[30] Lo que Innita No es/That which No Innita is [review, fiction]

What do nudism, vegans, rock, hyper-feminism, fine art and comics have in

common? The improbable answer is a pink girl with star-shaped freckles

called Innita, and her author/other half, No.

"No" is the legal name (legal surname "Para Innita") of a mysterious and

prolific artist dropping one amazing piece after another in a

variety of mediums/websites. A one woman army posting sometimes

several pieces a day, often digitally in places like flickr as well as oils in places like Bogotá.

The downside of No's outstanding creative output is that it leaves less time for curation, which means serialized books such as "De No para Innita vol. 1" lag a good two years behind the storyline and characters in the current drawn series. In any case, this is a good "origins" book and those bewitched by the visual work can start getting the coordinates of Innita's narrative in these two volumes available online at scribd.

By Innita's "origins" I mean something closer to those of the protestant revolution or the Dogma film movement than those of a Stan Lee character. She is rooted in a manifesto of principles more than

in a turtle-bit-me-so-now-I-have-x-ray-vision story.

The fundamental principle is roughly summarized as follows:

Feminine is best, reality is overrated. Reality shall be subverted and

replaced by art, not altered states, masculinity fully replaced, no

quarter. These ideas are expanded on page 192:

"Menorrealismo is an extreme artistic current; both classical and post-post-modern. This term comes from the amalgamation of the menorrhea (menstruation) and the word realism. Its significance determines that the essence of life is not reality (Spanish wordplay: “menorrhealism” as minor realism, lower realism),

but love[...]"

Based on this principle, the book covers three main narratives: Ginotropia

("gravitating towards the feminine"), interviews full of puns with Innita as a rocker, and the beginnings of "World War IV," a story line where the

vegan aspects of the hyper-feminine characters come clashing with the

world as we know it.

Incidentally, world war IV is fought between zombies and vegan female vampires. The origins of the conflict are World War III and the assassination of a female president. You'll just have to read it to make sense of it. If it seems twisted is because it is.

So much for description. Critically, I think its apt to describe what

sets this book apart, in terms of what it is not. Call it "That which No Innita is."

First of all, Innita is not your typical "hard rock chick,"

particularly not those presented in movies or comics. Those girls all suffer from one fatal flaw: inside all the hard exterior they are just a soft

goo of girly cliché. I personally believe that version of "hard women"

has been more detrimental to feminism than any broom or burka. No,

Innita is the genuine article, she is not waiting for the right guy to

knock her up and retire, she bleeds profusely and makes no apologies.

The next thing it isn't is "the first Colombian X." Whatever X

might be, those are not the right terms. The work is

highly innovative and there is no precedent I know of in Colombia, but

this is not some provincial figure with a bag of coffee under the arm

sold under the self-deprecation of exoticism. No/Innita is

an original playing by her own right on the big leagues, and asks for

no special treatment.

The girls on this book are not hot naked chicks derivative

of Milo Manara or superhero chicks a-la J. Scott Campbell "Danger Girl."

The accessible style borrows from comics as it does from other popular

illustrative art, such as the nouveau pieces of Mucha and

Lautrec. It contains traces and references to Klimt and Shiele, but

it all amounts not to a pastiche but to a distinctive visceral style

that is only No's.

By continuation of the previous argument, this book isn't really a

comic, (and I don't mean as opposed to a graphic novel) It is

fine art masquerading as illustration masquerading as comic book. In

this sense (but also in style and theme) the closest parallel I can

draw to No's work is that of the incredible Ashley Wood. In many ways

reading "De No para Innita vol. 1" is a pleasure similar to reading

Popbot.

Come to think of it, a mashup between Lady Sham, super agent Biatch

vs. Innita, would definitely be a fine art exhibit, er, comic book

worth seeing.

Fabio Arciniegas A., San Diego, California July 09, 2011

"De No Para Innita vol 1. and 2" is available on scribd,

http://es.scribd.com/doc/57472653/de-no-para-innita-vol-1-parte-1

Current works by No in the world of Innita available on flickr

http://www.flickr.com/photos/noparainnita/

Original Oils and Pencils available.

[28] Dragon Boats and other holiday racing

When asked to explain the National Dragon Boat festival holiday, my
Taiwanese friends seem to experience that brand of self-consciousness
reserved for explaining a strange idea that doesn't make much sense but
you accepted a long time ago.

Legend has it that a poet loyal to the king in third century China was falsely
accused of treason; rather than living shamed in exile he decides to
drown. The townspeople, who loved the poet, threw rice cakes to the
river so the fish wouldn't eat him and raced boats to find him. Ever
since, they celebrate each year the dragon boat race.

In my opinion, it is a perfectly valid and beautiful explanation. If
you disagree and it seems a little strange to celebrate a holiday by
racing adorned boats, I submit for your consideration three other
holiday races I've seen, the true strangeness of which should put things
in perspective:

Top 3 - The Seven Churches Race, South America

Maundy thursday, also known as holy thursday, is a christian holy
day which happens every year the thursday before Easter. It
commemorates the last supper between Jesus and the apostles and
precedes the Easter Triduum, the three days of Good Friday, Holy
saturday, and Easter Sunday, which commemorate the passion, death, and
resurrection of Jesus.

So far so good. Here's the strange part: Seven local churches are visited by
devout catholics in south america in celebration of this day. The
churches are to be visited before midnight and a certain number of
prayers have to be performed in each. Because it is time-bound, there
is a sense of urgency to the proceedings and more than a pilgrimage
the route acquires the taste of a race against time.

In some locations such as downtown Lima, ts is relatively easy to
accomplish. More than eleven churches in one square kilometer
provide ample time to complete the requirement. In other cities, it
can get complicated; I remember as a kid attempting this race only
once and from my recollection, skipping a few due to lack of time (or
perhaps, lets admit it, devotion.)

Why should there be seven and not eight or six is explained apparently
by the important stops Jesus made that night. It is unclear whether
the participants can tell what those stops were but one thing is
certain: grandmothers and children alike buzz from one crowded church
to the next in order to fulfill the tradition.

Top 2 - The Easter Egg Hunt Race, US (and increasingly in its cultural colonies)

The usual explanation about ancient pagan rites of fertility (of which
the hare and egss were symbol) getting mixed with early european
christian celebrations may shed some light into the origin of easter
eggs, but does nothing to lessen the cacophony of the
celebration: On one hand you have the resurrection of Christ. On the
other, children racing to collect the largest number of colored eggs.

More weird is seeing this tradition imported to catholic countries,
where there was no history of egg hunting until recently, as part of
adopting more "American" celebrations. Some Middle and upper class people
in south-american countries as well as Philippines are putting their
kids through the egg hunt as a "fun" activity during easter.

As an atheist I can only say the theological implications of this
import are left to each parent's conscience.



Top 1 - The Halloween Drag Race, Washington D.C.

It is my favorite, but Halloween is also the least rational of
all holidays. If you ask americans to explain it, 95% of the time
you'll get the "dress-like-a-slut-day" reasoning; this is not an
attempt by most of the population at being witty. We just don't know.

To make things better, this race has no mythical grounding on the
holiday in question; it has no grounding at all other than satisfying
a verbal pun. Drag Queens run down Dupont Circle while a crowd of
confused bystanders cheer and take pictures. Drag - Race. Get it?




So, Taiwanese friends, no reason to fret. Compared with grandmas
running through churches to commemorate Christ's pain, and screaming
banshee-like drag queens in the US capital, a dragon boat race doesn't
seem a strange celebration. Not at all.

Fabio Arciniegas A.
Taipei, Taiwan - June 2011

[27] Vineland, 2011 [Literature, Fiction, Essay, Review]

If Deleuze was right in seeing writers as physicians of culture, symptomatologists exposing the sickness of society, therapists proposing remedies of variable plausibility, Thomas Pynchon's Vineland is a treatise on Hematology: Vineland is about what ails the USA in its blood.

The book alternates its brilliant jokes -and almost everyone in the book is one- between the 60s and the 80s as Prairie leaves her ridiculous hippie dad, Zoyd (reduced to performing annual rituals of cross-dressing violence on TV to collect a disability check), in the search for everybody's object of desire: her mom Frenesi Gates.

On the trail of Frenesi's videodrome ghost we learn of the rise and fall of PR3, the People's Republic of Rock and Roll, a secessionist campus in Trasero county, California, of her involvement with the radical film crew 24fps and her calamitous relationship with bad guy Brock Vond, the fascist-par-excellence whose seductive powers are at the core of the cloudburst.

The mechanics of the book, and thus Pynchon's diagnosis, can be divided broadly in two: first is the mirror house, deformed reflections. Everything returns as a twisted version of its former self, including the actual dead (in the form of Thanatoids, undead victims of karmic faults who go around interacting with the living, watching TV, etc.). Family, individuals, pop culture, they all return in contorted, often amusing ways e.g., "Say, Jim!," an inverted Star Trek with an all black cast with the exception of a freckled redhead communications officer, lieutenant O'hara. At the end, not even fascism is what it used to be, as young would-be-rebels no longer need camps for "reeducation."

The second mechanism is sexual seduction. Fascism advances by means of corrupting desire embedded invariably in the character's DNA.

Beyond this, I will say no more about the book itself, don't want to spoil it for anyone; for praise of the books' literary merits, formal quirks, embedded song lyrics and puns (such as the japanese conglomerate Tokkata & Fuji) I'll refer you to Salman Rushdie (His New York Times review available here http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-vineland.html). For a thorough analysis of the Cultural Trauma in the book you can take a look at James Berger's lucid essay at The Modern Word (http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/papers_berger.html).

In the reminder of this entry I'll avoid repeating those great reviews in favor of a report from the field. A few years as a resident of California has prepared me to give you first hand information as to the current state of Vineland, the good.

THE ORIGINAL PLAYERS Vineland's children of the sixties, corrupted by the eighties, blindsided by the nineties, obliterated by the oh-ohs, are now effectively part of the living dead.

They gather in places like Cheswick's, a dimly lit box where time passes slowly, without anyone ever jumping through a window. In fact, there are no windows in the place, which suits everyone just fine. The minimum amount of air coming in is enough to keep them going.

Since there are no sits outside, the patrons take dutiful turns going out for smoking, standing right in front of the windowless hole that serves as ventilation. More smoke goes in than if they were sitting inside looking out. It is a formal game of do-as-you-are-told they have learned to play to perfection. In fact, the greatest faux-pas in this place of droopy eyes and daffy stares, sun-burnt wrinkled faces and faded tattoos is to inadvertently carry your drink in your hand as you cross the border between the inside of the box and the smoking area. This could "fuck us all up!" and its ferociously averted.

Obedience is the name of the game, and as long as they can have beer and tequila shots, the original players will keep dying quietly in line, and there's enough IPA and Patron to last everyone another two life sentences inside the place.

PRAIRIES CHILDREN Prairie's children are in their twenties or so and are a jolly bunch. Their life is full of music, but it is not Rock and Roll. In fact, Rolling Stone magazine reports there was not a single rock song in 2010's top 25. What you do hear in Vineland is pop-rap songs like this:

Bedrock

Oh baby, I be stuck to you like glue
Baby, wanna spend it all on you
Baby, my room is the G spot,
call me Mr. Flintstone I can make your bedrock.

G spot, I'll spend it all on you. Right. The mechanics of Vineland are what they always were, the pursuit of sensual pleasures, and screen to watch them. The contract is to work a job five days a week, and in return you can have an epic party every weekend and a facebook account to share it. A zero-sum game as long as you don't hate your job and the party indeed gets you laid.

Epic parties take time, are not always epic, and often take more money than Vinelanders earn. As these frustrations accumulate, the difference between the girl doing the St. Vitus dance on booze and ecstasy and the homeless dude shaking it to the same tune and drugs on Newport ave. starts appearing less accidental. The shared illusion that prompts one resident to applaud another on saturday nights is perturbed by the sight of wrinkles.

The karmic effect of time starts to contaminate the party, but for that too, Vineland has an antidote. And that is where the Flintstones come in..

CHILDREN OF PRAIRIE'S CHILDREN The Flintstones and the rest of the soft-core, infantile coating on sex prefigure the boundaries of the next stage. Thankfully, adulthood remains untouched during the party, because when the party looses its luster, or becomes too expensive, or one looses luster and feels no longer welcome to the party, reverting to childhood is much easier. When the time comes to make children, there's less adulthood to miss.

Kids provide great relief to Vineland, as socially accepted validation of any citizen which requires no particular skill. Be famous or be a parent; a renewed covenant where Prairie's children get to work the job they are tied to without loosing face. That's just the way life is, they'll tell you, this is what it means to grow up. And don't worry, you can still party. In moderation, of course.

BALANCE IS THE KEY In conclusion, thirty years later, all is good in Vineland. There is no revolution nor need for it because life here is truly a continuum. We have fat-free chocolate, and FDA-approved opiates without opium. Music is both sex-filled and kid-safe. The tube and life are identical, no need to escape one with the other. Young and old are closer together, all sharing the same desires and occasional addictions. Those desires taught at ever-tenderer ages to little Vinelanders, who will be even more efficient than their parents at both the party and at keeping the balance by finding meaning in the miracle of another little Vinelander on the way.

And if at any point should suspicion rear its ugly head suggesting we've been duped, the joint that is no longer revolutionary nor prosecuted will be there, and the tube will soothe our worries through one of those great Vineland saints who will sing to us tenderly:

Don't worry
about a thing.
every little thing
is gonna be alright...

Fabio Arciniegas A. San Diego, CA. May 26, 2011

[19] On occasion of Innita's cup size

When artist and friend No(that's his name) asked me to comment on whether his lover and muse --rock star Innita-- would be better received by critics if she had smaller breasts and clothed herself more, I was reminded of Paris' story and the perils of taking sides in arguments about women's looks; however, in matters of aesthetics is better to have a Trojan war than a cop out, so I've accepted to weigh in.

I guess the question could be answered statistically, a-la rotten tomatoes. However, the enduring success of Dolly Parton alone would be enough to skew any numerical results, so a philosophical answer is in order.

"Would critics receive better a clothed, A-cup Innita?" Let's break down the problem. Which critics are we talking about? Low, mid, or highbrow?

First of all, there's no such thing as a lowbrow critic, only lowbrow consumers. like camels they eat what they're fed.The predilection for larger breasts in this camp is guaranteed.

The midbrow is characterized by dissent and a contrarian attitude. Critics of this ilk are guaranteed to oppose Innita, they are in love with Audrey Hepburn anyway.

And the highbrow? Well Nietszche readers probably have guessed where I'm going talking about three levels, camels and so forth [1], and all i can say is this: i have yet to see the first child who doesn't love a big pair of tits.

Fabio Arciniegas A., San Diego, CA January 2010

[1]. "Of three metamorphoses of the spirit I tell you: how the spirit becomes a camel; and the camel, a lion; and the lion, finally, a child. Thus spoke Zarathustra."

http://www.flickr.com/photos/noparainnita/sets/72157619469279744

[18] Some thoughts on Compression, Visualization, and Blackjack

Beautiful Mnemonics - Compressed Graphics

It occurred to me a while ago that some printed graphics can be said to be "compressed," not in the JPEG sense, but rather in the traditional information theory sense of the word, i.e. they can contain more information than explicitly shown, provided the recipient knows the conventions necessary to extract the implied information. In traditional Tufte terminology, these graphics could be said to have a data-ink ratio higher than 1.0, and more poetically, to borrow another Tufte motto, they can illustrate a negative "smallest effective difference."

The example shown below is the compression of the traditional table for Blackjack basic strategy to a set of smaller tables with many implied cells. Perhaps these tables will not be useful to a complete amateur, but everyone with a basic knowledge of the game I have tested them with has found them very useful in memorizing the rules completely, something they have failed to do with the traditional table, which shows independently the 220 data points.

I believe this is an effective example of a special type of "compressed graphics" that can serve as "beautiful mnemonics" rather than "beautiful explanations."


(click for large version)


Below is a longer explanation of the two points above for those not familiar with Tufte's terms.

A longer version - Questioning data ink ratios and the smallest effective difference

Given the amount of manipulative and content-free media pushed around us (think Fox news), teaching people how to create elegant and meaningful visual explanations seems a useful goal. Perhaps no one has contributed more to it than Edward Tufte, who in his books explains the basic principles of effective information design and shows many outstanding applications. If you have not had a chance yet to see his work, I recommend you stop here and check the following link:

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/

One of Tuftee's recurrent themes is avoiding waste, making graphics with a "high data-to-ink ratio." In other words, charts where every line and piece of text is meaningful, without unnecessary colors and decorations. A sort of Visual Strunk and White which Tuftee praises with the lyrical phrase "the smallest effective difference."

In Tuftee's books, "the smallest effective difference" is usually illustrated by starting with a bloated and ugly graphic and succesively getting rid of unnecessary ink, minimizing waste. The result is usually a beautiful and compact representation of the original data, with a higher "data-ink ratio."

I've often wondered about the possible results of the "clean up process" given a starting point that was not a bloated graphic, but already a clean one1. To which point can it be simplified? are there cases where we can delete even data-ink and still have a useful graphic? perhaps an even better graphic? In short, is there a case to be made for a negative smallest effective difference?

1. Playing with other properties of the graphic such as dimensions is one possible answer. This is illustrated in Tufte's discussions about sparklines. In this case I'm referring to further deletion of data past the obviously desired deletion of fluff.

Before jumping into these formulas it is important to make a disclaimer: Tuftee's points are heuristics using math terminology, not standalone formulas for quality. With the above in mind, lets phrase in pseudo-math terms the idea of the smallest effective difference as follows:

Data ink ratio = data ink / graphic ink (ink that conveys information vs total ink used to produce the graphic)

From this, one interpretation of the smallest effective difference could be:
graphic ink - data ink

This would seem to imply that the goal is a data ink ratio closest to 1.0, in other words, a smallest effective difference of 0. However consider a graphic that implies more data than it explicitly expresses:
data ink = explicit data + implied data

To express more data than that explicitly shown, the receipient must know an algorithm to extract such data from the original message. In other words, the reader must be able to infer the implied data. In traditional information theory, a classic example of compression is run-length encoding, where contiguous identical digits are implied by specifying how many times they repeat instead of writing them explicitly. e.g.
3.422222222231333333 is converted to
3.42{9}313{6}

The compressed format is shorter, although it requires the reader to know a convention. If we were to consider text as graphics we'd already have a first example of a graphic with a data ink ratio higher than one. Thankfully, we don't have to make such an extreme case to illustrate the idea: the blackjack table below is a more meaningful example.

The point of many graphics is to render new data clear to the reader. In such cases, using a "compressed" graphic may not be a good idea because first one would have to explain to the reader the conventions necessary to read the implied data. However, not all graphics are meant to explain new data. Memorization and quick confirmation previously known information is also helpful.

Here's a practical example, compressing the traditional table for Blackjack basic strategy to a set of smaller tables with many implied cells. Perhaps these tables will not be useful to a complete amateur, but everyone with a basic knowledge of the game I have tested them with has found them very useful in memorizing the rules completely, something they have failed to do with the traditional table, which shows explicitly 220 data points. I believe this is an effective example of a special type of "compressed graphics," that can serve as "beautiful mnemonics" rather than "beautiful explanations."




A traditional Blackjack Strategy table
vs A compressed/mnemonic table

[17] A guide to existentialist cinema

[15] Alfred Jarry and Edsger W. Dijkstra

to Schaffer El Dedos.

It is a common opinion, among those who have traveled the proverbial path of excess, that the palace of Wisdom can only resemble either an absinthe-filled whorehouse or a physics lab.

Perhaps less obvious is the equivalence of the two options —at least when real professionals are involved— in defense of which I present the following parallel between Libertine glory Alfred Jarry and CS hero Edsger W. Dijkstra, on the topic of Certainty:

Jarry - Discussing principles of "Pataphysics"

http://faustroll.lineaments.net/ (free in french) or Amazon (english)

If you let a coin fall and it falls, the next time it is just by an infinite coincidence that it will fall again the same way; hundreds of other coins on other hands will follow this pattern in an infinitely unimaginable fashion.

Dijkstra - From "A position paper on Fairness"

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd10xx/EWD1013.PDF

[...] With a perfectly fair roulette it is possible that each time he turns the roulette and throws the ball, the ball will end up at zero. Unlikely, but perfectly possible. [...] The dissatisfied customer can still try to sue the roulette manufacturer, not because he has been cheated by the latter but only on account of the very high probability that he has done so. In a case like that, the conscientious judge can give the roulette manufacturer only a probabilistic fine; whether or not it should be paid can be settled by the roulette in question.

Fabio Arciniegas A., Taipei Taiwan September 2009