Archive for April 2009

Mad Men?

From 14 August 2005, Journal:

For a while now I’ve been thinking of something I read when I was following Babylon 5 back in the mid-90s. JMS had written of how formality arises in a post war period. Spent the early afternoon trying to track this down, and came up with the following messages. I think this one from 2 July 1996 is probably what I’m thinking about:

From: J. Michael Straczynski (71016.1644@compuserve.com)
Subject: Don’t wanna hear that!
To: CIS
Date: 7/2/1996 7:07:00 PM

(original post unavailable)

My sense is that these things tend to go in cycles; if you were around in the Roaring Twenties, with flappers, jazz, and (to say the least) a lapse in morals that went into the first part of the 1930s, you’d extrapolate from that to say that the 1950s, by virtue of being 20 years down the road, would be even MORE loose, more immoral, wilder. But, in fact, the 50s were extremely conservative. And most of the SF of the time looked to a future that was as button-down as the present of their writers. Then the looser 60s and 70s, and a rebirth of some extent of conservatism in the Reagan 80s and for health reasons.

The day someone perfects, and distributes, a guaranteed Aids vaccine, I think you’re going to see another sexual revolution that’ll make the 60s look like a dinner party.

So by the time of B5, we’re in a bit of a conservative swing again, in terms of sexual matters (which often tends to come about post-war).

jms

Which is two years after he posted this on 12 January 1995

From: jmsatb5@aol.com (Jms at B5)
Subject: Re: Attn: JMS. counterculture
To: rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated
Date: 1/12/1995 2:51:00 PM

This to Katherine Teague…you’re among the first to pick up on a deliberate writer’s choice in the writing of the series. In looking toward the period of B5, I tried to construct a society that had to come together on a planetary scale to fight a war for simple survival. My thinking was, “Okay, let’s assume that formality has come back into vogue; clothes tend not to be revealing, lines are more streamlined or severe, people address each other or refer to each other formally (”Mr. Isogi,” “Ms. Winters,” and so on).

I suppose a conservative could derive some satisfaction from this choice…though to quote Mephistophilis in “Faustus”……”Aye, think so still, ’till experience change thy mind.”

jms

which was because Teague commented on this, posted a day earlier

From: jmsatb5@aol.com (Jms at B5)
Subject: Attn: JMS. counterculture on B
To: rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated
Date: 1/11/1995 5:34:00 PM

By 2259 the “counterculture” as we understand it is absolutely old fashioned and retrograde. Seems like everybody’s working to get In, not be Out. Sort of an extreme gingrichification effect….

jms

There was also this, which seems closer to my memory

Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated
From: Jacob Corbin (cor…@swbell.net)
Date: Nov 14 1998, 4:00 am
Subject: Re: Civil Rights in B5? WAS: River of Souls ( *Spoilers* )
Reply to Author | Forward | Print | Individual Message | Show original | Report Abuse

And as JMS has pointed out from time to time when people have asked why everyone in B5 wears heavy clothing and listens to old-style swing, populations generally tend to become more conservative after a major war (the 20’s and the 50’s are both good examples of this). I’m still not sure if denizens of the 23rd century would be jazzhounds or not, but it’s a fun extrapolation and one of the things that initially attracted me to B5–along with neckties.

Jacob

And there was this, from September 25 1996

[…]
(I’ve also made the mental assumption of a return to a newformality in 2260, since styles go in and out of fashion. People use the word Mr. and Ms. more often, there’s a more formal stance with people you often get when a culture comes out of a major war, as we did after WW2.) […]

And I like this from 27 October 1995:

From: jmsatb5@aol.com (Jms at B5)
Subject: ATTN JMS: Influences?
To: rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated
Date: 10/27/1995 9:00:00 AM

[…]It saddens me a bit now that anybody who sounds too literate is often put down as showy or being theatrical. Listen to the speeches of Kennedy and Churchill and FDR, look to the great orators of our long history of a nation, from Lincoln to Jefferson. Their use of language, of an idea well formed and delivered, propelled this nation toward its current destiny, forged one country out of dozens of squabbling states. I listen now to politicians, hoping and waiting for the one who understands that the words have to dig into our souls and take root, must have power and the purity of language well-used. And I just don’t hear it anymore…which is perhaps why we have consensus takers and not leaders these days.

It saddens me that literacy has become suspect, and degraded, given how many millions of years of evolution spent developing the ability to create language. The quality of our thoughts is bordered on all sides by our facility with language. The less precise the useage, the less clear the process of language, the less you can achieve what you want to achieve when you open you mouth to say something. We have slowly bastardized and degraded and weakened the language, abetted and abided by a growing cultural disdain for literacy, a cyclical trend toward anti-intellectualism.

So I write my characters as sharp, and as witty, and as intelligent, and as literate as I wish I would be under those sorts of circumstances, which of course I never am. Maybe to remind people of the power of language…mainly because I just love the sound of words carefully stitched together. My dramatic conceit is that in 2259, we have had a moderate rebirth of formality, and the kind of literacy you would often see in letters from the turn of the century, and the 1930s. Because it allows me to write it the way I want.

This especially makes me think of a scene in the first season, when Sinclair is listening to the room’s computer recite ‘Ulysses’ by Tennyson in ‘The Parliament of Dreams’ (1994-02-23).

Now, the question I ask – is this happening? If you look at the Conservatism of the 1980s (which Bush II & Co seem to be echoing) this follows ten years after Vietnam. So it would seem to say that the next decade will be even more conservative then this one? (Oy vey). And yet, JMS talking about needing an Aids vaccine before another sexual revolution – this was written ten years before amateur internet porn, and there’s still no vaccine (although in ‘96, antiretroviral treatments which keep people alive today were only then beginning to become available). Anyway, I guess I have my eye out for a developing conservatism.

May 1992: A Comparison btwn the Irish and the Russians

I found a paper from Grade 11 History yesterday. This evening I typed it up. I’ve just finished reading Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia and I’d seen his Travesties last month, so this was a nice coincidental find and refresher. If you had asked me on Saturday about the Irish Revolution I described 17 years ago, I wouldn’t have known what you were talking about.

A Comparison Between the Russian Revolution and the Irish Revolution

Obscure television programs

…that have influenced my thinking.

Century City (2004)
My Life and Times (1991)

When I couldn’t remember the title of My Life and Times I did a search for Helen Hunt. I also remember her from her two episodes of Highway to Heaven in 1985 when her character was dying of cancer.

Then she got famous on a sitcom and disappeared. But in My Life and Times she played the lead character’s wife. In an episode set in the late 1990s, during an economic depression, they huddled together on a bed, holding each other, providing comfort amid the dismal. The scene was depicted in a gray colour scheme, in order to highlight the dreariness.

The messenger for the message | JRS part 2, from “Unconscious Civilization”

[p.57]

Harold Innis, the first and still the most piercing philosophyer of communications wrote a great deal about the problem of the written or what George Steiner calls “the decay into writing”.

The deeper we go into the written, the deeper we go into mistaking the snake for the apple – the messenger for the message. I’ve said before that one of the signs of a healthy civilization is the existence of a relatively clear language in which everyone can participate in their own way. The sign of a sick civilization in the growth of an obscure, closed language that seeks to prevent communication.

[
•blogging vs. academics & mainstream media journalism & the language of a press release;
•participatory vs. dictatorial
]

This was increasingly the case with those medieval scholars know as teh schoolmen. This is the case today with those who wield the thousands of impenetrable specialist dialects. They plead complexity, given this century’s [20th] great advances, particularly our technological breakthroughs. But the problem is not one of complexity. Not many outsiders actually want to know the nuts and bolts of building jumbo jets or writing post-modern novels. It is the intent that is in question – teh intent to use language to communicate, or alternately, through control of it, to use language as a weapon of power.

Unconsciousness – even hysterical unconsciousness – is not a surprising characteristic in a corporatist society where the language attached to power is designed to prevent communication.

“A life without this sort of examination is not worth living,” Socrates said in the most famous sentence of his trial defense. He was referring to the ongoing self-examination that public philosophy involved. And philosophy is a matter of public debate or it is nothing. Philosophy as just another specialist corporation is a flagrant return to medieval scholasticism.

Consciousness | JRS part 1, from “Unconscious Civilization”

[p.56]

Of course, misinterpretation or inadvertent interpretation is the great fear of writers who have any sense of the real world into which their language flows. Perhaps that is why so many of the key thinkers – let me call them the conscious thinkers – have feared the written word and expressed themselves through the oral. Socrates, Christ, Francis of Assisi are obvious examples. Shakespeare’s plays were almost oral, written down in bits and pieces, changed repeatedly on stage. Even many who wrote – Dante, for example, or the great figures of the Enlightenment – consciously sought to use a language polished into a simple clarity that could both evoke and be used as if it were oral.

Harold Innis, the first and still the most piercing philosopher of communications wrote a great deal about the problem of the written or what George Steiner calls “the decay into writing”.

[…; p. 62]

Socrates, on the other hand, had reached 70, and his trial, full of ironic humour, questions and a terrifying consciousness. He was a force of doubt and thus of disorder from the utopians’ point of view.

Cory Arcangel @ Images Festival

PERFORMANCE
FRI 10 APR 2009 7:00PM – 8:00PM @ THEATRE CENTRE

Live 5: Art Since 1960 (According to the Internet)
Hanne Mugaas & Cory Arcangel

How is the internet changing our perception of art? In its indiscriminate cataloguing and non-hegemonic participation, the internet presents an idiosyncratic account of art since 1960. The democratic and self-regulating mechanisms of the internet make artworks and art world information easily accessible for reinterpretation by its users.

Hosted by Pleasure Dome and the Images Festival, Art Since 1960 (According to the Internet) is an informal multimedia lecture presented by Hanne Mugaas and Cory Arcangel that examines the alternate discourse on contemporary art that is unfolding on the world wide web. “The control systems that normally govern the systematization of art are dismantled by the search algorithms and whims of home users,” states Mugaas. The academic discipline of art history is bypassed and the curatorial rigour of the museum is rejected by internet users posting on art. Certainly institutions have their websites, but they are overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of posts by users who ignore their methodologies. What are the results when this level of discourse is lost? Are the long established theories of art merely fusty conceits; irrelevant and elitist notions?

Gathering together art images, video and audio, Mugaas and Arcangel survey the internet’s art collections and how they are contextualized by its users. They offer their view on how this open sourcing of art and ideas has resulted in a variety of contiguities, conflations and collisions.

Cory Arcangel is an internationally renowned digital hacker known for his conceptual art projects. Check out and try out his reprogramming works at www.beigerecords.com/cory/tags/artwork/

Hanne Mugaas is a curator of art ephemera as well as a thought provoking art and culture pundit. View her collection of audiovisual postings at http://hanne-mugaas.com/artblog/