I had wanted to make an AfterEffects animation for my CommLab final project, but then I didn’t get around to playing with the program until the eleventh hour. The result is definitely not what I had in mind. (What I wanted to do was more like de Vicq de Cumptich’s Bembo’s Zoo animations.)

This is the second smidgen of the code for our final project. It pulls RGB values and color names from a tab-delimited text file (which is, itself, based on the actual Krylon color options) and outputs this grid of swatches. The swatches don’t do anything yet—just drawing them took me, like, two days, thank you very much, and that was with some very helpful help from Shawn. Partly this is because I apparently can’t keep in my head for more than thirty seconds how arrays and objects work, and partly it’s because I just. can’t. focus. And partly it’s because I apparently have no idea what the fuck I’m doing.

I’m beginning to really like Diego’s Plan B, as proposed over the weekend:

Fake our own deaths.

I keep telling myself I have to not panic and just write the code one piece at a time. Then, later, I can get somebody to help me put it all together, which is something I know I have no clue how to do. But just accomplishing what seem like they should be simple things is stumping me. Most recently, I was trying to get the swatch name to be displayed when a square is rolled over. This is not by any means an important feature—in fact, it doesn’t really serve any purpose. But I should be able to do it, and I can’t figure out why it doesn’t work. I keep getting errors like “The function showName() does not exist” or “Cannot find anything named ’swatches.’” Both of these things do, of course, exist, and I can’t see any reason why they wouldn’t be found.

I know it’s pretty rare for computers to just fuck up and much more common for me to do so, so I’m sure the answer is that I’ve done something really dumb and sloppy somewhere. But it could easily take me two hours to find that error, and every new goddamn line of code seems to cause some new mysterious issue. I can feel myself growing older just thinking about it. And there are a lot more lines of code to go. Here’s the stuff I was hoping to get done, oh, by, say, last Thursday:

And that’s not including the task of sewing us a new glove, for which I bought fabric on Monday, as well as a book about how to use my virgin four-year-old Juki serger. I know that’ll be fun once I get started, but I just can’t get started.

Maybe I need a drink.

The final video is on YouTube.

I’m working with Dimitri(o)s, Diego, and Jason on the video project du jour, and this week we had to draw storyboards for our piece. The guys wrote a script on Thursday, while I had a prior engagement. Today we split the script up into four chunks, and each of us drew the panels for one section. My first four panels are above. The whole storyboard is in this PDF that Diego made. As a bonus, doing this assignment also got me off the hook for missing a few days of DrawMo!

The gist of the story is that this guy (ML, aka Male Lead) discovers that his headphones allow him to hear other people’s thoughts—but only negative ones.

Next week, we’re somehow going to try to shoot this thing, in the subway. Fortunately, it looks like videotaping in the subway, even with a tripod, is not illegal, as long as you don’t block access or passage. Basically, as long as we don’t act like those film crew assholes who’re always redirecting me around my own fucking office building, we should be fine. Cops often have interesting misconceptions about the laws they’re supposedly enforcing, though, so I’ll try to remember to print out a copy of the rules before we go.

P.S. We used a cleaner version of the storyboard form, which I made because the one Spencer supplied filled me with sorrow.

I think Marshall McLuhan makes a lot more sense if you add the direct address “Dude,” followed by a comma, to the beginning of each paragraph or pithy sentence. As in,

Dude, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace,

or

Dude, the essence of automation technology is integral and decentralist in depth, just as the machine was fragmentary, centralist, and superficial in its patterning of human relationships.

or

Dude, the past mechanical time was hot, and we of the TV age are cool.

or

Dude, we are suddenly eager to have things and people declare their beings totally.

Yeah, like, totally, dude. But please, sir, do not bogart that joint.

McLuhan’s writing is more comprehensible than the Walter Benjamin piece, which still deflects every attempt at comprehension, but this is likely because it’s easier to dismiss as simply incoherent nonsense. As with the Benjamin, I feel like we are entering the discussion in medias res.

Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.

What in the Sam Hill is he talking about? Is there an antecedent missing somewhere? How does electricity extend “our” central nervous system? And who you calling “we,” white man? Apparently it doesn’t include me, because two pages later there’s

It is this implosive factor that alters the position of the Negro, the teen-ager, and some other groups. They can no longer be contained, in the political sense of limited association. They are now involved in our lives, as we in theirs, thanks to the electric media.

I’m sorry, but “the Negro” has always been involved in my life, thank you very much.

I know, I know, he was writing in a different era. But still, presumably we are being asked to read this because it has something relevant to say to our current studies. Okay, what could that be?

It’s got to be something more profound than the simple “Wow! It’s like he wrote this yesterday!” section on page 30, where we learn that (a) violent movies and video games engender real-world violence, and (b) living in Orange Alert all the time is completely meaningless. It’s also got to be something more germane than the assertion that

A tribal and feudal hierarchy of traditional kind collapses quickly when it meets and hot medium of the mechanical, uniform, and repetitive kind. . . . Similarly, a very much greater speed-up, such as occurs with electricity, may serve to restore a tribal pattern of intense involvement such as took place with the introduction of radio in Europe, and is now tencing to happen as a result of TV in America.

which is expressed more clearly and concretely in Here Comes Everybody.

Is it the litany of hot and cold items, which is exactly as useful as (though significantly less amusing than) the game of dividing everything and everyone into “punk” or “goth”?

etc.

How does any of this relate to what we are doing? Is this a connection that’s obvious to everyone else in the program—are they all, like, Dude, that’s so profound? Am I alone in having a block against finding anything useful in this kind of free-floating jive? Is it simply meant to be provoking? If so, then it’s not working—every week, we seem to have less and less discussion about the reading.

I read steadily, if slowly. Mostly nonfiction, and novels from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I don’t think I’m a lazy reader; the kind of book I like best is one that helps you see things from a different perspective. But this kind of writing makes me want to pitch the book across the room. Every article we’ve had to read for this class is of the sort that causes my brain to completely shut down. These readings bring out in me what one of my friends calls “Republican moments”: they make me want to start hollering about those elitist, arugula-eating people who always have to go and use those ten-cent words.

It is, as I said weeks ago, precisely the kind of writing that made me decide, after suffering through plenty of it in college, not to apply to graduate school in English. Yet here I find myself, again. Is this merely the result of sleep deprivation?

In any case, since you asked, here’s my response: This is bullshit.

The one thing I did get out of this reading is a list of other—and, I hope, better—books to read that may be more illuminating. These include,

• John Betjeman, Slick But Not Steamlined
• Kenneth Boulding, The Image
• J.C. Carothers, The African Mind in Health and Disease
• Douglas Cater, The Forth Branch of Government
• Alexis de Toqueville, Exploring Democracy in America
• Leonard Doob, Communication in Africa
• E.M. Forster, A Passage to India
• Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
• E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion
• Bernard Lam, The Art of Speaking
• Wyndham Lewis, The Childermass
• A.J. Liebling, The Press
• Lewis Mumford, The City in History
• J.U. Nef, War and Human Progress
• Constance Rourke, American Humor
• A.L. Rowse, Appeasement
• G.B. Sansom, Japan
• Wilbur Schramm, Television in the Lives of Our Children
• J.M. Synge, Playboy of the Western World
• Robert Theobald, The Rich and the Poor

So, . . .

I didn’t have a partner because apparently everybody else was already working with someone. This meant I could work on the video at home. BUT I don’t have a tripod or copy stand at home, I couldn’t find the data cable for either of my cameras, and I didn’t feel like blowing $50 on an iStopMotion license. So I shot each frame by hand, aligned them in Photoshop, tweened more frames in between some of them, and strung them together in both the demo of iStopMotion (which leaves a watermark—hence the slight letterboxing) and iMovie HD. The last chunk of frames are not aligned—it’s amazingly laborious to do so—which is why they wobble all over the place.

In a word, it sucks.

But, hey! I learned so much.

The homework assignment for CommLab week 4 was, “In teams of two, tell a story in 4–10 sequential images. Upload to your blog.”

Brien and I made this comic.

Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Somewhere I have some notes on this mind-numbing article, but I can’t find them. It’s probably because I carried this thing around with me for almost two weeks, as I slowly, slowly forced myself to read it. When I finally got to the blessed end, my response was . . . nothing? I have next to nothing to say about this article. It has next to nothing to say to me.

First of all, the political angle seems utterly forced. If you lop off the preface and epilogue, the essay seems less absurd, more grounded in reality. Instead of contextualizing Benjamin’s arguments, the comments about Marxism and Fascism push the discussion out of context, from the matter-of-fact, yeah-duh realm of “films are different from paintings” to the what-the-fuck-are-you-talking-about realm of “everything can be explained by Marxist theory, including your sandwich.” I’ll have the roast Capitalist Pig with frisée on ciabatta, please. Thank you. Sentences like,

However, theses about the art of the proletariat after its assumption of power or about the art of a classless society would have less bearing on these demands than theses about the developmental tendencies of art under present conditions of production.

make my brain shut right off. I must have restarted reading this piece four times; finally, the only way I got past the first page was to just turn it over. Skipped it. Gave up on trying to make sense of it. Moved on.

This kind of thing makes me feel like I’m growing senile. Help! I’m turning into my mother!

It also makes me wonder if it’s just a translation issue. “Aura”? Are you kidding me? Surely there was a better word available—a word that means something, a word that does not automatically invoke the sensation of being bullshitted. If we’re supposed to take this “aura” concept seriously, the translator needs to find a word that’s not loaded down with the weight of all that is woo-woo.

Probably another reason why I found this essay mind-numbing is that I just. don’t. care. about. film. I watch, like, four movies a year, and those are all on Netflix. I can’t remember what was the last movie I saw in a theater—Art School Confidential, maybe? To which I was dragged. Before that, I think it was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Honest. Not a movie person. Even when I was TA’ing a film class in college, I don’t think I ever watched more than half of the movies that were under discussion. It wasn’t necessary to see the films in order to mark up students’ papers: if the paper’s good, you don’t need to have seen the film.

Similarly, if the essay’s good, you don’t have to be already up to your neck in Marxist art theory to find it relevant.

The essay is not good.

The question my mind kept coming back to, as I drifted in and out of sleep while trying to read this thing, was, What does this have to do with our class? The best I could come up with was that bit about how at a play, the audience identifies with the actors, while at a film, they identify with the camera. So . . . something about interactivity, and what’s interactive versus what’s mock-interactive . . . ?

The other thing I kept coming back to was, He’s piling an awful lot of cultural significance on top of traditional art. Not just the aura nonsense, but also the stuff about cult and ritual. Maybe this is my perspective only because I’m from an era that has radio and TV and movies and computers, or maybe it’s because I grew up in an artist’s family, but I don’t find art important. Not in and of itself. Individual works, or parts of works, might be moving or thought-provoking, but art by itself? A lot of it is shite. The idea of it having any cult significance? Unless Benjamin is talking about religious icons, I don’t see it. And if he’s talking about something else, he fails to explain what that something else is.

One of my favorite lines in the whole string:

An analysis of art in the age of mechanical reproduction must do justice to these relationships, for they lead us to an all-important insight: for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.

Those are strong words, Walter. And completely meaningless ones. Awesome.

Another fave: “Artistic production begins with ceremonial objects designed to serve in a cult.”

This, I’m certain, is just an instance of awkward translation. The verb tense is confusing. Why present tense? Why not “Artistic production began”? Because that’s what he goes on to mean. So, here, the translator is just making him sound like an ass.

Much as in the aura argument, Benjamin’s invoking, in §xiii, of Freud as some kind of master of scientific investigation, undermines whatever it is he’s trying to say. So, as the film reveals to us visual details that normally go unnoticed, so psychoanalysis supposedly reveals psychological details that we otherwise don’t perceive.

Yes, we don’t perceive them because they’re not there. It’s amazing to me that people still talk about psychoanalysis, when to me, it’s always seemed that Freud might just as well have been talking about astrology or cloudbusters. I mean, he just fucking made stuff up about his patients. He generated ideas about how people behave in his head and then managed to convince himself—and thousands of other suckers—that his ideas could be seen in living, breathing action.

I don’t know. I’m trying to make it sound here like I have some kind of overall response to what Benjamin is saying. But, really, I don’t have a response to his argument because I can’t find his argument. He says a bunch of stuff, a few words on each page may spark a glimmer of recognition in my brain, but otherwise he might as well be talking about 1930s German politics, for all that I can relate to it. Oh, wait—he is talking aboit 1930s German politics, at least in part. Right.

Crank your speakers and click to play

Sorry about the wobbles.

This is my video journal of the Servo lab for PhysComp, filmed for CommLab on a Sanyo Xacti 6MP digital movie camera.

I tried to edit this within the Xacti, but I ended up joining the clips together in the wrong order. It was way too much work to separate them again—it’s just a lousy way to edit—so then I dumped the mess into iMovie HD (an older version, recommended by Bre Pettis in his very fine Getting Started in Video series), recut and rearranged it, and added title frames from Photoshop (too bad they look like crap after compression) and CC-licensed music by the excellent Kristin Hersh. This was my first time using iMovie; I found it reasonably intuitive.

So, basically, it’s just the worst video for a Kristin Hersh song ever. Rock on.

I finally got around to installing some WordPress plug-ins. Here’s what I’m running at the moment:

Akismet 2.1.8

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put in your template. See also: WP Stats plugin. By Matt Mullenweg.

Category Selector Back to the Sidebar (MOD) 0.7

Puts the category selector section back to the sidebar of the Post page. Now you can write at a WordPress v2.5 blog without hating v2.5. By Baris Unver.

FeedBurner FeedSmith 2.3.1

Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. By FeedBurner.

Fluency Admin 1.2.1

WordPress 2.5+ only. A rethink of the WordPress admin interface giving it a slightly more modern application-esque feel, inspired by Steve Smith’s Tiger Admin. Firefox, Safari and IE8 only. By Dean Robinson.

No Self Pings 0.2

Keeps WordPress from sending pings to your own site. By Michael D. Adams.

Wiki Dashboard 0.1

Mini-Wiki on the wordpress dashboard, for multiple autors [sic] collaboration. By Dzamir.

WordPress Admin Bar 3.0.2

Creates an admin bar inspired by the one at WordPress.com. Credits for the look of this plugin go to them. By Viper007Bond.

WordPress.com Stats 1.3.2

Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key. By Andy Skelton.

WP Ajax Edit Comments 2.1.2.0

Allows users and admin to edit their comments inline. Admin and editors can edit all comments. By Ronald Huereca.

I’ve also edited the stylesheet so that the body text is sized in points rather than pixels, and I tweaked some colors and margins and such.

Photo: Oh. by Adam Smith; some rights reserved.