learning to love you more

I didn't expect to like Miranda July's 8:30pm reading of her new Learning to Love You More book at Bumbershoot this year very much. So much success in so many media with such meager resources in so little time breeds envy, and envy contempt. But I was wrong, and came away loving her work just a little bit more, despite myself.

Our 11:30am visit to the accompanying Learning to Love You More exhibit before the crowds arrived did not bode well. Apparently the arts programmer at this year's Bumbershoot had arranged with the family that lives next door to him to be the star of the show: they were commissioned to complete all 63 assignments on the LTLYM website so they could display the results for all to see. Why they should be given such a naming opportunity and preference to put their mark on the exhibit above all the regular contributors was beyond me, and I began to criticize both the idea and the entire LTLYM project to my wife, until she mentioned the older son was over there, perhaps within earshot. When I looked to see, who should I spot but Miranda July herself talking to him, with her penetrating blue eyes (does she wear blue contact lenses over blue eyes?) looking back at me as I tried to verify that it was really her, and not just someone who looked like her. One can never beware doppelgangers too much.

From that point on the entire visit became awkward, as in hurrying through an exhibit I'd now decided to despise I found myself catching up with July toward the middle of it, in a corner, and had to detour past her lest she suspect me a stalker. My wife was in no hurry to finish looking at the assignments herself, so I dropped off the explanatory page at the exit and entered again to catch up with her. I finally decided to leave and visit the bathroom while she finished - only to find July blocking the exit this time, locked in a confab with the mother of the assignment family. Throwing caution to the wind, I rushed behind her, hoping she wouldn't notice me again - but probably just attracted her attention more.

When my wife finally emerged, we discussed the show. I mentioned hadn't really liked LTLYM when I'd seen it exhibited at the Seattle Art Museum a few years ago, before July's film came out; she didn't recall it. What bothered me was the difficulty of reading July's apparent sincerity in mounting the project, and my inability to get over a suspicion that, somewhere behind her equally apparent irony, she might be having a bit of a laugh at the participants, and the way she'd hoodwinked them into helping make her first big success. On the other hand, it seemed more wholesome than YouTube, Yahoo Questions, and similar phenomena (including my own minor efforts in this genre, the Shakespeare Questionnaire and Shakespeare Queries and Replies, both long since abandoned), in that it did not seem aimed at volume merely, did not run advertisements, and provided no opportunity for the usual flame wars and snarky comments that litter the Web landscape generally.

And we had liked her movie Me and You and Everyone We Know a lot when we saw it a SIFF or two ago, and had been disappointed when she'd had to cancel her talk on it, for which we had tickets, so she could leave for Cannes to accept her award. Indeed, I thought the movie quite smart and brave in the way it sedulously subverts the stereotypes basic to the witch hunts that break out with alarming regularity against suspected pedophiles, sometimes merely on the basis of children's memories recovered, or implanted, by the psychologists assigned to investigate - and their baiting by FBI and news crew agents impersonating children online to ferret actual or potential ones out. It reminds us, as Freud himself did long ago, just how polymorphously perverse and prone to increasingly sexual exploration kids themselves are, amongst themselves - and how loath even the most borderline adults typically are to intrude upon those explorations, however tempted.

July's evening reading dispelled my doubts, and increased my admiration. The studied spontaneity with which she presented what was obviously a well rehearsed show might, again, have annoyed me, except that if there were calculation on her part, it only seemed intended to encourage those of us in the audience to let our guards down, and open ourselves to the possibility of appreciation, and perhaps of wonder.

The sample assignments she showed us from the website were similarly nuanced, not so much naive art as an art sophisticated enough to make apparent naivete its actual medium of expression - as for example in Tim's "Lipsync to shy neighbor's Garth Brooks cover" report - to unexpectedly impressive effect. As July herself admitted, sometimes it seems like nearly everyone sending in assignments are white middle class art students themselves - so it's hardly surprising they inhale her vibe and produce a kind of post-ironic art in response. Retrospectively, it even seems like the best of these reports contributed to July's own aesthetic in Me and You, and I could have sworn that one or two bits actually made it into the script for the film - a fine case of artist and artistic audience feeding and extending each other's creativity, in a kind of virtuous circle so unlike the vicious circles of internet flame wars, viral youtube trashiness, facebook friends list competitions, media witchhunts, and the American political scene in general.

July's new project that closed her presentation was even more impressive: an entirely self-contained (within this particular audience) charity auction and actual act of charity that seemed as inherently eye-opening and critical of established charitable and non-profit institutions as I myself have been attempting to be on this blog lately, though with much less success. Keep it simple - so simple it seems quite artless and naive, without actually being so - and make it direct: that's the secret of Miranda July's most potent art, and the art her example inspires. Maybe she is pulling our strings - but there's nothing to fear here. All is intended to promote our greater good - and she's only too willing to let us turn the tables on her through the art we ourselves create in reply.

Al Gore and the assault on reason

We saw Al Gore Monday at Town Hall, promoting his book The Assault on Reason. My wife managed to snag a couple of the $5 tickets before they disappeared online in under 3 minutes - some kind of record. She's getting really good at this.

I managed to spot a couple of empty seats right up front, in the 3rd row or so, just before the ushers decided the unreserved seats were all taken, and stopped letting people in lest they snag one of the many seats reserved for Town Hall members, with some extras added right in front of the stage for local political luminaries - my wife recognized City Councilwoman Jean Godden, the former Seattle Times gossip columnist.

Gore came off like a cross between a professor and a preacher, pacing up and down the stage while delivering a rapid-fire account of the entire history of human civilization and its "information ecology" from the emergence of language 50,000 years ago to the emergence of radio and TV. His main point seemed to be that up until recently, we were able to compare notes and talk about what's real and what's important in a rational fashion, so as to decide together what to do about it.

But now obviously we can't, since you can't use reason to explain why we invaded Iraq - not when 75% of Americans thought at the time it was because Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attack - or why we've been ignoring the threat of global warming, when the evidence is substantial and the consequences dire if we can't reverse it - nothing less than the collapse of human civilization as we know it.

Unfortunately, however, Gore didn't seem to have any really good answer for why reason has failed us. He seemed to suggest that radio and TV are to blame, especially now that they are controlled by a few large media conglomerates and beholden to the other large corporations that advertise on them, and that the Internet (which, as we all know, Gore invented...) might be the answer, if we can prevent these conglomerates from seizing control of it and continue to guarantee net neutrality - he never actually came around to clinching those points.

Gore also seems misguided about how much reason and reality guided humans in the past in making social decisions. He cited Socrates as an example of reason in the past - but didn't mention, as I recall, that all the work he did in the Agora engaging other Athenians in conversation in pursuit of the truth only succeeded in getting him tried and executed by them.

At one point Gore made a passing comment that he wasn't one of those new fangled philosophy types who thinks we create our own reality socially - he quipped he wasn't enough of a philospher himself to understand them. And he mentioned that schizophrenics make up about 1% of the population throughout history, and that the language that allowed humans to socialize and create a reality-based civilization leads them astray, when they hear voices that tell them things that aren't real - but never followed up on this insight.

What seemed missing from Gore's talk was an alternative explanation for why we've lost touch with reality in the US recently - and why humans have historically done so throughout history, until reality hits them on the head with the truth, or rears up its ugly in a revolution that sweeps all the illusions that have kept certain groups in power away before it.

After all, wasn't it Karl Marx who long ago, back in the 19th century critiqued all this under the name of ideology, and demonstrated how throughout history ideological constructs have been deployed by those in power to keep those they dominate and exploit in the dark as to just how unjustified they are in doing so?

And that being the case - how come Gore never once mentioned Marx?

I suppose because Marx currently is, like Hegel before him, a dead dog that no one wants to think about anymore - not matter how accurate his critique might be of what's lead up to our current impasse, and where we might need to go now. Just as the Athenians executed Socrates because his quest for the truth and his habit of using conversation to trap them in contradictions that revealed they really didn't know what they claimed to know - that they really didn't know what was real or true, so we no longer study the contradictions of capitalism that reveal why it's a shoddy was of organizing the social economy.

After all, why should we need to, since socialism has fallen in Eastern Europe, and is hardly even practiced anymore in Russia and China.

We won, the great threat of the liberated masses is no more - and yet we wonder why a world run by corporate masters and their political allies seems so unreal.

Gore fielded one interesting question at the end of his talk - how do you go about convincing people who believe unreasonable things that they're wrong? By engaging them calmly in conversation, and using reason to show them their errors and convince them what is really true, answered Gore.

But after this final question, the Town Hall meeting broke up so people could line up in a very long line to get their books signed, with Gore pledging to sign every last one.

I'd have felt more confidence in his theories if Gore had urged us all to stick around, break up into small groups, and discuss our differences of opinion about the major issues of the day - with him dropping in on the groups to hear what was being said and sign any books people had.

That at least would have been a start. But like Obama, I guess Gore really hasn't thought that much about how his own adoption of a rock star persona is interfering with what he actually wants to see happen in the world.

This post needs editing. Come back for a tighter version later.

Barack Obama, Edith Piaf, Joe Strummer

We went to a Barack Obama rally Friday, the Edith Piaf biopic La vie en rose Saturday, and the Joe Strummer biodocumentary The Future is Unwritten Sunday - and Al Gore Monday, though he's going to get an entry of his own.

We were a little disappointed with Barack. The event wasn't a rally exactly, but a fundraiser for a more plebian group than usually gets to attend them - those willing to contribute $25 (bronze), $50 (silver), or $100 (gold) apiece to see him at the relatively small (maybe 4,000 maximum) indoor Qwest Event Center that recently opened in the former exhibition space built into the ground level of Paul Allen's football stadium.

It turned out to be little different from a free rally, however, and could easily have been held in the stadium itself, given the impersonal nature of the way Barack addressed the crowd. He was okay, but really just shouted his typical rally stump speech at us, with no acknowledgement that we weren't just a crowd of the curious, but actually cash-donating supporters.

We sprang for the $100 level, figuring it would guarantee us seats near the front. How wrong we were. In an odd attempt at egalitarianism - considering Barack's next stop was a more intimate fundraiser at the Westin hotel with tables for those donating $500 apiece, and a photo op for those donating $2,300 - each donation level got an equal shot at being close to the candidate, with an equal pie-wedge-shaped slice dedicated to each: gold on the right, silver in the middle, bronze on the left - and Obama on a catwalk between gold and bronze.

True, we did have a smaller line to contend with when we arrived (though silver and gold shared the same one) - but as for seats, there were none to be had in the floor area we were directed to in front of the press cameras. My wife, who has physical issues with standing for a long time, was actually turned away when she tried to leave the floor area to snag a seat in the back half of the hall - I guess maybe they were afraid there wouldn't be enough of us gold types to make a sufficient crowd for the press pictures. Later on, I think they allowed the bronzes to fill in behind us - and in the seats in our slice of the hall my wife had tried to use.

Even odder was the pre-show, arranged apparently by the local groups organizing the event, with no input from the Obama campaign. It was like a kind of allegorical homage to Obama's heritage and early life, beginning with two traditional African dance groups alluding to his paternal heritage, followed by a disaffected high school guy strumming his guitar and singing laughably innocent songs of teenage angst - I think the main lyric was, "read my lips - we're all gonna die someday" - as if here were the contemporary incarnation of Barack back when he inhaled.

Then a chorus of people gathered onstage - I think they were the volunteers who organized the event, though they could have been a cross section pulled from the crowd - and led us in a chant and clapping for Obama to appear before us - which took longer than anyone thought it would.

And as I said before, when he finally arrived and spoke to us, it was a bit of an anticlimax. There was no real effort to reach out to us, to address us as real people who'd thought enough of his candidacy to contribute to his campaign. Instead, he was just like a rock star, doing his show, and we clapped and woo-hooed our approval, and tried to get close enough to shake his hand when he descended the runway at the end - a woman a couple of people in front of my actually succeeded. I felt closer to Bono the last time I U2, I think - and certainly felt more of a connection to him that time we saw Bono taking a carriage ride with his kiddies down near Pioneer Square, when he tipped his hat to me for having noticed him from afar.

I guess we should have spent $1,000 on the Westin - maybe it would have felt less like a rock concert, and more like real politics.

Today Obama hit me up for another contribution by email - he does it so regularly it seems almost like spam - but this time he said it would be a lottery, and 5 people would be selected to have dinner with him and a real chat - so I sent another $10 to enter. I never spend that much on the lottery.

The movies we saw the next two days at SIFF seemed to provide commentary on the pitfalls Obama faces being a lumpen-friendly rockstar to the masses.

Edith Piaf was definitely lower class - abandoned by her street singer mother, neglected by her alcoholic grandmother, saved by her WW1 veteran father and spirited away by him to live among the maternal whores in his own mother's brothel, runaway boozer discovered on the streets of Paris, exploited by gangsters who killed the nightclub owner who discovered her - until she finally made a success of it and became France's best-loved music hall maven.

Unfortunately, La vie en rose doesn't even let her enjoy her success. The director, who talked after, had a horror of making just another biopic - so we've already see Piaf in decline, collapsing on the stage from injuries sustained in a car accident and the incipient terminal illness that killed her before she reached 50, starting at the very beginning of the movie, an arty non-linear dual (later triple) timeline that merely reveals her doom before we have a chance to enjoy her unlikely triumph.

In this the film merely succeeds in resembling the most depressing muscian's biopic I've ever had the misfortune to see - De-Lovely the Cole Porter story starring Kevin Kline, which shows him dying at the very beginning and has his dead spirit preside over the entire sorry story of his life.

Anyway, at least the filmaker allows Piaf, among the less likable aspects of her psychology he dwells on in an attempt to justify the bad bahavior of true artists like himself (as he fancies himself in her image), one truly redemptive quality - whenever some nobody comes along to play her their song so she might consider singing it, and her underlings try to get them to go away, Piaf says - screw my schedule and all the other things I have to do, let them in, let me hear them - and then loves their song, does it and makes it famous (so it is with Je ne regrette rien here, and with La vie en rose too I think ) - saying, "hey, what's the use of being Edith Piaf if I can't make important people wait and listen to this schmo and see whether he's any good?"

And that's what I miss in Obama. Who is he listening too these days, but his handlers? Back in the day, when he ran for the Illinois Senate, and the US Senate, according to his book he was actually a lot like Piaf, and listened to real nobodies sometimes, who said things worthy of his attention, and that made it into his book. But now? He's a rock star. Who can get through the crowd and the handlers?

Actually, Joe Strummer is a closer analogue to Obama - or what Obama will likely become. We finally saw Strummer alive, in the flesh, playing with the Mescaleros at the EMP's Sky Church a few years back, just before he died - we'd missed him at a club in New Haven back int he early 80s when the Clash were still a going concern, because after I called to see if tickets were still available before going to the club to buy them, some chick from Wallingford not only asked, but asked them to hold the tickets for her until she got there - and although I got there first, they held them for her. Jerks. The club folded soon after, thank God.

Anyway, the movie - Julian Temple's homage to the friend he discovered later in life, since Strummer rejected him for being too close to the Sex Pistols when punk was happening, as we found out a couple of nights ago in his drunken interview with a jerky Sean Nelson, Stranger emeritus - disclosed Strummer's roots in the squatters movement in mid 70s England, and traced the collapse of the Clash soon after they hit it big to how conflicted Strummer felt about being a radical rock star, calling for an egalitarian social revolution so successfully that he soon found himself rich and playing to football stadiums full of fans - instead of the few real fans he used to let in the window of his dressing room so they could sneak into the small clubs the Clash was playing in the early days for free.

This killed his career - he just didn't really want to do that kind of scene. While the early part of the movie is filled with unnamed talking heads no one recognizes who knew, lived and played with Strummer when he was a nobody like them - and who he screwed over to join the Clash - the later part of the movie is filled with unnamed talking heads so famous we already know their name on sight - Bono, Johnny Depp, John Cusack - who knew Strummer in later life, and just couldn't understand why he had such a problem being rich and famous like them - hell, they do very well at it, thank you very much.

And I think that might be where Obama is headed: the more successful he gets in traditional rock star/Presidential fashion, the more contact he's going to lose with the egalitarian, community organizing, everybody's point of view is significant roots that have compelled interest in his candidacy - and the more he himself may start to wonder, "Where the hell am I now? What have I done? Why do so many people adore me? Do they really listen to me - or I to them anymore?"

But for that story, we'll have to wait for David Plouffe or some other now close advisor to tell, 10 or 20 years on, of the fall of Ziggy Stardust, at the hands of the Spiders from Mars - his own, along with a very few others.

We can only hope it doesn't actually turn out that way, and that Obama actually does find a way to start a movement, and not just be a candidate, however adored by the crowd.

That's what he claims he wants to do - but so far it isn't really looking that way.