data mining for saddam.
Yikes! The Internet returns to its military origins, or, watch out who you befriend on Facebook: a new, five-part series at Slate, Chris Wilson’s “Searching for Saddam”, on “how the U.S. military used social networking to capture the Iraqi dictator.”
the beatles beyond rock band.
I intentionally avoided American love songs, trying to dispel their belief that all Americans were hedonists. Despite my efforts, romantic songs — whatever their language — were the guards’ favorites.
The Beatles song “She Loves You,” which popped into my head soon after I received my wife’s letter from the Red Cross, was the most popular.
For reasons that baffled me, the guards relished singing it with me. I began by singing its first verse. My three Taliban guards, along with Tahir and Asad, then joined me in the chorus.
“She loves you — yeah, yeah, yeah,” we sang, with Kalashnikovs lying on the floor around us.
David Rohde, “You Have Atomic Bombs, but We Have Suicide Bombers,” New York Times.
the thirty-ninth anniversary of a film within a film.
Are ya doin’ a movie?
Yeah.
About this?
Yeah.
What’s it going to be called?
Port-o-San.
Oh, far out.
- Stoned hippie to film crew, outside portable toilets, in Woodstock: Three Days of Peace & Music
The 1960s dictum “be in your own movie” (from Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters) was indicative of the influence of mass-mediated representations over actual experience in the 1960s. Media mattered, even though the counterculture of popular memory emphasized direct experience over the virtual thing. The problem (or was it the possibility?) that many in fact ascertained at the time was that mass-mediated representation and actual experience — getting deep in the machine and back to the woods — were merging and melding in all sorts of new ways. Hence the love affair with Marshall McLuhan.
This brings us to the most important scene (partial clip here) of that most important film, Woodstock: Three Days of Peace & Music. Despite the recent mud avalanche of nostalgia for the fortieth anniversary of the weekend of concerts, the film had far more influence after its release in 1970 than the actual festival in August of 1969.
The key scene comes toward the end of the film. It unlocks the whole movie — and the festival it memorialized. It shifts the focus of Woodstock from romantic innocence to topics far more vexing, difficult…and sour-smelling.
We are fast approaching festival’s end, with Jimi Hendrix soon to appear, famously playing a searing version of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” We have just watched Sly and the Family Stone and Janis Joplin perform prime time on Saturday night, and the Hog Farm has made “breakfast in bed for 400,000″ (as Hugh Romney, a.k.a. Wavy Gravy, put it from the stage before a mock-military-esque roll call played on trumpet). The film cuts to a truck that reads “portable chemical toilets.” Ladies and gentlemen, the Port-o-San scene.
The most important performer at Woodstock: Port-o-San Man.
It looks like we are about to witness the anti-Woodstock. Everything the counterculture sought to alter, all the artificial, plastic, disposable, deodorized, and disinfected faux-civilization that Woodstock’s mud, oatmeal, woods, and naked bodies in the lake sought to abandon for nature and the natural, it all seems to be encapsulated here.
And yet the scene that follows, titled “Port-o-San” on the DVD of Woodstock, is more haunting, more complicated, more evocative, than any famous musical performance in the film.
The camera pans from the truck to a middle-aged man dressed in a janitorial uniform. He is portly and balding but very friendly and jovial — this despite his job, which is cleaning portable toilets. “Man in here,” he says as he knocks on the toilet doors, then smiles. When he reaches the last one, it’s open and he discovers a cane. “Some poor fellow come looking for his cane,” the Port-o-San cleaner remarks.
It’s an odd moment: what is a cane, that quintessential symbol of old people, doing in this ur-film about youth? And how did it wind up in the portable toilet? Is the cane a kind of allegorical symbol of the older people who the hippies don’t want to become, trapped in their Port-o-Sans, avoiding nature and the real, only experiencing a deodorized box of plastic that barely covers up a world of shit below? Or is the cane a symbol of what is to come: the fall from grace after the bliss of innocent youth?
Maybe the cane is all of those things, which is why the scene is so important. The symbolism only grows as this movie-within-the-movie unfolds onscreen. The cleaning man sucks the shit out of the Port-a-San toilet with a giant hose. He dumps enormous amounts of disinfectant and deodorant within it to make it “a little more pleasanter when you use it.” He reloads the toilet paper, which is locked in its receptacle.
You can read the scene in multiple ways. It could be a critique of an American society that has sought to cover up with deodorant all that Woodstock refused to avoid, that must lock the toilet paper in a little box to keep it from getting stolen while Woodstock has made everything free.
Or, as I prefer to read the scene now, forty years later, it is the Woodstock festival itself getting sucked up into that sanitation tube. For, Woodstock was shit, and anyone who pretended otherwise was full of shit. But that didn’t mean that it wasn’t important. The place was a disaster; though, like many disasters, it contained infinite small deeds of kindness and care. “There’s always a little bit of heaven in a disaster area,” Wavy Gravy remarks in his breakfast speech.
But just after he says this, Wavy Gravy also conveys a kind of sense of the hopelessness lurking beneath the joy. Woodstock is not to be a revolutionary transformation, much as it might feel like that amid disaster. He requests that “you people who still believe, you know, that capitalism isn’t that weird” to buy a few hamburgers from a man whose stand burned down overnight. The point, buried in Wavy Gravy’s playful tone and tooth-gap grin, is that the larger mainstream system of capitalism may seem bizarre in a disaster area, but it it is far from disappearing as a system. Woodstock the film, bringing in millions of dollars, would soon prove this to be undeniably true. But for Wavy Gravy, the point is to help out the guy who has lost his business. The small gesture of connection and support, regardless of the larger system, is, for Wavy Gravy, the crucial political act.
There’s a tragic consciousness at work here, buried in the utopian fervor. This is the case even in (or maybe especially in) a man such as Wavy Gravy, who would go on to start a clown camp. And the tragic quality continues in the Port-o-San scene. This is the part of Woodstock that so often gets lost in remembrances and anti-nostalgic complaints alike.
Placed as it is toward the end of the Woodstock film, the mood of allegory weighs heavily in the Port-o-San scene. Into the cleaning man’s hose goes not only the shit from a toilet at Woodstock, but maybe also the compost of the counterculture’s entire utopian dream of revolution or evolution to a new world beyond the difficulties of the current one. Woodstuck’s muck and mire was proof that another world might be possible, but that it wasn’t going to happen by the end of the 1960s. Humankind was not actually going to get any more humane. Woodstock‘s participants couldn’t escape the larger system that easily. The Woodstock dream, too, would get sucked up into the tube.
But the Port-o-San scene itself also suggests that those utopian dreams still lurk, nutrients accreting in the sewage pipes of society. They leak out occasionally, though no one has ever figured out how to capture the energies buried in their rich sod of desire and fantasy.
The tragic tone of Woodstock that so many miss appears again in the final sequence of the film, as we view the festival site from a departing helicopter, viewing fields strewn with garbage, glimpsing a giant peace sign made out of the mess. The Port-o-San scene sets up this post-apocalyptic, ambiguous ending.
“My son’s here,” the Port-o-san man says to the camera crew at Woodstock, “and I got one over in Vietnam too.” Here we get to a startling aspect of Woodstock. The festival site strangely, bizarrely, links the muddied home front of the counterculture to the big muddy of Vietnam. The festival captured in the film became an odd film-strip negative of the war: choppers buzz overhead, but bring rock musicians instead of marines, thousands wander a wasteland, looking blasted and dazed, there’s a strange collision of advanced technology and mud, we see lots of destruction and shit and no one quite knowing what to do with it all, but among the chaos, there’s are moments of love. Of course, Woodstock was not a war zone, but it took place in the long shadow (both mediated and direct) of Vietnam.
In his simple, un-hippie-ish way, the Port-o-San cleaner offers a very decent response to the madness. There might be a little bit of heaven in a disaster area, as Wavy Gravy waxed ecstatically, but the toilets make clear that there’s a whole lot more hell. So, caught in the middle of it, the cleaning man admits that he can’t keep up with the crowds who need to use the facilities. All he can do is do his best to “make it a little more pleasanter.” He’s glad to help the kids, and his tone of voice suggests he loves both his sons unconditionally, the one at Woodstock and the one in Vietnam. His demeanor is less starry-eyed than Wavy Gravy, but, watching forty years later, it’s also more dignified. That a man makes cleaning up shit seem dignified is no small feat.
As the tired debates about the 1960s once again get trotted out this year (the only essays now more stale than the nostalgic odes to Woodstock are the anti-nostalgic screeds), the Port-o-San scene suggests we revisit Woodstock and Woodstock in a new way: not as a tale about escapism (to nature) but about engagement (with human society), not as a story about screaming guitars and rock stars, but as a tale about quiet men and women who did small deeds of charity among what felt like the lost cause of American life.
This wasn’t escapism. Port-o-San is the story buried within Woodstock the film, and Woodstock the memory. It’s a story of trying to cope — truly cope, even in failure — with the infrastructural and intersocial dilemmas of the complex, modern world. It’s the story of being overwhelmed by tragedy but still trying to make the world “a little more pleasanter.”
The telltale sign comes at the end of the Port-o-San scene. Emerging from a stall, a stoned hippie makes clear that Woodstock is not going to be an escape to the garden. We’re not going back to nature. The dream has got to happen within civilization, not outside it. And, for him, that’s fine. When asked how his visit to the facilities was, the anonymous hippie shrugs, tokes his pipe, and sums up where we’ll have to start: “Beats the woods,” he says, and strolls off into the morass.
ADDENDA:
Tom Taggart, the Port-O-San cleaner, later sued the makers of the Woodstock film for using the footage of his interview.
And here is a retrospective interview with Wayne Rodgers, who claims to have been the “stoned hippie” who walked out of the Port-O-San in the Woodstock film:
boredom & terror in christopher ‘ banal surreal gitmo photos.
Christopher Sims, Club Survivor, Camp America, 2006
Christopher Sims’ people-less photographs of the naval base and detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which he visited in 2006, are filled with ghosts. By portraying Gitmo as a kind of abandoned facility, Sims heightens the sense of both boredom and terror. On the one hand, the setting is so paradisical, with palm trees, rolling hills, and the ocean. On the other, we seem to be trapped behind barbed wire in an exurban housing development gone into massive foreclosure — and one in which you may hear occasional screams of bankrupted owners being tortured by their creditors just beyond the hills and walls.
Christopher Sims, McDonald’s, Naval Station, 2006
Christopher Sims, Suggestion Box, Camp America, 2006
Or wait, are we in some kind of museum of Gitmo Bay? Are we at some kind of historical heritage site? If we are, we know that the events of past are very recent — chillingly recent. If this is a museum still in the making, it’s a terrifying place in which playgrounds and cell blocks, lunch and torture, mingle beneath the relentless blue sky.
Christopher Sims, Playground, Naval Station, 2006.
The exhibition is currently at Civilian Art Projects in Washington, DC.
Images: Civilian Art Projects website.
moving beyond & thinking back on “shock and awe.”
…You’re using a hatchet where you need a scalpel. — Barack Obama, First McCain-Obama Presidential Debate, October 2008
Mark Landler of the New York Times, one talking head in Frontline’s marvelous “instant history” documentary, Inside the Meltdown, describes Hank Paulson and Ben Bernacke’s decision — after much avoidance — to go to Congress for direct capital injections from the federal government to the private banking system as “almost the economic equivalent of ‘shock and awe.’”
It’s an intriguing comparison, one that commentators such as Ariana Huffington pointed out at the time.
It makes me wonder two things:
First, during parts of the “Dubya” years, “shock and awe” seemed so powerful as a technique. It inspired fear and loathing (and analysis) on the left such as Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. Aside from “shock and awe”‘s obvious problems (small things such as killing a lot of people and causing plenty more to suffer), what seems more striking now is what a failure “shock and awe” seems to have been, both in its military and financial versions. What initially appeared as such agile legerdemain — the spectacle by which neoconservatism (in the political realm) and neoliberalism (in the economic sphere) was able to dominate, steal, overwhelm, and even win — now seems like such a desperate ploy: the anxious posturing of a vulnerable bully; the last sucker punch from a heavyweight going down for the count.
Second, and more intriguingly, now that its moment is perhaps passing, might begin to think about the broader metaphor of “shock and awe” during the first decade of the twenty-first century? Does it, will it, serve as a useful tool for understanding a wider swathe of cultural production in the face of shifting technological and social foundations? Now that we are moving from the hatchet blow method of power (shock and awe them and bop them — or ourselves — over the head) to the Obama administration’s surgical scalpel, can we ask: what was “shock and awe” all about in a deeper sense?
Was it a kind of collective spell out of which the U.S. and the world is beginning to snap? And snap to what: attention or pieces?
vietnamesque images from the iraq war.
Contemporary soldiers now watch Vietnam films such as Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and Full Metal Jacket not for their moods of a war gone terribly awry, but rather for the strange thrills of moral compromise experienced in the midst of battle. They want to experience the sublimity of quagmire.
But now that many in the military are actually experiencing a war gone awry, other images from Vietnam are turning up. Among them are Maya Alleruzzo’s incredible images from Iraq, such as this one: U.S. Army Sgt. William Brayman, 25, from Warner Robins, Ga., with Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment in Beijia village in Arab Jabour, south of Baghdad, on Monday, Feb. 4, 2008.
Alleruzzo’s website contains other startling images from a surge that, because of how dangerous it is and how difficult it is to report on (and how much the US government and military want to control the narrative), has become largely invisible: a ghostly kind of surge whose actual images tell Vietnamesque stories.
Image: Maya Alleruzzo, AP
