WALLPAPERS(by munawar 9949935350)

Coffee yesterday evening with Kevin Bankston, an EFF lawyer, who was kind enough to brief me on Lessig and some current cases he’s been working on. Kevin asked me for some books to read on the history of privacy, and I’ve decided to post the reply.

The best article remains the one that started me thinking, one in the annals of the american association of geographers by Michael Curry, a UCLA professor. He writes about property law and space in common law history, the protection of houses, churches, and hospitals in particular.

The most brilliant book I’ve ever read on privacy and the use of space: Paul Carter’s Repressed Spaces. A haunting, beautiful, deep book, much about how urban planners think and how artists and philosophers handled space in the early 20th century, as we started to think of ourselves as Freudian creatures.

I’m looking at my bookshelf — there are a lot of titles that were halfway useful but didn’t make me reconsider the nature of the beast entirely. Miles Ogborn’s Spaces of Modernity is a study of 18th c London that typifies the straight-out-of-foucualt school. Sisella Bok’s Secrets is more interesting for the uses of privacy (it’s also older). Two books that are really good on historical reasons to contain information (bnut have nothing to do with buildings) are Roy Porter’s Trust in Numbers and David Vincent’s Culture of Secrecy.

When I was working on the topic, I guess I ended up writing a series of articles about class interaction and buildings — when the elite ran away and started building pleasure palaces on the rhine valley; when the middle class started feeling like they needed to curtain in their coffee house booths — it all has to do with rising levels of class conflict on the public street. which is one reason i’m now writing about the roads, and how they change the dynamics inside a town when they arrive: they necessarily make public and noticeable the kinds of social tensions brought in by changes in information flow and hierarchy.

My friend Jeff Heer dreams about digitizing my 1965 Atlas of America so that one can compare birth rates, wood pulp factories, sunshine maps, suicide rates, birth rates, education, income, and mineral deposits with the flick of a mouse. And compare the America Nixon received with the one we have.

Until he does, there’s Social Explorer http://www.socialexplorer.com/maps/home.asp

http://www.nywiki.com/new-york-city/index.php/Main_Page

Paris has had this for years — the online map with pics, minus the wiki. But soon we can have maps with opinions built in.

Reading: Paul Fussell’s Wartime.

Fussell’s history of World War II follows the same pattern as his The Great War and Modern Memory, deriving a pattern of mass cultural change from the introduction of new words and ways of talking about the self. Mass-mobilization changes the homefront. Mass experience of systematic authority changes the mind and the image of efficient power.

Fussell is pretty sure that WWII invented the word “fucking” as an adjective. It degraded and drained the hope out of the experience of the army as a unit. “Fucking” implied that one was a god in one’s submarine but a plumber in real life, that the rituals of war were certain and fatal in the moment and meaningless once peace came. All one’s little powers were chicken shit and one knew it.

So it goes, writes Vonnegut. So I remember graduate students in Berkeley waxing sentimental over Slaughterhouse Five and the great meaninglessness of the universe. Turtle-necked eye-linered out women who pouted and spat for the semester were emailing the class poetry after Vonnegut. “Fucking” got them somewhere regency couplets never did.

Fussell is right, so far as I can tell, about the total transformation of language in a moment like World War II, the total shape it gives identity, hope, apathy, irony, courage. And Fussell is at least a little ironic and nostalgic himself, being first the author of a book about how World War I had really destroyed for good the elite-run universe that prayed and hoped and made love over each posy and poppy in the countryside. Such sincerity and glossy hope for inter-class collaboration died in the first Great War. What died in the second World War seems to have been faith in the ability of individuals.

Which makes the present moment so strange. There’s a lyric of the meaningless void. The New Yorker has been seen using “soul crushing” as a positive adjectival phrase. And yet, as Danah Boyd has remarked, our generation (age 26 to 30) graduated in the middle of the boom, and has high expectations. Great expectations for selfish gain and for accomplishments. Few hopes for what the soul can do. As if all that soul culture crap Raymond Williams talks about had been utterly beaten out of us.

Yeah, i don’t know what it means. Someone tell me please: what forces are changing language now on this deep level — of anathemizing courage in the name of irony, for instance. And someone else please tell me what facing the meaningless void does for civilization: poison? gift? nothing at all? remarkable face lift, making the client feel some twenty years younger? monastic humility in the face of grandiose expectations of the previous century?

Some nice person who likes my prose has been writing me about where the words come from.

I reply:

Mostly these days it’s more about clawing something worth saying out of the air, rather than the words with which to say it. If only the thought would come. I keep on shredding whiskey and tobacco in the hopes of uncovering some secret hoard of Real Thoughts from which the words could be easily unspun, instant by instant.

No look, it’s very nice of you to say such kind things. There’s a knack to the way of speaking, I don’t know where it comes from or why, but most of us who have it end up hiding with each other, from the stacks of people who presume it’s a kind of pretention (pretense is not offense just another kind of escapism) or an outdated mode of thinking of the ancien regime whose sacrifice is necessary for the red army’s success (sad sad rebels of a revolution already defeated).

I am working at a little cafe in Noe, where the laptops line up and the world winds up on coffee until the words spill out over keyboards and out into the ether.

These are images of people moving in time.

Further reading: J. W. Dunne’s Experiment with Time

Hip young swank thing Aleksandr Vladimirskiy, www.theotheralex.com, is better than I will ever be.

Invisible
Originally uploaded by joguldi.

Among the tricks I was supposed to learn as a landscape specialist was how to take photos of people so that they couldn’t tell I was taking pictures of them.

This weekend I followed a friend to the beach. While he was surfing I walked up and down the sand, taking pictures of couples and individuals on promenade.

In low light, moving swiftly by, the camera picked up only blobs and colors. Suggestions?

Daniel Joshua is a Berkeley undergrad in American History. I ran into him on the BART last week, and he explained his project to me. He’s been travelling literally across the country, photographing himself in the sites of famous movies. For Richard Candida Smith’s course on progressive-era America, Joshua went to Los Angeles and photographed the old slum districts. The comparisons become commentary on the American landscape, its myths, and change.

Joshua is planning a book on the landscapes of Kevin Costner and the American midwest.

Here: High Fidelity and Ghost.

Iowa and Back Again 054
Originally uploaded by joguldi.

PDVD_003
Originally uploaded by joguldi.

Further reading: Footsteps in the Fog: Alfred Hitchcock’s San Francisco
Jeff Kraft and Aaron Leventhal

Santa Monica Press paperback 24.95
288 pp

The New York Times > New York Region > Keeping Great Crowds Off Central Park’s Great Lawn

New York chooses pretty grass over social democracy.

This happened in 1850, folks. In Bristol and London and Birmingham they justified it on religious principles. Keep the working men at prayer instead of drinking on the park and rioting. Sell tickets to the green spaces so that only respectable workers can take their families there. Subtext: then we can avoid that nasty 1848 continental revolution business here in green England.

We have a lot to look forward to.

Can you forgive your brother his stupidity? Can you forgive a regime? Berkeley professor Richard Candida-Smith writes me about how punitive American culture has become. The church epitomizes a kind of reconciliation we can find nowhere else in American society. Hence, he observes, the church’s contradictory and seemingly nonsensical perspective on pedophilia in the priesthood. Candida Smith suspects that the church’s peculiar place towards forgiveness could make it one of the only paths away from this strain of damnation of one’s brother towards which America — left and right — is tending.

Most moving theological/literary encounter of the last three months: the Wooster Group’s staging of Gertrude Stein’s Faust. “I can do whatever I want whenever I want” insists Magdalena/Annabelle while seducing Edison/Faust. She preens while watching herself in the tv monitor. Taken by surprise, she runs away from the fear of having contradicted herself. She tries to broker the devil into leaving her alone by lying about what she can get away with.

The very image of the modern soul watching itself pose, convinced by its small amount of free will that expression alone is redemption.

(Required reading on forgiveness and how societies change: Robert Calasso, The Ruins of Kasch. About which more later. I continue to be haunted by Robert Calasso’s discussion of the sacrifice/body problem. And recently I’ve been hearing about Derrida’s work on the impossibility of forgiveness, which I’ve never read.)

3D head in box
Originally uploaded by joguldi.

This week, things look bad. A new pope, the promise of a Senate smear campaign against liberals as anti-religious. Leaders from the National Council of Churches and various thinktanks prepare statements condemning the movement in advance, preaching “tolerance.” The weakest possible defense. Bob Edgar of the NCC writes:

“This campaign, which they are calling ‘Justice Sunday,’ should properly be called ‘Just-Us’ Sunday.”

Hold on. Religious moderates need more than weak puns and a doctrine of tolerance to reclaim the country. They’ll need a clear articulation of our values, principles, history, means of working; we need to shout out loud that the so-called Christians on the Radical Right have splintered from conversation already. The Religious Right is out of communion with us, the moderates of America.

In Arizona and Florida and California and Masschusetts, the Religious Left is slowly rallying. But they’re going to need cover.

Everyvoice.net’s computer guys reported last week that their conference site had been hacked by the Religious Right. Small words and phrases were changed to subtly alter the meaning of the site content.

Timothy is right: people in communion have an obligation to settle their differences as patiently as possible, waiting decades through process before storming away. This is one reason that so many American and European Catholics remain Catholic despite the current state of that church. But when a group leaves communion — forgetting Timothy themselves, flaunting hatred and the politics of smearing — they’ve already turned their back. Moderates and liberals can’t turn the other cheek to someone out conversation. Not every fundamentalist has left the conversation utterly, not every Southern Baptist ignores the moderate at the table and shrieks hysterically. But one Religious Right is doing so loudly, powerfully, nastily. The virulent faction of the Religious Right — the one orchestrating smears — doesn’t deserve Timothy, let alone Jesus. They deserve to be slapped.

There is a certain rule to the art of charm. Some of it can be learned, some of it’s a natural skill. The answer to every question is always “yes.”

I sat with wide eyes in my dining room chair, looking out the window at what might pass by outside. Curled on a podium the cat was a white statue beside me. We were a pose, waiting for the mechanism of the clock to unwind us.

The next day I climbed into the desert, where the wind blew through my blue hair. In my hands was a broken and mended heart tied with string, bound with twine, with little wings made of goose wings stapled to it. It was still trying to move. My eyes were dilated like belladonnas,, and the desert was wide and empty, hills and mountains of sand rising around me in every direction, but up where the saucer of the sky spun with a million stars. Snakes and scorpions scuttled over my feet. Birds watched me. I was waiting for someone who never came.

I was sitting in a café waiting to see who walked by the street outside. I asked the bartender if he was a drummer, because the café was throbbing with the beats of something broken in the background. The bartender replied, “Yes.” I sat in the cafe with the windows and doors wide open to the world and watched the mariners and soldiers and orphans and cripples pass by. Finally a man came by carrying an orange. He asked me if I was also from the Valley of the Moon. I replied, “Yes.”