tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22963514724929039762024-02-07T17:55:54.075-08:00Assholes and Elbows (p.c. Blowholes and Rainbows ;D)Adam Katzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13445652093684270646noreply@blogger.comBlogger51125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2296351472492903976.post-80187938674014139082009-10-29T19:31:00.000-07:002009-10-31T15:34:15.650-07:00How Does It Feel: Annie, New Order, Grief and the Dance Floor<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzNkDm1mawYH9JqjaHUTH_AyCQ0404iDyy13XLErQVbkgwj2sX6t0joA8Y2Z_aReoODmRB92iMQdYD7fKDjWdg8l2jAE1XOg1fwgRyNNGt8wOSx_ZumY0W_q0e7HHwaqWMG2upyas_Vbg/s1600-h/AnnieDon't+Stop.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzNkDm1mawYH9JqjaHUTH_AyCQ0404iDyy13XLErQVbkgwj2sX6t0joA8Y2Z_aReoODmRB92iMQdYD7fKDjWdg8l2jAE1XOg1fwgRyNNGt8wOSx_ZumY0W_q0e7HHwaqWMG2upyas_Vbg/s400/AnnieDon't+Stop.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5398479722360739442" /></a><br />
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While wishing Don't Stop would start already, "Songs Remind Me of You" got prematurely imbued with Anniemal's second coming. Something retrospectively necessary as the rest of the album was not, though when it comes to the dancefloor, the 12" means more than the LP anyways. Standalone, the single crystallized the underlying thrust of Annie's larger thread, the healing power of really good dance music. On its surface it renditions that residual flickering of a burnt out old flame, but really picks up right where Anniemal left off, with the residual flickering of a phantom. <br />
<br />
Back in 1999 Annie broke through with a false start. After kicking around the Bergen music scene as a DJ, her penchant for melodies and a voice made for singles locked up with the talents of house producer Tore Andreas Kroknes. Madonna-sampling <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxmlHlRW440">The Greatest Hit</a> seemed to echo their subsequent coupling, with their made for each other revelation substituted by the song's "why'd we ever break up?/this moment probably won't last forever" abandon. The real world counterpart didn't. In 2000, Tore's degenerative heart condition kicked in with unprecedented malice and by 2001 he was dead at 23. <br />
<br />
<blockquote>After that, I was so depressed I just wasn't able to do anything. I stayed at home, away from everyone, completely in my own world. I wanted to make the album with Tore — that was the plan. After he died I just didn't think I had the heart. But then I thought, 'Right, you're really depressed now but you have to make this album. Tore would be quite pissed off if you just stopped doing anything.'</blockquote><br />
<br />
"Sssh! Let's start the record!"<br />
<br />
Kicking off with the coyest, most playful clarion call, Anniemal's intro met Animal Collective at their Wild Things Are fountainhead, yet the rumpus she was starting didn't forsake immediate gratification for Kid A knob twaddling and ruptured tribal thumps. A solid dance record straight up instead of straightforward it proved the form didn't belie the function with an emotional convalescence that denied no history.<br />
<br />
The Greatest Hit's "you are my" now also reads "you were." No Easy Love's skeptical commitment issues are saturated with a broken engagement, but Chewing Gum's bubble yum suitor disposal doesn't insist on crying out "versions of you." First of the album's songs proper, it's Annie pep talking herself from her subconscious, chimney sweeping "settling down" into the aether, owing guilt to no one, owning up to heretofore buried fun. It's the wide, mischievous grin playfully hidden on the LP cover, ruse ready with a hole under the rug and an edge sharpened by a too soon trip around the block. At the same time it's an expression easily capable of answering Foreigner's 1984 power-ballad plea. re: Heartbeat. An autumnal reverie of what The Greatest Hit's dancefloor reunion hearkens back to, sweet moves at a dance party before the rest was history. *<br />
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But it's Come Together where the preceding activity's potential gets set in stone with a paean to the communal power of dance music. That the final track, My Best Friend, is about the aforementioned residual haunts, Tore figuring prominently, it's also uncharacteristically not made for the dancefloor. Not that off the dance floor the music's jurisdiction fades, but the rest of the album's m.o. reworked the lyric "last night a DJ saved my life" and brought it full circle so that last night the dj might have saved their own life, too, with a window into the artistic process before the record a la the tomato sauce stain in that Daft Punk video. <br />
<br />
In total it distilled the trajectory of an unlikely but fitting historical precedent, New Order, into one knockout debut. Consider their impetus, the death of Ian Curtis. Stroszek and the Idiot might have filled out the ritual aspect of his suicide, but the denouement is at odds with the sly, wicked humor embedded in both. Joy Division's catalog on the other hand, connects the sendoff with the pantheon of death it belongs to. Outside of Disorder's liberatory potential, Curtis lived in black clouds with black linings, his baritone at the level of the focal point he viewed things from, a looming concern duly revered with depression and exacerbated in real life by the physical trauma of epilepsy. On their unanimous decision to carry on:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>"The first meeting we all had, which was the Sunday night [Curtis committed suicide], we agreed that. We didn't sit there crying. We didn't cry at his funeral. It came out as anger at the start. We were absolutely devastated: not only had we lost someone we considered our friend, we'd lost the group. Our life basically."</blockquote><br />
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It didn't hit me until I sat down with Substance, but the initially murky hesitance of New Order's first rumblings had turned into one of the most touching responses to suicide. Superseding The Myth of Sisyphus' narrow definition of the absurd, New Order inverted the doom and gloom of Joy Division's paradigm and created MDMA worthy dance tracks brimming with reasons to live. <br />
<br />
New Order didn't drop the concerns Curtis previously articulated, but the increasing integration of electronic material, as well as brightened flips to atmosphere, into the song structures ended up creating what would have been the proper backbeat for Curtis' legendary epileptic pantomimes. By Brotherhood it became an ebullient forward motion, that when underscoring philosophical panic attacks like Weirdo and Broken Promise instead emphasized the freedom exhibited in confusedly scratching against the void, the boundaries of one's processing skills overshadowed by the act of processing itself. Sumner described the act of writing lyrics as haphazardly subconscious, jostling epiphanies and going "wtf" after intentionally not trying to figure out the Ian Curtis songwriting method. <br />
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In retrospect, Sumner's described the <a href="http://www.toocooltodie.com/index.php?/tctd/news/when_bernard_sumner_blogs_bad_lieutenant/">darkness that permeated Joy Division</a> as not just a reflection of Curtis' inner turmoil in that nearly every person in the band had some kind of external issue (like many in Sumner's family dying off from physical illness) that hampered lots of the potential for pleasantry in growing up. Completely out of context and totally pretentious on my part, this quote from V. seems to echo Joy Division's mindframe from the standpoint of New Order's, looking back at those moments in youth when becoming acquainted with the world makes hopeless angst a coping mechanism.<br />
<br />
<blockquote>For that moment at least they seemed to give up external plans, theories, and codes, even the inescapable romantic curiosity about one another, to indulge in being simply and purely young, to share that sense of the world’s affliction, that outgoing sorrow at the spectacle of Our Human Condition which anyone this age regards as reward or gratuity for having survived adolescence.</blockquote><br />
"That outgoing sorrow," while not necessarily a universal trajectory, is a statement I greeted with momentarily relief when I read the book at 19 before I realized bated breath is exhausting in itself. New Order plays out like the process of the outgoing sorrow, mitigation as maturation in the face of "the spectacle." <br />
<br />
Cue Blue Monday. The song was made<a href="http://neworder-recycle.blogspot.com/2009/08/recycle-05-blue-monday.html"> as a ruse to sate fans' demand for an encore</a>, something they could play without having to stick around to finish, but its structure is hardly tossed off. The bassline is potentially lifted from Sylvester's <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ue2UXnxp8Rs">You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)</a>, the beat from Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder's <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uU9ikIg8FU">Our Love</a>, and that synth line in the beginning from Kraftwerk. Perhaps not original, but not tossed off. I bring these up also on account of the lyrical content.<br />
<br />
Defiantly flamboyant (drag) Queen of Disco Sylverster James' HiNRG powerhouse is stripped/slowed down and lyrically reversed, but with confusion. Donna Summer's contention that "our love will last forever" doesn't seem to pan out. Kraftwerk actually turn out to be robots. And Peter Hook is not helpful: "They're not about Ian Curtis; we wanted it to be vague. I was reading about Fats Domino. He had a song called Blue Monday and it was a Monday and we were all miserable so I thought, 'Oh that's quite apt.'" All the same, Blue Order came out in '83, and while their public image gave off bad vibes (mercilessly short sets, declined interviews, the pall of Curtis) their music was already picking up the italo disco they turned to in the wake of post-punk's newly dour stain. Blue Monday was bookended by Temptation and Confusion, and it defies its thematic content with a less dark, lively vitality, dancing the pain away in action if not in thought. In turn, the two became one long before Technique. <br />
<br />
And so, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y3FFWPBvBs">"Songs Remind Me of You"</a><br />
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Blue Monday's metareferentiality as identity fortification is here reiterated by Annie. While the spite in Blue Monday is better complemented by Happy Without You*, the melody and the drum patterns recall the band's makeshift rummaging. While for Annie this music's her bread and butter, that it provides comfort was a remedial factor for both of them. True, New Order were subsumed under the subset's potential aegis only after Curtis died, whereas Annie's attempts at being in a straightforward band were over far before she met Tore, but both find the trappings of italo-disco/disco disco/house/etc. as the most inviting framework within which to work out their grief, transforming it into something of great import. <br />
<br />
"Songs..." brings us to My Best Friend, back to the beginning. While convalescence entails recovery, phantom ailment still creeps up.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-style:italic;">once upon a time there was a girl<br />
met a boy that said he'd change the world<br />
promises he only made for me <br />
vanished into what he cannot be</span><br />
<br />
The song's chorus nods to how their mutual musical affinities created an association that undercuts the innocuity of listening to something as arbitrary as the radio. Blue Monday's rhetorical question of "How does it feel" in which the other person is guilted for mistreating the narrator is here directed at the self, but the agony of the question is implicitly a burden on the (de)parted. Yet it doesn't come on like the end of the world. Its omnipresence instead fuels the desire to play it back, repeatedly, as something therapeutic, "so good" and "so clear." <br />
<br />
<span style="font-style:italic;">it doesn't matter where I seem to be <br />
the sound of you remains eternally<br />
rewind it back so I can start again<br />
and play it 'till I reach the very end</span><br />
<br />
Don't Stop: Redux<br />
<br />
I'm not sure of Annie's standing in Norway, but her presence in the States is curious. A DJ who paired up with a house producer to put out a Norwegian variation on the dance record, her primary circulation stateside was within the indie community. While indie® might not be as insular as it used to be, there's a difference between indie fame and Kylie fame, where Kylie Minogue's popularity isn't predicated on the dispatching of irony. Now that i've heard Don't Stop i'm afraid the potential for that has been somewhat jeopardized. "Songs Remind Me of You" is a singular presence. The previously stated thematic concerns and reconfigurations are still apparent, but the primary outlet for elation is for the most part no longer part of the dancefloor pantheon, but a different kind of radio pop altogether. <br />
<br />
All of this becomes increasingly frustrating when the All Night EP and other discarded tracks are taken into account. A 5 song bonus disc attached to the special edition of Don't Stop, the songs contained there actually correspond to Anniemal in a way that that expands on it instead of recycling for diminished effect. While Don't Stop's association with Alex Kapranos more closely associates it with the 2005 indie community she got saddled with, the 5 songs (or 3 of them, at least), along with at least three others that didn't make the EP, constitute what would have been an amazing second album. Thus I offer you, the <a href="http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?2tmzmtz1wmz">ideal version of Don't Stop</a>:<br />
<br />
1. Hey Annie - As an intro track and a bridge from the last album this functions perfectly, with both the thematic continuation of Come Together's communal power, grappling with post-recovery notions of reverence, cheeky come ons, and a stated commitment to something new, all weaving through a killer drumline pattern.<br />
<br />
2. Don't Stop - The bubbling effect on the synths, the time after time cyndi lauper vocal stylings over a beat to put you in the mood for tearing it up, it's warm. <br />
<br />
3. I Know UR Girlfriend Hates Me - Yeah, the Chewing Gum redux, this is wicked, and perfect for flippant posturing on the dancefloor. <br />
<br />
4.. I Don't Like Your Band - This song finally has an appropriate revue to appear in, as telling someone to get a sequencer and hit up Kraftwerk, Bobby O and Moroder had no place on the actual album. <br />
<br />
5. Two of Hearts - the awesomely beefed up power hour assault of a cover, subtextual relevance obscured by surface ecstacy. <br />
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6. Ferret Summer - A breather, slight interlude with a winding hallway vibe, "sitting in an empty room, late in December" is preparatory for the glacial italo sheen of Anthonio (plus weirdo line "the touch of your ferret" layered in for intrigue).<br />
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7. Anthonio - coupled with Ferret Summer, Anthonio displays the other realms Don't Stop could have dabbled in for diversification of the Anniemal template, this could be a Sally Shapiro song. <br />
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8. Songs Remind Me of You - Hearkening back to Two of Hearts, the subtextual relevance of an arbitrary classic becomes the surface tension worked out on repeat in hook heaven here. <br />
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9. All Night - From the talkbox intro/backing pipes, to the double layered main vox, to the numero group roller jam comp backbeat, yet again Annie's potential trajectory is glimpsed. This also echoes Come Together, but with the action instead of the demand.<br />
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10. I Will Get On - For nostalgia, rarity, and dearth of tracks to choose from, the other track Annie and Tore made before he passed on. It's also a good flip side to The Greatest Hit, in that it plays like the breakup before that song's one night reunion.<br />
<br />
This will probably make my top ten. Considering what she was working out in the chaff re-instated above, Don't Stop could have continued the conversation being had in Roisin Murphy's Overpowered and Hercules and Love Affair's debut, Antony's vocals in the latter especially, which underscored the roiling maelstrom underneath the surface of that good time luster, its inevitable fixture in life and that one method for imbueing it with tractability - the dance floor. <br />
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*Happy Without You's hypothetical disillusionment doesn't easily lend itself to her public record, and it agitates the previous paragraph's conception of the album's grieving process, At the same time, it's recovery from another kind of tragedy, the Alvy Singer-type breeder of in-their-image companions. Tore appeared in her life no earlier than 20, and the song looks back at 16, so if autobiographical it gives credence to the notion that Chewing Gum style dating isn't without merits.Adam Katzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13445652093684270646noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2296351472492903976.post-52253795950983873562009-10-25T01:39:00.001-07:002009-12-22T15:34:55.046-08:00On Which Side Of The Goldstone The Boldface Lies<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiya4TVsabNxPRc3BQSJT7vgQTonOrBiiiHOdajnuZ_R1pOhmJjEf8nXhu9jA52gtDEFArJQJ9h_Syn_eDkmCXtkXQcQtcT6LTNIa31Y-YkRbp0v4Cf6opP-H36k1itEhHJamFfz19fS1w/s1600-h/fordindy.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 283px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiya4TVsabNxPRc3BQSJT7vgQTonOrBiiiHOdajnuZ_R1pOhmJjEf8nXhu9jA52gtDEFArJQJ9h_Syn_eDkmCXtkXQcQtcT6LTNIa31Y-YkRbp0v4Cf6opP-H36k1itEhHJamFfz19fS1w/s400/fordindy.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5396392600650153618" /></a><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRxfXPdERxEkfEKgxMS9hPTYdH4JjFJnmT8jdmREbw2qjDKG4jPcc1z7zqD44ADcJJn1LU-KVxRk5XfUY4gyirrr9GOU9ah61ayRvpnmedjDFOlUguJ_nIFglLqP5R2BpVFkNkT8Cx4AI/s1600-h/RLA_1.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 272px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRxfXPdERxEkfEKgxMS9hPTYdH4JjFJnmT8jdmREbw2qjDKG4jPcc1z7zqD44ADcJJn1LU-KVxRk5XfUY4gyirrr9GOU9ah61ayRvpnmedjDFOlUguJ_nIFglLqP5R2BpVFkNkT8Cx4AI/s400/RLA_1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5396392598624453602" /></a><br />
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The feigned incredulity in response to the goldstone report is embarassing. There is an acute multiple personality disorder in the backseat driver wing of the IDF that vacillates between might is right culpability and dissociatively exculpatory denial. Either they embrace military violence in all its transgressive glory with a distorted Machiavellian relish or play dumb with the ADL at their fingertips when that transgressive glory is delineated and reflected.<br />
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Framing The Goldstone Report hubbub around Operation Cast Lead, and in turn Operation Cast Lead around The Goldstone report (it's one of <span style="font-style:italic;">many</span>, dating back to the war itself***) allows for the discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to perpetuate its relegation to incidents. When an incident occurs the territorial damage extends beyond the occupied territories and seeps into Israel. Be it a suicide bombing or rockets on Sderot the discourse is maneuvered into a disrupted equilibrium as opposed to a "continuum,"<a href="http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1123309.html">as the report itself states</a>. Considering the imbalance of power that exists in an occupation, the dominance of this analysis isn't surprising, the discourse and its lexicon are controlled by the occupying power.<br />
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For instance, Operation Cast Lead began at the end of December 2008 and ended in late January 2009 - here's where rhetorical flourish obscures a central, ignored reality in the situation. An occupation is an act of war, everything that happens under an occupation is a continuation of that war. When standard conflict breaks out between non-traditional armed factions (here, Hamas, unarmed collateral) and the Israeli army, it is not a deviation from the norm, but an escalation. Not to say that the term "escalation" and "Israeli-Palestinian conflict" are foreign to each other in all realms of media coverage, but when the escalation ends and the term "cease-fire" enters the discussion, the excursion becomes an incident that transpired and is now over, and the escalation of "what" isn't broached, it's conveniently ignored. It's a compartmentalization of transgressions and abuses whose segmentation obscures the comprehensive totality of their penetration into occupied society. <br />
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Conversely, Israeli society generally has three direct interactions with the conflict - army duty (combat/checkpoint), suicide bombings, and rocket attacks. The lag time between these incidents, and there is a lag time, allows for discontinued engagement with the reality of the situation. The relative distance from the rockets and bombings most of the population experiences allows for the actual engagement to be relative in itself. Not to trivialize the suffering caused by all this via one Chickens Come Home To Roost framing device, the arbitrary casualties and surrounding physical/mental trauma civilians suffer is awful, but also on the dime of perpetually backwards policymaking with an apparent causal relation to the conflict. So when the damage caused is objectively, individually assessed, revealing its universal implications (anyone would suffer from this), it doesn't lend legitimacy to the compliance with and support for perpetual occupational policy with its attendant escalations by the general Israeli population, it's trivialization as a rule. <br />
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The dissociation has a few precedents. Part of it is born out of habitual denial from <a href="http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article2213.shtml">suppressing memories of what army duty entails i.e. what abuses one is capable of both committing and justifying in the moment</a>, the other part is born out of denial from self-congratulatory indifference to those abuses based on adulterated darwinian aphorisms and a reversal of the historical Jewish archetype's association with weakness, as <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/feb/21/israel2">formerly</a> <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/feb/22/israel">progressive</a> historian <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17029">Benny Morris did</a> when he recontextualized the damage done to the Palestinians as the few broken eggs required to make an omelette, like the Indians on the way to America. <br />
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Since army duty is conscripted, four years at 18 and annual reserve duty until 45, a direct engagement with the conflict is eventual, but comes from the vantage point of a world-class military and never within Israeli territory i.e. around one's home, unless you're being symbolic. Instead, it comes into Palestinian living space from above and around as the parameters for Palestinian territory are controlled and operated by the Israeli army, which exemplifies the discrepancy between the Palestinian constant and the Israeli variable. The Palestinians live under an occupation, the Israelis do not. Where civilian life and combatant life can be separated for the average Israeli citizen, a person occupied is a precision-targeted possibility from multiple angles, and a potential abductee on a perpetual year round basis. <br />
<br />
When Israel exchanges hundreds of political prisoners for a single digit variable of kidnapped soldiers, dead or alive, the assumption is that Israel is making a ridiculously large sacrifice. What's not considered are the grounds on which the hundreds of exchanged prisoners were arrested and detained and what their numerically large disposability reveals about Israel's Palestinian prison population. According to B'Tselem, by February 2008 there were <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5211930.stm">8,400 Palestinian prisoners </a> (11,000 by <a href="http://www.adalah.org/newsletter/eng/apr08/5.pdf">Adalah's count</a>) in Israeli custody. At that point over 5,100 were serving sentences, over 2,100 awaiting trial and about 790 were in administrative detention, the last of which has steadily declined since but still contains 42 holdovers from two years back, a large majority of which have been held twice with 2 of them female minors. <br />
<br />
While this refers to present statistics, between now and 1967 at least<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/26/israelandthepalestinians1"> one-fifth</a> of the population has at some point been imprisoned, with thousands over time in administrative detention. The option of administrative detention at the IDF's disposal, while already an excuse to bypass the legal system, is repeatedly abused (and abusing in itself) as a no-holds barred, indefinitely extendable imprisonment with the option of a detainee contention but only under the condition they and their legal counsel remain unaware of what it is they are refuting about the legitimacy of their detention. <br />
<br />
According to Israeli officials "70% of the detainees have blood on their hands." What should be delineated in that statement is whose blood they hypothetically have on their hands. The percentage of Israelis who at some point in their career <a href="http://www.harpers.org/archive/2002/04/0079129">delivered a severe beating or a haste execution at</a> a checkpoint, dropped bombs or fired on civilian and combatant alike, demolished a home or a building, or shut off/explosively sabotaged electricity and sewage at the expense of dialysis, incubation, and medical/civilian sanitary needs is rarely dished out. If done, it would severely complicate the distinction between civilian and combatant used to justify Palestinian casualties, in turn giving credence to the arbitrary destinations of Palestinian rockets. Since terror is solely the province of the Palestinian combatant and defense solely the province of the Israeli soldier, a comparative nature to their damage and its political use (as terrorism is generally defined as violence wielded for political ends) would frustrate the checklist by which assassinations are carried out when revealed as viable both ways. But it is not, violence by an existing state is legitimized, violence by non-existing state is not. <br />
<br />
Discussion of standard imprisonment does not include the daily grievances suffered at checkpoints. IDF Judge Advocate General Menachem Finkelstein in a statement to the Knesset<a href="http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=315603&contrassID=2&subContrassID=3&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y"> conceded to the legitimacy of complaints</a> about checkpoint abuse, including beatings, physical restraints and psychological humiliation. Not that it prevents the foundation for the complaints from happening, as in the recent testimony by IDF commanders entitled “<a href="http://www.btselem.org/english/beating_and_abuse/20090521_investigate_officers_testimonies_on_routine_use_of_violence.asp">A Blow is Sometimes an Integral Part of the Mission" </a>in which various commanding officers proceeded to explain why and how they routinely abused Palestinians, with checkpoints being one of the many outlets for said abuse. <br />
<br />
Generally averaged at 102 existing during any given month (since some of them are temporary, or "flying"), by 2008 there were 63 permanently staffed checkpoints within the west bank with another forty serving as actual crossing points into Israel. The 40 crossing points were not on the Israeli border but a few miles into the west bank, further expropriating occupied territory into de facto Palestinian disuse by the limitation of movement involved. 18 of the interior checkpoints are in Hebron and designed specifically for the Palestinians there. Staff is not limited to the IDF but includes private security companies as well. 267 miles of the road they rest on are free roaming for Israelis at the expense of Palestinians, whose movement is restricted, with 85 miles completely prohibited. This affects not just freedom of movement in or around your village, but water supply as well, forcing costly dependency on traveling tankers. <br />
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As for Gaza, the political independence withdrawal supposedly conferred on it came to an end with the election of Hamas. Leading up to the 2009 conflict was the post-election siege in which crossing points into Gaza were cut off barring medical supplies, fuel and other basic commodities. Framing reliance on tunnels with arm-buildup intentionally ignores how indulging in illegalities was required in order to gain basic living supplies. 50 percent unemployment, 79 percent below poverty levels. The fuel shortage led to power station shortage led to 15 percent elecricity shortage led to power cuts from ceased power station operations. 80 percent of water wells didn't function at full capacity, if at all, with 80 percent of the drinking water below WHO ordained drinking standards (one of a few criticisms in the Goldstone report that predates anything that happened during the conflict). Chlorine shortage kicked up "the risk of outbreak of disease." Sewage purification was sabotaged, with "50-60 million liters of raw sewage running into the sea daily." The bar on replacement/construction parts required for infrastructure repair damaged medical institutions, already running on generators, and the maintenance of medical equipment.* <br />
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For a moment consider the tunnels. Attached to their reputation is an arms smuggling ring, an international conspiracy in which Iran among others illegally supplies Hamas with weapons as opposed to the basic necessities required for living. These basic necessities, ascribed external responsibility, exist within Israeli territory and thus the onus should not be placed on anyone else for their distribution into Palestinian territory, they're already in the vicinty. Yet the criminality of the arms smuggling is only applied one way as Palestinians do not have the option of democratically electing a party with questionable legality, something Israel succeeds in doing with every election, recycling military leaders, some of whose priors, as in successful legal convictions, are entirely ignored but if analysed would fit the bill of terror. For instance Ariel Sharon's involvement in both the bombing of Qibiya and the Sabra and Shatila massacre, not to mention being more than a mere cog in the entirety of the mess in Lebanon. <br />
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In turn, Palestinians are not allowed to erect a standing army, with standard army munition. They can't erect munitions factories, build or import fighter jets, tanks or warships. My uncle is a manager at a Rafael <a href="http://www.rafael.co.il/marketing/area.aspx?FolderID=339">bomb making factory</a> in a civilian area, which covers all of those. It's not singular on any level, there are many bomb factories in civilian areas. A standing army, which trains its soldiers in methods of combat, including the operation of highly destructive weapons and bomb deploying mechanisms, has bases all over Israel's civilian areas. Any external monetary boost to Hamas is dwarfed by an annual American tradition that far outdates Hamas itself, as Israel recieves 3 billion dollars in military aid from the United States every year. <br />
Israel's civilian embedded military buildup also includes the high-tech industry on which Israel's economy is highly reliant. The high-tech industry covers development of security technology. Security technology is only useful in lieu of conflict. The increasing complexity and thus diversification of the security technology reflects less on innovative spontaneity than a causal connection between conflict and industry. War is good for business and in turn the health of the state. Peace talks don't rise and fall on who recognizes what, linguistic hangups offer a convenient diversion from <a href="http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070702/klein">how much it will cost</a>. <br />
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The subset discourse of Gaza itself relies on an ostensibly objective notion of cause and effect that relies on a particular series of events and their regional location. The return to Gaza was described on various occasions as the sleeping giant that is Israel being woken up by the disruptive force known as Gaza bent on sabotaging the potential for peace conferred on it by Israel's withdrawal. As documented above, Israel was not asleep from the time of withdrawal, as its machinations were still active. Two, the withdrawal's compartmentalization of the peace process represents another convenient disconnect in the discourse where in actuality Gaza is part and parcel of the occupied territories, thus actions in the West Bank correlate directly to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict Gaza is a part of. Checkpoints and arbitrary arrests were mentioned above, now let's move onto the separation barrier and the settlers. <br />
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<a href="http://malteserubble.blogspot.com/2008/12/ehud-is-ace-hoodlum-waltz-with-bashir.html">Again</a>, the statement of Dov Weisglass, Sharon's chief of staff at the time, on the <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=485929">withdrawal of Gaza</a>:<br />
"The disengagement plan is the preservative of the sequence principle. It is the bottle of formaldehyde within which you place the president's formula so that it will be preserved for a very lengthy period. The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that's necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians." <br />
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Considering the amount of procedures that did not stop following the disengagement the statement is apt. At total, the barrier is going to be 436 miles long. It is currently 58.04% completed with 8% under construction. The Separation Barrier is not really a separation, though. The same way the settlers change the facts on the ground with more and more land within the west bank de facto coming under army control as a result of guarded settler presence, the barrier expropriates land as well. 8.5 percent of the West Bank now lies on the Israel side with 3.4 percent of the West Bank either "completely or partially surrounded" by the wall. 27,520 Palestinians are now on the Israeli side, requiring permits to live in their homes and a gate from which to exit their communites. 247,800 Palestinians are completely or partially surrounded by the wall. In East Jerusalem, 222,500. <br />
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Back during the withdrawal settlers cried "Germany," with DIY yellow stars, when they were being pulled out of Gaza but if they were smart they could have signed up for a relocation to the west bank. In 2005 Ariel Sharon commissioned a report from the head of the State Prosecution Criminal Department Talia Sasson. To his chagrin it revealed how millions of shekels from state budgets were being used to build illegal settlements. The methods themselves were surreptitious. A <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/mar/10/israel">summary</a> of the report detailed one of the prevailing methods. "One tactic was to build a mobile phone mast, sometimes a fake, on Palestinian land. Next came a guard post to protect the mast followed by a paved road and then mobile homes for the guards to live in. Shortly afterwards settlers moved in." 100 settlements were built during Sharon's time in office prior to the report. <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4328817.stm">Various ministries colluded in the activity</a>. Housing supplied 400 mobile homes, Defense approved outposts, Education put up nurseries and teachers, Energy linked them to power grids, and taxpayers paid for the roads.The settlements dismantled in Gaza numbered 16, a fraction. <br />
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Settlers recieve military protection as well as the rights of Israelis living in the Green Line, thus having an oasis of privilege within the areas they squat. One aspect is leniency in prosecuting transgressions. Whereas Palestinians can be detained without explanation with the attendant cruel and unusual punishment,<a href="http://www.btselem.org/english/Publications/Summaries/200809_Access_Denied.asp"> settlers have gotten away with the following:</a><br />
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<blockquote>Settlers pave patrol roads and place physical obstructions on Palestinian lands adjacent to settlements, at times with the authorities’ approval, at others not. Settlers also forcibly remove Palestinians, primarily farmers, from their lands. ...cases of gunfire, threats of gunfire and killing, beatings, stone throwing, use of attack dogs, attempts to run over Palestinians, destruction of farming equipment and crops, theft of crops, killing and theft of livestock and animals used in farming, unauthorized demands to see identification cards, and theft of documents.</blockquote><br />
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One explanation of Palestinian animosity towards Israelis, primarily Jews, is the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1183053066461&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull">institutional breeding of anti-semitism</a>, with a brainwashed indifference to <a href="http://www.babelgum.com/3017891/vice-guide-travel-plo-boy-scouts.html ">shedding of Israeli blood</a>**. This serves two convenient misconceptions, one being the idea that if the Palestinian were to encounter an actual Israeli the <a href="http://www.promisesproject.org/">potential for reconciliation would automatically engender itself</a>, and two, that the institutionally derived nature of the imagery suggests a manufactured dissociation from reality that leaves Israel unaccountable for their violent associations. What it rests on is the idea that Palestinians rarely if ever encounter Israelis and/or Jews, which is false, as they encounter them on a regular basis. Yet, the Jews a Palestinian encounters on a day-to-day basis are either soldiers or settlers. Both are armed, violent, and can bypass UN censures with U.S. veto power but are unavoidable in the excercise of mobility. <br />
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In Hebron, where checkpoints serve to frustrate Palestinian movement primarily, Palestinians have to<a href="http://www.palestineremembered.com/GeoPoints/Hebron_534/Picture_11075.html"> build nets</a> between the second story and the first in order to not have to constantly deflect trash from the Settlers. Considering <a href="http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/tobin/97692">anti-semitism and the holocaust is still a vital part of the discourse</a> it's worth mentioning Yad Vashem chairman Yosef Lapid's <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/815603.html">statement about the settlers</a>: <br />
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<blockquote>It was not crematoria or pogroms that made our life in the diaspora bitter before they began to kill us, but persecution, harassment, stone-throwing, damage to livelihood, intimidation, spitting and scorn...I was afraid to go to school, because of the little anti-Semites who used to lay in ambush on the way and beat us up. How is that different from a Palestinian child in Hebron?...It is inconceivable for the memory of Auschwitz to warrant ignoring the fact that there are Jews among us who behave today towards Palestinians just like German, Hungarian, Polish and other anti-Semites behaved towards Jews.</blockquote><br />
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Israel prides itself on being a a parliamentary democracy, the only one in the middle east (if we ignore Lebanon), but the democratic governance, with citizen participation, only applies to activity within Israel's borders. For Palestinians it's a military dictatorship and when war rains down from the IDF the direction isn't exclusively horizontal, but vertical as well, which is not the case for Israelis.. So, looking at information that <a href="http://www.amnestyusa.org/document.php?id=ENGMDE150212009">came out before </a>the goldstone report, even <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7836869.stm">immediately after </a>Operation Cast Lead, when 3 Israeli civilians and 10 Israeli soldiers die during the operation from either imprecise rocket attacks or combat, in turn placing heavy importance on the effects of rocket attacks and warfare, requiring the report to be more fair and balanced is a further trivialization of the universal implications of the effects of rocket attacks and warfare. <br />
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Approximately (give or take) 1,300 Palestinians died. 4,000 buildings were destroyed while 20,000 were "severely damaged." Take this into account when Col. Kemp talks about leaflets being distributed as if bombing targets had anywhere to run. While "tens of thousands of Gazans were left homeless," the thousands of Israeli families that were momentarily displaced were able to hide in other parts of the country before coming back to the reparable damage to "several civilian homes and structures." While hamas rockets and mortars were fairly rudimentary/retrograde weapons (obviously able to cause some damage when fired with zero precision targeting technology), Israeli weapons were drawn from a state of the art, next generation arsenal with the technology for high-grade optic resolution allowing operators to "see the targets in detail," compounded by pin-point precision and astounding accuracy, along with the usual cluster bombs and white phosphorous. <br />
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Israel's ability to deploy these weapons in "closed" and "open" areas comes directly from their occupational power and is a privilege afforded them by the imbalance of power. Hamas cannot destroy 4,000 buildings and severely damage 20,000 others, nor can it send sewage flowing into the streets and shut off electricity (something Israel did both before, during and after the war). It can barely leave the territory it exists in. What it was able to accomplish was miniscule, it deployed less rockets than Palestinians were killed, destroyed about as many structures as Israelis were killed. If the Israeli side of the damage, including the 4 severe, 11 moderate and 167 light injuries, are worthy of being labeled as war crimes on the part of Hamas, as the singular rebuttal to Goldstone indicates, then the sentence must turn back ten-fold on Israel. <br />
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But again, war crimes in this sense would limit the retributive legislation to one war, and since an occupation is an act of war <span style="font-style:italic;">this</span> war started long ago and is not yet over. To prevent the next escalation, even in the delusional self-justification of the sleeping giant metaphor, the occupation must end. The efficacy in the current preventive measures are somewhat irrelevant as you don't figure out how to make an occupation work, it's illegal. India, Vietnam, Algiers, Afghanistan (with precedents, contemporaries and modern successors, all of them) were not failures because they didn't achieve an objective, they were failures because they were wrong to begin with and this is no exception.<br />
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Mirah, would you please...<br />
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*<a href="http://www.btselem.org/Download/200812_Annual_Report_Eng.pdf">B'Tselem 2008 Annual Report</a><br />
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**While a fairly superficial analysis, contextually, of the Hezbollah wing of the martyr factory, it still has valid points. So I can be clear on this - while utilizing children, or anyone, for suicide bombing missions/planning for them at all are forms of bureaucratized cowardice, with the outsourcing of sacrifice/actual engagement a viable task in the organization, the concern is what well that desire for conscription is drawn from, it's not manufactured in the abstract, or inherent, it's correspondent to an immediate reality. It's existence under the settler/soldier dichotomy of Jewish presence does not help. On the other end, this primarily relates to age, as children in Israel are raised in preparation for the army, in which they will learn to shoot, kill, and possibly sacrifice themselves for their country, setting aside college in order to do so. On another note, this is kind of hilarious for Spike Jonze's reaction of "what is the hezbollah?...I wouldn't even know how to begin processing this!" which might illuminate some of the quandaries and the prescribed method for dealing with them in Where The Wild Things Are. <br />
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</tbody></table>Adam Katzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13445652093684270646noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2296351472492903976.post-83763559041112205612009-10-19T17:54:00.000-07:002009-10-24T17:53:53.514-07:00On Vilde Chaya<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeZ7spdE9BIvROTKCQpAmkqRZfLnuq8TKY-bwFAMZO_QEQ2XfaqJc4EavsVd7jhpTa1Mf33aA-3UCKwVjFEOK_PhM1CAFU7xPBTGLHPK31AgEs_JrV_p3zYtq5RNq83_OewB4TZoAiDow/s1600-h/where+the+wild+things+are.png"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 271px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeZ7spdE9BIvROTKCQpAmkqRZfLnuq8TKY-bwFAMZO_QEQ2XfaqJc4EavsVd7jhpTa1Mf33aA-3UCKwVjFEOK_PhM1CAFU7xPBTGLHPK31AgEs_JrV_p3zYtq5RNq83_OewB4TZoAiDow/s400/where+the+wild+things+are.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5395526721321946018" /></a><br /><br /><blockquote>Mr. SENDAK:...A lot of people were angry at my books because they put children in jeopardy, just what you're talking about. And the idea of an American children's book where the child is not perfectly safe was something that was new.<br /><br />I didn't know it was new. I didn't set out to break any new ideas. I was just doing what was only in my head, which was of course mostly autobiographical because childhood was a terrible situation.<br /><br />INSKEEP: Why was childhood a terrible situation for you in Brooklyn?<br /><br />Mr. SENDAK: Well, Brooklyn, by the time my brain began to function, we were in the war. And we were Jews. And all of my father's family had been exterminated and much of my mother's family had been exterminated. So from very early on I knew of mortality.</blockquote><br /><br />The film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are is coming out to a rumbling identical to that which greeted the initial book upon release half a century ago. Mainly, it doesn't speak to a childhood story/story about childhood we can fondly remember/immediately embrace. In actuality, it was a story we grew fond of and are now facing a new set of complications with. There's a nagging notion that a definitive statement on childhood is missing from the proceedings.<br /><br />While the film might, on the surface, not be a definitive statement on childhood, to ascribe it such value would one, negate its still valid entry into the catalogue, and two, judge it on the merits of its introductory sequence as opposed to the increasingly complicated events that follow. While it initially situates itself within the burgeoning alienation of Max's adolescence from the vantage-less point of Max himself, the environmental factors Max bounces off of thereafter are not bottom-up. But to criticize the movie for its lack of immediate communicability with the younger set as a result of adulteration by the adults who made it negates the potentiality of diluted nostalgia, and lack of communicable relation with one's past self except within the framework of what you now know.<br /><br />And so, the introductory sequence i.e. Max's real life, bookends the film and said bookends are of a particular kind of childhood sadness. Max comes from a white, middle-class home within which everyone suffers the same alienation but at the expense of their kin. His father is absent, the only trace being an inscription on a globe telling Max "this world belongs to you." His mother, wit's end with her job but with no shortage of love for her kids, seeks solace in a potential suitor. His sister defies familial connection and seeks solace within her friends. Max himself grows more introverted with every failed interaction, measured by how much it caters to his attention, with what gradation of pain (as with a snowball fight turned sour). <br /><br />Talk of the sun's hypothetical demise in science class are filtered through doom and gloom mythos, internalized by max as a looming concern, or perhaps as an explanation, with the sun as one of a few coming references to patriarchal abdication's effect on the offspring. His attempts to scratch the glacial separation are passive agressive, veering from lovingly indulged storytelling to void-weary outbursts that when seen replicated in his mother's response causes the shock of recognition and sends him running. <br /><br />Back to the nature of definitive. "Definitive" would suggest such a thing exists ignoring how a more class/race conscious composite would negate this one's reality, and two, its inconsistencies aren't the relation between the film's suggested initial reality and the variegated experiences of children from all kinds of backgrounds, but between the film's suggested initial reality and what transpires during the subsequent escape from it, which itself, if considered, offers the missing link.<br /><br />While Max's origin story in the film feels tamed and bridled by industry concerns of marketability, with the broadest target audience being Max's class background counterparts whose parents, assumed, would be the most likely contributors to ticket sales, along with the niche indie market the trailer's use of the arcade fire seemed to be tailored for (calling to mind <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2007/10/22/071022crmu_music_frerejones">that New Yorker piece</a> they got cornered in), the only reason that might be an issue is because of the embellishment a film adaptation of a ten-sentence book requires. The origin story before script revisions was still what it ends up being in the film, the only changes were to Max's portrayal, previously less sympathetic and heavy on brattitude. While Max in the story IS an angry white kid, the fleshing out of the reason for his behavior seems relegated to something with the least visceral potential. <br /><br />Not to trivialize the absence of his father, something wholly devastating in itself, but the ensuing violence of the wild things seems to be working out subtextual trauma derived entirely from another kind of upbringing, one which makes more sense in the context of Sendak's quote above, as well as from one of Jonze's stated reference points, Lynn Ramsey's Ratcatcher. A Gummo critics could get behind as it overtly concerns the politcs of poverty, Ratcatcher showed a dustmen's strike exacerbating the filth and degradation of Glasgow's working class and the way that affects an adolescent's reaction to a drowning/his surroundings. For reasons I'll get to in a moment, I kind of feel <a href="http://www.allmovie.com/work/181285">Julien Donkey-Boy</a> would serve as an even better reference point. Or<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sunset_Tree"> John Darnielle's The Sunset Tree</a>, or <a href="http://www.worldstarhiphop.com/videos/video.php?v=wshhBAnHKj9x9rxtHe5o">this Tyson interview</a> with Oprah. <br /><br />So while a quiet, reflective suffering paints the opening scenes, with intimations of the hazards of play (as in Max's stunned tears from out of a crushed igloo) that perhaps offer a connection to the causal mishaps in the land of the Wild Things, it is nowhere near preparatory for what follows. Once we get there the onslaught of growing up's discomforting complications have more parallels to the communal disintegration and reconfigurative processing techniques of the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD7Wv1q-S18">Together</a> collective than to Max's own life. In fact, the socio-political implications of what ensues came off as almost uncomfortably exploratory of abrasion's symbiotic relationship with comfort. <br /><br />The oratory skills of the Wild Things take on the half-lucid id first ruminations of dreamworld avatars, with the shambling confessional mistakes of inebriation. Their hang-ups control their diction, with their fears punctuating the brash but inquisitive defiance of their statements. Things turn on dream logic, too, as Max's arrival disrupts the jaded and disgruntled demolition binge of Carol, sending Max into the jaws of death when Carol's approval of his participation clashes with the others' death penalty castigations of wanton destruction. For Carol there's something going on under the surface, being that they've all got something going on underneath this tyke's carefree indulgence is a cruel joke. <br /><br />As for the wild things' hangups: Alexander barely speaks up, mainly to spell out his exclusion in audibly self-loathing tone, perking up only at the site of KW. KW is a loner, with a glum but resigned acceptance of futility, uncharacterisitically indulging the magical promise of Max's arrival while averting Carol's passive-aggressive, history-laden displays of romantic interest. Carol is unstably optimistic, with the possibility of being failed and failing himself constantly lining any pleasant disposition with looming rage. Douglas is Carol's wingman, there to pick Carol up in lieu of encroaching breakdowns. Judith questions the legitimacy of everything with knee-jerk disillusionment hyperaware of her percieved intrusion but always game to partake in failed projects. Ira is actually kind of stoned-happy and easygoing. <br /><br />Judith and Ira are the only ones who maintain an overt kind of linkage with the <a href="http://blogs.jta.org/telegraph/article/2009/10/19/1008593/jewish-roots-for-where-the-wild-things-are">wild things' inspiration</a>, Sendak's Jewish immigrant family. Not a positive one, really, as Ira has a big nose and Judith has horns with an ADL style victim-complex and nasal whine but their presence lends the proceedings a tangential connection to Sendak's succeeding works' relation to the holocaust and the destruction it wrought on his extended family in Europe. <br /><br /><blockquote>LUDDEN: What do you think has drawn you to children's literature? Why there?<br /><br />Mr. SENDAK: I don't know. I think my own childhood. If I had a unhappy life, and most of us do, actually, and if you have an immigrant life and if you come to this country--I was born here--but then you grow up and everybody in your family who's not here is dead in a concentration camp, and all you hear is your father or mother weeping and tearing hair out, and knowing that pleasure was a sin. Playing ball in the street or laughing was a sin because they can't play ball and they can't laugh. How dare you have pleasure in life when they can't have anything? So I hated them. For a long time, I hated them, and my childhood was completely misshapen by what was going on in the world.<br /><br />So I had my brother and my sister and my father telling us horrendous stories. He didn't know what was appropriate. He just knew how to tell a story, and it was great, which maybe gave me insomnia, maybe not. But they were really terrifying of shtetl life in Europe and his experiences and stories where--and there were children dying. `I remember Eli and oh, he died in such a terrible way.' `Papa, tell us. Tell us how Eli died,' you know, like that was the best thing we could possibly hear. And then he wouldn't spare us the details. He'd tell us the whole horrible details of Eli's death, and they stayed with me for the rest of my life.<br /><br /></blockquote><br />The wild things' horseplay with each other transitions from roughhousing to disturbing in ways that sometimes echo what Liliana Cavani was <a href="http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/66">aiming for in the Night Porter</a>, others the various responses to domestic abuse. Their bipolar vacillation between angry despondence and joyous revelry is both psychological and physical, going at each other like permanently damaged creatures who've come to accept the violent imperfections of their behaviors as both liberatory in the infliction of pain and defensible in the context of displaced anger. <br /><br />Carol's violent outbursts are shrugged off in "he means well" phraseology. When dirt clod warfare breaks out, KW's facestomping of Carol causes him to take it personally, resorting to the arms of Douglas who he claims would only do such a thing as an accident. To remedy the situation KW asks him to step on her face, he doesn't satisfy the request. When Max takes on the role of face-stepper, she thanks him, relieved. Each one's outward displays of hostility are masks for their insecurities, (SPOILER, kinda) best exemplifed by KW's turning to the mysterious Bob and Terry and willfully interpreting their responses as everything she needed to hear (an action echoed by the wild things later on (SPOILER END)).<br /><br />When John Darnielle was <a href="http://www.nerve.com/screeningroom/music/mountaingoats/">interviewed by Nerve </a>about the difficulty of The Sunset Tree's autobiographical content, in which a younger Darnielle tries to grow into a functional adult in spite of his abusive stepfather, an unexpected geniality flowed through his response. "I don't want people to feel bad for me because I'm fine, and I don't think of my stepfather as this monstrous figure. A lot of the reviews describe him as drunken, which really annoys me because he didn't drink, really." When that ruffled the standard notion of confessional discourse, he deconstructed Oprah: <br /><br /><blockquote>The thing about those people on Oprah is, I wouldn't blame them. It's the way you have to frame stuff for an audience as broad as a daytime-TV audience. You really have to spell the story out in the simplest, most black-and-white terms possible. There's no room for nuance in best-selling self-help books. I mean, yes, the abuser is wrong to abuse and yes, the abusee deserves better than to be abused, but after that the dynamics get real sticky. If you are in that dynamic you learn to sort of play the role. I think art would be the better place to investigate these sorts of things. You don't work out problems in your marriage on TV; you do them in the house in really complicated ways. </blockquote><br /><br />Darnielle's stepfather had passed on years before he thought of making the album, sparking off a powder keg. For his mother and sister, his stepfather's behavior had passed on, too. The album's last track, though, is an uncharacteristically fond memory , and further complicating things Darnielle leaves something else for him, too: "My stepfather was a passionate, political man. He talked a good game about not lying about the world as you see it. To do honor to that part of him that made me who I am, I felt like I needed to tell the truth." The political machinations alluded to in the Wild Things are also a lot more complicated than expected. <br /><br />Almost immediately, there's a voluntary vassalage to Max's ascension to the throne, brought on by the Wild Things' percieved need for guidance, for the comfort of hierarchy and being told what to do. It's a desperate response to an emotional rut with grave consequences if the last-ditch effort becomes just another another slap in the face. Initially, it's almost Hobbesian, born in fear, with a "war of every man against every man", liberty sacrificed on behalf of something finally putting an end to it all. <br />Max's crown is pulled from an unidentified skeleton, one Carol shrugs off as something that was there before they were, before taking Max around the island and repeating the inscription of his father. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLJm-KDMSeXCCHP7hum7bGgGTTS0N1FKvBeasN5NJj_EoD0A49QTP8vO7S7IPsXIc4UaMLoDp7hkJeS5qXlEt-CJmdSLi5doBH49X7aBEydr2-3QMUHmQxdmmA8ZxMch3B7RXQW7YmMac/s1600-h/raise-scepter_wide.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 224px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLJm-KDMSeXCCHP7hum7bGgGTTS0N1FKvBeasN5NJj_EoD0A49QTP8vO7S7IPsXIc4UaMLoDp7hkJeS5qXlEt-CJmdSLi5doBH49X7aBEydr2-3QMUHmQxdmmA8ZxMch3B7RXQW7YmMac/s400/raise-scepter_wide.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5395525228881767954" /></a><br /><br />The top-down age-ist mechanization the creators are accused of finds defensible character here in that the dissolution of power and utopian vision aren't played off as a world-weary, hopeless dead end but instead a complication of prescriptive naivete in taking on the world's ills, whose resonance here is seen to be derived as much from internal expurgation as external observation, the world is as fucked up as we are. In doing so, the effect isn't to render attempts at remediating, both interpersonally and globally, as null and useless but perhaps perpetually flawed in a way that requires practical application of sympathetic oversight. <br /><br />That the realization comes from an illusory throne is loaded, obviously. Though his father's absence is never explained, you may gather the hazards of being one are accounted for in Max's travails, but his throne's dissolving importance seems to reflect on the power conferred to the vacated role and the reclamatory ability realizing the overcompensation in doing so entails. Yet when I watched the film the resonance of what transpired with the Wild Things wasn't informed by the introductory sequence, but my mother's experiences, something which recieved an unexpected reaction when we dialogued after the movie's end. <br /><br />Now my mom, like Sendak, grew up with the Shoah generation. While Sendak was around as a tyke for it it's implications for both of them were gained from the post-traumatic behavior of their parents. When my mom was max's age she was in Israel, and between the Six Days and the Yom Kippur Wars. As she describes it there was a whole generation of kids under parents with double baggage. Either tattooed or refuged, they came out of one catastrophe into another in the role of perpetual war veterans, with the attendant shock. Her dad, and a bunch of others, had PTSD and those kids got caught in the crosshairs of PTSD's blind rage.<br /><br />For a while there was a disconnect. Growing up and still now my granddad on my mom's side was a comforting example of gentle care. His deliberate movements mirrored the passing of time, not only in the way his methodical thoroughness with every action corresponded to the ticking of the clock but in the way it seemed to accept the futility of rushing, perhaps in light of "where to?" But the trajectory of how he got there over time eventually filled out in less than comforting ways. <br /><br />Yet, there's never been any animosity in our family trips to Israel, unless it was extra familial and aimed at the news. My mom, seemingly, had internalized the damage, simultaneously acknowleding both his and my grandmother's failure to properly introduce her to the world and that it was their introduction nonetheless, citing mitigating circumstances. With the potential for harm subsided, their presence was innoculable and the endearing parents they could have been, and were from time to time on the family outings she marks as the good times, are instead there now, enabling a familal relationship for her and the rest of us. <br /><br />When I mentioned the lack of connection between the introductory characterization and subsequent abrasive quality of the wild things and how the initial depiciton of alienation failed to account for the conflicted relationship with violence and love that ensued, my mom countered with the gradations of depression as measured by personal experience. Foregoing comparative trauma, she focused instead on the devastation wrought by incommunicable despondence in direct relation to one's surroundings and the destructive potentiality in any of its unremediated forms. Basically, the capacity for depression and violence isn't solely rooted in environmental factors, and comparing backgrounds ignores what most immediately informs it. All of a sudden it sounded like I had it in for the kid and wanted him to experience my mother's traumas, disregarding the intermitting melancholy I can fall prey to without the assistance of CPS violations. <br /><br />Yet all my assessments of the Wild Things interactions were second hand. I wouldn't want Eggers and Jonze to have explored that with anything other than genuine interest, and I wouldn't want a harsher reality displayed at the expense of the audience whose recognition of it on personal grounds would result in anguish. As it exists the opening sequence offers a comparative experience with the ensuing activity offering subtextual relation without being overt, but the latter part's engendering of that discourse suggests the discrepancy is worth addressing. It still begs the question, "what <span style="font-style:italic;">kind</span> of wild thing exists in all of us?" <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgd2iZls6Tl0FWt0xXagJBgQXYtzvxzfd3F0Oh6Ut3sZ7dqjsNbrAwUTDJ1DvertCoOWc6vJm6tlmFVPkn8M6QbCsnPfzRiYgoWgY-nUlBRKtguMBvKkQ6QDcUaW785GesgsdzpnDT1pZo/s1600-h/where-wild-things-are-sun.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 226px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgd2iZls6Tl0FWt0xXagJBgQXYtzvxzfd3F0Oh6Ut3sZ7dqjsNbrAwUTDJ1DvertCoOWc6vJm6tlmFVPkn8M6QbCsnPfzRiYgoWgY-nUlBRKtguMBvKkQ6QDcUaW785GesgsdzpnDT1pZo/s400/where-wild-things-are-sun.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5395526796282807634" /></a>Adam Katzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13445652093684270646noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2296351472492903976.post-30580434127233978682009-09-19T20:33:00.000-07:002009-10-05T14:46:58.668-07:00Gloury Rules, Revisited: The Basterdization of a History already Basterdized<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjD02HpH1raLez08iQpFHGvm_rW6JVdAJvKo37VWTrCVJaRlHff8hm3jusfG58-0TPnBs27ap_O5S-a1TK8rXCS6zEuQ-oaaw4nk-tor2I-D3AhCfI4FDGhsi30wpdIkVEGYd4LeC6c9_8/s1600-h/shoah_2.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 180px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjD02HpH1raLez08iQpFHGvm_rW6JVdAJvKo37VWTrCVJaRlHff8hm3jusfG58-0TPnBs27ap_O5S-a1TK8rXCS6zEuQ-oaaw4nk-tor2I-D3AhCfI4FDGhsi30wpdIkVEGYd4LeC6c9_8/s400/shoah_2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5388998153086090546" /></a><br /><br />What Inglourious Basterds is definitely not: Shoah. This is something not to either film's detriment. <br /><br />In my <a href="http://malteserubble.blogspot.com/2009/08/history-blows-gloury-rules.html">previous post</a> on Basterds I stated that the film draws power both from how the audience's knowledge of Nazi occupational hazard (ahem) informs the dire gravity of the deceptively trivial meandering between characters, as well as the way the film's direct correlation to the history it inverts is less a denial than a comment on its unattainabilty. <br /><br />Yet defending the film by suggesting it defines itself in what it is not can only go so far. The absences that inform the film are narrow in scope, and the wider, unacknowledged gap is generally taken for granted in the film's discussion. Some critics, like Jonathan Rosenbaum and Daniel Mendelsohn, accuse the film of holocaust denial. Yet the scope of their accusations is entirely confined to that of the film's, thus cementing the parameters to which the sanctimony can pertain. And what they pertain to is a narrow definition of the Holocaust, mainly that it concerns 6 million jews instead of 12 million humans. <br /><br />Mendehlson is the author of Lost: The Search for Six in Six Million, where he documents members of his family who died at the hands Nazis (note: Godard had plans to adapt this, which works as a further example of his disregard for the subjects he deconstructs). In his article "<a href="http://www.newsweek.com/id/212016">When Jews Attack"</a>, he posits a few things: the best revenge/prevention of future reiteration is by serving the truth as the Jews have apparently been primarily occupied with doing since (no mention of Israel), and adorning Jewish heroes with Nazi traits stokes vicarious celebration of SS cruelty, not only denying history but setting the foundation for the repitition of its errors. <br /><br />On the one hand, this is fairly incongruous, as the particularization of said cruelty as Nazi in character suggests it can't be repeated while the omen for the ignorant is its reawakening elsewhere. Yet the particularization is not necessarily an authoritative defining of said cruelty, but ascribing it a specific historical place and washing hands of its time-locked stain. This unfortunately relates to two subsets of holocaust analysis, the assumption of singularity in cruelty, defined as German, and that in which said cruelty can and never should be understood. The latter is the M.O. of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, a film who's scope offers a historical precedent in the discussion. <br /><br />The following I think is fairly revealing not about what Shoah did accomplish but what Lanzmann thought he was accomplishing. On the question of why the Jews were killed he coins the "obscenity of understanding," saying that "not understanding was my iron law" while filming and that "blindness...was the vital condition for creation. Blindness has to be understood here as the purest mode of looking, of the gaze, the only to way to not turn away from a reality that is literally blinding." Further, "the project of understanding...it is not only obscenity, it is real cowardice, because this idea of our being able to engender harmoniously, if I may say so again, this kind of violence, is just an absurd dream of nonviolence. It is a way of escaping, it is a way of not facing the horror." Which explains why he said trying to understand Hitler is immoral. <br /><br />For me, this illustrates less a reverently post-modern capitulation than an attempt to authoritatively engender confusion as a self-perpetuating discourse, Lanzmann being the fountain from which it pours forth. Perhaps his method is a maintenance of objectivity by lack of generalities, but his immersion in facts as phenomena cannot be called comprehensive in that his facts were narrowed to one strata of his film's titular atrocity. <br /><br />Shoah's method is another peculiarity in that there is no actual imagery from the holocaust. Why? Because "image kills the imagination." Considering the imagination of Robert Faurisson this is not a bad proposition. That's not to deny the method its brilliance, as it has its power. <br /><br />The film works as a series of interviews with subjects who fall into three assigned categories of survivors, bystanders and perpetrators, conducted for the most part on and around the camps and ghettos as they are today. It's understated but vicious. Conversational teeth pulling is done via translator to evoke the atmosphere and behavior of the neighborhoods surrounding the death camps, as well as to catch a predator cam engagement with nazis themselves, all bearing direct reflection on the remarkably vivid recollection of a dying collective memory.<br /><br />What nags, though, is that the power of these non-illustrated anecdotes is drawn from the footage not on display. Lanzmann's method would be severely undermined had it not been preceded by night and fog, or really any documentary evidence of the horrors of the holocaust. Therefore, Shoah, even on the grounds of its praise, cannot be the definitive document of holocaust analyses, only, even still, a great contribution to the discourse. On the grounds never broached in discussion of it, it can't be definitive based on its exclusion of the other six million: homosexuals, communists, gypsies, the disabled, the list goes on. <br /><br />The film's definition of Shoah rests on a narrowly defined, restrictive interpretation that only concerns the plight of the Jews, arguably the cornerstone of Nazi wrath, but not the entire wall. Considering the film's intentionally ponderous length of 9 1/2 hours, the exclusion is an insult to the rest of the victims' legacy. No time is spared to discuss how the wanton destructive anti-semitism might have slipped over into political, sexual and pan-ethnic repression. <br /><br />One interview subject, Raul Hilberg, was a pioneer of sorts in Holocaust research at a time when it was unpopular. His book, "The Destruction of European Jews" explores as its title dictates. That's excusable, as the goal has strictly defined parameters which he has broken elsewhere. Shoah names itself after the whole thing and then stops short and then even where it stops short it stands back. Considerably different is HIlberg's thesis on Jewish extermination: <br /><br /><blockquote>As a result of an organized undertaking, five million people were killed in the short space of a few years. The operation was over before anyone could grasp its enormity, let alone its implications for the future. Yet, if we analyze this singularly massive upheaval, we discover that most of what happened in those twelve years had already happened before. The Nazi destruction process did not come out of a void; it was the culmination of a cyclical trend. We have observed the trend in three successive goals of anti-Jewish administrators. The missionaries of Christianity had said in effect: You have no right to live among us as Jews. The secular rulers who followed had proclaimed: You have no right to live among us. The Nazis at last decreed: You have no right to live. </blockquote><br /><br />Hilberg's work came into disagreement with the other subset, of wholesale German character assassination, more recently when Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's WIlling Executioners denied decades of tempered, comprehensive and in-depth holocaust analyis to pin the impetus for the Holocaust on deep-seated German desires. Taking off from the fact that many of the gunmen in shooting operations weren't trained specialists but ordinary cops turned firing squads, the holocaust was really a manifestation of the German will to kill. <br /><br />In Hilberg's article, <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344046?&Search=yes&term=%22Raul+Hilberg%22&list=hide&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FSearch%3DSearch%26Query%3Dau%3A%2522Raul%2520Hilberg%2522&item=2&ttl=25&returnArticleService=showArticle">The Goldhagen Phenomenon</a>, the notion is dispelled in a few ways. For starters, not all of the shooters were German but also "Romanians, Croats, Ukrainians, Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians in significant numbers" which then partly harkens back to the extra-German character of anti-semitism, with the atrocities committed elsewhere including Romanian Odessa Massacre of 70,000 Jews and the far earlier Russian Pogroms. Further, not all the victims were Jews, including the fourth of Germany's mental patients practiced on to get ready for the main event. Also, Hitler's father, not a Jew-hater! <br /><br />Another important knock not deployed is the way the film doesn't extend its villainization over to the Allies. The one scene Churchill appears is merely part of a running gag mocking historical figure cameos in period pieces, which entirely ignores how Churchill's dogma overlapped with Hitler's regarding anti-semitism. One can be found in this<a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/uncovered-churchills-warnings-about-the-hebrew-bloodsuckers-439772.html"> Independent UK article </a>about his 1937 blaming of the "hebrew bloodsuckers" for their misery. Another example is from Nicholas Baker's Human Smoke, collecting vignettes reflecting on WWII's origins: <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi62P3D-Ncub5kSNRMIdAZvkyw22Eog0OEY34xYSUwrszsIgUQ8A57djWfDsOzLlqLKXocGjHXIYhfM98zoDzD3c8a0PsUdyv4EAFOaAaJF3DPD-IVDKKjpjn7SOAYMuZskkfRDuDkBycY/s1600-h/Picture+33.png"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 288px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi62P3D-Ncub5kSNRMIdAZvkyw22Eog0OEY34xYSUwrszsIgUQ8A57djWfDsOzLlqLKXocGjHXIYhfM98zoDzD3c8a0PsUdyv4EAFOaAaJF3DPD-IVDKKjpjn7SOAYMuZskkfRDuDkBycY/s400/Picture+33.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5388993630755284690" /></a><br /><br />That doesn't even begin to touch on Churchill's proclamations on what means justify colonialism's ends, yet another historical precedent for genocide in Germany (replete with numbered concentration camp status) as their <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herero_and_Namaqua_Genocide">1904 extermination of the Herero and Namaqua tribes in Southwest Africa</a> is both a reflection not just on their tendencies for extermination but on how Aryan notions of superiority overlapped with general European disregard for the considered-inferior subjects peopling the lands it played cartography with.<br /><br />Rosenbaum, to his defense, has an interesting bit about colleagues who got worked up over William Styron's novel Sophie's Choice (presumably for the way Styron inserts himself into a collective history via a semi-autobiographical but almost wholly fictional coming of age tale, he doesn't say) but got behind Inglourious Basteds. The choice of the novel is interesting in that its examination of the holocaust extends the scope from Jewish victimhood to Polish suffering/complicity in the legacy of what the holocaust put Sophie, a gentile Polish citizen, through, to the legacy of slavery on Styron's avatar, who inherits a fortune that dates back to the benefits reaped from a slave auction. As a centuries spanning example of the human capabilities for cruelty, surely the copious amounts of deviant/inventive torture from that institution debunks German singularity. <br /><br />The question should be, "wouldn't it have been more effective if they had a homosexual, a gypsy and a communist in league with the basterds?" Certainly. But considering what we've got, would it not have been immensely satisfying to know that Werner Von Braun had needed to worry about make-up assistance when making those "science is fun!" Disney reels?Adam Katzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13445652093684270646noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2296351472492903976.post-40799582754127496322009-09-14T01:39:00.000-07:002009-09-16T00:12:53.282-07:00Can't Be Sure Anymore: Assholes and Elbows and MixtapesIn the extra-functional hours of pre-dawn, modes of discourse tend to take on displaced routes of expression. Thus, this mix. <br />Blinds drawn with a parking lot on the other side a particular disconnect is wont to overflow in 7911B, but not without inverting the link-up to the abstract. You write papers/memos/articles/reports, get called on to speak or called in to explain yourself, indirectly facebook invited to a cause whose utmost importance is deflated by the medium of the dispatch, and moral gets subverted by temporal. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYmA9Y3o9CEviy435QOMurfdOeKz14FZxqmYp0Rq62R7JOsuCa42PHdfumfll1jbXM0C8UZ_FR1j09df7NEerNZchUfSFY1fhA4KcDEZADhgQ2pHTLVLHkppNNyrp_jzm1R-NE1CyC9hE/s1600-h/Picture+11.png"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 333px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYmA9Y3o9CEviy435QOMurfdOeKz14FZxqmYp0Rq62R7JOsuCa42PHdfumfll1jbXM0C8UZ_FR1j09df7NEerNZchUfSFY1fhA4KcDEZADhgQ2pHTLVLHkppNNyrp_jzm1R-NE1CyC9hE/s400/Picture+11.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5381588829580995202" /></a><br /><br />(AHEM)<br /><a href="http://www.zshare.net/audio/65542727b61e7d26/">http://www.zshare.net/audio/65542727b61e7d26/</a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_IuFfzhAa-gUsmPBhgP_WotpKOw9B5Feknur0f26imvzxaXXcpv-dBFjCu2cK3rZ1V8IZiuf44mrMqfeiXXAXrMJrQ8BlV1cBKSpeWG6YMXBRFtrxAOEEbVgxxyfv8oAwyWSun8zFl-I/s1600-h/Picture+4.png"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 241px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_IuFfzhAa-gUsmPBhgP_WotpKOw9B5Feknur0f26imvzxaXXcpv-dBFjCu2cK3rZ1V8IZiuf44mrMqfeiXXAXrMJrQ8BlV1cBKSpeWG6YMXBRFtrxAOEEbVgxxyfv8oAwyWSun8zFl-I/s400/Picture+4.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5381587369832818738" /></a><br /><br /><br />...breakdown <br />(and so, an attempt to connect the various thematic and aesthetic threads that seemed to make sense yesterday at 3 in the morning) <br /><br />Arthur Russell - What it's like<br />Post-scientific backlash against atheism by the agnostic pluralists, a perpetually shifting discussion that both in youthful extravagance and generational alienation devolves into pleading with tonality, of condescension, naivete, so on. But fuck if asking ain't still the most frustrating experience of diminished returns. <br /><br />T. Rex - Monolith <br />One of the original crossovers between role playing nerd and fashion queen, Bolan here does myth takes in girl talk, touching on the underside of that pioneering credulity. "Fogged was their vision, since the ages began" Oh, the CHILDREN OF MEN. <br /><br />Hood Headlinaz - Soul Glo <br />Flipping that waxed mop of de-blackification (as per Coming to America's satirical aside), the soul and the spirit are in the words. They're finally here, but, y'know, longevity. Of course, f that, glory here reigns even if momentarily.<br /><br />Kanye West - I wonder <br />So, comes an unscripted moment in a glutton of pre-programming and the self-appointed gods throw up their arms on an entire career. Armchair psychology thrown back at the VMA incident completely misses the point that Kanye is a perpetually self-diagnosed persona, whose inner turmoil and self-regard are honestly displayed for public discourse, which, really, is kind of what rap is, warts and all with the blemish cream in tow. Now, consider the line where he turns over to once-free spirited, now domestically dispirited women. Besides the come-on, it isn't a put down, it's not a gotcha call out of hypocritical tendency, but serious empathy to moments where free will and the expected trajectory overlap. You read some passages once, you shot down your parents, when did all that rage become white noise? <br /><br />Paavoharju - kuisuuden Maailma<br />Finnish Lutherans and tape hiss. You put down the spirits, we'll conjure them. Don't believe, we'll still create the illusion. Invariably, you'll still get lost. <br /><br />Triple Six Mafia - Niggaz Ain't Barin' Dat <br />6 minutes, the golden mean between the time spent fuming over a potential punching bag and the conversely impulsive act of violence. Looped here is the masculinity-testing incentive "slap a punk bitch" but the jarring element is the ethereal, contemplative piano loop that underlines it. It's beyond mantra, it's the inherent self-doubt in the "am I really going to do this" conundrum. <br /><br />Roxy Music - Ladytron<br />The flailing vibratto taking on the generally unquestioned obsession with the archetypal object of love/lust. The male singers rarely make this a two-way street, they can't unless they want their shtick demystified by shared limelight, thus the underlying tinge of psychoses. Basically, <br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9FW1-l0fcSIXykeoeVHWZHlCejfMH5Xghpxqh_vvSEl32dbBB1glZ0e3nhN4cytkoMUyajqsc0u2i5i-1ZGZ0alKoLDk9_Vw6m6jgEnfUppjXjxnjP3RshUP0Ph2tN0MJP-DYUepoY0g/s1600-h/large_reallifepic1.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 264px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9FW1-l0fcSIXykeoeVHWZHlCejfMH5Xghpxqh_vvSEl32dbBB1glZ0e3nhN4cytkoMUyajqsc0u2i5i-1ZGZ0alKoLDk9_Vw6m6jgEnfUppjXjxnjP3RshUP0Ph2tN0MJP-DYUepoY0g/s400/large_reallifepic1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5381578139879347346" /></a><br /><br />Scott Walker - The Old Man's Back Again (dedicated to the Neo-Stalinist regime) <br />Okay so, Democracy: <br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfYYs0I6FMFZtRGzjtw1pg2ykg58ouj3O59VjmPrEPOHw_laF5TnO1pi1jkbb-1zbDL9oVDUabCXOOKaQ-AuRYRLEbDeZP8F8r7TDdaMqbkqKYHJCNzrCVJrnuZen3QqMeZdgEItRNFiw/s1600-h/Picture+5.png"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 227px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfYYs0I6FMFZtRGzjtw1pg2ykg58ouj3O59VjmPrEPOHw_laF5TnO1pi1jkbb-1zbDL9oVDUabCXOOKaQ-AuRYRLEbDeZP8F8r7TDdaMqbkqKYHJCNzrCVJrnuZen3QqMeZdgEItRNFiw/s400/Picture+5.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5381579849602110978" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAHzpNsOG61SD6lYfFsrX-BRPD-b-t3owkh6jT0i6lGTyXNvQ2-GN5ykIG8t8fDLyyX1kCulLLH9wt91Noryz9X1F7giP7TqLsZwptuq552AdT4jlnbRWYWqgPBE-1UAphwS6JdrsAAhI/s1600-h/Picture+7.png"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 216px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAHzpNsOG61SD6lYfFsrX-BRPD-b-t3owkh6jT0i6lGTyXNvQ2-GN5ykIG8t8fDLyyX1kCulLLH9wt91Noryz9X1F7giP7TqLsZwptuq552AdT4jlnbRWYWqgPBE-1UAphwS6JdrsAAhI/s400/Picture+7.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5381579865946750066" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1T-6KyrCmz8NMYO2o_2IiExGcuo2VQjDtcHDVzc7Nq9XizWEEWAniqYjESsRxwzJ-ajvZ7KseeWi0Sw6f07-Tmq6G5QwSaPvATKHfE-FVdLG_124GBhmx4iJ5LfNSoFGD_UBuj8VeZfw/s1600-h/Picture+6.png"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 218px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1T-6KyrCmz8NMYO2o_2IiExGcuo2VQjDtcHDVzc7Nq9XizWEEWAniqYjESsRxwzJ-ajvZ7KseeWi0Sw6f07-Tmq6G5QwSaPvATKHfE-FVdLG_124GBhmx4iJ5LfNSoFGD_UBuj8VeZfw/s400/Picture+6.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5381579860519858866" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWxLogmMXrZKaTJqjbY-QV4H4jlnERz1-vqga3UnofVfXOM4wxXzhhNpFap2eZkubaEZNKL_zJhUpBHRW_9Ji8U3HiacbHwVXzfHw1UhDKxYBdLMC9ZWym-aUDh4fxEwZviZgM9MQZwD0/s1600-h/Picture+9.png"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 214px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWxLogmMXrZKaTJqjbY-QV4H4jlnERz1-vqga3UnofVfXOM4wxXzhhNpFap2eZkubaEZNKL_zJhUpBHRW_9Ji8U3HiacbHwVXzfHw1UhDKxYBdLMC9ZWym-aUDh4fxEwZviZgM9MQZwD0/s400/Picture+9.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5381579876275910722" /></a><br /> <br />Tyranny: <br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0BXmSCpx_sp-n-sG_p-SxdU-R6m7SpPnuRbrVf35wfqoE_oi4AuLlIxAxU8jerwaiJhYL0dS9cW6MmBECj2JMxkAo1FghQRW2Af6N1Dh2mk5j96wU0_Lu3LZyFaG0erpji4VtErFZ9Xo/s1600-h/Picture+10.png"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 214px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0BXmSCpx_sp-n-sG_p-SxdU-R6m7SpPnuRbrVf35wfqoE_oi4AuLlIxAxU8jerwaiJhYL0dS9cW6MmBECj2JMxkAo1FghQRW2Af6N1Dh2mk5j96wU0_Lu3LZyFaG0erpji4VtErFZ9Xo/s400/Picture+10.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5381579885390996994" /></a><br /><br />Jay-Z: DOA (Death of Autotune) <br />From camp song taunt to jovial, monarchial skewer. The western horns that lead Jay in like the tumbleweed that announces it's serious. Is he the sheriff in High Noon or the cattle baron lackey Liberty Valance? Whatever he is, he's fucking wicked. <br /><br />Jacqueline Taieb - Ce Soir Je M'en Vais<br />"Goodbye my love" that never gets lost in translation, you only think it does because you're sure its obvious simplicity is a cryptic beckoning for the moment to be seized. Result: seizures. <br /><br />Girls - Hellhole Ratrace<br />Self-help is always scoffable because it comes in paperback, thus the self-determination of the book-binding factory workers is skipped over in favor of the consumer's self-regard. It's only self-help if it's innocuous and doesn't really affect anything but your mood. Your equilibrium and the status quo. But shit, come on, if you're scraping the barrell a fucking good look in the mirror is nothing scoffable. The mirror merely being a projection of yourself it's all atmospheric application between the lines, but the yearning, the yearning is real and totally deservable. This song, recorded at 30 and speaking volumes at that young 20 that still feels over the hill regardless of the inherent illogic, is all the anxiety wrapped in one real hazy chin up. Thanks, Ketamine!<br /><br />The Rolling Stones - Wild Horses <br />They can't drag you away but they could definitely help you skip town. Why you don't is the crux. <br /><br />Figurines - Race You <br />There's that aspect in interacting where it's less a fluid exchange than a game of subtly sculpting the other's reply. That last word is the queue, that pause and that um is the missed opportunity, within the reaction is a possible approximation previous speaker's intent. It shouldn't be thought of that way, but sometimes that's how it plays. Selfless is the goal but then accolades come, then castigation comes, then pleas for some reflection. The logic: one can't be selfless AND clueless, but self-realization comes at the cost of impulsive goodness, thus how selfless is it if one pauses to ponder the act? Gahh! The impact is upset by the imp! Mainly, when the authoritative is drawn from the abstract ideal, it gets lost on its way to the bottom. Thus, populist revision! This song, not so much. That game of reflection winds up a sore when the other person's incongruities line up with his puppetry. "Don't call if you need a friend." Deserved response: "What kind of friend were you?" But i'll end on a postively wistful note, recontextualized and disheveled differently instead. "Somehow you never knew, things change and so do you...some dreams still hunt you down"<br /><br />Enjoy.Adam Katzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13445652093684270646noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2296351472492903976.post-72942236981071889442009-09-04T09:29:00.000-07:002009-09-04T12:13:53.230-07:00Blueprint 3: 21 Jumpstreet<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJX89W5B4CDfHAkKjb_Ez3wTr4FQr8U-CHAn_UNmvmbQfaP1hv1fBbVZsxPrvycrrqfmpIk2b10mI8DdpnOrQ7-8WELwZDh01InwKoUney6MnLdiW9srAiLp7IsNfAUKcEn1eArnq4DxU/s1600-h/jay-z_blueprint3.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 283px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJX89W5B4CDfHAkKjb_Ez3wTr4FQr8U-CHAn_UNmvmbQfaP1hv1fBbVZsxPrvycrrqfmpIk2b10mI8DdpnOrQ7-8WELwZDh01InwKoUney6MnLdiW9srAiLp7IsNfAUKcEn1eArnq4DxU/s400/jay-z_blueprint3.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5377652407771121810" /></a><br /><br />To re-up the deflated mythology surrounding The Blueprint 3 consider the pulpy trope of the professional con in secluded retirement being lured back into the game by some dangerously vested interest, spurred by an old foe, a trifling youngin' or barely abated habit. Obviously this would have been more fitting for Kingdom Come but as far as anyone's concerned anything put out after the Black Album is a favor. Jay hasn't exactly been secluded but he does need this in a way, for personal reasons. <br /><br />"Put your name in the pot already, then you can compare me to biggie and PAC already. Like im gone already and i am nigga i'm already home already"<br /><br />He made it out of the 90's rap beefs and his throne status on best of charts isn't posthumous. He's curating 3D portfolios on tv commercials, being out-yachted by Grizzly Bear's voices, and failing at realty development. His mouth was his main money maker, famously unscripted feats of memory and improv in the studio, now it's just spilt ink in supermarket rags, prenups and contracts. If not for us, the consumer, he's just going to be grandpa yelling at furniture after making toasts to dinner guests. <br /><br />"We talking bout real shit or we talkin bout rhymes?"<br /><br />When an author's done spinning yarns, they take respite in just telling you about themselves, thus the memoir. For Jay Z, that was the Black Album. Unable to recapitulate that he pulled a Styron a la Sophie's Choice and etched his bio into someone else's story on American Gangster, a narrative trick whose conceit alone seemed to spur superlatives (I bought it). It was a weird place, having moved from street hustler to corporate hustler, young punk to big wig, it's not hot to rap about white collar crime and celebrity status would put a seriously reasonable doubt on any gangster shtick so dress up that's self-aware becomes more palatable than unabashed fiction. <br /><br />The Blueprint 3 drops that. The old foes, the trifling youngins, and the barely abated habit are maybe half-real, but they're also paranoid manifestations of reflective insecurity. None of the new rap is a direct threat on the Jay legacy, but he's not exactly dead or old he's just weirdly hanging around like 80's vert-ramp skaters trying street punk tricks in the 90's. Thing is, he's got it, but he wants to pay new dues just to let you know he didn't need to. And that's where the album gets its emotional thrust, the (to be pretentious for a moment) raging against the dying of the light (for lack of a better high school poetry reference). <br /><br />"And as for the critics, tell me i don’t get it. Everybody can tell you how to do it, they never did it."<br /><br />Jay is a celebrity, he can tell you about his life, but it's only important because he's now cultural capital, he has to commodify it for our benefit and since he's cultural capital he gets measured against what's selling whether he likes it or not. Thus the album is packaged with a foot in two worlds, the old man gaze and young gun's ten yard stare. Old blue eyes references with horns and live drums and actual autotune with synth sheen and bubblegum. <br /><br />"Holdup, this shit need a verse from Jeezy… ay! I might send this to the mixtape Weezy"<br /><br />Which is what makes DOA or Death of Autotune so funny. He's being a dick AND a goof. The same way Wayne boasted about being the best rapper alive before getting an autotune chip implanted in his throat and picking up a guitar, or, similar to old lit snarks shitting on contemporary fiction, Jay's ruffling feathers and having a good time with it too especially when the second half of the album synths up a walkway right to a historical precedent, a timeless 80's pop gem. <br /><br />The album starts off hard, with an almost projected, self-purgating excoriation of high-grounded but low-minded critics who can't make the connection between "fake" worded slings and "real" textbook things, but then comes back around like a cosby actually in touch with his subject and takes to task the young kids doing what he made his career on:<br /><br /><blockquote>"ain’t nothing cool about carrying a strap, about worrying ya moms, and burying ya best cat, talking about revenge while you carrying his casket, all teary eyed bout to take it to a mattress."<br /></blockquote><br />The social realism defense always only goes so far and this song has it both ways, melding outside and inside conversations, taking dirty laundry to task while dishing it too. Reasonable Doubt sounded like a cocky young corner kid playing OG, and Jay's street cred was eventually called into question but by the Black Album dude finally sounded like he'd been round the block, with his voice filled in. Maybe now he's comfortable, and he's not connecting his past to someone else's present, but he is connecting someone else's present to his past, thus this is appropriately off with the kid gloves. <br /><br />"Hail Mary to the city your a Virgin, and Jesus can’t save you life starts when the church ends"<br /><br />There's this thing rappers do, where hyperaware of their gruff demeanor and its inability to convey other emotions they bring in r & b singers to do the hook, thus vicariously letting out what they can't. It has less to do with socially defined gender roles (or ringtones) than a patchwork melding of respective abilities. The most heartrending version of this comes on Empire State of Mind with Alicia Keys, a totally uncynical and somewhat humbly proud glad to still be here recounting of day to day stuff taken for granted, the added significance a particularly trivial inanity like a streetcorner takes on when compounded by time and personal relation. A musing on De Niro in Tribeca turns into being hood forever, that one McDonald's was only a short stop on another booming industry, the chorus goes inspirational platitude but becomes about a perceptive feeling instead of a reality when Jay takes time from musing on his success to measure its extendability, which doesn't go as far as his sympathy does.<br /><br />"I felt so inspired by what the teacher said, Said id either be dead or be a reefer head <br />Not sure if that’s how adults should speak to kids, Especially when the only thing I did was speak in class...Ill teach his ass"<br /><br />So yeah, fuck an adult when you're a kid. You hear Jay on Charlie Rose he does the intellectual talk show thing, he adopts the formality he laughed at in 99 problems to both mental AND visceral effect, something acting like an "adult" disposes when the purpose is being civil (unless you're Hans Landa). This is where Jay's cockiness makes him great, which we take for granted because we want humility but what if he took it like another kid and ended up a statistic for a Kozol book. It's a thing where what it is highlights what it's not without overshadowing it, as opposed to self-help books that offer you a secret that hits epic FAIL when applied to reality, Jay's talking his response and the what (adults in a position of comfort merely because they made it to 40 and hate on the reminders of what they were) remains the glaring problem, the way him hitting the top in Empire State of Mind doesn't neglect those who don't. <br /><br />You can take this and apply it to the album where Jay Z's the adult, and you can call him hypocritical, but again he's playing a kid while remembering he's been through the high school cafeteria before. This is more like 21 jump street. If you say you don't hear these things on the album because it's a mess, it's better said that it's messy. And everything personal is messy. And for Jay, these days, this is way more personal than that gangster shtick. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHdKg-KLjBsm3HIgD38f5A_gN4potwuzx94HmxIaY7TEFW5I178M9p7QUbqNS5qAPpvwCVXi1EcMGxoqUnArA2CuHzs6FvN8oVt0CcH-g8Wwm5NIrow5HayQOb3hP0UAHwLPR3RWTKIcE/s1600-h/21jumpstreet_l.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHdKg-KLjBsm3HIgD38f5A_gN4potwuzx94HmxIaY7TEFW5I178M9p7QUbqNS5qAPpvwCVXi1EcMGxoqUnArA2CuHzs6FvN8oVt0CcH-g8Wwm5NIrow5HayQOb3hP0UAHwLPR3RWTKIcE/s400/21jumpstreet_l.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5377683565181590946" /></a><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Forever Young</span>Adam Katzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13445652093684270646noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2296351472492903976.post-8518759100869307842009-08-21T22:29:00.000-07:002009-08-29T20:57:35.123-07:00History Blows, Gloury Rules<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQDYlJMF8DBO0zMty7SJrtFIcJh_BKb8iJFsbq4dVoPBkVbFrkxGnhrNcp2cYVwycCyVF1FzMNdMrvZp-gjcJN6Q57XU-pWK9dX5hMBSc-l_0CsF9upNUoAYaZwPfGCs3DEef_HEYlylM/s1600-h/1224252968211_1.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 268px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQDYlJMF8DBO0zMty7SJrtFIcJh_BKb8iJFsbq4dVoPBkVbFrkxGnhrNcp2cYVwycCyVF1FzMNdMrvZp-gjcJN6Q57XU-pWK9dX5hMBSc-l_0CsF9upNUoAYaZwPfGCs3DEef_HEYlylM/s400/1224252968211_1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5372732206334585458" /></a><br /><br />My preconcieved notions of Inglourious Basterds ran something like this: Tarantino's landfill consummation of film history, particularly his penchant for publicly elevating exploitative shlock to high art, would result in a film whose willing immersion in gruesome transgressions inadvertently captured the horror of life under Nazis as well as the fractured psyche of anyone who attempted to resolve it on its own terms. Just the look on Donny Donnowitz's face during Aldo Raine's speech spoke leagues in the trailer as to the extra-moral and deeply disturbed nature of his participation. But that's not the whole case.<br /><br />As it turns out, Tarantino has done something else, something no less important: He's imbued the lives of his characters with a filmic relevance that a cinema verite approximation would trample over, not unjustifiably but just irrelevantly so when so much of our history is written not just by historians, but by authors of fiction. WWII for long has not just been something that happened, but a pliable backdrop for by other means genre exploration, be it espionage or romance or self-congratulatory narcissism (or all three in the superficial yarnification of Where Eagles Dare). Forget allegorical attempts at understanding the real, but the bending of reality to the personal stampage of creative will. <br /><br />To take a reputably high art example - Gravity's Rainbow having less to do with the reality of WWII horrors than with Pynchon's acid-drenched rearrangement of the endlessly marginal information stored in his head. When it didn't directly engage in WWII it was off on Freudian tangents of peculiar libidinal intrigue, the deathly pall of supernatural/kabbalistic lore, sci-fi conceits and ahistorical occultist parallels drawn across enemy lines. <br /><br />Thankfully, Tarantino isn't that kind of ambitious, his playing ground here is always related to the war but by the indirect two-way mirror of the war film, which is where we find the literature relevant to this context. The Dirty Dozen's death row inmates thrown into enemy territory with the chance of vindication had more to do with 60's political climate of racial strife, political self-determination via distrust of authority, and existential developments in the perception of morality. <br /><br />Tarantino's concern with the present has less to do with current events than our fixation on the past and its portrayal. One level is through the aforementioned film genrifiction, the other is through cultural sensitivity. When pioneer Holocaust historian (because at one point it wasn't even a niche) and primary <span style="font-style:italic;">Shoah</span> source Raul Hilberg was denied access to the Yad Vashem archives it had to do with his complicated portrayal of Jews during the Holocaust, mainly the disingenuously representative politics of the Judenrate that he believed were complicit in ongoing machinations of genocide:<br /><br /><blockquote>"I had to examine the Jewish tradition of trusting God, princes, laws and contracts [...] Ultimately I had to ponder the Jewish calculation that the persecutor would not destroy what he could economically exploit. It was precisely this Jewish strategy that dictated accommodation and precluded resistance."</blockquote><br /><br />Another controversial assessment of the Jews during the Holocaust was Hannah Arendt's implication that "without Jewish help there would have either been complete chaos or a severe drain on German power." Further eroding the importance of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising or the Bielski brothers is the unintended perpetuation of said passive reputation by conservative polemicists arguing against Palestinian violence by suggesting the Jews never resorted to blowing up restaurants, as if the resulting near-success of the Final Solution somehow makes that come off as a good thing. <br /><br />And now, there's a furor (ahem) in the Jewish critical community about the film's parallels to terrorism and the glorification of its usage, the titular Basterds being a rag-tag band of psycopathic Jews enlisted by the American army to offset Nazi stability by spreading fear through their ranks with the use of scalping, insignia carving, brain bashing and any other sadistic means of disposal. (<span style="font-style:italic;">SEMI-SPOILER ALERT:</span> Their ultimate goal is to blow up a movie theater where the four most important Reichsters will be attending the premiere of Goebell's new propaganda action film, a plan that unkowingly runs along a similar plot hatched by of the owner of the theater, a disguised fugitive and sole survivor of a round-up massacre that killed her entire family.)<br /><br />While they should be more worried about what actual Jews are up to in the occupied territories the film plays with the grey area between the abject meaninglessness/inscrutability of existence and the cathartic release of cinematic analysis and reappropriation. The Basterds and the plot aren't merely wish fulfillment but a commentary on its non-existence. It's not the propaganda of Riefenstahl, where idealization supersedes honesty, but post-propaganda in which the framework of the presentation is aware of the facts' overwhelming bulwark against its fancies. <br /><br />It's Tarantino's understanding of the variegated tonality of filmic representation with which he allows his protagonists to achieve canonical (in the religious sense) ascension to historical importance. The unabashed recycling of soundtracks, plot devices, setups and tropes are here used because they exist, not because they correlate to something particular, but how they make something particular relatable, the final irony here being how the parlor tricks reveal the inherent alienation/remoteness of the film's central dilemmas. The atmospherically epic western framing of deceptively placid interrogations gives weight to the disorientingly overwhelming plight of the victim, as in the opening sequence where a farmer's wits are strained trying to coolly please the prized Gestapo "Jew-Hunter" there to sniff out the family under the floorboard, soon becoming the origin story for one of the main protagonists. <br /><br />Thus, Inglourious Basterds is not just the retroactively retributive war movie its adverts suggested but a delirious con game of mutable bluff. Tarantino's repertoire consists of pulp variables and encyclopedic auterism but all within the art of maintaining interpersonal cool with vested interest. Characters talk to each other, but almost like the other person's response is merely an expectedly sculpted reflection on whoever just spoke's well-kept facade, a cocky disposition requiring awestruck reassurance to make sure the trick is working. <br /><br />To ensure the trick works, and the charm of its deceit endures, crafted are a tryptich of outsized archetypes. Christoph Waltz's SS Col. Hans Landa, a self-styled detective whose mark is every last hiding Jew, hence his moniker "The Jew Hunter," whose motivation is the satisfaction of superciliously outsmarting his victims. Brad Pitt, licking his chops, obviously relishing the chance to play deep-fried Lt. Aldo Raine, a classic southern charmer who draws on his part Apache heritage as an explanation for the guerilla warfare the Basterds unleash on the Nazis. And Melanie Laurent's Shosanna Dreyfuss alias Mimeux, the tight-lipped, no-bullshit proprietor of the cinematheque who doesn't need the allies to unbridle her fury. Almost no one here is wasted, even the generally repugnant Eli Roth as The Bear Jew playing what eerily resembles the modern Kappa Delta Jewish American with aimlessly xenophobic balls to spare here transplanted in a historical situation where his dick moves are actually useful. <br /><br />Here, though, the violence is a mere intermittent startle. Instead, the action is almost entirely foreplay, consisting of interminably drawn out poker games where the playing hand is the conversational bluff and the stakes are death. One of the central ironies of the Holocaust is that it was perpetrated by what was until then considered the apex of civilization, emblematic of the intellectual and moral superiority of western culture. In Basterds, the use of manners, wit, and general congeniality are used primarily to ensnare the next possible victim, creating a juxtaposition between the tenets held dear by the hospitality management side of the self-aggrandizing clash of civilizations ideology, and the methods used to uphold their position outside of their diction. <br /><br />But this being as much a war movie as it is a war movie about war movies the scripting of the diction is just as important. Tarantino isn't only revising history, but revising the fictional approximation of history, with its historical innacuracies, composite characterizations and unrelated genre excercises by taking it to its logical conclusion, where the wide gap between what happened and how it's now told becomes the point in itself.Adam Katzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13445652093684270646noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2296351472492903976.post-43323502419573216362009-08-18T11:13:00.004-07:002009-08-19T15:26:56.497-07:00District 9 is a fucking chop-shop, go rent the Host<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.blogiversity.org/blogs/cstanton/district-9-trailer.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 570px; height: 276px;" src="http://www.blogiversity.org/blogs/cstanton/district-9-trailer.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><br />I'll start this off by confessing I have a thing for smart dumb action movies. i.e. the ones that revel in gloriously juvenile displays of testosterone but, in abeyance of substantial thematic subtext, instead layer the movies with a wonderfully convoluted game of mouse trap. For example, Die Hard 3 and the endless rounds of potentially fatal mindgames or Speed if you discount the first 30 minutes, the last 20 minutes and all the dialogue in between. I mention this mainly, because at best, District 9 is a smart dumb action movie. Unfortunately, its "smart" has nothing to do with its story as it comes saddled with a holier-than-thou socio-political claptrap that is in reality more problematic, and generally incoherent, than progressively enlightening. <br /><br />First, it's supposed to be an allegory about South African apartheid. From the outset that is impossible because, well, it's set in actual South African apartheid. This means a few things. One, you can't have an allegory about a political situation set in the political situation it's supposed to represent, it's counterintuitive because the abstract logic of symbolism can no longer mask the story's disconnect from its supposed intent. Now, if the movie isn't an allegory and it's just commentary on apartheid then what it actually says about the situation is entirely insensitive to the actual victims of apartheid, that if aliens arrived even the black south africans would act like the white ones and therefore humankind is naturally a hobbesian battleground that doesn't deserve the slightest sympathy. <br /><br /><a href="http://www.daemonsmovies.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/district_nine_poster-333x500.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 333px; height: 500px;" src="http://www.daemonsmovies.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/district_nine_poster-333x500.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><br />To an extent that would be an interesting premise since historically humans have been prone to being inhumane to one another, to the point of calling into question the logic of labelling an act of altruism or kindness humane. But that isn't the point of the movie, if a coherent one can be gleaned, and to glean one I have to discount everything that happens after the cannister explodes on the protagonist's face, which means everything after the first thirty minutes. <br /><br />But seriously, is it really enlightened to shit on the victims of South African apartheid because hypothetically, in the event of accidental alien encroachment, they'd behave just as bad as the whites? Historically, they never even got a chance to exact revenge on their oppressors, which in peace studies circles begets the eventual dissolution of sympathy status because that's when they "become" their oppressors and are no longer pliable victims worthy of televangelical donation commercials. Instead, thanks to the enormous debt accrued by their oppressors while pillaging the country interminably, the ANC was forced to abandon the Freedom Charter's list of demands that popular resistance sacrificed its welfare for: public housing, redistribution of the stolen wealth, electricity, sewage, essentially national development. All was discarded in favor of an IMF approved structural readjustment plan that resulted in political victory for ANC (i.e. they were elected) but an actual victory for the white-run banks and multi-national investors who kept apartheid afloat in that the resulting privatization of every aspect of life in South Africa overrode any decision made on behalf of public welfare. Which is why South Africa is basically now Apartheid without "Apartheid." <br /><br />The movie's agitprop is entirely ignorant of this and sits squarely within the banks of a blip in your high school history textbook on Free Mandela campus protests in the 80's. The only corporate malfeasance it engages with is standard sci-fi trope nefariousness involving genetic experimentation and arms procurement, of which any deeper meaning is obliterated when gene-spliced tentacle arms become super fucking cool after they can use alien technology to blow up half of Johannesburg, therefore it's not that it's bad, it's that it's being done by bad people aka the obligatory villains, which is where the "brilliant" parallelism comes in: The Nigerians. <br /><br />Whereas the MNU medical attaches and corporate clerks bestir an air of intelligently cloaked evil, the Nigerians the aliens are forced to share space with are straight out of Mad Max's Beyond Thunderdome. Basically redistributing the reputation of Nigerian princes the movie depicts a settler society of tribal, primitive, monstrously vicious scam artists who run a chop shop in District 9 where they trick aliens into giving up their arms (both weapons and limbs) for catfood and then perform apparently backwards witchcraft on each other with it, while also putting up their women for inter-species prostitution. We don't have to pull out Steven Pinker to know that humans are hardwired with the capability to be assholes, but to completely ignore the environmental degradation and political non-existence refugees are forced to squander in and how that supercedes bourgoise notions of civility by upending self-determination with squalor is unnecessarily antagonistic. <br /><br />Look no further than Primo Levi's discussion of what happens to congenial interpersonal relations and honest abidance of law when people are stripped of their identity, forced into a concentration camp and brutally dehumanized into skeletal pawns with both feet in the grave. Standard notions of civility and illegality are swept aside by forced hierarchical subordination, even between victims, and the use of theft and general by any means necessary scheming just to make it to the next day. Since the movie wants us to care about the Aliens being forced into concentration camps, as they are explicitly and wistfully referred to at some point in the film, then we have to consider what those conditions mean for everyone forced to live in them. Instead, the other refugees are mere goon stock with no purpose other than providing multiple will-they-or-won't-they escape scenarios, which is generally useless when the protagonist is such a fucking selfish twit (yes, with a name that plays on a common joke about white South Africans, which is merely clever). <br /><br />And honestly, that's where the movie is actually entertaining. The suicide missions, the double crossing, the ultimate chase, the race against the clock, the explosive kill-or-be-killed shootouts. It's actually effectively rendered, especially with a budget of 30 million it blows away most 200 million dollar endeavors on the basis of action alone. But to suggest it's anything more than that is a cruel joke. At least the action here merits some plaudits, though, unlike last year's fanboy/critic crossover darling The Dark Knight which was incoherent on both thematic (for reasons I discussed <a href="http://malteserubble.blogspot.com/2008/07/dark-knight-bummer-or-no-country-for.html">here</a>, if you also loved no country, brace yourself) and visual levels. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://subwaycinemanews.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/the-host.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 480px; height: 652px;" src="http://subwaycinemanews.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/the-host.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><br />It's unfortunate that no one mentions the Host when discussing the canonical significance of District 9. Both films were done on an unimaginably miniscule budget, and both attempted socio-political resonance within the genre trappings of science fiction. But where District 9 eschews empathetic characterization for out and out diminution, and fumbles into amnesia its ostensible political coating, the Host serves up affectionately endearing misfits turned miscreants and a consistent engagement in the machinations their plebe status is repeatedly (and realistically) shut out of engaging with. <br /><br />Korea's historical split is a PR debacle of disingenuously manichean proportions, a context duly and subversively deconstructed by the way the premise plays out. Jumping off from an real instance of callous U.S. military negligence, an army doctor dumps a veritable cache of toxic material into the Han river with an arrogant sense of impunity. Forward to the present and the careless negligence has birthed a literal monster, a genetic mutation foisted on one of the river squid. The beast's arbitrary selection of victims is countered with the story's focus on the dysfunctional family of a food cart vendor (fried squid included) near the bridge the squid calls home. <br /><br />The proprietor is a wit's end grandpa whose other job is a familial balancing act. One son is a somewhat dim deadbeat with a heart of gold whose private-school daughter is an at-all-costs priority. Another son is a hollowed out drone in post-grad quarter life crisis whose rebellious political youth on behalf of democracy has been sequestered into an almost nihilistic capitulation to cosmic insignificance. The daughter is a professional Archer with an inability to bend her skills to the human concept of time and its management. When the monster wreaks havoc on its habitat's surroundings the granddaughter is swallowed into DOA obscurity and the family thrust into inexplicable governmental maneuvering. <br /><br /> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/host.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 449px; height: 308px;" src="http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/host.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><br />The bystanders are rounded up into biohazardous interrogation by the fraternal collusion of the government and the medical establishment in a seemingly impromptu policy move straight out of the plague section in Foucault's Discipline and Punish. Any peripheral figures to the attack are labelled as potential carriers of a virus emitted by the monster's glandular secretions and are thus hosts whose medical importance supercedes their rights as people. Upon a phone call possibly from inside the belly of the beast all hell breaks loose along with the family and the previously ordinary barely-held together unit become fugitive band targeted by every establishment possible, whose plight is merely one example of the miasma faced by the general population. <br /><br />The movie doesn't simply bait the imperial nature of U.S. military presence, overt invasion or not, but the post-dictatorial paranoia of a country that never got a chance to recover from its fascist disposition when it became a pawn in a territorial dick game of cold war perpetuity, WITH ITSELF. The dampened aspirations of the respective family member's trajectories are reawakened with temporal significance by yet another manipulation of representative governance in which closed door policy making puts everyone on the chopping block, something that gains signifance as the movie progresses as opposed to completely forgotten before it even gets a third of the way through. <br /><br />Related post: <a href="http://malteserubble.blogspot.com/2008/07/dark-knight-bummer-or-no-country-for.html">The Dark Knight: Bummer, or No Country for Old Self-Righteous Billionaires</a>Adam Katzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13445652093684270646noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2296351472492903976.post-74772759390216686222009-08-08T11:23:00.000-07:002009-08-10T15:54:39.850-07:00"As They Say In Italy These Days, Take Off The White Gloves!" Public Enemies, Number One<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8-Esme7hyRJR0x_RTlOXBAr7QPuX2p-3HeC4Ax_NKXSN1pAoT-e_7HMrIB5jT2W2XdNIG66e211oQiTOfRYLjalNyr0V4jX-RDIQbD8jS3gieK0HiLyo4ck2TBJAJPo0H7JwWzyGSs98/s1600-h/public-enemies-promo2.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 266px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8-Esme7hyRJR0x_RTlOXBAr7QPuX2p-3HeC4Ax_NKXSN1pAoT-e_7HMrIB5jT2W2XdNIG66e211oQiTOfRYLjalNyr0V4jX-RDIQbD8jS3gieK0HiLyo4ck2TBJAJPo0H7JwWzyGSs98/s400/public-enemies-promo2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5367753832515083218" /></a><br /><br />In the opening, it's four years into the great depression, we're at the height of Dillinger's bask in transgressive, soon to be vestigial glory and he's paying a visit to Prison. He's being thrown back in to the place that gave him his backbone, that introduced him to the folks that would stick by him when his own pops didn't know any better than raising him by the knuckles. The cops, by the nightstick. But here it's not Dillinger's face that resonates the years behind bars, but a limp-struck elder inmate peg-legging a package down the assembly line with grit and determination. On his face is the law's reign, the penitentiary's manipulative grind, the years lost as a pliable doll for experimental normalization. What's in the box is his way out, and like in all other Mann films, from Thief to Heat to the Insider, it's who he's sharing it with that makes its potential success viable. <br /><br />Thus, Dillinger ain't there to do time, but to keep the clock running, it's a jailbreak. The box has guns, and the inmates have manpower. If anyone falls out of line it's not just their ass but everyone they're running with. Someone in on the break but out on the way to do things wails on a guard despite Dillinger's calls for restraint, leading to a gunshot and a near-botch that makes the ordeal messier than it should have been. Like many a Mann film, the objective is done, but not without damage. It ends with Dillinger dragging an inmate who's been shot in the back out the door of his car, reading each other's eyes, acknowledging their mortality and letting go. <br /><br />In the following scene Dillinger leaves a safehouse/farmland, his coattail, collar desperately pleaded with by a girl that lives there, she doesn't want to stay, she wants him to take her along. The place is broken down, it's in the middle of nowhere, and she'd rather be on the run from the law than living a destitute and meandering existence scraping by like a shovel at a cemetary. Nothing more really needs to be said, the prisoners were clamoring to get the fuck out, and the first people they meet on the outside don't feel much freedom either.<br /><br />First time I saw public enemies I had just come out of a friend's college graduation party where in the course of an hour or so I downed three or four mojitos before venturing forth. Hazy, uncomfortable, and with couldn't care either way company, it was a genuinely unpleasant experience that caused flaw-baiting to be my M.O. The digital cinematography came off shaky and drained and left me nauseous (i'm pretty sure that was an half-drunken side-effect, because this time the images burst forth with searing clarity). Also, I made the mistake of reading the first 60 pages of the book the movie's based on, which was stupid, because the movie gets its thrust from Mann and everything that name brings to mind. It felt underwritten, schematic, and even disingenuous. According to <a href="http://tenured-radical.blogspot.com/2009/07/steal-this-book-public-enemies-john.html">the person who's book the movie's source material is apparently indebted to</a>, it is (as well as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Enemies_(2009_film)#Historical_Inaccuracies">wikipedia</a>). But that's besides the point, and more to the point, whatever you're looking for. It's there. Maybe not in the most labored exposition, but still there.<br /><br />Let's take the use of Ten Million Slaves as a theme song. Otis Taylor grew up playing the banjo, but for a time dissociated himself from it when finding out its African roots were misappropriated by whites through bluegrass minstrel shows. The banjo is heavily featured on the song, appropriately, about uprooted, shackled Africans and their grounded, lost homelessness. It's told by a narrator whose dire modern circumstances are combated by reminding himself that it was worse for his ancestors, but still is well aware of the prospect that in the end he's all alone. Mann is meticulous in his set-ups, it most likely was not just used because the song has the refrain "don't know where they're going, don't know where they've been" and retires at lone wolf despondency. The film is underpopulated by black characters except for a backup breakout inmate and a safehouse owner, but the film's focus on an increasingly blurry forward motion where the law reigns on neither side of the coin and spins deliriously out of control brings up something more far-reaching. That it was once a slave-owning country is something I don't think is lost on it, that the opportunistic pursuit of pawns is the order of the day, that the crime networks are poor kids shackled by the prison system and written out of societal acceptance into a den of confidants is also something I don't think is lost on it, it's all even cheekily referenced in a courthouse sequence with a precautionarily shackled Dillinger leading to farcical, guilt-baiting proclamations by his lawyer each with a twinge of the real. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNiY4cyiQB13J5Y-7OoqfdWXLaB5LxrunzWnPVu1hvgrPDVwjhkyPOTw9Km_FS-QaOqrSNvn2PfeeZ-XFetIC08oX7s8-V_CnVXAWMAAMzXs7-ZKU474asfytRjDTyZCHjX48fZTJ00Oc/s1600-h/Picture+7.png"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNiY4cyiQB13J5Y-7OoqfdWXLaB5LxrunzWnPVu1hvgrPDVwjhkyPOTw9Km_FS-QaOqrSNvn2PfeeZ-XFetIC08oX7s8-V_CnVXAWMAAMzXs7-ZKU474asfytRjDTyZCHjX48fZTJ00Oc/s400/Picture+7.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5367752641303481298" /></a><br /><br />Partially disserviced, maybe a little. Purvis in real life was a fair-haired, womanizing southern charmer with a black manservant, his own pad in a time where all his partners were cooped up six to a place, his own horse at a stable and an aristocratic sense of entitlement. He was a joker in the depression's face, a skillful goon on the right side of the law, and could have been a different kind of worthy equal to Depp's characterization of Dillinger. I was sad those aspects of him were overlooked but came to terms with what Mann gave us instead. Bale's Purvis is dark, gloomy, with just enough sharp insight to both notice the overhwelmingly gaping holes in J. Edgar Hoover's superficially taut but wholly inept force and not be swallowed up by them. He is constantly failed by his men, and his superior wants nothing of him but a photo op and a tighter grip...on power (according to the book speculation arose that that desire went unrequited for Purvis as well). <br /><br />Both Dillinger and Purvis require men who are not just loyal but on the same footing with an eye for what they can't account for, so that when they've got your back they've got your head too. Baby Face Nelson's foul, selfish erratics put Dillinger and others in danger. Dillinger's whole gangster scene is being bought out by reconfigured criminality, the gameplanning associates setting their sights on a monopolization of the gambling empire with shut outs mirroring the survivalist industrialism that widened the income gap in inventive new ways (anti-trust, shmanti-trust!). On the side of Purvis, he has to call in older, experienced gents to see the job through, even then he's continuously faced with potential disillusionment by a case whose real-world ramifications have dwindling import when it comes to who he's has chasing but serious concern when it comes to who he's chasing them for. <br /><br />Hoover's real start was as an aid to Alexander Mitchell Palmer in the late 1910's red scare that rid the U.S. of its radical bent. The Emma Goldman's and Alexander Berkman's, wobblies and suspected workers were either jailed (10,000 by 1920) or deported, the one legit candidate for a real life socialist party in the states was jailed into discontinuity. Hoover's known for his sabotage of the civil rights movement in the name of red-baiting supremacy, but his work was already done for him by the time he was ready to make a name for himself. When we first see him in the film he's almost done for, a goof with an eye for sharp threads (his men are models, not cops) and front page composition (Purvis is photo-opped into his job as taskforce leader) with no clue about law enforcement and in desperate need of a fix for legitimacy. In a bid to federalize his bureau of investigation he's going to latch onto the public zeitgeist and shift the tides against folk heroes in the making. He's rarely on screen but every appearance makes clearer his lack of interest in public security and increasing interest in the power it avails. <br /><br />A key moment comes after yet another embarrassment, and this time the law isn't the other side of criminality, instead it mirrors its logical conclusion, fascism. Hoover admonishes his men and tells them to step their game up, his point of reference, Moussolini. His accent even switches into correlative German lunacy. "As they say in Italy these days, take off the white gloves!" And so continues the movie's descent into power's excess as the main goal becomes to break down the resistance, turn people against each other, and rough up whoever doesn't comply in ways that would end up in court if not for surreptitious impunity. <br /><br />The movie's rep in some places makes it out to be a hollowed out bullet, with the powder depleted and the shell lodged red-dry in crumpled disuse. It's an apt metaphor for the seemingly unsensational depiction of the end of an era, one of folkloric gangsters with cultivated populist reputations, who despite not redistributing any wealth instead represented luxuriously selfish transgressions, hitting up the banks that turned people out and taking the slice only the upper crust and the powers that be could afford. Of course the myth would remain, but the direct interaction with mythic progenitors would dissolve. But the movie is vital, it's emotional, alternately charming and depressing, but never static. <br /><br />Consider the central relationship between Dillinger and Billie Freschette. Her insecurities are a startlingly astute observation of class differences and even ethnic ones. She willingly dishes out her French half but hesitantly intones her Native American one. Dillinger's fascination with her leads to her fascination with his fascination, dumbfounded at its intersection with her humble and working class coat-girl trappings. Working in a nightclub and waiting on the well-to-do places her in direct contact with what she doesn't have as well as the glacial indifference and insensitivity afforded someone of her background. We don't need to see her past to gather how much damage her merely functional use in other's lives has done on her psyche. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsAw9kSHSuQl4nkfQQe8hNc3ANvZkofdrYZ-eAveesgiGOJqRGPLP2UaZaKS_jR9o7hA3kmMX6zZRXezw8vuLe39myJlH-Fm6qC6Gg8_3CP2I6_9Rr8je_mqbT7BjcoFR11SpdmJwYOQQ/s1600-h/Picture+9.png"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 225px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsAw9kSHSuQl4nkfQQe8hNc3ANvZkofdrYZ-eAveesgiGOJqRGPLP2UaZaKS_jR9o7hA3kmMX6zZRXezw8vuLe39myJlH-Fm6qC6Gg8_3CP2I6_9Rr8je_mqbT7BjcoFR11SpdmJwYOQQ/s400/Picture+9.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5367753021891767074" /></a><br /><br />A Mann motif from even before Thief but accentuated succinctly by Neil McCauley in Heat is the rule "Don't let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner." Mann being a multi-layering parallelist this inadvertently applies not just to the criminals but the cops that follow them as well, and the unfortunate byproducts, the repercussions it leaves on their immediate intimates. Here Dillinger intends to sweep Billie up into the fold, alleviating her insecurities by allowing his variation on the theme. When she points out the snobby disregard of co-patrons at a fancy restaurant to her three dollar dress and its socio-economic implications he tells her it doesn't matter where anyone's from, it's where they're going and sooner or later she's the next moment in a precarious and perilously linear game of connect the dots. <br /><br />Billie isn't a cop or a criminal but like Dillinger her life was also moment to moment even before she met him. It's not entirely insightful as to the full psychology behind her decision to join a bombastically romantic brute who beats up customers to let her know her new, liberated job is to be his girl, but whether the awfully insistent stranger's violence against an impatient customer seems extendable to her is something that, to her, might have come off as besides the point and that violence, potentially, a cathartic release her precarious allegiance to coat-girl duties doesn't afford her the opportunity to experience.<br /><br />Dillinger's behavior in the first half of their relationship simultaneously reeks of testy macho possessiveness and earnestly romantic devotion. But it's not taken for granted. Like Caan’s Thief pulling meathead moves on a waitress in a one-shot bid to secure the idyllic lifeplan whose dull pleasantries he fought for against the violent dehumanization of prison. Like Farrel’s Crockett holding back tears while pupil-darting insecure in a lovelocked stare with Gong Li, undergoing self-sabotage with platitudes about impossibilities. The posturing isn’t a dick-swinging writing flaw, but a central component to the characters’ construction. Mann is well aware, and his men in denial of how much bullshit their frosty, bravura exterior lets slip, what roiling, mushy vulnerabilities lay repressed for varied perceptions on getting the job done (for what? for whom?). Here Mann has Depp’s Dillinger actually break down and fucking cry for a minute. He has them swearing devotion and future promises at each other while playfully sitting in a bed of snow like it was Eternal Sunshine without the anti-Kate Winslet (in this case, Marion Cotillard) vibe in the writing.<br /><br />Another way standard notions of masculinity are subverted is in the inter-male relations and the way Mann portrays them. I'm not going to full on rah rah latent homosexuality because I think that's partially a cop-out and nearly obfuscates a much larger concern, which is the complications that arise from deep yearnings fiercly held back in the face of falling on the wrong side of both gender and orientation binaries. In Thief, there's these puppy eyes between Caan and his prison mentor in the penitentiary phone booth. They try not to look away, and are constantly following each other's pupils. There's a deep love there. People who dismissed risible dialogue in Vice were missing the deep facial intonations and the repressed frustrations batted between Crockett and Tubbs. Half their dialogue is in their faces, and in those gestures are couple's spats and fraternal bonds either over separation anxiety or cocking guns. In Public Enemies there's a scene where Dillinger holds onto his right hand man as he's dying, the words imparted are of heavy import, but there's undulating breathing and tenacity in their interlocking gaze. That there might be an undercurrent of "if this were another time, another place, maybe the Roman army" is not lost, but to zero in on that as the solely legitimate explanation would be a disservice to the layers. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCaXiOq5DocBl71261fBk-Vm6pWQr8Z4GbYG9z1jvRfKLrd31LimEk2O2R_kaeAOJ5Tb8y5cub0Y4s5tEOl9aNRFA-dMfXu1QKLY0WJWhIdBQCU22IsBZVSHUG03qv_11NSXGWW6Saovo/s1600-h/Picture+6.png"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 264px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCaXiOq5DocBl71261fBk-Vm6pWQr8Z4GbYG9z1jvRfKLrd31LimEk2O2R_kaeAOJ5Tb8y5cub0Y4s5tEOl9aNRFA-dMfXu1QKLY0WJWhIdBQCU22IsBZVSHUG03qv_11NSXGWW6Saovo/s400/Picture+6.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5367752902532323858" /></a><br /><br />Finally, as regards precarious postures and their vulnerable undertow, when Dillinger locks eyes with a gangster fable's motto to "die the way you live" it's just as much scared shit, know nothing else now intuition as fully aware ascension. The movie's a fever dream, but not one that withers away once the sun peels your eyelids back. Its historical accuracy is less important than its canonical discourse with gangster lore and Mann's continued dissection of his world philosophy, and as such its ideas and the way it offers them are timeless.Adam Katzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13445652093684270646noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2296351472492903976.post-44184152584613282792009-07-01T17:15:00.000-07:002009-07-02T10:04:09.324-07:00Army of Shadows: Close Vested Gangster Film Retooled as Meditation on Anti-Fascist Resistance<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://thepartingglass.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/army-of-shadows-poster.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 348px; height: 490px;" src="http://thepartingglass.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/army-of-shadows-poster.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />Jean-Pierre Melville was a connoisseur of threadbare meditations on gangsters, thieves, criminals. Empathy was never asked for nor implied by backstory. I saw Le Cercle Rouge and Le Samourai at a time where I kind of preferred a spoon-fed association with real problems and neither of these films offered any kind of insight into anything aside from extensive male posturing. My assessment was that there was really nothing but b-movie frameworks stripped of sensationalism and excess, but with the same running time what was left was an empty con, just as much as the one being pulled in front of the camera. <br /><br />What they had, though, was solitude. People said no more than they needed, conversations were terse, interactions minimal beyond the required task at hand. It's as if the goal of the criminal acquisitions was to never have to speak to anyone again. Le Samourai is only tragic in the sense that the one attempt at romance is undone by the lifestyle it would inevitably be attached to. What drew me to Army of Shadows was not how the substantive shift from underground crime to underground resistance might give the film a more bombastic, stylistic heft and thus an engaging draw, but how the preceding cold and distant meditations might work on something as personal and dangerous as fighting nazis, especially personal as Melville was a resistance member himself.<br /><br />Well, maybe a viewing of The Dirty Dozen did get me in the mood for a little anti-authoritarian rabble rousing, but there was nothing rousing and little to no rabble. For most of the film there was actually nothing separating it from previous Melville offerings except for a change of aims. The film is almost silent, the characters as close to the vest as Delon's thieves, their ongoings as stark and aversive as Le Cercle Rouge's thorough but impersonal diagrams of escapes, thefts and chases. The same sense of tragedy looms, but something clicks in a way that is brilliant and suggests Army of Shadows should both be a starting and ending point in any Melville retrospective, because the context illuminates both within and without the proceedings, with repercussions that extend backwards in his canon. <br /><br />Army of Shadows' main conceit is that a fascist regime will create a self-contained globule in which those trapped inside are at the behest of whatever the organizational framework sets up for them. Therefore, criminals are no longer a class of their own, the world of crime is now an ever-enveloping overhaul of any individual who might be deemed disagreeable to the status quo. Plucked from all nationalities, all races, all creeds, it no longer takes direct transgressions of criminal activity or ideological confrontation, but arbitrary distinctions decided by portentous and paranoid whim. In fact, as is observed in a prisoner camp in the film's beginning, the black marketeers end up being an odd fixture in an otherwise political/racial set of government targets. <br /><br />The fascist regime here is the capitulatory Vichy government of France, footstools for the overarching German forces. The center character, Phillippe Gerbier is a former civil engineer, stripped of his function and now an organizational leader in the underground French resistance. On a side note I'd like to mention Melville's choice of Lino Ventura over Alan Delon for Gerbier, the exact opposite of a leading man, he's stocky and stout with a pudgy face and glasses. He looks like my grandfather did in his fifties with the advent of a black toupee. No longer is Delon's cool disposition a photo opportunity, but the ravages of a real person.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAnjVNjVFjBqdKGqlpk4aPZCz6UAqcNR2vHV5aAI4JVklZ-qt0YVf8rvdRb-FcrIvMadHoYuj5JvIzgxuqKa2EagM4tqERviLDB06WdjWovqdwpvXX5sGvXuBQKkGki1rCWkUnI3wSX84/s1600-h/film.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 288px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAnjVNjVFjBqdKGqlpk4aPZCz6UAqcNR2vHV5aAI4JVklZ-qt0YVf8rvdRb-FcrIvMadHoYuj5JvIzgxuqKa2EagM4tqERviLDB06WdjWovqdwpvXX5sGvXuBQKkGki1rCWkUnI3wSX84/s400/film.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5353660828595013922" /></a><br /><br />The film's lack of distinguishing character isn't a directorial misfire but a reflection on the drab temperament of an occupied country. Following Gerbier from Vichy holding to resistance hideouts there's almost no distinction in the aura painted. It's the same draw, and that draw is short. Early on, during an prolonged and painful execution of a traitor who sold out key elements of the movement to the occupation, I initially thought of the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw walloping Syriana with confused outrage as their presumably progressive pedigree was ironically undone by the choice of showing an american being tortured by an arab who was actually a british character actor. Here there's a point, though, as the distinction between resistance members and common criminals becomes that same aforementioned draw. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOaaSRb0VukoU7SI46tXdAvyWv9h_mpm2mvownOIqUbeIWA8sPhmQ4xzcJhvz6e7Jm2TW05Gej3VKGMzAeaYjZXkIm5_N8G6jlC5oiAPO1nU0FYbe0u0tkZDb27Ymzs4ArmjYuncnRKfI/s1600-h/610x.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 264px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOaaSRb0VukoU7SI46tXdAvyWv9h_mpm2mvownOIqUbeIWA8sPhmQ4xzcJhvz6e7Jm2TW05Gej3VKGMzAeaYjZXkIm5_N8G6jlC5oiAPO1nU0FYbe0u0tkZDb27Ymzs4ArmjYuncnRKfI/s400/610x.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5353656982476791106" /></a><br /><br />The only references to family come when one member deflects a train station suitcase inspection by the Nazis by grabbing a mother's child and calmly blending in to her family as the previously missing patriarchal figure, shortly after dropping the child to face lower guard inspection anyways. The other comes when Gerbier and co-resistant Mathilde are discussing a dangerous operation and she pulls out her wallet to show a picture of her 17-year old daughter. Instead of affectionately commenting with an interested platitude of some sort he tells her to get rid of the picture for safety, which culminates in a final unfamilial blow in which loyalty is absurdly set up against loyalty. This in no way is meant to characterize the one strong (and really, only) female character as an emotional hazard, she's actually based on a member of the French Resistance named Lucie Aubrac and is generally portrayed as a mastermind with a no-nonsense head on her shoulders. <br /><br />The only references to love are in a fleeting but discarded reflection by Gerbier on Mathilde, and a platonic adoration Gerbier has for resistance supreme leader Luc Jardee, a mathematical genius Gerbier familiarized himself with during his days as a civil engineer. Jardee's brother is the would-be leading man, a dashing former pilot now in it for the sport of things reduced to the periphery because go-it-alone heroics and romantic thrills are blockaded by the morose and clandestine proceedings. There are no affairs, there is no love, there is what must be done, an association of self-effacing individuals preserving a right to function in a way that has become as abstract and unattainable as any philosophical text by which they might be pushed to persevere. <br /><br />When Gerbier leads a team to London to procure weapons from England, he ends up escaping a German blitzkrieg by stepping into a youthful British Army jukebox soiree. The absurdity of the scene isn't how the troops keep up while their towns are blown to bits, but how an underground member who hasn't allowed himself any kind of joyous emotional engagement in god knows how long can't rest with the proceedings for a minute, choosing instead to go back out to the crater-making havoc outside. <br /><br />The film's emotional aspect is less of a closet case than a closet raided bare, a black hole of dedicated, methodical coldness that leaves no spirit untrampled in its wake. The spy games and daring games of deception I expected unfold in the same impersonal way Melville's previously thefts and procedurals did, but the point here seems to be these things aren't a game. An attempt later in the film to break a resistance member from torturous captivity doesn't go anywhere, as the ambulatory disguises are sent away by a Nazi doctor who tells them a dying man can no longer be revived for further torture. Here there aren't any grisly torture sequences, just the dismal, horrific-looking aftermath. The faces of the captives are transformed into archeological digs, failed sculptures of harried rock that are painful just to behold. <br /><br />The criminal snitches in ditches code of honor that permeates every forming camaraderie is what also forms the film's final nail in the coffin for every character's semblance of humanity. When a capitivity leads to some dangerously detrimental developments a hit is order on a former ally. Instead of it being given to one member to take care of, everyone still alive packs into a car and takes off. Gerbier turns to Jardie and quips that he'd never thought he'd see the day when someone as grand as the philosopher Jardie would sit in backseat with a den of killers. That they were already dead inside is no coincidence. <br /><br />In the film's one legitimately breathtaking sequence, a summation of the loss at hand comes flashing at Gerbier, reflecting on the small things he was forced to give up while being led to his doom. His lack of games is met with a game in itself, a shooting range in which all prisoners have the opportunity to run fast enough to make it to the next round of summary fire. His defying act of self-preservation has nothing to do with his life but with his dignity as he has to decide on whether to give in to their game and run or stand there and be shot. <br /><br />That the movie eventually is revealed to be a diagrammatic portrait of the perpetual undoing of the resistance movement by external forces is there met by internal undoing of what it means to fight for your humanity. The excluded explication here is a mirror of the excised self a shadow network requires of a saboteur. The ground-up sabotage is both anti-authoritarian and slowly but surely an authoritarian effacement of the individual at their own hands.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7D2wWDPGeSu7Zq8ji3E78cpk6ByUw2LwdKdBlEyPY3ypGqz-JHDHLR-OjomBykthhduzG0E_ocd9Ex7D0dLV1RfWmSuJyD6R4Uk3F3rEqLt8EUOHAAAvoDxMy60HBGUgV5E3p_RVr3EU/s1600-h/549237152_77724b6d3a.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 225px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7D2wWDPGeSu7Zq8ji3E78cpk6ByUw2LwdKdBlEyPY3ypGqz-JHDHLR-OjomBykthhduzG0E_ocd9Ex7D0dLV1RfWmSuJyD6R4Uk3F3rEqLt8EUOHAAAvoDxMy60HBGUgV5E3p_RVr3EU/s400/549237152_77724b6d3a.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5353655762343581314" /></a>Adam Katzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13445652093684270646noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2296351472492903976.post-42678432907448409082009-06-18T15:16:00.000-07:002009-06-18T16:01:03.099-07:00Tom Tom Magazine entries on Terry Lynn and Valerie ScrogginsSo, while Assholes and Elbows remains an infrequently visited/updated interwebs destination I've done a couple of entries over at the typographically rocking venture, <a href="http://tomtommagazine.wordpress.com/about/">Tom Tom Magazine: A Magazine About Female Drummers</a>. In an age of post-modern and post-gender delineation of cultural, philosophical and political dialogue the fact remains that many of the social institutions radicals got their britches twisted up over are still in full effect, and Foucault-like, the traces are apparent even in "enlightened" circles. Thus, while ideologically we may have moved on from established gender norms of who can do what and where, the imbalance still exists. Thus, in the realm of drummers a specific ongoing documentation of female drummers is a good reminder that the norms, while silly and outdated, exist only because there was a historical/political precedent, not a biological one, and plenty has been done and is being done to level the conversation.<br />The enterprise itself isn't as heavy handed as the preceding paragraph and is instead focused on being awesome and fun.<br /><br />I wrote one piece on danceably confrontational Kingston MC Terry Lynn:<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://www.lifelounge.com/resources/IMGDETAIL/KINGSTONLOGIC.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 490px; height: 280px;" src="https://www.lifelounge.com/resources/IMGDETAIL/KINGSTONLOGIC.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:Helvetica;"><blockquote><i><a href="http://tomtommagazine.wordpress.com/2009/05/14/terry-lynn-and-her-kingston-logic/">"<span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 21px; font-family:Georgia;font-size:12px;">In a pretty great confluence of import importance and shat on toss-offs, Terry Lynn and Swiss-based Canadian production partner Russel Hergert took Daft Punk’s much-maligned Human After All track “technologic” and re-vamped it as a populist anthem for Jamaica’s impoverished, exploited and fed up underclass. By replacing software advert ad-libs with weapon readying directives, the original’s cheap, sony-commercial baiting hooks become a dissatisfied reveler’s checklist for starting a violent revolt.</span>"</a></i></blockquote></span><br /><br />and another about the intergenerationally gyrational history of Valerie Scroggins from ESG.<br /><div> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWvKhC57uuSVRffwwi_KPDr74bwrgY8D55-FOq02a3cIbq1Z_4ausrr_qQYI110ztbWW4m4xf4A8a4Wnl5wyMi2LT5FQNXRlAqAdKdqSs67TrtxhL81DXghFAQGIP5CPMAhiJ8ucwGJIo/s1600-h/up-Points-ESG.jpg"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWvKhC57uuSVRffwwi_KPDr74bwrgY8D55-FOq02a3cIbq1Z_4ausrr_qQYI110ztbWW4m4xf4A8a4Wnl5wyMi2LT5FQNXRlAqAdKdqSs67TrtxhL81DXghFAQGIP5CPMAhiJ8ucwGJIo/s400/up-Points-ESG.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5348800503539434178" style="cursor: pointer; width: 288px; height: 227px; " /></a><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:Helvetica;"><blockquote><i><a href="http://www.blogger.com/%3Cspan%20class=" face="Georgia" style=" "><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 21px; font-family:Georgia;font-size:12px;">From my understanding, ESG is a band that gets to you before you get to them. Early in high school, when buzz finally got from New York to my Miami abode via my mom’s NYMag subscription of those found noise pranksters with a mean hankering for a groove, Liars, beats had only begun to mean something. Those 9 tracks on their first album might seem tame now, but my lack of a concern for dancing (aside from my first inebriation in 7th grade at a family function thanks to drinks left unattended) was becoming something to be concerned about in itself. Liars’ stilted high-BPM groove didn’t really help that much but their song Tumbling Walls Buried Me in the Debris w/ ESG was one of many doors. The use of UFO was by then old hat, historically plundered more than almost any other song, but it was my initiation. Being the time of cult experimentalism and whatnot, it’s that song’s ethereal and otherworldly rumblings that lit up my room at night, playing close-lidded REM games in the dark. </span>"</a></i></blockquote></span><br /><div><br /></div></div>Adam Katzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13445652093684270646noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2296351472492903976.post-32712210697769327252009-05-12T13:01:00.001-07:002009-05-18T18:18:44.115-07:00"39 Years to Pension!" Wendy and Lucy + Morvern CallarNot only are Wendy and Lucy/Morvern Callar streaming on netflix instant watch, but they're also a cross-atlantic pair of escalating desperations in the face of diminishing opportunities for menial income. Of the differences is the outcome for the female leads' respective digressions. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/12/10/arts/10wend600.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 600px; height: 283px;" src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/12/10/arts/10wend600.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><br />In Wendy and Lucy, Michelle Williams plays the titular Wendy Carroll, a drifting 20-something on their way to an Alaskan cannery with nothing but a car, a dog named Lucy and 535 carefully unspent dollars to their name. The film unfolds in a small Oregon town Wendy stops at on her way to a remote and alien but steady and secure job. Whilst wandering a nature trail Lucy trails off, leading Wendy to a sparsely attended train-yard bonfire. Liberated from societal obligations, these are the crust punks and the free spirits navigating the fringes of industrial decay and census bureau statistical give-or-takes to jump trains, re-up with under-the-counter paying odd jobs, and temporarily set up shop wherever their backpack sees fit for however long the local authorities don't notice. Wendy remains silent and hesitant while a hooded Will Oldham, sporting markered fangs under his bottom lip and the name Icky, casually tells her about his time at the cannery and on which levels of the hierarchy mentioning his name works and doesn't work. Kinda bragging in self-deprecatory manner he goes on about a drunken fuck-up with a vehicle whose consequences he didn't bother sticking around for. <br /><br />Either not seeing the humor in that or disinterested in the outlying company engendered by that kind of un-"intentional community" she leaves for what essentially amounts to a slow dissipation of the barriers between them. Parking her transportive hibernation chamber at a Walgreens, she encounters the first glimpse of the somewhat damaging causality of "just doing my job." A perfectly genial security guard wakes her up to tell her she can't park there and go to sleep, despite her situation, and despite her car not starting, but being both a stickler and a human helps her move her car just outside the parking lot. Carefully tracking where and on what she spent her money she knows a check-up at the car shop will run her some money. Sleeping in her car and washing herself in bathrooms her tight ship is slowly sinking. As a human she can process the situation but doesn't want her dog to starve unnecessarily for the fuck-ups she's going through and when Lucy's Iams supply runs out decides to go on one major fuck-up to offset the costs of a car repair. <br /><br />Wendy ties Lucy up outside the nearest food mart and gets caught walking out with somewhat fuller pockets than when she came in. The person who catches her is a naive young townie with no sense of right and wrong outside of the strictest acquiescence to policy. Even when dragging her in to see the manager the only stickler is him. The boss knows the ins and outs and probably noticing what's coloring her concessive attempt at wriggling herself out of it initially tries to weather the storm being drummed up by his employee of the month. You get the sense that if the conversation were between the boss and Wendy things would go down a lot easier, but here's the good 'ol boy citing a mixture of store policy and traditional notions of good and fair totally removed from the reality unfolding in front of him, almost as a measure of faith.<br /><br />Instead the police drag her off leaving Lucy unattended while she thumbprints her way out of a minor offense. Between 50 dollar fine and 50 dollars plus a two-week-later court date she loses 50 dollars, more than her shopping excursion would've cost and goes back to fetch her dog. What follows is a slow descent out of a slightly deluded can-do, up by your bootstraps perseverance into a disillusioned realization of abject poverty. Somewhat befriended by the security guard after continual potholes in her search for Lucy her quip about not being able to get a job without an address is met with "you can't get an address without an address or a job without a job, the whole system is rigged." Her sister and brother-in-law politely dismiss her with a set of their own problems when she calls them on the phone, suggesting this isn't the first time she's looked for a bail-out, and has been slowly working towards a full-blown expression of failure to acclimate, delayering her subtle stabs at integrity separating herself from either abject homelessness or the casual, self-congratulating interaction with homelessness proffered by the group at the train yard. <br /><br />Echoing her plight is a brief interaction with potentially menacing homeless man, perhaps an ex-con, lamenting his inability to stay good in the face of his hatred for everybody. He stumbles on her asleep under a tree and fumbles through her things, tells her not to look at him, he could either be talking about his desire to rape her or articulating the trajectory of her choices and the external forces leading her to where she seems bound to end up. He just leaves, and she dry heaves in a nearby restroom having survived a potential attack that went nowhere. She also, though, has experienced the dregs, no car, no money, no job, with only the slightest semblance of a life. <br /><br />At the same time, despite the somber trappings, these are the kinds of people director Kelly Reichardt knows, the entire film has decisions made by Wendy resting on Lucy, told by that supermarket superstickler that she shouldn't own if she can't take care of. Despite being small it's also a kind of ridiculously epic story about a girl coming to terms with her situation via her relationship to her dog. Somewhat analogous is WAVVES as deconstructed by<a href="http://brandonsoderberg.blogspot.com/2009/05/white-privilege-warped-nostalgia-asher.html"> Young Berg over at No Trivia</a> making these seemingly self-indulgent laments about being a white suburban teen without particular accoutrements like money and jobs that aren't his parents, but there's also a healthy amount of self-parody in its characterization as a snuff-worthy "life's a chore." Reichardt's sympathy can only go so far, but at some point she also has to pull Wendy aside ask her to ask herself some tough questions. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://mmimageslarge.moviemail-online.co.uk/Morvern-Callar2.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 496px; height: 330px;" src="http://mmimageslarge.moviemail-online.co.uk/Morvern-Callar2.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><br />Morvern Callar, on the other hand, has a job at a supermarket, and a boyfriend well acquainted with posthumous publishing. The former is dead-end chore requiring menial subservience, the latter is just dead, ostensibly looking past shock and grief towards an opportunistic grab at publishing requiring Morvern take his manuscript to a list of publishers. I say ostensibly because his reason for doing so is never explored, seemingly intentionally as Lynne Ramsay's focus is entirely on Morvern's reaction, or non-reaction. <br /><br />What follows the opening discovery, her boyfriend dead on the floor with a floppy of the manuscript and a task as well as a mixtape of indie tunes specifically crafted for Morvern, is straight dissociative. Instead of calling the cops Morvern picks up a payphone and answers a barrage of questions from a stranger. Instead of grieving she takes ecstasy with a friend and weaves through a young and hip gathering in some rich kid's wood cabin, generally unaffected by the social pressures of being seen where needs be (in fact jokingly humping and dumping a dude with her friend before stumbling home). Instead of paying for a funeral she takes the money left her and goes to Ibiza. <br /><br />This almost jumps dissociation and goes into full-blown nihilism when on top of this she changes the name on the manuscript to her own. Where Wendy and Lucy's theft leads to a reflection on responsibility and current life stations, Morvern's is more of a post-reflective response. Wendy is being forced to come to terms with the way her means don't support her life and her insistence on a fairly overblown solution to it on the other side of the country in Alaska. Morvern, on the other hand, is a check-out girl/supermarket attendant, though not the end of the road, she's kind of entered the real world of post-secondary job market exploration and hasn't gotten very far. That she shacked up with a naive-seeming idealist more in tune with the publishing world than his surroundings is perhaps an indication of the vicariousness by which she holds herself back. <br /><br />His book is dedicated to Morvern, is apparently about a girl, but judging from the mixtape Morvern comes off more like a writing experiment than a girlfriend, someone her boyfriend can decorate for cultural references and commodifiable appropriation. By Ramsay's estimation it's the boyfriend who takes the easy way out. Her attraction to the story came from the idea that the "romantic" character is killed off and his "non-intellectual" working-class girlfriend takes over. It's a knock to the genre of young, intellectual males piecing together their surroundings in alienated, supercilious fashion. The film takes on the periphery, that angry young man's periphery that they can be seen as callously trampling on and putting it front and center with an upper-hand almost. <br /><br />Ramsay sees nothing wrong with what the character does, finds it "kinda...punk rock" actually, but notes the precise rationale to her actions. Despite being cold, chopping up his body and disposing of it before shipping off to Spanish rave culture, Morvern's use of drugs isn't indicative of any nihilistic free-spiritedness, it's a numbing agent. Her hedonism, which includes the three-way hookup early on almost immediately after her boyfriend's death, isn't blase, it's almost empirical. Her friend is a co-worker, a kind of aloof party girl whose association with Morvern is almost like a cipher she keeps to attach herself to before it was "like this." <br /><br />Knowing where she is, where's she's probably not going, she doesn't even read the manuscript but instead sees where it can take her. The way she was a stepping stone for her boyfriend's posthumous literary career she kind investigates where else she's just a cute checkout girl with a use beyond herself. When meeting with the literary agents, she kind of intentionally slips-up. While they fall head over heels for her, noting her potential explosiveness, they almost look past her. She doesn't say much, not in a mysterious way, but a kind of seemingly unsophisticated manner, blurting out she works at a supermarket when they ask her about the fine details of her authorship and her story, she's totally aware of how ridiculous the situation is, and how little she has to do to navigate it. <br /><br />On the cusp of meeting with a literary agent she kind of sees through all of it, a continuation of her druggy threesome at the beginning, and disconnected Ibiza-going later on, it's just as much a dead-end as her job. She's able to draw it from the face of a Scandinavian girl knocked out standing on who knows what celebratory numbing agent, looking undead as she smears her make-up outside a dressing booth with her head against the door. <br /><br />The only moment she wallows in misery comes later in the film, where disconnected from the youthful shenanigans across the way she wanders the hotel and stumbles on a young man who's mother has just died. His crying rings through the halls, and she offers to comfort him, he requests it even. She starts off with an anecdote of a familial funeral, but they both just end up bawling, pillow-brawling and fucking, not just each other, but each other's grief, almost themselves through the other's misery. <br /><br />But the film doesn't offer moral hand-wringing, it doesn't offer reflection of an audience-sating kind, it just offers Morvern Callar, disinterested in the boundaries of her means, aware she almost kinda means nothing to them and thus they almost kinda mean nothing to her, but she's still affected by and can affect them. <br /><br /><br />Interview with Kelly Reichardt at Slant Magazine <br />http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/features/kellyreichardt.asp<br /><br />Interview with Lynne Ramsay at warp records<br />http://www.warprecords.com/morverncallar/home/pages/interview.html#<br /><br />Both films available on dvd (and instant watch!)Adam Katzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13445652093684270646noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2296351472492903976.post-43378866100236820382009-04-17T06:35:00.001-07:002009-04-17T11:14:06.933-07:00Milking It: Commodifying Harvey's Legacy, Neglecting Fox and His Friends and Ignoring Gays with "Gays"<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhL8-Bu-MLVENVPpmITEL8CwBzagFsNcCoQfsfyOxekHXIwu9B-swSQIaiFk0wHgsr6Db5UpgKwBR-03f5-SoN8L5gEHjrUCzkrFNBIMHDLduPg7R_xhDOophLC7cmOzn_HD6vLU6SckZM/s1600-h/harvey-milk.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 304px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhL8-Bu-MLVENVPpmITEL8CwBzagFsNcCoQfsfyOxekHXIwu9B-swSQIaiFk0wHgsr6Db5UpgKwBR-03f5-SoN8L5gEHjrUCzkrFNBIMHDLduPg7R_xhDOophLC7cmOzn_HD6vLU6SckZM/s400/harvey-milk.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5325707761072472050" /></a><br /><br />During last year's arts section parade celebrating Sean Penn's temporary transformation into a visibly homosexual politician, whose assassination was martyred by cinematic tropes to illuminate the plight of homosexuals barred from legal union, it was easy to forget that the film wasn't particularly radical. Harvey Milk was somewhat anomalous in the world of politics as his ascendancy retained a firm root in the constituency that propelled it forward, including a sympathy for the local Castro street working class being potentially outrun by attempted corporate takeovers. Discussion of Milk as a politician assassinated for his homosexuality unfortunately places the conversation within a false dichotomy, which discussion of his legacy generally doesn't address. <br /><br />Milk was assassinated for being gay, as well as popular and successful whereas his rival and eventual assassin's wholesome good looks and good 'ol boy patriotism had become dated and useless in the wake of the homosexual and working class representation surging within local politics. By resurrecting the story of Milk to time it with the debates over gay marriage amendments not only did the filmmakers deflate Milk's legacy by associating it with what essentially amounted to a reformist capitulation to heterosexist standards of cohabitation, but also ignored the larger socio-economic variables affecting homosexuals as individuals outside of their orientation. <br /><br />As much as my anarchistic tendencies want to harp on the legacy being built around Milk's political trajectory, culminating in his becoming a fixture within the local government's bureaucracy and being forced to partake in a system where people are answered for instead of answered by, Milk's actual political activities were fairly nimble in a more amiably radical way than discussion would suggest. Milk's assassination took place less than a year after he was elected to office. The name Milk built took place entirely outside the realm of public office i.e. it took place in public, with the people. <br /><br />For instance, one of Milk's more actually revolutionary accomplishments, at least within the scope of what he was working with at the time, was his integration of gays into the union. In exchange for aiding Teamsters in their attempt to oust large beer companies from area bars for their refusal to sign union contracts for their workers, they began to hire more gay drivers. It's a particularly odd dynamic given the generally conservative reputation of the working class (even though the Teamsters were pretty much an establishment half-removed and the conservative reputation rests on a narrowly defined double standard), to foment ties between one oppressed subset, workers, with another, gays. This, of course, is a false dichotomy because one subset is defined by their occupation and the other by their orientation, neither contradicting the other. The workers were stiffed and the gays were excluded, but at least the workers had developed a buffer which could now be extended to ensure gays previously excluded would have an organizational defense as well. <br /><br />Milk acknowledged that the prevailing power structure, white and state capitalist, was an equal opportunity offender with no intention of extending its sphere of influence to the general population, especially to minorities and the working class at large. His community work engaged in the notion that the only way to provide a buffer against such a monolith would be to sap the power given it by an acquiescent population and aligning them on a grassroots level with each other. <br /><br />That he's remembered as a short-lived politician is almost a joke when he was a life-long activist. Not to completely discount his political aspirations, which were undercut by a theatricality that gave the ridiculousness of the political process its due, but that he was able to facilitate a confluence of wants with material accomplishments in wildly divergent community without relying on the prevailing power structure is more impressive than his eventual election to public office. The deconstruction of homosexual mythology and breaking down of standard misconceptions was a great service that his flamboyant and bombastic campaigns really only served as a platform for. Boy was a hustler in a system that hustled. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO9BqkZaQURSkTByO1fCm6XVpKOjjp6p3oU1nDgKsZlFyU6pd6ID-AW936A1mhoyBZjRyKMzh1auDeHzSGPqwGkqxJZOSJC_Ygc2bDn7ea17ITqtlVt4RKe-l1t6283SnrCrPyYkwrmoY/s1600-h/45024_harvey_milk.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 266px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO9BqkZaQURSkTByO1fCm6XVpKOjjp6p3oU1nDgKsZlFyU6pd6ID-AW936A1mhoyBZjRyKMzh1auDeHzSGPqwGkqxJZOSJC_Ygc2bDn7ea17ITqtlVt4RKe-l1t6283SnrCrPyYkwrmoY/s400/45024_harvey_milk.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5325707470545347682" /></a><br /><br />As Sean Penn got an oscar for tastefully impersonating a homosexual while Robert Downey, Jr. was quietly ignored for making fun of that same cultural appropriation with the aim of reaping critical acclaim and the material awards that go along with it, Milk's screenwriter made a cloying speech about capitulating to god while remaining defiantly homosexual, with a nod to the gay marriage movement. While Milk would have supported equal rights and have been glad to lend his name to the cause, it's kind of an insult to his political legacy, in which much more radical barriers were broached. Where equality with heterosexuals was less an empty slogan and more an assessment of what that kind of equality means. Just like homosexuals aren't all the same neither are heterosexuals, and Milk's work with trade unions and local businesses in defiance of government sponsored development was a far more penetrating olive branch than the "me too" politics of marriage laws. <br /><br />Most major films broaching the subject of homosexuality fall into that trap, too, placing homosexuals squarely within the context of a sociological statistic, a constant which can respond uniformly to any variable. The most daring thing done is to merely present to generally heterosexual males within a homosexual paradigm, make generalizations about their relation to all homosexuals and finito, you've got a message picture. Though I'll give I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry for engaging an audience that would normally write off homosexuals in one fell swoop out of gay panic in a fairly combative assessment of what it means to be gay in superficially masculine, oppressively heterosexual atmosphere (don't hate, it could have been worse, like, in and out, at least this one acknowledged the falsity of the stereotypes it was playing with). <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjW7AxkxpqkRr70_IoAOveOoJLarkAFVM6uS-I7lRh4Xhzte35e2Ys1Qd2qhfscZsEbdsnYKjymjtWs_TpP5l4WLV3bCkCd9bGN3JLT2CRwDIkYzRy9ebV6iP4A2eWHcilxXV79pXDEyYs/s1600-h/fox.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 290px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjW7AxkxpqkRr70_IoAOveOoJLarkAFVM6uS-I7lRh4Xhzte35e2Ys1Qd2qhfscZsEbdsnYKjymjtWs_TpP5l4WLV3bCkCd9bGN3JLT2CRwDIkYzRy9ebV6iP4A2eWHcilxXV79pXDEyYs/s400/fox.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5325709261059029410" /></a><br /><br />In contrast, I'd like to point you to Fox and His Friends, a classic of German cinema and a milestone in sexual discourse. It's director, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, moved beyond the confines of the sexual binary, not defining himself as either gay or straight, but willfully acknowledging the plights of both. Growing up and operating within West Germany Fassbinder experienced the less overt oppression of the capitalist economy and the government which enforced it. Historically written off as the democratic counterpart to its fascist soviet neighbor behind the wall, not everyone living there forgot that that critiques of power and exploitation by german intellectuals like Marx and Luxemburg were born within a capitalist economy. Not everyone forgot that Luxemberg was executed for her anti-capitalist critiques. And not everyone was averse to the conditions that made her put her life on the line. Fassbinder's films tended to explore the damaging effects of new manifestations of old power structures. Male-dominant, heterosexist, and exploitatively competitve. Fox and his Friends is an excellent amalgamation of those exact illnesses. <br /><br />What goes unacknowledged in presumably homo-progressive cinema is that homosexuals are also human, and are citizens confined within the systems their surrounding societies are governed by. Therefore, the same hierarchical delineations that affect heterosexuals can affect homosexuals as well. In the film, Franz Biberkopf is a lower-class gay carnie who goes by the name of Fox. Fox wins the lottery and inherits a fortune as well as a new group of friends, a bourgeois collection of biting socialites with an exquisite, extravagant, and expensive taste in living standards. Fox's sexual relationship with one of them makes him a prime target of their classist standoffishness, automatically measuring everything about him, from his education to his fortune to his dick size. <br /><br />Due to the decadence of their lavish lifestyle they seem to value bodies as exchangeable commodities just as well as their most recent wardrobe purchase, and the organ in which Fox rode in on is soon replaced by another member of the circle by the name of Eugen. Eugen is derided as "prissy" by Fox's street standards while Fox is deemed uncultured and savage by almost everyone else. Despite Eugene's precise calculations of Fox's behavioral qualities and their relation to his carefully measured upper-class standards, Eugen delves into a carefully mannered but mildly uninhibited affair, much to the chagrin of his own partner, another member of the circle who won't even regard Fox's presence as a human being. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGbO4m5zMqCrDz_6anoCqQLybCBb5440XcE29rjB7pBk8JMc5dC1rCuTMLPxCsQagSpdvht-QZcVFcGgeGXXdwPDp_Bxbdpj3Eoy9onhm3pkIqjLRJdJCptOTvaJ_cdc-fCPJ3DgMz2T0/s1600-h/fox_and_his_friends.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGbO4m5zMqCrDz_6anoCqQLybCBb5440XcE29rjB7pBk8JMc5dC1rCuTMLPxCsQagSpdvht-QZcVFcGgeGXXdwPDp_Bxbdpj3Eoy9onhm3pkIqjLRJdJCptOTvaJ_cdc-fCPJ3DgMz2T0/s400/fox_and_his_friends.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5325709651198504370" /></a><br /><br />Soon Fox is initiated into Eugen's family, an ostensibly well-off and well-rounded mother and father facing financial troubles in an unstable economy. Eugen's expensive lifestyle and his family's financial woes are charitably assuaged by Fox's good fortune, naively assuming it's what one does in a standard cohabitation, he assumes the good will of his new de facto in-laws. Having been used to a more free flowing, and more amicable interaction with a less judgementally uptight group of working class queers, his quick quips from the wells of street smarts find themselves no match for the bourgeois lifestyle demands of an armchair decorator with cushy tastes requiring books for shelves instead of shelves for books, 18th century artistry for a place to sit, and crystal castles for the light switch. <br /><br />And here the groundbreaking aspects of the film's discussion can already be assessed. Fassbinder was criticized for his negative portrayal of homosexuals by gay rights activists. What their narrowly defined objective ignored though was Fassbinder's acceptance that homosexuals ARE people, and instead of being an ideal definition of people "as well," they could also be a less than ideal people "as well." The adaptation of class doctrine can defy oppressed designation, working within multiple paradigms in a way that's both counter-intuitive to one's own self-worth but also to those one is closely associated with by means of a similar societal deprivation. The movie's subtitle is survival of the fittest, a bastardization of Darwin's theories that inevitably lent itself to conservative social theories, one in particular being the ruthless accumulation of capital. Fox's Friends in the title acquired the capital necessary to exist as themselves without interference, but their unstable method of acquiring that protective power affects every realm of the lifestyle they've adopted to properly maintain it. And not even if. Fox's sugar daddy co-optation comes about when Eugen is kicked from his apartment for "immoral relations." <br /><br />Already incisive enough the film has an unexpected interlude. Eugen and Fox elope from the confines of their staid, placid, and increasingly hateful constraints (Eugen has begun training Franz to be civilized, causing Franz to resort to binge sessions hating himself with the bar stool queers) to Morocco. Hoping to spring some vitality back into their relationship they intend on picking up a male to use as their temporary sexual liason. Seemingly having studied from a pick-up manifesto his society friends cobbled together from years of clandestine pursuits of the libidinal, Eugen ropes Fox into a shopping spree with the market being Moroccan men. The film, having already engrossed you in the classist dehumanization of a poor German by fellow citizen of the same sexual orientation, now asks you to question the levels of exploitation, the levels of dehumanization, and the hierarchy intensifies and stretches beyond belief. Germany was a powerful colonial force and it's citizens, being part of a European ancestry that for centuries defined the world against its will, still have a lingering sense of entitlement to the fruits of their geographical counterparts. <br /><br />Fully anticipating Eugen's rope tricks a Moroccan falls into their favor and bides his time in a knowledgeably patient manner while Eugen and Fox debate whether or not to jeopardize their already fragile relationship with a fling. Eugen being the most adamant for saddling up with a "camel jockey." When they get back to the hotel they are barred from entering their room together, as the Moroccan bell hop has been trained to follow the European hotel chain's orders and not allow Moroccans to exist on the premises. An argument ensues in which Eugen defends what he payed for and Fox defends their potential lover's rights in his own country (they both possibly make this point). The Moroccan boytoy, having been through this before, willfully leaves without further commotion. Feeling like they've been busted and sabotaged Eugen and Fox kind of kick their feet in until the bell hop comes back and tells them not to make a fuss. If they want a boy they can send someone from the staff! <br /><br />If Eugen and Fox, as European tourists with large amounts of currency, want to have their choice of servants for personal pleasure their continental clout allows them that. The movie abruptly reverts back to Germany after that, where you have to refocus your attention on Fox. It's slightly jarring, but also substantially more enriching for the rest of Fox's story. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUK3FCQ0SNt9r5aL_E4iEAvZOqqsX-wxl3dfgaGw1UY39bA_5plz4TCOaRrmM2vZZuhagegDPL1CKGct5-6wM_guZCMsfDz7Uogn20wcQcN_1mayBJmGkqPmS7chA17J9sfXjlB4TpG-I/s1600-h/protectedimage.php.jpeg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 302px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUK3FCQ0SNt9r5aL_E4iEAvZOqqsX-wxl3dfgaGw1UY39bA_5plz4TCOaRrmM2vZZuhagegDPL1CKGct5-6wM_guZCMsfDz7Uogn20wcQcN_1mayBJmGkqPmS7chA17J9sfXjlB4TpG-I/s400/protectedimage.php.jpeg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5325710099068937026" /></a><br /><br />Culminating thoughts: Group identity can be necessary for erecting a protective barrier against individual oppression for a common trait, but it also creates a lowest common denominator standard of non-consented absorption where manipulability and exploitation of an entire set of arbitrarily linked individuals becomes feasible. Individual identity allows one to see outside the cloistered association to understand why one particular aspect of your biology might define your link to a subset but not your relation to everyone else, mostly the dominant subset, or even yourself, each person being a confluence of characteristics that would require an obnoxious amount of hyphens to properly explicate. As a result each member of a subset can be affected by laws and mores of another subset they are excluded from, particularly when it's a subset has control over their standards of living and means of sustenance. Fox's friends can be gay and oppressed, but they can be rich, elitist and exploitative like the best of them, because they're not defined by their gayness, they're defined by the class they belong to, and a new hierarchy that doesn't revolve around preferences inevitably separated potential companions. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_0MFWhWUXDCC7JGZvs5UZT0WMAzOXfjrER3jpJkooQ57UqOgXnpI6bYXBUdcUVli9upHTCx7hptwu6meRNiWoweJbhb0NyTkRecwKTC-GX47SZt_eG8pl82cVb9kRn7HWVGUlW0SQ-dQ/s1600-h/faustrecht_france_pl.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 278px; height: 372px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_0MFWhWUXDCC7JGZvs5UZT0WMAzOXfjrER3jpJkooQ57UqOgXnpI6bYXBUdcUVli9upHTCx7hptwu6meRNiWoweJbhb0NyTkRecwKTC-GX47SZt_eG8pl82cVb9kRn7HWVGUlW0SQ-dQ/s400/faustrecht_france_pl.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5325721667839407458" /></a>Adam Katzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13445652093684270646noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2296351472492903976.post-12972931358145152882009-04-17T04:56:00.000-07:002009-04-17T04:18:29.299-07:00"Let Me Put Some God In You": A closer look at the videos for Usher's Love In This Club and Z-Ro's Tired<object width="448" height="374"><param name="movie" value="http://videos.onsmash.com/e/1kCnPdAcLtqWFK2d"></param><param name="allowFullscreen" value="true"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"></param><param name="allowNetworking" value="all"></param><embed src="http://videos.onsmash.com/e/1kCnPdAcLtqWFK2d" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowFullScreen="true" allowNetworking="all" allowScriptAccess="always" width="448" height="374"></embed></object><br /><br />Yeah, so, this is a year late but bear with me. Every time I view Usher's Love In This Club video it continues transmogrifying from a sleek, celebrity-filled vision of the hottest blue balls ever to something even scarier than I originally imagined. The video's initial allure was the way it wrapped itself up in the material excesses the genre is criticized for and subtly flaunts them in a preternaturally seductive way. <br /><br />Usher stumbling alone into some purgatory of his repertoire's intended haunts, with the doors leading back into itself, suggests an isolated detachment the seemingly retired superstar had to face when making a comeback. When Timbaland production team member/rising pop star Keri Hilson shows up as the video girl, her sultry taunts in response to his nervous and aggressively defensive inquiries play like the unstable youth demographic he's after. "I'm your every desire." Does the dude still matter? All the girls that fawned over him before his cameo in She's All That are grown, youngsters like Omarion or even weirdos with a futuristic vocoder and a Stevie Wonder visage like T-Pain done stole his place, and the market is unpredictable for celebrities not returning on the surreal life. <br /><br />But then Polow Da Don comes in, the synths take over, and all of a sudden Usher is at home again, no need to freak out, just freak. Just like the song is about fucking right there on the dance floor because there is no waiting to get out, about that moment that can't be suppressed, that is so immediate it feels just right, the music feels that way, too. Usher puts on his sunglasses, shouts out the DJ, and proceeds to ceremoniously emcee the main event, in which Usher attempts to fucks with a lady right there in the club or, maybe, slide his way into the pockets of his desired demographic. <br /><br />There to witness the proceedings are fellow Rap and R & B luminaries currently taking the clubs by storm. Those that Usher fizzled out to. The artists that Usher maybe passed the torch to before going back to his dressing room. Here everyone's a friend, Usher's like the kid that took a gap year and is now back for some serious business. Now he finds himself surrounded by wizened industry heads, borderline divas on the cusp of saturation, their entrance, their existence almost a wax work in a museum, crystallized in slow motion. Kanye with his back on the bar while a pair of high heels with legs attached to them saunter past his elbows, barely cocking his head in acknowledgement cause his glasses do enough attitude for him, one of Keri's girls slowly grazing his proximity (as well as Nelly's and that of many others), feels just as right as the song does. <br /><br />What undercuts the self-indulgence of the proceedings is that all this is good and great, but Usher isn't actually getting any. He's on the cusp of getting some when Keri Hilson and her crew of temptresses taunt him. Moving past the bevy of new social circles being famous and photogenic Usher is getting swept up by the libidinal undercurrent, it's not just flashy it's fuckable in there and he's going to cash in but right as they lock lips, right as they're about to bump hips she disappears. Usher being left to dance choreographically to his heart's and his loin's discontent. And still nothing. Then it ends. Everyone disappears. The girls are there no more. Usher tries to run out again, but this time he ends up in some approximation of heaven. Surrounded by clouds he's actually standing in the rubble of what was once the structure that hosted his grandstanding re-entry into superstardom. <br /><br />All of a sudden the song's libertinism becomes apocalyptically conservative, with the site of casual sex being done in like Sodom and Gomorrah. What really drives this home, and I didn't notice this until a recent appraisal, is that Keri and her girls don't just graze by and tempt the guys in the club. They leave them hanging in more ways than one. Each encounter leaves the men's lusty demeanor with a parting gift. When Kanye is walked by his hand goes out and a chain is dropped into his palm. Attached to that chain is a cross. When Nelly's hands are clasped by one of the girls, he's being signaled to guard the cross now placed in his holding. In the context of Usher's return, this is a trainwreck. Back in the lime light and before his first video is over his dick killed everyone. By unleashing the atmosphere of promiscuity everyone was blown to bits. Keri's angels did what they could, but maybe it wasn't a sure thing. In the context of Love in this Club, is there no such thing? Or is such a thing a sure fire way to get crossed out of existence? <br /><br />Like, the brilliance of the thing doesn't necessarily make it agreeable, but holy shit is it a sight to behold. The idea of spiritual liberation from the libations of liminal turmoil makes a startlingly irresponsible return in Z-Ro's tired:<br /><br /><object width="448" height="374"> <param name="movie" value="http://www.worldstarhiphop.com/videos/e/16711680/wshhTy5U5FwzIa4tUq3M" /> <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><param name="quality" value="high" /> <embed src="http://www.worldstarhiphop.com/videos/e/16711680/wshhTy5U5FwzIa4tUq3M" quality="high" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowFullscreen="true" width="448" height="374"></embed> </object><br /><br /><a href="http://malteserubble.blogspot.com/2008/04/z-ro-crooked-know-key-to-survival-is.html">I've written here extensively of Z-Ro's depression</a>, the way don status mythology making was progressively de-layered by his own self-admonitions. Raised by extended family, harassed by the police, isolated by both a perpetual violence that claimed most of his friends and a systematic injustice that incarcerated the others. Ro doesn't have time for romance, all he has time for is to scramble. And constantly being down on his knees he looked to god. Even if you're an atheist you understand the prescriptive nature of his laments are less out of ideological puritanism and more out of desperation. <br /><br />Despite being robbed of a comfortable existence, despite needing Lexapro to deal with it, he still looked outside himself. No matter the antipathy he still made space to reach out to gays, lesbians and other discriminated demographics. His willing of god onto others was, yes, superstitious, but also dissociative. A coping mechanism in which he saw the breadth of oppression claiming more people than himself. If he could use god maybe everyone else can, too. But what's odd is the continual knee-dropping, and not just because of it's undeniable presence, but because of how aware he was on I'm Still Living of its apparent inability to solve anything. "I pray so much I should be kin to the heavenly son." It's beyond solemnity now, it's a cruel joke, and one he assumes he'll keep on having to tell himself or he'll break down and stop waiting for anyone else to do him in. <br /><br />What's weird about this new video, boasting Mya instead of, say, past Rap-A-Lot hook roster stalwart Tanya Heron, is the comfort level. Ro's music video production values have gone up, and despite the relative obscurity, his old line about how "Niggaz say Rap-A-Lot ain't payin me like I ain't got nuttin, If six figures is bein bent over, I'm lovin the fuckin"seems to be the de facto protocol.<br /><br />What's awful here on my part is that his artistry is invariably also judged by his honesty, and Z-Ro's honesty was particularly hard to swallow because of the shit he had to get off his chest. His real talk was that he was living the same fucked up life everyone else around him was. The more fucked up, the more stirring, the more depressed, the more soulful. It's as if the only way he could get any better was to be on his death bed and though everyone wanted him to pull through his exit would have left a mark on rap analogous to that of Ian Curtis. <br /><br />What's great is that now Z-Ro seems to be finally doing better, or at least the videographer is making a convincing case. Sure the subject matter is about the shackles caused by societal constraints, but looking at all of his new videos dude looks a whole lot better than he did in his most recent stint in county prison, better than he did on his last album before going in. This video, though, is where it gets uncomfortable. Not because of the subject matter, which is aptly conveyed with Z-Ro's trademark sympathy, but his sympathy now seems to have a punch line. The whole thing plays like a weight loss infomercial. Sure, Z-Ro might have found god and told you before, but he never gave weight to it, he just obsessively referred to it as the last thing he could possibly turn to, telling others out of concern, but still not being 100%. Here, though, it's like it's a given, he's outsourcing the work to a street corner preacher. Every symptom of malaise and oppression is lined up like a welfare line and written off with the power of god, at least through the hands of this preacher. All the symbolic shackles are miraculously undone by that dude that was always catcalling you with catechisms on your block. <br /><br />At least Ro doesn't blow you up, but it's like meat and dairy and the split between vegans and vegetarians. Which is worse? Being killed or being stuffed in a cage and prodded at?Adam Katzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13445652093684270646noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2296351472492903976.post-61611318454507223062009-04-07T17:31:00.000-07:002009-04-12T22:18:41.694-07:00Rachel Getting Married<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh935SBRsuGsVR-qeAQAhRlESOw68MlCVUDkD8ZIFt6pnvUuC90C4AATaoL2MCn9_R0U7bDqtntNRU0GzWZ10t_U3BL5oAbZMtXV1d4G2idZLTLK-Y61u4R_MveDKU9j1tqZnEUkRzXkr0/s1600-h/Rachel-Getting-Married-movie-23.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh935SBRsuGsVR-qeAQAhRlESOw68MlCVUDkD8ZIFt6pnvUuC90C4AATaoL2MCn9_R0U7bDqtntNRU0GzWZ10t_U3BL5oAbZMtXV1d4G2idZLTLK-Y61u4R_MveDKU9j1tqZnEUkRzXkr0/s400/Rachel-Getting-Married-movie-23.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5322112668683782546" /></a><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">(I know I'm late on this, but it's now on on dvd so go watch it)</span><br /><br />In a moment of familial convalescence I had only gotten a glimpse of falling asleep to late night conversations between my mom and her sister, the two sibs at the center of Rachel Getting Married wash up scars both real and embedded. It blows the fire-breathing wound salting that came before it out the loch ness dwelling it wallowed in, almost making the mythical burrowing seem absolutely necessary so the connection could be made this strong again. <br /><br />My mom's upbringing, from the bits and pieces left at my disposal, was less than ideal. Impenetrable parentals barely there (youth done in by a nazi escape route, shell shocked IDF backlash, double time work loads to pay for the housing) with the double-edged sword of authorial command left at my mother's feet. The chance for being siblings was upended by a circumstantially forced hierarchy that tore them apart for years, the youngin's not knowing who the real mother was, my mom not knowing where her allegiances lay, or where her priorities were to be spent. Empty house for months at a time brought on round the clock, drunken card games, on one hand putting the youngest two of the four on display for guests to play with like dolls, with her other hand broom-ready, a dust pan in tow. <br /><br />On a most recent trip, while sleeping next to the crib of my sister's new born kid in her village house outside tel-aviv, both my mom and sister, always prone to on and off familial theatrics, just pored over the details of their youthful responsibilities. I, of course, felt unusually privileged and spoiled, again any sunk moods the result of first world neuroses. It was an odd moment, billion piece puzzle finally seeing some kind of solidified semblance. <br /><br />Rachel Getting Married is kind of like that. Both experiences making me jealous I wasn't and didn't have a sister to deal with the world through. I've got a little brother, he's more like the music hired for the film's festivities, a self-proclaimed god of rock blazing trails only distanced from a telescope in NASA. He's loads of fun, the infighting there aplenty, but the feminine quality that my post-gender lib/arts education is doing away with is totally missing. <br /><br />Without going too heavy into details, the film's wedding video with a broken record button on infinite gaze catches the whole unpacking of the family dynamic's fractured psychology. The constantly shifting alliances when a junkie sibling breaks back into the fold, the center of a tragedy she'll never be able to outlive being partly responsible for, the intimate knowledge thus wielded by every knowing relative to cut deep into that black hole of emotional negation. Why would blood relations be so cruel to one another? The underlying joke being that the titular character is working on her PhD in psychology, a bevy of statistics and APA terminology still finding itself useless in the alien terrain of another person. No matter what institutions these bloodlines hide behind, it's each other they'll eventually have to answer to. The sooner they realize that, the sweeter the release of finally knowing who they're forever bound to. Don't watch it for Anne Hathaway, watch it for who her character represents, in the context of her familial extensions. <br /><br />That release will never be that sweet, as the film attests, a bitter taste left on the tongue, too much baggage for a swift layover and departure, the desire to just leave the bags and fuck the f off. But finally, knowing what to fuck the f off from, and being able to decide what parts of it to warm up and into. Cut deep, but with a surgeon's precision. Stitches are imperative.Adam Katzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13445652093684270646noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2296351472492903976.post-81730296974081243152009-03-17T13:16:00.000-07:002009-03-22T00:57:20.831-07:00Blackness we can put our money behind!Apologies to anyone who is studying graphic design and/or has seen a legitimate flyer. This is happening on friday at my school:<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6-mUiRTJ6i_JZO7zqDV8B7OViwamaBLQIDqv7EfVnf4NdrPj6HLVjpN3Z1R7I4YlCYy9tsHEz3zimVWi0I5ToTpzCpqzlz2tPTsAiALGriKbzXFKwaE2spB1svUf3wA4d1f0zWzhUp78/s1600-h/serendipity_flyer_23-1.JPG"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 265px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6-mUiRTJ6i_JZO7zqDV8B7OViwamaBLQIDqv7EfVnf4NdrPj6HLVjpN3Z1R7I4YlCYy9tsHEz3zimVWi0I5ToTpzCpqzlz2tPTsAiALGriKbzXFKwaE2spB1svUf3wA4d1f0zWzhUp78/s400/serendipity_flyer_23-1.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5314257947180494962" /></a><br />(The event went through some budget drama and was overshadowed by last year's trainwreck involving Mickey Avalon falling through due to heroin chic/aggressively amplified narcissism. I originally wrote this for the school paper. I was asked to cut it down to 600 words, due to my own aggressively amplified narcissism I agreed but will put the whole thing online here!)<br /><br />So, In the process of getting Mania Music Group approved for Serendipity I nearly broke down when someone in the student senate asked if this unverified rap group would be problematic. While understood in the context of Mickey Avalon, the present circumstances that question were asked under unveil an underlying prejudice. Like, why did no one question spending who knows how much on a group of white guys playing southern fried noodling with a Malian melengoni thrown in. You could have done that for 2k with predominantly white Michigan Afrobeat enthusiasts NOMO (I spoke to their agent last semester). Better yet, for that kind of money, why not have gotten actual African artists? Why didn't they consider ACTUAL MALIANS like Amadou & Mariam? Or the DRC-based electric thumb-piano percussion group Konono No. 1? Afrobeat legend Hugh Masekela is still playing shows, but he's better off with people who actually listen to African music, right? GuilCo is too busy being progressive to pay respects to African culture outside of a possible documentary in Bryan Jr.? <br /><br />And then Holy Ghost Tent Revival, who don't even bother with the rest of the world, because they're busy playing American roots music. Great. So the moment a black rapper drops b and n bombs in one of their songs it's like "what? did they use the n word? are they talking about our women? put a leash on their barbaric blackness!" It suggests that Mickey Avalon's problematic factor wasn't his misogyny, glorified drug abuse, or general crudity (who was expecting better from the rap section of myspace's music label?), but that he was doing it in the overtly eyebrow raising framework of the predominantly black genre of rap music. Not a problem was that his cherry picking of rap's material excesses without the socio-political factors that shade their existence is basically a minstrel show, in which he's putting on the white presumption of black regressiveness. <br />If he were some kid with a guitar writing pained songs about anonymous females that ruined his reason for being by not caring about his feelings and breaking his heart, that the only thing he could do was recycle and perpetuate the tradition of dudes singing about archetypal heartbreakers (i.e. women) that make up the bane of their existence would be left off the hook as opposed to being called out for its misogyny. No, "love songs are soulful...oh, soul! Now that's black music I can get behind!" Yes, thirty years too late. <br /><br />Essentially the only rappers that can perform without scrutiny are Common, who we paid an unmentionable amount of money for two years ago. Why? Because he's a quote unquote conscious rapper, essentially meaning that he can be held up as a light against the dark recesses of the woman-hating, drug-running gun happy gangsters. Let's for a moment forget that Common once rapped the line "I house more hoes than Spelman." We'll let that slide because Common raps about being positive, about being non-violent and anti-gangsta, he says words like "revolutionary" and writes songs called "the people." That half of Common's lyrics are made up of lazy pop culture references is not really a populist form of witty poetics. Being a major label rapper with large corporate capital it amounts to synergistic strategies generally employed by companies like McDonald's when they want to reach the urban market by writing Lovin' instead of Loving in their trademarked phrases and doing an R &B jingle to back it up (yes, now probably you'll have to pay McDonald's to say I'm Lovin' It in a product). Making matters worse, Common, for all his supposedly elevated lifestyle accounts for, made not only a GAP commercial (sweatshop haven, because the streets of China aren't as important as the hood in Chicago) but a whole song for a Coke commercial about keeping it real (as opposed to "not selling out.") But not even the conscious ship lasted that long. Anyone interested in seeing Common play into what's "popular" check his last album Universal Mind Control, where he pulls a Mickey Avalon as if he wasn't in the rap game for 15 years but was instead 15 years old.<br /><br />The whole thing reeks of commodified solidarity. We'll decide what luminaries from underprivileged communities to spend money on, and that way we can set up a venerable collection of progressive and "civilized" black products, while simultaneously distancing ourselves from erroneous statistics about the majority white consumer demographic that purchases rap. By arguing that it's the white consumers whose preferences for misogynistic, materialistic violence gives white record executives the incentive to mold the apparently servile and malleable black kids into honky-approved Sambos for white consumption suggests that black people don't make decisions, that they're too good to think for themselves and now we have to save them from destructive immorality.<br /><br />One, even Soundscan, which is where these willingly unverified but politically useful statistics come from have admitted that they don't really check the races of all the consumers. Usually, if a music store is in an upscale neighborhood or a mall, it's assumed to be white. This rules out not only the black population, but various other minorities as well. It also completely disregards the communal, DIY nature of most rap consumption. The underprivileged people we prefer black rappers to speak on behalf of (as if they should know better about their own life) actually have cost-effective methods of distributing and sharing music, and no it's not filesharing. It's mixtapes they can get on the streetcorner, or unpublished cd's they sell out the back of their trunk. How do you think Young Jeezy started? Independently as Lil J.<br /><br />It's not really important how they did what they did, it's that they spoke about the stuff that they did before it that wide consumption of their new product allows them to live without doing. "But rap perpetuates drug use." Go to the National Security Archives website, click on Colombia, and pull up the list of the CIA's top narco-traffickers. Right under Pablo Escobar is Alviro Uribe. This was in 1991. Come the Bush Presidency he's our number one ally against terrorism in brown country. Or, read (about) Gary Webb's Dark Alliance: CIA, Contras and Crack-cocaine explosion in which he details the connections between the early 80's outbreak of the crack epidemic with the funding of the Contras, as if training and sending militants to rape, pillage and slaughter tens of thousands of peasants in the Nicaraguan country side in the name of preserving business interests wasn't bad enough. "Why don't rappers speak about that?" Why should they hold themselves up to white, or "progressive" standards when the supposed leader of the free world those standards come from is busy killing people with drug money it made off of their parents' generation's drug abuse? <br /><br />And that suggests that all gun talk and drug talk and sex talk is ignorant. Because it's only okay for Martin Scorcese to get critical acclaim for writing epic portrayals of the depravity of street life, like Goodfellas, that amount to a whole lot of drugs and guns and sex, but ends with a dude snitching and are all of a sudden deep. If rap was actually consumed by its antagonizers as opposed to the phantom white demographic that perpetuates its supposed problems, you'll find that rap works like a fictional narrative, too, writing its violent stories with poetic zeal that third person treatises with recycled compound-syllable academic terms can't really touch on. It's like a history book on Russia under Napoleon versus Tolstoy's War and Peace. It also has more head above water moments than you can count. Check out The Geto Boys classic My Mind is Playing Tricks on Me. It's not an anomaly.* <br /><br />Ignoring that is how we end up with Finding Forrester, where we're supposed to care about this black kid because he knows how to write fiction. Now white people have something to empathize with! He can join civilization! What if there's no civilization to join? Finally, after centuries of slavery and subjugation, the young black boy with potential understands how to be well-recieved in the white world. <br /><br />End scene. Here's to an open-minded future. <br /><br />*Beanie Sigel made an entire album's worth in The B. Coming. UGK kick off their classic Ridin' Dirty with an example. Trick Daddy started rapping to verbally explicate the nastier aspects of his life he didn't want to repeat physically. Z-Ro has made a career trying to survive the emotional turmoil the toll of dead and incarcerated friends takes on someone still roaming free on the streets. Read G-Side's bio on their myspace. Affected by Huntsville's variation on poverty and crime, they were in and out of foster homes and community centers. Instead of buckling down, "growing up" and getting an entrepreneurial internship at a local business institution they instead got together with the Paper Route Recordz crew, specifically the Block Beataz to create life affirming anthems for all their potential brethren stuck in the same situations. Notice the lack of bootstrap pulling in their songs, they actually care about each other and their audience. They're not kicking doors down with condescending maxims. Mania Music Group don't exist within the "conscious" archetype by typical standards, perhaps they sometimes rap topically but they're not wrapped up in a manifesto, they just live in Baltimore. That's going to happen, real talk comes from real living. Their M.O. is essentially the joy of rapping, creating communal enjoyment by playing with the words on the tip of their tongues. Their producers BeaLack and Headphonemusik basically play with all palettes of sound offering the aural equivalent of the experimental kicks the Mania Music MC's wordplay offers.Adam Katzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13445652093684270646noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2296351472492903976.post-66807101524216081502009-02-28T11:28:00.000-08:002009-02-28T22:19:39.850-08:00ListedOkay, so an F-book chain, but I haven't updated the blog in a while and want some shameless self-promotion thrown into the mix!<br />Some rap albums I like, a lot<br />No order, just because I don't believe in hierarchy (omg, anarchism 101!) <br /><br />Geto Boys - The Resurrection - So the horrorcore pioneers with a foot in the grave and a touch of the real real drop a totally cohesive funked-out trunk rattler with a head on the ground, a heart on the sleeve, and guns blazin'. This is a bone fide classic of the protest genre in the aural aesthetic that jars more than three-pronged -isms. <br /><br />Z-Ro - I'm Still Livin' - A depressive street album tired of the streets. Evangelical only out of palpable desperation. Bunch of friends dead, the rest in prison. One of the most insightful rap albums not just into the socio-economic subjugation of the hood and its effect on the psyche of the drug game rappers rap about, but into one person's depression in the face of it all as well. None of it pretentious, all of it heart. <br /><br />Kanye West - Graduation - In my opinion Kanye's most cohesive album, despite his free-for-all grab-a-thon synthesizing eurotrash with street bangers. Kanye's brash egotism is, to me, half name-making, half-desperation and captures the beatmaker/fashion icon at his most desperate and vulnerable. Here he's careful to enunciate every syllable so they'll hear him in the nosebleeds, and even with the endearing cheese of some of the puns, it's totally worth it. <br /><br />Lil' Wayne - Da Drought 3 - 100 plus minutes free (literally) to spend time in Wayne's purped-out, blazed up thought process. The wonders of the english language unveiled.<br /><br />Trick Daddy - Back By Thug Demand - Nostalgia and about-face rolled in one. Bought it for cheap at a liquidation sale, found out a hometown hero was really one of rap's greatest storytellers. From "Born a Thug"'s breakdown of the life of a criminal in the making, to the the way that "Booty Doo" he leaves no life detail untouched. It also helps the beats are monstrous. "Breaka-Breaka, dade county on the number line..."<br /><br />UGK - Underground Kingz - An accidental swan song, of sorts. So yeah, Pimp C plays out nearly all the facets of the literary archetype (minus 8Ball and MJG's added violence) but I never really realized the breadth of Pimp C's humanity until I heard second-half sleeper Shattered Dreams, where he puts more on the line than most of the rap canon big upping ladies' and gays' hopes and futures. The rest of this, too, is just great, especially because it's overblown and all over the place. Finally Port Arthur, TX hits the limelight the way it's been on every rapper's tongues and half of it's biggest export hits the grave. A worthy goodbye.<br /><br />Notorious B.I.G. - Ready 2 Die - Yeah, classic. The I'm a total asshole, thug in the negatory and I know it, but here's the whole of me, take it or leave it. And there's just as much heart as body mass. To be taken instead of left behind, obvs.<br /><br />Dizzee Rascal - Maths + English - His earlier stuff's good, too, but here he realizes his niche and the connections between the trans-atlantic hoods and there respective cultural outputs. He slows down his double-time and big-ups like never before. He still fails to get anywhere but american niche purveyors Def Jux, but with UGK guesting, dude didn't need to worry about distribution. <br /><br />Outkast - Southernplayasticadillacmusik/ATLiens - The sound of two gifted young MC's just playing with the possibilities rolling off their tongues. Touching stuff.<br /><br />Nas - Illmatic - Who else wrote stuff like this at 18? Puts academia to shame with the heights contained within. <br />Wu-Tang - 8 Diagrams - Yeah, if noticed, I'm as much for the first borns as the tenth plague, but even outside the wake of ODB's death, and despite being totally removed from the drug deals they originally recorded out of, this totally captures the weirdness of there being an entire capitalistic enterprise centered around powerful sensory distorters. To Ghostface and Raekwon, "hip-hop hippie bullshit," to drugs, this is the underside of it all that even "Timberlake and Timbaland" references fail to push out of the center. <br /><br />Clipse ft. The Re-Up Gang - We Got It 4 Cheap vol. 2 - Clipse and friends avoid label drama while in contract limbo, cherry pick the hottest beats and give us their own album with the gusto of a young MC laying it all out in hopes of making a name. But they've already made a name and know they've got the skills so this thing is fire, like, M.A.D. <br /><br />Madvillain - Madvillainy - typical underground/undergrad staple, but the experimentalism on this is not obnoxiously pitted against listenable rap. There are a few clever and subtle swipes at the "mainstream" but the production here eschews the labored attempts at hooks MF Doom was guilty of on Operation: Doomsday to drop in and out in multiple personalities to not just touch on weed mentals but alien spaceship rentals. It's wonderfully distended and out there, while also being in here (pointing to headspace!)<br /><br />Beanie Sigel - The B. Coming - Written before a jail term, no B.S., all Beanie Sigel. Another really depressive rap album playing out like dead man walking despite the one year sentence, the pangs sting. <br /><br />Big Boi - Speakerboxxx - One of the first instances where I realized self-hating experimentalism in rap pales in comparison to straight up rapping. Big Boi blew Three Stacks out the water with this, with a more wildly divergent emotional and stylistic pallette touching not just on big money fun but down-home slum humdrum. It's great.<br /><br />David Banner - Certified - Another instance where the thug vernacular Little Brother are embarrassed white people will call them on works a whole lot better than yelling something about the "revolution" while awaiting a commercial tie-in. Yeah, lots of it is harsh, but the way it basically destroys standard connotations of the b and h words is almost populist delineation of how to hate, ha. No, this is great, the relationship triptych is no boner-kill either, flipping the horribly misogynistic "beat that pussy up" line (and beat) from the yin yangs and making an anthem devoted to the female climax, following it with a straight up jam dedicated to consummating (rap equivalent of the Gaye) and then a kinda f'd up but totally down and out desperate apologetic plea to an ex in which the extent of masculinity is called into question. The politics on this album vacillated between free-for-all ignorance and thoughtful panoramics. It's awesome. <br /><br />Scarface - The Fix - Before calling it quits with men and women there was a drop of hope laced in the nihilism, the 'face seemed to be onto something peaceful, with healthy dollops of the hate thrown in, there's still something this seems to waiting on. <br /><br />T.I. Urban Legend - On the basis of freak though, really. Pretty much anything in his catalogue up to King is spotless, but this here is cristal. <br /><br />Trina - Diamond Princess - yet another bit of Miami withdrawal, the politics are (obvs) problematic, (totally) hilarious and (actually) wonderful. So maybe switching the gender balance and turning words like "pimp, bitch and ho" on their progenitors doesn't get rid of their existence, but gosh darn Trina totally makes dudes wobble at the knees while they grabbing their crotch for cover. The materialism no worse than MJB declaring womanhood by the stuff that Kendu buys her, but with women still making 77 cents of that man dollar, this is just as much the statement it was when Maralyn Monroe made it with Diamonds are a girl's best friend. <br /><br />G-Side - Starshipz and Rocketz - Okay, so this is the waters barely tested, this though almost entirely rest on the possibilities contained within. Block Beataz beats speak to 2 lettaz and Young Clova's words like their enterprise speaks to the docked spaceships pointed to by the wall-eyed kids on the cover, the universe apparent but held back from the youth in the hood. If NASA ain't answering, G-Side answer for themselves. <br /><br />DAM - Dedication - Occupied hood anthems, the hood as a refugee camp, the police as an occupying power. The women as victims equal to the men. The resistance fertile. The syllables washed through like fluids into the beats. The middle east as a template for rapping what's rapping against the rib cage. This knocks the world over.<br /><br />The Unicorns - Who Will Cut Our Hair When We Are Gone? - Arrogant, self-mythologizing, beef-prone with a legend-toting head nod in the B.I.G.-lite suicide that caps it off. It's got all the touchstones, so why not?<br /><br />And yeah, not 25, but ^&*% there's too many to mention so I'll cut it here.<br />Thanks for the time!Adam Katzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13445652093684270646noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2296351472492903976.post-1448085387299290742008-12-31T14:01:00.000-08:002009-02-23T00:23:58.446-08:00Ehud is an ace hoodlum; Waltz with Bashir<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiD7N7uzzzeG3MnM5d420cxmUnbmSH3gW_VE0Ct08xProxzDu4DlcC3nP5BCmijxGT1muGyvfXoNd_mXVQWeY8HIVqpwAnAKwzykXn_oOeOpAnwqBs6n4BckzZdw7-JjHkeTjrh9p1dErw/s1600-h/gaza3.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 271px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiD7N7uzzzeG3MnM5d420cxmUnbmSH3gW_VE0Ct08xProxzDu4DlcC3nP5BCmijxGT1muGyvfXoNd_mXVQWeY8HIVqpwAnAKwzykXn_oOeOpAnwqBs6n4BckzZdw7-JjHkeTjrh9p1dErw/s400/gaza3.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5286078831240539634" /></a><br />Holy shit do Israel's mainstream "liberals" bore me, the ones Israelis can wear on their sleeve to rouse only a grimace in response instead of a call for their head on a spike. David Grossman, novelist who milked many tearducts in my parent's house, but from time to time crawls out of his literary shell to make grandiosely ambivalent statements about war, misleading in their supposedly progressive populism but instead laced with the prescriptive ticks of an old hat Jabotinsky-ite. During the 2006 firebombing of Lebanon, he and Amos Oz, other milker of tearducts and stirrer of souls, released a moratorium on the war in intellectual news alternative Haaretz (read by my war is the answer loving uncle and his bomb factory running brother because the yediot and ma'ariv are too sensational). Though, if you read closely it was less a moratorium than a quip about how to run a war, a horrific tally having already bled the headlines they suggested a point has been sufficiently made and therefore they should try and make peace now. Instead of asking questions about the nature of bomb first policymaking they just quarreled with generals about logistics and the number of IED's. Thank you novelists, go back to stirring souls instead of blowing up their cages.<br /><br />Well, now he's back to make a poetically strained whiskey face over the overextension of what he felt was another sensible blowout, calling it being <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1051008.html">"too imprisoned in the familiar ceremony of war,"</a> but not condemning that familiarity by contradicting it with a statement that at first it was necessary, to show them what a sleeping giant does when woken up, now the peace making can begin. At that point I'd rather Ehud Barak yelling on fox news with the rationale and composure of a third grader who stabbed his classmate for launching spitballs at him. <br /><br />What's more disheartening is people are still on the gaza withdrawal "phenom" in which the palestinians somehow proved that, with a small parcel of land given to them without Israeli control (cough cough, all along the watchtower), they weren't able to control themselves as well as we were able to control them. That apparently is lack of democratic skill. Despite the fact the Dov Weisglass, working under Ariel Sharon, called the pullout, in a ha'aretz article<a href="http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=485929"> "The Big Freeze"</a>, a method of putting the peace process in formaldehyde. <br /><br />"The disengagement plan is the preservative of the sequence principle. It is the bottle of formaldehyde within which you place the president's formula so that it will be preserved for a very lengthy period. The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that's necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians." <br /><br />I.e. Israel was still building a security wall that expropriated land, changed the facts on the ground for peace negotiations, and disrupted the hell out of civilian life, all the while building more settlements in the west bank. So, in other words, the pullout was symbolic, and symbolically stupid. <br /><br />Then came the free elections, in which the palestinians were given the option of democratically choosing a party of their choice, and being suffocated financially for making the wrong free and democratic choice. They made the wrong free and democratic choice and were suffocated financially because the party of the people who weren't recognized as Palestinians until 1993 and subsequently dismissed when 1993 fell apart, decided not to recognize the state that won't recognize them, their constituents paid dearly. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggnGhOY086pcfOqD7hSrXE3WhHGNdxCgP2rr7VDbZ2moYkhEPzWiY8cEstIeMtDQCmJK0MFMuwK1gZKVJsuwy1eQvSJoDumsKCIjhKRcFT52_9BmuLkVYqJjfHgHVGrs2lo_5jrCZeoKM/s1600-h/waltz_with_bashir.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 225px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggnGhOY086pcfOqD7hSrXE3WhHGNdxCgP2rr7VDbZ2moYkhEPzWiY8cEstIeMtDQCmJK0MFMuwK1gZKVJsuwy1eQvSJoDumsKCIjhKRcFT52_9BmuLkVYqJjfHgHVGrs2lo_5jrCZeoKM/s400/waltz_with_bashir.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5286078027458255506" /></a><br /><br />Before the latest alpha male Don Makaveli explosion in Gaza saturday morning two things happened. A total of 13 people died in Sderot since 2001 from rocket attacks and Waltz with Bashir opened in New York. I saw the film friday night and already then it served up a penetrating analysis of how the Israeli government gets away with barbarian acts of cruelty. Cognitive dissonance. Then saturday morning happened. <br /><br />The film, a documentary about its creator and his involvement in the first invasion of lebanon, is animated. Ari Folman served in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. He was there for Sabra and Shatila. And he can't remember any of it except for a lucid flashback to a night on a blitzed-out beach on Lebanese shores, nude. He interviews friends and former comrades about their experiences, whether they remember him there with them. More likely than not, they do. The decision to animate the film allows Folman to tap into that dreamlike state of crystalline reverie that renders even the most horrific experiences merely an abstract thought, jumbled up in a cognitive framework that has the present and the imagination going on at the same time. There are scenes of harrowing wartime fuck-ups and the rhythm of soon-to-be shellshocked soldiers following orders that are horrifying except for the ethereal beauty in which they're rendered. And it's that beauty that is intentionally disturbing. The reason these images are beautiful is because they are memory, because they are distanced aesthetes in which everything is just a thought, one that you can't think through clearly or put in the right order to it comes out like an installation, a piece of art.<br /><br />It becomes clear that the reason behind that is because no one asked questions, they took orders. And this is emblematic of the country at large, reliant on conscription to keep its military state afloat, inevitably having to take up arms whenever a politician decides to not solve an issue diplomatically, a certain amount of denial is required. As excellently illustrated in the Gideon Levy article, <a href="http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article2213.shtml">"I Punched an Arab in the Face,"</a> Liran Feurer, a checkpoint soldier who was following orders, no soldier ever comes home to his parents a criminal, a thief, they always come home a hero, or someone whose done their job. To an extent this is because "in a certain sense, there are already two generations of criminals. The father went through it and now the son is going through it and no one talks about it around the dinner table." <br /><br />He talks about devolving into a cruel beast, taunting, maiming and essentially dehumanizing Palestinians at the checkpoint as it was passed down by the chain of command as acceptable. By the time he got home and went to art school he was a cold shell, completely removed from the inner turmoil he effectively shut down to do "what had to be done." This holds true for war, and army veterans, of which most Israeli civilians are. Yet, as massacres are revealed, as Ariel Sharon is deposed from his position for involvement in a slaughter of two refugee camps, as intifadas break out and homes are demolished, all these events are percieved as necessary acts of survival and are never connected to the events that came before them. Mostly because the stark and brutal realities of the acts required to carry those events out have been forgotten by the perpetrators, or discarded in a defeatist but justified manner by the hands that did the dirty work. <br /><br />What happens in the film is the events that he was a part of slowly dawn on him when his friends jog their memories. He begins to see the lack of questions asked in the first place. How everyone just shut down to a series of gossipy whispers, or confused onlookers, waiting for the next word, for the next command from higher up. Meanwhile, a group of Phalangist soldiers bloodlusting on the death of their leader, Bashir Gemayel, got the okay to take their revenge out on two refugee camps while soldiers in tanks with binoculars looked on. Both wondering what was happening and waiting to see what would happen next. Indiscriminate slaughter is what happened next. And this wasn't unprecedented. There was already an uneasy truce between the army and the militias before the event, when the Christian Phalangists would take conspicuous Palestinians, or whoever they deemed fit, to torture chambers and hacked away at their limbs. Walking around with them as if it was nothing, while Ariel Sharon deemed them worthy partners in private meetings. <br /><br />At some point Ari Folman is reminded of his parents in a concentration camp, of the good nazi who just did his job while indirectly and directly having a hand in the fate of millions of nazi targets. It's here in the film where it becomes clear that when drudging up memories of WWII, being the children of holocaust survivors doesn't offer an excuse but a lack of excuses. It might offer a psychological condition, but a particular one you'd want to avoid allowing control of your life. <br />Perhaps it'll be twenty years before a documentary like this is made on the war on lebanon of 2006, or the destruction of Gaza today, and by then it'll be too late to ask the right questions, by then it'll be too late to make sense out of something you put out of your mind. By then the families of the dead will already be giving Israel "reasons" to do what they do best, never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity. <br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/ylzO9vbEpPg&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/ylzO9vbEpPg&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br />Until then, here's another Gideon Levy article about the bomber pilots, and their tenacity to someone else's word, and their cold rationale for something that will never make sense. <br /><a href="http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1051317.html">The IAF, bullies of the clear blue skies</a>Adam Katzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13445652093684270646noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2296351472492903976.post-1336538726032148992008-12-25T20:50:00.000-08:002008-12-31T12:55:36.794-08:00Kill the poor (with kindness?): Out at the movies with the people down the tracks!<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhi8Rlm-qvU2nz4TMp42r0C-qfCyuktNr0Ip1D57jl_HMxVv7JiNyCVY5gXjIjBWvFCow6ToX48zKjjk4WAiSEYwUgxXKCNW-VXkbr9Pl5O1lK_Uw2x_FFeKBTLixhny86f6nIJV_L9FCE/s1600-h/wrestler4.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 248px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhi8Rlm-qvU2nz4TMp42r0C-qfCyuktNr0Ip1D57jl_HMxVv7JiNyCVY5gXjIjBWvFCow6ToX48zKjjk4WAiSEYwUgxXKCNW-VXkbr9Pl5O1lK_Uw2x_FFeKBTLixhny86f6nIJV_L9FCE/s400/wrestler4.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5284004761650161842" /></a><br /><br />So I saw the story of Randy "Ram Jam" today and it ended, obviously, and it leaves you dangling but if you feel dangled like an old broken down piece of meat, that means it got you to care. And the whole act of caring for or about Ram Jam is weird in itself. There's a knee-jerk cynicism in film and life criticism (because the two invariably intersect even while sometimes canceling each other out (because how can someone else's criticism totally relate to what just went through your sensory and mental processors?)) that suggests any time a westerner dabbles in the third world it's a form of privileged, condescending tourism with a smug, self-satisfying orientalist grin. Any transgression of class or GDP barriers places the auteur, or whatever, in a precarious balancing act where the hurdle between the point and its audience is the people paid to decide for the audience whether the hurdle is worth jumping. You find cliched but impassioned movies about stuff getting the short shrift from critics but love from festival auds. <br /><br />Not just east west, though. Rich/poor, bourgie/proletariat. Darren Aronofsky seems like a rich kid from an Ivy who got his legs in shape making art house cheese platters. I obviously don't know him, but every time I wanted to care for decrepit, desolate, destitute old Ram Jam I wondered how can an Ivy brat suddenly create such a genuine, sympathetic portrait of an old junkie wrestler in a trailer park without having been poor? Or unfairly demonized as white trash? And how could I hold him accountable for it if I was never poor or unfairly demonized as white trash? I mean, this film makes poetry out of what etiquette coaches and professionals in blandly civilized discourse would write off as low class communication problems unless told not to do so by austere cultural critics (I have so many targets floating in my head I wonder if all of them are real?). <br /><br />What's great about The Wrestler is it doesn't give Ram Jam some kind of skill, like piano playing, to make his white trashiness seem totally undeserved. It makes his being human reason enough to make "white trashiness" seem undeserved. More on that later, as I haven't seen Five Easy Pieces or Fingers or Finding Forrester, but there's always some need for a serious film about the poor to have this artistic crutch that all of a sudden allows the main, disenfranchised subject to finally be welcomed into the pantheon of real human beings. "They thought he was the trash he was hired to take out, until they accidentally discovered his maguffin of an arbitrary artistic skill" because they are maguffins, who gives a shit what this person can do or where they're from? As long as they pass the checklist we were wrong for thinking they were poor and stupid, which obviously they would be if they weren't so brilliant at whatever-whatever.<br /><br />Basically, Mickey Rourke, who's real life is some kind of noxious, lacerating mouthwash of a rock star turmoil, plays Randy the Ram. An old wrestler revered and respected by youngins and upstarts inside and in close proximity to the ring but nowhere else. Locked out of his trailer by a park manager who thinks he's never good for the rent because he only is when pressed, estranged from his daughter because he was too busy being a wrestler to be a father, and barely connected to a stripper (Marisa Tomei) who herself gets derided for her age by slick bro types with ties and engagement rings out for a night of misogynistic objectifiable partying before they have to cut off their bachelorhood for that one eternal black hole (i'm play-acting).<br /><br />What's weird is how both Rourke and Tomei both fall into their roles like alternate universe versions of themselves. Tomei plays a character who pushes her body for commission, and it's like she's putting a nail in the coffin of the image she's cultivated baring herself in almost every outing of hers i've ever seen. Every moment her body palefaces into motherhood and camel's back you get the meta-heavy heaves of her realizing this is what her life has come to. Rourke on the other hand is lumpen, misshapen scar tissue pumped full of fake cartilege and drugs, his barely beating heart being pummeled by every bad decision he's made in his life at once, and right now. He wants to feel something other than the visceral pleasure and adrenaline rush of ringside pain but his own life keeps on showing up at every shed tear.<br /><br />The only real asshole in the movie is the grocery store manager, played by Todd Barry, turning his laconic lackadasia into lacerating manageria (it's a disease). Wrestling, which i've always considered a joke, some testosterone fueled melodrama that plays like soaps for fucktards, is totally given it's due here. The wrestlers, in amiable, humorous, and conciliatory manner ask each other how they want the fights to play out. They hug and joke with each other in a totally non-jockish, humbling way. It's almost insane artifice that you have to wonder if it's trumping reality more than capturing it. But it's so sweet! They do it for the crowds, and for the rent, and for each other, because they have this community, too. And when they die a little, it dies a little (a totally devastating scene later on where Ram Jam, post-op, is at some community center convention with barely any show ups, noticing all these other old wrestlers with some kind of disability from their end's gravity approaching like thunder). <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_IN5_xe-3ujD4G5cPNl0-FNnRMKoPkdthJCfs1WR1weWCYdHRV4tBltnJqP9R1uBufVALNljvXvQjLLU2qPGYJXS_VRIct4W0-9dgHe41wQix-OvvJLHKEjUmXfxKSzdBsQ3jG12W804/s1600-h/ballast_iw.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 223px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_IN5_xe-3ujD4G5cPNl0-FNnRMKoPkdthJCfs1WR1weWCYdHRV4tBltnJqP9R1uBufVALNljvXvQjLLU2qPGYJXS_VRIct4W0-9dgHe41wQix-OvvJLHKEjUmXfxKSzdBsQ3jG12W804/s400/ballast_iw.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5284015672172559810" /></a><br /><br />Another movie that totally got me was Ballast, made by Lance Hammer, whose blaxploitaiton-baiting name totally threw me off guard when I found out he was white. There was another chasm, another transgressive exploration of another socio-economic status, this one compounded by race! A young white filmmaker making a soulful, sympathetic, and no-bullshit non-condescending portrait of life for broken black family in the mississippi delta. It made my dad throw up, but not because of it's realness, it was all over the shoulder shots that let you lean on the characters a bit, leer and hang out with them while their turmoil figured itself out. <br /><br />Armond White called it a white and middle class dream dressed up like an exploration of poor blacks. He could be right, but the movie never settles, it's always uneasy, up until its final shot. What's impressive about it is that while it was made by a white filmmaker, is obviously under a white filmmaker's gaze, it was workshopped with the actors. Non-professionals hired based on being who they were, black and Delta poor. I can hear auctioneering! and coercion! being yelled from deconstructionist protests in the back, but really how else can a young white filmmaker get someone from another socially constructed race to represent themselves on camera without being a purposely defeatist occidentalist and giving up? <br /><br />"It really wasn’t about bringing something out; it was about preventing them from putting something out there that wasn’t them. So my singular goal in the direction of actors, was to have the actors behave as they are at all times…I wanted them. This is straight out of Robert Bresson – you cast people for them. It’s not acting. I don’t want them to act."<br /><br />The film starts off with two suicides, one successful, one attempted. The attempted suicide is later confronted by his own gun by a kid run afoul of local crack dealers while his mother works a dead end convenience store job. There's long silences, little to no dialogue, and loads and loads of atmosphere and emotion. To suggest it's impressionistic for the sake of artsy exuberance is to miss the point. Apparently: "I ended up in the Delta and was just blown away. I can’t describe the sensation, because it lives in a world that is beyond verbal articulation – and that’s precisely the thing, I wanted to try to convey that, and I knew writing a novel or poetry wouldn’t capture that feeling… I was determined to make a film that somehow captured the presence of this place. It dealt specifically with sorrow, and it dealt specifically with a patient endurance in the face of suffering, and the dignity of this endurance just moved me tremendously."<br /><br />Ballast, too, doesn't saddle its protagonists with some lame-brained artistic trick to turn for the genteels, it just hangs out with them. Follows them, lets you in on them as far as you can go without being them, or hearing their innermost thoughts. They're heavily guarded, all you've got are binoculars, no x-ray specs. Come down for a day, say a word or two, or pass on through a gas station with nothing but a thank you. It's all good, they'll still be there, maybe. <br /><br />At the same time it doesn't contextualize them in a torrential stream of abstract polemics about institutions. Impassioned speeches are fine and all, but these characters, as fake-actual real people, have emotions too. Have other affairs. The destitution and structural racism might hang in the air, but it doesn't manifest itself every time black skin encounters white. What's revolutionary about the film and it's character's actions is they somewhat bypass institutional action, the hierarchic, dependency-inducing service industry of charity and social work. <br /><br />In passing it's mentioned how schools are nothing but concrete shams meants to hold kids for 12 years before dumping them back onto the streets with nothing but reflexive self-loathing and obedience. It's not mentioned explicitly in the terms put to use by <a href="http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm">John Taylor Gatto's Against School</a> but a decision is made to homeschool the kid instead. It's kind of a decentralization of uplift and recovery, in which each interpersonal reliance, mutual aid, is given the preferential treatment instead of another "economically down on my knees, time to commit unlawful transgression." Which is fine and all, but not everyone's a crack dealer. <br /><br />Part Two, in which I watch Fingers and Five Easy Pieces and ruminate on movies that need hotel lobby tricks to care about their protagonists, to come whenever I get the ability to write clearly.Adam Katzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13445652093684270646noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2296351472492903976.post-44858999223643374622008-10-19T00:01:00.000-07:002008-10-19T05:22:29.276-07:00Happy-go-lucky, Higher Education and Hyphy Hyphy Hyphy<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcOkb3ShJZn2GPlFNrGOt7hvZ_YU06EX-JBi1Nj1_i7Gntq2buxvOdKC7kqEOgD1kkudzczznyoLa3tON_vl4zJGwXsfhlBaAXY7s2PUPa_5wZRjpxEWjRnxkIOlqfVdvcmWTGyIJgK_w/s1600-h/happygolucky2.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcOkb3ShJZn2GPlFNrGOt7hvZ_YU06EX-JBi1Nj1_i7Gntq2buxvOdKC7kqEOgD1kkudzczznyoLa3tON_vl4zJGwXsfhlBaAXY7s2PUPa_5wZRjpxEWjRnxkIOlqfVdvcmWTGyIJgK_w/s400/happygolucky2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5258757671926005986" /></a><br /><a href="http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html">http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html</a><br />I barely cracked a millimeter in Infinite Jest but I did read David Foster Wallace's Commencement Speech at Kenyon University. Watching Happy-Go-Lucky at a film festival today that's all I could think about. Addressing a pantheon of liberal arts students about to break out of abstract sociological deconstructions into the harsh and concrete reality of what they already transcended mentally, Wallace attempts to prepare them to lift the banal rock of proverbs and platitudes to find the wondrous ant colonies sustaining themselves underneath. <br />He warns of a certain unconscious mode of thinking that's only critical in the sense that it exists for purposes of survival. Working a dreary white collar job, an upper echelon quadrant afforded by one's degree, won't mesh well with getting home and having to do even more menial work like grocery shopping. Getting stuck on the highway in bumper to bumper traffic can lead to automatic rants about the environmental damage of oil and the generational damage its going to cause. Being stuck with Lynchian blandness in a checkout line, confronted with quarreling families, assumptions are made about the way they carry themselves:<br />"But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options."<br />As a fiction writer, that makes sense, but he also graduated summa cum laude for a thesis in modal logic. One doesn't qualify the other, but what he's getting at is not that you can possibly exploit these situations with your notepad with a booker prize on the horizon, but that merely because you've liberated your consciousness to a new mode of thinking doesn't mean you can't slip into the dreary drugde of an automaton, what is important is that your critical thinking is used to remind you of not just your reality but that of your surroundings and I won't sum up the rest for fear of my turning this into some deepak chopra nonsense about the spirit and whatnot, but the point is that the liberating part of the liberal arts education should teach one to be alert and insightful not just on "issues" and "constructs" but on life. <br />Considering Wallace's recent suicide, this bit is sadly ironic, but not delegitimized in any way by his ultimate action. <br />"Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master. This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out."<br />And that's what I was thinking about while watching Happy-Go-Lucky, Mike Leigh's new movie about a frustratingly optimistic schoolteacher facing tons of societal woe without her features sagging like an outdated cosmetic job!<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLJeBw4WF2HC1WoK0-UlMgLBOjOvGNPYl3m52qc2bw9Ui7wXCR32oAGCV3V6XpooB6Nh700sx1fTkiPvcvCIxovU0Dqb6rgc8vKw-VggeZnGMEz2t0xHyAR1tSyoMkfUHgzw71wz5et3U/s1600-h/happygolucky.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLJeBw4WF2HC1WoK0-UlMgLBOjOvGNPYl3m52qc2bw9Ui7wXCR32oAGCV3V6XpooB6Nh700sx1fTkiPvcvCIxovU0Dqb6rgc8vKw-VggeZnGMEz2t0xHyAR1tSyoMkfUHgzw71wz5et3U/s400/happygolucky.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5258737769999717266" /></a><br /><a href="http://www.apple.com/trailers/miramax/happygolucky/">http://www.apple.com/trailers/miramax/happygolucky/</a><br />Sally Hawkins plays Poppy, who at 30 is the oldest of three siblings, but as Aaliyah circa 94 could testify, your birth certificate don't mean squat (p.s. I just looked at the lyrics for that song, 1994 was crazy!). Of course here there's no cougar manifestation or taboo transgressions that figure into her character, unless you count Poppy's inability to wallow in stalwart regard of everything that's wrong and wear her downcast conscientiousness on her sleeve. Instead she weaves the habitual Brit colloquialism that turns every phrase into a question considerate of the other person's opinion on it, even though she doesn't really need to ask because her every response subtly suggests (without her subtly suggesting) that she knows exactly what the other person is talking about. She's a kindergarten teacher and her wardrobe is halfway between the Vice Do's section and the LSD-toting 1st grade teacher in Billy Madison. Her personality supports it, too. <br />The way Hawkins plays it Poppy is the kind of halfway ditzy, pallishly goofy, but irrepressibly bouyant person that would make any Chomsky & Kafka reading paranoiac want to pull her out of her shell and tell her how things are and that her lifestyle is tantamount to ignorant, and therefore inadvertent, nihilism. What's great about the arc of the story is that she doesn't have a wake-up call, the film isn't her learning all the ills of the world, with head above water moments in which she decides to become a social worker or open a newspaper because she already did and is responding to the world as she knows how. Everything that happens to or around her merely confirms what she already knows.<br />There's a stark contrast made between her and her driving instructor who, despite having abandoned the school system (because it "didn't agree" with him) and the oppressive societal structures that keep him at bay (layed out hilariously between tense and terse bits of instruction as a series of increasingly outlandish and disconnected conspiracy theories), is virulently upset with black street culture to the point of becoming a paranoid racist. Poppy on the other hand doesn't have a black friend to fill her racial sensibility quota, but she gets on well with her predominantly black students and with another teacher who so happens to be...and doesn't drop into self-righteous and ultimately futile rant every time she has to think about what will probably happen to her predominantly black students once they move on up the educational system. <br />Instead, with a sherry in hand, she lays it out quite adequately without ever losing a smile, and not a spiteful smile, but one in which she knows the limitations of her abilities but isn't particularly concerned with what barriers she has to transgress! When her driving instructor tells her to lock the car doors when a black kid on a bicycle passes in front she responds in a dumbfounded "are you serious?" tone of mock indignance but doesn't lose her shit and storm out on him, instead laughing on to the next stop. She doesn't wear an anti-racism patch on her arm like the Clash but has an internal clockwork that would suggest she doesn't need one.<br />She doesn't come at it from some false hippie spiritualism, there's no rewards system or framework which will patly fill out a self help book, she just kind of exudes and this lends itself to the film's amiably shambolic structure. Unlike Amelie or one of the twee life-affirming bubbles of quirk sundance seems to pump out mechanically every year, her wondrous infectiousness merely plays out of her every gesture, the way she fits into conversations or the ways in which others react to her. There's no artificial CGI scape of London with Poppy popping in for a voice-over filled with easily digestible whimsy pointing out the cracks in other people she finds amusing, you pick it up as she goes along, no externalized signifiers. <br />If there is any wake up call it's merely a slight corrective to the extent in which her good natured internalizing of external conflict, much the way trees spit out CO2 as oxygen, actually lends itself to other people. The only thing I can compare it to is the Prez's story arc in season 4 of the Wire and the way his good-intentioned dealings with Dukie eventually prove unfruitful. Happy-go-lucky doesn't provide an easy fatalist defeatism to its various outcomes, though, it just goofily pals on. <br />I've not seen Mike Leigh's previous films, one concerning a leading figure fighting for abortion rights while sticking it out doing dangerous backyard work, and another in which David Thewlis apparently makes everyone feel gross. Reacting to critics who claim the movie is just Sunny D chemical sugars in the face of a Bhopal disaster he insists: <br />"If anyone wants to say that Happy-Go-Lucky is devoid of social comment, that's stupid, as it has plenty to say about how we live, that is the way we teach, the way we learn, the way we have relationships, the way we interact with people, the way people accumulate ideas and don't know what to do with them, surviving and dealing with problems. It's rooted in social issues, and in that sense, it's political if you like. But it's not tract, it's not a piece of propaganda. A film can only be interesting if it's rooted in reality in some way, things can only be funny if they're rooted in reality, and they can only be tragic if they're rooted in reality. It's overall a bright, energetic positive experience and I hope it makes you feel it's worth living. But within it are darknesses and sadnesses of various kinds, which are there for Poppy to react to, deal with, feel about and care about. As such it's hopefully a complex film that has its comic and celebratory side."<br />I also thought about Hyphy, the Bay Area rap juggernaut that announces itself like a bio-dome of self-sustaining gas and plant culture. E-40 and a gaggle of others have basically taken all of rap's supposedly regressive and embarassing aspects and turned into categorical emblems of nobility. Spinning lexicons whose rapidity would make Shakespeare blush they wear their stupidity on their sleeve, blow their aesthete out their speakers, and rove like the fearsome packs they're made out to be. What's great is their connection to the conscious sphere. For all the getting dumb, putting your stunna shades on, and general defiance of selfish ass-saving logic (by Dawkins' definition) by ghost riding the whip, they're intrinsically linked with acts like the Coup. While in promotion and content there's no direct connection, they kind of complete each other. Perhaps I should phrase it with Boots on the diplomatic end but it would only undercut keak and the rest of the gang. <br />In rap it's generally frowned upon to indulge in excesses if they're not cut along a strict moral grounding, IED's of explosive righteousness about your position in relation to the radio or mainstream conception. For all of the lyrical populism I can't really understand the lack of embrace for what pops out of a large portion of the population's speakers. To an extent there is a corporate commodification of what was once a communal property, but it's too easy to systematically dismiss something more than tangentially linked to its golden age on the streets. There are producers and writers who come in and do behind the scenes work to prop up artistic merit on the face of the album cover, that doesn't necessarily delegitimize the work that's being pumped out. Hollywood in the 30's and 40's was filled with supposed stoolies and toadies rung in to do a fix-up job and cut a studio picture for a paycheck. That doesn't necessarily mean everything they churned out was thinly spread butter. Some, like Preston Sturges, cut their reputation fitting in wildly variegated romps with personal stamps in between their bouts for creative control. Some, like Seijun Suzuki, transformed their contractual obligations into abstract art exhibits meditating on alienation, repression and violence while endlessly playing with convention. <br />It's too easy to conflate the artists whose product is being hawked and the industry that's hawking the product. There's the sociological, overarching framework which can be analyzed, but if you consistently lob the individuals working within it then the result is almost tantamount to the statistical outputs of opportunity costs in low-intensity conflicts. So, take the time to get dumb, put your stunna shades on, because the world being dark already doesn't necessitate you remind it of itself on a regular basis! <br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/BBRN2YLYzRU&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/BBRN2YLYzRU&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>Adam Katzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13445652093684270646noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2296351472492903976.post-10722959751392525752008-10-14T07:15:00.000-07:002008-10-17T11:51:28.324-07:00Peedi Crakk's Sweet Dreams (Jay-Z) and G-Side's Speed of Sound + Slow Motion SoundzPeedi Crakk - Sweet Dreams (Jay-Z)<br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/VeCG401XJtE&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/VeCG401XJtE&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br />This has to be one of the most endearing manifestations of a rap beef ever. Peedi has a few tracks out in which he freestyles discontent over Jay beats, but this one hits harder by being genuinely touching. The video plays like an abandoned projector reeling from memorial fragments of a bygone era. It's funny because Jay Z and Peedi obviously grew up in different hoods but their mutual mining of street weaved nostalgia leads them to the same school of hard knocks. Peedi, with kids in tow, bikes towards the camera with a graffiti typeset bounced on by a sing-a-long ball. Apparently Jay had set up one-on-ones to discuss the future of daf jam/roc a fella and instead sent over an A 'n' R rep to Philly to shitcan Peedi, Beans AND Freeway. Thus, the kids in tow is less a "remember these streets you abandoned via private jet," but "the entire region you took under your wing and then dropped from the nest." Peedi claims his new Amalgam Digital distribution set up for a Night in the Life is ideal, so maybe they'll have an awkward encounter at an airport lounge some day soon. Does anyone know where the guitar comes from, i've been searching through Queen songs for the last hour and can't find it! <br /><br />G-Side - Speed of Sound (produced by Block Beataz)<br /><a href="http://www.thefader.com/articles/2008/10/3/freeload-g-side-speed-of-sound">http://www.thefader.com/articles/2008/10/3/freeload-g-side-speed-of-sound</a><br />This is, like, the most perfect aural realization of some euphoric physical dissociation from the material world. Head nesting in the clouds, these rappers enunciate every syllable slowly, the beat subtly resting beneath them, in complete contradiction of their flow charts and the supposed titular trajectory. Nothing about their flow suggests they're breaking any barriers, but quite possibly they've broken one and now they're simulating floating in the aether. NASA's lost contact, they've made contact, through a handball richochet with alien satellites our ear canals are picking up on transmuted static. My tear ducts cry India when this comes on. <br /><br />G-Side- on everything<br /><a href="http://www.myspace.com/gside74">http://www.myspace.com/gside74</a><br />Wow, okay, aside from Stop Tha Violence, which is either harsh sarcasm or has nothing to do with its title, pretty much every song hits like speed of sound. Apparently G-Side is Stephen Harris aka ST 2 Lettaz and David Williams aka Yung Clova whose backstories go beyond those of hood figgas or drug dealers caught up in the game with a story to unload over some fresh beats. Their stories have that institutional neglect the Wire's naturalist plot mechanics strived for demystifying. By the time they met at the Boys and Girls Club in Athens, Alabama, one had been through foster care and straight up homelessness while the other got stuck with drug abuse in the family unit. So yeah, I'm white and my only point of reference is Dookie and Michael, but apparently their mission statement is to hit up the wishbones of their listeners with empathetic dustbins, sweeping up everyone's miserable past in a semantically sweetened street sweep.<br /><br />Paper Route Records <br /> “I ain’t going to lie, sometimes I hate the fuck out of Huntsville,” Money Addict says. “Any time you dig a hole and you stuck in some shit, you just want to breathe and be somewhere else.” - from the profile in The Fader.<br /><a href="http://www.myspace.com/paperrouteenterprise">http://www.myspace.com/paperrouteenterprise</a><br />Okay, here lies pretty much the most emotionally vulnerable - scratch that, hard front pulverizing sound factory I've been on a tour of recently. I mention the aural aspect because it completely transforms the words from spiteful slugs and bitch dumping in a song like Soul Glo into a window seat take off reflection. Which is weird, because while all their music seems to suggest transcending place, the crew apparently have no interest in leaving their spot in Alabama, spending their days myspacing, chess playing and breaking studio walls down like they're setting off in the NASA space shuttles grounded in a nearby park. <br />The Urb article makes note of the screw connection, but this is kind of like if screw left the vocals alone, creating a genuinely disorienting disconnect between the words and their propulsive engine. Instead of feeling down though that rift between the two is this unusually pleasurable zone of free-floating moonshine. Despite it's assurance that I should sit back and relax I'm so excited right now I might need to call NASA to calm me down. <br /><br />(click to enlarge!)<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0FgJrdMIZlZ29_MmjBw9nQpudxZi0LcnOvjbvjgVXJ0bkMg40qYnkyntuwufJM7zqbUK7H-s_Bfln5BsQx90SMwx58FVrCWTT9SWofOQFDxPuH9DndF4ed_qwI6K49AZTITvLhCaw7mo/s1600-h/l_26368df847c7d7303f5ce74a235dda76.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0FgJrdMIZlZ29_MmjBw9nQpudxZi0LcnOvjbvjgVXJ0bkMg40qYnkyntuwufJM7zqbUK7H-s_Bfln5BsQx90SMwx58FVrCWTT9SWofOQFDxPuH9DndF4ed_qwI6K49AZTITvLhCaw7mo/s400/l_26368df847c7d7303f5ce74a235dda76.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5257485070632117762" /></a><br /><br />Further reading - <br /><a href="http://www.urb.com/features/429/HoodHeadlinazNewJackpotCity.php">http://www.urb.com/features/429/HoodHeadlinazNewJackpotCity.php</a><br /><a href="http://www.thefader.com/features/2008/9/16/fader-51-paper-route-recordz-feature">http://www.thefader.com/features/2008/9/16/fader-51-paper-route-recordz-feature</a>Adam Katzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13445652093684270646noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2296351472492903976.post-17017525309919020072008-10-13T07:36:00.000-07:002008-10-13T20:38:56.749-07:00My President & Rich FolkYoung Jeezy - My President<br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/ZrgiKcqkm0k&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/ZrgiKcqkm0k&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br />Unfortunately Jeezy calls himself out on and of this one before it even starts showcasing any lyrical depth. There's been a strain of political semi-awakenings in the rap community in the wake of Obama's presidential nomination. Or, not necessarily political awakenings but the entrance of rappers into the conventional framework of what constitutes political consciousness. Will. I. Am with the Yes We Can theme song, Big Boi and Mary J. Blige's collaboration for an Obama themed song. This unfortunately makes a distinction between rap's previous examination of politics as an external force entirely neglectful of their immediate surroundings. Or at least the immediate surroundings of their fictional manifestations, the throwbacks to their alleged (and most likely historically true) lives on the streets. For me these were far more important than an endorsement of any particular candidate as hood politics were emblematic of the general disillusionment with the political system that rampant police corruption and funding cutbacks caused in the inner cities. I would love to see young rappers just write about going to an impoverished school, basically confirming the quotes in Jonathan Kozol books. <br />Here though we have Jeezy making what seems to be an obvious endorsement of Obama. Instead what we find is an examination of the economic and social factors that would lead a member of the underclass' reliance on the voting process to solve their problems. First he offers a series of polemics in which the current situation under the present administration is painted as fraudulent, deaths over crude oil, voter manipulation and so on. But some lines are laced in there that are just inquisitive of the political process in general <br />"Just Cuz You Got An Opinion Does That Make You A Politician?"<br />"I Say And I Quote 'We Need A Miracle' <br />And I Say A Miracle Cuz This Shit Is Hysterical"<br />But my favorite part comes in the beginning of the second verse, in which the long tradition of focusing on street level react quotes as opposed to abstract thematic concerns comes into play. With a seemingly overblown response undercut with a sly sense of humor Jeezy raps from the perspective of someone between the choice of drug dealing and I guess voting, which is an unfortunately false dichotomy but it stresses the desperation that would cause someone to buy into Obama's hope for change slogans instead of endorsing them wholesale. <br />"I Said I Woke Up This Morning Headache THIS BIG! <br />Pay All These Damn Bills Feed All These Damn Kids <br />Buy All These School Shoes Buy All These School Clothes <br />For Some Strange Reason My Son Addicted To Polos "<br />The song is almost subversive in that regard, suggesting the political process is really just a last resort and not necessarily the first thing required to improve upon the immediate problem OR the long run. I have no idea if the lambo and the rims being blue is something about an alignment with democrats and specifically blue-blood democrats. <br />What's great is the Nas verse continues that concern, and instead of stressing that voting for Obama will change that situation he holds up the historically cynical negation of the voting process as a means for change in the inner cities/poorer districts. Not only that, but this won't be any exception. <br /><span style="font-style:italic;">When Thousands Of People Is Riled Up To See You <br />That Can Arouse Ya Ego You Got Mouths To Feed So <br />Gotta Stay True To Who You Are And Where You Came From <br />Cuz At The Top Will Be The Same Place You Hang From </span><br />Instead of giving a mandate via song and verse this is an ultimatum, a binding contractual agreement, now that an endorsement has been commodified by an album called the recession, you can't just go around stoking people's hopes via skin color and rhetorical strategies. Unfortunately this still stresses reliance on the system to fix itself so it can serve the community while maintaining that hierarchical imbalance that created the need for welfare. At the same time though it's still cynical of the process as a whole. This song is great because it totally sees through the slogans and understands why someone would come to see a vote as something greater than it is, not because it actually is, but because they feel like they've got nothing else. It comes to the point where Obama is just as viable as Bill Ayers. <br /><br />Plies - Rich Folk/A Hundred Years<br />I was on my way back from the dentist when I heard Rich Folk on satellite radio and it reaffirmed my belief that Plies is one of the most endearingly honest sounding rappers no matter what he's talking about. A while back I had caught the hundred years video of Plies testifying in a courthouse looking like he was on the verge of tears as shiny as his mouth. One, it was the best usage of puss ass cracka I had ever heard, turning into a chorus suggesting such serious emotion that it obviously came from being personally affected by puss ass crackaness. In the courthouse a black person is sentenced to an irrational sentence, life taken away by an uncaring judge. My confidence in Plies was shaken when I read that his bodyguards shot up some audience members after a brawl broke out because his mic was cut for Lil Boosie to cut in on his overtime. <br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/PFmzOtYHC1k&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/PFmzOtYHC1k&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br />Sometimes though, you have to separate the art from the artist, and sometimes that emotional instability (which seems to have come from a poor choice in protection) actually strengthens a song's statement. Seriously, the facial expressions put on display here are the stuff of verite acting methodology, video recordings in a bomb shelter with last word expectant improbability. <br />Rich Folk on the other hand is basically my president's politics without a solution, especially not a political one. Unfortunately the song espouses the kind of individuating libertarian impulse of abandoning a community's groupthink to pursue riches. But the problems with this aren't really the individual choice, not everyone can afford to bring up the community with them. When white people tout Oprah and Cosby and various black business leaders as examples of success their brethren should follow they completely bypass an understanding of the factors that allowed for individual advancement as opposed to community transformation. T<a href="http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointelpro/cointel.htm">here's the COINTELPRO's sabotage of every effort for community organizers to create self-sustaining healthcare, education and food distribution within ghettoes for fear of a disruption in the food chain</a>, as well as spending cuts that followed in the wake of that perpetuating impoverishment in poor areas. Basically, it's when a statement like one that Plies makes here is used in a derogatory context that it becomes dishonest. <br />But why does one deal? To pay bills. While rappers talk about riches and how the game saved their life, or that of their fictional counterpart in the first person, they neglect to discuss the chain of command. Footsoldiers don't get the same respect, there's still a disparity in the distribution of wealth. In creating an unlawful hierarchy out of being disenfranchised by the lawful one, the drug business maintains disparities in wealth. They can afford cookouts at the local church, but it's still a service industry that places their organization in control.<br />So, here is this song where Plies plays someone vying for a better life. Not wanting to rely on drug dealing to pay the bills, knowing that being on the grind actually involves grinding, and grinding isn't always an alchemic process. It's also not just a matter of personal growth but posterity for future generations. This might not be just in response to people so embedded in the game that they despise you for making attempts at joining the bourgeoise negro elite that consistently looks down upon its less successful brethren (in accumulation of wealth and assimilation into the white capitalist power structure), this could also be in response to conventional rap wisdom of how it's necessary to survive. So yeah, it kind of denigrates others making decisions that don't have upward mobility written all over them, but it comes from being mired in those decisions on a daily basis. <br /><span style="font-style:italic;">"Fuck hood rich, I wana be rich for real, I don't want no gun I want a million fuckin dollar<br />bills, be in mind it's brand new and sit it on da edge, walk into my sons room, and you can't<br />tell if it's mine or his, I want my son to be the first one with a wheel, I want to send my son<br />to college and pay it up for four years, let the streets be mad and tell em he anit real, the<br />motherfuckers hate you when good is how you live, cus nine days broke is wat da streets call<br />real, the same mother fuckers who can't pay there fuckin bills, take it from me bein broke,<br />that ain't trill, it feels even better bein worth a couple mill"</span><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/ejTlN1_IoY8&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/ejTlN1_IoY8&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>Adam Katzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13445652093684270646noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2296351472492903976.post-42882918006372408292008-08-02T03:52:00.000-07:002008-08-08T22:30:47.907-07:00"Irony is for b*tches, I'm down for Byrony, fools!"Long before Journey's Don't Stop Believing became a posthumous cultural touchstone widely embraced without apologies, trumping VH1's snarky and false nostalgia with an appreciation that the song's genuine emotional resonance couldn't have been achieved without the grandiose pomposity of Steve Perry's high notes, there always had to be some kind of Foucault level deconstruction of one's emotional responses before someone could just stop fronting and say they like a song, with some petty stab at preserving dignity with the punch line of it being a guilty pleasure. Rappers on the other hand seem to have been entirely out of the loop on other people's musical hangups, and in their record bin scouring seem to have digested pop culture wholesale with no regard to a song's perceived connotations. <br />For all of rap's macho posturing, and self-concious sexual identity crises, rap has embraced some of the flat out gayest (by arbitrary cultural associations, because who in 50 years will know why the hetero male guard deemed them as legitimate acid tests for possible dwellers in the invisible closet, what a strange concept that will be in a few hundred years, no?) songs and made them worthy of any street aficionado. When an album's beats fail or a rapper goes in a direction to his audience's dislike, it's considered an artistic failure, and a creative deficiency that demerits that rapper's good will. But in some senses it is absolutely liberating that a rapper doesn't hold to the same standards of legitimacy and doesn't have to say some shit like "it's so bad it's good" in order to get down with Spandau Ballet. While in some instances there might have seemed to be a friction between rappers and r and b singers that was revealed to be nonsense, as even the most hetero, testosterone pumped caricatures let smooth croons grace their supposedly graceless tunes. <br />Here are some of my favorites. <br /><br />Method Man featuring Blue Rasberry - Release Yo' Delf. <br /><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Aio2WHXG44">Please watch: Actual video, embedding disabled by request of universal music group. Songstress front and center, then Meth owns it. </a><br />As pop culture history would tell it, this song is a gay torch carrier. As Method Man would tell it, it is both a bona fide hood anthem and a salute to anyone able to navigate the treacherous international waters of the record industry. The lyrics are I will survive, sculpted with a little street vernacular those three words are as straightforward as they can be. <br /><br />Z-Ro - Continue 2 Roll (ft. Tanya Herron) <br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/bwAk7v3QfIo&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/bwAk7v3QfIo&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br />Yes! Another context in which I can laud Z-Ro for being so painfully earnest that his usage of a spandau ballet song as a triumphant glare in the face of morally dispiriting adversity is as touching as he intended it to be, and nowhere near as schmaltzy as it sounds like it could be. He makes keen societal observations about the hypocrisy of the media's racially charged representation of rap culture, the onslaught of crime and violence and the crumbling of any kind of sustainable, benevolent infrastructure, and is generally depressed as hell about all of it. It works, and you can bet he didn't think twice about whether the sklar brothers would think it was funny because I Love The 80's made fun of it. <br /><br />Crime Mob - What is Love<br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/I4ueuxDdzok&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/I4ueuxDdzok&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br />A possible cry for help after sleepless nights playing hopscotch in debauched night club orifices (gender neutral), the song was turned into a novelty joke scoring the failed endeavors of the brothers butabi on an SNL sketch about obnoxious club patrons who don't know when to accept a rejection on the dance floor, or anywhere else for that matter. Crime Mob completely avoided the song's essentially cheese whiz associations and took it for what it immediately sounds like. A serious contemplation on the query put forth in the song's title. When asked about taking the song's sad impressions at face value by Status Ain't Hood, Crime Mob went into flat out braggadocio and said that if you don't like something, they'll flip it 'til you love it. <br /><br />Cam'ron - Girls <br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/xQoaDrUxL1I&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/xQoaDrUxL1I&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br />Sampling a carefree bubblegum self-indulgent girlie-girl anthem Cam was going for one of two things. The first, Cam measured and acknowledged a genuinely good pop song when he heard one, and realized it would make a great foundation for a song. Two, he measured twice and realized the song's a post-feminist ideation of anti-intellectual girlie-girlism and would make an excellent self-defeating casemaker for Cam'ron's justification of womanizing, essentially boiling down to "Girls are all whores". Either way, dude sampled Cyndi Lauper into a chauvinist anthem. <br /><br />Beanie Sigel - Wanted <br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/6L-skhH_tV4&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/6L-skhH_tV4&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br />Was it hair metal's most enduringly awful sons? Because it's definitely not the hard rock wikipedia claims it to be. Bon Jovi, coif in tow, stool down low, acoustic guitar for show, inevitably as empty as a midnight laser show, grabbing for archetypal glory by way of a western cliche. Beanie Sigel, though, takes the song's theme, and uses Jovi's wail to maximum effect, their siren like grip a stimulus for his near panic attack, as he fretfully recounts the down side of being an outlaw, on the run from the cops. Once the initial joke wears off, and before Cam'ron blazes in nuts first, this is a fairly intense song. <br /><br />Billy Squire's The Big Beat in Jay-Z's 99 Problems and Dizzee Rascal's Fix Up, Look Sharp<br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/TcQYgrm6Vv0&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/TcQYgrm6Vv0&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br />(This was so much fun to shout during Rascal's set)<br />Okay, and a bunch of other songs reaching back past Big Daddy Kane but I'm more familiar and comfortable with these two, and only somewhat surprised by its overall popularity. That two hard rappers would reach back to what signaled the rise in arena sized softies, crying pelvises known as def leppard, poison, air supply and various other fashion accessorizing boutique stylists with a penchant for leather is further proof that rappers don't need something hard in order to cultivate a suitably unfuckwithable image. Seemingly, both Jay and Dizzee recognized the cock in the rock and ran with it. One using it as a backdrop for a defiantly reactionary song about racial profiling, and the other, to, well, fix up and look sharp. I'll be honest, though, this original song is pretty badass. It's also instantly recognizable in it's sampled form and therefore posting videos of its newer contexts is unnecessary.<br /><br />Kanye West - Good Morning<br />Though he samples Steely Dan on the next track and daft punk on the third, there's something precarious about the usage of elton john in light of Kanye's public discussion and disavowal of homophobia, and both preceding and subsequent epithets targeted at him because apparently all rappers have gaydar. This probably has nothing to do with the above and has more to do with this being a good song, but still, I'll throw some political context to heat things up. <br />Original song- Elton John: "Somebody Saved My Life Tonight" <br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/7DtPlb77hJo&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/7DtPlb77hJo&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br />Bonus: Though it's only mimicked in the way his name is announced, you know that Method Man and the Wu totally sat through this song and thought they could make that sound tight as fuck. <br />Guess which song this ended up in.<br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/fAaFt7_6qvk&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/fAaFt7_6qvk&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>Adam Katzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13445652093684270646noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2296351472492903976.post-46405395185199280622008-07-23T17:33:00.000-07:002009-08-19T00:30:00.252-07:00The Dark Knight: Bummer, or, No Country for Old Self-Righteous Billionaires<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZ1wOdfyy0yvfBHCK4FA4b_mJsjI00-WQ6DrI-Rfk3ubtwh5g1uB7ooiM1GCWjRcDARnElKew_LVoE-XO6Tq6aL52If_d19RBLOdLyixR3xfu8woOaV7WrGA3p93eK5YfRiwcz6-0Nx6c/s1600-h/joker+for+old+men.bmp"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZ1wOdfyy0yvfBHCK4FA4b_mJsjI00-WQ6DrI-Rfk3ubtwh5g1uB7ooiM1GCWjRcDARnElKew_LVoE-XO6Tq6aL52If_d19RBLOdLyixR3xfu8woOaV7WrGA3p93eK5YfRiwcz6-0Nx6c/s400/joker+for+old+men.bmp" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5226610578913152770" /></a><br /><br /><br />I'm not sure at what point it was, somewhere around the first ten minutes of the film I pretty much guessed I wasn't going to like it much. Perhaps it was the entrance of the Joker into a co-op style mob meeting, where the black gang works on id and lobs middle school ideations of mob talk at the fool who robbed their bank. As the movie progresses the Joker becomes less of a character and more of a Camus cliffnote (and by note I mean one) on the absurd. How does law and order act in a world where law and order have to be created, but don't necessarily exist? <br /><br />And here is where the film's central thesis, if there was any, kind of bugged me. Instead of the Joker being a product of his environment (which isn't quite necessary but kind of becomes so due to the strictures placed by the film's allegorical intentions), the environment becomes a product of him, nothing more than an abstract cipher with the potential to unleash every force of good's inner evil out of a sense of pragmatism and ticking bomb philosophizing. And there it was, the downfall of society and government at the Joker's hands weren't examples of an inherent flaw in the system, or the institutions meant to keep it in order, but said institutions' inability to deal with an anomaly that their previously benevolent structuring was now unable to harness. <br /><br />If I heard right The Joker believes that all mankind are inherently evil, that there is no order, that man creates a false sense of morality to cover up its dirty underpinnings, and instead of everyone being a rough gem they're really pieces of coal that need to be thrown back into the mines. In that I think I'm giving the film too much credit, because they do to anarchy the same thing corporations with a finger on punk's pulse line have, or the government with a fear of its loss of power over the public faith did, mainly strip the idea of a society with no established institutions of order and turn it into a nightmarish floodgate for chaos at every turn. So then anarchy is chaos that happens when the good guys have lost their ability to take care of you. <br /><br />This is the same problem I had with the film No Country For Old Men's central thesis, that there's a "rising tide" of new kinds of violence, unexplainable by the present's conception of the human clockwork. Society being undone by a new kind of sickness for which no precedent existed. I say the film because it left out many of the book's thematic underpinnings, mainly that Chigur's sociopathy was a powderkeg that reminded the sheriff and Llewelyn of the point in their lives that they realized it was a meaningless mass of sadistic chaos, respectively, world war II and vietnam. Acts of unbridled brutality that stripped them of their comrades and left them walking ghosts without an explanation as to their existence. The book might have kept to the point that violence was becoming less understandable anomalies, seemingly alien inventions of torture. I disagree with it there, too, because it was governments that introduced the guillotine, it was governments that introduced the iron maiden, mutilation of the flesh in unrecognizably bizarre ways is nothing that rapidly developed only in recent times, it has historical precedence. <br /><br />But at least the book understood that historical precedence. The film's nihilism was undeserved, it just launched a cipher on a bunch of seemingly good characters and watched them crumble in baffled exhaust, remaining essentially good, but powerless in the face of amoral chaos. The film left out the thematic backgrounds of the characters, and Llewelyn's conflict with identity, which would have better explained their loss of humanity, something that was lost before Chigur. The Sheriff didn't believe a law existed, was dumbstruck as to his own position. Chigur was just a reminder of that. In the movie he's just a pat plot device. <br /><br />And despite Heath Ledger's showstopping, clamorous performance as a psychopath able to coldly rationalize his lack of rationality, that's all he is, "a new breed of villain." At first I thought the film was a showcase of libertarian realism, close to Frank Miller's threads of Randian jingoism, that the job of the state is best left in the hands of well armed capitalists, but as the film progresses Harvey Dent becomes a mantle of the law's ability to curb all of society's unwanted elements, and restore order to what was once good, as if Gotham, unlike the rest of the united states, wasn't built on exploitation and slave labor. <br /><br />Yeah, it's a comic book movie, but it makes explicit parallels between Gotham law's fight against The Joker and post 9/11 America's fight against terrorism. "If we cave in to the Joker's demands, then terrorism wins." Much of the police force is demoralized, placed in compromising situations that require they make realpolitik decisions, perhaps Sophie's Choices, in order to make it to the next round of sadism. Lucius Fox, Bruce Wayne's one man military defense contractor, is forced to wiretap on Gotham's 30 million people with phone lines so that Batman can catch his Bin Laden figure, The Joker. Lucius warns he'll resign, but he's willing to break the law just this once, to catch this uncompromisingly and inexplicably evil brand of villain. <br /><br />There is no explanation for the Joker. Before slicing victim's faces into smiling scars resembling his own, he gives fabricated explanations as to the reason for his, either an alcoholic father or loss of human spirit in the face of tragedy befalling his wife, possibly poking fun at the audience's need for an explanation of the character's motives. But if that's the case the film might as well poke fun at itself, as it's first film spent two hours setting up the motives for Batman. And stripping the Joker of any psychological explanation as an example of nihilism or unexplainable phenomena is a poor excuse for plot development. <br /><br />As a result the allusion is flawed because the film only picks up after 9/11, as if there was no historical precedent for the waves of terrorism in the supposedly civilized parts of the world. As if the United States and various other European countries didn't build themselves on the exploitation and expropriation of peoples they felt were inherently inferior, because of some racist genetic hogwash. That 9/11 wasn't a response to decades of pillaging other people's natural resources, destroying liberal governments because they got in the way of private business interests essentially paving the way for opportunistic fundamentalists with an equally fervent opposition to godless communism. <br /><br />In that way the film ends up being somewhat of a rationalization of all the fucked up things run through congress in the light of the war on terror, a humanizing portrait of all those who were compelled to do such things by a new, unprecedented, unmitigated evil. If they decided to be P.C. and make Harvey Dent black the film could have doubled as an ad for Obama. The government having been bought off by corrupt private elements, Dent was going to make a sweep that would change that. Though if they did do that, then his convoluted story arc in which he himself is eventually dehumanized by the joker and his political idealism reduced to a parable about the dangers of revenge (hello Batman parallelism!), people might not vote for Obama because his hope would be revealed to be an empty slogan by a comic book film with faux-philosophical pretenses? I don't know, either way, the film was discomfiting and disappointing in that regard. <br /><br />Sure, there was a sequence in which the prisoners are revealed to be as equally humane as the bloodthirsty civilians on the opposite ferry when they both have a chance to detonate the other for their own safety, but the foil for the act came when one of the civilians wasn't able to get his hands dirty, probably because he was used to batman doing it for him. That both boats came to the point of possible detonation means the overwhelming choice was to blow up the other boat. Either way, it was only for Batman to be able to point out that human good triumphs over sociopathic evil, and not everyone is a freak, an unmanageable anomaly like the Joker. <br /><br />Side note, I just read The Killing Joke for the first time, and Christopher Nolan claims that was his inspiration for the character's portrayal in the film, handing Ledger the one-off as preparation for his role. It was written by Alan Moore and his assessment of it years after publication is unusually apt when comparing it to the film's version, saying it was "clumsy, misjudged and [devoid of] real human importance." That, "at the end of the day, Watchmen was something to do with power, V for Vendetta was about fascism and anarchy, The Killing Joke was just about Batman and the Joker - and Batman and the Joker are not really symbols of anything that are real, in the real world, they're just two comic book characters."<br />Either Nolan didn't pick up on that or thought Alan Moore was an uppity old coot. In light of that quote, though, "why so serious?"Adam Katzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13445652093684270646noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2296351472492903976.post-39411288242132149952008-07-22T20:58:00.001-07:002008-07-31T16:42:16.166-07:00p4k afterthoughts: SundayOkay, the tail end of the previous evening involved opening the door at Schuba's and being warned by an older man who didn't work there to NOT. GO. OUTSIDE. Well, slightly less dramatic, would have went well with a flashlight underneath his chin, but still certainly ominous. We made it to the car, but I couldn't understand why I felt compelled to shower after basically being showered and laundered. Perhaps it was the image on the blue line earlier in the evening of two of the mud people from the day before who resented their parents for not making them woodstock '94 babies, locked in pre-coital passion, with breasts and limbs straight out of a mud bath and a hankering for a UTI. I turned around and focused on the screaming baby and a conversation in Russian and reminisced about the War and Peace that I wouldn't read. <br />Any ways, that day was going to be my day. If there were twenty bands I was going to see ten. Had been looking forward to Mahjongg's co-opted polyrhythms, secret police wiretap burbles and high school principal, counselor ready announcements but they were forced to wait until church got out. Times delayed I worried I'd miss the dirty projectors and when Times New Viking let it rip 'cross the ports while Mahjongg were still testing bongos I ran over and caught a spot. I had seen High Places the night before in order to be able to see The Dirty Projectors, something I divulged to both of them before probably never speaking to either again. Times New Viking sounded kind of great live, something their paper cup with a string telephone recording obviously doesn't do justice. I know, I know, that's the intend, find the pop gems buried underneath. I grew up on gbv, i'm over it. <br />Any ways, The Dirty Projectors. Sure, the notes on record sound like someone climbing a xylophone but until you see their multiple scale perpendiculars being performed on stage, the fullness of its orchestral framework doesn't really sink in. It was beautiful. They mostly stuck to Rise Above which gets better with every listen (i've actually only heard the entire thing once). <br />It's wierd that Black Flag broke up because Ginn kept on changing their style up and Rollins wanted everyone to catch up by just doing the same thing they did last time, because the dirty projectors' rise above rumination is exactly what I imagine the acid trips Ginn forced him to take sounded like in his head. I can imagine him in the corner of his room, or on the front porch dissociating himself from company and friends, crooning falsettos of Ginn's words, trying to reconstruct his life via the only thing he's got going. I tried playing it for my little brother, who can only think of doing standard covers of all the damaged tracks, but he hasn't been to house shows where everytime you show up someone is doing a bogus rise above cover, completely missing the point and wallowing in the past. I asked the band and they said that they get maybe a little hate mail for messing with a punk masterpiece, but they generally just laugh about it, which is the appropriate response, because honestly, the dirty projectors are far more punk rock than some upstart punk band wearing that strict, fascistic chug on their sleeves. Don't conform, play that shit like a xylophone! <br />So, thankfully it was still early in the day, I could maneuver through a somewhat spread out crowd to get a good glimpse of Boris. I really wanted to see them shred and pummel. Their drummer was dressed like a Michael Jackson impersonator and had a pink drum set with a gong behind him. Wata was obviously cool and detached like she was born with her fingers in shred position and is merely doing us a favor by taking some time on mortal soil to lodge a few tricks. I was ready to get elbowed in the teeth again. There was a "hey, remember me?" when I tried to pass and I thought for a moment I might be able to patch up the circumventing misunderstanding before !!! but it turns out the person was referring to the extortionist with the muscle t shirt before vampire weekend. After the obligatory "oh yeah!" I jumped in to the flailing arms the vertigo afflicted crowd members merely had my chin pushed up once or twice. I did this on an empty stomach and without water, and was hoping I would possibly near-faint so I could get one wihout having to lose my spot for les savy fav. Michio Kurihara was there so I thought they'd let up with a few Rainbow songs but it was straight riffage from top to bottom. <br />After almost resting on a few stranger's shoulders I made it to the front, where there was still another hour and 10 minutes before those who rock the party rocked the body. The Dirty Projectors kind sounded like the defense some might use for Apples in Stereo's Pete and Pete worthy glimmery pop sheen. I'm not a music theory major and can't gleam notes by ear (or by eye, for that matter) but those sounded like fairly standard pop rock songs. Which can be fun, but I was bracing myself for a whole different kind of beast. <br />"Check. Mic 1 Check. Mic 2 Check. Check. Check. Check mix." Tim Harrington is pretty much the best rock star going right now. Unconstrained by his body type, a cherubic cupid hitting a midlife crisis of more to love, not enough to give to, he indulges in all your fantasies and inhibitions in a way you'd be too embarrassed to pull off without apologies for having been drunk or not prepared enough for halloween. There's no irony in his stage presence, there is just honest, unbridled frivolity. If there was any deconstruction in his performance, it was his crafty destruction of american apparel's fashion sense. First running out in a yellow tracksuit with green tassles under the arms he eventually revealed red lame leggings, cut off on one leg so part of his sack, snug and loved by red boy briefs, could hang out in a one nut, some glory bawd. Now, like the hold steady, i'm not systematically familiar with Les Savy Fav's lyrics, but memories of the songs meanings helped ground their set's mythic proportions in Olympian dalliances with mortal flaw. It was beautiful, and scary. After running the gamut from pirate, caped crusader and sherlock Holmes, doing round robins on the crowd by half circling the railing, one of the first times I noticed joyful chills running up and around my skin, he covered himself in brown mud. At this point my awestruck admiration turned into fear as the show made it's way into g.g. allin territory. I couldn't get woodstock 94's explanation of the mud people's muck as soil mixed with running portapotty fluids, and when he started giving high fives to the crowed I planned on darting in any direction that would have kept my OCD from rapidly devolving into fits of unclean hysteria. <br />Even still, I couldn't help but smile. He smeared war paint on his band member's faces calling Union Park an ancient Indian burial ground that also, in his rambling, improvised historia, doubled as a youth initiation ritual into manhood. As the drummer lifted his shirt up for a belly smear Harrington explained that the youngest were rubbed there for their transition. There was one moment that was both heartbreaking and uplifting, it was Harrington, changing costumes in the back kind of sat there like a kid with a train set and muttered something about "why can't we buy this park? Why can't every day be like this?" And it was great, because the band brought their families, and made their family life like this. A testament to the idea that growing up doesn't have to mean getting old like an age home. <br /><br />Les Savy Fav performing We'll Make A Lover Out Of You (I didn't even realize he crowd surfed in a garbage can and played Oscar The Grouch)<br /><object width="540" height="425"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><param name="movie" value="http://video.pitchfork.tv/mediaplayer.swf" /><param name="flashvars" value="file=http://pitchfork.tv/node/1438/embed.xml" /><embed src="http://video.pitchfork.tv/mediaplayer.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" flashvars="file=http://pitchfork.tv/node/1438/embed.xml" allowfullscreen="true" width="540" height="425"></embed></object><br /><br />My day kind of trailed off after that. I don't know why Evan McGarvey didn't suggest, hey, why don't you choose Trae and Z-Ro's ABN instead of rehashing every white person's standard hip hop fallback, a wu-tang associate? Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I didn't get there late and watched from next to the sound tent, but the sound was distant and from what I could tell nothing different than any other wu-tang show, which, if you haven't been to one, go, because it's a blast. But it's the same blast. Here's the ODB tribute, Ooh Baby I like it Raw. Here's everyone's favorite Wu-Tang line "wu tang clan ain't nothin' to fuck with" and then here's a few solo songs. Maybe they should have had RZA show up and fuck with the sound. From where I was standing, Raekwon looked like Rick Ross' gold medallion of himself, with a body attached. They did another "one for the real hip hop heads out there" again making a silly distinction between their true to new york coke rap tales of drug dealing and non true to new york coke rap tales of drug dealing. That soulja boy Ice-T diss is hilarious. <br />Before making my last rounds in the record fair and picking up Marty Friedman's Megadeth solo project for my little brother, and that last Xiu Xiu album for myself, I caught five minutes of spiritualized, perhaps the most perfect five minutes of the festival. When they let the notes ring out, slowly following each other in a languorous haze, they filled out the festival grounds beautifully, black backup singers doing the soul thing for a white frontman not uncomfortable at all, but mollifying. When the chug picked up, the sound went flat, and I bounced, making my through the burning man contingent and taking the train to a homely couch. <br /><br />Holy S#&%! The exact five minutes I caught of spiritualized! (It's all coming back to me, I can see the sun setting over the steeple!)<br /><object width="540" height="425"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><param name="movie" value="http://video.pitchfork.tv/mediaplayer.swf" /><param name="flashvars" value="file=http://pitchfork.tv/node/1515/embed.xml" /><embed src="http://video.pitchfork.tv/mediaplayer.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" flashvars="file=http://pitchfork.tv/node/1515/embed.xml" allowfullscreen="true" width="540" height="425"></embed></object><br /><br />I missed cut copy, who I had initially hated, but then heard while boozing it up at the patio of the vagabond and fell in love with. I didn't see as much as I probably could have, and would like to space out my performances so I don't have to catch up on so many in one weekend, but what I did get to experience was awesome. Especially the vegan barbeque wings from the chicago diner, oh lord. HEAVEN (for animals?).<br /><br />Related posts: <br /><a href="http://malteserubble.blogspot.com/2008/07/p4k-afterthoughts-friday.html">P4k afterthoughts: Friday</a><br /><a href="http://malteserubble.blogspot.com/2008/07/p4k-afterthoughts-saturday.html">P4k afterthoughts: Saturday</a>Adam Katzmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13445652093684270646noreply@blogger.com