I recently saw the Christopher Nolan (“Memento”) film The Prestige starring Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, and a mossy, disappointed-looking Michael Caine. The film began in a manner that has become formulaic: the opening image is a panning shot of dozens of top hats clustered on a grassy hillside. It is a seemingly mundane but also unusual image. A Michael Caine voice over begins, wherein he explains the three parts of a magic trick.

These three parts are enumerated several times throughout the film, so I will not rehearse them here–if you choose to see the movie you really let yourself in for about seven minutes of explanation in total, tallying the time for each reiteration. The prestige is essentially the dramatic release of a magic trick.

Michael Caine’s voice over carries us to a scene where he–using his skills as a behind-the-scenes trick designer and act consultant–completes a magic trick for a little girl, its stages unsubtly punctuated by his voice over talking points. This scene is to be bookended at the movie’s close with a badly executed, suspension-of-disbelief disrupting plot twist.

From there a winding tale of professional competition, quasi-adultery, envy and revenge uncoils. The plot is driven by the pathologies of the competing magicians, who are cleanly divorced from humanity, social skills, and any recognizable emotional register. One character, for instance, seeks revenge against someone whose wife he killed. This occurs perhaps to drive home the fact that anyone is expendable in two mens’ quest to be the best magician, but it makes the entire plot feel like it’s trying to sew with its left hand. We are to assume that the plot is right-handed–the universal and fundamental, culture-bridging urge to be a master magician notwithstanding.

Despite these narrative flaws, generally good performances by the numerous big name actors make it all seem OK. David Bowie is in the movie, too. In truth, the only reason The Prestige merits mention is because of director Christopher Nolan’s knack for weaving what could be described as either a) philosophical conundrums, or b) cheesy mental puzzles to be loudly argued about in restaurants into the midst of his chaotic tales.

The movie contains two significant ideas, and the following paragraphs contain spoilers.

Hugh Jackman obtains a machine from Nikola Tesla which the withering inventor warns him never to use, mentioning vague horrors. The horror is specifically the fact that the machine creates duplicates. The implications of this are suggested rather than explored, as the audience only realizes at the film’s end that Jackman has been accomplishing his tricks at the cost of his own life. At each performance, he drowns himself, trusting that the machine will deposit a duplicate in the theater’s upper rows. The question of whether or not he has been killed is fascinating insofar as it applies to our own lives. We have to trust that we will be here in five minutes, and do it so willingly that we almost always ignore the quantum, constantly regenerative nature of our existence, in favor of ascribing continuity to our infinitely individual experiences.

The other idea is presented as a conceit, the subject of which is hesitation, which could be construed as some people’s need for a savior, a return to the security, absolution, and wholeness of our time as infants, or simply the need to have an end to a story. The audiences attending the magic shows in The Prestige are a few times times denied the promised resolution to the trick, on some occasions because of a death on stage. Their dumb, disrupted reaction in the face of the unexpected is in marked contrast to the initiative and drive of the performers.

The prestige is a dramatic release, one of the criteria for a performance to count as theater. Another is for the audience to know they are the audience and the performers to know they are performers. In theater it is safe to accept one’s role as a passive audience, and is in fact kind of ass not to. In life perhaps the opposite is true.

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I’ve been obsessed for some time now with the aesthetics and mentalities of certain periods in time. The 70s with its formica, drugs, and pre-AIDS promiscuity. The nuclear 50s with horn-rimmed glasses, buzzed hair, and a red scare played out on black and white television. What will the icons be of our messy era of social repression, tech explosion, and unpopular war? What harsh realities will fade as we move out of one decade into the next? What are the nascent issues now hatching that will grow into the galvanizing trials of a future iconography?

The whole practice of periodizing or fetishizing an era or scene may just be a way to insulate ourselves from responsibility. For those who idealize the beat generation or draw inspiration from the global revolutions of the 60s, there’s a longing for what they imagine those times to be like, but also a relief that, since those times are gone, there is no burden to actually live what in reality must have been an exhausting and alienating life. Was the punk movement filled with marginalized dreamers who just wanted a simpler life and greater autonomy? Or was it just a bunch of assholes who didn’t want to do anything they didn’t want to do?

There are some big problems with our cultural compulsion to put brackets around time periods, perhaps especially in the arbitrary designation of decades. A good example is the current surprise a lot of people have that North Korea is trying to build nuclear weapons, that the world’s ecosystem is turning against us, that we’re in a bloody war in Iraq for no good reason. These are grown-up versions of problems that entered our awareness long ago, but then disappeared once the numbers rolled over to a new set of ten years. Fashions changed, consciousness changed, it seemed like a fresh start.

So maybe it’s useful to look at the ways the present will be iconified and forgotten as it happens. While the dot com boom was technically in the late 90s, I think it will be absorbed as part of the 00s since it could only really be understood in retrospect – the same way a lot of the culture of the late 60s bleeds into the early 70s. That’s an easy one – college students getting rich off of empty, exciting language; venture capitalist rolling on the ecstasy of a wildly inflated market. But what did it set the stage for?

The boom was a huge shift in economy, public philosophy, and awareness who’s effects can easily be overlooked since it can swiftly be dismissed as ‘that crazy dot com bubble.’ What will the safe totems be for this war time depression? The powerlessness of compassionate intellectuals lulled to complacency by economic comfort? More likely it will be blogging. Soldiers blogging, moms blogging, everyone blogging. What was your blog about during the Iraq war? Oh, that was back when I was blogging about kitten attire and mom makeover secrets, it was great. At least the kids of the Vietnam era could take solace in their radicals. Are they out there now and just hidden from us?

Maybe it would also be useful to find out what type of learning mechanism makes this an appealing strategy for assimilating information. Is there a more comprehensive way to digest large pieces of information so that our landmarks of history can be based around events rather than temporal mile markers?

This is not only on my mind as a critic of culture, but on a personal level as well, because I have a similarly limited perception of myself. My idea of who I am is only based on about the last three months. I take no pride in past accomplishments, old friends fade from awareness, a stifling tunnel vision sets in due to the constant reenforcement of a small number of visual landscapes. I use seasons and years to put bookends on themes and personas that are ongoing and fluid. Whenever I go to my hometown of Eugene, OR or down to Santa Cruz where I went to school, I’m flooded with a deeper sense of myself and a wider vocabulary for interpreting my current situation. Upon returning to San Francisco, the vision narrows and the claustrophobia sets in, with little of the recovered identity transcending the boundaries of the bay.

Perhaps it’s a bit conceited to analogize the two periodizations. But if the world can carry around the calm that I feel when a larger portion of my history is at the front of my mind, perhaps we can collectively make better decisions and repeat less mistakes. Maybe a more comprehensive public consumption of history would have the added benefit of allowing compulsive nostalgics to stop dreaming of a scene or era or movement and see the ways they can shape the future by believing in their own perceptions.

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I apologize in advance for a second consecutive post that is again heavily youtube reliant.

However, if you take 18 minutes out of your day, please do so for this collection of three clips … that means you, Dave Cohn … brew a cup of tea if you need to multitask.

In introduction, although I want George to do his own talking, George Galloway is an old school socialist that was expelled from the Labour Party in October 2003 when a party body decided that statements he had made in opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq had brought the party into disrepute. He now leads the Respect Party and is Respect Party’s only representative in the British Parliament. He is a vehement opponent of Bush, Blair and the Invasion on Iraq. He also hates certain western media conglomerates, or rather … all of them.

Because the British could not handle Galloway’s inflammatory and unapologetic rhetoric, the Americans came gunning for him. Whilst he was fighting a legal battle against London’s Daily Telegraphfor reporting on questionable and biased accusations against Galloway of accepting bribes from Saddam Hussein, Galloway was facing the same baseless inquiry from the US Senate!!!!

To be fair and balanced, although I wouldn’t Galloway’s comments about the media and Bush, Galloway is not the perfect politician. He made the mistake of being a contestant on Celebrity Big Brother. Don’t you think he used a palatable chat and millions of viewers to cleverly convey his political agenda?

I think the closest America has had to a politician like Galloway was James Traficant but then he was corrupt liar and Galloway is not.

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We here at Hesitating have a special fascination with the emergence of online worlds — brightly colored simulacrums of human experience that take place in fantastic settings. Arguably the most popular, World of Warcraft has generally been omitted from some of the headline grabbing developments in the online community. This is probably due to its core gameplay and straightforward goals that keep players distracted from silly social experimentation. Second Life, perhaps the game most covered by the media, is more a hotbed of real meets virtual clashes and experiments since its in-game economy can be transferred into real currency.

This year, however, a real death mourned online in WoW sparked a fair amount of controversy. It started in a forum when a ‘friend’ of the deceased announced a funeral for March 4th at 5:30 server time. The girl who had died apparently had a stroke, and the forum was filled with half heart-felt condolences such as, “death is never fun” and “Are you fucking serious? Dude….I was in a guild with her… /cry,” along with a smattering of frowny-face icons.

One prescient post bet money on the funeral being disrupted by someone in the game. The following is a video made by the guild Serenity, who did in fact crash the procession. It’s a little long, so be patient.

My first reaction – before even seeing the video – was: “That’s fucked up.” But I was already chuckling in spite of myself. The lackluster sympathy on the original forum already demonstrates the structural holes in anonymity when it tries to support a weighty topic such as death.

Also, in a game where you were pretending to be in a different world, with different creatures and rules, who’s to say that a funeral slaughter is disrespectful? Maybe a precedent has been set and from now on it will be a sign of respect to the dead to hack all their mourners to pieces. Once the knee-jerk reaction towards offense wears off, it all seems strangely appropriate. If someone was a big enough fan of the game to have friends put on an online funeral, then that person would probably appreciate this type of event were they still alive.

To me, online worlds are exciting not because of the graphics or worlds you can explore, but because common human events such as funerals, weddings, sex, commerce, etc. are being conducted for the first time in these electronic petri dishes. There is no precedent or guidelines to follow in these online firsts, and the things that people choose to keep or throw away from the real-world counterparts is thought provoking. And in these decisions, precedents are being set. What if twenty years from now, when we go to the funeral of a friend online, we feel a sense of closer as the death squads flank us and we are forced to fight for our lives?

What say you, oh loyal readers?

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My peer group – for the most part – is a well-washed mass of royalty. Or, rather, anticipated royalty. Chris Ott at Shallow Rewards puts it best:

Our parents dreamt of doing lots of things and didn’t, dousing their desires to make sure we could explore ours more fully. The working at gas stations and walking miles in the snow…many of our parents had to supplement their family’s income, and wanted better

Ultimately, our parents’ drive to deliver a better childhood is proving a mistake, if a well-intentioned one. We are a generation embarrassed to have day jobs, embarrassed to work for a living. Embarrassed not to be kings and queens.

Ott acknowledges the myth that this wasn’t basically true of our parents’ generation as well. His implicit solution is to work a tolerable job and save your passion for your free time. Here’s where I disagree. While I appreciate the sentiment and the notion that most kids my age should just get over themselves, I take issue with the one-size-fits-all solution. Some people are legitimately depressed by their 9 to 5 jobs, and it seems like a format for living that better serves fictional economic bodies rather than individuals.

I read about a study once that said the average U.S. employee works more hours than anywhere else in the world, but the amount of work accomplished with each additional hour was the lowest. In other words, our attitude towards work keeps us at the office longer with the least amount of payoff. When you have an arbitrary standard of 40 hours a week, you get people extending 30 hours of work unnecessarily. And I would wager that the increased employee dissatisfaction plays a role in productivity as well.

I can understand why the work week was structured the way it is, but it’s one specific solution to an organizational problem that is perhaps outdated. The drive to maximize one’s earning torque doesn’t work for a lot of people. And for that segment of the population there are socialist pipe dreams. In my view, we should be looking back upon this time a hundred years from now and putting this labor schedule on a level analogous to how we view serfdom now. It’s simply an inefficient system for any civic goals you may have. The only realm in which it makes sense is one driven by bureaucracy rather than populism.

And so I think Ott’s solution is flawed. I think that the king syndrome is the product of our fucked up view towards work and leisure, and the problems of polarizing one’s life into those two categories in the first place. We shouldn’t think that we’re special, but we should acknowledge that we are unique. And rather than having a market economy – which is not a level playing field by any stretch of the imagination – create a variety of life paths that so that you can choose how best your talents serve consumers, we should have a system that takes care of economic necessities while allowing for the diversity of human experience.

Fruity, I know. But I’m sick of most people getting nothing just so everyone can entertain the illusion that they could have everything.

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