Passwords

[I realized in a previous essay that I hadn't reposted this essay from my newsgroup, and it's germaine to many things, so here it is].

Was there ever really a World War II movie where the sentry asked the guy coming up to name the team that won the American League Pennant in 1940? (Ha! Bet you said the Yankees! But actually the Detroit Tigers won it, the only break in what would otherwise have been an eight-year streak for the Yankees). There must have been some movies where that sort of thing happened, but I’ll be damned if I can think of one offhand.

Anyway, you can see the danger in that sort of password. All the enemy needs is a knowledge of American baseball, and you’re screwed. Real passwords need to be arbitrary, hard to guess, like swordfish, or taiyo kamuri.

We may be hard-wired to have a sense of “us” and “them.” There have been news stories that reported on the “implicit bias” tests that I mentioned in an earlier post as demonstrating that people are “naturally” racist. That argument fails both because those tests show the effects of learning, and also because “natural” doesn’t mean “inevitable” or “good.” That last part applies to any “us-ness” and “them-ness” as well. We may perceive such things as part of our basic functions; what we do with those perceptions is something else again.

How we decide who is “us” and who “they” are also matters. Sometimes it’s appearance, certainly. At other times it’s dress, language or dialect, behavior, or abstract notions like nationality and religion. When the demarcation gets abstract, as it is in things like religion or political faction, what then? What is the litmus test?

Let me suggest that, like the password during wartime, the way to tell us from them needs to be something that can’t be simply guessed by being rational; irrational requirements make a much stronger test. So the crucial test becomes adhering to some behavior that looks at least a bit weird to an outsider. You can eat meat, just not meat from “unclean” animals. Or you have to pray a certain number of times a day, facing a particular direction. Or you’re not allowed to dance, or sing to musical accompaniment. Or you have to believe that some well-respected scientific theory is a hoax.

Obviously, the more irrational the behavior, the greater the cost of belonging. Paradoxically (but in accord with human psychology), this enhances the perceived value to the believer.

Fortunately, irrationality isn’t the only thing that’s hard to guess. Experience itself isn’t rational, it’s non-rational, so shared experience can bind a group together as tightly as a hunting band or jazz combo. The shared experiences don’t require direct interaction amongst those who share them, either (although obviously such interaction intensifies the connections). It’s often quite enough to have seen the same sights, felt the same emotions, to make you one of “us.”

So we come full circle back to popular culture. There are a lot of folks writing in the blogosphere, who, whatever their primary interest, suddenly stop to post an iPod playlist. For the past several generations, music has been a crucial part of the shared experience, a way of affirming that, yes, we do all share some common ground.

When Ben first loaned me his iPod shuffle, I loaded it up with T-Bone Burnett’s The Criminal under My Own Hat, Chris Isaak’s Speak of the Devil, the CD from the Dylan No Direction Home documentary, INXS, Welcome to Wherever You Are, The Chieftains, Long Black Veil, and a CD called The Heart of the Forest, music of the Baka people of Camaroon. The rest of it mostly came from a mix CD I made a couple of years ago. I've written previously about the art of the segue, and setting the thing to shuffle sounds like a radio show that my people would like to hear, and would feel like they belong wherever it played.

Mapplethorpe

Robert Mapplethorpe was a major figure in 20th Century photography, in the same league as Diane Arbus, Ansel Adams, and others who transformed photography from a bastard child into an acknowledged venue for fine art. That Mapplethorpe’s lover, Sam Wagstaff was also a major patron and advocate of photography as fine art helped to accelerate the speed of the transition, and amplified Mapplethorpe’s influence, as did his friendship with such icons as Patti Smith.

Photo by Robert Mapplethorpe


Mapplethorpe came of age during the first flowering of “gay culture” as a publicly acknowledged and accepted part of American society and the arts. Prior to the late sixties, and seventies, it was generally understood that some areas of the arts and culture had a substantial homosexual representation (fashion, theater, and dance especially, plus those parts of pop culture that were called “camp”) but since homosexuality was usually illegal, and generally frowned upon as such, pretense and appearances were maintained and closet doors remained closed.

But after such things as the infamous “Stonewall Riots,” in New York, and a general softening of strictures about sex generally, part and parcel of “The Sixties” and “The Counterculture,” the “love that dare not speak its name” took to shouting its name into bullhorns for a while, at least in certain safe venues such as New York’s Greenwich Village and San Francisco’s Castro District.

Some of Mapplethorpe’s most famous (perhaps notorious would be a better word) photographs, was his “X, Y, and Z Portfolios”, quasi-documentary records of the time and its practices, the most infamous probably being the self-portrait with a bull whip in his anus. Other photos of the time are less shocking, but still charged with homoeroticism.

Then came Lady, Mapplethorpe’s photographic study of the body builder Lisa Lyons. This work may have single handedly created a new cultural image of feminine beauty. Previously, two female body types dominated the public imagination, the “never too rich or too thin” ideal of the fashion model, and the soft curvaceousness of Marilyn Monroe, Jane Mansfield, or Bridget Bardot.

Lisa Lyons


Lyons fit neither of those patterns; she was neither thin nor soft. Suddenly, the “hard bodied” female burned itself into the public eye. And with Mapplethorpe’s eye for light and shadow, that body became Hellenic, even Olympian. The Battle Babe was finally given the body whose form fit the function: that of challenging men physically as well as in other areas of endeavor. Lyons’ legs looked strong enough to kick a door down, and her arms looked like they could throw you across the room. The only question was how much you’d enjoy it.

I saw the traveling Mapplethorpe show when it came to the U.C. Art Museum some years back. This was the show that wound up being tried for obscenity in Ohio in 1990 as another battle in the Culture Wars. It also came just a year after Mapplethorpe himself died of AIDS. One of the most striking photographs in the show was another self portrait, Mapplethorpe facing the camera holding tightly to a cane with a death’s head skull at its top.

Self Portrait of Robert Mapplethorpe


But there was another aspect of the show that I found quite ironic. Between the sex of the earlier period and the death images taken when he knew he was dying, there was a period when he seemed to have photographed flowers almost obsessively. The irony is multi-layered. Those who brought the obscenity charges against the show confined themselves to just five photographs, no doubt because they knew that the rest of the exhibit was uncontroversial; even the nude photos of Lisa Lyons, well dang, she’s a woman, and naked women are part of what art galleries are supposed to be about. The flowers would have just confused everything.



But within the chronology of the Mapplethorpe’s life’s work, it seemed as if he became tired of the obvious and the raw, just as adolescents and young adults (most of us anyway) eventually become tired of the hunt and the frenzy and eventually settle down to a quieter existence. The Amish even plan for it, with Rumspringa, the time for sowing the wild oats. Contrariwise, the strictest upbringings produce the wildest breakouts; Mapplethorpe himself was raised Catholic, and observed that he turned every still life into an altar. Even a dolt of a preacher could use the example of Mapplethorpe as a metaphor for trying to return to grace through the natural beauty of the flower portraits.



Or maybe not, because it’s equally easy to see through that ruse. Mapplethorpe’s flowers were voluptuous and erotic, their beauty fleeting, captured in the single eternal moment of the camera click. Like all Romantics, Mapplethorpe’s work was always about sex and death, from beginning to its premature end, with even the flowers serving both bower and wake.

You Know I Couldn't Pass Up This One

Hard To Tell If Wikipedia Entry On Dada Has Been Vandalized Or Not

ZURICH, SWITZERLAND—The Wikipedia entry on Dada—the World War I–era "anti-art" movement characterized by random nonsense words, bizarre photocollage, and the repurposing of pre-existing material to strange and disturbing effect—may or may not have been severely vandalized, sources said Monday.

"This is either totally messed up or completely accurate," said Reed College art history major Ted Brendon. "There's a mustache drawn on the photo of Marcel Duchamp, the font size keeps changing [too easy], and halfway through, the type starts going in a circle []. Also, the majority of the actual entry is made up of Krazy Kat cartoons with abstract poetry written in the dialogue balloons."

The fact that the web page continually reverts to a "normal" state, observers say, is either evidence that ongoing vandalization is being deleted through vigilant updating, or a deliberate statement on the impermanence of superficial petit-bourgeois culture in the age of modernity.

Tihs is Not a Typo

Many years ago, when I was hanging out on the Compuserve Graphics Forum, I got into a little set-to with the sysops. I was playing with my then new hand scanner, and I uploaded a scan of a sketch/cartoon Dale Enzenbacher had made of me:

The sysop objected to the not-exactly-a-word “Sh*t.” Actually, the asterisk I’m using here was one of those stylized atom symbols, but you get the idea.

I thought the guy was being prissy at best, and censorious generally. Well, anyway, we had an exchange, in public, with me, among other things, observing that he was making it out to be worse than it was, and not letting the other members of the Forum make their own judgments about it. Tough titty, was more or less his response, minus the “titty” part, of course.

So I then proceeded to prepare a series of graphics images, each of which had, one way or another, the word “shit” in them somewhere or somehow. These little rebellions were not, however, easy to spot, and not a single one of them was ever rejected. In fact, for most of them, it was impossible to spot, because I’d camouflaged or otherwise encoded the offensive word.

The easiest way was to put the word in, then change the color palette value for the color of the letters to match the background. In order to see the word, you had to either change the one color, or color cycle the palette.



You can also see the message if you download it, then use something like Irfanview to shift the color palatte.

A variant of that was to take the color difference down to the subliminal threshold, then put a lot of other noise around it. Again, impossible to see unless you were looking for it.

Then there was the image of the brick wall that I made with the words “This is Art” spelled out in differing sizes, colors, etc., except that one of the hardest to see ones had the letters in “This” rearranged.

A more obvious one, but one that still got through:





I did many more of these than I uploaded, because, knurd that I am, I was getting more interested in the process than the actual dispute that had begun it. I’d proved my point, a proof confined more-or-less to myself alone, unless someone else had noticed, and if anyone did, they were obviously on my side, since they never told the sysop. But I was branching out into more intricate and arcane methods of the “secret message” trick.

There are, in fact, a plethora of methods of putting secret messages into graphics files generally. One trick is to modify the least significant digit on a pixel color code, then use that modification to encode your message. You need a “reference” image to get the difference off, and it helps to first do a compression (like the LZW encoding that used on Zip files), which makes your message look like noise. If you want, you can just have the reference be a solid color, so your message then looks like noise or static, or something like it, and if you have an image where that sort of texture is appropriate, then Bob’s your Uncle.

There was a crank book called “Subliminal Seduction” by Wilson Bryan Key (1974) that claimed all sorts of “subliminal messages” were contained in various advertisements, especially subliminal sexual messages. The fact is that subliminal images have less effect than overt, visible images, but there are all sorts of paranoias, and this one fed the notion that people were being all sexed up by invisible images bombarding them from all sides. Think of the children!

After playing around with my secret message images for a while, I had the notion of using some of those tricks on pornographic images, writings, etc. I’ll bet you could get a lot of free publicity for a “Subliminal Sex” art exhibition, where maybe only two thirds of the works actually had any sexual content, even of the subliminal kind, so the prissy folks would be getting headaches staring at a black canvas that contained a subliminal image of a puppy, and thinking it was erotic.

I think it would be more trouble that it would be worth to me, but if there are any artists out there who are hungry for notoriety, you know how to get in touch.