Week 13: ‘They will live a little bit better but in the same situation’

Wonder spawned in: 2010

Wondered into being by: Slavoj Žižek for the RSA and illustrations by Cognitive Media.

Wonderspan: 11 min

To experience this wonder at its best: Click on the full screen icon and make sure you can hear the sound.

The improvising intellect of the Slovenian cultural philosopher Slavoj Žižek ranges so extensively that he’s often accused of contradicting himself, as if being consistent is just a bit boring, or perhaps as if wild truth, if we ever saw her, would wear every clashing colour she could find.

Well, here is a classic Žižek iconoclastic blast at Starbucks' absurd claim to be helping us to 'buy into' a better world every time we buy their coffee.  He also has a pop at mainstream charities for using the hoarded wealth of the rich to 'keep the poor alive' while leaving the conditions of oppression (and our disproportionate wealth) unchanged.  Instead, he argues for his own brand of misanthropy as a more authentic way of loving than is charity:

'There is a certain type of misanthropy which is much better as a social attitude than this cheap charitable optimism.'

Is he wrong?  Even Greenpeace encourages us to get their branded credit card so you can ‘defend our world while you shop’.  Well, some charities* (perhaps those without large fundraising and marketing departments) are warier of buying into the norms of mass culture and are trying to tackle the root causes of a problem rather than just make it easier to live with.  But they can't afford to chug you in the street and probably wouldn't even if they could.

So here’s Žižek’s talk, with pictures (discuss… leave a comment!)…

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpAMbpQ8J7g

Extra…

And if that’s got you going then you might like this clarion call for us to recognise our common empathy as a foundation for a future in which we generally make less of a mess of things:

• http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jeremy_rifkin_on_the_empathic_civilization.html

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* = like the one I work with and which I am too weak-willed not to mention here - Alternatives to Violence Project

Week 12: 'You wanna battle me?'

Wonderdate: 2005

Wondered into being by: Tight Eyez et al

Wonderspan: 6 mi

To experience this wonder at its best: Click on the full screen icon and make sure you can hear the sound.

This week we're in Los Angeles, its South Central district.  It's the most dangerous neighbourhood in the city and one of the most violent in the industrialised world.  Four people are murdered there every week, usually by gunshot, and many more are seriously injured in street violence include drive-by shootings.  Victims are typically Latino and Black people in their late teens and early twenties.

In South Central, some young people have turned to dance as a way of prising some freedom and dignity from the oppressive injustices of their environment.  For many, their dance groups are an alternative to joining one of the territorial gangs.

One such group do their street dancing in clowning make-up.  Each dancer crafts a mask to suit their own personality.  The clowns were started by 'Tommy the Clown' Johnson, a local birthday party entertainer who combined an outrageous clown costume with the cutting edge hip-hop style of the 1990s.  He found himself mentoring teenagers to do the same and went on to organise huge face-offs or 'battles' between the various dance 'tribes'.
 
An early member of Tommy's clowns was Tight Eyez.  He explained in David LaChapelle's documentary film Rize how dancing had helped save his community from becoming empty vessels for commercial culture to fill:

‘We’re not gonna be clones of the commercial hip-hop world... because that's been seen for so many years.  … [A]nother generation of kids with morals and values ... won’t need ... what’s being commercialized or tailor-made for them...  And we're of more value than any piece of jewellery... or any car or any big house that anybody could buy.’

Tight Eyez went on to pioneer krumping.  Krumpers turn the energy of the violence that runs through the neighbourhood into a cathartic dance.  In krump sessions the dancers throw each other against a fence or wall or squirm on the floor as if they are being beaten; they get bruised but no-one gets really hurt.  The dance movements are aggressive, extremely energetic and all improvised.  As the energy rises, the dancers reach a state of ecstasy called 'getting buck', when all the pent-up energy is released into the dance.

In the clip, we see the clowns and the krumps battling it out, overseen by their universally respected host, Tommy the Clown.  Tight Eyez features too - he's the guy who starts off his callout by smashing a chair into the stage.

These dances are among the most vivid ways I've seen people loving freedom.

• www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jw5D38axdnE

Extra...

Here's Tight Eyez a few years later in a face-off with a guy called Retro, who's a turfer (smooth, mechanical cybernetic-type techno-dystopian... ohh, I dunno what it is exactly).

• www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITkHMe1P-iM

Week 11: 'I know... because I've counted all the ants''

Wonderdate: 2003

Wondered into being by: Evolution, plus Deborah Gordon

Wonderspan: 20 min (ooh, cheating)

To experience this wonder at its best: Click on the full screen icon and make sure you can hear the sound.

So this is a 20 minute wonder but I'm hoping that by 10 or 11 you'll be hooked.  If you're not, please accept my apologies as you return to your important work.

So, surely a social colony of any kind needs some kind of leadership - from an insect queen, for example, or a soviet of workers councils, or a David Cameron?  Well, ants manage with just a simple, constant instruction set, repeating over and over in each individual with no central control at all.

Deborah Gordon has watched ants for 20 years and finds that while an individual has very little of anything you could call cognitive ability (the queen included), as a colony they become intelligent problem-solvers.  The ants rely on patterns of contact with others in order to know what to do next, and that appears to be enough.  It's completely haphazard but because of their numbers (10,000 or so in a colony) the repeated pattern gets them all where they need to be... eventually.  So, no chief executive, no workers councils, no edicts or directives or commandments, no wavy-handy consensus decision-making, no hotline to God; for ants, anarchy works.

That said, every now and then one ant must turn to another and ask: 'Hey mate, do you know what it's all for?'

• http://www.ted.com/talks/deborah_gordon_digs_ants.html

Week 10: 'All of a sudden you'll hear the sound.'

Wonderdate: 1981

Wondered into being by: Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez

Wonderspan: 4 min

To experience this wonder at its best: Click on the full screen icon and make sure you can hear the sound.  In fact, you'll need to turn it up.

Good morning.  You are in love with another's song and long to hold onto it to hear it again and again.  This must be Paris.

And so it is.  In the 1981 film Diva, a young postman, Jules, is rapt with the song of African American opera singer Cynthia Hawkins.  She has never allowed anyone to record her sing but he lets his love make a thief of him.  While she performs the aria from Catalini's La Wally, he secretly records her (shadowed by 'le cool' Taiwanese gangsters who will give the film its plot by trying to steal and sell the tape).  Overwhelmed by the beauty of her song, he is undone.  At the end of the film, Jules plays the recording to Cynthia in her dressing room as part-confession, part-gift.  She is shocked, feels violated by his theft, then falls under the spell of the moment.  They find themselves holding each other, dancing gently to her music.

La Wally is an opera about love as necessary and impossible as Jules'.  When Wally's father tells her she must marry the man he has chosen for her rather than his enemy (whom, of course, she is in love with), she resolves to flee and sings the defiant lament heard in this aria.  Translated into English by Enzo Michelangeli, its opening stanza is this:

Well then? I'll go far away,
as goes the echo from the pious bell
there, amid the white snow;
there, amid the golden clouds;
there, where hope is, hope,
regret, regret, and sorrow!

In Diva, Cynthia Hawkins' character is played by real-life opera singer Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, whom we are about to hear.  Her full, bassy voice fills the aria with the passion and it literally cries out for.  Other renditions, even though beautifully accomplished, can seem thin by comparison.  And here they are, Jules and Cynthia:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTLF9TIx6lE

(it makes me cry)


Extra...

When he finds just the right spot at dusk to sing for his love, this performer is so accoustically adept that his song seems to come from within the air itself... and he is in his season right now for those with ears to hear and eyes to see...

• http://vimeo.com/12026944

Meanwhile in Antarctica, scientists are drawn in to the weird, white-noise singing of waddell seals and lie flat on the ice to get that bit closer to what is just beyond reach:

'You think in your mind that you're on land and all of a sudden you'll hear the sound coming up through the floor, you'll hear the shucks and the whistles and the booms that come and you realise there's a whole world underneath you.'

Thanks to Sunniva T for suggesting this one (from Herzog's film)...

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlrcbKlW4Tw 

This Monday morning we are in love with another's song!