Ruminatrix
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Thursday, May 15, 2003
Admit All
I admit everything. There's something rather sad about this confessional culture gone terminal: "I am the Mimi". Here's hoping Deep Throat never gets the urge to "feel a great weight lifting from his (or her) shoulders".
Vat-language
Adam Gopnik's New Yorker piece on the movie Matrix Reloaded has already been referenced on the tree. I don't mean to steal a link here and have yet to see the movie -- but Gopnik's essay isn't really a movie review and has little to say about the sequel. (Anyway, isn't the middle third of any trilogy likely to have inherent weaknesses?)
His subject is the metaphor of the Matrix as a political and cultural motif of this wired age. He mentions Zizek, Baudrillard and Phillip K. Dick. (I read Phillip Dick's novels voraciously as a college student and loved his prophetic vision, the dark humor, which hasn't really been touched on in any of the movie versions. Later I found out that Dick's amphetamine-fueled writing binges severely aggravated a tendency to acute paranoia. Back then I would have found that very cool.)
Others, including the philosophers Hilary Putnam and James Pryor, have also been fascinated by the "who-controls-reality" question -- though Gopnik ignores the Situationist Guy Debord, who coined the notion of the "society of the spectacle," which surprised me.
For Gopnik the Matrix is an image of our current powerlessness to change our society, of constraint on human agency on the outside world. He quotes James Pryor:
"If your ambitions...are relatively small-scale, like opening a restaurant or becoming a famous actor, you may very well be able to achieve them. But if your ambitions are larger -- e.g. introducing some long-term social change -- then whatever progress you make toward that goal will be wiped out when the simulation gets reset..."Matrix-like social control is evident in the "vat-language" (the term is Putnam's) exhibited by our monopolized media (especially TV), of corporate public relations-speak and advertising. It subverts language, makes us feel unable to feel that we can act upon the world, to change reality.
The other matrix is the one we are linked to right now, through code. The Web (a synonym for matrix after all) does have a liberating/exploratory potential, and enables us to stay remotely linked. But it does have a more malign aspect -- the "enforced" passivity of being consumers, viewers, watchers of the spectacle, the way it makes us fear being "unplugged", "out of the loop" if we leave.
To me The Matrix (the movie) was a wry vision of the entertainment industry itself, its ability to create shock and awe out of makeup and cardboard and plywood and computer graphics, all with the goal of getting the customers not to care very much about anything other than "what's on next?" or "where can I buy that?" Nothing illustrated this better than all the discussion of The Matrix's "ground-breaking" stop-motion special effects, which were almost instantly integrated into a series of TV ads for the Gap clothing stores, showing the seamless interface of entertainment and retailing.
Maybe local actions are the only ones which can be undertaken today. As I write, I hear that the 33% fare increase on New York's network of subways and buses -- which had been pushed through against public opposition by bureaucrats using fixed budget numbers -- has been overturned in the courts. Small victory, but a step in the right direction.
Tuesday, May 13, 2003
New Yorker cartoon
Man in suit to woman at cocktail party: "Well maybe we haven't found any weapons of mass destruction, but you can't deny that we've destroyed a massive amount of weapons."
"No Disincentive Not To"
The NYT's Paul Krugman is not the first to note that this country privately-owned media often behave like "state-run outlets", whereas the state-owned BBC (or the Israeli press) feel obliged to question their governments' policies to prove their editorial independence. Why? The US government rewards such compliance by weakening existing regulations on "cross-ownership" and other oligopolistic practises.
One media group wrote to [FTC Chairman Michael] Powell, dropping its opposition to part of his plan "in return for favorable commission action" on another matter. That was indiscreet, but you'd have to be very naïve not to imagine that there are a lot of implicit quid pro quos out there.And Fox News' parent News Corp, fearlesslessly censors stories to appease the government in Beijing.
And the implicit trading surely extends to news content. Imagine a TV news executive considering whether to run a major story that might damage the Bush administration — say, a follow-up on Senator Bob Graham's charge that a Congressional report on Sept. 11 has been kept classified because it would raise embarrassing questions about the administration's performance. Surely it would occur to that executive that the administration could punish any network running that story.
Meanwhile, both the formal rules and the codes of ethics that formerly prevented blatant partisanship are gone or ignored. Neil Cavuto of Fox News is an anchor, not a commentator. Yet after Baghdad's fall he told "those who opposed the liberation of Iraq" — a large minority — that "you were sickening then; you are sickening now." Fair and balanced.
We don't have censorship in this country; it's still possible to find different points of view. But we do have a system in which the major media companies have strong incentives to present the news in a way that pleases the party in power, and no incentive not to.
Monday, May 12, 2003
Twiggy
A new twig on the tree will be posting from the same machine as me. The third member of our household prefers to go unwired and unquoted. Theo's looking forward to posting and feedback and soon we will put some images up too. We went over some basic HTML tags on the subway to school today.
We have been taught to login and out (thanks Jim), but anyway I'm sure that at some point one of us will forget to log in/out properly and inadvertently post as the other. Thought I'd let you know ahead of time....
Sunday, May 11, 2003
More Research Required
One of my favorite album covers ever was the chimp sitting at an old-fashioned Remington typewriter on The Mekons' 1979 album The Quality of Mercy is Not Strnen. So I'm very disheartened by this story from BBC News:
A bizarre experiment by a group of students has found monkeys cannot write Shakespeare. Lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth wanted to test the claim that an infinite number of monkeys given typewriters would create the works of The Bard.
A single computer was placed in a monkey enclosure at Paignton Zoo to monitor the literary output of six primates. But after a month, the Sulawesi crested macaques had only succeeded in partially destroying the machine, using it as a lavatory, and mostly typing the letter "s".
Read the rest of this post...
Surveillance 'bots
A remote correspondent (hi dad!) sends a clipping entitled Were Shadowy Figure in a Spooky Government Facility Perusuing My Weblog?. Independent (UK) columnist Chris Gulker described finding searches from a 'bot supposedly at "homeland.fbi.gov/Watchlists/suspect/view.jsp" in his weblog referrer log and wondering what was going on. It turned out to be a "referrer spam" artist trawling for reverse hits. Not being much of a log user, I don't know whether this phenomenon is new or not. Anyone? What advertisers -- other than the usual suspects -- want to target the weblog-writing market anyway?
The article is now in a pay-per view archive so I won't link it. But its author's site has some cool stuff on 'bots (especially music industry ones looking for mp3s and so forth) and logs: "Heh, Web server access logs are the medium I read most often lately... they even have ads and spam in them..."
Another Dead Soldier
The SOG CRK77 Vino is the comando corkscrew, it's what the SEALs would use for a hypothetical beach-party, the pocket-tool of special forces tactical oenologists. It rocks.
Graceful as a fine Merlot, yet strong and hearty like a robust Cabernet, the SOG Vino®will handle any corkage with finesse and ease.....Available for even less elsewhere. I heard about Vino from a friend, and it's the only product SOG makes that couldn't kill something. But it's beautiful to (be)hold.
Saturday, May 10, 2003
Baghdad bank job
A lot of money went missing in the last days of the ancien regime in Baghdad. Tuesday's NYT reported that Qusay Hussein and Abid al Hasmid Masood -- assistant to the Iraqi president -- made a large withdrawal around 4 am on March 18th, hours before the first bombs struck Baghdad.
That's $900 million, plus Euros 100m -- or $1bn in cash.
So why was there so much specie floating around the Central Bank? Part of the answer is the Kirkuk-Banias pipeline. Re-opened in 1997, this conduit from the Northern Iraq fields to the Syrian port of Banias (or Baniyas) was used by Iraq to smuggle between 100,000 and 200,000 barrels of oil per day in circumvention of the UN oil-for-food program. Syria pretended the oil was from its own fields and paid the Iraqis off in cash to the tune of $6.6bn between 1997 and 2001. Its existence is not exactly secret: Google turns up 60-odd hits for "Kirkuk-Banias," mostly in oil-industry sources.
The best-known spigot suspected of filling Mr. Hussein's personal coffers was Iraq's oldest oil pipeline, from the northern oil fields around Kirkuk to Syria's Mediterranean port, Baniyas.Question: Why did it take the American press until 2003 to find out about the smuggling? This smuggling can't exactly have been a secret to US intelligence agencies, can it?
The pipeline pumped oil that was sold at cut-rate prices to Syria in return for kickbacks to the Hussein government, according to oil analysts and American officials.
Although American officials complained that the pipeline circumvented economic sanctions, it remained open until United States forces closed it last month.
"Syria continually denied doing it, they said they were testing the line," said James Placke, an oil analyst with Cambridge Energy Research Associates. "Well, they tested the line for two and a half years at the rate of about 150,000 to 200,000 barrels a day."
Since 1996, the United Nations has had official control of all Iraqi oil profits, which were to be used to purchase food and other relief supplies for Iraqi civilians.
While the United Nations has defended its oversight of the program, the General Accounting Office estimated last year that oil smuggling and other kickbacks linked to the United Nations program allowed Mr. Hussein to steal about $6.6 billion between 1997 and 2001.
Diving for dollars
So early last night I serve two groups at the bar. They're asking for wines-by-the-glass suggestions and it goes really well. I'm batting 100% -- in both cases they love the wines I'm steering them towards. They're not connoisseurs, but not total novices either. The labels aren't what's important here -- it's just fun when you see the "I really like this glass" light go on in someone's eyes. Or when they write down the name so they can look for it at the store.
Anyway, both parties ask for their checks at the same time, we do the credit card thing and I hand off the slips to the other bartender at the service station to ring in the charge tips. It's getting busy, so maybe ten or fifteen minutes go by before I think to look at those charge slips. There's only one slip -- we can't find the other. Without the slip we won't get the tip -- we don't know how much they left, but I'm guessing it was pretty decent.
I know I can't stop the show to hunt down a piece of paper. Patience is required -- several hours' worth. But for about five hours I'm pissed off at myself for not putting the slip in a safe place. (One of us probably threw it away the slip, figuring it was a duplicate copy of the other check). Still, eventually we isolate the trash can at his station and set it aside.
Five hours later, well after midnight, I take the can back to the kitchen, take off my dress shirt -- no sense in getting that dirty -- and start trash-diving in my undershirt. The Senegalese dishwasher, gives me some rubber gloves to wear, bless him. Now it's good old-fashioned up-to-the-forearms diving for a couple of three-inch slips among a midden of coffee-grounds and lemon wedges and other food-industry sludge, bulked up with maybe a hundred time-printed of paper slips -- drink and coffee orders and all the rest. Watch out for broken glass on the way down. It's like an archaeological dig: in each stratum the printout times get earlier. Look, here are some handwritten notes on the chef's cheese selections of the day, there are the little cans of juice we opened near the start of the shift. We're back in the right epoch, circa 7pm, let's see what we've got.
After ten minutes I retrieve two scrunched bits of espresso-tanned and wine-stained paper and yes, I feel like Schliemann at Troy. As I wave them in triumph, the sommelier walks into the kitchen --impeccably dressed as usual -- and looks at me like I've lost my mind. Here's $28 more for the tip pool. I'll get about three of those dolllars, but it's the finding the damn thing that makes my day -- because I knew those people had had a good time...Another day, another dollar.