Dear Scooter:

There’s a building outside my hotel room window, kitted out with neon accents like a gigantic piece of 1980s kitsch. Maybe it’s the LG building, I don’t know for sure and I’m too lazy – or distracted – to ask someone. So the building’s owner will remain a solvable mystery that will go unsolved.

Of course, I’m not writing about the building but to explain myself, to explain why I haven’t been as productive as you would’ve liked – as productive as you need me to be.

I could blame it on the many times I jerk off during the day – too many really, but the images are there, online, providing a sort of relentless, low-level stimulant that breaks the bounds of true need – but that would be a weak excuse.

And you’re not the sort of guy who listens to excuses with a kind ear – explanations, always but excuses, never. So, I’m not going to offer you any excuses.

Instead of going through a long, drawn out explanation I’ll describe a situation to you – a typical situation that saps my will to be productive, makes me wander down odd streets and stare at empty mall parking lots in the dead of night waiting for something extraordinary.

Here’s how it happens.

I’m sitting in a meeting – it could be any meeting really, they all pretty much look and sound and smell the same. Someone’s talking, maybe it’s me, it doesn’t matter. And while they’re talking I’m thinking about that moment in Hammett’s Maltese Falcon when Sam Spade, growing very suspicious (more so than normal) of Brigid’s motives tells her a little parable about a man named Flitcraft who, Spade says, disappeared one day, “gone, like a fist, when you open your hand”:

“Here’s what happened to him. Going to lunch he passed an office-building that was being put up – just the skeleton. A beam or something fell eight or ten stories down and smacked the sidewalk alongside him. It brushed pretty close to him, but didn’t touch him, though a piece of the sidewalk was chipped off and flew up and hit his cheek. It only took a piece of skin off, but he still had the scar when I saw him. He rubbed it with his finger – well, affectionately – when he told me about it. He was scared stiff of course, he said, but he was more shocked than really frightened. He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works.”

Flitcraft had been a good citizen and a good husband and father, not by any outer compulsion, but simply because he was a man most comfortable in step with his surroundings. He had been raised that way. The people he knew were like that. The life he knew was a clean orderly sane responsible affair. Now a falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally none of these things. He, the good citizen-husband-father, could be wiped out between office and restaurant by the accident of a falling beam. He knew then that men died at haphazard like that, and lived only while blind chance spared them.

[...]

And so I’m thinking about what you might call the ‘Flitcraft scenario’ (to elevate it a bit) and my mind starts to wander; I’m thinking more of what Hammett wrote than the meeting with its back and forth and small percentage of usefulness and large percentage of empty yammering.

I’m thinking, during that meeting – any meeting – about a Flitcraft, perhaps in Baghdad, who goes out to get something mundane and winds up sliced in pieces by a bit of uranium tipped metal or a round from an AK or a cluster or thermobaric or God only knows what. The randomness of it begins to dismantle something in my mind, something very carefully constructed leaving a bit of a mess in its wake.

I suppose this is a sort of weakness really; after all, others go on with the business of selling their homes or arguing about what to watch on television or…

Adam Greenfield checks his pockets for analog tools

At Balladrian, Pippa Tandy investigates the DNA of the present

Banubula sees Shakespeare in the Stars

Barista hugs the curves with “twisty, twisty crime”

Maps of War visually traces the history of imperialism in the Middle East (and a bit beyond)

DataisNature points us towards Micheal Wolf’s photos of Hong Kong

Giornale Nuovo ponders Castiglione

K-Punk takes us by the hand and guides us through the hauntological now

Laputan Logic returns from the phantom zone and posts about the saga of Susanowo

Today, for some reason, it occured to me that the Internet has many lonely, windswept spaces.

Perhaps it’s merely the encroaching cold whispering melancholy nothings into my ear.

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Ich bin ein Mann, der viele Fragen stellt. Ist hier ein Beispiel.

Letzte Woche, Dienstag denke ich, wunderte mich ich, wenn es eine deutsche Version von Bert und Ernie gab.

Die Frage wurde gestellt und jetzt, habe ich eine Antwort.

“The very basis of the precautionary principle is to imagine the worst without supporting evidence…those with the darkest imaginations become the most influential.”

Adam Curtis, “The Power of Nightmares” Part 3

Very often, on line conversations spin around and around, going nowhere at incredible speed (and with a peculiar sort of ferocity).   Sometimes however, surprisingly, you’re led to strange, quiet places.

Last week – on line – I discussed with a correspondent the possible meanings of a very old Egyptian statue: a representation of Khafra and Horus. Horus – depicted as a stylized falcon – cradles the back of the Pharaoh’s head with his outstretched wings, perhaps whispering celestial mysteries into his ear.

No doubt, egyptologists can offer a more scholarly, evidence-supported interpretation.

Beyond the precise political and religious uses to which the statue was put during Khafra’s reign, and after, we were (we are) fascinated by the waking dream-state it presents in stone-preserved form.

That is, the after-life and eternity fixated Egyptians carried with them, it seems, a dream of life’s purpose that linked the mundane to the supra-mundane. This dream inspired them, during that ancient civilization’s most fertile period, to embark on a sort of stone-based space program, an effort to build eternal structures and create a universe of imagery that kept the dream-state alive in people’s minds everyday.

I can’t know with certainty, but I believe the old civilization, the culture that built immense monuments to cosmic concerns, faded as a dream-world first and then, due to various social/political pressures and time’s irresistible damage, crumbled into what came next.

…

Needless to say, America, during the (both on the ground and mind-formed) empire building decades that followed World War Two’s end, cannot be compared, at least not flawlessly, to ancient Egypt; still, it (the U.S.) nurtured its own dream-state, one so seductive the world seemed compelled to fall deeply in love with it even as the real U.S. – or at least its strategists in Washington, committed all the old crimes using all the old excuses.

The dream was of a technologically advanced, politically fair-minded, future-oriented civilization, the burning chrome heart of shining modernity, the creator of actual stairways to heaven.

…

In recent years, with gathering velocity, this dream, this promise really, has been dying.   It’s being replaced, as Adam Curtis states, with a nightmare of endlessly increased security, eternal war against shadowy foes which, Curtis points out, don’t exist in the hyperventilating form our governments present to justify their draconian flights of dark fancy.

When your dreams are supplanted by nightmares, is disintegration far behind?

Paul W. Schroeder writes:

The Bush administration originally sold the Iraq War to the public, Congress, and the world with two propaganda packages appealing respectively to fear and hope. One drew a horrifying picture of The Disastrous Consequences of Inaction in Iraq; the other depicted The Bright Promise of Victory in Iraq. Everyone remembers the absurd predictions, false promises, and outright lies these packages contained.

Today both have been totally discredited by events. The president, administration officials, and loyal supporters in the Congress and media spin the ongoing disaster in Iraq and looming one in Iran as signs of coming victory, but only true believers are convinced. With rebellion rising even among Republicans and control of Congress in jeopardy, the president is touring the country with a series of speeches designed to refurbish the old propaganda of fear. This newest package, The Disastrous Consequences of Failure in Iraq, seeks to terrify the public, mobilize the base, and vilify the opposition by portraying worse disasters sure to arise should cowardly, cut-and-run Democrats cause America to fail.

It should be easy for opponents of the war to refute this fear-mongering campaign with The Disastrous Consequences of Staying the Course. Though any such exertion comes hard to a divided party with its so-called moderates pulling in the opposite direction, the evidence showing the current campaign to be as illegitimate and self-deluding as the original pro-war campaign is overwhelming. But such a counterattack, though necessary, will not defeat the White House’s strategy by itself and could even play into its hands.

The reasons are simple. Like other Bush-Cheney ploys, this one is not designed to educate or persuade rationally but to arouse and exploit patriotic emotion. Any counterargument, however solidly grounded in logic and evidence, will be politically and emotionally distasteful to many voters. Moreover, Americans want not merely to be warned of impending disaster but also to be told how it can be averted. To Republican true believers, “Stay the course” still represents the answer, simplistic and delusional though it is, while the majority skeptical about this answer demand something positive in its place.

The Republican electoral strategy thus rests on two pillars: on Bush’s reported private quip during the 2004 campaign, “You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you have to concentrate on,” while keeping the rest distracted, divided, and on the defensive; and on the opposition party’s tearing itself apart trying to devise a positive alternative policy, with some leaders, including Hillary Clinton, still endorsing John Kerry’s message in 2004, The Bright Promise of Letting Us Handle Iraq Better. This approach, now even more than in 2004, will divide the Democrats, confuse the public, and fail to rally supporters. Worse still, it would continue to obscure the central point and the first critical requirement for any solution in Iraq or progress toward one: that the current American venture has decisively failed, cannot be rescued or reformed, and must be abandoned.

This essay proposes an answer to this problem—not to the tactical electoral dilemma faced by the Democratic Party but to the policy dilemma faced by the country, an answer not offered by either party and almost certain to be denounced and repudiated by both. By frankly acknowledging failure in Iraq and acting quickly, decisively, and prudently on that recognition, the U.S. not only could avoid further disasters there but might also achieve a kind of success. Call it The Bright Promise of Accepting Failure in Iraq.

[...]

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Sometime in the 1980’s, a Professor of Medieval literature, following some unknown impulse, never fully explained, introduced me to this…

Mercifully, the whole thing is starting to fade, to become an episode.

When I do still catch the odd glimpse, it’s peripheral; mere fragments of mad-doctor chrome, confining themselves to the corner of the eye. There was that flying-wing liner over San Francisco last week, but it was almost translucent. And the shark-fin roadsters have gotten scarcer, and freeways discreetly avoid unfolding themselves into the gleaming eighty lane monsters I was forced to drive last month in my rented Toyota. And I know that none of it will follow me to New York; my vision is narrowing to a single wavelength of probability. I’ve worked hard for that. Television helped a lot.

I suppose it started in London, in that bogus Greek taverna in Battersea Park Road, with lunch on Cohen’s corporate tab. Dead steam-table food and it took them thirty minutes to find an ice bucket for the retsina. Cohen works for Barris-Watford, who publish big, trendy “trade” paperbacks: illustrated histories of the neon sign, the pinball machine, the windup toys of Occupied Japan. I’d gone over to shoot a series of shoe ads; California girls with tanned legs and frisky Day- Gb jogging shoes had capered for me down the escalators of St. John’s Wood and across the platforms of Tooting Bec. A lean and hungry young agency had decided that the mystery of London Transport would sell waffle-tread nylon runners. They decide; I shoot. And Cohen, whom I knew vaguely from the old days in New York, had invited me to lunch the day before I was due out of Heathrow. He brought along a very fashionably dressed young woman named Dialta Downes, who was virtually chinless and evidently a noted pop-art historian. In retrospect, I see her walking in beside Cohen under a floating neon sign that flashes THIS WAY LIES MADNESS in huge sans-serif capitals.

Cohen introduced us and explained that Dialta was the prime mover behind the latest Barris-Watford project, an illustrated history of what she called “American Streamlined Moderne.” Cohen called it “raygun Gothic.” Their working title was The Airstream Futuropolis: The Tomorrow That Never Was.

There’s a British obsession with the more baroque elements of American pop culture, something like the weird cowboys-and-Indians fetish of the West Germans or the aberrant French hunger for old Jerry Lewis films. In Dialta Downes this manifested itself in a mania for a uniquely American form of architecture that most Americans are scarcely aware of. At first I wasn’t sure what she was talking about, but gradually it began to dawn on me. I found myself remembering Sunday morning television in the Fifties.

Sometimes they’d run old eroded newsreels as filler on the local station. You’d sit there with a peanut butter sandwich and a glass of milk, and a static-ridden Hollywood baritone would tell you that there was A Flying Car in Your Future. And three Detroit engineers would putter around with this big old Nash with wings, and you’d see it rumbling furiously down some deserted Michigan runway. You never actually saw it take off, but it flew away to Dialta Downes’s never-never land, true home of a generation of completely uninhibited technophiles. She was talking about those odds and ends of “futuristic” Thirties and Forties architecture you pass daily in American cities without noticing; the movie marquees ribbed to radiate some mysterious en- ergy, the dime stores faced with fluted aluminum, the chrome-tube chairs gathering dust in the lobbies of tran- sient hotels. She saw these things as segments of a dreamworld, abandoned in the uncaring present; she wanted me to photograph them for her.

The Thirties had seen the first generation of American industrial designers; until the Thirties, all pencil sharpeners had looked like pencil sharpeners your basic Victorian mechanism, perhaps with a curlicue of decorative trim. After the advent of the designers, some pencil sharpeners looked as though they’d been put to- gether in wind tunnels. For the most part, the change was only skin-deep; under the streamlined chrome shell, you’d find the same Victorian mechanism. Which made a certain kind of sense, because the most successful American designers had been recruited from the ranks of Broadway theater designers. It was all a stage set, a series of elaborate props for playing at living in the future.

Over coffee, Cohen produced a fat manila envelope full of glossies. I saw the winged statues that guard the Hoover Dam, forty-foot concrete hood ornaments leaning steadfastly into an imaginary hurricane. I saw a dozen shots of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson’s Wax Building, juxtaposed with the covers of old Amazing Stories pulps, by an artist named Frank R. Paul; the employees of Johnson’s Wax must have felt as though they were walking into one of Paul’s spray-paint pulp utopias. Wright’s building looked as though it had been designed for people who wore white togas and Lucite sandals. I hesitated over one sketch of a particularly grandiose prop-driven airliner, all wing, like a fat sym- metrical boomerang with windows in unlikely places. Labeled arrows indicated the locations of the grand ballroom and two squash courts. It was dated 1936.

[...]

Five and Seven said nothing, but looked at Two. Two began in a low voice, `Why the fact is, you see, Miss, this here ought to have been a RED rose-tree, and we put a white one in by mistake; and if the Queen was to find it out, we should all have our heads cut off, you know. So you see, Miss, we’re doing our best, afore she comes, to–’ At this moment Five, who had been anxiously looking across the garden, called out `The Queen! The Queen!’ and the three gardeners instantly threw themselves flat upon their faces. There was a sound of many footsteps, and Alice looked
round, eager to see the Queen.

First came ten soldiers carrying clubs; these were all shaped like the three gardeners, oblong and flat, with their hands and feet at the corners: next the ten courtiers; these were ornamented all over with diamonds, and walked two and two, as the soldiers did.

After these came the royal children; there were ten of them, and the little dears came jumping merrily along hand in hand, in couples: they were all ornamented with hearts. Next came the guests, mostly Kings and Queens, and among them Alice recognised the White Rabbit: it was talking in a hurried nervous manner, smiling at everything that was said, and went by without noticing her. Then followed the Knave of Hearts, carrying the King’s crown on a crimson velvet cushion; and, last of all this grand procession, came THE KING AND QUEEN OF HEARTS.

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Oh, the busyness…how it vexes me…the busyness…