Dreaming inside Werner Herzog's Cave

Some thirty-two thousand years ago, someone in Southern France entered a dark cave above the Ardèche River and, by the light of a torch, created meaning with a piece of charred pinewood. He or she certainly was not the first to do so, but from our benighted historical perspective, shaped by the absence of evidence, this cave painter now stands at a make-believe beginning—as the first known one of us to escape the daylight and embark on the representational life.

In Werner Herzog’s latest documentary, “The Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” the paintings from the toxic, radon-filled blackness of Chauvet cave feel like a blast of fresh air. That is, a blast of thirty-two-thousand-year-old fresh air. The paintings are more than twice as old as any other previously discovered cave painting. They were created at a time when Neanderthals and Homo sapiens still shared the frozen ground of Ice Age Europe.

Around twenty thousand years ago, the face of the limestone cliff above the river bed collapsed, effectively sealing off the cave from time — until 1994, when a group of explorers led by Jean-Marie Chauvet detected a small air shaft reaching up from the cave’s ceiling.

Inside, they found a time capsule of pristine beauty, one that offers us a tantalizingly dim view of life between thirty and twenty thousand years ago.

For ten thousand years, the cave’s galleries hosted a variety of artists. Some meticulously scratched away the surface of cave wall to a clean white canvas before filling it with delicately rendered charcoal- and sepia-toned depictions of horses, rhinoceroses, and lions. A later crooked-fingered artist adorned the walls with red ochre hand prints. Someone even painted the lower portion of a female human figure, in which a giant fertile-looking vagina grows into a furry bison head. And, in what is perhaps the earliest recorded act of art criticism, a curmudgeonly cave bear, upon encountering what then was already a five-thousand-year-old painting, ran his claws down the length of the work, as if to say, “You call this art?!”

With their deft lines, ingenious composition, and raw aesthetic verve, the images of Chauvet overwhelm you with the sheer duration of human cultural experience in its full symbolic richness. There is something heartening, even liberating, in contemplating this obvious truth. There is no human existence apart from culture, and our species’ existence is a long and varied, though fundamentally continuous, story that dwarfs our idea of history.

Herzog captures in moving (3D!) pictures the wonder of these suspended moments of human life from seemingly beyond the reach of time.  Seeing such vibrant, sophisticated evidence of life literally leap out at you from the unfathomable depths of the past is, to put it strangely, a visceral intellectual experience. The paintings in the cave serve as a sort of memento viviri: reducing the last five thousand years of our hand-wringing concerns to ephemera. I left the theater feeling dangerously light—as though my ninety-minute communion with primeval humanity had somehow unburdened me from the modern world.

Yet for all their radiance, the Chauvet paintings only heighten our awareness of the dark unknown in which our past is hidden.

Read the rest of this piece at Hypervocal.com  

The Populists' Billionaire and the Misbegotten Ones

Thank you, Donald Trump, for finally bringing the long marginalized issue of native birth to the forefront of the American political scene. Here I thought “birtherism” was a live issue only for ignorant yokels and racist crackpots. Turns out it’s also a serious concern for plutocratic celebrity whores—who also happen to be ignorant, racist crackpots.

But I find your nativism infectious. Now that we’ve cleared up the circumstances of President Obama’s birth, it’s time to investigate the shadowed origins of other American politicians. Seeing as how you’recurrently polling as the top GOP presidential candidate for 2012, let’s start with you, The Donald:

What unfortunate vagina did you pop out of, sir?

Or was it an anus?

I don’t mean to offend you, as I realize insulting a person so encased in his own narcissism is like trying to shoot the pope when he’s in his bullet-proof glass-encased pope-mobile.

But I ask only because your resemblance to a gilded, sun-bleached turd is uncanny. And the possibility of you being not a man but a megalomaniacal piece of excrement might pose citizenship problems.

Does floating in the befouled water of a Brooklyn toilet count as being born on American soil? I’m not so sure. I therefore demand you show the American people your birth certificate proving that you are of woman born.

But that’s just the beginning of my conspiracy theory. I also have a strong unfounded suspicion that Donald Trump is only one of many thousands in this country who claim to be natural-born Americans, but who are, in fact, high density formations of bowel movement.

These imposters constitute the overwhelming majority of the Tea Party movement. That they try so hard to cloak their dubious citizenship status behind American flags, tri-corner hats, and constitutional rhetoric betrays them only further (as though the maleficent odor wafting from their mouths didn’t already give them away).

What am I saying? That our nation is infested with an army of illegitimate ass babies posing as real American citizens? You said it. That means there are now two of us saying it, which means my conspiracy theory must be true.

Read the rest of this piece at Hypervocal.com  

Remembering Rotting Books in a Digital Age

“When it was proclaimed that the Library comprised all books, the first impression was one of extravagant joy. All men felt themselves lords of a secret, intact treasure. There was no personal or universal problem whose eloquent solutions did not exist—in some hexagon.”

Such were the optimistic beginnings of “The Library of Babel,” the Jorge Luis Borges story where all the books of the universe exist in a library composed of limitless hexagonal galleries.

But the dream of infinite knowledge soon proves a curse, as the scholars wandering the library’s vast holdings search in vain for a single meaningful sentence. In time, the marbled halls become overrun with disease, banditry, and mass suicide.

Now is a particularly good time to remember Borges’s library in all its prophetic glory and ruin. Only a few weeks ago, Google’s dreams of digital book dominion of Babel-like dimensions were dashed on the rocky shores of copyright law. But I’m not interested in discussing here the thorny issues of copyright infringement and the corporate monopoly of knowledge.

Instead, let’s consider the dream itself—the dream of a digital world library.

Google is only one possible player in this quest for the online unity of knowledge. Historian and Harvard librarian Robert Darnton has been an outspoken advocate for a free digital public library. Surely, this dream of a single accessible source for the whole of human knowledge, a dream that goes as far back as the Encylopedists of the Enlightenment, is shared by all literate and humane people. Everyone believes that putting the world’s books at our fingertips would be a democratic step forward for humanity, right?

Of course. Yet, deep down, part of me balks at this dream of unified digital knowledge, even though I can appreciate its many obvious virtues. At the risk of sounding like a premature crank, I’ll confess: the death of print and the rise of the universal digital age reasonably unnerve me.

Why? Because with every advance in technology comes loss. Modernity, as much as it appears to be an upward arc of progress and invention, is equally one of continual extinction and destruction.

Take, for example, the prosaic wonder of email, which puts us in instantaneous communication with the globe. But its instantaneous capabilities not only diminish the content of our letters—they also encode our words and thoughts in an immaterial form that, unless one has enough foresight and ego to print them out, will likely vanish into the ether.

As someone with a perhaps unhealthy love for reading the letters of dead men, I find the idea of a future bereft of the legacy of human correspondence deeply depressing.

We don’t need to think in great stretches of time here to appreciate this sense of loss. How, in 2060, will you reread all those romantic “love emails” (a comically vulgar term) you sent your now elderly wife back when you were wooing her in college on your long-terminated university email account? And how will all your witty emails speak to posterity after your own wit has withered to dust?

With the silence of ones and zeros, that’s how.

Read the rest of this post here at HyperVocal.com

Filling the Digital Gap: The Missing Wild Bill Hickock Page

My friend, the San Diego-based artist and tech geek Tim Schwartz, explores the losses that arise in the digitization of knowledge. One of his projects, "Wild Bill's Loss," examines the missing page of an 1867 article in Harper's about Wild Bill Hickock just after his showdown with Dave Tutt. The article helped turn the handsome gunslinger into a national legend. Having slipped past the gaze of the scanner, this page is now lost to posterity. In an effort to plug the digital hole of history, Tim asked several artists and writers to imagine what was on that page.

What follows is my version of that missing page. The italicized words at the beginning and end indicate what was on the preceding and proceeding pages, starting with "That man is the most remarkable charac-" and ending with "she must jump it; and at it she went with a big rush...."

----------------------------------

“That man is the most remarkable charac-ter artist I have ever seen. Just fix your eyes on that there cocktail napkin he was doodling upon. Why, he’s captured your likeness, Captain, in a most startling and peculiar fashion.”

“Yessir, Kernel, that’s Bill for yer,” replied the Captain. “Always fidgetin’ with his pencils. Ye can hardly can have a conversation or play a round of cards with the man without him scratchin’ out some pitchures, on nappins, barstools, hankerchiefs, what have yer. A feller’s got to mind his possessions, hell, even his person, when he’s in Bill’s company if he don’t want to end up sportin’ one of them funny faces.”

“You mean he draws on people?”

“I do indeed, sir.” Captain Honesty then leaned in close, puffing away at me with his whiskey-scented breath, and told me how a few months ago, before the showdown with Dave Tutt, Bill had drawn on Tutt’s cousin Edna as she lay passed out on the saloon bar.

Suddenly Mr. Tutt’s grudge against Wild Bill made more sense.

I held the damp drawing up to marvel at its masterly craftsmanship. Wild Bill had not once glanced at his hand the entire time he was conjuring the Captain’s portrait, which he had so casually dashed off and left to posterity in a puddle of beer. The Captain accepted his exaggerated likeness with a resigned humor. And a good thing, for many a lesser man might have failed to appreciate the artistic liberties Bill had taken in his depiction.

“Tell me, Captain, does he always draw his figures with such prodigious genitals?” I asked.

“Sure as a Rebel bleeds red,” he replied. “Bill slaps a pecker on anything with a face. Men, women, Injuns, politicians, horses, chickens, you name it. Hell, the whole damn town’s all marked up with Bill’s lead. And I don’t mean bullets, Kernel.”

It was true. When I departed the Captain’s company later that evening, I noticed in the red light of dusk how all the facades of Springfield bore the unmistakable mark of Wild Bill’s draughtsmanship.

“But why does he do it?” I asked.

“I asked him about it once,” Captain Honesty responded. I says to him, ‘Say, Bill, why come you always add a big ole peeder to every one of them pencil drawrins of yours?’ He told me he done it on account of a nervous affliction.”

“What?” I gasped. “An affliction of the nerves in that immaculate specimen? Impossible!” I asked the Captain just what sort of nervous affliction a man of such upright and masculine bearing and such a nobly sloped forehead as Wild Bill Hickock could have possessed.

“He says it was a habit he had acquired in his schoolin’ days and t’weren’t a thing he could do about it even he had a mind not to.”

“You mean to tell me, Captain,” I shouted, “that Wild Bill is an artist not by his own volition and is slave to uncontrollable and perverse urges?

“Please sir, keep your voice down!” the Captain begged me. “It’s not that Bill’s a madman, sir. Why, he’s as sober as a judge. But Bill wasn’t always a pistol man, you know. ‘Fore he came to the border, he growed up rich back in Baltimore, where his mother schooled him in the fine arts. Even taught him to play the viola. Well, Bill, as you now rightly know, had a fearsome talent for makin’ pitchures. He spent his days out in the gardens of the estate drawin’ neked marble statues or holed up in his daddy’s librurry copyin’ ole pitchures out of dusty ole books. Soon enough, he’d done drawn everything in the whole mansion, so his parents had no choice but to ship him off to Phillerdelphia for proper art schoolin.”

“That’s, as Bill told me, where the trouble begun. ‘When I showed up in Phillerdelphia,’ he said, ‘I fell drop-dead in love with the first girl I seen. A gal prettier than all them Roman goddesses I’d tickled with my pencil back in Baltimore. But there was one problem. She was the Mayor of Phillerdelphia’s daughter.’ Course, the mayor’s daughter fell harder n’ rocks for Bill, too. But the mayor would have none of it. Said he would sooner sell his daughter off to white slavers in Arabia ‘fore he’d give his daughter to a degenerate artist from Baltimore.”

“Course, Bill swallowed the mayor’s venom real calm-like. He just looked him square in the melon till the man shouted hisself hoarse. But then, sure enough, the next day, flyin’ atop city hall, draped over William Penn’s statue was a huge brightly-colored canvas depictin’ the mayor of City Hall neked as a jaybird, abusin’ hisself with the Liberty Bell. ‘Twas the only man who ever insulted Wild Bill and didn’t wind up with a bullet put through his heart. But ever since that day, Bill told me, he’s suffered from his nervous affliction.”

“And you can reckon what happened from there,” said Captain Honesty. “Bill had to skedaddle right quick, for there warn’t no brotherly love left for him in Phillerdelphia. But just to spite the mayor further, he had his daughter meet him one last time for a farewell tryst out in the woods and had her come with the mayor’s prize hoss, Black Nell. Bill kissed his gal goodbye and rode off on Black Nell.

"Now, you can be sure the mayor nearly burst his necktie when heard his best hoss was stolen. He sent his meanest henchmen after Bill. But Bill rode like black lightnin’ across them Alleghenies and by the time they caught up with him, Bill had swapped his paintbrushes for shootin’ irons and was clear over in Kentucky— where I was stationed at Fort Knox. In fact, that were the first time I laid eyes on Wild Bill. I was out on detail in the woods outside Louisville when I see Bill shoot through the clearing on Black Nell just ahead of the mayor’s boys and headed straight for a stone wall. But Bill didn’t slow one bit. Instead he just whispered in Black Nell’s ear, tellin’ her she must jump it; and at it she went with a big rush. I never saw a more magnificent sight. Bill gave the mare her head, and turning in his saddle fired twice, killing both of his pursuers….

The Three Joe-kers of the Apocalypse

As our thyroid glands swell with radioactive iodine wafting over from Fukushima and another theater of war lifts its curtains in Libya — sure signs the end times are nigh — we all could use a little levity.

Thankfully, we have the Tea Party.

The new masters of the grotesque spectacle of American politics have given us reason to grin amid the recent flood of war and disaster with their latest announcement: the circus has come to town!

As usual, the Tea Party is in step with history. Circuses have long thrived in an apocalyptic atmosphere, from the lion-feeding frenzies of Rome to the dark days of the First World War, when the Dreamland Circus enthralled the crowds at Coney Island with its three stars: Lionel the dog-faced boy, Ursa the bear girl, and diminutive Princess Wee-Wee.

Last week, America’s latest incarnation of freak show populism upheld this venerable tradition in a jaw-dropping pit show featuring its own prized trio of outlandish specimens: “the Three Joes.”

Past, meet your present-day replacements. Underdog-faced Lionel, meet Joe Miller: Tea Party candidate who lost his 2010 bid for the state Senate in Alaska to a write-in vote. Bearish Ursa, meet Joe Arpaio, the Sheriff of Maricopa County Arizona, renowned for rounding up illegal immigrants, imprisoning them in sweltering makeshift camps, and making them parade around in pink panties. And, finally, Little Wee-Wee, step aside for Joe Wurzelbacher, aka, Joe the Plumber.

Read the rest of this article at HyperVocal.

The State Gun and the State Morons of Utah

Well, it’s official. The fair state of Utah is infested with Morons. No, not Mormons. Morons, with a capital M. And here I thought Utah was an anomalous state, filled with ginger-headed polygamists living in red rock compounds with bonneted child brides, but it really is just like the rest of America— which is to say, teeming with gun-crazy morons.

What is worse, many of these morons are serving in the top legislative bodies of our government. The state senate of Utah, exemplary as ever, is thick with them. I think we can fairly gauge the national discourse by the sentiments expressed by Republican state Senator Mark Madsen, regarding yesterday’s final approval of a bill to make the Browning M1911 semi-automatic pistol the “State Firearm” of Utah:

“I think it is a symbol of freedom and empowerment. I think in the balance of history, much more good has been done by free people using firearms than evil done by evildoers wielding firearms,” Madsen said. “I know there is an effort to make it a symbol of negative, I just don’t buy into the propaganda.”

Indeed, let us not overlook the balance of history. Lest we forget the freedom-fighting Spanish conquistadores leveling their muskets at the inhabitants of the New World. Or mercenary soldiers massacring civilians in Central Europe during the Thirty Years War in the name of democracy. Or the liberty-inspired decimation of the American Indians and Australian aborigines. Or all those freedom-loving wars of imperialism in Africa, India, the Philippines, and Indochina. Or the wholesome slaughter of eight million people during World War One.

Fortunately for historical balance, by 1939, evildoers stopped using guns, which had already become widely known by their truer name: “freedom preservers.” Deterred by the potent democratic symbolism of firearms, Hitler and Stalin instead chose to carry out their treachery with bologna sandwiches and paperback books, a trend that has pretty much stuck, right up through Vietnam and the recent drug cartel killings in Mexico. So, hold on, let me do the math… yep, clearly freedom wins.

But, in case we’re not convinced, listen to fellow Utah senator, Republican Chris Buttars:

“Weapons or guns especially are so demonized by certain elements of our society that I think this adds a real balance… .Weapons in the right hands have probably preserved freedom time and time and time again.”

Not just “time and again,” mind you, but “time and time and time again.” Because, to fully appreciate the freedom-producing powers of handguns, you have to take the longue durée view.

Senator Buttars apparently attended the same history class (and skipped the same introduction to the English language class) as Senator Madsen. The same class, it seems, that all Republicans have attended—the one where you learn to dress up garbage thoughts as a time-honored tradition, turn an enfeebled mind into a symbol of patriotism, and memorize the following rhetorical equation: guns + history /balance = freedom.

Of course, it’s hard to think of the last time I read in the news an account of a freedom-loving citizen with a gun shooting a deranged killer dead in his tracks and preventing a would-be massacre like the one last month in Tuscon. That’s the fantasy—of the armed hero springing into action when evil strikes—that is fueling not only Utah’s crayon-and-drool desire for a state gun but a whole spate of less symbolic and more disturbing legislation around the country.

Texas, Florida, and New Mexico legislatures are considering bills to legalize guns on college campuses, while Nebraska is voting on whether elementary and high school teachers should be authorized to wear concealed weapons in the classroom. Michigan and Iowa are looking to join states like Arizona and Tennessee that allow people to wear concealed or holstered weapons virtually everywhere, even in bars. Every state but Illinois and Wisconsin has conceal-and-carry allowances, and that looks like it might soon change. At a time when we urgently need to reflect on our culture’s irrational obsession with guns, our politicians seems to be reacting to the latest tragedy in Tuscon by fleeing into the solace of schlock hero fantasies, as throughout the country they try to re-enact “Die Hard” on the senate floor.

An armed populace of cool-headed, upright John McLains would be one thing. But Americans need to face the fact that they have a high-density population of morons in their midst. Not flat out deranged or malevolent morons, mind you, but those exhibiting the kinds of thought processes that unfold so naturally in the heads of Senators Buttars and Madsen. The kinds of thoughts that make you shudder to know that particular person is carrying a semi-automatic pistol in their holster.

What is to be done? Here, I think the Mormons—not the morons—of Utah can be of service. In past visits to their comely state, I’ve noticed that in restaurants where alcohol is served, a line on the floor separates the safe alcohol-free family atmosphere from the perils of intoxication posed by the “private club.”

I propose we institute a similar law with regard to guns. Let the freedom-loving patriots exercise their distorted constitutional right to feel cold steel on their crotch at all hours of the day, in church, at the bar, in the hospital, on the highway, on the senate floor—just make sure it is on the designated side of a line, partitioned by bullet-proof glass.