3quarksdaily

Tuesday Poem

  Slow Dance

  More than putting another man on the moon,
  More than a New Year’s resolution of yogurt and yoga,
  we need the opportunity to dance
  with really exquisite strangers. A slow dance
  between the couch and dining room table, at the end
  of the party, while the person we love has gone
  to bring the car around
  because it’s begun to rain and would break their heart
  if any part of us got wet. A slow dance
  to bring the evening home. Two people
  rocking back and forth like a buoy. Nothing extravagant.
  A little music.  An empty bottle of whiskey.
  It’s a little like cheating. Your head resting
  on his shoulder, your breath moving up his neck.
  Your hands along her spine. Her hips
  unfolding like a cotton napkin
  and you begin to think about
  how all the stars in the sky are dead. The my body
  is talking to your body slow dance. The Unchained Melody,
  Stairway to Heaven, power-chord slow dance. All my life
  I’ve made mistakes. Small
  and cruel. I made my plans.
  I never arrived. I ate my food. I drank my wine.
  The slow dance doesn’t care. It’s all kindness like children
  before they turn three. Like being held in the arms
  of my brother. The slow dance of siblings.
  Two men in the middle of the room. When I dance with him,
  one of my great loves, he is absolutely human,
  and when he turns to dip me
  or I step on his foot because we are both leading,
  I know that one of us will die first and the other will suffer.
  The slow dance of what’s to come
  and the slow dance of insomnia
  pouring across the floor like bath water.
  When the woman I’m sleeping with
  stands naked in the bathroom,
  brushing her teeth, the slow dance of ritual is being spit
  into the sink. There is no one to save us
  because there is no need to be saved.
  I’ve hurt you. I’ve loved you. I’ve mowed
  the front yard. When the stranger wearing a sheer white dress
  covered in a million beads
  slinks toward me like an over-sexed chandelier suddenly come to life,
  I take her hand in mine. I spin her out
  and bring her in. This is the almond grove
  in the dark slow dance.
  It is what we should be doing right now. Scraping
  for joy. The haiku and honey. The orange and orangutan slow dance.

  Matthew Dickman
  from American Poetry Review, 2008

Quentin Tarantino - Author of the Gatsby

By Liam Heneghan

[Spoiler alert: I discuss in some detail the plot outcome of The Great Gatsby and, for that matter, of Django Unchained]

I do not mean to suggest here that Quentin Tarantino set out in Django Unchained to revive in any sort of deliberate way the characters and themes of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The differences between these two projects are more substantial than their commonalities. One, after all, is a movie and the other is a novel. More importantly, Tarantino is self-consciously a genre re-configuring story-teller, whereas Fitzgerald wanted in The Great Gatsby to write something new using the form of the traditional novel. The Great Gatsby is that most brazen of beasts The Great American Novel. That being said both, in fact, are distinctively American works. Moreover, in both works the action is driven by a hero’s bid to rescue a gal. Both play games with time, though quite different ones as I will elaborate below. In both, injustices are addressed and resolved with varying degrees of success. To my mind the commonalities of revision, rescue, and redress, though these are perhaps the stuff of all great works, are so distinctively rendered in Django Unchained that one can say that Tarantino has re-authored Gatsby.

***

Many years ago Bono identified, for the edification of an Irish audience, the differences between Irish and American sensibilities. He was appearing on Gay Byrne’s The Late Late Show — as close as one could get in those times to addressing the Irish nation. He was asked to account for U2’s growing infatuation with the United States. As best as I can remember it now Bono reported that when a man gets wealthy in the US and he builds that large mansion on a hill his neighbors look up and say: “Some day I am going to be that guy.” However, when a man builds that house on the hill in Ireland, his neighbors point up and say: “Some day I am going to get that bastard.” This was around the time that U2 were recreating themselves in anticipation of the release of the The Joshua Tree. One supposes they hoped for mansions and accolades. The interview occurred several years after I first read The Great Gatsby as a Dublin teenager. Despite my infatuation with American literature at the time Gatsby struck me as a dud. It was not so-much that a self-made man was uninteresting to me rather I did not even recognize this sort of hero. Gatsby was Bono’s bastard on the hill.

My second reading of the novel was shortly after I got married in the late 1980s. Not only was The Great Gatsby a favorite novel of my wife’s but she grew up in Queens, NY where we were living at the time and she brought me out to see those Long Island mansions. Naturally, a smitten young man rereads in such circumstances. This second, fairly attentive reading, was more successful. The setting of the novel, and the way in which this geography reinforced the class distinctions among the characters impressed me (my wife and I were living closer to Fitzgerald’s Valley of Ashes — Flushing Meadows, Queens — than to East Egg). As a nature-oriented fellow I was also pleased to notice the scattered but quite crucial references to nature throughout the novel.

Grass, for instance, is developed as a minor character in the story (being mentioned in one way or anther over forty times in the novel). For example, we meet Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s lawn before we meet them. “The lawn”, Nick Carraway, our narrator, observed “started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sundials and brick walks and burning gardens…” Yes, the language is so pretty. Though the novel appealed to me on that reading, yet I still thought it more a gorgeous assemblage of themes yoking together a small set of yarns about inconsequential snobs, rather than a unified novel.

This Christmas break on the occasion of my younger son being compelled to read The Great Gatsby for school I took up the novel for a third time. It had been a quarter century since my last reading. That newly wed man of twenty-five years before may have been the more romantic but the middle-aged man I now am, is apparently more easily overwhelmed. It was as if I was reading another book, discovering in it depths I had gravely overlooked before. It may also have helped my recent reading of Gatsby that I have lived in the US for most of the intervening years. I share, at this point, an immigrant’s enthusiasm for the American project.

Gatsby is compelling not because he is a self-made man, a man about whom swirl rumor and innuendo, a man of gigantic wealth, a creator of fabulous entertainments, but rather he compels because of the sympathetic reasons that prompted his self-creation in the first place. You will recall that Gatsby intended with his riches to woo back Daisy Buchanan. Daisy (again with the lawn references!) is wed to the hulking and extravagantly well-positioned Tom Buchanan. How did we know that Tom is unworthy of her? Because he prattles on about a book called The Rise of the Colored Empires, claiming it to be “a fine book, and everyone ought to read it.” He goes on: “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be — will be utterly submerged.” In an early scene of New York revelry Tom smacks Myrtle (yes another plant) Wilson, his ill-fated girlfriend, and breaks her nose. It’s not the worst violence of the book, but is the most boorish. James Gatz, Gatsby’s birth name, had courted Daisy in Louisville before the Great War but being penniless was an unsuccessful suitor. It was in order to be worthy of her that Gatsby recreated himself, doing so, it is hinted, by indecorous means. And it looked as if for a moment he had succeeded — when Daisy and Gatsby convene with Nick Carraway’s assistance, Daisy wept “stormily” over Gatsby’s fantastic array of shirts saying “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such — such beautiful shirts before.”

Readers have puzzled over the years about how Daisy deserved such enduring devotion from Gatsby. It’s is clear though that in some ways Daisy had little to do with it. What seems important really was the metamorphosis that occurred in Gatsby’s soul when those five years earlier he decided to bestow his affections on Daisy on a moonlit night in Louisville. Fitzgerald describes the transfiguration of Gatsby in that earlier moment in ecstatic tones. Gatsby, he wrote “knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.” Gatsby thus become flesh, and it is the fate of all flesh to perish and die. Five years after the God-aspiring Gatsby became mortal — this being the action of the novel — Gatsby plans the almost god-like erasure of time. He and Daisy are to be restored to that glorious moment. Daisy was to nullify her four years with Tom. She was to declare that she never loved her husband. And though she does make that declaration, and perhaps even believed it for a moment, nevertheless daisies, though feral, belong on the lawn, and thus our Daisy returns to Tom and she betrays Gatsby. The sheer impossibility of Gatsby’s aspiration (and Nick tells him that it is impossible) had doomed Gatsby and he is violently killed.

***

Now as I was immersed in this third and most engaged reading of Gatsby I went to see Django Unchained as a Christmas evening entertainment. The story follows the fate of Django Freeman from slave to bounty hunter to rescuer of his wife Broomhilda from the plantation owner Calvin Candie. Django gratifying triumphs and the denouement is explosive. Unlike F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel which received mixed reviews at the time it was published, Quentin Tarantino’s movie has been almost universally hailed as a great work. It currently has an 88% favorable rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It is of course a controversial film. It is extremely violent, the N-word is deployed with what some regard as an unsavory frequency, and it has sparked debate on who gets the prerogative of making a movie on the topic of vengeance for the history of slavery. The specificity of the story, about slavery, race, vengeance may be of greatest importance, nevertheless, its themes are also universal and this is what I remark on here.

The claim that Django and Gatsby are parallel stories may still seem fanciful. Consider this though: Both Gatsby and Django had to recreate themselves to meet the challenges of their quests. Gatsby is mentored and transformed by the adventurer Dan Cody; Django by the dentist-cum-bounty hunter Dr King Schultz, who rescued him at the beginning of the film. Gatsby became fabulously wealthy mysteriously and almost overnight; Django acquired the expertise of a bounty hunter (including being the sharpest of shooters and possessing horse dressage skills) mysteriously and almost overnight. Gatsby wanted to rescue Daisy from the dastardly white supremacist Tom Buchanan; Django intended rescuing Broomhilda from the monstrous, and amplified racist, Calvin Candie. Gatsby’s legendary Saturday evening parties were merely a facade to get him close to the Buchanan’s East Egg mansion; Django’s ruse of being a Mandingo fighting expert gets him into Candyland, Candie’s plantation mansion. Nick Carraway, our first person narrator, facilitated the reunion of Gatsby and Daisy, Dr King Schultz facilitated the reunion of Django and Broomhilda. Gatsby wanted to go back in time to revisit his perfect moment; Django wants to go back in time to be reunited with his wife. Both works end in the destruction of a mansion. Django flourishingly rides away with Broomhilda from the demolished Candyland, and figuratively so does Carraway our narrator (in lieu of Gatsby). As Carraway describes it: “And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world.”

Images of nature play a similar role in both works, though I hold off an a fuller inspection for now. Let me merely note that there is a vegetational sequence in The Great Gatsby that starts in the west (whence came Gatsby and Carraway) that then runs from the trimmed to the unkempt grass lawns of Long Island and ends in a vision of the indigenous pre-settlement state. In Django Unchained it also starts in the ecosystems of the wilder west, to the violent and parkland pastoral of the south. More rugged nature still plays a role here: Schultz and Django pick off the KKK posse from their perch in the wilder vegetation above the scence; the runaway slave d’Artagnan hides up a tree before descending only to be torn apart by dogs.

There is besides a close matching of characters in both stories. Django/Gatsby, Broomhilda/Daisy (both meagerly developed as characters), Calvin Candie/Tom Buchanan, King Schultz/Dan Cody and Nick Carraway. Perhaps one can pair the incompetently hooded KKK with the Gatsby’s sodden revelers. The pairings are not perfect, of course. For instance, in the economy of Tarantino’s film-making Dr Schultz plays a dual role. And though there is no Stephen, Calvin Candie’s house slave, nevertheless Wilson, Myrtle’s husband, plays a role which though not precisely comparable, nonetheless, performs the similar task of triggering the endgame.

For all of this Daisy stays with Tom, whereas Broomhilda rides off with Django. Gatsby dies, Django lives. Since this is the most consequential difference between the two works, why this has to be so bears a little scrutiny. Here is my thumbnail sketch:

Gatsby in the process of materially transforming himself destroys himself — all those shirts are not just for show. Django, however, is magnified and empowered by his transformation (assuming, that is, one approves of the havoc he created). Gatsby chooses mortality, whereas Django is bestowed a god’s capacity for vengeance. Ultimately The Great Gatsby explores the nightmare lurking behind the American dream. Django Unchained starts with that nightmare and responds with a fantasy. Death stalks nightmares, fantasies spawn invulnerability.  Fitzgerald sets for himself the task of describing what happens when the goal is full restoration of time, pretending, in other words, that the past never even occurred. Tarantino’s task is the equally complex but seemingly more achievable one of responding when the past is unspeakable.

Both works deal, in a sense, with men — Gatsby, Buchanan and Candie — who builds mansions on the hill. In this sense Bono’s account of the American story might be right. But no one, apparently, likes that guy. Even in the American story we like get those basterds. The Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s Great American Novel, Django Unchained is Tarantino’s Great American Movie. Perhaps there is only one great American story. If this is so then it was inevitable that Tarantino rewrote The Great Gatsby.

 

Many thanks to Oisín and Fiacha Heneghan  and Vassia Pavlogianis for comments on earlier drafts - and even if they remain unconvinced, some of their insights have been incorporated into this version.  I found Adam Kotsko's review of Django Unchained interesting and helpful, especially his analysis of Django's automatic knowledge (see that here).

Follow me on Twitter @DublinSoil for 140 character updates on my columns.  Links to previous 3QD columns here.  

Secular Humanism 2.0

by Kevin S. Baldwin

I recently found myself in the unusual position of almost agreeing with Michele Bachmann. Wait: Before you stop reading this or welcome me to the fold, let me explain. I was reading a recent article in the Los Angeles Times about Bachmann's enthusiasm for the ideas of Presbyterian Pastor Francis Schaeffer and his disciple, Nancy Pearcey (The LA Times article was informed by a New Yorker piece ). Basically, they all believe that the secular humanistic values that developed during the Renaissance and Enlightenment were bad because they turned people away from the inerrant truth of the Bible. If only we could turn back the clock to the Middle Ages (cue Monty Python's "bring out your dead")!

"How could I agree with this?" you may ask. I didn't really, but it got me to thinking that maybe what's wrong with secular humanism is not secularism nor humanism, but that its humanism as practiced, is to the exclusion of other species and a disregard for the biogeochemical processes upon which we all depend. No, I am not suggesting eating crunchy granola, while holding hands, singing "Kumbayah," and celebrating Gaia. Looking backward to the Middle Ages or even to pagan times isn't the solution to what ails us: Looking forward to a more inclusive, humble, secular humanism may be.

To the extent that reductionistic science has allowed us to focus on components and variables that we can understand and manipulate to our benefit, and economics has allowed us to ignore the resulting negative externalities, we have dramatically improved some aspects of our lives at the cost of decreased biodiversity and altered biogeochemical processes. When the blind spots of science and economics have reinforced one another, the result has not always been good. When science and economics have hybridized in a complementary manner, the results have been more productive, e.g., environmental economics and biomimicry.

We are pretty successful at isolating individual variables, and manipulating them to see how they affect a simple system. We are not so great at understanding how multiple interacting variables can affect an outcome in a complex system (see Thalidomide). Another example of our shortcomings might be failing to predict rare but serious drug interactions. Yet another example is the story of the World Health Organization parachuting cats into Borneo to reestablish ecological order after DDT spraying led to a rat & caterpillar population explosions through a complex chain of events.

To avoid the kind of cultural solipsism that is so easy to slip into in the early 21st century, I keep the following quote from David Abram's (1996) "The  Spell of the Sensuous" (Vintage Books) close at hand: “Many indigenous peoples construe awareness, or ‘mind’, not as a power that resides inside their heads, but rather as a quality that they themselves are inside of along with the other animals and plants, the mountains and the clouds.” Can this broader conception of awareness be rehabilitated and updated for our own time? Can we make decisions while acknowledging we are embedded in a landscape of other creatures and entities?

Science and Economics (with its step-sister, Business) are two of the more prominent areas of inquiry that emerged from the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Many of the things that we consider to be progress over the last few centuries have happened as a result of their contributions. Unfortunately, many unintended consequences (e.g., overpopulation, overconsumption, pollution, peak oil, and global warming) have also resulted. These could be considered the bitter fruits of Secular Humanism 1.0.

Bringing the best science and business practices together could help us to continue to maximize progress while minimizing its consequences for future generations and other species: A kind of Secular Humanism 2.0. Entrepreneurial spirit tempered by an appreciation of the strengths and the weaknesses of both industrial capitalism and the scientific method, a more wholistic accounting that avoids externalities, and a system of ethics that extends to other species may serve future generations better than what we are currently doing. Innovators and decision-makers who take into account a triple bottom line of "Ecology Equity Economy" or "People Profit Planet" instead of strictly thinking in terms of shareholder value and quarterly earnings statements may give us a fighting chance against the challenges that lie ahead: Certainly better odds than a return to medieval theocracy.

The Humanists: Hsiao-hsien Hou's Café Lumière

by Colin Marshall

How often do we get two great cinematic tastes that, as they say, go great together? The Taiwanese director Hsiao-hsien Hou and the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu both, I would argue, display great taste, especially of the visual and rhythmic varietes. (Some insist Ozu had a tin ear, at least for music. Me, I could never strip his movies of those wobbly domestic strings.) But, separated by more than a generation, they never had a chance to collaborate. The next best opportunity came along in 2003, the 100th anniversary of Ozu's birth (and the 40th anniversary of his death). To mark the occasion, Hou made Café Lumière, his homage to the master of the small-scale, the unspoken, and the pillow shot.

Film scholars don't need to waste their time building arguments about whether Ozu's influence really drives the film; "For the centenary of Ozu's birth," a title card nakedly announces right up front. The Ozu diehard, naturally, will only need to have seen the Shochiku logo. Crafting this project under the auspices of the studio for which Ozu worked all his life signals a certain seriousness, especially for a foreign filmmaker in a land famously protective of its inner life. And when this picture reveals how it sees Tokyo — well, case closed.

As unappealingly obsessive as it might sound, Café Lumière never strays far from the mechanics of public transit. Its story opens with a shot of a passing urban train, and many more of them appear throughout. These trains appear not as a fixture of a wealthy megalopolis but as part of a living, breathing, startingly calm organism grown also out of laundry lines, endless layers of icons and text, and web upon web of power and telephone lines. I hadn't glimpsed this sort of Tokyo since Ozu last captured it in the early sixties, this unassuming Tokyo seen, if not always at ground level, at least never from a much higher viewpoint than the average commuter enjoys.

Legend has it that Ozu shot his "home dramas" (including but most certainly not limited to Late Spring, Tokyo Story, and, previously written up in this column, Equinox Flower) with the camera mounted at the height of someone seated on a tatami mat. It always seemed a little higher than that to me, but the humility of the aesthetic choice still came across. It suited the humility of the circumstances; the homes in which his dramas played out always housed the stripe of family that, while appearing outwardly "middle class" to modern audiences, clearly sufferent from the kind of poverty — perhaps "lack" gets closer — that touched everyone in a Japan still so fresh from the Second World War.

Hou's characters live in the Japan of today, more or less, and hence don't writhe in the bondage of family ties with quite the same resigned anguish. Yoko, a young writer researching the life and work of Taiwanese composer Jiang Wen-ye, freely hops between her homeland and his. Hajime, a bookseller and artist who spends his free time recording the sounds of the railway onto Minidiscs, doesn't seem to have any family at all. Yoko, taking a stretch away from her boyfriend in Taiwan, returns to Tokyo to break to her parents the news of her pregnancy. They take it better than they take the news that Yoko has no desire whatsoever to marry the father — the non-Japanese father, mind you! — whom she considers a layabout.

In an actual Ozu picture, this would have turned into a matter of life and death, or at least the family would have treated it like one. Hou makes confusion the presiding emotion: it turns Yoko slightly wayward, it oscillates her mother between acting composed and comically flustered, and it drives her father to stare wordlessly out windows for nearly all his screen time. Too occupied with learning more about Wenye and his music to let the trouble at home affect her dramatically, Yoko tries to retrace the composer's long-ago travels in Tokyo while he falls nearer and nearer into Hajime's orbit — an orbit he inevitably makes, I suppose, what with all those train rides.

Both Yoko and Hajime live, relatively untethered, in their own worlds. Unsurprising that Yoko feels no urge to marry; how could her existence, strung from bookstore to coffee shop to the remnants of an avant-garde pianist's past, accommodate it? By the same token, Hajime can't say what he starts to feel for Yoko — assuming he does feel it. He maps out his reality explicitly in a piece of digital art he pulls up on his laptop: himself, as a microphone-wielding fetus, enclosed in a womb made of trains. You could say these two — Hou's characters, but very much modern Ozu characters as well — struggle under an excess of isolation where their cinematic predecessors struggled under an excess of connection, but perhaps too simplistically.

The lack remains, if not as precisely identifiable a lack as in Ozu. Where the older, Japanese filmmaker illustrated the dissolution of his people's families, the younger, Taiwanese filmmaker illustrates the results of that dissolution. This more complicated situation all but demands the hybrid sort of vision you get from crossing Ozu's with Hou's. Café Lumière thus unrolls with the former's stillness, human proportion, and habitation of the architectural, — looking from one door of a home through another into another — but also the latter's spontaneousness and aesthetic drift toward what's (often inexplicably) compelling. Ozu's pillow shots — character-free images of the natural and build environment included not to serve the film's story but its rhythm — like his people, stood mostly still. Hou's pillow shots, like his people, move, often with unclear motivation, but always toward what feels interesting.

I ultimately write about every filmmaker I write about because of the way they see and hear — the way they spin their sense perceptions into cinema. Many film writers have written many variations on the notion that Ozu saw, heard, and felt in ways terribly close to the core sensibilities of mid-20th-century Japan. Somewhat fewer have argued, no less forcefully, that Hou, who roots the bulk of his work in Taiwanese history and Taiwanese themes, perceives something equally essential about his own country in the late 20th century and early 21st. Grand and a little too neatly paradoxical though this may sound, Café Lumière makes you ask the question: could an equally Ozuesque view of a Japan 40 years after him have not just benefited from but required the eyes and ears of a director only influenced by Ozu's culture but just as steeped in another, only influenced by Ozu's aesthetic temperament but just as confident in his own?

All feedback welcome at colinjmarshall at gmail.

Sympathy for Monsters: Reflecting on the Film 'Let Me In'

by Tauriq Moosa

In his treatise, On the Sublime and Beautiful, Edmund Burke wrote: “No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” The extent to which this is true is beyond our concern, but there is little doubt fear often puts rationality in a cage, chains the door and kicks it into a silent corner. It is this reaction that great horror writers, from Edgar Allan Poe to Clive Barker and Stephen King to John Ajvide Lindqvist, have sought in their works. It is not the alien beings or giant monsters which terrify us as readers, but often human characters portrayed in vulnerable positions fighting to escape the horror of their sudden environment.

Consider a world populated by giant monsters. Giant monsters who hunted other giant beasts, as non-human animals do here ‘in the wild’. A book that described this might be interesting, but hardly terrifying if it made no reference of threats to humans or creatures with vague properties of personhood (emotions, consciousness, etc.). It would be about as terrifying as a nature documentary on whale sharks. And think of the corollary: a house. Houses on their own hardly seem interesting places, but in the right kind of light, penned by a master story-teller, they can become the most terrifying of places.

It is thus the relation to humans or beings with personhood that matter. The wonderful movie ‘Wall-E’ has a robot title-character who displays emotions, actions, self-consciousness (i.e. properties of personhood). We identify with Wall-E because of these properties, showing that we care for persons not necessarily or only for humans. That is why any robot or alien – or even toys – have to display personhood for us to care: they need not even be shaped like humans for us to care about them. As long as they display engagement with their environment, there is reason for us to care about their well-being (since they display a care for their individual well-being and others’).

This why the movie ‘Let Me In’ has come to replace ‘Inception’ as my second favourite movie of the decade (my list will be at the end for those who care).

Overview of ‘Let Me In’

‘Let Me In’ is an American version of the Swedish film ‘Let the Right One In’, itself based on the Swedish novel of the same name by John Lindqvist (if you’re interested in how to pronounce his name, see here).

The story relates the relationship of Owen, a bullied loner, and Abby, a centuries’ old vampire in the body of a bare-foot twelve-year old. In the beginning, we are introduced to Abby and her ‘father’ when they move in to the same dilapidated, dirty apartment building as Owen. Owen spends his time outside, in the dark and snow, contemplating murder of his bullies and other normal, preteen boys’ thoughts while singing a ditty in his girlish voice. One night Abby introduces herself by announcing they can never be friends. Of course, this changes rapidly due to their contrast and similarities. Like pieces of broken mirror, they fit together uneasily but when together reflect their world to greater degrees.

My description does little justice to the beauty of the film. The visuals alone are striking: the harsh contrast of snow at night; the violence and brutality emerging from the body of an innocent-looking girl; the notable femininity of Owen and the strength and silence and watchfulness of Abby; Owen’s mother whose face you never see and might as well be absent in terms of parental duties, serving only to irritate Owen and be a bedrock of confusion and isolation. The acting is remarkable but the ability to pull through stretches of silence without losing the audience’s interest more so.

However, reflecting on this, one is drawn to a number of incredible conclusions. There is nothing simple or easily outlined: Abby is not clearly evil, Owen is not a strong character but retains your empathy, the bullies are awful but not clearly bad people. The only contrast is the visuals and in-between this is a thousand shades of grey called character profiles.

Monster and Man

I’ve said Abby isn’t clearly evil. She is a vampire and vampires traditionally are evil. However, what makes this classification difficult is the clear similarities to humans. Movies that transform the vampires into clearly horrific creatures miss out on doing something more terrifying, which movies like ‘Let Me In’ and ‘Interview with a Vampire’ pulled off: creating vampires with, whom you sympathise, battling humans, with whom you do not.

George Romero has done this successfully by creating the zombie genre, but displaying the awful things humans – live, not undead ones – are prepared to do in order to survive. Betrayal, murder, revenge all arise despite the need everyone has to survive.

But this is apparent even when not fighting for survival. In one of Romero’s later movies, ‘Land of the Dead’, we see a community of zombies shuffling, not harming anyone. They have learnt to interact, hold hands, put gas pumps into cars. The audience is led to believe these disgusting creatures are gaining some form of intelligence; they are also not harming anyone since humans are sealed off in a protected city (consider our planet of giant monsters above where similarly there was no threat to humans). Suddenly, with hooting and tooting and typical macho bravado, cars with gun-toting marines drive through the streets shooting the zombies. Limbs fly as the hapless creatures struggle to turn or even run – since they are too slow. The audience feels revulsion at the senseless violence: after all, these are human-like creatures – ugly yes but not harming anyone – and showing something akin to intelligence, too slow to react in ways to protect themselves. And here they are outmanned, outgunned and ‘out-vehicled’ by macho marines clearly enjoying pumping bullets into these miserable creatures.

Sympathy for monsters is a difficult move to pull off but Romero and other good writers/directors can. This occurs in ‘Let Me In’. We are supposed to feel sympathy for Abby, despite her monstrous nature. She clearly cares for Owen, who has no one else. Abby, too, clearly has the ability to care as displayed by her affections to her ‘father’ – who is actually her familiar.

But there is a further move. In ‘Let Me In’ we have moved beyond simply dubbing monsters as ‘not entirely bad’ and human people as quite evil, with Romero, Stephen King and others blurring the line between monster and man. ‘Let Me In’ uses this blurred line as the baseline. Then it leaps over it into murkier waters. The rest is not clearly explained by the movie, but is an argument for why Abby is in fact a greater monster than most vampires, even in B-Grade movies.

Why Abby is Evil

When we first meet Abby, she is with an older man. We are meant to assume this man is her father. As we come to know what she is, we realise it’s impossible, since Abby is probably a few hundred years old and this man is not immortal. He is therefore her familiar; which according to some vampire traditions is a human tied to the vampire; a human who obtains blood and other necessities for the vampire, in exchange for some kind of reward. Often the reward is illusory, such as an unsurpassed affection and love from the vampire.

Again this touches on human vulnerability: being in love. What stupid things do people do ‘in the name of love’? There is a reason why many think murders committed as ‘crimes of passion’ should not be ranked as equal to those of, say, a serial killer (not because of number but of kind). Passion dulls the mind, in an attempt to fulfil itself. Everything else is simply an obstacle in the way of obtaining that which is strongly desired. Thus, it’s not unheard of for apparently normal people to do uncharacteristic things to obtain the affections of someone he or she desires. The vampire tradition simply plays on this.

True, sometimes the reward is of a supernatural kind: sometimes the familiar is himself granted immortality, great strength, etc. But that ruins the obvious vulnerability the vampire-familiar pact is playing on. The vein is already open and being sucked dry; there’s no need to add magic to this already powerful idea. In ‘Let Me In’, it’s not obvious that Abby’s familiar has any kind of power; he carries out his murders in a sluggish, slightly reluctant fashion. It’s not often we see Abby convey affection toward the older man. When she does, he is overcome by her touch and her approval. Again, this is no different than any other abusive relationship, where we see signs of Stockholm syndrome: the beaten woman who claims she loves her fist of a husband but remains.

What we notice about Abby's familiar is his age. If he is mortal, he is at an age where performing feats to feed Abby is becoming more burdensome. Sneaking and murdering is not for the old or unfit, which this man clearly is. His failure is apparent when Owen often hears screaming from Abby’s apartment.

When the audience first hears these shouts, screams and heavy thumps, we are – along with Owen – supposed to assume it is the older man, Abby’s ‘father’, yelling because of the deep-sounding voice. However, in a brilliantly filmed shot, we see Abby’s ‘father’/familiar slouched uncomfortably in a corner, covering his head and being yelled at. That deep-sounding voice, that heavy thumping – we are witness to Abby’s demonic side.

Again, this is no different to people revealing abusive, horrible sides. The tradition of possession by demons, the reason it is still often believed, is because of the remarkable change in someone’s character. It is almost as if something external has ‘possessed’ this person. We even talk about love and hatred as something external: I was in love, hatred was in my veins, etc. We don’t like to acknowledge that extremities bring focus to the million shades of grey that mark our personality; after all, to make grey you need black and white.

Anyway, the point this raises is that the familiar has been failing at pleasing Abby. His age, his reluctance, and his regular failure – evidenced by the constant yelling by the demonic child – tell us his usefulness is coming to an end. Seen in this light, with this realisation, suddenly Owen’s role is not as simple as it first appears. Owen may at first be a loner who is ‘saved’ by Abby; Abby may appear as fortuitous in Owen’s life but with the degradation of her current familiar’s usefulness, is it any wonder Abby does everything she can to save Owen despite the obvious ramification of being discovered?

Abby is evil precisely because the whole premise is not about friendship but usefulness. Abby used friendship to obtain him since she recognised that she could get another human to love her, given that he is the right age and would therefore be with her as long as he would be alive.

Indeed, we see the advantage of Abby being in the body of a young girl. Being young, she appears more innocent but, furthermore, she can acquire a familiar her own age and use him longer. True, if she was, say, in her thirties, she could just acquire a young familiar and call him her son; but it would probably be more difficult. It is easier in movement, in obtaining a familiar, to be a young girl.

Abby is evil in that even before Owen has a chance to be a free adult, he is already in her clutches. Considering he would be looking after her, he could never have a life which was not completely devoted to her: her security, her safety, her feeding. And if he fails, he will be punished. She has all the worst aspects of a pet and a monster and all the manipulation of a lover. A worst combination of monster – well, it’s hard to consider anything much worse, though there are a few.

Again, a Contrast  

Yet, this is not remarkable. There are couples who exist exactly like this: bound by marriage, children, familiarity; perhaps they are bound by a dream, gagged by a lie and have tied themselves to a train-track called a relationship. Wherever their heads are placed, there is nothing so far removed from the supernatural relationship displayed by the evil Abby and her victim/familiar Owen.

To think this relationship is something special, only akin to vampires, would be to miss out on the contrast to, again, human relationships.

The most terrifying thing we experience is not the monster’s roar, the slithering tentacle. It’s not the sudden bang or the swinging lights. What keeps our blood pumping, what turns our hands into white knuckled fists, is the realisation that the things we call monstrous are found in our lives, amongst each other; horror is the light behind us putting shadows on the cave wall. At first, we call the shadows evil until we turn to see the light is merely reflecting our shapes and forms. This is what good horror does. This is indeed what ‘Let Me In’ performs beautifully.

There is nothing so monstrous as a man who thinks himself incapable of being a monster. Recognising this, it’s hard to say what is truly otherworldly about ‘Let Me In’. And that is what makes this movie so terrifying.

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favourite contemporary movies

1. The Dark Knight

2. Let Me In

3. Inception

4. Life is Beautiful

5. Up

Deep Vanilla

by Jenny White

Gus Rancatori is a Renaissance man who owns an ice cream parlor. Cambridge-based Toscanini’s is a hangout where you’re as likely to run into a Nobel Laureate in chemistry and a molecular foodie as a furniture maker or novelist. One day I met a dapper man with gray hair who had been a physicist at MIT and gave it all up to start a business making high-end marshmallows. Tosci’s staff is memorably pierced and talented. One of the managers, Adam Tessier, is a published poet and essayist who last year filmed a customer a day reading a Shakespeare sonnet. Some scoopers are music majors, hard-core rockers who play for bands with names like Toxic Narcotic. You might receive your khulfee cone from the hands of the next big pop star. Gus Rancatori circulates through the wood-paneled room beneath displays of art, the host at a rotating feast of words, ideas and, above all, ice cream. Gus is discreet, but has some favorite customer stories.

A very famous MIT type used to attempt to pay with his own hand-drawn funny money and then he would launch into a lecture about the symbolic value of money, which I tried to squelch by claiming to remember that class from Freshman Economics.  If you asked to help him, he would say, "I'm beyond help."  When another MIT student found out that I didn't have a computer he offered to give me one, so strong were his evangelic instincts and also, like many of the customers, he was exceptionally generous.

With one hand Gus makes what The New York Times has called "the best ice cream in the world”; the other takes the cultural pulse of the city.

 He has published a mini-memoir, Ice Cream Man, and writes a column for The Atlantic  -- close observations on what we can know about society through ice cream.

Customers! They're so nice. They're so weird. Some of them are so naked. We get a big cross section.  We're near MIT but we're also in Central Square near a housing project. We get people who don't speak English because they're incredibly smart and have come to MIT and we get people who don't speak English because they just snuck into this country. We get people from nominally Spanish-speaking countries who don't speak Spanish. I like to hire people who can speak other languages. It can help in the store. 

We often discuss the customers after a long night and I think most of us would agree that some of the most difficult customers are suburbanites who come into town on weekends or during the summer and are a little lost.  Maybe I'm seeing anxious tourist behavior, but it often seems that adults from the suburbs like to play a little stupid when they're out of their element, "Look at this, honey, they have Saffron ice cream!"  Any customer is capable of asking a question that is not really what they want to ask. "What's in the Goat Cheese Brownie?" really means, "Can I taste the Goat Cheese Brownie?"  A customer once pointed at the chocolate ice cream and asked if it was vanilla.  My playful brother, Joe, said, "Yes.  It is."  The customer thought for a minute and said, "I thought vanilla was white."  My brother feigned surprise and slapped his forehead, "My God. You're right.  That is chocolate."  When customers arrive while we're mopping the floor and all the chairs atop tables, they ask "Are you closed?"  Obviously we're closed, but they want to ask, "Can we still get something?" and if it is at all possible we try to serve them something, but something to go, so we can finish cleaning and go home ourselves. 

Time takes on a cultural dimension in the shop, as people develop a circadian rhythm in which the cosmos aligns with their stomach: I can do this important thing here and only here, now and only now, and I need French Toast to do it.

Some customers are like Japanese trains.  Every morning at 8:45 AM they get a double espresso or every night they come to study and begin with a White Peony tea.  One customer only drank nocciola frappes and when he died suddenly his friends at MIT all came to the store after a memorial service and drank nocciola frappes.  An accountant often arrives just before we stop serving weekend brunch and is upset when we are out of breakfast items. "This is very important to my week.  Why do you always run out of French Toast?" Another was indignant when we asked people to leave after our 11 PM closing. We need to get home, catch a bus or subway, or simply lock the doors to keep any night goblins outside. Many people do not like our policy prohibiting the use of computers for a few hours every week.  People think we are intentionally serving unusual flavors they like when they're not in the store; we make Cocoa Rum Chip every other week, but they only come occasionally.  We try to set aside special flavors for special people, but customers also have "commitment issues" about ice cream flavors.

For the IgNobel Awards, an internationally broadcast spoof of the Nobel Prizes held at Harvard University, Gus developed a new ice cream flavor as homage to the discovery by 2007 IgNobel Chemistry Prize winner, Mayu Yamamoto, that you can extract vanillin from cow dung. (Gus admitted that his recipe for Yum-a-Moto Vanilla Twist did not include poop.)  When I pointed out to Gus that he treats ice cream the way a novelist regards a blank page, he responded,

The idea of ice cream as a blank page might be very appropriate.  I think about many things but it is easy for any idea to slip across the surface of my mind and end up as an ice cream flavor.  Flavors come about from mistakes and misunderstandings.  Ginger Snap Molasses was the result of wordplay.  Steve's Ice Cream made Ginger Molasses and I wanted to get the cookie, the word "snap" and the idea of that snap into the flavor or at least flavor name.  Black Bottom Pie came about while reading a cookbook one morning when I should have been getting to work. Jeremiah Tower, the first chef at Chez Panisse, described a favorite dessert from Alabama and I realized I had all the ingredients but should probably invert everything.  So instead of making a chocolate rum pie with a ginger snap crust, I made a Chocolate Rum ice cream containing pieces of ginger snap cookies.  I have a lot of curiosity and even a food as simple as ice cream can provide a large playing field.

Running rough-and-tumble on the playing field of food, fun, and social analysis, Gus, together with the  anthropologist Merry “Corky” White, puts on a semi-underground annual food film festival that in its execution itself becomes a piece of performance art. Graduate students from Harvard and MIT volunteer their technical and lugging skills. The festival uses scavenged equipment and university rooms opportunistically acquired for that evening’s showing. Sometimes the films are shown in a room repurposed from a small swimming pool, chairs set inside the tiled chin-height walls. While watching the movie, you imagine Harvard men in knee-length bathing suits taking bracing morning constitutionals.

The films are usually accompanied by a speaker reflecting its theme, and Corky, an accomplished cook, makes film-appropriate food. After “Ratatouille”, the animated movie about a rat assisting a young Parisian from beneath his chef’s hat, the food critic Corby Kummer regaled the audience with stories from the field, but what the audience saw was the snooty food critic in the film, to whom Kummer bore a remarkable resemblance. Then Corky served up samples of ratatouille. When Gus and Corky realized the series was attracting a covey of attendees who skipped the movie and came just for the food, the series went even further underground in a game of cat and mouse (or rat) with the film grazers.

Food and drama embrace on screen and off. “The Kings of Pastry” is a documentary that follows three pastry chefs in the grueling competition for France’s most prestigious pastry title. Some of the men broke down under the pressure, their enormous sugar confections toppled, lifelong dreams ground to sugar dust. The audience in the borrowed Harvard room was tense; in the film, the judges were about to announce the winners. Just then there was a commotion at the door; members of the student shooting club claimed to have booked the room and demanded that we surrender it immediately. But we all remained in our seats, eyes glued to the drama on the screen, our noses twitching at the platter of Corky's cream puffs waiting on the table.

What is the secret of this enthusiasm for food -- not just for nurturance, but as a philosophical platform and for “deep play”?

The mysteries of ice cream?  Moving past the maternal link I think the fundamental appeal of ice cream is juvenile.  It is a food you get to play with and is actually improved by that combined stirring-melting spoon business.  As you soften the ice cream it warms.  Cold numbs taste buds so warming up the ice cream actually does make it taste better.  It is the little boy's equivalent of letting wine breathe. 

Playing with your food can be hedonistic and it can be dramatic, fusing our passions in one grand gesture of denial. You cannot have my Dulche de Leche. You may not pass. One customer was mugged when he refused to surrender a pint of ice cream to teenage thieves. And on another occasion the police caught a fleeing thief after first bringing him to heel with a well-aimed Toscanini frappe.

(Photo credit: Merry White)

The Owls | Filmchat on the Oscars

Ben Walters (BW) and J. M. Tyree (JMT) write about movies. Together, they wrote a critical appreciation of The Big Lebowski for The British Film Institute’s Film Classics series, and they also have co-written reviews of No Country for Old Men and Burn After Reading for Sight & Sound. They discussed this year’s crop of Oscar-nominated films on a transatlantic chat between Rotterdam and Lake Erie, and they agreed on a film to recommend: Exit Through the Gift Shop. Also discussed: Inception, Winter’s Bone, The Fighter, Somewhere, The King’s Speech, Shutter Island, True Grit, Catfish, and The Social Network.

JMT: Have you noticed how many of this year’s Oscar-nominated films are about family businesses of one kind or another?
10:08 AM It’s odd…
10:09 AM From Inception and Winter’s Bone to Black Swan, The Fighter, and The King’s Speech. “We’re not a family, we’re a firm,” Colin Firth says in The King’s Speech. And several of these films feature rotten families trying to push the kids into their firms…
10:10 AM BW: interesting. true grit and the kids are all right are about a determination toward family loyalty too
but the business side is something else, i guess
10:11 AM JMT: Yeah, on the other end of the spectrum, True Grit, like The Social Network, deliberately presents a total absence of family life. In another sense maybe True Grit presents a business venture that winds up becoming a sort of ad hoc American family. In The Social Network the business relationship is really more of a romance.
10:13 AM But for me it’s still the year of The Bad Family.

10:14 AM BW: yes, none of them is a family you’d opt into, really. yet there’s not much sense of really wanting out, is there? except the abdicaton of guy pearce in the king’s speech, i suppose! mattie in true grit is motivated by family obligation and the winklevii in the social network are close as close can be. even 127 hours, ostensibly as atomised an experience as you’ll find, gets its happy ending because of feelings of fealty to parents and a child-to-be
10:22 AM JMT: The King’s Speech and The Fighter are a match in another way. Both films are about overcoming your horrible family, but then entering the family firm anyway, only, this time on your own terms. There’s a distant echo of this in Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere, also, if one takes it as a reflection of what it’s like to grow up in a movie celebrity family and having a bottle of wine named after you and stuff like that. It’s like, with these films this year, whether your family runs a meth lab in rural Missouri or a would-be ballet dynasty, this line of work is pretty much the only option for your future. Films for terrible economic times in which no other work is available? Now I’m stretching this idea way too far…
BW: i don’t know, the economic necessity angle might be a stretch but certainly there’s plenty of overlap
10:26 AM there wasn’t much about either family or business last year – up in the air is business-based, i guess, and precious and an education are family-rejection stories
10:28 AM JMT: I think of last year’s Oscar films being more social and political – The Hurt Locker, Up in the Air, The Cove.
BW: right. it’s mostly war – avatar, hurt locker, basterds
so maybe you are onto something – money and blood?
10:29 AM JMT: So on Inception, I must say that repeated viewing has softened me up a little. I think I wanted the film to be something it wasn’t trying to be. Also, Shutter Island (which few are talking about) is basically a case of inception that doesn’t “take,” right?
10:30 AM BW: yeah, totally – except he’s both parts, inceptor and inceptee
trying to invade his own mind
JMT: 
10:32 AM The film directing feat of Inception got snubbed, whether you’re fond of it or not.
10:33 AM Are any of these films dear to you?
10:35 AM BW: interesting way to put it… not many, i have to say. true grit. this might be a sentimental response on my part to a sentimental(ish) film by filmmakers i love… don’t think there are any others that i’m rooting for, exactly
10:36 AM i was a bit sorry not to see tron nominated for visual effects. i dug those, even if the script was duff
JMT: Tron! – Or, It Had to Be Done. Should have been a musical. Is True Grit the most warmhearted of the Coen films to date? Certainly it puts paid to the idea – which we always thought was a canard – that they are supposedly these terribly chilly filmmakers who hold their characters at arm’s length.
10:38 AM BW: i think it’s probably the warmest throughout. it has a kind of gentlemanly quality that means even the scummiest characters afford and are afforded a measure of civility
10:41 AM JMT: It’s a lark, really, hokum from start to finish, and I don’t mean that in a bad sense at all – in the same way the Charles Portis novel is hokum. Plenty of bad stuff happens. But this is a world ultimately free from true harm for Mattie somehow. It’s a teen adventure story. These are deliberately “minor” works, “late” in the sense that they come after the end of a tradition and joke around with it…I think of True Grit as something like an anti-Twilight…?
10:44 AM BW: hmm… there might be something to that. i’m not sure about a world free from harm – all those hangings? – and the sense of invulnerability is arguably challenged at the climax… i wonder if it’s more the sense that they’re all engaged in a cooperative endeavour – the taming of the west – the american experiment – so there need to be some limits. whereas in most every other coen film it’s every doofus for himself…
10:49 AM JMT: You’re right – not harm-free but yet Tom Sawyerish somehow in the sense that things will come out all right? Do we really fear that Mattie will die of snake-bite? I don’t think so. I really like Matt Damon’s comic performance and enjoy the idea of this ensemble as a co-operative of oddballs floating around in a national cultural of individualistic entrepreneurship expanding ever Westward.
10:51 AM When you interviewed the Coens for Time Out London, they talked about that whole aspect of wanting the American landscape to shape their stories and their characters. It’s something they’ve explored a lot…
10:53 AM BW: yes – i suppose in a sense you could see it as the overarching tragedy of the coenverse – what do people do with this spirit of gainful entrepreneurship once there are only individualistic goals left in this land?
10:54 AM you could imagine them making a nice movie about the run-up to the declaration of independence… all downhill from there…!
JMT: A biopic of Ben Franklin, maybe! They’d probably love claiming they were working on that…
11:02 AM American entrepreneurship is something that the Coens and also Fincher get really skeptical about. I suppose that one of the things I resist in many of these other Oscary-type films is the “uplifting” sense that you have to find your own way through your family issues to successful entrepreneurship and celebrity, especially in The King’s Speech and The Fighter. By contrast, The Social Network is very negative on the consequences of that. And, as an anti-celebrity movie, Somewhere fits in with Black Swan, Exit Through the Gift Shop, and Catfish.
11:07 AM BW: interesting… a collective riposte to the idea of individual fame and credit? in general, i wonder if aronofsky is fincher’s evil double. they both seem interested in the crisis of individual identity in late-capitalist society but fincher is willing to grant the unfathomable despair that comes with that whereas aronofsky tries to finesse it away with glib expressionism and cornball salvation
overstated, perhaps…!
11:10 AM JMT: Well, about Black Swan, the entertainment quotient of the basic idea – of a ballet slasher film – has charm, no? It’s odd how that film is marketed as a “psycho-sexual thriller.” And then these articles appear saying, “Black Swan, that’s really how it really is in the ballet world!” What, when little tufts of down feathers start popping out of your skin? I enjoyed the film as camp – Drag Me to Hell is the only analogue I can summon off the top of the deck. Halloween candy, kinda scary, mostly goofy, with wicked performances. I picture a lot of late night screenings of both films a decade from now, if people are still going out of their homes to see the pictures by then. Or, no, Black Swan is actually a lot more like Fight Club with female characters, isn’t it?
11:11 AM BW: i caught a bit of requiem for a dream on tv last night, which was pretty hilarious. he’s pretty good at camp so i’m all for him embracing it
11:13 AM JMT: All right, I have to ask. What about The King’s Speech? Historically it’s notable because of its connection to the UK Film Council, which was abolished last year by the new Tory – sorry, “coalition” – government. I didn’t think you’d like the film, for some of the same reasons you thought unkindly of A Single Man.
11:14 AM BW: actually i did enjoy it
11:16 AM i though it was good, honest storytelling – a sympathetic character overcoming an obstacle for an aim you could get behind. it’s social and political hogwash, but i didn’t find it aesthetically dishonest or kitschy in the way a single man was. for what it’s worth, i thought firth himself was very good in that too. it’s an actor’s film and i thought it was well cast and well performed…
11:22 AM JMT: Showing the pull of actors at the Oscars, for sure. For me, The King’s Speech is one of those films that I start to doubt from the moment I leave my seat – the mold sets in pretty quickly. And once you start to doubt it there’s no way back in. It’s one of those Tolstoy’s “What is Art?” productions where all the ducks are in a row and immense creative efforts have been poured in, but…you know…
11:23 AM BW: yeah, i certainly don’t make any great claims for it. enjoyable rather than good, perhaps…
11:26 AM JMT: I won’t pretend I didn’t laugh heartily at the swearing scene! Do you have a darling or favorite in this batch of Oscar-nominated films, any stuff that really gets to you?
11:28 AM For me it was The Social Network and Banksy’s film.
BW: i was just about to mention Banksy
11:29 AM it was about the only title that genuinely veered off in peculiar directions and kept you guessing

11:33 AM JMT: Exit Through the Gift Shop treads on this idea of being a celebrity, a theme that also pops up in Black Swan, The Fighter, The King’s Speech, Somewhere, Catfish, and The Social Network. Banksy advocates a certain kind of facelessness and amateurism, in the best sense of the term, as opposed to entrepreneurial life. Or am I being taken in by Banksy too much? He’s both a celebrity and an entrepreneur of sorts. Yet he’s attuned to this paradox and he’s advocating something specific in the film…

11:37 AM BW: well, there’s an intractable problem, which isn’t his fault, in that to enjoy any artistic success today you need to have a personal brand – you simply can’t be anonymous, so if your work reaches a level of recognition there’s no way not to be either a celebrity or a conspicuously anti-celebrity public figure of some kind. that said, he’s an entrepreneur as well, which i guess does complicate it
11:40 AM JMT: Everyone says, “We don’t know who this Banksy person is!” And this is supposed to be such a big deal, right? But in another sense this isn’t really true. His film does a nice job of showing us who he is and what he’s about. It’s simply that we don’t know what his face looks like. In The Social Network, Sean Parker suggests cutting the word “The” from “The Facebook.” Banksy raises the stakes and cuts out the “Face.”

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Read more BW/JMT filmchats archived at The Owls site here >>

Nostalgia

Nostalgia, according to Webster's New World Dictionary¹, is “a longing for something far away or long ago”. We all feel it, and it seems to play a larger role in our lives the older we get. Which makes perfect logical sense because the older we get the more we think about the “good old days”. Eventually there comes a point where there are more days in the past than in the future.²

I recently went with my wife and our two children to her high school reunion down in Centreville, Maryland. She graduated from Gunston Day School, class of 1985. I never had an experience like that when I was in high school (or college for that matter). Since Gunston at the time was a boarding school, my wife lived there during the school year and obviously went back home to New Jersey when summer came around. I never left home. I took the bus to high school, and I commuted to college. When we arrived at that reunion, I could feel that nostalgia even though I never went there. I could tell my wife had this sense of such joy from remembering all her best friends from high school. That was accompanied by a feeling that you can never get back to those days, the sadness, the brink of tears.

It's that mix that describes nostalgia for me.

It is interesting, when you happen to look at a picture of yourself or a family member from years ago. You get that feeling there is this almost dreamlike sense that you or he/she were somehow a different person back then.

I can remember reading a few articles about cell replacement of the human body. The rate of cell replacement varies but one thing is certain, cells are constantly dying and being replaced.³

This could explain why we often feel that the picture of you from 10 years ago definitely looks slightly different but often gets us to think, “Wow, I can't believe what I was thinking back then”.

In purely scientific terms, we were a different person back then.

This is especially true when I see pictures of my father. To be honest, I would have to see a picture of him prior to August 27, 1994 which is when he had a terrible accident while working on a roof of a house. My father slipped off of a ladder and fell about twenty feet and landed on his head that day. He suffered a traumatic brain injury, was in a coma for about three weeks, and had to undergo extensive rehabilitation to be able to walk and talk and perform basic functions. He eventually was able to come home, fittingly, just in time for the holidays.

Looking at my father today, an outsider would never imagine anything was wrong or that he is different than the way he was 16 years ago. One thing that has never changed, however, is my father's obsession with classic movies, television shows, and music. Actually, I would argue that he is more obsessed with those things now than he ever was. Could it be because he is getting older or because he remembers a time prior to him getting hurt? Either way, he is searching for the “good old days”.

It makes me think about the movies that I loved growing up and how I can't turn away when they're on the television. Back to the Future comes to mind as one of the all-time greatest movies for me⁴. Not only does it bring back my childhood memories from the 80s, it also manages to weave in that 1950s era magic.

As I'm writing this it is early December and Christmas is approaching⁵. Nostalgia will help Coca-Cola to sell more of their beverage products through the use of an old-time Santa caricature on their bottles. Other companies, such as Maxwell House, will also try to sell their products by pushing the allure of the “good old days” and playing on our memories of childhood.⁶ These companies will no doubt be showcasing their products during commercials played in between and during our favorite christmas movies. Christmas is full of nostalgia. Who can forget being a kid waiting for Santa to show up and bring you your presents? Nostalgia is tradition. I hope that when reading this you get a sense of how important it is to provide good memories for our children, grand children, nieces and nephews. No matter how bad people may have had it growing up, they only seem to remember the good parts. Selective memory seems to be a predominant characteristic of those who live in and love the past.

It's for this reason that for every bad part of life, we need to provide or create a positive one. In time, these positive ones will weigh more.

Speaking of time, and movies, makes me think about Doc Brown's Delorian time machine⁷. I wish I had one. If I couldn't change the course of our lives, at least I would like to provide my father with some more great memories. At least then he could wax nostalgic with a bigger smile on his face.

Merry Christmas everyone.

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1The Fourth Edition, 2003

2I am not taking “life after death” into consideration. I also understand that number of future days is impossible to calculate.

3If the reader is interested, just google: “cell replacement in the human body” or some variation thereof

4I would argue that it is the greatest trilogy ever made. Please no hate mail from Star Wars fans.

5I understand there are other holidays out there. My family and I celebrate Christmas.

6If you really want to watch the “Peter” ad campaign I'm sure you can find it on youtube

7I apologize if you haven't watched Back to the Future and have no idea what I'm talking about. Wait I take that back. Go watch it now.



The Owls | Gekko-Sploitation, Wall Street 2, and Late Boomer Guilt

Ben Walters and J. M. Tyree chat about film for The Owls site. Together, they wrote the BFI Film Classics book about The Big Lebowski for The British Film Institute, and they’ve co-written reviews of No Country for Old Men and Burn After Reading for Sight & Sound. This month, they discussed Oliver Stone’s Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps, the sequel to Wall Street and Stone’s take on the financial sector meltdown in the United States in 2008.

JMT: Where did you see Wall Street 2? Did the audience seem to enjoy it?
2:26 PM BW: well, i saw it at a press screening so it’s hard to tell. critics don’t make for very expressive audiences
JMT: How does the film look from the UK, the austerity land of Conservative budgets?
2:27 PM BW: well, kind of out of time, i must say – i thought it felt like a period piece
as if it were set at the end of the previous era (greedisgoodia) rather than during the subsequent one (austerityland). bit of a shame, as the first film was so zeitgeisty
2:28 PM but i suppose Stone was going for a gotterdammerung kind of thing…?

 

2:30 PM JMT: One thing I noticed is that, while Michael Moore trashes the bank bailouts in Capitalism: A Love Story – essentially giving the Republicans their election year playbook in his supposedly progressive film – Stone goes to great lengths to “explain” the government’s actions as “responsible,” etc., in that very wooden scene set during the abyss of the financial crisis.
BW: well, when you’ve got eli wallach telling you the world’s gonna end, you better listen, right?
2:32 PM JMT: A lot of cameos, speaking of Wallach. That same real estate broker is back. The new music by Eno and Byrne makes a delicious bookend to Stone’s use of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts in the first film, it all seems so promising at first! Stone himself appears – am I mistaken? – as a purveyor or buyer of “ridiculous art.” Hmm…
BW: haha
2:33 PM i wasn’t sure if he was purveying or looking to buy. bookend i think is exactly right – i was expecting more of a survey of the new landscape but WS2 is more elegiac – or at least trying to be?
JMT: The original Wall Street [WS1] has a lot of wit. And it’s so fast paced. It’s a cocaine film.
BW: right, and very streamlined and sleek
2:34 PM this was a lot more muddled… but could that be apt?

Limos & Hairgel

2:37 PM JMT: Very interesting –> WS1 has this delight in the evil. Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) is totally seduced by Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) and the interior design stylings of Daryl Hannah. It’s a film about pinkie rings, two-inch TV screens, ordering “Evian” at the restaurant, big hair, cocaine in limos…as Iain Sinclair once said about the 1980s, “cocaine in the executive washroom.” But here in WS2 the protagonist, Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf) isn’t really fully seduced into the realm of evil. He’s got his Third Way idealism about his laser fusion plant investment scheme intact all the way until the end. I thought it could have been funny if the fusion plant turned out to be a “green tech” scam…

2:38 PM Like an faux-environmental pyramid scheme. But that just shows I was hoping for more camp…
2:40 PM BW: yeah, that would have been more fun. but in a way Jake’s dilemma is more ambiguous – it’s not angel vs devil, good vs greed, in private as well as business
JMT: That’s clearly Stone’s intention…yes…
2:41 PM BW: do i detect a whiff of uncertainty?
2:43 PM JMT: Well, no, I think you’re exactly right – the film is a parable that still believes in The Third Way of Clinton and Blair. It reminds me of those Ameriprise investment commercials Dennis Hopper made, God bless him. The commercials were geared toward Boomers in this sad and obvious way. They said, you can have it all, a mutual fund that invests in wind farms (and cigarette companies), your VW van, a guitar, and a home equity loan. There’s a whole generational complex here related to the abandonment of 60s idealism, I think.
2:44 PM I’m being very unfair to my elders and betters, but…

 

BW: that makes sense. there’s an ad playing on tv over here at the moment for some kind of investment product (i forget the name) which is unabashedly targeting that generation – ‘you’ve worked hard, now you deserve to enjoy your yachting and vintage cars and manicured garden’ kind of thing – and it seems stunningly tasteless. and i think that’s what made WS2 seem slightly out of time – a boomer attempt to suggest things are still all right. that final happy-smiley-child’s-birthday-party sequence was perverse, like jamming your fingers in your ears and singing a happy tune
2:46 PM JMT: Yes – although in WS1 Gekko does seem genuinely hurt by Bud Fox’s betrayal, like losing a son, so there’s a precedent in the original for viewing Gekko as a family man who wants to bequeath a legacy. Obviously he’s a supplanting father figure competing with Bud’s union rep Dad (Martin Sheen). I delight in that because it suggests Gekko wants an Ayn Rand-like alternative family unit based on evil quests for money. A “team,” as Daryl Hannah pointedly says to Bud when she leaves him – a team! This is more fun to watch than battles over the funding of some flaky laser fusion machine that’s going to save the world. Bah-humbug! 2:47 PM It’s like an Al Gore Power Point.

2:48 PM BW: haha. but it’s not even that, it’s a magic wand. it’s like the film can’t face the idea that everything’s screwed
there’s got to be a deus ex machina solution and if it weren’t for those old-school greedy BASTARDS we’d have it
stone’s trying to sell us a magic bullet

 

2:51 PM JMT: Well, okay, Stone did go around Latin American talking to all those left-wing leaders, right, so South of the Border is worth bearing in mind here. And his presentation of the crisis, in terms of the fall of Lehman Bros and the near collapse of Bear Stearns, is fairly historically faithful. Or at least it mirrors the brilliant PBS Frontline doc on the subject, Inside the Meltdown. U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a die-hard Wall Street guy who believed in “moral hazard,” had to initiate the government salvation of the banking sector against his own free market philosophy.
2:52 PM BW: my point is that the new movie doesn’t come up with a convincing dramatic framework for channelling these things through character and story
2:53 PM it’s all fairytale stuff about magic fusion reactors and implausible reconciliations
it’s more like cymbeline or winter’s tale than faust
2:54 PM JMT: Yes – wonderful comparison – especially because the female lead, Winnie Gekko (Carey Mulligan) is so malleable that she’s almost Shakespearean. She’s like, “Oh, I don’t want 100 million dollars, just tell me what you want to do with it.” That money’s tainted! No good can come of it. Wait…unless…we can end our dependence on foreign oil and coal reactors…
2:55 PM BW: she spends two hours crying
2:56 PM JMT: And structurally, Martin Sheen’s role in the narrative of WS1 (and his position as the film’s moral center) has either been replaced by Winnie or else it’s been automated! – I mean, literally – He’s been taken over by that fusion machine. From unions to green tech…it’s a very weirdly apt portrayal of U.S. Democratic party politics.
BW: there’s certainly a sense that politics has disappeared from this world altogether, which seems fair enough
2:57 PM we see some hints of 9/11
JMT: That’s also a gesture to WS1. The WTC Towers get some prominent shots, and now in WS2 there’s the shot of the empty site.

BW: yes, quite a few in each and one shot in WS2, i think, of a newspaper with obama’s face on it and the word DESTINY
2:58 PM but where WS1 had a sense of a politics behind people’s actions – that ayn rand-ish principled greed, destroying things BECAUSE they’re vulnerable – WS2 has a kind of grubby private opportunism vs airy bleaty activism – which is perhaps not an unfair version of contemporary public life
3:00 PM the new one is quite good, i guess, at conveying a sense of collapse and entropy – that’s what makes the attempted reinstatement of order in the last 20 minutes so pathetic
JMT: There’s also this idea in WS1 of “real work” where you manufacture honest stuff, like airplanes, versus high finance, which is this mumbo-jumbo numbers game.
BW: yes, making versus owning
here it’s all much more conceptualised
3:03 PM JMT: I wanted more evil – it’s there in the depiction of Gekko in London sweeping up all these “distressed securities” in the wake of the crash. But then he goes soft for a real family, and they…accept him…after he steals 100 million from them…or something. They’ll all go into the fusion scheme together and lose their shirts!
3:05 PM I tell you, I’m convinced that scientist in California is scamming them. Cut to Terence Stamp smoking a cigar as the fusion factory is dismantled. Maybe it’s owned by the clean energy subsidiary of BP!
BW: haha, brilliant!
i kept thinking of marty mcfly and doc brown…
JMT:  

 
3:06 PM BW: the redemptive coda is really bad, dramatically and morally. it makes no sense in the story and i can’t see any bearing to how things are panning out in the real world
3:08 PM JMT: If I were Winnie, I would have dumped the 100 million into the Frozen Truth web site for liberal bloggers she’s working on.
3:09 PM BW: what’s ‘frozen truth’ anyway?
what does it mean? what does she stand for?
3:12 PM JMT: I suppose “liquid truth” could be another sleazy metaphor for money. I see Winnie as a Generation Y New Yorker, raised under the umbrella of wealth drawn from high finance, probably a former dot.commer, determined to change the world, only not that much. As for Jake, it never seems to occur to him that if he wants to save the world maybe he should try another career path! I do like Susan Sarandon as “Jake’s Mother” (she has no name in the credits?!?), returning to being a nurse after her real estate business collapses. That brief glimpse of her back at work…
3:13 PM BW: yeah – along with the intimation that she hasn’t learned her lesson!
there’s lots of unclear, unsimple aspects to the film, i just don’t know if they’re meant to be that way
3:14 PM this jostling crowd of mentors for jake, for instance – the old-school banker, the ‘reformed’ gekko, the scientist, the upstart master of the universe…

Bad Dads...

3:15 PM and the visual clutter of the film – the ugly colour palette, those bizarre statistical graphics stone uses, those clashing pictures in josh brolin’s office (goya next to keith haring?!)
3:16 PM JMT: Right – the visual art theme also comes from WS1…The Gekko home has classy art. In the 1980s, the wealthy bought art as a hedge against inflation.
BW: if he left things messy and getting messier, that would make sense and be pretty apt to the situation, but he seems to want to resolve it all
3:22 PM JMT: Yes, this whole idea of muddle might be the key. Visually, morally, psychologically…
3:23 PM BW: …which i think could have been a fruitful way of dealing with the subject, but does stone know he’s doing it?
it’s, um, muddled…

[Coffee break.]

[6 minutes.]

Cell! Cell!

3:29 PM JMT: I think you’re right, the film is muddled. Really, the film is Gekko-sploitation, they know this sequel will make money, done. Bring out the hair gel and the big cell phone. Then what? I was hoping for camp. To me this film is a late Boomer parable about some very muddled generational compromises relating to the financial sector, made by a member of the Ameriprise Generation. In WS1, the money that’s stolen by Gekko comes out of a pension fund for airline workers. Now that the real airlines like WS1′s Bluestar have steamrolled their unions in bankruptcy courts and pensions are a dead idea, they’ve been replaced by 401(k) investment schemes where individual workers choose their own adventure in the stock market, tying their individual fate to that of large corporations. Because of the end of the pension system and the bailouts, all Americans are working on Wall Street now, so it’s a patriotic duty to see this film. Can we all get rich together through the market and retire with wealth without committing horrendous crimes? I imagine there’s deep ambivalence in the Boomer heart about all this.
3:32 PM Not buying?
3:33 PM BW: i’m sure you’re on to something there
JMT: The ending of the film contains your magic bullet idea that solves all these anxieties in one go – we can all invest in the fusion plant, get rich together, and save the world.
3:34 PM BW: there must be an escape pod?
JMT: From the broken economy?
And the broken family?
BW: right. just hold your nerve and we’ll ride it out… as they said at lehman…

*

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The Owls | Blood Simple + A Woman, A Gun, and A Noodle Shop

*Ben Walters and J. M. Tyree have been talking about movies, often amicably, since 1995. Together, they wrote a critical appreciation of The Big Lebowski for The British Film Institute's Film Classics series of books, and reviewed No Country for Old Men and Burn After Reading for Sight & Sound. They recently had a transatlantic chat about Blood Simple, the Coens' first feature. Blood Simple has been remade by Zhang Yimou as A Woman, A Gun, and a Noodle Shop, set for a limited theatrical release in the States on 3 September. This prompted thoughts about homage, genre looting, pulp, and Wong Kar-Wai's Barton Fink...

 

12:46 PM JMT: Just watching the end of Body Heat...
 BW: amazing
 wanna finish it?
 12:47 PM JMT: Not unless you want to wait 15 mins...no need...I know what happens...
 BW: i don't mind
 JMT: Let's start!
 BW: all righty then

12:50 PM JMT: I'd been thinking about Blood Simple and Body Heat after watching the Australian noir The Square. Then we noticed that Zhang Yimou’s remake of Blood Simple, called A Woman, A Gun, and A Noodle Shop, was getting reviewed and released. A good excuse to revisit Blood Simple...

12:51 PM BW: tell me about the square, i don't know that one
12:53 PM JMT: Brothers Nash & Joel Edgerton made this delightfully grim Aussie crime thriller in 2008 featuring infidelity, murder, and arson. The deadly fire is set off using Christmas tree lights!
12:54 PM BW: ho ho ho
that passed me by. is it notably similar to blood simple or more of a fellow pastiche?
12:57 PM JMT: It has that same sense of pressure and humor - a dog is eaten by an alligator and it's played for laughs.
BW: well, that's pretty funny
i think noir has always had a sense of humour
12:58 PM it's easy to overlook now that it's such a venerated genre but most of them had some kind of absurdity

JMT: Like the bowling in Double Indemnity!
BW: right
12:59 PM and they're usually full of puns and dramatic irony
JMT: Interesting you say that, because I keep circling back to Pauline Kael's comments about Blood Simple.
Ben: she wasn't a fan, right?
1:00 PM JMT: She said it was "Hollywood by-product." She also disliked Body Heat - for one reason because she felt it was slavish vis-a-vis classic noir. But Blood Simple and Body Heat are very different - although they're in the same mid-80s neo-noir wave. In classic noir, the sap kills the husband and then gets betrayed by the wife, right? Body Heat follows that pretty much all the way to the end of the line. But the fun of Blood Simple lies in inverting the classical scheme. Here, the sap mistakenly thinks the wife has killed the husband, setting this whole train of events in motion...
1:04 PM BW: right - so the coens made it new and their picture remains strong while kasdan's was mere pastiche so hasn't weathered well?
1:05 PM JMT: I don't want to run down Body Heat but I do think Kael's complaint is slightly more interesting in that case than in the the case of Blood Simple, where, as with Cassavetes and the Maysles brothers, she missed the boat on major filmmakers.
1:06 PM In fact, the Coens have never had much luck with The New Yorker...David Denby called A Serious Man "intolerable"...
BW: i suppose they've learned to live with it

1:08 PM JMT: Another clever inversion has to do with the female lead, don't you think? Body Heat is actively prurient, whereas everybody in Blood Simple looks worse for wear. As Abby, McDormand is the opposite of a femme fatale.
1:09 PM BW: right, they push the absurdity at the expense of the glamour
1:10 PM ...and refuse to punish the dame!
JMT: I'd say while Body Heat is knowing about noir, Blood Simple is more heavily invested in irony.
1:11 PM BW: yes, the coens are much more upfront about playing with genre. it's almost a form of cinematic drag
1:12 PM JMT: Ha! The love is genuine. I believe they've said that they thought the names of Cain, Chandler, and Hammett ought to be chiseled into the stone above the Columbia University Library.
1:13 PM BW: oh, it's out of love, absolutely

JMT: Blood Simple came out in 1984 when I was like 10 years old - it was the year of Ghostbusters, Beverly Hills Cop, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Gremlins and The Karate Kid! So I saw it much later on VHS. But I had been reading a lot of pulp in high school. Jim Thompson, Davis Goodis, the Black Lizard Crime series from Vintage. Blood Simple is deeply engaged with pulp.
1:14 PM Pulp fiction...
1:15 PM BW: that's one of the things that's so striking about blood simple as a directorial debut. rather than trying to offer a new kind of cinematic language, they demonstrate their understand* and control of an existing form. it's a very sophisticated piece of filmmaking - you might call it a kind of late style, formally speaking, which is not what you expect from first timers!
*understanding
1:18 PM JMT: Or the creation of deliberately "minor" literature. Chandler once wrote a letter to Hamish Hamilton explaining that people always asked him when he'd write something "serious." He talks about Pindar and Sappho and mocks "the Book of the Month Club, the Hearst press, and the Coca-Cola machine." He prefers "a savage, dirty age." Like the 1980s!
1:19 PM BW: like there's an age that isn't savage and dirty...
1:20 PM and zhang seems - on the basis of the trailer and the bits i've read about a woman, a gun and a noodle shop - to be applying it to another 'low' genre
1:22 PM although he's an interesting case in that he's become a specialist at classy pulp - the kind of pulp the book-of-the-month sensibility accepts as 'high'
hence his being recruited for the olympics gig, perhaps?
1:23 PM JMT: Danny Boyle and Stephen Daldry are following in his footsteps!
BW: ha
1:24 PM but adaptability is very much in the coens' dna. zhang is remaking a remake

1:26 PM JMT: Yes, there's that weird sense in many Coens films of a remake even when it's not the case - like O Brother w/r/t Sullivan's Travels, and The Man Who Wasn't There w/r/t the notorious execution scene cut from Double Indemnity. Most markedly in Miller's Crossing, which is almost like a missing Hammett novel adapted to film.
Which isn't to discount the originality in the films, at all.
1:29 PM BW: well, originality is always only a form of variation. their consummate ability to go with the tide, formally, is what allows them to surf it so well
1:30 PM JMT: Right - Kael didn't realize that they were more like Wilder or Hitchcock.
Hitchcock is quoted in the original trailer.
BW: really?

 

1:31 PM JMT: "It is very difficult, very painful, and it takes a very long time to kill someone."
1:32 PM That quotation is interspersed with various images, including the grave digging scene out in the Texas fields.
1:33 PM BW: they certainly share hitchcock's sense of humour about violence and death...but yes, wilder and hitchcock are very useful reference points - wilder especially, the idea of genre-skipping almost as a project in itself
1:37 PM JMT: I was just reading David Thomson's book The Moment of Psycho. He suggests that the whole first half of Psycho evokes American loneliness and banality. So does Blood Simple. Something's not right in the landscape. Everyone's pretty much alone - even the couple, Abby and Ray. When the husband Marty dies he has a bleeping computer to keep him company. It's like the low-rent assassin Loren Visser says, "Down here, you're on your own."
Whereas in Body Heat, William Hurt is like this smug jogger! Imagine anyone in Blood Simple jogging? (Maybe Meurice - he wears those great sneakers!)
1:38 PM BW: haha - visser at the gym

 

JMT: His "yellow lounge suit" is specified in the screenplay.
1:39 PM BW: amazing. he's what's wrong with the landscape
1:40 PM JMT: He's so intriguing!
1:41 PM I love his interest in the Soviet Union...
1:42 PM BW: there's a sort of compensation in the pastiche - the milieu is, as you say, alienation and ignorance and solitude, but the form, even though it's subversive, relies on the audience's recognition, its community of appreciation
JMT: Um...
BW: no?
JMT: You mean, we get the joke, like Visser?
BW: right
1:43 PM JMT: Got it!
He's fascinating...
BW: we get it and appreciate it, and by getting it we assert fellow-feeling with the coens and other genre fans
and visser totally appreciates the irony too
the way he laughs at the absurdity of his own death - that's ecstatic!
1:45 PM JMT: Visser's wonderful. He does the killing for the money, reasoning that it's free enterprise - "in Russia they make fifty cent a day" - but he does the math and recognizes that it's more efficient to kill Marty than the couple. He's like a shady parody of one of those management consultants that says you can eliminate 50% of your workforce and streamline everything...
What a performance by Walsh! Talk about the banality of evil.
1:46 PM BW: he's amazing. they all are - utterly archetypal but also utterly, ridiculously unique
1:47 PM coming back to the remaking thing, it's interesting that the coens are currently finishing off their second official remake
JMT: True Grit
1:48 PM BW: right. though i think technically their film is based on the charles portis novel rather than the john wayne film
but as the film is much better known, it's kind of a remake in pop-culture terms
1:49 PM (or something)
amazing cover to the novel btw: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Grit_(novel)

1:51 PM JMT: I've got that version! Another very strong female lead. This is one thing I really like about the Coens’ work. McDormand's lead in Blood Simple sets up her later role in Fargo as a source of "ordinary strength," for lack of a better phrase.
BW: yes, they have bottomless faith in the ability of sensible women to get on with it
1:52 PM JMT: Whereas, again, not to flog Body Heat, but there Kathleen Turner is viewed as a toy who turns malicious.
Abby is more subtle.
1:53 PM There's a great bit of noir-type laconic dialogue when they're first leaving town.
Abby: ...What was that back there?
Man: Back where?
Abby: Sign.
Man: I don't know. Motel...
==>Another cruddy Coen motel coming up!==>
1:55 PM BW: moving around never does anyone any good in coen films, yet it's the american condition...
1:56 PM JMT: Like in Psycho!
BW: ha, totally
1:57 PM JMT: Thomson talks about how "in America the poetry is often in the official signage." Like "interstate." The desire to be elsewhere. And that terrible road loneliness. The Hopperesque.
1:58 PM That's what James M. Cain was getting at, too!
BW: it's another kind of subversion - taking these emblems of american furtherment like hitting the road and looking for the big payday - this applies to psycho and most of the coens' work - and showing it as sheer folly
1:59 PM JMT: All those bags of money dangled in Coen films. Marge in Fargo speaks to Visser, in a way, when she says "All for a little bit of money."
2:01 PM BW: and to ed crane and the big lebowski and llewelyn moss andlinda litzke...

2:02 PM JMT: "Dry cleaning - was I crazy to be thinking about it?" (Ed Crane.) He needs that $10,000 to start his business.
Visser gets...how much? Is it $10,000? Due to inflation, the standard Coen payout has increased to around $1 mil over the years...
2:03 PM BW: it's A Lot Of Money
2:04 PM you could almost do a breakdown of coen movies by deadly sin
blood simple - wrath and avarice
raising arizona - envy
2:05 PM miller's crossing... um...
JMT: :)
BW: pride?
2:06 PM JMT: Hmmm...
:)
2:07 PM --Yes, it's $10,000 - "a right smart of money," Visser says - "smart" and "stupid" being another big theme here.
BW: smart also being what you do when you're hit. like a pummel of cash or a bruise of change
2:08 PM JMT: "When you smart me, it ruins it.” As Bernie says in Miller's Crossing.
BW: in the chair
2:09 PM his big hollywood reveal! waiting in the dark to put the frighteners on regan in true noir style, but regan spoils it by laughing
that's what classical hollywood could say to the coens, really
'when you smart me, it ruins it'
JMT: Yeah! "Who looks stupid now?" What Visser says to Marty after he's killed him.
2:10 PM BW: a quote from the ladykillers, which in due course the coens would recycle in full!
or at least riff off. it's their own approach to sources that makes them so ripe for remaking (or remixing) themselves
it would be great to see them remake one of their own movies, like hitch with the man who knew too much
2:12 PM JMT: Whoa - which one? Huh...
BW: maybe raising arizona? updated with ref to fertility technology?
2:13 PM i guess it's complicated by the fact that they do so many period pieces
JMT: They joked for awhile about remaking Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Since the story wouldn't phase anybody, they could focus on production design exclusively...wallpaper, etc.
BW: :-)
like van sant's psycho but more so
2:14 PM but also it would be intriguing to see, say, wong kar-wai's take on barton fink
the writer trapped in the hotel...
2:15 PM JMT: Wonderful!
BW: paul rudd as the big lebowski?

 

 

2:16 PM JMT: Which brings us back to Zhang's remake. I don't know enough about it. But it got me thinking about how memorable Blood Simple remains. What New Wave figures like Truffaut and Godard saw clearly was that America has a fundamental relationship with crime literature. This is the country that produced Poe, Hammett, Chandler, Goodis...Mark Harris’ book Pictures at a Revolution discusses how both Truffaut and Godard had an abiding interest in Bonnie & Clyde - in directing it - a script which was itself influenced by the New Wave. This remake seems to set up Blood Simple as a weirdly quasi-canonical work, at least in the sense that it’s being reworked and adapted to another culture.

2:17 PM BW: certainly there's a whole conversation to be had about the transmission of cinematic ideas across cultures - american genres drawing on and returning to japanese, italian, french and indeed chinese cinema... kurosawa, new wave, leone, now zhang.
it's the same old song, but with a different meaning...

*

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The Owls | What's the Matter with Inception?

Verizon's street poster for Inception

Ben Walters (BW) & J. M. Tyree (JMT) have been talking about movies together since 1995, often amicably. They co-wrote a critical appreciation of The Big Lebowski for The British Film Institute’s Film Classics book series. They shared notes – via email, chat, and document sharing – on Christopher Nolan's Inception, in which Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, a corporate spy who retrieves secrets by invading targets' dreams. JMT watched it in San Francisco and BW saw it in London.

Bath of Dreamings

JMT: Here's a mainstream picture we both looked forward to watching, Inception, Christopher Nolan’s summer hit. It's a trap to worry overly about a Hollywood blockbuster being a Hollywood blockbuster, but I feel baffled by the critical reaction. The people next to me at the multiplex were loudly oohing and ahhing over the film as though it were a display of fireworks. And since then I’ve talked to several very smart people who enjoyed the film. What did I miss?

BW: I've got to admit I'm not quite sure. Maybe people like having their legs pulled? With sumptuous production design?

JMT: The new Film Quarterly (Summer, 2010) has a thoughtful book review by Martin Fradley about the state of the contemporary film industry. It talks about Hollywood's "new auteurs" – deal-makers, producers, agents, and distributors. Maybe that's Christopher Nolan at this point, a corporate auteur, the total bundle - which is intriguing given how weird his films are.

BW: In a way I think that's the most interesting aspect of Inception – he has the clout and the industrial nous to mount a massive shaggy dog story like this. And it's certainly another exploration of his pet themes – the ways memory, identity and narrative shape our lived reality.

JMT: He doesn’t really “do” joyful moments of intimacy. Or humor.

Undone Minds

BW: No one comes to Nolan for hugs or chuckles. His films are meant to be conventionally satisfying riddle movies, by and large, within which frame he can explore more genuinely upsetting ideas of identity. When it works, it makes you question whether you actually have any right to your opinion about yourself. When it doesn't, it comes off as dull, pretentious, over-designed guff.

JMT: My frustration watching Inception was that it barely explores the fascinating pathways opened by its own premise.

BW: Yes, I had a similar feeling...

JMT: The idea that someone could extract information from your dreams is delightfully terrifying. Tie this to corporate espionage and you have a potential minefield of cultural comment. Those levels of meaning certainly can be extracted. A critic could become an extractor, like Cobb, sent into the film on a mission to retrieve its moments of subversiveness. But on the whole the film doesn't really go very far in this direction.

BW: Not remotely. Which is a bit surprising after Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, which did have some political engagement. Nolan's always interested in the ways in which unguardedness can undo a mind, and how terrifying it can be to be confronted with a reality from which your mind has assiduously quarantined itself. And he has explored them in gripping ways elsewhere; here, not so much. But he is predominantly interested in individual identity, I think; it's rewarding when there is a political dimension but I think that's incidental rather than essential to him.

Unicorns & Tops

JMT: Surely Inception sets itself up in comparison with Blade Runner, with the film's "totems" like the spinning top invoking the origami unicorns (and so forth) of Ridley Scott's film, as well as the ultimate puzzle about one's one interior sense of self being manufactured. But in Blade Runner it really matters whether Deckard is an android. In Inception, the only thing at stake in the ending is whether everything we've seen is just one guy helping some mogul with a business problem, or else, well, you know...

BW: But I think you might be short-selling the potential cultural heft. The idea of deepening corporate invasion of identity is a resonant one, I think. Identity theft, targeted advertising, online surrender of privacy, all these things do affect the construction and definition of identity in ways that Inception could bounce off. By which I mean that it is timely – I'm not staking great claims for the way in which it engages these subjects.

JMT: It's all there, but Inception oddly avoids sustained engagement with these "political" matters, or whatever you might call them, in favor of a personal story. Cobb has got to get back to his kids.

BW: The potential is there but not really tapped. But I think it's worth noting that by tying these things so explicitly to profiteering and careerism, Inception is a slightly different beast from other reality-benders like, say, Blade Runner or The Matrix.

JMT: Maybe if we saw profiteering and careerism as real motives - as it is, we're supposed to care more about whether Cobb makes it home than whether it's okay for minds to be invaded and ravaged.

BW: Sure, the corporatisation is more of a background. It's really a one-last-job heist movie. And the ethical implications are barely engaged with – Ellen Page having one line about it maybe being a bit questionable.

JMT: But, like, trippy fun!

BW: Right! But the fun wears thin. The story isn’t much more emotionally engaging than it is politically thoughtful. This points to a somewhat paradoxical problem for Nolan: he's fascinated by identity but not much good with character.

Mazes & Monsters

JMT: Speaking of Ellen Page as tech wiz Ariadne (she makes and unwinds mazes). It’s an untypical move not to make her role into a romantic interest. Page looks desexualized, while Cobb’s wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) is smoldering but absent/fatal. There are love interests in Nolan's films, but is there much - or any? - genuine intimacy that unfolds in the "now"? I'm hard pressed to think of examples. Again, this is a point of interest, this weird lack of something human...

BW: Well, his protagonists tend to (mis)remember and investigate rather than, um, live. We root for them because they're the narrative engine, not because we're actually invested in their welfare to any great degree. And I think this brings us to another problem with Inception – this lack of facility for the quirks and charms of actual present people result in a film basically comprised of really boring, thuddingly rational dream sequences.

JMT: They're not that dreamy. A friend pointed out that the snow level of the narrative/dream is a Bond film. And really it's also an Inception video game. Blam! I'm using the bigger gun now. Someone else I talked to reminded me, though, that since the dreams are constructed they would tend to be less weird than “real” dreams. So that can be unwound as possibly more interesting...

BW: Cop-out! Dreams should be weird and woozy and hot and fickle. Inception plays like a two-and-a-half-hour American Express ad.

JMT: It's not truly surreal or even very disjointed, apart from a few moments. In Memento the structure relentlessly compels the eye. Here, as in The Prestige, it's overly elaborate, a three-layer cake, in which each detail is perfect but...

I know the tricks...

BW: The Prestige is the definite companion piece here – another essay on a soufflé of a subject executed with high-spec machine tooling. With The Prestige I wanted to shout "Go and watch F for Fake! That's how to make a movie about magic tricks!"

JMT: "I know the tricks," Cobb says in Inception. The Prestige handles magic tricks and Inception handles dream tricks. Both have a notion of the world being a false appearance, a deception. This links Inception with the concerns of cinema, and also with film history. But unlike in Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly, or F for Fake, no paranoia is induced by Inception. Why?

BW: Perhaps because Nolan's such a rationalist. There's never a feeling in his films that things are really coming off the rails – not in a fundamental way. An individual's situation, even his identity, might be under threat, but the world itself is securely moored. Dreams and magic are always at the service of The Real. Even that dream idyll Cobb and Mal indulge for 50 years – how dull is that! They could do or be anything they could conceive, and  they ROUND UP ALL THE HOUSES THEY'VE LIVED IN?! Stay UNDER, do us all a favour.

JMT: Inception skirts a number of very pressing contemporary concerns, but drowns or submerges them in its bath of dreamings. To my mind the film is a parable of avoidance of some kind, not engagement, subversion, or disruption. On a tangent, the ad campaign for Inception was sponsored by Verizon, which like all the other big telecoms colluded in domestic surveillance. Funny, that! It's simultaneously "obvious" and strangely "unspoken," rather like the film's own unexamined themes.

BW: I think you could probably say that "bath of dreamings" line of most Hollywood pictures. It's just a disappointment that the one that takes dreams as its explicit subject does so little with them. But yes, it's timeliness again – you can mine the project for all sorts of resonances, intended, incidental, frustrated; it obviously comes out of a cultural space loaded with concerns about unacknowledged surveillance of the interior self. But in some ways it could have been made at any time: it's basically concerned with anxiety about the unaccountable unconscious, which is hardly new ground for cinema, or art. On a less serious note, given all these frames in which time passes at different rates, Nolan missed a chance for a great gag – he could have had a Hollywood ticking-clock countdown with a justification for taking ten times as long as it should!

JMT: On that note, why is this film so humorless? So many of the scenes in Inception take the following form: "Please sit down at this cafe/desk/airplane seat so that you and I can have an important one-on-one conversation about a previously undisclosed aspect of the science fiction in this film." When I saw Dileep Rao (Yusuf) enter the picture, I remembered how funny he was in Drag Me to Hell. That Wellesian sense of the con-man prestidigitator in Raimi’s film is lacking here.

BW: Nolan's con artists never have any fun.

PR: The original "inception"

JMT: A dark comedy using the premise of Inception could be enjoyable. This has been done, but what if the protagonist was tasked with arranging the sponsorship deals on those implanted dreams? Since the whole experience is manufactured anyway, why not have the person driving a Volkswagen, listening to a JBL stereo system, drinking Diet Coke and chewing Doublemint? But that's a tangent...What's the picture's most intriguing aspect for you? For me it's probably seeing action sequences in which the characters are asleep.

BW: I was intrigued – or rather confused – by the film's starting notion that it's hard to plant ideas in people's heads. Isn't that how publicity works? Isn't that why everyone is talking about this not-very-interesting movie...?

JMT: So, what else are you watching these days? Any recommendations?

BW: I've been watching a bunch of Seinfeld and have been surprised how much of it revolves around the vagaries of landline use – competing for payphones, missing calls to your home phone – and how much of a period piece it feels because of this.

JMT: Excellent, I love seeing payphones! This reminds me of the Beeper King boyfriend in 30 Rock, who has to rely on payphones when he's out of the house. Also for online viewing, I've been compelled by clips of Douglas Gordon's "24 Hour Psycho," a slowed-down version of Hitchcock's film that takes a day to unfold. I came to Gordon's work belatedly, after reading Don DeLillo's new novel Point Omega.

BW: That's a beautiful piece. Hypnotic and, I guess, kind of dreamlike. Certainly brings us back to the unaccountable unconscious...

*

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Love, Recession Style, with Twin Sister and Soderbergh

A consideration of "Vampires with Dreaming Kids" and "The Girlfriend Experience"

David Schneider

These days, my life is lived on the hypermedia broadband, incessantly, obsessively. And occasionally, I have some remarkable experiences there. I'd like to tell you about two of them which chimed together.

Recently I discovered a quite extraordinary band just starting to run the Brooklyn club circuit. Their name is Twin Sister, made up of four guys and a girl, all friends from Long Island, between the ages of 20 and 26. They've just released an EP called "Vampires with Dreaming Kids," and to my mind it's one of the most lushly considered "concept albums" I've heard in a long time: a great ascending arc of falling deeply in love, and that is a thing that is ever so difficult to talk about even when talking about music: to say so is a great risk: one is either wise, or deeply foolish. (And fools rush in, etcetera etcetera.)

I'd like to consider this EP in conjunction with Steven Soderbergh's "The Girlfriend Experience," which I encountered directly after. I found myself watching "The Girlfriend Experience," and toggling between that and "Vampires with Dreaming Kids" back and forth, so taken was I with the emotional and intellectual effect this had – for "Vampires with Dreaming Kids" and "The Girlfriend Experience" are diametrically opposed to one another in every respect but one: they are both true.

There are four tracks on Twin Sister's EP. The first, "Dry Hump," begins with late-night drunken guitars: one, acoustic, a melancholy strum; another, electric, an errant, plaintive wail. A whisper of a girl's voice, supine, playful, wasted –

If you're all alone

            bring over your bone s

                                       and payyyyy me

                                anywhere you want to                            

pay me

It's a line that folds under the lip of pornography, but doesn't slip in; that feels up the emotion of blasé whorishness but doesn't give in, precisely (because of the title) it's a wet hallucinatory invitation to halfway. As the music shimmers like a dirty Spacemen 3, the phrase repeats – first sounding like Billie Holiday on a broken record, then Björk at both her most coquettish and most playful. Then a big fat guitar bass note flanges upward, and the track becomes at once a striptease and a torch song, heavy with sleaze and sweet dream.

And then the morning, with red-haired lover, all things diamond and aflame in "Ginger" – in the first instant of wakefulness crashing down like My Bloody Valentine's "Loveless," but then opening up into castles of cathedrals and bell-chimes and stained-glass cascades, riding on a river of bass in a month of The Sundays. Epic as The Arcade Fire without the bathos, intimate as Sinead o'Connor when breathless, re-writing The Pixies' "Gigantic, big big love" with a slow, confident heartbeat and arabesques of the quotidian made magical, "maybe little birds begin to grow."

But Twin Sister knows – it knows the castled cathedrals raft upon the bass river of Time, it knows that the epic must admit of the quotidian, that the myth must be made human for it to survive. And so "Ginger" closes like a breaking-down phonograph gearbox, its grand gates dissolving into the '70s prairie of "Nectarine." It's an acoustic, country-inflected romantic ballad that casts a male voice into Penelope's song:

When you're sailing 'round the evening
and when you come back home
when you come back home
I'll won't ever let go I haven't before

These lyrics risk the gauzy, flaccid cheesiness of '70s soft-rock, but the risk pays off with  a gallopity rhythm and a slide geetah, recasting a stasis of ebb-and-flow in overnight stays into a story of pioneers, male and female voices pairing in a duet

We can ride back home

which prompts the inevitable question: what, where is home?

"I. want. a. haaaus," insinuates lead singer Andrea Estella on the finale, each word insistent on the beat. It makes one a little nervous. After all, there's a brief Slavic moue on "want," as if she's channeling Ivana Trump for an instant. But just like the implied "money-shot" of "Dry Hump," anxiety over filthy lucre dissolves into the intimate and mystical –

I want a house

    Made of old woo(d)…

                You can paint it any color   

 you like

                            Just as long as I can be with you

What's particularly magical about "I Want a House" is that its slowdance down-beat and whukka-whukka guitar rub up against the sickeningly sweet clichés of commercial Top 40 R&B ballads, and steal the honesty from their overprocessed heartstrings. Imperceptibly, "I Want A House" shifts from downbeat to upbeat, from acquisitiveness to ownership, and into a beautiful, melodic slow house groove.

We see now why Twin Sister has titled this EP "Vampires with Dreaming Kids." Notwithstanding the current lurrrve for all things vampiric, it seems clear to me that Twin Sister has taken a collection of genres that exude a popular and therefore vampiric seduction – porn, goth, country, r&b – and brought them into the home of dreaming kids, i.e. lovers. In which they are allowed to twist and change, playfully, with impish, seductive danger, as Twin Sister morphs itself into a safe and generous sonic home. 

The few critics who have so far responded to Twin Sister's music have labelled it "Shoegaze." Sure, there's the slow-beat, electronic dush paired with chromatic guitars, but this is not the shuffle-sway of early-20s mumblecore shyness. You're missing the point if you're looking at your shoes. This is music that implores you to look boldly, directly, communicating what you want, because this is music that fulfills trust with generosity, a generosity extended by Twin Sister to make the entire EP free for download.

•••

Right about the same time I encountered Twin Sister, this past month, I checked out Steven Soderbergh's experimental film "The Girlfriend Experience," shot amid the financial crisis of 2008 and released in May 2009 to reviews as mixed and coolly considered as the film itself. Back then, A.O. Scott in The New York Times, in a highly nuanced critique, thought some of its methods "tryingly obvious and irritatingly oblique," but suspected that

'The Girlfriend Experience' may look different a few years from now. When the turmoil of the last 12 months has receded and the 10th-anniversary deluxe collectors edition comes around, this strange, numb cinematic experience may seem fresh, shocking and poignant rather than merely and depressingly true.

As the unrelenting disclosures about the financial crisis have denuded our emperors, and turned eyes to the pornographic details of our exposure to debt, A.O. Scott's timeframe has collapsed – that time is now. And with "The Girlfriend Experience"'s themes of vampirism, commerce and intimacy tangled in a Gordian knot of modernity, the film provides an unsettling – and insistently curious – counterpoint to Twin Sister's music.

As you may recall from the marketing hype, the film stars "real-life" porn star Sasha Grey, 21 years old and credited in at least 161 triple-Xers. She's been called "the smartest girl in the business" she constructed her stage name from The Portrait of Dorian Gray, and she considers her work performance art. In Soderbergh's film, Grey plays the role of Chelsea, an upper-echelon escort negotiating her lifelovebusiness in Manhattan, catering (mainly) to young professionals barely containing their panic over Wall Street's fall.

Now, I love brilliant women, but Sasha Grey's porn doesn't do much for me; I've seen a few scenes, on the tamer end of her spectrum (for research purposes naturally). As is the case for most pro smut streaming out of the Valley, it looks like she's acting, which is to say it's not very good acting, since porn generally works best the closer it gets to a cinema verité of pleasure. She's somewhat cold, often blasé, often dominant, sometimes providing a study of the fabricated nature of the medium through those non-moods.

In other words, utterly perfect for Soderbergh's movie.

Because she's trying to escape the frame.

"GFE," runs the jargon in the CraigsList adult section, "the girlfriend experience," which is a clever marketing euphemization of the term "escort," which means prostitution dressed up to imagine itself differently. Chelsea (Grey), as we learn through the narrative, is yet still a romantic and refuses to take the euphemized, marketized term "GFE" at its pornographic value. Throughout the film, she's searching for the perfect client, the one with whom she'll love her job. It sounds like an absurdity on its face, but when are any of us not on that quest? What looks to be "a perfect match" is a mirage (a waffling screenwriter, in a loop-within-a-loop); the remainder of the men dolorously detail their financial anxieties while dispensing investment tips. Such is the contemporary girlfriend experience, a gender theorist might conclude.

The film very deftly tangles the definition of "success," between what you love to do and what makes money, and then severs them neatly. Call girls need marketing too, but paying someone is expensive and prostituting your own prostitution is nauseating. Chelsea turns a trick as an audition to a sex junket in Dubai, then gets abused in a written review, "clammy hands" being the wrist-slap of the insult onslaught. Even the reporter she talks to angles questions toward exploiting her character. This is life, and through most of it Chelsea rides with barely-edged directness and knowingness.

In the final scene, Chelsea is called in to a Hasidic diamond merchant. He escorts her into the back room, and lectures her on the importance of voting for McCain while they both strip to their underwear. In most of the film, as in most of her porn, "grey" the color is as much a dominant presence as Grey the actor. Here, the room is warm; Sasha Grey has never looked more beautiful and inviting. She clasps him in a very chaste embrace. He climaxes. And for the first time in the entire movie, you sense an actual intimacy between two people, a "couple" trying to transgress their identities but unable to penetrate beyond them.

"If you're going through hell," Winston Churchill said during the Blitz, "keep going." There's a reason why, in Soderbergh's film, the only professional actor is Grey herself. It's "a hall of mirrors," as Village Voice critic J. Hoberman wrote, reflecting the exploitative tension between professional and personal goals in not only Sasha Grey the actor and Steven Soderbergh the director (whose career swerves between blockbuster and art-house) but you, and me, and everyone, in these Great Recession years.

And by peering closely at the telescoping reflections of mirrored surfaces, we do yet see beyond surfaces – we are intimate with the tanglings of our economy below the professional veneer. And begin the cycle with a new song.

"If you're all alone…"

What I wouldn't give to see Sasha Grey digging a Twin Sister show.

Thunder Soul; or, a Secretary for the Arts?

by Katherine McNamara

Thunder Soul

A terrific documentary comes your way early this summer: Thunder Soul, about the legendary Kashmere Stage Band and its inspired leader, Conrad O. Johnson. The film's director is Mark Landsman, who is very good at catching energy on screen. Music, kids at risk, a black high school in Houston, a first-rate musician who taught "his" pupils how to be the very best players in their world: that is Landsman's happy subject. His film is not sentimental or, even worse, a "celebration": it knows its cinematic values and serves them straight up: excellence, to start with; excellence, to finish. He conveys joy in every direction with no unearned emotion; cutting, framing, pacing with precision and surprise.

Conrad O. Johnson was a jazz performer, arranger, and composer who was going to go on the road in the '60s, until he met a strong, pretty woman, Mama Birdie, as she came to be called, who agreed to marry him. In turn, he agreed to stay home, to be with her and the four children they would have, and find work locally. He taught band at various schools, then in 1969, moved to Kashmere High School, in North Houston, a closely-knit African-American part of town, where the principal, rightly, gave him free run of the music program.

The film opens in 2008, when Craig Baldwin, one of Johnson's former musicians (1975) and a self-described "near felon" in the old days, helps organize a reunion concert to honor Prof, as he's always been called, their old master, 92 years on him. Craig knows his stuff. He calls out old comrades who haven't lifted a horn in 30 years and gets them back on track. The energy crackles, the music makes you jump. Grown men and women fill the chairs they once claimed in the old music room, which had been their sound-stage and sanctuary. Prof, so frail, summons himself up from a hospital bed to attend the marvelous concerts (there are two), beams, approves, shows his former students his love. All is complete.

Mark Landsman heard a story on NPR about the coming reunion, and knew he had to get to Houston with his camera. A commission came from Snoot Entertainment, and he was on his way. What struck him particularly, he told me, was the vibrant, tightly-knit community in which Prof had worked. North Houston was a black district where everybody knew everybody else, knew their children, and looked out for each other. When the Kashmere Stage Band went to state competitions, when it went to Paris and to Japan, neighborhood people got together and held bake sales and put out cans for change and found innumerable ways to raise the needed money. The kids went, they saw, they conquered. From 1969 to 1978, the Kashmere Stage Band won 42 out of 46 competitions, and came in first in the state, the only black student band to win the title in those years.

One of the pleasures of life is listening to, or  reading, old-time jazz musicians and baseball players talk about the craft of their art. Think of Buck O'Neil on the Negro League on Ken Burns' Baseball series (or writing about it in his oral history of an autobiography), or, read, say,  Monk's advice (1960) to the saxophonist Steve Lacy:

Just because you're not a drummer, doesn't mean that you don't have to keep time.
Pat your foot & sing the melody in your head when you play.
Stop playing all that bullshit those weird notes, play the melody!
Make the drummer sound good.
Discrimination is important.
You've got to dig it, you dig?
All reet! ...

A record producer named Eothen Allapatt, general manager of Stone's Throw Records and founder of his own label, Now-Again, interviewed Conrad Johnson a few years ago.  He is in the film, too. He loves this music. The interview is lively, if a bit poignant, as Prof Johnson is getting on. It's instructive, though.

E: Buddy Smith told me that you came up with Illinois Jacquet!
C: Yeah. We used to play. Arnette Cobb too. We all lived in Houston, I played…. well, during those days it was different. To advertise, if a company put out — let’s say a new brand of soda water — well, they would advertise it by putting a band on a truck and letting the truck drive around the city. Or they would have us play at the stand where they were selling, and the music would draw people to the stand. Illinois was a drummer at that time! This was around 1939 or 1940.

E: Were there any other local musicians that blew your mind?
C: There was a band called The Birmingham Blues Blowers. This was in Houston. We listened to them quite a bit. They played many proms at the school. I remember peeping through the windows of the gymnasium when I was a little kid to watch them play. I said, “I want to do that!”
........

E: When did you join your first professional band?
C: Just out of high school. I played almost every joint in Houston, whether they had small bands or whatever. I was all over the place.

E: What was it like, being a black performer at the time of Jim Crow? Segregation, outright racism?
C: I’m going to explain it to you like this. At that time, the people – black and white - who really had the money to hire the players wanted black performers. Because they were the naturals - blacks introduced jazz to the world.

E: So it wasn’t hard for you to get gigs?
C: Man, we had almost all the gigs! I was working all I wanted to. Blacks introduced this music. If people wanted to get real jazz, they had to hire black bands.

Prof tells Allapatt about the blues in Texas, about jazz ("You see, you can’t play jazz if you can’t play the blues. Jazz has blues lines running through it. This was just something that people understood. It was a branch of music — the blues. But there could be sad blues, happy blues, work song blues. Basically jazz came from blues and gospel.") He talks about his early record-producing days; about the music he wrote; how he got into r&b. The two men talk about musicians who came up from Texas, those who had been Prof's students and had gone on to turn professional.

"I had a free run at the band."

It's a good story, how Johnson comes to Kashmere High School. "Well," he says, "the principal of Booker T. Washington, George Hanes, left and moved to Kashmere, so I went there. I had a free run at the band. George was a musician himself — a jazz drummer. He told me, 'Listen, I want everybody to know what you’re doing here. So I’m going to let you take off and do jobs with the stage band, whether it’s school hours or not.' He took a big responsibility ‘cause the teachers didn’t like that. Anyway, that’s when the band got popular."

This is not a small point. I want to underline it. Having arts in the schools depends on having real artists in the schools and letting them do their work.  

E: Do you think that the crop of students you were drawing from were inherently talented?

C: No, they didn’t have it until we worked with them. And we developed that talent. See, I didn’t lead a band that you had to take a test to join. The students would simply apply to enter the band. I’d let almost all of them in, there were very few that I turned down.

E: So many hours a day did you play with the students?

C: Well, if you include going on jobs and all that? At night I’d be with them for like 4 or 5 hours. And during the regular school day I’d be with them for like 2 or 3 hours.

E: Those kids, and the music, was – matter of fact, it is – your life.

C: That’s true.

E: You dedicated so much to your students. Did they appreciate you for this?

C: Oh yeah, before they came to me they didn’t know anything about the music!

.....

E: How much did you have to work to get your kids to play so well? Your high school students were as good as any funk band in the nation!

C: The thing about it is, they had to depend on me for interpretation and concept. But they listened. And they got it! And once they did, it was right on the money. It was there.

.....

E: A lot of band directors weren’t teaching their kids, rather they were just walking them through performances. Didn’t you take a more instructional role?

C: Exactly right. The kids didn’t know a thing about jazz. Look man, the history would be transmitted as I taught. It entered as I taught.

E: Well, you are living history.

C: I guess so…

If you invite artists into schools, you don't gauge their success by how many poems are produced, or pictures drawn, or slides looked at, or tunes listened to. Nor even by how many medals and cups are won. Artists who can make a kind of safe place where youngsters can make without self-consciousness; where they learn their craft from the inside out, in ways proper to the art's own form; where they can learn how the body feels when it makes good work: those artists are the ones wanted. Nobody on the outside really knows what happens when a poet or musician or puppeteer encounters students, when the students come alive to him, to her. They are in a place of their own, surrounded by thick imaginary walls, like encircling arms, built by the adroit artist. What they do is make things. That's it, and there's no real measure for what happens, except excellence. Any environment short of that is not a place for art.

"I gave them the music."

E: When you first started bringing the band to contests, how long did it take before you started sweeping the shows?

C: That is the question! It took about two and a half years before I really got into it. The judges just didn’t want to believe it at first. They would always make us tie or something. So I said, “OK, you want to make ties, we’ll see about that.” So I went and wrote more music, and came to find out later from one of the judges that the music I wrote was the strongest.... And for many years I was the only black band in those contests.

E: You were going up against programs with lots of money – 

C: And plenty of teachers! They had private teachers!

E: And you were destroying them. How?

C: It was the feeling of the band. I gave them the music. You see, the kids didn’t know much about music when they came there. The students I was teaching only knew the rock era. But I taught them jazz. And the way that they understood it was uncanny. We won festival after festival. I was just inducted into the Texas Bandmasters Hall of Fame. When I was at the ceremony, I saw band directors that knew me from the years that I led Kashmere. And they said, “Man, when we saw you in those competitions, we knew we were playing for second or third place.” I trained my kids to try to win the contest. Give it all you got and then don’t worry. And it worked. There would be times when the kids came to me and they wanted to fight! And I said, “No, you can’t fight ‘cause you’ll destroy your image.” Man, other kids would tell them some ugly things. Kashmere played well and the kids couldn’t beat them. I had to talk to my kids, man ‘cause these kids WOULD FIGHT!

E: And they were mean looking dudes! On the Zero Point cover? Man!

C: (Laughs) Yeah, you see all of them! Look here, they could fight. But I controlled them. And it ended up that the band directors and the students actually liked them.

"That was hope."

By the end of the 1970s, the school administration changed, and the new people began to make Conrad Johnson's school life unpleasant.

E: They basically forced you into retirement!

C: That’s right…

....

E: Look back on those years that you lead the Kashmere Stage Band. That was hope. When you look back, how do you view it as a whole?

C: Here’s the way I look at it. All of the people — this is true — all of the people who saw that band perform and heard the magnificence in their sound, and their work…  Only those people will ever know. The records are just a facsimile. Seeing and hearing that band perform was unexplainable. There was nowhere for that band to go, they’d done everything. Once the kids from Kashmere got to college, they saw that they had already one everything that college bands were doing. So they weren’t interested in going there. They would go to college, but some wouldn’t even play in the college band. And a lot of kids stopped playing music altogether once they left the high school. And I had some fine players! It upset me… 

A Secretary for the Arts?

Bill Ivey, former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities under Clinton, has been one of the "team leads" reviewing the status of NEH and the National Endowment for the Arts. He seems to be adept at blending arts administration, university foundations, and corporate "intervention" in ways meant to help arts professionals think about fostering American arts and culture. (It is not clear to me where artists live in this line-up.) Several years ago, an article about him in Backstage (no link available) noted:

Perhaps more audaciously, Ivey is also calling on corporations to think more deeply about their responsibility to society and for the nonprofit arts sector, in turn, to study examples from the commercial realm for innovative new models to consider: "When Goddard Lieberson was president of Columbia Records, he viewed a record label as a public trust: He knew it would always have a vibrant classical division even if it didn't contribute to the bottom line, because it didn't operate as a subset of a subset of a multinational corporation. Today, with boards of directors harassed by shareholders each quarter, they don't have the flexibility to take risks that produce great art." HBO, by contrasting example, "sells subscriptions and produces content that generates buzz and a perception of quality, which is how you get 'Angels in America,' certainly one of the most important TV events of the last 24 months." Should it prove unable or unwilling to study new models, the arts will be "ignoring the fact that both the nonprofit and commercial business models make it very tough to make creative decisions. Among nonprofits, it's budget constraints, the inability to grow new revenue streams. Among for-profits, it's parent companies chasing stock prices and the inability to think of artists' development over the long haul." Neither of which, he says, are healthy for our culture.

Having run a non-profit Web journal myself for ten years, I recognize the accuracy of his comment, but also its incompleteness. Of course, he said this during the Bush administration, when the head of our government was an MBA. Our new president is a writer. The musician Quincey Jones has said he would press Obama to appoint a Secretary of the Arts.

What should the Secretary of the Arts do? (Who should s/he be: an artist? An arts administrator? Someone who is both, but more like Jane Alexander than Dana Gioia, perhaps?) How to encourage and enlarge the making of art, without making it "official" art, and without watering it down, making it safe and nice? Does the stimulus package contain an Artists' Relief Act? If we are thinking more specifically about arts in the schools — and we should; arts programs are being cut right and left, as local revenues dry up like rivers in the desert — we have to figure out new ways for schools to nourish the minds and hearts of children. The arts are glorious, but they are not easy, and our national public culture is deeply philistine. 

In the matter of artists in schools, we ought to look at the best examples available to us, even while remembering that they can't, finally, be copied. To go into schools you need real artists, people like Conrad O. Johnson, who was a musician to the very ends of his nerves; who cared about the children; who knew — you have to know and belived this, without question or second thought, and you can't fake it — that his students could be the best musicians in the world. Yes, they won prizes and yes, they went to Europe and Japan; and yes, they lived, and grew in fullness. But then a new administrator cut the cords of money and enthusiasm, and Conrad Johnson retired, as he had to do, because he could not compromise his program. Whatever bureaucratic justification was given by the administrator, to whomever he had to give it, was a kind of lie. Not an intentional lie, but a lie of the bureaucracy: the kind of lie that bureaucracies tell and encourage all the time: because, however the bureaucracy justifies itself, it has nothing to do, finally, with the music, with the art, with the artist and his pupils. Whatever reasons they give you are lies, unless they can say straight out: this program gives us trouble: because that is what they really mean.

And yet: where will the money come from? And yet, if you run a school district or an arts agency, is it not better to be poor, if that is the case, and truthful?

The former director of the National Endowment for the Arts, himself a poet and businessman, must have approved the gimmicky slogan broadcast relentlessly for his agency: "A great nation deserves great art." This is not truthful, in many ways, as most advertising is not truthful, and I hope it has already gone away. Aside from the question of "great nation" — do we mean, an enormous nation? one that can define the meaning of "torture" as it likes? one that has violated international law with impunity? that swept aside all financial regulation and so, undermined the global economy? — no nation "deserves" "great art." Nobody "deserves" great art. Art, its makers, and its making, follow their own, exigent rules.

A long time ago, I was an itinerant poet in Athabaskan schools in the Alaskan interior. Then and now, I believed you always offer the best work you can to youngsters, because you are responsible to them just as much as you are responsible to your art. I saw Thunder Soul in Washington, D.C., the day before Barak Obama was inaugurated. Yes, this is a time of enormous crisis, but we in the audience found ourselves jumping to the music, and afterward, we met the director, and Craig Baldwin, who had led the reunion band, and Conrad O. Johnson, Jr., director of the foundation named for his father.

The producers, the director, Landsman, the director of photography, Sandra Chandler, and the editor, Claire Didier, plan a wide-spread release of the film early next summer. In the meantime, they are going to show it in schools and churches and town auditoria, wherever people know that things can be better if we work together. When Thunder Soul comes your way, you can welcome it, because it makes you feel good honestly, complexly, as an adult. The whole experience is a delight. The job that will follow is very, very hard. Work worth doing, with zest.

Links

Thunder Soul, the movie (watch this space for more information)

Conrad O. Johnson  

NPR story about the Kashmere Stage Band reunion 

Eothen Allapat's interview of Conrad O. Johnson (excerpts can be seen in the movie, as well) 

Conrad O. Johnson Foundation 

Kashmere H.S. Stage Band cuts

Dave Eggers's arts and schools initiative 

Texas Thunder Soul 1968-74, the cds

A History of Tomorrow: The Silent Generation Sings

My Doorstep

Welcome to my space. Come in, take off your boots, and make yourself at home: especially if you haven't got one any more. Warm yourself by my fire. It's going to be a long, cold winter. You know it and I know it. It's 7 degrees in the South Bronx this morning, as I write, but for about a quarter of an hour the rising sun comes romping westward down the street into my window, casting everything in gold, shining out the trash-strewn streets and sparse-shelved bodegas and vacant lots and abandoned baby carriages. For a moment.

Wall Street sure laid us one ginormous goose-egg. (I guess now we know what the inverse of that image on the Right looks like.) But tomorrow it'll all crack wide open. Hope you like your Humpty-Dumptys sunny-side up. I know I do. I used to take them scrambled, but now I know on which side my bread is buttered.

You're probably scrambling, hunting down that endangered species known as a job, scientific name JobIS bonUS. I feel your pain. Someone recently wrote that the Internet, as advanced as it seems, is still in the hunter-gatherer stage. Well, I've been a-huntin', and a-gatherin', and I've got laid in these weeds all kinds of Easter eggs for you to enjoy. It's better than a game of Boggle.

So how's about I tell you a story?   

_{This is going to be epic.}
But first, some epigraphs to amuse your bouche.

One other hint: hover over the hyperlinks. A hawk circles above his prey before he goes in for the kill.

Diptych: A Prologue

Left: Saturn Devouring His Sons, Peter Paul Rubens, 1636
Right: The Ancient of Days, William Blake, 1794

The Rubens, above, hangs in the Prado. If you go there, you'll see that one of the child's eyes has a gleaming dot on the iris, the precise focal point of light in the entire painting. If you look very closely, you'll see that it was painted with a dab of pure liquid silver or quicksilver. Wherever you stand in the gallery, the brightest point of light is always concentrated on the horror-stricken eye of Saturn's infant. Silverwhite light. Genius. You might be able to see it online if you follow the directions here.

1. The Biographer

Have I ever told you about my father?

He was born in 1939 in Georgetown, a small coastal town in segregated South Carolina. My grandfather owned an appliance store there during the Depression, and managed to keep it open, owned by him, until his retirement in the 1990s. When my dad applied for college in 1957, he was awarded a full scholarship to the Rensslaer Polytechnic Institute after attending the prestigious National High School Institute for Engineering at Northwestern University. He also earned a place at Yale, with an inadequately small scholarship and work-study. Tuition that year was $3,000, the same price as a new car. Far too much. Over a very solemn conversation at the kitchen table, it was decided: "Go to Yale. We'll figure out a way." My grandparents scrimped and saved and my dad worked mad hours to afford the fees. He matriculated under the quota, which wasn't eliminated until the year after he graduated. He struggled to completely destroy any hint of a southern accent in his voice, and suppress his Jewish cultural identity, in order to integrate with the WASP establishment. It was hard. The stresses were great. The cultural barriers were immense. He drank. A lot.

In his first year, he nearly failed out because his public South Carolinian education hadn't prepared him for the rigors of an Ivy League engineering program. As he advanced, he wanted to be a professor of ancient history. But he was terrible at languages; couldn't master the French, much less the Latin or Greek. So he went to law school on his dean's advice. ("What do you want to do?" "I dunno," he shrugged. "Why don't you apply to law school?") He applied to Harvard, Yale and Columbia and got in at all three. (Ahh, those were the days.) He enrolled at Yale mainly because he couldn't be bothered to move all his stuff.

That was 1961. By 1964 Kennedy was dead, the counterculture was beginning, the Draft was on, and my dad sought refuge in a one-year tax law program in order to defer it. He was an associate with a top New York City law firm for four years, met my mother, and then they moved to the Sun Belt when it looked like a Rome called New York City was being overrun by barbarians in the early 1970s.

He worked very hard, made money, sent his son – eventually – to a very fine university, lived well, drank good wines, traveled all over the world, and eventually would have the market bilk him out of a great deal of his retirement.

He doesn't talk about himself very much.

2. The Marketer

Hi there, folks! My name is Mephistopheles. That's how you would address me, at any rate. For I am in marketing – lower, perhaps, on the ladder of professional esteem than even a lawyer. A Devil, you call me. Don't worry, I take that epithet philosophically. Spending a season in Hell has its advantages. Down underground, there's nothing to do all day but hear the screams of the Damned, and endlessly barrel-roll on a spit while your flesh is scarred by black flames. Wicked good fun if you're into that.

At the lowest rung of the cycle, with your back spread-eagled for the scorching, the vast reserves of Dark Energy in the universe shoot a hotwhite light through your mind. For an instant, you'd swear you could see Lucifer plummeting, a shooting star falling from the firmament, illuminating the third Host of Heaven in headlong descent. And as the burning ember of an Archangel strikes the event horizon – it plays over and over in your mind, catastrophically, searing into your retinas like FOX News coverage of 9/11 – the disc of the world warms golden, the entire crust of the Earth is molten translucent, and from below you can see all the Earth's entities vaguely, as if through gauze bandages. If you're very, very lucky you can ride the cellphone towers up to the satellites, and jump on the radio-wave bleed-off, and speed on an electron rail right out into Space, surfing between frequencies as swiftly as you'd flick an Aquos remote. It's totally "lying in the gutter, gazing at the stars," dudes and dudettes. It's like being a celestial couch potato; only problem is that cellphone reception is lousy here, down in the bowels of Hell, and you can't call for Domino's. (I mean, even if their only deliverable items to this Hell-hole were anchovy-onion pies, I swear I'd make an effort to stumble into the Vestibule. Because if there were delivery service in Hell, you better believe they'd take plastic.)

The point I'm trying to make

is that as you're traveling further out in Space, you're traveling back in media-time, too. Things start to get real funky, like reading a blog backward to the start. But then, wouldn't you know it: just as you've deliciously anticlimaxed – for example, by discovering who killed Lilly Kane before fingering the suspects – that Damned spit-roaster flips you over again. Your face is in the fire and your hairy ass is mooning everyone in Hell. And you can't tell whether it's the sheer embarrassment, or the 33rd-degree burn on your lip, that hurts the more.

I figure you might as well make the best of a bad situation. See, from the opposite poles of the Earth, Vishnu and Shiva are having a grand old party. They're spinning that spit-roaster about 5,000 rpm, churning the molten core of the Earth and creating its magnetic field. (Consider yourselves lucky – without those Indian deities, we'd all be tv dinners, which is why every night here is a Chicken Phal night.) Every nanosecond of every day, all of us Damned bastards are spinning wildly in our graves, watching the media roll out a red carpet to the stars. Damned reruns: if I could, I'd fall down on my knees and repent! yes! just so I'd never have to see Fonzie jump the shark again. (Though Lucy in the chocolate factory cracks me up every time. I dig those fiery redheads.)    

I'll grant you, though, this torture is definitely an information technology. In my infinitely recurring nanoseconds of radiowave bliss, I've learned to fast-forward through the most recent episodes (I can catch up on Hulu later), as well as the ones I've seen a million times – and the infinite regress of syndication packages – and delve back, back into your land of men, your land of men and women too. It's tough work, getting out of the present tension; I've spent a long, long time (billions of nanoseconds, that is) merely zipping in and out of your cellphone-braced heads, surfing the foam of the Web –

These shapings of the unregenerate mind ;
Bubbles that glitter as they rise and break
On vain Philosophy's aye-babbling spring.

– and I gotta tell you, a little learning's a dangerous thing. Maybe you should study yourselves more. Well, that's why I'm here. I don't know if you've run across an Infernal Calendar lately. You might be able to find one in the disused basement of a local urban planning board, through the door marked "Beware the Leopard," and hung up on the wall behind Miss December, because Janus has two faces. (Clever, eh?) If you find it, you'll see that a season in Hell lasts about 400 years, give or take a couple runs around the solar block. And believe me, at the end of that season, Hell does indeed freeze over. You've heard the phrase "colder than a witch's tit"? Nah, that demon-mother's-milk is like a hot toddy compared to the stuff we have to deal with. It's like Chicago without Gore-tex(TM) and whiskey. So that's when I go on winter break. Now, what with the recession and all, I suppose I should have just taken a staycation, and watch endless reruns of the Dark Lord in His Infinite Puissance chomping on Brutus, Cassius and Judas Iscariot (schadenfreude never gets old in Hell) but seeing how you American folk are in a mess o'trouble, I thought I'd take advantage of Old Smokey while he's distracted with his meal, and at least try to catch the notice of The Man Upstairs by handing over a bit of Knowledge. See, God? Eventually, eating of the Apple bears fruit. But it ain't gonna be easy. It's gonna take work.             

Now, the following is a bit confidential, so please follow me into my office. And shut the door.

So, Fascinated Reader, what d'ya think of that, eh?
Unimpressed? Whaa? Okay, so I guess you folks aren't as clueless as I thought. Moving on...

3. Biography Redux

As we have said, my father is almost 70 years old: an almost exact contemporary of Senator John McCain, the final political (and, we must say, a certain social) presidential-caliber representative of his generation, by which we term The Silent Generation.

What are the characteristics of The Silent Generation?
They were born during the Depression years, and were commanded to silence their emotions, and work very hard, as the second wave of the 20th-century calamities descended. They were too young to fight in World War II, but were imbued at an early age with heroics being transmitted by radio, newsreel and comic books. Afterward, they were additionally burdened by both the sacrifices that their "elder brothers" endured, and their knowledge that they had lost the opportunity to claim their own heroism. (I personally suspect that is why we had a desire to fight the Korean War without a serious draft. A certain segment of the American population retained that desire for heroism and volunteered.) This generation grew up during the 1950s, an age of belief in American know-how, stick-to-it-iveness, nose-to-the-grindstone, repressing-emotional-intrusions, a religious belief in the chain of command (the integration of World War II military values into civilian life), a belief in the rightness of the country's decision-making process, conformity to all of the above, and a desire – and a belief in their ordained ability – to shape the world via the collective efforts produced by the American machine. The previous generation, the Greatest Generation – the greatest generation?! – ever? – into eternity? – had destroyed global tyranny (well, half-destroyed it, at any rate, which is why Truman got the boot). This Silent Generation, repressed in its ability to voice its (boiling, rageful) frustration with the hardships caused by the Lost Generation – which had everything and lost it – in addition to the constant pressure and paranoia of a Soviet A-bomb attack – keep your head down, children, and don't look at the light – which had to have loomed larger than a nightmare bogeyman – as well as the additional burdens of being oppressed by an Eisenhower leadership of heroic character (with all its faults), was then inspired to control, subdue, and conquer the natural environment itself.

It was the only way they could kill their fathers. In the Freudian sense, I mean.

And the Nazis. Who killed their fathers, even if they returned home alive. The Nazis killed them by stopping them from speaking the unspeakable things. Death-in-life and life-in-death, as Yeats might say. The fathers and the Nazis together who stood like twin colossi erected on a plain, one white one black, atop the buried acorns of their lives.

To be human and alive is to be able to communicate, and the cone of silence swallowed two generations.

The interstate system, the oil industry, plastics, the car, the Moon Shot – gaining personal freedom via technology and consumer goods – was the only way to speak, enunciate freedom, and compete against the Soviet Union directly, when direct military confrontation would have meant world holocaust.

It's okay. Gravity makes a rainbow, you know. Just ask Werner von Braun.

As I recall, our communications technology is pretty good.
Dot. Dot. Dot.

Zwwee-ch-chzzewshhhcgrhrhwwheeeHeeey, all you groovy cats, this is DJ Mephistopheles comin’ to you DEAD, DEAD DEADER THAN DEAD over this wicked pirated Evangelical frequency at 66.6 FM on your digital dial, because we’re all Manichaeists in the underworld. All talk radio for the pleasure of your outrage, only at K-Triple-X. What’s that K stand for? Fucked if I know. The Klan? No way, dudes and dudettes, they are so lame-o these days, they are so, like, waaaay last century that we stuck them in some stupid pits, they can’t make it up to this broadcast level of Hell. And they have these tinny microphones that only catch really narrow wavelengths. See, here on K-Triple-X, we go real deep, I mean plunging those vibes into the Earth to make it shake its booty. Where they can't follow. (You know white men can’t dance.) And we don’t let them use our gear. I mean, seriously, dudes and dudettes, I’m DJ Mephistopheles, He From Whom All Light Hath Been Stripped, and all I have to say to the KKK is – turnabout is fair play, bitches.

Sooo, what’s the story, Morning Glory? I’ve got your GPS right here, baby, I can see where you’re coming from, but do you know where you're @?

EDDY

Do you know where you are?

You’re in the Labyrinth, sweet child o'mine, and oh it’s got plasma flatscreen walls. So pretty, child. I’ll  have you so delightfully entertained while you fatten up on polyunsaturated fats, you'll never know when the Minotaur bears down on you. Oh. Oops. He's here already. When you're up to your neck in the shit of the bull market, you've just got to laugh: an expletive suddenly gains crystal-clear definition via the SPIRALnumbers on your balance sheet.

It's funny, you know: the last time a snowball had a chance in Hell, I was out here on contract, helping out some arrogant prick – a doctor, as I recall – what was his name? (it's so difficult to remember these things after a marathon of "Keeping Up With the Kardashians.") Ohh, yeah: FAUSTUS, that was him! If ever there was a physic in need of some serious medicine...like electroshock therapy – I kept warning him, "You'll have Hell to pay for this..." and he kept reading that like, "Oh goodie – Satan himself is comp'ing me!" What a WHIRLdunce. And he thought he was sooooo smart. Heh. He thought he was bored with his studies, but really, when it came down to it, he just couldn't be arsed to apply himself.

So Herr Doktor works his arcane magic, not unlike our financial wizards and their "exotic instruments," POOLconjuring effervescent, evanescent moneys from the cold wastes of Cyberia, where all but the brainbrawniest fear to tread, for the cryptic maps are written in invisible ink. And oh, organizing world trade's his oyster, too –

How am I glutted with conceit of this!
Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please...
I'll have them fly to India for gold,
Ransack the ocean for orient pearl,
And search all corners of the new-found world
For pleasant fruits and princely delicates...

Man! When are you FALLINGgonna learn? After I fired that mountebank, I instantly materialized in front of my friend Kit to tell him all about it. And he told it to all of you. But then he got a shiv in the ocular – I guess everyone's got to pay for their Knowledge – in the Ivy it's going for 200 large – and now nobody reads Marlowe any more. Okay, I'll sling you some lines from a more familiar face:

O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
My tables,--meet it is I set it down,
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain;
At least I'm sure it may be so in Denmark:WOMAN

Yeah, we're all shot to Hell, dudes and dudettes, and I'm not out of it either. But it's gonna be okay. I promise. I hear the Greeks and FALLENRomans declaiming out in the Forum of the Vestibule, and one of them insists that Dante wrote at least one other book. Of course, no one around here picks it up – not that we don't have it; both Blake and Borges rifled through our stacks, and found they're at least as good as Amazon's – it's just that everyone here's so godDamned solipsistic, always wanting to read about Themselves. I once mustered enough energy to get out the Door, but all I saw was this Dark Wood, and I was afraid. I heard the water-nymphs and dryads whispering on the DOWNwind about the existence of a third book, but they're just mythological creatures, not even gods, and I didn't trust them. Besides – the end of Battlestar Galactica was just beginning. So I had to get back to my sofa. Hey, it's an Eternal struggle. Forget about the Fifth Cylon; who do you think is hotter, Kara Thrace, Boomer, Athena, or Six? I dunno. it's an even race down to The Wire, but I have a feeling Kara's my kind of crazy.

Anyhow, that's the end of my Hellacious program. Next up, we've got DJ Ba'al, ballin' the Jack in a Battle of the Bands between Slayer and Megadeth. Stay tuned...shhhhhweeeeiiighcgchhhhhEEEEEEEE

THIS
IS A TEST
OF THE EMERGENCY BROADCAST SIGNAL
IF THIS WERE AN ACTUAL EMERGENCY
YOU WOULD NOT HAVE HEARD THE SIGNAL

London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling

down
my fair
lady


Right.

We must set our lands
in order.

I will reduce you
to order.

5. The Dream of @

 

 

I will expand you into order.

6. @Home

– @, is that you?
– Yes, I'm back, ED.
– What time is it?
– Late. Late. Too late.
– You didn't call, you didn't email, you didn't IM... What the Hell is the matter with you?
– I'm sorry, ED, I'm really sorry. I just...needed some time to think things through.
– Think? What the Hell do you mean? What are you trying to say?
– Nothing, ED, really. I just had to be in my own space for a while.
– I had the most horrible dream while you were gone. Frightening forebodings. I was so sure you weren't ever coming back.
– Whatever do you mean?
– Oh, god. I've never felt you so distant. It's like you were a million miles away. You said something about having to deal with some stupid bullshit, and then I don't hear from you for three whole days! Once I thought I heard your voice. It was disembodied, like it was coming from a completely different universe. The thread that connected us, I could feel it fray, then break -- I felt it in my bones.
– No, ED, no. None of that could ever happen. You're the most beautiful woman I've ever known. And the way your mind works -- the way you react to my touch -- so supple, so fluid, such Classical forms, such Romantic organic depths, oh you have worlds within worlds within your body. We were made for each other. You're mine. And I am yours.
– Hmmpf. Well, will you at least tell me, from now on, when you're going to be home?
– EDDY, sometimes I don't know. I catch ill-fated winds, I get caught in whirlpools, I find myself among strange people and have to puzzle my way out of their homes. And sometimes I have to fight monsters, and I can't leave until they're dead. But I would never, ever miss your birthday. I mean, have you seen the present I made for you?
– What?
– Turn on the light.
– Oh.
– See? All of this -- it's all for you. So that whenever I'm away, you'll know that I'm always @Home with you. Have you looked over there?
– This box?
– Open it.
   ____________
– [                       ]
– My god, that's ugly.
– No, that's not the real ring, it's symbolic.
– Of what?
– The wood in that ring? That's oak. The very same oak that grew into the posts of our bed, the living tree that grows from the earth itself. I had to topple two enormous statues that were covering the acorns, so they could grow into our bed. You gave me that strength.
                                                                                        So what was this dream you had?
– Oh my god. It seems so silly now. There was this crazed midget running around trying to fuck me. Somehow I grew fat and stupid and you and all your friends rejected me. I was catastrophic, I didn't know who I was, I whored myself out and circled round the drain and fell into space and out of Hell and through language itself until I smacked down on the lap of this really annoying guy who just kept talking bullshit.
– So did you fuck him?
– Who?
– The midget.
– Oh, Hell no! Though I got him pretty steamed up. He started Nausicaaing me while I was in the bath. Heh. He was in marketing so I knew exactly what to do. Five bars of a shampoo commercial and he was PreEjaying into his hairy knuckle-dragging palms.
– HA! What a loser.
– But there was this other guy, now he wasn't so bad. Tall, well-spoken, kinky. I think he was one of your readers.
– What happened with him?
– Oh, he basically told me to fuck off because I was fat and stupid. But you should have seen his face when I stepped out of the bath. I was Aphrodite rising from the sea-foam, for all he cared. I told him to lick my fuck-me boots.
– You did not.
– Did too.
– And did he?
– I told him to lick my souls.
– And did he?
                    Did he?
                                You're such a big faker. Listen...
I've got something really important to tell you.
– What?
– Something wonderful.
–What?
– I think we're on for a real Renaissance.
– Things are real bad out there, @.
– I know. And I know Obama's going to screw up some things. I mean, he's going to have to orchestrate the three circles of Federal power like the Ringling Brothers. He'll have to juggle catastrophes like live chainsaws. He'll have to catch supervillains in the Web quicker than Spider-Man. But he's got all of us on his side. And we're powerful. We have skills.
– To pay the bills?
– Well, that's the only catch. I still need to find a J.O.B. If there's anyone you know who's hiring, please, send my stuff along.
– I don't think you'll have any problem.
– You don't?
– Not any more.
– Well, I guess we'll see. But I guess the point that I was trying to make, they entire point of today's craziness, is that -- it's so perfectly obvious to me -- the human creative potential has never been so great. And with the human networks we're creating, we can all be painters, musicians, writers, DJs, filmmakers, composers, compositors, animators, information architects, poets -- and yes, marketers of all these things too, um, I suppose -- we do live in the Matrix, and yeah, we can unplug if we really want, but we can also figure out styles of kung-fu that the Old Masters never dreamt of. We need to stop thinking within the Barzunian entropic Matrix of "dawn to decadence," and challenge ourselves to beat those who -- heh -- thought they had it going on, centuries ago. The Internet is ten times Blake's vision of Heaven before Urizen glowered guiltily, separated himself, and fell into the corporeal universe to become Jehovah/Satan. Except for the sex. (We should all be able to sun ourselves naked in the backyard.)
– Well, thank you for that soapbox, Mister Information Secretary@Home.
– Really, I needed to say it. We're so caught up in the present nanosecond that we've forgotten: the Internet is the most complicated thing ever created by human beings. The people who built the Space Shuttle might take issue with that, but the Internet: we built it all together. The military men and the organization men of the Silent Generation, the hippies and surfers in California who turned cyberculturists, and all of you.
– You who?
– Sorry, I lost a packet there. Did you say Yahoo!?
– No, of course not!
– Good, because they're crap.
– No, no, everyone knows they're crap. I said "You who?"
– That's some pretty decent chocolate milk, right?
– Aiyeeee!! I mean "Who the hell are you talking to??"
– Ohh. You. <tok tok> On the other side of this window.
– Don't even get me started talking about Windows.
– Wasn't intending to. Hello, all of you on the other side of the window. I know you're all looking in. I can't seem to draw the blinds any tighter. But there it is. You lookin' at me? --I said, are you lookin' at me, cyberpunk? High-five. Not too hard. 'Specially if you've got a touch-screen.
– Yes, @ is right on this one, you'd better listen to him, children. Touch-screens are very sensitive.
– Yo, cyberpunks. I've seen such amazing stuff out there recently. I couldn't believe what was out there, when I first tried to come home from the War, and got blown off course in a hail of tangents. Completely ingenious art --
– Like what?
– It's too late at night for that discussion. Can we talk about it more in the coming weeks?
– Sure. What else have you seen?
– I've seen these awesome webapps that basically allow you to run an entire business from a single laptop -- billing and finance, creative ideas, virtual conference rooms, it's going to be a total revolution in the way we work.
~~ Say what? 
– Who the hell are you? What are you doing in my house? How'd you get in here?
~~ I'm a Fascinated Reader. I couldn't help overhearing...
– You are nothing like I imagined you. No-thing. Wow, what a Jilloff-worthy-fantasy killer you are!
~~ I demand to know which Webapps you're talking about!
– WAAAAAA!
– See! Look what you did. You woke up the baby.
– Look, I don't know who you are or where you came from but you're getting out of our house right now. Here's two tickets to the Theatre. Learn what you can there. Show starts in about two seconds so you better move.
– WAAAAAA!
– Look, honey, can you take care of baby Ampersand? I'm exhausted from my travels, and I still need to email my dad tonight. It's his 70th birthday really soon, and I need to tell him some things.
– Sure. I'll be nursing &. Come to bed when you're done.

Dear Dad,

I'm sorry. I understand things a lot better now. I understand why you have trouble talking. But you gave me the chance to say things. You gave me the tools to say the things I have to say. It's the dense network and the tight structure and the wiry line that contains, that directs the path of the generative Chaos. You gave us this world, this space here, where I met my future wife. I would never have met her – ever – if you hadn't given us the method and the medium. Thank you. Happy 70th birthday. And you can have your cake and eat it too, because it's going to be a whole new world tomorrow. A better one, where people can talk to one another, and not be so angry all the time. We're going to build it. We're really going to build it. Because we can all be Spider-Men on this Web. Thank you.

Love,
@Home

P.S. Always remember:

May the road rise with you.

<send>

– You in here, ED?
– Yes. Come see your baby daughter.
– Hello, ED and &. You know, it's amazing how much she knows at just two-and-a-half months old.
– She's got a real sense of place, just like her father.
– EDDY, I was thinking. We haven't really given her a full name yet.
– Well, it needs to be grand. She was born at an epic time.
– We should combine our surnames.
– Really, @? I never liked being called EDDY Mañana. Every time anyone said my name, it was like invoking Zeno's Paradox.
– Well, being born @Ahora wasn't great shakes either. I think the name gave me myopia from the cradle. I was never able to see too far down the road.
– So let's think. &... &...
– Dot.
– Dot?
– My grandmother's name.
– I like it. Say it again.
– Dot.
– Third time's the charm. &... . That's it. We got it.
– Wait a sec. Look at what's there. We've got to sound it out. Ampersand -- I'm so glad we chose that name, I mean if we'd been high or hanging out with the Yahoos too much we might have wound up with something like "Colon." Eeurgh. So: Ampersand Ellipsis. That's beautiful. But it sounds...I dunno...somehow incomplete. Like she'll always be waiting for something.
– Well, we'll put a period on it, then.
– No. You've got to be kidding, ED! Either it'll sound like she's on the menses straight out of the womb, or -- in England they call it a "full-stop," and that just sounds too much like "he do the police in punctuated voices."
– Okay, what then?
– I guess that's the question everybody's asking right now.
– Eureka!
– What is it?
– Of course! Of course! The strongest, the greatest integrity, fitting with all the principles: that's it that's it that's it!
– My god, what are you talking about?
– I'll tell you later. Here. Let me write the formula out for you. This is good mother's milk.

– &...∆ Ahora y Mañana.

– That sounds just about right. I like that. Whew. So we accomplished something today, at least, even though nobody's getting paid for it. Let's go to sleep.
– Yes. I'm very sleepy all of a sudden. But -- why are you getting into bed like that?
– You mean, all reverse-y, with my feet at your head?
– Dude, they stink! You've been walking around in damp socks all day.
– Look, I could say the same thing about your feet. It looks like you've gone to hell and back in those togs. But something about it just feels right. And besides, I can do............this!
– Ooh.

@ fell asleep then, on the words of Factor Sleepwell, drifting toward the seas, sailing past Raggedy-Ann and Andy, the Boy Bedlam, and the Cheshire cat that flies, like bluebirds, over the rainbows. Then he was hunting dinosaurs with a ray-gun, but instead of "PEW! PEW!" the gun said, in this weird yokely voice, "A rising tide lifts all boats." He groped his way through the underbrush to Constitution Hall where he was invited to take up a quill pen. And he wrote, "If we don't hang together, we'll all hang separately." And then he dreamt:

This.

So how about it, Daddy WarBucks?

In memory of Bryan M. Schneider, who knew a thing or two about spies and dragon-slaying.

&...∆

HBD

Molly Bloom me

KILLROY WUZ HEER

Critical Digressions: Thanksgiving, Drama, or Turkey and Capote

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

We celebrated Thanksgiving with traditional fervor and gaiety in the American capital. Being an expatriate, we have coveted invitations to native Thanksgiving dinners in years past but recently have been able to manage something on our own; Turkey, drunkenness, familial tension. It really is a wonderful sort of holiday as we all thank our Gods or each other for being where we are, kind of like that song that goes, "It's not where you're from/ It's where you're at."

Thanksgiving produces great drama: there's drama in the way the turkey is pulled out from the oven, arrives on the table, and in the way the knife is held in abeyance over the large bird, typically with the largest hands of a particular clan. And the inevitably drunk patriarch may rise up after the meal, bang his belly against the edge of table, and make slurred pronouncements causing bottles to fall, faces to redden. Some run out to sniffle or smoke. Others, in attempting to steady the old man, take elbows in the jaw. You get the picture.

Through this weekend, we watched several movies including "Capote" - all critically feted, none dramatic. Capote, the New York Review of Books notes, "might have been about anything...a bittersweet coming-of-age story with a triumphantly happy ending...[or of the] genre of celebrity decline" but it is instead the "story of how Capote came to write and publish In Cold Blood." And strangely, we were underwhelmed (and find ourselves not only in the minority but in the company of the cantankerous octogenarian, Stanley Kauffmann). The problem is that a writer writing about something, anything, is not dramatic - even a flamboyant, voluble writer writing about a couple of grisly murders.

So how does a director, even one as able as Bennett Miller, depict a series of writerly crises on screen? Facial twitches? No. Falling bottles? Perhaps. Facial twitches and falling bottles? More likely. It is, to be fair, a tall order. Bottles do fall and knives are held in abeyance in films that feature writers including "Barfly" and "Misery" but neither is attempting to transcribe a writer's inner life. In fact, the only comparable project that comes to mind is the Coen Brothers’ "Barton Fink", another pretty, flat film. Joel may tell you that drama was not his ambition but acknowledging the lack of drama doesn't make it okay.

Dellilo, for instance, has attempted the lack of drama as an aesthetic project. The following is characteristic the prose in Cosmopolis, a pretty, flat, generally poorly reviewed novel: “He didn’t know what he wanted. Then he knew. He wanted to get a haircut.” Not only is there no drama in the narrative trajectory of the book - man gets haircut – but there’s no drama syntactically; read together, the effect of the sentences is of briskness and there is no drama in sustained briskness.

On the other hand, there is more drama in Updike’s prose (even though Updike is not known to be a great dramatist): “With an effort of spatial imagination he perceived that a mirror does not reverse our motion, though it does transpose our ears, and gives our mouth a tweak, so that the face even of a loved one looks familiar and ugly when seen in a mirror, the way she – queer thought! – always sees it. He saw that a mirror poised in its midst would not affect the motion of an army…and often half a reflected cloud matched the half of another beyond the building’s edge, moving as one, pierced by a jet trail as though by Cupid’s arrow.” You will, of course, notice that the rich, sonorous cadence of the coupled sentences is broken by the short, comma-less, next sentence: “The disaster sat light on the city’s heart.” This is drama.

So if you’ve had enough drama this weekend, lie on the couch, arms dangling, reading Cosmopolis, watching Capote. On the other hand, if your old man didn’t get up, drop things and yell at everybody, pick up Franzen’s Corrections - a dramatic book that ends with Thanksgiving dinner - and watch the Oscar nominated "Affliction" - a character study in a bleak setting that beats "Capote" hands down. For more pointers, pontification, and of course, dramatic digressions, ladies and gentlemen, remain tuned. Right here.

Other Critical Digressions:
Gangbanging and Notions of the Self
Dispatch from Cambridge (or Notes on Deconstructing Chicken)
Literary Pugilists, Underground Men
The Naipaulian Imperative and the Phenomenon of the Post-National
Dispatch from Karachi
The Media Generation and Nazia Hassan

A Filmmaker Expands on Our Shrinking World

From The Washington Post:

Most filmgoers may not know the name Jem Cohen, but many of them have probably seen his work without knowing it. For more than 20 years, the New York-based filmmaker has been an observant vagabond, turning his camera on the American and global landscape to create poetic reflections on the most alienated aspects of the contemporary human experience. His most highly regarded work has been shown in world-class museums; in fact, one of those installations, "Lost Book Found," featured a sequence starring an errant plastic bag that would be quoted a few years later in the Oscar-winning film "American Beauty." In Cohen's newest film, "Chain," which will be shown tonight at the Hirshhorn Museum, the worlds he has traveled in for the past two decades seem finally to have meshed and merged, in a film that blurs the lines between fiction and documentary, personal essay and political polemic, formal rigor and punk rock spontaneity. The film stars the Japanese actress Miho Nikaido ("Tokyo Decadence," "Flirt") as a Japanese executive and Mira Billotte, of the District-based band Quix*o*tic, as an itinerant worker and squatter. Despite their different stations in life, they're both adrift in a generic, nameless landscape. As in his previous films, Cohen invokes the critic and dedicated wanderer Walter Benjamin in "Chain," but he also acknowledges Barbara Ehrenreich's book "Nickel and Dimed."

The result is a haunting portrait of two women who embody the alienation, abandonment and grudging optimism of the 21st-century economy.

More here.

The Detached Cool of Andy Warhol

From The Village Voice:

May 6, 1965
Andy Warhol makes movies with the same unruffled objectivity that he looks at life. His usual procedure is to set up the action—often a group of people interacting—point the camera at them, turn it on, and step back. The camera makes the movie: whatever happens, planned or not, is the film. Sometimes in the studio (which he refers to as "the factory") there will be interruptions: telephone calls, people going up or down in the elevator, somebody dropping something or walking inadvertently in front of the camera. All is recorded. No trace of surprise or annoyance registers on Warhol's face. He is totally cool or very uptight, depending on your point of view. The latter school says: "Andy's been trained in Madison Avenue. He's like a high-powered executive who doesn't show his feelings, but he's seething inside." Personally, I think it the height of coolness to regard everything with a detached eye and rely on intuition to make instant decisions. Warhol's intuition is usually correct.

More here.

Cinema Veritas: Harvard's unique film program shines anew

From Harvard Magazine:

The history, theory, and analysis of films as cultural and aesthetic “texts” became a legitimate academic field in the late 1960s, leading to a 1970s boom in cinema-studies programs across America — but not at Harvard. Although the College ventured into film studies through a General Education course and subsequent courses at the Carpenter Center, there was no degree program. In the film-studies program, students learn how to “read” films as complex historical and aesthetic artifacts. D.W. Griffith’s Civil War epic, The Birth of a Nation (1915), might be analyzed as a cinematic masterpiece of framing, continuity editing, mise en scène, and narrative structure, as well as a palimpsest of U.S. racial history: its positive depiction of the KKK was highly controversial but didn’t extinguish its popularity. Students examine national cinemas, film theory, and special topics such as film and philosophy, or the human body, or architecture.

More here.

Bees Battle "Hornets From Hell"

From National Geographic:

A small but highly efficient killing machine lurks in the mountains of Japan—the Japanese giant hornet. The voracious predator pumps out a dose of venom with an enzyme so strong it can dissolve human tissue. Just a handful of these hornets can kill 30,000 European honeybees within hours. Watch an attack of giant hornets on a beehive, and learn the surprising secret that Japanese honeybees use in their defense. (Picture from Wikipedia).

Watch this stunning video here.

Working for the Arts and Women’s Rights

From Jazbah:

Independent filmmaker, Sabiha Sumar, has earned much acclaim for her films which deal with political and social issues such as the effects of religious fundamentalism on society and especially on women. Sabiha’s documentary ‘For a Place Under the Heavens’ features conversations with women from varying backgrounds. The film steps us through Pakistan’s short history and how each government has contributed to the rise of fundamentalism. Though we hear a lot about women’s oppression, the image of four professional, confident and independent women discussing Pakistani politics and religion conveys an important message: Pakistani women are not all passive and silent. One telling moment is the film is when Sabiha talks to Mufti Nizamuddin who is well respected as a Islamic scholar. He asserts that it is the fault of women that they have been left behind and that they have not demanded their rights, “Islam does not stop women from moving forward. They can come forward and take charge.” When asked if men in Pakistan will be willing to give up power if women were to demand it, he responds, “It would take a revolution. No one relinquishes power easily.”

More here.

March of the Conservatives: Penguin Film as Political Fodder

From The New York Times:

The movie is "March of the Penguins," and of all the reactions it has evoked, perhaps the most surprising is its appeal to conservatives. They are hardly its only audience; the film is the second highest grossing documentary of all time, behind "Fahrenheit 9/11." But conservative groups have turned its stirring depiction of the mating ordeals of emperor penguins into an unexpected battle anthem in the culture wars.

"March of the Penguins," the conservative film critic and radio host Michael Medved said in an interview, is "the motion picture this summer that most passionately affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and child rearing." Speaking of audiences who feel that movies ignore or belittle such themes, he added: "This is the first movie they've enjoyed since 'The Passion of the Christ.' This is 'The 'Passion of the Penguins.' "

More here.

F. Scott Fitzgerald Gets a Second Act After All

From The New York Times:

IT'S one of those fantasies, I think, that Fitzgerald is a glamorous and romantic figure," said the author and film historian David Thomson, speaking of the Jazz Age legend F. Scott Fitzgerald. "Not that I think in real life he was, but his life has come down to us that way. And Hollywood therefore feels that he ought to be graspable." Like an unrequited love, the surprisingly ungraspable dream of translating Fitzgerald's doomed romanticism to the big screen has gotten under moviedom's skin yet again.

More here.

Animated documentary

From Haaretz:

"When you first come across it, the concept of "animated documentary" sounds strange, almost an oxymoron. After all, the purpose of a documentary is to capture a fragment of reality and to do so in a way that is as faithful as possible to that reality...

But there has been a surge in the making of documentaries in recent years and a growing realization that a documentary does not capture an objective truth, but rather the way that reality is reflected in the eyes of the director. Decisions such as what to film and what not to film, what angles to employ, how to edit the material and what soundtrack to use affect the portrait of reality presented in the finished film. The successful "Fahrenheit 9/11," for example, does not offer an objective description of what happened after the terror attacks in the United States; it shows the way in which the director Michael Moore sees things.

If so, then it is possible that animated documentary is not such a wild idea after all. And, indeed, lately there have been an increasing number of films in this genre around the world; animation and documentary film festivals have special categories for it, and even the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which awards the Oscars, has stipulated in its regulations that an animated documentary can compete in the documentary film category."

More Here

Critical Digressions: Dispatch from Karachi

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

We have touched down in Karachi and are reacquainting ourselves with the city through rituals that we religiously repeat every six months: in the afternoon, we get into our ‘97 Corolla, turn up the AC, turn on FM 89 (that plays Duran Duran's "Wild Boys" and "Taste of Summer" back to back with Nazia Hassan and our new generations of rockers, Noori, EP and Jal), pick up a copy of the Friday Times from our man at PIDC (who asks us how we've been and inquires about the political climate in the US), drop our dry-cleaning at the Pearl, get a shave and olive oil massage at Clippers (where we are informed of the reflexology treatment that they have recently introduced), get a beer for the road at the Korean restaurant (which nestles between our legs), and then by the evening, meander through Saddar, passed paan-wallahs, underwear-wallahs, open-air gyms, tea houses, Empress Market, the Karachi Goan Association building, to get a shirt altered, buy some DVDs (Carlito’s Way, Aurat Raj and Disco Dancer), and have fresh falsa juice as the sun warms our back and the sea breeze wafts through the city, portending the monsoon. On Thursday nights we will attend qawwalis at moonlit tombs of saints, on Friday nights we will attend the rollicking Fez disco at the Sind Club, on Saturdays, head to Burns Road for a plate of killer nihari (a hot, soupy dish prepared with calves' calves), and on Sunday, chat with old friends over Famous Grouse and Dunhills about the way things are and will be. Here, we are ourselves and we are alive.

William Dalrymple, however, an insightful commentator on India, writes, "Karachi is the saddest of cities...a South Asian Beirut." The analogy, of course, is incorrect. Looking at a map of Karachi he writes, "The pink zone in the east is dominated by the Karachi drug mafia; the red zone to the west indicates the area noted for the sophistication of its kidnapping and extortion rackets; the green zone to the south is the preserve of those specializing in sectarian violence." Ladies and gentlemen, we have lived in Karachi and can tell you with great certainty that this take on Karachi is facile. It is as if we were passing through New York in the early '90s and were to comment: New York is today’s Sodom. Down Atlantic Avenue, across Brooklyn, in areas such as Bedford-Stuyvesant, Bushwick, and Brownsville, gang warfare and the crack epidemic have transformed traditionally middle-class cantons into a no-man’s land. Bullet holes and crushed needles mark and mar desolate facades and streets. But urban decay is not simply a peripheral phenomenon. In Manhattan, whether north or south, Harlem and Manhattan Alley or Hell’s Kitchen and the Bowery, ethnic warfare plays out on the streets: Blacks, Hispanics, Irishmen, Italians, Chinese pitted against each other, daggers drawn.

Dalrymple has written a number of brilliant books on India (and lives there) but neither his view on Karachi nor ours of New York is complete and consequently, is inaccurate. There is more to New York than bullets and needles. But Karachi gets short shrift: outside observers are able to reduce Karachi to a few facts and artifacts. Since we don’t control our own discourse, others are able define, in fact, redefine the city, see what they want to see. Take Tim McGirk’s ludicrous article in Time in which he perceived Karachi through the eyes of a “hit-man.” That’s like perceiving Los Angeles through the eyes of a 7th Street Crip! This variety of analysis is not only poor but wrong. Karachi’s murder rate, in fact, is at par with Delhi’s (and DC's). And in Bombay, mobsters not only run the movie industry but become politicians and politicians stir murder and champion rape! Of course, Bombay is not merely the sum of squalid facts. Neither are other megacities like Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Lagos and Jakarta (even Lahore), although they share many similar problems.

The problem with reportage is not simply one of dominant discourse but of the news infrastructure in this part of the world. Unlike other cities, Karachi (and indeed all of Pakistan), is typically covered from another country: the South Asian bureaus of major newspapers are based in Delhi. Naturally, then, the worldview of reporters like Barry Bearak, Celia Dugger, David Rhode and Amy Waldman (all of whom, incidentally, can't hold a candle to the knoweldgeable Dalrymple) are colored by local prejudice. On the other hand, former US Consul General John Bauman, an insider – somebody who has lived in Karachi for many years, not just passing through on a ten day junket – says “there are so many good things being done in this city. The city is a lot more complex than the single image people get in the United States.”

Take our word for it: Karachi is wonderfully vibrant. There are dimensions of Karachi not often appreciated by outside observers (foreign reporters and disgruntled expatriates alike): Karachi's vibrant cultural life comprises open-air pop concerts, classical dance shows, art exhibits, independent film festivals and coffee houses; there is great dining, street-side or indoors, and a throbbing nightlife. Karachi is very similar to New York; the same frenetic rhythms beat under our feet.

Mind trips and psychotic inventions at annual Asian series

From The Village Voice:

Count our blessings. No sooner does the screaming summer-movie emptiness begin to envelop the city than Subway Cinema's annual fest of new East Asian pop cinema uncorks a refreshing cataract of psychotic invention, genre excess, and meditative derangement—often in the shape of movies that have no chance of distribution or a slot in a tonier local venue. Who knows what chances the fresh Seijun Suzuki film has under any other auspices—Princess Raccoon is a self-mocking operetta whose song styles range from Nippon-ized Jacques Brel-ishness to '70s album rock, set on deep-dish-Dada ballet sets that are regularly subsumed by digital mythopoeia and headlong design nuttiness. Some kind of Snow White fable with Kabuki accents—let's not care about content, because Suzuki doesn't—it's a movie unlike any other ever made by an octogenarian. With its 2-D stiffness and trite songmaking, it's not Pistol Opera, and yet any ambivalence about Princess Raccoon's "success" has to be reckoned against Suzuki's insurrectionary resilience and his nearly half a century of movies that, though nattering on about assassins or prostitutes or princesses, speak in their own unique visual tongue.

More here.

Chianti & History

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

Come summer, we escape Cambridge for points East and despite our poverty, find ourselves in Italy. Here, we do as the Romans do: during the day, we sprawl at piazzas in the shadows of mighty edifices, and at night, prowl the streets, like the progeny of the wolf-suckled. And soon, we will meander through the undulating gold and olive hued Tuscan countryside, drunk on fresh warm Chianti from roadside enotecas, and on the periphery of Montepulciano, will find our kinsman's villa where we will drink more, eat more and revel for a fortnight. Then we will head further east on a cheap ticket that includes a long layover in Amman, before arriving at our final destination, Karachi.

Sipping wine in the shadow of the edifice of history, we have mused that the next leg of the journey, from Italy to Jordan, recalls another made a millennium ago by the Franks of Italy who swept south circa 1097. Let by Peter the Hermit and Walter the Penniless, David Koresh-like figures, the First Crusade began with an attack on the Jewish communities across the Italian coast and ended at the gates of Nicaea where they were wiped out by the young Turkoman leader Arslan. Subsequently, one Bohemond of southern Italy, along with a French contingent comprising Raymond St. Gilles and the Brothers Bouillon, led another effort that succeeded in taking Jerusalem. Carnage followed the fall of the city: Muslims, Jews and Christians alike were slaughtered.  Soon, a tenuous Frankish empire comprising the principalities if Jerusalem, Antioch, Edessa, and Tripoli was established, one that relied on the Genoa and Venice for naval support.

The attack stirred a period of introspection amongst the disparate Muslim nations of the region: the Fatamids of Egypt, the Seljuk Abbasids in Baghdad and the Turkomans of "Rum." Ultimately, because of the attacks, the Muslims were able to summon a coherent response: Salahuddin. Salahuddin expelled the Crusaders circa 1290. There were other Crusades, the most unfortunate being  what has come to be known as the Children's Crusade (when bands of children were sold into prostitution before they left the continent.)

Although we don't like reading too much into history, today, when the horrid specter of jihad looms, the Crusades seem strangely relevant. Moreover, the quest for Jerusalem seems to be a powerful historical dynamic. Of course, the Crusades summon different memories for different peoples. Here in Italy, the Crusaders are lionized while in the Middle East they are remembered as the defeated. Of course, history like literature, is simply an exercise in perspective.

Ridley Scott's perspective on the Crusades makes for a mildly interesting spectacle (although Orland Bloom is an unfortunate casting decision). Amin Malouf's the Crusades Through Arab Eyes is a novel variety of historiography. P.M. Holt's unembellished version appeals to our sensibilities. It is, of course, the ascendant civilization that canonizes collective memory and defines discourse.

We remember things differently and different times (and like to think of different things altogether) but then we've had too much to drink. And we believe, "It's not where you're from/ It's where you're at."

Love and Crime in India

From The New York Times:

In Bollywood extravaganzas, which abide by very different cinematic rules than Hollywood's, spectacle is the rule of thumb: characters can break into song and dance at any moment, garish sentimentality is ubiquitous, and an under-three-hour running time is practically unheard of. With "Bunty aur Babli," the latest Bollywood musical import, the director Shaad Ali Sahgal tries to take all excesses to the extreme and, for the most part, succeeds. A considerable improvement over his trivial 2002 debut, "Saathiya," this vibrant, rollicking and often absurd film is first-rate mindless entertainment. 

As Parath Singh, the gruff, chain-smoking police inspector on the outlaws' trail, Amitabh Bachchan, the veteran megastar of more than 150 films, has a blast in a role that begins as a glorified cameo but develops into something more significant: the controller of Bunty and Babli's fate. At 62, Mr. Bachchan is still agile: the dance sequence with his real-life son Abhishek (in their first onscreen appearance together) is pure pleasure. 

More here.

Treasure Island vs. Star Wars

Bruce Sterling writes in Domus magazine (on-line registration required) about the similiarities of science fiction and design, using an unrealized project for a sci-fi version of stevenson's novel "Treasure Island"

"Forty years ago, it was unheard of to turn a science fiction movie into a springboard for product design. But it almost happened. And it almost happened in Italy, where famed industrial designer and architect Achille Castiglioni and his brother Pier Giacomo once did the set design for a Space Age science fiction film. The director in question was Renato Castellani, an Italian neorealist and man-about-Milan who had met the Castiglioni brothers at university. For some reason – probably sheer youthful brio – Castellani became obsessed with Robert Louis Stevenson's adventure classic, Treasure Island."

The Top 40 Picks From the Tribeca Film Festival

From the Village Voice:

Since the Tribeca Film Festival's 2002 debut, naysayers have grumbled that the last thing New York's crowded movie calendar needs is an event this large and unwieldy. But the fourth annual edition, squeezing 158 features and 96 shorts plus workshops and panels into 14 venues and 13 days (April 19-May 1), should prove that Tribeca is no longer just a corporate-powered celebrity pep rally for Lower Manhattan. The city's biggest and by default most eclectic film festival, Tribeca has also significantly upped the quality control in the last couple of years.

Night Watch A box-office smash in Russia last summer, this metaphysical horror thriller stages a battle between Light and Dark forces in present-day Moscow—complementing the struggle over a young boy's destiny with simplistic but convoluted mythology and a ton of Slavic brooding. Director Timur Bekmambetov is a Roger Corman protégé, and there's an endearing B-movie spirit to the enterprise, copious digi-effects notwithstanding. Amusingly crammed with blatant steals from the Matrix, Star Wars, and Lord of the Rings movies (not to mention Buffy, the David Fincher playbook, and even Jonathan Glazer's iconic UNKLE video), it's itself the first in a trilogy—still to come: Day Watch and Dusk Watch. A Fox Searchlight release, opens July. LIM

4 This precociously nuts debut by 30-year-old Muscovite Ilya Khrzhanovsky links numerology to cloning to the genetic manipulation of livestock to the homespun manufacture of doll parts. Larded with dead and aging tissue, this jaw-dropping whatsit—winner of a top prize at Rotterdam this year—is a grandiose study of barbarism and decay, a treatise on the way of all flesh, with DNA spliced in from Leos Carax, Kira Muratova, PETA ads, and Chris Cunningham's Aphex Twin videos. LIM

Gilaneh The newest film from Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Iran's grande dame of popular-resistance cinema, isn't quite the deft balancing act that Under the Skin of the City was, but it's the only Persian film we've seen that addresses life on the ground during, and after, the eight-year-long war with Iraq and "that Baathist bastard." It's a diptych: First, a histrionic matriarch and her pregnant daughter, refugees from bombing, decide on the eve of the war's end to return to their city homes, which they find bombed out and devoid of men. Fifteen years later, they're back in barren countryside, the grim after-effects of war dominating their lives. Co-directed with newcomer Mohsen Abdolvahab, Gilaneh is too indulgent to impotent peasant speechifying, but the reverb is substantial. ATKINSON

More here.

Two Film Series Spotlight Indian Cinema's Dual Traditions

In the Village Voice:

With some high-profile releases in the past few years, increased press coverage, and tourist-friendly phenomena like Bombay Dreams, the Bollywood brand is quickly finding its place in American pop culture's mainstream masala. Now, two uptown series attempt to flesh out the recent history of Indian cinema. Lincoln Center fetes mega-luminary Amitabh Bachchan, touted record-book-style as "the biggest film star in the world." The title of Bachchan's tribute is inspired by a 1999 BBC online poll that named him Superstar of the Millennium. Bachchan bested not only Sir Laurence Olivier and Charlie Chaplin but presumably Sarah Bernhardt and David Garrick; Bachchan's sheer number of film roles—almost 150 since his debut in 1969—was no doubt a decisive factor. In his first hit, the violent revenge narrative Zanjeer (1973), the towering, baritone-voiced actor established the model for his later on-screen persona: the "angry young man" who takes on the powerful and unscrupulous but displays a charismatic decorum between smackdowns. In keeping with Bollywood's market-friendly smorgasbordism, Bachchan served as Dustin Hoffman, John Travolta, and Sylvester Stallone rolled into one.

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Love, Domination and the Toxic Pursuit of Perfection

Manohla Dargis in The New York Times:

Think of it as the intelligent woman's guide to how not to have sex. You go on a blind date. The guy has a shaved head and beady eyes, and within seconds tells you that you are not as thin as he imagined. Most women - check that, most sensible, sane women - would tell baldy to take a very short hike off a very long pier. You know better. Even Bridget Jones, with her trembling jowls and insecurities, knows better and would cuddle up with a pound of toffee rather than subject herself to such outrage. The woman in the film "Primo Amore" is not made of such sternly self-reliant stuff.

Set in northern Italy and in the darkest recesses of a woman's heart, "Primo Amore" is a horror movie about desire and the toxic pursuit of perfection. Sonia (Michela Cescon) hooks up with Vittorio (Vitaliano Trevisan) at a bus stop during an arranged meeting. At first she is overly eager, he is altogether aloof; given how Venusians and Martians usually align, that should mean they were made for each other. While stung by his comment - whippet-thin, her jowls don't shake and her thighs don't swish - she still goes out with him for a friendly drink. From her anxious gaze it seems clear she very much wants, even needs to forgive the man, either for her sake or his. Within a strangely short time the two are dating, house-hunting and living together, a postcard-perfect couple.

Sonia, as it turns out, is a woman who loves men too much and herself too little; Vittorio, in turn, is a man who would love Sonia more if there were much less of her to love. One day while out swimming with Vittorio, Sonia catches sight of a rangy blonde in a bikini. As the blonde settles next to the couple and stretches her long, model-thin limbs, Sonia shifts uncomfortably, her eyes nervously shuttling toward the other woman. The director, Matteo Garrone, captures the scene with cool detachment, letting us register Sonia's discomfort from an easy distance. This not only keeps us outside Sonia's head, for better and eventually for worse, but also lets us see that Vittorio appears oblivious to what is happening right next to him.

First comes love, then come the scales. Soon after the leggy blonde makes her unwelcome appearance, Sonia goes on a diet with Vittorio's enthusiastic support. But what first seems like a foolish whim, a matter of vanity and the usual female neurosis, grows progressively perverse. As Sonia sheds weight, Vittorio starts to swell in size, not literally but in terms of power, taking increased control over her every bite and gesture. As in many domestic monster movies ("The Stepfather," among others), the boogeyman appears to have crawled from beneath the bed and slipped under the covers.

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