Roy Christopher's Blog, page 4

The Acker Ethic

I’ve been thinking about allusion, quotation, and sampling in the broadest possible terms. It’s led me both deep into the self and what makes up consciousness and way, way outward into what constitutes reality. Some of the concerns are epistemological. That is, how we know what we know. And some are ontological. That is, how we be who we be. I’m zooming in and zooming out to find the limits of the concepts of reference and recycling.

Before we get to Kathy Acker’s writing practices, let’s start with brief survey of other perspectives:

In his book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (Tarcher, 2006), Daniel Pinchbeck extends Heisenberg’s idea that observation influences the observed into a Hegelian word-view that consciousness constitutes the core of reality, as if the physical world and our perception of it are merely two sides of the same phenomenon. Taken wholesale, it’s not quite solipsism, but it’s close. The act of writing blurs the lines even further.

In his introduction to Cicero’s On the Good Life, Michael Grant writes,

Cicero strongly believed that the universe is governed by a divine plan... When he looked round him at the marvels of the cosmos he could only conclude, adopting the “argument from design,” that they must be of divine origin. He was happy to adopt this form of religion, purified and illuminated by the knowledge of nature, because it justified his confidence in human beings, which was based, as has been seen, on the conviction that the mind or soul of each individual person is a reflection, indeed a part, of the divine mind.

Cicero held a distributed view of religion, each of us representing one aspect of the divine. Evoking both Immanual Kant and Jakob Johann von Uexküll in her book Ecstatic Worlds (MIT Press, 2017), Janine Marchessault writes,

Building upon Kant’s philosophy, Uexküll maintained that the world of every living organism on the earth is different from that of every other organism because of the uniqueness of its sensory organs and its environment; each creature inhabits a unique environment that is uniquely experienced. The world is thus made up of multiple, overlapping environments.

So, on one side, we’re each the eyes of the divine, but if each of us sees ourselves as the center of our own universe, then we all live in universes made up of our own observations and experiences. It’s its own many-worlds theory, even if just by a slight shift in point of view. For the sake of the discussion at hand, let’s adopt the theory—even if only by analogy. When we write, we take on a point of view, make observations, and relay experiences. Now, what if we step outside of ourselves and borrow points of view, observations, and experiences from others?

“I’m not an enclosed or self-sufficient being.” — Colette Peignot,
channeled by Kathy Acker in My Mother: Demonology

Kathy Acker in London in the late 1980s. [photo by Mark Baker]

Experimental writer and all around badass Kathy Acker would do just that. Her writing practice included variations on William Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s cut-up method, parody, pastiche, postmodernism, and forms that flirted with plagiarism. During a visit to RE/Search headquarters in 2012, her friend and ex-lover McKenzie Wark told V. Vale, “She would just read a book and re-write it. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she would just read Treasure Island and re-write it. You don’t wait for inspiration, you just get going” (italics in original). Wark met Acker in July of 1995 when she was visiting Sydney, Australia. The next year, Wark visited her in San Francisco. Their brief relationship, which largely existed between those two meetings, is chronicled via their collected emails in I’m Very Into You: Correspondence 1995–1996 (Semiotext(e), 2015).

Like everyone who came in contact with her, Wark was irrevocably inspired. Acker left no stone unthrown, no line uncrossed. Wark continues, “When I met her, she had three books… And she was writing Pussy, King of the Pirates (Grove Press, 1996). It’s one-third Treasure Island and two-thirds something else, and she would just read these three books and, almost at random, re-write them.” Acker explained her methods in a1990 interview with Sylvére Lotringer:

I placed very direct autobiographical, just diary material, right next to fake diary material. I tried to figure out who I wasn’t and I went to texts of murderesses. I just changed them into the first person, really not caring if the writing was good or bad, and put the fake first person text next to the true first person. And then continue to see what would happen. I used pre-Freudian texts because I didn’t want to deal with Freudian jargon. It was a very naive experiment at first. I was experimenting about identity in terms of language.

Like a mash-up artist or hip-hop producer, Acker would sample other texts, recontextualizing them among her own. It wasn’t a shortcut, it was an experiment, an exploration outside herself. Marchessault adds, “The environment described by Uexküll is defined by a multiplicity of overlapping subjective experiences of time.” Acker continues,

What a writer does, in 19th century terms, is that he takes a certain amount of experience and he “represents” that material. What I’m doing is simply taking text to be the same as the world, to be equal to non-text, in fact to be more real than non-text, and start representing text.

Acker was not plagiarizing or imitating but representing another’s text. It’s not mimésis or mimicry in the Aristotelian sense. A symbol on a map represents a particular building or destination, but it isn’t imitating that building or destination. As Acker added, “I didn’t copy it. I didn’t say it was mine.” She was smuggling in other points of view, other observations, other experiences, others. Hers was a proto-punk act of creative destruction.

In her Acker biography, After Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus writes, “But then again, didn’t she do what all writers must do? Create a position from which to write?” Architect of a different vector of bomb, one designed to level the pedestals of the literary canon, Acker could have proclaimed, “Now I am become life, creator of worlds.”

These are not the cover of The Grand Allusion.

The above are notes for a bit in my book-in-progress, The Grand Allusion (forthcoming from Repeater Books). I am admittedly reaching past my understanding of these concepts, so I have to say thanks to McKenzie Wark and Steven Shaviro for their guidance on this topic.

And thank you for reading,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

Bibliography:

Kathy Acker, Hannibal Lecter, My Father, New York: Semiotext(e), 1991.
Kathy Acker & McKenzie Wark, I’m Very Into You: Correspondence 1995–1996, New York: Semiotext(e), 2015.
Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology, New York: Grove Press, 1994.
Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates, New York: Grove Press, 1996.
Aristotle, Poetics, New York: Penguin Classics, 1996.
Michael Grant, Introduction, in Cicero, On the Good Life, New York: Penguin Books, 1971, 8.
Chris Kraus, After Kathy Acker: A Biography, New York: Semiotext(e), 2017.
Janine Marchessault, Ecstatic Worlds: Media, Utopias, Ecologies, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017.
Steven Shaviro, Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction About Postmodernism, San Francisco, CA: Serpent’s Tail, 1996.
V. Vale, A Visit from McKenzie Wark, San Francisco, CA: RE/Search Publications, 2014, 21.
McKenzie Wark, Philosophy for Spiders: On the Low Theory of Kathy Acker, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021.

When Everyone's a Winner

Celebrity, fame, and influence are inherently asymmetrical. They all require a one-to-many style of distribution akin to the wide-range broadcasting model of legacy media. As that media infrastructure has given way to smaller and smaller platforms serving smaller and smaller audiences, the ideas of celebrity, fame, and influence have been reconfigured and need to be redefined.

The dictum, “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes,” for which several sources have claimed credit, is widely attributed to Andy Warhol. Regardless of who first said it, those 15 minutes of the future are the popular origins of the long tail of fame. Though the phrase has been around since the late 1960s, its proposed future is here.

In his 1991 essay, “Pop Stars? Nein Danke!” Scottish recording artist Momus updates Warhol’s supposed phrase to say that in the future, everyone would be famous for 15 people, writing about the computer, “We now have a democratic technology, a technology which can help us all to produce and consume the new, ‘unpopular’ pop musics, each perfectly customized to our elective cults.” In Small Pieces Loosely Joined, David Weinberger’s 2002 book, he notes about bloggers, content creators, comment posters, and podcasters: “They are famous. They are celebrities. But only within a circle of a few hundred people.” He goes on to say that in the ever-splintering future, they will be famous to ever-fewer people, and—echoing Momus—that in the future provided by the internet, everyone will be famous for 15 people. Democratizing the medium means a dwindling of the fame that medium can support.

Around the turn of the millennium, the long tail, the internet-enabled power law that allows for millions of products to be sold regardless of shelf space, reconfigured not only how culture is consumed but also how it is created. It’s since gotten so long and so thick that there’s not much left in the big head. As the online market supports a wider and wider variety of cultural artifacts with less and less depth of interest, they each serve ever-smaller audiences. Even when a hit garners widespread attention, there are still more and more of us farther down the tail, each in our own little worlds.

In his 1996 memoir, A Year with Swollen Appendices, Brian Eno proposes the idea of edge culture, which is based on the premise that “If you abandon the idea that culture has a single center, and imagine that there is instead a network of active nodes, which may or may not be included in a particular journey across the field, you also abandon the idea that those nodes have absolute value. Their value changes according to which story they’re included in, and how prominently.” Eno’s edge culture is based on Joel Garreau’s idea of edge cities, which describes the center of urban life drifting out of the square and to the edges of town. The lengthening and thickening of the long tail plot our media culture as it moves from the shared center to the individuals on the edges, from one big story to infinite smaller ones.

Now, what does such splintering do to the economics of creating culture?

"The lottery sucks! I only won 17 bucks!" — Rioter in Bruce Almighty (2003).

Bruce Nolan, played by Jim Carrey in the 2003 movie, Bruce Almighty, is a man unimpressed with the way God is handling human affairs. In response, God lets him have a shot at it. One of the many aspects of the job that Bruce quickly mishandles is answering prayers. His head is flooded with so many, he can't even think. He sets up an email system to handle the flow, but the influx overwhelms his inbox. As a solution to that, he implements an autoresponder to send back a message that simply reads, “Yes” to every request.

Many of the incoming prayers are pleas to win the lottery. His wife’s sister Debbie hits it. “There were like 433 thousand other winners,” his wife Grace explains, “so it only paid out 17 dollars. Can you believe the odds of that?” Subject to Bruce’s automated email system, everyone who asked for a winning ticket got one. Out of the millions on offer, everyone who prayed to God to win the lottery won 17 dollars.

About 15 dollars. That’s what you get when you’re famous for 15 people for 15 minutes. That's what you get when everyone’s a winner.

"It’s all become marketing and we want to win because we’re lonely and empty and scared and we’re led to believe winning will change all that. But there is no winning."
— Charlie Kaufman, BAFTA, 2011

The mainstream isn’t the monolith it once was. It’s a relatively small slice of the total culture now, markedly smaller than it was at the end of last century. For better or worse, the internet has democratized the culture-creating and distributing processes we used to privilege (e.g., writing, music, comedy, filmmaking, etc.), and it’s brought along new forms in its image. Since the long tail took hold around the turn of the millennium, the edge culture of the internet has splintered even further via social media and mobile devices. Anyone can now create content and be famous for 15 people for 15 minutes—and earn 15 dollars for their efforts.

The Medium Picture

This repost from the archives is an excerpt from my book, The Medium Picture (coming out next year from the UGA Press). Here's the brief overview:

The ever-evolving ways that we interact with each other, our world, and our selves through technology is a topic as worn as the devices we clutch and carry everyday. How did we get here? Drawing from the disciplines of media ecology and media archaeology, as well as bringing fresh perspectives from subcultures of music and skateboarding, the book illuminates aspects of technological mediation that have been overlooked along the way. With a Foreword by Andrew McLuhan, The Medium Picture shows how immersion in unmoored technologies of connectivity finds us in a world of pure media and redefines who we are, how we are, and what we will be.

About The Medium Picture, William Gibson says,

“Very much looking forward to reading new Christopher, exactly the sort of contemporary cultural analysis to yield unnerving flashes of the future.”

And Paul Levinson adds,

“Brilliant, pathbreaking, palpable insights… Worthy of McLuhan.”

Be on the lookout…

As always, thank you for reading, responding, subscribing, and sharing,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

Awful Ever After

I woke up in the middle of a curve. These days feel like more and more taking a turn too hard and trying to regain your bearings. Sometimes the centrifugal realizations aren’t even new, but they get recontextualized repeatedly around that curve, given new information, knowledge, or experience.

For example, I realized a while ago that the idea of cool isn’t a stable phenomenon. Everything that used to be cool is now remade, rebooted, recycled—when it isn’t rejected outright. That realization is not new, but it has a new relevance when the cool that is contested is your own. When your own idea of cool slips from the zeitgeist, it’s a reckoning. It’s one thing to hold an idea like that out at an academic length, and wholly another to be slammed right up against it.

“Here there is a tabula rasa of indifference. It is like attending a family gathering and realizing you are old, and the new generation does not give a fuck about you or your experience.” – from Tade Thomson’s Rosewater

There’s a time just before your own that remains relevant and influential whether you acknowledge it or not. We tend to compress the time before us right up against our first memories, like a wave against a wall, forgetting the ocean of events swelling behind it. But no one cares what was cool before they were born. An abject lack of history makes it all fair game. Some things that happened “in the ‘90s” actually happened in the ‘60s, ‘70s, or ‘80s. No one really cares when.

We tend to compress the time before us right up against our first memories, like a wave against a wall, forgetting the ocean of events swelling behind it.

In addition, if you’re waiting to get back to that lovely little time—accurate or not, real or imagined—as if something will change and we’ll all return to some former state of comfort or ease, you can stop waiting: We’re never going back—not to the time before a certain presidency, not to the time before COVID-19, not to the time before 9/11, not even the time before social media and smartphones.

For example, The technical infrastructure of television is unrecognizable compared to what it was during its debut in our homes, but it’s still here, our window to the wider world. The telephone has also been wholly reconfigured, but it’s still here, always with us. We can’t cut the cord. Once we adopt these things, they don’t go away.

When I look up from my phone and see everyone else walking around staring at their phones, I always think about us looking back on this time. “Remember when everyone used to walk around looking at their phones? Ah, the Good Ol’ Days!” But can you imagine the next thing being better? Wearables and implants aren’t better to me than just being able to leave the damn devices at home. That’s never going to happen again.

So, are we really trying to stay connected or are we just trying to stay distracted? Maybe the curve never straightens back out. Maybe this is the new normal: chronic dizziness from rounding the grate in the drain, over and over, amen.

New clipping. Video!

To take the sting out of my Sunday morning musing, here’s a new video from my dudes clipping.! “Run It” is from the hip-hop vs cyberpunk project, Dead Channel Sky, due out next March from Sub Pop (more on that soon). Check it out!

Thank you for reading, responding, and sharing,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

BOOGIE DOWN PREDICTIONS is Two!

Hey, it’s been two years since Boogie Down Predictions dropped!

The great Greg Tate called it, “The bomb diggety!” and Dan Charnas says, “Roy Christopher has given us more than a book; it’s a cypher and everyone involved brought bars.”

Here’s a bit more about how it came together and what it’s been up to since. Read on!

Cover art by Savage Pencil.

While I was writing my book Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future (Repeater Books, 2019), I gathered up some friends, and we put together an edited collection as sort of a companion to Dead Precedents. Time was one of the aspects of both hip-hop and science fiction that I didn’t get to talk about much in that book, so I started asking around. I found many other writers, scholars, theorists, DJs, and emcees, as interested in the intersection of hip-hop and time as I was. I had three solid pieces at the end of the first day! As I continued contacting people and collecting essays, I got more and more excited about the book. Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism is a quest to understand the connections between time, representation, and identity within hip-hop culture, as well as what that means for the culture at large.

Crazy respect to Jeff Chang for the kind words.

Here’s my Preface to Boogie Down Predictions:

That Banging is the Rhythm.
That Banging is the Beat.

“It’s harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future.”
— William Gibson

“What can you do? You can’t turn back the clock.That’s why you keep on moving, and you don’t stop.”— Babbletron, “The Clock Song”

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” So begins the prologue to L. P. Hartley’s 1953 novel The Go-Between. Time is as inescapable as it is impossible to conceive. Technology tries to tame it, chopping it into discrete bits and arranging them in manageable lines: the alphabet, the printing press, the clock, the internet. Marshal McLuhan once wrote, “Just as work began with the division of labor, duration begins with the division of time, and especially with those subdivisions by which mechanical clocks impose uniform succession on the time sense.” From Frederick Taylor’s studies of time and scientific management to the division of labor of Taylor and Henry Ford, the inventors of modern industrialization, division and duration are operative terms for the technologies of time.

If you were asked to name the salient elements that define hip-hop music, sampling would be among the first things to come to mind. If you’re reading this, you know it started manually with fingers finessing black vinyl, chopping and stretching tones on two turntables. The manual mixing of recorded sounds by DJs allows them to, as Naut Humon puts it, “Manipulate time with your hands!” Reconfigured and recontextualized notes lift hip-hop out of the linear, tying it equally to both forgotten pasts and lost futures. Because of sampling, hip-hop’s manipulation of sound is also its manipulation of time. More so than any other musical genre, hip- hop toys with temporality.

Dart Adams knows the time.

Further stretching this frame, the aesthetic of hip-hop’s early days feels like possible futures. Way before Tupac and Dr. Dre danced in the desert and Chuck D was doorman to the Terrordome, things were always already going down in the Boogie Down Bronx. The post-apocalyptic scene there in the early 1970s, the repurposing of left-behind technology, the hand-styled hieroglyphics on every building wall, and the gyrating dance moves: an entire culture assembled from the freshest of what was available at hand.

Whereas the dominant (read: “European, white, male”) culture of the 20th century regularly pictured the next century through stories and inventions, that hasn’t been the case as much among those same folks so far in the 21st. Even as far back as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, which viewed its 1887 present from a fictional year-2000 wherein the United States had evolved into a technologically enabled, Marxist utopia. Twenty-first century tales that venture to look that far ahead rarely find such positive results, especially where technology is concerned.

With that said, it would be remiss to talk about hip-hop and its tumultuous relationship with time without mentioning Afrofuturism. “Afrofuturism is me, us [...] is black people seeing ourselves in the future,” says Janelle Monáe, whose futuristic R&B concept records The ArchAndroid, The Electric Lady, and Dirty Computer imagine android allegories in alternative futures. Afrofuturism addresses the neglect of the Black Diaspora not only historically but also in science-fiction visions of the future.

#1 New Release on Amazon, y’all!

Through its relationship with time and its technological manipulation thereof, hip-hop also invites us to view different vantages of the future. Just as it recycles and revises the past, hip-hop also invites us to re-imagine the future. As we will see, these re-imaginings are far from apolitical. William Gibson is fond of saying that the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet. Any reader of history knows that the past isn’t evenly distributed either. Drawing different conclusions from the past and picturing a future that is different from the present are the very essence of resistance.

“Hip-hop is imprisoned within digital tools like the rest of us,” writes the technologist and musician Jaron Lanier. “But at least it bangs fiercely against the walls of its confinement,” That banging is the rhythm. That banging is the beat. That banging is the celebration of days past and the longing for better ones to come. As Kodwo Eshun writes in his 2003 essay, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism,” reprinted herein,

Afrofuturism approaches contemporary music as an intertext of recurring literary quotations that may be cited and used as statements capable of imaginatively reordering chronology and fantasizing history. Social reality and science fiction create feedback between each other within the same phrase.

Though this dialog between social reality and its fictional futures has occurred since we started telling stories, mechanical and digital reproduction has made the exchange easier and much wider spread. The division of sampling and duration of remixing keeps the feedback flowing in time. As Jacques Attali puts it, “Our music foretells our future. Let us lend it an ear.”

Charles Mudede’s Book Nook

Our old friend Charles Mudede Recommended Boogie Down Predictions as a Christmas gift, pointing out a few of the features of the text as well as a special appearance by a cat.

Me and Ytasha Womack talking hip-hop and Afrofuturism at Volumes Books in Chicago. [Photo by Shannon Keane.]BDP in Chicago!

Ytasha Womack, who wrote the Introduction, and I did an event for Boogie Down Predictions this July at Volumes Books in Chicago, and you missed a treat if you weren’t there.

BDP at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. [photo by Ytasha Womack] BDP in Houston!

On a Sunday afternoon last year at Houston Public Library's African American History Research Center at the Gregory Campus, the poet, artist, activist, and teacher Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton and I discussed hip-hop culture, myth-making, and Afrofuturism. Mouton’s memoir, Black Chameleon: Memory, Womanhood, and Myth, (Henry Holt, 2023),  explores the use of modern mythology as a path to social commentary. Thanks to Deep and James Stancil (organizer and moderator), it was a raucous talk about all of the above.

Me and Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton at the Houston Public Library's African American History Research Center. [photo by Lily Brewer]

Thank you!

Many thanks to Jamie Sutcliffe and Mark Pilkington at Strange Attractor Press for their support and enthusiasm, Dominic Rafferty for the stellar layouts, and Savage Pencil for the dopest cover. Thanks to those who contributed words, images, blurbs, and direction, those who wished us well, and those who didn’t. Thanks to Rebecca and Kimberly at Volumes Books for their continued support, to Ytasha Womack and Deep Mouton for their support, to James Stancil and all at Intellect U Well, Inc., and to you for checking it out!

BDP at Rough Trade in the UK.

And if you don’t have a copy, do yourself a favor!

Thank you for reading, responding, subscribing, and sharing!

We in this,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

The Grand Allusion

I’ve been studying and writing about allusions since Matt McGlone pointed me toward them when I took his graduate class on metaphor at the University of Texas at Austin. I ended up doing my doctoral dissertation on the use of allusion in rap lyrics, and I’ve wanted to expand the idea ever since.

Sometimes an allusion is not necessarily an homage. Sometimes it’s just “inspiration.” Deborah Harry in 1976, and Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn in 2016.

Well, I just signed on to write a book about them called The Grand Allusion for Repeater Books! To commemorate the announcement, I thought I'd repost my early thoughts on the idea.

There are a lot of tenuously connected ideas bouncing around in what passes for an overview below, so thank you for enduring my thinking aloud. I'll be sorting these thoughts out further for the book.

Read on!

Medianesia

On his spoken-word album Bomb the Womb (Gang of Seven) from 30 years ago, Hugh Brown Shü does a great bit about it being 1992, and everything seeming familiar. “What has been will be again,” reads Ecclesiastes 1:9. “What has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” That old familiar feeling has been around longer than we’d like to admit, but how do make sense of things that seem familiar but really aren’t?

The first time I heard “The Pursuit of Happiness” by Kid Cudi (2009), I felt like something was a bit off about it. I felt like it had originally be sung by a woman, and he’d just jacked the chorus for the hook. I distinctly remembered the vocals being sung by a woman but also that they were mechanically looped, sampled, or manipulated in some way.

Upon further investigation I found that the song was indeed originally Kid Cudi’s, but that Lissie had done a cover version of it. Her version is featured in the Girl/Chocolate skateboard video Pretty Sweet (2012), which I have watched many times. Even further digging found the true cause of my confusion: A sample of the Lissie version forms the hook of ScHoolboy Q’s song with A$AP Rocky, “Hands on the Wheel.” This last was the version I had in my head and the source of my confusion.

I use this rather tame example to show how easy it is to be unsure about the source of something that we feel like we know. It’s a form of medianesia where our entertainment messes with our memories. The phenomenon plays out in many other contexts as well.

Visualize Allusions Dave Vanian of The Damned on the cover of Slash #1, May 1977, and Playboi Carti on the cover of his record Whole Lotta Red, 2020.

The cover art for Playboi Carti’s 2020 record, Whole Lotta Red (AWGE/Interscope) knocks off the lo-fi aesthetic of classic punk magazine Slash. This isn’t the first time Carti’s visual aesthetic has paid homage to punk.

Playboi Carti Die Lit (2018).

The stage-diving photo on the cover of his 2018 record, Die Lit (AWGE/Interscope), recalls a similar SST promo photo of HR of Bad Brains, who was notorious for doing backflips on stage. It’s closer to Edward Colver’s classic 1981 Wasted Youth live shot, which appeared on the back of their Reagan’s In LP (ICI Productions).

Wasted Youth Regan’s In (1981). Photo by Ed Colver.

Such allusions are everywhere in our media. They’re also prevalent in human interpersonal communication. The example I always cite for this comes from Adbusters Magazine founder Kalle Lasn. In his 1999 book Culture Jam, Lasn describes a scene in which two people are embarking on a road trip and speak to each other along the way using only quotations from movies. Based on this idea and the rampant branding and advertising covering any surface upon which an eye may light, Lasn argues that our culture has inducted us into a cult: “By consensus, cult members speak a kind of corporate Esperanto: words and ideas sucked up from TV and advertising.” Indeed, we quote television shows, allude to fictional characters and situations, and repeat song lyrics and slogans in everyday conversations. Lasn argues, “We have been recruited into roles and behavior patterns we did not consciously choose” (emphasis in original).

Social Steganography

Lasn writes about this scenario as if it is a nightmare, but to many of us, this sounds not only familiar but also fun. Our media is so saturated with allusions to other media that we scarcely think about them. A viewing of any single episode of popular television shows Family Guy, South Park, or Robot Chicken yields allusions to any number of artifacts and cultural detritus past. Their meaning relies in large part on the catching and interpreting of cultural allusions, on their audiences sharing the same mediated memories, the same mediated experiences.

In an article from 2015, Devin Blake uses comedy as an example. Pointing to the well-established fact that we no longer define ourselves by what we produce but by what we consume, he marks the rise of what he calls “consumer comedy.” That is, comedy that references other media in order to pack its punchlines. “A lot of what happens in late night TV, for example,” he writes, “seems to involve things that we consume, namely other media like TV shows, movies, and music.” The added knowledge of an allusion is crucial for comedy in that if the audience doesn’t catch a reference, they won’t get the joke. Blake adds the critical insight: “A world of comedy-for-consumers is different than one filled with comedy-for-producers.” The consumption of information is not tethered to the physical world in the way that the production of material goods is.

Marshall McLuhan would frame these media allusions in Gestalt psychology terms as figure and ground. The figure being the overt reference—visual, verbal, or otherwise—and the ground being the invisible referent—the original image or text. “The figure is what appears and the ground is always subliminal,” he wrote. In the visual allusions above for instance, the figure is what you see, and the ground is the source material, the knowledge you have that you’ve seen the thing before, that old familiar feeling. The figure is the artifact at hand, and the ground is the historical context it’s indexing.

Deborah Harry had a Slash cover, too. Issue #5, October 1977.

So widespread is the use of allusion in our media that it has become its own cultural form. Following allusions on a path through media provides a unique way to understand contemporary mediated culture. Because allusion relies on shared media memories, exploring its use and function in media and conversation helps answer questions of how such mediated messages are stored, conceived, retrieved, and received.

Allusive tactics are not limited to television shows, movies, music, and conversations. Users employ them on social media as a form of social steganography. That is, hiding encoded messages where no one is likely to be looking for them: right out in the open. In one study, a teen user has problems with her mother commenting on her status updates. She finds it an invasion of her privacy, and her mom's eagerness to intervene squelches the online conversations she has with her friends. When she broke up with her boyfriend, she wanted to express her feelings to her friends but without alarming her mother. Instead of posting her feelings directly, she posted lyrics from “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.” Not knowing the allusion, her mom thought she was having a good day. Knowing that the song is from the 1979 Monty Python movie, Life of Brian, and that it is sung while the characters are being crucified, her friends knew that all was not well and texted her to find out what was going on.

Flowers for QAnon Howling on hallowed ground: Jake Angeli a.k.a. the QAnon Shaman.

Social steganography is not always so innocuous. Media allusions are arguably more vital on social media where memes are the currency exchanged. Conspiracy theories are spread online through shared texts as their adherents rally around allusions to those texts. The hidden knowledge allows these groups to communicate with each other out in the open without alarming others or stirring up ire or opposition. So-called “dog whistles,” these allusions are shibboleths shared by members and ignored by others. QAnon has largely shared references to their own rumors and accusations, but other texts like William Luther Pierce's The Turner Diaries and the Luther Blissett Project’s novel Q are also touchstones. On the possible connections between the Q of QAnon and the Q novel, Luther Blissett member Wu Ming 1 says, “Once a novel, or a song, or any work of art is in the world out there, you can’t prevent people from citing it, quoting it, or making references to it.”

If we’re all watching broadcast television, we’re all seeing the same shows. If we’re all on the same social network, no two of us are seeing the same thing. The limited access to content via broadcast media used to unite us. Now we're only loosely united via the platform, and the platform itself doesn't matter. What matters is ephemeral and esoteric knowledge, knowing the memes, getting the references, catching the allusions. The references are stronger than their original media vessels. As less and less of us share the ground of each figure, the latter outmodes the former as it shrinks. Whether images from other media or quotations from a text, the allusions themselves outmode the vehicles that carry them.

As always, thank you for reading, responding, and sharing.

I appreciate you,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

About Time

The time-travel trope never seems to wear thin. Even a bad time-travel story has its moments. Madeleine L'Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time (1962) was the first full-length novel I ever read, and something about it latched onto my sixth-grade imagination and hasn’t let go. Several of my favorite all-time stories involve time travel to some extent.

“Part of the fascination of time travel concerns the stark paradoxes that threaten as soon as travel into the past is considered,” writes the theoretical physicist Paul Davies in his 2001 book How to Build a Time Machine. “Perhaps causal loops can be made self-consistent. Perhaps reality consists of multiple universes.” These thought experiments are rife with unanswered and unanswerable questions, which are the very stuff of great stories.

Though the concept started in religion, it was popularized by H.G. Wells’ 1895 novella, The Time Machine. Mechanical time travel has remained a standard in science fiction ever since. According to James Gleick’s Time Travel: A History (Pantheon, 2016), H.G. Wells wasn’t trying to explain anything. He was just trying to come up with a “plausible-sounding plot device” for a story.

There are the plausible-sounding back-in-time explorations like the Back to the Future franchise (1985-1990), and the time-loop lunacy of Groundhog Day (1993), as well as the outright hysterics of Hot Tub Time Machine (2010) and Hot Tub Time Machine 2 (2015), but they’re not all winners. Project Almanac (2015) illustrates the inherent paradoxes of temporal travel and their intrigue while still being only an okay movie, but it falters in spite of the time travel rather than because of it. 2009’s Triangle also loops time into a muddy and often confusing story. Time travel can be such a cumbersome cognitive load that it’s difficult to get right in a story with much else going on and even harder to make feel real. And then of course there’s Justin Smith Ruiu’s ChronoSwoop app.

With that said, here are twenty one of my favorite stories that feature time travel in one form or another.

“Time is a game
played beautifully
by children.”
— Heraclitus, Fragment 79

Jack Purvis, Malcolm Dixon, Tiny Ross, David Rappaport, and Craig Warnock in Time Bandits (1981).Time Bandits

The story that best captures my childhood fascination with adventure—and directly follows the feeling I got from A Wrinkle in Time—is Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits (1981). Reluctant to go to bed, a young boy (Kevin) is soon whisked away by a band of tiny time-traveling thieves who’ve stolen a map of the universe from the Supreme Being. Through portals marked on the map, they bounce through time, stealing whatever they can along the way. Though young Kevin has been longing for adventure, soon all he wants is to get back home.

David Sullivan and Shane Carruth in Primer (2004).Primer

Written, directed, produced, edited, and scored by Shane Carruth, who also costars, Primer (2004) is a D.I.Y. garage sci-fi thriller. It got a lot of attention upon its release in 2004 for its bargain budget, but it’s an achievement at any price. Friends and engineering colleagues Aaron (Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan) build a box that turns out to enable them to travel back in time. The fact that they stumble upon this ability and then use it for fairly frivolous means (stock trades) doesn’t dull the chronologically jumbled plot or the inevitable unraveling of their relationship.

Cristin Milioti and Andy Samberg in Palm Springs (2020).Palm Springs

Right when you thought the time-loop concept was past tense, it comes back around again, just as renewed and refreshed as it is recurring. A destination wedding is the setting for the temporal hijinks in Max Barbakow’s Palm Springs (2020). Like the Harlequin in Harlan Ellison’s “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman,” who deliberately knocks a clockwork world out of its scheduled whack, Nyles (Andy Samberg) breaks everyone out of their routines and shows them a different way through the wedding day, over and over again, until Roy (J.K. Simmons) and Sarah (Cristin Milioti), er, shake things up for him.

Karra Elejalde and Bárbara Goenaga in Timecrimes (2007).Timecrimes

Timecrimes (Los Cronocrímenes; 2007) capitalizes on its causal loops and suspenseful twists rather than wasting them. The film contains exactly four actors, and its action takes place over the course of about an hour and a half. In its handling of causality, Timecrimes is somewhere between Primer and the popular Back to the Future franchise of the 1980s, both of which feature extensive backwards time travel. Like Primer, which uses time travel as the pretext for the study of larger issues, Timecrimes evokes themes of voyeurism and ethics in addition to its time-looping structure and the subsequent questions of causality. [See my full write-up in the Econo Clash Review.]

Safety Not Guaranteed

Inspired by a classified ad that ran in Backwoods Home Magazine in 1997, Safety Not Guaranteed (2012) shows how the possibilities of time travel test our loyalties. All of the film’s characters are faced with decision points that didn’t exist before but that point back to issues they should’ve already processed: one applying for medical school, one tracking down his high-school flame, one seemingly above everything anyway. It’s a surprisingly poignant and effective movie.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

The narrator in Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Vintage, 2010) is a time-machine mechanic. Charles (the narrator has the same name as the author) travels around in his TM-31 Recreational Time Travel Device, alone save his AI supervisor Phil, his onboard computer TAMMY, and his imaginary dog Ed. His mom is stuck in a time-loop, and his dad—inventor of the TM-31—is missing. That premise and those few details unfold into some interesting possibilities and wild predicaments.

Robert Pattinson and John David Washington in Tenet (2020).Tenet

Before Tenet (2021), the writer and director Christopher Nolan was often criticized for being all head and no heart, but when he ventures too far into love (e.g., Inception and Interstellar), he falters. With Tenet, Nolan seems to stay with his strengths, one of those being the technical intricacies of time travel. Here it’s not so much time travel as we think of it but reversed entropy. So, within this ontology, if one wants to go back in time, one must travel through that piece of time backwards (i.e., you can’t blink back to last Tuesday; you have to go backwards through all the days since then to get there). This yields unique results and finds Nolan at the peak of his powers. Though someone described Tenet as “a puzzle box with nothing inside,” I say it’s well worth the puzzlin’.

The tangled timelines of Lauren Beukes’ The Shining Girls (2013).The Shining Girls

“The problem with snapshots,” Kirby Mazrachi thinks, “is that they replace actual memories. You lock down the moment and it becomes all there is of it.” Kirby is one of the girls in The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes (Mulholland Books, 2013), a disturbingly beguiling novel that is now an Apple TV series in which Elisabeth Moss plays Kirby. Beukes’ easily digestible prose and gleefully nagging narrative betray a convoluted timeline and staggering depth of research. Drifter Harper Curtis (played in the show by Jamie Bell) quantum leaps from time to time gutting the girls as he goes. The House he squats in his helper, enabling the temporal jaunts. He’s like an inverted Patrick Bateman: no money, all motive. Where Bateman’s stories are told from his point of view in the tones of torture-porn, Harper’s kills are described from the abject horror of the victims. And the victims, who are all strong-willed women with drive and purpose, are only victims at his hand. Otherwise they shine with potential and promise. [Read my full review.]

The babyfaced killer and Jessica Rothe in Happy Death Day 2U (2019).Happy Death Day and Happy Death Day 2U

Time-loops don’t get any loopier than this. One of the genius turns in the script for Groundhog Day, written by Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis, was their use of the Kübler-Ross model of the five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—as an outline for the loops. Christopher Landon’s Happy Death Day (2017) follows Tree (Jessica Rothe) stumbling through a similar cycle. In its sequel, Happy Death Day 2U (2019), a different person is stuck in the next day, and given her repeated previous experience, Tree steps in to help. And a third Happy Death Day is on the way!

Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt in Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys (1995).12 Monkeys

A core thread of 12 Monkeys is Gaston Bachelard’s Cassandra Complex, in which one is given knowledge of the future, but is unable to convince anyone that the knowledge is true. Inspired by a 1964 French short called La Jetée written and directed by Chris Marker, Terry Gilliam expanded it in 1995 into a feature film starring Bruce Willis, Brad Pitt, Madeline Stowe, and David Morse. James Cole (Willis) is a prisoner in a decimated 2035, having been ravaged by a virus released in 1996. Cole is sent back to 1995 to try and find the source and stop it, but no one believes his claims of imminent doom.

Chloë Grace-Moretz as Flynne Fisher in Scott B. Smith’s adaptation of William Gibson’s The Peripheral (2022).The Peripheral

After three novels set in the present, The Peripheral (Putnam, 2014) marked William Gibson’s return to the future. The story projects all of the hallmarks of cyberpunk both into the near future and much further afield. In the far future, what passes for a government has figured out how to open new timelines in the past (a.k.a. “stubs”) just prior to an apocalyptic event. As in 12 Monkeys, they’re trying to figure out what happened and somehow benefit from it, exploiting the past for gain in their present. The television adaptation predictably deviates from the novel, but is also pretty great.

Logograms from Denis Villenueve’s Arrival (2016).The Story of Your Life

Leveraging a very strict interpretation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (i.e., that the language you speak creates and shapes the reality you live in), the lead scientist in Ted Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life,” Dr. Louise Banks (played by Amy Adams in Denis Villenueve’s 2016 adaptation, Arrival), starts to see the world through the language of the alien visitors, the heptapods. Their language, like their perception of time, is nonlinear, so Banks begins to experience her story, and that of her daughter’s short life, according to the alien linguistic sequence.

Jake Gyllenhaal, director Duncan Jones, and Michelle Monaghan on the set of Source Code (2011).Source Code

What happens to one reality when we change another quantum reality’s outcome? Source Code, the system for which the movie is named, uses the last eight minutes of brain activity we all experience upon death to allow a person to experience a different timeline in another, compatible person (via quantum entanglement and “parabolic calculus”;  As William Gibson put it, “The people who complain about Source Code not getting quantum whatsit right probably thought Moon was about cloning.”). The idea of the system is to be able to find out what happened just before a catastrophic event (in this case a train bombing), in order to prevent further events from happening (e.g., a massive dirty bomb set for downtown Chicago). Somewhere between brain stimulation and computer simulation, Source Code does its work. But Captain Coulter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) goes in for one last shot at getting everything just right (like Aaron’s repeated runs in Primer) and manages to manipulate more than the system is supposed to allow.

Kindred

Octavia Butler’s Kindred (Doubleday, 1979) keeps landing her self-styled protagonist (Dana) in the slavery-era of the American South. Though she meets some of her ancestors, her jaunts are unplanned and unpredictable, making this a harrowing read at best. Among many other things, Butler is one of the few authors to address the physical dangers of time travel, as Dana loses an arm during her first temporal trip.

The Hazards of Time Travel

Can you be nostalgic for the future? In Joyce Carol Oates’ The Hazards of Time Travel (Ecco Press, 2018), the 17-year-old Adriane Strohl is exiled 80 years in her past (1959), finds another expatriate from their present (2039) and thus begins a time-fraught, dystopian love story.

The Time Traveler’s Wife

Audrey Neffenegger’s debut novel, The Time Traveler’s Wife (MacAdam/Cage, 2003), has already been generative enough to yield a movie and a TV series. In another interesting take on temporal logistics, the time-traveler himself, Henry, makes his unexpected jumps due to a genetic disorder.

Donnie Darko

I’ve already written quite a bit about Richard Kelly’s 2001 Halloween myth, Donnie Darko, but it deserves mention for Kelly’s attempt at constructing a comic-book logic of time travel. As somnambulistic as it is, from the very beginning of the movie, something is off, and the traveler is drawn to fix it. He leverages help from unwitting friends, family, and authority figures to correct the anomoly. [Read my full write-up.]

This is How You Lose the Time War

Cowritten by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, This is How You Lose the Time War (Saga Press, 2020) chronicles the correspondence between two lovers/enemies in a war over the fate of the universe. This epistolary novel is written from the highest vantage point on time and space I’ve ever seen. Its time travel is only due to its scale. It’s difficult to even describe the scope of it, but thankfully the drama between them is relatable to all.

Before I Fall

Lauren Oliver’s Before I Fall (HarperCollins, 2010) puts a YA twist on yet another time-loop story that flows through different stages of purpose and grief. Seventeen-year-old Sam Kingston keeps having to redo February 12, “Cupid's Day,” and has to keep doing it until she gets it right. Sam approaches the repeated day in ways she wouldn’t normally, surprising her friends and family. Like the novel, the movie—starring Zoey Deutch as Sam—is somehow both dark and uplifting.

Detention

Joseph Kahn’s 2011 genre-melting thriller Detention is a wild, wild ride. It’s like The Breakfast Club meets The Faculty meets Back to the Future. Through their school mascot, a giant grizzly bear (the time “machine”), secrets about these misfits in detention, the principle who put them there, and their collective past are revealed. Oh, also one of them is a serial killer.

The Future of Another Timeline

Once it’s possible to repair the past, which revision remains? Bouncing between 2022 and 1992, The Future of Another Timeline (Tor, 2020) by Annalee Newitz explores the very notion of what time and history actually mean when you can travel through one to change the other, yet also how everything is connected to everything else.

“Just as the river where I step
is not the same, and is,
so am I as I am not.”
— Heraclitus, Fragment 81

You Don’t Know What You’ve Got Until You Get It Back.

Different Waves, Different Depths, my recent short story collection, includes two time-travel stories. One, which explores the time-loop trap of trauma, is called “Not a Day Goes By,” and the other is a novella-length, go-back-and-fix-things love story called “Fender the Fall,” the tagline of which is You Don’t Know What You’ve Got Until You Get It Back. Those are only two of the nine stories total. Get yours!

Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism

Speaking of time, our collection Boogie Down Predictions covers the many ways that hip-hop tampers with temporality through essays by Omar Akbar (“The Theology of Timing”: Black Consciousness and the Origin of Hip-hop Culture), Juice Aleem (The Free Space/Time Style of Black Wholes), Kodwo Eshun (Further Considerations on Afrofuturism), Erik Steinskog (Preprogramming the Present: The Musical Time Machines of Gabriel Teodros), and Rasheedah Phillips (Constructing a Theory and Practice of Black Quantum Futurism), among many, many others. Check it out!

If I missed your favorite time-travel tale, let me know. Special thanks to Dominic Pettman for his input on this topic.

As always, thank you for reading, responding, and sharing.

Looking forward,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

Strange Exiles: Freestyle Media

I’ve been on the road for the past month, from Jacksonville, Florida to southeast Alabama, over to Austin, Texas, to the hills of middle Tennessee, back to Alabama... I’ve visited with friends I’ve had for decades, my partner of 13 years, and my parents and sister. Getting offline and into the real world with real people sounds as corny as it is simple, but it’s been a great reminder of who we really are. I recommend it.

With that said, here are two of the best interviews I’ve ever been the subject of and a couple of articles from the last few weeks—even a bit of one from several years ago.

Read on!

Freestyle Media

Bram E. Gieben, the host of the Strange Exiles podcast and newsletter and author of The Darkest Timeline (Revol Press, 2024), and I had an hour-long discussion that covers most of my writing, from zines and magazines to blogs and books, and many of my influences along the way.

Here’s a bit from Bram’s introduction:

I’ve been especially looking forward to this interview with media theorist, cultural critic and hip-hop futurist Roy Christopher, author of one of my favourite books of the past decade, Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future.

A treatise on the common origins, concerns and themes of cyberpunk and rap music that takes in William Gibson, the CCRU, Rammellzee and The Bomb Squad, it’s a mythopoeic masterpiece of research and criticism.

We spoke for an hour about his origins in BMX zine culture, the life of a culture journalist, his journey into media theory, and his influences from Spike Jonze to Marshall McLuhan.

Give it a listen, share it with someone who might dig it, and give Strange Exiles a follow. Bram is doing great work over there.

Strange Exiles Episode 26: Roy Christopher - Freestyle MediaI’ve been especially looking forward to this interview with media theorist, cultural critic and hip-hop futurist Roy Christopher, author of one of my favourite books of the past decade, Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future. A treatise on the common origins, concerns and themes of cyberpunk and rap music that takes in William Gibson, the CCRU… Listen now2 hours ago · Strange Exiles and Roy ChristopherMy “Mining Affordances” piece in the Henry Ford Magazine

I wrote a piece about skateboarding for the Summer/Fall 2024 issue of the Henry Ford Magazine. “Mining Affordances” explores the way that riding a skateboard reshapes one’s relationship with the world, the environment, and oneself.

Here’s an excerpt:

Skateboarders find their own use for everything in the city. First it was surfing the open waves of sidewalks and streets. Then the challenges of the steep walls in empty backyard pools beckoned. Eventually, street skating found affordances in everything: ledges, curbs, stairs, handrails—edges and angles of all kinds. The pro skateboarder John Rattray adds, “It’s been game-changing for me to learn how and why the actual movement of skateboarding helps us to neurologically regulate.” Even with the proliferation of skateparks, pure street skating is still the true measure of skill and vision.

Many thanks to Kristen Gallerneaux for inviting me to do this piece, Jennifer LaForce, Julie Friedman, and all at Octane Design and the Henry Ford Magazine.

You can flip through the magazine online or download the .pdf of my essay.

“A good idea well-articulated is what moves me. Sometimes that’s a song, a poem or a movie. Sometimes it’s just a well-formed sentence. There's nothing quite like a novel thought taking root in a fertile mind.” — Roy Christopher

My bit on the Contributors Page of the Summer/Fall 2024 of the Henry Ford Magazine.ICYMI: Another Interview

As you know from my last newsletter, Chase Griffin recently did an interview with me for Metapsychosis, a journal of consciousness, literature, and art. Chase is the author of What’s on the Menu? (Long Day Press, 2020), the forthcoming Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace (Corona\Samizdat), as well as co-author (with Christina Quay) of How to Play a Necromancer’s Theremin (Maudlin House, 2023). Thanks to Chase’s insightful questions, he and I cover quite a lot in this short but wide-ranging conversation.

This is a very different discussion and a nice companion to the Strange Exiles discussion above.

If you missed it, check it out! If you read it, share it with someone!

#tbt

Finally, I shared this bit from an essay I wrote on November 9th, 2016 on Instagram, and it seems to be hitting again. Maybe it’s just a reminder to call your mom or your dad, tell a friend you love them, or just to hug someone a little longer. Some would rather keep us apart, but we’re not who they think we are. As Kevin Seconds once shouted, I still believe.

As always, thank you for reading, responding, subscribing, and sharing my words and work.

I appreciate you,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

An Invisible Intellectual Speakeasy

Chase Griffin recently did an interview with me for Metapsychosis, a journal of consciousness, literature, and art. Chase is the author of What’s on the Menu? (Long Day Press, 2020), the forthcoming Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace (Corona\Samizdat), as well as co-author (with Christina Quay) of How to Play a Necromancer’s Theremin (Maudlin House, 2023), about the latter of which I wrote,

“How do you like your metaphors mixed? This work of psy-fi docutainment, best ingested by first grinding it into Bookpowder, follows Rocco Atleby’s kudzu plots in the pursuit of fluctuation on the horizon of the Patasphere. Flitting and flirting with spacetimeconsciousness dimensionzzzzz, deep down, heinleined under there somewhere, Chase Griffin and Christina Quay have committed some really serious satire. So pack your pestle and mortar and get ripping!”

Thanks to Chase’s insightful questions, he and I cover quite a lot in this short but wide-ranging discussion.

Read on!

Redfishingboat (Mick O), sk8 or fly [CC BY-NC 2.0]

Chase Griffin: Is there a circuit for you between BMXing/skateboarding and media theory? If so, what’s that sparking thing?

Roy Christopher: Well, in the broadest sense, one of my main research interests is the influence of technology on culture. The study of media—and even that in my mind is quite broad—somewhat narrows the research to where the results of this collision play out. I’m focused on the domains of various youth cultures, so BMX and skateboarding media is where bikes, boards, digital cameras, video cameras, writing, riding, music, and the like converge and capture it all. When you watch a video or see a magazine from a certain era, you’re seeing a snapshot of a culture at that time.

So, yes. I started making zines in the summer of 1986. Ten years later, I started messing around with HTML, and I saw the web as another level in zine-making. Though I was still doing print zines, I learned some basic code, bought some domain names, and starting building websites. The blogs (a term I am still hesitant to own) of the 2000s might’ve been the last era during which I felt like my approach to indie discourse thrived. The social-media silos killed all of that.

CG: Is the feedback loop the only way to go? Is this what makes today’s media such an anxiety inducing place? It feels like it’s not just the geopolitics and climate change? The loops, content aside, can be wholly crippling for many. It feels conspiratorial at times, in a divide and conquer kind of way, to get us all to stop acting in meatspace and live in this anxiety box so that the robber-barons can go on robbing the poor and raping the earth. Is there an alternative to this? Is there a way to create a more positive media?

RC: Last year, I went back to a bar I used to frequent in Chicago, and the same few people were there, sitting in the same places, having the same conversations. That’s what social media looks like after you take a break. It’s always baffling to see the same people posting the same stuff months later.

So, my first inclination is retreat. I’ve left every major social media platform and flirted with a few new ones, but I get fed up and deactivate them every few weeks. It makes for an inconsistent online presence, but I can’t be more consistent with it and still feel human.

Anxiety is lucrative. Once the social media platforms saw the goldmine of outrage, their steering users toward anxiety of one sort or another was inevitable. This has spread to every other kind of media. The goals are not information or entertainment as much as they are to elicit a reaction—any reaction. It’s turned journalists into trolls and the rest of us into dupes. There’s just more money in making people feel shitty than there is in making them feel good.

Anxiety is lucrative… There’s just more money in making people feel shitty than there is in making them feel good.

CG: What is the best way to help others?

RC: Fund their creative pursuits. Every problem I see my artist and writer friends and colleagues having is because there’s no money to do the cool things they want to do. I have the same problems, but I’ve sacrificed things and adjusted my lifestyle to facilitate the creative work I want to do, and subsequently I get to do some of it. The internet democratized and simultaneously demonetized everything.

To put it simply in a slogan: pay for art.

CG: I feel like we should all get together and create a better media. I miss the promise of the user-generated utopia. Do you think coding and computer engineering should be taught in public school widespread and starting at an early age? Do you think that if everyone speaks the new Latin, we can jumpstart society and get along without the new greedy and incompetent priest class?

RC: I can’t help but be cynical about the state of media at this point. The promise of the user-generated world has been fulfilled, but it’s no utopia. Computers, the internet, and ubiquitous cameras and screens have democratized every form of creativity. If one can be a “content creator” simply by aiming a lens, we’re not exactly honoring human creativity. DJ Scratch once said that the reason we respect something as an art is because “it’s hard as fuck to do.” Is the bar getting higher or lower?

A lot of my current students have majors that you would think would help (e.g., computer science, data science, information science, etc.), but the truth is that not everyone should be doing this stuff. The barriers to entry that existed before the internet were not tuned properly, but take a quick look at your feed, and you’ll see that we need some of them.

I think it’s all going to get a lot worse before there’s even a chance of it getting better.

CG: What does your ideal virtual community look like?

RC: A real-life secret salon. An invisible, intellectual speakeasy. I know a lot of smart, creative people. If I had a place to meet all of them on a regular basis and exchange ideas and collaborate on projects, that would be the ideal virtual community. If you went looking, you’d never find us.

Many thanks to Chase Griffin for doing this interview, Metapsychosis for publishing it, and you for reading and sharing it.

Thank you,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

Translating Motion

The first pair of pegs I had on my bike were made for a motorcycle. They were bolt-on, fold-down foot pegs designed to be used for passengers. I bolted them on the fork legs of my Blue Max. They twisted around quite a bit, but if you were balanced just right, they’d hold you in place. This was before axle pegs were available in every bike shop, before bolt-on pegs and platforms, and well before flatland BMX became one half of competitive Freestyle BMX during the AFA years, less and less a part of it during the X-Games era, and then slid from the face of major competitive coverage, into solitary obscurity, away from the rest of BMX.

Me in a Funky Chicken position during a contest in Jacksonville, Florida in 1990.(Note the standing pegs.)

When I was riding the Blue Max with the motorcycle pegs, there were only a handful of flatland tricks to learn, and it was easy to see where to start if you wanted to learn even the hardest of them. Curb endos, 180s, rollbacks—the core of the sport's repertoire didn’t even require pegs. This changed quickly as the sport progressed. By the late 1980s, there were hundreds of tricks, many of which involved rolling around in either direction on either wheel, and many of which I still can't do to this day.

Doing tricks on a bicycle is all about translating one kind of motion into another. Whether it’s rolling, spinning, balancing, or just standing somewhere different, every maneuver is about turning an expected movement into the unexpected stunt.

Matt Heckert and his “Walk-and-Peck” machine.

I was introduced to Matt Heckert’s work by issue #7 of Andy Jenkins’ Bend zine. There was a picture of Survival Research Laboratories‘ “Walk-and-Peck” machine (a.k.a “The Centaur”), and it was credited to Heckert. This was the Summer of 1986, just after W&P had a feature role in the SRL performance, “Extremely Cruel Practices: Designed to Instruct Those Interested in Policies That Correct or Punish.” 

Now Heckert makes kinetic sound machines. Some are noisy as all hell. Some click, pop and convulse like mechanical, prehistoric creatures. All are fascinating both visually and sonically (See his “Birds” for one example).

“All of my work ends up sounding like a train somehow.” — Matt Heckert

The installation he built for the San Diego State University exhibition I saw involved tilting hoops that cause long poles to rotate in circles. The sound they generate is an ambient metal symphony of sorts. The six machines are connected to a computer where a MAX/MPS MIDI program controls their motion. The programming was done by Heckert’s friend William Tsun-yuk Tsu, and it’s set to randomize their motion so that the machines are all doing their own thing. Also programmed into the controls (at random intervals) is a sequence during which the machines all drop to their lowest speed, and one where they all go freaking-ape-shit-fast. Watching them all fall into sync at low gear after an hour or so of chaos is a calming, serene experience.

Matt Heckert’s “Rotifiers” at SDSU in 2003. [photo by Roy Christopher]

The installation was originally titled “Martian Cocktail Party” after an old composition from 1981 that Heckert did prior to forming his Mechanical Sound Orchestra. I suggested “Stirring Machines” due to the stirring motion of the poles and as a play on Alan Turing. With a smirk, Heckert said he’d add my suggestion to the list. He told me later via email, “It seems I have a propensity to pursue sounds from the roterior (i.e., sound from the process of rotating) and build things which allow for rotification of sound, so I would just as soon call these things ‘rotifiers.’” Having spent many hours in the room with this installation, I can say that it was a thing of odd beauty. Having dismantled the machines for their trip back to the Bay Area, I can say that their elegance betrays the complex inner workings of Heckert’s design.

In the artist’s statement for his Machine Sound Orchestra, he writes,

I found that when a mechanical device performs a repeated task by remote control, an observer tends to believe the device is somehow expressing some kind of autonomous emotion—frustration, desire, etc.—thus creating the mystique of an intelligent or sentient machine. This is not a sound issue, of course, but one which deals with the audience/performer relationship and the audience's perception that some sort of non-verbal communication is taking place.

During the reception at SDSU, I overheard Heckert telling another machine-sculpture artist that the trick was translating one kind of motion (e.g., a spinning axle) to another (e.g., a rotating ring), and I couldn’t help but think of riding my bike. Flatland BMX might not quite be an art form, but it toys with audience expectations in a similar way. The things we enjoy about watching technical extreme sports and kinetic artwork are not only the skills on display but the twists and tumbles we didn’t expect.

I still ride flatland, but the pegs on my bike these days were made for it.

Get a Spine!

I have a few books out, if you’re interested. :)

Bits of the above originally appeared on ESPN. Shout out to Brian Tunney. Thanks also to Matt Heckert and Andy Jenkins.

Thank you for reading, responding, subscribing and sharing,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

Capturing Collapse

Unlike other war movies, Alex Garland’s Civil War is told from the point of view of those behind the cameras. War photographers in search of the elusive moneyshot, Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) and Jessie Cullen (Cailee Spaeny), along with journalist Joel (Wagner Moura) take their quest all the way to the top. The film follows them from New York City to Washington DC–from war-torn city streets, through the free-for-all frontier law of rural areas, through the military frontline, all the way to the White House. As Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) reminds them on the way, “It’s not a story if it never gets filed.”

Kirsten Dunst and Cailee Spaeny in Civil War (2024).

The scariest part of the film isn’t the gunfire, explosions, death, or destruction. By far the film’s scariest feature is its ontological instability, the watching of one’s world crumbling with nothing in the way of recourse. The lack of cues from limited access to media heightens the sense of helplessness. The lack of partisan politics is part of the film’s power. There is precious little information about what will come next, which adds to the fear and anxiety of the journalists trying to capture the collapse.

There is a paradox here, a struggle between exposure and isolation: exposure to danger and isolation from information.

The camera work of the better found-footage films, like The Blair Witch Project (1999), Chronicle (2012), and Cloverfield (2008), which the latter’s director Matt Reeves likened to “looking through a soda straw,” is eerie and effective in a similar fashion. There’s such a sense of exposure. The first-person point of view makes the viewer feel “in” the movie, as opposed to passively watching it. The scariest moment of M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs (2002) was when the television stopped working. The sense of isolation inherent in that moment is terrifying, isolation from safety and exposure to hostility. Much like the security camera footage of the Columbine shootings, and the camera-as-character of Cloverfield, Garland gives us a crippled information flow (i.e., looking through view-finders, no media coverage) while subjecting us to total exposure (i.e., driving through a country in the throes of war).

Filmmakers are typically trying to get movie cameras “out of the way” of the movie. Filmmakers typically aim for the camera to be transparent, much as transparency has been advocated in computer interface design. Authors Jay Bolter and Diane Gromala have argued that the interface needs to be reflective as well as transparent, as in windows and mirrors and their book of the same name. The interface needs to get out of the way sometimes (transparency) and provide cues for interaction at other times (reflection). Moving images have similar needs to fulfill.

In Civil War, the cameras are so decidedly in the way as to become focal points. Snapshots pause on the screen as they are taken. Their wobbles, glitches, blurs, and unrelenting singularity of viewpoint define and redefine our experience in the film’s undulating chaos. In this way, Garland deftly mixes form and content, mention and use. The photographic process is integral to the picture.

Even if it’s far from grainy security camera footage, the camera’s limits are what define this viewing experience. Even in defying our expectations, it is a surprisingly effective film. Even with its focus on photography, in Civil War the best shot is all Garland’s.

A version of this review originally appeared on bOING-bOING. I expanded it here after seeing the movie a few more times. My favorite scene, which I didn’t get to talk about above, is just after the midpoint when, having just escaped a certain death (featuring the momentary but meme-worthy appearance of Jesse Plemons), the main characters are driving through a forest on fire. Burning embers float in the air around their truck as Sturgill Simpson’s “Breakers Roar” is playing. It’s such a beautifully brief respite from the chaos.

Also, Sturgill Simpson is only one of the many great artists on the soundtrack. Civil War also features songs by Can, Suicide, Silver Apples, and De La Soul, as well as the score by Garland’s regular collaborators, Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury.

Thanks for reading, responding, subscribing, and sharing,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com