Billionaire Smooth Jazz Musician Hits Rocky Road
Calling it in this week y'all. Movie Recommendations, and a nice quote.
Writing these articles has helped me organize my ideas and get into the habit of writing at least once a week.
That being said I need to do more of that organizing and try to do something like 30 minutes a day over trying to cram it all into one day a week and inevitably get burned-out on the idea. I have a few ideas for pieces and I am collecting quotes based on themes like fear, suits, pain, grief, memory, environment, commodity, solidarity, paranoia, death, hypnosis, media, love, and more to be added.
I will try to weave these themes together in interesting ways and tell a story using poems, movies, music, art, and personal experience. A research method I learned about this week called autoethnography seems exciting to me and I want to learn more about it. The definition from Wikipedia
autoethnography is a form of qualitative research in which an author uses self-reflection and writing to explore anecdotal and personal experience and connect this autobiographical story to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings.
One theme that I will probably add to my interests is security. I enjoyed this article titled “The Novel and the Secret Police” that details how Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland is “is a sweetly companionable sort of book, heartsick and humane….it is hard, here in the somehow-not-yet-done-with-us summer of 2020, to avoid feeling that it is also unnervingly prescient, and that it is so not least in how it stitches into coherence scenes of street-fighting militancy, brutal state reaction, and the ramping up of a rabidly privatizing economic order”
The article talks about how in Vineland
Pynchon’s law enforcement visionary sees that the American future lies in the routing of all available definitions of freedom through the ever-narrowing channel of security. His is a dream of a never-ending war waged against elements internal to the nation. If Vineland is a novel about the ascent of neoliberalism, it takes care to identify that political order not solely with market-triumphant privatization and the marginless financialization of civic existence, but also with the carceral forces required to secure it.
This connects to ideas of Surety and Control from “The Collapse of Ideology and the End of Escape” where Surety means “I demand certainty, to feel safe and reassured about my future, my status, my self-image and my self-importance” and Control means “I demand to feel empowered to determine everything on my terms, including the scope and direction of change.” These come from the larger e-s-c-a-p-e ideology that Jem Bendell outlines in that article.
We want so much to be safe and secure, those wants and desires are manipulated by powerful interests (sorry I’m vague here) to actually throw vulnerable people into uncertainty and to put laws into place that make it so they actually have more control over your life.
I initially just wanted to share what I thought was a beautiful paragraph from the Boston Review article.
When, early on, Zoyd encounters a representative from the considerably more fictive “NEVER”—the “National Endowment for Video Education and Rehabilitation”—he shows real acuity about the intricate funding structures proper to these entities. “Nice per diem,” Zoyd says to a man who introduces himself as Dr. Dennis Deeply. “You guys’re Federal?” To which Dr. Deeply replies: “Bisectoral, really, private and public, grants, contracts. . .” Bisectoral. It’s a fleeting but a telling moment—the briefest of idiomatic reminders that, when authority speaks in Vineland, it is quite ready to do so in the sanitized nomenclature of administrative cogency, financialized bureaucracy, public-private synergies. Not a lot of people, in 1984 or for that matter 1990, were naming that idiom of power neoliberalism, though of course eventually they would.
But my notes also said “Connect security in Boston article to security in e-s-c-a-p-e” but I don’t know if it was a clear as I thought it would be. The next note for this weeks article is “Make movie pairing.”
I watched the Apollo 11 and The Weather Underground documentaries back-to-back this week and thought it was a really great juxtaposition. Two completely different worlds operating in the same country at the same time.
Watching Apollo 11 you can’t help but be amazed at the sheer power of the rockets and be awed by the beautiful imagery of being up in space. But I found myself questioning who might have designed those rockets, and thought it funny that the only thing that leaked in from the “outside world” was the Chappaquiddick incident where Ted Kennedy killed Mary Jo Kopechne in a car accident.
It’s interesting to watch a documentary where it is only the footage of the event in question, with no commentary or interviews. The only other documentary I can think of that is like that is Koyaanisqatsi. And its director said
it is up [to] the viewer to take for himself/herself what it is that [the film] means…these films have never been about the effect of technology, of industry on people. It's been that everyone: politics, education, things of the financial structure, the nation state structure, language, the culture, religion, all of that exists within the host of technology. So it's not the effect of, it's that everything exists within [technology]. It's not that we use technology, we live technology. Technology has become as ubiquitous as the air we breathe ...
Apollo 11 got near-universal critical acclaim. It presents Nasa and the Apollo 11 mission in a vacuum. Free from the Nazi rocket scientists and the Cold War. Free from the injustice of racism, sexism, and the Vietnam War. So I think that immediately watching the documentary on The Weather Underground right after it is a good palate cleanser. It does a really good job of highlighting the stark contrast between idealized America, and the real America. The cherry pie in the sky, and the boots on the ground.
I think this tension is best exemplified by the Gil Scott Heron song Whitey On The Moon.
I don’t know. Let me know what you think!