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[bylinezine]

Slow it Down: An interview with Adam Rothstein

Adam Rothstein writes about technology, though does so without any of the rush or tumble. He's careful, arching his way through the thought process, straining past the headline, to arrive somewhere ahead of the development. 

But the "technology writer" label is a short-sighted claim. Instead, he's someone fascinated by the now - whether political, social or cultural - , and how it aligns with then and tomorrow. 

His academic background certainly influences his historian-like take, but it's his ability to bring numerous angles together - with an active, brimming voice - that lets his pieces land outside of a textbook.

Here's our brief chat with Adam. 

Read his latest contribution, "Ad Coelum", here. 

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Alec Berry: So, you seem like a writer who's very much in service to the subjects you're writing about, versus a writer who's in service to themselves. 

Adam Rothstein: Yeah ... it's difficult exactly to sum up what I'm trying to do in writing, but I think explaining the material is definitely always the goal, especially when it's subject matter that is a little uncommon or a little unfamiliar. [There are] things that get covered in a certain way, in a certain direction in the general discourse, so I try to open up a different way of looking at it. I think a lot of that comes from my background in academic writing. I was studying philosophy, and I was going to teach philosophy before I abandoned that course and decided to pursue freelance journalism. 

AB: In terms of opening up "a different way of looking at" the subjects you write about, can you be more specific about that? 

AD: Sure. A lot of the things I write about are relatively new. Technology is the easy route to go with that. There's a lot of new technology out there, and we're trying to figure it out. We're trying to know what it's for, how it can be used, what it means, and what it will change about our world. There's a lot of quick solutions to that; there's a lot of quick answers to those questions. I try to look to the second, third or maybe fourth answer because, a lot of times - as we've learned studying history - you look at something ... like a technology that's invented for one purpose ... and it ends up affecting something entirely different. So these interconnected webs of the way of causality works in the real world, outside of the sort of design fiction or the kind of advertisement for the product as is. What it actually ends up being used for is much more interesting, I think. Maybe much more important, too, depending to most people in the world.

AB: I do like your interest in slowing down these always in-motion subjects.

AD: I don't like to be one for knee-jerk reactions, that's for sure (laughs). I try to avoid those whenever possible. That serves me pretty well when thinking about technology, or how to organize people or the way the world works. I think very few people have the skill or the luck to have their first, immediate reaction be the best one. I know I certainly don't. 

I've never really gone toward journalism as being the first one out with the story, breaking the story. I've kind of gone for the more historical view. Maybe I can just apply my skills to that better? It seems more in tune with my personality and abilities, but it's also something I see as important. That's why I do it. 

AB: With most of your stuff online, have you felt a need to push against your background in academic writing? I mean, going by your answers, it does't seem so, but has it ever slipped into your head - in order to catch someone's attention within a much faster medium - you may need to leave some of those tendencies behind, or do you proudly keep them? 

AD: Oh, yeah. It's always a struggle for me. If I really wrote the way I want to, I would write 5,000 word tracks about the Hegelian dialectics of social media art or something (laughs). Which, I do venture into some of that heady, theoretical territory from time to time, but there's definitely some ... trying to work with the online medium of writing is a different procedure than academic papers, for sure. 

On the other hand, it was in grad school that I first started blogging. There was a transition there for me. I was having frustration with the academic lifestyle, the academic cannon, and  then I saw blogging as this great outlet. This different way of doing things. It wouldn't need to conform to these channels or way of thought. It was fun to be able to kind of hybridize my writing for the internet. 

AB: With your piece for ByLine this week, you mentioned in an email that you felt you were just writing about drones again. And you were. But what I liked about the piece ... you managed to take it away from the now and link it to past and future. It gave it some scope versus being another tweet.

AD: That's the real thing about drones, in my opinion. I'm actually working on a book about drones which themes are along those lines. Drones are these things that are very current, very much in the zeitgeist, and something some people are very worried about in terms of surveillance and military power. But drones are also very historical. They've been around for a while. Even very familiar reconnaissance drones have been around for 40, 50 years at this point, so it's not something new. But it fits into our historical continuum in the way we adopt and adapt to new technologies. 

I kind of compare drones to things like the airplane or the car in the way that these were culturally transformative technological forces that weren't really as simple as the one thing. They're sort of connected to all of these other developments. Drones are totally like that. They're about radios, big data, processing ability and digital imagery. There also about the very basic mechanics of aircraft, and that's a 100-year technological continuum, and drones are not even the cutting edge as far as aircraft go.

So they're incredibly historical, and that's how I like to think of them. And I still find them fascinating, and I still find them troubling, in certain respects. If I had a mission about drones - if I had something I'd want to impart to an audience - it's that we can still be concerned about drones even though we're considering them on this wider, historical level.

[bylinezine]

Ad Coelum

Written by: Adam Rothstein

Look into the sky above you, and what do you see? The visible edges of weather perhaps, and refracted light from the sun. The blue dome of light is ethereal, having no actual boundary but that which our eyes perceive. The atmosphere, and all the chaotic force of the shifting flows of moisture and temperature, are held in only by their own weight. The sky gives way to outer space by the settling of those gases down towards the planet—eventually, the scattered molecules are few and far between, stray particles really, bouncing ballistically through the exosphere like beach balls above a crowded beach, with only the luminous traces of the earth's electromagnetic field for company.

The sky is ours—integral to our extended planetary ecosystem and necessary for all the life that lives on and in the earth's thin crust. And humans, as is their wont, set sail out into the sky, using it for whatever purpose they can think of. They harness it to drag their rampaging chariot of culture on into the future, however grim that destination might be. But if the sky is a terrain that we might navigate and use, then it is fated to become ownable. Where humans go, their system of laws and property always follows, like the wagon train of a great invading army. When the entirety of the land is owned, inhabited, sub-divided, and contracted, then they sky must be next. And so, in this contemporary period of technological development, humans are greatly innovating the process of sky-ownership. With new technology, comes new necessity and new means for owning pieces of the sky.

Technology has fragmented the air above our heads, converted it into streams of waves, shafts of light, avenues of fresh breeze, and large fields of visible space. Want to lay claim to one of these emerging sky features? The question is not why so much as how. This functional ability is always evolving as the technological means by which we understand our claim to the sky advances. When we investigate some of the current means for colonizing that seemingly boundless expanse of air above our heads, we come to see that just as how the current means are entirely different than they were only one hundred years ago, in another hundred years, they will most likely be wholly different yet again. Drones, a currently emerging technology, are primed to be one of the motive forces in this evolution.

The Latin phrase that gave birth to the origins of Common Law about the right to the sky is: Cuius est solum, eius est usque ad caelum et ad inferos, which translates to “For whoever owns the soil, it is theirs up to Heaven and down to Hell." Referred to in law as ad coelum, literally “to the sky," this principle is very poetic, but the problem is that visualizing airspace as simply large columns extending upwards from the ground doesn't allow subdivision, resale, and compartmentalization of the sky as separate from the ground. So ad coelum has been forced to evolve.

Originally meant as a means of preventing your neighbors from building overhanging buildings, roofs, or signage from their property onto yours, technological augmentations to ad coelum began in the golden age of ballooning. The courts found that transiting the air above a person's land did not count as trespassing, and so the sky ways were open to free transit by the public. In 1909, The Automobile, a magazine, reported angry property owners' complaints that airship pilots, throwing down sand ballast onto their property, were ruining the fine lawns Los Angeles. However, given the freedom to pass overhead unmolested by the courts, the only legal recourse of the property owners against the airships was the city ordinance against littering.

The US Supreme Court case of United States v. Causby was the final blow to unrestrained ad coelum. It seems a farmer complained that flybys by military planes were alarming his chickens, causing them to throw themselves into the walls of their coop, killing them. He sought restitution for the loss of his property under the Fifth Amendment. The court found his argument compelling, but defined his right to the airspace as “exclusive control of the immediate reaches of the enveloping atmosphere.... own[ing] at least as much of the space above the ground as he can occupy or use in connection with the land.” Thus began the airspace land grab—in which property owners could not extend their ownership to the heavens, but only as far as they could build. As technology made the space useful, it had to be owned apart from the useful ownership of the land, insofar as the former did not impinge upon the latter.

Today, the Federal Aviation Administration defines Class G as generally anything under 1200 feet not otherwise classified as controlled. In this zone, pilots may fly as low as they like, so long as they maintain a 500-foot distance from people or man-made structures, except when taking off and landing. This definition is given under the understanding that the FAA, as a branch of the United States Government, has exclusive right to regulate the sovereign airspace of the country, otherwise known as the National Airspace, or (NAS). Ad coelum is now a short ceiling underneath the jurisdiction of the FAA.

But with the new technology of drones, that 500-foot ceiling lowers further. The 2012 FAA Modernization and Reform Act passed by Congress allows public safety agencies to operate unmanned aircraft under 4.4 pounds in weight, as long as they are within line of sight from the operator, and no more than 400 feet from the ground. The Class G cushion is now likely to be invaded by swarming machines, an entirely new class of aircraft in a new class of airspace, separate from the larger aircraft traveling above. These stratifications of the sky may seem arbitrary, but 400 feet happens to be a special number to law enforcement. It was the altitude of the helicopter in question in the Supreme Court case of Florida v. Riley.

In that case, police observed a marijuana growing operation from a helicopter 400 feet in the air above the property, and used this observation to obtain a search warrant. The court ruled that 400 feet was not close enough to the property for the owner to have a reasonable expectation of privacy, even though it was less than the 500-foot distance stipulated by the FAA.

So 500 feet and above is the limit for safety, whereas 400 feet and above is the limit for privacy. And yet, drones are allowed within this privacy cushion, in order to keep them out of the Class G airspace above. If this seems possibly contradictory, it is because it is. As drones take to the skies—an eventuality the FAA must regulate by 2015 at the latest, on orders from Congress—privacy will move into the spotlight for our understanding of ad coelum, as lightweight drones reduce the danger of dead chickens, but increase the risk of peering into windows.

Cameras are the primary payload of commercial drones, and their rights and responsibilities when collecting data from below 400 feet has not been fully tested, either in the courts or in the actual ramifications of their use. The FAA has been hesitant to voice any opinions about the future of privacy rules in the regulation of drones. They look upon themselves as an office devoted to maintaining safety, not constitutional privacy rights. However, if they continue to allow public law enforcement agencies to operate drones capable of surveillance below 400 feet, it will only be a matter of time before the Supreme Court ends up either maintaining the 400 foot ceiling of Riley, or lowering it yet again.

Flying machines are claiming airspace from the sky down in a series of layers, but the columns of airspace above property as originally visualized by ad coelum are not yet lost. Tall buildings are claiming their own airspace from the ground up. In cities with high-rise buildings, the idea of “air rights” is a complicated and malleable form of real estate procedure. In New York City, home of some of the most expensive property in the United States, air rights can be sold from one building to another. It works like this: in a certain zone, property owners are allowed to build to a certain height, say for example, ten-stories. However, if there is a building that cannot be torn down and rebuilt because of its historic significance, the owner can still sell the air rights. A three-story building in a ten-story zone can sell its unused seven-stories of air rights to its neighbor, allowing that neighbor to build to a total of seventeen stories. The purpose of this is to allow taller buildings while having gaps between them, so that the streets do not become deep canyons of skyscrapers stacked right next to each other. And so, the column of air above a short building is preserved, by being sold in the negative to building that will take up an equivalent volume of air.

There are a number of zoning regulations like this in New York City, they allow flexibility in architecture without turning the streets into narrow aisles between stacked pallets of construction. There is what is called the Floor Area Ratio, which is used to measure the total floor area of the building, versus the surface area of the lot. If the lot is 10,000 square feet and the Ratio is 2.0, there can be up to 20,000 square feet of building floor space on that lot.

The Floor Area Ratio, combined with the Open Space Ratio, allows architects to build upwards, while leaving open space. If the example property above, with 20,000 square feet of floor area, requires an 0.20 open space ratio, that means that the building footprint can be no greater than 16,000 square feet, leaving 4,000 square feet of open space. This still allows flexibility, as the building could be four floors of 5,000 square feet, eight floors of 2,500 square feet, or any other shuffling of the numbers within those bounds.

The greatest flexibility is for buildings that are tall, skinny, and separated from each other, rather than short, broad, and packed tightly. This is what New York City tends to encourage, which is great for allowing light to the street, and allowing tenants to enjoy excellent views of the city. In addition to the air rights, these “view rights” and “light rights” become an unofficial commodity for every property. This is a large reason for why property along Central Park is so valuable—as long as the park exists, the view and light exposure on the park side will be guaranteed. In some areas, the right to light and view is maintained by the zoning. New York City also mandates a “Sky Exposure Plane," which is an invisible, angled plane rising up from the sidewalk, back into the property of the blocks. This ensures a certain maximum slope of the street “canyon." Buildings will not intrude into this space, so light and air from the sky can get down to street level, rather than being left in shadow at all hours outside of noon. Many buildings are constructed with setbacks, where the floors retreat in from the street as the building rises, so they will not cross the Sky Exposure Plane. This ziggurat-like construction is not just for aesthetic purposes—it is mandated by law in order to protect public access to the sky. The ad coelum shape of public space bends in from the street, refracted by the prisms of interpreting and trading credits under complicated zoning regulation.

As we start to consider drones as a technology primed to join the urban environment, this conserved and traded public space is not just a place for light and air, but the potential domain of drones. A Sky Exposure Plane is, whether we like it or not, a de facto Drone Exposure Plane. Drones, in an urban environment, are necessarily architectural. AJ Kohn's speculative architectural project Shura City images a city designed specifically to keep drones out, by tailoring architectural features to take advantage of drones' weaknesses. When we open up city space to the sky, and we open up sky space to drones, we are conducting a complicated origami of laws, space, and intention, but what sort of animal these multi-faceted folds will resemble remains to be seen.

The nuances of New York City building code may be esoteric, but it is nothing compared to the aetheric qualities of the electromagnetic spectrum. The domains of radiated energy, a fundamental physical feature of our universe, are not free from ownership and control by human society. Nearly 130 years ago, Heinrich Hertz first demonstrated that James Maxwell's theorization of electromagnetic waves was correct, by generating radio waves in his laboratory. Since that time, human beings have made these waves the beating pulse of our information ecosystem, in broadcast systems like television and radio, in communications infrastructure like satellite-based GPS and Wifi, and even in sophisticated sensory equipment like X-ray cameras and positron emission tomography, or PET scanning.

Not unlike how the FAA was created to regulate the airspace for maximum fair usage, the Federal Communications Commission was formed to do a similar task as newer technology, such as television broadcast, began to overstep the jurisdiction of the Federal Radio Commission. However, when it comes to deciding who owns what part of the spectrum, matters are not nearly as clear as the FAA's color-coded map of airspace. Now our three-dimensional airspace is shot through with a fourth dimension—that of radiating waves. The universe itself oscillates with vibrations stretching across the earth's sky as far as it can without interference. But you can own a subset of these vibrations, if you play your cards right.

The electromagnetic spectrum is divided into bands, and each band is divided up into channels. These bands are assigned to classes of devices - everything from cell phones, to medical imaging equipment, to spy satellites checking the atmosphere for signs of a detonated nuclear bomb. Some of these bands are decided in consultation with the International Telecommunication Union, an agency of the United Nations responsible for coordinating communications issues between various countries. However, each country retains the right to have sovereign control over the spectrum in its country—even if the energy in those bands can extend not just across national borders, but through the entire universe.

Radio stations called “border blasters” are licensed within the territory in which the transmitter resides, but are specifically intended to broadcast into a country in which they are unlicensed. The famous station XERB broadcast over the Mexican border to Texas in the 1960s, carrying the well-known voice of Wolfman Jack. Similar stations in the United States broadcast into Canada. Other stations, like Radio Free Europe, serve as propaganda news sources, broadcasting with the financial support of one country to the inhabitants of another. And then, there are the mysterious numbers stations—shortwave stations that broadcast repeating strings of nonsensical numbers and letters at particular times to particular regions. There is no official recognition of these stations' existence or purpose, and it is speculated that they are coded information stations meant for spies abroad. Like dark figures slipping across border walls in the night, these shadowy stations trespass across the electromagnetic sovereignty of nations large and small, alike.

To “own” a channel on a particular band is often as simple as paying the license fees, as in the case of radio. The FCC will license a particular spot on the dial in a particular area to a radio station, and then organizes all stations across the country to make sure none will conflict with any others. But electromagnetic radiation is not as easy to parcel as land, and physics often gets in the way. There are stations that are licensed only as “daytimers," forced to shut off their transmitters at night. This is because medium frequency radio waves bounce off the ionosphere after the sun has set, allowing them to travel much further in a process known as “skywave." To allow certain stations to take advantage of skywave and to keep other stations from causing interference as the range of transmitters change dramatically after dark, the FCC takes hours of operation into account when licensing the spectrum “landscape", a dimension that shifts as the sun's radiation disappears over the horizon.

There are certain bands of the spectrum maintained as unlicensed by the FCC, to allow for large quantities of consumer technologies to use those radio wavelengths. For example, the ISM band is an open range, where all kinds of personal devices such as Wifi, cordless phones, Bluetooth transmitters, and even microwave ovens operate in a wave length around 2.4GHz. If every Wifi device needed an FCC license before you could plug it in, that would be bureaucratic chaos. On the other hand, in crowded areas with lots of ISM band devices, transmissions suffer from the interference these devices cause each other. The unlicensed bands are electromagnetic freeports, interzones of unlicensed broadcast and static-riddled interference, where once it was common to open the neighbor's garage door when your phone rang, and heating up dinner in the microwave made the baby monitor sound bizarre. As technology develops new uses for radio waves and the number of devices in operation increases, certain areas of the sky become crowded, and the demand to open up more band monopolized by single-serving sources like radio and television grows louder. The FCC tries to maintain a fair system for making all of these difficult decisions, but when running up against the cutting edge of technology, often makes mistakes.

One of the worst cases was the license giveaways for the cell phone bands, which began back in 1982. It was thought that by giving off the spectrum all at one time in a massive lottery, it would open the cell phone bands up to the widest possible field of competitors, enabling the best service for customers. However, investors saw this as a business opportunity, and organized large pools of people to enter the lottery. Many people were awarded spectrum licenses that they never intended to use, and they held onto them until the large telecom companies offered to buy these licenses for a high price. This malfunctioning roll out of spectrum had the effect of delaying cell phone service in many areas of the United States, and made it more expensive.

As drones take to the skies, the electromagnetic spectrum will be shaken up as much as the National Airspace. Drone technology has no dedicated frequency reserved for it. If the sense-and-avoid technology is developed to make drones safe enough to fly in the NAS with other air traffic, it will no doubt require sending large amounts of sensor data in between drones and their command-and-control hubs, using more invisible bandwidth than they take up of physical airspace. Put drones in a crowded cityscape, flying among tall buildings that are transmitting more and more data themselves, and we are looking at a crowded airspace in the future, coming lower and lower to where we stand on the ground. Flying cars and jetpacks may be fantasies from a future that will never exist—but that doesn't mean we won't have traffic jams in the sky. The more humans there are on the ground, the more the air above fills up with our machinations. What these new technological advances will be, ones that will change the way the horizon looks and acts, are impossible to guess.

Adam Rothstein is an insurgent archivist and writes about politics, media and technology wherever he can get a signal. Previous bylines include The State, The Atlantic Tech and The New Inquiry. 

Read his previous ByLine contribution, 'The Surveillance City, here. 

[bylinezine]

Lost Books: A Few Questions for Lily Wan

In the thick of a sleepless, shadowy week, I found myself mired in distraction, absorbed in the ether of the web, reading an article about creosote and arsenic and the people who used to harvest oranges grown in the now toxic soils. Somehow I came across author, Lily Wan's blog, “Lily + Bike (+Food),” which happened to restore some of my faith in the idea of setting a task and then accomplishing it.

She is editor at the independent bimonthly publication, The Fine Print, based in Gainesville, FL, where she also writes, advocating environmental awareness. As I would discover, her blog was practically the most basic task in a series of many not-so-basic tasks: preparing to bike long distances (sometimes 200 miles), actually doing it, finding food to eat and places to sleep, and then writing a little about it.

If it wasn't the simple self-motivation that got me, then it was the stray photos - buttressed roots of swampy cypress trees, or waffles, and other savory foods glaring at me when the last thing I ate was a bagel at 7am. I wondered if she would have any other interesting stories to tell, and after reading her piece, "Beige Matter", I had the chance to ask her about those stories, and her thoughts on travel, writing, and biking.

_ _

ByLine: How long have you been writing?

Lily Wan: I've been writing for about eight years ... I started taking it a little more seriously when I entered school in Gainesville. I was a freshman when I began working at The Fine Print, which was always my favorite local magazine.

BL: Neat. How do you feel about your time spent at The Fine Print, and work in environmental advocacy?

LW: I started writing at The Fine Print in 2011. I'm an environmental science major, and my coursework is really technical, so I felt like I needed a creative outlet. I think its important in a college town like Gainesville to connect students to local things. I feel like a lot of kids are absorbed in the fact that they go to UF; they're going to school and building their resumes.... we're students, but we're also citizens of Gainesville and we're still living here for four years. I sort of saw this as my chance to shed more light on environmental issues happening here. I graduate in May and am passing on my role at The Fine Print.

BL: Interesting. In "Beige Matter" you mention how creativity can sort of go dormant. Do you feel that something is lost when you can't take time to just write, even though it might not serve a purpose or help anyone?

LW: Yes, definitely. I notice even when I write more creatively, more often, I'll see things as slower and more beautiful. I'll start to narrate how things go, how I go through things in my mind, as I go through my day. I feel sharper, and things are more enjoyable.

BL: So, was there a time when you did more creative writing?

LW: Um, I did more creative writing two years ago, or longer. I feel like the reason I don't write more often is that I could be doing other things that benefit people other than myself.

BL: You mention that in the lost book you had sketches of Cementerio de la Recoleta. What, and where is that?

LW: Its a famous cementary in Buenos Aires. That was my first stop when I went to visit a friend who was studying there. Its really beautiful. Italian-influenced. The grave plots are very expensive. Some of them were really ornate and clean, others were kind of decrepit, the gates were secured with twisty-ties, the caskets were broken and cracked open. It was a cool day just walking around that cemetery.

BL: If you hadn't lost the book, would you have compiled any of the material into stories or other works?

LW: I started moving some of it onto a blog. I was picking out different parts and little anecdotes I wanted to share. It was exciting but also frustrating - I was packing for winter and summer, cities, and hiking, so I was carrying a lot of stuff with me physically, but also emotionally. I contacted United like, three times (laughs), begging ... maybe one day it will show up at my door.

BL: About your recent blog: when did you create it?

LW: September. I decided last summer I was going to do this tour, it had been in the back of my mind for a while - I wanted to hike the west coast for a long time. I basically started the blog for myself. I'm a full time student, I have other things to do, but I feel like if you really want to do something you can just throw yourself into it and figure out as you go along.

BL: So, when you go biking do you feel the same freedom as when you write?

LW: That's a good question. I don't have any distractions when I'm biking. I usually don't listen music. Biking is an awesome platform for thinking. You're in such a hypnotic motion anyways … your blood's moving, the scenery's constantly changing. As far as writing goes, um, (laughs) its definitely harder to keep talking to yourself while you're on a bike moving.

[bylinezine]

Beige Matter

Written By: Lily Wan

It was Friday, I was sweaty. ‘SOCIAL SECURITY OFFICE’ had been rolling over to-do lists day after day for over a month, and I finally just threw myself on my bike and rode the long haul up there.

Walking into the building, I was told to shut off my phone. The security guard’s eyes followed my fingers for confirmation.

It was 45 minutes before closing and the air was thick with impatience and whining children’s evaporated tears. After being held in the foyer for about ten minutes, I was finally admitted to the waiting room. The seat that had opened up was a cozy one: to my left, a girl dressed in black and maroon, sneaking drags from her e-cig; and to my right, a toddler slouched on his father’s lap. The father and son were reading a cardboard children’s book about Roy G. Biv and microwaves.

Sitting there, I felt like I could hear everyone rehearsing something—an excuse, a question, or maybe just a name. I’d never been to a social security office before and, to be honest, I wasn’t quite sure the entire scope of reasons people came to these places. (That feels ignorant to say, and even worse to write, but I’m being honest.) Are they trying to prove something? Why did everyone bring all three, four of their children? This woman has one, two…six, seven, eight bags with her—I wonder. A man sat across from me, holding the same few floppy forms I was. I bet he’s here for a replacement social security card, too. Mine practically decomposed over the years, what happened to yours, Sir? He shifted in his seat.

I mirrored him and shifted around also. He blinked plainly.

My eyes fell to the wall and crawled back up it, tracing the ordinary beige. It was the government’s beige--so much so that I felt it should be molded from wax and laid to rest in a Crayola Super Pack. “Bureaucratic Beige” it would be called. It would have made for a good skin color in my six-year-old self’s Seurat rendition. Instead, though, I remember using Banana Mania because someone in my aftercare once told me that’s what I should be using, as she shoved the broken crayon into my hand, swiping away the Peach I was using. Peach was renamed from Flesh in the 60s.

That word makes me cringe.

Toward and toward the corner, I kept up with the wall. Then to the other corner, the third, the ceiling, the slick floor. Hands idling, my mind raced. And it was a good race, a race that wanted to make itself concrete.

All I had with me was a backpack filled with weeks-ago’s etcetera, but it occurred to me that I probably had a pen somewhere in there. My hand fluttered around the bag’s pockets till it met the familiar feel of a 0.5mm Uni-ball. The relief was like the kind you feel when you catch a falling plate or a nearly-missed connection flight. I resurrected a few old papers accordioned and crushed at the bottom my bag and began writing.

I was scribbling words that were halfway written before the previous word was even finished. I tried to keep up with my thoughts, but I was so excited just to be writing.

I hadn’t felt a creative flow like this in over a year. I used to do a ton of personal and creative writing. My most satisfying work was over the course of 2012. It lived in a 5 x 8 ¼ black Moleskine whose edges wilted down to hug its pages. It was nearly full and after bouncing around over 20 flights in three months, a seat back pocket swallowed it up. On every other flight, I’d be entirely careful to avoid such a tragedy, but on my last flight, from Sydney to San Francisco, I should have checked just one more time.

The book had everything in it. It had pressed lavender flowers from Aix-en-Provence and a family recipe for German chocolate cake shared by a fellow traveler in New Zealand. It had my sketches of Cementerio de la Recoleta, and even some accidental smudges of dulce de leche from a slightly torn bag of freshly made alfajores. But more valuable, it had my uncensored, wholly candid thoughts, accounts and first impressions. And firsts are only so once.

Despite many desperate emails to United (interspersed among pleas from passengers for their iPhones and reading glasses), there was no closure. The book is likely buried in United’s abysmal warehouse just outside of Houston.

Since then, the third sentence has always choked me. I would begin to write: The first sentence was fine, second was okay. On the third, I’d idle just long enough for me to ask myself why I’m writing whatever I was anyway.

There was always work I should have been doing instead. I had no reason to be taking this creative break; it felt like an indulgence that didn’t positively affect anyone other than myself. Besides, the spaces I’d write in were always in full-access. My computer was nearby, so why wasn’t I taking this time to answer emails? Why wasn’t I researching my next story for the magazine? I didn’t even need a computer for this. I could just as easily do it on my phone.

Sitting there in the Social Security Office, I reminded myself of these duties, too. But I felt safe there, and free. I had no obligations I could attend to, I had nothing to check. I had my pen, my paper, and my unsilenced mind, bound only by Bureaucratic Beige.

“Forty-seven? Number forty-seven.”

That was me. I painted out the rest of my sentence--it was incomprehensible, but satisfying. I would have stayed if I could. 

Lily Wan is print editor at The Fine Print in Gainesville, FL. Read her piece, "Out of Sight, On the Mine" here.

[bylinezine]

Hestiation, labeled: An interview with Jason Farrell

Since mid-2008 (maybe earlier), Jason Farrell and I have known each other as robots. We've tweeted, emailed, replied on forums, shared each other's podcasts and read each other's writing, but up until this point I'm fairly sure we've never held a traditional conversation.

Not to say we've failed to participate in a dialogue. I'd like to think these distant gestures of social media stood for something. Just now I know what a phone call is like with him, and I cannot, necessarily, consider him a machine programmed to bounce comments or items at me, making me feel as if I'm not alone. I know there's someone on the other side; a man conducting this technology; a mind considering it all.

Jason lives in Portland, OR working as a transcriber for the disabilities office of a local community college. That backdrop, of course, played a part in his ByLine contribution, 'Roads Less Traveled' (which if you haven't read, you should). He writes elsewhere online occasionally, and co-hosts a book review podcast, The Bookhouse Boys. 

This is the first of a new interview feature we'll conduct here at ByLine as a way to further inform you of the guests we spotlight. So let's talk to Jason. 

---

Alec Berry: So I guess I'll start this interview asking, not necessarily when you started writing, but when did you start to take it seriously and why?

Jason Farrell: Well, that would sort of presuppose that I am taking writing seriously (laughs). Which I always hesitate to say because I never feel like I do enough of it to justify that. I was actually just speaking to another friend who does some writing as well, and he asked me the question: do you consider yourself a writer? I said no, and he kind of argued with me. 'Well, I consider you a writer, that's why I send my stuff to you," he said.

I did kind of get out of writing. I did a lot more of it in college, but I became a little discouraged and became interested in other things, and when I started to think about writing - and I know you've been there - I got really analytical about my stuff, picking it apart, not really getting anywhere because I was so hard on it. 

But what I did - maybe like 4 years ago - I did NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). Bascially, you write 50,000 words in 30 days. The basic idea there is that you just write. You don't produce a masterpiece. You don't even edit it, really. There's no outline. But once you're in the thick of it, you just write. It shouldn't be incoherent; it's not a free write, but neither is anyone really judging it. I felt like that was a really good thing for me because that was a huge problem for me. I needed to break down that dam and lose that hesitancy. 

It opened writing back up a little bit, where I could, you know, proceed with a piece and not be bogged down.

AB: Talk about that hesitancy a little more. Like you said, I've definitely been there before, but why did you feel that? When you looked at your stuff, what about it made you clam up?

JF: Well, it got bad enough that I couldn't even produce a piece and go back and read it to judge it as terrible. It was when I was in the midst of a sentence, I felt so bad about the sentence itself, that I couldn't even force myself to put something on the page and move onto the next thing. It was almost like I was anticipating the reaction of whoever was reading it, and I couldn't evoke whatever it was I was trying to evoke. Word choice failed. It all just ground to a halt. 

AB: Now that you can just push stuff out, do you still like you're pushing the bad shit out, or are you writing, in some way, the way you'd like to?

JF: Yeah, kind of. My main is that I don't write regularly enough. I need an outside motivation like, for example, you asking me to contribute something for ByLine.

When I sit down and write, it's a much less painful process than it was for a while. It's more that I can move on and look at it with a critical eye. Not an overly critical eye, not second guessing everything, but just as a way to improve the writing. I mean, I'm 42 years old, but I'm still learning how to properly edit things, you know. Where should I draw the line between what is second guessing or when I should really get rid of something or rewrite? I'm still feeling my way around that. 

AB: I have a bad habit of .... I really edit while I write. It's not a bad thing, necessarily, but it can get to the point where it may take me 4 hours to write 6 paragraphs because I get so picky about the word choice. I'm the type of guy who's more interested in how something sounds versus the content of a piece, sometimes. 

JF: On the podcast that I do, I've found that I tend to come down, maybe more than my co-hosts do, on how the writing strikes me. Sort of what you're talking about. The way that it sounds. It's very subjective, but what I would consider the quality of the writing itself. I still consider plot and characters and all that, but language itself interests me. Sometimes, a piece that's really well written can overcome the sins of not being the greatest story. Where as something that's so well put together and hits all the beats can be pedestrian. The ideal situation is a marriage of the two. 

AB: When you're writing an essay or whatever, it's so tough to be profound, but it's still tougher to make something with a certain sound. I think a lot of people become obsessed with the opinion or point, though. In terms of at least internet writing. I read so many pieces where they say it so plainly, and I lose interest in it. 

But I want to go back to the point you made about not wanting to call yourself a writer. I always feel like it's a weird ballpark you enter when you call yourself that. Do you feel that too?

JF: Yeah, yeah. I feel like if I tell somebody, one of their first questions will be: what have you written? There's an expectation, of being a "writer," that it's something I do on a regular basis. 

AB: You and I are sort of on a similar level, where we may not write everyday, but we definitely put a lot of thought into it. But in the grand scheme, when we publish, it's a very small level. When you're passing around clips or whatever, it's tough to actually get someone to read your stuff and consider it - like really consider it - because you're not at a high level.

JF: I think there's some truth to that in the real world. Unless you can take somebody to the bookstore and show them your book on a shelf, unless you can do that, there's a sense of 'how are you any different?' Because we can all technically write. Maybe more so than ever before with the internet. The reason a person writes does very, but if I'm going to give myself the title I need something to really separate me. 

AB: With 'Roads Less Traveled" , the piece you contributed, I like your willingness to describe the actions / statements of the students with consideration. You poke fun to show your character in it, but you're also not afraid to give those oddball moments weight or thought. What's the reasoning there, aside from your conclusion?

JF: Although the beliefs of these folks strike me, and would strike a lot of people, as very strange, it actually reminds me of how strange many human beliefs are, and how important context is.  Is it objectively more strange to believe, as Catholics do, that during communion they are eating the transubstantiated flesh of a 2,000 year old being or that one can separate one's soul from one's body and literally fly on the wind on a stormy, Winter night, as someone who follows a Shamanic tradition might?  Some beliefs are more familiar to us culturally than others, and I believe more accepted as a result, even by those who don't follow that faith themselves.  It would have been easy to ridicule the students' beliefs, but I viewed that more as a trap I wanted to avoid than a desirable approach.   Whatever the window dressing, these are still fellow human beings trying to make sense of a sometimes senseless world, and I wanted to respect that. 

AB: As with your job, there seems to be a need for professional separation, but in terms of a personal need was there a desire too to remain distant when observing these classes? 

JF: Yeah, I suppose.  I haven't had the urge to participate at any point.  I haven't thought, shoot, if only I wasn't working at the moment, I'd be taking this class.  I'm not very free with my inner thoughts and feelings, for one thing, and any class with this much sharing of self would probably make me uncomfortable.  Also, I only just heard a student for the first time voice any doubt whatsoever about what they talk about here ... I would be brimming with doubt and skepticism.  My vantage point is a nice, safe one, where I don't have to worry about mocking anyone or feeling out of place.

AB: It's a good way to show the conflict. You're basically this journalist, sworn to objectivity, yet it's a scene so colorful and inherently spiritual that it's tough to stay outside it as a third party because you must react some way. The students even request your interaction

Did you ever think being a transcriptionist would provide material? If so, is this the payoff? 

JF: No, this is the first time in seven years I've even considered writing a piece that centered around my experiences working as a transcriber.  Mostly that's down to the fact that the classes usually aren't very interesting...anyone who has spent a term in a community college would be familiar with the kind of stuff I encounter 99% of the time.  I also considered whether or not there was a conflict of interest here that would prevent me from writing such a piece.  I felt there was a theme here that transcended merely typing up some funny stories about odd/stupid/whatever behavior, and that's not going to usually be the case.

[bylinezine]

Roads Less Traveled

Written by: Jason Farrell

"What kind of tree am I?  Not hard to tell."

The woman, her head surrounded by a halo of wispy, corn blonde hair, presses her palms together and rests them lightly on her chest.  Her eyes are closed, her face relaxed.  Several seconds pass; all of the 40 odd eyes in the room are fixed on her.

"Strong and tall, the wind blows through my branches," she continues.  "Squirrels carry their winter food along my limbs.  I am powerful.  I am wise.  I grow tall, and the warmth of the sun is soaked up by my leafy canopy."

"Oak," murmurs someone in the back row, and the refrain is picked up around the room. "You're an oak," asserts a woman sitting in front of her, in a firm voice.  She's nodding assuredly as she says it, smiling.

"Yes, I am the oak," the blonde woman says.  At this moment, in this room, this is as true as if she had said she is a woman, or that she is blonde, or that she has blood moving through her veins, or air circulating through her lungs.

***

I am not a religious man.  I grew up in a household only half-heartedly devoted to Catholicism, and by the time I was a teenager, no one in my family actively worshipped God or attended church, least of all me.  Later, my sister was to follow a path begun for her by summer camps and Sunday school and discover that, for her, religion provided a chance to seek answers to questions that the rest of us didn't seem to be asking.

My co-worker and I were here in a professional capacity in our roles as transcribers for the disabilities office of the local community college for which we work, not because we were enrolled in the class.  When I saw the name of the class in an email, "Shamanism," my eyes grew wide.  Every once in a while, we receive a class that stirs genuine curiosity, a class we might actually be said to look forward to, but the vast majority of the time it's yet another math or basic reading class, another variation on the same material we've all transcribed a dozen, or a hundred, times before.

But Shamanism...I didn't even know there existed such a class at the college.  I had a vague idea of what that was likely to entail...a mental image cobbled together from role-playing games and movies about American Indians...but what would a class in Shamanism be like?  Would there be lectures, tests, pop quizzes?  Would the students form circles, make offerings, and chant to the spirits of ancient traditions?  Yes, as it turned out.  Yes on both counts.

***

"This may sound strange," he began.  The man in the back row was handsome in the way usually described as "rugged."  With his medium long dark blonde hair and unshaven chin he resembled a young, previously unknown Hemsworth brother.  Appropriate, it turned out, as he would explain over the course of the class that he followed the Norse tradition.  The tree that wasn't hard for him to tell about had been none other than Yggdrasil, the legendary tree that connects the nine worlds of Norse cosmology.

"I wear my underwear inside out to protect my chakras from negative spirit energy," he finished.  Despite his characterization of this statement as "strange," his face betrayed no shyness or hesitation.  In virtually any other class, or any other social setting, such a statement would likely produce incredulity or snickers of derision.  In this class, the only odd thing about it was that he qualified it as strange.

"Absolutely!  That makes perfect sense!" said the instructor.  A small, bespectacled woman, middle-aged, with a perpetual, easy smile and braided hair, "Susan," as I'll call her, accepted this perfectly sage advice with unflappable equanimity, and added some of her own.  "It's also quite common to turn one's bedsheets backwards to keep away the spirits that may mean us harm as we journey through unreal reality."

It's not that you could say literally anything here, and have it accepted as fact, though to an outsider like myself, it can sometimes feel that way.   There is logic and consistency here too, as well as hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years of tradition and belief.  But it is a different set of rules than I'm used to.  For me, as a person with a long history of reading fantasy fiction and role-playing games, as well as academic treatments of various world mythologies, when I'm in this group of people it's as if we've all woken up one day and found that not only are these things real and true, but all of them are true.  

True, and potentially dangerous.  Susan delivers a warning against invoking the wrath of Pele, by taking the lava rock from Hawaii that are remnants of her body, with a firm and persistent tone.  Most of the class have described encounters with a "power animal," which is not actually the spirit of an animal at all, but rather a powerful spirit that chooses to appear in the guise of a familiar animal.  These spirits act as guides while the shaman's own spirit walks through dream, and the worlds beyond.  They act as protectors.  They act as teachers.  Sometimes, that teaching leaves a mark.

"I met my spirit animal when I was dreaming," says the girl.  Her eyes are bright, and she's excited to tell the class about her experience. "It was Fenrir, the great wolf, and he growled at me, low and angry.  Then he hit me in the jaw.  It hurt for a week!"

The class laughs, in solidarity.  They know how tough the love of your power animal can be, especially when it's the wolf that is foretold to kill Odin during Ragnarok.

"He didn't do it to hurt me, of course," she hastens to add.  "He was just trying to teach me."  Sometimes the spirit animals actually devour their mortal charges.  Never to harm, though.  Susan describes a spirit journey in which several spirits place her upon an altar and carve her heart into small pieces, and then feed them, while she watches, to Otorongo, the jaguar.  Susan had recently been through a painful break-up with her partner, and her heart had become black and stricken.  Once devoured, the transmutative power of Otorongo can restore her heart to her, healthy and strong once more.

Sometimes the tough love turns to, well, love.  "It can be the best sex you'll ever have!" exclaims one woman after the question of whether or not it's acceptable to make love to your spirit animal was broached, somewhat hesitantly,  by a classmate.  Susan assures her, and everyone else, that sex with your spirit animal is common and natural, and is completely separate from your earthly relations, should you have them.  It's not cheating, and it's certainly not perverted. 

Another young woman asks permission to show her connection to her snow leopard power animal through dance.  "I don't want to make anyone uncomfortable," she says.  "The movements are very sexual."  No one objects.  She dances to a tune in her head, her body swaying, caressing her hips lightly with her palms.  It's suggestive, but gentle, like a belly dance in slow motion.  She admits afterward that she nearly took off her skirt.  "When I dance, I am completely uninhibited.  I forget that anyone is watching me."

This classroom is clearly a safe area to express beliefs like this.  Discussion in a recent class revolved around the idea of sovereignty, staying true to yourself in your power, and not letting anyone take it away from you.  In other words, don't let other people tell you you're wrong.  Or worse, crazy.

***

The student was moaning and gasping, her head in her hands as she bent over her desk.

"I want to be heard.  Ah... Words are getting in the way."

"Just let it come," said Susan.  "The song can be pure sounds.  It doesn't have to be words."

The student is trying to hear the song of the snow snake.  Or ice dragon.  It was a bit confusing.

"I've got his attention," she says. " I keep seeing his eyes.  It's silvery, sleek.  It's, whoa, I'm getting hot.  I'm starting to get sweaty.  Oh!"

"Yes!  That's a classic sign that your power animal wants to merge with you.  Take your time."

"It's shimmering.  I can see through him."

"He's showing you the three sides of himself."  Susan is standing next to her, encouraging her.  "One side is the dark serpent Nigog form.  Another is the cosmic serpent, which is ethereal and translucent.  His were-form is the dragon.  And he also has an elven or human form."

"Ooh," says the student, "that triggered something.  He...he looks like Legolas!"

Oh, boy.

"Yes, he does look a bit like Legolas!  He's close.  Let him come in."

Susan leans close to the student and begins to move her head back and forth, undulating like a snake.  "Hsssssssss. Hssssssss." 

The student shivers and writhes and moans.  She clenches and unclenches her hands.  "I'm cold and hot at the same time.  I'm all tingly."

Susan smiles.  "I would sit there and feel that.  Sometimes the voice isn't ready to come out yet, but he'll show himself in other ways.  Perhaps you'll get more when we do our journey later today."

Exhausted, the student opens her eyes and slumps back in her chair.  "Thank you," she says.

I glance at my co-worker, but he's stonefaced, betraying nothing.  I try to maintain a similar impassivity, a professional detachment, but it's not always easy.  Legolas?  Sometimes I envy them for their bravery, their ease with each other and with themselves. Other times I have to fight mightily to regulate my facial expressions, as a chuckle rises in my throat.

***

"People are so fucking STUPID!  Ha!" 

"Rita," as I'll call her, is a snarling woman with tattoos on her arms and on her upper spine, a loud voice, and a boisterous laugh.  She has the glint of challenge in her eye as she stalks, predatory, around the room.  She punctuates each sentence with profanity.  She seems to enjoy taking up as much space as possible, swinging her arms in loose arcs when she walks, and sprawling sideways in her chair when she sits.  It's clear that she knows the instructor, who is a mild, friendly woman, and seems to enjoy the respect of the other members of the class.  I can't stand her.

"People don't know how to eat in this country!  They just shovel the food in their fucking faces.  I just want to tell them to SIT their ASSES down and give thanks!"

Rita is very judgmental, from what I've heard from her.  The range of beliefs among these twenty or so people is wide-ranging, and sometimes frankly amazing, but only Rita delivers her pronouncements with the finality of a chosen one.  Only she reduces those who do not believe more than she uplifts those who do.

In any classroom, we introduce ourselves to the instructor and let them know why we're there.  We also let them know, gently, that we are not members of the class, and cannot participate in any class activities.  This is rarely an issue.  I can tell that it tugs at the threads of the web of communal brother/sisterhood that seems integral to a class in Shamanism, but Susan resists the impulse to call attention to us.  Even so, typing away in relative anonymity on the side of the room, a few students have made it clear that they consider us part of the group. 

The first day, Susan asked us to explain why it was that we couldn't participate.  When I briefly did so, there were nods and smiles around the room, and the Hemsworth brother earnestly proclaimed that we were "doing good work!"  On another day, there was a minor misunderstanding with a new student who had occupied the power outlet we needed for our equipment with his iPhone charger.  As I was trying to explain myself to a woman who took my request that he move the charger as a personal affront, I heard another student call out "They belong here!"  Later, he came up to us, and said simply, "I'm sorry. That should never happen.  When anyone comes through that door, they are welcome here."

No, I don't like Rita, and I can't yet grasp why she is held in high esteem by her noticeably more tolerant, more open-minded classmates, but the fact is that her views, and her means of expressing those views, are in the minority.  A minority of one.  Part of the idea of sovereignty is that nobody's sovereignty is any more important than any other person's.  We are not all nations vying for control over each other.  We are friendly neighbors trading stories and sugar in a vast and placid sea.

***

It is dark.  I can hear deep breathing all around me.  The class is making a journey to meet Brighid of the Tuatha de Danann, a Celtic goddess of healing, fire, and poetry.

Susan sings to Brighid in her many aspects.  Each cardinal direction represents a different facet of the goddess, and she turns in each direction, and implores Brighid to lend them her blessings: of hearth and home, of battlefield and bonfire.   Then she begins to drum.

Every class ends like this, with a spirit journey in the dark, while the teacher sings to the spirits, and helps the students on their way.  Everyone participates except, oddly, for Rita, who for three weeks has always found some reason to disappear during these rituals.  The first time she was panting and moaning, and when someone asked if she was alright, she said no, her body was on fire, and she had to leave.  Her exits have been less flamboyant since, but she never stays. 

With nothing to type but [drumming] during these rituals, my mind often wanders.  Sometimes I find myself with my eyes closed, feeling the reverberation of the drum make my blood jump, the circle of bodies feeling both nearby and distant in the darkness of the room.

Eventually, the drumming stops.  The students form a circle, hold hands, and call a blessing upon each other from whatever spirit they spoke to that day. 

"May the power of Brighid's healing flame be yours."

"Yes," the class intones in unison.

"May the power of being true to yourself be yours."

"Yes."

Twenty five blessings, delivered in turn, acknowledged and reinforced by a simple word of agreement.  Afterwards, the spirits are thanked, because gratitude is one of the most important principles of the shaman.  The lights come on, and everyone grabs their things and leaves the room to rejoin the world.

"Excuse me."

Susan is approaching my co-worker and I with a dish with six candles on it.  She had explained earlier that Brighid's sacred flame, in Kildare, Ireland, had been maintained for centuries, and could be spread by ordinary candles throughout the world.  These were six such candles.  According to Susan's beliefs, each of these squat cylinders of wax held the power of healing.  Having one in your home would help insure that no harm came to you or those you loved.

"Would it be considered improper for you to accept Brighid's light?"  Susan smiled at us. 

I hesitated.  Would taking a candle be dishonest?  Would refusing one be disrespectful? To me, these were ordinary candles, no more possessed of the power to bless my life than an igneous rock from Hawaii had the power to curse it.  I didn't believe in Mayan Death Gods, or Fenrir, or Brighid, or any of the panoply of other beings that had been invoked in class.  In many ways, this class seemed like an exercise in wish fulfillment, in finding comfort in believing that we're special, beloved of the universe, and in the special care of wise and powerful beings that guide us along the perilous paths of this world and beyond.  Who wouldn't want to believe that their problems, however severe, could be solved by a song?

What I did believe in, I suddenly realized, were the people in this room, people who believe that wisdom and contentment are more powerful when shared, who welcome strangers into their midst like trusted friends, who feel that differences make community, who do not proselytize or condemn or judge, who taught me that, though our many roads do indeed diverge to chart our myriad journeys, they can also converge again in the unlikeliest of places.

"That would be okay," we said, thanking her and selecting our candles. 

Jason Farrell lives in Portland, Oregon.

Read his piece, "Broad Horizons: My Relationship with the Fiction of Doug Tennapel" here. 

[bylinezine]

Open Us Up See What’s Inside

Written by: Michael Nagel 

I read a news story the other day about a man who, after killing a family of five, carried the youngest girl, wounded and bloody, across the street to a neighbor's house and asked them to call an ambulance. A few hours later he was killed in a firefight with the police. Maybe he was trying to get to Mexico. I don't know the condition of the little girl. I haven't checked, though I'm curious.

The man didn't know the family he killed. They were strangers. He didn't know the neighbors. They were strangers, too. He handed them the little girl and asked them to call an ambulance.

Why did he do that?

I found Donald Barthelme's reading list online, 83 books, and I've decided to read every one of them. I found the first book in the UTD library, At Swim Two Birds by Flann O'Brien. Flann O'Brien was not his real name. He published the one book and then he died. At Swim Two Birds hardly makes any sense. It jumps from one thing to the next. After he died, someone found the manuscript for his second book, The Third Policeman (he claimed he'd burned it) and published it posthumously. His second book is on Barthelme's list, too.

Firefight. What a spectacular word. I picture people slinging handfuls of flame.

I've always been the type of guy who likes the smell of gasoline and rubber cement. If you explain something to me in detail I will go into a trance. I won't retain a thing. For the love of God, though, what's going on? I am only just now coming to terms with not being a child prodigy. All this time I'd been holding out hope. I thought I might pick up a violin and know exactly what to do. At night, when the temperature changes, the window panes pop. I thought someone was throwing rocks. I held up my finger and looked at my wife.

When I got home last night a man in a walker was unloading groceries from his trunk. I asked if he needed help. He said, I don't need help, I need some motherfucker to stop parking in my spot. I asked if he had thought about investing in an orange cone.

What happened, I wonder, between shooting the little girl and saving her life? What changed? How did she feel in his arms while he carried her through the grass?

In At Swim Two Birds an author is sitting in a room with his characters, forcing them to act like his characters, but once he falls asleep they are free to do whatever they want. So what they do is drug the author for twenty hours at a time and go about their lives. They return four hours a day to play their parts, ridiculously, disdainfully, then slip him more pills. They are not at all who he thinks they are.

I got a new pair of glasses, and I've been reading billboards at incredible distances. The edges are sharp. I'd been living, apparently, in some other place. I'm still getting used to the prescription, though, and sometimes I think I might be sick. Did the little girl say something to him? Did she look at him some certain way? What could change a man so quickly from a monster back into a man? And what if she were to look at me the same way?

When I got home last night, an orange cone was blocking the handicap spot. Finally, I thought, someone using my ideas. It's supposed to get cold today, record breaking cold, 34 degrees, the coldest it’s been in May for one hundred years.

An Ohio man was put to death yesterday morning for raping and killing a six-month-old baby. His execution was set for 10 a.m. His last meal was fried fish and chocolate ice cream. While he wrote letters, doctors tested his veins, and a witness said his family laughed about something before they left his cell.

I'm thinking about how they used to mix one blank bullet in with the firing squad so a soldier could always wonder if he'd done anything at all. Hilter's assistant killed him with a pistol, burned his body in the driveway. Timothy McVeih's last meal was three pints of mint chocolate chip ice cream.

I'd meant to watch the clock until 10 a.m., and then at 10 a.m. to feel something, but it was noon before I realized I'd forgotten the whole thing.

Recently, for his last meal, a Texas inmate ordered two chicken-fried steaks; a triple-patty bacon cheeseburger; a cheese omelet with ground beef, tomatoes, onions, bell peppers, and jalapenos; a bowl of fried okra with ketchup; one pound of barbecued meat; a half-loaf of white bread; three fajitas; a meat-lover's pizza; one pint of Blue Bell ice cream; a slab of peanut-butter fudge with crushed peanuts; and three rootbeers. He didn't eat a bite, causing Texas to indefinitely suspend the last meal tradition, and pretty much ruining the death penalty for everyone.

When we drove past the orange cone, I said to my wife, That was my idea. And she said, The cone?

I've always been the type of guy who turns up his music until the mirrors rattle.

I spent the day looking at pictures of execution chambers. I wanted to see where this was happening. The Boston Marathon bomber, nineteen years old, could face execution if nothing goes his way. The Aurora gunman, twenty-five, could face execution, but I don't know that for sure. The rooms are exactly what I expected them to be: white, clinical, florescent. In the center is a cross-shaped table with brown leather straps. The walls are lined with windows.

I found old photographs of gas chambers, which are smaller than I pictured, just big enough to fit a man. Gas chamber executions can last up to fifteen minutes. The convict goes unconscious almost immediately, but it takes awhile for the organs to die. They used to tape a stethoscope to the man's chest and listen to his heartbeat from outside.

I'd thought, for some reason, the windows would be one-way glass. I'd thought the witnesses could see in but the convict couldn't see out. I was wrong, though, it's two-way glass, and everybody can see everybody. In his last official appeal, Timothy McVeigh requested his execution be broadcast on live, prime time television.

While I had blood drawn I imagined the tingling in my fingertips was the poison entering my veins. I walked around with my hands in my pockets and a cotton ball taped to my forearm. A cold front blew in, just like they said it would, and everyone bundled up in their sweatshirts and hoodies.

They used to open the skulls of criminals, hoping to find something strange inside.

In one old photograph, a man is sitting in the electric chair in a full suit and tie. His shirt is wrinkled under the synched-tight strap. The photograph is black and white but I imagine, for some reason, his suit is a brilliant blue. 

I saw a movie one time where two men kidnap a little girl but end up caring about her too much to let anything bad happen. They tell her stories at bedtime and take her to the park. I was just a kid, but even then I wanted to believe evil was no match for an adorable child.

I still haven't looked up if that little girl survived. It's possible I don't want to know. Or it's possible it doesn't matter. Carrying a wounded little girl across a lawn isn't exactly an act of heroism, but it's at least an act of courtesy, and courtesy sometimes seems like the only thing holding this whole mess together.

In an airplane, flying back from my brother's graduation, I am drinking a beer, feeling like I'm supposed to be having some sort of contemplative experience, but really only being able to think about the beautiful golden color of the Heineken in its frosted plastic Delta Airlines tumbler. There is so little we can do about who we are. There are factors beyond our control. Open us up, see what's inside. Murder rates increase when the temperatures rise. When we get home, my wife and I are mad at each other for no reason and I can't bring myself to touch her shoulder and ask her what's wrong. Off and on, I'm fine with things falling apart. We turn out the light, and I wonder why I'm acting this way.

Some doctors believe insanity is the only sane response to an insane world. I read that in a magazine article about psychoactive drugs.

And the problem with characters is that characters are understandable, which is, of course, not how people are. We don't have motivations. We vary wildly one instant to the next, constantly redeeming, constantly condemning ourselves.

I imagine he brushes the hair out of her eyes. I imagine her hair is long and black and the night is perfectly calm. I imagine the sound of the neighbor's doorbell at three in the morning, and this man holding this bloody little girl, catching his breath, refusing to make any sense at all.

Michael Nagel lives in Dallas, TX. His previous bylines include The Bygone Bureau. 

Read his piece, "Recursion" here. 

[bylinezine]

the Surveillance City

Written by: Adam Rothstein

When digital technology meets the city, surveillance is what emerges. The ability to capture digital information is too easy, and the potential effects of that information are too great for the powers that be to ignore the possibility. When technology intersects with urban problems, with urban design solutions, with urban governance and populace, we get surveillance. In the same way that the potential of electric power and the automobile generated a power grid and interstate highways, the digital camera and networked technology, when spread across the agar plate of the city, grows the Surveillance City.

Surveillance's function is simple—to watch everyone, to prevent particular actions, to look for suspicious activity that could threaten the way we think the city ought to be. But the technology is complex. Countless technologies work in conjunction with each other, or separately. As the different components of surveillance are deployed, the city responds with urban logic—directives from the government, lawsuits by the interest groups, new projects from researchers and designers, and with direct actions from the citizens in the streets. This strange concoction of technology, society, and culture is implanted in our city, glowing with all the mystery and gloss of a new consumer device. This device, suddenly ubiquitous beneath us, above us and around us, is the Surveillance City.

Like any new device, learning to use it and live with it is a process of understanding it. We must come to terms with the exact capacities of this new thing, and understand how the life of our city is both the same and different with it. This change is an ongoing process. We are already designing our city as a Surveillance City, whether we acknowledge it or not.

I was sitting in a dark van, watching several screens play out information in neat columns, waiting for something to happen. I heard the door unlatch and slide open. A dark figure wearing a mask reached inside, dropped an SD Card on the table and scooped up the empty one waiting. Inserting the card into my computer, I watched the scene out in the streets suddenly jump into focus—cops with clubs, protesters linked in a human chain, horses pushing against the crowd, intersections closed down. I began uploading photos to the internet via social media and a couple websites, and just like that, events were recorded into history.

This was during the Occupy protests in 2012, and I was doing volunteer media work for a protest news website in Portland, Oregon. Among many other things learned during this experience, I suddenly grasped the way that information creates reality. The many thousands of things going on in the streets were only real to the rest of society if they could be captured in photo and video and distributed to those who wanted to view them. The reality of the urban space at that current moment, the jagged line between a police force and the people, between the city administration and the ground of the streets and parks, was only as real as the photos that were captured. Otherwise, the night would pass, and a lackluster news report and passive mayoral press release would be all that was left to recount what happened, like garbage left in the gutter after a street fair. This era of urban history relies upon digital media to be recorded and spread through networks, whether by traditional media outlets or individuals working as journalists. Otherwise, these nights of protest would have past for the city like only a dream, dispelled to the far corners of the imagination after waking.

The city was not always a Surveillance City, but has become so as digital and networked technology proliferates across it. Tim De Boer, the author of the research project Maximum Security City, describes the evolution of technology's function through the analogy of city walls. “The city was originally invented in order to provide protection. The archetype is the walled city. The encircling walls made it almost impossible to capture the city, but there were other advantages, too, since walls work in two directions, shutting out but also shutting in.” Every technology brings with it supplemental functions to its designed use, that only become visible in deployment.

The Surveillance City is built on a web of technology innovation that is much more complex than bricks and stone piled on top of each other. We aren't just talking about CCTV and drones. We are talking about CCTV, but CCTV in the context of the so-called Domain Awareness Centers, where video feeds from an entire city is funneled into one room. This could be video from drones, but also from giant balloons called aerostats, from hydraulic lift towers and video crowd-sourced from cameras on police, citizens and private vehicles. All of this video is can now be composited, stitched together from thousands of sensors.Algorithms allow computers to search all this video for familiar faces, to read license plates and to harvest the metadata that comes along with video and photographs to figure out where it came from and when. Cutting edge computer interfaces and the data centers allow these algorithms to work quickly, we are talking about the flood of data being fed into these centers to give them material to chew on. Meanwhile, the government and private companies are accessing additional data surreptitiously, to feed into their machines. Every device and computer we use is bleeding metadata into the networks, which are being vacuumed up by Stingrays (spoofed mobile phone towers that trick your device into identifying itself), by wifi and bluetooth device sniffers, and by a variety of device skimmers. All of this data, visual and otherwise, creates a facsimile city, through which you can be found and tracked as if by a sixth sense. If there is a technology in use today, it can be most likely harnessed to track you by your use of it, and someone is working on the details to make it happen.

These technologies are released into a world filled with actors, all attempting to do various things with this new Surveillance City. There are companies like Google, Palantir, 3M, and Blue Coat, who act simply to profit. But profit doesn't spread across the city uniformly. As Selena Savić and Gordan Savičić describe in their essay, “Technology Enabled Discrimination”:

The tendency today is to fragment urban tissues into highly secured and filtered wealthy enclaves on one side, and poor, unsafe and unmaintained areas on the other (Graham and Marvin, 2001). since the popularisation of “trickle down” economics by Margaret Thatcher, governments often chose to invest in infrastructure for the rich, with the hope that this investment will gradually “trickle down” to everyone. But usually the opposite happens (Minton, 2009).

There are the designers of such systems. But they are often as beholden to profit as the corporations they must work for. Asher Kohn, researcher behind the anti-drone project Shura City said to me about architects and surveillance: “architects are like lawyers, mere 'professionals' in service to their clients. To talk about serving a community as a client is often a bit beyond-the-pale. They're on the side of the highest bidders. Why that is and who those bidders are gets into questions about society as a whole, not just architecture.” We might say the same of any algorithm programmer, or the designer of any drone.

There are activists, like the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF), that have launched lawsuits against the NSA and telecommunication companies alleging warrantless surveillance. The EFF conducts activism in federal, state and local government, and advocates against the adoption of particular surveillance systems by cities. But with limited resources, they are forced to focus on individual issues rather than the big picture. Dave Maass, spokesperson for the EFF, says: “...we're not a huge organization, so we can only track a fraction of the issues developing. We tend to stick pretty close to the areas where we have direct involvement, whether legislatively, legally or through other endeavors.”

And then there are the rest of us, who must walk the surveilled streets on a daily basis. But we have our own shaping effect upon the Surveillance City. Asher Kohn reminds us that even as the object of surveillance, the observed parties are at least half of the relationship that makes a Surveillance City:

A huge part of living under imperialism is having tighter internal logic than external logic; Napoleon was thwarted in Spain, Russia, Egypt by locals' internal logic run at odds to what the invading empire assumed was going on. Likewise, [Shura] City uses architecture to create space between the internal logic of everyday life and the external logic of an imperial gaze.

Kohn's Shura City project describes, perhaps slightly tongue-in-cheek, a city designed to thwart surveillance and attack by drones. The windows look like QR Codes, towers and minarets string wires to ensnare propellers, and jagged, New Aesthetic surfaces hide the buildings from machines in plain sight. The project is speculative, but speculation is our primary tool for learning the future of the Surveillance City.

It is by speculation, by the tropes of Panopticons and 1984, by the nightmares of activist literature and privacy advocates, by the product propaganda of corporate advertisements, and the blue sky, utopian fixes of academics and researchers that we can form any picture of what the Surveillance City will look like tomorrow. The Surveillance City built itself by evolving, one day at a time, between the city and technology, between societal actors and their ideas. It will continue to do so, and these speculations are the creeping clines of the territory, showing us the course that further upliftings and erosions might take.

Consider the Cryptoparties, a non-profit word-of-mouth project started by activist Asher Wolf, to educate people about how they can secure their communications with encryption. Consider the Drone Journalism Lab at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, that is researching the socially-positive applications for drone technology, and the artwork of Trevor Paglen, whose book Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes cataloged and revealed information about the secret government facilities used for surveillance. Consider the work of Tim De Boer, Asher Kohn and Adam Harvey, whose projects described ways the city and society might react to continued proliferation of surveillance technology. Or consider Camover 2013, an anarchist contest in Germany to see who could destroy the most surveillance cameras.

These brute force speculations on what the future of the Surveillance City will or won't be are a way to deal with the vast device that has begun crawling its rhizomatic roots through our cities. Each response to the Surveillance City deals directly with features of the network of surveillance technology, and positions itself to direct the various responses of new actors who will shape how that network continues to grow and change. Whether the next action is to install another CCTV camera or to smash one; to publish one's information online, to encrypt it, or to make its existence illegal; to put a drone in the hands of the police or the hands of protesters—each of these actions becomes the next wall of the Surveillance City. The Surveillance City, as large as it is, is made up of no more and no less, than humans living together, with technology in their hands and ideas in their heads.

--

Adam Rothstein is an insurgent archivist and writes about politics, media and technology wherever he can get a signal. Previous bylines include The State, The Atlantic Tech and The New Inquiry. 

Read his piece, 'The Youth: A Lower Class' here. 

[bylinezine]

'He’s growing, on this evidence, and beginning to ask harder questions than he has'

Written by: Corley Miller

Towards the end of the 1970s, one senator, six congressmen, the mayor of Camden, New Jersey, and various other mid-atlantic functionaries accepted substantial bribes and kickbacks from ‘Karim Abdul Rahman,’ a wealthy sheikh seeking preferential treatment in developing portions of the New Jersey waterfront. Since ‘Sheikh Rahman’ was the invention of a zealous pair of FBI agents and convicted con man Melvin Weinberg, these men were indicted. There ensued a notable American scandal, called ABSCAM by the press.

But—not too notable. Legislators are small, daft players in the American-political-scandal commedia, most frequently depicted haplessly shoving stacks of cash into their freezers or paying for dully bizarre sex acts. By the time reporters caught up to ABSCAM in 1980 the mere venality of its elected players wasn’t shocking much of anyone. Still, it happened, and it must have played a minor part in the manufactured degradation of American trust in government that’s been one of the main political narratives since Eisenhower. Whatever sordid catenary connects Kennedy’s inaugural with Reagan’s, ABSCAM hangs along it.

David O. Russell’s American Hustle is, ostensibly, about ABSCAM and the cop-criminal team that did the scamming. This is by the same plotty logic that holds Christmas Story to be about a BB gun, Russell’s The Fighter to be about boxing, or Twelfth Night about twins who get shipwrecked: a story, we believe,  is ‘about’ the single most consistent and summarizable narrative element we can identify within it. And on these blurbable osteocentric rules Hustle is indeed about ABSCAM: it starts with the caper in progress, frolics through the backstory, and concludes with the arrests.

But it’s hard to watch American Hustle and come away with any sophisticated feelings about Senators, Congressmen, or bribery. In fact, saying it’s ‘about’ ABSCAM at all feels a little rickety. There are six congressional indictees in ABSCAM and between them they account for three of the films 132 minutes. There could have been an entire film—a Nixon’s worth of greying someones down in Georgetown, stashing suitcases underneath the stairs and going to their club, confident they’ve done well by doing good. A film about the moral corruptibility of optimists. There could have been  an ABSCAM Argo also, the quietly heroic story of how the caper happened. A film about the FBI men on assignment in a townhouse, shunning the nurses next door for fear they’d blow their cover, taken as gay: about the incorruptibility of heroes.

But American Hustle doesn’t start with a senator, or with a heroic agent. It starts with Christian Bale’s Irving (the con man) putting on a toupee, and continues with Bradley Cooper’s Richie (the agent) disrupting the toupee and Amy Adams’ Sidney (the woman) gently fixing it. It’s an ingenious scene, it takes up more time than is given to the congressmen combined, it tells us next to nothing about either sheikhs or bribes, and it’s only the beginning: we’ve still to see the curling irons on the other three leads, Jennifer Lawrence’s apotheotic updo, and Jeremy Renner’s unflappable pompadour. If you watch American Hustle, it feels less like a film about scandal than a film about hair.

Hair? Hair, yes, but hair as a metonym, hair and all the personal  and period weirdness that it represents. ABSCAM may inform the bones of Hustle, but its body—where the camera lingers, and what’s offered by the plot as resolution—is a liars’ romance, a story about people who do their hair at home and then go out and play their roles. Irving puts his hair on. Jennifer Lawrence’s Rosalyn disregards microwave instructions, starts a fire, claims she’s done everyone a favor. Richie puts his hair in curlers and neglects his fiancée to go dancing with Sidney, who is pretending to be British. No one cares about the moral status of indicted congressmen—just finish that ice fishing story. It’s delightful, it floats and stings and shines and almost never stops, and it’s very difficult to place. 

*

David O. Russell’s been around for a while, and the schtick he’s settled into is brilliantly-acted ensemble pieces with a well-elided fetishism for domestic Americana—films that, whatever they’re ‘about,’ are most concerned with hair, or with sports fandom, or jogging, or one’s indolent siblings (and their hair). Unlike the novelists, he’s too smart to try making one American film, so each one is a narrow look at a particular (white) community: small-town New England, Philadelphia’s inner suburbs, fin de stagflation New York.

The role hair et al plays is semiotic as much as human: reality, for Russell, is an effect devoutly to be wished. He’s most comfortable, as in The Fighter or American Hustle, directing something based on a true story, and the overtly fictional stuff (Huckabees, Silver Linings Playbook) can fidget and pose desperately as it attempts to communicate its reality. The Philadelphia Eagles, hair curlers, and drug-addictions are less narrative elements than signs indicating that the story, despite its untrueness, is still organic and imperfect authentic and American[1]. 

Everywhere in Russell’s America, people are indicating imperfection: these are comedies of earnestness. Russell’s men are vulnerable frequently and legibly; his women only in moments of rare crisis. Female leads are present Madonnas and past whores. Children are mentioned sometimes as a moral anchor but rarely filmed. The Russellian romantics are passionate but obstructed petit-bourgeois: widows with a promiscuity problem, con men with an honesty problem, stagnating brilliant media workers, overpolitical firefighters, boxers with a family problem. They meet each other in the first act and, over the rest of the film, love finds a way.

For, as much as imperfection may be signaled, it’s always perfection that’s performed. In America, love always finds a way. A character in Silver Linings Playbook throws A Farewell to Arms out the window and on the basis of his work Russell would agree: the world’s ‘fucking hard enough as it is. Can’t somebody say…let’s be positive? Let’s have a good ending to the story?’ In these films the rebels are always rescued, the girl always gotten, the mob always outwitted, and the love always true and actual. It’s comedy in the oldest sense: Russell writes happy endings for weird people.

But not, usually, big happy endings: in the recent stuff generally and Hustle particularly, victory is measured in romance rather than achievement. This isn’t Argo—the point isn’t that they get away with it, it’s that Sidney and Irving can get married, and that Rosalyn ends up happy too. Silver Linings Playbook[2] redeems two hours of rage and ambivalence with one shot of Tiffany and Pat canoodling in the easy chair[3]; Huckabees ends with an uncountable number of rewarded loves. Russell’s a comic writer in the Shakespearean sense: a lot happens, and then everyone gets (figuratively) married.

The marriage, though, is always given as an adjustment of happiness and not of station. Love is a reconciliation, rather than an inspiration—a way of sitting down happily to watch the football game, or of retiring to the Bronx to raise a child. Even in The Fighter, the one recent Russell film with an ambitious protagonist and a crowning achievement, Micky’s worldly success is a consequence of the emotional and relational health created by the love affair. The success with Charlene is the real causative success; the worldly achievement only a kind of necessary formal demonstration of the fact he’s got his head right.

In fact, the notion of achievement or external change as a good is almost conspicuously absent in the Russell oeuvre. There tend not to be villains in his films, but there are often adversaries—good-hearted individuals whose interests must be gently overcome. The mother in The Fighter, Caterine in Huckabees, the bettor Randy in SLP, Hustle’s Richie—they’re punished mildly, and often forgiven, but they are punished. And their crimes are clear—they want more than they have[4]. They share an appetite, a desire that their lives be made more rather than simply better. The protagonists are wiser—they don’t want different lives, just better, less damaged versions of the lives that are. A happy ending, in Three Kings, is when you trade the treasure for the lives of strangers. You prosper by abandoning maximalism and ambition and doing something right for your friends and loved ones.“We succeeded,” says Irving to Richie at the beginning of Hustle’s second act, “because we stayed small.” That’s how it tends to work in a David O. Russell film.

*

If you wanted to build an angry critical reading of Russell’s career, you’d start by noting the proscriptive, even reactionary Panglossianism of his plotting: every Russell film can be read as a kind of open letter to the middle class, urging good measures of romantic love, football, and loyalty in hard times. Promising that everything will be alright. Urging no radical action or awareness, no attempt to rise above one’s station, never any ambition other than internal. A Learyish prescription for comfortable living in a boom economy: buy in, buck up, and settle down to your happily-ever-after.

The critical case might then turn personal: it’d note Russell’s notorious actual and verbal [5] abuse of his casts and crew, and wonder whether there wasn’t some violence inherent in the system that created such consistently affirming stories. It might also rankle that a blockbuster director—someone whose own life has been a more-or-less uninterrupted chain of ambitious triumphs—should be telling all of us that we ourselves just need to work on getting less insane and discovering the meaning of our lives and maybe kissing someone on a Lay-Z-Boy. One can forgive an earnest propagandist, or a hypocritical artist, but on the critical reading it seems disturbingly possible that Russell is neither.

The harshest criticism of the Russell plot might be that it simply isn’t true—one doesn’t get over one’s anger issues by attending dance lessons and being lied to by a widow, there are no such things as existential detectives, life in the middle class in America is getting worse, only one person has ever been Micky Ward, and sometimes it doesn’t all work out for everyone. That evangelizing for this model—in the America of rampant inequality and stagnating poverty—isn’t just flighty, or irrelevant, but maybe actively evil. That the reason Hemingway matters is that humans need not just hope but be strong—not just a reassurance that things will end happily but an admission that life is difficult, a validation of the struggle, and a reminder to keep going anyways, because it’s all that’s possible. That there’s a role for actual existentialism, not just assholes with notepads asking us about ‘the sex.’

But then the truth is that Russell’s first film came out in 1996, and that for most of his career his bourgeois lullabies weren’t just sellable but even appropriate. There was a boom, and then a slightly less pleasant boom, and then some period of well-hidden decay. People felt they had time to find themselves. Nobody was talking about inequality. Unemployment was scarcely believable lows. All of Russell’s films, with the exception of the recent Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, have been films composed entirely during economic expansion. Films for good times. And while 2012’s Playbook is based on a novel from pre-crash 2008, Hustle seems to be entirely an object of our newer, more complicated economic understanding: the Russell film from the recession. The question, then—and the decider of how seriously one will take the angry case—is whether his outlook seems to have changed at all. Whether there’s anything here that suggests a new model, or a new understanding of the America he’s so preoccupied with.

The answer seems to be a qualified ‘yes.’

*

The very first shot of American Hustle, before the comb over, is a slide reading ‘Some of this stuff actually happened.’ How much of it? On a scene-to-scene level, very little. The characters have been renamed and most of the plot relocated. Everyone involved is more attractive than they were in real life. This is how movies work. They’re wittier, and better-lit, and better-dressed—because life is drab, life is boring, life frustrates us. Stories, and films especially, have to be better than real life. And so the sets, the makeup artists, the omnipresent breasts of Amy Adams—because it’s better.

Hustle changes more than just the anatomy of the principals, though. It changes events. Some changes are minor and incidental—the film’s Irving breaks windows as a boy, while the real Melvin broke them as an adult. But others are real and substantial. The biggest changes concern the moral character of Jeremy Renner’s Carmine Polito, Mayor of Camden. The real life Polito, who was named Angelo Errichetti and looked less like a superhero, was the indispensable fulcrum of the scandal—the local pol who, having been greased, introduced the FBI to the senators and congressmen who were eventually indicted.

He was also a little guiltier than the film makes him. Renner’s Polito plays roughly the same structural role as life’s Errichetti—he takes the cash, and gets others to take the cash as well, and is eventually arrested. But, as always with Russell, it’s the tone that makes the difference. The filmed Polito refuses the cash. Irving—ordered by the sinister Richie, who could arrest him at any moment if Irving doesn’t comport with his ambition—has to go and talk him into taking it, which he does by appealing to shared Bronx cultural heritage. After this Irving and Carmine are friends. They go out to dinner together and sing ‘Delilah.’ Carmine gives Irving a microwave oven as a gift.  Irving says ‘I’ve never had a friend like you.’ And throughout, even while Carmine is taking bribes and introducing everyone to the Mafia, the film reminds us constantly that his criminal purpose is in fact virtuous—the revitalization of the New Jersey waterfront by the conspired sheikh’s casinos. Polito really believes it, we’re told, and who can judge him for it? Polito’s not taking money, the film says, he’s taking a chance that this might change things for the citizens of his state.

What it boils down to is: Carmine Polito has been sympathized. He’s not a grifter—he’s a grift-accepting visionary. With a wonderful family. But he’s taking bribes, and he’s being conned. Not because Irving enjoys conning him—but it’s the only way Irving and Sidney, the real protagonists, can free themselves from Richie and retire to the Bronx. This makes Carmine something rare in Russell films: a victim[6] of the protagonist’s pursuit of happiness. The usual calculus is that everyone succeeds together, and the success costs no one anything. Micky takes his brother back and the whole family is together when he wins the championship. Pat and Tiffany’s success hurts exactly no one. And in Hustle all of the arrestees, like everyone who’s conned at the beginning, simply vanish. Except for Carmine.

In a way Carmine is a classic Russell character—someone who wants to change the world and ends up going to jail, while everyone who just wanted to fall in love (even Rosalyn) ends up happy. What’s different is the emotional depth the film’s willing to offer him. Unlike Randy and Micky’s mom, Carmine’s a fully realized human character. Russell’s gone out of his way to give this film a sympathetic victim. If Hustle could have been Argo, it could also have been Ocean’s Eleven, with a dastardly mark who deserves everything he gets.

So—why concoct a sympathetic victim? Partially it’s narrative thermodynamics—it’s not clear that the second and third acts of the film would work without it[7]. But it also seems to indicate that Russell’s breaking genuinely new ground in American Hustle—beginning to wonder what Sidney and Irving’s eventual domestic happiness might have cost, and who might be paying for it.

It’s hugely encouraging that Hustle even asks the question.  

But there’s also a bit of disappointment. At the end of the film Russell backs down from really dwelling on Carmine’s victimhood. There’s a brutal scene, true, in which Carmine attacks Irving, but the final and most obviously fabricated caper, in which Irving and Sidney extort the FBI into reducing Carmine’s sentence, is a reversion to Russell’s usual[8] optimism: even the bad things aren’t that bad. Love finds a way—Irving’s love for Carmine, in this case—of reducing the penalties Carmine’s incurred by being disruptively ambitious. The real penalties—the emotional penalties—are offered up to Richie, whose sins of ambition are forgiven by no one.

There’s ways in which this conclusion reads as maybe the typical Russell moment: everything seems bad at first, but through the good and selfless machinations of the weird-but-wonderful and totally selfless protagonists, it ends up fine. There’s an irresistibly executed appeal for sympathy and an openly-conspired happy ending. The sense that the ending is a resumption rather than a new creation. That things have been set right rather than created anew. Here, in these films, are people with damage. Imperfect people. Rageful ex-husbands, unfaithful criminals, desperate Albuquerqueans. They are putting on toupees and sleeping with entire offices and permitting their brothers to destroy them. But within two hours, with the help of an unlikely lover, they will have shown their true virtue. They will have found the silver lining.

And, once they do, things will be obvious: because actually they are not Rosalyn or Irving or Pat. The perfection is always performed eventually. They are Jennifer Lawrence, Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Mark Wahlberg. They are Batman and Katniss and Hawkeye. They are the heroes of epics, beneath the curling irons and Desean Jackson jerseys. This is the Russell mold: the vulnerability, the damage of the Russell protagonist is only cosmetically, fixably deep. They just need to be loved in the right way, or to chat with Dustin Hoffman. The road that’s paved with good intentions leads directly and obviously into happiness. At least that’s how it usually goes--but here, for the first time, is also a consideration of the costs. An understanding that someone else may suffer on the way to the stars’ domestic bliss.

Russell’s is a terrifically appealing model—a Magic Kingdom for besieged adults whose only legible shortcoming is that it may not be true. It’s still unclear whether this world of win-win personal discovery  reads in 2014 as cloying or invigorating. As honest or condescending. It’s unclear whether you could make a David O. Russell film about any of the political issues of the last fifteen years—about Guantanamo, or Bear Stearns, or the NSA or Fukushima or the ice caps—unclear whether we may not need a darker model. And in that regard—despite American Hustle’s enormous performances by Lawrence, Cooper, Adams and Bale,  it’s Renner’s Carmine Polito, the first (mostly sympathetic, partially innocent) victim that Russell’s ever really put on screen, who’s the best sign for Russell’s continuing relevance as a filmmaker. He’s growing, on this evidence, and beginning to ask harder questions than he has.

Corley Miller is a writer living in Brooklyn. His previous bylines include the LA Review of Books. 

[1] Russell’s obsession with American identity is rarely pursued explicitly, but you can read literally every one of his films as an examination of a specifically American encounter, and even the universal moments are marked with overwhelmingly American elements. 

[2] Playbook is a funny film and maybe in some senses the most representative Russell film: it combines the appearance of extraordinary honest realism with a completely ridiculous premise. E-A-G-L-E-S on the one hand, but amateur ballroom dancing as a cure for clinical psychological  issues on the other. Really the key question with Russell is whether we want to find stuff like this inspiring or condescending.

[3] The Fighter ends with an achievement, but the logic of the film is that Mark’s boxing success is only limited by his emotional health, and therefore that his success with Amy is the real causative success and the boxing thing only a kind of necessary formal demonstration of the fact that his head’s right.

[4] Caterine is an evangelical nihilist, which—in addition to being a snottily self-contradictory position to take, is kind of the ideological equivalent of ambition.

[5] The gem in this video is Tomlin’s cool response to the entire affair, especially her parting shot, ‘You set the yelling standard for the whole set.” The yelling standard! 

[6] You could call Richie a victim too, but Richie’s palpably a victim of his own ambition—Carmine, although felonious, is given as almost entirely innocent.

[7] The Richie/Sidney romance, while incandescent in the scenes it gets, feels like it might not bear a much closer examination, and the mob thing is good but breaks very late.

[8] The basic plotting here is identical to the climax of Three Kings, in which the heroes give up their treasure to save someone they’ve gotten to like along the way.