Howl and Burroughs

Howl, is just that, Gisberg's verbalised cry of pain, grief and anger. A wail that screams from the depths of a shunned group of people on the fringes of society. The two first lines alone capture the unremitting tone of despair throughout the poem. "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical naked"

To fully understand Ginsberg's pain, one must first contextualise the poem. Mid-fifties, postwar America; the rise of the wealthy middle classes, the beginning of the civil rights movement and a time of wide spread Cold War paranoia. It was a very repressive society, and specially so for the homosexual community, disgraced by hardcore religious bigotry. Ginsberg and the rest of the Beat movement, were completely disenfranchised, and disaffected by the middle class life of their parents. Hence, they turned to sex, drugs and the road, as vehicles of escapism.

So Howl could be seen as a big 'fuck you' to the middle class, christian, law abiding America. The unabashed outpour of pain is liberating, and almost relished by Ginsberg (“danced on broken wine glass barefoot”). He exposes himself (figuratively and literally; "waving genitals and manuscripts")

There is an underlying masochistic tone, finding joy in the act of defecting, in not belonging, even if it means a meager existence in the fringes of society.

In the second part of the poem, Ginsberg rams against the contemporary city, Moloch, and the unabashed capitalism that this represents. A soulless entity that has taken its grip on mankind, breaking their very humanity; “Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo!”

The only means of escaping this crushing reality is to surrender oneself to insanity and knock on the doors of Rockland’s psychiatric hospital (third part of the poem) This brings me back to Ginsberg’s stunning, almost mystical imagery ("sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz") It is like one long acid trip. In the hallucinations, one can escape Moloch’s unforgiving grip and find truth and beauty, happiness, at a stretch.

Similarly to Gisberg, William S. Burroughs deals with notions of control and manipulation. Control has now expanded into the realms of the metaphysical; it has gripped the human mind. His experiments with the three tape recorders taps into the individual conscious and manipulates it with Freudian-like mind tricks. These mind tricks, or reactive commands are inserted everywhere in our capitalistic society, from adverts, to editorials and newspaper stories. “Contradictory commands are an integral part of our modern industrial environment” Like in Ginsberg’s Moloch, the system is designed to confuse us, and to make us believe that we are always just out of reach of true happiness. Our confusion and dissatisfaction only helps to further fuel the cannibal dynamo of capitalism.

The Politics of Amnesia

“Human history is now post-collectivist and post-individualistic.” We have evolved from the time of the great cultural theoreticians, tested their philosophies, built upon them and moved on. We now live in a very different world, void of the very instigators of the mid-century theory. Political stability, reduced class struggle and decades of relative economic prosperity have created a complacent generation with numbed ideals (“quietly spoken middle class students”). On top of this, developments in communication technologies have led to a hyper-connected society in which we are constantly saturated by information. Absolute truths falter under the constant relay of fluctuating knowledge. So, added to our already weak ideals, we are also unable to make up our minds.  The bigger picture has become so indefinable and uncertain we decide not to attempt to grasp it any longer. 

So, we look away from this unfathomable world around us, and shift the focus down onto our naval. “Structuralism, Marxism, post-structuralism and the like are no longer the sexy topics they were... interest in French philosophy has given way to a fascination with French kissing.”  Terry Eagleton does not seem to think this is necessarily a bad thing. He recognises the fact that “human existence is as much about fantasy and desire as it is about truth and reason”. And fair enough, if the world around us has become so unfathomable, maybe a bit of self observation might make us understand it better. 

But this shift in cultural theory hides a much sadder reality. It is a symptom of an ever more egocentric society. We have become selfish self centred beings through the cult of the individual, ushered by a consumerist capitalism that imposes us to “indulge our senses and gratify ourselves as shamelessly as possible”. It appears the self-study is not in pursuit of a deeper insight (in a maybe meditative kind of manner) but it is because it’s all we are interested in. It is as far as our short sightedness will go.

This narcissistic society is also a product of the “disintegration of old fashioned bourgeois society into a host of sub-cultures.” The common enemy has dissipated, and with it its inspiring rebellious solidarity, “you can no longer have bohemian rebels or revolutionary avant-gardes because they no longer have anything to blow up”. Being subversive has now become a fashion, a manifesto of one’s individuality, and so people will reject and rebel against almost anything that is the norm, with no real grounds to do so, the non-normative has become the norm.

So what next for this disorientated child-like generation? Has this latest financial crisis and economic recession caused us to look up from our naval? I certainly hope so.

ROBERT MONTGOMERY

David Hickey’s text on Las Vegas was a completely different take on the Vegas I experienced. To be fair, I have only visited the city once, and it was at the age of 11 or 12, when pretty much everything is off-limits to the young and puzzled mind. It was a brief weekend trip from Los Angeles, with my parents, a very unlikely destination considering their general aversion to mass tourism and resort-style vacations, not to mention their absolute indifference towards gambling. I believe it was a morbid curiosity that drew them to the Strip, the appeal of the strange exotism that the place exudes.

We stayed in one of the most bizarre hotels in the strip, the New York New York, a pastiche of cardboard cutout New York skyline, and kitsch landmark reproductions, all laced together with a ribbon-like rollercoaster, swerving in and out and around the pseudo-skyscrapers. It looked like a cartoonified version of a film set for a dull action movie. Upon entering, we were released into a cacophony of light and sound, flashing slot machines and spinning roulettes, carpets with impossible patterns and mirrored ceilings, hoards of obese bermuda-wearing tourists and armies of suited casino waiters. As we stood transfixed on the edge of this vertiginous precipice, the sound of screaming rapidly rolled into the room from an opening in the far side, and all of a sudden a rollercoaster exploded into the cavernous casino at a 100mph, carrying a dozen screaming souls over our heads, only to disappear a fraction of a second later through an opposite hole in the wall.

And this was just one casino. Each was more ludicrous than the previous. The Camelot, the Luxor, Ceasar’s Palace, the Venetian… a collection of mock architecture interconnected through air-conditioned elevated walkways so as not to break into a sweat on the street. It was all so absurd. It felt more orchestrated theme park, a perverse Disneyland, than the Rat Packs famed Wild-West playground.

But I can imagine Hickeys Vegas, at least if only as a past version of the current city, before its disneyification. It may all be fake, but at least it doesn’t attempt to hide the fact that it is fake. Its frank. Its a giant spectacle, where you just pick your role, and slip right into it, be it player, pimp, hooker, or drunk. No questions asked. As Hickey explains, there are only two rules; “1- post the odds, and 2- treat everybody the same”. And there is an uplifting reassurance in this sense of simplicity, which allows people to just get on with it (waitress’s humble, but grounded ambition to move up from “food” to “cocktails”). No class or race prejudices exist, and it may be all about money, as most of its detractors claim, but money at least “is the worst way of discriminating among individuals, except for all the others”.

So in this sense, one could perceive Vegas as a true democracy, a city “about stakes, not status “. A place with no secrets, and as sad as this prospect might sound (no mystery, no magic, no myth!) it also means a place “where there is everything to see, and not a single pretentious object demanding to be scrutinized” i.e. no bullshit.

Dubai, on the other hand is knee deep in bullshit (or rather human shit; raw sewage overflowing into the gulf has turned the coastline into a frothy, toxic, bacteria-ridden soup unfit for human bathing, or most aquatic life for that matter). I have never been to Dubai, apart from a short overhaul at the airport, but I already despise the place. It represents everything that is wrong with society. It is abysmal that such technological prowess and construction might is being invested into such an obviously dead ended, unsustainable affair. Socially it is a ruin, rotten from the inside out, a conspicuous consumerist wet-dream, built on slave labor and  petro dollars, which only intensifies the infantilisation of society into perpetual adolescents who’s only satisfaction is sought in buying worthless toys and mind numbing entertainment . Environmentally, well, it will only take an impending water crisis to cause it all to crash and burn. So why all this effort?

Mike Davis quotes a very interesting thought by Trotsky, “In appending new forms the backward society takes not their beginnings, nor their stages of evolution, but the finished product itself.” The Dubai Sheikdom is essentially a backward society. It is a despotic regime that has simply appended capitalism to its millennia-old feudal system. The result is a blurred concoction of totalitarian state and private corporation, where government ministers double as construction developers, and where laws and regulations are bent to the interests of investors.  As for the civil liberties which have usually accompanied the establishment of the free market in the west, these have been completely ignored, from unions, to free press, to the right to vote. Hence “the new forms, in a backward society, appear more perfected than in an advance society where they are approximations only of the ideal for having been arrived at piecemeal and with the framework of historical possibilities.” i.e. Of course you can afford to build the tallest tower or the largest artificial islands, if you build them on slavery!

Dubai’s ambition is to be number one, the biggest, the loudest, the brightest, the most outrageous. A Vegas in the Middle East if you will. But is lacking in one essential factor, if compared to Vegas; its earnestness. Behind Dubai’s showbiz glitz, lies a very obscure reality. It is not a reality where the waitress wants to move from food to cocktails, but where the construction worker wants to be set free and go home. As Hickey beautifully portrays, “Vegas at least cheats you fairly”.­

Eerie photographs of Dubailand

I thought Badiou’s metaphor was spot on, and wonderfully written. It captured the feeling I think many of us share when faced with the financial crisis. Mere bystanders, as powerless to act upon it, as spectators in a cinema are to alter the course of the film. And so we sit, and stare, and hope that the impending disaster will be averted by our heroes in the nick of time. But as the scenes of sinking stock markets, mounting debt and countries on the brink of bankruptcy flash by, our heroes appear to be as ignorant and inept to saves us, as we are ourselves.

He incites us to look away from the screen, at the crowd around us. That’s where the real crisis lies. In the jobless, the homeless, the truncated lives. It is ironic that it all started (arguably) with the sub-prime mortgage, the chance for many to finally own a home, the American dream, that human right. It was an almost noble cause, never mind the real motive of profit.  And now the very ones who had finally been given a breakthrough, are paying the dearest, and are worse off than at the beginning of the whole endeavor.

The noble cause was corrupted, and the American dream was abused. As Badiou wittingly remarks, it transformed “people into capricious children and eternal adolescents whose lives revolve around getting new toys”. It was no longer just about a home, but a lifestyle, that had been hammered into the popular conscious, through trash culture. Life in engorged houses with ice-making refrigerators and three-car garages, shopping sprees and frivolous pampering, because we deserved it, you are worth it, or so we were made to believe.

Badiou is trying to direct some of the finger pointing at ourselves. Yes, the crisis was concocted by the Wall Street predators and their mathematician wizards, but we fueled all that speculation. The baffling complexity of the global financial market, our inability to grasp its inner workings does not excuse us from it. And its recent reality check is a reminder of a consumer society gone astray. Only in realizing this, can we start taking some responsibility and initiative. We must start to look away from the screen. We must lose the fear that our governments are instilling in our confused minds, and start to deal with the scene in the cinema. I'm not sure I would go as far as proposing a return to communism (that didn’t turn out too well, did it?) but I do believe it is time to put this “capital-parliamentarism” in doubt. It might even be time to let the banks fail…

As for Mead’s text, I thought it was quite amusing. I found it quite refreshing to read about the architect, and not the architecture. So often an architect is aggrandized through his or her work (understandibly), and you forget that there is a person behind the myth. Having said so, it is quite bewildering that one of the “geniuses” in architecture struggles to express her process of creation. It wouldn’t be the first time that a brooding psyche struggles with words, but she did appear to be quite coherent when not speaking about architecture.

“I rather suspect that Zaha has an ancient fear: that to discover how here processes work would be to jeopardize them” . This begs a comparison with the financial market, derivatives and hedge funds that no one really understood, but the logarithm experts who designed them, generating profit out of nothing. Zaha’s unknown process, unknown even to her, with her own of clan of parametric wizards, generating architecture, out of... well, apparently, nothing.

What if there is no process at all, if its all random, intuitive at a stretch?. It would be a bit of a worrying thought. If she became a trend to follow, how do you teach a non-process? Would architecture be reduced to spasms of pseudo-intuition and computer scripting? What a terrible fate this would be. It would herald an architectural crisis en par with that spawned by the Wall Street bloodhounds.