I cant make those sums work for any variant of the way we live in the West: either were going to fix it through as-yet-unknown technologies, or were going to be the caboose, the last part of the human race to live in a sustainable way. Were the last, not the first, and we have to face the fact that our lack of sustainability is a crime and a shame . . .

via Boing Boing.

I don’t really buy all that let’s-all-become-smallholders stuff, if I’m honest. And I don’t even know what a caboose is. I say we take off into space and let the hippies have their planet back.

But it’s worth adding to your cognitive-bias armoury that for every ‘first’ there may well be a more important ‘last’ we’re missing, obscured by the shortness of our lives, our lack of history or something else for which we’re less blameless.

And vice versa.

I don’t follow them. That would probably be weird.

They’re flippin’ brilliant. A lot of them have sections titled ‘My GIFs’. Supporting gay marriage is a thing.

They do this thing where they say stuff like, “Reblog if you’re up to no good!”. And they send round these little questionnaires where they answer 20 questions about their favourite music and their star sign and shit like that.

Today I saw one that asked the question, “What was your first URL?”

The original piece from Clive James is about using brand names in poetry. So I’m taking it totally out of context.

It could be said that verve is the only thing that does travel. Perhaps we need a more expensive word for it. The word “rhythm” is overworked for something so hard to pin down, but at least it gives you the idea that vocabulary is not enough. The fresh words must lead to a phrase, and the phrase must have impetus, which must help to propel the line, and so on. Otherwise nothing is being built except a lexicon.

via Product Placement in Modern Poetry by Clive James.

Clive’s final paragraph includes this thought:
Evocation needs more than notation: it needs impetus.

It’s the impetus I’m interested in here.

PS Ben Hammersley was a late addition. And this shows. Bite me.

After WWII, Betjeman was often disparaged as a social throwback, and today, although his prominence is no longer seriously questioned, there is still a remarkable list of important anthologies which do not include any of his work. But at the time his fellow craftsmen knew that he was at least as up-to-date as they were. Geoffrey Grigson might have turned down Betjeman’s poems for New Verse, but Eliot wanted them for The Criterion. There would have been no doubt of Betjeman’s originality if he had taken Faber’s offer when it came. With Eliot in command of the editorial board, Faber already had the power of an establishment institution specifically equipped for deciding which new poets were modern enough to last. But . . . Betjeman stuck with the more fustian house of John Murray because, as a cultural conservationist dedicated to the preservation of a vanishing England, he didn’t want his books to look modern at all. He didn’t want a front cover showing nothing but a typeface: he wanted little drawings of herbaceous festoons and time-honored architectural doodads, like illustrations from Ruskin. He did, however, from within the neat boxes of his four-square stanzas, sound more modern than anybody.

And it’s true, I guess. Betjeman is closer, in my head, to Constable than Eliot. And they made him a knight of the realm? Overrated.

It’s odd to think that, between them, Faber and John Murray got to decide who’s modern, and who’s not. (As it is, in all probability, just as conveniently explanatory and easy to overstate.) Nevertheless, anybody old enough to know who they are will appreciate the truth of it.

Old white men used to be able to decide an awful lot. They’re not all men any more (although most of them are still white), but, as Ben Hammersely puts it, “the world is currently run by a generation whose upbringing has left them intellectually unable to be deal with modernity.”

The government, and the security industry, in this country and elsewhere, have spent the past ten years really blowing it. Time and time again there has been a demonstration of security theatre, or overreaction, or overstatement of the risks in hand. From liquids in airports to invading Iraq, no one believes this stuff any more.

While there is no doubt that religious extremism, whatever the religion, has presented a risk to life, that threat has been so overstated as to render any other warnings, on any other subject – including the one in hand today – completely impotent.

A world where Al-Qaeda can be described by the government as an existential threat to the UK, when it is patently not, is a world where warnings about updating your virus scanner because of Chinese cyberwarriors or Russian mafia will be ignored as yet more paranoid security bullshit.

Despite the fact that it probably isn’t.

I’m seeing a classic gestalt-shift thing here.

(You know gestalt shifts? They’re those pictures where you can see two things, but not at the same time. There’s gestalt shift images scattered throughout the post.)

In the past, we had an infrastructure capable of deciding who and what was modern, and what was not. And pretty much all of us benefited from it. The occasional Betjeman got shunted to one side, I guess. But, in exchange, we had all that stuff sifted into convenient piles for us to digest, comfortably.

And now we have an infrastructure where we’re all capable of deciding who and what is modern, and what is not. And pretty much all of us benefit from it.

And, of course, the opposite is true. All of us suffered under the old system too. As we will suffer under the new.

In the past, though, you knew who you were rebelling against, I guess. If you were a poet on the rampage, you could go and burn down Faber or throw brickbats at Eliot.

Like Ben Hammersely, I’m fairly confident who to blame at the moment for the wrongness. Our current generation of leaders are totally and utterly incompetent, when it comes to understanding the current condition of confusion.

This is probably much more comforting than I’d care to imagine. What will I do when they’re dead?

I’m as big a bring-on-the-fucking-future-already cheerleader as anybody, and I’m reasonably adept at using the notation afforded by all this modern stuff, (Modernism is sooo-ooo old-fashioned, and even post-modernism was a mere transition) but, “Evocation needs more than notation [and aesthetic]: it needs impetus.”

It frightens the bejeebus out of me to imagine where the New Impetus™ will come from.

We’ll miss the people who put adjectives into hexagons when they’re gone.

If the expansion was incremental, it still happened awfully fast. In the poetry of Pound, the revolutionary who now looks merely transitional because he was so far outstripped by what he started . . .

via Product Placement in Modern Poetry by Clive James.

Describes a lot of today’s stuff, I guess. The New Schtick is merely transitional.

This is an interview with the editor of Soldier of Fortune magazine.

Google search for 'Soldier of Fortune Magazine Covers'

Participatory Journalism:

When you did have the money to send reporters around the world, what were the magazine’s most ambitious missions — both in terms of the conflict and what the reporters were tasked with doing, beyond reporting.
In a large number of cases, we sent reporters over on what we called “participatory journalism” assignments. We’d carry guns. If we were shot at, we shot back. We didn’t hide behind a log.

Rambo and the Karens:

Probably the most significant thing we did in the last couple years was convincing Sylvester Stallone to focus the theme of his latest Rambo movie on the Burmese oppression of the Karens. When the movie was released, it caused quite a stir, resulting in demonstrations in many cities throughout the world and articles that would never have been published had not the Rambo movie been released.

BAs in literature and war reporting:

There are more and more reporters who have no experience covering war, much less participating in it. The quintessential example is Sarajevo. I can’t blame the reporters for being naive. I blame the editors for sending them over in the first place. They had no point of reference. Are you going to send someone with a BA in literature to interview the mechanic at a nuclear power plant, when they don’t know a piece of wood from a piece of coal? It’s the same thing with conflict reporting. Some of these kids are just dumber than dog shit.

The images come from a comic/magazine called Samandal.

SS:

We were all at Pierre’s apartment when Mubarak stepped down, celebrating. We were kind of talking about alternative media and how it was so important for the revolution to create alternative media. Someone said to us, “Why don’t you just start a newspaper?” We said okay, tonight we celebrate, tomorrow we have a meeting. And the next day we had a meeting and we started working on the newspaper, just like that.

SS:

When it started it was about challenging the law: in order to start a newspaper here you have to get certification from state security. So it was kind of a challenge; freedom of expression was our main goal [. . .] We believe in awareness. Awareness comes through freedom of expression and not the other way around. So Gornal is basically about giving people a tool to express themselves.

SS:

We want to print things we don’t agree with. For example, one of the members of the Muslim Brotherhood is writing something. We want some articles from people who support the military as well, even if we personally don’t believe in the military’s performance in ruling the country. But many of these people don’t want to write.
[Why don’t they want to write?]
I think it’s because the whole newspaper looks like it’s very revolutionary and stuff and so they just don’t want to join in with something like that.

On the role of Twitter and Facebook, SS:

It’s very exaggerated, definitely. They think all we do is tweet. But it’s true that, like five years ago, people would complain about torture and stuff like that and nobody believed them. If you discussed police brutality with people in the streets, there was no awareness about it at all, but when the videos of torture came out on the internet… Things started to change. Maybe it could have happened through another tool, but this is how the change began.

On those too poor and hungry for revolution:

SS:There are two kinds of people who are against Gornal. There are people who benefited from this regime, who benefited from the corruption. Or there are people who are very, very poor, and it’s very hard for them…
HT: During the revolution, they didn’t have food. Prices went up, so that was hard.
SS: I kind of realized that two weeks after the protests. A lot of them are very angry, they say, “You are ruining our lives.”

Asking the military for an interview, SS:

I told him we are working on an independent newspaper and we want to do an interview with Ismail Etman, a member of the military council. And he asked me, “What is the interview about, and with whom?” And I said, “You can just say we are the youth of the revolution, you know, the Facebook people.”

And this is how the interview ends. Soppy git that I am, I cried, a little.

Can we ask you a really stupid question? Did you have a plan of what you wanted to do when you grew up? Before the revolution? And has it changed?
HT: Well, my plan got ruined when I started college. I wanted to major in fashion design, but now I am majoring in journalism because there is no fashion design major. But I don’t think it has changed. I started thinking more politically about everything. My goals became more about the people; people around me at least.
Are you still going to be a fashion designer?
HT: Yes! For the people.

One of the oddest chapters in the annals of the Cold War was its proxy war by magazine, and the oddest Cold War magazine was undoubtedly Tricontinental. Based in Havana and art-directed by legendary poster designer Alfredo Rostgaard, Tricontinental was the official publication of OSPAAAL, one of the many revolutionary acronyms liberated by Fidel’s triumph in 1959. OSPAAAL stood for Organization in Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and its magazine was available in each of the New World’s great colonial languages: English, French, and Spanish. [. . .]

There were unreadably long lists of tiny victories by innumerable guerrilla organizations: trucks full of ammunition or wheat or concentrated fruit juice liberated from the imperialists; city squares and government buildings gloriously defaced by revolutionary slogans; hopelessly obscure silos, checkpoints, bridges, pipelines, roads, radio towers, and police stations, exploding forgettably in the subtropical night. There were first-person accounts of police corruption and genuinely tender evocations of fallen comrades. In March 1970, a special issue presented the full text of Brazilian Marxist Carlos Marighella’s Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla, a pragmatic and hair-raisingly detailed program for revolution in the cities of the industrialized world. [. . .]

What made all of this truly strange, however, was Tricontinental’s design. Compared to dismally drab Soviet attempts at cultural propaganda — or the comically guileless efforts of the Chinese — the Cubans had something uncontrivable going for them: it looked like they were having fun. Tricontinental resembled an underground zine from San Francisco more than an information vehicle for Third World liberation, and that juxtaposition had an effect comparable to that moment in Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil when a gang of black nationalists in a municipal junkyard read from a stilted manifesto while necking with white women in abandoned cars. Tricontinental’s covers were deliriously poppy, with bright, eyecatching graphics, making it just the sort of thing Marighella’s urban guerrillas should never be seen carrying in public.

This all comes from Revolution by Design By Babak Radboy | Bidoun Magazine. And I found it via Cartographies of the Absolute.

Here’s a link to the Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla. It’s fascinating to imagine what Carlos Marighella would have made of the smartphone.

http://moultoncrow.tumblr.com/post/9882030598/the-greatest-photo-of-the-london-riots-this-will (sic)

I ‘liked’ this section. If you’re, like me, prone to the glib, it resounds of Tottenham and #ukriots:

Conventional logistics can be expressed with the formula FFEA:

F—food F—fuel E—equipment A—ammunition

Conventional logistics refer to the maintenance problems for an army or a regular armed force, transported in vehicles, with fixed bases and supply lines. Urban guerrillas, on the contrary, are not an army but small armed groups, intentionally fragmented. They have neither vehicles nor rear areas. Their supply lines are precarious and insufficient, and they have no fixed bases except in the rudimentary sense of a weapons factory within a house. While the goal of conventional logistics is to supply the war needs of the “gorillas” who are used to repress rural and urban rebellion, urban guerrilla logistics aim at sustaining operations and tactics which have nothing in common with conventional warfare and are directed against the government and foreign domination of the country.

For the urban guerrilla, who starts from nothing and who has no support at the beginning, logistics are expressed by the formula MMWAE, which is:

M—mechanization M—money W—weapons A—ammunition E—explosives

Revolutionary logistics takes mechanization as one of its bases. Nevertheless, mechanization is inseperable from the driver. The urban guerrilla driver is as important as the urban guerrilla machine gunner. Without either, the machines do not work, and the automobile, as well as the submachine gun becomes a dead thing. An experienced driver is not made in one day, and apprenticeship must begin early. Every good urban guerrilla must be a driver. As to the vehicles, the urban guerrilla must expropriate what he needs. When he already has resources, the urban guerrilla can combine the expropriation of vehicles with his other methods of acquisition.

Every good urban guerrilla must know how to use a smartphone.

I wasted a bit of time comparing the old and rare images with the stuff that’s common on The Google.

Here’s Asheville, North Carolina in 1902:

And the same time in the present day-ish:

[There used to be an image here. I've removed it due to a DMCA takedown thingy. Basically, imagine the same shot as the one in 1902 but taken a few years ago. The difference between the one I've removed and the one below are fairly minimal.]

It comes up third in a search on The Google.

Not sure why I’m posting it really. Maybe because over a century late they’re still taking pictures from the same spot?

Or perhaps because even the youngest of us is old enough to watch pace layering in action and see in geographical time.

One day, our descendents may be able to see in geological time.

See. In geological time.

This is interesting. What are we going to do with it?

“It’s directed by the same guy who did “Die Hard”.

The late 80s was a time when TV was trying to educate me about film. The web seems to be trying to do the same again.

http://fuckyeahmovieposters.tumblr.com/post/9124344611/die-hard-made-and-submitted-by-donald-smith

This comes from 10 Modern Movies That Are Better in Black and White, which, despite its List of N Things, degenerate-case-of-essay title, is aces:

There is, we can all agree, just something about black and white. In his wonderful 1989 essay “Why I Love Black and White,” Roger Ebert wrote: “There are basic aesthetic issues here. Colors have emotional resonance for us… Black and white movies present the deliberate absence of color. This makes them less realistic than color films (for the real world is in color). They are more dreamlike, more pure, composed of shapes and forms and movements and light and shadow. Color films can simply be illuminated. Black and white films have to be lighted. With color, you can throw light in everywhere, and the colors will help the viewer determine one shape from another, and the foreground from the background. With black and white, everything would tend toward a shapeless blur if it were not for meticulous attention to light and shadow, which can actually create a world in which the lighting indicates a hierarchy of moral values.”

Once I picked the movies that we thought would work for this experiment, I realized that trying to just describe them in a standard post wouldn’t work at all. So I’m doing something different with this post: I made a little video for each title, with clips transformed to black and white and commentary explaining why each one was selected.

Here’s the first one:

The rest are cool too — though be careful with the links as Jason Bailey’s inexplicably chosen the spammy nightmare of Megavideo to host some of the clips. (If you click play, you have to shut down the irritating pop-up window and then click play again.) [Update: it's not inexplicable at all - as he explains below, it's a copyright thing.]

In the late 80s, we had the Incredibly Strange Film Show and Moviedrome on the TV. Both shows tried to educate viewers into watching better movies by doing two things; scheduling the movies and/or prefacing them with little appreciation lectures.

I pretty much devoured both the shows and their recommendations. At the time, the seemingly massive, higgledy-piggledy selection in the video store needed taming.

I could reminisce for hours about the shows. But won’t.

Instead, I’d just like to point out I’ve noticed loads of amateur Moviedromes and Incredibly Strange Films Shows springing up, and would just like to register my approval. Here are two examples:

1. Chaos Cinema and Indiewire

I really enjoyed this video essay, CHAOS CINEMA: The decline and fall of action filmmaking, partly because it reminded my so much of Alex Cox’s startlingly informative introduction to Yojimbo back in 1990 (a sign of good telly — it’s stuck with me for 21 years). Moviedrome taught me how important spatial awareness was in filmmaking, this video essay demonstrates how this skill has been lost:

Chaos Cinema Part 1 from Matthias Stork on Vimeo.

The video essay Chaos Cinema, administered by Indiewire’s journalistic blog PRESS PLAY, examines the extreme aesthetic principles of 21st century action films. These films operate on techniques that, while derived from classical cinema, threaten to shatter the established continuity formula. Chaos reigns in image and sound. Part 1 contrasts traditional action films with chaotic ones and takes a close look at the “sound” track, especially its use in car chases.

2. Collate and Assimilate

Similarly, Rob Ager’s YouTube channel is fabulous. His ‘collate and assimilate’ methodology is the epitome of show-don’t-tell in critical analysis. His take on The Shining is fascinating and explores similar themes to Chaos Cinema, though it’s possibly only for the truly motivated. His analysis of The Thing demonstrates how you need a bit of wabi-sabi goes a long way in creating a true classic: