Not Watching The News

I can't watch the news. Oh, I can see most of it, headlines on the net & any article I think I can stand to read. But the talk-show analysis I have not been able to stand, not since the day after Robert Mueller’s Congressional testimony — the ghoulish, triumphant ways the press, even the non-trumpian parts of it, characterized what they saw as his failures. Which were, of course, their own. I pitied his obvious, unexpected, frailty.

And so I have watched other things.

Among the latest other things has been a large part of the Prime Suspect series, the ones I remember less well, the later ones. Which I remember less well because they are less good, seasons 4-7. They are less granular, less cross-textured; the thinness of the plot line leaves spots where Mirren has to carry the whole show forward with refusal – silence, wordless ambiguity or submissions, head tilting, angle of neck, eyes lowered, eyes turned away. She has a repertoire of these pauses, but they are not enough.

I decided against Season 5 because I couldn't take the savage dog scenes again – the empty swimming pool, the murder. We're in an age of naked savagery: police shootings the new lynching, the new de facto Jim Crow, the government, this hyena regime, attacking women, children, migrants, the homeless, animals, trees, wildlife reserves, anything and everything that is not a particular section of itself.

So I decided on seasons 3, 4, 6, & 7. 3, because it was so intense, because it so deeply concerned police corruption. I'd forgotten David Thewliss and Ciaran Hinds and was glad to see them again, and to find that Vern/Vera is Peter Capaldi. That season also originated the trope of the soprano children's choir, the mystère des voix Bulgares-type threnody for the innocent.

Knowing how it all ends, though I've forgotten the details of the journey, I'm watching these seasons for Helen Mirren, for the sake of watching a very good artist at work. An artist working; somebody, something working. And Prime Suspect is the longest single arc of Helen Mirren's work that we have.

After season 3 there are no women writers. Meredith Oakes has story credit for the first of the three 1995 movie-length episodes of what is not called Prime Suspect 4. The rest are written by men,

The final season is a study in cruelty – Tennison as old & unfuckable, childless, butch-ish, on the verge of dotage; burnt out, alcoholic, quasi-incompetent; alienated, orphaned, futureless. Her face is flat-lit and pale, her blonde hair fading and wispy, her grey skirt the colour of the office curtains and chairs and carpet and corridors. There's nothing left but the occasional white flash of anger in the depths of her blue, blue eyes.

At the end she's slumped on the floor of the interrogation room, next to the just-confessed murderer, a 14 year old girl. The OIC and others enter, having watched the interrogation from behind one-way glass. Mirren says, looking down, "You've got what you wanted," and it seems that one of the meanings of that line is: the complete humiliation and defeat of Detective Superintendent Jane Tennison who, through her own fault, her own impossible refusals and demands, is now so alone and lonely a murderous child sucked her in.

Somehow I do not think that is quite what Lynda La Plante would have done to or with that character.

Yes, the final scene of the episode is of Jane Tennison giving her horrible retirement party the slip (with male stripper in police costume), striding along the footpath into a probably alcohol-free unknown. She is gathered and determined; she refuses to take any part in the kind of party she specifically asked not to have, which features and celebrates the bullying, blokey police culture she was never prepared to join nor able to defeat.

Forsaken, almost human, she sank not beneath their wisdom.

I can see how the concept plays on the page, but that's not the effect of watching The Final Act. One striding-away scene after 3 hours of alcoholic failure as a cop, a daughter, a sister, an aunt, to mother or be a mother, a girlfriend or wife – after three hours of that kind of lighting, the effect is to leave you feeling there is nothing left, that there was never any point to any of it. The bullying, blokey culture would have pinned the tail on the wrong donkey or on none at all; the victims are still dead, their families are still bereft, and there's nothing to say thank you for, or to. Justice is a long way away.

In 2006, the nadir of Bush 2, when Final Act was made, the only hopeful scene on screen was the destruction of the Houses of Parliament in V for Vendetta.

In 2019, watching the sterilization of Tennison's gesture towards legacy, her gift of art to the young girl artist – that is, watching the destruction of the autonomous feminine of two generations, and seeing the hard light and concrete of what's shown to remain – leaves me wretched.

And then suddenly that extraordinary shot flashes into my mind: the shot at the end of the scene in the café where, following the steps of AA, Bill Otley apologizes to Tennison for trying to ruin her career. The last sequence in the café scene shows Tennison walking away. Then the camera goes back to Otley. He looks upward, to his left, mouth hanging open as though gasping for air; the lighting illuminates his head as though he has just been endowed with salvation.

That is the other thing Tennison is walking away from, bless her: the enduring sanctimoniousness of the conventional answer.

If Tennison isn’t some kind of role model, if a life’s work like hers is nothing but failure, then the whole value-system deserves to be walked away from: supposed virtue as well as certifiable vice.

Stained Windows & Xfixes

Mark Mordue reminded me of staring at stained glass windows out of boredom.

What you absorb staring at stained glass out of boredom! At stone or brick walls, through windows, at gardens, statues, sky! (Newtonian gravity slowing the brick's ascending arc, muscles and the sun rippling on the brickie's labourer's back.)

Those Stations of the Cross in so many parish churches: cream bas-relief, the figures so exaggeratedly moulded they seemed about to fall off the wall, Mary & Veronica minor-key harmonics of the anguished Holy Face… rounded calves & thighs, strained & cabled tendons, gaping spear-wounded flesh…

There was a slightly self-conscious modernization in the illustration style of a lot of ecclesiastical art & devotional artefacts & ephemera from the mid-’60s to the mid-‘70s, of catechisms, prayer-books, rosary beads, saints’ medals, holy pictures, gospel study handouts. The very streamlined illustrations in paper media seemed to emanate from the U.S.

The crucifixes of South Australian Catholic churches & cathedrals from the mid-’60s to the mid-‘70s were often designed & executed by Middle-European artists who came to Australia after World War II. These were noticeably more symbolic than those of the old style derived from the southern (mostly Italian) renaissance art & its C16-C19th descendants.

I suspect this was symptomatic of new confidence, consumerism, money and medicine: a not necessarily consciously-formulated perception that life was no longer itself a kind of crucifix, no longer had to be "offered up," was no longer predominantly made of or for or by constant difficulty and unrelieved suffering.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Yesterday, for reasons unknown to God or man, I wanted to look at the weather forecast. I was waiting for a phone call so I tapped the weather app on my phone.

When I got there, there were text boxes. Essentially: we want access to your location & other material on your phone/in your cloud storage. (This app had come with the phone, I’m pretty sure. Yes, it did. I’ve been using it occasionally for going on for two years.)
Read our privacy policy
I understand / Uninstall

The app said I could alter things later in my settings. (I’m not so late to the party as to believe anything I want to do will be in the settings.)

Standover tactics have always got my back up. I Uninstalled and the thing went away. Presumably.

This meant that I needed a new weather app. Looked online, and each one I was considering wanted access to my photographs in storage “beyond [my] device,” my location, or other collections / clutches & records of information on my phone. One of them, whose name is lost to infamy by my swift decision to move on to the next possibility – also wanted access to my text messages and browsing history.

By this time I was ready to scream: why do you want access to my photos, texts, contacts, phone messages, and browsing history? You’re telling me the weather! And I pay for your app by suffering your ads to occupy part of my screen!

Why do you want access to my location? I want weather information about a particular place. Where I am is not necessarily related to my search! GET OUT OF MY STUFF!

Long story short, though I did download one of these horrors I found out how to uninstall it. I’ll get my weather information somewhere else, thank you.

I PAID FOR THIS PHONE. And it wasn’t cheap.
I OWN IT. And it wasn’t cheap.

In the world of Amazon’s self-publishing, “unpublish” does not mean “delete,” even though we might want it to. On Facebook “delete” means “unpublish,” even though we press a button or link that specifically says: Delete. Amazon and Facebook both retain our files not matter what we, the alleged owners, might have wanted or even explicitly asked them to do with them.

Even though Amazon and Facebook have long worked & traded on the difference between ownership and control: I DO NOT AGREE THAT CONTROL TRUMPS OWNERSHIP.

I know every remaining app on my phone does much the same thing, and there’s somewhere between little and nothing I can do about it.

And so we come to Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for A Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (Public Affairs, New York, 2019).

The basic situation that Zuboff describes is this: there are two sets of activity on the internet for every single thing we do. The first, the one we are aware of, consists of the searches we make & the results we get, the pictures we put on Facebook or Instagram, the things we say on Twitter, and so on. These are the trails we are aware of, and this trail was the thing there was public concern about when website cookies were new. The concern with cookies was that our fondly imaged to be anonymous jaunts across the web could be tracked and we, money-having creatures, could be advertised to on the basis of our cyber-tracks, and persuaded to buy, or, at greater jeopardy, tracked for political or law-enforcement reasons.

However, for each of our overt and intended actions there is an unacknowledged second stream of data created simply because the net works the way it does. This data is pretty much the source of Google’s fortune: it is extremely granular, recording our behaviour in such detail that highly accurate predictions can be made about it. Selling these predictions to advertisers is what Google began doing very early on – it ceased not being evil about 2002. Selling these predictions to advertisers is Google’s core business.

Internet surveillance was ignored as a civil rights issue in the U.S. particularly because of the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. At that moment preventing another attack became the new Department of Homeland Security's highest priority, and was made highest priority of the intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

Before the Spaniards invaded Mexico they first laid claim to it. They did this by means of declarations, written in charters which were kept in chests on the ships to be conveyed back to the king. They were written in a language the Indians did not understand; they made the Indians subjects of the king, subject to the king’s punishments for disobedience. “Disobedience” covered everything from existing to resisting.

Those declarations removed the land and its inhabitants, flora, fauna, minerals and other contents, from inchoate social space into private space owned and ruled by a single identifiable entity. Those declarations were the written foundation/justification for the crimes of invasion and colonialism.

Before attacking villages, as sufficient notice, the invaders whispered these declarations into their cuffs.

Zuboff points out that Google and other corporations have laid claim to the second stream of data our internet activity creates, which originated in and was also part of common, inchoate social space. Like the land and people of the Americas.

(When a declaration is made about common space that was barely conceptualized before, it is named and defined and identified, and identified as now being under the rule of a particular and foreign and other entity. In the matter of "Netiquette," I've always wondered who declared, who had the right to declare, on behalf of everyone, and despite the labels on 16mm documentary film cans everywhere, that "all caps is shouting." I have shouted above. Oh, why not. The whole thing is to scream.)

Google and later others, such as Microsoft, and lately our friendly, corporate ISPs, were never forthcoming about the second stream/set of data that everyones’s internet activity generates. They have acted at all times to obscure its existence.

Zuboff maintains that this data, created by the users of the internet, should belong to the users. That is, it should belong to us, to be used as we see fit, not as large, secretive, profit-driven companies see fit. The fact that this stream of data is not being treated as belonging to the people who create it constitutes an unimaginably large, new kind of theft.

Zuboff sees ongoing research into more ways to use this data to manipulate users through apps for commercial gain, particularly at this scale, as a new form of colonialism. Oh, says the screen you're not supposed to watch while you're driving, you’ve been to this restaurant before. How about now, since you're driving past...

But these commercial applications of highly accurate behavioural predictions are just the beginning. The next obvious application is political, surveillance of all of us and our political activity via the COINTELPRO boxes in our pockets, the face recognition technology in CCTV cameras in public spaces interior and exterior, the fridges and personal digital assistants which listen to more than our commands, the smart TVs that watch us as we watch them. An Internet of Things constantly detecting and reporting... All the dystopias anyone’s ever nightmared about, everywhere, all the time.

Nowhere will be unmonitored. Sanctuary will cease to exist.

Industrial capitalism came to terms with labour and ultimately supported the workers it employed, Zuboff says; this was a social contract that was explicitly negotiated. (Though it did take bloody battles from the Luddites to the New Deal for labour to accomplish that.)

Surveillance capitalism has made no such agreement: the sheer speed of the tech firms in seizing this data leaves the deliberative processes of democracy far behind. If lawmakers don’t know what’s being done they cannot gather information about it, debate it, legislate.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a complex and lucid book, a formidable accomplishment. However, I do think its predictions for the future may rest on a fact not often alluded to in overviews like this: most of us have less and less money.

Google & its pards can poke us all they like, point us at any point of sale they like, but we have less and less money. They can advertise what they like using all the data since the Big Bang; but without money, we just ain’t buyin’. Google, etc., are getting so rich, determined as they are to force us back into the dust from which we came, I can see them collapsing for lack of users/used to throw to their actual customers, the vendors who pay for super-reliable predictive sales data.

And so it seems to me that our general financial impoverishment will make political surveillance and ever-nastier law enforcement the enduring purposes of the net. (And Google and FB will join law enforcement to keep themselves relevant and solvent.)

A note on author photos:

Shoshana Zuboff, the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, a formidable intellect, complex, comprehensive, and lucid:

While I was reading this I did what I always do when I’m greatly taken with a book: I gaze at the author photo wondering where and how, under the skin, between muscle and bone, the writer stores the magic that’s in the writing.

Zuboff’s both is and is not a very female photo. There are 4 circles close to its centre: the lenses in her glasses & the hoops of her earrings, a small, cheerful, symmetrical path through the picture, echoed by the curls at the end of her hair and the round pendant below her neckline. There are counter-currents creating tension, too: short hair brushed to her right but long hair falling over her left shoulder; her straight gaze.

And yet it’s a puzzling photo. Two of the fingers of her right hand are bent. I finally realized my question actually was: why is the author’s right hand in this photo at all?

Her gaze is direct. Without her hand the photo is still interesting: her hand has not been placed on her right cheek quest to enliven an otherwise boringly symmetrical composition. Without her hand cradling her right cheek, we are left with Zuboff’s very direct gaze and her perfectly symmetrical face and eyes. Perfectly matching eyes are unusual and arresting in themselves.

In Anglo culture, at least, a direct and unwavering gaze is a challenge. It’s “staring,” it’s “rude,” particularly if it’s coming from a woman.

Placed along her cheek, cradling or supporting her cheek, Zuboff’s hand is a much larger element in the image than her eyes and their remarkable gaze. The angle between her hand and her wrist is awkward and sharp; it directs the viewer’s eyes to her neck and throat, vulnerable areas, showing age, indicating fragility and mortality. Zuboff’s right hand de-emphasizes her gaze. Its positioning directs the portrait into the semantic area of I'm just a girl, works to lessen or remove any sense of challenge the reader might feel in the face of either her eyes or intellect.

And yet it also works against its intended distraction.

By stretching the skin on her cheek, her hand stretches her smile. The left side of Zuboff’s mouth seems to be smiling (the upturned end of her lips), but the right side does not. The smile has become a grimace. Her lips can still be read as smiling if the viewer isn’t paying much attention. That the positioning of her hand may not have been the original concept of the portrait seems indicated by her two bent fingers. They suggest that she isn’t committed to this placement, isn’t “authorizing” it, isn’t anxious to smooth over the subversion of the image its inclusion has led to.

A direct and close-up gaze is generally avoided in women’s author pix. After a short and informal survey of author pix on a local literary website, this is the range of poses I find:

Medium shots:
the writer’s body faces the camera/viewer but her gaze does not
the writer’s gaze is directed towards the camera/viewer but her body is not

Close-ups:
the writer’s face is turned towards the camera/viewer but her gaze is directed above the camera/viewer
the writer’s face looks upward to the camera/viewer
the writer’s body and face both fully face the camera/viewer, but her head is tilted

There are lots of smiles.

By not aligning the writers’ faces/gazes with their bodies, all these poses lessen authorial assertion, conviction, or challenge.

These conventions are so enduring and so well understood they are gleefully parodied in this portrait:

But, delightful as it is, this photo was taken a long time ago.

If parody is the best or all we can do in the face of these imperatives / conventions / imperatives, then we're already in a panopticon beyond the dreams of glass, a digital debtors' Bedlam and prison which no-frill phones won't be enough to dismantle.

The Wheel of Fortune

We were launching Golems Waiting Redux at Publication Studio in 2011. Friends came, bringing an old friend who has bicycled all over the world. This friend mentioned that he worked near the Houses of Parliament in London; the Millennium Wheel is been built where he used to park his bicycle.

I don’t know why this remark struck me so forcefully, even though quietly, that it stayed with me ever since, but it did, and it has. I’ve looked at photos of the wheel across the river from the Houses of Parliament, understood at a gut level that the location of the Wheel was the announcement of a new world, a new regime, an insult to old physical and organizational structures; its sheer size a trumping, trouncing shout that former gravities have been overthrown.

But despite all this I couldn’t quite grasp why it was a giant Ferris wheel that said so.

The thought would nag at me from time to time, or rather, my lack of understanding would.

Sometime late in 2017 the faithful dinner companion and I were watchingAgnes Varda's Faces places – blu-ray from our local county facility – and, as always, disappointed that the dream has ended, needing to be less brutally ejected into the word we live in, we watched the bonus material.

There was a group photo of all the European directors present at that year’s Cannes. We watched it being set up, and then captured by a thousand points of light / flash-assisted, wild-game long-lenses.

At that moment something very strange happened to me.

The faithful and I, watching bonus material all our lives, have always felt an unspoken fellowship with the directors, cinematographers and other creators of the flick. Being writers we always felt that we were engaged in the same activity: creating something that did not exist before, seeing it, hammering like Hephaestus until the words fitted like gold to airy thinness beat. Feeling that lighting, blocking, acting, directing are cognate activities, talking about the deleted scenes - should have been included, trimmed or deleted altogether - looking at this nuance, that implication, marvelling, examining, talking shop.

But this photo at the 2017 Cannes was different. The day was grey and the colouring was odd, a kind of grey sepia. The people standing on the stage there looked alien to me, when they never would have before. The thought crossed my mind: these are the people in charge of what we see. They seemed to belong to a completely different sphere or species, to have stepped in from another universe.

The Wheel by Parliament is the ancient & mediaeval Wheel of Fortune. That was an undercurrent of my original take on it. But I didn't understand its sudden, loud, declarative appearance, or its shout of victory.

Its appearance now is relevant because of precisely this: the vast gap between those who have wealth / power / cultural capital / achievement / fame, and the rest of us.

The Wheel is evoked instinctively in societies of great inequality.

Moving from our sofa into the photo taken at the Cannes Film Festival would create such a radical transformation of our income, housing, healthcare, clothing, diet, location, mobility, choices and liberties that it is literally unimaginable.

So radical and swift and complete… It would feel as though it could be explained only by the intervention of Fortuna (or that bastard derivation, Destiny), whose deeds have long been represented by the Wheel.

And lest we forget… The Wheel rotates through the whole 360 – losing a job / healthcare / housing, becoming ill and homeless would be such a radical transformation downwards as to be the kind of horror in prospect that keeps you working, head down, lips buttoned, silent, for years or decades. This part’s not inconceivable or unimaginable at all. It’s a street away, a block away, a supervisor away.

The Wheel is evoked instinctively in societies of great inequality.

Our Signature Activity

Some books of contemporary essay leave me muttering, “I’m not your therapist.”

Porn is essentially voyeurism. Surveillance – all those drone-shots in all those military & espionage movies, security cameras, speed cameras – is essentially voyeurism. When information is currency, voyeurism becomes the culture's signature attitude & activity. Memoir becomes voyeurism…