Olympic Bobsledding Advertisements - a case study

Perhaps you are not watching the 2009 Utah Olympics. But I did for a very, very brief moment and here is what I noticed.

Your vantage point is not exactly the one most suitable for watching sports, so much as watching ads. To view your favorite Olympic team get the gold, you must experience this event as they maneuver around - not the slope of a mountain - but around numerous advertising apexes. The goal is exposure. Okay, so this is really obvious, I know.

There is another thing, too. Capital and the state are two thing you confront when watching the Olympics. The reporters and announcers are constantly comparing nationalities, getting the audience to identify with an imaginary community - not a bad thing in itself - but one that exists within the confines of imaginary legal borders, with a false unification.


For the Olympic Games, advertising creates the frame, creates the experience, creates a spectacle. The ads actually block our view in most scenes. But they are necessary, integral to the experience, and we don't even need to respond to them. They didn't really ask a question in the first place, and so they get no response. What is their use - who can say? This is something Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard noticed about mass communication in a simulation economy.


Frame by frame, the fantasmagoria is lining up to greet you. A camera patiently waits at the next station, carefully placing another ad into the centerpiece of its broadcast - this time for KONICA MINOLTA. The bobsled finally comes into view and passes by swiftly enough, in a neck-breaking blur. But the whole time the logo KONICA MINOLTA is staring you directly in the face.


Things last no longer than the time it takes for them to happen. From the very beginning to the very end of this one-and-a-half-minute experience, you might have been exposed to thirty or more advertisements. Many of which you probably did not notice. Through your viewfinder you see a little red spot appear at the bottom of the screen, announcing "OMEGA".

It's the perfect mixture of exhilaration and deception.


But to tell you the truth, I don't see how bobsledding can be deceptive. The ads do not deceive. The slope of a mountain does not deceive. Nothing here is deceptive. Everything is pure fact. At bottom there is this truth: nothing deceives, there are no lies, there is only simulation.


Simulation is the separation of value from fact. This is the way I understand it.

Political economy has a strategy of using exchange values and use values as "alibis" for one another when it is convenient. But the new political economy can do no such thing. When the only thing being exchanged are simulated experiences, value is arbitrary in a political economy of signs.

I can spy with my little eye, an INTERSPORT ad... whatever that is!


If we stay with this line of thinking, we become suspicious of reality. But here there is no suspicion, the facts are there before us, "ADIDAS", "KONICA MINOLTA".

The critique of simulation is not a complementary critique of political economy - it is the new critique of political economy, because simulation has already replaced reality.

ADIDAS, by the way, stands for "all day I dream about simulation".


Advertising is just a system of objects, just a technology. Or is it?

By reinventing capital in each successive phase of capitalism, (1) counterfeit, (2) production and (3) simulation, the ads confirm the latest initiative capital has enjoyed since the dawning of the simulation economy. It is a way of life!


The lonley slope of a mountain, an event that was made for television, and one advertisement. There are no accidents here, no catastrophes, no terrorism, no traffic-jams, no panic, and no Soviets. It is just surplus time. But it is still a 100 percent advertising event. This is a desert in real-time, a scenery full of value, and the clock is ticking.


At least we know it was a good day for KONICA MINOLTA.

And America!

The bobsled team see their whole lives flashing before them in one big whooosh! For you it is a moment of truth. To quote Jean Baudrillard from Symbolic Exchange and Death:

"Reality itself founders in hyperrealism, the meticulous reduplication of the real, preferably through another, reproductive medium, such as photography. From medium to medium, the real is volatized, becoming an allegory of death. But it is also, in a sense, reinforced through its own destruction. It becomes reality for its own sake, the fetishism of a lost object..."

Who will have the final word? Let's talk to the bobsledding team and find out.


With the ubiquity of ads here, it's amazing these sports channel announcers have the audacity to say they will return once again to the Olympics after a short "commercial break".

But the American bobsledding team's colors are red - the world about to dawn! - and black - the night that ends at last! - and he's got his fist up in the air, so who can really complain...

Beneath the Pavement, the Beach

Three years after the 2005 riots in the suburbs of France post-Marxist sociologist, Slavoj Zizek, wrote that the rebellion was meaningless and without "any positive utopian vision."

Enter: a post-ideological era.

It's not that we no longer have ideologies, of course, but the dominating capitalist ideology has disguised itself so well that the ruling class can get away with unfounded impassés. We say "economy" instead of "capitalism"; we say "journalism" instead of "spectacle"; "community policing" instead of "racial profiling", etc.

Above all, what better proof is there of capitalism's triumph in the last three decades, Zizek asks, than the disappearance of the very term "capitalism"? Or perhaps the disappearance of an anti-capitalist narrative? And the disappearance of an "anti-social" narrative, where social unrest - especially 'violent' unrest - is "anti-social", and violent social stratification is ordinary.

"The fact that there was no program in the burning of Paris suburbs tells us that we inhabit a universe in which, though it celebrates itself as a society of choice, the only option available to the enforced democratic consensus is the explosion of (self-)destructive violence."

This is the most difficult task for us. To be able to explain why - what looks like "self-destructive violence" - is actually a tremendous breakthrough. There is a tendency, however, to see unplanned explosions of revolt as "without program". Zizek contrasts the suburb riots with May 1968's positive utopian vision in France. But it is true that even in 1968, the social rupture had no clear objectives most of the time either.

"The fact was that to anyone who asked rationally enough 'What do you want?' I had no answer," said a radical recalling the first Night of Barricades. "I couldn't say that I didn't even know who these comrades were, couldn't say that I was demonstrating for the sake of demonstrating."

In other words he couldn't say whether the outburst had any program, at least that he was aware of. The promise of a better world lying beneath the cobblestone street can seem like a surreal joke, once it failed to meet its objectives. Having expected nothing less than the overthrow of the dominant social order, the surreal then turned on itself.

Jacques Lacan was similarly pessimistic, though he and Foucault, too, befriended the '68 radicals - became themselves '68 radicals. Foucault threw the cobblestones at police from an occupied university building. Lacan's challenge to the spirit of '68 was this: "As revolutionaries, you are hysterics who demand a new master. You will get one."

That prediction came true. The Gaullist regime disappeared; postmodern times came after, and May '68 was not a revolution - at least not politically or economically. Now in the shadow of their failed expectation, we live in an age where revolt is supposedly not utopian, not positive, and is not articulated. We have a stronger master, and a more sophisticated super-structure.

A photograph from Greece this week:


Underneath the broken cobblestones there is still a beachhead, though for some the utopian vision seems a bit quaint. What is our program? It goes without saying that we want a world without presidents and prime ministers; we want worlds of our own constructed with directly democratic structures, not states. We start by breaking the spell. And then, piece by piece, regain control over our lives through cooperation.

We realize that surrealism is a success. - At least in the context of a world that has yet to be fundamentally transformed. We realize that for the most part we are playing this game, naturally, with our hands tied behind our backs.

An image from a Swedish newspaper:


Only in the context of a game where we are able to cooperate fully are we successful. The continuing delay of mass action devoted to cooperative activity, however, along with inadequacies in counter-culture, have reduced our vision to pitfalls, recuperations, and dead-ends.


Meanwhile there is a lot gossip about angry, raging youth. What do they want? We have seen tremendous increases in the amount of wealth accumulation, through trade, through the exploitation of Africa, etc. without any corresponding increase in the real possibilities of everyday life through deliberate forms of democracy. There is more stuff to fill the lives of Americans and Europeans, but less food elsewhere, and less democracy everywhere.

When tipped off, it results in outbursts without programs. We react cruelly against the cruel world we find ourselves stuck in, by burning down Christmas trees, by destroying police cars. Some riots may have lacked pretense to a particular kind of vision - one that requires privileged or experienced people to write communiques and press releases - but they still reflect the surrealist state of mind.

Underneath the police car, the pavement. And the beach? Not far away...

My subverts are better than your adverts

This is a story of capitalist recuperation. It begins with Saul William's song List of Demands.

Saul Williams is a spoken-word poet and hip hop activist. In List of Demands he attacks conspicuous consumption. Written in the voice of "the impoverished and oppressed," including the "factory worker," Williams said in an interview with Morphizm that the last thing the song reinforces is hyperconsumption. He wants his money back because he's drowning in McDonald's fatty burgers; he is compelled to stand; he has a better plan.

But it doesn't matter how you attack it, the commercial enterprise will figure out a way to recuperate its opposition and sell it back to you in a different package. It has perfected the art of recuperation.

a brief description of recuperation

The situationists - who were the first artists to notice what what most revolutionaries had yet to realize - articulated the importance of fighting the bourgeoisie on cultural, as well as economic and political fronts. They articulated recuperation, gave it definition, put it in context. During their heyday in the 50s and 60s the situationist-organized 'art strikes' had intensified class struggle and demoralized the capitalist spectacle to some extent.

What is the spectacle? It's everything - humor, advertising, television, and so forth - comprising today's "spectacular level of commodity consumption and hype," as Kalle Lasn wrote in Culture Jam. And to show how deep the spectacle's recuperation has penetrated social life, successors of situationist theory have been absorbed into the spectacle they fought against. Having become marketing experts, advertising consultants, and advanced campaign managers, many of the culture jammers are now the prizes and trophies of capitalist domination.

Not just an ancillary source for marketing gurus, radicalism and rebellion are the dialectical anti-thesis of capitalism and thus the perfect synthesis for "post-ideological", late capitalist domination. This Jack in the Box advertisement that I photographed is a perfect example.

(Someone I shared this ridiculous image with has since added their own recuperation to it. After vectorizing, it was underlined with pro-consumption slogans, "Submit, Conform, Consume", to emphasize the overtness of fastfood recuperation. To learn how this works download the zine How to Make Adverts Better.)

In the recent book Coming of Age at the End of History, an embittered Generation Y activist, Camille de Toledo, narrates the story of how commercial experts came to treat situationist texts themselves as troves of treasure and information which helped them understand cultural products and how to improve the commodification of counter-culture. Now 30-ish, de Toledo is unsurprisingly cynical toward this historical moment where we are all being continuously recuperated. "All that remains of the spirit of revolt are annoying slogans."

In a German film about aged-anarchists, Was tun, wenn's brent?, one of the characters is a former activist who runs an advertising agency that exploits anti-capitalist and radical iconography. It is not just radical imagery that can be recuperated, it's the radicals themselves. In this film the former radicals have to become radical again, in fact, in order to save their bourgeois social status. In so doing, they relive the experiences they had as radicals.

On Guy Debord's own account, the SI was already actually recuperated by 1972, when too many elements of its work had been co-opted against itself. McKenzie Wark details this phenomenon in 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International, where she wrote, "Having invaded the spectacle,

... the spectacle invaded it in return. It was no longer a secret enemy of spectacular society, but a known one. Its theory became ideology, mere contemplation. Contemplation of the Situationist International is merely a supplemental alienation of alienated society."

back to the List of Demands...

...you know what had to happen. Given all that led up to this blog post, of course, it was bound to happen: it wasn't long before some corporation figured out a way to use Saul William's anti-capitalist art to reinforce capitalism itself. In this case, the shoe manufacturer Nike was quick to use the List of Demands song - a chart-topping single in 2007 - in an advertising campaign called "better than your better". Have a look:

After two successful commercials the advertising team added a third, using the List of Demands lyrics instead of the previous bullshit. List of Demands is now inseparable from the sporty image that Nike bestowed upon it through popular consumption.

I was curious so see what Saul Williams thought about this, whether he gave Nike permission, or whether they simply used it. So I searched and found that Nike obtained the rights to use it from the record label. Williams welcomed Nike's use of it. In the Morphizm interview he remarked that,

"My intention remains for these songs to be heard by as many as possible. They are the virus that I wish to spread. I’ve infected Nike and all within their reach with a song that raises awareness as well as fists. It is indeed written in the voice of the impoverished and oppressed, which includes the factory worker. They know its their song when they hear it. The last thing it does is make someone want to go buy sneakers, but it may encourage someone to hit their boss over the head with a tennis racket. So be it."

As a 'public pedagogy', using capitalism as a vehicle does not seem to have succeeded. Williams essentially claims that Nike's bold move to use his List of Demands to advertise the opposite of what he is demanding puts Nike at risk of being recuperated by radicalism. It risks détournement, which is when commercial iconography becomes subverted. Détournement as a way of "infecting" the world with his anti-capitalist message, he says, could work.

Through détournement, radicalism creates moments of what Julia Kristeva in Word, Dialogue and Novel called the "carnivalesque" enacted to fight against the spectacle of everyday life. The carnival, according to Mikhail Bakhtin in Rabeilas and His World, is created using folk humor positioned outside the officially sanctioned culture of those in power. According to Williams, his song is an entirely different order of détournement. But it is the same logic use to détourne the Jack in the Box advertisement.

This is the logic:

1. It was positioned, from the beginning, outside the spectacle.
2. Now it is inside because of recuperation.
3. The song is so powerful that it will pull what is inside back outside with it.

This is hard to believe. Nike has framed the List of Demands so firmly in consumer iconography that it's impossible to imagine that this could be realistic.

Artists seem to think the commercialization of art is the best way to reach a wider audience. Anarchist punk band Anti-Flag aggravated fans by signing with major record label, Sony BMG, for example. The music giants have a new strategy. They want to maintain the "authenticity" of their recuperated artists by encouraging independent work. Meanwhile the innovations are used for commercial purposes. KRS-ONE explains in an interview with Digital Journal that,

Today, artists like myself or Chuck D or Talib Kweli hold a degree of credibility that’s attracting companies like Red Bull, Cadillac, or Nike. Executives at these companies are our fans. And they are really sick of the state of music. So what they’ve done is spend $250,000 of their own money, in the case of Nike, to create a song with Kanye West, Nas, Rakim, and KRS ONE. We don’t rap about the shoes because they don’t want us talking about that. They just want us to create a song they can play on their website. Authenticity is the new business model and these companies need a product that’s not destroyed by an artist's shady image.

There is something else that easily results from this business model too, which destroys radicalism from two directions at once. Corporations directly use recuperation in order to sell ordinary consumer products; they indirectly use recuperation to sell consumer products that imitate radical lifestyles, resulting in hipsterism.


I don't want to end on a depressing note because while recuperation can be a source of anxiety, others take it as an acknowledgment that radical creativity threatens bourgeois production. I'd like to know what other people think about this.

How the Indigenous Organized

"The revolutionary organization must learn that it can no longer combat alienation with alienated means."

- Situationist International

This was a central tenet of the SI, guiding their work on the spectale's recuperative strategies and especially the strategies of the subordinated classes. I am taking a look at the indigenous organization in Bolivia from the 1990s to the present. The indio community there has created a revolutionary struggle that, while not impervious to recuperative forces, is possibly the best model for decentralizing power and collective bargaining in the present era.

The organization of indigenous groups changed after the political turmoil of the late 1990s. The indigenous supplanted the labor unions as the primary working class mode of resistance by forming ad hoc groups organized around specific issues from their different but overlapping perspectives.

Urban employment after Coca Zero - the U.S.'s plan to eradicate coca growing in Bolivia - brought the indigenous to the cities, where they displaced miners (long considered the vanguard of the working class by the Bolivian left). They functioned primarily in neighborhood collectives that incorporated many elements of labor unions, but were not based on connections to particular employers. The neighborhoods maintained constant pressure on the government, with an overall emphasis on the failed Coca Zero plan, and the privatization of natural resources.

“By freely combining indigenous, nationalist, and anti-neoliberal discourses, they often incorporated the demands of other groups to broaden their base of support or increase their legitimacy.”

- Benjamin Kohl and Linda Farthing, Impasse in Bolivia

While the neighborhoods increasingly assumed the vanguard position toward social change in Bolivia, each followed its own agenda, organizing strategies, and rationale for action, but often worked side by side under unlikely conditions. For example, coca growers in Aymara joined forces during the “water war” of 2000 to combat privatization and defend the indigenous way of life in the highlands. This method, which has been echoed elsewhere all over the world in resistance movements, is broadly anarcho-syndicalist in its outlook though the political makeup of the Bolivian groups may have specific ideological goals that are not. With over 35 distinct cultures in Bolivia, the groups remain distinct but culturally cohesive (Wise et al. 2003).

Both the unions and the campesinos – the rural laborers and coca growers – act as the basis for local governments, assigning land and mediating disputes both within and between communities. The local unions collaborated to form federations of unions, and the federations were large enough to democratically make decisions at the municipal level. Almost without exception, the mayors, council members and congressional deputies in the Chapare region have come from coca-growing unions. This mixture of neighborhood, government and union has created a broader class of people working together toward a common goal.

Eliminating imperialism anywhere cannot happen without such a broad organization force like this. Imperialism in all its forms will have to confronted in such a way that gives resistance to it an intrinsic satisfaction, as the SI was quick to point out. I often have the feeling that resistance in the U.S. does not have intrinsic qualities like this. It's more like a separate activity from everyday life. People who enjoy "politics" on an abstract discursive level may be like that, but resistance is purposive, active, and connected with daily living.

Of the tools at the oppressor's disposal, the dismissal of resistance culture is one of its strongest. As Nietzsche said in BGE, despising the "smell" of another human being is one of the most acerbic ways to reprobate the Other. Look how the mestizos hate the smell of indigenous people in Bolivia. Anything indio is unwanted and unaccepted: indio labor, indio life, indio music, indio skin tone. Racist class war in Bolivia therefore made it necessary to create a revolutionary struggle beginning with a cohesive indio solidarity movement.

Macy's Fashionista Détournement

Another picture set for the Détournement Gallery. These Macy's ads were found by a friend of mine who was browsing through the fashion annual in the Seattle's The Stranger. The issue featured articles about socially-conscious alternative clothing styles interspersed with full-page Macy's détournements. Have a look see -

This is how Macy's and the other big US retailers marked Earth Day, by using the holiday to market its products. And when you buy their earthy hippie necklaces, you get a nice little plastic baggy with it that's forged out of petroleum and takes over a hundred years to break down in a landfill, and you aren't allowed to leave the store without one. That's the magic of Macy's!

Macy's is a champion of social consciousness issues, like gay rights, for example. Which is why when pressured by angry anti-gay activists who opposed their "rainbow" mannequins in Boston, Macy's management quickly stuffed them in the closet. A real slap in the face to Seattle's gay community on Capitol Hill, where most of the featured fashionistas in The Stranger's Fashion Annual were from.

You see, when you buy these high heels you're actually participating in a democratic society because every dollar is a vote, and every vote counts. Also, did you know that when you buy Macy's "faux fur" you may really be buying dog fur? The vertical production chain is so mysterious nobody is ever really sure what they're paying for and where it comes from.

Several years ago there were no Macy's in the Northwest. We had a local retail clothing boutique line called The Bon Marché. That clothing line sprang up after World War II, during the post-war consumer expansion. In 2003 The Bon Marché was bought by Federated, the company that now owns Macy's, and changed the name to "Bon-Macy's". And since 2005 they're all "Macy's". So power to the bosses!

As Seattleites are aware, Macy's prefers non-union workers over unionized ones in its textile factories. Students from UW protested at a Seattle Macy's for busting Guatemalan unions last October. In Mexico, Macy's-hired clothing makers work 24-hour shifts and 5,000 of them were fired when they attempted to organize. You can read more about Macy's fashionista social consciousness on Co-op America.

Or maybe just give 'em a peace of lead.

Buy shoes, support the revolution.

The Spectacle Takes Three

A few weeks ago my barista friend told me that our other friend told her that I could tell her about the spectacle.

"He said it would take three weeks to figure out. So what is it?" she asked.

I began telling her that it would take immense mental effort and rigorous training to put ourselves to the task and come to grips with the spectacle. In short, I was having fun with this new relationship we had developed around the possibility of understanding something neither of us can get outside of to fully comprehend.

Every time I see her in the cafe I write down a new quote from Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle and pass it on while I pay for my drink. She then gives me a wry look as she studies the quote and then asks me if it's like any of the following:

"Propaganda?"

"No, that's just one particular manifestation, and it's too overt to cover everything."

"Class consciousness?"

"Well, it's definitely ideological, but it's more like a massive infestation of false consciousness."

"Dominant discourse?"

"That's sort of the idea. But it's much broader than that. All discourse, possibly."

She now tells me that whatever I'm giving her is just another spectacle, and I told her that seems correct given that the spectacle's means and ends are identical, "endlessly basking in its own glory," as Debord wrote. At any rate, it's been roughly three weeks and while some progress is being made, nothing conclusive has been established.

Things Look Better When You Put Them in a Circle

That's actually what it says on a German postcard I have. Inside the circle are some emails from people I met in Berlin at dance clubs and art galleries. I was glad to rediscover them and stay in touch. In the spirit of circles, I thought I should post a non-chronological summary of my exciting travels in Germany, since I never did that when I came back.

First of all, the boundary between art and everything else doesn't exist in Germany. Public art is everywhere, which I envied on numerous occasions. That is probably what I loved most about public spaces in Europe. There is, of course, indoor art. But I noticed that people wore their clothes like pieces of art, erected their lives around art, and lived for kultur. Pictured on the right is the farmer's market beneath the Munster Cathedral in Freiburg. Cities themselves, and city planning in general, is done with a better understanding of the public sphere and aesthetics (with gains for efficiency) in mind.

The people of the Eastern part of post-DDR Germany have a collections of "degenerate" art and public Marxist artifacts that isn't often seen. In Chemnitz and Leipzig I attempted to understand the important German art movements of the 20th Century, adding new interpretations to older forms.

I noticed that German girls were startlingly cute but could at times be eccentrically deterministic. At least one German girl whom, for whatever reason the cosmos has, always did her laundry exactly when I did mine. There was something oddly fatalistic about the whole place though. Germans are serious and simultaneously not-serious about folklore and other myths in places like Bavaria and Baden-Wurtemberg. For one weekend I stayed with on a family farm in the Schwarzwald and learned how they make Schnapps from apples. Then I hiked 40 kilometers into the wood and ruined my Birkenstocks - (silly Northwesterners use them for everything.) All is well that ends well, however - I met a German hiking troupe who shared a backpack full of white wine with me and we hiked back to Gengenbach together.

On the other side of the Rhine, French women live under a completely different cultural logos. (But I visited in Strasbourg, in the Alsace region, which I'm led to believe is less French than, say, Paris.) On the other side of Munich, Czech women can be assigned very astute gender codes. The image of the half-naked woman holding a Kalashnikov in one hand and in the other hand a bottle of vodka (or MP3 player) is evidence of one kind of male-dreamt phantasy leftover from the Soviet-era: but half-naked women with guns are supposed to be hot on both sides of the Atlantic. But after visiting the museum of communism, Kafka's museum, and more "degenerate art", the lens I viewed the Eastern parts through was probably tainted by cultural impressions of post-Soviet transitioning. (That impression is probably what drives part of the tourist industry there too.) The Czech women I met in Prague were adventuresome and liked to dance.

Did I mention that the G8 Summit also occurred while I was in Germany? (Time is a circle, right?) Unfortunately that was in the northernmost part of the country while I was studying EU agricultural policies (see "Viticulture and Capitalism") and EU expansionism in the southernmost part, Freiburg im Breisgau. Otherwise I certainly would have been there filming on behalf of the independent media collective. "Stop G8" was spraypainted in yellow and red all over Freiburg.

Looking back, annoyance was a dominant theme in my trip. At the Dachau Concentration Camp, the American students I was with annoyed me spectacularly. American tourists also annoyed me at bars and various other places in Munich. It seemed I could not escape the pervasive tentacle-ish expanse of American culture even while overseas. I wanted to know Germans, not Americans, especially not crude Americans. It almost sounds cliché to talk about the ugly American, but since most of my friends aren't ugly Americans, I was really surprised that the other students in fact were. It threw me off-guard. I remember two students from Claremont talking about wearing fur coats, how fashionable it is, and how animal rights activists can go to hell. They were loud and had short attention spans too. I wanted to puke my vegetarian food all over them.

At one point I analyzed a lecture at the university in Freiburg by a well-known American intellectual, Saskia Sassen. After studying European politics, I looked back on American sedition laws with sickening disapproval. Police states seem to bubbling up everywhere though.

I made a twelve-day excursion to Turkey, and feared that I was going to be stuck there during a riotous military coup. The AK party was re-elected 4 days later after I left. In Ankara, the capital, I visited the mausoleum of "the father of the Turks", Ataturk, and felt something Stalinist crawl up my spine. In my entries, however, I did not purposely leave out all the good things there is to say about Turkey. There are many good things to say about Turks, just not Turkish politics. Americans tend to see Turkey as setting "an example" for democracy in the "Islamic" or "Arab World" and I think that's very degrading. Turks are not Arabs; there is a high degree of animosity between Arabs and Turks. So if anything they're setting an example for other Turkish nations. (Invading Northern Iraq is not setting a good example!)

A Turkish man told me this joke: What are the three shortest books in the world? Let me tell you. The first is the connoisseur's guide to English cuisine; the second is the comedian's guide to understanding German humor; and the third is the Turkish guide to Turkish democracy.

I should mention the haikus I wrote. Back in the EU zone, I waxed poetically on everything from sidewalks and physiology exhibits to the primacy of vegetables and the day that cameras will rule the world.

Wayfaring my way to Nuremberg, school was out and I was free to be thoughtful and artsy in my own little world. In Dresden I over-Sartreized the pleasures I took in traveling. I spent a day in Wittenberg and visited all the places where Martin Luther had lived and taught. In Hamburg I must have gone to a dozen art galleries, all of them very good. I also met a house DJ on the Reperbahn (a popular street for clubs and prostitution) who invited me to a house party. We got very drunk. My impression of Bremen is that it's a sleepy town, and that probably has to do with the fact that I arrived too late for my hostel reservation and I ended sleeping in a park by a bed of flowers and under a windmill. It was dreamy and allergenic at the same time! But, it was summer season, and I found that to be a rather quixotic adventure in itself.

Another quixotic adventure took place in a small Dutch town where, because I was stranded at a train station after midnight, I met a married Bulgarian gypsy couple and they invited to stay at their home for the night. (No, it didn't end up the Tarantino film "Hostel" - I escaped the next morning safe and sound.) We watched a Bulgarian gypsy movie on their television and talked about all sorts of things using a pidgin version of Turkish and German, since neither of us could find a satisfying common language. I thought they were very hospitable and came to my rescue just when I unexpectedly needed it. But they were also too hospitable, since they made me an exorbitant amount of food to spoil me and make me feel like some sort of king. It was also unnerving since they wanted me to eat while they watched.

I can understand their traditionalist background, but that was too disturbing for me. I ate a couple tomatoes and then I said I was full just to be polite. The whole ordeal was the Bulgarian gypsy's husband's fault though, since he ordered the wife around like a farm dog while he insisted that we men lay back, relax, and smoke cigarettes. My disgust soon overcame my gratefulness and I left early the next morning.

Amsterdam is one of the freest cities in the world, and my time their was too short. But, I must say, Berlin is really where I felt situated as if I belonged there. It's incredibly diverse and has all the freedom and accompaniment of intelligent, sexy people I could have imagined. I visited fewer art galleries in Berlin than Hamburg because the city was too spectacular not to live in it and introduce yourself to the people sitting next to you. Berlin is where I met the swinging, transsexual dancer from London, who goes by the name "Hollywood". One Friday we partied all night in a former nuclear power plant, though it's now turned into a 4-story dance club, and we hung out with a group of refined party-tourists from Madrid. Two brunettes from Paris, Marie (and Marion?), especially excited from all the speed they took, led us to some very wild night clubs. In the taxi Marie laughed and said to me, "I can't stop dancing!" Another night-creature I met in Berlin, named Victor from Buenos Aires, spoke at least 12 different languages very fluently.

Travelers are impressive!

At the same time I hope I made impressions upon people (how can you not as a visitor?) and I hope that those impressions reflected well on myself and my country. Even at home, one is always a representative of some place or another. I often become an effigy for various sorts of things - "the left" when I'm in the presence of my neoconservative uncle, or "people who know something about technology" when I'm at work, for example - so being aware of one's representations and appearances does mean quite a bit, though that sounds somewhat superficial. Representations and appearances mean perhaps more to me than it meant before I visited Germany. Art and kultur also mean a lot more to me as well.

Justice Unbound

Last Saturday, Northwest SDS chapters broke away from the confines of the Oct. 27th End The War March and spread the message of the protest to the Pike Place Market area in downtown Seattle. The aim of the short march was to bring the anti-war message of the march to areas of greater pedestrian presence, such as the Pike Place district near the downtown area. The organizers from AnswerCoalition.org had made arrangements with the city for the larger march, but this confined the message to small streetways on Beacon Hill and in the Chinatown district, clearly out of the way from the majority of pedestrian areas. No arrests were made, and our group felt the actions we took were necessary to affect change and cause a small disruption in the daily lives of urban-dwellers and shoppers. The group chanted, "While you're shopping bombs are dropping" to remind the city that the War in Iraq has not ended after nearly five years, and to urge action to be taken.

Protested spots included Wells Fargo for its involvement and funding the detention of migrant workers and families in the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, and Starbucks for its Walmart-style union-busting and salaries which are lower than the cost of living, especially in cities such as New York. Protests at these sites weren't planned, but chanced upon, and the opportunity seized.

Most pedestrians seemed surprised and glad to see SDS marching. Yet there were a small number who gave the group quizzical looks, perhaps misunderstanding the importance of democracy in the streets. To them, I must say that exposing, dramatizing, and creating tension is the very heart of direct action, since this is necessary for growth and change. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create a kind of crisis and foster such a tension that the community and the government--constantly refusing to negotiate or discuss with those whom they represent--are forced to confront the issue. We sought to dramatize the issue in the streets that it could not be ignored. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that his fellow Athenians could rise from the bondage of myths and ignorance to the realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must we see the need for nonviolent "gadflies" to create the kind of tension in society that will help us, as Dr. King wrote in the Letter from Birmingham Jail, "Rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood."

Was Ist Amerikaner Kultur?

Antwort: Dreck.

Astral America

For me there is no truth of the American mainstream militaristic film. I ask of Americans who enjoy these films only that they be Americans who enjoy these films. I do not ask them to be intelligent, sensible, original. Very basically, I'm tired of Americans who do not understand the immanence of ideology in their own media. The Internet Movie Database has a tendency to do that. A film is simply one piece of a larger American ideological superstructure. But no film, no musical genre, no artist, or director can ever be the entirety of an ideological attitude. IMDB users have unrealistic expectations for anything they think you're labeling as a "propaganda film". Hardly anybody is in the business of making "propaganda films" these days. Most propagandists work in documentary making, for example Michael Moore. I think the modern documentary is truly the last vestige of traditional propaganda.

'Films that tell a story' are into doing something much more subtle. But it works quite well at giving us attitudes we like, attitudes we think fits with our lives, an outlook we find acceptable, and even giving examples of things we ought to find acceptable, etc.

Films unintentionally put up a smokescreen, or a facade, which says this film is not to be taken "seriously". I can only say to this that 1940s Looney Toons shows, with all their acerbic propaganda and definitive purpose, appear to say it is not meant to be taken "seriously" either. Yet we watch these now and immediate understand them as serious propaganda. While the films are simply reflecting American ideology, it is also insulating their own propaganda. It is a form of cultural communication, the culture talking to itself. And understood this way, it is propaganda, yet not Leni Riefenstahl style. It's a subconscious reflection.

To Live and Die in Istanbul

Turkish politics are heating up. Last weekend in Istanbul a bombing killed none and left 14 wounded. It is not as bad as the Istanbul bombing in 2003 that killed 27, however. Bombings happen nearly five or six times a year, and more often in Istanbul, the cultural center which is closest to the West. But life seems to go on as normal regardless of infrequent PKK attacks.

The newest danger in Turkey seems to be the possibility that the Turkish military might attack Kurdish areas of Northern Iraq, which is one of the r
elatively more peaceful regions in Iraq at the time. A huge military build-up is already on the way towards Southeastern Turkey, to begin attacks against the Kurdish PKK which is a sanctuary for the murderous anti-Turk separatist guerrillas. The US is telling Turkey not to attack Iraq for stability reasons, and the Arabs are complaining that this would ruin Ottoman integrity. Pro-EU Turks argue this would ruin chances to join the EU.

Weapons are easily accessible in Iraq. And the Kurdish PKK party have been using their access to weapons in order to attack economic interests of the Turkish society. It seems that while I am visiting Turkey for academic reasons, it would be best not to stray onto the path less-traveled. Tourist areas are attractions for explosive attacks, and in fact Sundays bombing was in front of a McDonald's. Steering away from crowds is the best idea. The US State Department says in its travel advisory that the possibility of terrorist attacks, both transnational and indigenous, remains high in Turkey.

Americans should exercise ''caution and good judgment, keep a low profile, and remain vigilant with regard to their personal security.'' But Turkey is still not on the current travel warnings list. And regardless of the bombing that killed nobody on Sunday, the city of Istanbul is still a safer place to walk than Chicago or Newark which have higher murder rates than, say, Cairo or Istanbul. In fact, the murder trend in American cities is dropping, but overall, the murder rate has risen by 7% since 2003. It would seem somehow perverted to fear walking in Istanbul as compared to Los Angeles, when in Los Angeles one has a greater possibility of being shot, or mugged. There is even a market in LA for renting 9mm Glocks for a day, something one won't find in Istanbul. As Tupac's To Live & Die in LA lyrics testify, LA is the place

...where everyday we try to fatten our pockets
Us niggaz hustle for the cash so it's hard to knock it
Everybody got they own thang, currency chasing
Worldwide through the hard times, warrior faces
Shed tears as we bury niggaz close to heart
What was a friend now a ghost in the dark, cold hearted bout it
Nigga got smoked by a fiend, trying to floss on him
Blind to a broken man's dream...

Media and the Mental Development of the Masses

Steven Johnson's analysis of the newest forms of media and the mental development of the populace is exactly right. He argues that the most debased forms of mass diversion -- video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms -- turn out to be nutritional after all. And he calls this the "sleeper curve".

I believe that this is the one of most important new force altering the mental development of young people today, and I believe it is largely a force for good: enhancing our cognitive faculties, not dumbing them down. And yet you almost never hear this story in popular accounts of today's media. Instead, you hear dire tales of addiction, violence, mindless escapism. It's assumed that shows that promote smoking or gratuitous violence are bad for us, while those that thunder against teen pregnancy or intolerance have a positive role in society. Judged by that morality-play standard, the story of popular culture over the past 50 years -- if not 500 -- is a story of decline: the morals of the stories have grown darker and more ambiguous, and the antiheroes have multiplied.

The usual counterargument here is that what media have lost in moral clarity, they have gained in realism. The real world doesn't come in nicely packaged public-service announcements, and we're better off with entertainment like ''The Sopranos'' that reflects our fallen state with all its ethical ambiguity. I happen to be sympathetic to that argument, but it's not the one I want to make here. I think there is another way to assess the social virtue of pop culture, one that looks at media as a kind of cognitive workout, not as a series of life lessons. There may indeed be more ''negative messages'' in the mediasphere today. But that's not the only way to evaluate whether our television shows or video games are having a positive impact. Just as important -- if not more important -- is the kind of thinking you have to do to make sense of a cultural experience. That is where the Sleeper Curve becomes visible.