Key to the City

The Captain of the US Airways flight that crashed into the Hudson River yesterday, Chesley B. Sullenberger III, has been given the key to the city by Mayor Bloomberg. From what I've read, Captain Sullenberger is very deserving of honor. But it begs the question: What is a key to the city?

According to our good friend Wikipedia, the "Key to the City," is an American version of the "Freedom of the City," which has its roots in the Roman Republic. Roman legions were not allowed to enter the city gates in formation or with weapons without permission for fear of military coups. The "Freedom of the City," military edition, was an honor that allowed legions to come into the city.

The more common form is the civilian form, which boils down to freedom from serfdom. Basically, through this honor, you were elevated to the level of human-being.

"The key to the city is a similar award that is descended from freedom of the city. It is used in several countries, but is especially popular in the United States."

But what is it?

According to Wikipedia, the key to the city is, "An ornamental key is presented to esteemed visitors, residents, or others the city wishes to honor. Evoking medieval walled cities whose gates were guarded during the day and locked at night, the key opens every door in city limits."

We could talk about who deserves a key to the city and all those questions of honor, but I'm more interested the key to the city being able to open every door. If this is true, it is horrifying. Imagine the people who could walk into any building....

If you are cursed to live in Flint Michigan, you might come home from being laid-off from your 10th job in 2 years to find American Idol finalist LaKisha Jones lounging in your house. If that doesn't sound bad, watch this video.



And all you wanted to do was come home, drink a sixer of High Life and fill out your unemployment papers.


In 2004, Atlanta gave Ludacris the key to the city, not for having hoes in different area codes—they wanted him to stay local—but for his contributions to scholarship funds. When he steps into the room, it's "shirts off and panties dropping." This may or not be appealing to you, depending on whether you want Ludacris sleeping with your wife.

And before Captain Sullenberger recieved the Key to New York, every member of the 2007-2008 New York Giants did, as well. Which means Plexico Bures has a key. And as he sits on your couch, his gun, which he still carries in his pocket, goes off and hits you in the leg.

But Detroit, as it does with all things bad, takes the cake. In 1980, the mayor of Detroit gave the key to the city to Saddam Hussein for contributions to a local church.

But then again, if you were living in Detroit in the 80s and 90s, you had bigger problems then Saddam Hussein walking into your locked house.

In response to Jason

"It is not then, the violation that makes avant-garde art (or really, any transgression) so seductive, but the idea that new ways are being experimented with and found--better ways."

But of course, the violation is exactly what makes the avant-garde "seductive," at least to most people. Certainly Aliza Shvarts, the Yale student whom we talked about earlier, fell prey to this notion, this idea that the violation of taboo makes not only for provocative but good art. She probably should have spent her undergraduate years drawing and painting nudes, perfecting the fundamentals of art. Which brings into question Jason's statement about the Princeton students wanting to photograph nudes. I don't know enough about photography to know whether photographing nudes is a fundamental step, but I am worried by undergraduate students who want to immediately break the rules. Learn the rules first, then break them if you have a reason.

I do think it is a mistake to say that the new ways are always "better ways." I attended what can only be described as an avant-garde poetry reading a few weeks ago at Myopic books in Chicago. The main poet was accomplished—he had held a Stegner fellowship—but his poetry wasn't that great. Clever at times. And he broke a lot of rules. But cleverness doesn't last. And it doesn't rewrite the rules. It illicits a grin here, a wide eye there. Nothing more.

On the Nude, and other Transgressions

"I don't think it is any longer necessary to make nudes, which might be a way of saying it is no longer necessary to enact transgressions in order to make significant works of art, even modernist art. This is, again, not to suggest that the cultural and social antagonisms which provoke the whole process of art as transgression, from Romanticism on, have been cured or calmed."

Jeff Wall in an interview with Arielle Pelenc. Jeff Wall: Selected Essays and Interviews. p 256

Does the law crush the soul? Is obeying the law living in bad faith? Is transgression the beginning of authentic existence, the origin of art's truth and freedom? Although one might be drawn to think that these are the tenants of avant-garde art (which finds itself necessarily embattled against traditional, official culture), Jeff Wall asks these questions, ultimately opining that "it is the writing of laws, not the breaking of them, that is the most significant and characteristic artistic act in modernity." So, encrypted in the act of transgression, the avant-garde experiments by positing new behaviors, not just breaking old ones. 

It is not then, the violation that makes avant-garde art (or really, any transgression) so seductive, but the idea that new ways are being experimented with and found--better ways. The artistic nude emerged against a social attitude that demonized the human body rather than curing society's arcane, philistine conception that the nude body was a hazard and hotbed of iniquity--that it, rather than society itself (among them, politicians of both church and state), needed to be tamed and educated. In Western Europe, we see this social attitude nearly entirely usurped by a more liberal mentality. One need only flip on the TV to see women nude in shampoo commercials.

What that also does, importantly, is call into question those artists still existing in that pre-mentality. If you stumble across a young photographer looking to do nudes (there are a few here in Princeton), you might first ask yourself if they've done their homework. The Monk or even The Scarlet Letter were once polemics against sexual legalism. Today "erotic" clit-lit stocks grocery store aisles. The Godardian Breathless jump-cut, child of the New Wave, tires itself in standard MTV fare. 

Laws are meant to be broken, re-written, attempted, and broken again. How else can we progress? How can we live but by transgression?

JMH

We're not dead, yet.

Some time ago, sitting in my lonely apartment at the school where I used to teach, no doubt longing for some contact outside of the thirty teenagers running up and down the hallways outside my rooms while calling me gay in Korean, I installed Google Analytics onto both of my blogs. If you don't know about Analytics, its a fascinating tool that Google developed for businesses that allows users to monitor the hits on websites. But it's more than a hit-counter. It will tell you the time spent on each page, the web searches that brought viewers to the site, and, perhaps most amazingly, the locations of each viewer.

I was fascinated to know that people, granted a very small number of people, outside of my friends read what I was writing, or in the case of my other blog, posting. Checking the statistics and the locations of the hits became somewhat addicting. I have no social life? It's cool—somoeone from Russia just read my tumbleblog. This is admittedly a very poor substitute for friends, but you can only handle playing so much Super Smash Brothers with 13 year-olds before resorting to ridiculous options.

Of course, the key to attracting viewers to a blog is to post frequently. Scroll on down to the next post—a half-ass affair of one paragraph—and you'll notice it was written in September. September is a long time ago. I was still unemployed, still somewhat hopeful about the the current year, and my feet weren't cold all the time. And so the hits fell. Which is fine—what does it matter if you get 150 hits a month or 20? Except for the fact that Google Analytics mapped out my sloth with humbling acumen.

Everytime I would log on to see the hits on my tumbleblog, which I posted to regularly, I would also be confronted with the sobbering statistcs that 50% less people read my this blog than last month. I don't care about the numbers. I'm not interesting enough to expect big numbers. But I always felt like Google was more or less admonishing me for not writing more, which is akin to your parents reminding you that you haven't cared for your dog, the dog you allegedy love, as evidenced by the fact that the only thing covering its ribs are scabs.

To put this feeling (and the blogs readership) in graphical form:





A line getting as close as possible to 0.

Rather than deleting my Analytics account or shutting this blog down—both easy and probably advisable—I'm going to try to remedy the lack of writing.

But you'll have to stay tuned for the next post because I can't waste what little I have to say on one post.

So long, Muxtape

I was very sad to see the demise of Muxtape as we know it. I initially wondered why the site wasn't shut down sooner, but it was, on the whole, pretty innocuous. It even linked to Amazon so you could buy tracks if you liked them (downright saintly compared to The Pirates Bay.) Muxtape will be reincarnated, according to the site's letter from it's founder, now gracing every old Muxtape page, and this time, it will be centered on independent musicians. Perhaps that is good news considering MySpace's recent troubles with the indie community.

It does make me wonder if Tumblr's music option will stay.

Electing the Vice-President

Today over brunch, a friend proposed that the way we elect the vice-president is one of the most undemocratic aspects of American politics. Perhaps this is true. I don't think it's ever a problem, given the vice-president's role as a glorified adviser and figurehead. But it might be a problem, or at least cause for concern, if the president dies or is impeached, in which case the vice-president surpasses the vote of the American public and takes command of the country (this is most poignant in the case of Gerald Ford, who was neither elected Vice-president or President). But then again, giving the vice-presidency to the runner-up was a disaster, as the vice-presidency of Thomas Jefferson proved. In any case, I don't know if it's a problem in this election, especially if McCain wins, as I suspect many people—the religious right, at least—will not be voting for him so much as Sarah Palin.

Courting the Women's vote

We here at Under Which Lyre have not blogged much on politics (or blogged much at all, really). I hadn't found the campaign too interesting (with the exception of Hilary v. Obama) until recently when I watched the both McCain and Obama at Saddleback.

I have also found McCain's recent choice of Sarah Palin as his running-mate very interesting. The choice is a bit baffling to me—she has been Governor of Alaska for only two years, and before a brief stint as the chairperson of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, mayor of a town of about 9,000 people. She also has no strong background in foreign policy, which is troubling considering that the 72 year old McCain is a cancer survivor and may very well pass away in the next four years.

Of course, she's a social conservative and an evangelical, and McCain had not been that attractive to the religious right. (I would agree with Andy Crouch, and disagree with the folks at This Recording, that the best thing about Sarah Palin is her choosing have to have her child despite the diagnosis of Down Syndrome.) McCain has also decided to meet Obama on idea of change in Washington and has therefore nominated an outsider with a record of working against the political establishment in Alaska. And she's more attractive than McCain, Joe Biden, and even Obama. And then there's the idea of winning the women's vote, courting Hilary's disenchanted voters, which Palin made abundantly clear with her reference to Clinton's "18 million cracks" in the glass ceiling. Which is a long way of bringing me to my point:

I think that the idea of McCain trying to help "break the glass ceiling," or even of McCain courting the women's vote, is humorous at best. Why? Courtesy of the Drudge Report:

In his book The Real McCain, author Cliff Schecter claims that John McCain made extremely ugly remarks about his wife Cindy McCain during a tirade witnessed by three reporters and two aides. "At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain's hair and said, 'You're getting a little thin up there,'" Schechter writes. "McCain's face reddened, and he responded, 'At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt.' McCain's excuse was that it had been a long day.

There isn't really much to say after that, is there?

Psychoanalysis, Theology, and the coming of Joel Osteen

From the Introduction of Theology, Psychoanalysis, Trauma: By Marcus Pound

Arguably [Frank] Lake was the first to understand that psychoanalysis needed to be practised within a participatory and liturgical framework—the argument of this book; yet if his work remains problematic it is not because of his liberal advocacy of LSD, but because in the end theology is subordinated to psychoanalysis and nt the other way around. For example, salvation seems to care less about God than achieving an autonomous and secure ego which is to be supplemented with supernatural 'fortitude'. God appears as the religious equivalent of a body-builder's steroids, providing extra muscle to a more general course of well-being.

Lake's problem arises because he assumes the ultimate autonomy of the secular sphere. Yet according to the work of John Milbank, the secular is not itself a given reality, a space of 'purely human' to be discovered once the cobwebs of superstition have been cleared away. Rather, the secular was imagined, discursively created through the emergent disciplines of the social sciences which are of themselves already bastardized forms of theology. Take natural law for instance. From the perspective of the political sciences natural law was no longer a means of mediating the divine, the basis of a participatory good. Instead, it was posited that humans, left to a state of nature, were self-seeking individuals whose sole motivation was the preservation of their own sphere of interest. Therefore, it was in their best interest to enter a mutual contract, curbing some of their rights at the expense of securing their sphere of influence. In this way the human subject was manifest within relations of pure immanence and the secular was constituted as a field of the formal power relations required to maintain the social order. What remained of religion was deemed utterly private, transcendent, and ineffable and as such banished from the social, thereby confirming the autonomy of the secular.
Yet as Milbank argues, theology is a social theory, one that seeks to promote mutual social relations, without being predicated upon the notion of the private individual or need to formally exercise power; but of neighbourly love, spontaneous charity, and learnt virtue; and it fails to challenge the autonomy of the secular it will inevitably be positioned by it, reduced to an immanent field of knowledge such as wish-fulfilment, or tucked away in some private ineffable realm.
It is not difficult to extend Milbank's project to psychoanalysis. After all, psychoanalysis was key in securing at the level of the individual what was posited of the social. Early interpreters of Freud such as his daughter Anna, Harry Guntrip, or Heinz Hartmann, all argued that the self was in origin a bundle of self-seeking drives, the primary expression of nature, a chaos which needed to be brought into social conformity through the rationalizing principle of the ego—the approach known as ego-psychology. And like Hobbes, man would pass from nature to society through a contractual agreement; only now the contractual agreement specifically targets the sexual relation: the ban upon incest. Moreover, like the social contract, it affords a certain compromise: one may not have exactly what one wants (i.e. the mother); nonetheless, one can always find a respectable substitute. Psychoanalysis was therefore a profoundly conservative project, aimed at helping the subject adjust to a reality defined in advance by wider secular and political thought. And it is perhaps for this reason that should theology fail to assume a meta-critical stance apropos psychoanalysis, it will inevitably be positioned by it, confined to existing social reality. Salvation will become indistinguisable from achieving a secure ego-identity, and the Church's ability to speak out against wider political and economic injustice will be seriously compromised.

A few thoughts on The Dark Knight

I'm in Pasadena at the moment visiting a friend. Earlier in the day after we visited Silver Lake's hipsters at Intelligentsia (yes, it's spread from Chicago), we went to the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It was incredibly sketchy to say the least. Among the myriad of jugglers, rappers hawking their CDs, and performers dressed like movie characters, I saw the Joker. Well, a poorer, taller imitation of him. But no mistake, he was Heath Ledger's Joker, not the iconic Jack Nicholson joker of the first Batman movie. My first thought: "Well that's awfully quick—the movie came out last week." The other characters—Gene Simmons, (a drunken) Spiderman, Captain Jack Sparrow, the Tinman—somehow seemed more appropriate, not only because the movies have been out longer, but because Ledger's joker, a sociopath, seems too dark, too psychotic to be juxtaposed with French tourists and vendors selling Maps of the Stars.

I saw the movie for the second time tonight (at double the price of my Illinois matinée), and I was as taken with it the second time as the first (especially the chase scene on lower Wacker Drive.) I won't review it for you here—there's a litany of reviews online. (I'm fond of Thomas Hibbs's piece in First Things). But in spite of Christopher Nolan's brilliance, I think he could have taken notes from the Coen Brother's film, No Country for Old Men.

As one reviewer aptly noted:

Imagine No Country for Old Men, change the plot some and throw in people dressed up as bats and clowns and that's the sort of sandbox of ideas and areas of darkness that The Dark Knight plays in. Without a doubt, if you combined the film's interpretation of Two-Face and The Joker you would have Anton Chigurh.

And while No Country for Old Men revolves around the same themes of chaos and destruction (though it should be said that the crushing blow it delivers to determinism manages to destroy any potential hope; The Dark Knight manages to keep hope alive, as Hibbs notes in the aforementioned review), it does so in a more subtle manner than The Dark Knight. Here I am referring to the scene between the Joker and Two-Face in which the Joker.....dare I use this line....seduces Harvey Dent to the dark side. The Joker says something to the effect of "Unlease a little anarchy," and "Chance is fair." In this scene, with both villains present, we have a glimpse of Anton Chigurh from No Country. But Chigurh's character is all the more disturbing because he never mentions the word anarchy, never goes into a detailed discussion of his morality of chance save to say that the coin he uses got there the same way he did.


My second qualm with the movie is that the score can be a bit too much. I can only handle the dramatic music for, I don't know, 2 hours, not 2 and a half hours. There are moments, especially in the latter hour of the film, where the intensity or horror of the moment are detracted by the music, which depending on your theater's sound system may overpower the dialogue. Recall No Country, which had no soundtrack whatsoever, making the film somewhat less human. I do not think that Nolan should have jettisoned the entire soundtrack of The Dark Knight. On the contrary, I think the music is quite helpful at times. I do think that it could have been regulated more.


Of course, one could argue that subtlety is not the mark of a movie in which the main character is wearing tights. But Nolan's movie is too clever to be lumped with other comic book movies. His treatment of Two-Face, for example, He eschewed the heavy handedness of the George Clooney Batman films in which both villains seem to play an equal role, which led to the dismal failure of the characters. Allowing Dent to metamorphose into Two-Face in the last 1/4 of the film does not distract from the Joker, and more importantly, from Batman's internal struggle between good and evil and the sorrow and loneliness that accompany it. It would be foolish to say that the director was incapable of being subtle. I would perhaps be willing to buy the argument that the heavy-handedness was needed for the general audience of the film, though.

Reading Lolita in Wheaton, Illinois

Is awful.

As this post hints at [and yes, here I am shamelessly shuttling you off to my commonplace book], Lolita is known as a dirty book. When I was in high school, not having read the book, I thought it akin to literary porn.

Of course, the old Vintage International Cover doesn't help:



















[seen here as the cover of the audiobook]


So of course, I'm quite embarrassed when I take this out of my bag at coffee shops in Wheaton, Illinois, where it often seems like the majority of coffee shop patrons are there for Bible studies. I quickly break open the book, hiding the cover and the spine. I think that's easier than saying, "But no, no, no....do you know how beautifully Nabokov writes?"