Far Country Tell : the wit of jesus and orpheus

CGI TV

Getty images

Not everything you saw on TV during the Olympic opening ceremonies actually happened . . . and I'm not talking about the guy 'flying' to light the torch. Apparently it has been revealed that there was extensive use of 'live' CGI to enhance the fireworks display. (read report here) (update: see original SkyNews report here)

Now Chris Chase at Yahoo Sports says "The Opening Ceremony is, at its core, just one big performance. And isn't it accepted that some things might not be legit at a performance?  The final torch bearer wasn't actually running around the top of the stadium, does the fact that everyone could figure that out make it any less impressive? It might have been unnecessarily deceptive, but the firework-faking isn't really that big of a deal."

Is that really the case? Is the deception of billions of people not that big of a deal? It may not be --and there in lies the rub.

My first inclination is to say that there really is no comparison between the gravity defying man and the fireworks. We know that the man flying is performance because it breaks the laws of everyday existence and is presented as such . . .

but the 'coverage' of the fireworks display is more in the genre of 'photo journalism'. It is televised reporting of an event . . . television is supposed to allow millions (billions!) of people to participate --as though they were there-- in a geographically and temporally localized event.

In fact, however, we never experience those events . . . we constantly go beyond the event.

We enter the world of hyperreality.

The point that Chris Chase of Yahoo Sports is attempting to make (in a flippant throw away manner) is that situation, audience expectation and 'genre' will dictate the limits of 'reality manipulation' via television. The opening ceremony of the Olympics is in the same genre as David Copperfield making the Statue of Liberty disappear or David Blane levitating whereas the coverage of the war in Iraq and the Democratic/Republican National Convention are in a more authentic genre or television journalism.

Indeed, this is not the case! The DNCC has already hired 'seasoned production and design teams' to produce the convention for television. (see the report here) Is this not in the genre of performance? This is 'reality tv' and its actors have been writing the book for the new New York Reality TV School for decades now. (see the Nightline report here)

But certainly this osmotic membrane that is television has no effect of how we live in the everyday world!?

I remember how utterly 'fake' the Lunar Earthrise seemed to me when the footage came back from the Japanese Kaguya satellite. (see the Earthrise here) Does it really matter that we see what they said we are seeing? It looks like a movie or a video game. Kaguya's hi-def cameras captured what Baudrillard calls 'The Pornography of the Real' . . . Like the porno --which grants us a view of something that we would never see but wish it would look like in an attempt to remind us of what we think we experienced or never had but always wanted to-- maybe all that matters is that television shows us what we think something should look like.

This the genre of performance has such a power over our lives it even has had an effect on the U.S. torture policy. (see Newsweek report here)

Dahlia Lithwick says, "According to British lawyer and writer Sands, Jack Bauer—played by Kiefer Sutherland—was an inspiration at early "brainstorming meetings" of military officials at Guantánamo in September 2002. Diane Beaver, the staff judge advocate general who gave legal approval to 18 controversial interrogation techniques including waterboarding, sexual humiliation and terrorizing prisoners with dogs, told Sands that Bauer "gave people lots of ideas." Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security chief, gushed in a panel discussion on "24" organized by the Heritage Foundation that the show"reflects real life."

what is going on here?

So, in hyperreality, not only are we constantly going beyond the event . . . but in our attempts to capture 'reality' the event is slowly becoming our 'reality'. More importantly and precisely, media is affecting our bodies and the way we move through our world and daily concerns.

The tangled webs we weave . . .

what will we do?

***

Update:

MSNBC has a new report about the CGI fireworks citing British Sky News (source)

"Even those at the city’s new Bird’s Nest National Stadium, where the Olympics are being held, viewed the fake footage from their seats as they watched on the stadium’s giant television screens, said Britain’s Sky News, in a story, “Olympic Fireworks Faked for TV.”

“Stunned viewers thought they were watching the string of fireworks filmed from above by a helicopter,” said SkyNews.com. “ But in reality they were watching a 3-D graphics sequence that took almost a year to produce.”

mythic walks and spiders

Very cool news out of Oxford, England tonight.

Addison's Walk: A Mythic Conversation, a play I co-wrote with a friend from St. Andrews, was warmly received by attendees of the 2008 C.S. Lewis Conference.

The play imagines the night of September 19th, 1931 when C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Hugo Dyson spent the evening debating the relationship between myth and the Christian faith. [See a pic of Addison's Walk here!] No one really knows what was said that night but that conversation led to Tolkien's poem (written as a final response to Lewis on the matter) Mythopoeia and to C.S. Lewis becoming the staunch poster boy for hip Protestant intellectual types (since up to that point Lewis was, a best, a generic theist).

For anyone interested in Tolkien's work, Mythopoeia is vitally important to understanding Tolkien. The poem itself contains everything one needs to know about Tolkien's 'doctrine' of sub-creation.

There's already talk of a 'traveling show' being produced which would take the play (and a panel discussion) to colleges around the U.S. I'm really excited about this because it brings me one step closer to my hope of writing and directing a Tolkien biopic. Let's see what happens . . .

***

On another front. On August 1st  The Mirror Crack'd: Fear and Horror in JRR Tolkien's Major Works will be available for purchase from Amazon and the Cambridge Scholars Press site. . . well, just Amazon.co.uk for now. The cool thing is that you will find my essay Of Spiders and (the Medieval Aesthetics of) Light: Hope and Action in the Horrors of Shelob's Lair on chapter 3.

You can see a sample PDF of the book here:

Download the_mirror_crackd_sample.pdf

restore vision . . .

When I think of Imaginative Guerrilla Resistance I not only think of events that alter human activity but events that help us see the with new eyes . . . it makes our stale settings fresh again . . . to see things as they are or were meant to see them.

I first heard about Improv Everywhere in 2003. I can't quite remember what I was listening to, This American Life i think, but i remember being blown away by the possibilities of it all. Art that ruptures our everyday space, our absorption in the temporal. In many ways their guerrilla art has been a major source of inspiration for my dissertation work.

Specifically, what I think is their greatest mission . . . The Moebius.

resist . . .

over the course of my dissertation I have been repeatedly asked, "what does imaginative guerrilla resistance look like?". As i am adding the final touches to my work i've come to realize that first and foremost imaginative guerrilla resistance is an activity . . .

Behold, the world of Guerrilla Gardening . . .

dance . . .

14 months, 42 countries, a cast of thousands
Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

w. Herzog vs. e. Morris

I just came across a beautiful conversation between filmmakers Werner Herzog an Errol Morris. These two filmmakers have a long history together and together represent a radical force in undermining (at the very least obfuscating) the line between fiction and non-fiction filmmaking.

Herzog's Minnesota Manifesto was incredibly influential for me and poet Dale Smith in the making of our short film Gulf Coast Daybook. Be sure to check out his Strozsek, Fata Morgana, Lessons of Darkness, Fitzcarroldo, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, and his most recent Rescue Dawn. Morris is an enigma to me . . . check out his films Gates of Heaven, Vernon Florida,  The Thin Blue Line and his Miller High Life commercials and you'll know what I mean.

More importantly, the question of what is 'real' and how do we unconceal the 'real' in the moving image is central to both filmmakers. While I'm in agreement with Baudrillard that any conversation about 'the Real' is part of a larger problem (namely the death of a symbolic relationship with the world), these two filmmakers are indispensable conversation partners in any response to  a hyperreal world.

enjoy the conversation here: Werner Herzog and Errol Morris conversation

SXSW withdrawal

SXSW film festival came to a close saturday and I'm already having withdrawal . . .   my highlights include excellent panel sessions on the use of music in film;  the blurring  line between fiction and non-fiction films; the use of sound in films and a brilliant acting workshop by Jeffrey Tambor.

Aside from some terrific experimental and short film selections (seek out The Timebox Twins, Doxology, Safari, Bathtub, Shot and The Aviatrix) I was able to catch three feature films:

Wellness (which ended up winning the grand jury prize); The Promotion (dir. by Steve Conrad starring Seann William Scott and John C. Reilly); and Harmony Korine's concept album of a movie about a Michael Jackson impersonator who travels to an impersonator commune in the Scottish highlands inhabited by the Three Stooges, Abe Lincoln, Buckwheat, Madonna, James Dean, Marlyn Monroe, John Paul II and Charlie Chaplin entitled Mr. Lonely --Oh, did I mention there was a subplot about nuns who sky dive without parachutes? . . . genius!

SXSW music just began . . . saw the Lemonheads the other night. dig.

Peace on Earth

1939 dir Hugh Harman

climate change . . . the big picture

While the last post was a confession of my ever growing embrace of green and sustainable technology as a whole and healthy expression of the human imagination, this post is meant to keep our feet on firmly on the ground.

A few weeks ago I read one of the most levelheaded (bordering on cynical) articles on global warming I've ever come across. Anyone concerned about carbon footprints  (as I am) needs to read If More CO2 is Bad . . . Then What? or (Download .pdf)

Robert Bryce –a self confessed climate change Agnostic– makes a compelling argument:

"The belief that the world can drastically cut global carbon-dioxide emissions at a time when about half of the people on the planet are still living in relative energy poverty borders on fantasy. Moreover, the industrialized countries in general, and the U.S. in particular, have no moral standing from which to tell the developing countries that they should slow the growth of their energy consumption."

This article is a direct volley to America's growing 'Whole Foods Liberals'.

"The developed countries of the world can talk forever about the virtues of solar panels and windmills, but what the energy-poor need most are common fuels like kerosene, propane, and gasoline. And just like us, they want reliable electricity. The people in the industrialized countries have a moral obligation to help the energy-poor get cheap, reliable energy. And it is undeniable that the cheapest and most reliable forms of energy, for now, are fossil fuels.

. . . Bringing hundreds of millions of people out of energy poverty – and, thus, into higher standards of living – means providing them with access to cheap, plentiful energy. Like it or not, that largely means fossil fuels, and increased use of fossil fuels will mean further increases in carbon-dioxide emissions. The hard truth is that the people of the world are going to have to adapt to a warmer planet – regardless of the cause of that warming."

While I don't know nearly enough about Robert Bryce and his work I think this article proposes an insightful dilemma: There is no efficacious eco-response to climate change that will ever do the job if the answer doesn't take into account those the West has left behind. We can throw all the post-industrial green and sustainable technology we want at the issue but  'Morality' (those who still don't have clean drinking water, clean burning stoves, etc.) and 'Scale' (there is a lot of these 'third world' conditions out there!) will continue to drag our efforts down into the industrial bog we so desperately want to leave behind.

Are we too late?

what will we do?

 

read more from Robert Bryce here.

Green and Sustainable (Theology)

As I think more and more about the world Dylan will grow up in the topic of Green and Sustainable Technology is becoming a centrally important issue. Emerging of out my PhD work on Tolkien I can't help but see the  links between Elvish craft . . . Elvish magic and green/sustainable technology.

Tolkien says in 1956:

“The Elves represent, as it were, the artistic aesthetic, and purely scientific aspects of Human nature raised to a higher level than is actually seen in men. That is: they have a devoted love of the physical world, and a desire to observe and understand it for its own sake and as ‘other’ – sc. as a reality derived from god in the same degree as themselves – not as a material for use or as a power-platform. They also possess a ‘subcreational’ or artistic faculty of great excellence.” (letter 236)

In a chapter that should be published later this year I briefly sketch out Tolkien's 'theology' of technology, magic and human artistry and how Philosopher Martin Heidegger's own writings on art and technology can help us understand Tolkien's position better. . .

In that chapter I say: