Crumb

This is the film that first made me hyper-conscious of self-imposed, voluntary corporate branding as illustrator Robert Crumb observes that “these days” everyone is walking around wearing t-shirts and clothing advertising one company or another.  But the effects of this film cast a far wider net than mere corporate aversion.

Crumb is a complex man from a complex family; his two elder brothers are geniuses in their own right but each is also more mentally disturbed than the next which leads me to wonder, in this case with much greater emphasis than normal, whether it is the the anomalies and deviations from what is considered a “healthy, normal” mind that give rise to great art or whether it is the life of an artist that give rise to mental instability.  Of course there is no definitive answer but this film’s utterly deviant subjects underline that the two are hardly mutually exclusive. Required viewing.

In the Realms of the Unreal – The Mystery of Henry Darger – Dir: Jessica Yu

Continuing on this theme of mental instability and visionary creativity, here we have as our subject an ascetic, anti-social man about whom even his lifelong neighbors knew very little.

A janitor and avid church-goer, no one knew, until he was moved to a convalescent home in his final weeks on Earth, that in his single apartment he had written a fifteen-thousand page fantasy novel with profoundly complex and beautiful illustrations wherein all the young girls who were the subjects of his very innocent-spirited magnum opus (and even that is understatement) had penises – more than likely because he didn’t know better.  The study of his work is a study of how the mind attempts to heal it wounds – Darger was sent to boarding schools and even a sanitarium in his childhood – all of which he works out in the course of his book.

Rivers and Tides – Dir: Thomas Riedelsheimer

This documentary about nature-artist Andy Goldsworthy will, unequivocally change your life. using only things found in the natural world, he synchronizes himself with the patterns found in the world and ultimately finds a way to render found objects in a manner that pursues and underlines their energy.

Not only is it a fitting introduction to this extraordinary soul, but Fred Frith’s score perfectly punctuates this delicate process throughout.

Highly recommended. Beautiful beyond belief.

Surfwise: The Amazing True Odyssey of the Paskowitz Family – Dir: Doug Pray

Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz is another man who turned his back on the conventions of society and decided to raise his nine children in a dilapidated RV, teaching them what he felt were the true values and virtues of life.  An expert surfer, and Stanford-educated physician who was head of the medical association in Hawaii, Paskowitz’ extraordinarily liberal views manifested different results in each of his children.  Living on a strict organic food regimen and making do with as little money as possible, this is a study in what it might mean to live virtually off the grid, for better or worse, and whether or not that is any longer possible.

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill – Dir: Judy Irving

Concerning the life of homeless musician Mark Bittner who befriends a wild flock of stray parrots that live in San Francisco city proper.  What begins with a seemingly innocuous birdseed hobby becomes a life unto itself and he transforms into a kind of Francis of Assissi to this displaced, growing flock.  He conjectures the flock began as a group of runaway pets that found each other and eventually began breeding in the wild.  Mark champions them when public outcries by environmentalists to exterminate them so as to ensure the stability of the local ecosystem take on City Hall.  This film teaches a lot more than birdkeeping, however, as it observes what dynamics may unfold when we open our arms and our hearts to realities of the present and the abundance that exists in our ever changing world.

Man on Wire – Dir: James Marsh

I get vertigo even thinking about this film, let alone looking at the cover photo.  But yes, it is real – Phillipe Petit, a French tighrope walker, conspired, coordinated and ultimately manifested his ultimate dream – to walk a tightrope between the very top of the World Trade Center Twin Towers.  He pulled this off without any sanctions from the city of New York or permits whatsoever.  This document of the event is made even more amazing by the fact that the Twin Towers are no longer there.  Likely to be nominated for an Oscar in 2009, this is easily a film that will irrevocably change your expectations of what can be done while here on Earth.

Sharkwater – Dir: Rob Stewart

Speeding along on the inspirational humans train, we come to Rob Stewart’s Sharkwater that I had the great fortune of seeing when it had its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival several years back.  Rob Stewart was, of course, in attendance, and confided that he simply set out to make a film about the ocean, and his love for sharks.  What he ended up with, however, is a precursor to Al Gore’s much more ballyhooed Inconvenient Truth; Stewart discovers that his beloved predators are being siphoned out of existence by the hundreds of thousands as the illegal shark-finning trade (that is, hunting the sharks for their prized fins and then dropping them, alive, back into the ocean) becomes ever more voracious.

Stewart gets arrested, deported, threatened by global blackmarket gangs and even goes undercover in some very dangerous locales after all of this, to bring us a critical warning: if we wipe out the top of the food chain, we wipe ourselves and everything below it out as well.  Suddenly Jaws seems like the worst kind of demonizer.  Much like Fatal Attraction did for empowering women back in the 80’s.  Shark Week will never be the same.

The Devil and Daniel Johnston – Dir: Jeff Feuerzeig

My favorite short story of all time is not The Lottery, but rather “Light Verse” by Issac Asimov wherein an irreplaceable broken robot is discovered to be the secret source of an artists unrepeatable holographic light sculptures.  When it is repaired, as a favor, by a visiting robotics specialist, she murders the man for having tinkered with her glitchy android worker.

Daniel Johnston sees devils, fears more things than you can count on your hands and contends with all manner of mental illness ranging from manic depression, schizophrenia, narcissism and bipolar disorder, and he is also considered to be one of the musical geniuses of our time by such luninaries as Curt Cobain and Thurston Moore.   Utterly self-obsessed to the point of exasperation, this doc provides an exahustive insight into Johnston’s world.

Dark Days – Dir: Marc Singer

Whoa.  Just – whoa.  I am not sure which is the real documentary I am referring to here: the film about secret underground village of homeless people living in an abandoned train tunnel in New York City, or the making-of documentary about director Marc Singer who gave up everything to make this film and ultimately find these people something better.  Perhaps because I was playing Bethesda’s Fallout 3, a first-person-shooter about the world after a massive nuclear holocaust, that tempered my response to this film.  Even then, I was still picking my jaw up off the floor.

The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara – Dir: Errol Morris

A composite interview with Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, a former president of Ford Motors, and a chief manager of the Vietnam war, reveals the complex decisions that must be made concerning war, career and the bottom line.  Regardless of your political leaning, exposure to McNamara’s perspective on all of these will expand and diversify, and perhaps even muddle your own arguments and considerations when opining on what is best and what is acheiveable in the fog of war.

The film won Morris the 2003 Academy Award for Best Documentary.

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I held off joining FB for a long time because I can still vaguely remember the sense of awe and dread I felt when observing my 12 years younger brother and his prissy The Hills reject girlfriend perambulate through the voyeuristic obsession of checking out what their homies were up to.  Eventually, a desperately close friend of mine who is a “New Media” consultant talked me out of and into acquiescing, arguing that I should at least be savvy to what they were doing with Ajax and how Facebook trumped MySpace which at one point I recall trumping this Napster spin-off called Friendster.

So — good.  I put out an indie album (a real from-the-heart effort) at the beginning of 2008, my first release in 12 years on a CD no less and spent the remainder of my year getting schooled about the way things work now, which is to say – forget print, its all about the music blogs.  I now know about SEO, affiliate ads, linkbacks, watering holes, Linkshare, Clickbank, Kontera, Amazon Associates, Adsense, licensing content, ezinepublisher, bloggers paying their rent with promo CDs at Amoeba, Sonicbids, mirpod, odeo, Ning, viral videos, ROFLcon, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Furl, Mixx, Reverbnation, Trig, Twitter, Fanpop, trackbacks, NoFollow, DoFollow, LinkedIn, Wayn, Spock, Plaxo, Sharethis, and every other goddamned way of clamoring for anyone who I ever met or whomever I met has met that might exist.

And it’s done.  The US has its first ever dark-skin colored president, the Dems control the house and senate, the DOW goes up and down faster than the mechanical bull at the Saddle Ranch and its time to move forward.

Web 2.0 is over.

In my last post I announced the death of viral videos.  Now I am speaking with some certainty that Web 2.0 has to lay its head in the loam and expire its last breath.  No it’s not because I “want real, meaningful relationships back.”  It’s because it’s just, in toto, a glorified SPAM button that leads to nothing more (I promise you) than Google analytic and Adsense report mashing and at best the world’s biggest flash-mob-cum-grassroots-electoral-campaign.  That does not discourse make.  Mobilize?  Perhaps.  All good, but now what.  You got 80 years ’til you give up the ghost – what else?

Joel Salatin is a farmer that produces beef, poultry and pork.  He will not ship his non-USDA, totally natural product to you via any means because it defeats the purpose of his obsessively local-grown ethic.  When pressed he will confide that he is not a beef-manufacturer or a Luddite, traditionalist, purist, or grassroots, return-to-the-way-things-were thinker, but rather a post-industrialist.  He is looking at what’s here and how to expand it into new ways of approaching our well-being, continuity and enjoyment of things,  dealing in complexities not often ascribed to the “humble farmer.”  He will tell you that he is a grass-farmer.  And that the cheeseburgers we eat are the product of what the animals over which he lords, ate.

That’s where I am headed; not a return to some puritanical  time before Facebook, but rather to the next iteration.  A better-sustained dialogue into the experiences possible and the evolution of what this mass-consciousness means.  The Tweets are nifty, but let’s form a paragraph.  Let’s not dally.  Things move faster now, but that is not a strong enough argument to settle for ADDled brevity.  There is something beyond that thought, and if you have the courage, you may find unclaimed territory.  I want to meet you there.  Press me, challenge me, let’s climb the next summit together, because we sure can’t do it flashing postcards at each other from the digested murmurs of our fragmented IDs, Twittering and FB updating away, grasping for attention, lost in the sea of unformulated meditations on the boundless ecstasy in which life itself revels.

I import the indelible experience of Web 2.0 into this uncharted space, honoring its potency, and expect something that builds upon its Mind-Meldish, Chrysalid potentiality.  But enough is enough.  I have no idea where that leaves me, us, yet.  Isn’t that, again, exciting?

psst go go get your life back…

Opine, damn you.

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The etymology of “steampunk”:

I first heard the word steampunk when my friend Matt Johnson, after editing my book True and Selfish Prophets commented how much he enjoyed the steampunk imagery. Though I had never heard the term, I immediately knew what he meant; my book is filled with “Gnostic technology”, “dream gadgetry”, “systems of gears and crankshafts”, antikythera mechanisms, and a wraith-like blue-skinned creature named Archkali who skitters along the ceiling of the protagonist’s dreamworld hovel on a system of wires and pulleys.

My interest in these things stemmed from my lifelong study of Alchemy, the Templars, secret societies, Darwin, the Kabballah, The Dark Crystal and Time Bandits, technology and my strangely inherent Luddite tendencies.

I began researching this astute term for my suddenly obvious obsession and was inevitably directed to Steve Jackson and his GURPS role playing system. “Steve Jackson came to it happenstance by drawing on his prolific genre bending to corroborate the pieces into what he coined “steampunk” but probably was an evolution from Cyberpunk. Indeed, the two share similar anti-social traits and usually embody those who are on the bleeding edge but living in the margins.”

It is a logical progression. As Steve Jackson games are necessarily creating rich environments for their subscribers to play around in, as Cyberpunk was a rich palette in the early 90’s to draw from, the seemingly natural migration of its system to other time periods like a hundred years prior to turn-of the century Mary Shelley/Emily Bronte/Conan Doyle/Jules Verne with all of its explosion of new tech is practically guaranteed.

I was amazed that there was never a dedicated section to the Steampunk genre in any video or bookstore and so I explored creating a tome that discussed its origins, significance, meaning and impact on our culture. I logged extensive notes on the topic and promised myself I would release at the very least a handsome coffee table book (because it is so deliciously visual) but feared that somewhere there was already someone beating me to the punch.

When I created my musician profile at garageband.com almost five years ago, I bypassed their stock music genres from the drop down list, selected other and input “Steampunk” as that which best described my music.

When I submitted my 40 page grant proposal to FACTOR in Canada last year, the section designated for marketing and style was replete with images of airships, copper gadgetry and citizens dressed in handsome teched-out Victorian attire. Despite the excellent proposal, I was denied funding – the evaluation gave me excellent marks in all categories but flunked me on this area.

Steampunk as a musical genre (what it might be):

What does Steampunk as a music genre sound like? Well I have seen the emergence of bands that claim they are steampunk because they Cosplay the genre while playing whatever kind of music they might, but rather than shoot them down for it, I would venture to be even more inclusive – for me Steampunk as a musical genre embodies that which merges an organic sincerity with an admission of a deliberate influence or interference of technology. By this definition, My Bloody Valentine (lumped under the Wombadelia umbrella in the Gen-X 90’s) is Steampunk for its organic somnolent breathy vocals and miasmic textures, while deliberately forcing the listener to be self-conscious of the very medium to which is was recorded by wobbling the whole 2 inch tape itself while playing back – breaking down the fourth wall. I submit that Steampunk may also be the more classic camera obscura organ-driven musical accompaniment to a Lumiere brothers screening, or perhaps Tom Waits’ Bone Machine, made of blown dynamic mics recording giant tin artifices clanged and beaten with sticks in a backyard shed. I hope that the genre does not ferment and harden into some self-parodizing gimmick that can be quickly discarded when the fad goes passé.

A few weeks ago I even promised my friend that within not five years but one year, kids on the street would be sporting monocles as the latest fashion trend. He looked at me as though I was crazy, but alas, even in this projection I was overly conservative. Just type Steampunk into the searchline at ebay and you will see how true this is.

I did the same with robots in the early 90’s when I created the ironic annual holiday Robot Pride Day. Then pirates (when we formed the league of Sky Pirates in 1994). Now, in retrospect anyone even remotely jacked into the system would retort “big deal, that’s obvious.” It wasn’t before Bruckheimer and Netscape and Pixar and licensing PKD happened.

But really I am not here to trumpet my prescience, but instead to contribute my two cents before this all blows up in the mainstream and saturation steamrolls the finer points into mass-marketed pulp. Because Steampunk is indeed now locked on with its Tipping Point.

So here are some lists and excerpts from my notes with some additional commentary. The lists are hardly exhaustive, they are just here to substantiate the prevalence of Steampunk in our culture:

Films:

Amelie
Brotherhood of the Wolf
The Brothers Quay films
City of Lost Children
Dark City
Delicatessen
Jan Svankmeier films

All Hayao Miyazaki films:
Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, Castle In the Sky, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Porco Rosso

Metropolis
Stardust
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
Steamboy
Time Bandits
Treasure Planet
The Great Mouse Detective
The Dark Crystal
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
The Golden Compass
Van Helsing
Wild Wild West
Westworld
A Very Long Engagement

Tin Man (television)

Steampunk Subgenres:

Victorian
Gothic
Western
Post Apocalyptic
Fantasy
Dickensian
Post Renaissance

Steampunk Videogames:

American McGee’s Alice
Myst, Riven
Arcanum
Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water
Oddworld
Final Fantasy series
World of Warcraft
Panzer Dragoon Orta
Gunvalkyrie
Thief

There are too many books to even open the category. Just visit Amazon and you will get more than you could ever want. But beyond the obvious Mary Shelley, Conan Doyle, and Jules Vernes, I do want to give special mention to the perhaps less obvious Bruce Sterling, Neil Gaiman, Diana Wynne Jones, Erik Davis, Isaac Asimov, Stanislaw Lem, Lewis Carroll, Mervyn Peake and Piers Anthony as participants in the genre.

I kindly request that those of you who are geeking hard on this genre do not flame me for including or omitting items, as I am posting my own research pro bono here – forfeiting the opportunity to participate in the coming landslide of money to be made from exposing this movement. I do invite your constructive comments, however.

A steampunk infomercial for WETA workshops custom Steampunk pistols:

Why is Steampunk relevant?

I had a band in the late 1990’s called Ribcage. The band’s motto was “air for flight, blood for rage.” The name stemmed from my epiphany that the ribcage protects our breathing mechanism, our inspiration, our soul, and it houses our heart, our passion, our blood pump. It is the technology that serves as a vanguard to all that embodies our most sacred and important inner machine.

When I attended the Toronto film festival in, I think it was 2002 or 3, I had the opportunity to see Terry Gilliam do a very exclusive master talk for select members of the media. It was centered around the new film he was working on “Tideland.” I had prior knowledge of this project because I was sent the script and asked to audition several months prior. I realized something as I approached the material about Gilliam and his subject matter, and the way he did things, and I wanted to ask him directly if I was near the mark. Here are my notes, in their original form from that evening:

Terry Gilliam says it’s mostly a budget thing, but even so with all the glories of CG he feels ultimately cheated; despite the visuals being there, there is a lack of credible tangibility…he likes the idea of found objects that you can touch and tinker with. And that’s really what this is all about isn’t it. Keeping the magic in our own hands in a way that we can grasp. As though we are the frustrated inhabitants of Flatland, we need the techgnosis to exist in a dimension beneath ours so that we can still feel as though it is under our control.

Gilliam says that the ubiquitous pipes coming out of everything for him represent a form of opulence as he grew up on a farm with an outhouse and the radio was a medium that forced the listener to use their minds eye to create the imagery. In London the pipes were due to retrofitted bathrooms growing up and around antique elaborations of architecture and so it also represented a form of urban sprawl slowly choking the landscape of tradition.

I asked Gilliam what the term Steampunk meant to him. He looked at me the same way I must have looked at Matt Johnson that day I heard the term for the first time, and yet knew exactly what it meant. Having earned his attention, I hypothesized that considering his obvious reticence about the positive influence of technology and bureaucracy (Time Bandits is about greed and power that comes from controlling technology, Brazil is about the terrors of bureaucracy and overindulgence in technological systems) that perhaps the lean towards the last industrial revolution – that which was powered by steam and coal – permitted an exploration of our irrevocable cyborgian reliance upon the machine, but sustained in a world of things and organica; that at the very least the age of steam resembled our human makeup in some way – where coal and fire is our heart and the steam is the air exhausting from our lungs. He considered it, visibly filing it away in some mental lower drawer, and then responded he didn’t disagree.

And this, I think is the essence of Steampunk’s true allure for us today; we are surrounded and often outpaced by the technology to which we are unsustainably married, and yet the interface is virtual and alien – not tactile and visceral, but representative. We call ourselves meat suits and wetware, but we are profoundly ensconced in the circumstances that arise from our interactions therein.

In his seminal book “Finite and Infinite Games” James P. Carse writes “in order to operate a machine, one must operate like a machine.” We must change our very nature in order to commune with the object that empowers us. It renders us differently than we are and enslaves us to it. But steampunk attempts to reclaim some of that control – its origins are in a time of imagination, wonder and discovery as we plug things into wrong sockets to see what lights up, we tinker, modify, experiment, bend the laws of nature and influence the elements to serve our fantasy. It is self-empowering rather than overwhelming. It is a tweaker/hacker’s heaven. It is populated by modders, do-it-yourselfers, independent researchers, alchemists, mad scientists and independents. Of course its time has come – nothing could better reflect the double-aught zeitgeist. It is the story of us fighting for our lives.

In his book Carse also writes that a machine operates from an energy that is introduced from outside of it, a garden thrives from energy that comes from within, from its own chaotic and variable nature. This inspired the name of my mid 1990’s ambient music project “Automated Gardens” whose motto was “There will never be a future” – meaning, there is only a now. Our imagination is the seed of our tomorrow (I am now paraphrasing Kahlil Gibran).

Steampunk is the externalized manifestation of this inner urge to remain a part of the magnificent and mysterious world of which we are still a part.

This article is ongoing, and may be updated without notice. Your comments and contributions are invited.

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