whitebait

your ticket to the universe

Just re-reading parts of the one of the early books that started W's academic focus on urban cultures. The preface still gets me right there in the gut.

Shortly after I finished this book, my dear son Marc, five years old, was taken from me. I dedicate All That is Solid Melts into Air to him. His life and death bring so many of its ideas and themes close to home: the idea that those who are most happily at home in the modern world, as he was, may be most vulnerable to the demons that haunt it; the idea that the daily routine of playgrounds and bicycles, of ordinary hugs and kisses, may be not only infinitely joyous and beautiful but also infinitely precarious and fragile; that it may take desperate and heroic struggles to sustain this life, and sometimes we lose. Ivan Karamazov says that, more than anything else, the death of children makes him want to give back his ticket to the universe. But he does not give it back. He keeps on fighting and loving; he keeps on keeping on.

-Marshall Berman, 'Preface' to All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982)

but who guarantees the inter-comparison of all scales?

At the Pavillon de Breteuil near Paris, like Sleeping Beauty in her glass coffin, lies the standard kilogram, the international prototype, protected in its cave ten metres underground by the BIPM, the International Bureau for Weights and Measures. This platinum kilogram is so fragile that it can't be used to calibrate its standards, also in platinum. Daylight, dust or pollution could add or remove a few phentograms of matter to or from it. The slightest change of pressure would be fatal. Accordingly, most of the time reference kilograms, representatives of a sort, are used to replace it in all regular administrative acts. Yet once every thirty years or so (three time since 1889) it is necessary to check the the representative copies haven't gone off course or betrayed the honourable intention of the original. During a ceremony restricted a minimum, to limit the sputter, movements and variations of temperature, the prototype is exhibited outside its mausoleum, The discrepancy between the different representative kilograms is measured, and the Master swiftly returned to its tomb.
                                                                                                                             (from Latour and Hermant)

And from Wikipedia:

Official copies of the prototype kilogram are made available as national prototypes, which are compared to the Paris prototype ("Le Grand Kilo") roughly every 40 years. The international prototype kilogram was made in the 1880s.

By definition, the error in the repeatability of the current definition is exactly zero; however, any changes in the standard over time can be found by comparing the official standard to its official copies. Because the official copies and the official standard are made of roughly the same materials and kept under the same conditions, comparing the relative masses between standards over time estimates the stability of the standard. The international prototype of the kilogram seems to have lost about 50 micrograms in the last 100 years and the reason for the loss is still unknown.^[3] The observed variation in the prototype has intensified the search for a new definition of the kilogram.

                

    The French 'historical' look!                                  The US 'modern' look!

st sebastian in the city

Here is a delightful quote from sociologists Bruno Latour and Emilie Hermant, part of a description of an 'interaction' between a couple at the Cafe de Flore in Paris:Invisible City:

At low temperature, yes, of course, there are individuals. At higher temperature, it's difficult to be sure. We'd rather say that there are targets towards which an ever-increasing series of missiles is heading. We're all Saint Sebastians: a sharp prick of love - wasp, horsefly, cherub - the disrupting arrow of grace, the bite of jealousy, the devouring fire of ambition, the onslaught of viruses and bacteria, the itch to travel, or to consume, the narcissistic wound, fire that flushes the face. Yes, Alice - that's the name she was given: another arrow shot by her parents - is camping at the intersection of these vectors, these vehicles, these angles of attack, these protests, all converging on her, offering their services, like so many make-live, make-die, make-do, make-have and which with their Lilliputian vibrations, end up putting into motion this interaction, wrongly described as intersubjective. All that converges on her, like the flight of pigeons in the Luxembourg garden onto the bag of seeds that an old woman regularly holds out to them; like a cloud of yellow flowers on the bark of a forcicia that yesterday was still dry and today is revived by the spring.

It comes from '2.Proportioning', then 'Plan 25'.

 

*   *   *   *

Reminds me a bit of the wonderful passage in the anthropologist Eric Michaels' Unbecoming: An Aids Diary (1997), reflecting on a moment in a (Brisbane?) hospital bed.

The marvellous thing about all this, I realise as I wake from my dream, is how this place really is one of those superbly rich sites of contradiction, sort of a Foucauldian holyground on which multiple lines of discourse converge, like ley lines converge at Stonehenge.  A person lying in my bed merely looking around the room and out the window can see great distances, to parlimentary debates on condoms and morals, to histories of Australian asylums, etiquettes, heirarchies and colonialisms.  But what most has me flat on my back here is a discourse of "Tidiness"(39)

want tortoise time

In 1839, a rage for tortoises overcame Paris. One can well imagine the elegant set mimicking the pace of this creature more easily in the arcades than on the boulevards.

-The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin

The less time he has for it, the more Whitebait feels the imperative to keep blogging. Doomed like the flaneur whose way of being in the world--initially, at least--was about not surrendering to the insistent demands of work and capitalism, of always having to be doing something valued as productive. Be more efficient, work faster ... to go slower, someday. Sheesh. Whitebait needs to work on building a different kind of space for living, maybe more 19th century arcade than hectic boulevard.

This doesn't completely make sense but Friday philosophy is often like that.

P.S Not sure if this has been mentioned before but one of Whitebait's most memorable school reports directly likened him to a tortise. Slow but usually very methodical.

what's in a name?

Today Whitebait is chained to his Tokyo desk, taking his turn working on a draft of a major university grant application that he is putting in for with his colleague, the Sheepwoman. These applications require an horrendous amount of work (and only have a 27% success rate which is further mitigated by a number of formal and informal factors including your relative seniority and track record, the 'class' of institution you belong to, the quality of your project, and the random luck of draw of who ends up assessing it on the day and whether they got out of the right or wrong side of bed). Overall, pointy-heads in Australia like to grumble about many aspects of them (e.g, they suck up time otherwise reserved for doing actual research), but the applications do at least have a clearly useful function in making the applicants think long and hard about their bigger project, its relevant literature, research questions and methodologies etc.

Whitebait and Sheepwoman's project is on the notion of urban rivalry and comparison.  Something W. was very interested in as part of his recent (see below) trip to Osaka. Amongst the comparisons spotted in some of the literature include historical references to Osaka as the 'Manchester of the East'. This led him today to google 'Paris of the Orient' while wondering how many of these imperial/colonial forms of comparison existed. Answer: a number. And he then found this fascinating wikipedia page which list city nicknames. It is a wonderfully eccentric list. Some surprises, old favourites and bizarre ones :

Melbourne: 'Bleak capital of the world' [does anyone know the origin of this? - W]

Auckland: 'Sydney for Beginners'

Chicago: 'Paris of the Midwest', 'Second City', 'City of Big Shoulders'

Dipolog City, Zamboanga del Norte, Philippines: 'Locust City'

Messina: 'Rebirthing City'

Warsaw: 'Default City' (popular in Polish usenet community)

Farjado, Puerto Rico: 'Hardface city'

 

holiday screenings

So it’s that time of year when some serious listing begins (for a really mental take on this--in the best sense--check Woebot’s beautiful scans of his top 100 records when they are successfully loaded).

So, Whitebait would like to offer his guide to twenty classic ‘city’ films worth watching for the first time or once again. This list is for when you might be lurking at the video shop over the next week or so looking for something interesting to watch. Get more details on each release at imd. Nothing surprising nor obscurantist here – just a mix of generally well know popular/fun/arty stuff. He isn’t arguing that these are ‘the’ best city films (and do pitch in with your own recommendations in the comments please), just the ones that have tended to lodge in his mind for whatever reason. His definition of a ‘city film’ is one where the urban setting or environment takes on the status of an actor, or becomes a key point of meditation.

So, it isn’t enough that the film is just has the city as a backdrop - that would be too easy wouldn’t it.

In alphabetical order (doh!):

1. All About My Mother - this may seem tenuous given the criteria but it gets on the list for that one perfect Freudian scene when Manuela is shuttling from Madrid to Barcelona. A train tunnel, an exquisite musical buildup and then a taxi past Sagrada Familiar.  One of the most exhilarating moments of recent cinema.

2. Bladerunner – is it Los Angeles or really Tokyo? Doesn’t matter as it is still stands brilliantly today as we keep on marching into the cyborg future that arrived 100 years ago.

3. Chinatown – yes, Los Angeles figures strongly. Crooked water politics and noir in the land of sunshine.

4. Chungking Express – crowded and deserted Hong Kong exteriors and the gorgeous Faye Wong sneaking into a policeman’s house to provide a free makeover (life before Queer Eye!).

5. Collateral – brilliant in every way. And a great tongue-in-cheek thriller ending in the sense that like all good recent LA films it slams the idea that there is life in the city beyond car travel - by equating the metro rail system with death.

6. Dark City – familiar sci-fi noir themes but very handsomely and adeptly executed.

7. Falling Down – yes, this film has a crappy racist politics at the heart of it but it is one hundred times more complex and intelligent in the way it goes about these complex politics than detractors will acknowledge. And in doing so it offers some handy insights into the politics of city space and mobility.

8. Fellini’s Roma/La Dolce Vita – Whitebait learnt some Italian for a while and this was a great way to practice. He likes the essay-like Roma just because it seemed a damn weird movie the first time around. And the second time.

9. La Haine – was a film of note before the recent Parisian uprisings but W. suspects it might be even more gripping and pertinent now.

10. L.A. Story – still some great and eminently repeatable one-liners despite the unsatisfying romance narrative at the centre. And a reference to that great Martin poem, ‘Oh pointy birds, oh pointy pointy …’

11. Manhattan – Whitebait remembers a time when he did trust film critics who would write that the latest Woody Allen film was worth shelling out for at the cinema.

12. Naked – a brutal and funny film in equal doses. Life on some very dark English streets

13. Short Cuts – this is tied up in some bad memories for Whitebait (and he still hasn’t plucked up the courage to see it again) but because Raymond Carver’s stories were the inspiration it still goes on the list.

14. Summer of Sam / Do the Right Thing – while DtRT is the acknowledged classic (so damn hot and tense on those New York streets) … SoS goes back to the late seventies and reworks similar themes with another great soundtrack.

15. The Big Sleep – who knew it rained in Los Angeles so much?

16. The End of Violence / Wings of Desire – EoV isn’t a successful film but it has a great eerie take on L.A. and Bill Pulman is in great form. More interesting than satisfying. If you aren’t in the mood for that then go straight to WoD.

17. The Last Wave – a completely different representation of Sydney in its articulation of the unease that remains in a place forcibly acquired from its indigenous inhabitants.

18. Tokyo Story - it is nearly all studio sets and yet it paints a damning picture of the role of the urban in the disintegration of familial bonds and individual selfishness (Beware – the pace is slow in a good way).

19. Sans Soleil – more an essay on memory and therefore quite a different viewing experience. But many of the scenes from Tokyo remain etched in my mind.

20. Wonderland – would contend for number one if that was the objective of this exercise. A moped riding through the streets, trains in the night, a Michael Nyman score, blind dating, London streets, a barking neighbour’s dog who drives a woman to the brink … this is The Poetry of City Life 101. Exceptional.

a sociological web opera

Whitebait is currently struggling with some big questions about how to 'write'  (is that sufficient?) about particular places. He finds much conceptual inspiration in the self-described sociological web opera online at Paris: Invisible City, produced by Emilie Hermant, Liz Libbrecht, Patricia Reid and influential academic Bruno Latour. Check it out (those on a slow dial-up connection should probably leave it for another time).

hamburgers identified as culprits in case of missing parisian prostitutes

Ipso facto QED. Whitebait examined a thesis today which brought to the fore of him mind the question of logic and arguments. Fraulein Dr Dr then made a nice connection for him with a comment about George Ritzer's conclusion to The McDonaldization of Society (1993) which she has recently been reading. While Ritzer is a bit fuddy-duddy Frankfurt school in his take on popular culture (to this bloggeur's mind) he does have a sense of humour as put forward in this argument about whether it is possible to resist the kind of capitalism exemplified by the golden arches:

McDonalds was recently sued by the famous chef, Paul Bocuse, for using his picture on a poster without his permission. Enraged, Bocuse said: 'How can I be seen promoting this tasteless, boneless food in which everything is soft' [oui oui, so masculine - W]. Nevertheless, Bocuse seemed to acknowledge the inevitability of McDonaldization:'There's a need for this kind of thing ... and trying to get rid of it seems to me to be as futile as trying to get rid of the prostitutes in the Bois de Bologne.' Lo and behold, two weeks later, it was announced that the Paris police had cracked down on prostitution in the Bois de Bologne. Said a policeman, 'There are none left'. Thus, just as Bocuse was wrong about the prostitutes, perhaps I am wrong about the irresistability of McDonaldization.