No Man's An Island, Until There's An Earthquake

Watching Persepolis tonight was a nice coda to Milan Kundera’s Ignorance, which I had finished reading last week. Since finishing that book, I’d been thinking a lot about the concepts of exile and return, and feeling like a stranger in one’s own homeland. In the film, the protagonist and narrator, Marjane, flees Tehran as a young girl for Vienna. While Tehran is rocked by putative reactionary dogma, mortar shells, and tragedy, Marjane’s life is a whirlwind of love, loss, and lots of moving. With each day, her experiences and encounters drag her further and further away from her family and friends, who won’t ever know what it means to be Marjane, Iranian and in Austria, in 1982. Marjane, indelibly altered abroad, returns home to discover that she is no longer the Iranian who left her parents arms four years prior, but an Iranian-European hybrid, searching desperately through the eyeglasses of nostalgia for the world that she once knew that no longer exists. Marjane is there, but Marjane’s Iran is not. Unsurprisingly, the film ends with Marjane sitting in an airport in Paris, her final departure from Tehran. Will Marjane find peace and fulfillment in this second adopted homeland? If Kundera’s book is any sort of guide, it would seem that the answer is no. Once the homeland is lost, so is hope for a life not haunted by loneliness and the pangs of nostalgia.

Persepolis addresses these feelings of social alienation, depression, nostalgia, and anger through simple yet expressive cartoon, backgrounds that are expressionistic and highly emotive, and a beautiful score that enhances the power of the image without feeling obtrusive. It leaves its audience with the question: how do we define ourselves? Are we beholden to our bloodlines, nation or memories? Perhaps with the exception of our brothers and sisters in arms, few Americans have to face this crisis of identity that comes with a forced divorce from the homeland. Upon return, the people that were left behind are no longer the same people whose smiles are frozen in old photos and videos. If the ties that bind us are our shared experiences, what happens when those experiences are replaced by new ones? Does the thread remain strong; does it start to unravel or does it break? When an earthquake shifts the plates, they don’t go back together. Is it the same for people? According to both Persepolis and Ignorance, it is. Both works are endowed with a profound sense of isolation—especially Ignorance. Milan Kundera attacks the 'No Man is an Island' philosophy head on by providing the reader twin case studies of loneliness. In the novella, two exiled Czechs—one man entering the twilight of life, one woman firmly in middle age—return to their home country only to find that their roots have been dug up. Unable to reconnect emotionally or in memory with their former brothers, mothers, lovers and friends, these orphans float like those two ships passing in the night, “reaching out, seeking one another”, and find nothing but water and abyss.

Musical Interlude

As I prepare my next angry installment of the Death of Gutenberg, I thought I'd take this moment to share my current iTunes top 10 (no the irony is not lost upon me), in no particular order:
1. "The Funeral" - Band of Horses
2. "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)" - Beyonce
3. "Cold White Christmas" - Casiotone for the Painfully Alone
4. "Love Connection" - Casiotone for the Painfully Alone
5. "No Wow" - The Kills
6. "Sinnerman(Felix Da Housecat Remix)" - Nina Simone & Felix da Housecat
7. "How Soon is Now" - The Smiths
8. "Jai Ho" - AR Rahman, Sukhvinder Singh, Tanvi Shah & Mahalaxmi Iyer
9. "Love Story" - Taylor Swift
10. "Straight Lines" - Silverchair

Death of Gutenberg Pt. I

I disagree with Kevin Kelly’s myopic exultation of visual media in his Idea Lab article "Becoming Screen Literate" in the NYTimes Magazine’s recent Screens issue. While he makes some keen comparisons between print media and visual media, he ignores the glaring differences that make visual media a more distrustful mistress. While the manipulation of information can be accomplished both in text and on screen, the ease at which it can be accomplished varies greatly, and usually to the detriment of historical truth.

Kelly suggests in his article that visual manipulation should be seen as a creative past time, a sport that can bring together people across distances and timezones. He views the subjective recreations, paraphrases and reimaginings of video to be on par with similar practices in text, saying “In fact, the habits of the mashup are borrowed from textual literacy. You cut and paste words on a page. You quote verbatim from an expert. You paraphrase a lovely expression. You add a layer of detail found elsewhere. You borrow the structure from one work to use as your own. You move frames around as if they were phrases”. In Kelly's logic, what could possibly be the ethical repercussions of a practice that can be connected to something as rich in tradition as our literary cannon? It’s easy to point to examples of art and creativity in visual editing and pat ourselves on the back for our inventiveness. But what effect does this harmless new sport have on our larger collective conscious & memory?

What Kelly fails to address is the dark underbelly of our progression toward screen dominance—the blurring of the lines between what is real and what is not real. . .Kelly speaks of a future in which visuals will be annotated much like books. The many textual devices that allow for tangential information and borrowed ideas to be cited within the narrative will never exist for visual media the way they do for text. Textual citations don't disrupt the narrative and don't create a false reality in which borrowed information is mistaken for originality, or objectivity. How will this be done in the lazy, fast paced world of visual imaging where the focus is on appearances and not on accuracy? Unlike in books the video editor's job is output. He is disconnected with the visual authenticity of what he is creating, whereas in books and newspapers, the editor is expected to check and double check that what is being put out is real...