“Jonathan Lethem on John Carpenter’s ‘They Live’ - Wall Street Journal” plus 1 more

Jonathan Lethem on John Carpenter’s ‘They Live’ - Wall Street Journal

Posted: 28 Nov 2010 05:56 AM PST

By Jonathan Lethem

In November, Soft Skull Press began a new series of short books called "Deep Focus," in which acclaimed novelists write about their favorite acclaimed films. The series, edited by Sean Howe, will cover cult classics, New Hollywood films for the sixties and seventies, film noir and other genres. Below is an excerpt from the first release, Jonathan Lethem's in-depth look at John Carpenter's 1988 sci-fi horror film, "They Live."

Graffiti and Text Art

In the early nineties, first in Providence, Rhode Island, and then up and down the eastern seaboard, thousands of paper, and later vinyl, stickers began proliferating in the urban commercial-detritus/graffiti collage of lampposts, subway entrances, and construction-site billboards. The stickers presented a blunt little graphic, a visage of testosteroid hostility, recognizable to some as the masked face of the professional wrestler Andre the Giant, accompanied by various slogans—most often ANDRE THE GIANT HAS A POSSE.

After a 1994 lawsuit denied use of the wrestler's name, the reworked stickers took up a They Live theme: the wrestler's face was now accompanied by the single command OBEY. The sticker campaign was eventually credited to the street artist Shepard Fairey, who'd created them with his schoolmates while a student at the Rhode Island School of Design. Fairey's famous now as a lawsuit-stricken imagery poacher, creator of the iconic Barack Obama CHANGE poster; he's as mediocre a poster boy for "appropriation aesthetics" as 2 Live Crew, whose sample of Roy Orbison's "Pretty Woman" thrust them into the Open Source vanguard, such as it was, in 1989. Fairey's stickers could be seen as a guerrilla-subliminal ad campaign for They Live, reinscribing the film's motif of icons of persuasion hidden in plain sight: our overlord's commands are visible if you know where to look. And we, the underground, make ourselves known to one another by outlawed modes: pirate broadcasts, signal jamming, samizdat pamphlets, graffiti. (Fairey's They Live reference also puns on Roddy Piper's career as a pro wrestler.)

They Live displays no fewer than four layers of public textual stuff. Three are under the filmmakers' control. First, the Matrix layer of manipulative fictions: the magazines, newspapers, and billboards for computers and vacations in the Caribbean. Second, the unmasked truth of obnoxious commands hidden beneath: OBEY, WATCH TV, HONOR APATHY, DOUBT HUMANITY, et cetera. Third, fake graffiti scrawls: THEY LIVE, WE SLEEP. The fourth layer, imposed by the documentary effects of location shooting, and probably exaggerated by a budget prohibiting Antonioni-esque impulses to repaint the world, consists of whatever text was randomly immortalized in the camera's passing gaze: actual signage (like the freight train reading SHOCK CONTROL), or legitimately illegitimate graffiti (like the gnomic, concrete-poetic PARK CENT on the side of the Dumpster in Nada's alley).

Such accidental documentation isn't always negligible: my brother and other graffiti-artists-turned-graffiti-historians pore over those vintage New York City location films that contain subway scenes, like The French Connection, Death Wish, and The Taking of Pelham, 1,2,3, ferreting out lost traces of their subculture's origins. They Live's special interest in fugitive modes of discourse isolates these random captures in a charged neutral zone. It's as if some third constituency, neither enchanted nor disenchanted by the alien broadcast, occupies the same city invisibly, and has sent SHOCK CONTROL and PARK CENT out as signs of their existence. Call this third constituency "the Real."

Fairey's interventions occupy the same uneasy middle ground as They Live itself: on the one hand, the termite arts of graffiti or of the deliberate B-movie, marginal activities carrying a subversive potential past the sentries of high art. On the other, the gallery-ready postures of text artists like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer, or of the Cahiers table of "conscious" auteurs—Hitchcock being the supreme example—at which Carpenter may occasionally be granted a shaky seat. Too poised and context-aware to be claimed as primitives, too crass and populist to be comfortably claimed for the high-art pantheon, Fairey and Carpenter both oscillate dismayingly in the void between.

Once, by chance, I attended a baseball game at San Francisco's Candlestick Park at which Jenny Holzer had been commissioned to "appropriate" the stadium's LED signs for her own artistic-subversive purposes. The vast and unfamiliar venue and audience was meant to exfoliate Holzer's art into the larger world. Being a Holzer fan, and learning of the planned intervention at the baseball game, I anticipated great things. My companion at the game knew nothing of Holzer's work, so I strained to set up his expectations. But the effort fizzled. When Holzer's enigmas crawled past on the signs, they died in the stadium's open-air light and the visual and auditory noise, baseball's common denominators. They'd become merely ineffectively opaque announcements, or advertisements for products we couldn't buy.

The discourse of commerce is a kind of quicker-picker-upper, superabsorbent of what happens along, even (or especially) that which presents itself as oppositional to, or critical of, commercial culture. So, much of Barbara Kruger's and Holzer's impact was gently naturalized within advertising language. This awkward fact cuts against They Live's central assertion: that the distance between the "lies" of commercial-ideological speech and the coercive "truths" smuggled inside it is an extreme one, and shattering to cross. Really, the two coexist and even mate with appalling ease (Recall the "ironic" generic packaging that was faddish in the eighties—cigarettes labeled CIGARETTES, and so on—that claimed to deny the sizzle of advertising allure in favor of the steak of gratified desire). Kruger and Holzer's non sequitur interventions briefly attained a gallant purity, but they'd always needed the gallery or museum context as a quarantine against recontamination. Their work degenerated anyway, refamiliarizing into po-mo moral rhetoric, or reappropriated for fashion layouts. What makes Shepard Fairey's populist gesture insipid is how self-evidently it awaited a product retrofit, a proceed-to-checkout button. When the OBEY T-shirt or CHANGE political campaign rolled out, no one, least of all the "artworks" themselves, even hiccupped.

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TechMan: Destructive Stuxnet worm has experts scrambling - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Posted: 27 Nov 2010 09:20 PM PST

Malicious software turned a dangerous corner recently with Stuxnet, a computer worm that attacks the control systems for things like nuclear power plants and electrical grids.

Stuxnet makes spam networks and credit card schemes seem like child's play. Experts say it can do things like make motors fly to pieces.

"Stuxnet has highlighted that direct attacks to control critical infrastructure are possible and not necessarily spy-novel fictions. The real-world implications of Stuxnet are beyond any threat we have seen in the past," Dean Turner of the Symantec security firm told the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

The first target seems to have been Iran, which has admitted to malware in its nuclear facilities, but said it was confined to employee laptops.

The New York Times reported last week that forensic experts dissecting the worm found that it was calibrated in a way that could send nuclear centrifuges "wildly out of control." Iran is spinning thousands of centrifuges to try to produce enriched uranium, which can be used for either nuclear fuel or a bomb. The forensics work found that Stuxnet takes over the power supply that controls the speed of a motor.

International inspectors have said Iran has had problems keeping its centrifuges running, with hundreds removed from active service.

Stuxnet at work?

No one has been willing to say so for certain, but experts say the scenario is possible given what they know about the worm.

Another thing no one can say for sure is where Stuxnet came from. But all the experts agree that the program is so sophisticated that it would require the backing of a government to produce it.

A number of questions remain about the worm. Here are some answers (credit to Blake Hounshell posting on the Foreign Policy website):

What was its target? Most experts agree it was Iran, either the Natanz nuclear enrichment site or the Bushehr nuclear power plant.

Was it effective? Iran says it caused no damage. Others have pointed to the failings of centrifuges, unconfirmed reports of nuclear accidents and the resignation of the head of the Iranian nuclear programs.

Why and how did it spread? Stuxnet attacks a Windows-based program called WinCC, a supervisory control and data acquisition program made by Siemens, a German company. If the worm cannot find a copy of WinnCC, it looks for other USB devices and copies itself onto them. Or it spreads across local networks. Stuxnet has been found on Siemens software at more than a dozen industrial facilities outside Iran. Since these types of control systems are not normally connected to the Internet, speculation is that the worm was either introduced with a USB drive or that it came from one of the laptops of Russian consultants at the nuclear plant.

Who did it? Most speculation centers around Israel. The United States is also cited as a candidate. No nation is admitting anything.

Despite these unanswered questions, one thing is clear: Stuxnet is a worrying escalation in cyber attacks. Now that a software assault on industrial sites has been demonstrated, others may follow.

"Proliferation is a real problem, and no country is prepared to deal with it," Melissa Hathaway, a former U.S. national cybersecurity coordinator, told The New York Times.

The worm has set off alarms among industrial control specialists, she said: "All of these guys are scared to death. We have about 90 days to fix this before some hacker begins using it."

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Security tip: Malware often must run a program to infect your computer. If you see an e-mail attachment ending in .exe that you are not expecting, it could be a rogue program. Do not click on it. Delete it.

Read TechMan's blog at post-gazette.com/techman. TechTalk video podcast is at post-gazette.com/multimedia and audio version at post-gazette.com/podcast. Follow PGTechMan on Twitter.

First published on November 28, 2010 at 12:00 am

Fiction

Minggu, 28 November 2010