Fact Checking

Heard of Christian Marclay? "The Clock"? He's the present darling of the art world (or so it seems, from my complete outsider's perspective). "The Clock" is a twenty-four hour video-art piece made up of clips from movies featuring the current time. Sounds gimmicky at first, but reading the details in a terrific New Yorker article has got me pretty fascinated. 

There's one sentence in the article I'm interested in here, though. In the section discussing Marclay's irritation with galleries not giving the work appropriate respect, the writer relates an anecdote about a Los Angeles museum wanting to project the work on their outdoor wall. The anecdote is followed by a qualification in parentheses:

"(LACMA denies suggesting outdoor projection)."

 I'm probably weird, but this struck me as hilarious. These bracketed A denies verbing B appear in New Yorker articles all the time, but they're usually more like "the notorious arms trader denies dealing with the Taliban" or "Exxon Mobil denies deliberately tarring birds" or "Politician denies the Mafia influence". So the gallery denying outdoor projection was pleasantly tame.

This must, I suppose, be the work of the fact checkers. Reading the Marclay piece, it seems pretty clear that the LACMA denies sentence was a later addition. The degree of fact-checking this implies is intriguing. Did the gallery really suggest projecting the clock outdoors? Talk about a fine-toothed comb.

Fact-checking, it turns out, is pretty much an American phenomenon. The New Inquiry has a really interesting article about this, dissecting its place in American culture. There's also a bit more about the Daisey affair, if that interests you. The London Review of Books has a bit of a lighter, shorter take on fact-checking too. The outsider take on American fact-checking there is pretty interesting.

Anyway, I'm hoping for more slightly ludicrous fact-check clarifications like the gallery denial.

Lines from the New Yorker (Mar. 5, 2012)

"“This Is Not a Film” was smuggled out of Iran on a flash drive hidden in a cake.”

 

“The truth is that punitive, hysterical religions thrive, while soft, mystical ones must hide their scriptures somewhere in the hot sand.”

“And then you blink again and it’s three women, only one of the women is shaped exactly like a vase.”

“But I’ll get back to Russia. I don’t know when. But I’m still young. Your empire will collapse and I’ll get out of here.”

Blergher + Daisey

I was reading something on my sister's blog about chocolate chips, and I realised that Blogger is rubbish. Not quite sure how that train of thought went. But blogger does seem to be a bit rubbish. I even found a blog elsewhere explaining why Blogger is so rubbish. Seems like Google retains the right to do what they like with your content, for example. Probably meaningless, but annoying in principle. My main complaint is that it is just a bit ugly. Everyone's wordpress blogs look so classy. So I'll be trying to move there sometime soon. Once the class this all goes towards is over perhaps. Start a new thing combined with my other old blogger blog.

Anyway, CNF! I've been meaning to write something about the whole Mike Daisey deal, though it isn't real timely anymore. I'll keep it brief. In case you haven't heard of Daisy: he's a New York performer with a stage show titled “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” which is a pretty awful title if you ask me. The show is a monologue detailing, in part, Daisey’s visit to a Chinese factory responsible for manufacturing Apple products. In January, this section of his monologue was broadcast on This American Life (that is, on the world’s most downloaded podcast).

          

A few weeks ago, This American Life aired a retraction episode, saying that they had found significant departures from the truth in Daisey’s monologue. The entire episode was devoted to unpacking these, first with the China-based reporter who uncovered the inconsistencies, then in a tense interview between Ira Glass (the host) and Daisy himself. Glass seemed personally hurt by the deception, and Daisey was pretty glum. The Guardian has a nice summary, complete with their writer's own sense of betrayal.

The two podcasts are available here and here. Both fascinating listening, but don't do one without the other.

(Daisey's the toady one in the picture above, by the way. Glass is the scruffy intellectual.)

The issue raised by the Daisey affair is basically the different notions of truth attached to different media. Daisy insisted that, in the context of the theatre, his monologue was truthful in its essence, despite the substantial fabrications. He realised he had made a mistake in allowing it to be aired on TAL, where the expectations for veracity are rather higher. But Glass felt that even in the theatre, where he himself first heard the monologue, the audience was led to assume Daisey's words were literally true. Here's the relevant bit of transcript:

Mike Daisey: Yeah. We have different worldviews on some of these things. I agree with you truth is really important.
Ira Glass: I know but I feel like I have the normal worldview. The normal worldview is somebody stands on stage and says 'this happened to me,' I think it happened to them, unless it's clearly labeled as 'here's a work of fiction.'

I wanted to be all postmodern, and side with Daisey on the theatre issue. Because whatistruthanyway. But I think I got off that boat when it occurred to me that I didn't think his manipulations were actually in support of any greater truth at all. He wants to be opening people's eyes to something Apple is doing in secret, but actually, it really appears to be a problem Apple are genuinely tackling. As the retraction episode pointed out, it's all there in their own reports. Many of his distortions do not serve the truth, rather painting a damaging caricature of Chinese industry and serving only his own show.

A Dead European Darling

Kill your darlings, they're always saying. This one's still warm.

From my suburban Brisbane bedroom, I dive behind a Street View camera and into a Prague New Town alley. Retracing the path I trod in those early days is an uncanny experience, like discovering my memory preserved in a digital archive. The record isn’t perfect—checkerboard cobblestones have lost their icy skin and the sky holds a sun I never saw that February. But Google has kept countless details I have all but lost.

Next to my hostel door, the brown Antikvariát still displays its dusty stock of quiet brown books. Clicking forward, I pass a Triple-A Taxi, its more-trustworthy-than-average driver staring straight at me. On my right, the gate I never saw opened stands as impenetrable as ever, strewn with the same scrunched graffiti that unsteadied my newcomer’s confidence. The gate’s high wall decays back through its history, scraps of white paint hovering over plasters and concretes in assorted greys and browns, layers exposed like geological strata right down to the crumbly brick of who-knows-when. I remember running my fingers over those layers before I found gloves, and I’m starting to remember a lot more. As I pass the blurry images of some not quite anonymous Central Europeans, I can feel again what it’s like to be a teenager shivering in the middle of a continent of strangers. After two years and across thousands of kilometres, I am that hungry boy again, looking for a meal on his first real winter night.

At the end of the narrow street, I emerge from concrete and graffiti into postcard Europe. The Gothic loom of Jindřišská věž still hovers to my right, and I take the glance I took that night before turning left towards the centre. Two trams are frozen on their tracks, one heading towards me, one away. I can hear their bells trill. Despite the photographed sun, I see everything lit by the dense orange of Prague’s sodium street lamps. The Google images fade into my own accelerating memory as everything comes rushing back. Across the street, the chain bakery I’d thought charmingly local looks no less welcoming than it did. But I want something heartier, something more Czech. I click past a mobile phone shop, another bakery, and a dozen parked Škodas, until I come to the restaurant. Set in a plain yellow building, its green wooden front, stripy awnings and selection of window menus and signs leave it looking somewhere between imitation French bistro and Irish pub. But it must have looked Czech enough for me that night. One piece of advice I wish I could send back to myself, staring in that restaurant window: keep walking.

  

This chunk I've just cut intact from my 800 word memoir. 500 words of introduction doesn't work so well there. But it remains a darling.

Obligatory Procrastination Post

I’m writing a (very) mini-memoir today, on my first few days in Prague two years ago. So far, it seems to be about Google Streetview (which is really the coolest) and eating a pork knee. Might not sound like the most interesting topic for a memoir, until you remember than a Czech pork knee looks like THIS:

Might still not sound so interesting actually. We’ll see. I’m struggling over the tone. So far it’s been what seems to me very Memoir in tone, sort of poetic and wistful, but I think lots of it could benefit from a much funnier approach. Sedarisey, self-caricaturing. Maybe I’ll manage to mix the two. Actually, that’s what I think Sedaris does so well. Not the wistful/poetic so much as just the moving and honest, mixed with his trademark hilariousness. See for example: Old Faithful.

Anyway, I guess I’ll get back to it. Wish me luck.