VOLURE'S LAMENT

"I miscounted the men, Liz! I miscounted the men!"

Gavin Volure (Steve Martin) thinks he will get away with a daring and cunning escape from his white collar house-arrest. Instead he gets crash-tackled by a federal marshall. Poor Gavin Volure! Having bid goodbye to the woman he loves (Tina Fey), Gavin locks one federal agent in a bathroom and flees across the law, anticipating -- wrongly -- that all his guards were occupied as this critical moment.

He miscounted the men.

This bizarre and hilarious episode (s03e04) of Tina Fey's sit-com "30 Rock" on NBC, penned by John Riggi, provides a compelling glimpse into the unfolding edge of language itself. The phrase "I miscounted the men!" is uttered masterfully by Steven Martin with the force of a catch-phrase, punchline or slogan although it is none of these. Nor is it really even a joke.

At base it is simply a partially applicable linguistic oddity with an ambiguous potency. The Liz Lemon character, after Gavin Volure's failed suicide attempt ends in a tackle from pop-star Tracy Jordan, mutters to herself, "Hmm... he miscounted the men."

Part-joke, part slogan, a dash of sense and a spoonful of nonsense -- all these factors are arranged in this remark in a particular proportion to each other. They are held in a curious and delicate balance which recurs through out this episode, demonstrating very bluntly the point at which new meaning arises into human languages.

Linguistic coherence and incoherence always meet in verbal comedy but no two meeting are exactly the same and the use of these meetings by comedians does not exhaust the significance of this conjunction. It is like a zen-movement in which sense and non-sense are balanced upon the tip of a sword's blade.

Here it is again: Liz Lemon mistakes a Japanese "sex doll" replica of Tracy Jordan slumped stiffly in a chair in the corridor for the real person pop star. She exclaims, with great agitation, "Tracy, get out of the hallway!" Immediately the living man steps from an adjacent doorway with a sly grin of paranoid triumph, declaring, "Or am I???"

Sure, this gets the message across -- Ha! You did not realize that this "me" was only a decoy. I fooled you just as I will fool others! However it also fails to get its message across. The grammar is mis-wired and blows a fuse. There is a special balance of coherent and incoherent communication presented in these exchanges.

And a third time: When pop-star Tracy Jordon, newly wealthy from his porn video game profits, hears the tale of the horrible killing of Jose and Kitty Menendez by their own children. Fearing the worst, Tracy takes steps to prevent his own patricide while employing the false plural term "Menendi" and explaining how he intends to "ex-cape Unmenendez." He plans to escape from the situation with a Menendez-style result, obviously, but the grammatical constraints of the expression are reduced in a specific degree which produces this new reaction -- humorous and puzzled appreciation. (or dismisall in the case of those who are not sensitive of swift enough).

This is not a challenge to the definitions of appropriate and inappropriate semantics, it is an applicate of appropriate semantics in the production of new linguistic order. The Frenchman Gilles Deluze once went on television to define style as "creating a language within your language." The work of the artist is to access a style which is functional but appears invalid or inert when compared to old existing works. It compares unfavourably to past fashions and therefore has the potential to present new style. This is a balancing act by which the articulator, if he or she succeeds, carries the project of language forward.

When Gavin Volure attempts to give Alec Baldwin the slip by escaping out the bathroom window of his mansion-jail he buys himself some time by leaving a running tape-deck behind to simulate conversations with Mr. Baldwin who is standing outside the bathroom door. A few comments work in this fashion but rapidly it becomes clear that no one can very well predict a random future conversation enough to plan all his responses in advance. The comments from within the bathroom lose the expected timing and start to slip away from the coherence of the conversation. At a certain point in this slippage the audience laughs as we pass through the invisible veil into nonsense.

"Innovation... Tomorrow... America... Sunstream."

That's the narration from a coporate television advertisement for Volure's bogus company "Sunstream." We are invited to laugh as the use of mere mood and associative terminology by corporations to move people without actually communicating the facts. Yet the membrane of meaning that should go between these evocative terms is not really absent. Instead it is present in the form of the humorous revelation of a new stylistic sense -- a very subtle feeling which is shared between these words and their context and the contemporary mind.

The feeling comes across and words are employed but we are directly confronted with the absence of the connective tissue. Or rather we are exposed to the actual connective tissue of the comedy -- since it is humourous delight and social critique rather than persuasive business rationality which is presented. The writers take us to the border where conventional linguistic sensibility would rupture but they do not present it as ruptured quite simply because it is not ruptured -- a new bit of membrane provides teh substructure but, of course, because the new is not recognized in comparison with the old expect in contrast, the mystery is the "absence" of sense coupled with the form of sense.

The edge of the blade is articulated as we pass from the sensible to the insensible, a move that is reiterated in the final descent into madness as Volure begins to sing "Tomorrow"

Tomorrow, tomorrow

I love you: "Tomorrow,"

You're only a day... doh dohday...

THE FUTURE OF ART IN DARK TOWERS

"The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed."

An evocative opening sentence?

Stephen King thinks it is. He claims these are the finest words he has ever written and perhaps we should consider him seriously -- since he is supposedly the most widely-read English-speaking author since Charles Dickens.

"Horror writer" is definitely poor and inadequate category for Steven King. He is remembered by the uninformed for a set of classic supermarket bestsellers featuring demonic house pets, haunted automobiles & sexually disturbed adolescents who can start fires with mind-power. It hardly need be pointed out that these are already a large-scale attempt to re-mythologize the contemporary American landscape. And in the decades since his fame, Steven King has continued his mutation into the most popular, most prolific and, quite possibly, the most important mythic artist of the late 20th century.

So let us put aside our like, dislike, or indifference to the story-telling skill of Steven King. Instead, we should diagnose the primary features associated with the cultural production of King's self-proclaimed magnum opus -- a massive 7-book meta-narrative, entitled: The Dark Tower.

1) The seed of this work lies in a line of dialog from Shakespeare's King Lear which formed the title of Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" and blossomed in Stephen King as the odyssey of Roland the Gunslinger in his Ahab-esque pursuit of the legendary fortress which stands at the Heart of All Possible Worlds. Thus the concerns of classical literature are continued into the modern world as an extension of their acoustic resonances and cinematic evocations. McLuhan never grew tired of quoting T.S. Eliot's assertions on this very point.

2) It is rooted in unconscious inspiration. The invocational open sentence "arose" into King's awareness, and vexed him with his sense of its unique perfection. One is reminded both of Coleridge's revelatory discovery of the opening lines of Kublai Khan and also the phrase "There is a man cut in two by the window," which set the young poet Andre Breton on the arch-contemporary path which would become called: surrealism.

3) A ghost in the machinery of the mind. The idea of the work suggested to King by Browning's poem neither dissipated nor dominated his psyche. It merely lurked. It persisted. There is a ludicrous aspect to hearing Steven King describe his fear that audiences would reject the story which was so dear to his innermost heart. Unlike his more popular books, he found THE DARK TOWER to be significant, peculiar and oddly unjustified. Our higher cultural inspiration, in order to be vital, must be a bit slippery, a bit vexing. If we can count on its style, depend upon its worth... then it surely it cannot be very fresh?

4) Poetry is the method. Everyone knows that Heidegger felt this way -- and he joins King in a concern to produce a world-mood. It is the implicit quality of the opening sentence against which all the rest of THE DARK TOWER is referenced, and not against any crude external factors that might be hiding the "meaning" of the work. King's dedication to unfolding the hidden implications and subtle personal reactions of the artist in each 'next step' of the work is obvious and admirable. It goes hand in hand with his devotion to the rambling aural poetry found in rural speech patterns -- which King works hard to sublimate into his own stream-of-consciousness responses to what he has already written -- decode a half-glimpsed but potently felt subtle world which the artist can expereince as mysteirously 'already existing.'

5) It is blatantly post-genre. This is not some little experimental hybrid like "vampire comedy" or "adventure-romance." It could truthfully be called a coming-of-age sci-fi fantasy Western-style adventure soap opera which mingles humor, myth, travel writing, social commentary, stream-of-consciousness under a simultaneously post-modern and classical-archetypal manner with a flavor of deep surrealism and an homage to small-town living. Part book, part film, part comic, part painting. THE DARK TOWER does not cross genres but confidently takes its stand in that global complexity which is establishing itself as the "new normal category" of the 21 century.

6) It is hyper-referential. Now only does the narrative enfold all other Steven King books and characters, even those not yet written, AND not only does it include King himself and the decades-long writing of THE DARK TOWER, but it also compresses different ages of popular culture and high literature into a single vast world and moment.

ULTIMATE DOCTOR WHO MIX

The Streaming Anthem of Cosmic Imagination

boyoehackenslash had this to say:

"This is brilliantly mixed, I've always liked the doctor's theme tune, though surprisingly, I've never been a big fan of the program itself. Go figure."

Boyoehackenslash is not special. A great many more people take pleasure in the opening title music of BBC's Doctor Who than actually enjoy watching the television program. It is popular with weird kids, technophiles, mythology enthusiasts & educated hippie children -- all of whom have a mysterious ability to tolerate the woeful British special effects. We are simply asked to behave as if in the Theatre and pretend that the unrealistic tin-can with the black golf-balls glued onto it is actually a race of malevolent cyborgs that symbolize the terrifying specture of the dehumanized future.

( Side note: The Dehumanization of Humanity into a mass-mind hive of man-machines, or h. cybermechanicus, was the sole theme dealt with by British cultural arts during the early-middle twentieth century. From T.S. Eliot's "Hollow Men" to J.R.R. Tolkein's armored hordes of industrial-power Orcs to the insidious world of Orwell's "1984," we find the same menacing species of Evil that Colin Wilson and the Beatles struggled to escape from. Gone were the days of simple flight into Neverland. Now, after the onslaught of Nazi bombing and the emergence of the Computer Age, the ethereal character of the British imagination needed to stand and denounce the regimes of inhumanity. And this is basically the plot for every episode of Doctor Who. )

This outlandish sci-fi TV program is an extended Aesop's Fable exhorting humanity to wrest control of the technological future from its nihilistic enemies and submit the "system" to intelligent control at the hands of the naturalized human qualities of humour, love, compassionate survival, and delight in the mysteries and coincidences of the vast cosmic realm outlined in modern physics.

Hence the anthem-like quality of the song composed by Ron Grainer and first mixed by Delia Derbyshire in 1963. Classic primitive techno music.

It was re-mixed several times over the decades, allowing new generations of Sound Editors sense and articulate the spirit of the composition. The job of splicing all these variations together into a seamless whole which reveals the shared intrinsic quality of all fell to ReverseThePolarity, who purports to be Craig from Chelmsford.

Well, "Craig from Chelmsford," your excellent work has been noticed! How better to discover the secret of this powerful musical composition than by streaming it seamlessly into itself? After all, to reveal the common stream between many examples is the very technique of discovery itself.

The philosopher Heidegger said, basically -- art is whatever Artists do, artists are whomever produce Art. A loop of meaning. Do we give up? No. Instead we journey around the self-proving loop and allow the common essence to emerge into presence.

Martin Heidegger is exactly like Craig from Chelmsford.

culture is religion:

Go to youtube.com and spend 8 minutes & 4 seconds attentively experiencing the multi-decade mix of the Doctor Who theme music called The Doctor Who Ultimate title Mix.

Thank You, THREE WOLF MOON T-SHIRT

In 2009, the online-sales giant Amazon.com observed a 2300% increase in the quantity of orders for a trite depiction of three wolves howling at the moon on front of a hand-dyed cotton t-shirt... as black as the eternal nightsky.

This haunting mystic image stirs the hearts of young children, trailer park Tolkien fans & faded hippies who idolize the late Paleolithic era. On the surface, this is the worst kind of Kitsch.

Why was it suddenly so popular?

A random (sic) swarm of online shoppers had spontaneously become a popular movement that consisted entirely of giving this one t-shirt supreme ratings and brilliantly retarded "surrealist" customer reviews. According to raves for the product, this remarkable t-shirt:

(1) "has wolves on it, attracts women"

(2) helps you fight crime (by transferring powers from role-playing games into real life)

(3) is totally sweet because it has wolves on it.

Dig?

Unfortunately this textile masterpiece suffers one grievous defect, "[You] cannot see wolves when sitting with arms crossed."

This is a recognizable strain of populist humour familiar to fans of Robert Hamburger, "Tom Goes to the Mayor," the Paul Bunyan-esque status of Chuck Norris, and the irresolvable cold war between Pirates and Ninjas. Despite this, we would be remiss to identity this as primarily a comedic affair.

We are dealing with spontaneous public art. Like soundwaves, this art escapes the museums and resonantes beyond the visual cage into which we put our most dangerous paintings and photographs. This is the art of McLuhan's cyber-acoustic era -- on display in the prestigious Gallery of Amazon.com Customer Reviews. The exhibit of this work is currently travelling the globe and may soon be available at your local branch of the National Museum of People You See Wearing T-Shirts.

Neither satire, sarcasm or homage can capture this strange extrapolation from the aesthetic experience of this clothing item. Ironists and naive idealistic dopes are blurred indistinctly together in the affirming and purchasing of Three Wolf Moon t-Shirt. The original artist belongs among those persons who find true aesthetic frequencies and simply stash them into generic commercial artworks. The comedy is produced by the incongruity between the t-shirt's apparent attempt to be natural, evocative and spiritually deep with its utter shallowness. It's depth IS shallow. Like the virtues of young Mormons, this potency is genuine but suffocated by its narrow and uncomplicated experience of culture. This comedy -- pathos revealed as bathos -- is collateral damage, a side-effect of the obstacle which the online post-dadaist shoppers have been trying to overcome.

In order to mine the original "gold" quality, isolating it aesthetically and extending this theme across media (a reasonable definition of all art). The affective intensities are transduced from one slice of a body to another.  What???

I said: art.

All the easier to accomplish, in this case, since the title "Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt" demonstrates the same aesthetic -- helping to isolate it as a common quality shared between words and images. To say the name of this product is like meeting a celebrity in person and using his full name. Yes, thank you Tom Hanks, I would like that back rub now....

It has that quasi-mythological and post-cultural "ring" to it -- like the bad English translations of Aboriginal titles (Chief Runs-With-Bears-and-Squirrels) and cute Japanise marketing slogans (Super-Karate Feel-Good Happy Time Shoes!).

Word and Image are co-revealing an authentic mood, an aesthetic blessing-force, which is recognized by the soul of the child and elevated into cultural complexity by the sharp ironic instincts of a generation raised in the ultra-mediated amphitheatre of the modern "world."

Next step?

Get a tattoo of "Coach" from CBS SURVIVOR: TOCANTINS.

Yeah, that's right
-- the Dragon-slayer!!! *

THESE F%#@KING WORDS

( b. from Norway writes: "If you are still working on your blog, may i suggest an entry concerning your views on the use and effects of swearing on language and awareness?")

"Billions of blue-blistering barnacles!"  This verbal outburst is typical for Captain Archibald Haddock from Herge's incomparable TINTIN adventure series.  Does it count as profanity?  What really IS an obscene term?

In English we use swear words interchangably with profanities.  We lump together the language of fierce oaths & lower bodily functions, curses, and Divine Names taken in vain.  These are the core obscenities -- shit, fuck, cocksucker, asshole, pussy, cunt, Jesus Christ, God Almighty, etc. To these we add also the wide field of partial profanities such as political incorrections (Nigger!), soft swearing (Jesus H. Christ!), absurdist substitions (Jumpin' Jehosophat!) and various inarticulate noises of rage, elation and disgust.  

Most important, immediately, is that these words are NOT descriptions.  Their content is largely immaterial and we no more expect that "Oh God! Oh God!" is a Biblical allusion than we anticipate that "You asshole!" depicts a verbal addressing of a literal talking anus.  In fact a word like "shit" loses much of their offensive charge as soon as it is employed to describe real feces.  

Over time, and between cultures, the specific obscenities variety while the general function of swearing persists.  Rage, sexual coitus & astonishment are the usual sites at which human beings reach out for a special range of charged expressions that are often, but not always, connected to higher religious entities and lower bodily functions.  

That "God" and "Fuck" can be used interchangably in some situations is very revealing.  The common principle shared by both higher and lower terms of this kind is their extra-verbal intensity.  "Godammit!" is seldom a petition to the Divine, just as "Fuck off!" does not actually describe the manner in which we expect our adversary to exit the scene.  Frustration is being voiced.  Intensity.  A willingness to commit to action and a threat to operate outside the socio-linguistic realm.  Conversely, in sexual passion the ability to overwhelm the socio-linguistic realm with bodily intensity is hoped for, reached toward.  

Swearing an oath of fealty, likewise, is a verbal pledge which asserts a committment beyond the power of words.  Since these are "just words" I could be lying to you -- thus I must convince you with the more-than-words words.  The surplus charge is inevitably an expression of the potential to become physically engaged.

Thus swear words have a double-function.  They are a way in which the boundary condition of language attempts to language itself & they are an invocation of physicality. If culture is very broadly defined it becomes the entire set of novel outcomes derived from the ongoing 'matching' of symbol to energy, word to life, form to substance, theory to fact, etc.  The merger of the semantic and energetic is the ongoing concern of poets, philosophers, psychoanalytic patients, scientists, politicians... everyone.  It is THE continuing event which characterizes human History.  My bestial nature may which to scream at you but I have the words with which to say, "I disagree."  Language is creatively mapped upon our channels of feeling and action.  

"Fuck it!" represents an incomplete mapping.  So does "Aaaaaaaaaaaaarrgh!"  So does "God only knows!"  We may, in good company, prefer one term to another but essentially they all indicate that the operation of langauging has gone off the rails -- as surely as do H.P.Lovecraft's classic use of "unspeakable, indescribable cosmic horrors."  

We are languaging the failure of languaging.  This has two sides, as mentioned earlier: a disconnect, or twist, relative to our symbol system & a breaking free of the partially-languaged bodily energies.

The symbolic disconnect -- words for non-speak -- is what I call "the blank tile."  This intensely ambiguous half-symbol is found on television as the BLEEP of censorship.  Interestingly, one does not even have to BLEEP a real obscenity to get the same effect.  The signal of "necessarily cancelled signal" on its own can provoke human excitement.  

A metaphor for understanding this process can found in the graph displays of digital music.  When the levels are functioning properly they do so within given limits.  A very loud noise or a disruptive feedback effect will cause the levels to "spike" off the chart.  There is still sound but the function has become impaired.  Listening to a uneducated street punk employ a phrase such as "That fuckin' Fuck was all up in my face 'n' shit!"  we readily observe that his linguistic register is failing.  Each attempt at description exceeds the useful limits of his terminology, creating a rupture which is patched over with cursing.  

Swearing is the application of ritualized units of contracted non-speak (the blank tiles) to indicate the limited adequacy of verbal expression. 

However, ignorance is not the only motive for such a function.  One may wish to emphasis one's body energies to another person by priviliging them over and above the descriptive syntax of speech.  Lovers routinely employ profanities in a generally positive and loving fashion because it helps them to access a shifting realm of shared body energies occuring prior to speech.      

Sensitive lovers often enter into the following dilemma: while desiring to access intensity through the free use of the cultural obscenties one simultaneously does not wish to resemble those who commonly employ and affirm such obscentities.  I.e., How can we have porn pleasure without being porn people?

Another common conundrum relates to children's access to and employment of these terms.  It is well known that the attempt to eradicate "bad, dirty, ugly" symbols is symptomatic of a corrupt cultural matrix.  However, this knowledge does not entirely meet the needs of parents.  Can we sear around the child?  What do we do if the child swears?  etc.

It is both trite and unrealistic to "not swear about the child" -- since this inevitably becomes the usage of idiotic faux-swearing with periodic interruptions associated with moments of actual extreme upset during which the language rules no longer apply.  Daddy resolves to say 'bum' instead of 'ass.'  As as result he sounds like a dork most of the time and says 'ass' only when he's really upset!  However, none of this diminishes the importance of being attentive, positive and developmental with speech patterns in the home.

The key factor is to remember that all language is context specific.  It is quite legitimate to enforce rules such as "words we don't say around granny" or "language we don't use at the dinner table."  As soon as one tries to condemn or eliminate categories of expression all together one is destined for failure and ridiculosity.  It simply does not matter how often a child says "Motherfucker!" but it certainly matters that a child can readily access more precise terminology, can switch fluidly between body-express and sociable speach, and can easily tailor its words to its circumstance.  

"Shut up, you cunt!" is a gesture of bad faith when speaking with most grannies, just as invoking "God's Will  is often an equivalent gesture of bad faith  in academic and rational discourse.  Neither "cunt" nor "god" is always inapprporiate -- but out of context the terminology becomes weaponized (sic).

When we make a gesture of bad faith toward an appropriate discourse we also make such a gesture toward Language generally.  Thus it may appear alarming that there is a tide of open profanity in the current age.  The philosopher Martin Heidegger even claimed that Language has Language has withdrawn itself from the Modern world.  Certainly the pandemic of "fucking," "whatever," and "like" can seem daunting but we are, at the same time, in the age most conversant with the principle of creative languaging.  

There is a beautiful and musical usages of these bodily expressions of non-speak found cinematically in Cohen Brothers films, Tarantino films, "The Wire," etc.  Here we see the playful languaging of the languaging of the apparent failure of languaging.  Smooth and ironic.  Lovely.  However we must face up to the fact that most irony is really just ignorance and cynicism.  I may be in love with the rhythms and language-exceeding shape of "Those fuckin' guys!  This whole fuckin' thing!" -- but I confess also to the belief that most people swear as an inadvertant confession of the incomplete docking between their energetic experience and their socially acquired symbols.

In order to think rationally about language it is critical to have already exceeded your automated and irrational responses to the implications of terms.  This is the precondition for sensible allowing and disallowing.  The ready means of self-learning on this topic is simply to repeat, in a relaxed, attentive manner, any word which presents itself with a slight cringe.  This bodily or emotional recoil may be great or small, may be obviously "your reaction" or vaguely "your idea that someone might react."  Such attentive repetive proceeds rapidly to a spontaneous release of the negative implications.  

On such a basis a rational attitude may develop.