Nested Infinities

The purpose of a system is what it does. This heuristic, coined by the cyberneticist who architected Chile’s doomed Project Cybersyn in the early 70’s, Stafford Beer, removes intention from structural analyses. If, for example, the consequences of the police is disproportionate violence against the poor and minorities (most of whom are impoverished), it makes no sense to say that the police actually serve some other purpose. This works on a local scale too. Imagine Duchamp’s urinal. It makes no sense to say it serves the purpose of removing waste into the sewer system to be recycled. It simply does not do this. Instead, it’s on a pedestal with the words “R. Mutt 1917” written on it. This requires us to look at it as a reflection of what it does to the space around it. It ridicules the conceit of galleries – this toilet is made equivalent to a Rembrandt; It expands the concept of art indefinitely – why couldn’t this toilet be art; It mocks intellectual property – “R. Mutt” is as valid as “Rembrandt” since his name didn’t equate to him creating it.

This object scale approach to the art – call it a systems analysis of objects – comes to mind when thinking about L. Frank Baum’s 1907 children’s book Policeman Bluejay, which I happened to read on a break from heavier books. Featuring only flashes of violent death, it’s tame for Baum (seriously – watch The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus). What made me think of Stafford Beer, however, isn’t Bluejay (alas, ACAB), but what bookends the book. The story begins with two children, Twinkle and Chubbin, who are lost in the woods with their picnic basket. They’re hungry but afraid to empty their basket because, as Chubbins says, there’s “starve in the bottom of it.” After upsetting a witch, they’re turned into birds. Antics ensue. Maybe a strong word for an ultimately abbreviated morality tale, but eventually they learn they can turn back if they eat tingleberries. After fighting rebellious rooks (malevolent species needing to be beat back also appears in The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, unnervingly), they find one healthy and one malformed tingleberry. Chubbins gives the latter to Twinkle because there’s “more stomach-ache in it.”

Not pictured: Policeman Bluejay

Why does the book describe a basket full of nothing as starvation; how is the malformed tingleberry full of stomach-ache, invoking the experience of starvation? Wordplay, of course, but let’s also look at how the story begins. Chubbins and Twinkle lounging in the forest wake up in a clearing that they call a “trap” and a “prison.” They’re confronted by a tuxix (the witch) “flat in shape, like a big turtle; only…its body was covered with sharp prickers” who demands to be pet. They nearly consent to petting it when a voice warns them of what she is, after which they refuse and she curses them until they “promise to become my slaves.” The story begins with embodied contradictions. An afternoon of free form lounging turns into a prison, the tuxix wants to be pet but is unpettably shaped, the protagonists are trapped in the body of birds – symbols of freedom. These contradictions point to the wound between the world as presented and its functionality: a basket begins by holding emptiness while a tingleberry is, in policeman bluejay’s words, “very bad for birds.”

A Tuxix, probably

The difficulty is that baskets and tingleberries are not just their consumption, but also what they produce. The purpose of a basket is to store things, but that necessitates that a basket’s purpose is to be empty; it produces emptiness. The purpose of a tingleberry is self-reproduction, but that requires they spread through waste (i.e. are consumable); it produces edibility. They’re starve and stomach-ache as a consequence of creating emptiness and edibility. This incessant presence through negation plays out in the forest at large. At the center of the forest which Bluejay polices is a Land of Paradise which “a strong wind blows all birds away…except the Birds of Paradise themselves.” Marked as the “legendary” Eden, it’s the presence against which all the forest, present and real, is measured as a malformed reality against. Its negation. This negation is reinforced when the rooks steal Policeman Bluejay’s hat and club after our visit there, the only markers of Bluejay’s policeman role as Law. From whence came the forest but from the seeds blown out of the Land of Paradise?

Which brings us to the “Great Law” of the forest, for, if a policeman exists, naturally we must ask what law he enforces. One of the residents of the forest that Twinkle and Chubbins befriend, and who is later unceremoniously killed by hunters, is the owl who tells the kids that the Great Law of the forest is Love. That while “this is strange when you remember that some animals eat birds” and that the Birds of Paradise “are not obliged to take life…so they call us savage and fierce,” those in the forest are still “good parents, helpful neighbors, and faithful friends.” If owl is correct, what is this Love that exists universally among the forest animals? Which must be enforced? Enforcement is what makes it universal. A backwards logic where the law, in enforcing itself, defines itself. Contrast this to the Land of Paradise where the trappings of a commune, each staying out of pure desire, fulfilment, expose the irony of such completeness. In the words of Chubbins, “It’s too pretty. I’d get tired of it soon.”

There’s an old SMBC comic where, standing before Satan, a bored looking bald man says “there is no torture so horrible that a human won’t eventually fetishize it.” In the votey addendum (an SMBC standard), Satan commits him to heaven as the ultimate punishment. This is precisely it. Love must be enforced as universal, but its enforcement implies non-universality; negation reveals what is present by simultaneously creating what it reveals. Consider how Beer defines information in his speech “What is Cybernetics” as “that which changes us.” In this sense negation is information in the way a line of code defines the function of a program even as it alters the structure of the operation. The ability to negate the Law, to concretely define the Law outside the universal, to give it presence, reveals all such objects (from laws to baskets) as a coordination of such information. Love here is the necessity to non-universalize, see a mutual space of negation, worlds, inside the world. One might say that a Land of Paradise, in lieu of this, is as lossy and loveless as being the Tuxix’s slave.

“The mind is its own place and, in itself can make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven” -John Milton/Zach Weinersmith

In 1923 Wallace Stevens, the great poet of absence-as-presence, published Harmonium. One of my favorite poems from this collection, “The Snow Man,” beginning with the lines “One must have a mind of winter/To regard the frost and the boughs,” concludes:

               For the listener, who listens in the snow,

               And, nothing himself, beholds

               Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is

Here “nothing” becomes something in itself, ever-present, but perceivable only when embodied. A thing which can not exist in its own right – and what does it mean for “nothing” to not exist besides for a thing to exist? What if we conceive of nothing not as merely a thing but as a system that does, that produces? For the listener to be “nothing himself,” then, is to negate the world, and in that negation to behold the negation as negation. Which is to say to see like an empty basket sees the food it stores or a malformed tingleberry sees its taste. It would be to become something like a Law unto oneself, and, in enforcement, permanently to negate one’s universality. An exhausting flight from paradisical slavery which Chubbins captures in his final question to Twinkle. “Don’t your legs feel heavy, Twink?” “Yes, do yours?” “Awful.”

Advertisement

Everything That Rises

Came across this recently:

The Flintstones Issue 5, pg.5; the inciting incident

And decided to read all 12 issues of what turned out to be Mark Russell and Steve Pugh’s…remake?…of The Flintstones. Thinking on how this series seems to noticeably re-emerge every 20ish years, from the 1960s Honeymooners-influenced cartoon to the disastrous 1994/2000 movies to this one-run 2016 comic,  it seems that, as is sometimes said of Hamlet, each generation has its own Flintstones. “Seems” is worth emphasizing here. Despite the comic horror of this panel (a victim of its own sincerity), this rendition of the cast doesn’t really feel new. Of course it’s different. I’d be amused and confused to discover a TV show I watched on Boomerang discussed genocide as it hocked cigarettes and vitamins, the kind of crass marketing that this comic specifically mocks. But this image of human beings as prone to systematized, catastrophic violence in a comic that uses a museum in our world as a framing device and itself recycles a 60 year old franchise in a time of mass franchise recycling – its comic horror – feels worth exploring a little.

To lay the foundation (or bedrock, if you will). Russell set about making a “meditation on power” in the vein of superhero comics. That’s why, between the rock puns and side-plots, the driving narrative is Fred reacting to the way in which society is changing towards a consumerist model that forgets that it was founded on violence. At the end of the first issue, after a Cro-Magnon (treated like immigrant labor in this context) is encased in ice trying to hunt a mammoth at the whim of Mr. Slate, a quarry capitalist, they refuse to stay on the job, saying “it seems like the whole point of civilization is to get someone else to do the killing for you.” This same Mr. Slate replaces all his workers, including Fred, with gorillas and Cro-Magnon in issue 9. After failing to win over a love interest, having slightly less power than another guy, he rehires the old crew, seeing the error of his ways: “once you pray to a god of strength, you surrender all right to beg for mercy.”

Crosshatched with this is the story of the Flintstone’s appliances, specifically bowling ball the armadillo and vacuum cleaner the baby mammoth. Forming an unlikely friendship because of their shared abuse at the hands of the Flintstones, their relationship supplements the idea that perhaps civilization is the issue with society. While Mr. Slate has a teddy bear-like relationship with his turtle butler Philip, inefficiency emphasizing the commitment, the sub-plot of issue 9 has Wilma throwing out bowling ball because she’s surprised Fred with a new one. Later that night, the Flintstone’s appliances break bowling ball out of the junkyard before he’s “recycled” (killed for meat). All this only for vacuum cleaner to die in the next issue, poorly cared for. His last panel showng his trunk slopped over the edge of a garbage can, Fred saying “don’t be upset, honey. It was just a thing.” Bowling ball, furious, attacks a bowling competition announcer in the final issue and is duly thrown in the garage. There he meets and befriends shop-vac, a tinier duplicate mammoth. A vicious, virtuous circle.

The Flintstone Issue 7, Pg.15; the anticlimax

The blunt point is that power quickly folds into our everyday, making violence unspeakable by its obviousness. In the words of M Bison, the most important day in someone’s life is just Tuesday for another. Those within “civilization” are hapless contributors who, even if they realize the horrors of the system, are helpless in the face of it – except with enough power. A worthwhile sidetrack would note the West Wing-style Great Man implications. In The Flintstones you can point to Mr. Slate undoing his layoffs after being taught an unrelated moral about power while in a previous Russell remake the year prior, Prez, a trillionaire saves the US from a self-serving, industry-drafted vaccine bill (to some degree portentous) through new DNA copyright laws is treated as a happy ending. It’s the logic of Lisa calling Elon Musk “possibly the greatest living inventor.” Much like the use of the language of genocide, this understanding of power is not only wrong, but also misses the point. It lacks the dynamism of reality.

Prez Issue 6, Pg.16; the tepid denouement

Of course Bedrock exists as an allegorical space, not a canonical one. The proximity of the town to us is instructional. Hence why we’re introduced to it through a museum guide. But it’s hard to walk away from all the “civilization” dialogue, the blatantly contemporary experience, without a sense that this the story of a fundamental tenet of human experience. It reminds me of a line that makes me squirm whenever I listen to Vampire Weekend’s otherwise compellingly lachrymose “Jerusalem, New York Berlin”:

So let them win the battle

But don’t let them restart

That genocidal feeling

That beats in every heart

The reason I squirm at this and The Flintstones is the assumption that a genocide isn’t a social, cultural, historical, or political policy that is acted on by a government and its supporters, but an abstraction of groups, a “feeling,” a specter for Scrooge. This isn’t surprising since even Lemkin, the lawyer who coined the word, refers to the Holocaust as the principle of government relying on an “ancient barbarity” and proof that “our science and our civilization have not expunged barbarity from the human animal” in his April 1945 article introducing the concept to the public.

I think of a question David Graeber & David Wengrow pose in The Dawn of Everything: “What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?” As it’s crafted in The Flintstones, humanity is doomed to an endless loop of genocide, in an inability to develop beyond, since, at its core, society is interchangeable with civilization, and civilization with land grabs and consumerism; we make friends individually, we wait for the those in power to come to their senses. Funnily enough, the very first draft of the 1994 movie, the one that was ultimately rejected and led to the movie’s 9 year development hell with over 30 screenwriters, would have been inspired by Grapes of Wrath. It’s hard, if not hilarious, to imagine Barnie and Fred bumbling into a picket line and becoming part of collective political action. That’s the promise Russell lacked the imagination to pursue.

At the end it’s the difference between the concept of cycles and dynamics. A cycle loops. Think the old rainwater cycles from middle school. You can adjust the groundwater levels or the temperatures, but all you can ask is when will it rain next. Stasis. I haven’t mentioned The Great Gazoo, the Martian that was the cartoon’s shark jump late in life, but here I’ll say that his role in the comic is like rain. He observes Bedrock, tricks members of his species to save humanity, before finally sending a report to his home planet that says they should protect humanity until it “get its act together or gracefully go[es] extinct.” What’s meant to ring like hope, sounds like hell, reminding me of the final lines of Irene Mathieu’s “although winter in Chile, it was summer on Mars”:

It doesn’t matter much whether you claim Mars or Earth as home; if you spin you always come around again or everything comes around to you, dirt or grief or bombs or waves around again and around and again every winter of bombs raining into the next summer of dirt again around and again

how can you write a new thing

                                             In a universe composed of circles

The title of the collection, poetically enough, points to a process closer to what you could call dynamics. Orogeny is the process where, due to collision of tectonic plates, mountains are formed as one plate is  forced upwards. How can you write new things? On a geologic time scale, you lift them up.

A Chrome Dinner

Last week I wrote about the relationship between once internet celeb Trisha Paytas and Italian Futurist FT Marinetti, specifically about how their similar visions of a boundlessly mutable self were responses to a hunt for cultural capital and their reliance on trolling to that end. As I’ve finished reading The Futurist Cookbook since then, I figured I’d clarify/expand my thoughts by way of a focused example of one of the “meals” laid out in the book. This “formula” is called “Improvised Meal” and was developed by the “aeropainter” Fillia. It’s hard to call a “formula” without ingredients (or directions) a “meal,”  but that just reveals the intentional contradictoriness invoked by the idea of an improvised formula. To be forward about this again: while you might think Fillia’s another fascist, at least one lecturer at UCLA says [PDF] he merely “share[s] palingenetic tendencies with the Church and with the rhetoric of the fascist state.” A 1 Nazi and 10 others at a table deal in my opinion, but moving on.

I think this is more a formula than an actual saying

The distinction I want to make, which is as truly scientific, rigorous, not at all nebulous, just like the Futurist’s cooking, is between personality and character. In my scientistic jargon, personality is something like a force acting on the world impersonally, and often by the power of habit. Think a high fantasy villager-to-hero archetype or a littered banana peel. A character is a force that, pushed against by a countervailing force, changes its structure. Think glow ups or a Mario Kart player driving into that littered banana peel. Of course there’s historical contingency involved – today’s tropes were yesteryears controversies – but a rough and straightforward litmus test is possible. A character is someone you want to incorporate into the story of your life while a personality is someone it’s fun to see every 3 months because you end up doing something wildly memorable, but if they cancel on you that’s fine. I’m saying Italian Futurism has a lot of personality, but little character.

Fillia begins the piece exclaiming that the point of these meals is “maximum originality, variety, surprise, good cheer, and the unexpected.” Already it’s clear that the titular “Improvised Meal” is the concept of a meal and not a specific meal or recipe (nor could it be, requiring “the unexpected”). Fillia goes on to list some elements of a “mentality” that every cook is “required to develop”: form and color as important as taste, original architecture for the dish so much so that everyone thinks they’re eating “WORKS OF ART,” prepare the meals according to each persons “age, sex, physical makeup, and psychological factors,” and must (if possible) “arrive at the meals in motion, traveling on flying carpets that run along in front of people” because “it will develop the human spirit of adventure and heroism” if “each person [is] carried along to capture his preferred dish. He concludes by reinforcing that, while discussion among the staff exists, “the personal taste of the diners must never be taken into account.”

You might have already noticed a few weird things. First, obviously, this isn’t a meal – it’s not even an imagined meal. It’s the equivalent of the signage fast food places have behind the counter to remind the staff how to consistently make the food. Second, it’s anti-automation, pitching for an improvised and identity-targeted approach to serving food. Yet that anti-automation coexists with demographizing tastes, leaving the person out of it. In a sense it’s demanding an automatable improv where the diners are objects subjected to works of art. The most provocative part being that the works of art, ideally, are constantly escaping the diners – the objects of the cooks creativity are meant to be ennobled by the thrill of the hunt. But how is the person to know what dish is tailor made to them though? I suppose, if we try to square the circle, because they are what they are. It’s not hard to consider that Fillia imagines these cooks to be futurists too, and as such play the same role as himself.

Let’s go a step further. Futurist cooking isn’t about food. In a passage from a news article that (per Charlotte Birnbaum’s introduction) may have been written by Marinetti himself, it’s blithely stated that a Timballo d’avviamento was “possibly too poetic to be properly appreciated” since, as everyone knows, the stomach “is an uncouth materialist.” On the one hand, the Futurists had an understanding of the complexity of the eating experience, influenced as it is by mood, context, memory, and location. Especially their emphasis on odor, which, as A.S Barwich discusses in her work in Smellosophy¸ is more taste than taste itself. On the other, as the above quote hints at, as the shape of Fillia’s “meal” hints at, what they’re interested in is not the experience, but the idea of the experience. Their kitchen works under the Burger King slogan, “have it your way”: atomized and mass produced, improvved and standardized; not about the diners’ preference, but the odors pumped into the mall to simulate a Cinnabon craving.  

Hence why Fillia’s “improvised meal,” if you managed to catch it, doesn’t mention food at all. This disinterest in food combined with an actively anti-pasta stance can’t help but remind me of the statement Marinetti made in the 1909 manifesto I quoted last post about demolishing museums and libraries. While it appears like the futurists were trying to create something, because they imagined themselves as outside the histories they were embedded in, all they could refer to for the creative act was the creative act itself. It’s the logic of CEOs who have no relationship to, nor interest in, the business they’re running; whatever decisions they make regarding the pieces of art under their purview (games, food, movie, etc) is filtered through abstractions and demographics. A clear influence on early Marinetti was Rimbaud and his image of the poet as a “visionary through a…disorganization of the senses.” Yet it’s not surprising this description could also easily appear on a PowerPoint slide in a VC pitch meeting for the next disruptive tech company. It’s empty without context.

For the Futurists, that context is “uncouth materialism.” We’re all stomachs waiting for a flying carpet to chase. We’re personalities pushed around mindlessly. We’re NPCs. Of course the issue will always be that, if you’re playing Mario Kart, there will always be peels on the road. And it’s hard to maintain the dictum “do what I say and be free” as an aesthetic principal, as Fillia does, without hitting that peel head first. In fact, those that I think best carried this logic forward are conceptual artists from the 60s like Sol LeWitt who conceived of the artist as a deliverer of ideas. In LeWitt’s case,  open-ended instructions. The idea was that this democratized art. A good goal. But feels a bit like saying the manufacturer of a coloring book has done the art part of the book already. The claim is built on the conflation of the idea and the material, transmuting the artist into a deity whom the bored child and zany cook enacts the will of. At its best its technocratic.

Sol LeWitt’s instructions for a wall drawing at Yale

What I would call these works is organized senselessness. Specific to the Italian Futurists, an organized project of depersonalizing. The political inclinations of the Futurists leave little doubt that democratizing art was never part of their project, and in “improvised meal” it shines through in the first instruction of the meal: “form and color are as important as taste.” This is so obvious that we have an intuitive, if not entirely perfect, sense of when food is ripe and when it’s gone bad. Bad milk smells like bad milk. So why mention this aspect? Well, because appearance is of primary importance. The performance of the meal is the meal, its literal and metaphorical form and color are vital. The meal itself, like much of the Futurist Cookbook’s recipes, is inedible in that they’re not food. It’s not sense. Sense is “uncouth.” It’s about the fulfilment of the idea – this is the desired future. Despite its professed dynamism, it reads like a dream where everything is chrome and the only proper reaction is to scream.

You Really Think Someone Would Do That? Just Go On The Internet and Tell Lies?

“I have the joy of knowing, as I affirm these Futurist convictions for you, that my talent, which has been several times booed by the audiences of France and Italy, will never be buried beneath too heavy applause.”

                                            -FT Marinetti, “The Pleasure of Being Booed,” 1911

               A friend was recently telling me about how Trisha Paytas, the Only Fans/drama/mukbang internet celeb is an unknowable, perpetual troll. This is undeniably true from even a brief google. In Interview Magazine in 2022 she said “I just found out what a meme is like a year ago” while all across her twitter they uses the word with the comfort of the internet user they are. Now, I don’t actually care about Paytas. They’re your typical 4chan-like, lying for attention and with “ironic” bigotry, a personality that has existed since the appearance of mass media. What I do find interesting about them is that I also happen to be reading The Futurist Cookbook, the ribald and patently ridiculous anti-pasta manifesto of early 20^th century fascist and artist FT Marinetti. There’s a lot that could be said about the intersection of their career and this fascinatingly absurd and genuinely funny book (whether joking with or at it). The comparison is poignant for exactly that reason, in fact.

Her commentary here is more traditional verbal irony

               But before we get there, there being the place where the much lugged about Sartre quote about the self-aware absurdity of Anti-Semites resides, I want to indulge in the ridiculousness of Marinetti and his Futurism to emphasize the conscious quackery. By way of background though, let’s be clear on who Marinetti was. Born Carlo in 1876 in Egypt to a family that had been invited to act as legal advisers to foreign companies by the then Khedive of Egypt, Ismail Pasha. While being educated in a Jesuit school and read poetry by his poetry proficient mother (herself daughter of a Milanese professor), bambinone, as he was called, also happened to come of age at a time of enormous technological change, shrinkage in new territory for imperialist powers to expand their economies into, and the early stages of the two major European nation-states of the 20^th century. 1861 and 1871 saw the birth of what we now consider Italy and Germany respectively (although obviously not necessarily so cleanly as that).

               That’s all to say Marinetti had a huge chip on his shoulder. Where was a spoiled, rambunctious, ambitious poet going to make a name for himself in a country that, once the charcuterie of competing European powers, could be described as neither a “developed country” nor “third world”? As you might imagine, this was the recipe for a very specific kind of personality. One simultaneously countercultural, haughty, self-aggrandizing, nationalist, and relentless. One who saw the Cubist developments in France and wanted to outpace it. He would fix Italy by becoming Italian, world culture. By the time he released the manifesto that what would explode the Italian Futurists into the world in 1909, he’d inherited his family fortune, a nostalgic view of imperialism in Africa, and developed a penchant for drama(/lying). In the 1909 manifesto he depicts a 1908 car accident he had as the moment Futurism was born, writing “when I came up–torn, filthy, and stinking– from under the capsized car, I felt the white-hot iron of joy deliciously pass through my heart!”

               What’s amazing about this passage is that, by his own admission, he was driving “through streets as rough and deep as the beds of torrents.” In essence Marinetti is depicting his own reckless and near manslaughter speedfreak behavior as a transcendent quality, justifying his indifference to the lives of others by an assumption of majesty within the violence he caused. It’s not his fault that it’s so titillating! You’re being too sensitive! Etc. I think we’re all familiar with the idea of taking a fairly clear cut situation and making it as dramatic as possible for rhetorical effect. It’s no surprise the manifesto, the literary form now most associated with white nationalist mass murderers, was Marinetti’s primary vehicle. Imagine the worst guy you know. The one who refuses to be held accountable, will say blatant lies to get what he wants, and will definitely gaslight you out of habit when not maliciously. The guy who carries a childhood of dodging responsibility with him everywhere. Did I mention bambinone means “big baby”?

               These are the kinds of people who it’s funny in the abstract to watch be themselves because, as in the case of the former president you might have thought of just before, how else can you respond to insanity but by going insane? This is really what you’re going into when you read The Futurist Cookbook. His very important first demand of the 1931 manifesto is “the abolition of pasta, that absurd Italian gastronomic religion.” Throughout the book he goes on to say that “the defenders of pasta drag its ball and chain like convicts” and calls pasta “another form of slavery.” He turns objects into self-parodying cultural reflections for aesthetics and attention. One haute couture recipe called porcoeccitato requires a raw salami to be served upright in a sauce of hot espresso and eau de cologne. Sustenance becomes zaniness. As with all history (especially theirs), there’s a lot more interesting stuff going on, but I think you get my point.

Tempting to call this traditional verbal irony, but he might actually mean this

               Which brings me back to Trisha Paytas. Obviously their actual politics elude me – as I’m doomed to always wonder whether Marinetti truly reviled pasta – but it’s the wrong question to ask anyway. Rather, I think Rebecca Jennings is on to something when they write in The Vulture that “Paytas wouldn’t be herself is she weren’t altering who ‘herself’ is nearly constantly.” This rings a chord with what is one of the most interesting passages in the original manifesto to me:

The oldest of us is thirty: so we have at least a decade for finishing our work. When we are forty, other younger and stronger men will probably throw us in the wastebasket like useless manuscripts—we want it to happen!

Of course “the new” was already a big thing (think Ezra Pound, the other big fascist artist). As it is now. Marinetti though, ever the lover of violence and justifying it, depicted this dissociative novelty as the core of renewal. It’s specifically and exactly the throwing away, the being made useless, that would, to use his phrase for Futurism’s aspiration, “free this land.”  

               Trisha Paytas’s internet apersona seems to stem from this same place. Not that Paytas is fascist. I don’t know or care about their beliefs. At the core of both these express the disposability of the self, not as an acknowledgement of the flux of life and personal developments that turn the self around like  clear glass in sunlight, but as a tool through which one can forever remake the present by burning away the past. Not to grow from it new gorse, but to build apartments which they’ll let rot and raze too. Habitats like consequences. It’s Europeans looking at Native American society (or as Marinetti would have it, African society) and seeing empty land. A (de)spoiled outlook. The comedy of watching people like this is the comedy of watching children: there’s a shock and novelty to how they can make the most mundane things weird, sometimes frustratingly. Yet eventually children – yes, even when they become poets – recognize the space between exploring novelty and cohabitation.

               Needless to say these are people unworthy of the degree of attention they get but hard to turn away from. I’d be a hypocrite to say otherwise, being fascinated lifelong by Italian Futurism and its evocative verve. But, re-experiencing Marinetti for the first time in a while, I’m struck by how boring it eventually gets. About 111 pages in I’m pretty much finishing out of curiosity rather than interest. This happened back when I first encountered Italian Futurism in college too. Marinetti’s magnum opus, Zang Tumb Tumb, an avant-garde classic depicting the Battle of Adrianople through varying use of font and spacing, is memorable more for its visuals than its content. It’s all appearance. Visual art is actually the best and lasting expression of Italian Futurism. I think this is partially due to the fact that it’s hard to depict apersona. Even the invisible man, the most literal embodiment of not-being, of image flexibility, has to be shown with sunglasses or bandage wraps. If you depict absence by itself, you’re not depicting anything at all.

The most striking part of Zang Tumb Tumb imo

               My favorite work from the Italian Futurist painters, the most graceful and luscious depiction of speed and technology, is Giacomo Balla’s Street Light. This claustrophobic portrait of a creamy yellow arc lamp emitting sharp v’s of light with a half-moon in the background consumed by red, white, and grey u’s like a swarm of moths manages to pull from a still image an endless circulation. The moonlight coexists with the arc lamp. The colorful halo surrounds the arc lamp, an accident of a human eye staring at light too long, while superseding both, pulling over the whole, more veil than shroud. To not mince words – Balla, too, was a fascist. Both men were, in their time and now, repugnant. What’s striking to me about Street Light though is that it’s an attempt at a literal embodiment of yet another Marinetti manifesto call to arms, “Let’s Kill The Moonlight.” Despite this, Balla fails. The moonlight perseveres because, to kill the moonlight, you have to acknowledge it is yet living. won’t you celebrate with me?

               And ultimately how boring is it to see the same people, time and again, swat at their own madness? The longer these types go on, the more clear it is there’s no there there. Both in the sense that they have no substance and become boring, trivial, and meager, but also in that whatever they substituted for an identity is slowly eaten away at by reality accrued. While Paytas still makes millions on Only Fans, they’re forever fending off accusations and tweet 17 consecutive happy thoughts some days to low low engagement. Their time has passed. Whatever controversy that happens to them now will be doubted or ignored. Marinetti, for his part, compromised his younger artistic vision. By the end of his life he was Catholic Academic, defending Futurism from a fascist base increasingly favoring degenerate art labels and Marinetti’s own appeal from 1909 to “destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind.” As they say: Well, well, well, if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions.

               That’s how this all has to be looked at. It’s not tragic or sad besides the victims of, on the one hand open and genuine hatred, and on the other, extreme callousness. Which amount to the same thing in the end. Eviscerating oneself in the ruthless pursuit of influence to the detriment vulnerability –including in oneself! – is a remarkably consistent symptom of rightwing anti-capitalism. Which is to say, capitalist culture folded like dough onto itself. Fake it til you make it. Returning as promised, this is all to say Sartre had it right when he said anti-Semites “know that their remarks are frivolous…[they] delight in acting in bad faith.” One might add anti-Semites come from the same swamp as trolls generally. You can’t be blamed for enjoying their absurdity in a world with Poe’s Law and little emoji usage. Nathan Fielder works in that liminal space (a topic for another day). It helps to acknowledge that slapstick, while less funny when real, sometimes can’t have happened to a better person. Marinetti had a heart attack and died at the age 44, a useless manuscript. It’s not justice, but, hey, it’s fittingly dull.

Oh, and he lied about hating pasta thing too. obviously.

I Gotta Believe

               Frustratingly, I’ve recently been on a PaRappa The Rapper binge. I say frustratingly because it turns out the game is difficult, awkward, and opaque. Nothing unusual for a nearly 30 year old game nor for what’s widely considered to be the first rhythm game. Doom plays less smoothly than Doom Eternal, but the original has the handicap of defining the genre for its progeny. That doesn’t make me feel better about being, functionally, the unfortunate person trapped in John Searle’s Chinese Room: given a set of instructions for a language I don’t understand, I have to convince the game I’m fluent. Believing my eyes are tricking me into beat deafness, I close my eyes and fail; believing the game has delay issues, I tap early and fail; believing the game is badly made, I hunt for Reddit threads to not feel alone in my bad mood. Still, I binge. For what?

               The PaRappa series was short-lived as far as iconic and impactful series go. It encompassed only the first game, the spin-off Um Jammer Lammy, and the direct sequel to the first before falling away due to growing disinterest from its creative head, advances in game technology that outpaced the team, and the negative size of Sony’s profit from the brand. I suspect that even if everyone’s desires lined up the franchise wouldn’t have become Sony’s Mario as PaRappa’s artist, Rodney Greenblat, wanted. Among many reasons why – Sony’s marketing strategy, Mario’s folkloric mutability – I think about what Martin Hagglund writes about self-consciousness in This Life. It’s “the condition for being beholden to others.” PaRappa works as narrative and gameplay because the player, turned into a Turing test, is beholden to it. Coming of age story means becoming consciousness of our connection to others.

               In short, the first PaRappa The Rapper is a story about a dog boy trying to impress a flower girl by learning self-defense from an onion, driving from a moose, salesmanship from a frog, and cooking from a chicken, before outrapping PaRappa’s mentors to avoid having an accident on their first date and eventually performing with an MC flea on a stage. The more nuanced (yet no less short) synopsis is laid out by Katherine Isbister in her essay on the game in Well Played 1.0. “The player’s relationship to the mentors moves from one in which the player is very low in power, to one in which the player is really a peer being hosted.” PaRappa goes from the idea of other as risks (self-defense and driving) to the idea of others as audiences (salesmanship and cooking) to overturning these ideas (bathroom) in favor of  self-expression (performance). Pursuing puppy love, you become part of the world.

               Building worlds through society, self-expression, and love are so much a part of PaRappa’s DNA that his creator, the pop musician-turned-game developer Masaya Matsuura, that it forms the basis for the plot of his game dev debut/band marketing The Seven Colors: Legend of PSY・S CITY. A playthrough of a fan translation of the game is on Youtube (special shoutout to the translator’s blog). On watching it you’ll find a point-and-click adventure game where you travel through an almost entirely abandoned city with eccentric, hectic visuals in search of the titular seven colors to bring “the lovers’ Night” back. Upon finding all seven heart-shaped colors and mailing them to heaven, you are told that “The Power of Love” has been returned to the Earth and all is well now. As night falls and the isometric view ofPSY・S CITY turns and rises, its lights bleed together until they form the word “Love.”

imagine the city ordinances required for this

               The Seven Colors is a messy game with puzzles ranging from obvious to random, which was the style at the time. Its visuals are bright and interspersed with musical sequences yet you can’t help but notice that you’re wandering a personless city, more likely to be sung at by flowers at forks in the road and spaghetti from an alien planet than talking with a human person. There’s a surreal loneliness to the whole affair. In the foyer of the city’s museum, under eerie didgeridoo-like synth ambience, there’s a poster that when clicked on states that the “establishment” of the city began in early 1992 with “Music King Matsuura, Lyricist Emperor Mori & Picture Saint Mic*itaya…as the Holy Trinity of Expressionism.” They’re self-descriptions that reflect both the playfulness and Ozymandian horror of the game. Of what in this Play-doh wasteland are they kings, emperors, and saints of? Are you, the player, their suppliant?

More museums should have paeans to artists in their foyer

               In an article talking about his complicated love and nostalgia for PaRappa and its “funhouse mirror reflection of American hip-hop culture,” Yussef Cole writes that looking back on it “there’s more performativeness than there ever was authenticity.” This position on the ratio of performativity to authenticity in PaRappa doubles for The Seven Colors. There’s a hollowness at the core the game. The brightness of the game is like the brightness of a Gaugin painting, erasing humanness from the scene. The only moment of social intimacy in the game that’s shown in the Youtube playthrough is a cat sitting down for tea and sardine parfait. They offer a chair but add “what, no chair?” They offer some parfait but add “Oh, you’re not too keen on it , eh?” This rejection plays out in the room of a lounging woman you can find. When you click on her she winks and a pair of sunglasses and a balled fist appear before you and knock you out. A synecdoche for the city with no love.

               The two games relationships to performativity puts me in mind of FD Signifier’s video series on Kanye. He points to how wrestlers are performing a character in the “world” of the squared circle, called kayfabe, and uses this as an analogy for hip-hop personas. No doubt what Cole means when saying “blackness…can still feel like a performance” when he considers the “rootlessness” of globalized hip-hop. Expanding on this, between these two Matsuura games, The Seven Colors has the performance of authenticity while PaRappa has the authenticity of performance. This is not only built into the use of a dog for the main character – itself an accident of history but, poetically, a reflection on willingness to follow instructions – but also in the opening cut scene. Instead of meeting the cast, we watch the final scenes of Jet Baby, an in-universe superhero movie. We see the world through the idea of disguise & fantasy. Like FD says in his video, telling a wrestling fan wrestling’s not real is like “telling people The Avengers isn’t real. We know.”

None of this is to argue with Cole’s experience. PaRappa is not made by Black creators nor with Black people in mind. Japan, as Cole notes at the top of his article, still flagrantly appropriates cultures for their aesthetics. That a 1998 NYTimes article approvingly compared PaRappa to “tough guys” like Wu-Tang Clan who “are so exaggerated that people laugh at them” instead managing to be “hip by not being cool” signifies as much. That the article describes it as “a kind of universal suburbia that Japanese children recognize from countless American sitcoms,” and Rodney Greenblat is quoted as describing the aesthetic as a “hyperbole of picket-fence Americana” signifies as much. It’s the mythical American life (always coded white) filtered through Japanese pop art; an ancestor of Macklemore winning over Kendrick at the 2014 Grammys. All that’s to say that knowing PaRappa is performing itself is both what makes it both conceptually interesting and culturally aged.

               Coming back to my binge, the two questions I kept asking myself as I repeated Cheap Cheap the Cooking Chicken’s level were: Why am I losing? Is it the game being old? While certainly coping, my coping centers around the central design structure of the game. PaRappa is a black box. Most players have no idea how scoring works and, based on the top comment on this post, knowing won’t help. It can be frustrating, this seeming lack of direction, even as the mentors tell you what to do. But I think of what Ryu Watabe, lyricist and VA for Chop Chop Master Onion, said in a 1996 developer interview. “Hip hop is all about freedom. There aren’t any rules and restrictions.” While there definitely are rules and restrictions in a game (it’s perhaps the fundamental feature of a game), this push to fail and develop is freedom. A game you can’t fail is a loading bar. Failure is what reminds us we are, in fact, trying.  We improv to improve. In trying, we perform ourselves as strange to ourselves.

me when I improv improve

               It’s this intersection of performing oneself and, through that, the inherit imperfection of performing self, that saturates my experience of the game. It’s easy, in short, to get hooked on cooking Cheap Cheap’s sardine cake (sadly not a parfait) because failure signifies the empty space you can play around in. That empty space of play is one where you can discover yourself through experiment, maybe mixing up flows until one fits, maybe mashing until you give up, maybe testing to the limits of the rules themselves, maybe following them exactly and getting as far as you’re able. That empty space of play is a utopia, and in utopia there is no game over until the game’s off – the game over screen in PaRappa commands you to “TRY AGAIN!!!” Method Man said it best in a Complex TikTok when asked who he thought was the best rapper alive right now. “He hasn’t been born yet.”

               This is why, I think, the throughline between PaRappa and Lammy is the phrase “I gotta believe.” It’s a phrase expressing doubt (I didn’t believe but I have to), command (I tell myself to believe), and uncertainty (I don’t have to know, just believe). It’s a fairly standard self-supporting phrase that is also a commitment to oneself, seeing oneself as inhabiting an empty space of play, as able to fail and be held accountable for failure and TRY AGAIN!!! In This Life, Martin Hagglund, reading Marx’s letter to Arnold Ruge as his version of MLK’s “I Have A Dream” speech, writes “the key to waking up…is the form of self-consciousness: the recognition that it is our dream and that we have to make it our own through our practical activity. Making the dream come true is a matter of our work.” As in the PaRappa games where not only do the characters struggle through learning from mentors, but we as players have to struggle through failure after frustrating failure.

               The opening level of Um Jammer Lammy says it all. Lammy is dreaming that she’s late to a performance with her band Milk Can and has to be guided through the performance by Chop Chop Master Onion. His lyrics predict the events of the game. Canonically this suggests either oracular powers or near-manifesting levels of stupidly bad luck. As the performance comes to an end, Master Onion confirms to Lammy that she’s been strumming a vacuum. The only stage that doesn’t get mentioned in the lyrics is, in fact, the very one she dreamed she was performing. And, if you beat it, performing well. After waking up, she realizes she is in fact almost late to her show and so the events of the game unfold exactly as predicted. A fire, a nursery, a plane, a wood workshop, Hell (in the Japanese version). But what’s noticeable absent is the final stage, the show itself, except as the unreal version that is the dream itself and implicitly in the final call-and-response line “you come far.”

               So what? Well, I suppose fulfilling the dream requires waking up from it. You don’t sleepwalk away from Omelas. The risk of that empty space of hidden rules made to be broken, of aching through the emptiness by actual doing beside others, the command to play and fail (which isn’t the opposite of play but the ground on which play is built) are the core experience of a dog boy and a lamb girl trying to impress a flower girl for the former and not disappoint her band mates for the latter. These are game worlds thriving with life. Not because they’re the implication of business that is a city, but because the characters are committed to one another; they’re lively because the gameplay itself is built around the idea of engaging with others as more than Chinese Rooms. You have to wake up and realize that this is not a dream. You are beholden to others because, in this 2D world, we bend 3D.

Roald Dahl, Censorship, & Change

The recent hullabaloo over edits to Roald Dahl’s books have invited people from all over the spectrum to hash out their specific gripes about “PC culture” or corporate censorship. There isn’t much to say on that end that hasn’t been fairly stated in these TikToks. Just the changes listed in NPR’s article about it come off as barely considered – giving Willy Wonka’s “imported” Oompa-Loompas gender neutrality is not very different from the LGBT predator drone meme.

You wouldn’t have to look far to find a strong contrast. In the first print of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory the Oompa-Loompas were “Black pygmies…’from the deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had been before.’” In 1973, after two years of protest by the NAACP to the original 1964 book following the release of the movie, “I found myself sympathizing with them, which is why I revised the book.” Regardless if the author was genuinely moved to sympathy or felt pressured by the “real Nazi stuff” of an NAACP protest, he made changes himself.  

I think this front of the culture war is a cul-de-sac. It might have very lovely and interesting personalities within it, but I ended up here only because doing a 3-point turn on a side street is annoying. The above TikToks cover it as fully as it can meaningfully be covered.

No, what caught my eye was a fleeting invocation of Salman Rushdie by NPR (and other outlets) and how that highlights what I actually think is going on. As is famously known, after The Satanic Verses were published, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie. He went into hiding for about a decade until the late 90s and has had a fruitful open career until just last year, August 2022, when Rushdie was stabbed during a talk.

That’s to say that Rushdie is an odd person to invoke. He’s a relevant voice on the topic of censorship, but it feels off here: the estate of an author made changes to their property in consultation with a publisher and a consulting firm focused on “including and embedding authenticity.” A government declaring the literal death of an author this is not. It feels like a different kind of thing is going on here that’s getting lost in the (understandable and exaggerated) drama.

When I first heard about this, after my trained numbness in response to culture war content, I thought of live-service games. The fundamental idea in this business model is that the final game is never final. In the ideal form of this model the game is free to play with developers regularly updating content to keep the experience fresh, here adding new skins, there adding new game modes, and using the engaged fan base to address bugs and balancing issues. The most famous example of this is Fortnite with its surreal use of cross media promotion and chapters worth of patch notes.

The reason I thought of live-service gaming is directly related to the unique approach to cross media promotion Fortnite has, in some sense, pioneered. According to the publisher of the new Dahl books (via AP) “the analysis started in 2020, before Netflix bought the Roald Dahl Story Company and embarked on plans to produce a new generation of films.” At first glance, the obvious takeaway from this is that the publisher is reacting to a media ecosystem it doesn’t understand and tried to, so to speak, preact to any possibly controversial content that would appear in the “new generation of films.”

At second glance I think it speaks to an obvious truth that claims of censorship, especially those focusing on Salman Rushdie, are failing to differentiate between. Rushdie’s tweet reveals a lot:

These changes are not about the angelic or devilish nature of Roald Dahl or his work. That would require these works are seen as aesthetic objects worthy of moral consideration. It’s clear from the edits that, if morality is at play at all, it is the assumed morality of a nonspecific mob. Bug fixes reacting to an imagined future player base.

The publisher doesn’t see the books as aesthetic objects at all. They are products. Obviously. They are products in an economy designed around live-service logic: The simultaneous hyper-relevance (in the sense of de-emphasizing difference for mass appeal a la Marvel), and dismissal (in the sense of the work being infinitely mutable a la Fortnite), of context. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is not full of ideas, but content. Like all human waste, it is incidental to consumption. It must be moved out of sight to reduce friction in the flow of goods. This is capitalism.

To forget this is to risk sounding either silly or reactionary. Suzanne Nossel, chief executive of PEN, released a statement saying “If we start down the path of trying to correct for perceived slights instead of allowing readers to receive and react to books as written, we risk distorting the work of great authors and clouding the essential lens that literature offers on society.” One can easily imagine a conservative pundit in 1973 saying this in response to Dahl’s alterations to the Oompa-Loompas.

And this might also speak to the obsession with “great authors” and literature as an “essential lens,” with the quest for “authenticity.” Maybe there’s a lesson to synthesize from live-service logic. Maybe that Art is not a Thing, but a Process. Often our oldest art (when we acknowledge it as art) comes to us without an author or a society to refer to. Often it’s incomplete or tweet-length quotes from other books citing now lost works. But even this loss can be an aesthetic experience that allows us to “receive and react to books” – as Anne Carson did with her translation of Sappho, If Not, Winter.

As she writes in her introduction to the text, “brackets are an aesthetic gesture toward the papyrological event rather than an accurate record of it.” Regardless of whether these changes to Dahl’s work will be a bracket in his larger legacy, or whether they’ll turn what we currently recognize as canonical Dahl into a papyrological event, the twofold question remains: are we more interested in the aesthetic gesture or the accurate record? What and whose logic determines what should change? For change is coming, and, as of this moment, all we’re doing is waiting on the next patch.