Contextual Healing is now Context Message (featuring the Animal Staring Contest)

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Change is [often] good.

Context Message: bringing you all the articles of Contextual Healing and new features like the

Animal Staring Contest

Seagull staring contest.

It was a hot summer afternoon that threatened rain. I stood on a scrabbly beach on the shores of Lake Michigan, all pebbles and sand and grass. Yards away under the murky freshwater current, immigrant mollusks clung to the large white rocks that jutted out of the lake, where kids and adults clung out onto, to perch. Thousands of anemic perch, experiencing flu-like symptoms, swilling up gillfulls of the European mollusks’ bacteria, made eye contact with one another and darted around in love.

She’s still looking at me, isn’t she? I just need some space.

Is that your sock?

I saw you standing there with your black robot and its crazy eye. You let it take over your eye. It looked right at me. I  see you. Any food? None.

Blink

Hurricane Katrina: Saturday is Four Years Since the Storm

Contextual Prescription:

Documentary TROUBLE THE WATER. New Orleans Ninth Ward residents Kimberly Roberts and her husband Scott Michael Roberts documented Hurricane Katrina from the calm before the storm through the absolute nightmare of after.

If this recession is now showing you boldly how the government/corporations don’t care about all of us non-rich people, check out how they’ve ALWAYS not cared if we knew how they didn’t care about this country’s outright poor people (many in this case also descendants of the U.S.’s original enslaved African labor force, many of whom just happened to be black).

TROUBLE THE WATER trailer on You Tube: here

AP: “Leonard Peltier Denied Parole”

From Associated Press:

BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) U.S. Attorney Drew Wrigley says imprisoned American Indian activist Leonard Peltier has once again been denied parole. Wrigley says the next scheduled hearing for Peltier is 2024, when Peltier would be 79 years old. Peltier is serving two life sentences for the execution-style deaths of FBI agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams during a June 26, 1975, standoff on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. He was convicted in Fargo, N.D., in 1977. He has claimed the FBI framed him, which the agency denies, and unsuccessfully appealed his conviction numerous times. Peltier had a full parole hearing for the first time in 15 years last month at the Lewisburg, Pa., federal prison where he is being held. Defense attorney Eric Seitz declined comment on the U.S. Parole Commission decision Friday, saying the Justice Department had not informed him. (Copyright 2009 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

Context?

Contextual Healing recommends:

Film: Incident at Oglala: The Leonard Peltier Story

From the archives (2003!) Film Review: Phone Booth: Please hang up and try again later

(Did anybody see Phone Booth? I did!)

by Lauren Pabst

In the tradition of one-location suspense films that are inordinately proud of their one location (such as Speed), comes Phone Booth — a movie that manages to create a moderate climate of suspense while operating entirely within the confines of a gimmick.

Colin Farrell plays Stu Shepard, a slimey publicist who is targeted by a mad sniper (voiced by the smooth, threatening baritone of Kiefer Sutherland) from within Manhattan’s last free-standing phone booth, located in Times Square. The events escalate and Stu soon finds himself trapped by both the sniper and the police, as a murder suspect.

A premise like this one does not create a large amount of mystery about what’s likely to happen, and the surprise is that somehow the film does not feel quite as predictable as it should. If the concept is gimmicky, director Joel Schumacher milks it for all it’s worth, transforming the titular glass enclosure into a creepy aquarium-like setting for the main character’s emotional, sweat-drenched trial by long-range fire.

Phone Booth’s fast pace editing and variety of shots — methodical circling, zigzagging zooms and slow-mo’ swooping around the booth and its limited immediate area — keep things frenetic but snappy and holds the audience on a MTV/ Matrix/ Fight Club-style visual adrenaline rush.

The film’s pace reflects its 10-day shoot, Schumacher said in a recent interview with the Muse. “Everything about the film was chaotic,” he said, laughing. “The first day of shooting I was panicky. I thought people would walk out.” Despite his initial fears, Schumacher soon found relevance in the film’s attempted true-life voyeuristic aspect, he said.

“I wanted it to feel for you the way it does — when you turn on the news, what’s happening right then,” he said. “If you turned on the news and they were saying that there was a guy in a phone booth and they think he had killed somebody and he wouldn’t get off the phone, you would watch. We all would.”

For someone trapped in a phone booth, Stu certainly draws a crowd — including a trio of disgruntled prostitutes, led by an amusing Paula Jai Parker, and the more reserved women in his life, Kelly (Rhada Mitchell) and Pam (Katie Holmes), who take turns looking puzzled and distressed. Forrest Whitaker is rather levelheaded as the top cop assigned to defuse the booth debacle. Sutherland’s sniper sounds sinister and somewhat reminiscent of that other mystery caller from Scream, but with more creepy calm and unsolicited psychoanalysis to offer his captive.

Like his character, though, Farrell fittingly garners all the attention. He does right by the mediocre script, accepting the perplexing attempts at witticisms as vestiges of his loser character instead of leaving them as clichè moments for the hero/bad-guy banter highlight reel. Farrell’s emphatic performance out-paces the rest of the film, and, at times, it almost feels like a one-man acting exercise with creative editing.

“Colin Farrell was my first choice, but no one would let me do it with him because he was unknown.” (The filming took place in 2000). This casting problem was the reason for one of the film’s three postponements, Schumacher explained. “First the film was postponed because of Sept. 11th because it’s set in New York, then until after Minority Report came out because then Colin would have a bigger profile.”

The sniper attacks in the Washington, D.C. area pushed back the October 2002 release date another six months, he said. For Schumacher, there was no way the film could have disregarded the events of last fall. “You can’t put movies above humanity.”

Though Phone Booth impressively renders the basic scenario of its gimmick, it remains un-ambitious in developing the story’s other angles. The film begins cleverly, with a bass-boosted montage of the state of the phone usage of modern man. However, by the end, there exists a bit too much sketchy emotional candor from the characters and blatant disregard of most all of the intricacies of the situation that rob the film of its possible depth. For all its tension building, via cool split screen tricks, the film only succeeds in hammering home pulse-pounding, crash-zooming irrelevance.

Duet

It must be said:

It’s a hard song to begin with

The first time

Her voice was like an escalator made of gold

Churning easily, powerfully up and down

Matching the original’s pre-pubescent falsetto note for note

This time

Her voice was fragile

It threatened to break

Chest and throat exposed in a sparkly black dress

Black-suited, he strode out

His mic wasn’t even on at first

Frazzled production manager

Or just lack of fame

That other duet – the first duet -

MTV Unplugged all those years ago -

Was smoother

This one was more like a blue diamond-encrusted wristwatch

Or a landfill of broken iPods

Rocky.

Her golden hair was flipped in a 70’s style

Like the Neo Disco Queen that she is

For a generation who don’t dance no more

His face was placid. Hers looked smooth but uneasy

Her hands traced the notes in the air with a flutter

His voice was as smooth as a broad, glossy banana leaf

Being pelted with the foggy drizzle of her notes

That splattered like raindrops but caught sunlight

And sparkled

She had gone and found some things new

A lot had changed since the first duet

She had cut records, banked and spent millions, shed clothing, rode jet skis, ironed hair, burned out, came back

They sang

She famous. He, not much.

Trading off hitting the trademark high notes

They propped one another up on stage

Bracing at the loss of a hero

Who sang and danced for and with a planet

Mauled and disfigured and finally killed?

By the White Tiger of Fame

Sure as Siegfried’s man Roy

They sang for him

To him

Standing in the center ring

While the cameras flashed

Disturbing the same beast

Michael Jackson: The Man in Our Mirror

by Lauren Pabst, Contextual Healing

The only reason I can talk about Michael Jackson is because he’s a freak. His face is all cut up. But just remember, when you look at that thing he calls his face, that he did that for you somehow. Somehow he thought you might – maybe it would help, maybe people might like me more if I turn myself into a white, ghoulish-like creature.

- Dave Chappelle, For What It’s Worth (2004)

Like many others, I was surprised and saddened by the death of Michael Jackson.

I just took for granted that Michael Jackson would always be around – an uncomfortable work in progress, a strange and wonderful phenomenon.

I feel sad that now when I think of Michael Jackson, it will be in the past tense. I felt a similar sadness with other music greats, but in this case there’s also an upsetting sense of:

This is how the story ends.

Thanks to the harsh, immediate spotlight of our celebrity worshiping culture, though I never even laid eyes on the actual MJ at so much as a CD signing event, I – like most of us – was intimately aware of the details of his extraordinary, turbulent life.  Not just aware of the infectious grooves that have become part of our cultural sense memory and cause the blood to pump along with the bass line of “Billie Jean.” Not just aware of his unprecedented success in album sales and music videos, and his wild talent for singing, songwriting and dancing, but aware of the abusive childhood, the reported self-loathing, the clandestine surgeries, the skin bleaching, the claims of vitiligo, the pet chimp and the hyperbaric chamber, the sad attempts to create a fantasy childhood he never had, the allegations of child molestation, the surgical masks, the collapsed nose, the scarf-draped children and dangled baby of mysterious origins.

I realize that part of me was hoping for a comeback – not like the current one that was projected to make gobs of money performing for rich Europeans – but a grand triumph of self-awareness (a decision to “make that change” as he croons in the song “Man in the Mirror”). I half-hoped in the back of my mind that maybe the years ahead would see a calm, rotund, septuagenarian Michael perched on a stool, wearing a sport jacket, his face – if not transformed into the round cocoa original, at least long-since un-meddled with -  singing “We are the World” with Alicia Keys at the 2020 Grammys; releasing a book of interviews conducted by Cornell West in which he examines the troubled cauldron of influences – societal and personal – in which his once-troubled lifestyle was forged. Unlikely, I know. Maybe this would have been possible in a parallel universe. But not here. Not anymore.

And I realize that with this fantasy trajectory, I’m basically wishing that Michael Jackson grew up to be someone other than who he was. It is to wish that he had a less traumatic life, that the little kid with the devastating soulful voice singing and dancing alongside his older brothers wouldn’t have grown into an adult so clearly warped by an entire life under a media microscope.

In a thoughtful article in the New York Daily News on June 26th, 2009 about Jackson’s musical legacy, Jim Farber writes:

“Jackson’s work with his brothers did more than score bullseye’s on the charts. Their relationship gave the mass media a model of a cohesive African-American family operating in joy and harmony at a time when race raged as a dividing point in the country. From that point on, Michael Jackson’s story would be as much about symbolism as talent.”

Symbolism indeed. If in those early years, young Michael – with his youthful charisma, energetic voice and wide, easy smiles – represented a new possibility for the generation coming of age during the Civil Rights movement, then we must also examine where he ended up in terms of symbolism. The problem is that according to some, Michael never came of age. He devoted millions to indulging childlike whims that he had been denied as a famous kid and befriended other current and former child stars. In his 2003 sexual abuse trial, Dr. Stan Katz testified that Jackson did not fit the profile of a pedophile – he had emotionally regressed to being a 10 year-old boy.

In the white-hot height of his career following the 1982 release of the album Thriller, produced with Quincy Jones, the 20-something Michael Jackson seemed to have it all. His epic music videos smashed the color line of MTV and according to Farber, jump-started the pop music frenzy that characterized the 80’s.

If we follow the MJ-as-symbol theory, then when it comes to race relations, the 80’s were the decade of everything being – or seeming, at least pop-culturally – okay. Michael Jackson was the most successful recording artist since Elvis. Equality! On TV, Dr. Huxtable and his family presented a portrait of upper-middle class black contentment. Equality! But as the 80’s wore on, crack swept the streets of black neighborhoods across the U.S. and rates of black and Latino incarceration began skyrocketing. With the closing of factories and deportation of high-paying unskilled jobs, generations were born into what would become decades-long unemployment. And it seemed that that amazingly contradictory happiness of fame took its toll on the emotionally fragile, painfully shy superstar Michael as he became more reclusive and altered his famed appearance more and more.

Was the troubled, surgically altered adult Michael Jackson a sad product of post-Civil Rights era decades of pretending that everything was fine?

Symbolism alert: he made millions to star in Pepsi commercials and was severely burned.

Last night saw the expected wall-to-wall news coverage of the death of Michael Jackson. Even now, TV anchors and “entertainment reporters” are probably readying a days-long audio/video dirge for the benefit of their own ratings. In other words, the pendulum has swung the other way: as with the obscene media treatment of the death of Anna Nicole Smith, it seems that the more mocked and reviled the celebrity was in life, the more embarrassingly obsessed the mainstream media becomes with their untimely passing.

Almost like we had guilty consciences or something.

There are still those who have rejected Michael Jackson completely because of the allegations of child molestation that we brought forward in 1993 and again in 2003. Though Jackson was found not guilty of the most recent charges, many take the fact that he settled out of court with the family from the ‘93 suit (in which the plaintiff was the child of a former friend) as proof of guilt. But as in most celebrity trials, it is often the case that myth outstrips fact in the public imagination. In other words: many who pass judgment don’t know for sure what happened in either case or even the details of what happened in the trial. The mere accusation of child molestation is often enough to destroy a reputation.

But when it comes to celebrities, everyone feels entitled to an opinion. That’s the way it goes in our culture: celebrity bashing is the corrosive flip side to the gilded coin of celebrity worship. No matter how much your life sucks, you can vent your frustrations at someone richer, more beautiful and crazier than you.

But even in the world of celebrity, double standards abound. In his 1999 song “Mr. Nigga,” recording artist and social critic Mos Def weighs in:

You can laugh and criticize Michael Jackson if you wanna
Woody Allen, molested and married his step-daughter
Same press kickin dirt on Michael’s name
Show Woody and Soon-Yi at the playoff game, holdin hands
Sit back and just bug, think about that
Would he get that type of dap if his name was Woody Black?

An interesting and valid point. Woody Allen (whose most recent film “Whatever Works” opened just a few weeks ago) and his public image have been basically unscathed by his admitted behavior towards his current wife, who was a minor at the time of their initial “involvement.” And what’s more, it seems that the license to bash a famous person increases exponentially when the person’s appearance does not conform to the ideals or even norms of society.

Which brings up an uncomfortable question. Namely, where does the whole of American culture fall on the responsibility spectrum for the  life of Michael Jackson – a life with as many ups and downs as a rollercoaster at the Neverland Ranch? Of course, though we are all products of our environment, personal choice and the autonomy of the individual is a large factor in the equation of who we all become. But thanks to the work of father Joe Jackson, an ambitious session musician from Gary, Indiana, Michael Jackson – from the tender age of 5 – was specifically and mercilessly groomed to entertain the American public. And he did so – in an unprecedented way.

And now we know exactly how this man’s life has played out.

Along these lines, today I think of the scene from the 1999 film Three Kings. The film, written and directed by David O. Russel (I Heart Huckabees) is set shortly after the end of Operation: Desert Storm and places that conflict in a murky and fascinating context of greed and cluelessness.

In this scene, the Army Reserve Sergent played by Mark Walhberg is kidnapped and tortured by an Iraqi intelligence officer (played by Said Taghmaoui). The topic of conversation turns unexpectedly to the King of Pop:

More than Meets the Eye

by Lauren Pabst, Contextual Healing

Many of this Summer’s blockbuster fantasy movies pit humans against machines, even as Americans find our government on the robotic side of the real thing in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Part I

i, Autobot

“I got you a webcam so we can chat 24/7” says a college-bound Shia LaBeouf, ever so cooly, to love interest Megan Fox via cell phone early on in the trailer for Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, which opens today in theaters nationwide.

“Sounds cute, I can’t wait,” Fox replies cutely, flatly.

This little digital commercial is slipped prominently into the promo, just before clips of car chases and robot behemoths firebombing aircraft carriers, walking all over famous landmarks (Brooklyn Bridge! Pyramids of Giza!), busting up freeways and placing our visually pleasing heroes into jeopardy.

The flirty little exchange fits perfectly with the overall tone of Transformers, a fantasy action adventure based on the animated series from the 1980s, in which two squads of alien robots – one good, one evil – duke it out on battlefield Earth.

Though LeBoeuf and company will spend most of the movie along with the good Autobots fighting the evil Deceptecons, this little suggestive exchange aimed at the teenaged, digital device-consuming, YouTubing generation puts all of that robot-blasting in context. Technology (of the type that rumbles out of a tractor-trailer disguise to snatch your car off the highway) can be the enemy… but (in real life, now) before anything else, it is our trusted sidekick – our little digital friend. It’s what allows us to keep in touch with our sexy girl/boyfriends.

Since many of the summer blockbusters deal with the fantasy theme of man versus machine, it seems an appropriate time to take a look at our everyday relationship to robots. While Terminator: Salvation imagines malevolent killer robots programmed by an evil, autonomous, human-hunting computer program the Transformers series offers two sides of the coin – there are evil Deceptecons, but there are also helpful, righteous Autobots. And through our shared righteousness, humanity is on the side of the Autobots.

The friendship of Shia LaBeouf’s Sam Witwicky and Optimus Prime in Transformers is one more entry in the lovable-robot canon of American cinema. As evidenced by last summer’s WALL-E, as well as R2D2 and C3PO from Star Wars, Haley Joel Osment in A.I., Johnny 5 and the little guy from Batteries Not Included, the friendly robot is well established in our pop-culture consciousness. And let’s face it, friendly robots populate our life – from our trusty cell phone to our colorful, cute iPod, our indispensable laptop computer, our efficient microwave oven, and yes the webcam that allows us to chat with our significant other “24/7.”  Robots today provide unparalleled amounts of stimulation – mentally and in some cases even physically.

But in the Summer of 2009, the theme of man vs. machine is too significant and evocative for us to ignore. Certain other real-life battles are playing out right now, around the world. And like the heroic Autobots, we owe it to ourselves to transform a bit – our point of view, that is. There is definitely more than meets the eye.

Part II

“I’ll Be Back”

The Terminator was the 1984 action movie hit, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a humanoid killer robot from the year 2029, sent back in time to the Reagan era to kill the mother of the as-yet unborn John Connor. Connor would grow up to lead a rebellion against the evil machines that would take over Earth – an Air Force computer program called Skynet had become self-aware somewhere around the turn of the 21^st Century, and was now bent on destroying the human race.

In Terminator 2 (1991), Schwarzenegger was back, this time as a benevolent bodyguard-bot, reprogrammed by the future John Connor and sent back to 1995 to protect his mom and his young self.

Now, twenty-five years after the original, there is a new Terminator movie, the actor who embodied the original killing machine has been “reprogrammed” yet again as the Governor of California, and Terminator-like killer robots zoom around blowing up people. But just like Arnold, these robots work for us.

I felt a bit of cognitive dissonance watching the new Terminator: Salvation in a half-full darkened, cold theater on a hot June afternoon. The scenes of the nightmarish Terminator robots hunting the brave humans of the Resistance were for us images to eat popcorn to, while the real thing is taking place half a world away.

The machines formerly known as Predator Drones are unmanned flying vehicles capable of bombing targets in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq with Hellfire missiles as they are operated remotely by pilots in an air-conditioned room on an Army base in places like Nevada. The U.S. Defense Department first admitted to arming these unmanned drones on October 25, 2002; they previously had been known to be used only for surveillance purposes.

The first intended targets of these Predator Drones were suspected al-Qaeda members. The drones have since been used in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. From just a handful seven years ago, the U.S. now has over 5,300 drones in operation – some as small as insects. Aerial drones also patrol the U.S.-Mexico border in the name of surveillance – these are currently unarmed.

In the words of one senior Bush administration official, as quoted by P.W. Singer, author of Wired for War, “The unmanning of war plays to our strength. The thing that scares people is our technology.”

Leaving aside the question of fear, the use of killer drone technology in the nebulous, seemingly unending “War on Terror” has many furious.

There has been an outcry by civilians in Pakistan, where over 250 people have been killed by the drones over the past year. A popular hit song in Pakistan last summer, as Singer explained on the TV and radio program Democracy Now! had lyrics charging that Americans look at them as insects. There are outspoken critics of the drones within the U.S. Defense establishment like David Kilcullen, an architect of General Petreus’ Iraq war surge, who claims that the unmanned robot killers are serving to further infuriate and radicalize the population of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq creating new enemies of the U.S. with each strike.

Some decry the attacks as a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty, and point to their illegitimacy, due to the fact that the U.S. has not declared war on Pakistan. But the U.S.’ position is that the authorization of the use of force grated after the attacks of September 11, 2001 applies to all nations, if there are any suspected anti-American militants within their borders. But the use of the unmanned drones has provided the U.S. with a way to launch attacks, while avoiding an overt on-the-ground invasion of Pakistan. Recently, according to Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations, the motive waters have been muddied, as the drone attacks in Pakistan have not focused on al Qaeda operatives, but members of the network led by Baitullah Mehsud – opponents of the Zardari government with an alleged role in the assassination of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

All those who wondered if the drone attacks would end with the changing of the administrations didn’t have to wait long for their answer. In the early hours of January 23^th 2009, three days after President Obama took office, a drone struck two targets in Pakistan’s tribal Waziristan region. Fifteen people suspected of being supporters of the Taliban and their families were killed, including three children.

In the tribal regions of Pakistan can be found people living a rural, non-urbanized or globalized, traditional lifestyle. Three days earlier, in his inaugural speech, President Obama had referred to tribes:

“…because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.”

Do the “lines of tribe” have to dissolve for people to live in peace? That is a loaded statement to make when we consider the context of American treatment of the indigenous tribes of our own country. In fact, the U.S. government carried out one of the first instances of “ethnic cleansing” of an area with the Cherokee Removal Act of 1838, which culminated with a forced march of civilians known now as the Trail of Tears. In fact, Adolf Hitler studied the U.S. treatment of Native Americans (which reads more like a dark library than a “dark chapter”- see the recent PBS series “We Shall Remain”) and admired it as a model of genocide.

Whatever Obama meant by that, the drone attacks have had a major affect on the tribal areas: The Sunday Times of the UK reported in April that up to 1 million civilians have fled the tribal regions of Pakistan to try to avoid these drone attacks, as well bombings by the Pakistani army.

What are the advantages of deploying advanced technology against people? Steven Cohen of the Foreign Policy study program at the Brookings Institute defends the drones on the basis of their being a surgical-like warfare application. “What they do is allow any country that possesses them to pinpoint without much collateral damage,” Cohen says. “The drone, in essence, while it conjures up images of a mechanical monster is in fact far more effective and more humane than dropping tons of bombs on an area.”

How accurate the drones are, however, has been called into serious question. According to the Times of Pakistan, there have been 60 drone attacks by the United States on the tribal regions of Pakistan between January 14^th, 2006 and April 8^th, 2009. Horrifyingly, the Times reports, of these 60 attacks, only ten hit their intended targets, killing 14 alleged al-Qaeda leaders. An estimated 687 Pakistani civilians were killed in the drone attacks; unintended casualties, the aforementioned “collateral damage” (incidentally, also the title of an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie from 2002).

However, most of the people who will sit in multiplexes this summer watching Christian Bale’s John Connor fight the evil Skynet computer system and its robotic minions, or Shia LaBeouf and the gallant Autobots battle the evil alien robotic Decepticons, blissfully unaware or only muddily informed of the real-world drone attacks, will find themselves cheering on American humans as they face malevolent robots. In the blockbuster movies, like Terminator and Transformers, our (American) heroes are tasked with the burden of being the representatives of humanity that fight against the cold, brutality of an unfeeling robot programmed to murder cooly, indiscriminately.

The irony is so blatant that it would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

Some are very aware of what the drones are doing, namely, their operators – many of them 18 and 19 year-olds literally assigned to this post because of their Playstation skills. As with their colleagues deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, the drone pilots –working on Army bases in the U.S. – though they may never physically experience the battlefield, have been known to develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) due to the jarring nature of their work. According to an August, 2008 story by the Associated Press, “Remote control warriors suffer war stress,” the pilots must guide the drones back to the attack site after the damage has been done, using the drones’ built-in surveillance equipment to gather high-resolution imagery of the casualties. Unlike Air Force pilots who can drop tons of bombs and never face the consequences of their work, the drone pilots cannot avoid seeing the dead bodies their mission has resulted in. A mission that resembles nothing so much as a live video game – with deadly real results.

Like a lot of action movies these days, Terminator: Salvation plays just a bit like a recruiting film for the Army. Set in a nightmare scape of 2018 (whoa! not much time, gang), it’s a watery by-the-numbers adventure where the carbon-based good guys scamper around the Western deserts (hmm) of a post-Apocalyptic United States wearing the official Resistance long olive trench coats oddly reminiscent of another time.

From a character’s pointed obsession with earning the right to wear the natty coats of the Resistance and an uncomfortable parable of redemption and self-sacrifice, Terminator Salvation is a embarrassingly earnest, bleak blow-up affair. Christian Bale’s John Connor (the fully grown charismatic alterna-leader within the corrupt bureaucracy of the Resistance) is brooding and glum. There’s little of the fantasy-rebel glee that characterized the earlier entries in the series, or the first Star Wars movies.

Then there’s the journey of Marcus Wright (Australian actor Sam Worthington), which makes up most of the film, a death row inmate from 2003 (he has committed some vague murders, never really explained) who, after having donated his body to science, emerges fully alive in the sand shitstorm of ’18 as a robot-human hybrid. Connor and company must decide whether the G.I. Joe-looking Wright can be trusted. For his part, Wright proves his loyalty to the human side via heroic self-sacrifice (a theme of the Terminator movies, to be sure, but one made more queasy given Worthington’s striking resemblance to an uber-soldier from one of those Army of One commercials).

In the midst of it all, the movie also offers a small vignette of resistance that could have been written by Sophocles; a bit of American Empire Greek Tragedy-style catharsis:

Connor refuses to follow the orders of the Rebellion’s leaders when they tell him to blow up Skynet’s command central, where thousands of human prisoners are kept. In the movie, it is the fact that he is unwilling to destroy innocent people (AKA collateral damage) that makes Connor a great leader. But what happens next is remarkable. The soldiers of the Resistance, inspired by Connor, actually refuses to follow the orders to bomb Skynet. Not so far-fetched, according to the conclusions of the 2005 documentary Sir No Sir, which retraces a large-scale resistance and its spread throughout the entire armed forces, during the Vietnam war. Connor is then able to save the human hostages, by engaging in the heroic hand-to-hand (or in this case, hand to bot) personal combat most highly prized by action movies.

In Terminator: Salvation, it almost seems like the plot has been designed as a rebellion lightning rod for an impressionable audience. Rebellion is painted in fantastical terms, awesome and escapist within the Hollywood-devised movie scenario. For much of the audience, the movie may be more relevant than the goings-on in the War on Terror. the real robot war being waged in our name, instead of merely identifying with fake cinematic versions.

Do our Summer blockbusters decontextualize current events, further desensitizing us to the effects of the real robot wars being being waged in our name? That all depends if these images of shadow cinematic rebellion remain entirely divorced from substance.

“If you are listening to this – you are the Resistance” John Connor intones breathily over pirate radio waves.

Ditto that.

Tactile Media Lament Part One(a)

Tactile Media Lament Part One: I, Pod

This week, I went out to buy a CD. I wanted the little booklet, the brittle plastic case and the experience of skinning it from its thin cellophane wrapper. In short – I wanted a tactile media experience. I wanted to go into a store, look around at my fellow shoppers, get to meet – briefly – some people from around who were working there, and see what else is out there on the shelves in the way of music.

I quickly realized that the CD store (the highlight of my high school Saturdays, where during college I stood in line at midnight on Tuesday mornings to be among the first to buy a newly released album) like the video store (where I had worked during high school and college, decked out in khaki and royal blue, “Denzel Washington on a sub? You’re looking for Crimson Tide…”) was teetering on the verge of being bitch-slapped out of existence by something as undignified as a hundred million chewy white plastic cords or a shower of red and white envelopes.

What about people without computers who never stopped buying CDs?

I myself had all but forsaken it in recent years in favor of downloading. I was a senior when Napster hit; on the computers at my high school we downloaded jam after jam, experiencing unheard-of instant gratification. We would graduate that year, 2001, into a brave new world, and our “let-me-get-that-one-song” habit grew. With access to high speed internet at college, we soon got them all. Every ditty in our head. We could get Jon Secada’s “Just Another Day” without dropping $15 on his self-titled debut album. Or something.

Since 2007, New York City has seen the demise of the Kim’s Video (113th Street location), Harlem institution the Record Shack, all branches of Tower Records and recently all of the Circuit Cities. The massive, contradictory Virgin sign still slinks redly on and off over the spreading neon stain of Times Square, but the store underneath is a dark, empty shell. The Virgin Megastore in Union Square has announced that it will shutter May 31st.

I visited the now unplugged Circuit City on 80th & Broadway when it was in the process of being picked over of its merchandise by shrewd bargain hunters, like apparently myself. The shelves were for sale too, and hanging off the walls in some places. Merchandise was herded into small sections of the showroom. I picked up $4 CDs by the stack and felt a weird guilt. There were some I wanted, and would have paid full price for at one time. It was a whole record – like about 15 songs – by musicians I really liked. Their precious little plastic packages full of grooves and heart were being liquidated.

Though national chains like Circuit City are owned by mil- and billionaires, the closure of their outlets has still meant the loss of many local jobs.

But the loss of the Record Shack, forced out of business by the cutthroat gentrification of 125th Street is perhaps the saddest story of the download revolution. Sikulu Shange came from South Africa in the 1960s and opened up the Record Shack to serve the music needs of the Harlem community. This winter, after more than 30 years, Mr. Shange lost his lease in the storefront across from the Apollo Theater. He was not only evicted but saw his entire inventory confiscated by the landlord.

In the case of the Record Shack and Mr. Shange, multiple forces of the current market acted against them. But the winds of change are blowing: the CD store is practically over.

In the past 25 years, we have cycled through four fully distinct dominant music media platforms. There was first the record album, the cassette, the CD and now the ghostly MP3. Music went from analog to digital, then finally non-tactile. Record albums of a size that did justice to the works of art that graced the cover gave way to less dignified playing card-sized plastic cartridges. A generation simply squinted and moved on.

Along with these delivery format changes, the way we listen to music has trended towards the personal. With the popularization of the Sony Walkman in the early 1980s, music began its transition into an individual experience, as opposed to mainly a shared one.

Are those white slippery headphones sucking in more than they’re giving?

Let me offer a rough but probably fairly accurate observation. Thirty years ago, the music people heard over the course of the day was mostly in the presence of other people. Today, the music people hear over the course of the day is mostly heard by them alone, through headphones or in a car. The iPod and other MP3 players have not only made music more individualistic, they have made it more accessible and prevalent. We’re musically saturated.

Before downloading became dominant, I used to scramble to tape record songs off the radio. Hearing a favorite song was – in that case – thrilling and special; my chance. The technology of cassette tapes made possible this serendipitous music trapping; as free as downloading, but more exciting. When I was lucky enough to capture a song from the beginning to the end, it felt like a sign that the forces of the universe were aligning in my favor.

Do you have an MP3 player? Do you sometimes experience premature song fatigue? With thousands of songs at our fingertips, we sometimes become bored and restless halfway through even a favorite song and itch to see what is next. This is not to say that MP3-ers do not love music – indeed, it is the ardent music lovers that have cleaved most readily to the Pod and similar devices. “My own soundtrack? To this crazy life? I think so.”

But are those white slippery headphones sucking out more than they’re giving?

Apple’s advertising campaign around the iPod (launched in October of 2001) was jazzily original… and cryptic. The ads depicted a colorful background with a black silhouette of a slim, hip person, grooving to a gummy white iPod lodged around their ear area. Ostensibly going for funky, distinctive and accessible, this image of a blacked out (missing?) person plugged into a sharply visible iPod – came to haunt every bus shelter and magazine page over the past decade. This hip person is plugged into the iPod. But they’re GONE. Where did they go?

I got to thinking about pods. Two peas in a pod, pod people… Why were these things called iPods, anyway? What if, like the Isaac Asimov book and later the Will Smith/Steven Spielberg movie I, Robot, the “I” in iPod didn’t stand for internet (or whatever), but meant actually “I, Pod.” Interestingly, you could get a glimpse into a person’s life by shuffling through their iPod – so the colorful little robots could actually be seen as a repositories of a person’s musical and cultural tastes. And who’s to say how much other information they can store (at the risk of sounding paranoid, they could even undertake mini surveillance missions). After all, they can now squeeze 1,000 songs – (that’s the 12 tracks of Jon Secada 83 times over) into something the size of a Starburst.

But as a consumer society, the United States has pretty much made the switch to non-tactile music media. But this just means a critical mass of people have done so – not everybody. What about those people who never stopped buying CDs? The people without access to computers or the internet? They are being rapidly left behind as their tactile daily newspapers struggle to keep their non-digital presses rolling, as their neighborhood video rental stores peter out of existence. They’re like rabbit ear TV watchers, cajoled by friendly but forceful commercials announcing the switch to DTV in June. After all, we already slowed up their plans – the original switch was in February – because not enough of us got the converter boxes.

Maybe it’s just me, but I detect a hint of exasperation on the part of the local TV elite embedded in the helpful announcements they’ve been commissioned for:

Bubbly local TV personality: “Digital TV is coming June 12^th! If you have cable or satellite, you’re ALL SET.

BUT: If you watch TV using rabbit ears, you’ll need a Digital Converter Box. Otherwise, your TV will go BLACK on the afternoon of June 12^th.”

Under her breath: “Get it together, morons.”

We’ll see if the luddite lethargy of analog TV watchers will again cause this grand transition to stick in the mud, hampering the condensation of the TV signal and eventual sale of the saved airwave space to the private wireless companies.

In the meantime, I suggest you investigate for yourself how far the CD store meltdown has progressed in your area. Go out and buy a CD, preferably from a local store. Understand what we will soon be missing for the siren song of the download. Feel the woosh of the door, as you enter a space dedicated to the distribution of music. Make conversation – or at least eye contact – with your fellow shoppers, and the folks behind the counter. Buy a whole CD – risk the presence of dud tracks. They’re probably having a sale, anyway.

Tecumseh’s Vision (If You Don’t Know, Now You Know): PBS’ We Shall Remain

On Monday, PBS aired Episode Two: Tecumseh’s Vision (available in its entirety for viewing online here) of We Shall Remain, American Experience’s five part series retracing the history of the native peoples to what is now the United States (largely neglected by mainstream narratives of U.S. History) by examining five pivotal moments in time.

Episode One explored the aftermath of the Mayflower’s 1620 arrival from England, bearing the people known as Pilgrims. The episode told of their encounter with the Wampanoag people, shattered by an epidemic of European-origin disease years before. The film made potently clear and accessible the fact that the disintegration within two generations that resulted in all-out war by the English on the existing nations of what became New England was anything but inevitable.

Episode Two fast-forwards to the late 18th Century, when the growing United States, newly chartered via the American Revolution (1775 – 1783) was pushing ever more into what had become known as Indian Territory, the area West and North of the Ohio River, South of the Great Lakes and East of the Mississippi.

Among the nations in that area were groups of Shawnee, based in modern Kentucky. Two young Shawnee brothers, Tecumseh (whose name represents a shooting star that resembles a leaping panther) and Tenskwatawa (meaning “open door”) emerged as powerful spiritual and military leaders who mounted an unprecedented and effective defense of their homeland.

Tenskwatawa had been alcoholic and abusive before undergoing a trance in 1805, from which he emerged claiming that he had spoken to the Master of Life. Tenskwatawa began to spread a powerful message urging the Shawnee and all indigenous people to reject the habits and lifestyle of the white man that had spread to them over the past century and a half. Tecumseh, his whole life a steadfast provider and expert warrior, emerged to lead a pan-Indian confederacy mobilized by the words of Tenskwatawa against the encroachment of the United States, whose offensive was led by Northwest Territory governor and future U.S. president William Henry Harrison.

In the war of 1812, Tecumseh and his warriors allied with the British and dealt several major blows to American forces, including putting a halt to the American invasion of Canada. But ultimately, the British pulled out of the fight for the independent Indian state in which is now the heart of the Midwestern U.S. – literally deserting Tecumseh and his warriors in the middle of a battle with the Americans.

As with Episode One, Tecumseh’s Vision incorporates stunning and powerful cinema-quality reenactments, featuring Michael Greyeyes as Tecumseh.

Growing up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the middle of the area defended by Tecumseh (the Ojibwa and Potowatomi joined his army), I feel grateful for having finally learned the history of the land I had wandered – it seems to me now – almost blindly.

Don’t miss Monday, April 27th 2009:

Episode 3: Trail of Tears

on your local PBS station