, would quickly see the Cremaster films for the malarky that they are.

THE BOTTOM LINE: If civilization fails when art and culture stop being sexy, then the Cremaster Cycle is a crime against humanity. I, for one, would rather watch a clown die of cancer than sit through all 7.5 hours of Barney's incoherent, self-indulgent, desperately ugly horseshit.

(image from www.soundopinions.org)

Goodbye, Arthur C. Clark (1917-2008)

Arthur C. Clark had a very good run. In addition to being an excellent science fiction writer, he was also an accomplished scientist. Childhood's End is probably my favorite of his books, although I also liked Songs of Distant Earth for more sentimental reasons.

(Image from latimes.com)

Happy Early Easter

My friend Ondra sent me this:

Bass with Balls #1: Music Man Stingray

The Music Man Stingray was first produced in 1976. Its physical similarity to the Fender Precision bass can be explained by the fact that it was designed by disgruntled former Fender employees, including Leo Fender himself, who sold his company to CBS in 1965. The classic Stingray, like the one pictured here, boasts a single humbucking pickup in the bridge position and an active 2 band EQ. Fingerstyle players who are used to anchoring their thumb on a neck pickup will have a tough time with the Stingray, as the strings have less springiness and punch when plucked way down by the bridge.

The Stingray sounds like a sabre-toothed tiger in heat humping a hive full of honeybees. Not only are its low mids thicker than Ricki Lake's ankles, but their complexity is fractaline, layering a piano-like clarity and sustain and a fret-buzzy growl to create a tone that's almost synesthetic. Properly amplified, the Stingray will cut through any racket made by even the noisiest guitarist like a knife through warm butter, without the honking and blatting characteristic of its Fender cousins. Its tone is perfect for funk, rock, punk, or metal, but the single pickup limits its tonal range, and if I were playing soft jazz, R&B or country I would probably reach for a different bass (likely a Fender Jazz). Although the Stingray's quality is legendary, it sacrifices versatility for personality, and some bass players just don't like it. I respect this. it takes more balls to be original, warts and all, than to be some kind of half-assed chameleon.

This bass is famous for its rugged construction (its body is solid ash and its neck is attached by six fat bolts--that's 2 more than are holding my Fender Jazz 5 together) as well as its quiet electronics (it's called a "humbucker," after all). Lower-end manufacturers have recently started copying it more often, but it still trails far behind the P-bass in terms of how often its design is ripped off. The most noteworthy budget Stingray clone is probably the Ibanez ATK, which, in my opinion, is a stylish piece of junk like everything else built by Ibanez.

Famous rock bassists who play a Stingray include Cliff Williams of AC/DC, Flea (who has since switched to a signature model Modulus Stingray clone that costs as much as a used Toyota), Tim Commeford of Rage Against the Machine (who switched to the Fender Jazz bass after Rage's first album) and Justin Chancellor of Tool (who switched to Zon basses about halfway through the recording of Aenima). I don't know why all the Stingray players are jumping ship--my guess is their great bass tone made them famous enough to afford fancier axes like Zons and Moduli. Even Kurt Cobain traded in his trusty Volvo for a Lexus in the end.

Here are some videos featuring the Stingray: The Red Hot Chili Pepper's "Aeroplane" (the Stingray's forte is slap-and-pop, and it really stands out in this song) and Rage Against the Machine's "Bomb Track."

H.R. Giger

The biotechnological aesthetic in H.R. Giger's work is interesting, but I think its pessimism, its reptillian coldness, and its distorted or ugly faces and figures keep it from being beautiful. I'd love to see something similar with more emphasis on the informational rather than the mechanical and industrial, and on consciousness over blindness and violent manipulation. Some arboreal and mammalian (i.e. human) motifs might open up the possibility of a narrative with more than one or two dimensions (an exploration of evolutionary [dis]continuity, or self-reference, maybe?) while still allowing room for the treatment of the tragic and the grotesque. Too bad I can't draw or paint, so I all I'm basically doing is complaining that no one will make this art for me.