Gloss

I’ve been watching All the President’s Men lately and trying to come up with a theory for it. I want to say that twin events, All the President’s Men and the election of Jimmy Carter, stand as the final two-pronged assault of America’s political counterculture.

Which is to say that they were the parting shots of (and monuments to) the whole countercultural movement, just before its unilateral surrender to the forces of music videos and product research.

They were big events for 1976, which—let’s face it—was the year most of us were born. But of these two bicentennial landmarks, I want to say that ATPM has proven to have the lasting positive influence. Nobel Prizes notwithstanding.

I’m talking only about the movie, not Watergate itself, and certainly not Woodward and Bernstein’s reconstruction, All the President’s Men the book (which I do have plans to read now in the near future). The power and influence of this movie comes from its lionization of the reporter as one of those archetypal countercultural figures typical of ’70s Hollywood golden age, a contemporary Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, or a mildly employable Easy Rider.

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Just saw Inland Empire, and of course have no idea what I just watched. So. Mulholland Drive was, relatively speaking, a controlled and linear masterpiece. It gave you two-thirds of partially plausible narrative before clamping down with the mindfuck. This new one just takes the mindfuck and smears it all over the story from almost the first digital frame on. But the set pieces that follow are virtuoso. Lynch, as you know, didn’t even write a script, he just filmed whatever came to him. It’s tagline is “A Woman in Trouble”—that’s not a storyline, that’s a theme to riff on. Talking it over with John afterwards, we agreed the movie was one long cinematic jam session.

But IE does have its own impenetrable logic. Laura Dern opens a door near the end and everything somehow clicks in spite of itself. Of course the bunnies are in that room, you find yourself thinking after being spun in circles for three hours. But then there are no bunnies in the room. That’s because they live in another dimension! The best Lynch-logic moment was the neighbor’s cameo, walking out from behind the tree with a red light bulb in his mouth. Lynch, helpfully, cues a flashback to the blinking red lamp from forty-five minutes earlier. Yes, it all makes sense now.

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The last few holiday seasons have seen a rapid development in Christmas light technology. Half a decade ago, icicle lights replaced old-style string lights as the stand-out holiday product. Next came net lights, which introduced the second dimension into Christmas lighting, allowing the decorating customer to blanket entire surfaces – say, a bush – in a single gesture.

The next holiday craze would logically be to just add another dimension to the Christmas light’s n-space. In other words, the time has come for three-dimensional holiday lights, the Christmas Cube.

A 10 light x 10 light cube suspended in space above a cold suburban lawn would present an exercise in perception that would be measurably more enlightening than the standard flashing-lights and glowing plastic reindeer fare. And it could be accomplished by assembling together n number of net lights, where n is the length and width of a square set of net lights. (Easy!)

I’ll be doing it myself on the back porch as soon as I’ve saved up the money. The grid of a single net light forms one side of the cube, shown here in its purest graphic form:

Fig 1

By lining up 6 of the above grids equidistantly, we achieve the idealized mathematical cube of Chrismas lights:

Fig 2

But this is no mere exercise in chasing the rising tolerance for entertainment of America’s credulous but jaded middle class. If we could translate this homemade prototype into a professional, patented Christmas product, using a wire material that holds its shape but was flexible, we could take the surface of the cube and perform all sorts of operations from the fields of topology and differential geometry.

We could make a catenoid.

We could make a pseudosphere.

A similar experiment was included in last year’s LA MoCA exhibition Ecstasy: In and About Altered States, which means the form has verifiable psychedelic applications.

See its write up at We Make Money Not Art