Chaplinesque

"Nothing fails like success," said successful Chaplin. "I mean by that, that money never satisfied a spiritual or intellectual need. . . I doubt whether a rich man ever has a real friend. . . . I always understand poor artists; rich ones always seem to me a contradiction in terms."

David A. Gerstein's Essays on Chaplin's life, films, and views

  Charlie Chaplin is one of the actors for whom early films (especially silent film) were a natural medium for communicating with an audience. From 1915's The Tramp to 1936's Modern Times, Chaplin was one of the most popular movie stars in the world. Chaplin (along with Buster Keaton) defined silent comedy with a redemptive grace that lifted it above simple slapstick.
  Chaplin's "little tramp" character developed from a boorish ne'er-do-well to an iconic hero of the disenfranchised but upbeat. Chaplin's productive period overlapped with the beginnings of the Great Depression, and may have contributed somewhat to the tramp's popularity. Chaplin's tramp was the down-and-out before it was de rigueur, and embodied an ability to rebound from a thousand humiliations to succeed, usually involving getting the girl.
  Chaplin the man had no problem getting the girl in life, which was in itself a problem. He set the stage for expensive, messy, and dutifully reported celebrity divorces with his divorce from Lita Grey (originally cast as his romantic interest in The Gold Rush, but after their relationship began the role was recast). The settlement was a then-record $825,000, and the newspapers had a field day with various sorts of penny-dreadful stories and satire. The 1992 film starring Robert Downey Jr. as Chaplin concentrates heavily on Chaplin's personal affairs, including three under-eighteen brides and various flings. It is possible to reduce anyone to this level with some yield, but in Chaplin's case the on-screen persona dominated his own in the popular mind. While he was at the zenith of his fame, his indiscretions were overlooked, but later he would be subject to spurious paternity suits and finally barred from the United States during the Red Scare due to his potential Communist ties.
  But that is not why Chaplin is worth our time; he is most important methinks as a symbol for both underdogs and absurd heroes; the first who finally gets his due, or the second who gets his due while slyly straddling the divide between status quo and chaos (or comedy). When Chaplin actually spoke in his movies (as he did in 1940's The Great Dictator, where he played both the poor worker and the Adolf Hitler character) he finally gives the absurd/abject everyman a voice striking in its basic humble humanism:

The way of life can be beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men's souls -- has barricaded the world with hate -- has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.
[full-text of the speech]

Chaplin presents an ethic echoed in his short story Rhythm: A story of men in macabre movement. It is almost a purely absurdist piece, about an officer commanding a firing squad who forgets why on a very existential level. It is a critique of military bureaucracy just as Dictator was a critique of totalitarian government; they both show the headway one sensitive, sane & absurd person can make against an unyielding and inhuman system. As Gerstein says in the essay about Chaplin and the social order, Chaplin probably felt

the contrast between his real-world high-society self and how, trapped in that self and admittedly fascinated by its environment, Chaplin may have mainly let out his feelings about class in fiction, through his films.

The underlying feelings did not elude contemporary writers, however, and Hart Crane captured something of it in his poem Chaplinesque:

We will make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk
Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb
That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,
Facing the dull squint with what innocence
And what surprise!

And yet these fine collapses are not lies
More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;
Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.
We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

Excerpts from Literary Critics on Chaplinesque
I would consider Crane's poem to be judgement of Chaplin's work on the basis of where it finds value. The "fine collapses are not lies": there is a blessedness to the absurd being that frees them from the game and smirks, and allows them to hear and help the "infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing," as T.S. Eliot would have it (the two works are linked in the criticism linked to above). Use the comments on this post to discuss the poem if I am missing the boat.


Random (i.e. more modern) Chaplin stuff -
Excerpt from Aesop Rock's song Daylight, off his CD Labor Days
[as best I can transcribe]

Ok - lift me to activism chain, activate street sweep
Plug in deteriorating zenith of Pendragon
I hack swords wars for the morbid spreading of mad men madly gospel
Sick in your lincoln log cabin and Charlie Chaplin waddle

Ad campaign from the early 80's using Chaplin's character for IBM, to soften its unfeeling big-business image

Images: Cats' Eyes

Haha!
And he's filled his folders brimful with media
so his system swaps to a swampy crawl,
and the host of hosts is a sea of cat's eyes
some warlike, some serene; sorrowful
or sentient or devoid of sentiment,
moving together like a thundercloud in disguise.

[rumblerumble]

Open Source: That niggling thing.

I've noticed a recent trend that bothers me. People on mainstream media have been tossing the use of the phrase "open source" around in reference to software as if the listener will correspondingly wink and nod with a "crapware" grunt to boot. I'm sorry that I can't bring any specific references to finger; since my only exposure to mainstream media is limited I strongly suspect that the memory I have is from either "Law and Order" or "The West Wing".

The problem I have with resolution over the matter is that I can see why people who are uneducated about the political atmosphere of the internet might come to be seduced by a sympthetic attitude or false dichotomy: Open Source is Crap and Proprietary Software Works. This dichotomy is more true than it is false for all practical observations. However, this kind of ideological crutch does not fully express the issues involved and is thus very misleading. But people like this kind of thinking. People want to root for something, but are meanwhile ill equipped to prduce more complex models than a general assesment of 'which is better' Windows vs. Linux, or Explorer vs. Firefox, plaintext or HTML.

There are cases which make it clear that thinking in simple opposition is harmful if taken to the kind of fanatic passion, driving people to paint their faces and dress in the colors of their favorite local sports team. These are cases where systems do not function purely as a conduit for private or commercial communication, they operate as a mechanism by which we conclude our positions as mutual individuals into a recognized political attitude.

There arise more and more cases where political consequence is rendered using computer software. We were recently exposed to the issue of Diebold and Election Systems. Diebold is a company well known for its automatic teller machines (ATMs), which was a natural candidate for the production of electronic voting machines. These machines record peoples votes using proprietary software, which acts as a digital alternative to the administration of analog voting. The public does not to know what kind of computation made the end tally results. There is no transparent authentication and verification in the ballot system. This is not good.

It is one thing for a user to have an unknown flaw in proprietary software like Word, it is another thing entirely to trust a closed system to count the public vote.

More recently, drivers in Florida have pushed to reveal the source code used for breathalyser software. Those accused of driving under the influence are questioning the accuracy of a device that renders the evidence leading to a potential sentence -- an outcome with the potential to affect the rest of their lives.

Make up your own mind, there are other perspectives to be had. All I ask is that when you hear people discussing the merits and methods of proprietary vs. open source software, I hope that you choose to educate from your less knee-jerk of positions, rather than push the issue further toward the stale dichotomy it oft wants to head.

Images: Hurrikanusai

We waited, watching the west for life-giving haul and that dark Decision.
Then the great gust passed; we advanced and fished at wisdom.


[Hokusai's 24 Views of Mt Fuji]

Hurricane-Readiness-Saturday Overflow

We gather together here within the cone of probability to bring you our first overflow, appropriate to the volume of water swelling with Wilma's low pressure zone that will eventually be storm surge.

But let us look back while we have time and power to this hurricane season, through a season of hurricane activity:

Using the power of time-lapse photography to compress nature's grandeur into an envigorating clip, NASA brings you the 2005 hurricane season as seen from space. Gives a visual indicator of the forces at work in Wilma's warpath.

On that note, crusaders for the rights of foetal humans may have to find a new warpath after minute amounts of stem cells were removed from fetuses without a need for their martyrdom.

Martyrdom and a hurricane of controversy come to a head in Frontline's The Torture Question, trying to find a culpable level of governmental/military bureacracy and exploring their roles in the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay [and others without a name] scandals.

Is anyone culpable? Perhaps we should ask this man:


Which one? .....

Breaking News! Stanford has put some of its lectures and podium-thumpers online through the Itunes Music Store. Free but through a proprietary player... still branding, but not so deep a burn.

Let us hope Florida escapes without a deep wound these next few days. The weather is the only thing in this state that I could worship if I had to create gods from my senses; something about that feeling when the sun hits your block but the rest of the land lies in shadow from a thunderous herd of stormclouds. Save your best table scraps to burn outside - these gods enjoy the smell of meat.

1 Floridians
22:Meat from publix not the public, so mote it be.
23:Forgive me Lord for I have punned.

Credit to braineel for links and wit

Outrage Economics

Posner on Gay Marriage

In response to the recent trend to recognize gay marriage, most notably by Spain, Canada, and the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, Posner has a think about how to grok the way to maximize total social welfare with respect to implementing gay marriage policy. He brings up the idea of disutility from outrage, and how that should figure into our welfare considerations:

Economics focuses on the consequences of social action. One clear negative consequence is the outrage felt by opponents of gay marriage and of homosexual rights in general. Philosophers like John Stuart Mill would not consider that such outrage should figure in the social-welfare calculus; Mill famously argued in On Liberty that an individual has no valid interest in the activities of other people that don't affect him except psychologically. (Mill had in mind the indignation felt by English people at Mormon polygamy occurring thousands of miles away in Utah.) But that is not a good economic argument because there is no difference from an economic standpoint between physical and emotional harm; either one lowers the utility of the harmed person.

I suspect most who read this will have a sort of wrinkle to the nose or discomfort in the tapping of the toes. Perhaps it is that one suspects that since those who would be significantly interested in gay marriage are a minority, that if those who experience significant outrage over the matter are a majority, progressive social policy would be stymied by including the disutility from outrage into our economic calculations. Though this is not necessarily so (the cost of outrage is not generally an overwhelming force), if it were true in this situation, would social policy be flawed to not consider this overwhelming disutility?

Given civil unions, and contractual substitutes for marriage even short of civil unions, the discrimination involved in denying the right of homosexual marriage seems to me too slight (though I would not call it trivial) to warrant the courts in bucking strong public opinion; [...]
Of course it is often the duty of courts to buck public opinion; many constitutional rights are designed for the protection of minorities. But when, as in this case, there is no strong basis in the text or accepted meaning of the Constitution for the recognition of a new right, and that recognition would cause a powerful public backlash against the courts, the counsel of prudence is to withhold recognition. Doing so would have the additional advantage of allowing a period of social experimentation from which we might learn more about the consequences of homosexual marriage.

If the courts were to make a positive or negative decision on a controversial when it may be that social utility is not best served by such a decision, they would forgo the potential freedom for social experimentation at the margins. That is, without something being explicitly illegal or legal, these costs could be weighed further.

One state, Massachusetts, already recognizes homosexual marriage, as do a small but growing number of foreign nations (Spain, Canada, Belgium, and the Netherlands). Perhaps without judicial intervention gay marriage will in the relatively near future sweep the world, and if not it may be for reasons that reveal unexpected wisdom in the passionate public opposition to the measure.

Yeah, I know. This isn't the most romantic take on the matter, but that isn't what bothers me. I'm not sure that I fully agree with Posner this time. I agree that outrage costs are important to consider, but I feel as though we ought to also consider the nature of the opposition. If the thing that inspires outrage is accompanied by negative externalities (such as pollution), the outrage would act as an index to harm. I do not think that this kind of outrage over the affairs of others operates in this way as an index. If anything, taking into account the negative feelings that are inspired within one individual (the one who is outraged) without any fault or force from another individual (the one who is gay and married) would be like externalizing a negative, we would be polluting our policy with the wasteful outrage.

I generally lean towards keeping the social nose out of individual affairs. Sometimes we need to poke it in, as is the case with the welfare of children and the elderly, but it doesn't seem to me that relationship definitions are something to regulate. And that is where I agree with Posner in effect. Where there are legal alternatives to the benefits of marriage, there is no need for the law to intervene; there is nothing stopping people from considering themselves married.

Images: Displayed symptoms of the city's plague

Two sites chronicling the artists that take it upon themselves to add to the already polluted ideaspace of our great civilizations.

First, Stencil Archive, which allows for more personal control of the outputted image/text: here silhouettes and tags become little pieces of mixed media beside advertisements and show posters.

(image by crack punk from the .au)

Second, street memes, a site that focuses on stencils as well but also features stickers and posters that try even more to become the media that they combat. Here is a covert example, mixed in with Ipod ads on a nondescript brick wall:

(photographed by bootsy in NY)

Both sites focus on the images produced by people who, like graffiti artists before them, have a compulsion to add their effort to the assault of images we face past our front doors. Somehow this is closer to the point; mass producing a visual/linguistic epithet (like a tag but even more efficient). It at least suggests that audiences have the power to insinuate themself into the show. There is a stencil revolution that may be reactionary now, but is moving indiscernably towards a point; the end of time for some, the beginning of life for others, and the destruction of all walls now definitive.

Interviews with Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales

Transcipt of the C-SPAN interview with Jimmy Wales, Sept. 25 2005



Video of the same interview

Jimbo (Wales' internet handle) is prodded by Brian Lamb to reveal the power structure of Wikipedia, the collaborative nature of truth in Wikipedia's open editing system, and the influence Ayn Rand had over his early adulthood. Some interesting tidbits concerning Wikipedia slip out as well, some verging on the heroically idealist:

Wales: Wikipedia for a lot of people hearkens back to what we all thought the Internet was for in the first place which is, you know, when most people first started the Internet they thought oh, this is fantastic, people can communicate from all over the world and build knowledge and share information.
And then we went through the whole dot-com boom and bust and the Internet seemed to be about pop-up ads, and SPAM, and porn and selling dog food over the Internet. And now Wikipedia kind of hearkens back to the original vision of the Internet

A conscientious interviewer, Lamb must try to get concrete ideas of Wikipedia's working model instead of vagaries, and somewhat succeeds:

WALES: And so we're moving from that model which was necessary when we had a small group of people to a model - I make the comparison of the British monarchy. That my power should decrease over time and become more symbolic. And it's more my job is to defend the community not rule over the community.

Although Wales has the vision of deposing himself for the good of the commonwealth, others in the industry, such as "Robert McHenry, former editor and chief, Encyclopedia Britannica." are dubious. Lamb brings up McHenry's analogy comparing Wikipedia to a public restroom which leads to this exchange:

LAMB: Last sentence, I mean last paragraph: "The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject to confirm some matter sof fact is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom." - I know you've seen that …
WALES: Right.
LAMB: ... many times ...
WALES: Yes.
LAMB: "It may be obviously dirty so that he knows to exercise great care or it may seem fairly clean so that he may be lulled into a sense of - a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him."
Mr. McHenry's not very happy with you.
WALES: Well, I had dinner with Bob after he wrote this article. And he's a really very thoughtful, nice guy. So I don't actually know if he regrets this inflammatory rhetoric because now he's sort of gotten famous as the public toilet guy.
So - but the ultimate point there is an interesting point but one that I feel is invalidated by the fact that there is a community. And I suppose if you want to call it a public restroom you can but it's a public restroom that's kept immaculately clean for the most part. And most people are more than happy to go into, you know, the Four Seasons hotel and use the public restroom because it's cared for by people."

If Wikipedia is the Four Seasons hotel, then our place here at Sewers must be a pissoir open to all, but serving as the home turf for a tribe of trinket-collecting rats.

Another Interview with Wales through ITConversations.com

Videos of a public talk given by Wales including a Q&A session

If there is no God

If there is no God,
Not everything is permitted to man.
He is still his brother's keeper
And he is not permitted to sadden his brother,
By saying there is no God.

--- Czeslaw Milosz

Audio: Eleven CD Dylan Thomas Collection

Once upon an election year, I had a membership to Salon that helped me become a closet pundit.
But there was more on the site than politics; I had found it originally through the Salon Audio section, searching for a recording of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The audio section offered (and still offers) an eleven-disc download of Dylan Thomas reading his own and other's works. One hard drive later, I was trying to find it again, and came across a post on MonkeyFilter featuring the collection, available through the day-pass feature that Salon now employs.

Do not gloss lightly over these good links:
CD1 CD2 CD3 CD4 CD5 CD6 CD7 CD8 CD9 CD10 CD11

Audio: 700 Hobo Names

This is an audio file created by John Hodgman, author and compiler of the book The Areas of My Expertise. The book covers a wide range of subjects, but must be bought to explore them further. Thankfully the author has deigned to read his compiled list of 700 hobo names to the tune of The Big Rock Candy Mountain, a hobo ballad.

Here are a few gems from the hobo names (although they all have a incomparable genius of description):

1. Stewbuilder Dennis
3. Holden the Expert Dreamtwister
25. Normal-Faced Olaf
108. Cthulu Carl
145. Robert IsHeAnElf, (One of the Seven Silt Brothers -all named Robert- known for their small stature and predictable bitterness)
189. Skywise the Sexual Elf
299. The Scroll-Keeper
304. Blind Buck and Bluesy, the Invisible Seeing-Eye Dog
307. Fake-Cockney-Accent Allen Strip
311. Sir Francis Drank
396. Not-Only-but-Also-Pete
437. Pontius Cornsilkheart
464. Lee Burned-Beyond-Recognition
547 .Myron Biscuitspear, the Dumpster Archeologist
635. Tailstuck Gunther, the Vestigial Man

Everyone feels the need to be distinctive; I can only imagine that need is more pronounced living a transient and needful life.
And hopefully this post has contributed a bit to their memetic afterlife.

Tangent: Where the Banana Led...

I had been seeing this unmistakable dancing banana expressing joy, revelry, or blind faith for forumites throughout the internet. Little did I know where its dancing would lead.



No, not to worship the banana (or despotic smiley) itself; instead I was compelled to search out a Wikipedia article explaining the rise of the banana as an outlet for e-motions (with apologies to Master Shake). Like many internet cliches, the banana arose from a flash animation, dancing long after the song Peanut Butter & Jelly Time comes to a close. The final point on the banana timeline I had the patience to notice was a gem of media-mashing, a dancing banana that changes color according to the current Homeland alert status, written in what i believe is XML (please correct me if I am wrong). I do not know if this is the penultimate form that the banana will take, but I can only love the banana inasmuch as it helps me understand the evolutionary theory of internet memes.

THe banana was only one example, however. I found a linkpost site through another linkpost site (the subject of another tangential in the near future), but the latter had a link to the banana, along with All your base are belong to us, Yatta!, and other temporary obsessions of the connected demographic. This site is called glasscocx, a name whose explanation is best left to the site's FAQ:

The most cliched links are often referred to being "glasscock", named after the famous image of a female golfer kissing a trophy. This image was once so ubiquitous that presently it is thought that the entire B3ta community had seen it, hence the name.

At glasscocx the editors monitor internet discourse for the formation of new cliches and post them as they appear. Some days, I feel like they have the correct method, and they are honorable folks. But what are we trying to understand?
Perhaps bananas are best left unpicked.

Animation: Strindberg and Helium

The Misadventures of a Swedish Playwright & Essayist & Radical Visionary and his Pink Friend Helium
[Featured in Flash! animation.]



The Strindberg and Helium creative staff have merged the morose August Strindberg (during his Inferno period) with Helium, a character they describe as a "joyous, floating friend [they] created to brighten Strindberg's day." The result is sublime:

I had forgotten that a female saint is, after all, a woman. That is to say: man's enemy.
[Followed by the cooing marshmallow]
[i.e. the effect does not translate to text]

However even the misanthrope ages like a patient or dignitary:


He lived an extreme life, aesthetic and extremist, detached or lunatic, somehow unscrewed from the worlds socket and blinking with the shaking of the fan. Here is a sample of his Occult Diary, kept the years 1896-1902:

When I married Bosse I got her with child immediatly. But she grudged me that great honour, and out of spite she went off with her unborn child. She alleged that I had deserted our bedroom, but the truth was that she had begged me to move, as pregnancy had given her a dislike for my person. She returned and the child was born. The next thing was that she did not want to have more children, but did want to continue "married life". This resulted in distaste and disgust. First we separated, then we got a divorce. After that we came together again and I became her lover, and still am. This then is the question, in what way have I failed ? My reputation was restored, but is so no longer, for her lies are enduring, in spite of all there is to confute them! At 50 I was no good as a husband, but at 58 I am good enough to be a lover! It is sublime! Sublime !!!"

The reason this is best-of-the-web is the lack of a self-conscious mold in the humor genre. Strindberg and Helium act according to their characters, not sacrificed to general sarcasm in front of an audience.

A link to a more biographical breakdown of Strindberg's sum of days. I think the man himself might prefer the cartoon.