From Off the Streets of Cleveland

July 14, 2010 by Leave a comment

I’m just back from holiday, and I was going to leave it a while before I started blogging again, but I have been moved to action by the sad news of the passing of a true hero of the counter-culture, Harvey Pekar, of American Splendor fame.

I’m not usually one for vicarious grief, but I have been feeling genuinely cut-up since I heard that Harvey was dead. His work was personal and honest, sometimes painfully so, never glossing over his own character flaws, and it was hard to read it without getting to feel that you really knew the guy. Long before anyone had even dreamed of blogs, Harvey was there, documenting the daily grind of a lowly wage-slave, creating poetry from the rhythms of his blue-collar existence.

If you’re not familiar with American Splendor then visit your local comic-book store and pick up an anthology – the best one to start with is probably American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar which collects up the best of the early issues; also worth reading is Our Cancer Year, which chronicles Harvey’s experience of lymphoma – it is quite grim in parts, but ultimately positive. More recent comics can be found online at The Pekar Project. The 2003 biopic American Splendor was justly lauded by the critics, and Harvey also features in a segment of the 1988 documentary Comic Book Confidential (which was where I first came across his work). He appeared several times on the Letterman show in the late 80′s, until he fell out with the host after criticising NBC’s owners General Electric on air. He also recorded a series of opinion pieces for radio station WKSU, which can be listened to at their website.

Harvey’s work was based on the idea that the lives and experiences of ordinary people, living through good times and bad with their family, friends and community, were worth recording, and would tell the story of our times more accurately than more conventional histories. As he said, “Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff”, and few have captured it better than he did in the pages of American Splendor.

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Liberté, Egalité, Virtualité

December 12, 2009 by Leave a comment

There was an interesting story in the Herald this week, concerning Greg Drayman, a well-known figure around the SL auto-racing circuit I’m told, who found himself on the wrong end of a permanent banning order earlier this month, as a result of conviction on what seem like trumped-up charges. As one might expect Mr Drayman is not best pleased at this turn of events, especially since the penalty extended to the confiscation of all his virtual land and property, including the popular Kokopelli Raceway Park.

This act of Linden absolutism backs up my theory that social relations in Second Life are essentially feudal in nature, and that the conflicts that arise are analogous to those which drove the transformation of western society in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth centuries, culminating in the triumph of bourgeois liberal democracy. (An excellent overview of this period is provided by E. J. Hobsbawm in The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789-1848).

What are the demands that must be met before we could be confident that injustices like those inflicted on Mr Drayman could happen no more? What concessions must be wrung from the Lindens to bring the political culture of Second Life into the Nineteenth century, never mind the Twenty-first?

If we take our cue from the liberal revolutionaries of the past we would campaign for basic democratic rights: universal suffrage, civil liberties and the rule of law. The Terms of Service should be replaced by a written Constitution (approved by referendum), a Legislature should be elected to write new laws as necessary, and day-to-day policy should be directed by an elected Executive, all overseen by an independent Judiciary. Some sort of land reform would seem to be essential too. As we have noted before SL land is distributed under a leasehold system; for capitalist social relations to really take hold there would have to be the possibility of owning freehold land.

These rights might seem unobtainable, since it is difficult to see how any leverage could be exerted on Linden Lab as long as they own and control the physical infrastructure of the grid. Any assault on the virtual Bastille could be repulsed by the flick of a switch, and cyber-insurrectionists liquidated just as easily.

There may be a technical solution to this though; it would involve engineering interoperability between the main grid and OpenSims running on non-Linden hardware. The key thing would be to allow SL residents to import into their inventories items created on external systems, preferably without the Lindens being aware of this. (I have no idea if this is feasible; I imagine it would involve hacking into the asset servers in some way.) Political dissidents could reside on democratically constituted OpenSim servers, storing their virtual lives safely beyond the reach of the SL authorities, ready to be transferred to an alt when they needed to visit SL proper. Nobody would need to have a premium account, unless they particularly wanted to lease land on the main grid, though there would be no real reason to do that if land could be bought outright on a non-Linden grid. Merchants could set up in the free zones, attracted by the lower tax rates and superior governance, which would give a them a competitive edge over businesses still paying dues to the Linden empire.

If enough people got on board with this, and if the rebels were able to stay one step ahead of the Lindens’ attempts to secure their borders, the Lab’s revenue from subscription and tier payments would dwindle, to the point where they would be forced to concede to democratic demands, as the ancien régimes of Europe were obliged to cede power to a triumphant bourgeoisie in the Nineteenth century.

Would this be enough to satisfy those of us with more radical aspirations? The situation might be akin to that in Russia after the February Revolution, with Liberals and Mensheviks trusting the bourgeoisie to complete the process of democratic reform, and Bolsheviks arguing that only a dictatorship of the proletariat could truly achieve the goals of the revolution.

It seems clear that a campaign for democratic rights in Second Life is long overdue, and that communists should play a leading part in such a movement (though in organisational terms we would have to maintain a separate identity within the anti-Linden struggle, to ensure we were in a position to oppose the liberal tendency to compromise with counter-revolutionary forces). It would be a big task, but I don’t think that it’s impossible. I have some more detailed thoughts on Party structure, programme, propaganda and tactics, but I’ll save them for another post.

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On being kind not cruel

December 4, 2009 by Leave a comment

Remember Gwen Bell? Social media guru? I wrote an embarrassingly mean-spirited post about her blog back in January? (I don’t know what was bugging me that day, but whatever it was it had my misanthropy turned up to 11).

Anyhow… this month Gwen has been running “The best of 2009 blog challenge“, inviting bloggers to reflect on the year just past, and nominate their favourites in various categories, one each day.

I’m usually no good at posting to a deadline like this, due to my almost complete lack of self-discipline, but it just so happens that today’s prompt is “Book”, and I was just thinking today of something that I read a few months ago, which struck me at the time as especially memorable.

It’s a passage from Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, first published in 1966, and the book that made Thompson’s name, though the style is much more straight reportage than the gonzo journalism he is famous for. It’s a solid piece of work, humanising the Angels and locating the moral panic that grew up around them in the context of social change in 60′s America, without ever losing sight of the fact that they always had the potential to act in seriously unpleasant ways.

The bit that sticks in my mind wasn’t written by Thompson himself (though he does provide many quotable lines), but by Allen Ginsberg, part of an speech he gave in 1965, in which he tried (successfully as it turned out) to dissuade the Angels from carrying out their threat to attack a march against the then-raging Vietnam war:

To take the heat off, you’ve got
to take the heat off
INSIDE YOURSELVES -
Find Peace means stop hating yourself
stop hating people who hate you
stop reflecting HEAT
THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT HEAT
THE MOST OF PEACE MARCHERS ARE NOT HEAT
They want you to join them to relieve
the heat on you & on all of us.

Take the heat – Anxiety Paranoia -
off us, AND off the police, off all the fearful -
REASSURE, and act clearly in such a way
as to reassure -
by being kind not
cruel -
and it’ll be remembered and responded to.

Ginsberg’s plea has been rendered no less urgent by the passage of four decades. I can’t pretend to myself that I’ll be able to live by his words, but I’ll try to recall them when I’m blogging, and my Anxiety Paranoia is getting a little out of control.

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Incomplete hints of impossible marvels

December 2, 2009 by 1 Comment

One of my favourite places in SL used to be Innsmouth in October Country, a run-down coastal town with more than a few hidden secrets. Sadly, it disappeared some time ago, to be replaced, last time I looked, by an anonymous marina.

Now Innsmouth has been resurrected, though it’s looking even more dilapidated and spooky than it used to:

The whole place seems deserted, though the lighthouse is still working:

But be careful – the town is not as empty as it seems, and a little exploration may turn up more than you really want to find…

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I need to return some videotapes…

October 21, 2009 by 2 Comments

Man, these flotation tanks are something else; I went in for a quick dip, and when I got out three weeks had passed…

The weather has turned much colder since I last posted, dispelling any lingering memories of the summer and heralding the onset of another brutal North-European winter. When I was younger I used to quite like autumn and the winter months; walking to work in the crisp cold dawn and spending the long dark nights drinking and socialising by friendly fires. Now, as the leaves fall and the darkness draws in, I can’t help but reflect gloomily on the season just past, and how it is likely that I have more summers behind me than lie ahead.

Recent years have seen me go out a lot less in the winter, a trend exacerbated by my growing addiction to the internet. Brave the icy winds to meet friends in a crowded bar, or enjoy wandering on a (virtual) tropical beach? Drive up into the mountains for a day of skiing, or curl up with my laptop and read about someone else doing it instead? Looking out the window at the grey sky, it seems like an easy choice.

I do make more of an effort to leave the house during the warmer weather, usually going to the park with a book. I did perhaps read a bit less this summer, now I’ve got an iPhone, which lets me get my cyber-fix even when I’m out and about. The city where I live has a “no drinking in public” ordinance though, which means if I am minded to take a small refreshment and/or a discreet smoke while reading, which I often am, I am obliged to remove myself to the quieter corners of the park where the other substance abusers hang out, and where it is rarely advisable to flash expensive electronic gadgets, so the low-tech book still comes in handy for entertainment.

What I’m reading at any given time is largely dependent on what happened to be on the shelves of my local second-hand bookstore the week before, but I do try to rotate through a cycle of contemporary fiction, classic literature and non-fiction, padded out with a lot of pulpy sci-fi.

This summer I finally got round to buying a copy of Lunar Park, which had been on my “to-read” list for ages. Bret Easton Ellis is one of my favourite living authors; when I daydream about writing a novel his is the style I imagine myself emulating. I like the way he can build a sense of dread and paranoia from deceptively banal descriptive prose; never has an appreciation of the work of Phil Collins sounded so terrifying. American Psycho is easily his best work, maintaining a thoroughly unsettling tone from start to finish, thanks to a central character at once monsterous and comic, insecure psychopath Patrick Bateman. Ellis’s other novels are more patchy; Less Than Zero is certainly efficient in evoking a sense of ennui, but as a result it rather lacks narrative momentum, similarly Glamorama‘s characters are so authentically shallow that it is hard to remember who they are let alone care what happens to them.

Lunar Park isn’t as good as Psycho but it is very entertaining, particularly the opening chapters where Ellis constructs a plausibly alternative autobiography, before setting up an intiguing suburban horror story. It flags a bit in the last third, when the subtext overwhelms the narrative to some extent, but the themes of loss and regret are mostly woven into the story in a pleasingly organic fashion, and the ending is unexpectedly poignant.

I’ve picked out a few volumes to get through before the end of the year, and I’ll try to write some brief notes on them, since I think this blog would benefit from some more intellectually challenging content amongst the pop-culture ephemera.

That’s on hold for this week though, while I take a look at Burning Life. Look out for a post on that sometime in the next month or so…

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Fly me to the moon

July 20, 2009 by Leave a comment

40 years ago today Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot upon the moon. I was alive at the time, but too young to have any memories of the actual event. I do remember that when I was growing up in the ’70′s, watching TV shows like UFO and Space:1999, reading comics like 2000AD and lots of pulpy sci-fi novels (The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein is one that especially sticks in my mind), and of course seeing Star Wars at the cinema, I just took it for granted that by the time I was an adult there would be widely-available space travel, permanent bases on the moon and regular trips to Mars and beyond.

Whole books have been written about my generation’s disappointment when these visions of the 21st Century failed to materialise. What we got was the internet, with virtual worlds to explore instead of alien planets. It is possible to visit a the SL version of Tranquility Base:

moon01

and numerous other lunar-themed sims, like this somewhat gloomy moonbase:

moon02

or this rather cooler one:

moon03

but I can’t help feeling a bit cheated.

The disillusionment isn’t just a generational thing though. It reflects my internal dissatisfaction with the course that my life has taken, as I age and am forced to acknowledge that there are some opportunities that will never come my way. It’s not that I’m unhappy with the decisions that I have taken over the years, just that every path that one chooses means leaving many more untrodden.

And anyway, I’m still hopeful that NASA will get their act together and make space travel available to the masses before I die. I just want to see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars…

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Ferrisburg, Vermont

May 4, 2009 by Leave a comment

Award-winning Second Life artist AM Radio has a new work, “The Red and the Wild” on display at the Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts.

An empty house and a steam locomotive float eerily on the surface of a shallow sea. A dynamic red mass surges out of, or perhaps into, the upper storey of the building, exploding over the landscape. Cables radiate out from the house, leading to boxes containing mysterious artefacts. In the distance stands a row of water towers, brooding over the horizon.

red-wild01

What does it all mean? In a Freudian analysis, a house would symbolise the human body, the open window suggesting a female form, while the locomotive and the water towers seem clearly phallic. The scarlet substance may be blood, or perhaps a representation of energy of some kind. Is it emanating from the building, or penetrating it? Are we witnessing an escape, or an intrusion?

I may be over-analysing this. Mr Radio, in the interviews he has given about the piece, says it was inspired in part by “Breakfast at Tiffany’s“, where Holly Golightly visualises her anxiety as a “mean red”. He also mentions that the house is based on one that he remembers from childhood. Looking inside the building reveals that the red has its origin in what looks like a crystal radio set. So maybe there is a message about containing anxiety by constructing your own reality/identity, something that Second Life is well suited to.

Or not. The ambiguity of the piece is a large part of its attraction. It’s like a Rorschach ink blot. My sexualised interpretation tells you more about me than it does about the artist or the work.

I’ve read a couple of pieces about AM Radio, but I haven’t heard him discuss his influences. I would say that his installations give more than a nod in the direction of surrealism, particularly the work of René Magritte. Doorways, windows, locomotives, are all recurring themes.

(As an aside, I vaguely remember seeing somewhere that someone had created an avatar with an apple for a face, after Magritte’s famous image. If I only imagined that, and no one has actually done it, I want to claim credit for the idea right now).

I like AM’s stuff, though I find it mostly intriguing rather than unsettling in the way that the best surrealist works are. I think the Second Life aesthetic is too clean to really invoke that dream/nightmare feeling that you get from someone like Max Ernst.

My favourite is probably the “Lost Highway” segment of “The Space Between these Trees“:

space01

Doors again. The Doors of Perception perhaps. I should drop some mescaline next time I log on, I might get more of a nightmare thing going.

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Bötterdämmerung

April 24, 2009 by Leave a comment

… would have been a much better title for my last post, come to think of it.

I first saw Blade Runner during its original cinema run back in 1982, around the same time as I was reading all the early William Gibson stuff, and it had a similarly profound effect on my emerging aesthetic consciousness. Functional hi-tech amidst a crumbling cityscape has been my idea of what the future holds ever since, and it’s always seemed quite attractive. What with the depression, and global climate change, and the decline of the Western powers, it’s just about possible to imagine that Los Angeles in 2019 will look pretty much like it does in Ridley Scott’s movie, though maybe without the flying cars, and hopefully without the killer robots on the loose.

There is a Bladerunner City in SL, but the architecture on display owes more to the ziggurats of the Tyrell Corporation than the run-down streets of future LA which, for me, are the most visually pleasing element of the film. The owners of the sim are evidently interested in transhumanism; the welcome notecard at the entrance gives a brief history of the idea, from Dante to Huxley. I got the impression that they would prefer Roy Batty (surely the least threateningly-named homicidal android ever) to the crumpled Rick Deckard, though of course (spoiler alert) it turns out that Deckard’s human frailty is actually a more perfect realisation of the replicant-maker’s craft than Batty’s superhuman abilities (or not, it depends which version you watch).

I can’t say that I am familiar enough with the various strands of transhumanism to have a firm opinion about it; I do believe that technology changes who we are as humans, but I think that that process does not operate on the level of the individual, but rather is mediated through the changes in social organisation that accompany advances in science. To take the internet as an example, it is only now that we are working out how to use it in a social way, with things like Facebook, and blogs, and even Second Life, that the full civilisation-changing potential of the medium is becoming apparent. Maybe one day we will all be dreaming of electric sheep.

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Precocious wisdom

February 13, 2009 by Leave a comment

My assertion that only the young and inexperienced can have the confidence to write authoritatively about the mysteries of love seems to be borne out by the news that “How To Talk To Girls”, a book by nine-year-old Alec Greven, has made it on to the New York Times best-sellers list.

I would point to this as further evidence of the infantalisation of our culture, but, as far as I can tell from the reviews, the key tip the book imparts for clicking with the chicks is “Pay attention to them when they are talking about stuff they like”, which is actually pretty sound advice. I wish I had known that when I was nineteen, never mind nine.

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Cargo cult consciousness

February 12, 2009 by 2 Comments

There was once a time when I was a regular reader of the Second Life Herald, but these days I look at it only rarely. Founded by noted metaverse pioneer Peter Ludlow, aka Urizenus Sklar, the Herald, with its mission statement “to record, observe and study the legal, social and economic implications of life in the virtual world” promises some serious commentary on Second Life culture, a window into what is going on in the minds of the grid’s most interesting residents.

In reality the Herald is a strange brew; part superficial yet impenetrable gossip, part breathless exposé . I have never been able to decide if one is meant to take it seriously, or if it is in fact some sort of elaborate joke, a parody of our shallow, celebrity-obsessed culture and insatiably sensationalist media.

The overall impression, for me anyhow, is rather exclusive; to extend William Gibson’s high-school simile, it’s like the class newspaper edited by the popular kids; the geeks, dweebs and other losers can look but only dream about joining in. Just like any non-virtual celebrity-gossip publication in fact, but with one crucial difference; while real-life celebs, at least on the A-list, are objectively attractive, and their lifestyles glamorous, their Second Life counterparts are generally not much more aesthetically pleasing than the average avatar, and the accounts of their activities are seldom other than dull. The element that gives an edge to our culture’s worship of its secular idols – aspirational envy – is missing, and in its absence there is nothing to hold the reader’s attention.

For me the Herald is a good example of cargo cult culture; the idea that, by reproducing the form of a real-life phenomenon in the virtual universe, one can appropriate its significance. This theme seems to underlie a lot of what goes on in Second Life, and its essential fallacy is why life on the grid so often seems unfulfilling.

I think that it is mistake to see the potential of the metaverse as lying in the ability to mould a more perfect version of the real world. What is created by such an effort is but a shadow of reality; instead of emerging into the sunlight we retreat further into the cave. The real promise is contained in the possibility of experiencing something that augments our perception of reality rather than trying to reproduce elements of it. I don’t know if that is going on somewhere on the grid, and I’m not sure that I would be able to recognise it if it was, let alone articulate its meaning.

The problem is that everyone who comes to SL, myself included, brings with them the baggage of conscious and unconscious expectation. I am self-aware enough to know that in visiting the grid, and especially in writing about it in this blog, I am chasing after something that is missing in my real life. Put like that it sounds a bit dysfunctional, but I think that for most people a little wish-fulfillment is a healthy thing, and reflecting on experience in Second Life can provide useful insight into what is going on in one’s life outside the metaverse. Perhaps if Freud were living now he would ditch the interpretation of dreams in favour of avatar analysis as a royal road to the unconscious. It is of course possible to overdo this, and use one’s virtual life as a way of hiding from, rather than illuminating, the problems of real life. This desire to evade harsh reality is certainly one of the factors underlying internet addiction, or indeed any sort of addiction, but even for the non-addicted majority of SL residents, in whose number I count myself, there is a downside to the escapism – by using SL as a way of relieving my frustration with the limitations of my current existence I am locking myself into a real-world paradigm, and thus missing out on the what the grid really has to offer. If I was perfectly happy with my life I could perhaps approach SL with an open mind and experience its full potential, but then if I was perfectly happy with my life I wouldn’t be wasting hours sitting in front of a computer screen.

It’s the Second Life paradox; the people who will visit regularly do so because they are, more or less consciously, trying to fill some gap in their lives; as a consequence of this they are the least likely to be able to make the most of the opportunities SL affords. Meanwhile the people whose lives are fully realised, the very ones who would be best suited to exploring the possibilities of this new virtual world, will never feel the need to come anywhere near it.

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