Richard Kramer: “The Gay Characters on New Normal and Modern Family and Glee are snippy-sweet, proudly trivial, commedia dell’arte figures fingering price tags at Design Within Reach on a Sunday afternoon. I enjoy these shows; they’re well-meaning, and well done. But don’t we deserve the whole picture? Aren’t gay people as contradictory, compromised, fucked up as anyone else? I know I am, and I’m pretty sure Thomas Barrow is.”
Come visit the Los Angeles Review of Books at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books! You can find us this weekend at our booth, number 26, located in the Trousdale Parkway on the USC campus. This is your chance to not only meet the staff that makes the Review possible, but to pick up a copy of our beautiful new print edition magazine: a selection of our best interviews and author questionnaires. Bring your friends, and we hope to see you there.
Eric Hayot discusses anachronism, elderly resentment, and Claude Levi-Strauss in Japan:
Time makes us all anachronisms to ourselves. As we get older, we are all left behind by a history we had once been sure we were making. We struggle, in our aging bodies, to recall the embodied force of fitter, sharper selves. The problem is worse, presumably, if you live to be 100, like the late anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (born in 1908, he finally passed away in October 2009). By then, you may have lived long enough, as Lévi-Strauss did, to see your upstart theories kill their most visible father (Jean-Paul Sartre), dominate the village for decades, produce a litter of influential children (Althusser, Foucault, Bourdieu), and gradually fade into respectability, granting you the privileged gestures of institutional and governmental recognition — Nicolas Sarkozy visiting you at home on your birthday, for instance — that we use to bury something while praising it.
Cute Policing
by Tong Lam (photo © Tong Lam)
A lot has been said on the rise of China’s soft power in the international arena. What is less often discussed is the rise of police soft power in urban China in recent years. Indeed, although policing has always been a central component of the government’s penetrating apparatus of social control, Chinese police forces have recently begun to adopt a softer image in certain contexts. For example, residents of Chongqing still vividly recall the young, heavily made-up female traffic cops introduced by the former local party chief Bo Xilai. Similarly, when Bo was the mayor of the city of Dalian in the 1990s, he also instituted the idea of having young and good-looking female police officers patrolling the city center on horseback, a practice that has apparently outlasted Bo’s political career.
Indeed, while many observers have associated the use of young female police officers with Bo’s peculiar populist policies, the idea of cultivating a benign image for the police has become routine in Chinese cities. Generally, the emergence of a neoliberal economy since the 1990s has resulted in a fundamental restructuring of China’s social and economic landscape. In urban areas, this involves the growing disparity between middle class residents and migrant workers who do physical labor and perform service functions. Meanwhile, the gentrification of city neighborhoods has also led to the creation of new urban spaces dedicated to leisure and consumption.
Yet, these newly created public spaces (or, more accurately, these privatized public spaces) are never really designed for the masses in the broad sense. On the contrary, the highly visible presence of security guards, police officers, and various forms of surveillance apparatuses, such as closed-circuit television cameras, in these spaces is part of the neoliberal regime of social inclusion and exclusion, of the sort described so famously, with reference to California’s biggest metropolis, in the Mike Davis classic City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. In this context, the urban poor and “undesirables,” such as migrant workers, are made to feel unwelcome in what are purportedly “public” spaces. At the same time, the constant presence of the panoptic gaze does not just reassure the rich elites and middle class citizens of their safety, it also helps to instill a sense of fear and insecurity among them, making them appreciate the role of the state in maintaining law and order.
The rise of cute-looking police surveillance apparatuses is therefore part and parcel of contemporary China’s strategy of constructing a “socialist harmonic society” in an increasingly tension-ridden society. And while comparable cute-looking surveillance apparatuses can be found in other East Asian societies such as Singapore, Taiwan, and Japan, they should also be seen as part of a larger global trend of masking the ever penetrating state power with softer and more benign images.
Recommended Reading
Guilty of Indigence: The Urban Poor in China, 1900-1953 by Janet Y. Chen (Princeton University Press, 2012): a study of how the Chinese urban poor were managed by the government in the first half of the twentieth century.
Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution by David Harvey (Verso 2012): a critique of the historical relationship between global capitalism and the city, and a discussion of how to create alternatives to the current system.
Image: Rossums Universal Robots, Karel Capek, 1920.
Rob Horning reviews Illah Reza Nourbakhsh’s study of the role of robots in popular culture, Robot Futures:
In Robot Futures, Illah Reza Nourbakhsh, a professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, tries to complicate our ideas about our robot helpers. As robotic technology develops and insinuates itself further into everyday life, what counts as a robot is becoming more slippery, drifting further away from the C-3POs and the Twikis and the other box-of-bolts robot buddies of science fiction. Is a garage-door opener a robot? Do they have to be self-propelling? (A Roomba seems far more robotic than a laptop, but a laptop is far more useful.) Must a robot think “for itself,” as if it actually has a “self”? Do they even have to be machines at all? Do I become a robot when I use my smartphone?
“Synthetic biology is not just a new tool for creating the Anthropocene; it is also a new tool for art.”
- David Biello, “The Art of Life in the Anthropocene”
Photo: Eduardo Kac, “Natural History of the Enigma.” Courtesy Black Box Gallery, Copenhagen.
Image: Deinococcus radiodurans, Michael J. Daly, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.
Every microbe was once a poem. David Biello continues his series on the Anthropocene with The Art of Life:
The microbe itself emits a red glow, completing the uncanny effect. Spawned by word reaching Bök of scientists transcribing the lyrics of “It’s a Small World (After All)” into another living bacterium’s genetic code, “The Xenotext” represents a story written for humans in the medium of life.
Synthetic biology is not just a new tool for creating the Anthropocene; it is also a new tool for art. The question is: does everything become art in some sense when the whole world becomes an artifact of human effort, from sprawling cityscapes to the weather?
Read about flower creation, maggot painting, microbe literature, and bio art.
Photo: Dandelion circle on blue bells; Brough, Cumbria; 4 June 1985; © Andy Goldsworthy.
Liam Heneghan on his acquaintance with ecologist and author William R. Jordan III and The Sunflower Forest:
When I first brought a group of my undergraduate students to meet William Jordan III at Cafe Mozart in Evanston, Illinois, he told them that each year we should ritualistically destroy a small plot of virgin prairie, of which there is virtually none left in this state, in order to dramatize its importance to us. I assured them that he did not mean this sacrifice literally; he assured them that he did.
Free Bins
by Green Apple’s Kevin Ryan
Lots of retail stores can boast that they offer items for sale in a broad price range, say from $999 all the way down to $.99. But at Green Apple, we can do better than that, not only because we usually have at least a few rare books priced at $2000 and up, but because our lowest-priced books are free. And the selection is usually pretty good. The Free Box has been a part of Green Apple, and a fixture on Clement Street, since we first opened our doors in 1967. Here’s how it works.
We have the busiest used-book buy counter in the Bay Area. Every day, dozens of folks bring in their boxes and bags of books to sell. Because we have limited space, we have to keep control of our used book inventory, which means turning down a lot of good books. Yes, that copy of Madame Bovary is in nice shape, but it’s the third one we’ve seen today. Sorry, but when that Stephen King book came out in paperback, we are no longer able to sell the hardback. Once folks have gone to the trouble of hauling their books in to sell, they’ve often made that emotional break with them, and aren’t interested in lugging the rejects home or around to other stores. And that is where the free box comes in.
The fact is, many books that go into the free box are sellable, just not at Green Apple. For the entrepreneurial sort, willing to collect the books to try and sell at other stores, or to list on eBay, there is profit to be made. This has occasionally led to conflict. Over the years, there have been an assortment of characters who seemed to be making a minor living out of our free box. In the ecosystem of Green Apple, these folks are the bark beetles, breaking down the final remains of the fallen tree and returning the parts back into the cycle. But mostly we consider the free box a community asset. The ideal consumer is the casual passer-by, who spots a book by a favored author, but maybe a bit dog-eared or with a torn cover, and snatches it up.
For more on LARB’s Naked Bookseller program, go here.
