A long view on YouTube is that it’s a platform for artists – outsider mostly, many of whom make art about their own lives – and educators.
The “how” YouTube did it (dynamic ad insertion, the advent of smartphones with video cameras, Google’s search dominance) is less interesting than “what” they did.*
Because of YouTube, there is more much more art today than there was in 2005, and art is also much more diverse.
It has ushered in an age of mass creativity without historical parallel.† It’s engendered a cultural shift that we are just beginning to understand, as the first generations to grow up with its aesthetic possibilities turn their attention to stickier questions: mortality, morality, tragedy, comedy, etc.
Whether or not these fruits bloom on YouTube, or elsewhere, won’t matter much. The shift in visual language, and in narrative storytelling, will continue to ripple out for some time to come.
That’s a remarkable occurrence that is easily forgotten given how much attention is devoted to the business of the platform.
Footnotes
*Whether the “upload” is a five-hour loop or a 5-second shot, what matters is that there is no preset form, no prescribed length. While some discursive games benefit from tight rules (TikTok, Vine) the game of performing on YouTube has worked because of its open-endedness. Yes, there are many copies of copies. But there are enough sui generis concepts to make it a vital cultural force.
† Maybe not since the printing press and mass literacy?
When you’re a migrant, be it a refugee or an immigrant, you’re forever an outsider.
You’re no longer fully of the culture you left and you’ll never be a true native in the one you’ve joined.
On the one hand, this can be a source of anxiety and insecurity. The desire to belong is encoded in our very bodies: it’s in the shape of our vocal folds and the size of our neocortex.
On the other hand, it can be a lowkey permanent ecstasy – ek stasis: to be or stand outside oneself.
To be uprooted, is to be ungrounded and thus free from the assumptions that often prevent us from understanding why we are the way we are.
Thus, challenges engender advantages.
because
therefore
I have never shared most of the childhood references of my cohorts.
I study the way that culture bonds us with greater interest than an anthropologist.
I was not raised with the same historical memory as the nation to which I pledge allegiance.
I do not assume – as most do, incorrectly – that society shares my political beliefs.
I have never known a before without alienation; there is nowhere I can “return” to.
I believe progress is possible but not inevitable; I don’t believe there is a golden era in our past.
I had to find the equivalent of words to communicate and often mangled aphorisms.
I encountered language as opaque, rather than transparent; as a social construct rather than a neutral medium. I developed a habit for etymology.
I did not view the characters on TV and in movies as familiar.
Relatable characters are predictable, boring. I expect characters to expand and challenge my sense of the world, rather than mirror and confirm it.
I am so accustomed to imposter syndrome that I understand it is as natural, necessary.
When I conceive of subjects, protagonists, I instinctively imbue them with skepticism.
A diverse group of readers have told me that the January 5, 2019 edition of my newsletter is my best to date, so I am indexing reprinting it here for posterity.
Though some continue to claim it’s a real wall, these gestures are like burlesque moves at a drag show.
The Wall is, has always been, a monument.
So why does an obviously symbolic wall mean so much to so many people?
Wholesome.
From the moment we’re born, literally severed from our mother’s flesh, we are constantly feeling the edges of where we end and the world begins.
As adolescents, we push against our parents to define ourselves. As adults, we pull others close – those who we say “complete us”.
The reality is that where we end, and where the world begins, is not a line but a knot of connections, like the expansive roots of a hundred year-old tree.
What is inside of us vs. what is outside of us; what is self vs. and what is other.
In reality, these distinctions are impossible to draw.
Much of our body is inside out. Our skin is, in fact, our largest organ. There are organisms constantly passing through us and biomes in our guts. More than half your body is not human.
Who or what you are today, literally, is not who you were yesterday and it’s not who you will be tomorrow.*
Luckily, society gives us a sense of self that is stable and, usually, affirmative. Until it doesn’t.
Until society erases our name, and calls us by one that reduces us to what it wants.
When the “I” is threatened, we may cling to whatever presents itself as solid, unchanging. The Rock of Ages. The Arc of the Moral Universe. A loving God.
To believe is to endure, to believe is to hold fast.
A wall as a religious sculpture makes a powerful promise: believe in me and we will separate the inside from the outside.
Worship me and you will remain whole. Sacrifice for me and your intengrity will be restored.
Is it any surprise that hundreds of thousands are willing to pay for the Wall out of pocket?
Such totems are a protection against contagion. A backstop against change. †
Are they suckers? They’re certainly not alone.
“whole” foods
The leisure class are just as instrumental to our economy. As in, an instrument of.
Like the working poor, the working rich must play their role in a production that yields only capital, often at the expense of community.
If you are what you can buy, then what are you but an insatiable need?
How do you plug a hole in the center of your self that no amount of money can fill?
The region stretching from Malibu south to Marina del Rey and inland as far as La Cienega Boulevard (and including Santa Monica, Pacific Palisades, Brentwood, West Hollywood and Beverly Hills) …[had a] 26 percent jump from two years earlier… Many preschools in this area spiked far higher, including Kabbalah Children’s Academy in Beverly Hills (57 percent) and the Waldorf Early Childhood Center in Santa Monica (68 percent). According to World Health Organization data, such numbers are in line with immunization rates in developing countries like Chad and South Sudan. (The Hollywood Reporter, 2014)
“Only pure substances will enter my and/or my child’s body” is the “Walls work” for people who have access to the most expensive information in the world, but still need a belief system to makes sense of their inexplicable emptiness.
Purity is a powerful myth. It can be used to animate the machinery of racism (“pure” blood) but it can also drive rituals of consumption and sacrifice (pure goods).
What makes purity so seductive is that it instantiates a mythical Eden, a time and place wherein everything was in balance; be it with nature or with machines or with “the others”.
On the last day of the year, I was looking for parsley in Highland Park, to make rabo encendido or oxtail stew.
I’d read online that this poor person’s soup (the tail!) has now become popular with the leisure class (cf. bone soup) and their demand has driven up prices. I’d better make it soon before I can’t, or so went my self-serving logic.
Highland Park, as you may know, is itself a poor person’s neighborhood where demand from the leisure class has driven up prices‡ such that the previous community is being displaced. Creative destruction in action.
Within a few minutes, I criss-crossed a holy intersection of potent spells: Kinship, Kinfolk, Cookbook, Civil.§
I didn’t find any parsley (amaranth, anyone?), but I picked up this bag of Coava coffee.
Inside the bag was a color trading card of the Central American farmer who grew the beans I was to consume.
What all of these brands have in common is that they promise to be authentic. (Not so the new Framebroiler, down the block, which promises only to be cheap, convenient and consistent.)
Much like the Wall, they offer to transport the consumer to a better time and place. Authentic and real.
These businesses promise to make you whole. To enrich your spirit. (We should pause on that.)
That these are often luxury products only adds to their spiritual value. Their high prices feed the hope that there is a light at the end of the tunnel; that if you amass a sufficient fortune, you can escape to a world that is still in harmony.
Like the Wall, they are a religious response to the same economic anxiety.
At best, they offer a salve for the symptoms. At worst, they spread and deepen the anxiety.
Ultimately, they fail to cure what ails us because they are religious answer to a political problem.
In America, rich and thus powerful elites have used their influence to actively disinform and disenfranchise voters. They have installed polluters to protect the environment and con men to regulate the markets. They’ve stacked the courts with loyal sophists.
These are people who believe in nothing at all, and now is their time. Again.
That’s why I sympathize with the people who contributed to the Wall, evil as it is. Just as I sympathize with the people who would pay $500 for an axe sold by a graphic designer. We are all groping for the real.
The ground underneath us all is being liquified, into capital.
We survive insofar as we can maximize returns to shareholders.
The fear of being erased; the fear of being displaced; the fear of losing control (autonomy, sovereignty) to unseen powers; the fear of being contaminated: these are all logical and necessary reactions to a political reality in which the wolves are guarding the henhouse.
The wealthy have recaptured the state, but unlike previous gilded ages, the institutions that once provided people with a sense of self – our clans, our confessions – are less persuasive.
In their place will come new organizations – or renewed versions of the old. I’m certain of it.
Because we’ll need more than religious sculptures to withstand the floods, and the rains, and the fires. To say nothing of the tens of millions, who will be displaced by the consequences of today’s orgy of greed.
I don’t have a line to those who believe in the Wall. But as someone who has squandered a small fortune in art, I’d like to make a pitch to those who would buy a $635 knife.
I agree that it feels good to have and to hold something simple and pure, authentic and real.
My suggestion is that those $635 would cut much deeper, and cleaner, in the hands of Elizabeth Warren and/or Alexandria Ocasio Cortez.
Postscript
I found the parsley, and much more, at Food 4 Less. As of October 2017, their parent company Kroger entered into a three year contract with UFCW.
Joshua Green: “the idea for the wall was devised by frustrated Trump aides, primarily Sam Nunberg, annoyed that their candidate wouldn’t stay focused on the issue of immigration:
Inside Trump’s circle, the power of illegal immigration to manipulate popular sentiment was readily apparent, and his advisers brainstormed methods for keeping their attention-addled boss on message. They needed a trick, a mnemonic device. In the summer of 2014, they found one that clicked. “Roger Stone and I came up with the idea of ‘the Wall,’ and we talked to Steve [Bannon] about it,” said Nunberg. “It was to make sure he talked about immigration.”
Initially, Trump seemed indifferent to the idea. But in January 2015, he tried it out at the Iowa Freedom Summit, a presidential cattle call put on by David Bossie’s group, Citizens United. “One of his pledges was, ‘I will build a Wall,’ and the place just went nuts,” said Nunberg. Warming to the concept, Trump waited a beat and then added a flourish that brought down the house. “Nobody,” he said, “builds like Trump.”
* Even the atom betrays us: “One of the mysteries of science is how something as apparently solid and straightforward as your body can be made of strangely behaving quantum particles such as atoms and their constituents… What’s more, as quantum particles, electrons exist as a collection of probabilities rather than at specific locations, so a better picture is to show the electrons as a set of fuzzy shells around the nucleus.”
† Racism has provided many Americans a similar salve for their psychic wounds. “I might be poor and thus powerless, but at least I’m not a ——.” The belief that women are worth less than men still provides some such relief. But as good people chip away at racism and misogeny, those who would use bigotry as armor are once again exposed to the machinery that daily grinds them into inputs and outputs. They’ll try to hide behind the Wall.
‡ I don’t blame hipsters for displacing first- and second-generation immigrant families. I welcome all “foreigners”. Instead, I blame the real estate sector for having successsfully captured the state. As I’ve written here before, housing should not be an investment vehicle. But the resulting, unfolding tragedy has a silver lining. The phrase “income inequality” is so technical and opaque it makes eyes gloss over. Here’s a better phrase: “I was priced out of my home.” Priced out. of a home. How is that possible in a civilized society?
§ Some of you already know my stories about “Civil”, and this letter is my longest yet, so I’ll just summarize my affair with this Latino-owned business thusly: to call yourself civil, meaning “pertaining to public life, relating to the civic order, befitting a citizen” is to raise the bar really fucking high. Spoiler: too high. “Creative Class” would have been a better name, all around. But the convention has always been to hijack a term of community – e.g., kinship, kinfolk, fidelity, prudential – for private use.
If you’ve read this far, my God, thank you! Here’s a small reward from a masterwork:
“I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.”
Monolingualism is an aberration – most people have been multilingual…
The human body and brain is quite well adapted to multilingualism. So the ideology of monolingualism is a fairly new phenomenon, only the last couple of hundred years. It’s such a distortion…
Think of the language situation before the mid-18th century. There were empires, multilingual conglomerations, whose borders waxed and waned with marriage and war; nobody cared about linguistic diversity, the great threat to unity was religious diversity. When the state decided to mobilise language as a resource for creating the nation, you got the ideology of the monolingual nation state, where we want linguistic borders to coincide with national borders. But of course they never did.
I slept fitfully and repeatedly dreamed of the migrant family, as enshrined by Christianity.
La familia sagrada.
The holy family versus Herod, the king. The family as a bulwark against the state.
But even the liberal state, which replaces the primacy of clans with intentional communities, is the sum of countless families.
The interplay between, and within, families is a perennial topic of our political coverage, be it “hard news” or entertainment.
And yet… a great deal of formal political discourse still relegates family affairs to the fringes, or “special interests”; primarily, to those concerned with the patriarchy – its proponents and detractors.*
If feminists are on the fringes, it’s because they are leading the way.
Justice starts at home. Equality starts at home. The pursuit of life, liberty and happiness starts at home.
I know these truths have long been known but they remain in a kind of “closet”.
Thus, the bedrock logic of the alliance between social conservatives and reactionary capitalists was this: One valued “small government” because it (supposedly) enabled the patriarchal family (and/or racial hierarchy), while the other valued the family because it enabled “small government.”
In 1971, Congress passed a major child care bill that looks a lot like Warren’s today. Nixon, responding to conservative advisers, vetoed it and said it was anti-family.
Several Trump administration officials, congresspeople, and anti-choice activists recently attended a “Make Families Great Again” conference hosted by the Hungarian embassy to discuss policies to entice women to “have more babies.”
I recently deleted my facebook account, after downloading my data. this is a quick look at the most frequent words in my posts as well as how often I posted during my 10 years on facebook.
Friston draws a carefully regulated boundary around his inner life, guarding against intrusions, many of which seem to consist of “worrying about other people.”
…In Friston’s mind, the universe is made up of Markov blankets inside of Markov blankets. Each of us has a Markov blanket that keeps us apart from what is not us. And within us are blankets separating organs, which contain blankets separating cells, which contain blankets separating their organelles. The blankets define how biological things exist over time and behave distinctly from one another. Without them, we’re just hot gas dissipating into the ether.
– Shaun Raviv, The Genius Neuroscientist Who Might Hold the Key to True AI
Emphasis mine.
In a recurring motif in your Neapolitan novels, Lila is beset by what you call episodes of “dissolving margins.” As you wrote in My Brilliant Friend, “She said that on those occasions the outlines of people and things suddenly dissolved, disappeared.”
… You yourself steer us toward the possibility of collaborative origins, emphasizing in Frantumaglia the “highly composite, immaterial organism” to be found in the pages of your novels, “made up of me who writes and of Lenù, let’s say, and of the many people and things she narrates.”
The quest for Elena Ferrante, as your emphasis on dissolving boundaries would suggest, need not entail deciphering a clear-cut process of co-authorship—quite the contrary. We readers may never know the precise divisions of labor that have gone into the creation of you, the author, any more than we could identify which qualities in a child come from which parent’s DNA.
– Rachel Donadio, Elena Ferrante: Who Is Behind the Pseudonym?
In the early 1960s, two very different regimes attempted to remake humanity:
Still, the revolution was most astonishing not for its radical redistribution of wealth and resources, its abolition of most forms of private property, or its successful confrontation with the empire at its very doorstep. Its deepest ambition went further: to completely reform the individual. Thus the Cuban Revolution promised nothing less than the reinvention of humankind. The revolutionary leadership envisioned the creation of a “new man,” one tirelessly dedicated to the collective rather than driven by individual seIf interest.
–Revolution within the Revolution, Michelle Chase.
When Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council in 1962, bishops from many parts of the world hoped that the church would finally change its doctrine and allow priests to marry. But John XXIII died before the council finished its work, which was then overseen by his successor, Paul VI (one of the popes most strongly rumored to have been gay). Paul apparently felt that the sweeping reforms of Vatican II risked going too far, so he rejected the pleas for priestly marriage and issued his famous encyclical Humanae Vitae, which banned contraception, overriding a commission he had convened that concluded that family planning and contraception were not inconsistent with Catholic doctrine.
Opposing priestly marriage and contraception placed the church on the conservative side of the sexual revolution and made adherence to strict sexual norms a litmus test for being a good Catholic, at a time when customs were moving rapidly in the other direction…
The obsession with enforcing unenforceable standards of sexual continence that run contrary to human nature (according to one study, 95 percent of priests report that they masturbate) has led to an extremely unhealthy atmosphere within the modern church that contributed greatly to the sexual abuse crisis.
–The Sins of Celibacy, Alexander Stille
Both projects are modern, though they invoke the future and the past as justification.
They are examples of what Michel Foucault has described as biopower:
During the classical period, there was a rapid development of various disciplines—universities, secondary schools, barracks, workshops; there was also the emergence, in the field of political practices and economic observation, of the problems of birthrate, longevity, public health, housing, and migration. Hence there was an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations, marking the beginning of an era of “bio power.”
A song from 1998, inspired by julio iglesias and the walking scenes from “Hopscotch”. this was the first Pepito song, done with Reason, SoundEdit 16 and SimpleText on an iMac G3.
[note: I saw a man, apparently homeless, using a Starbucks cup to justify his occupying space in an outdoor seating area.]
A slow yielding of public to private spaces (an old ebb and flow) led to a tremendous opportunity for Starbucks in the early 1990s: not to sell coffee but to rent public space.
To rent a Starbucks public space you purchase a disposable token (a white Starbucks coffee cup) and place it near your person. The cup contains a complimentary drink. The tokens – cups – are uniform in outward appearance but can be filled with various liquids which are sold at different prices to allow the consumer to signal who they are. The liquids may be consumed.
It’s understandable that Starbucks would attempt to program a discussion of race throughout its chain of “public squares.” The effort failed but I bet they’ll try again, perhaps by allowing regional or individual stores to set the agenda and partnering with established brands.
Do you leave your e-reader or iPad on the table in Starbucks when you are called to pick up your cup of Joe? You’re probably not inclined to do this, because the object in question might be stolen. The medieval reader would nod his head approvingly, because book theft happened in his day too.
From my Facebook account, April 18, 2018:
Basically, Starbucks coffee shops are so prevalent, they’re a quasi-public space.
Meanwhile, there’s very few public spaces being built. So where do you go meet a friend? What public space can you occuppy?
And when you’re in a private space, the rules are different. In principle, the police exist to serve and protect THE PUBLIC but, in practice, they often serve PRIVATE interests – i.e., those of businesses.
We need more public spaces. Not co-working spaces, not chill bars, not coffee shops. Public spaces that faciltate a vibrant civil society. No transaction needed.
And, yes, private companies that provide a quasi-public service (this web site [Facebook] included) should be held to the highest standards – i.e., those of our public sites.
People in my precinct need more public places to hang out without fear of ‘loitering’. The commercialization of our common spaces & criminalization of sidewalks has made ‘hanging out’ a crime. I support anything that gets neighbors out & active in their streets. They live there.
In 1998, there were two movies about a natural catastrophe: Armageddon & Deep Impact.
In 2006, there were two movies about magicians living outside the reality-based community: The Prestige & The Illusionist.
In 1964, there were two movies about systems failure and nuclear war: Dr. Strangelove & Fail-Safe.
You’ve probably never heard of the second one even though it was directed by a director whose movies were widely seen (Sidney Lumet) and starred actors with long careers: Henry Fonda, Walter Matthau, Larry Hagman and (!) Dom DeLuise.
Both movies end with catastrophe – nuclear annihilation – because humans (men, really) can’t get it right before the system they’ve built kills them.
Dr. Strangelove came out first and did better. But I suspect that part of the reason why it’s better known is that it was funnier and used symbols more effectively.
War Games was released almost 20 years after both movies (1983). I consider it iconic and I think many would agree (“Would you like to play a game?”).
Like Dr. Strangelove, War Games is not only funny, it works as both a realistic drama and an allegory.
In War Games, the system is a more developed character: it’s physically embodied as a computer (that gets plenty of close-up’s!) and even has two names. The military calls it WOPR but its inventor names it Joshua – after the creator’s dead son!
One day, Joshua, the computer, strikes up a friendship with a real boy who likes to play with computers and… hijinks ensue!
The relationship beween the computer boy and the real boy not only drives the movie, it gets us to a very different ending.
The human boy teaches the computer that some games are not worth playing. The computer then teaches this lesson to the serious adults in the room by giving them a nuclear war scare (simulation).
In other words, in War Games, humanity survives by letting young people lead the way (as Ally Sheedy convincingly argues: 17 year-olds really want to live).
I just saw War Games again last night and I found it to be just as good for the 45 year-old Jose as for the 12 year-old me. Really, it’s excellent.
The comedy is very dry and the jokes come fast. I think it could be grouped with Dr. Strangelove, for sure, but also Robocop, among others.
I’m in the middle of writing a kind of update and I was pleasantly surprised just how much this movie influenced me.
Images “attached” are scenes from Fail-Safe (1964) and War Games (1983)
Magicians show you things you don’t know you’re seeing. Prosecutors tell you things you don’t realize you’re hearing.
Movies use a similar ploy: they make you feel smart and perceptive about details they want you to regard as facts.
In other words, they hide clues in plain sight. (Like the Purloined Letter)
This can make moviegoers feel superhuman; like they can see into the future and under the surface of things.
A great movie will exploit this feeling to hide a greater truth under an obvious fiction.
The moment in Black Panther (2018), when the ship flies into the dusty ground of an impoverished nation and emerges under blue skies, above a hidden kingdom of peace and wealth: that was some deep, deep shit.
I just scanned the most recent issue of “14 y medio”, a banned / clandestine news digest from Cuba.
You won’t be surprised that the stories are about struggle.
It reminded me of feedback I got recently about a TV pilot I’m writing, set in a Cuban island, with a Cuban protagonist.
The advice came from a good friend, with experience: “There’s so much struggle. You have to give the protagonist some success earlier on.”
I did. But it’s worth noting that middle-class Americans (the idealized audience for TV entertainment) simply don’t understand what life is like for most everyone else.
Moreover, struggle is not depressing, per se. Struggle is not a defeat. Struggle is the baseline – the foundation for comedy, desire, nostalgia, hope, frustration, etc
The extent to which TV is cast from the perspective of people who expect the glass to be full is remarkable. Even when the show depicts suffering, this bias colors the tone: the pain is tragic, all-consuming, debilitating.
In reality, the pain is constant but so is the perseverance. And ingenuity. And passion.
According to David M. Kennedy, one of the nation’s leading criminologists, American policing is practiced more as a craft than as a profession. “The kind of thinking that should go into framing and refining what a profession of public safety should be has still not been done,” he told me. Officers are deployed as enforcers of the state, without being taught psychology, anthropology, sociology, community dynamics, local history, or criminology. Lethal force is prioritized above other options…
There’s no training on how to de-escalate tense scenarios in which no crime has been committed, even though the majority of police calls fall into that category…
“This is how situations go so, so badly—yet justifiably, legally,” Skinner said. Police officers often encounter people during the worst moments of their lives, and Skinner believes that his role is partly to resolve trouble and partly to prevent people from crossing the line from what he calls “near-crime” into “actual crime.” The goal, he said, is “to slow things down, using the power of human interaction more than the power of the state.”
