Man Cave 2: The early days

Man Cave 2: The early days

Yes, I understand that the early days could easily be simple: cave men are men in caves. But we don’t know a whole lot about how these caves were appointed, as it were. Did early tool use lead to the first Laz-E-Boys? Were the first cave paintings precursors to NFL and Bikini team posters? It is hard to say. But I’m guessing, no.

Instead, the early caves were probably more like studio apartments in the current economy: dad, mom, vulnerable progeny, too-small stove, bad ventilation…or else, as theorized in various places, caves could also be very short term rentals. As in, humans find cave, fall in love with cave, move in, and have an enjoyable day or twelve until the previous owner – sabre tooth tiger, perhaps, if those were around in the early humans making housing mistakes era – returned. Then, fairly nasty eviction notice followed by a dinner of “homo sapiens du jour.”

No, the early days I’m talking about begin around 1570, when Michel de Montaigne, the Renaissance essayist, decided to retire from his job. He had just been denied a better job due to politics, and was sick of his job in the Bordeaux parlement.  So at the advanced age of 37, he decided to pack in the daily grind and retire to the first and perhaps greatest of all man caves: his Tower.

Montaigne lived in pretty sweet digs for the 16^th Century. Imagine one of those swank estates they are always showing in Downton Abbey or Upstairs/Downstairs or Ivory/Merchant films. Now take the estate, and put three huge castle walls in front of it; then (for some reason I always think of Legos) put two four-story towers on the front two corners. Plenty of woods and land to ride your horse (precursor of the ATV). Servants. 

Man Cave #1

1. My friend Kevin has a man cave. And when I say cave I mean door is blocked by man stuff so you have to climb over boxes of computer hardware and old programming textbooks, spilled boxes of CDs of various ilks, snake-cables in search of VGA connections. Musical instruments. Piles of books hunted and gathered from the local used bookstore. I mean a couch that hasn't been sat on for weeks because it is covered with man-ivy: tendrils of telephone wire and Ethernet connections and aforementioned cables woven into clothing and plastic bags of unknown provenance.

The story goes that a friend took a photo of Kevin's office in Washington and when people saw it they assumed that it was the after shot of the earthquake that had recently hit. Nope. Pre-earthquake. No one would have known that an earthquake had hit Kevin's office. Or if thieves had ransacked his place looking for those small thumb drives with information that could convict higher-ups in the FBI.

Kevin has a man cave. It has a moat (an anteroom you must maneuver, often filled with dangerously unstable piles of gear  and bicycles propped against walls like traps to snare the unwary). It is dark. It has a big desk that covers two walls and a big monitor that lets you watch film of the Grand Canyon at actual scale. It has a real turntable but also a digital thingy to take the turntable's weak original signal and turn it into a badass male signal worthy of the shielded speakers lurking darkly in the corner.

It is clear. A man had been here. Alone

Cyborg sports: blade runners and androgen insensitivity

1.
Remember the bread crumb idea? First attempted in Hansel and Gretel, with poor results: the birds eat the crumbs and Hansel can't get home. (Of course going home to parents who hate you and abandon you in a forest is another matter...). Later in the Extremely Early Days of computing and the net, I came across the breadcrumb notion:


A Web site navigation technique. Bread crumbs typically appear horizontally near the top of a Web page, providing links back to each previous page that the user navigates through in order to get to the current page. Basically, they provide a trail for the user to follow back to the starting/entry point of a Web site and may look something like this:
home page --> section page --> sub section page
This technique also is referred to as a bread crumb trail.
The good news is that Angry Birds don't eat virtual breadcrumbs. 

2. 
So today I got back from errands determined to write a blog on...well, not on this topic of distraction. I was going to write about Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody, which has me thinking more about cyborgs and networks, and how the new social media technologies have changed many of the behaviors and altered many of the limitations previously attached to organizing groups of people. As I sat down I realized I might want to watch the highlights of the Red Sox victory over the Yankees from last night (3-2, 10th inning walk off hit by Reddick). So I went onto ESPN's website, and promptly found a story about...Oscar Pistorius. Oscar is a double amputee running on carbon blades, and previously he had been banned by the International Association of Athletics Federations  from able-bodied competition. The IAAF argued that the blades gave him an unfair advantage; but the Court of Arbitration for Sport (you did know such a court existed, didn't you?) ruled in his favor. (Pistorius is a multiple Paralympic gold medal winner). Cyborg sports! Carbon blades! The whole question of what constituted advantage (Pistorius isn't likely to win or even make it through the heats, though his personal best time of 45.07 for the 400 meters is quite good). And most important: Pistorius, picked to represent South Africa, will compete not only in the world championships in South Korea, but also in…drum roll…the Summer Olympics in London! 


The lead article had a link to a more in-depth conversation, so of course I clicked and read Johnette Howard's story at  http://espn.go.com/espn/commentary/story/_/page/howard-110804/oscar-pistorius-meets-olympic-qualifying-standard-400-meter-time-renews-controversy-prosthetic-legs.


And what I read was fascinating in a number of ways. Since cyborg sports is already a reality (human bodies augmented by drugs, but also by complex biomechanics measurements and training techniques, cutting edge equipment like the shark-mimicking suits for swimmers and those big-ass drivers all golfers now must have) this next phase really intrigued me. If I am an amputee, and must use these legs to run at all, should I be able to? What if those prosthetics give me an advantage; is that like taking steroids? Or does the fact that I'm an amputee balance that out? 







The answer is…we don't have an answer to whether Oscar's carbon blades (he's nicknamed Blade Runner of course) give him an advantage, unfair or not. Oscar has seven experts on a team that helped him overturn his ban. Howard comments, 


All of them provided their unpaid help to Pistorius on the condition they would independently reach their own conclusions and retain the right to publish their work when his last-resort appeal of the IAAF ruling to the Court of Arbitration in Sport (CAS) was done.


While all seven agreed the specific scientific report the IAAF used to ban Pistorius was faulty -- which was the only (and very narrow) criteria argued in his appeal before the CAS -- the same experts have since admitted they disagree on the bigger issue of whether Pistorius gets any sort of advantage from his prostheses. The different views are succinctly explained in this point/counterpoint debate that appeared in the Journal of Applied Physiology.


With the Iraq and Afghan wars producing young men and women who have lost legs, this dissuasion is likely to grow. I heard a Gulf War amputee speak at the Iron Man in Idaho a few years ago, and he says sport saved his life; he was depressed and thinking of suicide when he saw someone in carbon blades running competitively. The biomechanics are complex, but the moment when Pistorius crossed the finish line in Italy and knew he'd not only won the race but crushed his best time AND made the world championships and probably the Olympics - that's simple. It's fricking amazing. At the end of the race the second place finisher, Jamaican Lanceford Spence, "comes rushing up to Pistorius, clapping and smiling and finally embracing him in a bear hug that sends both men falling to the track."


Simple. Inspiring. Perhaps, for some out there, life saving.


And…well, the story doesn't stop there, because there was another cyborg sport story embedded in the first one.

3.


The article about Blade Runner also included a second story about Caster Semenya, the women's 800-meter world champion. She does not run on carbon legs - she has the original equipment, those amazing powerful legs that world class runners all have.




Her cyborg issue is not able/not abled, but male/female. 


Semenya has had a sensational career - she's only 19 - and she won the Berlin world championships in August 2009 with a time of 1:55.45 for the 800 meters. that was the fastest time in the world, period. She was 18. 


After her victory many, including Time Magazine, questioned her gender, and the IAFF (remember Pistorius?) required her to take a number of psychological, gynecological and endocrine tests. This meant she couldn't train for 11 months, and set off a storm of protest from South Africa's government and populace.


Unlike, say, the East German women swimmers who now appear to have taken serious amounts of performance enhancing drugs to win their Olympic gold back in the Cold War days, Semenya is thought to have what is called androgen insensitivity syndrome. According to CBS news:




People with this rare condition appear to be female, and they are, for all practical purposes. Yet in actuality, they have one X chromosome and one Y chromosome in each cell, the pattern normally found in males, according to WebMD. Some women don't find out that they have the Y chromosome until they try to conceive and end up getting the news from a doctor in a fertility clinic.


So should she have been tested? The CBS article points out that the Olympic Committee stopped testing in 1996 when 8 female athletes tested positive for the Y hormone; they stopped because it isn't clear that this gives an advantage, but also because it isn't something the person "did." 


Like Pistorius, she too has been "cleared" to run. Her version of the carbon blades is her physique, which is extraordinary, and which has set off a whole popular media frenzy in which some articles refer to her as he, and other articles try to re-dress the gender issue by dressing her up in more womanly attire. 

  


4.
Central to the cyborg debate is the question of augmented vs. restored. If an amputee has function restored, that fits more or less easily into our categories. He lost something; we are giving him that [human] thing back. Or in the case of Semenya, she did not do anything to augment her performance, and though she occupies a middle place in gender, she presents as a woman in the crucial areas. 


But as I follow the bread crumbs back, it is clear that notions of able and dis-abled, female and male, are radically in question as we head into the second decade of the 21st century. And as with Hansel and Gretel, there is likely to be no way back to the home one had (clear and obvious roles for men and women, clear differences between able bodiedness and its lack). Do we want to go back to that home? I don't. 

insult to injury

I was thinking the other day of a possible blog called "insult to injury" about aging and being in your fifties. Part of this was a cyborg reflection that aging is a software and hardware issue, and that a lot of cyborg narratives are driven by a human desire not to age as quickly as we do. 


So part of my fifties is being an athlete and beginning to get injuries based on this aging of the body, with the concomitant knowledge that my own inability to shift practices as my body changes is partly to blame for two torn muscles, a messed up knee, some emerging back issues (twice I've frozen up like some great insect with a carapace instead of a flexible spinal column). 


This would have to include the phrase fiftying it, a phrase Will Forest and I have developed. Fortying it meant you did something you used to do easily (make sharp field cuts, jumping with power, etc) and getting hurt. Fiftying it meant you did nothing noticeable and yet you STIILL GOT HURT. 


I've fiftied my ankle and my back, and I've spent four months in PT coming back from a two week span of trashing my knee (stuck on a mountainside above Desolation in Tahoe with a full pack trying to get down dead ends and free climbing pitches; drilling my knee on rebar and doing stupid Bike tricks that put too much jolt on my knees at Burning Man), and I've learned that the PT you are doing to get back function is actually the practice you ought to do anyway to retain function at this age.


And so the insult to injury is that it implies you have not, even now, learned your body very well, or well enough to avoid injury. And that a cleverer approach, a more disicplined approach, might well result not only in strength and lack of injury, but also...new/old body knowledge.


My friend Cat says that with our bodies now, everything old is new and everything new is old. She's right about that. 


And on top of all this, one has merely to look at one's desk (if one has a Memento Mori on it as the medieval philosophers did; mine is on my window ledge next to a spiral shell and a cup of pens) to see that these bodies that are no longer new also have a shelf life, a strange number which indicates the years this body will have this or that function, be able in these ways and less in those ways. Death is the whisper behind injury, is the spectre haunting the self we've cobbled together out of learning and myth, impulse and repetition, allegiance to some social norms and inevitably resistance to others.

Kelsey my neighbor said tonight in the hot tub that balance is the result of failure as well as success; each stumble is a chance to learn that balance. She is young and very immortal feeling, just out of college and on her way. She had her head back and knees up and looked very Maxfield Parrish. My brother Peter added that most adults are not really as shaped or formed as they appear; he quoted Louis CK: one of us is 5, and one of us is 8, and one of us is 37, but usually we are all down on the level of the 5 year old. 


And so we have failing and still capable and desired bodies, many of us. We think we should know more by now and we are right. The insult of lack of self knowledge is added to the injury of aging.


And yet...I sometimes think I always always knew it would be like this. Somewhere when I was 13 I was also 56. And so far 56 has felt wide open; what is old is new and what is new is old. I can sit at a computer that wasn't even a glint in Eniac's eye when I was 13 and remember 1967,  


It turns out that most of us do not learn along some nice curve. At least we don't for many of the most important challenges facing us as crazy monkeys, a species on the brink. 


I believe all the important questions have a location along the interface between body and world. And that body is linked to body and bodies, and bodies are linked to bodies that include machines (computers are a clear but not the only example of networks of humans and machines, with the networks and the humans doing real work to continue the life of the network). 


The pendulum swings from the philosophizing of the fifty year old to the fifty year old body and the self wound around each other like DNA strands. We talk about global warming and then about the confusions of gender, of power, of communication, of media, of humans cut off from feedback loops and thus unaware of the shit that is about to hit the world's fan. 


So perhaps once in a while one's body must be injured, so that the insult of not knowing is again felt, like a hot lash, a slap, a wakeup call. 


PS when I searched for a Parrish image of Kelsey I found this as the caption:

Barn's burnt down --
now
I can see the moon.

  Masahide

cyborg teacher 1

I was curious about whether there have been film representations of cyborgs as teachers, so I decided to google cyborg teacher. Of course, what I got was a wild array! The first link I clicked was for a real stinker of a movie, Class of 1999, in which cyborg teachers have been placed in "out of control" schools, to whip the attitudinal teens back into shape. Stacy Keach has, like, no eyes. Malcolm McDowell is uber scary. One of my favorite scenes is when the new "teachers" scan the students, and the audience views the readouts on how many gang members are in the crowd in front of the school. 


It's an interesting dilemma: the school really does have a gang problem; the cyborgs make it better at first, and then...the school has a cyborg problem. There is sadly a second movie, Class of 1999 2: The Substitute. One of the cyborg teachers from the first film comes back...and once again, substitutes get a really really bad rap. 


So the first version of cyborg teachers is aimed at the classic issue of classroom discipline, and imports the basic RoboCop logic. Society, and the soft nonaugmented humans who make it up, has failed; kids are in gangs and anarchy is loosed upon the blackboard jungle world. There is no pretense of learning; it is simply a struggle to see which war lord will control the mostly terrified students. 

Of course novels and films about the problems schools face with violent students is an old story (see Blackboard Jungle among many takes). And of course there is the classic 1980s Reagan era solution to all problems like this: terrorists? Columbine? Just get a cyborg superhero, or a truly heroic American on steroids, to take on these shitheads and beat sense into them (or the life out of them). 


But I'm struck by the 1990ness of these images. Cities, public schools, the world has somehow all been taken over; the people who used to run things are now victims, and the erstwhile victims are now aggressors. But the people who used to run things (read: white middle class filmgoers and voters) have a (literal) new weapon: technology. Technology can help them regain control, and control, it turns out, is what it (school, urban life, geopolitics) is all about. 


Today, as the U.S. government teeters on debt failure, a crisis completely designed and constructed by ideologues intent on making good all those rabid right wing radio ideas...I consider how to teach, what to teach, to my students in the fall. In a way, I want them to be competent cyborgs in a world where media representations outnumber actual representations. 


Here is another site dedicated to cyborg teacher:

The classroom is itself a technology that I would argue is a virtual space, designed, organized, enclosed, no different than a space comprised of bytes; the classroom is a part of a larger education system whose parts are cooected to every aspect of American culture: home to road. The teacher and the student walk “into” the classroom from some other place and erect the theater of the system as they go about their business. The teacher stands at the front of the room, the student sits, listens, and writes notes. If a student leaves the room, he or she will walk down the hall and look into other “rooms” in which others are pretty much doing the same.

This illustration of the cyborg is mearly a test, a hypothesis, a means of seeing, not meant to be factual. It’s meant to be pleasant, perhaps a distraction; it’s meant to invite a game into the picture: to create learning spaces just as virtual as the classroom. What is this learning space: Interactive Fiction, of course.

http://www.steveersinghaus.com/archives/294

That is, the face to face classroom according to Steve Ersinghaus might be fruitfully reimagined as a place where people are partly somewhere else (as in my online course) but also synchronically linked (that is, in that virtual place at the same time). 

The cyborg teacher as cyborg enforcer looks at students from the point of view of enemies, of uncontrollable violence animals with a patina of humanity. The cyborg teacher as teacher of cyborgs imagines that the students are always already partly elsewhere, with different goals and priorities, and that a good deal of what modern teachers teach is how to think through things over time with some degree of time commitment and focus. 


Sometimes I think that given our media saturated and information-centrifugal world, everyone in the US is ADD. Learning to attend - not attend as be in your seat, but to attend to what is being offered as learning, to attend to one's own priorities and skills - turns out to be a massively cyborgian task.


About one month to go on this sabbatical, and I'm getting ready to dive back in to this task. I can imagine a prompt that asks students to "read" classrooms, and teachers, and what combinations are best for learning. I want my students to use social media to connect with other people, students and otherwise, to produce real knowledge, to join forces and collaborate on real problems. 

First cyborg stop: teaching the frack out of Fracking in Monterey County.

Reading The Dada Cyborg

I am loving this book to pieces, partly because it deals so well with Hannah Hoch, a terrific Dada artist. It is giving me good ideas about how to negotiate between the early cyborg meanings in Norbert Wiener's style of cybernetics, and later more "pomo" meanings in the work of Donna Haraway and others. I'm also interested in ways the cyborg can allow artists and activists to begin intervening to challenge reactionary and militarist political trends. Weimar feels so often like a too-contradictory republic/Statist cyborg, one that "resolved" into fascism. And the United States post Reagan feels that way as well.

For now I want to simply post Matthew Biro's answer to the question, "In a nutshell, what is the Dada cyborg?"

The Dada cyborg is a motif or image type that I kept identifying in Dada art and, in particular, the work of the Berlin Dada artists. As I investigated Dada cyborgs and, simultaneously, the concept of the cyborg as it was developed in cybernetics and cultural theory after World War II, I came to the conclusion that the cyborg frequently appeared in Berlin Dada art because it could represent a new conception of hybrid or “networked” identity. By analyzing various appearances of the Dada cyborg between 1919 and the early 1930s, my book thus traces an emerging pattern of cultural activity that links Dada art with the rise of mass media as well as the (roughly) contemporaneous cultural theory of Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Ernst Jünger, and others. It is a concept of identity that appears across multiple media and shows us the roots of our own media- and conflict-saturated consciousnesses today.

http://www.uminnpressblog.com/2010/01/dada-cyborg.html

Hannah Hoch's photomontages are amazing. Here is one form 1919-20 that Biro discussed in great detail, analyzing (among other things) the human/machine hybrids of the Kaiser and of her lover, the Dada artist Raoul Haussman. It is called "Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany."

The golden header

1.

I first found out on my way to watch the last minutes of a depressing game.

My bro called me "Did you see it? Did you see it? Did you?"

I could only think...no. We scored? The US women scored? But...isn't the game more or less over?

It was so awesome getting all that from one sentence repeated in a frenzy.

Telephones are pretty awesome for getting good news fast.

2.

The Women's World Cup of Soccer is front and center on my Summer Sports agenda. I watched France-England and a bunch of Sweden-US (we lost 2-1 on a freak carom off of our wall) and US - North Korea.

When we scored in the 76th...SECOND!!!!! I was both delighted and...well, and had that slightly doomed feeling you get when things come quickly and easily. When we missed a close off the bar header I felt proud of our attack.

Then came the penalty on Rachel Buehler. The amazing, insane stop by our goalie Hope Solo. Then the heartbreaking calling back of the play, giving Brazil a second chance. (At the time there was no apparent explanation; later we learned that one of the US players crossed the line and encroached, but...this is NEVER called this tightly, as far as I can tell). Then Marta scoring the penalty kick to tie it.

AND the red card sending Buehler off for the rest of the entire frickin' game (awful call upon awful call). Then...

well this is one of those moments when it seemed the US really woke up as a team. They played on fire. Even with Marta putting in a marvelous goal to go ahead. Even with a player (why do they keep saying "man?) down? But effort after effort was repelled by the back on its heels Brazilian defence.

And then the Play.

3.

I've seen The Catch: Montana throw to Dwight Clark for the winning score in the 1982 NFC title game against Dallas. I've seen Viniateri kick that insane field goal in 2002 after the Tuck Rule saved the Patriots' season in the snow against Oakland.

But I think The Play is...well, I can't get it out of my head. I've seen it maybe thirty times on YouTube and ESPN. Rapinoe cruising up the left side, hauling, then putting her head down and hitting an absolutely perfect, probably religion-founding, cross, just out of the reach of the Brazilian goalkeeper, curving just enough toward the US striker.

And then Abby went up (afterwards it almost looked like a dolphin just about to break the surface of the ocean after a dive). And never ever blinked.

I am in love, seriously. I went to bed and closed my eyes and saw Abby hit it again, some kind of halo around her head, like a soccer saint. Ball. Goal. Tie. Hope.

Honestly. The best.