The Social Network and The New York Review of Books

In the New York Review of Books,  The Social Network, Zadie Smith is supposed to writing about the recently released film written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher, but in broaching the topic, she is entirely absorbed with herself. She is, we are informed not only of the same generation as Mark Zuckerberg, but she was at Harvard with him. She taught writing there while he was an undergrad. Despite her generational and cultural proximity to Zuckerberg, Smith finds herself recoiling at his technophilic conception of impoverished connections. She is horrified by her students' reactions to French experimental fiction. Smith declares herself a young fogey, devoted to privacy and secrets and rich, nuanced, textured relationships, (or so we imagine). As she ponders Greeks and Romans through the "richness" of her cultural and literary associations around Zuckerberg's relationship to antiquity, she seems to be assuring her readers and herself, that yes, there is a better world out there of high cultural connections that make our lives more meaningful and more substantial. In this world, EVERYONE has a print and digital subscription to the New York Review of Books.

In all of her self-assertion, she forgets to mention something about the film that one would expect a writer with her pedigree and her sensitivities to be of note -- the degrading and degraded role of women in Sorkin's screenplay and Fincher's film. Yes, Erica Albright gets to be cast as the muse of negative capabilities in the film's origin myth, but almost every other female character is represented as eye candy, pole dancer groupie, sex toy, jealous harridan or surface from which cocaine might be snorted. Zuckerberg may in fact have a steady Asian-American girlfriend in real life, as Smith helpfully points out, but in Fincher's cinematic Harvard those perfect SAT scores seem to be an Asian-American girl's calling card for bathroom quickies.

I dislike the call for "positive representations of minorities" as if that would cure any of our society's ills, but The Social Network's casual racism and misogyny and its complete obtuseness about hypersexualization of Asian-American women cries out for a harsh 1990s style identity politics spanking. The film does capture some of the intoxicating energy that fuels life on line: but its inability to think through richer inter-racial and inter-subjective relationships is simply sad. Smith is so preoccupied with sorting out whether she is young (like Zuckerberg) or old (like Sorkin, Fincher, Jared Lanier and me) that she fails to be anything more than descriptive and tendentious in her review of the film.

In fact, Smith's self-absorption seems to founded on her sense of self-importance. One condition of social networks is that they have dislodged and decentered the authority of critical/aesthetic/cultural judgment. I am therefore less worried what "people" will or won't think of The Social Network because they've read The New York Review of Books. Smart, young women of all races will find their way through the labyrinth of the culture's present fantasies of the roles they play and don't play during moments of technological and social change without the help of the NYRB or Zadie Smith. Meanwhile, the romance between Jewish-American computer geeks and Asian-American smart girls waits to be written.

Cuts to Higher Ed in CA

As the entire UC system looks to cut its faculty salaries by 8% as of August 1, 2009, we are looking at the dismantling of one of the best public Universities in the world. When Clark Kerr drew up his ambitious Master Plan, he worked with a governor, Pat Brown and a state legislature willing to commit to providing the best possible public university to the citizens of the Golden State. Of course, their motivation was not completely idealistic: Cold War anxieties about competitiveness with the Soviet Union certainly shaped the liberal consensus about the importance of accessible higher education. Governor Schwarzenegger and this legislature will have the dishonor of undoing the UC: the are applying the shock doctrine along to California’s university, forcing the UC administration to raise tuition 9.3% while lowering faculty salaries by 8%.

According to Josh Keller's article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, "California's 'Gold Standard" for Higher Education Falls Upon Hard Times," it seems that nearly all of California's educational policy wonks dismiss the Master Plan as hopelessly obsolete, applicable only to 1960, when 90% of the state was white and "coffers were full." But rather than reformulating a plan that could galvanize public opinion and promote commonly shared goals - to address the needs of the state's growing Hispanic population and to improve the dismal place California now occupies in comparative educational capital (it ranks 25th among states in the proportion of its residents age 26-34 who hold bachelor's degrees, well behind New York, Illinois and Virginia), the leadership of the State has refused to do what is necessary to guarantee access and excellence to today’s students.

At UCI, some of our most brilliant students come from rural California, or coastal immigrant enclaves: they are first generation college students who are at least in part economically responsible for hard-working multi-generational families. What do we say to them about their job prospects in a state that devalues the very education for which they have struggled? As higher education cuts sink in, you will see the demographics of the Ph.D. pipeline become even less diverse. You will see lower income undergraduates struggle ever harder to pay their bills while attaining high levels of academic achievement. You will see the flight of top ranking professors from their posts to private universities, leaving our best students behind. One of the historically specific mandates of the UC in recent years is to hire and educate graduate students so that the California industry and culture of the future will be able to reflect the demographics of this rapidly changing state. By cutting the UC system to this degree, this goal is implicitly abandoned. How can faculty as a group honestly encourage our most outstanding working students and/or students of color to pursue Ph.D.'s?

Looking at other public universities in financially beleaguered Sun Belt states, it is worth noting that salary cuts are not being implemented - Florida's higher education is being cut 10.5% but without salary cuts (Chronicle of Higher Education May 29); Arizona seems focused on administrative efficiency and limited program closures, again not resorting to salary cuts (CHE March 27); Nevada cut 12.5%, but even there, salary cuts won't go above the 5-6% proposed for other state workers. UC alone appears to be hell-bent on the anti-stimulus of cutting pay for the state's workforce.

One of the major issues at work here is inability of the UC, the Cal States and the Community Colleges to work together to force California's dysfunctional legislature to support higher education. This is the dark side of Kerr's Master Plan: a clear educational hierarchy. However, post-secondary education in California cannot afford competition between these interests for an ever shrinking part of state funding. There are critical and distinct roles for research universities and Cal States as well as Community Colleges to play in educating students, and promoting a healthy civic and public culture in our state. Higher education cuts in the state of California do direct damage to the condition of our democracy. Democracy and education, as John Dewey once suggested, are intimately related, their fates inextricably entwined.

In the meantime, years of poorly framed public policy have made it possible for for-profit outfits like University of Phoenix to tap into public and federal funding in order to provide their students with on-line courses taught by contingent faculty. This for-profit model of higher education stands to benefit from the undermining of the UC system, where central administrators, in a dive for the bottom, are suggesting we standardize all our courses and give them on-line.

Californians have chosen to invest in bubbles while shrinking government and public services. The time for that is past. Joan Didion deplored the destructive short sightedness of her beloved home state's institutions and politics, which always lagged far behind the state's changing demographics and its shifting needs. We are at a critical juncture in the history of public higher education: we can either rewrite a new master plan to educate not just a fantastically diverse workforce, but a truly diverse citizenry, or we can decide to destroy a public good that has been the envy of the world.

Hou Hsiao Hsien's Voyage of the Red Balloon

We screened this film as a family last night and I have to say that I was very moved by the delicacy of Hou's vision. I think it was released briefly in the US with little attention. The Voyage of the Red Balloon is a tribute to the 1956 French short named "The Red Balloon," and it touches on the formless, half-forgotten poignancy of childhood emotions that Hou and Truffaut are masters at representing. The film is about a harried single mother, played by Juliette Binoche. She is also an inspired director of a small puppet theater in Paris, teaches in a puppetry program and is trying to manage an ancient and cramped apartment building she inherited from her mother. Binoche is fearless about representing this woman in her worst light, including bad hair color with dark roots. She is always harried, overworked, and sometimes abrasive. She hires a new babysitter, a Taiwanese film student named Song to take care of her Simon. Simon and Song buy after school snacks, play pinball and Simon shares something of the story of the fractured family in which he has grown up. Binoche's distraction borders on neglect, but she also able to evoke the depth of her love for her son and a passion for her work that brook no sentimental or simple reconciliation. People say the word tenderness too easily these days, but this film is captures a stillness and tenderness simply in its static, long shots of family life in cramped quarters. Song's quiet, but compassionate presence, her calm detachment, her relationship to the family, to filmmaking and to the 1956 Red Balloon ground t the vision of this film.

If you expect a climax, or emotional release that has been niche-marketed and audience tested to death, you will be disappointed. Hou made a beautiful film, half drama, half documentary called The Puppetmaster about one of China's master puppeteer's life and career. This film is based in part on interviews with Li Tienlu the eponymous Puppetmaster and dramatizes his story. You can't help but think of puppetry in relationship to film and to think of the folkloric entertainment as some kind of ancestor to today's distraction. There is that moment in Truffaut's 400 Blows when Antoine and friend, playing truant, hide out in the puppet theater in the Jardin du Luxembourg.

In fact, if you read the on line reviews of Hou's work, complaints about long shots that never end, boredom and disappointment abound. But his work is about the long arc of small emotional events. He pays tribute to Paris -- a city that has inspired many filmmakers and is an especially important protagonist in the cinema of the French New Wave. Hou and Tsai Ming Liang along with the late Edward Yang made Taipei into a cinematically auratic city -- and the Taiwanese filmmakers have returned to Paris in order to pay tribute to it...Perhaps this is what people call transnational cinema, and it certainly is a sign that funding schemes know no national borders and that national cinemas are transnational cinemas. Tsai has been commissioned to make a film in the Louvre with Jeanne Moreau....

Ambiguity and Olympics: Review of "Terra Cotta Warriors: Guardians of China's First Emperor"

            Now in its final week, and well over a month after the 2008 Beijing Olympics you would think that the enthusiasm for all things Chinese would have died down. Yet the American audience is insatiable. A testament to this can be found in the continued popularity of the “Terra Cotta Warriors: Guardians of China’s First Emperor” at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana.

From May 18^th until October 16^th, a selection of 14 of an estimated 7,000 plus life-sized statues that constitute the fantastic funerary army will be exhibited alongside numerous pieces of affiliated armor, weaponry, jewelry and other ritual objects. Unearthed quite accidentally by farmers near the tomb of the First Emperor Qin Shi Huang, a man credited with having unified the disparate municipalities of China under one regime, these pieces had lain undisturbed for over 2,000 years.

Each one of the warriors is remarked to have had individual features unique to them as if carved from the faces of the warriors they represented. And yet this alone cannot help compensate for a noticeable but profound sense of disappointment upon seeing the sparse offerings that make up the core of this exhibition. What is inherent to the mysticism and grandeur of the “Terra Cotta Warriors” and therefore their large appeal is admittedly their unprecedented numbers as much as their unique individual attributes.

Not surprisingly Bowers never fails to remind us of the unparallel nature of its discovery nor that this exhibition will mark the largest of its kind to ever have appeared in the United States. To be fair though, the Museum fought long and hard to make it happen. Plagued with reversals and doubts, the Chinese end of the negociations had to be reassured again and again, not only to loan the items out but also to allow Bowers to be the first to exhibit them. In past showings it seems only a handful of the warriors were ever allowed to leave China at a time.

Tellingly, a major factor behind the museums tenacity in their fight to realize the exhibition despite the relatively few amount of warriors was the assurance of success in the ongoing build up and climax of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Already a hot topic of conversation, China’s hosting of the games seemingly tripled its “brand-value” over a relatively short period of time. In this sense, Bowers had wisely hedged their bets on a popular piece of “cultural commodity”.

            Clearly then, the record breaking number of people that have and continue to attend the exhibition are swept up in something more than just an immense archaeological discovery. The carnivalesque atmosphere of the outrageous lines and “Terra Cotta” performers that can be seen giving out high-fives to a confused and bewilderingly opinionated crowd seems at least to me, something strange and out of place for a museum. 

            Everyone apparently has something to say about human rights or the origins of paper and gunpowder while waiting for, our touring the show. But I would go further than attributing this phenomenon exclusively to a ubiquitous Olympic excitement. It appears rather to be a reflection and propagation of a carefully constructed media event that has been ongoing for some time now: the drawn out debut of a new rival on the world stage.

            From a series of soft toned black and white photographs of meditative, smiling “Warriors” that greet the audience upon arrival, to the barely audible generic Chinese harp that pointlessly wafts through the air, the exhibition at times appears to paint a peaceable serenity onto an otherwise suggestive Chinese “war machine”.

            Yet in equal measure, it contains a curious amount of underlying threat in the milieu of bureaucratic Tai Chi. One such example is found underneath a giant info blurb entitled “Unification” which seeks to explain the nature of the First Emperor’s reign:

“His regime was characterized as a rule by law: laws were issued from the center to control populace not as a guarantee of individual rights as it would be under a rule of law.”

It is as if to clarify that the Qin Dynasty was not a democracy, as if the audience was unaware that ancient empires were anything but despotic. And if the suggestive nature of this wasn’t clear enough, immediately adjacent is an image of a few “Warriors” spearing a villager without any real context.

            The popularity and frenzy then of the “Terra Cotta Warriors” is part and parcel of something bigger. It in effect encapsulates the American audiences’ response to a China as an object of disturbing ambivalence. The confused and contradictory signals that place the “Warriors” and as a result, China, in a firm context as oppressive and threatening while simultaneously highlighting a defanged, prosaic orientalism accentuated by the spectacle of the Olympics is directly reflective of this.

            Other than participating in some sense of China “as event”, the value in seeing the “Terra Cotta Warriors: Guardians of China’s First Emperor” rests squarely in the ability to give life to this palpable anxiety and confusion indicative of China’s emerging place in the American cultural consciousness. 

“Terra Cotta Warriors: Guardians of China’s First Emperor” 

May 18th until October 16th 

Bowers Museum Exhibit Website: 

http://www.bowers.org/exhibits/TerraCotta_Warriors/index.jsp

In Focus: The Landscape

In Songs of the Sky, No. 2, one of twenty-seven prints featured in the Getty’s eclectic exhibition of landscape photography, Alfred Stieglitz tilts his camera upwards and photographs a silhouetted sky. It’s a small black and white print (not even 4 by 6 inches), but as powerful a depiction of natural beauty as any image in the exhibition. By including Stieglitz’s print, the exhibition blurs the distinction between landscape and cloudscape, broadening the scope of the former to include the latter. With this gesture, the curator acknowledges that any form of nature—including the celestial heavens—can conceivably create a “landscape” photograph.

Unlike the two neighboring photography exhibitions—Bernd and Hilla Becher’s “Basic Forms” and August Sander’s “People of the Twentieth Century”—“In Focus” occupies just one small room in the Getty’s photography wing. The landscape photographs, displayed in more or less chronological order, are situated close enough to each other to easily facilitate artistic comparisons, “to make the progression of aesthetic and technical developments apparent,” as the curator says. Presenting the prints chronologically also enables one to see how, in spite of having uniquely photographic techniques such as deep/shallow focus and negative splicing at their disposal, early landscape photographers still tended to mimic landscape painters—sometimes even painting or drawing over their negatives. In contrast, Stieglitz’s 1923 cloudscape abruptly signals the arrival of a new breed of photographer, the photographer as an artist in his own right.

Like Stieglitz, Edward Weston—another modernist photographer who embodies this new breed—also tests the limits of landscape photography with his print of a sand dune in the California desert. While Stieglitz’s image focuses exclusively on the sky, Weston’s limits itself to the curves and ripples of the desert sand. The photograph eschews traditional landscape composition to emphasize the inherent grace in detail; the coastal horizon is barely visible beyond the sharp-focus, high-contrast desert.

Deserts—in various renditions—are a recurring theme in the exhibition. From an 1867 sepia photograph of the Nevada desert to a 1995 color print of the Owens Valley in California, several artists document the desolate landscape of the American West. What unites the prints is not just the common setting, but the presence of humans, either literally or symbolically. In every desert image besides Weston’s (which, by virtue of its modernist style, betrays a human touch), the photographers depict human migration or its consequences. And while the early photographs tend to romanticize the West, the later prints—including Robert Adams’s—emphasize a more skeptical view of westward expansion. One notable exception, of course, is astronaut James Irwin’s 1971 lunar landscape, a photograph that glorifies exploration as enthusiastically as the desert landscape images of the 19th century.

On the surface, Robert Adams’s photograph of a quarried Colorado mesa may not seem quite as riveting as some of his other landscapes (especially the photographs in his 2006 Getty exhibition, Landscapes of Harmony and Dissonance). In actuality, the print still demonstrates Adams’s deep environmental concern, but with greater subtlety than usual. From an aerial position of virtual omniscience, Adams captures a desert landscape marred by an endless series of tire tracks; the humans are absent, but they’ve clearly left their mark. Viewing Highway 54 from a more human perspective forty years earlier, Dorothea Lange’s print, The Road West, depicts a similar transformation with less censure, emphasizing the social over the environmental.

The final image in the exhibition, a color print by Virginia Beahan and Laura McPhee, succeeds in reconciling the social and environmental concerns of Lange and Adams into a single landscape photograph. The print’s composition—blue sky, snowy mountains, and desert shrubs—would form a very conventional landscape photograph if not for the intrusion of rusted, man-made furnishings in the foreground. Before westward expansion, this patch of land in the Owens Valley was home to a Native American tribe. As Americans moved west, however, the tribe lost its land to an apple orchard, which eventually lost its water to Los Angeles. Decades later, during World War II, the land became the site of an internment camp for Japanese-Americans, the remnants of which are visible in the image. By evoking the plights of these diverse groups, the photograph records the disfiguring of a pristine environment and bears witness to a history of social injustice.

In Focus: The Landscape
August 26, 2008-January 11, 2009 at the Getty Center, curated by Brett Abbott
www.getty.edu

The Irvine Review

Welcome to the Irvine Review! Cultural criticism is the meat and potatoes of this blog: reviewers have a wide-ranging freedom to write about art, media, literature, film, games, television, music. The blog is an experiment in forming a public/digital space that engages authors and readers in an on-going discussion of the cultural issues of the day.