One-Way Street

Remembering the Red Scare

During the Cold War the West regarded communism like it was a conspiracy of microbes. The eventual communist takeover of the world was masterminded by a cabal of dour fanatics in Moscow, but it also had a life of its own, infecting the messier parts of the world--and the US if it weren't disinfected of Volvo owners and other radicals. At the time communism seemed difficult to contain because it was conceived by Karl Marx as the next dialectical step in world history. One day all the big factories of the West would suddenly fall into the hands of the workers, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. It didn't help that the last dialectical step in socio-economic history was the advent of capitalism in the 18th century, the age of snuff and knee britches, suggesting that we were overdue for a massive change in how we make and buy goods.

Communism is pretty much dead now, with only two genuinely communist states left, North Korea and Cuba. Marx would have been surprised that communism lingered longest in agrarian societies. Poland and Czechoslovakia threw off communism with hardly a second thought, while in China and Vietnam the old hierarchies remain, but in the background, demanding attention only once a week or so, like Presbyterians. Meanwhile, American paranoia has come to feed off of Islamic fundamentalism, which is irrational and vicious in ways the Soviet bloc never was. On the other hand, Islamic fundamentalism thrives in unstable societies, rather than in conditions of economic and political inequality. American conservatives have always felt more comfortable tidying things up than spreading the wealth.

David Priestland’s The Red Flag: A History of Communism traces this history in great detail. He covers all the usual suspects--Marx and Engels, Trotsky, Ho and the like. He also looks at the intellectual and cultural side of Marxism, discussing major artists and thinkers as Bertolt Brecht and Sergei Eisenstein. He mentions Walter Benjamin exactly once (alongside Herbert Marcuse, interestingly). Priestland had to draw the line someplace, I guess, and Benjamin was an unorthodox Marxist, to say the least. Still, the subject of Benjamin and the Frankfurt School (also mentioned only in passing) touches upon a highly complex subject: the influence of Marxist thought on philosophy, sociology, economics, and critical studies. Marx has made something of a minor comeback among economists now that the Great Recession has revealed some major cracks in the capitalist foundation. In the rest of the disciplines, Marxist terms still appear here and there--I use them occasionally--but very few people conduct purely Marxist critiques of cultural phenomenon nowadays. Marxism, like deconstruction, has been so thoroughly integrated into critical discourse that it's impossible to separate it out.

Priestland largely neglects this line of historical development, which is understandable but unfortunate. Marx is like Freud in the sense that they made possible a new way of talking about human behavior. Regardless of what you think of them, they reshaped the discourse of their fields. In the case of Marx, he remains important in that we still don't have any other way to talk about what comes after capitalism. There's no real way to see capitalism from the outside except through the terms Marx left us. As someone recently said, these days it's okay to question the existence of God but not the right of capitalism to exist.

As far as Marxism as a political system, Priestland is as comprehensive as anyone but a specialist would want. He places the origin of communism in German Romanticism and its concern for human authenticity. Early capitalism was  turning everyone into narrow specialists and therefore, in the view of the Romantics, into partial humans. Priestland explains why Russians were so attracted to Marx: They thought communism would make them more European. Priestland is also unsparing in his details of the brutality and violence spawn by communism. He even captures the peculiar brand of black humor the system bred. Mao once cheerfully brushed aside the death and destruction caused by the Cultural Revolution by explaining, “It’s a mistake when good people beat up on good people, though it may clear up some misunderstandings, as they might otherwise not have got to know each other in the first place.”

Facets Hangs On, Barely

Every cinephile's dream is to have an instantly accessible digital library where one could log in and download anything from Abbott and Costello to Bela Tarr. In fact, such a digital library already exists and it's available to anyone who doesn't mind exposing oneself to federal prosecution. All you have to do is download an eMule client, originally developed by a guy who goes by the name Merkur, which, I believe, is German for "massive malware infection," and chances are you'll find a copy of the latest Thomas Ciulei, no questions asked. The world of BitTorrent is even wider and richer, though the risks are the same and the copies aren't legal, either. The situation is much like the ’60s and ’70s, when 16mm film collectors were effectively forced underground by the studios and the FBI. Then as now, it’s dangerous to like movies too much.

The inherent frustrations and dangers of the cinephile's primary challenge--gaining access to primary texts--were why Milos Stehlik and Nicole Dreiske founded Facets Multi-Media in 1975 on a then-derelict stretch of Fullerton Avenue in Chicago. My own film education started just down the street at DePaul University, where Facets films were regularly screened. I would also trek down to Facets for screenings and, somewhat later, to rent films. In the late 1980s video rental stores were rare, and they had a crummy selection and they generally treated you like you were going to steal the movie. 

Facets had its annoyances as well, but their selection was unparalleled. The clerks weren't terribly attentive or helpful; they always seemed like they were expecting Gene Siskel or Steven Soderbergh to walk in the door any minute, and they couldn't be bothered with a DePaul student trying to find a Yugoslavian film that wasn't already rented out. 

Fortunately, Facets now has a much more user-friendly rental system. Forty-two thousand of their 65,000 films are available to rent by mail in an arrangement that's much better than Netflix. Their rarest films, some of them one-of-a-kind copies, are accessible only in their Cinémathèque. You have to do some work to find the screenings, though. Facets has always been low key about promotion; their off-the-beaten-track location means they're used to people coming, largely unbidden, to them.

Over the year enough people have risked parking tickets to sample perhaps the best commercially-available film collection in the United States to keep Facets afloat, if not thriving. The digitization of cinema, along with the proliferation of distribution channels (legal and illegal), has cut into Facets' audience and threatened its business. Plenty of people get up in arms when book archives are threatened, but only the devotees worry about the disappearance of film archives. If Facets goes out of business--Milos Stehlik, still its director, insists they can survive, but he admits they're in financial trouble--there's no guarantee its priceless film collection will remain accessible.

Yes, you can stream 8 1/2 to your iMac with your Netflix account, and you don't have to worry about a clerk snickering as he mails you a copy of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but the Facets Patron Circle Membership is cheaper and they have DVDs you'd be hard pressed to find anywhere else, like Benjamin Christensen's creepy Haxan (1922; still above), a silent film that influenced the makers of The Blair Witch Project. Facets one of the last places where it's still possible to get a sense of the infinite possibilities of the medium. It is, as Roger Ebert has said, “a temple to great cinema."

The Twilight of the Twilight Series

Conventional wisdom in Hollywood says that you couldn't market a film that appeals only to girls. Sure, Hollywood will on occasion produce a film unambiguously directed at girls. Agnieszka Holland's superb The Secret Garden (1993) was one noteworthy instance. And, of course, there's the whole Disney princess series, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) through The Little Mermaid (1989) and beyond. But Hollywood has never invested in high-concept, non-animated, girl-centered films on the scale of the Star Wars saga, Star Trek, Harry Potter, or The Lord of the Rings trilogy. There's never been a franchise for girls who have outgrown Disney's pert narcissists.

Until now. The number one film in America right now is New Moon, the second film adaptation of Stephenie Meyer's four-part Twilight series. The hero of the series is a teenaged vampire named Edward Cullen, who is as smooth-skinned and chaste as a Disney princess. Edward is a younger version of the kinds of slacker boyfriends played by Michael Cera, before they start talking in fitful mumbles and dress like they're in the Strokes.

Edward has been the target of much derision by the uninitiated, which is to say boys. Meyer has to walk down the trail blazed by Ann Rice, who turned vampires into gothic performance artists, sexually aggressive and thoughtful monsters with a dandyish streak. Meyer's Edward, by contrast, wears khakis and smoldering expressions as if he's trying to remember his locker combination. Unfortunately for the Twi-Hards who have to defend him, it probably won't help to point out that Bram Stoker's original Dracula was also very odd.

The Twilight series has been attacked by the Lord of the Star Trek Wars fanboy mob, a much more powerful interest group, and not just because of their greater numbers. Twi-Hards congregate in Ugg-booted mobs, so you know to stay out of their corner of the multiplex, but the fanboys will cut off your network access if you cross them. Twi-Hards and the objects of their devotion also get no respect from the media or from literary critics. Twi-Hards are invariably described as "shrieking" in newspaper accounts, while critics lament Meyer's sub-literary prose style and feckless plots. In both written and filmed versions the Twilight stories are structured like the breaks between high school classes: five minutes of intense microdramas followed by long periods of languor.

At least some of these criticisms figure to be rectified with the film adaptation of third installment, Eclipse, which will be directed by horror film vet David Slade. Horror films also have primitive plots, but Slade will at least speed things up a bit. Edward will no doubt become more Nosferatu and less Joe Jonas. Eclipse will be harder-edged than its predecessors and less a Pop Tart version of J-Horror. However, recast as a more conventional horror film, Twilight won't simply become more boy-friendly; it will tamer in another sense: less likely to stir threatening female passions.

Dubai World Everywhere

Across the world buildings under construction are stalled and existing buildings are being torn down to make way for, well, nothing else. And, as always, buildings in Detroit are sprouting trees. 

Evidently, the financial troubles faced by government-backed developer Dubai World aren't as serious as first reported, but the company filed for bankruptcy anyway. Among the projects imperiled is Waterfront City, the Rem Koolhaas-designed generic city in Dubai's harbor. About 30% of the dirt has already been moved to create the city, which will be twice the size of Hong Kong. However, several developers have suspended their Waterfront City projects, and the rest of the massive project may be sold off to pay the bills of Nakheel, a Dubai World subsidiary. 

Other Dubai projects in serious trouble include the 80-story twirling towers development, once proposed for Chicago and now under some sort of stealth construction at an undisclosed location in Dubai. There are the usual financial troubles along with differences of opinion between the financial backers, who aren't related to Dubai World, and the architect/developer David Fisher, a megalomanic who wants to keep the tower's location a secret in order to surprise everyone. The biggest surprise would be if the building is completed at all. 

Meanwhile, closer to home, the Chicago Spire saga continues. On October 9 architect Santiago Calatrava came to Chicago to declare the project wasn't dead, even though cranes have been stilled since June. Three days later the Spire's sales office was evicted for nonpayment of rent. Now the Spire developer is trying to convince local unions to lend money to fund the project. The tactic isn't as desperate as it sounds: unions financed the construction of Bertrand Goldberg's Marina City, completed in 1964 and considered at the time to be a highly risky project. In any case, so far the unions haven't agreed to sign anywhere.

Failing to land the 2016 Olympics hasn't stopped the city from demolishing four Walter Gropius-designed buildings at Michael Reese Hospital: The Friend Convalescent Home, the Laundry Building, the Serum Center and now the Power Plant. Three more are scheduled for demolition, while the final building will undergo some sort of obscure evaluation, the end result of which will probably be demolition. The Gropius buildings are located on land designated to be athletes' housing for the Olympics, but no new use for the land has emerged.

And finally, a little box designed by another great Modernist architect was demolished last week. The design of the "Test Cell" has been attributed to Mies van der Rohe as part of the IIT campus, although Mies's grandson believes Mies handed off the design work to a junior architect. In any case, the building is gone, making way for a new train station.

Renzo Piano: The Architect as Pirate

Architect Renzo Piano talks to Abitare, the Italian design magazine. The interview is a design version of the Paris Review Writers at Work series in that Piano suggests that different working methods arise out of different conceptions of architecture as a design practice. Piano contrasts his working methods with dreamy architects like Frank Gehry, who "initially favours his mental imagination," and Jean Nuovel, "who lies down on his bed and starts to concoct something." Piano regards himself as a builder, an assembler of pieces, a kind of "pirate" who steals elements from other buildings and assembles them into a coherent whole. He likens his approach to the writer Italo Calvino, an obsessive note taker who immersed himself in daily experience, like a good architect should. Calvino began "stealing from daily life" because he "never believed in the idea of a wild creative impulse." Piano concurs, adding, "As a good Genovese and a Virgo, this method stays with you for your whole life."

In addition to his hands-on approach to design, Piano has a strong chthonic impulse. He regards buildings as three-dimensional objects that rise out of nature (or are embedded into cities, another metaphor he uses). He says, "Architecture can be seen as a way of lifting enormous structures from the land in order to create space for the unpredictable flows and movements of daily life." His IBM Traveling Pavilion, pictured above in Rome in 1986, expresses this impulse.

If buildings are rooted in place--an ideal being challenged by younger, more avant-garde architects--they should also express something deep within a culture. Piano tells the story of taking his 10-year-old son to a museum exhibit of Viking ships in Oslo. He says,

Looking at them you realise that the way that they are designed, which seems so strange, is not only connected to practical issues to do with sailing, but also to something else. When you build something there is a moment when you realise that it is not enough just to deal with the technical questions and that you need to add something extra – a dream, a desire, an imagine, something which represents you.

Viking ships pushed the ancient technology of sail-aided rowboats to its limits. But their non-functional design features expressed a shared cultural attitude about nature and death. As stout as their ships were, the Vikings didn't dare to cross the seas without a little magic built into their boats.

For Piano great architecture combines "a response to needs and a response to dreams." This belief leads him to defend his Modern Wing at the Art Institute of Chicago, which has been criticized for being too blandly functional, as "a powerful visual machine, carefully planned in every detail in order to perform this function to the highest level." Here I have to agree with Piano: the Modern Wing is a sublime machine. All of his best work can be seen this way.

The Origin of Laura: Many Notecards Short of a Load

 Before one can say anything about The Original of Laura (Dying Is Fun), the "latest" novel from Vladimir Nabokov, the question of whether or not the novel should have been published must be answered. So here is my position on the matter:

Either way is fine with me.

The Origin of Laura, like all of Nabokov's novels, was written on ordinary 3x5 note cards, the kind you get at Staples. Nabokov wrote in pencil in a precisely wrought émigré's handwriting. (That's him above, filling out note cards in his car.) This method of writing, which has more in common with Research Paper Writing 101 than Keats's pen that "gleaned my teaming brain," nevertheless produced startling lines like "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul." Nabokov shuffled a lot of note cards before he completed Lolita, among the best English-language novels of the mid-twentieth century. With Laura, however, he left only about 100 cards for his son to work with. The novel includes the note cards, which you can tear out and rearrange. It's fun for a minute or two. Close examination of Nabokov's cards teaches one that, in Nabokov's previous novels, some sort of alchemy must have occurred between the note cards and the finished novel. Somehow The Origin of Laura is less than the sum of its 100 parts, even at the stylistic level.

By the way, playing with the note cards also teaches you never to write a novel on note cards. First of all, keeping track of all those cards is a pain in the ass. Second, to write in small perfect fragments is to be constantly worried that the totality will suddenly vanish.

Anyway, the thematic and formal underdevelopment of the novel can be seen in one line. A character named Nigel Dalling (also spelled "Delling" and "A.N.D.") who is described as "a neurotic and hesitant man of letters, who destroys his mistress in the act of portraying her." Not a bad sentence, but it lacks Nabokov's trademark arch specificity. Even in expository sentences like this one Nabokov generally added a small stylistic flourish, like the amulet at the end of his Ws. The sentence also points to one of Nabokov's tangled, metafictional plots--at the end of Pale Fire we're left asking, did the poet invent the critic, or the critic invent the poet? This plot, it turns out, is a tall stack of note cards short of realization. We don't ask questions; we just shrug. The characters, too, exist as bare outlines, little wooden soldiers Nabokov had carved and painted but had yet to deploy. 

Nabokov claimed that he could plot out an entire novel in his head before sharpening a single pencil. If that were in fact the case, perhaps The Origin of Laura might truly read like "a novel in fragments," as the cover claims. Reading this incomplete work, however, is like listening to the novelist mutter to himself as he contemplates his butterfly collection.

Actual Size

 The American artist Ed Ruscha loved paradox and absurdity, as if his paintings were word problems and not visual images. Ruscha's visual style was grounded in commercial graphic design, and one step ahead of it. The word "Spam" appears in Actual Size (1962) as if it were stamped upon our brains, and yet the word is a nonsense syllable, neither nature nor culture, much like the food product itself. In his work from the 1960s, Ruscha teased out the kernel of absurdity in commercial brands. By making the Spam brand more emphatic than it has any right to be, Ruscha shows us why we can't help but laugh at Spam--and why actually eating Spam is so correspondingly sad. 

The Spam of Actual Size is the precursor to the now widespread practice of creating brands out of semi-words, Dadaesque combinations of the well-worn and the peculiar: Accenture, Elantra, Verizon. They're like words from a mythical culture that had products but no people. These semi-words are supposed to be instantly vernacular. Verizon became so ubiquitous so quickly that you'd swear the business was founded, way back when, by Jebediah Verizon. In the age of Google, of the bottomless archive, the origin of "Elantra" is an enduring mystery.

Ruscha has something to say about the mixed-up temporality of our shared language and the untraceable symbols generated ceaselessly by hyper capitalism. In his later work Ruscha became intrigued by the possibilities of the silhouette. When Ruscha paints silhouettes of teepees and other images from the American West, it becomes quickly apparent that what we're looking at are logos. It's no coincidence that Ruscha happened upon this motif when Ronald Reagan was president. By the early 1980s the American West had been so thoroughly commodified by popular culture that it no longer functioned as a mythical past. Furthermore, the Reagan/Bush I/Bush II era, disrupted only by a Bubba interregnum, turned the West into a brand of political fantasy. Ruscha depicts the West as a series of images both instantly recognizable and barely there, a space depleted of any promise or use value. All that's left is the mild visual pleasure of the logo.

For more on Ed Ruscha, see Hal Foster's remarks on an exhibit of his work at the Hayward Gallery at the Southbank Centre in London.

Dutch Bicycles Revisited

One of the most popular posts I've ever written was on Dutch bicycles. Since my initial post I've talked to a number of people about Dutch bikes and urban bicycling in general. Clearly there's a huge interest in Dutch bikes in the US, even though I've never actually seen someone riding one. In any case, I'd like to post an update on this topic because it says a lot about the prospects of creating an environmentally responsible transportation system here.

A couple of weeks I began a new job, which is why, incidentally, my posts have been so infrequent. My new job is in Evanston, which is next to my home town of Wilmette, IL. Evanston is the home of Northwestern University, and the town combines college town amenities, an urban feel, and suburban convenience. Like a lot of college towns, it boasts a healthy bike culture. Not only are there a lot of cyclists on the streets, bike racks are widely available, at least downtown, and car drivers seem used to dealing with bikes in the streets. 

My bike commute has effectively doubled. It's now 12 miles round trip, over cobblestone streets, steep curbs, hills, and potholes. My route takes me near Lake Michigan, so the winds can get blustery. It takes me about 45 minutes each way.

I ride a Bianchi Boardwalk. It's a hybrid bike--more stable than a road bike, faster than a mountain bike. Overall, I really like the Boardwalk: it's fast, nimble, and versatile. It's taken a beating but stood up pretty well. 

A bike commute, it's important to note, is not a Sunday ride on a bike path. It's not Saturday errands around a city neighborhood. Ride sixty miles a week on a bicycle lugging a stuffed messenger bag and your requirements for a bike change. 

So I went looking for a Dutch bike. I wanted something that could withstand the pounding a bike commute gives out, and I wanted the comfort of sitting a little more upright than my Boardwalk allows. I went to Turin bike shop in Evanston where they sell Electra Amsterdam bikes (and Bianchis, too). They're classic Dutch bikes: all black, with fenders, chain guards, and a leather saddle. They're beautiful bikes. The salesman owned one, and he loved it, and told me I didn't want one.

Dutch bikes are great until you hit wind. Then you feel like Pee Wee Herman in a wind tunnel, crouched on the bike, peddling madly and not moving very fast. The Amsterdam has three speeds and a coaster brake, an arrangement I haven't used since I commuted to grade school. Other Dutch bikes have only 8 speeds, plenty for tooling around flat, compact Amsterdam, but seriously limiting on windswept, undulating Midwestern roads. Strap on a bag holding a laptop and a novel and suddenly you're riding grandpa's bike. Even under ideal conditions, the upright posture of a Dutch bike gets uncomfortable on rides longer than 8-10 blocks. The Turin salesman said the Electra rode like a dream on short trips, but on longer rides his hips started to hurt. 

Dutch bikes are as much a set of attitudes as actual bicycles. Dutch bikes are about balancing elegance with practicality, about using bicycles as workaday vehicles without all the fuss and hazards associated with American bikes. They're also about larger cultural changes: making room for bikes on our streets, using public funds to place bike rakes in commercial zones (and removing abandoned bikes taking up valuable bike rack space), and, most of all, not making the automobile the default transportation option for daily transportation.

My 12-mile bike commute is longer than the driving commute of many people I know. However, I can bike to work only because the towns of Wilmette and Evanston have made a commitment, however minimal, to encourage bicycle riding. Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, and Paris have tried to emulate Dutch bike culture with mixed results. Paris's Vélib’ system is a model public bike rental system, but Vélib’ bikers peddle like lonely kindergardeners around central Paris as gangs of scooters roar past. 

As romantic as Dutch bikes are, the reality is that I don't live in Amsterdam. I'm never going to ride to work on a Gazelle while wearing a suit. I have to contend with Great Lakes winds and minivan drivers on cellphones. So I'm going to make a few small modifications to my Bianchi and continue to wear a helmet. I would love to live in a Dutch bike culture, but until that happens, I'd be satisfied to live in a place where people used turn signals.

An American Brat Eating an Ice Cream Cone

The great film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum reviews a book, Chris Welles Feder's In My Father's Shadow: A Daughter Remembers Orson Welles. Orson Welles led a famously messy life, but his offspring were born in orderly intervals: three marriages, each producing one daughter. Christopher (sic) Welles was the product of Welles' first marriage to Virginia Nicolson, so her list of disappointments is the second longest (after her mother's) of the women in Welles's life.

Among her earliest disappointments was her failed attempt to be her father's favorite actress. At age eight she pestered her father into giving her a bit part in The Lady From Shanghai. Welles hurriedly wrote her into the script as "an American brat eating an ice cream cone." He later cut her scene from the movie, much to his daughter's chagrin. 

Consigned to the sidelines of her father's life, Chris Welles watched as Oja Kodar emerged as Orson's favorite actress (and mistress), surpassing even Rita Hayworth. On the other hand, Chris watched her father's films with more avidity. She claims that her view of the cinema as a medium was changed forever after she saw Citizen Kane at 18. Typically, her father didn't accompany her for her first, or the many subsequent, viewings.

Rosenbaum reports he responded most directly to Chris's accounts of her father's wayward affections. Orson Welles would periodically appear in his daughter's life, raising her hopes that he would be fully present in her life, only to be disappointed later. Really, that's pretty much the same experience all of Welles's fans had.

The Mumbai Terror Attacks

Today the Virginia Quarterly Review begins publishing a four-part account of the Mumbai terror attacks of November 2009, written by Jason Motlagh. The series begins with a bullet whizzing past the head of a snack bar manager at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, then continues with minute-by-minute chronicle of the chaos. Motlagh's account, which runs to 19,000 words, was assembled from interviews with survivors, police records, transcripts of intercepted phone communications between the gunmen and their handlers, video from closed-circuit security cameras, and reports in the Indian media. In some ways his investigation was more thorough that the police's. In at least one case, Motlagh uncovered a major witness that the Indian National Security Guards (NSG) had no idea existed. 

Motlagh's gripping report appears in the VQR blog all this week. It's not a quick read, but the report is novelistic in its details and narrative thrust. It also demonstrates how difficult it is to construct a coherent account of a violent incident. Too bad the VQR article couldn't be required reading for those people trying to gain political advantage from the tentative and partial accounts from last week's Fort Hood incident.