Chris Ortiz y Prentice's blog

Destiny Made Manifest in a Pattern of Stars

Chris Ortiz y Prentice — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 02:50:23 +0000

This could be the new flag of the United States of America. Fifty-one stars. In November 2012, Puerto Rico voted in a referendum to become the fifty-first state of the USA. The measure now awaits approval from the U.S. Congress. Whether the representatives of the fifty states will invite in Puerto Rico, currently a U.S. territory, depends, of course, on a number of factors: culture, taxes, how it would change the political dynamics of the country, among others. But there's another big deciding influence at play here, though it is less tangible, and that is how a fifty-first state would change the appearance of the U.S. flag. Why would that matter? Because the arrangement of the stars on the flag has everything to do with belief in Manifest Destiny.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

U.S. destiny made manifest in fifty stars, arranged neatly in offset rows. Fifty: not just a round number but somehow, to our simian brains, it seems a solid one. The design of the current flag reflects, I would argue, a sense of arrival. Half a hundred states. But the U.S. flag only got its fiftieth star in 1960.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

The symmetry of the stars has not always appeared so manifest. Fewer stars make for a more contingent, not to say temporary, look. And odd numbers added another challenge.

U.S. Flag from 1819-1820: 21 stars (After Illinois before Alabama and Maine)

U.S. Flag from 1845-46: 27 Stars (After Florida before Texas)

U.S. Flag from 1851-1858: 31 Stars (After California before Minnesota)

U.S. Flag from 1867-1877: 37 Stars (After Nebraska before Colorado)

U.S. Flag from 1959-1960: 49 Stars (After Alaska before Hawaii)

Images from Wikimedia Commons

Thirty-one stars was a particularly awkward phase. But there is something wrong about that observation. As if the U.S. were a teenager in the 1850s. There is frankly too much suffering in the story of how the flag got its fifty stars to permit such a flippant trope. As if westward expansion, the imperialist policies of nineteenth-century USA, were motivated, even in part, by the desire for a more symmetrical seeming flag!

Might there soon be a fifty-first star? Will the democracy give up the notion of U.S. exceptionalism and go with a more contingent looking flag? Or will it seek to maintain the mythos of symmetry?

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Alternate Pattern for 51 stars

What sort of "united" would a country of fifty-one states wish to project? Circled wagons or side-by-side, independent but joined in rank and file? The importance of the psychological effect of the arrangement of the stars on the flag should not be underestimated. The circular pattern which heads up this post was, according to Wikipedia, proposed by the New Progressive Party of Puerto Rico, which is the party that advocates for full statehood. What new image of the USA would a circular pattern instill in the hearts and minds of citizens? Who makes up such a USA? What are its policies? With what attitude do the states regard one another? What destiny does it manifest? What destiny does the country wish to be made manifest?

The Lesser Known Bel Geddes: An Assessment of the Harry Ransom Center Exhibit

Chris Ortiz y Prentice — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 21:43:29 +0000

Image Credit: Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation

The Divine Comedy, scene rendering: In a path of blue-white light Beatrice steps down from her chariot to meet Dante, 1921-1930

Norman Bel Geddes lived a sixty-five years that connect two worlds, the Victorian past of 1893, the Atomic Age of 1958. His work reflects and resists that trajectory. The current exhibit on Bel Geddes at the Harry Ransom Center (UT Austin) divides his career into phases or stages of development. A highly creative childhood segued into a successful career as a stage and costume designer for New York Theater. Of all his work—in industrial design, in architecture, in “futurism”--his set and costume design remains my favorite. But in an important sense, Bel Geddes never left the theater.

In his thirties, Bel Geddes painted some wonderful watercolors of his stages and costumes. The famous one is of his most ambitious—indeed wildly ambitious—production of The Divine Comedy. There’s a great story attached to this endeavor. Bel Geddes recounts in his autobiography a period of creative fallow. He had set his desk against a blank white wall, so over-active and confused was his imagination. He says he learned every crack, contour, and bump of that white wall. One day, looking up at one such barely perceivable irregularity of texture, it appeared to expand and swirl. Soon it was a horrible vortex. Bel Geddes rose from his desk, stumbled backwards, crashed against the bookshelf and fell to the ground. As he recovered from this vertigo he recognized that his eyes were fixed on a book that had fallen next to him. It was Dante’s great work. Bel Geddes opened a page at random, so the story turned myth goes, and decided to employ his imagination in a massively scaled, and complete, production of The Divine Comedy.

Image Credit: Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation

Figures of dancers for Palais Royal Cabaret, 1922.

The watercolors from this period of wonderful creative exertion should strike to the heart of any fan of science fiction, anime, or fantasy. It was in this same foundational period of Bel Geddes creative life that he decorated the Palais Royal Cabaret, one of Paris’s most fashionable spots between the wars.

Image Credit: Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation

Costume design for Gypsy Woman in The Miracle.

Bel Geddes turned next to industrial and interior design. I find his work of this period—including a range stove that influenced design for decades—understated, sleek, modern. Seltzer bottles for 1939:

Image Credit: Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation

In this period, Bel Geddes designed an energy-conserving house, which was less practicable than provocative. Bel Geddes, the stage man, persisted throughout his career.

It was in the booming forties and fifties that Bel Geddes’s ambitions could be matched by material resources. It seems to me that Bel Geddes was better when pressed by limitations. Ambition turns monomaniacal when it is paired with fame—which Bel Geddes had by then come by—and seemingly unlimited resources. Bel Geddes started modeling cars of the future, tanks for the army, a cruise-liner, an ocean-liner of the skies, baseball parks, and of course the Futurama for the 1939 World’s Fair.

Image Credit: GM Media Archives, General Motors LLC.

General Motors, Futurama Spectators, ca. 1939

The massive Futurama could never again be matched. I think Bel Geddes understood that. The works of his middle and old age show a returning humility. Understated Bel Geddes, like understated Dickens, is a rare and fine commodity:

Image Credit: Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation

Prototype case for Emerson Patriot radio, ca. 1940-941

Very likely Bel Geddes could not do otherwise than imagine the future. I think there is a sort of futuristic old-fashionedism about Bel Geddes at his best. This style, which shows up in his stage and costume design, in his industrial design, in his home design--should be distinguished from the old-fashioned futurism, the supermans and skyscrapers that dominated the sci-fi pulp, of the 40s and 50s. Bel Geddes is an old-fashioned futurist when he does Futurama. But at his best, Bel Geddes was, I suggest, a futuristic old-fashionist, as in this never-completed plan for the British Imperial Hotel in Nassau:

Image Credit: Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation

Job No. 684, Colonial Hotel - Nassau, 1954-1956

Futuristic old-fashionedism: the will to conserve mated with the will to create. One among many strands of the modernist tapestry.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

How USA Really Voted on November 6

Chris Ortiz y Prentice — Sat, 17 Nov 2012 15:10:56 +0000

Image Credit: IDV Solutions

What a wonderful map! This IS the popular vote on November 6, 2012. John Nelson gave us this map, and we thank him for it. It's called a "pointillist map:" one blue dot for every 100 votes for President Obama, randomly distributed in the county in which the votes were cast. One red dot for every 100 votes for Mr. Romney. You've heard of purple states? Well here's our purple country. Click the link on the image credit to find a large and hi-def version of this map. Then meet me back here, won't you?

I'll be candid. There's an irrational part of me that wants the result of an election to match how much blue or red there is on the map. I know that's not how it works. This time, the state-level electoral college map came out pretty evenly red and blue. But take a look at the county-level map:

Image Credit: Wikipedia

As usual, it looks like a sea of red with a few islands of blue, and yet, as we all know, President Obama was elected for four more years. I realize that it's a question of population density not geographical space, but now, at long last and thanks to Mr. Nelson, I can see that.

Mr. Nelson tells us he was inspired to make this kind of map by his advisor, a Professor Kirk Goldsberry. Here's a pointillist map of the 2012 presidential election Professor Goldsberry did of the Dallas Fort Worth Area:

Image Credit: Kirk Goldsberry/KK Outlet

The top map shows red and blue dots for Mr. Romney and President Obama respectively. The bottom map shows voters by ethnicity. (Can you guess? Try and then click the link to find out.) What a revelation! Of course, pointillist maps are only one of the new mapping techniques to show election data, but they are a powerful one. Looking at John Nelson's map I find myself thinking: so this is who we are.

Image Credit: IDV Solutions

One thing we seem to be is country and city. Do you notice how there is a ring of red around the purple-blue cities? That seems to hold true around the nation.

If Our Greatest Toy Maker Had Lived Ten More Years..

Chris Ortiz y Prentice — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 02:22:51 +0000

Image Credits: Newscom and Jim Henson Tribute Forum

Novelist Bruce Sterling, who gave a very hip keynote address on designer Norman Bel Geddes (1893-1958) at this year’s Flair Symposium "Visions of the Future," concluded his remarks with a challenge: Which of us has the courage to imagine the future like Bel Geddes did? Larger than life, impracticable, earnest, utopian, democratic, dazzling: can we still dream like that?

In this post, I give it a go with a foray into the sci-fi genre of Alternate History: What if Jim Henson (1936-1990) had lived a further ten years and had gotten involved in the Silicon Valley scene? How might computing have developed differently?

Henson was the master toy-maker of his generation, and it seems to me the last of his kind. He made things not code; his creations were not merely imagistic but tangible. By mid-career, with Sesame Street, The Muppet Show, and Yoda from Stars Wars under his belt, he stretched the limits of his puppetry with Dark Crystal (1982), about which he said:

But with The Dark Crystal, instead of puppetry we're trying to go toward a sense of realism - toward a reality of creatures that are actually alive and we're mixing up puppetry and all kinds of other techniques. It's into the same bag as E.T. and Yoda, wherein you're trying to create something that people will actually believe, but it's not so much a symbol of the thing, but you're trying to do the thing itself.

Image Credit: darkcrystalwikia.com

Aughra, pictured above, testifies to Henson's new puppetry, as do many of his later creations, such as those in Labyrinth (1986), The Storyteller (1988), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) and Dinosaurs (1991).

Image Credit: Mirage Studio, Jim Henson's Creature Shop, and New Line Cinema 1990

Regrettably, as everybody knows, the movies went with computer generated imagery instead of Hensonian advanced puppetry. The scene of the official passing of the torch from animatronics and material models to CGI is Stephen Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993). In that film, real-life models are interspersed with computer modeling in a more promising fashion than has been subsequently achieved. The following "Making of Jurrasic Park" is instructive (the pertinent bit starts at 6:30):

Given Henson's influence in television and cinema, it is hard to see how it would not have extended to Silicon Valley had he lived just a little longer. What I'm suggesting is that, instead of cybertronics and iPads and smartphones, perhaps, if Henson had lived, our computing technology would have been embodied and embedded in entirely different ways. Perhaps playfulness and physical configurability would have been valued over information retrieval and display. The present inclination for some time now has been to engraft technology onto our bodies.

Image Credit: Forbes

But if Henson had lived, I wonder whether our technology would be less egotistical, not to say monomaniacal. So obsessed we are with assessing our environments, ferreting out ever last bit of information, recording every image, every sound. If Henson had lived, maybe we would be looking at one another more directly instead of glancing up occasionally from our iPhones. Maybe our technology would be more fun, would be made more for fun and not for work. Each toy would be unique and textured, not smooth, homogenous and glossy. Wouldn’t you rather have Fiery than Siri?

Image Credit: http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Kevin_Clash

Introducing the brand new Sir Bounderton Stratchingberry: Twist it twice to bring up maps, double it once for text. Bounce and bring up your phone contacts. To answer, throw Sir Bounderton around your neck and bend the Snoozlebroger to your ear! Be warned: Sir Stratchingberry is fond of jumping rope and will occasionally break out in an operatic "It's Not Easy Bein' Green"!

Commodity Conrad

Chris Ortiz y Prentice — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 15:03:14 +0000

Image Credit: Phil Hale

As an avid and generous reader of Joseph Conrad, I don't like Phil Hale's cover art for the most recent Penguin Classic releases. It's not the artist either. Hale can credit to his name some wonderful portraits and figures. No, the problem is that Hale took too much for his own that ubiquitous but injurious reading of Conrad, which became prevalent pretty much from day one: namely that Conrad is a DIFFICULT author (woe to the author who wins that terrible epithet!), and this predominantly because Conrad's prose, like Hale's writhing, headless corpse-like figures, is TORTURED. A few of the more famous modernists said some very dismissive things along these lines about Conrad, and it is our misfortune to have inherited their anxiety of influence as authoritative judgment. But Conrad's prose is compelling, immediate and alive! Yes, it's true and I state it with certainty. Conrad is not difficult, he is rewarding. Kipling said reading him is like reading a great author in a first-rate translation: that is to say, you get two arts for the price of one. But Hale's covers can turn off even me from reading one of my favorite authors, such a forbidding, cold, and painful experience do they promise. Cold War Conrad fared much better than his postmodern iteration, so far as book covers are concerned. And the original editions achieved an attractiveness which has never been matched. I'll show you. Come along.

Contrast, first, a few of Phil Hale's other figures with his covers for the new Penguin Conrads.

Image Credit: Phil Hale

Hale's officially commissioned portrait of former Prime Minister Tony Blair is ennobling, understated, and modern, qualities few portraits of state share. Hale's painting of the great Sri Lankan cricketer Muttiah Muralitharan is exhilarating and alive. It shows much of what cricket fans find so enchanting about that game. And then Hale's cover for the graphic novel Halo shows a light hand with violence, very well suited to the adventure series. All of these qualities suggest what the editors of the new Penguin must have recognized: Hale is a good choice for fresh editions of Conrad. All the more lamentable, then, that Hale didn't bring them to bear on Conrad!

Image Credit: Phil Hale

These Munchian nightmare figures take all the fun, all the consolation, out of Conrad. I think I see some of what Hale might have meant. The faces are obscured just as, in Conrad, the sheer amount of information about a character tends to obscure rather than clarify our understanding of them. And of course there is pain in Conrad's books. But, as I suggested, I think these figures are not tortured on that account but on the theory that Conrad's prose is famously convoluted. In either case, Hale's painful, contorted Conrad cruelly ignores the Conrad who, he insisted, so loved humanity:

For my own part, from a short and cursory acquaintance with my kind, I am inclined to think that the last utterance will formulate, strange as it may appear, some hope now to us utterly inconceivable. For mankind is delightful in its pride, its assurance, and its indomitable tenacity. It will sleep on the battlefield among its own dead, in the manner of an army having won a barren victory. It will not know when it is beaten. And perhaps it is right in that quality. The victories are not, perhaps, so barren as it may appear from a purely strategical, utilitarian point of view. (Conrad in 1905)

I don't find this sentiment nor the prose in which it is expressed painfully convoluted. But who will ever find their way to this consoling Conrad when there are covers out there like this one by Dan Eldon?

Image Credit: Dan Eldon (2007)

It's not that there is no pain or blood or even torture in Conrad. Of course there are because these exist in the world and Conrad was a realist. But there is also love and life in Conrad. The Penguin Modern Classics took more to heart Conrad's warmth for people. The covers from this era are troubled but certainly not corpse-like:

Image Credit: A detail of 'Die Windsbraut' by Oskar Kokoschka

Image Credit: Detail from The Coming Storm by Winslow Homer

Oxford World's Classics Conrad is also less blinkered by Conrad's depictions of pain:

Image Credit: Detail from Margaret by Philip Hermogenes Calderon (1833-98)

These are beautiful and complex paintings that allow for a layered emotional response. And there are good reasons to further complicate already intricate novels with paintings. As Geoff Dyer recently observed in The New York Times, classic paintings, such as those used by Penguin Modern Classics, served as "visual essays on the books they adorned," and a "side effect was that books I was reading for an education in literature doubled as an introduction to art history."

Very well; either let us return to classic paintings for covers or let us paint Conrad more generously. This shall suffice for paperback school copies.

Believe it or not, though, Conrad was not always read just for school. People read him because they found him worth reading. The original editions reveal a Conrad wrapped up and presented for leisured enjoyment.

Image Credit: wikipedia

I'm not one for commodification, but a commodified Conrad might not be the worse thing if it gave him, at last, that kind of reader he always wanted more than any other. Let us name this reader by everything she or he is not, or not only: conceited, elitist, conspicuous and fashionable.

Capturing Visual Reality: Close, Wide, Random, Complete

Chris Ortiz y Prentice — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 20:43:07 +0000

Image of Ron Mueck's In Bed (2005); Image Credit: Brooklyn Museum

Ron Mueck is an Australian sculptor of the "hyperrealist" school. He got his start working for Jim Henson and on Labyrinth (1986). Mueck became known to the art world for his 1996 Dead Dad, a two-thirds life-size sculpture of the artist's father moments after passing away. Mueck's sculpture attempts to reproduce human beings in all of their external reality. That is to say, while there are no organs on the inside, so far as what everyone but surgeons can see of a person, Mueck depicts, down to the last follicle.

Jason Polan publishes a weekly series for opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com called "Things I Saw." Simple drawings with factual captions, Polan attempts to capture the quotidian.

Image Credit: Jason Polan

If Mueck captures the lightest freckle, Polan depicts the light switch on the wall. Though the visuals of these arts are strikingly different, their philosophies are really two sides of the same coin.

Getting at reality's details, significant because they are available to perception, has been realism's concern ever since it gave up explaining why things are the way they are. This was, at any rate, the great literary thinker György Lukács's explanation for how a relatively minor writer like Émile Zola could attain literary predominance over Walter Scott.

Reality offers so much to see: rather than try to fit it all into an understanding, the new realists have tried to depict it in the first place. They are anti-reductionists, Polan no less than Mueck. Clearly Polan's drawings don't depict in photorealistic detail as do Mueck's sculptures. But Polan's approach is the "wide" and "random" to Mueck's "close" and "complete:" both are premised on the fecundity of what is available to be seen. Polan gets at a greater sense of the available by looking broadly and by depicting what we usually do not think of as being worthy of depiction. The broken comb on the sidewalk is there, we know it is there, but we don't always give its there-ness due credit: thus Polan's anti-reductionism. Mueck gets at a greater sense of the available by looking closely and by depicting everything that is available to be seen without a microscope. The birthmark on the right butt-cheek is there, we know it is there, but we don't always give its there-ness due credit: thus Mueck's anti-reductionism.

The question is to what degree the details for each artist are superflous. Mueck, like Freud and E.M. Forster, is a technician in the art of slow-motion capture. If we could provide a sustained attention to what is only briefly but really there to be perceived, we would learn that every passing moment is suffused with meaningfulness. Conrad and Henry James worked in this tradition as well. In Walter Scott's novels, no detail is really superflous because he organizes them into an interpretative framework. He looks from the moon's perspective, as it were: he sees long stretches of time from a distance. For the psychorealists, like Mueck, a detail only seems superfluous because we do not consider it for long enough to understand its significance. That something may be perceived is reason enough for its significance, so finely attuned to reality is our embodied consciousness. Forster shows this by slowing things down in time; Mueck does it by either blowing things up, in scale, or shrinking them down, making the viewer lean in to find out.

Image of Mueck's Boy (1999); Image Credit: Yale Books

Image of Mueck at work on Spooning Couple (2005); Image Credit: Brooklyn Museum

Polan's panoramic view insists more upon non-significant randomness, which is also why he depicts non-human subjects, like the cricket or the lamp. I find Mueck's work more compelling, no doubt because his medium is so much more engaging, but also because he shows us something there and significant that we are able to interpret but not always given a chance to. In other words, his work allows us to verify what we can only half-suspect in real-time. Polan's work is more like an object-lesson about the dangers of totalitarian impulses: once you get it, you've got it. Each new installment shows another thing he saw, but one is tempted to ask, so what? I saw a piece of red plastic on the sidewalk today. Do you care? Probably not as much as you do about the face of that crouching boy.

Image of Mueck's Boy (1999); Image Credit: Vive le Liberté

Dressing to Dissent at the United Nations

Chris Ortiz y Prentice — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 15:22:24 +0000

Image Credit: United Nations webtv.un.org

Almost every male speaker to the September Summit of the General Assembly of the United Nations wore a suit and tie. It is easy to overlook this fact, so widespread is the convention, so rare the defiance. But what heads of state wear in front of one another shows something peculiar about the modern nation state. Leaders are, by and large, drawn from the cultural and economic elite. What all this suit-and-tie wearing indicates, however, is that the ruling class of the modern nation-state must subscribe, or seem to subscribe, to middle class or “business” virtues, like hard work, entrepreneurship, merit, and self-effacement. When a male leader chooses not to don a suit and tie, a choice made by President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (pictured above), he is really saying something: but what, exactly, is he saying?

Take, for example, the suit and tie worn by U.S. President Barack Obama for his address to the world on September 25.

Image Credit: United Nations webtv.un.org

President Obama's suit does not strike me as ostentatious; stylistically, it does not depart from the appearance of workaday, professional attire. (Note, however, how neatly tailored and solidly constructed the clothes are. Not every workaday businessman can afford such a suit!)

Let us take President Obama as the rule and President Ahmadinejad as the exception that proves the rule. Now, what was the historical process by which suit-wearing became the standard for heads of state? Let us speculate.

I would argue that to arrive at an answer which would explain both Ahmadinejad's and Obama's sartorial selections, we need to describe two interelated historical processes, one pertaining to the imperialist nation-states of the Nineteenth Century, the other to the nation-states formed through decolonization in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.

Of first importance, in the imperialist case, was the long process by which the traditional power formations of the aristocracies--based on tradition, heredity wealth and landholding--were transformed into power formations of the monied classes. This transition was no neat break, including as it did, urbanization and industrialization, the rise of literacy and the popular press, the networking of global cities through shipping, railroad, mail and telegram, the increasing importance of credit to the state, the ousting from parliamentary structures of “gentlemen” by lawyers, bankers, and labor-leaders; in a word, everything (and it’s a lot) that comes as money plays more and more the determining role in social ascendancy. It was a complex historical process inflected by place and contingency; but roughly speaking, the ruling class was kings and barons and lords, and then it became businessmen and buerocratic professionals. The leaders of today's "super-power" nations wear suits, and that includes China, as instanced by Premiere Wen Jiabao (pictured below):

Image Credit: United Nations webtv.un.org

As for the male leaders of decolonized nation-states, I speculate that they wear suits-and-ties as the price of entry, as it were, into "respectable" standing at the United Nations. In a word, wearing a suit-and-tie is a matter of hegemony.

Inflecting these large, world-historical processes--the ascendance of middle-class hegemony as it played out in the West and in the era of decolonization--are other factors, including culture and gender. For of course, not every head of state or person of power wears a suit to the UN. Sometimes the choice of garb would appear to reflect culture of origin, as in the case of Lyonchoen Jigmi Yoezer Thinley, Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Bhutan (pictured below).

Image Credit: UN webtv.un.org

The military dictators wear uniforms. Many of the women wear the female equivalent of the suit-and-tie, as instanced by Dessima Williams, Permanent Representative of Grenada to the UN:

Image Credit: UN webtv.un.org

And, of course, to really explain why a person wears a particular article of clothing to the General Assembly we would have to tell add the histories by which "female suits" or military uniforms became available as options but also personal and family histories and psychologies, contemporary networks of clothes production and consumption, and maybe even a little randomness.

But accounting for all the different variations on suits and the military dictators and the cultural-garb--each of which could bear more analysis--there remains a specific kind of outlier, and that is the person who references the suit while flaunting its conventions. It is these I would point your attention to; these are the ones dressing to dissent, these are the leaders who are highlighting a difference from the world-hegemony that says modern leaders are business people (if they are not military dictators).

Ahmadinejad wears no tie in front of the UN, and the reason is historical and ideological, just as I have posited: according to the BBC and the Guardian, Iran banned the sale of ties after the 1979 Islamlic Revolution in order to signal non-alliance with the West.

Dressing to dissent at the UN, by my analysis, requires gesturing towards the suit-and-tie but flaunting its conventions. President of Venezuela Hugo Chavez achieves this not by foregoing the tie but through tie selection:

Image Credit: UN webtv.un.org

Chavez's bright, broad red tie is no business man's: it is a flaunt at the "leaders-are-professionals" hegemony of the United Nations.

Let us conclude with a final instance that stretches my theory. Pictured below is the late Noble Prize Winner Wangari Muta Maathai, founder of the Greenbelt Movement in Kenya, a non-violent protester and person of great influence. (There is a very moving Independent Lens documentary about this incredible person entitled "Taking Root.")

Image Credit: UN webtv.un.org

Wangari Muta Maathai is wearing a dress not professional women's garb. Nor does it seem to me her clothing decision can be explained away as an innocuous gesture towards culture of origin, as can the King of Bhutan's. No, I think Wangari Muta Maathai is dressing to dissent in this instance, tactically using culture and gender to do so but without falling into the "exotic performance of culture/gender" that brings into hegemonic alliance other non-suit wearers. This is a tricky feat, and it is difficult to put a finger on just how she manages it. Nevertheless, it forms an additional option to flaunting-the-suit for those who wish to perform resistance to the hierarchies of the UN and indeed the world.

“Colorizing” the Black-and-White Past

Chris Ortiz y Prentice — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 15:06:41 +0000

Image Credit: Sanna Dullaway

Abraham Lincoln has been colored in by means of computer software. There are more color photographs of the past today than there have ever been before: and that is because people, like artist Sanna Dullaway, are using Photoshop to colorize black and white ones. In this post, I wonder why.

To approach an understanding, it will be helpful to consider a few examples of real color photographs taken in the later Nineteenth or early Twentieth Century. Color photography got its start with famed Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell’swork on the perception of color in the 1850s, although it wasn't until 1907 that the Lumière brothers introduced the first commercially viable technology for color photography. In 1909, French banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn (not to be confused with the architect by that name) hired professional photographers to go out and capture the world in true color. Here's a French scene from that groundbreaking series:

Image Credit: Musée Albert Kahn

With Lumière brothers' “Autochrome” technology, photographs from the early Twentieth Century started to flow. In the one below, a French soldier looks out from his post in Eglingen, Haut-Rhin: 1917.

Image Credit: Paul Castelnau

And below is a photograph of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, who travelled the Russian Empire from 1909 to 1915, capturing its peoples and places in color.

Image Credit: Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress)

These photographs shock me into a realization so basic it is hard to put into words. History is really real. The old cities were really there, in full color. Men and women looked then like they do today; streams were blue then, hair was red, clouds were white, clothes were blue. The world was just as bright in the past as it is today. Hundreds, thousands, of years ago was fully as present to those living then as today is present to us. All the black and white photos and books through which I have learned about history had allowed a creeping sort of disbelief into my attitude towards the past. I realize I have sometimes equated the past with the media through which it has been made present to me. These color photographs inspire me to imagine the past anew as pulsing, felt, immediate.

Of course, color photography is a medium; it is still a technology for capturing a visual effect and reproducing it to a now distant viewer. The immediacy I am feeling is in my imagination. I think it is this feeling of immediacy which people who are colorizing black and white photos are trying to produce.

Image Credit: Sanna Dullaway

In this image, artist Sanna Dullaway has colorized Alfred Eisenstaedt’s iconic “V-J Day in Times Square,” originally published with the caption: In New York's Times Square a white-clad girl clutches her purse and skirt as an uninhibited sailor plants his lips squarely on hers.

It's like it happened yesterday.

On Psycho-Realistic Action Heroes

Chris Ortiz y Prentice — Sat, 22 Sep 2012 18:34:52 +0000

Image Credit: Prometheus (2012)

Hollywood, you are going about action movies all wrong, then, because you have taken for granted what is the opposite of the actual case. You believe we viewers take pleasure from grandiosity of visual effect, but in fact your viewers are suffering from a spiritual condition of nullity brought on by over-exposure to the visually incomprehensible. How to make us feel anything: that is your challenge! Two recent treatments of the action movie hero provide a neat case in point and will serve for a conclusion to these remarks on the importance of psychological realism to compelling action cinema.

The image below--taken from Timur Bekmambetov’s Wanted (2008)--shows assassin Fox (Angelina Jolie) wielding a large-caliber handgun in one hand, an Uzi in the other, reclining on the hood of a hot red Dodge Viper, presumably holding herself on to the speeding car by virtue of her imponderable leg strength.

Image Credit: Wanted (2008)

If you have read my last two posts, you will not be surprised to learn that I consider this image an excellent example of all that is wrong with action cinema. It goes without saying that it does not represent a physical possibility. All the elements of this scene have been selected for the way they look on the big screen; none of them have been criticized from the perspective of psychological realism. Eminently consumable, it takes its place in the vault of one’s imagination next to countless like it and is immediately forgotten about. Incidentally, Wanted imagines a world where one can bend the trajectory of bullets by waving the gun while you shoot it: as with the image, so with the movie as a whole.

Now let’s conclude by looking at a far better because psycho-realistic depiction of the action movie hero in scientist Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) of Ridley Scott’s 2012 Prometheus. In the shot which heads up this post, Shaw is using a semi-automated technology for surgery to manually remove from herself the growing fetus of an alien species. The fanciful elements of this scenario are obvious, but it is treated with great psychological realism. One cringes to watch it. Scott’s only mistake is to have Shaw running about the ship after completing the surgery. Shaw, up to this point, is a believably strong person. Had she collapsed after the surgery from feelings of exhaustion, over-strain, betrayal, sorrow, and fear--not to mention blood loss--her character would have been more relatable and the plot would have benefitted as well. (For instance, the viewer might “pass out” with Shaw only to reawaken in a ship on red alert, with no crew around and possibly an alien intruder on board. It is vulnerability, remember, which lends to action cinema the power to compel emotional response. As it is in the movie, the viewer gets too omniscient a viewpoint to be very apprehensive, and Shaw is going on a mission almost immediately after suturing her lower abdomen.)

As I have argued, it is that with which we are close to which we are able to respond emotionally. The two arrows of choice in the quiver of action filmmakers should be the close-up and the wide angle; the first to capture the knowing look, the quivering flesh. The other because one only dares look out of the corner of one’s eye at a sight that one somehow knows to be too large to comprehend. The Sublime, as the Romantics called it, must be treated tangentially, and in fact, disappears the moment one tries to get a direct view of it.

Image Credit: Prometheus (2012)

Scott understands this remarkably well in this shot, where he produces a psychologically fraught moment by combining a close-up--Shaw’s strong but exhausted and vulnerable person--with a wide-angle--an unknown, armored, large bipedal coming round the corner.

Keep our eyes, Hollywood, on what is at our level, and only gesture towards what we know is there all the time, almost as if it were looking down at us: the “general and universal physical fear” of which Faulkner spoke, “so long sustained by now that we can even bear it.” Adopt psychological realism and you will have made gripping action cinema.

Part II: Suspense is Better than Action

Chris Ortiz y Prentice — Sat, 15 Sep 2012 15:31:11 +0000

Image Credit: National Archives image (208-N-43888)

Part II: An Objection is Entertained

Last week I argued that suspense makes for more arresting visual effect than does what passes for “action” in Hollywood these days. My main point was that human frailty creates suspense and that psychological realism will do much to improve action cinema. Bigger visuals are not necessarily better at creating an emotional response in the viewer.

Now, you may say to me: Chris, you are not taking into sufficient account how big real visual events have become.

You act as if we lived in the forties still; you seem to want an action cinema which would treat destructive action as if it rarely happened. But it happens every day, and has happened diurnally for some time now, and a few times on a grand scale.

Admittedly, the world has gotten a lot more frightening; it is indeed, as Cormac McCarthy found a way to express it, no country for old men. All the more reason to adhere to psychological realism! When “death looks gigantically down” (Poe), we feel it more gigantically, I would argue, when it is measure against something like sanity, or just plain safety. Sheriff Bell provides that measure, in McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2005). The Coen brothers, who adapted McCarthy’s novel into the best action/suspense thriller of which I am aware, never lose sight of it either.

Note, for instance, how the camera “eyes” firearms in the scene excerpted below from the film version of No Country (2007). (Warning, the violence in this scene, unlike that of many action movies, is disturbing.)

Courtesy: No Country For Old Men (2007)

The viewer does not see the firearm until the penultimate moments. Instead, we see Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson) eyeing something very uneasily. When a firearm discharges, it is a very frightful thing, even when you are certain you will not be shot. The vast majority of action movie makers have forgotten this, and they are to be blamed for their lapse. The Coen brothers and McCarthy, by contrast, eye a gun in the way that you would if it were in the room with you.

Hollywood, do you want to arrest the viewer’s attention: then treat guns as the awful instruments of destruction and nihilism that they are. A person is made of most supplicating flesh, and a bullet of the most indifferent lead.

It is true -- and this is our tragedy -- that very many of the world’s suffering denizens live intimately with the continual threat of firearms and even massive explosives. Weapons are not less frightening for being ubiquitous; they are all the more terrifying for that. As William Faulkner could say by 1950: “There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up?” What McCarthy and the Coen brothers have shown is how this question becomes a problem of the spirit. You cannot show this, I think, with visual effect alone, hence the crucial importance to No Country of Sheriff Bell’s narrated monologues.

Hollywood, I believe you are well aware of the Faulknerian condition; but I think you are going about exorcising our demons all the wrong way. Observe this scene from the highly entertaining but all too scopophilic Independence Day (1996):

Courtesy: Independence Day (1996)

What are we doing when we imagine the total destruction of famous buildings? We are warding off the evil spirits.

“But alas,” writes Mike Davis (Dead Cities and Other Tales, 2003) “they have come after all; brandishing box-cutters. Although movies, like kites and women’s faces, were banned in the Hindu Kush version of utopia, the attacks on New York and Washington D.C. (on September 11, 2001) were organized as epic horror cinema with meticulous attention to mise-en-scène.” The U.S., in Davis’s view, has responded to cinematic terrorism cinematically: “The ‘Attack on America,’ and its sequels, ‘America Fights Back’ and ‘America Freaks Out,’ has continued to unspool as a succession of celluloid hallucinations, each of which can be rented from the corner video shop: The Siege, Independence Day, Executive Action, Outbreak, The Sum of All Fears, and so on.”

The dog which escapes the destruction in the scene excerpted from Independence Day (1996) says it all. Blow-em-up action cinema is every bit as much a response to the Faulknerian condition as is No Country For Old Men. But where that movie presents a problem of spirit, the blow-em-ups are trying to make us laugh it off; or are they trying to immunize us against our fears. Faulkner again: “Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it.”

Please, Hollywood -- I do not plea with but beg of you -- do not compete with reality for grandiosity of visual effect! We are sick to death with the visual reality of unimaginable events, and the way to heal is not to match on the silver screen, in super high definition, each new cataclysm.

Why Suspense is Better than Action: A Plea to Hollywood to Adopt Psychological Realism for Action Movies

Chris Ortiz y Prentice — Sat, 08 Sep 2012 19:15:02 +0000

Image Credit: J.R. Eyerman

Part I: Analysis of the Problem

What ails action cinema? Why, it is Hollywood’s obsession with visual effect, which derives from a misunderstanding about how emotion is connected to looking.

Hollywood has put all of its eggs into the basket of “scopophilia,” Freud’s term for the pleasure a person obtains from looking. Hollywood’s action movie-makers, in particular, aim to visually stun.

South Park - Michael Bay on Pinkbike

Courtesy South Park: Season 11: Episode 10 "Imaginationland" and Pinkbike.com

The problem with aiming to visually stun is that the price of its success quickly inflates. Like a drug, that which visually arrests fails to satisfy a second time. Film-makers must needs ratchet up the visuals, and indeed the last half-century of action cinema attests to a breakneck race to feed the addiction. Explosions, pictures of Earth from space, drooling monsters, time-lapse: the quiver of visual technique bursts at the seams, and yet one begins to feel that none of the arrows aims true.

Image Credit: Deep Impact (1998)

What is worse, there is no longer anywhere left to go. 3D held our attention for a moment, no doubt, but as only a technological solution, it fails to address the real problem. We are bored with action cinema. All the visuals in the world no longer do anything for us. We have seen enough!

Image Credit: Avatar (2009)

The real question -- and the one I am making a plea to Hollywood to reconsider -- is, What makes a sight arresting to a person? What visual information is capable of starting up in our bodies a feeling? Hollywood’s answer has been, for the most part, that which is big gets a response. The bigger the better. Their mistake has been to disregard how little we viewers are. In a word, the movies have gone big without retaining anything small, with the result that we do not really sense the bigness of even the biggest visual effects.

Add Action FX to your iPhone video; Image Credit: Bad Robot Interactive

This brings us, Hollywood, to the one and only step necessary to reinvigorate the action genre: adopt realism!

Action cinema cannot afford to disregard the claims of realism. What makes a situation exciting, gripping, scary, intense is the possibility that bad things could very easily happen to a person. American action cinema is filled with super-people, but people are really rather clumsy and ineffectual. When situations get tight, it’s scary because chance plays such an indomitable role in deciding the issue. There is only so much that a person is capable of. The most highly trained people who deal with “action” scenarios in real life will be the first to tell you that there is no such thing as super. There is only fortunate. One gives oneself the best chances by being disciplined and knowledgeable, and it can still very easily go terribly wrong.

Great action narrative recognizes the frailty and ineffectuality of human beings. What realism will do to make for arresting visuals is to scale them, an indispensable technique for the eliciting of an emotional response.

Image Credit: The Walking Dead (2010)

It is the vulnerability of the man on the horse in this screen shot from the popular AMC series The Walking Dead that scales for the viewer the magnitude of the cataclysm. Psychological realism is the reason for arresting visual effect.

Tune in next week for: An Objection is Entertained