Boring postcards of the future?

During the break last class, I was reminded of James Howard Kunstler's feature, Eyesore of the Month. Kunstler is an American social critic/author who wrote the book The Geography of Nowhere, a history of urban sprawl and suburbia in the US. These days, his main concern is the impending (or is it current?) oil crisis. He's a key figure of the New Urbanist movement (which, as perceptive and thoughtful Vancouverites, we all owe it to ourselves to learn about) and is deeply ambivalent about all those Bad Things like SUVs and highways and Wal-Mart. Kunstler's blog, Clusterfuck Nation, is here, and is generally an engagingly belligerent read.

You might have already guessed why my brain linked Kunstler's name to Parr's Boring Postcards collection - the utopian, motorway-centric Modernist urban planning Parr documents is precisely what Kunstler finds the most apalling about Western culture. Some of Kunstler's Eyesores look eerily similar to the images in Parr's books...but the images aren't the only thing of interest here - Kunstler's sarcastic write ups are also top notch:

Nelson Rockefeller, the Captain Kirk of Modern Art patrons, arranged for this UFO to land like a Vulcan acropolis in in the Center of New York state's capital city around 1972. One unfortunate byproduct of the Empire State Plaza and its accessory freeway ramps: they obliterated the south end of the city. Note the granite fortification wall where the freeway terminates, and the forbidding maw of darkness that the motorist is compelled to enter in order to gain access to the internal workings of this bureaucratic mega-machine. Governor Rockefeller regarded it as a kind of ultra-pop sculpture garden, best viewed from freeway ramps. What happened on the ground didn't matter.

What was going through their minds in the sixties?

Remember, buildings like this department store in Meridian, Mississippi, were designed and built by people who were AGAINST hallucinogenic drugs. Note how the colorful banners on the pole in front really "dress it up."

Kunstler offers us a contemporary interpretation of the mid-century developments cataloged by Parr. Looking at these dreary roadways and concrete-block buildings, even uglier now than when they were built (years of grime and wear aren't kind to concrete - sorry, SFU), it's even harder to comprehend the unbridled enthusiasm displayed for such things in Parr's books and old news clips like the one Susan showed us last class.

Kunstler's criticism does not end in the Modern era, however - some of his Eyesores are shiny, new, critically-acclaimed buildings - buildings which might easily end up on the postcards and brochures of today. I find these particularly interesting:

The Peter B. Lewis Building for Case Western Reserve University's Weatherhead School of Management. Architect: Frank Gehry. If your dog had a tumor like this the vets would just shake their heads and put him to sleep. The design follows the logic of cancer: invade and overwhelm the host organism. It's appropriate that this building houses the business school, because it aptly expresses the disfigurement of American economic practice in our time: banality meets pathology in a tragic duet.

Behold the model for Frank Gehry's Museum of Tolerance now under construction in Jeruselum. Financed by Americans, the museum makes an interesting case in its sheer physical form: the Post-modern must not just be tolerated, it has to be suffered. The citizens of Jeruselum will now have to suffer a building that looks like a pile of floor sweepings from a machine shop.

(He's really not fond of Gehry.)

Behold the new $30 million Ontario College of Art & Design classroom and studio building by British architect Will Alsop -- a totemized retro-futuroid coffee table joined umbilically to its Soviet-style predecessor below. The message, apparently: art and design are nothing but fun fun fun. Nothing to get serious about. A playful spirit of induced hazard will keep students wondering when the checkered box might wobble free of its cute swizzle-stick legs and come crashing down on their heads. This exercise in hyper-entropic avant garde faggotry is so cutting edge that it is already out of date. The only question: which of the two conjoined buildings is more cruelly ridiculous?

Kunstler is onto something here. Still utterly fixated on the ever-new, it seems [some of] the architects of today haven't learned from their Modernist predecessors; they're continuing to build structures "so cutting edge [they are] already out of date." These extravagant, outlandish buildings are great monolithic expressions of our culture's boredom, imposing their message of newness - sweet, whimsical newness! - onto the streets and people around them. The terrible thing is, though, once these monuments to newness become boring or old, we cannot simply discard them and move onto something newer still; the buildings might lose their charm, but they retain their practical use, and we have to continue living and working in them, not to mention looking at them, for years and years to come. It's dismal. I wonder what people's reactions to these buildings will be in the future - will they be as bemusedly perplexed as ours to Parr's Boring Postcards? Honestly, though, what are they thinking? It's frightening to think that the current vision of the cutting-edge is so stubbornly fixated on the unique. If we think the dingy boxes of 60s architecture are out-of-place blots on our streetscapes, just imagine what these things will look like in a few years. Can you imagine the horror of having one of Gehry's melted, blobby buildings in our city? Sure they're fun, refreshing, and thought-provoking in their unique blobby way for the time being, but when this brand of architecture goes out of style - which I pray it will soon - they are going to pollute their cities with the absurdity of 1000 Space Needles. I wonder if buildings this aggressively absurd will ever be viewed as boring. Ugly or not, they're certain to generate emotional and opinionated reactions (like this one).

For a fun aside, here are my favourite unrelated Eyesores:

This one says it all -- and thanks to Judy Peer of Rochester, New York -- who found this monument to greed and chauvinism on Winton Road there. The tattooed eagle straddles a lumpish, deflated earth (perhaps punctured by its talons) before the ranks of Humvees waiting for buyers who can take advantage of the special corporate tax break for vehicles over 6000 pounds (nice work Karl Rove!). Notice, the setting is one of those innumerable places not worth caring about which someday will add up to a nation not worth defending.

This one is a series of pictures, so I can't easily duplicate it here. Certainly worth clicking on the link, though.

What do you guys think of Kunstler's critical look at the boring postcards of the past and future?

Naps, glorious naps.

Oh, and as a follow up to my in-class announcement that I've begun napping (at long last!), I found this great article about the nap. (Link thanks to the always informativeArts and Letters Daily.)

Boredom and video games!

Perhaps this is a result of the universality of our class topic (or of the persistent question hovering in my mind during every idle internet reading and every vaguely intellectual over-coffee conversation – “Can I blog about this?”), but lately I’ve become more interested in certain aspects of the everyday. My sudden fascination with popular [leisure] culture has escalated to such a high degree that I – of all people – have been excitedly following the latest developments in video game systems. Perhaps if you don’t know me, you won’t realize how highly uncharacteristic this is, but I never even owned a Nintendo, and I’ve certainly never shown any interest in such things. I’ve come to the conclusion that video games can potentially say a lot about our culture, though – think back to Adorno, who claims that “even the most superfluous and senseless activity undertaken in people’s free time is integrated in society” (193). What does it mean that the new PS3 console is the most powerful home computer available on the market? There’s also Nintendo’s new Wii, which is operated with a different motion-sensitive wireless controller in each hand – Nintendo’s changes to user interface require an excellent grasp of hand-eye coordination (which, alas, I am without) and an acute sensitivity to one’s movement. There’s never been anything like it on the market before. What’s all this about?

Adorno might say that these new videogames encourage the development of skills required for labour – I’ve heard it said a million times that video and computer games are nothing more than [very] thinly veiled military training (I’m going to lose a bit of credibility here and cite the end of the summer blockbuster movie, Snakes on a Plane, in which a character lands an airplane based solely on the skills he gained through video game expertise). Adorno reminds us again and again that what we do in our free time “is nothing more than a shadowy continuation of labour” (194), and in the case of video games, I might be inclined to agree with him. It is perhaps for this reason that video games are beginning to get more critical attention – for example, here is an article in which the author, Ryan Stancl, applies different modes of cultural and literary criticism to Katamari Damacy, a newer Playstation game. Admittedly, Stancl does not provide us with especially deep or incisive criticism (presumably the readers of “Game Career Guide” are not as familiar with the New Critics or with Psychoanalysis as we English students are), but it’s an interesting line of thought at any rate. Stancl argues that “video games now, more than ever, need to be not just reviewed, but critiqued, because of their negative image in the press, in politics, in the general public, and quite simply because they are so ripe for critiquing.” While I certainly agree on the last point, I must say I get the feeling that, these days, people view video games in less of a negative light than they once did (or is that just me?). I often see hip and/or hip-hop guys playing their PSPs on the bus without shame or self consciousness. Once reserved for nerds, some video games are becoming not only acceptable, but maybe even fashionable. Then again, hip-hop guys might secretly be a bunch of nerds – I hear that Coolio spent a lot of time playing the online first-person shooter game “Tribes.”

If Adorno is right that our free time is determined by our labour, then we might take a more bottom-up approach and look at our leisure activities as a way of better understanding our work. There is a popular conception that video games are escapist, fantastical, and exciting; however, my limited experience has taught me that the opposite is true. My boyfriend freely admits that his favourite genre of video game is that in which you perform tedious, repetitive tasks and “watch numbers increase.” This sound remarkably reminiscent of industrial labour – or, to use a more contemporary example, of any number of clerical data-entry jobs, doesn’t it? That grumpy old Adorno might be right in his claim that “free time is shackled to its opposite” (187) in this regard – a lot of games involve the kinds of tasks familiar to the work environment.

If you’re unconvinced, allow me to turn your attention to Work Time Fun (or WTF), a game recently released for the Playstation Portable. Work Time Fun is basically a model of the workplace, set in Hell (or, I would argue, capitalist-Hell). The Wikipedia entry (linked above) for WTF describes it as follows: “The game contains over forty minigames, representing inane part-time jobs you receive from the ‘Job Demon’, that you must complete in a certain amount of time and at a certain difficulty, depending on the level.” The minigames include sorting chickens…

…and putting the caps on pens (notice the factory worker comrades in the background).

Once you’ve completed your tiresome task, you receive a pay cheque for your efforts.

Money accumulated from pay cheques can be spent at these odd vending machines where you receive either useless trinkets (“for your gallery”) or – and this is the kicker – more banal minigames.

So, think about this for a second: you’re working to make money so as to buy more work. This frustrating (yet oddly addictive) cycle of labour seems like a pretty harsh (if tongue-in-cheek) critique of capitalism. What would Adorno say? Perhaps something along the lines of: “the contraband of modes of behavior proper to the domain of work, which will not let people out of its power, is being smuggled into the realm of free time” (190) – this game literally provides the player with a proletarian work experience. It’s also reminiscent of the notion of “work-leisure” in the Lefebvre piece we read (226). Lefebvre says that a fruitful way of understanding people’s “place in the division of labour” is to study their leisure activities – “everyone tries to programme the amount of time at his disposal according to what his work is – and what it is not” (226-227). So what does it say when bourgeois university students spend their free time playing games which simulate proletarian industrial labour? As a possible answer, I’ll turn to Adorno once more, specifically to his idea of “unfreedom.” He suggests that the “freeness” of free time is not only dubious but nonexistent, as “people have been refused freedom, and its value belittled, for such a long time that now people no longer like it” (193). Indeed, it may be because video game players (a breed still somewhat mysterious to me, I admit) are so entrenched in capitalist ideology that they enjoy nothing more than spending their leisure time “watching numbers increase.”

Influenza-born boredom.

For the past week or so, my ability to critically think about boredom has been reduced [or, perhaps, obliterated] by a mild to moderate cold. Last Wednesday, while you were all discussing Sherlock Holmes and the everyday, I was concentrating on things more along the lines of Sudafed and the sick day. I'm not sure I was self-reflective or conscious enough to feel bored, so I can't offer any brilliant observations linking mucus with ennui, alas. I did, however, have enough creative energy to make a conceptual mix cd loosely based on boredom...these aren't songs about boredom or songs that I find boring -- more songs that sound bored, disengaged, or somehow emotionally tentative. A small part of my motivation for posting this here is that it is more or less the greatest study mix I've ever made. (Feel free to ask for a copy come exam time.)

01 Grizzly Bear - Shift
02 Thanksgiving - Oh Well
03 Little Wings - Light Green Leaves
04 A Silver Mt. Zion - Horses in the Sky
05 Erik Satie - Gymnopedie I (Lent et Douloureux)
06 The Dirty Projectors - Weather I'm Under
07 Sparklehorse - Spirit Ditch
08 Wooden Wand - Leave your Perch
09 Castanets - Cathedral 2 (Your Feet on the Floor Sounding like the Rain)
10 Cass McCombs - A Comedian is Someone Who Tells Jokes
11 Microphones - Headless Horseman
12 Drowsy - I Died of Death
13 The Bell Orchestre - The Bells Play the Band
14 Max Richter - Horizon Variations
15 Metallic Falcons - Silent Night
16 Akron/Family - Shoes
17 Brightblack Morning Light - Everybody Daylight
18 Born Heller - First Kiss
19 Lau Nau - Hunnun
20 Sibylle Baier - Remember the Day
21 Claude Debussy - Des Pas Sur la Niege

Real, thought-provoking post to be written upon regaining my mental capacity!

Boredom on the bus

A few days ago, while riding the bus home, I had the displeasure of sitting in front of a particularly irritating gentleman. I fear I won't entirely do him justice without a full scale tirade, but I'll hold back this time and just mention that he had an unfortunate habit of loudly sucking his tongue against his teeth, every 3-5 seconds, all the way from SFU to East Van. God, it was awful. The annoyance I felt towards this man (which, by Kootenay Loop or so, had escalated into a rage of sorts) reminded me of something Simmel wrote about the metropolitan individual's aversion to others, which he refers to as a "mutual strangeness." He says that, despite our assumed indifference, "our minds respond, with some definite feeling, to almost every impression emanating from another person." Well, I was certainly responding to this one – somehow he broke into my sphere of indifference.

Generally, when I am in a place that involves a large number of potentially irritating strangers, I do a fairly good job of affecting what Simmel might call a blasé attitude, a total lack of interest. The daily 135 bus ride is different, though. I am quite irritable on that particular bus – sometimes I grow to hate people simply because of their facial expressions or back packs or because they sit next to me (the nerve!). This makes me wonder – does my 135-bad-temper have something to do with boredom? Is it some very peculiar way of entertaining myself for those 45 long minutes every day? Sure, "Dr. Computer Plus" and "Loss Control for Pee and Poo" are funny signs, but only about the first hundred times you see them – after that, you have to find new sources of entertainment. For those of us who get car sick and as such can't fill the "enforced leisure" with a book, what better way to pass the time than to get good and indignant?

An aside, or, rather, a slight change of topic: for me, the persistence of the 135 bus ride in my life troubles the distinction between situational and existential boredom. My commute is a very small part of my day, and it makes sense that my extreme aversion to it stems from situational boredom…but is there some deeper level of situational boredom when the situation repeats day after day after day? I think of the poor souls who have to battle the suburban traffic jams every day (the opening scene of Office Space, perhaps?)…the boredom of the commute is undeniably an integral part of these people's lives; it's inescapable! So, do these hours spent on the bus or in the car constitute a deeper antipathy than your average situational boredom? Have our daily commutes altered our conceptions of boredom?

Theorizing Boredom

...in which my usual outlet for procrastination - the internet - becomes a place of productivity.