Writings by Pat Hartman.
My main claim to fame is the zine Salon: A Journal of Aesthetics, 25 issues published from 1988 to 1998. My book, Call Someplace Paradise, can be found here.
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04/01/2002 - 04/30/2002
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Tuesday, April 30, 2002
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A Western and So Much More
The Hired Hand, a movie directed by Peter Fonda in 1971, was re-released in a restored version at the 2001 Venice Film Festival. This news interested me because The Hired Hand is one of my personal top ten Best Movies You Probably Never Saw, and I'm delighted to see it get some recognition.
Written by Alan Sharp, the maximally character-driven script is a relationship story disguised as a western. Thanks to Vilmos Zsigmond, it gets an A for cinematography, with trippy stuff like multiple exposures of glorious lush natural vistas. What I love about it is, of course, the strong female character Hannah, who is self-defining and sure of her rights without being abrasive, nasty or self-pitying. She's plain but magnetic. Just in case we miss the point, the other female character is nubile, attractive, and miserably unhappy. Here's the story:
Harry and Arch have been bumming around the countryside together for seven years. Dan is a younger fellow who recently started riding with them.
Suddenly Harry announces that he's going home to the wife and daughter he left behind. When they married he was 20 and she was 30 and he can't remember what color her eyes were, but he feels the need to go back and settle down.
The three men ride into a cruddy little town. Dan gets shot by a supposedly wronged husband who then barges into the cantina with a smoking gun, followed by his supposedly raped wife, clutching a blanket around her nakedness. After burying Dan (to the accompaniment of some interesting Bible verses), Harry and Arch decide to go after the killer. They steal his horses and shoot him in both feet.
Arch accompanies Harry back to find Hannah, his abandoned wife, in the place where he's presumed to be dead. It's the fulfillment of every woman's fantasy, that some day he will come back, but Hannah is outwardly unmoved. Harry says "Just let me work the place for a bit like a hired hand." She agrees, on condition that Harry doesn't reveal his identity and upset their daughter.
Alone with Hannah out on the verandah one night, Arch tries to put in a few good words for his friend. She tells him it's just a matter of time before Harry leaves again.
In town, a local yokel taunts Arch about Hannah's reputation for being free with her favors, implying that a whole succession of hired men have done way more than fix the chicken coop. Arch tells Harry about this, and advises him not to judge Hannah or even to ask her any questions. Harry ignores the advice and self-righteously confronts Hannah. Quietly but firmly defiant, she stands up for her rights. Yes, she takes lovers and then kicks them out at will. That's the way she likes it, and who is he to complain? Sexual autonomy is a privilege she's earned by surviving Harry's betrayal. You get the feeling Harry wishes he had never brought it up.
He rides into town and puts up signs on notice boards to alert the citizenry that no further hired hands will be needed out to the Widow Collings.
In another confidential nighttime porch conversation, Hannah tells Arch - truthfully, or out of a need not to appear vulnerable - that one man in her bed is as good as another. She would just as soon sleep with Arch as with Harry or any of the hired men.
When Arch decides to move on, Hannah tells her estranged husband it's for the best, because Arch is as much a rival for his affection as another woman would be. The only hope for their reconciliation is if Harry gives up the male bonding thing. Arch rides away, and the reunited couple make love and declare their tender feelings for each other. Life begins anew.
But soon a messenger arrives with Arch's severed finger, courtesy of the guy with the bullet wounds in his feet, back in the weird town. Harry of course must go to the rescue. Hannah says, "You planned this, you never meant to stay." Harry mounts up and rides off. Arch is in a jail cell, where the killer's miserable, abused wife smuggles him water and, eventually, a pistol. Harry rides into town and starts shooting. Arch escapes, but Harry has been fatally shot. Dying in the dust he says, "Hold me, Arch."
In the last, no-dialog scene, Arch rides back to Hannah's, leading Harry's empty horse. He puts the horses in the barn. It looks as if he and Hannah will have the chance to find out whether one man in her bed is as good as another.
posted by Pat on 9:16 PM |
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Death of Irony: Reports are exaggerated
(written October 2001)
They say September 11 was the day irony died. Yet I believe irony lives.
Plenty of it can be found in the way things are so different, depending on which part of the earth's surface you happened to have been set down on.
In one place, dogs eat vitamin-enriched kibble, wear clothes, and have their nails clipped by professionals. In another place, rabid dogs eat human corpses.
In some countries, people pay for the pleasures of sado-masochism. In others, it's not difficult to wind up in the hands of those who wield whips and cattle prods for free. In our country, the mass murderers store severed body parts in the refrigerator, out of public view. Elsewhere, the pieces are strewn all over the place as a warning.
In some places, a man who makes an unwelcome sexual advance can be taken to court. Elsewhere, the total subjugation of women is an unquestioned fact of life, every kind of abuse their daily expectation. The women of Afghanistan, for instance, are ruled by lunatics, the kind of men who will rape a woman and then execute her on a prostitution charge. Just one of these guys would keep Freud busy for years. Here, such a man would rate the attention of an entire team of FBI profilers. Over there, he gets to call himself holy and run everything.
In one place, a sports arena is where the soccer moms and dads bring their kids for healthful family fun. Elsewhere, a sports arena is where crowds gather to watch executions. In the US, an amputated hand brings out half a dozen emergency vehicles and the limb is packed in ice. The victim goes in for fourteen hours of surgery, perhaps transported by a med-evac helicopter. Elsewhere, hands are cut off on purpose, watched by throngs of people, none of whom can do anything to help, and any civilian taken up in a helicopter is likely to be pushed out of it.
A block from where I live, one household got a head start on Halloween. In a low window there's a lifesize color picture of a grinning skull. In any of several places throughout the world, if a sideways glance toward a neighbor's house revealed a partly decomposed human head, chances are that partly decomposed human head would be real.
To Americans the grinning skull is a party decoration. To someone in another place, it's their parent or child. Like the grinning skull I saw on the website of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. These RAWA women specialize in concealing cameras beneath their burqas, the voluminous tentlike coverings they are forced to wear. Their pictures of beatings, executions, freshly severed limbs, the desiccated remains of massacre victims, and other horrors lit by bright sun against a backdrop of blue sky, are smuggled out to the free world. Many hundreds of women risk their lives to make atrocity photos Afghanistan's number one export. The obscuring veil, the very symbol and instrument of oppression, becomes a weapon turned against the Taliban. The irony of this is nothing short of delicious.
Before proceeding I have to say, clearly and loudly, America is the best country in the world. Unfortunately, that's a lot like being the wellest patient in the hospital. It's still a long way from being healthy.
Our government has a habit of interfering with the internal affairs of other countries at the wrong times, for the wrong reasons, but standing back, if not actually turning away, at other times and for reasons equally as wrong. America comforts itself with the rationalization, "They just hate us because we are rich and powerful." America is like a vainglorious movie star who thinks the critics are only jealous of his wealth and fame. If someone came right out and told him, "No, we hate you because you can't act, you're a jerk, and your breath reeks," he still wouldn't believe it. Jonathan Kwitney's book Endless Enemies is a good place to start understanding the anger felt toward us. As Susan Sontag puts it, "a few shreds of historical awareness" show another side of September 11 and place it in perspective as "a consequence of specific American alliances and actions."
Some commentators call the NY/Washington attacks an "unprovoked blow." But hadn't the US military destroyed a pharmaceuticals factory which turned out to be only a pharmaceuticals factory? Something like that could be construed as provocation. Yeah, but they did something else first, to provoke us...Tracing this stuff back is like listening to your kids squabble in the back seat. "He pinched me first." "Did not. He started it when he kicked me." Pretty soon they're fighting about who did what on a different car trip, last year. You don't want to hear this, you just want them to put a sock in it. One of those kids will have to be the first to grow up and figure out some different way of doing things.
Speaking of maturity, the President's pronouncement that anyone who isn't on our side is on the side of the terrorists, is exactly the type of thinking that's created so much bloodshed and sorrow throughout history.
The national character of America is self-absorbed, uncomprehending, and oblivious to what passes for reality in other places. There are many things about which it can be said of Americans, "They just don't get it." The relative opulence of our society blinds us to so much. When we hear of other people being injured, we may hark back to medical experiences of our own, which may have been at least partly pleasant. Painkillers, flowers, candy, attention, being treated like someone special. It's a whole different thing to be wounded or ill in a place where there are no antibiotics, clinics, or clean water, and nobody can be bothered with you because their own problems are even worse.
Whenever Americans are targeted, there's a collective gasp of disbelief that might puzzle an eavesdropping visitor from outer space. This stranger might form the impression that an American life is worth five, ten, or a hundred times as much as any other kind of life. America is smug in its superiority. For instance, there's an attitude about how everybody in the world should speak English, and why in hell should we bother to learn their stupid languages? The result: several governmental departments are wishing, right about now, that they had more Arabic speakers on staff.
Corporate America sells every weapon of destruction to every side in every war. How could we have expected to go on indefinitely, building our national wealth on armaments, with nary a repercussion? Military America equips the world with money, guns and advanced training, then it's "Ta ta, run along now and kill each other." How could we have thought all that evil karma would never rebound on us? The truly ironic part is, if World War III really gets up and rolling, nobody's going to get rich off it. People who own yachts die from nuclear, biotoxic, or chemical warfare just like regular folks. We'll all be equally dead. All our bank accounts will be set back to zero. All our credit cards will expire.
A military analyst named Joseph C Cyrulik wrote in an Army publication, "an enemy can inflict pain to the point that the people demand a change in the government's policies." For some Americans, the changes they demand are inimical to every principle of the Constitution. They want more restrictions, more face scanning, more wiretaps - more of every item on an outrageous shopping list that must have the founding fathers spinning in their graves.
But all the surveillance that's already been imposed didn't prevent those attacks. Isn't it rather naive to think doubling or tripling the amount of techno-spying will prevent future catastrophes? What's needed is not more of the same, but something entirely different.
By the way, how did suspects on the FBI's watch list manage to board airplanes without the FAA hearing about it? Yeah I know, the sharing of information between federal agencies is a freedom-slayer, and no libertarian ought to be in favor of it. But we know that federal agencies do share a ton of information every day, to catch deadbeat dads, illegal immigrants, child molesters, and other undesirables. So as long as they're going to do it anyhow, how come they didn't do it when it really mattered?
There's a lot to be said for the idea that terrorism only works if it causes people to change the way they live their lives. The Taliban mob have already succeeded in setting us on the road to totalitarianism. "If we allow these attacks to alter our basic freedoms, then the enemy will have won," says the ACLU, and it's right.
"......to the point that the people demand a change in the government's policies." What if, instead of begging for more useless "security" measures, there could be a whole different kind of change? What if the change America demanded of its government was for it to stop doing the things that cause so much of the world to justifiably hate us? Maybe we do need to change the way we live our lives. Some definitive thing is needed to convince America to change for the better. Sadly, terrorism isn't it.
But hey, I'm very, very glad to be a citizen of the US for so many reasons. For instance, we've got the American Red Cross to offer advice on how to survive the stress of a terrorist attack.
"Avoid viewing repeated media coverage of the event." Here, we can choose whether to do that or not. Elsewhere, TVs and VCRs and rounded up and burned, and the Internet is banned.
"Talk it out," the Red Cross advises anxious Americans. Over here, that's good advice. You join a support group and share your innermost feelings and the emotional turmoil subsides. Elsewhere, a wrong word in the wrong ear can get you taken away at 3 a.m. Imagine being a woman in Afghanistan, knowing the little son you cuddle today will likely grow up to be a Talib. In just a few short years he's going to be your absolute master, with the power of life and death over you. Here, parents worry that their kids will blow them in to DARE for smoking pot.
"Ask for help if you need it," is the ARC's advice to Americans. Here, some degree of help is available for most people in dire predicaments, even if a series of bureaucratic hurdles must be jumped in order to qualify. Elsewhere, there is no help. Ask for it all you want , need it desperately - it's simply not there.
Even when we want to do the right thing, our efforts are often maladroit and counterproductive - like buying slaves to end slavery. All over the world people think, "Look at those greedy Americans, why don't they help us?" And no matter how many dollars we give for humanitarian aid, chances are the food we send will never reach its intended recipients, but be captured by the bad guys and sold on the black market to buy more guns. In Afghanistan, the ration packets we "snowdrop" for the innocent sufferers are just as easily harvested up by the monsters. No matter how much we want to help the starving, we probably can't, and that's pretty damn ironic.
"Listen to other people," the Red Cross says. A tough assignment, but once in a while Americans manage it. Listening to others is, after all, a key value of our culture, advocated by all the self-improvement books. It helps us make friends, connections, and sales. Elsewhere, listening to the wrong people can get you taken away at 3:30 a.m.
"Be especially kind to others." Again, we have the luxury of choice in this matter. By and large, Americans will do a kind thing that doesn't involve too much inconvenience. Elsewhere, there are whole countries ruled by grim monomaniacal ogres who never give a thought to kindness and who have never, ever wished anyone a nice day.
"Spend time with your family." Around here, most people have the option of getting together with the relatives for Thanksgiving. Elsewhere, "spend time with your family" is a bitter joke because they're all in a stinking mass grave.
"Return to your usual routine." I wish the ARC hadn't put it quite that way. Maybe the more productive course would be to not return to our normal ways, but to put more energy into politically educating ourselves, and/or praying. Elsewhere, though, the idea of getting back to the mundane is another of those unfunny jokes.
And they just get unfunnier. "Find a peaceful, quiet place to reflect and gain perspective." Most Americans could probably make it to some chapel or nature spot for a spell of meditation. Elsewhere, there are no cars to jump into, no buses or trains in which to escape. Find a peaceful place! Hordes of people are trying to do that very thing. They're called refugees, and there are millions of them.
In the wake of September 11, the program directors of a giant radio syndicate put together a list of songs they didn't think should be played. (If Dylan's "Neighborhood Bully" wasn't on the list, it should have been.) As it turned out, two of these songs were performed by stars during a disaster benefit telethon for the victims. Is that not ironic? How about the fact that an American entertainment corporation responded to an attack by narrowminded intolerant religious cranks who hate freedom, by issuing a list of songs its employees shouldn't play? Not ironic yet?
Madonna and thousands of others wear stars and stripes as clothing, and are cheered for their patriotism. During the Vietnam war, people got arrested for dressing in facsimile flags. I don't know whether that's irony, but it's something very near.
In the light of what we're learning about ubiquitous government surveillance of online communications, it's laughably ironic that just a short time ago the big issue was those darn cookies snuck onto our hard drives for the benefit of advertisers.
One of the worst things about enemies is how they make you forget about your own most cherished values. It's an ugly irony that the very principles America was founded on are being held up to question. That hurts. Thinking about religious tolerance, for instance - one of the bedrock values - can make us awfully uncomfortable these days. How are we supposed to react to a bunch of Islamist fanatics? Profile the hell out of them, round them up and kick their ass right out of here. Then there's racial tolerance. We're against ethnic cleansing, and we punish other nations for engaging in it. But plenty of Americans would like to wipe out every last Arab on the planet. "That's different." Of course it is. Irony, anyone?
And then there's a whole category of stuff that would be ironic if it were true, but none of these items could possibly be true. Even though they are reported in reputable, big-league media, who in their right mind could believe these things? For instance, it seems that our Chief Executive used to be in business with Osama bin Laden's big brother. Okay, let that one go for now. Nobody wants to be held accountable for the actions of their family members. Lord knows I don't.
But how about this one? A New Yorker article quoted an FBI man who admitted "a scenario like the one that wrecked downtown Manhattan and part of the Pentagon had not been conceived of." The Department of Defense has a $300 billion annual budget. In theory, some portion of the amount is allotted to paying people to think. All that money and military brainpower brought to bear on issues of national defense and security, and nobody thought of this possibility? Yet the Director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare says his agency has known for years that Iran trained people to fly commercial aircraft into civilian targets. Hey, there were kamikaze pilots back in WWII. And nobody thought of it?
The New Yorker also interviewed an architect who worked in the WTC and is a great fan of its structural integrity. She says the towers were built to withstand the accidental impact of a jet (or at least the kind they had 30 years ago) but "nobody thought about the fuel." A twelve-year-old developing his first computer game could have thought of it. All these high-priced smart talented experts, the people who run the world, who get the big bucks for making decisions and acting on our behalf - they didn't think of it. Granted, there probably would still have been no way to prevent the tragedy. That they were unable to do anything about it is understandable. Not having thought of it is unforgivable.
Here's another wild tale: Just 4 months before the attacks on NY and Washington, our government gave the bad Afghans $43 million. For not growing poppies. Isn't that the silliest thing you ever heard? I could refer the govt. to someone who would agree not to grow poppies for a mere $1 million. Astute businessman that he is, our President wouldn't pass up such an opportunity to save the taxpayers $42 million, would he? And my candidate wouldn't have spent the money on fake passports or aviation school tuition.
There's a really far out story about why the US got to be such good buddies with the Taliban in the first place. These supposedly reputable news sources would have us believe there's an American business called Unocal that wanted to run a gigantic pipeline through Afghanistan to bring oil from central Asia to Pakistan and the sea. And the Taliban promised to fix it so they could. (Why is it that when some kind of really dirty dealing goes on in the international scene, so often what lurks behind it is the lust for oil? Oil has far surpassed gold in its power to corrupt and maim nations.) Anyhow, this would mean we cozied up to a coalition of murderous lunatics for the sake of fuel to run our jet skis and leaf blowers. Isn't that the most absurd thing you ever heard?
Especially in the light of what the hemp proponents have been telling us all these years: with hemp biomass, we could produce enough fuel to be an energy-independent nation. If the US government weren't addicted to anti-drug hysteria, it could tell the sheiks to get lost, and at the same time save the American farm with guaranteed full employment. Wouldn't it be ironic if America remains in thrall to the Arab countries just because of its stubborn, paranoid refusal to acknowledge that industrial hemp is no more a drug than alfalfa is? If willful stupidity about one species of vegetation is the only reason the oil producing countries have us in a chokehold - wouldn't it be ironic?
One more crazy story: the US created the Taliban. A while back, the American military sent out the call for every Islamist nutcase in the hemisphere to gather in Afghanistan. American power and influence patched together this monster and pointed it at the Russians. Osama bin Laden, good anti-Russian that he was, got from us $3 billion and top-notch training for his guerillas. (Some say he has gone to ground in a high-tech hidey hole constructed by our very own CIA. Irony may not be the most accurate word to describe this situation, but it is the kindest one.)
So what if his minions were behind the bombings of a couple embassies and of the World Trade Center in '93?. We knew the guy was a pit bull, but he was our pit bull, and we thought we had him on a leash. Just like with Iraq, Panama, Somalia, and Haiti, we supplied the weapons, technology and know-how to another military dictatorship that would turn around and bite its benefactor.
So came the day when Russia finally had to give up trying to subdue Afghanistan. In what one foreign policy expert characterizes as a typical example of "US intrusion followed by neglect," America pretty much lost interest too. This year, we only gave the Taliban $125 million in foreign aid, and basically blew off Afghanistan. But the Taliban was still there. The oil boys and the anti-drug warriors energized and fed the monster, and set it loose on the villagers. Pretty soon the monster tired of such easy pickings and decided to go after Dr. Frankenstein.
Who in their right mind could ever believe a scenario like that? It would be just beyond ironic. It would be insane.
This conflict is a mess for sure, and the only good thing to come out of it so far is an impassioned and immortal piece of writing by Tamim Ansary. "An Afghan-American Speaks" started as an e-mail to a small circle of friends and has now been published around the globe. Ansary reminds us that the people of Afghanistan have been the victims of a "cult of ignorant psychotics" for a long time. He makes the excellent point that it's no use bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age because the Soviets already took care of that little chore. He points out that the Taliban are the only people with the means to escape or hide, leaving behind a nation of disabled orphans as targets.
I have to agree with Mr. Bush on one thing - it's stupid to waste missiles to knock down tents and camels. It would be useful to have something like a neutron bomb (kills people, spares buildings) only different. What's needed here is a totally new concept - a bomb that eliminates homicidal maniacs and spares regular people. Unfortunately no bomb is that smart. Even the most surgical of strikes will kill the innocent. It really sucks, but ten to one the only workable solution is to send ground troops that can at least see what they're shooting at. To wantonly destroy the people of Afghanistan can only help the Taliban. With a smaller, more controllable population they can get that oil pipeline built or whatever else they may want to do.
The people of Afghanistan are like the families in an inner city housing project that's been taken over by the Crips or the Bloods, and we all know what that's like. Of what use is it to make them suffer to the point where even the Taliban starts to look good?
This conflict isn't really between the America and Afghanistan, or even between Christianity and Islam. It is, as always, between the psychopaths and the sane people; between the big guys who create and profit from war, and the ordinary people who just want to be left alone to live some kind of life.
The people in power over there do things against the will of the ordinary person, just like the people in power here often do things I don't want them to do. But guess what? They don't consult me. Never mind that nonsense about voting. I wasn't asked to vote on giving bin Laden and his thugs all that money. Nobody gave the ordinary Afghan a chance to vote on destroying the World Trade Center, no more than my government gave me a chance to vote on whether to bomb a factory.
A long time ago I read in a science fiction anthology a story based on a memorable idea. Two countries had issues with each other, and instead of going to war they each chose one champion, the strongest, most fearsome soldier, to fight it out on everybody's behalf. And I seem to remember a similar tale where the solution was even more refined - the two smartest chess players met up for a match to decide which side won. These stories were supposed to be futuristic, and the future is here. So how about it?
Yeah, it's a crazy idea - but no crazier than what's been showing up lately in the real news.
posted by Pat on 9:07 PM |
Sunday, April 28, 2002
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Adam and Eve of Hip Comedy
A kind friend provided a tape of a documentary about the career of Mike Nichols and Elaine May, the Adam and Eve of hip comedy. (Nichols went on to become a highly original film director, responsible for, among others, The Graduate, Catch-22, Carnal Knowledge, and Silkwood.)
The distinctive thing about Elaine May as a comedienne is that she was neither plain like Lily Tomlin nor cute like Gilda Radner, but debutante beautiful, model beautiful. Looks of course don't affect the range of character an actress can play, but having someone so comely to work with must have made life easier for the makeup, costume and lighting crews. Nichols was a handsome and quite presentable youth but behind all the stage makeup the poor guy looked like the Joker in Batman comics, or a vampire.
In vaudeville and early TV, the paradigm for comedy teams was the straight person and the funny person. May and Nichols may have been the first pair to fill both roles simultaneously. In those less sophisticated days, comics who were used to the non-visual media of radio and recordings probably laughed at their own jokes all the time. In many sketches, you notice May and Nichols couldn't help cracking up at their own material, even though coming from the Second City comedy troupe, they must have been accustomed to live performance before an audience with eyes.
I remember as a kid seeing them on TV, but in circumstances where it was dangerous to laugh at lines like, "It's a moral issue...so much more interesting than a real issue." The documentary is a combination of their performances interspersed with interviews with other show biz figures. Steve Martin, for instance, says he used to listen to Nichols and May while falling asleep, in the same way I used to listen to Lenny Bruce.
In one sketch, Elaine appears on the left side of a split screen, the archetypal Mom, while Mike is on the right, as her grown-up son. It's a phone conversation, a dead-on portrayal of maternal possessiveness, one of the most perfect works of satire ever created - and I do mean ever. It was brilliant for its time, and every word holds up today. It might even be perennial - comprehensible in Shakespeare's day and throughout the foreseeable future. One of the commentators says Nichols and May were like music, the contrapuntal thing, and in this piece that musical element is apparent.
In one sketch, May is a funeral home employee and Nichols a bereaved relative. Their interaction is reminiscent of the way certain software companies function. You don't get what you think you paid for, but find an endless series of add-ons are necessary to make the program work.
In another bit, he's a dentist and she's having her teeth worked on. They enact a schmaltzy romantic scene worthy of a 40s movie, with orchestra music swelling to enhance the drama. The lovely Elaine emotes her way through the dialog with a spit vacuum tube dangling from her mouth and a big bib flapping on her front.
At times they collaborated with animators. One sketch, from Michael Sporn Animation, is a conversation between a couple in bed, which couldn't be shown on TV in those days. The screen is entirely black except for the two pair of eyes which tell the whole story.
Robin Williams in his appreciation of Mike Nichols notes that he was "happy to be a flaming asshole." For example, in a sketch where May played an awards presenter, Nichols portrayed "the most total mediocrity in the industry," one of those who bravely go on "quietly and unassumingly producing garbage." This face-slap to the entertainment business was administered during the 11th Annual Emmy Awards broadcast in 1959. May and Nichols were introduced by master of ceremonies Vice President Richard M. Nixon, who said, "We recognize how fortunate we are that these men and women can say what they believe, and you who listen to them, if you don't like it, can turn to another channel." Right on!
posted by Pat on 9:17 PM |
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What Would Jakob Do?
There are mouse pads with that question written on them, to keep it eternally before the eyes and in the consciousness of web designers. Who is this Jakob anyway, and why should they want to follow his example?
Jakob Nielsen is the world's leading proselytizer for usability. He is a prophet and revolutionary, in the business of "breaking the chains of oppression," as well as a practical man who tells us exactly how to do it the right way, faster and cheaper than doing it the wrong way. He believes that when a web user punches in www., that person isn't looking for a magical mystery tour, but for a straight-ahead, logical and ultimately productive trip to useful information.
I love authors who grant me vindication. See, I feel the same about the web as I do about a car. It's not supposed to make my life harder, but easier. It's not meant to add more labor to my load, but to relieve me of some of the grunt work. Its purpose is not to plunge me into a labyrinth of confusion, but to free me for higher things. The machine is supposed to be my slave, dammit, not the other way around.
All along, in dealing with the Internet, I've been grumbling "It doesn't have to be so difficult." I look at senseless site maps, and needlessly complicated interfaces, and dead-end pages, and all that stuff, and gripe. More technologically-oriented friends have indicted me as a crank, a fogey who just doesn't understand these new-fangled things.
Yet here is Jakob, putting his foot down: "In general, a flow chart layout should only be used when the information space is in fact structured as an ordered sequence." Amen, brother! Then he puts the other foot down, and stomps all over the time-wasting posers: "Gratuitous graphics simply have to go, including all instances of text rendered as images." As in so many other areas of life, Less Is More.
He's right about tiny search boxes. He's right about outdated information. He's right about query reformulation, which to my mind is the single most necessary survival skill in cyberspace. He is extremely literate. He cares about the misuse of a hyphen. He cares about the difference between affect and effect! I think I'm in love!
Because he makes so much clear and persuasive sense, I enjoyed reading parts of Designing Web Usability that will never have any applicability to my own life. For example, how to conduct a cost-benefit analysis when contemplating expenditure on usability engineering for a company's intranet.
I intuit that Nielsen loves books, and that's precisely why he's such a great web theorist. There's a reason why books have been around so long, and their best features need to be carried over, while the things that aren't appropriate to the new medium need to be left behind.
When D.W. Griffith started to make movies, people at the time didn't understand things like jump cuts and parallel editing - it took a while for the human brain to catch on. Now we comfortably watch stuff with several cuts per second, hundreds per minute. We follow multiple story lines, and perform all sorts of sophisticated mental gymnastics without even being aware that we're doing it. This is why I believe Nielsen when he says the ability of the human race to effectively use the web will improve.
I want to say it's like the "hundredth-monkey" phenomenon, where the monkeys on one island started washing their potatoes and the monkeys on the next island somehow began to do it too. Supposedly, after a certain critical mass is reached, the behavior magically becomes part of the collective consciousness - even when the individual hasn't directly observed it or been taught. Unfortunately, I remember reading that the hundred monkeys example was a fabrication.
Still, something like it does apparently occur even in the lowest lifeforms. One of the mysteries of medicine is how bacteria communicate with each other and tell their cohorts who have never been exposed to an antibiotic, how to neutralize it. And humans running the four-minute mile. After one person had finally accomplished it, suddenly dozens were able to. Then there's Teilhard de Chardin, cosmic evolution, and the noosphere.
All this is a big digression from Nielsen. My point is: however brilliantly humankind as a whole may evolve into synergy with computers and the noosphere-like construct called the World Wide Web, it won't happen tomorrow. Meanwhile, there's nothing to gain by making the thing more complicated, and nothing to lose by taking a little extra time and care to give people an experience that's pleasant rather than nerve-wracking.
This is what Nielsen is talking about. He admits, as few technophiles will, that reading from a screen is no fun. "Hard" and "unpleasant" and "painful" are words that occur again and again in Designing Web Usability.
He doesn't mention this, but part of the misery of reading from a monitor is the ungodly noise computers make. The whine of their innards can be maddening. A Walkman with a music tape is essential equipment if sanity is to be maintained, and that doesn't always mix well with the reading experience.
Anyone with half a teaspoon of awareness knows that most Americans loathe reading. Yet web authors seem to think the average American will sit still to read a lot of pointless verbiage just because it's displayed on a monitor.
Sixties guru Stephen Gaskin has preached for years on the value of "your solid gold attention," the most precious thing you can bestow on another person, on a concept, or even on the mundane tasks of chopping wood and carrying water. Esther Dyson, whose seminars are the hottest ticket in the technical realm, goes on about what a valuable commodity attention is. Nielsen explores the "attention economy" in a sidebar on page 160.
The "attention economy" is what it's all about. If you want my attention, Mr. or Ms. Web Designer, don't hijack it with the thousand and one tricks your tribe have already managed to invent. I want to be wooed, not raped. I want value, not horse manure. And Jakob Nielsen says I'm perfectly within my rights to feel this way.
Now I get it. This book is only nominally for web designers. It's really for users. He wants to make sure we know what we're entitled to. He encourages us to demand the respect and consideration we deserve from the people who want to grab a handful of our solid gold attention.
The man cares about whether things make sense. When confronted with a page about United States Products, illustrated with a picture of the very famous and unique Sydney Opera House, Nielsen does not shrug and say, "So what?" He says (with admirable restraint) it would be smarter not to.
Nielsen believes form should follow function. If you talk the talk you gotta walk the walk. One of his examples: a site that brags the company pays the "strictiest attention to detail." Nielsen doesn't come right out and say it, but he might as well: God is in the details.
He wants to stem the tide of illiteracy that started with zines and pervades so much of the web. I don't know yet if he brings up this issue somewhere, but for me there's importance in accuracy because the young have a tendency to take as gospel what they see on the screen. So there's a moral obligation here, to spell Cincinnati correctly, for instance, which comes to mind because as a copy editor I had a hassle with a teenage writer over that very question. Of his misspelling the kid said, with total conviction, "I got it straight off the Internet." End of discussion.
Then there's accessibility, which is usability for people who find it difficult to "use traditional computer input and output devices in the way they were intended" - a number he puts at 30 million. That is, he points out, too large a market segment for web designers to cavalierly disregard.
In a nutshell, Nielsen's genius lies in how he works both sides of the street, advocating usability not only for the humanitarian reasons, but for the enlightened self-interest reasons so dear to the hearts of profit-seekers. "Every single user votes with every single mouseclick." With one of those What would Jakob do? mousepads on every desk, the world of cyberspace would be a better place.
"Information space is n-dimensional, where n is a very big number." Jakob Nielsen
posted by Pat on 9:15 PM |
Friday, April 26, 2002
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A Trip Through Facets
So I finally got around to looking at some publications from Facets Video that have been in the "to be read" pile since 1998. This company has videos for sale or rent, more thousands of them than Julia Roberts has teeth. Looking through several issues of the Facets newsletter was a real trip. Here's what I learned:
1. A still from a foreign film made long ago prompted a realization: my interest in non-mainstream cinema dates back to when I was a precocious grade-school kid with adult reading privileges. In the shelves of the local library I found books about two films, Last Year at Marienbad and Hiroshima Mon Amour, both with stills from the films along with, I suppose, words from the scripts. It's kind of interesting to trace back a passion to its origin.
2. A movie has been made of The Neon Bible, the first novel by John Kennedy Toole, who is more widely known for writing A Confederacy of Dunces and then committing suicide when he couldn't get it published. (It later won him a Pulitzer.)
3. In the April/May issue of Facets Features, one of the "Critics Choice" picks was Waco: the Rules of Engagement. This movie holds my interest for many reasons, not the least significant of which is that I once interviewed Mike McNulty, who lives around here. Waco: the Rules of Engagement was nominated for an Academy Award, but didn't win. As Cintra Wilson so succinctly noted, "Why recognize a new, present villain like the ATF...when you can trot those photogenic Nazis out, year after year? You'd think impending murders would have some clout over ones committed fifty years ago, but nooooooooooo..."
4. A practical how-to film called Grow Marijuana found its way into the "Travel, Nature, Sports" heading, appropriate to all three.
5. I never again want to hear anyone complain that there are no good movies. How about this one, created by Joe Ambrose and Frank Tynne. Destroy All Rational Thought: "A documentary of the Here to Go event in Ireland, a one-time celebration of the lives of literary outlaw William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin." The Master Musicians of Jajouka are in it. What more could anyone want from a viewing/listening experience?
6. There's CD-ROM where you can "create your own episodes of The Simpsons with 17 characters and voices from the show, more than 35 backgrounds, 250 moving and stationary props, 20 special effects, colorful fades, textures and patterns, and music." Damn! My attention has been on other things, and I had no idea this kind of fun was out there waiting to be had.
7. There's a CD-ROM about Van Gogh and the extremely well-known painting "Starry Night": "Research done at UCLA's Griffith Observatory determined that the painting was most probably a representation of the pre-dawn sky over Saint Remy on June 19, 1889." From those splashy blobs of paint, they can pin it down to the exact day? It reminds me of something I read once, that the earliest historical event capable of being accurately dated occurred on May 28, 585 B.C. An eclipse of the sun interrupted a battle between the Lydians and the Medes. The opposing generals, recognizing the anger of the gods, signed a peace treaty and everybody went home, never again to make war on each other.
8. There's a filmmaker who somehow managed to escape my awareness until now - and boy, do I regret it. If I won the lottery tomorrow, first thing I'd do is order a complete set of her works. And then I'd rent the Aggie, the old downtown theatre that's been turned into a music club but still has a projector, and I'd have a Claire Burch film festival and let everybody in for free.
The subjects covered by this incredible woman include the history of funeral directing in America and the biography of a rebel named Jim Moore called How I Got Out of Jail and Ran for Governor of Indiana. Her main obsession seems to be San Francisco's Peoples Park, its history and denizens. Some of Burch's films are tributes to culture heroes: Bill Graham, Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, James Baldwin. Some are tributes to unknown homeless people, street musicians, artists, poets, the severely disabled, murdered children, and nudists. She documents Wavy Gravy's birthday party, the Oracle, a benefit for Jan Kerouac's medical bills, the National Institute for Art and Disability, the CIA/Contra/Crack connection, the problems of blacks in Oakland. And this was just up until 1998. I've lived my life all wrong. I want to have been Claire Burch.
posted by Pat on 9:04 PM |
Thursday, April 25, 2002
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Her Beauty
This is the face that launched a hundred websites, and its owner majors in self-esteem. Estella Warren speaks of "my beauty" as you or I might speak of "my fingernail." Estella has quite unique light-colored irises, the kind of untrammeled eyebrows popularized by Brooke Shields and, it goes without saying, tousled tawny hair.
But the mouth is weird. The upper lip ascends so far as to be reminiscent of a tragic birth defect. Two gigantic teeth show, and it's questionable whether she could bring that lip down to cover those teeth. Even worse, the glint of gloss emanating from the top edge of the upper lip is blindingly luminescent. In fact, it looks like nothing so much as the mucous-sodden upper lip of a tearful child.
Recall how Courtney Love seized upon the violated girlchild look, which appeals to unconscious (and conscious) pedophiliac rape fantasies, and made it her personal style. Likewise, Estella Warren seems to have adopted the snotnose look and elevated it to iconic status. (O brave new millennium.) Subliminally, what we have here is a snuffling, whining tot. To what inner masculine urge does this correspond? Does Estella appeal to the inner beast that delights in having made a child cry? Or merely to the inner daddy, who longs to take out a handkerchief and wipe that adorable nose?
posted by Pat on 3:30 PM |
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This is the human way: to spend years constructing an elaborate disguise, then more years praying, "Oh please let someone penetrate my disguise, and see the real me."
The priest racket:
"It will rain if you bring lambs to the temple for sacrifice." The lambs are brought, and the priests have a party.
If it rains: - "See? We told you this would work. It's a clear sign that you should sacrifice some more lambs. And by the way, the gods said to drop off a couple jugs of wine too."
If it doesn't rain : "You people didn't pray hard enough and you didn't bring enough lambs."
Did you know.....? It's illegal in France to make a movie without Gerard Depardieu in the cast. In the US, it's illegal to have a wedding and not play Pachelbel's Canon.
posted by Pat on 1:11 AM |
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