Tangles of Pop Culture

There is no popular culture in general. Even if we could hold the word to one of the several things we tend to mean by "popular" (well liked, "low," tawdry, insincere, bodily), we would still be describing the eddying movements of a mob that evades generalization. If we assert that there is some popular culture, we acknowledge the power of the Horde to stand as at least equal with Empire.

But, of course, in the hot swirl of tawdry, bodily, well liked things, we will not find consistency, even in the acknowledgment of complexity. Popular culture always follows the logic of the state in places. Consider how the Jumpman/Daisy//Kong triad continues to present a patriarchal gender dyad (boy saves girl) within a human/animal dyad (man tames beast, culture captures nature) even in all of its new guises. Once the Super Nintendo offered it, Donkey Kong took the human mask onto his animal face, pressing the boundary of the dyad back to a place between the warm blooded and the reptilian, making himself and his children human enough ("there is no society," Thatcher says, "only individuals," then adds as an afterthought, "and their families").

Today I am encouraged by three pieces of popular culture which loudly affirm complexity. I needed them.

1) It turns out that the first piece of reportage on video games (1972) was a piece of mind blowing journalistic poetry by an LSD pioneer: "Something basic is going on."

2) Pink's new music video in which she fucks a nun, dances with impolite joy at a school dance, beats up Capitalism, and kills a matador made me laughcry so hard.

3) The Queer activists at http://www.putthisonthemap.org/ have issued a PSA wherein teenagers (their educators and spokespeople are all very young) say things that proudly step beyond fighting for the state logic of marriage. Things I needed to know were speakable by the wonderfully young:

‎"This is about how my identities cannot be summed up in letters."

Concerning Fashion Magazine Bibles

[This is a new edition of a post that on another blog of mine, but since I am trying to commit to seriously writing this one, I am moving in by decorating with a few things I like.]


Artifacts in Question:
Revolve
Bible Illuminated: The Book

Let's not open the fashion magazine quite yet. There on the cover we already see it: The Beautiful Person. Their shoulders are square to the corners of the magazine, though their eyes may laugh upward or blush down. Sometimes one shoulder or the other kicks up in a gesture of sass, but a flip-book of all fashion magazine covers would show the beautiful person jittering only slightly, looking around as if bored by us, but always with their shoulders flat against the glassy screen of a glossy cover. They press against our vision like the wings of a pinned moth or the shoulders of a hieroglyphic Pharaoh.

The beautiful person leans as close to the viewer as it can, meeting us halfway. If the flip-book of all fashion covers ran forward in time, we would see little signs popping up, denser and denser, around its body like the little sign under the moth or the writings around the Pharaoh. These are the near ends of trails that lead down and in, maybe a dozen golden threads that we can follow into the maze of the beautiful person. These paths are labels on the beautiful organs: refined tastes, timely interests, sexual talents, morals, beaded chains that we can follow inward as we peel the beautiful person open and figure out what is inside of them.

This is how we learn to be beautiful. We buy fashion magazines and go spelunking within the bright caverns of the beautiful person. We follow twists of words like threads, strings running in from the words on the cover, through tables of contents, page numbers, chained sentences, onward and inward, splitting through internal reference and holding the bright images together like chains of pearls. Maybe this is what one might mean when they say that an image has "depth."

Consider two efforts to take the Bible and make it a work of depth [this is not news, per se, but I thought I would share]: The first, Revolve, published first in 2003 by Thomas Nelson, presents the beautiful person as a young woman in the company of laughing friends, and offers several paths down and through the New Century Version which is the raw material of her body. Paths like "Guy 411" and "Caught in a Sin Spiral?" in this year's edition, or "Relationships 101: Keep the friends, lose the drama" and "Rock your outlook" in last year's draw the biblical text together into chains beaded with pictures and clasped with sidebars.

The second, Bible Illuminated: The Book, published by the Swedish company "Illuminated World" in 2008, resembles a fashion magazine on the inside, now building pearly cords from the Good News Translation following cryptic headings: "A Good Investment," "If Love Gets Cold," "All Power Comes to an End." The glaring difference, though, is that the beautiful person here has been refigured entirely. We are not peeling back the sides of a body presented with squared shoulders, but a single beautiful eye that watches us askance and over heavy mascara. The beautiful person here has perhaps been crying, maybe finally walking out of a nightclub, giving one last look to someone who will remember them desperately. Perhaps the beautiful person is waking up in the dark, having fallen asleep exhausted after some bit theatrical part, still in garish stage makeup. But it is not looking at us. The eye here has its own concerns. The beauty here is of a gaze to be seen, but not one that we can return: just sight, sight without seeing. The trails down and in will take us into a Bible, but we cannot know if we are looking at a beautiful believer that we should dissect to better impersonate, or if this is the beautiful, obscure body of God crying off her liquid eyeliner.

These books are the same, of course: If the letters of the Bible are cells, both draw them into tissues, organs, and systems by tracing trails in and down off of the shiny cover. Both are moralizing works that push hard to explain how our own bodies might become beautiful by being filled with ribbons of Bible.

But they are as different as their covers. The beautiful person in Revolve faces back, calling for the simple impersonation against which we have defined art. Evangelical Christians retain a fraught relationship with Bible-as-literature, and we see one solution here: the Bible which cannot be held at an artistic remove. We can work at a reflective reconstruction, reassembling our bodies into meaningful, Biblical chains, by staring back along that gaze, as easily as learning wisdom from Cosmo, or using a mirror to retrain facehair.

The moralism of Revolve comes up from the Book of Revelation, up from the end of time, back across the text toward the cover, and out into the reader's body with the random variation and inexorable straightness of bubbles rising from deep water.

But the beautiful person on Bible Illuminated: The Book refracts. It bends the text into a series of complex exchanges, curved lenses and not flat panes. We don't know whose components we are learning here, whether someone like us or God herself. That eye could be not looking back glassily and drippingly for any number of reasons, and the titles offer no clue.

In some ways the beautiful person of Bible Illuminated recalls the great work done by the word "art." Since Kant, art has been the engagement with indifferent beauty. One does not fuck art or eat it, or touch it, or get excited by it. One might become motivated by art, but not aroused. Art, then, is created by injecting distance into the unavoidably desirable. Thought itself is desirable, and it becomes coldly exciting across panes of glass and empty space. What we call "reflection" happens in the gap between the velvet rope and the Mona Lisa.

But, then again, Bible Illuminated presents not merely distance, but distraction. Aversion. The beautiful person on this cover traces downward as in any fashion magazine through trails of images strung together with trails of text. But the beautiful glance aside fissures each chain into a tangle. Even the apparently thick cords of images, Revelation illustrated with heartrending photographs of environmental degradation, or Acts with photos of the celebrity activists and philanthropists, never tie in a simple way. To know whether the young Black men paired with the description of the three kings are representations or contrasts would first require making a function of that beautiful eye, making those eyelashes God's or our own.

If you would be curious to read a Bible recomposed into chains of the most complexly moral, reflective and obscure photography, and to undertake the recursive and paradoxical work of remaking your insides to resemble after beauty of such a process, you can see the whole thing online.

Do.

Harry Potter and the Satanic Specters: The Franchise as Seen Through its Religious Metaliterature

[Here is a thing I just wrote for In Media Res. It is impolitely long, but I had a blast writing it. Click HD on the slideshow, and you can read the covers first hand.]

Conversations on Harry Potter seem to inevitably return to quantity - 67 languages, 400 million copies, £15 billion - but when the religious reactions are invoked, they remain unmeasured - a few churches complaining, but many others which aren’t. Toward giving Rowling’s religious readership some specificity, we might begin with the 65 works easily identified in Worldcat, or with the 14 works in the slideshow at right (including two audio series).

When I began investigating these books, I thought I would discover the same concerns about the seductions of Satanism which surrounded Dungeons and Dragons in the 1980s, but I was surprised at the range of religious readings I found. Of course, if one would like to remain convinced that it would take an incredibly shallow reading to articulate Potter to occult practice, I recommend you read Phil Arms’ book, but even here a great deal has changed since the 1980s. In particular, every concerned work had to wrestle with the question of whether or not the witchcraft denounced in Deuteronomy 18:10-11 includes contemporary Wicca. And, that answer in hand, they each had to decide whether the Pagan Federation was right when they claimed to be "swamped" with new applicants, and partially attributed that fact to supernatural themes in popular literature. Not every author was concerned, but those who were had to discuss the possibility that Christianity is now vying for adolescent faith not against graveyard conspiracies, but respectible and accessible witchcraft.

But the most interesting critique was that which began after the specter of occult practice passed. Authors like Connie Neal worry less about the books as such than about the fact that Christians were fighting with one another over them, and work to create a space where Christians with diverse readings of the text could treat one another with love. And in Abanes we find a nuanced attention to the ethics and metaphysics of the Potter books which challenges the conventional wisdom likening Rowling to Tolkien (he is an outspoken supporter of the latter). Restoring the metaphysical nuance obscured by film adaptation, Albanes encourages serious reflection on the fact that humans never weild magical power in the Lord of the Rings books. Gandalf was once, and could still be, a vivid and specific analog of a Christian angel in a way that Harry really cannot. Some of the complaints in this literature do not emerge from shallow readings or fast fears, but a depth of reflection that exceeds that of many academic commentators.

And religious readings of Potter also include many works that find profound homiletical teachings in the series, not for people in general, but for their tradition in very particular. The sixteen sermons that Rev. John Zingaro collected from a circle of Potter-friendly pastors present an as-yet-unnamed genre we might call "fan-homiletics." And Luke Bell’s explication of what he, as a monk, learned from the series makes innumerable tiny patterns in the book spiritually significant.

In recent years, scholars of popular culture have realized that our work must not be constrained by (though it must account for) licensing decisions. We have learned to attend to fan-art, but we have not yet begun to take seriously the creativity in religious readings of popular culture. Of all of the multiple, community-specific readings of Harry Potter, this minor analytical genre, both when it supports and when it opposes Rowling’s series, attends to the inner lives of its readers admirably. Here, unlike the theme parks, licensed clothing, and action figures, our attention is drawn toward what might be Harry Potter’s big take-away: Young people share an ethical and metaphysical reality to which "fun" is not an adequate orientation.

Ghosts 1: Pokemon Cursed Black

Yesterday I was stumbling about the other day, and I came across the story of a hacked version of the original Pokemon cartridge which added "Ghost" as a possible starting character. In this version, the story goes:

Defending Pokémon were unable to attack Ghost — it would only say they were too scared to move. When the move “Curse” was used in battle, the screen would cut to black. The cry of the defending Pokémon would be heard, but it was distorted, played at a much lower pitch than normal. The battle screen would then reappear, and the defending Pokémon would be gone. If used in a battle against a trainer, when the Pokéballs representing their Pokemon would appear in the corner, they would have one fewer Pokéball.

The implication was that the Pokémon died.

What’s even stranger is that after defeating a trainer and seeing “Red received $200 for winning!”, the battle commands would appear again. If you selected “Run”, the battle would end as it normally does. You could also select Curse. If you did, upon returning to the overworld, the trainer’s sprite would be gone. After leaving and reentering the area, the spot [where] the trainer had been would be replaced with a tombstone like the ones at Lavender Tower.

But the most interesting part is that victory is replaced by merciless penance for the evil done by the player. Of course, this forced moral reflection, driving the player to stare at the endless violence done in the course of an adventure, appears in other games, but it is incredibly rare and often cordoned into the tiny world of Serious Games. Please, read the post yourself to get a surprisingly chilling sense of the way that a Gameboy adventure could create a moment of moral reflection.
Of course, for Pokemon to force a serious engagement with the ethical possibility of player action requires that the mandatory sportsfolkship of the series be circumvented. Here, the insertion of the "curse" attack is an artistic insertion of foul play, bringing murder into a game where violence is always somehow limited to the polite possibilities of Olympic wrestling, and hunting always ends in either escape, capture, or curable injury. Now the question becomes thinkable, "Where was death in the Pokemon universe this whole time? How did all of those lightning and fire attacks end so cleanly?"
This is, in some sense, well tread territory. The obsession with the dead in video games, particularly those which make violence most cartoonish and dismissable, is a familiar theme in fan art. But it is surprising how completely the types of violence possible in video games escape mainstream criticism. When we see gunplay of a kind that makes sense out-here, parent groups frequently complain, but attention to the death of goombas or pokemon is left entirely to the marginal play of fan creativity.
It is appropriate, then, that Pokemon Black is itself a ghost. Know Your Meme thinks it is probably just a story, a fiction about a game, not as a game, but ghosts thrive on quasi-existence. It has been created as a "visual novel" for the DS, and it may soon be released as a complete game, either as a hack of a later version or a gamemaker project.

Ghosts don't need to be real to haunt.

Digital Commodities and Human Sacrifice

Today I met Reverend Billy. Changeallujah!

The religious games course I am teaching has slid along two primary chains of thought. One runs from games, to play, to antistructure, and the other from religions, to the sacred, to the carnival. We open with the family dog (selectively bred into taxonomical entrapment), we meditate on biting, and we end up among wolves. And along both paths, after three months of work, the question was now how play might actually turn Earth and make way for new life.

And today we had the amazing good fortune of meeting Bill Talen, his wife Savitri who organizes, choreographs and manages much of the Church of Life After Shopping, and their beautiful child, over Skype. These are some of the loudest(, funniest) and most creative voices against the exploitation of the Earth for the sake of unreflective consumerism, and if you have not yet seen the documentary "What Would Jesus Buy" on their pilgrimage to expose Mickey Mouse as the Antichrist during the 2003 Christmas parade at Disney Land, do yourself the favor (it is on Netflix instantwatch, there is no excuse).

So, having wondered a little about how we might reflect ethically, meeting Reverend Billy got me wondering about the ethics of playership more generally. Perhaps all of this digital death is not detectable inside of the games because the violence is being outsourced. Maybe Mario can kill impartially because the violence is being experienced and mourned elsewhere. So, new question: What is the human cost of a single Goomba's death?

For some great preliminary answers I ended up reading Annie Leonard's Story of Electronics .
For all of our talk about immaterial capitalism, the computers which empower our digital play are material devices assembled and "recycled" under conditions of hidden, but nonetheless quite material poverty. The ratios can never be assembled because both the virtual battlefield and the sweatshops that make them possible always recede from the analytic gaze, but there is an economy lives at work here. If we could measure the popularity of a game by the number of enemies killed, and then determine the cost in silicon chips of those games, and determine the labor and environmental costs of those chips we would be able to see a flow of life and death like Mauss describes in The Gift.

In Annie Leonard's original flavor of "The Story of Stuff" I found a surprisingly clear reflection on the spiritual meaning of economies of this sort (though one that sees only the production of life, not the reciprocal economy of death) by Victor Lebow, so I thought I would offer the whole quote here. Enjoy:

Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption. The measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige, is now to be found in our consumption patterns. The very meaning and significance of our lives today is expressed in consumption terms. The greater the pressures upon the individual to conform to safe and accepted social standards, the more does he tend to express his aspirations and his individuality in terms of what he wears, drives, eats - his home, his car, his patterns of food serving, his hobbies.
These commodities and services must be offered to the consumer with a special urgency. We require not only 'forced draft' consumption, but 'expensive' consumption as well. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing pace. We need to have people eat, drink, dress, ride, live, with ever more complicated and therefore constantly more expensive consumption.

Victor Lebow, "Price Competition in 1955" Journal of Retailing 31.1 (Spring, 1955), 7-8

Alea: Three thoughts on the power of randomness

1. Italo Calvino's "Cybernetics and Ghosts" (1967) is still the best thing that I have ever read on the subject of computers. I taught it today: "The power of modern literature lies in its willingness to give a voice to what has remained unexpressed in the social or individual unconscious: this is the gauntlet it throws down time and again. The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts. Dreams of progress and reason are haunted by nightmares."

2. Currently working on an online museum piece about the pile of books written to help Christians understand Harry Potter properly (coming soon), I have been trying to figure out what to do with various medium sized heaps of information. Sometimes there is too much to ignore, but without either a coherent source or telos. It can happen for all sorts of reasons. Maybe it has been fished in by a search engine, or just because information has collected around some single issue which energized a couple dozen people to publish in places where a movement is impossible. Here, for instance, are a bunch of Pope Benedict XVIs.

3. I am posting this here, really, because though I want to get back to work, I also want to leave a record which will let me use some interesting online devices as divination tools:
a) Cliche generator
b) Theotech generator (with everything else generators as well)
c) Queneau's 100,000,000,000,000 surrealist sonnets.

A Vocabulary for the Study of Religion in Information-Age Games

An "argot" is an insider language. They can range in complexity from a simple (often unwritten) list of vocabulary words to fully developed grammars. The present project takes place at the boundary of the academic study of religion, and the increasingly academic study of videogames, and several overlapping dork-cultures, each of which have their own trade argots. There will be n00bs, Culturally Posited Superhuman agents [CPS agents], and ergodic texts here. Like any trade (or criminal, for that matter) argot, these languages serve the dual purpose of keeping outsiders out and facilitating speedy communication between insiders on the complex topics around which they are organized. I am particularly fond of the Yiddish term, "Lehavdil loshen," language for keeping things separate.
This lexicon is an always and necessarily partial list of terms that I find very useful for my own work. I will keep the list "soft," revising and adding as I go, but I wanted to create a place to start for my students and a place for me to return.

Crystal Dragon Jesus: "Any fictional religion, such as those found in a Medieval European Fantasy, which possesses attributes stereotypically associated with Christianity (especially Roman Catholicism) — such as priestly vestments, nuns and their habits, confessionals, the designs of houses of worship, and crosses — but which centers on a deity other than the Christian God, like an animistic spirit or pagan-flavored god. Often there will be a Yahweh analog but not a Jesus one" (accessed 8/26/2010)

Culturally Posited Superhuman agents [CPS agents]: Adopted from McCauley and Lawson's psychological theories of ritual action, later adopted by Harvey Whitehouse. These are the agents with "counter-intuitive qualities" by which they separate religion from other cultural phenomena. The most common "counter-intuitive quality" may be CPS agents' frequent violation of the rule that an agent "(normally)" is a "physical object" and bounded by the constraints of that situation. Other relative frequent surprises include being "eternal, parentless, or capable of recovering from death" (25).

Kobayashi Maru: "A no-win situation caused by a set of rules that can only be won by changing the rules, in effect, cheating. This term comes from the name of a small ship in distress in a scenario shown in a Star Trek movie. According to the film, the scenario is featured in a training simulator for students attempting to become ship's captains. They receive a distress signal from the Kobayashi Maru and can either attempt to rescue it and be destroyed by enemy forces or leave it and let it be destroyed. James T. Kirk, according to the film, is the only person to have won the scenario--by reprogramming the simulator. Kobayashi Maru, loosely translated, means "Little wooden ship." (Urban Dictionary entry, accessed 8/26/2010)


Bibliography:
McCauley, Robert N, and E T. Lawson. Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms. Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2002.

Whitehouse, Harvey. Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004.