Novacene

 

'I saw a reconstruction of Newcomen’s ‘atmospheric steam engine’ in 1926 when I was seven years old.” This is the sentence that opens the brief epilogue of James Lovelock’s altogether compact Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence, a book published in July of 2019, two years to the month before the author would die at the age of one-hundred-and-three. Lovelock was born the same year as J.D. Salinger, Jennifer Jones, Jackie Robinson, and my grandpa Jim. What makes Lovelock’s age especially notable from the standpoint of Novacene is that it seems to help the reader believe they’re in the hands of someone with a mind uniquely attuned to the long game. Consider, as an example, a crucial passage from fairly late in the book: “Indeed, in certain ways, such as the ubiquity of personal computers and mobile phones, we are already at a stage similar to that of the Anthropocene in the early twentieth century. In the 1900s we had internal-combustion-powered cars, basic aircraft, fast trains, electricity available for homes, telephones and even the basics of digital computing. A century later the world has been transformed by the explosive development of these technologies.” Lovelock was among other things the creator of the Gaia Hypothesis, and that is certainly how I first became familiar with him. The basic idea is that the earth is a single contained creature or interdependent organic system and the rest of us all mere creature features. Humanity's realization of the central importance of the entirety of its constitutive systems has become critical in recent years. The cosmos is 13.8 billion years old, earth 4.5 billion years old, life on Earth has been around for 3.7 billion years, and human life for “just over 300,000 years.” Intelligent life emerged as a unique quirk of evolutionary contingency, and human beings would seem to be “a freakish one-off” on the cosmological scale. The earth itself is getting old, increasingly frail, even if human beings remain a relatively fresh novelty. The good news and the bad news, swaying like an alert cobra: “our supremacy as the prime understanders of the cosmos is rapidly coming to an end.” Homeostasis is largely a matter of thermostasis, and carbon-based organic life has evolved to do the complicated cooperative work of serving these ends out day by day. Lovelock says that technically he is an engineer rather than a scientist and that he would rather possess a keen sense of obscure mechanics than a table or chart of explanatory numbers. There is an “honourable deceit” in engineering dynamic systems that you can describe but cannot truly explain. Asked by NASA in 1961 to help provide the first Surveyor mission with a gas chromatograph, Lovelock knew that he could but knew also that he wouldn’t have had the ability to explain quite how. This basic model of reasoning can be extrapolated and unravelled such that we might then make a quick leap and task ourselves with imagining how future silicon-based (or not) cybernetic intelligence(s) could be expected to evolve within the context of dynamic super-finessed systems-coordination utterly at odds with “the single-channel, step-by-step arguments of classical logic.” In the gradual development from Deep Blue, which beat Garry Kasparov in 1997, to AlphaZero (which plays chess, Go, and Shogi) in 2017, we have witnessed the graduation of artificial intelligence systems to the status of superhuman. We can’t truly know how skilled AlphaZero is “because there are no humans it can compete against.” Lovelock sees the emergence of artificial cyborg intelligence as a product of Gaia, a breakthrough within the evolution of the Gaia system to which mankind will have been best case scenario foremost handmaiden, a veritable parent. It surely bears mentioning that ours is a planet that ought to be far too hot for habitation. It is only the impossibly perfect conditions of earthly homeostasis that have thus far prevented this place from becoming another Venus. Lovelock is confident AI will see it that way. What prevents the likelihood of an all-out Terminator-style mass-extermination of humans by cyborgs? If AI wants this planet it’s going to have to take us along with it...and make sure we’re fed and watered. 

High Life (Claire Denis, 2018)

Patsy Cline, "Stop The World (And Let Me Off)"

Forensic Architecture

 

Born in Haifa and for many years a noted academic with an openly radical bent, Eyal Weizman would go on to become the co-founder and most prominent public representative of Forensic Architecture, an agency founded in 2010 with a mandate to focus on both research and advocacy, especially in instances where military and policing powers may have been misused (cough, cough). In February of 2020 Weizman was barred from attaining a travel visa with which to enter the United States when an algorithm purportedly flagged him as a security risk. Forensic Architecture conceives of itself as a counter-forensics, turning the forensic gaze back against the State; it is also a new species of transsystemic systems analysis appropriate to an era of satellite imagery, metadata, and multimedia. In a manner analogous to international travel, the thorough consideration of any event or event variable must be performed with respect paid to and consideration for the qualifiable terms of the active surrounding systems bordered everywhere by other systems, surging or waning, and so on, nobody ever quite sure who all is watching. A huge part of what Weizman himself targets are the preconceptions of Statist ideologies. That being said, what most excites about Forensic Architecture as a body with a whole lot of organs is the timeliness and extraordinary rigour of the work carried out in its name. Weizman: “[Forensic Architecture] regards the common elements of our built environment—buildings, details, cities, and landscapes, as well as their representations in media and as data—as entry points from which to interrogate contemporary processes.” The architectural analysis of “incidents in their contexts” seeks to pull from the incidents, contexts, and “their microphysical details the longer threads of political and social processes.” Weizman makes it clear that there are three tiers to his organization’s work: field (data collection), laboratory (transformation of data into evidence), and forum (the presentation of evidence and findings). Part of what makes this work so distinct from most theory, however, is that the “forum” dimension of the agency’s work does include presentations made in a juridicial context, whether the courts in question exist within nation states or as international institutions/bodies (like the ICC). There are many more kinds of evidence of any given event than you may imagine and these not merely reducible to “drawings, models, aerial and ground-level photographs of buildings” and that sort of everyday pedestrian stuff: evidence relating to the analysis of buildings and built environments; basic criminal-investigation-type forensics; audio-visual collection/collation by/for news media outlets or social media users (all significant events are multi-camera); remote sensing technologies; osteobiography; historical document analysis; direct interviews; a general analytics of testimony; and analysis of climate factors (i.e. historical patterns of aridity and desertification). As for architecture itself, Weizman repeatedly makes the case that buildings and built spaces are capable of prehension (versus apprehension or comprehension). An example would be how “it takes years for an air bubble trapped between a wall and a fast-drying paint to make its way up the building facade.” The responsibility for the 2013 collapse of a large sweatshop in Bangladesh is split, argues Weizman, between the structure itself, the surrounding infrastructure, and global economic systems. Drone attacks on buildings also involve holes in the roofs of buildings, the ordnance—usually Lockheed Martin Hellfire antitank missiles—tending to explode inside rooms deeper within a given structure, maximizing kill rates while leaving most of the structure intact. Weizman looks at how various nation states—especially Israel—use humanitarian rhetoric to their own ends, producing a troubling space for discursive and juridicial redress or anything resembling even the intestinal rumblings of accountability. Weizman conceives of a new extraterritorialization of the demos in terms of modern combat, climate change, and environmental violence. How does one operate in the zone of resource wars and chaotic mobility, a great big spinning machine that eats refugees, while we are each of us casually gathered like sleepwalkers into our little groups, not unlike the dazed and inattentive players of Pokémon GO, fad of yesteryear? Weizman advises that you operate “close to and under the threshold of detectability.”  I would add that if you have a kayak you can be both under and above the threshold of detectability at one and the same fanciful-ass time. Just saying.

Black Sunday (John Frankenheimer, 1977)

Love & Peace (Sion Sono, 2015)

Patty Party [in Chronological Order]

Aside from The Talented Mr. Ripley, which is the greatest crime novel ever written, my favourite Patty novels are A Dog's Ransom and Edith's Diary.  

Big Daddy Blues [Selfie]

 

Carbon Ideologies

 

Don Quixote (G.W. Pabst, 1933)

Harlan County U.S.A. (Barbara Kopple, 1976)

The Human Surge (Eduardo Williams, 2016)

In No Immediate Danger, the first of William T. Vollmann’s twin Carbon Ideologies door-stoppers, much time is given sheepishly over to straight-up science and a whole heap-load of British Thermal Units and parts-per-billion number crunching, only to then move on to Vollmann's adventures in post-Fukushima Japan with his dosimeter, pancake frisker, kindliness, and razor wit. The second volume, No Good Alternative, consists almost entirely of reportage and essayistic asides. While Vollmann can be biting and sarcastic, he is always a man on the ground in good faith; he is interested in people, even sometimes declaring that he likes very much people that you or I might find it very difficult to like indeed; the sarcasm and gallows humour are counterpoint to what must be a genuine streak of folksy ingenuousness. Many people probably don’t know that for however long a period in the early ‘90s the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation considered Vollmann a serious suspect in the Unabomber case. Long fascinated by and concerned with the plight of sex workers, in the early ‘80s Vollmann once rescued and secured the freedom of a young Thai girl confined to a rural brothel while in Thailand on assignment for Spin magazine. Vollmann is also a notorious, publicly open cross-dresser and his alter personality is named Dolores. You may or may not wish to drop in on or check up on The Book of Dolores, a 2013 collection of photographs and essays. A driven dragoon who will go considerable distance to get his story, Vollmann never seems to stop. Hence the glut. He is reported to have extremely bad carpal tunnel from constantly writing. At one point in No Good Alternative he tells us he revised the chapter we are in the process of reading on a bullet train to Tokyo. Carbon Ideologies in its split form is addressed with a certain teetering folksy ingenuousness to the residents of a "hot dark future” that is definitely our fault but which is also extremely hard to defend or explain. In No Good Alternative, Vollmann has done a better job than anybody I’m aware of who has preceded him at demonstrating the legacy and profound value of James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Not glib, this is rather a writer who wants a literary language that does not unnecessarily alienate. Wen Stephenson's lightly chastising "Carbon Ironies," which curious readers can go espy over at The Baffler’s website, argues that Vollmann is a marvellous writer who has written a pair of volumes people ought to read, but that his position as a kind of defeated fatalist means he seems not to acknowledge that democracy and good citizenship require us to take action when it may only make a piddling difference…or maybe even none at all. Stephenson says it is too late for anything other than planetary calamity, but that we should be working on engineering very bad scenarios that are slightly less bad than the worst case scenarios. I think Vollmann would take this criticism seriously. I think he flirts with saying the same himself. A short chapter near the end of the second book entitled "What We Should Have Done" is a real tour de force and there isn’t anything at all that’s glib or facile about it. Vollmann’s preferred character type is I think the solitary scrounger tilting at windmills. The villains are the "regulated community," the bottom line business interests with their loathsome political bedfellows, utterly affronted by any obstacle that would presume to impede their spree. Vollmann would like nothing more than to see a way out of the chokehold and to his dismay he cannot. This is a sad story, a jug band blues. What essayist, activist, and tiresome public scold Rebecca Solnit wants from us solitary, impotent, and paralyzed loser inhabitants of unliveable reality when she calls us “lazy cynics” like there had ever been anything we could have done to appease this awful lady except to overturn the state of things like it were a dinner table…what she wants I surely do not know, but she always seems to look like the cat that swallowed the canary.

Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970)

Neil Young, "Vampire Blues"

 

Ace of Jase: My Annual Russian Officer's Cut

The Ukrainian women working out of Mission Barbershop always give me the ace Russian officer's cut with that little flourish up top (a wee whisper of hulking action humanoid Dolph Lundgren, famous for a moment in the late 80s and early 90s). These Ukrainian hair clippers are charming and ironic as well as efficient and economic in their movements...like, if you have to do a job don't add anything extra to the job if you can help it. I love these ladies. But that's not love. No. That's sentiment. Which is at least better than infatuation. What is most precious in fleeting encounters is a momentary look of uncannily deep recognition. Do you feel me? A spiritual being cannot run and operate without networks. And never could. You can run and operate just fine without a shovel full of coal in your hands. The 'sons' and 'daughters' of Silicon Valley are hardly our enemies...

Freddie Hubbard, "Sky Dive"

JPW Industrial-Grade Film Criticism

 

The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988)

At times Martin Scorsese’s fascinating The Last Temptation of Christ [from 1988, year of the Calgary Winter Olympics], feels like an Off-Broadway Easter production that has decided to both play up the gritty New York City accents and to transport both cast and crew to the Middle East in order to stage the decisive one-night-only production where boorish middle class attendees complain of an ambient quality of displaced distaste and a heavy green fog of dismay like you’d expect to experience should the actual blessed Christ peer your way.

Superbad (Greg Mottola, 2007)

I thought Seth Rogan was hilarious when he first appeared riffing in those early breakout (blunderingly heteronormative) Judd Apatow pictures, but largely I think on account of the repetitive and one-note nature of Rogan’s essential schtick I came before long to find the man enormously irritating and no longer my cup of tea. However, in Mr. Rogan’s favour, it must always be remembered the he wrote groundswell classic Superbad with his childhood friend Evan—about their own experiences, naturally—and they named the two principal characters after themselves. Now, you can’t tell me that’s not a solid dude. 

The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005)

I have been forced in the recent past to face the fact that I no longer like Terrence Malick’s way iffy scattershot epic The New World even a little. Colin Farrell definitely gives the sloppiest and greasiest performance of his spotty career but what's even more concerning and dispiriting to my thinking is that despite the contributions and advisory interventions of members of the Chickahominy and Patawomeck tribes, documented nowhere more amply than on the special features accompanying the Criterion Blu-ray of Malick’s 1607-scale gambit, the gaze of the camera here is unambiguously that of a stentorian white man with mutton chops and a conquistador kink. (If you would like more information on the politics of the gaze, I refer you to Laura Mulvey’s film studies mainstay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.)

Little Murders (Alan Arkin, 1971)

In a number of interviews including one on the region-B Indicator Blu-ray for Alan Arkin’s epochal Little Murders, adapted from the caustic and quicksilver play by Jules Feiffer, star and co-producer Elliot Gould explains how they originally had nouvelle vague maverick and Jules Feiffer fan Jean-Luc Godard attached to direct, believe it or not, but it was not to be and the final straw came when Gould tried to explain to Godard that he, the grande Swiss cineaste, was going to have to be much more agreeable with studio brass if he truly wished to direct the film. Godard purportedly responded (as quoted by Gould): “When my wife or child ask me to tell them I love them I tell them to go fuck themselves.”

Blood Simple (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1984)

In his hysterically funny warts-and-all memoir Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother, cinematographer-turned-director Sonnenfeld recounts a macabre and side-splitting anecdote concerning the production of Blood Simple, the first of three Coen brothers films he would lens. One night Sonnenfeld found himself filming while Joel Coen buried his little brother Ethan in an open grave in the backyard of Sonnenfeld’s “starter home” in East Hampton in order to get some guy-being-buried-alive second unit pickup stuff for the Coens' mostly Texas-shot narrative feature debut (and what a debut). Ethan gradually became completely covered in dirt and though he kept his composure for a good long while before raising a fuss, he eventually felt compelled to point out politely to the two silhouettes above him in the dark that he probably didn’t actually need to be under all that dirt at the point where the character would surely be unconscious. All three men shared a nervous chuckle.