Life in the Pissant Swamp: Musings on the University at Albany's Project Renaissance

 

For many of those who dream of going to university and who dream of being an academic someday the academic life is often surrounded by and encased within a web of romanticism. The problem with this is that many of those who romanticise academia have a Californicated rather than a real view of university life and of the professors they hope to study with. In actuality, the academic life is very different from the fantasies that fill the minds of those academic wanna bes who romanticise higher education and the academic life. In fact, academia is closer to Peyton Place crossed with The West Wing if The West Wing was much ado about very little if not nothing, than to the fantasy world of mediaeval romance and chivalry which was never really real in the first place.

When I was young and naive I was one of those who romanticised higher education. These romantic illusions and delusions about academe were largely maintained during my undergraduate years thanks to my limited knowledge of and experience with the more Peyton Place and The West Wing aspects of life within the ivy-covered sometimes gothic walls of higher education. Fortunately, this romanticism did not survive my postgraduate years thanks to a number of smacked by reality moments during my postgraduate sojourn including professors who blackmailed female graduate students into having sex with them, its more powerful professors leaving their wives for the less powerful client younger graduate students they worked with, and its ultimately petty political and ideological machinations.

My most intimate experience with the petty political and ideological machination side of academe happened around 1997. I was hired to be one of, if memory serves, six teaching assistants working with six faculty members for a new academic programme at the University at Albany in Albany, New York, Project Renaissance. While I no longer remember all of the dramatis personae in the Project Renaissance saga thanks to the passage of time, I do recall that Project Renaissance was the brainchild of Lil Brannon, who had a doctorate of education from from East Texas State University (one of the many teacher's colleges that became universities in the post-World War II era and now Texas A&M- Commerce), the head the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, CETL, at the University at Albany at the time. 

Project Renaissance's goal was to provide a multidisciplinary living and learning educational experience for selected students. All selected students were assigned to Mohawk Tower, the 22 storey skyscraper in the centre of Indian Quad (now Indigenous Quad), one of the quadruplet quads on the University of Albany campus. At the heart of Project Renaissance's educational focus was a course called Human Identity and Technology, a course that all the students had to take and a course which fulfilled the University of Albany's general education requirement, something that made it more appealing to some students. The goal of these courses--there were eight sections of the course--over the two semesters was to explore how individual identity was impacted by groups, cultures, and institutions, how human identity was impacted by various technologies, and how human identity was impacted by nature, religion, the arts, literature, society, genetics, gender, race, and ethnicity 

Six faculty members and six teaching assistants were hired to teach this course and its course sections. The faculty and graduate assistants were assigned to two groups with each group putting its own spin on the class.. The course I was assigned to, which included V. Ng, some bloke from the mediocre Religious Studies Faculty at SUNY Albany, and another chap whose name I don'tt recall, decided to put a historical spin on the class, something I was not particularly comfortable with given that it seemed to me to replicate the world history courses that were already offered in the History Faculty at the University at Albany. I thus decided, in my discussion section of the course, a section that supplemented the larger course taught by the faculty to at least one hundred students, to be more topical emphasising identity--class, ethnic-racial, gender, sexual/gender identity--in my section. Needless to say, this was a course massively unworthy of the name Renaissance. By the way, I was also uncomfortable with the large size of the generar class meeting--100 students--since it seemed to me to undermine what I thought was one purposes of Project Renaissance, to wit, to provide greater student-faculty intimacy in both its courses and its interactions

I made my concerns public at one of the planning meetings for my group. As a consequence within a few days I was taken off the project at, I was told, the request of the faculty members that ran my group. They didn't even talk to me about this issue before they did the you're fired rag. They simply branded me a heretic--I was told there was concern about my general focus on identity and sexual/gender identity in particular--and ingloriously dismissed from Project Renaissance. They apparently wanted nothing but yes men. Needless to say I learned a valuable and important lesson in how petty power and petty ideological politics play out in the postmodern American university that day.

My ignominious dismissal was, to say the least, a serious problem for a graduate student like myself as I no longer had an assistantship and hence no longer had financial support for the school year. Project Renaissance, perhaps as a result of History Faculty lobbying for me, gave me an administrative assistantship. This lasted a semester instead of the school year as promised. I was summarily dismissed from my administrative position at CETL and Project Renaissance claimed that they no longer had the monies to support me for the next semester. It turned out, of course, that this claim of poverty was a lie. Just before the end of the term I discovered a letter that said that Project Renaissance was planning on getting rid of heretical me and giving my monies to someone else instead.

I contacted the Graduate Student Union of which I was a card carrying member about this injustice and provided the union with a copy of the letter detailing the fact that the powers that be were giving my money to someone else and thus unfairly dismissing me, and filed a formal complaint with the union. The union representative met with Brannon and, at least on one occasion, with Brannon and me. Brannon continued to claim pennilessness throughout the meeting. This experience with the union complaint process provided me with yet another valuable lesson which I have never forgotten, a lesson in the limited power of unions, and in the limits of unions in general. The union was of absolutely no help to me. In fact, the union rep seemed to be more interested in pleasing the powers that be than in helping me in a case where the powers that be were clearly dissembling. As a result, I was only able to continue my doctoral education thanks to the History Faculty which provided me with an adjunct position so I could continue to pay the rent, buy food, and pay for and take classes. By the way, this lesson would be replayed several years later when I taught at SUNY Oneonta where the union conceded to the bureaucrats the right to hide the classes of adjuncts during the pandemic making sure that students could't enrol in the class. a situation that made it impossible for me to continue to teach at Oneonta given that it meant that I would only have one class and would thus not have health insurance and that my pay would be halved, both of which made it impossible for me to continue to commute to Oneonta from Albany to teach given the associated costs. So I retired.

Project Renaissance did not last long. My sense was that many administrative personnel and faculty members at the University at Albany were sceptical about the programme and raised questions about the it during the reevaluation phase despite claims by Project Renaissance that it aided student retention, something increasingly important to the increasingly neoliberal bureaucrats who run second or third level research universities like the University at Albany given the declines in state financial support for higher education. Additionally, the founder of the programme was no longer there to fight for it. Like so many faculty and educational bureaucrats in American universities these days Brannon seemed to be more interested in moving up the corporate ladder to better paying and higher status academic bureaucratic duties and used Project Renaissance to help accomplish this upward mobility bureaucratic feat. Brannon moved to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 1998 where she initially coordinated that university's master's programme in English Education and later became the director of Charlotte's writing programme and the dean of the College of Arts, a position she currently holds at UNCC.

As for my romantic illusions and delusions about academia, they died the day I was wrongly made redundant. I was, as Nick Lowe says, nutted by reality, the reality that academia is just like any other modern corporate bureaucracy in the core nation world and the reality that academic bureaucrats are just like other modern bureaucracies coloured as they are in Niebuhrian grey. The soap opera that is academia is actually, and one should be surprised by this, a mirror of life in general. It. like them, is full of petty rivalries, petty back stabbings, petty blackmailings, petty adulteries, and petty kafkaesque soul stealing bureaucracies. While I am not sure that that old proverb about the less important an institution is the pettier and less important its politics is is true, I am sure of that academia, which is kind of an alternative counterculture that gives academic administrative personnel and its academic faculty a degree of limited and limitedly important power, is, in the final analysis, filled to the brim with a lot of  petty power games that mirror those, if in much less important and impactful form, how governments operate, how economic corporations act, and how humans typically behave. And that ain't romantic at all.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Isabella Balkert and the Amazon Factor

 

It is quite clear by now that social media have played to a lower common denominator than even the critics of television as the lowest common denominator could ever have imagined. Both Google, particularly its YouTube division, and Amazon have played a major role in this dumbing down of the already dumbed down. I was reminded of this recently when I looked up a film on Amazon, a site that used to be easy to use in order to find what one wanted but which is now one of the worst even when you put in the actual title of a book, a movie, or a CD.

I was reminded of this social media dumbing down recently after I watched the 2005 film Conversations with Other Women on the This channel. I was pleasantly surprised by the film as I had almost forgotten that once upon a time independent films with wit, intelligence, and even some cinematic innovation, i.e., art, in other words, were made in the United States, a land where most films have been made for adolescents, literal and metaphorical, since the 1970s in order to "entertain" them and increase craporate profits. Independent American cinema, of course, was put on life support thanks to the Machiavellian strategies of the oligarchic suits who run Hollywood, strategies which included the buying up of independent production companies which were subsequently downsized of eliminated, the blackmailing of cinema houses--which are also dominated by crapitalist cartels--in that tried and true crapitalist and craptorate way--if you want to show our films then--and Hollywood's success at regaining control of the means of production, distribution, and exhibition, aka synergy in postmodernist capitolese over the film industry. This, of course, made it virtually impossible for independent films to be shown in the US and Canada and even beyond if to a lesser extent in places like France after a time. By the way, this was also, and not surprisingly, the same strategy Hollywood had used to run foreign films out of the US and Canadian market (and even beyond its North American kingdom to some extent) and who used their positions of market dominance to create a ratings system blessed by Washington that ran pornography out of theatres during those same years. Hollywood, you see, has never liked competition anymore than they liked much in the way of narrative innovation. All this, by the way, made the 1948 US Supreme Court decision breaking up the Hollywood cartel something that had been thrown into the dustbin of history for by the 21st century Hollywood once again controlled production, distribution, and exhibition putting the Hollywood cartel back in place thanks largely to neoliberal free marketism, a wonderful misnomer to describe a crapitalist world dominated by vertical and horizontal (the old and more descriptively and accurate terms compared to the faddish synergy) integration and the resulting craporate monopolies and cartels, and propaganda which, whether in primary or secondary forms, socialised and socialise the post-Star Wars "kiddies" into a world in which the blue meanies include black and white films, subtitles, and repetition

But back to Conversations with Other Women: After watching the film I thought I might buy it. So, I went to Amazon to see if the film was still available on either blu ray or DVD. What drew my eye almost immediately, however, were the "reactions to the film in the dumbed down and even dumber downed Amazon "review" section . One reaction in particular drew my gaze, a reaction by Isabella Balkert apparently posted on Amazon.UK in 2007. Balkert gave the film one star compared to over 70% of reactors at the time of this post who gave the film 4 and 5 stars. She did so, she claimed, because she found the split screen technique, the interior reactions of the characters, and the flashbacks in the film, flashbacks which provided critical plot points, too difficult to follow simultaneously. I suppose these more complex art films way too difficult to follow for someone presumably brought up on movies made primarily for those with limited cultural capital and limited attention spans.

Balkert went on to condemn art films in tried and true and predictable ways. She condemned the film as pretentious, boring, and the acting awful,  Pretentious and boring, of course, are the rather boring cliches of those for whom any film that strives for art rather than "adolescent" entertainments and tells us more about the person uttering such rhetoric than it does about the film being "reacted" to. As for Balket's claims of bad acting, this is rich coming from someone who, I assume, is an amateur and who has never acted in a feature film in her life according to IMDb. This discourse, one which ignores the fact that Helena Bonham Carter has been honoured for her acting by her peers, i.e., those who work in film. She has, in fact, to note two examples of awards she has received, BAFTAs and Emmy's to her name and has been nominated for academy awards twice. Someones, in other words, find her an excellent actor as do I. The other lead in the film, Aaron Eckert, has also been praised for his acting chops by many critics, particularly for his performance in Neil LaBute's art film In the Company of Men. Needless to say, Balkert is the pretentious and boring one here given that she seems to be speaking in cliched tongues and offers no empirical evidence to substantiate her very weak godlike claims.

If I may, I would like to offer some advice to "Critic" Balkert. I would advise her to stick to the (occasionally gloriously) simplistic, formulaic, and linear films of paint by the formulaic numbers Hollywood. In fact, there is a simplified version of Conversations with Other Women which eliminates the split screen as an alternative for those traumatised by art films and their artistic complexit. There i, after all, room for flims of all types whether genre grounded, artistic, surrealistic, complex in its narrative, or even "adolescent". It is too bad Follywood doesn't recognise this any longer.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Riskpig Meets Buffy and Firefly

YouTube videos never cease to amaze me but then as a misanthrope I am a sucker for the inherent absurdity of human life. Today the YouTube video that did not cease to amaze me was a "reaction" to the season two episode of Buffy called "Passion" by a poster who calls herself RiskPig.

In the final minutes of this "reaction" the Goth kitted RiskPig makes some brief remarks on the differences between Buffy and Firefly which she notes she is watching at the same time as BtVS. According to RiskPig Firefly is more "intense" than Buffy because, she arges, Firefly requires less of a suspension of disbelief. One feels, at any moment she says, that any of the main characters might die even though none of them did through the course of the television show. It would not be until the movie Serenity that any of the major cast of characters in the show would die and those deaths may have been due more to the decisions of the actors not to return to the franchise should a subsequent movie be made, something that never came to pass given the lack of success--something that Hollywood defines purely in monetary terms--of Serenity at the all important box office.

There are major problem with RiskPig's hypothesis. Before I discuss these problems, however, I should note something critically important at least for those of us with an scholarly and empirical bent. At the time that RiskPig offered her observation on "Passion" she had only watched Buffy up to "Passion", the seventeenth episode of season two. Since Buffy ran for 144 episodes and was a show about the loss of innocence as one grew up--it is a bildungsroman--one can compellingly argue that RisPig had jumped the gun at least a bit. Scholars, before they offer analyses of their object of study, prefer to look at all the evidence before they jump over the interpretive cliff. By the way, I should also point out that by the time Riskpig watched "Passion" she had reacted to all but episode 14 of Firefly, the 14th episode being the last episode of the show, a show shown out of order by the braniacs at Fox and a show that was cancelled before all the episodes of season one were completed. A movie, a movie that according to sources was originally meant to be the season two finale of the show before it was cancelled in 2003 by the suits at Fox, followed two years later.

Now back to the problems with RiskPig's hypotheses about the differences between Buffy and Firefly. RiskPig misses the fact that Buffy is, as I noted earlier, a bildungsroman and that this fact matters when comparing Buffy to Firefly The fact that Buffy is a bildungsroman makes Buffy far more structurally, generically, and tonally a more innovative television show than Firefly. Firefly is, like another of Whedon's adult oriented shows, Angel, a more traditional show. Both Buffy and Firefly may play with metaphors. Firefly, however, given that it is an adult show, plays less with metaphors than does Buffy. Firefly's one major metaphor is the one that plays off the differences between the core nations and the modern nations in the late 20th century world. The Alliance, for example, is a metaphor for the core nations of today, the rich Western nations of the contemporary world that design product in the core, manufacture them in the semi-periphery and exploit the resources of the periphery, the global capitalist "frontier", so they can make mass marketed consumer goods relatively cheaply. The frontier planets, the outback planets, the bush planets, the places that want to be left alone by the Alliance but aren't, which is why Captain Malcolm Reynolds, keeps pushing his Firefly class ship named Serenity further and further into the black, further and further into space, in other words, each year, are metaphors for the wilderness. Whedon, after all, it should be remembered, studied with Richard Slotkin, author of a highly regarded trilogy on the history of the culture and mythology of the American frontier, including its culture of violence, from its beginnings in the 1600s to the 20th century. Buffy's metaphors, on the other hand, are embedded in the monsters of each episode of the show and sometimes in its longer season, series, and character arcs.  So while both Buffy and Firefly, work several levels--the literal plot and narrative level, the the metaphorical/allegorical level and the mythological worldbuilding level (which includes existentialist and theological themes)  Buffy is much more complex because it intersects its metaphors much more extensively with adolescent and young adult life cycles, life cycles that, in turn, intersect with a variety of economic, political, cultural, geographical, and demographic forces.

RiskPig also misses important similarities between Buffy and Firefly. Both, not surprisingly, share similar themes. They are, after all, both authored by Joss Whedon. Both explore issues like chosen families, and existentialist choice. Both are also heavily influenced by Whedon's love of classic cinema, the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and John Ford in particular. Firefly, for instance, is Ford's Stagecoach in space--a film that was adapted from Maupassant's brilliant short story "Boule de Suif"--and combined with the tough professionalism and chosen family themes at the heart of the films of Hawks. The suspense in both Buffy and Firefly is, of course, quite indebted to Hitch, the master of the thriller who no one working in the industry today can come close to matching. 

Finally, what RiskPig, like most of her other amateur fellow "reactors" typically miss is the fact that literature, films, and television, are not real and can never be real anymore than opera or operetta can be "real". Even documentaries are manipulated through the use of editing and music, to note just two ways docs are manipulated by their makers. It is this uninterrogated faith, a faith akin to a belief in resurrection, the virgin birth, or reincarnation, in "realism" or naturalism, a term I have never heard one "reactor" use, that is a major problem in the "reactions" of most YouTube reactors. It is a faith, an almost cult like faith, which has socially and culturally constructed a very narrow and parochial conception of aesthetics, a term I really shouldn't use for "reaction" videos, a conception of aesthetics that deletes other approaches to art--allegorical, impressionism, expressionist, dadaist, surrealist, theatrical--from its approach to art. It is a narrow conception of art which would celebrate a colour photograph of the Rouen Cathedral by a tourist as superior to the impressionist paintings of the same cathedral by Claude Monet because it is more "real". One wonders if these true believing amateurs are even aware of the fact that Monet painted the cathedral in different ways in order to, paradoxically, capture how the cathedral looked like at different times of the day in different light, to capture it more realistically or scientifically, in other words They certainly don't seem to aware of the fact that notions of realism have differed across time and continue to differ in Western theoretical discourses.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: When Fantasy Became Real, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Limitedly Examined Life

 

I love those "kiddies" who spew fragments of their unexamined lives out for all to potentially see and hear on YouTube. They whinge and whine about petty little "unrealisms" in the very limited range of moving "entertainments" they watch, cliched mundanities that suggest that those who utter such banalities are constricted not only by limited experience and limited cultural capital but also by Freudian anal disorders. That the cinema they are whinging and whining about, much of it fantasy, nay hyper and uber fantasy--action adventure fantasy, fantasy fantasy, and science fiction fantasy--is as far from the realism or naturalism they claim to treasure, as far from realism as musicals, in fact, a genre they generally despise, doesn't seem to cross their limitedly active minds. One gets the sense from these social media "kiddies" that if they sat down and read Gogol's classic short story "The Nose", assuming they read classics of course--a huge assumption--that they would whinge and whine and scream and shout "oh come on, a nose would never detach itself from face and go slumming around Sankt Petersburg living the life of a state councillor", a title they wouldn't do research on because they don't do research or they want you to post the answer on their reaction page so they can make monies. As a consequence of their limited understanding of art one supposes that these social media "kiddies" would likely find a slice of life masterpiece like Olivier Assayas 2008 Summer Hours "boring", though, in fact, like many of the films of Eric Rohmer, Summer Hours is far "realer" than the fantasies they are devoted, in a groupie sort of way, to. And that, dear reader says all you need to know about the contradictory stream of consciousness that operates across the little grey cells of most "kiddie" "reactors" on social media. All hail the not so examined life where "boring" is not in the socialised eye of the beholder but out there some where in FetishLand.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Elise Stefanik and the Dumbing Down of America

The self-proclaimed princess in waiting of Tangdonia, Elise Stefanik, is at it again. And thank Yahweh she is. I mean what's not to love about a group of we were schooled in posh educational institutions scribes, hypocrites, Pharisees, and pots--or is it kettles?--like proud as peaches Reptardians such as Elise Stefanik. What's not to love, after all, about a pollution of politicians who have perfected the "fine art" of nudge, nudge, wink, wink and being very very economical with the truth, so economical with the truth, in fact, that there often isn't any truth in theur screed at all. Anyway, you know the world is Pythonesque when someone like Stefanik, whose party is full of both sides of their mouth real anti-Semites for whom the only good Jew is either a Jew vaporised by the second coming (can you say genocide?) or converted to Christianity can make political hay by selectively "condemning" anti-Semitism (something, by the way, that spews out in many directions) and deliberately confusing and conflating valid empirical critiques of Israel and nationalist Zionism with anti-Semitism .And let's not forget that politicians like Stefanik, while condeming limits on speech out of one side of their gobs advocate for it out of the other side of their reality challenged gobs. Stefanik and her ilk, after all, are not about free speech for all. They are about free speech only for those that follow their parochial party line. Now that is good old time Republicrat pied pipering at its "finest". Doubleplusgood Elise, doubleplusgood.

One of those who seems to have been well pied pipered on Facebook by Mrs. Stefanik and her comrades is one John Joseph White who, in an impressive rant with an abundance of demagogic slings and arrow but without much in the way of empirical evidence, well actually any empirical evidence whatsoever, " claims, and I quote here [that] it’s the federal government’s involvement in education that has led to the creation of dopey young Progs". Prog rock fans? One might suspect after reading this missive that JJW is a prime example of what he condemns, the dumbing down of American educational institutions, a dumbing down that has produced several bushels of empirically challenged social media "reactors" as even a glance at social media would confirm. The only problem with this hypothesis is that JJW's lowest common denominator jeremiad is, as is almost the case with demagogues, polemicists, and ideologues of his reality challenged ilk, off the mark. But then people who have little grasp of historical reality are always off the mark even though such rhetoric plays well in places like Peoria aren't they?

There are, of course, a variety of reasons for White's rather naive knee jerk manicheanism. Don't you just love a world consisting solely of uncool black and dope white? Reality isn't, as I noted, one of them. In reality, of course, the increase in federal spending at research universities in the wake of World War II--see the Cold War and its consequences that Ike warned Americans about-- along with increased "investment" from other parts of the military-industrial-economic complex, has increased research in American universities. In reality the increased amount of research in American research universities thanks to this increased public and private support for research in American universities, has turned American research universities, including Harvard, into world renowned centres of research that many other smaller nations are envious of. All that said let me note that I would support JJW if he called for an end to imperial war making research in American universities for, after all, I agree with that commentator who once admitted to the fact that he couldn't tell whether MIT was a government-corporate department with educational courses attached to it or an educational institution that did extensive, financially "profitable", and high status military research for government and corporation, something that is, of course, quite profitable for the latter.

One of the reasons for the current state of American universities is a lack of funding from those deluded many who want to turn American universities into knee jerk purveyors of selective holier than thou myths they picked up through socialisation for deluded conformity, something Stefanik cynically knows how to manipulate for power and plunder purposes. Another is the neoliberalisation of American universities, a neoliberalisation that has turned American universities into beggars for students because they need the monies. This begging for students, in turn, has meant that neolliberal university administrators, devoted as they are to the Mammonish theologies of economics and business, preach the gospel that everyone should go to university because it will lead to a greater financial return for them over the course of their "radiant futures". This, in turn, has led to the trivialisation of the humanities and the critical thinking aspect of education and schooling. And it has led, as a consequence, to the retailisation of the university, the corporatisation of universities, a corporate/retail model in which the customer is always right. 

 

Speaking of universities and neoliberalism, it needs to be pointed out that it is hard to discern whether many American universities these days are semi-professional and private sports teams or clubs with educational courses attached to them or educational institutions that have sold their souls for something you don't find at the University of Toronto, Cantab, Oxon, or Laval, sports and the status and retail branding they bring. The paradox that for profit sports are taking over and transforming academic institutions that are putatively not for profit "educational" institutions should not be lost here though I suspect it will by many.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The Narrow Minded Tyranny of "Realism"

 

When one reaches the autumn years of one's life one, or at least some of us, begin to reflect on the lives we have led and on what we have done and not done with our lives during the years we have lived. As someone whose life has often revolved around art, around an obsession with and devotion to books, music, film, and television art forms, I have long regarded the life without art as the life that really isn't worth living.

As a result of this what might reasonably be called a cultural prejudice I have long thought about how art works and how it functions. I don't know precisely how this works, but there is, I think, some art that seems to transcend or appears to almost transcend its space and time at least for those of us who have acquired a degree of cultural capital over the course of our lives. Some works of art, such as, at least to me, the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, many of the writings of Mikhail Bulgakov, the symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven, Maurice Ravel's string quartet, Hector Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, many of the operas of Giacomo Puccini, Gustav Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954), Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1964), and Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), to note a few, seem to draw me out of the mundane and banal space and time that is my life and draw me into an almost magical realm of intellectual and emotional joy. I know, of course, that empirically speaking this sense of transcendence is, at least on the empirical surface, nonsensical. I have long been aware of the fact that art is inscribed within the economic, political, cultural, geographic, and demographic contexts of its space and time. Nevertheless, when I read, listen to, or see works of art, I have a sense that some art, what I regard as great art, takes me, thanks to their magic, out of the realm of the everyday and propels me into a transcendental realm of immense intellectual and emotional jouissance.

I don't mean to imply that this notion of art as transcendental means that we have no need of understanding how works of art work and function in their various economic, political, cultural, geographic, and biological-demographic contexts. Nor do I mean to imply that everyone needs to recognise and value as art that which I value as art or see as beautiful. It is clear, after all, that beauty and value are indeed in the socialised eyes of the beholder. I am not arrogant and ignorant enough to believe that I speak in cathedra when I, for instance, categorise Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as great transcendental art and something else, such as the television show Silver Spoons (1982-1986), as lowest common denominator bread and circuses entertainment, a far too common conceit that many people, particularly on social media sites like YouTube, unfortunately have and a common mistake far too many reactors on YouTube unfortunately make.

As someone who, as I noted, is moved intellectually and emotionally by specific works of art, works I regard as great art, I have been utilising the time that I now have thanks to my retirement reading and rereading books, watching and rewatching movies, and watching and rewatching television shows that I have long wanted to read , listen to, and watch, and watching reaction videos on YouTube, something that rarely results in the transcendental experience great art sometimes  brings. Recently, as a consequence of this retirement programme,  I rewatched a movie which I have very fond memories of, Vincente Minelli's Gigi (1958). 

As I was watching Gigi several things came to mind beyond the nature of art and the nature of the experience of art. I, a baby boomer who came of age in a cinephilic age, a cinephilic age in which many of us cinephiles went to first run and second run cinemas so we could see what were regarded as classics of the cinema from the silent era to the 1960s, thought about the fact that many of the contemporary social media film reactors tended to ignore musicals in their reactions and, if they deigned to react to them, regarded them with disdain, a common prejudice among the broader film going public today which is why so few musicals are made these days. My sense is that much of this disdain for musicals, a disdain that turns musicals and other non-realist forms of cinema, such as screwball comedies and surrealistic films, into acts of profanation, is due to the fact that far too many gensolescents apply a very narrow notion of "realism", a very narrow time and space bound notion of "realism", to films that are not and were never meant to be "realistic".  Now, I guess, I know what commentators mean when they talk about people who possess limited imaginations. No wonder many of those same people think that art, including film art and film entertainments, which have never been "realistic"---a descriptive fact--save perhaps in rhetoric must be "realistic"--a normative rather than empirical polemic--even when they can never be "realistic" given the nature of the cinematic apparatus.

There are, of course, problems with applying a very narrow notion of "realism" to films in an ex cathedraish way. A screwball comedy like Howard Hawks's Bringing Up Baby (1938) is not and never had any intention of being "realistic", something that should be obvious from the fact that commentators have been calling films like Bringing Up Baby screwball comedies since the 1930s. The term "screwball" hardly screams I am realistic. Nor are musicals, like Minnelli's Gigi, meant to be realistic. They, like opera, operetta, and musicals before it, merge genre, tone, acting, and music, including singing, into a potential art form that is, as are all books, films, including documentaries, and television shows, inherently unrealistic because they are manipulated in a variety of ways through things like music, editing, and selectivity, something the great German playwright, art polemicist, and social theorist Bertolt Brecht recognised long ago which is why he tried to use his art for political and ideological purposes in order to raise the political and ideological consciousness by pointing up for them the creative and manipulative processes at the heart of so-called "entertainments". Perhaps no film genre foregrounds its cinematic apparaturs and construction more than the musical.

As I was watching Gigi there were several things about film art that came to mind. I thought about how Minnelli was one of the few directors of which I am aware who knew how to use colour in a way similar to those who filmed in black and white and who used shadows and lighting for aesthetic and expressive purposes. Gigi, for instance, is full of Minnelli reds, colours that for me echo the vibrant colours of Van Gogh, and colour contrasts via sets, clothes, and natural settings. Minnelli's art is also expressed in his use of domestic and "natural" spaces, in his compositions, and in his utilisation of Belle Epoque art and architecture. Gigi, in other words, is manufactured art as are all books, musical works, films, and television shows. It is a pity that so many don't grasp this simple fact. And it is a pity that so many don't grasp the significance of mise-en-scene in some films and television, something that, in turn, can perhaps be used to distinguish art from entertainment.

These observations on Minnelli's mise-en-scene, by the way, have no bearing on whether one likes or dislikes Gigi. They are descriptive empirical facts that any educated close observer can deduce simply by watching Gigi attentively. Unfortunately, many of those who react to films and television shows on YouTube have neither sufficient observational skills or sufficient educational skills to deduce much of anything from the films or television shows they watch beyond simple plot points. And this is one of the reasons why social media sites have replaced television as a vast wasteland, as the purveyor of mostly narcissistic for profit lowest common denominator content. It is a pity that this state of affairs is likely to change anytime soon if at all. Humans, after all, are human

Life as Crisis Management: The Grocery Store Kiada

There are a lot of things I really don't enjoy doing. I don't like going to the laundromat. I really wish I lived somewhere that had laundry facilities on site. I don't like cleaning the toilet bowl. Mom, why did you not tell me that I would be cleaning crap from toilet bowls for the rest of my adult life? And I don't like shopping particularly when there are hordes of other people shopping at the same time. And that is why I try to shop earlier in the morning or later at night.

Today was one of those days when I did some shopping in the early am hours on a rainy Sunday that felt a lot like Cambridge, England. I needed to pick up some groceries, I needed to get some medications, and I needed to fill my gas tank up with some petrol before petrol prices start rising again thanks, in part, to cartellisation and speculation, both inherent aspects of modern capitalism. So around 8 am I got in my car and headed off to the Delmar Hannaford and the Glenmont Walmart.

Both stores reminded me about two of the things I really detest about shopping for groceries and medications. I had a coupon for ten dollars off at Hannaford. It was one of those coupons where if you buy $25 dollars or more worth of items you get a $10 dollar discount. Among other things I wanted to pick up some Siggi's Honey Yoghurt, which I like very much and which was on sale at Hannaford.  So I went to the yoghurt aisle and guess what? Yup, the Delmar Hannaford did not have any Siggi's Honey Yoghurt on the shelves. Nor was it on the cart that the person stocking yoghurt had out so he could fill the empty yoghurt shelves. As I didn't want to wait on a check of stock in the back I decided to skip the yoghurt--the other varieties did not appeal to me--and pick up enough other items so I could make the amount needed so I could get the coupon discount.

My experience at Walmart was a bit different from that of Hannaford. I managed to find most of what I wanted at the Glenmont store even if I had to do a bit of searching for several items, something I almost always have to do at Walmart. The Equate Alka Seltzer was a bit hard to find since they recently moved it for some reason. Walmart seems to like to move stuff once you have found out where it is. Something else that was recently moved and I wanted to find at the Glenmont store was the Beyond Meat burgers, which I like very much. I went to where they were the last time I was at Walmart a few weeks ago but lo and behold they were nowhere to be seen. It was like they had been raptured. Giving up, I went to the self checkout in the store. Seeing an employee there I asked him where it was and was told to look on A32. Unfortunately,  I could not find aisle A32 or even the signage for aisle A32. As I did not want to continue looking for the Beyond Meat burgers--I had perishable frozen items in the car from Hannaford--I gave up and went home.

Stupid me you see I had forgotten about the rules of one of those many variants of Murphy's Law. I had forgotten that generally speaking when you want to find something in a mega grocery store or department store with their labyrinthian aisles and their items sometimes on the move you won't be able to find what you are looking for because the item you are looking for is out of stock, not on the shelves, or you can't find the aisle it is supposed to be in. And so it goes.
 

The Books of My Life: Rites of Spring

Scholars and intellectuals have long debated the question of how the history of the war to end all wars should be approached and viewed. One group of scholars of the Great War argue that World War I was the product of economic and political tensions between the European great powers of Great Britain, France, Russia, and the new great power kid on the block, Germany. The German nation-state, as they note, emerged in 1871 after Prussia's victory in the Franco-Prussian War. It was, they assert, the nationalistic fervour that gripped and united the German speaking states in the wake of that war that was the major factor that united the German speaking states into a nation. 

Other scholars of the Great War argue that the war to end all wars was the product of ethnic tensions, ethnic tensions particularly in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a multicultural empire that united German speakers, Magyar speakiers, and Slavic speakers into a tense confederation. Slavophilism, a Slavophilism manipulated by great power Russia which fancied itself as the messianic protector of Slavs everywhere, gripped parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, particularly Serbia, where ethnic tensions between it and Austria-Hungary played themselves out in deadly fashion resulting in the assassination of Austrian prince Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist in 1914. This assassination, in turn, set the war into motion thanks to the alliances that European countries had made with each other, alliances which lead Austria to declare war on Serbia, Russia to declare war on Austria, Germany to declare war on Serbia and Russia, and Great Britain and France to declare war on Germany. 

For other scholars the Great War was the product of both long term great power politics and nineteenth century and twentieth century nationalisms. The match that set both low burning flames alight was, these scholars tell us, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, an event that set in motion military mobilisations which were impossible to stop after a tipping point had been reached leading inevitably to the war to end all wars. 

University of Toronto professor Modris Ecksteins, in his superb Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1989), adds another dimension to the study of the political and military forces that led to the Great War, culture. While not ignoring the role that economics, politics, demography, and geography--four of the five factors that make humans human--have played and play in human life and human history, Ecksteins argues that culture--manners, values, norms, and morals, all things that allow social scientists to unlock the spirit of an age--are central to understanding why World War I happened.

Eckstein begins his tragic tale about the relationship between culture, modernism, and World War I in France. In the first chapter of the book Ecksteiins focuses his historian's gaze on art entrepreneur Sergei Diagilev's, composer Igor Stravinsky's, and choreographer Rudolph Nijinsky's controversial Le sacre du printemps, the Rite of Spring, which was performed by the Ballet Russes at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in a Paris in 1913. At the heart of Paris's cosmopolitan modernist culture, according to Ecksteins, one that brought together composers, choreographers, artists, dancers, artistic entrepreneurs from the bohemian quarters of modernist Paris, was a modernist bohemian culture that defined itself in opposition to bourgeois cultural values, its other. This modernist bohemian culture, Ecksteins argues, celebrated the artist who, through his or her art, transcended or rose above the conventions, mundanities, and trivialities of modern bourgeois culture. Le sacre, in both its music and in its choreography, Ecksteins argues, was meant to offend "traditional" bourgeois sensitivities through its celebration of the primitive via its primitive violent rhythms and its primitivist and violent choreography. The ballet ended up, as Ecksteins notes, dividing its audience into warring cultural camps of modernist "traditionalists" and bohemian modernists.

Transcendent heroic modernist artist heroes like Stravinsky and Nijinsky, Ecksteins argues, were reacting against the mainstream bourgeois culture of duty that had dominated and continued to dominate both France and Britain in the late 19th century and into the 20th. In England, according to Ecksteins, a nationalist ideal of duty filtered down from the English manorial elite to the English bourgeoise. It was a conception of duty in which the individual meshed unproblematically with the nation-state. These French and British conceptions of duty were, according to Ecksteins, eventually allied to and aligned with notions of progress, namely, the belief that France and Britain were helping to make the world a better place, an ideology that dominated French and British manners, customs, values, and morals. Duty thus, according to Eckseins, was the key symbol around which "traditionalist" French and British bourgeois culture floated. It was this concept of duty allied with notions of defending and extending civilisation, according to Ecksteins, that rationalised and justified the decision of France and Britain to go to war with Germany.

German modernist culture, a culture of moral countenence and secular outlook, on the other hand, Ecksteins's argues, defined itself in opposition to French and British and particularly English bourgeois culture. This, according to Ecksteins, made Germany the true heir to the avant garde idealist and primitivist culture represented in Le sacre. Germany was, after all, the new nation-state on the block. It was a new nation in the throes of an industrialisation and militarisation that would eventually allow the ethnocentric and nationalist German nation-state to compete on the world stage with the other great powers of Europe, if tensely. Great powers, after all, have historically had tense relationships with each other for a number of political, economic, cultural, geographic, and demographic reasons.

Like France and Britain, according to Ecksteins, German modernism centred around the key symbol of duty. The German conception of duty was, however, contends Ecksteins, different in important ways from the conceptions of duty which dominated French and English culture. Germans, Ecksteins argues, were drugged up, thanks to socialisation, on the belief that it and it alone instantiated a civilisation in which the state was the literal embodiment of the volk, the folk. Germans thus came to believe that their civilisation was a civilisation that was superior to all others, something the French and English also believed about their civilisations if in a somewhat different way. Germans, Ecksteins asserts, came to believe that Germany had a unique destiny, a messianic destiny in which Germany and German culture, thanks to its creative artist warrior culture grounded in ideologies of technique, scientism, efficiency, self control, and right, would supplant Great Britain and France as the true city on the hill. This distinct  and hegemonic German culture of duty and destiny, Ecksteins contends, was an important causal factor that led to World War I.

After the Great War, Ecksteins points out, cultural disillusionment set in in France, Great Britain and Germany, a disillusion captured nicely, Ecksteins notes, in Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, a book which had a major impact on how people viewed the war all across the core nation world at the time. Thanks to Remarque's book (and others similar to it such as Charles Yale Harrison's Generals Die in Bed, I would add) This cultural disillusionment, argues Ecksteins, was driven by cognitive dissonance, the cognitive dissonance between the fervour with which men initially went off to war and the disillusionment they  experienced thanks to the brutal realities of modern warfare, particularly modern trench warfare, during the war This disillusionment, in turn, one that was driven particularly in Germany by economic despair, political dysfunction, and culture wars, led to a variation on the German culture of duty and transcendence, one that was grounded less in creativity through life than in creativity through death, Nazism. Ecksteins argues that Nazism, the German cultural and political movement that was born out of the belief that for the Fatherland, in order to achieve its destiny "decadent" Germany had to recapture the spirit of comradeship, the comradeship that paralleled the comradeship of the German trenches in the Great War regardless of the cost. Nazism, Ecksteins argues, was thus kitsch. It was kitschy, Ecksteins argues, because it took selective fabrications from the past and mixed and matched them with selective fabrications of a glorious utopian future, a utopian and radiant future where all real Germans, or at least real German men, would be transformed into warriors marching ever onward even unto death for the for the messianic cause of the fatherland, Gotterdammerung.

In many ways the world of the early twenty first century seems to be cycling back to the late 1920s and early 1930s. Many in the 1930s argued that capitalism was dead thanks to the economic collapse it caused and found salvation instead in the Nazism and Bolshevik communism, a Nazism that was pulling Germany out of Great Depression thanks to military spending, industrialisation, and cultural revival and a Bolshevism that kept the Soviet Union from having a depression, again, at least in part, thanks to industrialisation. In the wake of a series of economic busts and increasing political and cultural polarisation many in the post-World War II North America, Europe, and the Antipodes, once again seem to be looking for an alternative to the political and economic systems that have dominated the core nation World since World War II. Many of them, particularly on the populist right, blame the state itself rather than capitalism, for their many difficulties.

As Ecksteins reminds us, fascism, Nazism, and Bolshevism were not the only strands of authoritarian, melodramatic, and banal kitsch that arose in the 1920s and 1930s that appealed to many on the populist right in the post World War II core nation world. As Ecksteins notes, Nazism was cousin to another kitschy cultural and political movement which emerged during the Great War and the post-Great War era, American Christian fundamentalism and, I would add, Christian fundamentalism's close cousin American Christian nationalism. Like Nazism, American Christian fundamentalism and the right wing American nationalist faith that would emerge from it mixed selective delusions of the past with selective delusions of the present. Like Nazism, the American nationalist faith was and is grounded in delusion, was and is narcissistic, was and is self affirming and self-righteous, was and is filled with hate for an evil other, and was and is stoked up on a sense of choseness and victimisation. For the Nazis, of course, the German race was victimised in particular by Jewish vermin (who Hitler wanted to gas in the same way that rats were gassed in the killing fields of Flanders and France during the Great War as Ecksteins notes), decadents, the infirm and disabled, pacifists, the irresolute, socialists, and communists. Today many American Christian nationalists and their fellow travellers believe likewise that they have been victimised by a host of vermin others including liberals, socialists, communists, gays, trans, politically and culturally incorrect books, somewhat paradoxically by Nazis, and even, in some quarters, by Jews. Like the Nazis of the past today's American Christian nationalist onward marching soldiers are as immune from self-criticism as their Nazi kissing cousins and are just as deluded, thanks to their paranoias and conspiracy theories, including one about blood rituals being performed by demonic liberals in a pizza parlour in Washington, DC. And so it goes...

Rites of Spring is a landmark book that I can't recommend more highly for anyone interested in nationalism, cultural history, and the history of ideology. Ecksteins book is a fascinating excursion into the social and cultural construction of national culture, national character, and civil or public religion. It is a book grounded more in social and cultural psychology than in a fetishised psychoanalysis that a product of the social conditions and the culture of fin-de-siecle Europe and is. as a result, all the better for it in my opinion.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The Nobody Does it Better Than Me Mentality

 

Someone once claimed that everybody was a critic. That is perhaps an overstatement. Perhaps it would be better to say that everyone, particularly in the core nation West, is a whinger and a whiner. 

Many right wingers, for example whinge and whine about the decline of Western civilisation and want to ban, censor, or, in that wonderfully exemplary banal phrase of the brave new banal digital age, cancel, those things--literature, films,  educational courses of study--that they believe to be aiding and abetting the decline of Western civilisation whether in the US, Canada, Australia, Great Britain, or Western Europe. The jeremiads of the politically and ideologically correct populist right generally involve, in some way, shape, or form, a moral panic about "new" or "modern" notions of sex, gender and ethnicity, including race, and the role education and schooling plays in disseminating these new ideas about sex, gender, and ethnicity to their apparently naive, innocent, and defencless children. 

Many liberals, and particularly those who believe that the arc of history always bends in the direction of justice for all, whinge and whine about those who they see as standing in the way of human progress. and human liberation Paradoxically, the politically and ideologically correct jeremiads of progressivist civil rights liberals are not that dissimilar from those of the populist right since they too are focused on "modern" notions of sex, gender, ethnicity and race, and the role education plays in disseminating  "modern" and liberating ideas about sex, gender, ethnicity to children desperately in need of enlightenment and liberation.

The new social media have, as Jill Lepore notes in her excellent history of the United States, These Truths, played an important role in expanding, spreading, and exacerbating this broad culture war between the "traditionalists", who are less traditionalists than Victorians, and the progressivist liberators. They have also played an important role in expanding and spreading the notion that everyone can be and should be a cultural critic. Culture criticism, of course, has been around for ages. Aristophanes, for instance, criticised the cult of war and Socrates in his comedies of the Ancient Greece of the fifth and fourth century BCE. The Frenchman Francois Rabelais satirised what he saw as the folies of his era, the Renaissance. The American ex-patriate Stanley Kubrick and his American and British collaborators darkly satirised the madness associated with nuclear war with its mutual assured destruction, MAD, in Doctor Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

There has long been another stream of criticism, however, cultural criticism, the criticism of works of art whether paintings, sculpture, plays, literature, films, and television, for example. One variety of this form of cultural criticism has been associated with intellectual culture, an intellectual culture that has long had ties to the world of publishing with its books, magazines, and newspapers. This form of cultural criticism has typically been the province of critics who, while they may be less about doing art than writing about and commenting on art, still have an intellectual understanding and grasp of how art "works" and functions. Film critics like Stanley Kauffmann, John Simon, author of a superb scholarly work on Ingmar Bergman, and Andrew Sarris engaged in a form of  film criticism that was highly scholarly and intellectual, for example. 

Another strain of cultural criticism has been, more "democratic" or more accurately populist in orientation. One might call this the everyman or everywoman "school" of cultural criticism. One can find it in fanboy and fangirl cultures that stretch back at least to the mania surrounding Arthur Conan Doyle's detective Sherlock Holmes in the Victorian era. One can find it in the intellectual and fanboy and fangirl cultures associated with television shows like Doctor Who and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. One can find it in the intellectual and fanboy and fangirl cultures of Jane Austen criticism, fanboy and fangirl cultures that focus on and often decry the adaptations of Austen works for film and television that don't live up to the "standards" these fanboys and fangirls set for them. What all of these fanboy and fangirl cultures have in common is a belief, some might call it a conceit, that they, amateurs that they are, could actually make better entertainments than the professionals who are actually engaged in making entertainments for the masses. 

One can find both of these forms of culture criticism on social media platforms like YouTube if not in similar concentrations. Specialists or professionals, those who actually have studied what they are commenting on or reacting to on social media are a small minority on YouTube, but then they were also a minority in the world of culture and cultural criticism in those eras dominated by communication forms like books, magazines, and newspapers and later movies and television. Social media platforms like YouTube are dominated by fundamentalist and evangelical like fanboy and fangirl amateurs who tend to be literalist ignoring, for whatever reason, any discussion of other levels in cultural texts including the metaphorical and allegorical, the mythological, and the contextual (economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic). They tend to lack an understanding of how classical narrative worked and works given that they have generally been secondarily socialised into a world where films and television programmes really don't have much in the way of classical narrative composition, little in the way of narrative complexity, little in the way of character complexity, and little in the way of plot complexity but are high in roller coaster narrative and plot simplicity and in brand redundancy, genre redundancy, and disposability. And let's not forget that they really don't read many classic works of fiction grounded in classical narrative forms or many works of fiction at all. They tend to be inscribed within cultural and ideological notions of realism that are irrelevant and which lead to the tyranny and fascism of a limited and limiting notion of realism, a tyranny and fascism of "realism" that limits the artistic forms films are supposed to take and which has resulted in a form of "criticism" that is awash in trivialities such as gee that nose would never remove itself from someone's face and live the life of a titled Russian. Finally, many of them operate on the assumption, some might call it a delusion, that they, amateur reactors, can actually make a better film or television programme than the professionals who actually make films and television programmes. This may be true, social media's amateurs may be able to come up with a better script than those who wrote the scripts for the mediocre Gilligan's Island, though such a contention is certainly arguable and I doubt that they can, than a more traditional work of art like Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I should point out that both of these forms of criticism, the intellectual and the everyman and everywoman or populist form of criticism, can also be found in other "domains" of Western culture. They can be found in, for instance, the intellectual and the everyman and everywoman is a Bible interpreter regardless of whether one is educated or not discourses of American Christianity. And that is why, I think, one can credibly argue that the populist form of cultural criticism, a kind of intellectual anti-inellectualism, is akin to the populist varieties of American fundamentalism and evangelicalism, also types of intellectual anti-intellectualism, with their everyman and everywoman is a valid interpreter of the Bible despite how little schooling they have. I should also note that fanboy and fangirl cultural "criticism" is fickle. I, for instance, recall much gnashing of teeth and whinging and whining about the Graham Williams and Douglas Adams era of Doctor Who, the reflexive or meta era of the show in the late 1970s and early 1980s when Williams was producer and Adams was script editor. Today, many Who fanboys and fangirls now regard that era as one of the best periods in the history of the show. Times they do a change don't they?