Poem: "apple-faced kids"

when the clock sounds

the apple-faced kids

rush to class

not to learn

but to whiz in their heads

the wonders of the world

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Apple's New Creation (and I hope it's not called an iPad)

A company known for its draconian tactics to protect internal secrets, Apple is expected to announce its new creation tomorrow (which was sent out to "friends" last week but cannot be found on Apple's site).
Everyone is abuzz. Since Christmas, I have been reading blog forecasts about the secret Apple device. What's it going to be? Apple remains mute. The consensus among the technorati seems to be some kind of multi-touch super-sized iPod on steroids running a version of the Mac OS X operating system.

As David Pogue wrote in his blog, quoting Robert Burns, “There is no such uncertainty as a sure thing.” The certainty is so certain all of us are in some kind of suspended state of uncertainty: "What's it going to be?!" I have never experienced such a paradox: an emphatic declaration of a device's existence that may or may not exist. When journalists write about the iPad (I hope they don't name it this, as Mad TV humorously demonstrated), iSlate, iTablet, Mac Tablet, MacBook Touch - or whatever the damn thing's going to be called - it is usually prefaced with the epithet "the probable" or "expected" Apple miracle device. Are we talking about an unidentified flying object or a real thing? I dunno.

The device (which may or may not exist) has been deemed to have any number of features:

• a Kindle killer
vendors will allow consumers to download lush, color graphic books, magazines, and newspapers. I must say if I can read National Geographic in full color and swipe the pages with my finger I want an iThingy too. 

• a Nexus One killer
 If the new device signs on with Verizon who's going to want a Nexus One? I really doubt though that people who will have bought a Nexus One anyway are going to drop it for Apple.

• Video Game Console Killer  
Adolescents and twenty-somethings will supposedly be wowed by the device which will undoubtedly beat anything the Playstation can do (Grand Theft Auto anyone?)

• and even a laptop killer

 Well, if all you do is search the net and check email, then yes a multi-touch device would be an adequate replacement. But, anything more than that, in my humble opinion, is going to need a laptop or a desktop.    

I have read it may have the following features:

• a 3G network with Verizon
• a webcam
• an extended iTunes App store
• games
• streaming TV
• media content from HarperCollins
• the ability to teleport users to fourth dimensions (joking, obviously on the latter)

Whatever "the creation" is, I have the same sinking suspicion as David Pogue, that "there are some aspects, some angles, that nobody’s guessed." Apple has been notorious in the past for concealing its hidden angles. Throughout the company's history, Apple has revealed products that wow the masses and changed the status quo. Here are some notable game-changing features Apple has wowed us with in the past:

• The GUI of the first Macintosh in 1983. The smiley Mac face hits shelves.
  
• OS X (a radical departure from OS 9). Apple starts clean. For real.
  
• the iPod
  
• and, of course, and perhaps most emphatically, the iPhone.

With the company's successes, however, there have been some notable guffaws, 

• the Newton (which seems to be the closest product matching tomorrow's rumored gadget) 
• or the Cube. Now, even though the Cube was a failure, Apple persisted and came up with the Mini. So, if tomorrow's device is some kind of tablet PC, hopefully, it will forgive the tarnish of the Newton.

Amidst the mass of speculation, I think I can offer one piece of clear, objective fact. Whatever is unveiled at tomorrow's press conference in San Francisco will inevitably face the trial of the hoi polloi. If the announcement does not live up to its hype, then Cupertino will surely suffer. People will be quick to say, "Apple has lost its ability to produce cutting-edge products." If the product dazzles, then Apple shares will exponentially rise. But: here is the rub. How quickly can Apple's Research and Development team concoct the next WOW device before the public gets bored of this one (which is not even out yet!)? Apple has always been able to foresee a market niche even before the market realizes such a niche exists. Case in point is the iPhone. Apple realized creating content for the mobile web was the way go even though many phones on the market only had measly WAP access to the net.

Apple's greatest strength is its weakness. Can it continue to foresee market trends? With Google now in on the hardware market, I think Apple will have a tough time in the future staying above the rest. I personally do not think they have lost their edge.

My own prognostication is that tomorrow's device will surely wow us. We will be impressed. I have a hunch though, that by Christmas 2010, the technorati will be buzzing again about another fabled Apple device. The question is, can Apple keep up with this game? What will the rumors be in six months? The flexible Apple device that fits in the palm of your hand, feels like a book, but miraculously is made up of tiny nanomites that feed its internal architecture (thanks GI Joe)!

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Poem: "nursing home"

 

her lying, sheets thin, mattress barely a support

she dying

glistening fluorescent light a harsh reveal

of her ruddy body, bare

save for the taffeta pajamas,

a crispy swath of rose embers,

issued by a crisis,

yet, her mouth curved a bit, sitting next to her -- so low --

i felt gravity’s relentless tug

and she curved, wincing at the pain,

although it hurt; a scissor-like pain throughout her entire frame,

she said it was okay;

her hair, long and brown like spaghetti string,

matted by the months of neglectful uncombing;

her beauty an archetypal beauty, matching the faces of every woman who was,

his, an is, an unmediated face of pathos lines, matching every face of those who are

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Fragment: The Moon Shines Bright

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Stolen Shot: Midnight Cowboy

One of the best on-location street scenes in movie history was actually an accident (although there are some naysayers who say the shot was scripted). When "Ratso" Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) yells, "I'm walking here!" to a New York City taxi driver in Midnight Cowboy (1969), the cabbie was a real-life cabbie. To save money, Director John Schlesinger did not file a permit with the city to use the Midtown Manhattan street for his film. The scene is a "stolen shot," which in film rhetoric means the director did not get official permission to shoot on a city street. The pedestrians are real New Yorkers, not extras. Their surprise is not canned. The cameramen were poised in a van a block away, shooting the scene. The cab driver is an actual pissed off cab driver. No extras on set.
Hoffman is brilliant in this scene. He does not break character. He keeps Ratso's limp intact (evidently Hoffman kept pebbles in his shoe to keep his limp consistent for every shot). His cigarette falls to the ground; he doesn't bother to pick it up. When his buddy (John Voight) looks stunned, Hoffman pulls him along by the arm. Hoffman's adlib is perfect; after a near brush with a yellow cab, he keeps it hot, muttering in character, "Actually, that ain't a bad way to pick up insurance, you know"; you can tell Voight is a little surprised by the interruption, but even still, he stays in character.

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Me, describing him

"when I look at him now —

face scrunched into the shape of an oval —

he thinks with his jaw set"

— me, describing him

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The Problem of the "Innocent Child" (Thanks, James R. Kincaid)

Shirly Temple 
image credit: movieactors

The notion of the “innocent child” is a powerful narrative in the West, so much so, we forget it is even a narrative to begin with. The Romantic child (boy or girl) historically has been around since the Greeks, immortalized by Sappho and also the Greek epigramists. This image of the child, unmediated and innocent is typical of the poetry of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience and William Wordsworth’s child of spontaneous, overflowing emotion in the “Prelude” but also, the image, at least partly, of Thomas Mann’s Tadzio in Death in Venice and Nietzsche’s Romantic depiction of the child as the pure child and bringer of a new philosophy in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. But, it was Jean Jacques Rousseau who made the claim that the child exists a priori in a state of innocence “in nature” which in time, through puberty, is corrupted a posteriori by the mediating forces of “society.” Rousseau famously advised nannies to allow children to wear loose-fitting clothes (or no clothes at all) so they would not be constricted by anything other than their unmediated innocence. Rousseau wrote controversially that children are not inflicted with Original Sin but are born innately innocent and pure. He made the then radical claim that Original Sin is an erroneous doctrine. Taint is not inherent on the soul of a newborn, but, the soul becomes corrupted by a misguided society. For Rousseau, the innate innocence of the child must be preserved through careful education. Education is what maintains innocence along with the child’s developing consciousness. For Rousseau, then, there is a general suspicion of nurture. In Rousseau’s Romantic (and I use this word purposefully, and critically) political vision, the good state is inscribed within a social contract that works to protect and preserve the inherent goodness of children.  It is an unguided introduction to society that corrupts the child and separates it from nature, thus distancing the child from an original innocence, its true and unfettered state.

One of my favorite cultural critics who explored further the idea of innate innocence is James Kincaid. He wrote a book called  Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting. In this book he argues once "adults" name the child innocent, such naming empties the child of a meaningful signifier. "Innocence," then, becomes a metaphor for an empty container, a blank face, devoid of substance which can be filled in by the adult’s desires. The innocent child is the “present” child — the ubiquitous Shirley Temple — who by being shed of experience, of sexuality, is in fact made to be molested. It seems in the West we are at odds with the binary of erotic/innocence. We cannot seem to reconcile ourselves with this strange pairing. Kincaid argues that the very construct of "innocence" is paradoxically warped to mean "protection" against experience but also, simultaneously, a disavowal of the child as inherently erotic. He uses some great examples from popular culture: the Home Alone kid: both cute, cunning, but utterly innocent. Shirley Temple, of course. Jean Bennet Ramsey. Poor thing. She was made both to be erotic and innocent. You can't have your cake and eat it too, kids.
I guess we could blame it on our Judeo-Christian heritage but, it does not take long to look into "recent" history: just look at the Genesis account of Adam and Eve (or at least how it has been interpreted). We were once innocent, until some dame messed things up for us. We were happy naked and in union with God. We got knowledge and now we're screwed. Seen from the view of the Fall, we've been trying to get back to the garden ever since (thanks Joni Mitchell). What a perfect scapegoat is the child (and the woman). They look kinda cute: a perfect face to throw all of our hopes and insipid wishes for innocence on them - poor, innocent creatures! So what has been created as a sort of compromise?! Well, adolescence of course. At first we were happy with merely the child/adult dyad, with the emphasis on the adult. It could be argued that the only truly human being in the West for thousands of years was the blue-eyed, blond hair man. The child? Not even considered as subject. The supposed invention of the child, as distinct from the adult, apparently is an eighteenth century invention that did not exist even as recent as the Middle Ages, according to the cultural historian Philip Ariès in his book, Centuries of Childhood. So, we go ahead and create the child three hundred years ago and then, to add insult to injury, create the adolescent. An even further blurring of the lines. It is no wonder that we are wee bit confused. But, that is fodder for another discussion.

The Good Son: the duality is brought out ad absurdam in the film, The Good Son (1993) also starring the kid from Home Alone, in a complete role reversal. From cutesy kid to serial killer. Mark, a boy of about nine or ten, played by Elijah Wood is sent to stay with his Uncle and Aunt in Maine after the death of his mother.  He quickly learns that his cousin Henry (Culkin) is in fact evil. He shoots dogs, wears a spooky paper-maché mask, drowns his brother, almost kills his sister, and attempts to push his mother over a dangerous precipice.  The movie, with cute child actors to boot, is almost certainly playing on the innocence/experience duality, the virtuous, innocent boy versus the abject opposite, an evil child, with no apparent explanation to why he does the cruelty he does — and why, no one, except Mark, Elijah Wood’s character, realizes his evilness. It is as if the child has to be either completely one or the other: any venture into the gray is taboo.
    Mark, the good child, is all-knowing and incredibly intuitive.  When his mother dies in the first scene, he is literally committed to the belief that she will not leave him, and, almost immediately, transfers the mother image to his aunt, as if he knows this must be the case.  We do not agree with his logic, perhaps, but we cheer his innocent intuition and allow it to endear him to ourselves, thus creating a convenient matrix to explain the Mother/Aunt Son/Nephew bonding.
    The evil child is also all-knowing and incredibly intuitive, but he uses his “gifts” to curse, convince people to fly, smoke cigarettes (the epitome of evil?) — and we are made to revel in this only as a ploy to convince us that he really ought to die!  Both boys, consequently, are inverses of each other: Culkin is blonde, blue-eyed and light, the other, Wood, is brown-haired, blue-eyed and darker complexion. In the movie’s final scene, as James Kincaid brilliantly observed (and I am ashamed to say I have capitalized on his argument), the mother dangles both boys from a Maine precipice in the hopes of saving both children, ostensibly her sons.  Her strength is not enough to hoist both children up, so she has to let one of them go to save the other or risk losing both.  What would you do?  Do you destroy the good child or the evil child?  As James Kincaid notes, audiences cheered when she destroyed the evil child (159-60) and we thought nothing of it, deeply satisfied she did the deed. It is as if the film is stating not quite subtly, we can now wash our hands of the problem once and for all.  We have saved the good child from obliteration and we somehow seem sated by this fact.
Is there an alternative narrative? I wonder, is there a narrative out there that does not fall into this duality Rousseau set up for us so long ago? Is there a way out? In the present narrative, the child is discarded (like the Wild Child of Averyon) or is the child beatified (the child of innocence)? Kincaid suggests at the end of his book that to free ourselves from the current narrative we must free ourselves from suspicion, from repression, from nonsensical legalities and the like that threaten to blind us from the child qua child. Stay tuned. Peace.

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