Avital Ronell

Astra Taylor's documentary Examined Life premieres in New York this week and opens in other cities soon. It follows eight philosophers, public intellectuals, writers, or whatever you want to call them, on trips through public spaces like airports and garbage dumps.

Cornel West, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Zizek, and Judith Butler discuss their ideas with the filmmaker on strolls, or while rowing a boat (in the case of Hardt) or from the backseat of a moving car (West).

Taylor's film focuses on conversation and movement. It avoids the usual talking-head, quick-montage, stock-footage, re-enactment style of today's feature-length documentaries. Examined Life ignores and therefore refutes television techniques. It is serene yet exciting, allowing us to understand and experience the mind-states evoked by the thinkers in the movie: "anxiety is the mood par excellence of ethicity" (Ronell); philosophy emerges from "personal catastrophe lyrically expressed" (West); "we should develop a much more terrifying abstract materialism" (Zizek).

Rooted to seats in a café on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village, Taylor and I spoke about her film, which will also be published in book form by the New Press.     Read More

Encounters at the End of the World

Encounters at the End of the World gratifies on three levels: it is apocalyptic, it has cute penguins, and it stars a man with a German accent berating us because we are inadequate. It is an animal show, end-of-the-world adventure travel, and a trip to a German dentist. Herzog's impatience with people has become palpable. He can't wait to tell whoever he meets that "nature will regulate us," that "the empire has started to fade into the abyss of history." Saying these things in Antarctica gives them a weight they'd lack if you said them on Vanderbilt Avenue. Read More

One morning earlier this year, my friend Dot and I drove north out of the city. We were taking her dog for a walk. Our destination wasn't far—a beach near Balmedie, eight or so miles from the northeast Scottish city of Aberdeen, a stretch of sand dunes and sparse grass between fields and sea. It was bright and gusty and, although the day before midsummer, chilly.

We drove on past Balmedie and turned onto a path where a sign indicated that the area was protected by a security firm. Ignoring the sign, we drove slowly between high, blowing arrases of grasses and cow parsley, past an empty mansion house, past empty lawns and ponds and landscaped gardens. Another sign stuck incongruously into a flowerbed bore two words, ‘Trump International.' The whole place was empty. Only a Land Rover parked beside what once must have been a farm building indicated human presence. On the rustic wall hung a plaque bearing a grandiose coat of arms. I got out of the car to read the motto but there wasn't one. Instead there was one word: Trump. Read More

To the Editors:

Brian Gallagher's Shepard Fairey piece is timely and relevant. When Fairey was arrested in Boston the other day, the first reaction of some people I talked with about it was that his arrest was a stunt Fairey somehow engineered to generate publicity for his career-retrospective show at the ICA in that art-unfriendly city. It wasn't, but thinking that shows how people don't trust Fairey's motives.

Certainly his arrest adds to his credibility as a street artist engaged in a radical art practice, as does the countersuit Fairey has filed against the Associated Press regarding his Obama "HOPE" poster. The issues of fair use and bogus claims of copyright infringement are important ones we should confront. Gallagher points out that so much of Fairey's work owes its inspiration to the work of the Russian constructivists and to images of various political figures seen in propaganda posters. But there is a more basic source for Fairey's art, at once more obvious and more hidden: John Carpenter's 1988 sci-fi movie They Live. Read More

In a move that surprised exactly no one, Time magazine recently chose for its "Person of the Year" Barack Obama. Likely sensing that bust-size photos of Obama gazing hopefully into an indeterminate distance were just about kaput as aesthetic capital, the Time editors decided to go the cool route. Richard Stengel wrote: "Our cover portrait is by the street artist Shepard Fairey, whose roots are in the skateboarding world and whose early poster of then Senator Obama became the great populist image of the campaign. With this cover, Fairey has now created a new iconic image of the President-elect—a rich, multilayered poster that echoes but then expands on his original." The cover of Time represents a sort of closing of the circle for Fairey, whose ubiquitous Obama poster, adorned with the word "Hope," shot his style to new heights of recognizability, while galvanizing a particular image and notion of the candidate in the American consciousness. It's not hard to see that in this partnership each side is conferred abstract benefits. Time gets the "edgy" aesthetic value of Fairey's work, and Fairey gets the validation and exposure provided by Time's circulation. (In other words, the cover is the Audi A8 from Transporter 3.) Read More

To the Editors:

In "Reality Publishing," [N1BR, January 13, 2009], an article recently posted on the online version of n+1, Darryl Lorenzo Wellington suggests that there is a partnership between the National Book Critics Circle and the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. No such partnership exists. It is true that a former president of the organization, John Freeman, was involved in the contest (as a judge), as is at least one present board member. Other NBCC members may have signed on to help with the culling process. But these are private, remunerated affiliations—the organization has no connection with Amazon's contest.

Jane Ciabattari
President
the National Book Critics Circle

The Board of Directors
the National Book Critics Circle

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Darryl Lorenzo Wellington replies:

At the time of the contest's inception, John Freeman was president of the National Book Critics Circle. He was more than simply a contest judge. He was an Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award spokesperson. He promoted the contest enthusiastically and his name appeared on innumerable promotionals, always accompanied by a reference to his National Book Critics Circle affiliation. The National Books Critics Circle also assisted in soliciting reviewers for the ABNA contest (as I stated in my article) via a list serve message which I assumed was approved by the NBCC executive board. I completely accept Ms. Ciabattari's assertion that no official relationship existed between the National Book Critics Circle and the contest. I note however that Mr. Freeman's enthusiastic participation tended to blur the distinction in the minds of the general public. My point wasn't that the contest had necessarily been endorsed by the National Book Critics Circle—only that the National Book Critics Circle's name appeared so often that from the perspective of potential contestants there was sufficient reason to feel that was the case.

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I knew about Britney Spears a few months before the rest of the world. What I mean by this is that I was a viewer of The Box in 1998. You could call into The Box to request a video, and the idea was that at some interval after you had made your call, the video you had requested would appear. I sometimes thought about doing this, but the logistics of it seemed daunting to me, and I could never muster the nerve. Instead, I was content to watch the videos that others had chosen, which were not the videos I would have chosen. To judge by the videos that did play—and there seemed no difference between this pseudo-democracy and the usual kind of pre-programmed channel, since the same handful of videos rotated with numbing regularity—The Box catered to an "urban" demographic underserved by MTV, which was then in a transitional phase of its existence, long past the heroic days when it featured gender-bending synth-pop from limp-wristed limeys with a perpetual sob in their voice, and just at the beginning of Carson Daly's brazen ascent at TRL. Read More

I never could believe the line about Madonna being an empowering female figure because she, not the Man, was controlling her sexuality. I find even less believable the line about Britney Spears being this century's version of Madonna. Madonna wasn't much of a singer either, but her early downtown fauxhemian street urchin chic makes her look avant-garde in comparison. Madonna wasn't the first Catholic schoolgirl to rebel, so I hesitate to say that Madonna had ideas, or even that she deserves credit for co-opting them, but when I see pictures of Britney padding about parking lots in Uggs, Madonna starts to seem like some malevolent, mantilla-wearing intercontinental sorceress out of Henry James. Britney is a hot dog—thick, pink, synthetic, inert.

We were on our way back from swim practice in my friend Elaine Mernick's Honda Civic with the radio tuned to, I don't know, Hot Whatever, when I heard ‘. . . Baby One More Time' for the first time. Oooh, I loved it. My immediate thought was that it didn't sound like anything I had ever heard before. My second thought was that actually it sounded sort of like a song from Chess, the Broadway musical composed by ABBA songwriters Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus. Ten years later, though, I am sticking by my initial impression of ". . . Baby One More Time." Also, ten years later, Britney Spears continues to make this kind of music: music that sounds like it was made by a person who has never heard any other music before.

If this is the case—just in case this is the case—I've put together a playlist of songs that I think Britney should listen to, songs that will introduce her to music in general, songs by artists whose examples, both positive and negative, Britney could learn from. Mix tapes are tricky in the way that all presents are tricky—you have to balance your own taste with the taste of the recipient, even if that person's taste is terrible. You have to hide the medicine in the applesauce. Keeping this in mind, I have refrained from making the entire mix tape just Bikini Kill. Read More

It was only a month after Britney made her plaid pleated-skirt debut when the stained blue dress showed up and the US Senate impeached a president for the second time in history. That fall, the schoolgirl and the intern vied to be the dominant American feminine ideal; me, I just wanted to get into college. So I drove myself to the Banana Republic to buy an outfit for my early-decision interview, where I encountered a very helpful man in his late twenties or possibly early thirties named Jeff who unlocked a dressing closet for me and loitered to help me choose. I wanted to look grown-up and pretty, but serious and smart. When he asked how things were working out, I came out in some sort of slinky silky black skirt (at Banana Republic in the late '90s, everything was slinky and silky and black). But Jeff had a different idea of the direction I should go in. He held out a pleated skirt. He asked, Why don't you try this on? I looked at it, confused. I took it from him. "This is, like, a schoolgirl outfit," I said. He smiled. "I know." Read More