The Arts Council of Greater New Haven, New Haven Review, and New Haven Theater Company are pleased to announce the return of Listen Here, the weekly short story reading series in which actors from the New Haven Theater Company read short stories chosen by New Haven Review editors.

The spring Listen Here series will take place on Tuesday evenings, from 7:00 to 8:00 p.m., with reading occurring on a rotating basis at Willoughby’s Coffee & Tea (194 York Street), Lulu: A European Coffee House (49 Cottage Street), Bru Cafe (141 Orange Street), and Manjares Fine Pastries (838 Whalley Avenue, on the corner of West Rock Avenue).

Willoughby’s Coffee & Tea
March 9: What Did She See in Him?
Raymond Carver, “Fat”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Jelly-Bean”

Lulu: A European Coffee House
March 16: Short Cuts
I.B. Singer, “Why the Geese Shrieked”
Jamaica Kincaid, “Girl”
John Cheever, “Reunion”
Annie Proulx, “The Blood Bay”

Bru Cafe
March 23: Breaking Up is Hard to Do
Bobbie Ann Mason, “Shiloh”
Bernard Malamud, “The Jewbird”

Manjares Fine Pastries
March 30: Straight Shooters
Stephen Crane, “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky”
Tobias Wolff, “Hunters in the Snow”

Willoughby’s Coffee & Tea
April 6: Take Me Out to the Ball Game
James Thurber, “You Could Look it Up”
James Farrell, “My Grandmother Goes to Comiskey Park”

Lulu: A European Coffee House
April 13: Something’s Not Right
T.C. Boyle, “Bloodfall”
Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery”

Bru Cafe
April 20: L’Etranger
Isidoro Blaistein, “Uncle Facundo”
John Cheever, “The Swimmer”

Manjares Fine Pastries
April 27: For Shame
Lorrie Moore, “Control Group”
Toni Cade Bambera, “The Lesson”

Willoughby’s Coffee & Tea
May 4: Lovesick
Jhumpa Lahiri, “A Temporary Matter”
Lydia Peele, “Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing”

Lulu: A European Coffee House
May 11: Animal Crackers
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Black Cat”
Annie Proulx, “The Half-Skinned Steer”

Bru Cafe
May 18: Brothers
Louise Erdrich, “The Red Convertible”
David Sedaris, “You Can’t Kill the Rooster”

Manjares Fine Pastries
May 25: Romeos & Juliets
Louise Erdrich, “The Plague of Doves”
Wiliam Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily”

The Publisher
New Haven Review

Terry Gilliam’s latest film, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, is currently playing at the Criterion Cinema in New Haven, but I haven’t seen it yet.  However, two unique films directed by Gilliam (which I consider his best, or are at least the ones I remember best), Brazil (1985) and 12 Monkeys (1995), are showing tonight and tomorrow night, respectively, at the Whitney Humanities Center on Wall Street, at 7 p.m., courtesy of  The Yale Film Society and Films at the Whitney.

Not wanting to give anything away, if you haven’t seen these films, I’d say they’re well worth your attention if you like fables of the future with a quirky relation to the present.  Do I mean the present when the films appeared or the current present?  Both, I think.

Brazil is set in a kind of Orwellian future that knows itself to be Orwellian — the way that Orwell’s 1984, ostensibly set in 1984 but written in 1948, has a relentless feel of the immediate post-WWII world.  Brazil is like that too: it looks like a future that dates back to Orwell’s 1984 as homage (the film appeared in 1985, note) and as comment on the datedness of the kind of dystopia it re-imagines for us.  A Ministry of Information “sometime in the 21st century” that uses pneumatic tubes for interoffice communication?  Computer consoles that look like ham-radios with screens?  Warrens of nameless workers who are only male and wearing suits that look like the ‘40s?

But there are elements that make it feel ‘80ish too: fashion statements such as a stunning hat that actually appears to be a ladies’ leopard-print high heel inverted on the wearer’s head; increasingly disastrous cosmetic surgery interventions; a female heroine with short spiky hair who is more butch than the willowy male hero (a twitchy, sadsack Jonathan Pryce); add to this the vast sets that recall, deliberately, Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and you have something like a retro-chic version of how the police state might morph before the millenium.

There’s plenty of Gilliam’s characteristic wide-angle and fish-eye camera work, lots of visual distortion, evocative uses of lighting and scale and, as usual with the former Monty Python animator, endless visual fun, including a Battleship Potemkin reference (in “the director’s cut,” at least) to give filmbuffs a laugh.  And the story — with threats of sabotage and terrorism against the state fleetingly evoked, and the Orwellian catchphrases posted in the background: “Truth is Information”; “Trust in Security” — stills holds up and maybe resonates as much now, post-W., as it did shortly after Reagan’s re-election.

12 Monkeys is set in the future, but not so distantly.  James Cole (Bruce Willis) was about 8 in 1997, the year when a viral plague wiped out most of the human race.  Now he’s about 40, sent back to 1996 to try to gather information that will help scientists in the present day (when everyone is living underground) find an antidote to the plague.  The basic situation of the film – time travel to the past to counteract the post-apocalyptic present, and the dramatic detail of the killing in the airport — derives from Chris Marker’s film La Jetée (1962).  But Gilliam brings to the material lots of fun, whacked-out stuff.

And keeps it interesting and mysterious.  A first viewing really plays with your head, much as the various “endings” of Brazil do.  And the visual palette is ramped up with chatter and crosstalk from TV sets (broadcasting the Marx Bros.’ Monkey Business, for instance), films (hiding out in a cinema while Vertigo is onscreen), music (one of my favorite moments is the look on Willis’ face when he hears, on his first trip back to‘96, Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill” on the radio), and the kind of beat futurisitic clutter held over from Brazil.

Other pleasures include a desolate, post-apocalyptic Philadelphia (and a not-so pleasurable version of that city, c. mid ‘90s, that looks truly distressed); also, Brad Pitt, as a psychotic scion of a rich magnate of biochemical products, is all quirks, trippy chuckles and frenetic hand gestures and mismatched eyes, heading the political group 12 Monkeys, dedicated to animal and environmental rights, but which might be moving toward terrorist or guerilla acts — again, a timeliness all-too-apparent for today’s viewers.

The apocalypse in Marker’s film was nuclear-based; in Gilliam’s it’s viral, but there’s enough environmental sentiment present, together with dismay at the human race — and stunning shots of an array of African animals loose in the streets of Center City — to fuel whatever global-warming apocalypse scenarios might be circulating in the brain of the 21st-century viewer.

Kevin Daniels’ oneman show, El Hablador: the Storyteller keeps butterflies, ending its 3-day run tonight at the Yale Cabaret, involves several conceits that blend together to create a unique theatrical experience.

First of all, “el hablador” (the storyteller) features the notion that the main character — Daniels, a young black man in a suit, barefoot — is stranded on an island where his need to tell stories is fulfilled by messages in bottles.  These hang from the ceiling, and the storyteller selects one or another, seemingly at random, and offers it with friendly gestures to an audience member who then reads aloud the message inside.  Addressed to the storyteller, the messages present occasions for a story.

Another conceit comes into play through the storyteller’s name: Dante, an illusion to the famous poet who catalogued the inhabitants of hell in its various circles.  Indeed, the stories El Hablador tells dramatize social hells of our contemporary world for four protagonists in interrelated stories.

Yet another conceit could be said to be the form of the stories themselves: delivered in highly rhythmical, allusive, visceral raps, the stories are offered as spoken both by and about the character in question.  The most effective, to my mind, was the tale of an African-American father trying to flee the crisis of Hurricane Katrina with his family; the story provided a convincing sense of other characters in the man’s life, as voices or ghosts pursuing him from the disaster.  The story of a young man trying to articulate his relation to his own sexuality was deft in its use of dramatic, confrontational soliloquy.  The other stories, of an Hispanic drug-dealer victimized by the ‘no exit’ like space of his ghetto upbringing, and of his white former girlfriend who moved to Vegas to become a stripper, while full, like all four monologues, of wonderful verbal riffing and expressive outbursts that were almost show-stopping in their brilliance, seemed to trade more on certain cliches of ‘the life’ than the other two monologues did.

Still another conceit that was perhaps the most striking was that the storyteller — who was a childlike, ingratiating mime-figure when speaking in his native language — ‘became’ the character in the monologue as if possessed by the voice, or as if he were a machine into which the ‘track’ had been inserted.  This was signaled by the breakdowns into repetitions and slowing speed as monologues drew to an end.  It was an effective transition device which, because of Daniel’s precise sense of rhythm — matching physical and verbal contortions in expressive combination — never seemed forced.  Rather it was unnerving each time, as if watching a puppet with Tourette’s Syndrome crash under the calamitous force of having to articulate such passionate, victimized lives.

Not being someone for whom rap has had much allure, I have to say that Daniels’ monologues impressed me with the scale to which the form can be stretched, combining the strengths of spoken word poetry, with allusions and metaphors piling up quickly, of dramatic monologue, in which a true self is revealed by choice of expression, and of oral storytelling, in which choice of incident and detail gives reality to scenes we “see” only in words.

El Hablador provides a commanding performance and gripping theater.  The space of the Cabaret was very effectively used through placement of the action, lighting the space to include the audience readers, and the scenic quality of hanging bottles like stars in the sky, each a story.

Saturday, Jan 16 @ 8 and 11pm:

http://www.yalecabaret.org/home.php

Strange Love in Outer Space, the final show by the Yale Cabaret this semester (two shows tonight; three on Sat, including an early show for kids), was written by Janyia Antrum, a twelve-year-old student who participated in the Dwight/Edgewood Project last summer.  The program gives local 6th and 7th graders from Augusta Lewis Troup and Wexler-Grant Community Schools an opportunity to work with Yale School of Drama theater people. Janyia was mentored by Brian Valencia, a dramaturg.

The one-act that Janyia wrote in two days at the D/EP’s weekend retreat got a second act after she went home and dreamed about the characters’ further adventures.  The Yale Cab commissioned a third act to find out where the characters were going, and the full trilogy, produced by Jorge Rodriguez and directed by Christopher Mirto, has now had its debut.

What kind of characters?  The main figure is Splontusia (Alex Hendrikson), a four-eyed, one-armed creature who gets transformed into being mean and evil by an injection from the mean and evil Dr. Roswald Tuscanium (Dr. T, for short; Valencia), a worm-like creature with a slit for eyes, truncated arms, and a long trailing body.  By end of act one, however, these two would-be antagonists have admitted that, yes, there’s something charming about that slit and something bewitching about the gleam in that fourth eye…

Romantic complications ensue with the addition, in act two, of Grumis (Mirto), an aquatic creature with a rather dim-witted if likeable delivery who has always loved Splontusia, and, in act three, of the outrageously named Bonegettagettaquisha Star Jones (Dipika Guha), a pirate woman who happens to be part dog, and who has kinda had a crush on Dr T ever since science class back in high school.

And, yes, there are songs.  In fact, be prepared to get on your feet for the rousing “the way love moves in outer space” finale.

I don’t know if Janyia has ever seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but I assume that her cast and mentors have, and they maintain a similiar level of zany engagement and campy silliness that made that film such a hit.  Dr T laughs diabolically and snivels pathetically; Grumis sings like an insecure kid on Sesame Street and then belts out his beloved’s name, “Splon-tuuu-syaaaaa,” like Stanley Kowalski with fins (and how he does those fish-hops I’ll never know).  And once Splontusia starts vacillating (Dr. T did chain her to a toilet, after all), B.S. J. arrives as a possible new match for Dr T; she growls and howls yet still manages to exude the charm of a funky Puss In Boots; and Splontusia herself, all in white, at a regal height, towering above the rest of the cast, veers in a mercurial manner from ditzy to heart-felt to aggressive to, finally, someone ready to be her own person.

See it to support young talent!  See it to meet creatures you won’t find anywhere else!  See it for the toilet bowl song!

Strange Love in Outer Space
What does it take to make a relationship work?
by Janyia Antrum (2009 Dwight/Edgewood Playwright) Directed by Christopher Mirto
December 4 @ 8 and 11PM
December 5 @ 4, 8 and 11PM
Love just got a whole lot stranger. A trilogy of plays begun in the Dwight/Edgewood Project.

Pulitzer-prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey, who is currently the James Weldon Johnson Fellow at the Beinecke, is reading at that august repository of valuable manuscripts, 121 Wall St., this Wednesday, Nov. 18th, at 4 p.m.  Read my discussion of her book Native Guard here.

Local poet Don Barkin, author of That Dark Lake, will be reading his poems on Friday, Nov. 20th, 7 p.m. at the Kehler Liddell Gallery, 873 Whalley Ave.  The event is co-sponsored by the Kehler Liddell Gallery and the Westville Village Renaissance Alliance.  Check out my article on Don’s book in this Thursday’s Advocate, or online.

Both events are free and open to the public

And on Thursday night, Nov. 19th, The Yale Cabaret, 217 Park St., is holding a fundraiser.  In this unique event, audience members will be hit up for suggestions, and the Yale School of Drama folks (students, faculty, staff) will have 60 minutes to bring the audience desiderata together in 15-20 minute pieces, to then be performed for the audience who will judge the best piece, according to announced criteria.  So if you’ve ever wanted to be in on a creative team, as well as a critical voice in awarding merit, here’s your chance.  It’s also a chance to support this very worthwhile theatrical endeavor.  Tickets are $20.  Doors open at 6 p.m. for seating and bar service.  6:30-7 p.m. is the time of the teams and planning; 7-8 p.m., dinner service is on; 8 p.m., the show begins.  Contact: 203.432.1566, or online at www.yalecabaret.org.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009, 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.

New Haven Review and Yale University’s McDougal Center for Graduate Student Life will host its 2nd Town Meets Gown Read In, where writers from New Haven and the Yale communities come together to share original works of poetry and prose. The “Read In” features five writers from each community and is approximately two hours long, with discussion afterwards. Refreshments will be served for this event, which is free of charge.  The New Haven Review (www.newhavenreview.com) is the literary arts journal of the Elm City; the Yale University McDougal Center for Graduate Student Life hosts events by and for graduate students on a regular basis.

Admission is free.  Readings are at McDougal Center for Graduate Student Life, 320 York Street, New Haven

Three months ago, I began to toy with an idea: Wouldn’t it be nice to find a place in New Haven where one could hear short stories read on a regular basis? Several sources contributed to this notion: author talks I had been booking at the Mitchell branch of the New Haven Public Library, reading to my children once upon a time (and sometimes still) before bedtime, catching once in a blue moon the Saturday radio program Selected Shorts, a “poetry crawl” that I organized in my neighborhood.

By coincidence, I received a note from David Brensilver, author and director of communications for the Arts Council of Greater New Haven, asking if New Haven Review would be interested in organizing weekly or monthly readings by local authors of their work. I responded right away that I was interested in a weekly reading series, but not of authors and their work, first because there are already very successful monthly reading programs organized by local writers of just this nature in the basement of the Anchor Bar and Restaurant and at the Institute Library respectively, and second, there is no way to maintain a weekly flow of new work without a lot of legwork finding local writers with material ready to read—and that much legwork was something I could not afford.

Since my role with New Haven Review is voluntary—like the rest of the team’s—I was looking for something that bridged efficacy and efficiency. Fortunately, in David, I found a soul perfectly amenable to the plan I was concocting, which went something like this. On a weekly basis, actors would read already published short stories at a rotating group of local coffeehouses. Here’s how I put it to him:

Why already published short stories?

Simple efficiency. With already published short stories, the New Haven Review team can build reading schedules far in advance. That meant, among other things, that when it was time to publicize the event, instead of dipping into the New Haven Independent’s Community Calendar each time the next reading was ready, we could load three or four months’ worth in one fell swoop. Reading original works or works in progress would require a constant hunt for new material with no guarantee of successful booking.

Why have actors read?

I’ll grant that we New Haven Reviewers are reasonably good readers. We’ve already shown our mettle at public readings in which we’ve participated. But let’s face facts: when you want a great short story to really sing, there is no substitute for a good actor taking the stage—or podium. Having heard my share of writers serve as the readers for audiobook editions of their work, I can assure you ‘tis the better part of wisdom to let actors do well what writers often only do fairly, at best.

Why read at coffeehouses?

Coffeehouses provide space at no charge since they receive added business in exchange. Since this is not a money-making endeavor for us, renting halls and charging for tickets were non-starters. Moreover, since this is an after-hours affair—translation: not for kids—we especially needed coffeehouses that either stayed open at night regularly or were willing to do so for the readings. Finally, the decision to go with several coffeehouses rather than one was based on the idea of spreading the wealth among the neighborhoods of New Haven and coffeehouse schedules. (At present, each coffeehouse is responsible for roughly one reading a month.)

So, will it work?

Beats the shit out of me. I have no idea if New Haven is hungry enough for this kind of thing. I think it is, but it’s primarily a question of getting the word out as aggressively as possible. We figure that with food for thought and stomach in one place, how can you go wrong?

The Arts Council of Greater New Haven and the New Haven Review, in partnership with the New Haven Theater Company and four area coffeehouses, are pleased to announce the launch of Listen Here!, a weekly series in which New Haven Theater Company actors read short stories selected by New Haven Review editors. Readings will take place on a rotating basis at Blue State Coffee, Koffee on Audubon, Lulu: A European Coffeehouse, and Manjares Fine Pastries in Westville. Readings are every Thursday at 7 p.m.!

September 10: Childish Adults
J.D. Salinger’s “The Laughing Man”
Ray Bradbury’s “Have I Got a Chocolate Bar for You!”
At Koffee on Audubon, 104 Audubon Street, (203) 562.5454, www.koffeenewhaven.com

September 17: The Impious of the Perverse: High Holidays Special
Philip Roth’s “The Conversion of the Jews”
Melvin Jules Bukiet’s “The Golden Calf and the Red Heifer”
At Blue State Coffee, 84 Wall Street, (203) 764-2632, www.bluestatecoffee.com

September 24: Great Expectations
James Joyce’s “Araby”
John Cheever’s “The Pot of Gold”
At Lulu: A European Coffeehouse, 49 Cottage Street, (203) 785-9218, www.lulucoffee.com

October 1: In Loco Parentis
Jim Shepard’s “Courtesy for Beginners”
Amy Hempel’s “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried”
Manjares Fine Pastries, 838 Whalley Avenue (in Westville), (203) 389-4489

October 8: Shock Treatment
Marisa Silver’s “What I Saw from Where I Stood”
Adam Haslett’s “The Good Doctor
At Koffee on Audubon

October 15: Love Stories
Woody Allen’s “The Kugelmass Episode”
J.D. Salinger’s “Just Before the War with the Eskimos”
At Blue State Coffee

October 22: Make Good Choices
John Updike’s “A&P”
Michael Byers’ “In Spain, One Thousand and Three”
At Lulu: A European Coffeehouse

October 29: Something Wicked This Way Comes: Our Halloween Special
Lynne Anderson’s “A Dead Summer”
Nancy Holder’s “We Have Always Lived in the Forest”
Manjares Fine Pastries

November 5: In the Blink of an Eye
Ambrose Bierce’s “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”
Dave Eggars’ “After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Was Drowned”
Koffee on Audubon

November 12: The Future of Our: Discontents
Harlan Ellison’s “Along the Scenic Route”
Ursula LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”
Blue State Coffee

November 19: Family Romance: Pre-Thanksgiving Special
Steve Almond’s “The Soul Molecule”
Julie Orringer’s “The Isabel Fish”
Lulu A European Coffeehouse

I hate my generation, I offer no apologies
I hate my generation, yeah–Cracker

My recent visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s show “The Pictures Generation, 1974-84” made this song, from 1996, leap to mind. Interestingly, in her review of the show for the Village Voice, Martha Schwendener bookended her take on the show with two generational markers: a comment from a seventy-something viewer (‘I have no appreciation for this’) and an anecdote by Robert Longo (one of the artists in the show) in which a 15-year-old asked if he got the idea for his Men in the Cities drawings from an iPod ad. Schwendener uses these bookends to talk about how art is generational, marked by what’s in the air at a given time; art can be distanced from us by the convictions we’ve spent a lifetime acquiring (the seventy-year-old), or as immediate as our own ignorance (the 15-year-old).

I appropriate Schwendener’s opening as my opening because I’m supposedly ‘of’ the ‘generation’ being represented in this show. Which is to say that the artists represented, born from the mid-40s to the mid-50s for the most part, are from fifteen to five years older than I am. In 1977, when the Pictures show was up at Artists Space, that seminal event from which this exhibit, curated by Douglas Eklund, takes its name, I graduated from high school. So these artists are my elders in the way that older siblings and such can be: which is to say: annoying in their know-it-all cool, their endgame of art as no longer having ‘aesthetic’ quality, no longer being something specifically made as an ‘art object,’ but rather something concocted from images and existing only as commentary on the ubiquity of image, both as something we look at everywhere, as spectators and voyeurs, and as something that shows us ourselves, as reflection and simulacrum.

This, as almost every commentator on the show has underscored, is the first generation to come of age with TVs in the home. And that, we’re made to think, has made all the difference. Though why television should spell the death of the aesthetic object is another one of those mysterious givens of art history, as for instance when it became clear, to use Wallace Stevens line, that ‘it must be abstract.’ We can rehearse the reasons why — point to Abstraction, point to Conceptualism and Minimalism, point to Pop Art — and then sum up why the only self-respecting response to the ubiquity of Madison Avenue, as the moneyed little brat it is, is: to appropriate it, thus making images of its images. Only this time with irony.

Fine. I can accept that. It was 1977, after all. Disco … Punk … New Wave, you get the idea. And, what’s worse, these people were all recently in art school. Let them have fun, let it rip … never mind the bollocks. But howevermuch one might have been sympathetic to the stance at the time, something rankles when these brittle disquistions on the staging of objecthood and send-ups of the mechanisms of attention, generally known as The Tube, get appropriated by The Museum and then hoisted onto walls where formerly masters of their medium had hung.

Is there a sense in which these artists — Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, Sherrie Levine, David Salle, Louise Lawler, Barbara Kruger, to name but a few — are masters? Yes, if we mean ‘masters of an idiom,’ ‘masters of manipulation,’ for how else explain the manner by which these largely ephemeral works have become ‘permanent’ as art objects? Where once these artists might have protested The Tube’s appropriation of virtually every image, The Artworld’s appropriation of every possible style, The Museum’s appropriation of every ‘aesthetic object’ so-called (da Vinci to Duchamp, etc.), offering their appropriations as flick-offs of the Pop Art/Minimalist aesthetic that, to quote Saint Andy, was all surface or mere object, they have now, via this show, appropriated The Museum, appropriately enough. Because this day had to come. But as with the idea of exhibits in The Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame, I can’t help feeling that everything about the art that gave it charm and brio has become a casualty of its enshrinement.

And what’s maybe even worse than that is the fact that the note-cards in the show play back to us the tired tale of epic struggle, not against the Artworld, or even against the bourgeoisie, but against The Image, and yet one is left wondering in whose name such struggle takes place. If it’s artist decrying advertising, such an idea is not new at the time and certainly not accurate to the world of the artist after Pop Art; if it’s the more thinky pleasure of deconstructing the Image, it’s not clear who can really receive this message. For there’s no evidence, in all this surfacedom, that anyone here can think outside the Image or that they would want to. When Sherrie Levine takes pictures of Walker Evans pictures she trades on the fact that those photographs are already known images. And her images of those photos become objects, but objects whose only purpose is the ancillary role of objectifying imagehood. When we watch clips of the TV show Wonder Woman we might hear an internal voice asking us: why was this televised, what does it say about the medium, and about the advertisers who aired to support it, and about those who tuned in — or at least we might in an exhibit cataloguing eras of broadcast television — but the question I ask myself here is what makes this objectification of an Image salient, provocative … enduring?

The big gun of the show, we’re told by everyone, including Barry Schwabsky, whose critical take on the show for The Nation I’m mostly in agreement with, is Cindy Sherman, and it’s true that, in rooms of forgettable stuff, her images of herself as ‘forgotten film stills’ are already ‘unforgettable.’ But is that because they really do look like images of movies we may have seen once upon a time, or is it because we have seen these images before — in the aggrandizing use of Sherman as the poster child of self-exploitative manipulation of gender signals in which every ‘look’ is aimed to see/show a cliché? Striking as these photographs might have been in their day, they now seem already to be like Walker Evans’ photos chez Levine, now objectified by the curatorial effort to tell a story in which the Image of the object (here ‘woman,’ the great absent signifié) reigns. And Sherman’s sad one-shot psychodramas are the best way to ‘reflect’ that.

The reason the seventy-year-old has no appreciation for this, we may say, is because a good part of her life was lived before The Tube changed forever the meanings of looking and watching and being seen … enviable woman, she existed before The Image was everything. But the reason I have no appreciation for this is that I don’t see why The Museum has to capitulate to The Tube, nor why my looking at things and beings (odd that I should think such may be found in the world I live in, independent of images of them) has to be inflected by ersatz renderings of more commercial mediums (TV, magazine ads, pop music) for the sake of art history, and po-mo art history at that. For if the grand narrative was already kaput when this stuff first surfaced — and these artists were cool with that in their glib image-happy heyday — then the deflating irony comes in when we realize that, without those art-critic gestures to the narratives of Pop Art and Objectivism, these particular images mean — to borrow another line from a song — less than zero

‘Of course the company founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998 - now reckoned to be the world’s most powerful brand - does not offer any substitute for the originators of content nor does it allow this to touch its corporate conscience. That is probably because one detects in Google something that is delinquent and sociopathic, perhaps the character of a nightmarish 11-year-old.’
 — Henry Porter, “Google is Just an Amoral Menace,” The Observer, 5 April 2009

Porter’s article, which I found because two Facebook friends linked to it, resonated very tellingly after attending a symposium, ‘Library 2.0,’ held at Yale Law School on Saturday, April 4.

After an intro that featured much ‘lifted’ film content and a bright, buzzword-laden welcome that urged us to Tweet and Blog and upload photographs from our cellphones, etc., and a paper by Josh Greenberg of the New York Public Library that celebrated the outreach potential of blogs, we finally got to a presentation, by Michael Zimmer of Univ of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, that offered a few caveats to the collective zeitgeist of online über alles with the notion, picked up from Neil Postman, of technology as always offering a Faustian bargain.

Given the need for the internet in contemporary communications, we might think Zimmer was simply playing devil’s advocate or was a Luddite at heart, a throwback to the ancient days before we all went online. But not so, what Zimmer was really cautioning us about was all the unexamined consequences of our lemming-like acceptance of internet interaction. As librarians have had to at times stand up for civil liberties, like the right to privacy about one’s intellectual inquiries and sources of information, Zimmer had reason to wonder if ‘Library 2.0’ — the library as modeled on Google, essentially — will continue to provide a ‘safe harbor for anonymous inquiry.’ Not simply ‘who owns the content’ of what we post — but who owns the documentation, who gets to data-mine, and so forth. Ted Striphas, of Indiana Univ., extended this ‘Big Brother is Watching’ paranoia into Amazon’s Kindle system which relays its users’ annotations, bookmarks, notes, and highlights back to ‘the mothership.’

In the course of the day, there were several references to ‘the Death Star’: the four huge publishing conglomerates that now exist where twice that many major publishers existed a decade before. But the real ‘Death Star’ emerged when the topic of Google’s digitization plans for out-of-print books was on the table in the day’s last panel. Already we had heard, in an excellent presentation by John Palfrey of Harvard Law School, how 100% of a focus group of what he called ‘digital natives’ (those hitting 13-22 since the major internet wave of the late ’90s) used Google to search for information and all went to the wikipedia entry on the subject first. Though Palfrey didn’t elaborate on this at the time, the point became clear in the Google discussion when Frank Pasquale, Visiting Professor at Yale Law School, spoke of the possible consequences of putting all our searches for information in the hands of ‘proprietary black box algorithms subject to manipulation.’ Wikipedia is always the first or second entry in any Google search. The first ten are apparently all anyone looks at. Everything that gets buried by the algorithm is as good as not there. This is not how research is conducted.

Then there’s the question of all those out-of-print books. Obviously it would be to the public good to have them searchable and accessible online if only because anything not online or available through Kindle (in other words, anything not part of the Death Star of Google and Amazon) falls into the ‘here be monsters’ of off-the-map ignorance. Already Jonathan Band, a lawyer, had told us that ‘fair use’ was becoming more conducive for technological and creative appropriation, and Denise Covey of Carnegie Mellon University Libraries and Ann Wolpert of MIT Libraries had spoken about faculties pursuing an open access policy in which anything they publish can be searched and referenced online — a blow to academic publishers, but a victory for the notion that research on the internet should not be hampered by commercial considerations.

In other words, the notion of open access to all information, via the internet, of complete ‘transparency’ of provider and user, was more or less the mantra of the day. But what the Faustian bargain came to seem finally was not with the technology itself, but with giants such as Google and Amazon as the Big Brothers playing Mephistopheles, offering us the interconnected, easy access world of our dreams, but a world where we sacrifice something of our own intellectual curiosity, restlessness, and desire to see outside or beyond that black box algorithm that makes things so easily manageable for us.

Think about how Wolpert pointed out that what made the MIT professors move for Open Access was their realization that, in the world of electronic text, libraries only ‘lease’ access to online work, rather than owning it like all those printed copies they store in perpetuity. If something happens to the provider or to the lease, all that material is no longer available. And now the publishing world seems poised to turn over all electronic control of out-of-print materials to Google to broker for us, and to disseminate to us according to its lights. As Brewster Kahle, co-founder of the Internet Archive, urged us to consider, there are alternatives. But as Ann Okerson, of Yale Libraries, said at the end of the final panel with a kind of ‘fait accompli’ finality: if Google accomplishes this digitization, the students and users of libraries at Yale will simply want access to it, and her job will be to work with it, not fight it.

‘But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.’
 — George Orwell, 1984