A nice image in that line. Which, since reading A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes, has made me think of Treppenwitz. Literally, ‘the wisdom of the stairs’. The striking reply that crosses one’s mind belatedly when already leaving, on the stairs.
Though, I’ve always preferred Cynthia Ozick’s version of the word: Treppenworte. The words one didn’t have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one’s dignity or survival.
What if Occupy Wall Street incorporated as an investment bank and an attached savings bank? And what if at #Occupy demonstrations around the country, protestors could walk up to a little table and sign up as board members of the Occupy Corp investment bank – and then go over to a different table (crossing over what used to be that pesky regulation which Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act dissolved). And there, the poorz set up accounts on the customer-facing table: Occupy Trust. The “bank” would immediately issue a lien against the empty account, so that the bank would eat the future earning potential of these protestors. In this way, the bank gobbles up a bunch of toxic assets. Then they bet against the value of the debt on the market. Of course, insolvency looms. Then they demand and get a giant bail-out. The bail-out is split up among the millions of “board members.” The B-Story is about cops and a forbidden love affair between a protester and a cop. And there’s a bit with a dog.
Mark Pesce, a media professor at the University of Sydney, lectures on his “Hyperdistribution Theory.” The theory is predicated on a few assumptions: the internet’s revolutionizing effect on content distribution has transformed how advertising must relate to content, and also how viewers react to advertisers.
Traditional advertising is increasingly losing its effectiveness. One marketing trade publication said that television advertising is only one-third as effective as it was in 1990. Only 14% of people say they trust it, and only 16% are even watching the ad. So television advertising as it has existed is not sustainable.
Advertisers used to be able to simply buy or rent a captive audience. Today, advertisers have to invent ideas that actually attract an audience. Now advertising is the price you pay for not realizing the value of building your passionate tribe.
People hate irrelevant advertising. Technology and channel choice are enabling viewers to eliminate irrelevant advertising. Every brand today has to think and act like a media company. They can’t just push spots and banners out onto websites or television, brands have to pull people in. It’s a very different attitude.
Pesce’s lesson for the internet is to connect the program with the advertiser authentically. The aim is relevance: for the advertising to be relevant to the target market for the show, the advertising should feel like a compliment or a continuation of the program content.
The advertising should be integrated completely with the program. The advertiser effectively pays for the budget of the show. Then, in an internet-wired world, you hyper-distribute it any way you can. Put it on bittorrent, limewire, peer-to-peer networks, free video sites, you get it out there anyway because the advertising message – which is relevant to your audience – is part of the program.
This integration must be more than Clorox sponsoring General Hospital back in the early 20th Century. It also has to be more than glorified product placement. To be truly integrated, content must be consistent with the advertisers’ brand. The advertiser’s involvement must be meaningful, trustworthy and valuable. Brands and producers have actually got to provide something that people want, not something that people avoid.
Red Bull does it with action sports. The soda company has an in-house video content department that creates content. They have an in-house event management department that stages competitions. After building an audience for their content, ESPN is now paying Red Bull for the right to air the commercials.
Oliver Wills wrote of President Obama, “Obama’s strategy everywhere before entering the White House was one of omnidirectional placation. It had always worked. Why would he abandon, at this point, a method of such proved effectiveness? Yet success at winning acceptance may not be what is called for in a leader moving through a time of peril.”
He was the wrong guy for the moment. The oligarchy pulls no punches. They will press their advantage in this crisis/opportunity to buy federal assets at dimes on the dollar. And they will. The fire sale will really take off under President Romney in 2013. Then what?
Well, between now and 2016, progressives need to convince the public that Obama was not liberal. During Romney’s first term, progressives need to harp on Obama as having been not liberal. Because maybe, just maybe, in 2016 we’ll have one last chance to replace President Romney with a new FDR.
I don’t know who that is. Dean Baker, Elizabeth Warren?
When Rome fell and libraries were burned, all the works of Epicurean poet Lucretius nearly disappeared. It’s understandable that the Church would go after Lucretius, as he excoriated religion. His master work was called “On The Nature of Things.”
The Dark Ages snuffed out the book, and with it, most details of Epicuranism – the view that the universe is atomic, made of matter, and our behavior should be based on the idea that fear destroys, and that a balance of knowledge and humility is the key to happiness (though you can’t get enough of both).
A long, pestilent 1,400 years later, a scholar in the Papal Court named Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini became one of a new breed of hero from history: “the book hunter.” Perhaps because he had worked his way into the upper eschelon of the Church, Bracciolini was very successful at his hobby. He was probably the most successful book hunter of all. He rediscovered and paid for monks to copy major works by Cicero, Vitruvius, Manilius, Eutyches, Probus, and above all, Lucretius.
I’ve been thinking about people like Bracciolini recently. A story about him and his book hunter friends would probably be something like an historical adventure prequel to “The Name of the Rose.” I picture these friends and rivals of Bracciolini, racing around the region, bribing people to steal codex that were rumored to be locked away in dark abbeys. They evaded capture and trial by conservative sects when Vitruvius’ nudie human manuscripts were seized. I can picture this band of adventurers breaking each other out of prison. I can see them digging into the buried ruins of old country estates for sealed libraries. I can imagine them loathing the era in which they live, trying desperately to recreate an environment where learning was encouraged like it had been before the rise of the Church.
The story would find its natural conclusion in 1417 when Lucretius’ “On the Nature of Things” is found. The poem contains the line: “So, little by little, time brings out each several thing into view, and reason raises it up into the shores of light.”
When all of this is lost, who in the future will rediscover Citizen Kane?
“And don’t tell me God works in mysterious ways,” Yossarian continued, hurtling over her objections. “There’s nothing so mysterious about it. He’s not working at all. He’s playing or else He’s forgotten all about us. That’s the kind of God you people talk about—a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did he ever create pain? … Oh, He was really being charitable to us when He gave us pain! [to warn us of danger] Why couldn’t He have used a doorbell instead to notify us, or one of His celestial choirs? Or a system of blue-and-red neon tubes right in the middle of each person’s forehead. Any jukebox manufacturer worth his salt could have done that. Why couldn’t He? … What a colossal, immortal blunderer! When you consider the opportunity and power He had to really do a job, and then look at the stupid, ugly little mess He made of it instead, His sheer incompetence is almost staggering. …”
When I see a bankster shilling on the teevee for his crime boss overlords’ right to break laws, I think about Robert Penn Warren’s image of the clammy, sad little fetus that cowers inside industrialists:
It was like the second when you come home late at night and see the yellow envelope of the telegram sticking out from under your door and you lean to pick it up, but don’t open it yet, not for a second. While you stand there in the hall, with the envelope in your hand, you feel there’s an eye on you, a great big eye looking straight at you and dark and through walls and houses and through your coat and vest and hide and sees you huddled up way inside, in the dark which is you, inside yourself, like a clammy, sad little foetus you carry around inside yourself. The eye knows what’s in the envelope, and it is watching you to see you when you open it and know, too. But the clammy little foetus which is you way down in the dark which is you too lifts up its sad little face and its eyes are blind, and it shivers cold inside you for it doesn’t want to know what is in that envelope. It wants to lie in the dark and not know, and be warm in its not-knowing. The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can’t know. He can’t know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can’t know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he got or because of the knowledge which he hasn’t got and which if he had it, would save him. There’s the cold in your stomach, but you open the envelope, you have to open the envelope, for the end of man is to know.
I imagine the voice behind that sad little face muttering: “I don’t wanna know. I don’t wanna know. I don’t wanna know.”
ps. Thank you Robert Penn Warren, for writing “All the King’s Men.”
I immediately thought of itsasickness when I read this:
“Almost anything you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting” – David Foster Wallace, ‘The Pale King’
Similarly,
- Ira Glass on the art of the interview:
“Most people aren’t great storytellers in general, but if you stumble on the thing that really means something to them, you’ll get a great story out of them. This is one of the insights of therapy, actually. If you read all the early Freud stuff—you know how when he stumbles onto the central issue with his patients, suddenly stories flood out of them in pure narrative, with these incredible poetic images? That’s what happens when you’re working out in your head something that isn’t totally resolved and then you speak about it. It comes out as narrative.”
What are you interested in?
That’s what makes you interesting.
Henry Miller once said, “The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.”
The Coolest New Website on the Internet
By Eric Klinenberg, Sep-2010
The creators of the networking site itsasickness.com are betting our obsessions will be the Internet’s next big thing. Behind the scenes at Departures’ photo shoot, the three founders—including actor Alan Cumming—discuss their own “sicknesses” and why our fixations are what make us most interesting.
“This is how we use the Internet already—we just don’t admit how wonderfully weird and funny it is,” says Barnaby Harris, referring to his new website, itsasickness.com, a portal for anyone who’s obsessed with something and wants to “geek out” about it online. “We encourage people to acknowledge their sickness,” Harris says, “and help them see that other people have it, too.”
The expression “It’s a sickness” has been following Harris around, in different contexts, for years. A veteran Broadway stage manager, he realized at some point about eight years ago that nearly everyone he knew had become obsessed with yoga. “I got caught up in it, too. Then one day I stepped back and saw that most of these people were just as hostile and bitter as the rest of us. But they were so sanctimonious; they carried their mats around New York City like they were Torahs. What’s that about?”
Harris, a puckish 44-year-old, didn’t need long to come up with an answer. “It’s a sickness,” he says. “We’re a sick people in an obsession-based culture.”
The yoga scene, Harris thought, was both silly and humorless, and he decided to say so. He made a T-shirt that said F**K YOGA (this is a family magazine, but you get the point) and wore it for 39 days straight. “Everywhere I went, people asked me how they could get one. I even did a spread for GQ!” Energized, he opened a store called F**k Yoga, in lower Manhattan, where he sold the shirts. To his delight, the Tony Award–winning actor Alan Cumming became a huge fan. “I loved how the shirt made people gasp,” says Cumming.
Wanting to push the concept further, Harris began selling other products printed with the logo—flip-flops, skateboards, even yoga mats—and started targeting other obsessions, notably one of America’s most famous architects. After his F**K FRANK GEHRY shirt got a write-up in The New Yorker, Harris and Cumming considered doing something bigger: a theatrical piece, maybe, or a TV show or radio interviews. Ultimately they decided that the project belonged where the daily drama of our obsessions already unfolds: on the Internet.
Object networking, a phrase that Harris says may have been invented by the itsasickness team, is about establishing deeper ties to the things that we obsess over, and in the process recognizing that our relationships with these things—favorite foods, TV shows, political causes, you name it—help define us. Social networking, as anyone who’s spent time on Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn knows, is about making more (and usually more shallow) connections to people. Itsasickness is built on the counterintuitive premise that focusing on objects, not interacting with people, is a more intimate and pleasurable way to spend time online.
Fred Gooltz, the young chief operating officer who learned about using social networks for online organizing while working for groups that supported Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, has a blunt way of contrasting the two kinds of sites. “There’s nothing more disorienting than a social-networking site,” he says. “We hardly know most of our ‘friends’ these days. And how much do we really care what they just ate for lunch?”
“Sickness” is a loaded word for the enterprise. There’s a history of stigma attached to obsessive behavior, including fandom (think of Trekkies). Harris wants to play on this idea but also evoke the more contemporary meaning of the term. “ ‘That’s sick’ is what kids in California and surfers and skiers say when something is intense or incredible,” he says. “It’s not something to be ashamed of—it’s cool.”
In fact, itsasickness is designed to encourage participants to show they are the sickest. “You get status, like a crown, for being a leader on a topic,” Gooltz explains. “We want to identify and engage the most hardcore people,” Harris adds. In one video on the site already, member Joe Plummer discusses the mystery of Shakespeare’s true identity; in another video, musicians Adam Schatz and Jeff Curtin sing songs they wrote about episodes of Lost.
The chance to prove the depth of one’s passion may well draw people to itsasickness.com. So might the site’s hip, professional design, high-quality videos, and celebrity-generated content. (Zoe Kravitz’s obsession? Costumes! Jason Bateman’s? Classical music.) But attracting eyeballs and keeping them there is the great challenge for every Internet start-up, and itsasickness faces stiff competition for our attention. Sports junkies, for example, already have ESPN.com, SportsIllustrated.com, CNN.com, and the countless sites covering their favorite teams.
Harris, who describes himself as an evangelist for the project, says his faith stems from his view that the phrase “It’s a sickness” is the perfect expression for the moment. “It’s going to be the next ‘Just do it,’ ” he says, “but for everything, not just sneakers.” Another plus is the fact that the site’s content is generated by genuine enthusiasts. “We’re not some big media company with an ulterior motive for creating community. The experience we offer is authentic. Even the ads, when we get them, are going to be authentic, and we’re going to offer specific products geared toward people’s obsessions.”
Of course they also have to find a way to sell companies on partnering with them, but Gooltz believes their business plan can succeed. Unlike social-networking sites, which are notoriously difficult to monetize, a successful object-networking site—but only a successful one—would be an obvious draw to advertisers. If Kindle users flock to itsasickness, might Amazon want to follow them? Whether the more specialized and obscure “sicknesses” like asparagus, No. 6 clog boots, and the Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki, which make up the majority of the site, will have a similar appeal is just one of the project’s many unknowns.
As they approached the final launch date set for this fall, Harris and Cumming were already scheming their next step. “I really shouldn’t tell you this,” Harris says, “but we’re working on an itsasickness TV show, with Alan as the MC and, most likely, the sickest people from the website providing content.” Some of us, at least, can never get enough.
Facts
Itsasickness obsessions include argyle, bubble wrap, Estonia, hurdy-gurdies, molé, Peter Lorre, Rooibos tea, and Savile Row tailors.
In Alan Cumming’s itsasickness video about his obsession with his dogs, he confesses that they have their own publicity photos.
Obsessions
Alan Cumming: True oil, gay rights, Caledonian MacBrayne ferries, seventies Scottish child-star singer Lena Zavaroni, luxury travel, Flip video, his dogs
Fred Gooltz: Seventies movies, Conan O’Brien, Led Zeppelin, Motown, Shakespeare, World Cup soccer, Porsche 911
Barnaby Harris: Hawkeye Pierce (Alan Alda’s character on M.A.S.H.), seventies TV and movies, Apple products, overuse of paper towels
Every lefty’s favorite Slovak philosopher looks into the WikiLeaks story and knocks it out of the park.
First he dissects The Dark Knight movie in a way that basically seconds the general thesis of my Wild West script about media and theatre:
The Joker wants to disclose the truth beneath the mask, convinced that this will destroy the social order. What shall we call him? A terrorist? The Dark Knight is effectively a new version of those classic westerns Fort Apache and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which show that, in order to civilise the Wild West, the lie has to be elevated into truth: civilisation, in other words, must be grounded on a lie. The film [The Dark Knight] has been extraordinarily popular. The question is why, at this precise moment, is there this renewed need for a lie to maintain the social system?
Which leads to his understanding of why we’re being told to fear Assange.
What WikiLeaks threatens is the formal functioning of power. The true targets here weren’t the dirty details and the individuals responsible for them; not those in power, in other words, so much as power itself, its structure. We shouldn’t forget that power comprises not only institutions and their rules, but also legitimate (‘normal’) ways of challenging it (an independent press, NGOs etc) – as the Indian academic Saroj Giri put it, WikiLeaks ‘challenged power by challenging the normal channels of challenging power and revealing the truth’.[*] The aim of the WikiLeaks revelations was not just to embarrass those in power but to lead us to mobilise ourselves to bring about a different functioning of power that might reach beyond the limits of representative democracy.
