by
A S Hamrah
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Twice each month on Friday nights, the leaflet said, the Harmony Center for the Joyful Spirit hosts movies at the “Home of Gwendolyn and Daniel.” The mission of Oakland’s Harmony Center is to bring “Joy and Inspiration into our lives.” “What better way to do that than to get together with friendly people for an informal meal, enjoy a great film, and then have a lively discussion of the ethical and spiritual lessons of the film?” the leaflet asked. It described Gwendolyn and Daniel’s “24th floor penthouse apartment with a ‘top of the world’ view” where “movies are shown on our 58-inch plasma HDTV with Dolby Digital Surround Sound.” Instructions followed: “If possible, please call or email with your choice of pizza, meat or veggie. Please note that we maintain a shoeless household.” Now I knew I was in California. And I knew what being in California meant: no matter how spiritual the discussion, the pizza would suck.
kill me
California is death haunted compared to New York. Everything is still and spooky, the grass along the highways north of Oakland is dry and brown. New York moves in the frame-skip fast-forward of digital video. One thing replaces another, they build an IKEA in no time by paving over cobblestone streets in Brooklyn, and they demolish buildings from the 1850s to do it. In New York, even the ghosts get priced out. In the quiet counties of Marin and Contra Costa, they linger.
It never occurred to me that I’d rather see Lynndie England in a movie than Norah Jones. Nothing works in My Blueberry Nights. Even Wong Kar-wai’s famous ability to pick music deserts him. Regardless of what’s playing on the sound track, it’s “After Midnight” you hear — the film looks like a ten-year-old beer commercial starring Eric Clapton.
What has Wong Kar-wai been doing for the last eight years? None of it makes sense. He seems more lost than any of his characters. Today we live off revivals of Days of Being Wild or As Tears Go By, but when In the Mood for Love came out in 2001 it was a film you pressed close, you looked into its eyes, it was tragic, true, and hot. Its sound track got us through many nights or car rides home — “Quizás, quizás, quizás.” Seven years later, it’s over. The thrill is gone, the nights are cold.
ouch
I can’t say anything about Juno because I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it because I hated Little Miss Sunshine so much. After I saw Little Miss Sunshine I really wished I hadn’t. I refuse to make that mistake again. If that’s what a feel-good movie is, I can’t stand to feel that good. It’s physically painful for me to feel that good.
As a consequence of this individualization of behaviours, we use chemistry to compel our children's attention (as well as our own), at all costs, to bend to the--unprecedented, completely artificial and terribly invasive--needs of a Janus-faced capitalism, which simultaneously advocates relentless productive discipline and limitless consumerist hedonism. So, it is in the broad framework of a vast (in)attention economy that ADHDs must be situated--rather than in the overly narrow framework of the subject-object relation or family dynamic. If we are our children are suffering from something, it is firstly from the very specific socio-economic illness that is 'mental capitalism'. [...]
[...] The 'Great Society' dreamed up by Friedrich Hayek is admirably 'liberal' in that it endeavours to provide as many means of happiness as possible to the individuals that make it up, while leaving everyone free to provide their own definition of happiness [...] But attention cannot be reduced to a simple question of means. You cannot claim to be holding an axiologically neutral discourse (separated from any subjective value) on attention, for the good reason that attentional processes are inextricably linked to our processes of valorization. [...] attention is individuating between it is rooted in a circular dynamic--in a circle that may be vicious or virtuous: I valorize what I pay attention to and I pay attention to what I valorize. As soon as the means-resource conditions the end aimed at through it, it is no longer possible to claim--as does our economic ideology--that it is maximizing the means while leaving everyone free to choose their own ends. Making do with an economic vocabulary in the study of attentional dynamics therefore prevents us from posing the essential question: how--which is to say, inevitably, in which direction, to what ends--are we to direct the attention which gives direction to what we become?
so good
It would be terribly reductive--even if partially true--to characterize such enthralments in terms of an opposition between 'them' (the media, journalist,s the powerful, rulers, elites, the establishment) and 'us' (the poor little ignorant people, shamefully manipulated by Machiavellian politicians, big bosses of multinational firms, spin doctors and storytellers). Media enthralments result from an echosystem in which we are all implicated [...] Even if we are led to find its deplorable and degrading effects deeply repulsive, this echosystem can only be conjugated in the first-person plural: whether we like it or not it constitutes 'our' environment, 'our milieu' [...]--we are what and who we are because we live in the 'middle' of it. We don't merely live in it: to a large extent, 'we' are it. And just like our atmosphere or climate, however unbreathable or overheated they may be, our media echosystem--with all its nuances, standardized sectors and no-go zones--is necessarily communal. Here as well, there is no plan(et) B.
very DFW and also reminds me of my closing para for viewer in the high castle
[...] If our behaviour is always (a little) irrational, this is because our actions are always (a little) constrained (for lack of means or lack of time), a constraint which prevents us from collecting enough information to be certain about what we are doing. It is precisely here that we can gauge the unrealism of the neoliberal paradigm which, blinded by its 'liberal' ideology, systematically fails to take into account the consequences of the multiple forms of constraint which 'irrationalize' our behaviour--beginning with the most important among them: information deficiency.
[...] with the reduction to zero of the marginal costs for the transmission of digital goods we are in the midst of the emergence of something absolutely novel with profoundly revolutionary implications. But, on the one hand, the costs of production of the material goods necessary for the existence and circulation among us of cultural goods are far from evaporating, remaining ecologically unsustainable at their current levels. While, on the other hand, and above all, when attention phenomena are taken into account, we find competition returning at the time of reception of cultural goods. This was certainly Herbert Simon's central message in 1969:
In an information-rich world, most of the cost of information is the cost incurred by the recipient. [...] Human beings, like contemporary computers, are essentially serial deices. They can attend to only one thing at a time. This is just another way of saying that attention is scarce.
We touch concretely here on the mechanism by which the attention economy is rooted in a CIRCULAR SELF-REINFORCING DYNAMIC: attention attracts attention. Attention accumulated in the past and the present supports the future accumulation of attention. It is because millions of tourist have come to see the Mona Lisa that millions of tourists rush to see the Mona Lisa. [...]