Posts
From Slate.com's Jursiprudence Reporter Dalia Lithwick:
What's most startling about Roberts' writings isn't always the substance. Some of the policy ideas he rejected—like that of paying "comparable worth" for traditionally female jobs—may have deserved the scorn he evinced. What's truly is shocking is his dismissive tone, which seemed to surprise even ultraconservative Phyllis Schlafly, who described it yesterday as "smart alecky." Gender disparities are invariably "perceived" or "purported," in Roberts' eyes. Every effort to solve them is laughable. At a moment when serious inequities in women's wages, employment, and opportunities existed in this country, Roberts seemed to dismiss every attempt to remedy them as a knock-knock joke.
In a 1985 memo about whether a government lawyer could be nominated for an award program honoring women who changed professions after age 30, Roberts wrote and approved the nomination but added: "Some might question whether encouraging homemakers to become lawyers contributes to the common good, but I suppose that is for the judges to decide."
Another memo has Roberts blasting the proposed Equal Rights Amendment, dismissing it as an attempt to "bridge the purported 'gender gap.'
Pile these memos onto what we already know of Roberts and gender issues: that later and as a lawyer in private practice, Roberts would argue for narrowing the scope of Title IX—the statute that bars gender discrimination at any school receiving federal funding.
Elliot Mincberg, senior vice president of People for the American Way, told the Chicago Tribune today, "You do see a real clear lack of regard for—and even it could be argued, hostility toward—laws and theories and arguments that would promote equality for women in important ways."
And Kim Gandy, president of NOW, fumed in the same paper: "I don't see Roberts' positions as conservative. ... I know a lot of conservatives who expect women to be paid fairly, who think women should become lawyers if they want to be lawyers. That is not a conservative position, that is a Neanderthal position. It's unfair to conservatives to call the positions he takes conservative."
inally, there's the humorless-feminist tack. I vaguely remember this argument from the '80s: It's that women can't take a joke. So that is the new defense: This wasn't just a joke, it was a lawyer joke! That's evidently the White House position, too: "It's pretty clear from the more than 60,000 pages of documents that have been released that John Roberts has a great sense of humor," Steve Schmidt, a Bush spokesman told the Washington Post. "In this [housewives] memo, he offers a lawyer joke."
Heh-heh.
I don't quite know what to make of that argument. It brings me back to Bruce Reed's giggling blondes. The problem isn't with his desperate housewives (or hideous lawyers) crack, but with his relentless "Gidget sucks" tone. Roberts honestly seemed to think that humor or disdain were the only appropriate ways to think about gender. It's not that feminists can't take a joke. It's that Roberts can't seem to take feminists seriously.
The record seems to make it quite clear that Roberts—with his "perceived/purported/alleged" discrimination trope—simply didn't believe that gender problems were worthy of his serious consideration or scrutiny.
The emerging picture of Roberts is of a man deeply skeptical about federal efforts to equalize opportunity for women or minorities, be it through busing, housing, voting rights, or affirmative-action programs. He was even more skeptical of judicial efforts to engage in the same project. And that's a legitimate, if debatable, political theory. But if, as the memos suggest, Roberts' ideological views are the result of being too smart-alecky or dismissive to accept that these disparities were of serious national concern in the first place, he doesn't just have a gender problem. He has a reality problem.
Thursday, August 25
Wednesday, August 17
unrealities
The Bush administration is significantly lowering expectations of what can be achieved in Iraq, recognizing that the United States will have to settle for far less progress than originally envisioned during the transition due to end in four months, according to U.S. officials in Washington and Baghdad.
The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society in which the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges, U.S. officials say.
"What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground," said a senior official involved in policy since the 2003 invasion. "We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we're in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning."
The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society in which the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges, U.S. officials say.
"What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground," said a senior official involved in policy since the 2003 invasion. "We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we're in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning."
Saturday, August 13
Someone Tell the President the War Is Over
August 14, 2005
By FRANK RICH
LIKE the Japanese soldier marooned on an island for years after V-J Day, President Bush may be the last person in the country to learn that for Americans, if not Iraqis, the war in Iraq is over. "We will stay the course," he insistently tells us from his Texas ranch. What do you mean we, white man?
A president can't stay the course when his own citizens (let alone his own allies) won't stay with him. The approval rate for Mr. Bush's handling of Iraq plunged to 34 percent in last weekend's Newsweek poll - a match for the 32 percent that approved L.B.J.'s handling of Vietnam in early March 1968. (The two presidents' overall approval ratings have also converged: 41 percent for Johnson then, 42 percent for Bush now.) On March 31, 1968, as L.B.J.'s ratings plummeted further, he announced he wouldn't seek re-election, commencing our long extrication from that quagmire.
But our current Texas president has even outdone his predecessor; Mr. Bush has lost not only the country but also his army. Neither bonuses nor fudged standards nor the faking of high school diplomas has solved the recruitment shortfall. Now Jake Tapper of ABC News reports that the armed forces are so eager for bodies they will flout "don't ask, don't tell" and hang on to gay soldiers who tell, even if they tell the press.
The president's cable cadre is in disarray as well. At Fox News Bill O'Reilly is trashing Donald Rumsfeld for his incompetence, and Ann Coulter is chiding Mr. O'Reilly for being a defeatist. In an emblematic gesture akin to waving a white flag, Robert Novak walked off a CNN set and possibly out of a job rather than answer questions about his role in smearing the man who helped expose the administration's prewar inflation of Saddam W.M.D.'s. (On this sinking ship, it's hard to know which rat to root for.)
As if the right-wing pundit crackup isn't unsettling enough, Mr. Bush's top war strategists, starting with Mr. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers, have of late tried to rebrand the war in Iraq as what the defense secretary calls "a global struggle against violent extremism." A struggle is what you have with your landlord. When the war's über-managers start using euphemisms for a conflict this lethal, it's a clear sign that the battle to keep the Iraq war afloat with the American public is lost.
That battle crashed past the tipping point this month in Ohio. There's historical symmetry in that. It was in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002, that Mr. Bush gave the fateful address that sped Congressional ratification of the war just days later. The speech was a miasma of self-delusion, half-truths and hype. The president said that "we know that Iraq and Al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade," an exaggeration based on evidence that the Senate Intelligence Committee would later find far from conclusive. He said that Saddam "could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year" were he able to secure "an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball." Our own National Intelligence Estimate of Oct. 1 quoted State Department findings that claims of Iraqi pursuit of uranium in Africa were "highly dubious."
It was on these false premises - that Iraq was both a collaborator on 9/11 and about to inflict mushroom clouds on America - that honorable and brave young Americans were sent off to fight. Among them were the 19 marine reservists from a single suburban Cleveland battalion slaughtered in just three days at the start of this month. As they perished, another Ohio marine reservist who had served in Iraq came close to winning a Congressional election in southern Ohio. Paul Hackett, a Democrat who called the president a "chicken hawk," received 48 percent of the vote in exactly the kind of bedrock conservative Ohio district that decided the 2004 election for Mr. Bush.
These are the tea leaves that all Republicans, not just Chuck Hagel, are reading now. Newt Gingrich called the Hackett near-victory "a wake-up call." The resolutely pro-war New York Post editorial page begged Mr. Bush (to no avail) to "show some leadership" by showing up in Ohio to salute the fallen and their families. A Bush loyalist, Senator George Allen of Virginia, instructed the president to meet with Cindy Sheehan, the mother camping out in Crawford, as "a matter of courtesy and decency." Or, to translate his Washingtonese, as a matter of politics. Only someone as adrift from reality as Mr. Bush would need to be told that a vacationing president can't win a standoff with a grief-stricken parent commandeering TV cameras and the blogosphere 24/7.
Such political imperatives are rapidly bringing about the war's end. That's inevitable for a war of choice, not necessity, that was conceived in politics from the start. Iraq was a Bush administration idée fixe before there was a 9/11. Within hours of that horrible trauma, according to Richard Clarke's "Against All Enemies," Mr. Rumsfeld was proposing Iraq as a battlefield, not because the enemy that attacked America was there, but because it offered "better targets" than the shadowy terrorist redoubts of Afghanistan. It was easier to take out Saddam - and burnish Mr. Bush's credentials as a slam-dunk "war president," suitable for a "Top Gun" victory jig - than to shut down Al Qaeda and smoke out its leader "dead or alive."
But just as politics are a bad motive for choosing a war, so they can be a doomed engine for running a war. In an interview with Tim Russert early last year, Mr. Bush said, "The thing about the Vietnam War that troubles me, as I look back, was it was a political war," adding that the "essential" lesson he learned from Vietnam was to not have "politicians making military decisions." But by then Mr. Bush had disastrously ignored that very lesson; he had let Mr. Rumsfeld publicly rebuke the Army's chief of staff, Eric Shinseki, after the general dared tell the truth: that several hundred thousand troops would be required to secure Iraq. To this day it's our failure to provide that security that has turned the country into the terrorist haven it hadn't been before 9/11 - "the central front in the war on terror," as Mr. Bush keeps reminding us, as if that might make us forget he's the one who recklessly created it.
The endgame for American involvement in Iraq will be of a piece with the rest of this sorry history. "It makes no sense for the commander in chief to put out a timetable" for withdrawal, Mr. Bush declared on the same day that 14 of those Ohio troops were killed by a roadside bomb in Haditha. But even as he spoke, the war's actual commander, Gen. George Casey, had already publicly set a timetable for "some fairly substantial reductions" to start next spring. Officially this calendar is tied to the next round of Iraqi elections, but it's quite another election this administration has in mind. The priority now is less to save Jessica Lynch (or Iraqi democracy) than to save Rick Santorum and every other endangered Republican facing voters in November 2006.
Nothing that happens on the ground in Iraq can turn around the fate of this war in America: not a shotgun constitution rushed to meet an arbitrary deadline, not another Iraqi election, not higher terrorist body counts, not another battle for Falluja (where insurgents may again regroup, The Los Angeles Times reported last week). A citizenry that was asked to accept tax cuts, not sacrifice, at the war's inception is hardly in the mood to start sacrificing now. There will be neither the volunteers nor the money required to field the wholesale additional American troops that might bolster the security situation in Iraq.
WHAT lies ahead now in Iraq instead is not victory, which Mr. Bush has never clearly defined anyway, but an exit (or triage) strategy that may echo Johnson's March 1968 plan for retreat from Vietnam: some kind of negotiations (in this case, with Sunni elements of the insurgency), followed by more inflated claims about the readiness of the local troops-in-training, whom we'll then throw to the wolves. Such an outcome may lead to even greater disaster, but this administration long ago squandered the credibility needed to make the difficult case that more human and financial resources might prevent Iraq from continuing its descent into civil war and its devolution into jihad central.
Thus the president's claim on Thursday that "no decision has been made yet" about withdrawing troops from Iraq can be taken exactly as seriously as the vice president's preceding fantasy that the insurgency is in its "last throes." The country has already made the decision for Mr. Bush. We're outta there. Now comes the hard task of identifying the leaders who can pick up the pieces of the fiasco that has made us more vulnerable, not less, to the terrorists who struck us four years ago next month.
By FRANK RICH
LIKE the Japanese soldier marooned on an island for years after V-J Day, President Bush may be the last person in the country to learn that for Americans, if not Iraqis, the war in Iraq is over. "We will stay the course," he insistently tells us from his Texas ranch. What do you mean we, white man?
A president can't stay the course when his own citizens (let alone his own allies) won't stay with him. The approval rate for Mr. Bush's handling of Iraq plunged to 34 percent in last weekend's Newsweek poll - a match for the 32 percent that approved L.B.J.'s handling of Vietnam in early March 1968. (The two presidents' overall approval ratings have also converged: 41 percent for Johnson then, 42 percent for Bush now.) On March 31, 1968, as L.B.J.'s ratings plummeted further, he announced he wouldn't seek re-election, commencing our long extrication from that quagmire.
But our current Texas president has even outdone his predecessor; Mr. Bush has lost not only the country but also his army. Neither bonuses nor fudged standards nor the faking of high school diplomas has solved the recruitment shortfall. Now Jake Tapper of ABC News reports that the armed forces are so eager for bodies they will flout "don't ask, don't tell" and hang on to gay soldiers who tell, even if they tell the press.
The president's cable cadre is in disarray as well. At Fox News Bill O'Reilly is trashing Donald Rumsfeld for his incompetence, and Ann Coulter is chiding Mr. O'Reilly for being a defeatist. In an emblematic gesture akin to waving a white flag, Robert Novak walked off a CNN set and possibly out of a job rather than answer questions about his role in smearing the man who helped expose the administration's prewar inflation of Saddam W.M.D.'s. (On this sinking ship, it's hard to know which rat to root for.)
As if the right-wing pundit crackup isn't unsettling enough, Mr. Bush's top war strategists, starting with Mr. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers, have of late tried to rebrand the war in Iraq as what the defense secretary calls "a global struggle against violent extremism." A struggle is what you have with your landlord. When the war's über-managers start using euphemisms for a conflict this lethal, it's a clear sign that the battle to keep the Iraq war afloat with the American public is lost.
That battle crashed past the tipping point this month in Ohio. There's historical symmetry in that. It was in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002, that Mr. Bush gave the fateful address that sped Congressional ratification of the war just days later. The speech was a miasma of self-delusion, half-truths and hype. The president said that "we know that Iraq and Al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade," an exaggeration based on evidence that the Senate Intelligence Committee would later find far from conclusive. He said that Saddam "could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year" were he able to secure "an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball." Our own National Intelligence Estimate of Oct. 1 quoted State Department findings that claims of Iraqi pursuit of uranium in Africa were "highly dubious."
It was on these false premises - that Iraq was both a collaborator on 9/11 and about to inflict mushroom clouds on America - that honorable and brave young Americans were sent off to fight. Among them were the 19 marine reservists from a single suburban Cleveland battalion slaughtered in just three days at the start of this month. As they perished, another Ohio marine reservist who had served in Iraq came close to winning a Congressional election in southern Ohio. Paul Hackett, a Democrat who called the president a "chicken hawk," received 48 percent of the vote in exactly the kind of bedrock conservative Ohio district that decided the 2004 election for Mr. Bush.
These are the tea leaves that all Republicans, not just Chuck Hagel, are reading now. Newt Gingrich called the Hackett near-victory "a wake-up call." The resolutely pro-war New York Post editorial page begged Mr. Bush (to no avail) to "show some leadership" by showing up in Ohio to salute the fallen and their families. A Bush loyalist, Senator George Allen of Virginia, instructed the president to meet with Cindy Sheehan, the mother camping out in Crawford, as "a matter of courtesy and decency." Or, to translate his Washingtonese, as a matter of politics. Only someone as adrift from reality as Mr. Bush would need to be told that a vacationing president can't win a standoff with a grief-stricken parent commandeering TV cameras and the blogosphere 24/7.
Such political imperatives are rapidly bringing about the war's end. That's inevitable for a war of choice, not necessity, that was conceived in politics from the start. Iraq was a Bush administration idée fixe before there was a 9/11. Within hours of that horrible trauma, according to Richard Clarke's "Against All Enemies," Mr. Rumsfeld was proposing Iraq as a battlefield, not because the enemy that attacked America was there, but because it offered "better targets" than the shadowy terrorist redoubts of Afghanistan. It was easier to take out Saddam - and burnish Mr. Bush's credentials as a slam-dunk "war president," suitable for a "Top Gun" victory jig - than to shut down Al Qaeda and smoke out its leader "dead or alive."
But just as politics are a bad motive for choosing a war, so they can be a doomed engine for running a war. In an interview with Tim Russert early last year, Mr. Bush said, "The thing about the Vietnam War that troubles me, as I look back, was it was a political war," adding that the "essential" lesson he learned from Vietnam was to not have "politicians making military decisions." But by then Mr. Bush had disastrously ignored that very lesson; he had let Mr. Rumsfeld publicly rebuke the Army's chief of staff, Eric Shinseki, after the general dared tell the truth: that several hundred thousand troops would be required to secure Iraq. To this day it's our failure to provide that security that has turned the country into the terrorist haven it hadn't been before 9/11 - "the central front in the war on terror," as Mr. Bush keeps reminding us, as if that might make us forget he's the one who recklessly created it.
The endgame for American involvement in Iraq will be of a piece with the rest of this sorry history. "It makes no sense for the commander in chief to put out a timetable" for withdrawal, Mr. Bush declared on the same day that 14 of those Ohio troops were killed by a roadside bomb in Haditha. But even as he spoke, the war's actual commander, Gen. George Casey, had already publicly set a timetable for "some fairly substantial reductions" to start next spring. Officially this calendar is tied to the next round of Iraqi elections, but it's quite another election this administration has in mind. The priority now is less to save Jessica Lynch (or Iraqi democracy) than to save Rick Santorum and every other endangered Republican facing voters in November 2006.
Nothing that happens on the ground in Iraq can turn around the fate of this war in America: not a shotgun constitution rushed to meet an arbitrary deadline, not another Iraqi election, not higher terrorist body counts, not another battle for Falluja (where insurgents may again regroup, The Los Angeles Times reported last week). A citizenry that was asked to accept tax cuts, not sacrifice, at the war's inception is hardly in the mood to start sacrificing now. There will be neither the volunteers nor the money required to field the wholesale additional American troops that might bolster the security situation in Iraq.
WHAT lies ahead now in Iraq instead is not victory, which Mr. Bush has never clearly defined anyway, but an exit (or triage) strategy that may echo Johnson's March 1968 plan for retreat from Vietnam: some kind of negotiations (in this case, with Sunni elements of the insurgency), followed by more inflated claims about the readiness of the local troops-in-training, whom we'll then throw to the wolves. Such an outcome may lead to even greater disaster, but this administration long ago squandered the credibility needed to make the difficult case that more human and financial resources might prevent Iraq from continuing its descent into civil war and its devolution into jihad central.
Thus the president's claim on Thursday that "no decision has been made yet" about withdrawing troops from Iraq can be taken exactly as seriously as the vice president's preceding fantasy that the insurgency is in its "last throes." The country has already made the decision for Mr. Bush. We're outta there. Now comes the hard task of identifying the leaders who can pick up the pieces of the fiasco that has made us more vulnerable, not less, to the terrorists who struck us four years ago next month.
Thursday, August 11
The Orange Lounge
The Orange County Museum of Art ‘s Orange Lounge at South Coast Plaza, is the first museum space on the West Coast to regularly present digital art and video and the only space of its kind in the United States located in a major retail complex.
The Orange Lounge presents solo and group exhibitions and special events featuring artist demonstrations, performances, and discussions that investigate the impact of digital media on contemporary visual culture. From real-time computer-generated moving images, to room-sized video installations, to artworks based strictly on the Web, the Orange Lounge is a dynamic site for exploring and interacting with new media art. Catalogues, CDs and other products related to video and new media are available in the Orange Lounge.
Exhibition Sponsors
The Orange Lounge design and construction was funded by the Segerstrom Foundation. Major support for Orange Lounge programs is provided by The James Irvine Foundation and technical support is provided by Integrated Media Systems.
The Orange Lounge presents solo and group exhibitions and special events featuring artist demonstrations, performances, and discussions that investigate the impact of digital media on contemporary visual culture. From real-time computer-generated moving images, to room-sized video installations, to artworks based strictly on the Web, the Orange Lounge is a dynamic site for exploring and interacting with new media art. Catalogues, CDs and other products related to video and new media are available in the Orange Lounge.
Exhibition Sponsors
The Orange Lounge design and construction was funded by the Segerstrom Foundation. Major support for Orange Lounge programs is provided by The James Irvine Foundation and technical support is provided by Integrated Media Systems.
Evolution vs. Religion
Quit pretending they're compatible.
By Jacob Weisberg, Slate.com
President Bush used to be content to revel in his own ignorance. Now he wants to share it with America's schoolchildren.
I refer to his recent comments in favor of teaching "intelligent design" alongside evolution. "Both sides ought to be properly taught … so people can understand what the debate is about," Bush told a group of Texas newspaper reporters who interviewed him on Aug. 1. "Part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought."
The president seems to view the conflict between evolutionary theory and intelligent design as something like the debate over Social Security reform. But this is not a disagreement with two reasonable points of view, let alone two equally valid ones. Intelligent design, which asserts that gaps in evolutionary science prove God must have had a role in creation, may be—as Bob Wright argues—creationism in camouflage. Or it may be—as William Saletan argues—a step in the creationist cave-in to evolution. But whatever it represents, intelligent design is a faith-based theory with no scientific validity or credibility.
If Bush had said schools should give equal time to the view that the Sun revolves around the Earth, or that smoking doesn't cause lung cancer, he'd have been laughed out of his office. The difference with evolution is that a large majority of Americans reject what scientists regard as equally well supported: that we're here because of random mutation and natural selection. According to the most recent Gallup poll on the subject (2004), 45 percent of Americans believe God created human beings in their present form 10,000 years ago, while another 38 percent believe that God directed the process of evolution. Only 13 percent accept the prevailing scientific view of evolution as an unguided, random process.
Being right and yet so unpopular presents an interesting problem for evolutionists. Their theory has won over the world scientific community but very few of the citizens of red-state America, who decide what gets taught in their own public schools. How can followers of Darwin prevent the propagation of ignorance in places like Kansas, whose board of education just voted to rewrite its biology curriculum to do what President Bush suggests?
Many biologists believe the answer is to present evolution as less menacing to religious belief than it really is. In much the same way that intelligent-design advocates try to assert that a creator must be compatible with evolution in order to shoehorn God into science classrooms, evolutionists claim Darwin is compatible with religion in order to keep God out. Don't worry, they insist, there's no conflict between evolution and religion—they simply belong to different realms. Evolution should be taught in the secular classroom, along with other hypotheses that can be verified or falsified. Intelligent design belongs in Sunday schools, with stuff that can't.
This was the soothing contention of the famed paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who argued that science and religion were separate "magisteria," or domains of teaching. The theme appears frequently in statements by major scientific organizations and wherever fundamentalists try to force creationism or its descendents on local school boards. Here, for instance, is the official position of Kansas Citizens for Science, the group opposing the inclusion of intelligent design in the state's science curricula: "People of faith do not have to choose between science and religion. Science is neither anti-Christian nor anti-God. Science denies neither God nor creation. Science merely looks for natural evidence of how the universe got to its current state. If viewed theistically, science is not commenting on whether there was a creation, but could be viewed as trying to find out how it happened."
In a state like Kansas, where public opinion remains overwhelmingly hostile to evolution, one sees the political logic of this kind of tap-dance. But let's be serious: Evolutionary theory may not be incompatible with all forms of religious belief, but it surely does undercut the basic teachings and doctrines of the world's great religions (and most of its not-so-great ones as well). Look at this 1993 NORC survey: In the United States, 63 percent of the public believed in God and 35 percent believed in evolution. In Great Britain, by comparison, 24 percent of people believed in God and 77 percent believed in evolution. You can believe in both—but not many people do.
That evolution erodes religious belief seems almost too obvious to require argument. It destroyed the faith of Darwin himself, who moved from Christianity to agnosticism as a result of his discoveries and was immediately recognized as a huge threat by his reverent contemporaries. In reviewing The Origin of Species in 1860, Samuel Wilberforce, the bishop of Oxford, wrote that the religious view of man as a creature with free will was "utterly irreconcilable with the degrading notion of the brute origin of him who was created in the image of God." (The passage is quoted in Daniel C. Dennett's superb book Darwin's Dangerous Idea.)
Cardinal Christoph Schonborn, the archbishop of Vienna, was saying nothing very different when he argued in a New York Times op-ed piece on July 7 that random evolution can't be harmonized with Catholic doctrine. To be sure, there are plenty of scientists who believe in God, and even Darwinists who call themselves Christians. But the acceptance of evolution diminishes religious belief in aggregate for a simple reason: It provides a better answer to the question of how we got here than religion does. Not a different answer, a better answer: more plausible, more logical, and supported by an enormous body of evidence. Post-Darwinian evolutionary theory, which can explain the emergence of the first bacteria, doesn't even leave much room for a deist God whose minimal role might have been to flick the first switch.
So, what should evolutionists and their supporters say to parents who don't want their children to become atheists and who may even hold firm to the virgin birth and the parting of the Red Sea? That it's time for them to finally let go of their quaint superstitions? That Darwinists aren't trying to push people away from religion but recognize that teaching their views does tend to have that effect? Dennett notes that Darwin himself avoided exploring the issue of the ultimate origins of life in part to avoid upsetting his wife Emma's religious beliefs.
One possible avenue is to focus more strongly on the practical consequences of resisting scientific reality. In a world where Koreans are cloning dogs, can the U.S. afford—ethically or economically—to raise our children on fraudulent biology? But whatever tack they take, evolutionists should quit pretending their views are no threat to believers. This insults our intelligence, and the president is doing that already.
By Jacob Weisberg, Slate.com
President Bush used to be content to revel in his own ignorance. Now he wants to share it with America's schoolchildren.
I refer to his recent comments in favor of teaching "intelligent design" alongside evolution. "Both sides ought to be properly taught … so people can understand what the debate is about," Bush told a group of Texas newspaper reporters who interviewed him on Aug. 1. "Part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought."
The president seems to view the conflict between evolutionary theory and intelligent design as something like the debate over Social Security reform. But this is not a disagreement with two reasonable points of view, let alone two equally valid ones. Intelligent design, which asserts that gaps in evolutionary science prove God must have had a role in creation, may be—as Bob Wright argues—creationism in camouflage. Or it may be—as William Saletan argues—a step in the creationist cave-in to evolution. But whatever it represents, intelligent design is a faith-based theory with no scientific validity or credibility.
If Bush had said schools should give equal time to the view that the Sun revolves around the Earth, or that smoking doesn't cause lung cancer, he'd have been laughed out of his office. The difference with evolution is that a large majority of Americans reject what scientists regard as equally well supported: that we're here because of random mutation and natural selection. According to the most recent Gallup poll on the subject (2004), 45 percent of Americans believe God created human beings in their present form 10,000 years ago, while another 38 percent believe that God directed the process of evolution. Only 13 percent accept the prevailing scientific view of evolution as an unguided, random process.
Being right and yet so unpopular presents an interesting problem for evolutionists. Their theory has won over the world scientific community but very few of the citizens of red-state America, who decide what gets taught in their own public schools. How can followers of Darwin prevent the propagation of ignorance in places like Kansas, whose board of education just voted to rewrite its biology curriculum to do what President Bush suggests?
Many biologists believe the answer is to present evolution as less menacing to religious belief than it really is. In much the same way that intelligent-design advocates try to assert that a creator must be compatible with evolution in order to shoehorn God into science classrooms, evolutionists claim Darwin is compatible with religion in order to keep God out. Don't worry, they insist, there's no conflict between evolution and religion—they simply belong to different realms. Evolution should be taught in the secular classroom, along with other hypotheses that can be verified or falsified. Intelligent design belongs in Sunday schools, with stuff that can't.
This was the soothing contention of the famed paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who argued that science and religion were separate "magisteria," or domains of teaching. The theme appears frequently in statements by major scientific organizations and wherever fundamentalists try to force creationism or its descendents on local school boards. Here, for instance, is the official position of Kansas Citizens for Science, the group opposing the inclusion of intelligent design in the state's science curricula: "People of faith do not have to choose between science and religion. Science is neither anti-Christian nor anti-God. Science denies neither God nor creation. Science merely looks for natural evidence of how the universe got to its current state. If viewed theistically, science is not commenting on whether there was a creation, but could be viewed as trying to find out how it happened."
In a state like Kansas, where public opinion remains overwhelmingly hostile to evolution, one sees the political logic of this kind of tap-dance. But let's be serious: Evolutionary theory may not be incompatible with all forms of religious belief, but it surely does undercut the basic teachings and doctrines of the world's great religions (and most of its not-so-great ones as well). Look at this 1993 NORC survey: In the United States, 63 percent of the public believed in God and 35 percent believed in evolution. In Great Britain, by comparison, 24 percent of people believed in God and 77 percent believed in evolution. You can believe in both—but not many people do.
That evolution erodes religious belief seems almost too obvious to require argument. It destroyed the faith of Darwin himself, who moved from Christianity to agnosticism as a result of his discoveries and was immediately recognized as a huge threat by his reverent contemporaries. In reviewing The Origin of Species in 1860, Samuel Wilberforce, the bishop of Oxford, wrote that the religious view of man as a creature with free will was "utterly irreconcilable with the degrading notion of the brute origin of him who was created in the image of God." (The passage is quoted in Daniel C. Dennett's superb book Darwin's Dangerous Idea.)
Cardinal Christoph Schonborn, the archbishop of Vienna, was saying nothing very different when he argued in a New York Times op-ed piece on July 7 that random evolution can't be harmonized with Catholic doctrine. To be sure, there are plenty of scientists who believe in God, and even Darwinists who call themselves Christians. But the acceptance of evolution diminishes religious belief in aggregate for a simple reason: It provides a better answer to the question of how we got here than religion does. Not a different answer, a better answer: more plausible, more logical, and supported by an enormous body of evidence. Post-Darwinian evolutionary theory, which can explain the emergence of the first bacteria, doesn't even leave much room for a deist God whose minimal role might have been to flick the first switch.
So, what should evolutionists and their supporters say to parents who don't want their children to become atheists and who may even hold firm to the virgin birth and the parting of the Red Sea? That it's time for them to finally let go of their quaint superstitions? That Darwinists aren't trying to push people away from religion but recognize that teaching their views does tend to have that effect? Dennett notes that Darwin himself avoided exploring the issue of the ultimate origins of life in part to avoid upsetting his wife Emma's religious beliefs.
One possible avenue is to focus more strongly on the practical consequences of resisting scientific reality. In a world where Koreans are cloning dogs, can the U.S. afford—ethically or economically—to raise our children on fraudulent biology? But whatever tack they take, evolutionists should quit pretending their views are no threat to believers. This insults our intelligence, and the president is doing that already.
Wednesday, August 10
Reading in America Declines yet again?
The number of Americans who read literature has dropped by 10 percent over the past decade, according to a survey released in 2004 by the National Endowment for the Arts. That loss of 20 million readers means that, for most Americans, "literature has no real existence," says Mark Bauerlein, editor of Forum, in a response to the arts endowment's report.
The response, in a journal published by the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, includes comments from 12 scholars from across the country.
Of particular interest to humanities professors, writes Mr. Bauerlein, is that the drop increased to 17 percent among 18- to 24-year-olds. The dip "signifies a vast shift in youth culture," he says, and it is clear "the Internet, videogames, instant messaging, etc., have contributed to this decline."
Moreover, the decline in young readers has led to a shift in resources from literature programs to curricula dedicated to popular culture, film, and media and technology studies, writes Mr. Bauerlein.
To scholars taking part in the response, the implications of the survey's findings are far-reaching.
"It is apparent that my students do not know as much as they should know or as they need to know," writes Paul Voss, an associate professor of Renaissance literature at Georgia State University. "Specifically," he says, "they do not know how to read in the full sense of that term. More dangerously, they don't care to read. Apathy, in this case, is a far greater problem than ignorance."
The NEA report "is a powerful contribution to what is developing into a serious debate over the relation of reading to technology," writes Sharon Alusow Hart, a literature professor at East Tennessee State University.
But, while preserving readership in the face of technology may seem daunting, now is no time to back away from the challenge, writes Mr. Bauerlein. Like it or not, he says, the survival of literary expression "is no longer a departmental concern or a canon question. It is a public concern."
The article, "Reading at Risk: a Forum," is available online at http://www.bu.edu/literary/forum/onlineform.html
The NEA report, "Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America," is available at http://www.nea.gov/news/news04/ReadingAtRisk.html
The response, in a journal published by the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, includes comments from 12 scholars from across the country.
Of particular interest to humanities professors, writes Mr. Bauerlein, is that the drop increased to 17 percent among 18- to 24-year-olds. The dip "signifies a vast shift in youth culture," he says, and it is clear "the Internet, videogames, instant messaging, etc., have contributed to this decline."
Moreover, the decline in young readers has led to a shift in resources from literature programs to curricula dedicated to popular culture, film, and media and technology studies, writes Mr. Bauerlein.
To scholars taking part in the response, the implications of the survey's findings are far-reaching.
"It is apparent that my students do not know as much as they should know or as they need to know," writes Paul Voss, an associate professor of Renaissance literature at Georgia State University. "Specifically," he says, "they do not know how to read in the full sense of that term. More dangerously, they don't care to read. Apathy, in this case, is a far greater problem than ignorance."
The NEA report "is a powerful contribution to what is developing into a serious debate over the relation of reading to technology," writes Sharon Alusow Hart, a literature professor at East Tennessee State University.
But, while preserving readership in the face of technology may seem daunting, now is no time to back away from the challenge, writes Mr. Bauerlein. Like it or not, he says, the survival of literary expression "is no longer a departmental concern or a canon question. It is a public concern."
The article, "Reading at Risk: a Forum," is available online at http://www.bu.edu/literary/forum/onlineform.html
The NEA report, "Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America," is available at http://www.nea.gov/news/news04/ReadingAtRisk.html
Sunday, August 7
The Xbox Auteurs
August 7, 2005
By CLIVE THOMPSON
Like many young hipsters in Austin, Tex., Michael Burns wanted to make it big in some creative field -- perhaps writing comedy scripts in Hollywood. Instead, he wound up in a dead-end job, managing a call center. To kill time, he made friends with a group of equally clever and bored young men at the company where he worked, and they'd sit around talking about their shared passion: video games. Their favorite title was Halo, a best-selling Xbox game in which players control armor-clad soldiers as they wander through gorgeous coastal forests and grim military bunkers and fight an army of lizardlike aliens. Burns and his gang especially loved the ''team versus team'' mode, which is like a digital version of paint ball: instead of fighting aliens, players hook their Xboxes to the Internet, then log on together in a single game, at which point they assemble into two teams -- red-armored soldiers versus blue-armored ones. Instead of shooting aliens, they try to slaughter one another, using grenades, machine guns and death rays. On evenings and weekends, Burns and his friends would cluster around their TV's until the wee hours of the morning, gleefully blowing one another to pieces.
''Halo is like crack,'' Burns recalls thinking. ''I could play it until I die.''
Whenever a friend discovered a particularly cool stunt inside Halo -- for example, obliterating an enemy with a new type of grenade toss -- Burns would record a video of the stunt for posterity. (His friend would perform the move after Burns had run a video cord from his TV to his computer, so he could save it onto his hard drive.) Then he'd post the video on a Web site to show other gamers how the trick was done. To make the videos funnier, sometimes Burns would pull out a microphone and record a comedic voice-over, using video-editing software to make it appear as if the helmeted soldier himself were doing the talking.
Then one day he realized that the videos he was making were essentially computer-animated movies, almost like miniature emulations of ''Finding Nemo'' or ''The Incredibles.'' He was using the game to function like a personal Pixar studio. He wondered: Could he use it to create an actual movie or TV series?
Burns's group decided to give it a shot. They gathered around the Xbox at Burns's apartment, manipulating their soldiers like tiny virtual actors, bobbing their heads to look as if they were deep in conversation. Burns wrote sharp, sardonic scripts for them to perform. He created a comedy series called ''Red vs. Blue,'' a sort of sci-fi version of ''M*A*S*H.'' In ''Red vs. Blue,'' the soldiers rarely do any fighting; they just stand around insulting one another and musing over the absurdities of war, sounding less like patriotic warriors than like bored, clever video-store clerks. The first 10-minute episode opened with a scene set in Halo's bleakest desert canyon. Two red soldiers stood on their base, peering at two blue soldiers far off in the distance, and traded quips that sounded almost like a slacker disquisition on Iraq:
Red Soldier: ''Why are we out here? Far as I can tell, it's just a box canyon in the middle of nowhere, with no way in or out. And the only reason we set up a red base here is because they have a blue base there. And the only reason they have a blue base over there is because we have a red base here.''
When they were done, they posted the episode on their Web site (surreptitiously hosted on computers at work). They figured maybe a few hundred people would see it and get a chuckle or two.
Instead, ''Red vs. Blue'' became an instant runaway hit on geek blogs, and within a single day, 20,000 people stampeded to the Web site to download the file. The avalanche of traffic crashed the company server. ''My boss came into the office and was like, 'What the hell is going on?' '' Burns recalls. ''I looked over at the server, and it was going blink, blink, blink.''
Thrilled, Burns and his crew quickly cranked out another video, then another. They kept up a weekly production schedule, and after a few months, ''Red vs. Blue'' had, like some dystopian version of ''Friends,'' become a piece of appointment viewing. Nearly a million people were downloading each episode every Friday, writing mash notes to the creators and asking if they could buy a DVD of the collected episodes. Mainstream media picked up on the phenomenon. The Village Voice described it as '' 'Clerks' meets 'Star Wars,' '' and the BBC called it ''riotously funny'' and said it was ''reminiscent of the anarchic energy of 'South Park.' '' Burns realized something strange was going on. He and his crew had created a hit comedy show -- entirely inside a video game.
Video games have not enjoyed good publicity lately. Hillary Clinton has been denouncing the violence in titles like Grand Theft Auto, which was yanked out of many stores last month amid news that players had unlocked sex scenes hidden inside. Yet when they're not bemoaning the virtual bloodshed, cultural pundits grudgingly admit that today's games have become impressively cinematic. It's not merely that the graphics are so good: the camera angles inside the games borrow literally from the visual language of film. When you're playing Halo and look up at the sun, you'll see a little ''lens flare,'' as if you were viewing the whole experience through the eyepiece of a 16-millimeter Arriflex. By using the game to actually make cinema, Burns and his crew flipped a switch that neatly closed a self-referential media loop: movies begat games that begat movies.
And Burns and his crew aren't alone. Video-game aficionados have been creating ''machinima'' -- an ungainly term mixing ''machine'' and ''cinema'' and pronounced ma-SHEEN-i-ma -- since the late 90's. ''Red vs. Blue'' is the first to break out of the underground, and now corporations like Volvo are hiring machinima artists to make short promotional films, while MTV, Spike TV and the Independent Film Channel are running comedy shorts and music videos produced inside games. By last spring, Burns and his friends were making so much money from ''Red vs. Blue'' that they left their jobs and founded Rooster Teeth Productions. Now they produce machinima full time.
It may be the most unlikely form of indie filmmaking yet -- and one of the most weirdly democratic. ''It's like 'The Blair Witch Project' all over again, except you don't even need a camera,'' says Julie Kanarowski, a product manager with Electronic Arts, the nation's largest video-game publisher. ''You don't even need actors.''
Back in college, Burns and another Rooster Teeth founder, Matt Hullum, wrote and produced a traditional live-action indie movie. It cost $9,000, required a full year to make and was seen by virtually no one. By contrast, the four Xboxes needed to make ''Red vs. Blue'' cost a mere $600. Each 10-minute episode requires a single day to perform and edit and is viewed by hordes of feverish video-game fans the planet over.
More than just a cheap way to make an animated movie, machinima allows game players to comment directly on the pop culture they so devotedly consume. Much like ''fan fiction'' (homespun tales featuring popular TV characters) or ''mash-ups'' (music fans blending two songs to create a new hybrid), machinima is a fan-created art form. It's what you get when gamers stop blasting aliens for a second and start messing with the narrative.
And God knows, there's plenty to mess with. These days, the worlds inside games are so huge and open-ended that gamers can roam anywhere they wish. Indeed, players often abandon the official goal of the game -- save the princess; vanquish the eldritch forces of evil -- in favor of merely using the virtual environment as a gigantic jungle gym. In one popular piece of Halo machinima, ''Warthog Jump,'' a player cunningly used the game to conduct a series of dazzling physics experiments. He placed grenades in precise locations beneath jeeps and troops, such that when the targets blew sky-high, they pinwheeled through the air in precise formations, like synchronized divers. Another gamer recorded a machinima movie that poked subversive fun at Grand Theft Auto. Instead of playing as a dangerous, cop-killing gangster, the player pretended he was a naive Canadian tourist -- putting down his gun, dressing in tacky clothes and simply wandering around the game's downtown environment for hours, admiring the scenery.
So what's it like to actually shoot a movie inside a game? In June, I visited the Rooster Teeth offices in Buda, Tex., a tiny Austin suburb, to observe Burns and his group as they produced a scene of ''Red vs. Blue.'' Burns, a tall, burly 32-year-old, sat in front of two huge flat-panel screens, preparing the editing software. Nearby were the two Rooster Teeth producers who would be acting on-screen: Geoff Ramsey, a scraggly-bearded 30-year-old whose arms are completely covered in tattoos of fish and skulls, and Gustavo Sorola, a gangly 27-year-old who sprawled in a beanbag chair and peered through his thick architect glasses at the day's e-mail. They were fan letters, Sorola told me, that pour in from teenagers who are as enthusiastic as they are incoherent. ''The way kids write these days,'' he said with a grimace. ''It's like someone threw up on the keyboard.''
In the script they were acting out that day, a pair of ''Red vs. Blue'' soldiers engaged in one of their typically pointless existential arguments, bickering over whether it's possible to kill someone with a toy replica of a real weapon. The Rooster Teeth crew recorded the voice-overs earlier in the day; now they were going to create the animation for the scene.
Burns picked up a controller and booted up Halo on an Xbox. He would act as the camera: whatever his character saw would be recorded, from his point of view. Then Sorola and Ramsey logged into the game, teleporting in as an orange-suited and a red-suited soldier. Burns posed them near a massive concrete bunker and frowned as he scrutinized the view on the computer screen. ''Hmmmm,'' he muttered. ''We need something to frame you guys -- some sort of prop.'' He ran his character over to a nearby alien hovercraft, jumped in and parked it next to the actors. ''Sweet!'' he said. ''I like it!''
In a ''Red vs. Blue'' shoot, the actors all must follow one important rule: Be careful not to accidentally kill another actor. ''Sometimes you'll drop your controller and it unintentionally launches a grenade. It takes, like, 20 minutes for the blood splatters to dry up,'' Ramsey said. ''Totally ruins the scene.''
Finally, Burns was ready to go. He shouted, ''Action!'' and the voice-overs began playing over loudspeakers. Sorola and Ramsey acted in time with the dialogue. Acting, in this context, was weirdly minimalist. They mashed the controller joysticks with their thumbs, bobbing the soldiers' heads back and forth roughly in time with important words in each line. ''It's puppetry, basically,'' Ramsey said, as he jiggled his controller. Of all the ''Red vs. Blue'' crew members, Ramsey is renowned for his dexterity with an Xbox. When a scene calls for more than five actors onstage, he'll put another controller on the ground and manipulate it with his right foot, allowing him to perform as two characters simultaneously.
As I watched, I was reminded of what initially cracked me up so much about ''Red vs. Blue'': the idea that faceless, anonymous soldiers in a video game have interior lives. It's a ''Rosencrantz and Guildenstern'' conceit; ''Red vs. Blue'' is what the game characters talk about when we're not around to play with them. As it turns out, they're a bunch of neurotics straight out of ''Seinfeld.'' One recruit reveals that he chain-smokes inside his airtight armor; a sergeant tells a soldier his battle instructions are to ''scream like a woman.'' And, in a sardonic gloss on the game's endless carnage, none of the soldiers have the vaguest clue why they're fighting.
Yet as I discovered, real-life soldiers are among the most ardent fans of ''Red vs. Blue.'' When I walked around the Rooster Teeth office, I found it was festooned with letters, plaques and an enormous American flag, gifts from grateful American troops, many of whom are currently stationed in Iraq. Isn't it a little astonishing, I asked Burns when the crew went out in the baking Texas sun for a break, that actual soldiers are so enamored of a show that portrays troops as inept cowards, leaders as cynical sociopaths and war itself as a supremely meaningless endeavor? Burns laughed, but said the appeal was nothing sinister.
'' 'Red vs. Blue' is about downtime,'' he said. ''There's very little action, which is precisely the way things are in real life.''
''He's right,'' Ramsey added. He himself spent five years in the army after high school. ''We'd just sit around digging ditches and threatening to kill each other all day long,'' he said. ''We were bored out of our minds.''
Perhaps the most unusual thing about machinima is that none of its creators are in jail. After all, they're gleefully plundering intellectual property at a time when the copyright wars have become particularly vicious. Yet video-game companies have been upbeat -- even exuberant -- about the legions of teenagers and artists pillaging their games. This is particularly bewildering in the case of ''Red vs. Blue,'' because Halo is made by Bungie, a subsidiary of Microsoft, a company no stranger to using a courtroom to defend its goods. What the heck is going on?
As it turns out, people at Bungie love ''Red vs. Blue.'' ''We thought it was kind of brilliant,'' says Brian Jarrard, the Bungie staff member who manages interactions with fans. ''There are people out there who would never have heard about Halo without 'Red vs. Blue.' It's getting an audience outside the hardcore gaming crowd.''
Sure, Rooster Teeth ripped off Microsoft's intellectual property. But Microsoft got something in return: ''Red vs. Blue'' gave the game a whiff of countercultural coolness, the sort of grass-roots street cred that major corporations desperately crave but can never manufacture. After talking with Rooster Teeth, Microsoft agreed, remarkably, to let them use the game without paying any licensing fees at all. In fact, the company later hired Rooster Teeth to produce ''Red vs. Blue'' videos to play as advertisements in game stores. Microsoft has been so strangely solicitous that when it was developing the sequel to Halo last year, the designers actually inserted a special command -- a joystick button that makes a soldier lower his weapon -- designed solely to make it easier for Rooster Teeth to do dialogue.
''If you're playing the game, there's no reason to lower your weapon at all,'' Burns explained. ''They put that in literally just so we can shoot machinima.''
Other game companies have gone even further. Many now include editing software with their games, specifically to encourage fans to shoot movies. When Valve software released its hit game Half-Life 2 last year, it included ''Faceposer'' software so that machinima creators could tweak the facial expressions of characters. When the Sims 2 -- a sequel to the top-selling game of all time -- came out last year, its publisher, Electronic Arts, set up a Web site so that fans could upload their Sims 2 movies to show to the world. (About 8,000 people so far have done so.)
Still, it's one thing for gamers to produce a jokey comedy or a music video. Can machinima actually produce a work of art -- something with serious emotional depth? A few people have tried. In China, a visual artist named Feng Mengbo used the first-person-shooter game Quake III to produce Q4U, in which the screen is filled with multiple versions of himself, killing one another. Players' relationships with constant, blood-splattering violence is a common subject in game art. Last year, the 31-year-old artist Brody Condon produced an unsettling film that consisted of nothing but shots of himself committing suicide inside 50 different video games.
''I try to come to terms with what taking your life means in these games,'' Condon says. ''I'm trying to understand, spiritually, your relationship with an avatar on the screen.''
But even machinima's biggest fans admit that the vast majority of machinima is pretty amateurish. ''It's like if some friends of mine all broke into a movie set, and we all got to use all the cameras and special-effects equipment,'' says Carl Goodman, director of digital media at the American Museum of the Moving Image, which began to hold an annual machinima festival two years ago. ''We wouldn't quite know how to use it, but we'd make some pretty interesting stuff.''
Yet as Goodman points out, there's a competing proposition. Machinima does not always strive to emulate ''realistic,'' artistic movies. On the contrary, it is often explicitly devoted to celebrating the aesthetics of games -- the animations and in-jokes, the precise physics. Most machinima is probably meaningless to people who don't play games, much as ESPN is opaque to anyone who doesn't watch sports. But for those who do play Halo, it was genuinely thrilling to see something like ''Warthog Jump,'' with its meticulously synchronized explosions.
The Rooster Teeth crew has its own hilariously stringent rule for making machinima: no cheating. When they shoot ''Red vs. Blue,'' they do not use any special effects that are not organically included in the game; everything you see in an episode of ''Red vs. Blue'' could in theory have taken place during an actual game of Halo, played by a fan in his bedroom. It's a charmingly purist attitude, a sci-fi version of the ''Dogma'' school of indie film, which argues that movies are best when cinematic trickery is kept to a minimum.
One evening in New York, I visited with Ethan Vogt as he and his machinima team shot a car-chase scene for a Volvo promo. Vogt and two producers sat at computers, logged into a multiplayer game; each producer controlled a car racing through crowded city streets, while Vogt controlled a free-floating ''camera'' that followed behind, recording the visuals. The vehicles -- an enormous 1972 Chevy Impala and a Volvo V50 -- screamed along at about 60 miles an hour, fishtailing through corners while plowing into mailboxes, lampposts and, occasionally, clots of pedestrians. The lead car burst into flames. ''That's great,'' Vogt said. ''That's great.''
Though it shares with independent filmmaking a do-it-yourself aesthetic, machinima inverts the central tradition of indie film: smallness. With their skimpy budgets, indie directors tend to set movies in kitchens or living rooms -- and focus instead on providing quality acting and scripts. Machinima, in contrast, often has horribly cheesy acting and ham-fisted, purple-prose stories -- but they're set in outer space. Want massive shootouts? Howling mob scenes? Roman gladiatorial armies clashing by night? No problem. It is the rare form of amateur film in which the directors aspire to be not Wes Anderson but George Lucas.
Indeed, with video games played on computers, it is now possible to build an entire world from scratch. The core of any video game is its game engine, the software that knows how to render 3-D objects and how to realistically represent the physics of how they move, bounce or collide. But the actual objects inside the game -- the people, the cars, the guns, even the buildings -- can be altered, tweaked or replaced by modifications, or ''mods.'' Mods do not require any deep programming skills; indeed, almost any teenager with a passing acquaintance in graphic-design software can ''re-skin'' a character in a game to make it look like himself, for instance. (Xbox and PlayStation games, in comparison, are much harder to mod, because the consoles are locked boxes, designed to prevent players from tampering with the games.)
I was able to see modding in action one night when I visited the ILL Clan, a pioneering machinima group. Their headquarters are the kitchen table in the cramped one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment of Frank Dellario; a lanky, hyperkinetic 42-year-old, he sat on a rickety folding chair, pecking at a keyboard. The table was littered with four computer screens and laptops, the remnants of take-out sushi and a hopelessly tangled morass of computer cords and joysticks; a huge wide-screen TV lurked behind them for viewing their work. On the night I visited, they were using a game engine called Torque to shoot a short heist movie for Audi, in which two thugs beat up a concert violinist and make off with an antique violin in a van.
To quickly create a gritty-looking city, Dellario and his colleague -- ILL Clan's co-founder, Matt Dominianni -- hired a local artist to build a generic-looking urban intersection inside the game. To customize it, Dominianni went onto Google, found snapshots of a few seedy stores (an adult bookstore, a tattoo parlor and a furniture outlet) and digitally pasted them onto the front of the buildings. Then they went to a site called Turbo-Squid, a sort of Amazon for virtual in-game items, and for $45 bought a van that could be plunked down inside the game. When I arrived, they were browsing the site and contemplating buying a few women. ''My God, look at this one,'' Dellario marveled, as he clicked open a picture of an eerily realistic 3-D brunette named Masha. ''I'm going to marry this woman. They've finally broken through to total reality.''
Dellario put the van into the correct location in the scene, then logged into the game to figure out the camera angle for this shot. He frowned. It didn't look right. The lighting was all off, with shadows falling in the wrong places.
Dominianni figured out the problem: ''The sun is supposed to be at high noon. It's in the wrong place.''
''Oh, yeah,'' Dellario said. ''Let me move it.'' He pulled up a menu, clicked on the ''sun'' command, and dragged it across the sky.
Now they were finally ready to shoot. Dellario realized they needed an extra pair of hands to manipulate one of the thugs. ''Want to act in this scene?'' Dellario asked, and he handed me a joystick.
I sat down at one of the computers and took control of ''Thug1,'' a brown-haired man in a golf shirt and brown pants, carrying the stolen violin. Dominianni was playing ''Thug2.'' Our characters were supposed to look around to make sure the coast is clear, then jump in the truck and race off. Dellario gave me my motivation: ''It's like you hear a suspicious noise. You're nervous.'' I used the joystick to practice moving my virtual character, craning its neck -- my neck? -- back and forth. I have played plenty of video games, but this felt awfully odd. Usually when I am inside a game, I'm just worried about staying alive while the bullets whiz past my ears. I've never had to emote.
While Dellario and Dominianni fiddled with the camera angle, I grew impatient and wandered around, exploring the virtual set. I peered in a few shop windows -- they were strikingly photorealistic, even up close. Then I walked down an alley and suddenly arrived at the end of the set. It was like a tiny Western town in the desert: once you got beyond the few clustered buildings, there was nothing there -- just a vast, enormous plain, utterly empty and stretching off infinitely into the distance.
This spring, electronic arts decided to promote the Sims 2 by hiring Rooster Teeth to create a machinima show using the game. Called ''The Strangerhood,'' it would be freely available online. ''The Strangerhood'' is a parody of reality TV: a group of people wake up one day to discover that they are living in new houses, and they can't remember who they are or how they got there. In the Sims 2, the animated people are impressively Pixar-like and expressive, making ''The Strangerhood'' even more like a mainstream animated show than ''Red vs. Blue''; you could almost imagine watching it on Saturday morning.
The problem is, the Sims 2 has turned out to be incredibly difficult to shoot with. When the Rooster Teeth gang uses Halo for machinima, the characters are mere puppets and can be posed any way the creators want. But in the Sims 2, the little virtual characters have artificial intelligence and free will. When you're playing, you do not control all the action: the fun is in putting your Sims in interesting social situations, then standing back and watching what they'll do. When Rooster Teeth's Matt Hullum builds a virtual set and puts the ''Strangerhood'' characters in place for a shoot, he's never quite sure what will happen. To shoot a scene in which two men wake up in bed together, Hullum had to spend hours playing with the two characters -- who are nominally heterosexual -- forcing them into repeated conversations until they eventually became such good friends they were willing to share a bed. Shooting machinima with Sims is thus maddeningly like using actual, human stars: they're stubborn; they stage hissy fits and stomp off to their trailers.
''We'll do three or four takes of a scene, and one of the Sims will start getting tired and want to go to sleep,'' Hullum said. ''It's just like being on a real set. You're screaming: 'Quick, quick, get the shot! We're losing light!' ''
Hullum showed me a typical ''Strangerhood'' scene. He put Nikki, a young ponytailed brunette in a baseball cap, in the kitchen to interact with Wade, a slacker who looked eerily like a digital Owen Wilson. (To give Wade a mellow, San Francisco vibe, Hullum programmed him to move at a pace 50 percent slower than the other characters.) Hullum pointed to Nikki's ''mood'' bar; it was low, which meant she was in a bad mood and wouldn't want to talk. ''When they're bored, you have to lock them in a room alone for a few hours until they start to crave conversation,'' Hullum said. He tried anyway, prodding Wade to approach her and talk about food, one of Nikki's favorite subjects. It worked. The two became engrossed in a conversation, laughing and gesticulating wildly. ''See, this footage would be great if we were shooting a scene where these guys are maybe gossiping,'' Hullum mused, as he zoomed the camera in to frame a close-up on Wade. Then Nikki started to yawn. ''Oh, damn. See -- she's getting bored. Oh, no, she's walking away,'' Hullum said, as the little virtual Nikki wandered out of the room. ''Damn. You see what we have to deal with?''
The audience for ''The Strangerhood'' has not exploded the way ''Red vs. Blue'' did. The project is a gamble: its creators hope it will break out of machinima's geeky subculture and vault into the mainstream.
Though in a way, Hullum said, the mainstream isn't always a fun place to be, either. Before he returned to Austin to work on ''Red vs. Blue,'' he spent six miserable years in Hollywood working on second-rate teen movies with big budgets, like ''Scooby-Doo'' and ''The Faculty.''
''So now to come to this, where we have total creative control of our own stuff, it's amazing,'' Hullum said, as he watched Nikki walk out of the house in search of a more interesting conversation. ''I just pray we can keep this going. Because if we can't, I'm in big trouble.''
Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for the magazine.
By CLIVE THOMPSON
Like many young hipsters in Austin, Tex., Michael Burns wanted to make it big in some creative field -- perhaps writing comedy scripts in Hollywood. Instead, he wound up in a dead-end job, managing a call center. To kill time, he made friends with a group of equally clever and bored young men at the company where he worked, and they'd sit around talking about their shared passion: video games. Their favorite title was Halo, a best-selling Xbox game in which players control armor-clad soldiers as they wander through gorgeous coastal forests and grim military bunkers and fight an army of lizardlike aliens. Burns and his gang especially loved the ''team versus team'' mode, which is like a digital version of paint ball: instead of fighting aliens, players hook their Xboxes to the Internet, then log on together in a single game, at which point they assemble into two teams -- red-armored soldiers versus blue-armored ones. Instead of shooting aliens, they try to slaughter one another, using grenades, machine guns and death rays. On evenings and weekends, Burns and his friends would cluster around their TV's until the wee hours of the morning, gleefully blowing one another to pieces.
''Halo is like crack,'' Burns recalls thinking. ''I could play it until I die.''
Whenever a friend discovered a particularly cool stunt inside Halo -- for example, obliterating an enemy with a new type of grenade toss -- Burns would record a video of the stunt for posterity. (His friend would perform the move after Burns had run a video cord from his TV to his computer, so he could save it onto his hard drive.) Then he'd post the video on a Web site to show other gamers how the trick was done. To make the videos funnier, sometimes Burns would pull out a microphone and record a comedic voice-over, using video-editing software to make it appear as if the helmeted soldier himself were doing the talking.
Then one day he realized that the videos he was making were essentially computer-animated movies, almost like miniature emulations of ''Finding Nemo'' or ''The Incredibles.'' He was using the game to function like a personal Pixar studio. He wondered: Could he use it to create an actual movie or TV series?
Burns's group decided to give it a shot. They gathered around the Xbox at Burns's apartment, manipulating their soldiers like tiny virtual actors, bobbing their heads to look as if they were deep in conversation. Burns wrote sharp, sardonic scripts for them to perform. He created a comedy series called ''Red vs. Blue,'' a sort of sci-fi version of ''M*A*S*H.'' In ''Red vs. Blue,'' the soldiers rarely do any fighting; they just stand around insulting one another and musing over the absurdities of war, sounding less like patriotic warriors than like bored, clever video-store clerks. The first 10-minute episode opened with a scene set in Halo's bleakest desert canyon. Two red soldiers stood on their base, peering at two blue soldiers far off in the distance, and traded quips that sounded almost like a slacker disquisition on Iraq:
Red Soldier: ''Why are we out here? Far as I can tell, it's just a box canyon in the middle of nowhere, with no way in or out. And the only reason we set up a red base here is because they have a blue base there. And the only reason they have a blue base over there is because we have a red base here.''
When they were done, they posted the episode on their Web site (surreptitiously hosted on computers at work). They figured maybe a few hundred people would see it and get a chuckle or two.
Instead, ''Red vs. Blue'' became an instant runaway hit on geek blogs, and within a single day, 20,000 people stampeded to the Web site to download the file. The avalanche of traffic crashed the company server. ''My boss came into the office and was like, 'What the hell is going on?' '' Burns recalls. ''I looked over at the server, and it was going blink, blink, blink.''
Thrilled, Burns and his crew quickly cranked out another video, then another. They kept up a weekly production schedule, and after a few months, ''Red vs. Blue'' had, like some dystopian version of ''Friends,'' become a piece of appointment viewing. Nearly a million people were downloading each episode every Friday, writing mash notes to the creators and asking if they could buy a DVD of the collected episodes. Mainstream media picked up on the phenomenon. The Village Voice described it as '' 'Clerks' meets 'Star Wars,' '' and the BBC called it ''riotously funny'' and said it was ''reminiscent of the anarchic energy of 'South Park.' '' Burns realized something strange was going on. He and his crew had created a hit comedy show -- entirely inside a video game.
Video games have not enjoyed good publicity lately. Hillary Clinton has been denouncing the violence in titles like Grand Theft Auto, which was yanked out of many stores last month amid news that players had unlocked sex scenes hidden inside. Yet when they're not bemoaning the virtual bloodshed, cultural pundits grudgingly admit that today's games have become impressively cinematic. It's not merely that the graphics are so good: the camera angles inside the games borrow literally from the visual language of film. When you're playing Halo and look up at the sun, you'll see a little ''lens flare,'' as if you were viewing the whole experience through the eyepiece of a 16-millimeter Arriflex. By using the game to actually make cinema, Burns and his crew flipped a switch that neatly closed a self-referential media loop: movies begat games that begat movies.
And Burns and his crew aren't alone. Video-game aficionados have been creating ''machinima'' -- an ungainly term mixing ''machine'' and ''cinema'' and pronounced ma-SHEEN-i-ma -- since the late 90's. ''Red vs. Blue'' is the first to break out of the underground, and now corporations like Volvo are hiring machinima artists to make short promotional films, while MTV, Spike TV and the Independent Film Channel are running comedy shorts and music videos produced inside games. By last spring, Burns and his friends were making so much money from ''Red vs. Blue'' that they left their jobs and founded Rooster Teeth Productions. Now they produce machinima full time.
It may be the most unlikely form of indie filmmaking yet -- and one of the most weirdly democratic. ''It's like 'The Blair Witch Project' all over again, except you don't even need a camera,'' says Julie Kanarowski, a product manager with Electronic Arts, the nation's largest video-game publisher. ''You don't even need actors.''
Back in college, Burns and another Rooster Teeth founder, Matt Hullum, wrote and produced a traditional live-action indie movie. It cost $9,000, required a full year to make and was seen by virtually no one. By contrast, the four Xboxes needed to make ''Red vs. Blue'' cost a mere $600. Each 10-minute episode requires a single day to perform and edit and is viewed by hordes of feverish video-game fans the planet over.
More than just a cheap way to make an animated movie, machinima allows game players to comment directly on the pop culture they so devotedly consume. Much like ''fan fiction'' (homespun tales featuring popular TV characters) or ''mash-ups'' (music fans blending two songs to create a new hybrid), machinima is a fan-created art form. It's what you get when gamers stop blasting aliens for a second and start messing with the narrative.
And God knows, there's plenty to mess with. These days, the worlds inside games are so huge and open-ended that gamers can roam anywhere they wish. Indeed, players often abandon the official goal of the game -- save the princess; vanquish the eldritch forces of evil -- in favor of merely using the virtual environment as a gigantic jungle gym. In one popular piece of Halo machinima, ''Warthog Jump,'' a player cunningly used the game to conduct a series of dazzling physics experiments. He placed grenades in precise locations beneath jeeps and troops, such that when the targets blew sky-high, they pinwheeled through the air in precise formations, like synchronized divers. Another gamer recorded a machinima movie that poked subversive fun at Grand Theft Auto. Instead of playing as a dangerous, cop-killing gangster, the player pretended he was a naive Canadian tourist -- putting down his gun, dressing in tacky clothes and simply wandering around the game's downtown environment for hours, admiring the scenery.
So what's it like to actually shoot a movie inside a game? In June, I visited the Rooster Teeth offices in Buda, Tex., a tiny Austin suburb, to observe Burns and his group as they produced a scene of ''Red vs. Blue.'' Burns, a tall, burly 32-year-old, sat in front of two huge flat-panel screens, preparing the editing software. Nearby were the two Rooster Teeth producers who would be acting on-screen: Geoff Ramsey, a scraggly-bearded 30-year-old whose arms are completely covered in tattoos of fish and skulls, and Gustavo Sorola, a gangly 27-year-old who sprawled in a beanbag chair and peered through his thick architect glasses at the day's e-mail. They were fan letters, Sorola told me, that pour in from teenagers who are as enthusiastic as they are incoherent. ''The way kids write these days,'' he said with a grimace. ''It's like someone threw up on the keyboard.''
In the script they were acting out that day, a pair of ''Red vs. Blue'' soldiers engaged in one of their typically pointless existential arguments, bickering over whether it's possible to kill someone with a toy replica of a real weapon. The Rooster Teeth crew recorded the voice-overs earlier in the day; now they were going to create the animation for the scene.
Burns picked up a controller and booted up Halo on an Xbox. He would act as the camera: whatever his character saw would be recorded, from his point of view. Then Sorola and Ramsey logged into the game, teleporting in as an orange-suited and a red-suited soldier. Burns posed them near a massive concrete bunker and frowned as he scrutinized the view on the computer screen. ''Hmmmm,'' he muttered. ''We need something to frame you guys -- some sort of prop.'' He ran his character over to a nearby alien hovercraft, jumped in and parked it next to the actors. ''Sweet!'' he said. ''I like it!''
In a ''Red vs. Blue'' shoot, the actors all must follow one important rule: Be careful not to accidentally kill another actor. ''Sometimes you'll drop your controller and it unintentionally launches a grenade. It takes, like, 20 minutes for the blood splatters to dry up,'' Ramsey said. ''Totally ruins the scene.''
Finally, Burns was ready to go. He shouted, ''Action!'' and the voice-overs began playing over loudspeakers. Sorola and Ramsey acted in time with the dialogue. Acting, in this context, was weirdly minimalist. They mashed the controller joysticks with their thumbs, bobbing the soldiers' heads back and forth roughly in time with important words in each line. ''It's puppetry, basically,'' Ramsey said, as he jiggled his controller. Of all the ''Red vs. Blue'' crew members, Ramsey is renowned for his dexterity with an Xbox. When a scene calls for more than five actors onstage, he'll put another controller on the ground and manipulate it with his right foot, allowing him to perform as two characters simultaneously.
As I watched, I was reminded of what initially cracked me up so much about ''Red vs. Blue'': the idea that faceless, anonymous soldiers in a video game have interior lives. It's a ''Rosencrantz and Guildenstern'' conceit; ''Red vs. Blue'' is what the game characters talk about when we're not around to play with them. As it turns out, they're a bunch of neurotics straight out of ''Seinfeld.'' One recruit reveals that he chain-smokes inside his airtight armor; a sergeant tells a soldier his battle instructions are to ''scream like a woman.'' And, in a sardonic gloss on the game's endless carnage, none of the soldiers have the vaguest clue why they're fighting.
Yet as I discovered, real-life soldiers are among the most ardent fans of ''Red vs. Blue.'' When I walked around the Rooster Teeth office, I found it was festooned with letters, plaques and an enormous American flag, gifts from grateful American troops, many of whom are currently stationed in Iraq. Isn't it a little astonishing, I asked Burns when the crew went out in the baking Texas sun for a break, that actual soldiers are so enamored of a show that portrays troops as inept cowards, leaders as cynical sociopaths and war itself as a supremely meaningless endeavor? Burns laughed, but said the appeal was nothing sinister.
'' 'Red vs. Blue' is about downtime,'' he said. ''There's very little action, which is precisely the way things are in real life.''
''He's right,'' Ramsey added. He himself spent five years in the army after high school. ''We'd just sit around digging ditches and threatening to kill each other all day long,'' he said. ''We were bored out of our minds.''
Perhaps the most unusual thing about machinima is that none of its creators are in jail. After all, they're gleefully plundering intellectual property at a time when the copyright wars have become particularly vicious. Yet video-game companies have been upbeat -- even exuberant -- about the legions of teenagers and artists pillaging their games. This is particularly bewildering in the case of ''Red vs. Blue,'' because Halo is made by Bungie, a subsidiary of Microsoft, a company no stranger to using a courtroom to defend its goods. What the heck is going on?
As it turns out, people at Bungie love ''Red vs. Blue.'' ''We thought it was kind of brilliant,'' says Brian Jarrard, the Bungie staff member who manages interactions with fans. ''There are people out there who would never have heard about Halo without 'Red vs. Blue.' It's getting an audience outside the hardcore gaming crowd.''
Sure, Rooster Teeth ripped off Microsoft's intellectual property. But Microsoft got something in return: ''Red vs. Blue'' gave the game a whiff of countercultural coolness, the sort of grass-roots street cred that major corporations desperately crave but can never manufacture. After talking with Rooster Teeth, Microsoft agreed, remarkably, to let them use the game without paying any licensing fees at all. In fact, the company later hired Rooster Teeth to produce ''Red vs. Blue'' videos to play as advertisements in game stores. Microsoft has been so strangely solicitous that when it was developing the sequel to Halo last year, the designers actually inserted a special command -- a joystick button that makes a soldier lower his weapon -- designed solely to make it easier for Rooster Teeth to do dialogue.
''If you're playing the game, there's no reason to lower your weapon at all,'' Burns explained. ''They put that in literally just so we can shoot machinima.''
Other game companies have gone even further. Many now include editing software with their games, specifically to encourage fans to shoot movies. When Valve software released its hit game Half-Life 2 last year, it included ''Faceposer'' software so that machinima creators could tweak the facial expressions of characters. When the Sims 2 -- a sequel to the top-selling game of all time -- came out last year, its publisher, Electronic Arts, set up a Web site so that fans could upload their Sims 2 movies to show to the world. (About 8,000 people so far have done so.)
Still, it's one thing for gamers to produce a jokey comedy or a music video. Can machinima actually produce a work of art -- something with serious emotional depth? A few people have tried. In China, a visual artist named Feng Mengbo used the first-person-shooter game Quake III to produce Q4U, in which the screen is filled with multiple versions of himself, killing one another. Players' relationships with constant, blood-splattering violence is a common subject in game art. Last year, the 31-year-old artist Brody Condon produced an unsettling film that consisted of nothing but shots of himself committing suicide inside 50 different video games.
''I try to come to terms with what taking your life means in these games,'' Condon says. ''I'm trying to understand, spiritually, your relationship with an avatar on the screen.''
But even machinima's biggest fans admit that the vast majority of machinima is pretty amateurish. ''It's like if some friends of mine all broke into a movie set, and we all got to use all the cameras and special-effects equipment,'' says Carl Goodman, director of digital media at the American Museum of the Moving Image, which began to hold an annual machinima festival two years ago. ''We wouldn't quite know how to use it, but we'd make some pretty interesting stuff.''
Yet as Goodman points out, there's a competing proposition. Machinima does not always strive to emulate ''realistic,'' artistic movies. On the contrary, it is often explicitly devoted to celebrating the aesthetics of games -- the animations and in-jokes, the precise physics. Most machinima is probably meaningless to people who don't play games, much as ESPN is opaque to anyone who doesn't watch sports. But for those who do play Halo, it was genuinely thrilling to see something like ''Warthog Jump,'' with its meticulously synchronized explosions.
The Rooster Teeth crew has its own hilariously stringent rule for making machinima: no cheating. When they shoot ''Red vs. Blue,'' they do not use any special effects that are not organically included in the game; everything you see in an episode of ''Red vs. Blue'' could in theory have taken place during an actual game of Halo, played by a fan in his bedroom. It's a charmingly purist attitude, a sci-fi version of the ''Dogma'' school of indie film, which argues that movies are best when cinematic trickery is kept to a minimum.
One evening in New York, I visited with Ethan Vogt as he and his machinima team shot a car-chase scene for a Volvo promo. Vogt and two producers sat at computers, logged into a multiplayer game; each producer controlled a car racing through crowded city streets, while Vogt controlled a free-floating ''camera'' that followed behind, recording the visuals. The vehicles -- an enormous 1972 Chevy Impala and a Volvo V50 -- screamed along at about 60 miles an hour, fishtailing through corners while plowing into mailboxes, lampposts and, occasionally, clots of pedestrians. The lead car burst into flames. ''That's great,'' Vogt said. ''That's great.''
Though it shares with independent filmmaking a do-it-yourself aesthetic, machinima inverts the central tradition of indie film: smallness. With their skimpy budgets, indie directors tend to set movies in kitchens or living rooms -- and focus instead on providing quality acting and scripts. Machinima, in contrast, often has horribly cheesy acting and ham-fisted, purple-prose stories -- but they're set in outer space. Want massive shootouts? Howling mob scenes? Roman gladiatorial armies clashing by night? No problem. It is the rare form of amateur film in which the directors aspire to be not Wes Anderson but George Lucas.
Indeed, with video games played on computers, it is now possible to build an entire world from scratch. The core of any video game is its game engine, the software that knows how to render 3-D objects and how to realistically represent the physics of how they move, bounce or collide. But the actual objects inside the game -- the people, the cars, the guns, even the buildings -- can be altered, tweaked or replaced by modifications, or ''mods.'' Mods do not require any deep programming skills; indeed, almost any teenager with a passing acquaintance in graphic-design software can ''re-skin'' a character in a game to make it look like himself, for instance. (Xbox and PlayStation games, in comparison, are much harder to mod, because the consoles are locked boxes, designed to prevent players from tampering with the games.)
I was able to see modding in action one night when I visited the ILL Clan, a pioneering machinima group. Their headquarters are the kitchen table in the cramped one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment of Frank Dellario; a lanky, hyperkinetic 42-year-old, he sat on a rickety folding chair, pecking at a keyboard. The table was littered with four computer screens and laptops, the remnants of take-out sushi and a hopelessly tangled morass of computer cords and joysticks; a huge wide-screen TV lurked behind them for viewing their work. On the night I visited, they were using a game engine called Torque to shoot a short heist movie for Audi, in which two thugs beat up a concert violinist and make off with an antique violin in a van.
To quickly create a gritty-looking city, Dellario and his colleague -- ILL Clan's co-founder, Matt Dominianni -- hired a local artist to build a generic-looking urban intersection inside the game. To customize it, Dominianni went onto Google, found snapshots of a few seedy stores (an adult bookstore, a tattoo parlor and a furniture outlet) and digitally pasted them onto the front of the buildings. Then they went to a site called Turbo-Squid, a sort of Amazon for virtual in-game items, and for $45 bought a van that could be plunked down inside the game. When I arrived, they were browsing the site and contemplating buying a few women. ''My God, look at this one,'' Dellario marveled, as he clicked open a picture of an eerily realistic 3-D brunette named Masha. ''I'm going to marry this woman. They've finally broken through to total reality.''
Dellario put the van into the correct location in the scene, then logged into the game to figure out the camera angle for this shot. He frowned. It didn't look right. The lighting was all off, with shadows falling in the wrong places.
Dominianni figured out the problem: ''The sun is supposed to be at high noon. It's in the wrong place.''
''Oh, yeah,'' Dellario said. ''Let me move it.'' He pulled up a menu, clicked on the ''sun'' command, and dragged it across the sky.
Now they were finally ready to shoot. Dellario realized they needed an extra pair of hands to manipulate one of the thugs. ''Want to act in this scene?'' Dellario asked, and he handed me a joystick.
I sat down at one of the computers and took control of ''Thug1,'' a brown-haired man in a golf shirt and brown pants, carrying the stolen violin. Dominianni was playing ''Thug2.'' Our characters were supposed to look around to make sure the coast is clear, then jump in the truck and race off. Dellario gave me my motivation: ''It's like you hear a suspicious noise. You're nervous.'' I used the joystick to practice moving my virtual character, craning its neck -- my neck? -- back and forth. I have played plenty of video games, but this felt awfully odd. Usually when I am inside a game, I'm just worried about staying alive while the bullets whiz past my ears. I've never had to emote.
While Dellario and Dominianni fiddled with the camera angle, I grew impatient and wandered around, exploring the virtual set. I peered in a few shop windows -- they were strikingly photorealistic, even up close. Then I walked down an alley and suddenly arrived at the end of the set. It was like a tiny Western town in the desert: once you got beyond the few clustered buildings, there was nothing there -- just a vast, enormous plain, utterly empty and stretching off infinitely into the distance.
This spring, electronic arts decided to promote the Sims 2 by hiring Rooster Teeth to create a machinima show using the game. Called ''The Strangerhood,'' it would be freely available online. ''The Strangerhood'' is a parody of reality TV: a group of people wake up one day to discover that they are living in new houses, and they can't remember who they are or how they got there. In the Sims 2, the animated people are impressively Pixar-like and expressive, making ''The Strangerhood'' even more like a mainstream animated show than ''Red vs. Blue''; you could almost imagine watching it on Saturday morning.
The problem is, the Sims 2 has turned out to be incredibly difficult to shoot with. When the Rooster Teeth gang uses Halo for machinima, the characters are mere puppets and can be posed any way the creators want. But in the Sims 2, the little virtual characters have artificial intelligence and free will. When you're playing, you do not control all the action: the fun is in putting your Sims in interesting social situations, then standing back and watching what they'll do. When Rooster Teeth's Matt Hullum builds a virtual set and puts the ''Strangerhood'' characters in place for a shoot, he's never quite sure what will happen. To shoot a scene in which two men wake up in bed together, Hullum had to spend hours playing with the two characters -- who are nominally heterosexual -- forcing them into repeated conversations until they eventually became such good friends they were willing to share a bed. Shooting machinima with Sims is thus maddeningly like using actual, human stars: they're stubborn; they stage hissy fits and stomp off to their trailers.
''We'll do three or four takes of a scene, and one of the Sims will start getting tired and want to go to sleep,'' Hullum said. ''It's just like being on a real set. You're screaming: 'Quick, quick, get the shot! We're losing light!' ''
Hullum showed me a typical ''Strangerhood'' scene. He put Nikki, a young ponytailed brunette in a baseball cap, in the kitchen to interact with Wade, a slacker who looked eerily like a digital Owen Wilson. (To give Wade a mellow, San Francisco vibe, Hullum programmed him to move at a pace 50 percent slower than the other characters.) Hullum pointed to Nikki's ''mood'' bar; it was low, which meant she was in a bad mood and wouldn't want to talk. ''When they're bored, you have to lock them in a room alone for a few hours until they start to crave conversation,'' Hullum said. He tried anyway, prodding Wade to approach her and talk about food, one of Nikki's favorite subjects. It worked. The two became engrossed in a conversation, laughing and gesticulating wildly. ''See, this footage would be great if we were shooting a scene where these guys are maybe gossiping,'' Hullum mused, as he zoomed the camera in to frame a close-up on Wade. Then Nikki started to yawn. ''Oh, damn. See -- she's getting bored. Oh, no, she's walking away,'' Hullum said, as the little virtual Nikki wandered out of the room. ''Damn. You see what we have to deal with?''
The audience for ''The Strangerhood'' has not exploded the way ''Red vs. Blue'' did. The project is a gamble: its creators hope it will break out of machinima's geeky subculture and vault into the mainstream.
Though in a way, Hullum said, the mainstream isn't always a fun place to be, either. Before he returned to Austin to work on ''Red vs. Blue,'' he spent six miserable years in Hollywood working on second-rate teen movies with big budgets, like ''Scooby-Doo'' and ''The Faculty.''
''So now to come to this, where we have total creative control of our own stuff, it's amazing,'' Hullum said, as he watched Nikki walk out of the house in search of a more interesting conversation. ''I just pray we can keep this going. Because if we can't, I'm in big trouble.''
Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for the magazine.
Friday, August 5
Design for Confusion, Paul Krugman
I'd like to nominate Irving Kristol, the neoconservative former editor of The Public Interest, as the father of "intelligent design." No, he didn't play any role in developing the doctrine. But he is the father of the political strategy that lies behind the intelligent design movement - a strategy that has been used with great success by the economic right and has now been adopted by the religious right.
Back in 1978 Mr. Kristol urged corporations to make "philanthropic contributions to scholars and institutions who are likely to advocate preservation of a strong private sector." That was delicately worded, but the clear implication was that corporations that didn't like the results of academic research, however valid, should support people willing to say something more to their liking.
Mr. Kristol led by example, using The Public Interest to promote supply-side economics, a doctrine whose central claim - that tax cuts have such miraculous positive effects on the economy that they pay for themselves - has never been backed by evidence. He would later concede, or perhaps boast, that he had a "cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit."
"Political effectiveness was the priority," he wrote in 1995, "not the accounting deficiencies of government."
Corporations followed his lead, pouring a steady stream of money into think tanks that created a sort of parallel intellectual universe, a world of "scholars" whose careers are based on toeing an ideological line, rather than on doing research that stands up to scrutiny by their peers.
You might have thought that a strategy of creating doubt about inconvenient research results could work only in soft fields like economics. But it turns out that the strategy works equally well when deployed against the hard sciences.
The most spectacular example is the campaign to discredit research on global warming. Despite an overwhelming scientific consensus, many people have the impression that the issue is still unresolved. This impression reflects the assiduous work of conservative think tanks, which produce and promote skeptical reports that look like peer-reviewed research, but aren't. And behind it all lies lavish financing from the energy industry, especially ExxonMobil.
There are several reasons why fake research is so effective. One is that nonscientists sometimes find it hard to tell the difference between research and advocacy - if it's got numbers and charts in it, doesn't that make it science?
Even when reporters do know the difference, the conventions of he-said-she-said journalism get in the way of conveying that knowledge to readers. I once joked that if President Bush said that the Earth was flat, the headlines of news articles would read, "Opinions Differ on Shape of the Earth." The headlines on many articles about the intelligent design controversy come pretty close.
Finally, the self-policing nature of science - scientific truth is determined by peer review, not public opinion - can be exploited by skilled purveyors of cultural resentment. Do virtually all biologists agree that Darwin was right? Well, that just shows that they're elitists who think they're smarter than the rest of us.
Which brings us, finally, to intelligent design. Some of America's most powerful politicians have a deep hatred for Darwinism. Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, blamed the theory of evolution for the Columbine school shootings. But sheer political power hasn't been enough to get creationism into the school curriculum. The theory of evolution has overwhelming scientific support, and the country isn't ready - yet - to teach religious doctrine in public schools.
But what if creationists do to evolutionary theory what corporate interests did to global warming: create a widespread impression that the scientific consensus has shaky foundations?
Creationists failed when they pretended to be engaged in science, not religious indoctrination: "creation science" was too crude to fool anyone. But intelligent design, which spreads doubt about evolution without being too overtly religious, may succeed where creation science failed.
The important thing to remember is that like supply-side economics or global-warming skepticism, intelligent design doesn't have to attract significant support from actual researchers to be effective. All it has to do is create confusion, to make it seem as if there really is a controversy about the validity of evolutionary theory. That, together with the political muscle of the religious right, may be enough to start a process that ends with banishing Darwin from the classroom.
Back in 1978 Mr. Kristol urged corporations to make "philanthropic contributions to scholars and institutions who are likely to advocate preservation of a strong private sector." That was delicately worded, but the clear implication was that corporations that didn't like the results of academic research, however valid, should support people willing to say something more to their liking.
Mr. Kristol led by example, using The Public Interest to promote supply-side economics, a doctrine whose central claim - that tax cuts have such miraculous positive effects on the economy that they pay for themselves - has never been backed by evidence. He would later concede, or perhaps boast, that he had a "cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit."
"Political effectiveness was the priority," he wrote in 1995, "not the accounting deficiencies of government."
Corporations followed his lead, pouring a steady stream of money into think tanks that created a sort of parallel intellectual universe, a world of "scholars" whose careers are based on toeing an ideological line, rather than on doing research that stands up to scrutiny by their peers.
You might have thought that a strategy of creating doubt about inconvenient research results could work only in soft fields like economics. But it turns out that the strategy works equally well when deployed against the hard sciences.
The most spectacular example is the campaign to discredit research on global warming. Despite an overwhelming scientific consensus, many people have the impression that the issue is still unresolved. This impression reflects the assiduous work of conservative think tanks, which produce and promote skeptical reports that look like peer-reviewed research, but aren't. And behind it all lies lavish financing from the energy industry, especially ExxonMobil.
There are several reasons why fake research is so effective. One is that nonscientists sometimes find it hard to tell the difference between research and advocacy - if it's got numbers and charts in it, doesn't that make it science?
Even when reporters do know the difference, the conventions of he-said-she-said journalism get in the way of conveying that knowledge to readers. I once joked that if President Bush said that the Earth was flat, the headlines of news articles would read, "Opinions Differ on Shape of the Earth." The headlines on many articles about the intelligent design controversy come pretty close.
Finally, the self-policing nature of science - scientific truth is determined by peer review, not public opinion - can be exploited by skilled purveyors of cultural resentment. Do virtually all biologists agree that Darwin was right? Well, that just shows that they're elitists who think they're smarter than the rest of us.
Which brings us, finally, to intelligent design. Some of America's most powerful politicians have a deep hatred for Darwinism. Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, blamed the theory of evolution for the Columbine school shootings. But sheer political power hasn't been enough to get creationism into the school curriculum. The theory of evolution has overwhelming scientific support, and the country isn't ready - yet - to teach religious doctrine in public schools.
But what if creationists do to evolutionary theory what corporate interests did to global warming: create a widespread impression that the scientific consensus has shaky foundations?
Creationists failed when they pretended to be engaged in science, not religious indoctrination: "creation science" was too crude to fool anyone. But intelligent design, which spreads doubt about evolution without being too overtly religious, may succeed where creation science failed.
The important thing to remember is that like supply-side economics or global-warming skepticism, intelligent design doesn't have to attract significant support from actual researchers to be effective. All it has to do is create confusion, to make it seem as if there really is a controversy about the validity of evolutionary theory. That, together with the political muscle of the religious right, may be enough to start a process that ends with banishing Darwin from the classroom.
Friday, July 29
Australia's E.S. 'Nigger' Brown Stand and "Judicial Restraint"
Taking a Stand
An Aboriginal Australian researcher battles to strip a stadium of a derogatory word
By PETER MONAGHAN
Stephen Hagan, an associate lecturer in the Kumbari/Ngurpai Lag Higher Education Center at the University of Southern Queensland, is a trailblazer in Australia's Aboriginal community.
Inspired by his father, who was a member of the National Aboriginal Consultative Committee, the first elected Aboriginal advisory body to the Australian government, Mr. Hagan was the first Aboriginal Australian to be posted overseas in the country's diplomatic corps, to Sri Lanka in the early 1980s. He has also worked with Aboriginal educational, arts, and business groups.
Yet his activism did not take a crusading turn until he moved in 1997 to the city of Toowoomba, to begin graduate work in social theory of education at the University of Southern Queensland. The critical moment came when Mr. Hagan, an accomplished rugby player in his schoolboy days, took his family to a match at the Toowoomba Sports Ground, the town's rugby-league headquarters.
He was shocked to see that the section of the stadium in which he and his family were sitting was blazoned with large letters reading "E.S. 'Nigger' Brown Stand."
The stand was named in 1960 to honor a local player from the early 1920s, the first from the region to represent Australia, who went on to become a well-respected businessman and alderman on the Toowoomba City Council.
Mr. Hagan decided that the word "nigger" was something that his children, and the community at large, should not see in such a public context.
"I'm 45 years of age now, and all my life I've only heard it used in the derogatory sense," he says. "In primary school, in secondary school, people called Aboriginal people niggers if they wanted to make fun of them or belittle them, or try to put them off their game, be it on the football field or in life. Later, socially, as young teenagers, at discos, if they wanted to pick a fight with you, they'd call you a boong or a coon or an abo or a nigger. Those were just demeaning terms that were used throughout my life. I certainly haven't heard nigger used as a term of endearment."
Mr. Hagan's battle to change the name of the "Nigger" Brown stand has taken him to the Australian High Court, which refused to reverse a lower-court ruling against him, and then to the United Nations, where he won a recommendation that Australian authorities press Queensland's state government, which owns the stadium, to remove the word.
It has also led the scholar to publish a book, The N Word: One Man's Stand (Magabala Books, 2005), about his struggle to effect the name change, and to pursue Australia's vexed relationship with an epithet that has caused strife in many other corners of the world. In claiming that terms of racial vilification cause actual harm and cannot be allowed to enjoy the blithe protection of free speech, Mr. Hagan echoes the arguments of critical race theorists in the United States, such as Derrick A. Bell Jr., a visiting professor of law at New York University, and Kimberle W. Crenshaw, a professor of law at Columbia University. He also engages the arguments Randall L. Kennedy, a professor of law at Harvard University, makes in his 2003 book, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word.
Emigrating Etymology
Long associated primarily with American racism, the epithet "nigger" has its roots in the 17th century and has ranged widely throughout the English-speaking world.
In the pioneering days of European settlement in Australia in the early 19th century, writers of newspaper reports, diaries, and letters leveled the epithet at Aboriginal people encountered along the way.
But how did the word end up as the name of a section of a stadium in Toowoomba? One of the ironies of the tale is that E.S. Brown was a white Australian who was so blond and blue-eyed that when he was just a few years old, his older brothers gave him the nickname as a joke. One version of the tale says that Mr. Brown came by the name because he was a dapper dresser who favored a brand of shoe polish called "Nigger Brown."
Whatever its origin, the vilifying term "remains a principal symbol of white racism regardless of who is using it," in Australia as elsewhere, says Mr. Hagan.
But after six years of trying, he has not convinced Australian courts, or the Australian population, that the word's connotations present a good reason for removing the word from the stadium.
Mr. Hagan appealed to the United Nations because Australia is a signatory to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. And Susan Booth, Queensland's anti-discrimination commissioner, has also called on officials to act on the U.N. recommendation, arguing that Mr. Brown could be honored in a way that "does not offend those many, many people who find the stand name offensive" -- by, for example, renaming it simply the E.S. Brown Stand.
Stadium officials and state-government leaders have already signaled that they will not abide by the U.N. recommendation. The president of the Toowoomba Sports Ground Trust, John McDonald, told reporters after the U.N. finding: "It is obvious to most that the name does not have any suggestion of racial discrimination. The stand has been named in honor of a legendary member of our community. It's nothing more than that."
In public statements, the premier of Queensland, Peter Beattie, has said of the term: "It would be inappropriate today, but it is not inappropriate in terms of history."
Mr. Hagan questions that interpretation, especially after uncovering records of the term's use in Australia. That excavation is the subject of the doctoral dissertation that he is writing, titled "The Origin, Maintenance, and Legitimization of the Word 'Nigger' in the Australian Vernacular."
The word was "firmly entrenched in Australia as a degenerative nickname in the early 1800s," says Mr. Hagan. And in the context of pervasive disparagement of Aboriginal Australians by the country's immigrant majority, it came to be used with little self-consciousness. For example, says Mr. Hagan, historians cite such instances as a high-ranking Queensland state official in the early 20th century saying, in the state parliament, "Those who know the nigger best feel most the impossibility of doing much to ameliorate his condition or protract the existence of his race. This callousness as a rule arises from no lack of sympathy with the blacks, but from a firm conviction that their stage of civilization is too many hundred perhaps thousand years behind our own to allow their race to thrive side by side with ours."
Mr. Hagan points out that the word is being revived today by the growing popularity of American hip-hop in Australia, such that a white teenager might say to his Aboriginal friend, "What's up, my nigga," with no intention to disparage -- although only a very few "street kids" among Aborigines would ever use it themselves. But he argues that the claim that such usage is in fact positive is hardly convincing at a time when surveys continue to show high levels of racism in the Australian population, and government studies reveal an increasing incidence of racist violence against black Australians.
Against that historical and contemporary background, Mr. Hagan argues, keeping the word "nigger" on the stadium section perpetuates racial discrimination and defamation. What the term signified in 1960, when the stand was named, is outweighed by the fact that the contemporary display of the term is "extremely offensive, especially to the Aboriginal people," he says.
Legal Definitions
When Mr. Hagan brought a complaint about the Toowoomba stadium in a federal court in Queensland, under the federal Racial Discrimination Act, his arguments were dismissed. The court found that the term had "long ceased to have any racial or racist connotation (if it ever did have that)." Mr. Hagan had not demonstrated, the court said, that the decision to name the stand as it was named was an act that "was reasonably likely in all the circumstances to offend, insult, humiliate, or intimidate an indigenous Australian or indigenous Australians generally." (In 2002, the High Court of Australia refused Mr. Hagan's application to appeal the lower federal-court ruling.)
If Aboriginal people were offended, the federal court further opined, then why did none complain during the 40 years that the name was blazoned on the stand before Mr. Hagan pressed the issue?
Because, Mr. Hagan responds in his book, the nickname was given, and later included on the sign, at a time when Aboriginal Australians were thoroughly disenfranchised -- not even allowed to vote or be counted in censuses.
He says that he was astonished by some of the reasoning applied by the court. One justice cited the term "niggerhead reef" as an example of a term at which the public did not take offense.
"Niggerhead reef -- I didn't know what that meant," says Mr. Hagan. "I looked it up, and discovered it referred to a blackened, dead outcrop of coral jutting up out of the water. Well, that itself is a very disparaging, demeaning term for black, dead reef."
Popular opinion also seemed to play a role in the court's decision. In rejecting Mr. Hagan's arguments, the court also took note that a group of 35 local Aboriginal community members had supported the stadium management's stance. It was not until later in the legal proceedings that Mr. Hagan gathered strong shows of support from other Aboriginal people and groups.
"A lot of people assumed that this would be a straightforward case of in and out of the courtroom, and the judicial figures being eminently qualified and educated, that they would see the word for what it is and ask for its removal," he says. "But what happened at the courts surprised everybody. It was only then after the decision that I gained a lot of support."
Nonetheless, he admits, one poll by a television news program showed that as many as 85 percent of Australians believe the name should not be removed. That position has been championed by conservative talk-show hosts and columnists.
Deeper Currents
Sen. Aden Ridgway, a member of the Australian Democrats party from New South Wales who is the only Aboriginal senator in the Australian Parliament, wrote in a review of Mr. Hagan's book last month in On Line Opinion, an Australian journal of social and political comment: "In The N Word, you can read more than you want to know about state politics, national politics, Indigenous community politics, local government, dealing with our glorious mainstream media, the police, prisons, bureaucracies, and just generally being Indigenous."
The book demonstrates, says Senator Ridgway, "how deeply ingrained [racism] is in our national psyche." He calls on the federal and Queensland state governments to heed the U.N. recommendation: "In Indigenous affairs, we regularly need to look to international human-rights standards. If not, all we have left is the 'Australian tradition' and we know that tradition is an unfair one; a racist one; and a politically expedient one."
Contrary to Mr. Kennedy's argument that some uses of the N word amount to an act of solidarity among African-American users, Mr. Hagan says he cannot find a value-neutral way of construing the term that he has fought so hard to remove. Like many of Randall L. Kennedy's critics, he says the word is simply too emotionally and historically charged.
Americans must bear in mind that, when it comes to questions of race and color, Aboriginal Australians can be better compared to African-Americans than to American Indians, says Rebecca Kavanaugh, an Australian lawyer who has recently completed "Reconstructing Reconciliation: The Lynching of Black Australia," a doctoral dissertation, under the direction of NYU's critical-race theorist, Mr. Bell. Like black Americans during Reconstruction, Aborigines have been victimized by the "N word" and lynching, she notes. From the beginning of European settlement, Aborigines "were labeled, and identified, as black and I think that probably explains how the words and practices which developed here were similarly used in Australia," she says.
So, says Mr. Hagan, "here we are, the only sports stadium in the world with the word 'nigger' on it and they don't want to discuss it, air it, or debate it. The way they handled it -- the politicians, the media, and the ground trust who had control of the athletic oval -- was to marginalize me, and characterize me as a bad, troublesome black who had only just moved into Toowoomba."
For his part, Mr. Brown has not been available to weigh in on the dispute. He died in 1974, and now lies under a headstone that, like the stand named after him, is engraved with the word "nigger."
An Aboriginal Australian researcher battles to strip a stadium of a derogatory word
By PETER MONAGHAN
Stephen Hagan, an associate lecturer in the Kumbari/Ngurpai Lag Higher Education Center at the University of Southern Queensland, is a trailblazer in Australia's Aboriginal community.
Inspired by his father, who was a member of the National Aboriginal Consultative Committee, the first elected Aboriginal advisory body to the Australian government, Mr. Hagan was the first Aboriginal Australian to be posted overseas in the country's diplomatic corps, to Sri Lanka in the early 1980s. He has also worked with Aboriginal educational, arts, and business groups.
Yet his activism did not take a crusading turn until he moved in 1997 to the city of Toowoomba, to begin graduate work in social theory of education at the University of Southern Queensland. The critical moment came when Mr. Hagan, an accomplished rugby player in his schoolboy days, took his family to a match at the Toowoomba Sports Ground, the town's rugby-league headquarters.
He was shocked to see that the section of the stadium in which he and his family were sitting was blazoned with large letters reading "E.S. 'Nigger' Brown Stand."
The stand was named in 1960 to honor a local player from the early 1920s, the first from the region to represent Australia, who went on to become a well-respected businessman and alderman on the Toowoomba City Council.
Mr. Hagan decided that the word "nigger" was something that his children, and the community at large, should not see in such a public context.
"I'm 45 years of age now, and all my life I've only heard it used in the derogatory sense," he says. "In primary school, in secondary school, people called Aboriginal people niggers if they wanted to make fun of them or belittle them, or try to put them off their game, be it on the football field or in life. Later, socially, as young teenagers, at discos, if they wanted to pick a fight with you, they'd call you a boong or a coon or an abo or a nigger. Those were just demeaning terms that were used throughout my life. I certainly haven't heard nigger used as a term of endearment."
Mr. Hagan's battle to change the name of the "Nigger" Brown stand has taken him to the Australian High Court, which refused to reverse a lower-court ruling against him, and then to the United Nations, where he won a recommendation that Australian authorities press Queensland's state government, which owns the stadium, to remove the word.
It has also led the scholar to publish a book, The N Word: One Man's Stand (Magabala Books, 2005), about his struggle to effect the name change, and to pursue Australia's vexed relationship with an epithet that has caused strife in many other corners of the world. In claiming that terms of racial vilification cause actual harm and cannot be allowed to enjoy the blithe protection of free speech, Mr. Hagan echoes the arguments of critical race theorists in the United States, such as Derrick A. Bell Jr., a visiting professor of law at New York University, and Kimberle W. Crenshaw, a professor of law at Columbia University. He also engages the arguments Randall L. Kennedy, a professor of law at Harvard University, makes in his 2003 book, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word.
Emigrating Etymology
Long associated primarily with American racism, the epithet "nigger" has its roots in the 17th century and has ranged widely throughout the English-speaking world.
In the pioneering days of European settlement in Australia in the early 19th century, writers of newspaper reports, diaries, and letters leveled the epithet at Aboriginal people encountered along the way.
But how did the word end up as the name of a section of a stadium in Toowoomba? One of the ironies of the tale is that E.S. Brown was a white Australian who was so blond and blue-eyed that when he was just a few years old, his older brothers gave him the nickname as a joke. One version of the tale says that Mr. Brown came by the name because he was a dapper dresser who favored a brand of shoe polish called "Nigger Brown."
Whatever its origin, the vilifying term "remains a principal symbol of white racism regardless of who is using it," in Australia as elsewhere, says Mr. Hagan.
But after six years of trying, he has not convinced Australian courts, or the Australian population, that the word's connotations present a good reason for removing the word from the stadium.
Mr. Hagan appealed to the United Nations because Australia is a signatory to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. And Susan Booth, Queensland's anti-discrimination commissioner, has also called on officials to act on the U.N. recommendation, arguing that Mr. Brown could be honored in a way that "does not offend those many, many people who find the stand name offensive" -- by, for example, renaming it simply the E.S. Brown Stand.
Stadium officials and state-government leaders have already signaled that they will not abide by the U.N. recommendation. The president of the Toowoomba Sports Ground Trust, John McDonald, told reporters after the U.N. finding: "It is obvious to most that the name does not have any suggestion of racial discrimination. The stand has been named in honor of a legendary member of our community. It's nothing more than that."
In public statements, the premier of Queensland, Peter Beattie, has said of the term: "It would be inappropriate today, but it is not inappropriate in terms of history."
Mr. Hagan questions that interpretation, especially after uncovering records of the term's use in Australia. That excavation is the subject of the doctoral dissertation that he is writing, titled "The Origin, Maintenance, and Legitimization of the Word 'Nigger' in the Australian Vernacular."
The word was "firmly entrenched in Australia as a degenerative nickname in the early 1800s," says Mr. Hagan. And in the context of pervasive disparagement of Aboriginal Australians by the country's immigrant majority, it came to be used with little self-consciousness. For example, says Mr. Hagan, historians cite such instances as a high-ranking Queensland state official in the early 20th century saying, in the state parliament, "Those who know the nigger best feel most the impossibility of doing much to ameliorate his condition or protract the existence of his race. This callousness as a rule arises from no lack of sympathy with the blacks, but from a firm conviction that their stage of civilization is too many hundred perhaps thousand years behind our own to allow their race to thrive side by side with ours."
Mr. Hagan points out that the word is being revived today by the growing popularity of American hip-hop in Australia, such that a white teenager might say to his Aboriginal friend, "What's up, my nigga," with no intention to disparage -- although only a very few "street kids" among Aborigines would ever use it themselves. But he argues that the claim that such usage is in fact positive is hardly convincing at a time when surveys continue to show high levels of racism in the Australian population, and government studies reveal an increasing incidence of racist violence against black Australians.
Against that historical and contemporary background, Mr. Hagan argues, keeping the word "nigger" on the stadium section perpetuates racial discrimination and defamation. What the term signified in 1960, when the stand was named, is outweighed by the fact that the contemporary display of the term is "extremely offensive, especially to the Aboriginal people," he says.
Legal Definitions
When Mr. Hagan brought a complaint about the Toowoomba stadium in a federal court in Queensland, under the federal Racial Discrimination Act, his arguments were dismissed. The court found that the term had "long ceased to have any racial or racist connotation (if it ever did have that)." Mr. Hagan had not demonstrated, the court said, that the decision to name the stand as it was named was an act that "was reasonably likely in all the circumstances to offend, insult, humiliate, or intimidate an indigenous Australian or indigenous Australians generally." (In 2002, the High Court of Australia refused Mr. Hagan's application to appeal the lower federal-court ruling.)
If Aboriginal people were offended, the federal court further opined, then why did none complain during the 40 years that the name was blazoned on the stand before Mr. Hagan pressed the issue?
Because, Mr. Hagan responds in his book, the nickname was given, and later included on the sign, at a time when Aboriginal Australians were thoroughly disenfranchised -- not even allowed to vote or be counted in censuses.
He says that he was astonished by some of the reasoning applied by the court. One justice cited the term "niggerhead reef" as an example of a term at which the public did not take offense.
"Niggerhead reef -- I didn't know what that meant," says Mr. Hagan. "I looked it up, and discovered it referred to a blackened, dead outcrop of coral jutting up out of the water. Well, that itself is a very disparaging, demeaning term for black, dead reef."
Popular opinion also seemed to play a role in the court's decision. In rejecting Mr. Hagan's arguments, the court also took note that a group of 35 local Aboriginal community members had supported the stadium management's stance. It was not until later in the legal proceedings that Mr. Hagan gathered strong shows of support from other Aboriginal people and groups.
"A lot of people assumed that this would be a straightforward case of in and out of the courtroom, and the judicial figures being eminently qualified and educated, that they would see the word for what it is and ask for its removal," he says. "But what happened at the courts surprised everybody. It was only then after the decision that I gained a lot of support."
Nonetheless, he admits, one poll by a television news program showed that as many as 85 percent of Australians believe the name should not be removed. That position has been championed by conservative talk-show hosts and columnists.
Deeper Currents
Sen. Aden Ridgway, a member of the Australian Democrats party from New South Wales who is the only Aboriginal senator in the Australian Parliament, wrote in a review of Mr. Hagan's book last month in On Line Opinion, an Australian journal of social and political comment: "In The N Word, you can read more than you want to know about state politics, national politics, Indigenous community politics, local government, dealing with our glorious mainstream media, the police, prisons, bureaucracies, and just generally being Indigenous."
The book demonstrates, says Senator Ridgway, "how deeply ingrained [racism] is in our national psyche." He calls on the federal and Queensland state governments to heed the U.N. recommendation: "In Indigenous affairs, we regularly need to look to international human-rights standards. If not, all we have left is the 'Australian tradition' and we know that tradition is an unfair one; a racist one; and a politically expedient one."
Contrary to Mr. Kennedy's argument that some uses of the N word amount to an act of solidarity among African-American users, Mr. Hagan says he cannot find a value-neutral way of construing the term that he has fought so hard to remove. Like many of Randall L. Kennedy's critics, he says the word is simply too emotionally and historically charged.
Americans must bear in mind that, when it comes to questions of race and color, Aboriginal Australians can be better compared to African-Americans than to American Indians, says Rebecca Kavanaugh, an Australian lawyer who has recently completed "Reconstructing Reconciliation: The Lynching of Black Australia," a doctoral dissertation, under the direction of NYU's critical-race theorist, Mr. Bell. Like black Americans during Reconstruction, Aborigines have been victimized by the "N word" and lynching, she notes. From the beginning of European settlement, Aborigines "were labeled, and identified, as black and I think that probably explains how the words and practices which developed here were similarly used in Australia," she says.
So, says Mr. Hagan, "here we are, the only sports stadium in the world with the word 'nigger' on it and they don't want to discuss it, air it, or debate it. The way they handled it -- the politicians, the media, and the ground trust who had control of the athletic oval -- was to marginalize me, and characterize me as a bad, troublesome black who had only just moved into Toowoomba."
For his part, Mr. Brown has not been available to weigh in on the dispute. He died in 1974, and now lies under a headstone that, like the stand named after him, is engraved with the word "nigger."
A Medium in the Making: Slicing Familiar Films Into Something New
July 29, 2005
By ROBERTA SMITH
MILWAUKEE - Movie-loving artists divide roughly into two groups, fans and users. The fans flock to films, or the nearest video rental store, for both respite and inspiration; they discuss and sometimes write about what they see with distinctive intelligence. Their numbers are legion; their apotheosis is probably Manny Farber, the artist who had a distinguished career as a film critic before turning to painting full time.
The users are such impassioned, if not addicted, cinephiles that movies become the central component of their art. Films are not just inspiration for these artists; they are raw material that can be appropriated, manipulated and reshaped into another work of art, with their names on the credit line.
The user population, while hardly legion, is growing. Spurs to their expanding ranks include Pop Art and Andy Warhol's films; the widespread photo-appropriation of 1980's art (it is a short step from still to moving images); and the advent of digital video and computer editing. The last greatly increased the reach of video, although artists like Jack Goldstein and Dara Birnbaum were appropriating from film and television in the early 80's. Over the last 10 or 15 years, the recycling of existing films into art has been taken for granted.
Which makes it interesting that "CUT/Film as Found Object in Contemporary Video" at the Milwaukee Art Museum is the first exhibition in an American museum to focus on film appropriation in contemporary art, or more precisely, contemporary video. The show, which was first seen in December at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, Fla., has been organized by Stefano Basilico, a former adjunct curator of contemporary art at the Milwaukee museum who once ran an art gallery in SoHo and now works as an art adviser in New York.
With 14 works by eight artists that mostly date from 2000 or later, "CUT" is in many ways a small show of recent art. But with a spacious, well-choreographed installation that moves from lighter to darker galleries, it covers quite a bit of ground in terms of the ways, means and end results of film appropriation. It also includes some recent standouts of the genre, including Douglas Gordon's 1993 "24-Hour Psycho" (which is just that) and Christian Marclay's 2002 "Video Quartet," a rousing homage to the silver screen.
In addition, the exhibition gains in scale because movies and moving images in general are so much with us. They take up a lot of the cultural landscape, both reflecting and conditioning society, forming a kind of collective dream life. Needless to say, this gives artists a lot to work with psychologically, formally, narratively and in terms of spectacle, stereotypes, stars and the culture and protocols of moviemaking.
Of course borrowing from and, in essence, privatizing something as public and elaborately collaborative as a movie can be a particularly aggressive, even Oedipal, form of artmaking. But it can also be pure laziness. It gives an artist's work an instant worldly aura, and the viewer the reflexive thrill of finding a bit of Hollywood in a gallery or a museum. But then what happens?
Do artists exploit our susceptibility to the movies? Do they reshape their borrowings enough for their work to achieve a degree of autonomy? Or do you come away feeling that, when all is said and done, you would just as soon look at the original? All these reactions can be had in the darkened galleries of "CUT/Film as Found Object in Contemporary Video."
As the title indicates, Mr. Basilico has concentrated on artists who literally manipulate existing films, for the most part subjecting them to extreme editing or screening them in unusual ways. The galleries almost echo with Jasper Johns's famous working principle: "Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it."
Works by Mr. Marclay, an artist-musician and splicing genius, bracket the show. It opens with his 1995 "Telephones," which samples scenes from scores of Hollywood movies in which actors answer, talk on or hang up telephones and melds these moments, almost always turning points in the plot, into a single conversation.
It ends with "Video Quartet," a four-screen extravaganza that lifts musical sequences and various dramatically noisy scenes (war, people screaming from all sorts of movies, Oscar Levant playing the piano and Meryl Streep portraying a violinist) and arranges them in a delirious crescendo of song and emotion that gives the phrase "visual music" a whole new life.
Such adept slicing and dicing is a recurring technique here. It is least interesting in Michael Joaquin Grey's admittedly jewel-like "Blink," which miniaturizes bits of Leni Riefenstahl's "Olympia" to the tune of Bjork's version of "Leaving on a Jet Plane." In "CNN Concatenated," Omer Fast edits scores of one-word snippets spoken by various television newscasters into a monologue that no talking head would ever give.
In a major feat of cross-referencing called "Learning From Las Vegas," Kevin and Jennifer McCoy have taken 21 films set in that desert city and rearranged their scenes according to 120 categories, each on a separate DVD. (The piece has an elaborate carrying case/display station that includes a monitor.)
The "Learning From Upholstery" DVD was playing the day I visited; you can also learn from lingerie, fake monuments, stealing, cowboys, gold and even art. The piece applies Mr. Marclay's telephone principle with a somewhat monotonous anthropological precision, declining the conventions and set-pieces with which most movies are filled. Each DVD functions as a kind of chart, tracing the way these conventions change with time and according to the quality of the movie.
The weapon of choice of Candice Breitz, a South African artist, is shrinkage, achieved by much slicing but without any disruption of continuity. Her "Soliloquy Trilogy" trims "Basic Instinct," "Dirty Harry" and "The Witches of Eastwick" of everything but those minutes when the leads of those films - Sharon Stone, Clint Eastwood and Jack Nicholson - are on screen (or speaking just off camera). This brutal crunching creates a loose allegory about a fallen woman who finds her soul, a good man who sins, and the Devil, who never changes.
It also extracts the high voltage of the movie star and the function of a lead character; while never on screen for more than eight or nine minutes in total, each actor conveys the gist of the movie's narrative.
Paul Pfeiffer goes beyond eliminating or rearranging sequences to changing the images themselves. In his haunting "Long Count," three short loops on tiny monitors show films of Muhammad Ali's boxing matches with Sonny Liston, George Foreman and Joe Frazier. In all the figures of the boxers have been digitally erased. Their ghostly residue and the rapt audience exemplify Mr. Pfeiffer's disturbing yet magical meditations on the role of race and black athletes in American society.
Subtraction is not always the path taken. Mr. Gordon's "24-Hour Psycho" stretches Hitchcock's classic suspense movie into an excruciating yet oddly riveting nonsuspense experience. Mired in slowness, and projected on a double-sided screen in the middle of a gallery, "Psycho" acquires a monumentality that seems commensurate with its place in the popular imagination.
The most emotionally powerful work in the show is Pierre Huyghe's 1998 "L'Ellipse," a triple projection that is also the only one to add to an existing film. Mr. Huyghe has created a scene that was never actually part of Wim Wenders's 1977 movie "The American Friend," but was merely implied by that directorial staple of pacing and economy, a jump cut. The omitted scene is a 10-minute walk that would have been taken by Jonathan, played by Bruno Ganz, from his room in a Paris hotel, across the Seine, to a friend's apartment, where he learns that he has a fatal disease.
In the original film, the action jumps from the hotel scene, played on the first screen, to the elevator of the apartment building and Jonathan's subsequent reading of his doctor's report (which is false), a sequence that plays on the third screen. However, Mr. Huyghe's work pauses in between, on the middle screen, to show us in a single tracking shot, Mr. Ganz, now 20 years older, taking the anxious walk Jonathan never took in the film. One result is an emotionally rich conflation; the 1977 fiction is extended in real 1998 time, when Mr. Ganz's own life is two decades further along, and undoubtedly more shadowed by the prospect of death.
Despite the literalness of its title, this show is not entirely faithful to its premises. Mr. Fast's CNN images are taken from television, while "Horror Chase," another work by the McCoys, is appropriation-free. Made from scratch but relying heavily on movie convention, it shows a terrified man, pursued by an unseen monster, hurtling endlessly through the rooms of a movie-set house, because the film repeatedly changes direction, running backward and forward.
Such fissures highlight the absence of works using found video like "Dial History," Johan Grimonprez's harrowing television news collage about airplane hijackings, or Seth Price's recent, rather brilliant usurpation of some raw video shot by Joan Jonas in the early 1970's. Also missing are those looser forms of appropriation that restate or refilm an existing film, as in Cheryl Donegan's remake of Godard's "Contempt"; Brice Dellsperger's cross-dressed versions of "Dressed to Kill"; Jon Routson's movie-house bootlegs.
Still, "CUT" brings needed curatorial clarity to an expanding genre that is challenging to survey. The catalog provides an expansive backdrop by flanking Mr. Basilico's lucid discussion of the works with essays by Rob Yeo, on the history of film appropriation in underground film (starting with Joseph Cornell), and by Lawrence Lessig, on the creative chill that recent changes in copyright law are bringing to the arts.
You come away from this show with a new sense of film as a found object; as an immense reservoir of untapped form and feeling; and as a highly charged raw material by which artists can celebrate, examine and stave off the deluge of images bearing down on us from all sides.
By ROBERTA SMITH
MILWAUKEE - Movie-loving artists divide roughly into two groups, fans and users. The fans flock to films, or the nearest video rental store, for both respite and inspiration; they discuss and sometimes write about what they see with distinctive intelligence. Their numbers are legion; their apotheosis is probably Manny Farber, the artist who had a distinguished career as a film critic before turning to painting full time.
The users are such impassioned, if not addicted, cinephiles that movies become the central component of their art. Films are not just inspiration for these artists; they are raw material that can be appropriated, manipulated and reshaped into another work of art, with their names on the credit line.
The user population, while hardly legion, is growing. Spurs to their expanding ranks include Pop Art and Andy Warhol's films; the widespread photo-appropriation of 1980's art (it is a short step from still to moving images); and the advent of digital video and computer editing. The last greatly increased the reach of video, although artists like Jack Goldstein and Dara Birnbaum were appropriating from film and television in the early 80's. Over the last 10 or 15 years, the recycling of existing films into art has been taken for granted.
Which makes it interesting that "CUT/Film as Found Object in Contemporary Video" at the Milwaukee Art Museum is the first exhibition in an American museum to focus on film appropriation in contemporary art, or more precisely, contemporary video. The show, which was first seen in December at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, Fla., has been organized by Stefano Basilico, a former adjunct curator of contemporary art at the Milwaukee museum who once ran an art gallery in SoHo and now works as an art adviser in New York.
With 14 works by eight artists that mostly date from 2000 or later, "CUT" is in many ways a small show of recent art. But with a spacious, well-choreographed installation that moves from lighter to darker galleries, it covers quite a bit of ground in terms of the ways, means and end results of film appropriation. It also includes some recent standouts of the genre, including Douglas Gordon's 1993 "24-Hour Psycho" (which is just that) and Christian Marclay's 2002 "Video Quartet," a rousing homage to the silver screen.
In addition, the exhibition gains in scale because movies and moving images in general are so much with us. They take up a lot of the cultural landscape, both reflecting and conditioning society, forming a kind of collective dream life. Needless to say, this gives artists a lot to work with psychologically, formally, narratively and in terms of spectacle, stereotypes, stars and the culture and protocols of moviemaking.
Of course borrowing from and, in essence, privatizing something as public and elaborately collaborative as a movie can be a particularly aggressive, even Oedipal, form of artmaking. But it can also be pure laziness. It gives an artist's work an instant worldly aura, and the viewer the reflexive thrill of finding a bit of Hollywood in a gallery or a museum. But then what happens?
Do artists exploit our susceptibility to the movies? Do they reshape their borrowings enough for their work to achieve a degree of autonomy? Or do you come away feeling that, when all is said and done, you would just as soon look at the original? All these reactions can be had in the darkened galleries of "CUT/Film as Found Object in Contemporary Video."
As the title indicates, Mr. Basilico has concentrated on artists who literally manipulate existing films, for the most part subjecting them to extreme editing or screening them in unusual ways. The galleries almost echo with Jasper Johns's famous working principle: "Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it."
Works by Mr. Marclay, an artist-musician and splicing genius, bracket the show. It opens with his 1995 "Telephones," which samples scenes from scores of Hollywood movies in which actors answer, talk on or hang up telephones and melds these moments, almost always turning points in the plot, into a single conversation.
It ends with "Video Quartet," a four-screen extravaganza that lifts musical sequences and various dramatically noisy scenes (war, people screaming from all sorts of movies, Oscar Levant playing the piano and Meryl Streep portraying a violinist) and arranges them in a delirious crescendo of song and emotion that gives the phrase "visual music" a whole new life.
Such adept slicing and dicing is a recurring technique here. It is least interesting in Michael Joaquin Grey's admittedly jewel-like "Blink," which miniaturizes bits of Leni Riefenstahl's "Olympia" to the tune of Bjork's version of "Leaving on a Jet Plane." In "CNN Concatenated," Omer Fast edits scores of one-word snippets spoken by various television newscasters into a monologue that no talking head would ever give.
In a major feat of cross-referencing called "Learning From Las Vegas," Kevin and Jennifer McCoy have taken 21 films set in that desert city and rearranged their scenes according to 120 categories, each on a separate DVD. (The piece has an elaborate carrying case/display station that includes a monitor.)
The "Learning From Upholstery" DVD was playing the day I visited; you can also learn from lingerie, fake monuments, stealing, cowboys, gold and even art. The piece applies Mr. Marclay's telephone principle with a somewhat monotonous anthropological precision, declining the conventions and set-pieces with which most movies are filled. Each DVD functions as a kind of chart, tracing the way these conventions change with time and according to the quality of the movie.
The weapon of choice of Candice Breitz, a South African artist, is shrinkage, achieved by much slicing but without any disruption of continuity. Her "Soliloquy Trilogy" trims "Basic Instinct," "Dirty Harry" and "The Witches of Eastwick" of everything but those minutes when the leads of those films - Sharon Stone, Clint Eastwood and Jack Nicholson - are on screen (or speaking just off camera). This brutal crunching creates a loose allegory about a fallen woman who finds her soul, a good man who sins, and the Devil, who never changes.
It also extracts the high voltage of the movie star and the function of a lead character; while never on screen for more than eight or nine minutes in total, each actor conveys the gist of the movie's narrative.
Paul Pfeiffer goes beyond eliminating or rearranging sequences to changing the images themselves. In his haunting "Long Count," three short loops on tiny monitors show films of Muhammad Ali's boxing matches with Sonny Liston, George Foreman and Joe Frazier. In all the figures of the boxers have been digitally erased. Their ghostly residue and the rapt audience exemplify Mr. Pfeiffer's disturbing yet magical meditations on the role of race and black athletes in American society.
Subtraction is not always the path taken. Mr. Gordon's "24-Hour Psycho" stretches Hitchcock's classic suspense movie into an excruciating yet oddly riveting nonsuspense experience. Mired in slowness, and projected on a double-sided screen in the middle of a gallery, "Psycho" acquires a monumentality that seems commensurate with its place in the popular imagination.
The most emotionally powerful work in the show is Pierre Huyghe's 1998 "L'Ellipse," a triple projection that is also the only one to add to an existing film. Mr. Huyghe has created a scene that was never actually part of Wim Wenders's 1977 movie "The American Friend," but was merely implied by that directorial staple of pacing and economy, a jump cut. The omitted scene is a 10-minute walk that would have been taken by Jonathan, played by Bruno Ganz, from his room in a Paris hotel, across the Seine, to a friend's apartment, where he learns that he has a fatal disease.
In the original film, the action jumps from the hotel scene, played on the first screen, to the elevator of the apartment building and Jonathan's subsequent reading of his doctor's report (which is false), a sequence that plays on the third screen. However, Mr. Huyghe's work pauses in between, on the middle screen, to show us in a single tracking shot, Mr. Ganz, now 20 years older, taking the anxious walk Jonathan never took in the film. One result is an emotionally rich conflation; the 1977 fiction is extended in real 1998 time, when Mr. Ganz's own life is two decades further along, and undoubtedly more shadowed by the prospect of death.
Despite the literalness of its title, this show is not entirely faithful to its premises. Mr. Fast's CNN images are taken from television, while "Horror Chase," another work by the McCoys, is appropriation-free. Made from scratch but relying heavily on movie convention, it shows a terrified man, pursued by an unseen monster, hurtling endlessly through the rooms of a movie-set house, because the film repeatedly changes direction, running backward and forward.
Such fissures highlight the absence of works using found video like "Dial History," Johan Grimonprez's harrowing television news collage about airplane hijackings, or Seth Price's recent, rather brilliant usurpation of some raw video shot by Joan Jonas in the early 1970's. Also missing are those looser forms of appropriation that restate or refilm an existing film, as in Cheryl Donegan's remake of Godard's "Contempt"; Brice Dellsperger's cross-dressed versions of "Dressed to Kill"; Jon Routson's movie-house bootlegs.
Still, "CUT" brings needed curatorial clarity to an expanding genre that is challenging to survey. The catalog provides an expansive backdrop by flanking Mr. Basilico's lucid discussion of the works with essays by Rob Yeo, on the history of film appropriation in underground film (starting with Joseph Cornell), and by Lawrence Lessig, on the creative chill that recent changes in copyright law are bringing to the arts.
You come away from this show with a new sense of film as a found object; as an immense reservoir of untapped form and feeling; and as a highly charged raw material by which artists can celebrate, examine and stave off the deluge of images bearing down on us from all sides.
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