Two similes

1. Finding a home for a creative impulse is like sex.

2. Re-working and polishing to reach a finished work is like giving birth; it's painful, harrowing, and exhausting, but the end result makes it all worth it.

Banksy on advertising

From Cut It Out:

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.

Notebook doodle

Dadgum super-sad cartoons...

The two saddest animated scenes I've ever seen. No dialogue necessary.

Ellie and Carl in Up:


Seymour the dog from Futurama (based on a real-life dog named Hachiko):

Comments on the "video games as art" debate

      

Image source: Grim Fandango (1998)


      IN MANY WAYS, the word art is polyphonous. It has a large number of disparate meanings that we tend to invoke indiscriminately each time we use the term. It's not surprising, then, that when someone argues that so-and-such is not art, there is some kind of backlash, and the case of video games is no exception. Film critic Roger Ebert has kindled this debate over the years by arguing on various occasions that video games are an inherently inferior medium. “No one in or out of the field," he says in one interview, “has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists, and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized, and empathetic.”
      These and other statements of his have brought on a number counter-arguments—some good, some bad—from game critics, designers, players, and people with too much time on their hands. Many of them pointed to the artwork, music, and sounds in games while others identified storytelling techniques that are unique to the medium; some even gave offered examples which are personal favorites of mine like Shadow of the Colossus. But every refutation I've read seems to miss the point, as I see it, in one way or another.
      Recently, Ebert retracted his comments, graciously agreeing with numerous accusations that he didn't know much about video games in the first place and that he was wrong deny outright the artistic possibilities of a medium still in its infancy. Despite this, I find myself―as someone fairly knowledgeable about games―mostly agreeing with his earlier arguments. In truth, it's rare that any game comes anywhere near the mantle of “high art,” as haughty a notion as that is. But it's also rare that games approach the sorts of art that I consider to be the most valuable: art that opens up new conversations, that brings new light to the old and familiar, that has a profound impact on how we experience and make sense of the world. Of course, this sort of art is in short supply in other media as well (and, of course, it's partly because of its scarcity that it's so treasured). Yes, video games have no “Moonlight Sonata” (although the song appears in some of them), no Ulysses, no Ernest Goes to Jail. But, just as there are countless uninspired first-person shooters, there are countless uninspired mystery novels, love songs, and unexceptional paintings. Where I agree with Roger Ebert is with his argument and not with his irreverent use of the word art: that the core experience in video games, as a medium, is not an intuitive vehicle for art as he and I have defined it.
      In their early days, video games were thought of mainly as children's playthings. Grand Theft Auto and other titles have helped to change that perception over time, but the medium hasn't quite outgrown it. And despite the improved graphics and mature content, the center of today's gaming experience is still a kind of toy-driven exhilaration. Bioshock has some Ayn Rand inspired story elements, but they are ultimately a background for shooting things. Myst, Silent Hill 2, Shadow of the Colossus, and Braid are all excellent examples of subtle, evocative storytelling, but they are ultimately about exploration and puzzle solving. In the same ways that Chess is about warfare and Monopoly is about capitalism, their stories are lost in the “action,” so to speak―at best a host to their interactive elements. As Doom creator John Carmack once said, “Story in a game is like story in a porn movie. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.”
      As Ebert has noted, there is a basic conflict of purpose between the conventional experiences of video games and the works of other established mediums. Games are usually about overcoming obstacles or playing within the parameters of the game world, while novels and movies are more concerned with characters and storytelling. This is not to say that no video games have taken storytelling seriously. Interactive fiction (text adventures) of the '80s and graphic adventure games and interactive movies of the '90s made story the central focus and reduced game play to a series of decisions to advance particular narratives, with mixed results. The problem with these has generally been that player decisions are mostly superfluous. One path leads to the end, the rest to impasses or “Game Over” screens. Some games have multiple endings, but they are usually analogous to a different final paragraph at the end of a novel. All told, very few game story lines necessitate meaningful player decisions. Most are essentially movies broken up by puzzles, hazards, and errands. Even ambitious titles like Heavy Rain, which offer up more complex choices and consequences, are still far from being considered exemplars of an art form on par with film and literature.
      As eloquently or poorly as some stories are told, high-quality stories in video games are extremely hard to come by. I suppose Grim Fandango is a decent love story; Rez is an interesting experiment with A.I. in existential crisis; and Andrew Plotkin's Shade has its flaws but could not be told in any other way. I'm not suggesting by any stretch that my tastes are universal, but anyone familiar with video games up to this point has to admit that there is a very limited number of games out there which competently—much less masterfully—explore contemporary issues or manage to impart a lasting emotional impression. Simply put, most video games do not focus on these things. They have amusing mechanics with challenges to overcome, and they generally don't need the social commentary and emotional resonance to be successful as games. But in so doing they cannot be so easily classified as art (as I've been using the word).
      However, I may be getting ahead of myself in suggesting that good stories are the only ways to get at these qualities. Some exceptional games are able to achieve these through the game mechanics themselves. fl0w, for example, presents a stylized glimpse into the experiences of tiny organisms, and I can't help but think that Katamari Damacy makes some kind of commentary on consumerism and all of the objects and clutter in our lives. As always, the line between art and not-art is tenuous and ultimately subjective, but I still believe that art which breeds empathy, emotion, and understanding is perhaps harder to come by for games than for novels and movies—due, in large part, to the medium itself rather than shortcomings in terms of what has been offered so far.
      All things said, though, my favorite game to this day is still probably Super Mario Bros. 3. It may not engender empathy or count as "art" based on what I've said, but it's damned fun.

 

Update:

Journey is probably for the best argument I've seen yet for games as art. Absolutely incredible.

Neopragmatist Poetics

Here is a recent essay that more or less sums up my current views on philosophy. I plan to do some heavy revising down the road, but I think it's still worth reading as is.

1. Redescribing Shelley's Defense of Poetry: Rorty, Rich, and the Making of a Neopragmatist Poetics

2. The Plaque Conspiracy with Continual Reference to Derrida (a humorous, misleading cover sheet and preface originally attached to the above essay)

Hitchhiker

One man's vandalism is another man's art. At least, that seems to sum up the situation in Raleigh, N.C., where college student Joseph Carnevale created a 10-foot roadside monster out of stolen orange-and-white safety barrels.

[...]

1. He Created A (Barrel) Monster ... And May Go To Jail

Poem 28

An art historian
approaches a
shipping pallet
full with shit
and snapped pencil
ends,

                    thinking:

          Post-gestural
scatological
post-minimalism with
valences of
positivist sociological
            optimism...?

Indeed.

Pedagogy of Hope

I finished reading Pedagogy of Hope by Paulo Freire about a week ago. Not to say that these are the only important ideas, but here are some passages and quotations that caught my eye while I was reading:

"I thought I'd been so clear," I said. "I don't think they understood me."

"Could it have been you, Paulo, who didn't understand them?" Elza asked...

Talking about what he was writing, Josué suddenly told us: "I'll suggest a good habit for a writer to get into. At the end of a book, or article, let it 'marinate' for three months, four months, in a drawer. Then one night, take it out again and read it. People always change 'something,'" concluded Josué, with his hand on the shoulder of one of us.

When it comes to language there is something else I should like to bring up here. It is something that I have never accepted—on the contrary, something that I have always rejected. It is the assertion, or even insinuation, that fine, elegant writing, is not scholarly. A scholar does difficult writing, not fine writing. Language's esthetic moment, it has always seemed to me, ought to be pursued by all of us, including rigorous scholars. There is not the least incompatibility between rigor in the quest for an understanding and knowledge of the world, and beauty of form in the expression of what is found in that world.

It would be an absurdity for there to be, or seem to have to be, some necessary association between ugliness and scientific rigor.

[T]eaching is not the pure mechanical transfer of the contour of a content from the teacher to passive, docile students.

[T]o teach is not the simple transmission of knowledge concerning the object or concerning content. Teaching is not a simple transmission, wrought by and large through a pure description of the concept of the object, to be memorized by students mechanically. Teaching—again, from the postmodern progressive viewpoint of which I speak here—is not reducible merely to teaching students to learn through an operation in which the object of knowledge is the very act of learning. Teaching someone to learn is only valid—from this viewpoint, let me repeat—when educands learn to learn in learning the reason-for, the "why," of the object or the content.

Therefore teaching is a creative act, a critical act, and not a mechanical one.

I feel utterly at peace with the interpretation that the wane of "realistic socialism" does not mean, on one side, that socialism has shown itself to be intrinsically inviable; on the other, that capitalism has now stepped forward in its excellence once and for all.

What excellence is this, that manages to "coexist with more than a billion inhabitants of the developing world who live in poverty," not to say misery? Not to mention the all but indifference with which it coexists with "pockets of poverty" and misery in its own, developed body. What excellence is this, that sleeps in peace while numberless men and women make their home in the street, and say it is their own fault that they are on the street? What excellence is this, that struggles so little, if it struggles at all, with discrimination for reason of sex, class, or race, as if it reject someone different, humiliate her, offend him, hold her in contempt, exploit her, were the right of individuals, or classes, or races, or one sex, that holds a position of power over another? What excellence is this, that tepidly registers the millions of children who come into the world and do not remain, or not for long, or if they are more resistant, manage to stay a while, then take their leave of the world?

[. . .]

What excellence is this, that, in the Brazilian Northeast, coexists with a degree of misery that could only have been thought a piece of fiction: little boys and girls, women and men, vying with starving pups, tragically, like animals, for the garbage of the great trash heaps outlying the cities, to eat? Nor is São Paulo itself exempt from the experience of this wretchedness.

What excellence is this, that seems blind to little children with distended bellies, eaten up by worms, toothless women looking like old crones at thirty, wasted men, skinny, stooped populations? Fifty-two percent of the population of Recife live in slums, in bad weather, an easy prey for diseases that effortlessly crush their enfeebled bodies. What excellence is this, that strikes a pact with the cold-blooded, cowardly murder of landless men and women of the countryside simply because they fight for their right to their word and their labor, while they remain bound to the land and despoiled of their fields by the dominant classes?

What excellence is this, that gazes with serene regard upon the extermination of little girls and boys in the great Brazilian urban centers—that "forbids" 8 million children of the popular classes to go to school, that "expels" from the schools a great number of those who manage to get in—and calls all this "capitalistic modernity."

We become capable of imaginatively, curiously, "stepping back" from ourselves—from the life we lead—and of disposing ourselves to "know about it." The moment came when we not only lived, but began to know what we were living—hence it was possible for us to know what we know, and therefore to know that we could do more. What we cannot do, as imaginative, curious beings, is to cease to learn and to seek, to investigate the "why" of things. We cannot exist without wondering about tomorrow, about what is "going on," and going on in favor of what, against what, for whom, against whom. We cannot exist without wondering about how to do the concrete or "untested feasible" that requires us to fight for it.

[S]omething of basic imporance turns—the basic importance of education as act of cognition not only of the content, but of the "why" of economic, social, political, ideological, and historical facts, which explain the greater or lesser degree of "inderdict of the body," our conscious body, under which we find ourselves placed.

The fundamental problem—a problem of a political nature, and colored by ideological hues—is who chooses the content, and in behalf of which persons the thing the "chooser's" teaching will be performed—in favor of whom, against whom, in favor of what, against what.

It is impossible to democratize the choice of content without democratizing the teaching of content.

What is altogether impermissible, in democratic practice, is for teachers, surreptitiously or otherwise, to impose on their pupils their own "reading of the world," in whose framework, therefore, they will now situate the teaching of content.

The role of the progressive educator, which neither can nor ought to be omitted, in offering her or his "reading of the world," is to bring out the fact that there are other "readings of the world," different from the one being offered as the educator's own, and at times antagonistic to it.

The school we need so urgently [I said in 1960] is a school in which persons really study and work. [...] The intellectualism we fight is precisely that hollow, empty, sonorous chatter, bereft of any relationship with the reality surrounding us, in which we are born and reared and on which, in large part, we yet feed today.

"I do not authentically think unless others think. I simply cannot think for others, or for others, or without others."

There is no dialogue in "spontaneism" any more than in the omnipotence of the teacher. But a dialogical relation does not, as is sometimes thought, rule out the possibility of the act of teaching. [. . .] If the educator's thinking cancels, crushes, or hinders the development of the educands' thinking, then the educator's thinking, being authoritarian, tends to generate in the educands upon whom it impinges a timid, inauthentic, sometimes even merely rebellious thinking.

More than ever before, political decision making, in a progressive mold, ought to be extended into populism, so that a university would place itself in the service of popular interests, as well. This would imply, as well,in practice, a critical comprehension of how university arts and sciences ought to be related with the consciousness of the popular classes: that is, a critical comprehension of the interrelations of popular knowledge, common sense, and scientific cognition.

...an interdisciplinary understanding of teaching, instead of merely a disciplinary one.
Various academic departments sought to work in this way in an attempt to overcome the compartmentalization of views to which we subject reality, and in which, not infrequently, we become lost.

From the peak of an elevation, we descried* a whole world to be built differently. [. . .]

*Past tense of "descry," not a typo. I think.

Notebook doodles II

When I first came to college I was an art student dipping his fingers in philosophy and a few other classes.

I had a tendency to draw in my notes sometimes (which is still there), and I thought I'd post some of these doodles—maybe as emblems to show my "education" or at least some of my time spent in the classroom—both learning and not.

So I rummaged through my old notebooks, and here they are. (Not all of them, but a few of the good ones.) Enjoy.

---

HA 555: Art History Since 1945.

"[It's like an argument they have where they're] angrily shaking martini glasses at each other."






ANTH 160: The Varieties of Human Experience.







PHIL 292: The History of Modern Philosophy. Damn I was bored, by the looks of it...








SOC 104: Intro. to Sociology






PHIL 562: Kierkegaard. My only drawing in all my notes (and these aren't even lecture notes):


The full quote is:

With the aid of conclusion, one automatically and mendaciously takes credit for everything (I have heard people, so obtuse that they have nothing between the ears, say that one cannot stop with Socratic ignorance) and like all windbags finally ends up with having done even the impossible. Inwardness has become a matter of knowledge, to exist a waste of time. That is why the most mediocre person who concocts a book these days talks so one would believe he had experienced everything, and simply by paying attention to his intermediate clauses one sees that he is a rogue.

ENGL 312: British Writers to 1800.








ENGL 332: Shakespeare.






HSES 260: Personal and Community Health. My only full page of "notes":




PHIL 672: Philosophy of Law.




ENGL 580: The Rhetoric of Everyday Life.




The button reads: "I am a hardcore Marxist."


GEOG 104: Physical Geography.


The poem from the above reads:

Boredom is
a porous drum,
whose beat is deaf
and also dumb.

---

i. Notebook doodles I

A sketch of a tree in front of Strong Hall from my freshman year. I found it while I was going through all my old notebooks.

A Wednesday in Spring

My first essay for my creative non-fiction writing class, pre-workshop:

1. A Wednesday in Spring

The specific song I was listening to on my iPod at the moment I wrote of was "Vacant Sky" by I'm Not a Gun. I'm pretty sure it was immediately followed by "As Far As Forever Goes."


3/7 update:

Here it is again, without all those blatant, embarrassing errors.
2. A Wednesday in Spring (First Revision)


3/24 update:

Actually, don't read either of these. I'll have a revised version up before long.

Zezão

1. Lost Art - Zezão
2. Turning the spotlight on Brazil's hidden art

ASCII Einstein

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Drawings of Darfur

1. Human Rights Watch - Darfur Drawings

Masterpieces of Modern Art

Robert Ryman. Twin. 1966.


Robert Rauschenberg. Erased de Kooning Drawing. 1953.


Cy Twombly. Untitled. 1970.


Ad Reinhardt. Abstract Painting. 1960-61.


Shigeko Kubota. Vagina Painting (Performance). 1965.


Yves Klein. Blue Monochrome. 1961.


Piero Manzoni. Artist's Shit. 1961. (Manzoni does a fantastic job of relating his work to that of his contemporaries.)