Assholes and Elbows (p.c. Blowholes and Rainbows ;D)

How Does It Feel: Annie, New Order, Grief and the Dance Floor

2009-10-29T19:31:00.000-07:00

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.

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 The Greatest Hit 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.

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.'

"Sssh! Let's start the record!"

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.

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. *

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.

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:

"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."

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.

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.

In retrospect, Sumner's described the darkness that permeated Joy Division 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.

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.

"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."

Cue Blue Monday. The song was made as a ruse to sate fans' demand for an encore, 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 You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real), the beat from Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder's Our Love, 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.

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.

And so, "Songs Remind Me of You"

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.

"Songs..." brings us to My Best Friend, back to the beginning. While convalescence entails recovery, phantom ailment still creeps up.

once upon a time there was a girl
met a boy that said he'd change the world
promises he only made for me
vanished into what he cannot be

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."

it doesn't matter where I seem to be
the sound of you remains eternally
rewind it back so I can start again
and play it 'till I reach the very end

Don't Stop: Redux

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.

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 ideal version of Don't Stop:

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.

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.

3. I Know UR Girlfriend Hates Me - Yeah, the Chewing Gum redux, this is wicked, and perfect for flippant posturing on the dancefloor.

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.

5. Two of Hearts - the awesomely beefed up power hour assault of a cover, subtextual relevance obscured by surface ecstacy.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

*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.

On Which Side Of The Goldstone The Boldface Lies

2009-10-25T01:39:00.001-07:00

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.

Framing The Goldstone Report hubbub around Operation Cast Lead, and in turn Operation Cast Lead around The Goldstone report (it's one of many, 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,"as the report itself states. 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.

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.

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.

The dissociation has a few precedents. Part of it is born out of habitual denial from suppressing memories of what army duty entails i.e. what abuses one is capable of both committing and justifying in the moment, 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 formerly progressive historian Benny Morris did 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.

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.

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 8,400 Palestinian prisoners (11,000 by Adalah's count) 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.

While this refers to present statistics, between now and 1967 at least one-fifth 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.

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 delivered a severe beating or a haste execution at 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.

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 conceded to the legitimacy of complaints 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 Blow is Sometimes an Integral Part of the Mission" 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.

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.

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.*

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.

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 bomb making factory 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.
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 how much it will cost.

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.

Again, the statement of Dov Weisglass, Sharon's chief of staff at the time, on the withdrawal of Gaza:
"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."

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.

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 summary 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. Various ministries colluded in the activity. 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.

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, settlers have gotten away with the following:

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.

One explanation of Palestinian animosity towards Israelis, primarily Jews, is the institutional breeding of anti-semitism, with a brainwashed indifference to shedding of Israeli blood**. This serves two convenient misconceptions, one being the idea that if the Palestinian were to encounter an actual Israeli the potential for reconciliation would automatically engender itself, 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.

In Hebron, where checkpoints serve to frustrate Palestinian movement primarily, Palestinians have to build nets between the second story and the first in order to not have to constantly deflect trash from the Settlers. Considering anti-semitism and the holocaust is still a vital part of the discourse it's worth mentioning Yad Vashem chairman Yosef Lapid's statement about the settlers:

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.

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 came out before the goldstone report, even immediately after 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.

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.

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.

But again, war crimes in this sense would limit the retributive legislation to one war, and since an occupation is an act of war this 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.

Mirah, would you please...

*B'Tselem 2008 Annual Report

**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.

***

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

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On Vilde Chaya

2009-10-19T17:54:00.000-07:00

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.

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.

INSKEEP: Why was childhood a terrible situation for you in Brooklyn?

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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 that New Yorker piece 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.

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 Julien Donkey-Boy would serve as an even better reference point. Or John Darnielle's The Sunset Tree, or this Tyson interview with Oprah.

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 Together 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.

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.

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.

Judith and Ira are the only ones who maintain an overt kind of linkage with the wild things' inspiration, 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.

LUDDEN: What do you think has drawn you to children's literature? Why there?

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.

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.

The wild things' horseplay with each other transitions from roughhousing to disturbing in ways that sometimes echo what Liliana Cavani was aiming for in the Night Porter, 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.

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)).

When John Darnielle was interviewed by Nerve 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:

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.

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.

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.
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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 kind of wild thing exists in all of us?"

Gloury Rules, Revisited: The Basterdization of a History already Basterdized

2009-09-19T20:33:00.000-07:00

What Inglourious Basterds is definitely not: Shoah. This is something not to either film's detriment.

In my previous post 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.

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.

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 "When Jews Attack", 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

In Hilberg's article, The Goldhagen Phenomenon, 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!

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 Independent UK article 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:

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 1904 extermination of the Herero and Namaqua tribes in Southwest Africa 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.

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.

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?

Can't Be Sure Anymore: Assholes and Elbows and Mixtapes

2009-09-14T01:39:00.000-07:00

In the extra-functional hours of pre-dawn, modes of discourse tend to take on displaced routes of expression. Thus, this mix.
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.

(AHEM)
http://www.zshare.net/audio/65542727b61e7d26/

...breakdown
(and so, an attempt to connect the various thematic and aesthetic threads that seemed to make sense yesterday at 3 in the morning)

Arthur Russell - What it's like
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.

T. Rex - Monolith
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.

Hood Headlinaz - Soul Glo
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.

Kanye West - I wonder
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?

Paavoharju - kuisuuden Maailma
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.

Triple Six Mafia - Niggaz Ain't Barin' Dat
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.

Roxy Music - Ladytron
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,

Scott Walker - The Old Man's Back Again (dedicated to the Neo-Stalinist regime)
Okay so, Democracy:

Tyranny:

Jay-Z: DOA (Death of Autotune)
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.

Jacqueline Taieb - Ce Soir Je M'en Vais
"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.

Girls - Hellhole Ratrace
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!

The Rolling Stones - Wild Horses
They can't drag you away but they could definitely help you skip town. Why you don't is the crux.

Figurines - Race You
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"

Enjoy.

Blueprint 3: 21 Jumpstreet

2009-09-04T09:29:00.000-07:00

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.

"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"

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.

"We talking bout real shit or we talkin bout rhymes?"

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.

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).

"And as for the critics, tell me i don’t get it. Everybody can tell you how to do it, they never did it."

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.

"Holdup, this shit need a verse from Jeezy… ay! I might send this to the mixtape Weezy"

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.

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:

"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."

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.

"Hail Mary to the city your a Virgin, and Jesus can’t save you life starts when the church ends"

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.

"I felt so inspired by what the teacher said, Said id either be dead or be a reefer head
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"

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.

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.

Forever Young

History Blows, Gloury Rules

2009-08-21T22:29:00.000-07:00

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Shoah 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:

"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."

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.

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. (SEMI-SPOILER ALERT: 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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

District 9 is a fucking chop-shop, go rent the Host

2009-08-18T11:13:00.004-07:00

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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).

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 here, if you also loved no country, brace yourself) and visual levels.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Related post: The Dark Knight: Bummer, or No Country for Old Self-Righteous Billionaires

"As They Say In Italy These Days, Take Off The White Gloves!" Public Enemies, Number One

2009-08-08T11:23:00.000-07:00

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.

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.

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.

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 the person who's book the movie's source material is apparently indebted to, it is (as well as wikipedia). 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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Army of Shadows: Close Vested Gangster Film Retooled as Meditation on Anti-Fascist Resistance

2009-07-01T17:15:00.000-07:00

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tom Tom Magazine entries on Terry Lynn and Valerie Scroggins

2009-06-18T15:16:00.000-07:00

So, while Assholes and Elbows remains an infrequently visited/updated interwebs destination I've done a couple of entries over at the typographically rocking venture, Tom Tom Magazine: A Magazine About Female Drummers. 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.
The enterprise itself isn't as heavy handed as the preceding paragraph and is instead focused on being awesome and fun.

I wrote one piece on danceably confrontational Kingston MC Terry Lynn:

"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."

and another about the intergenerationally gyrational history of Valerie Scroggins from ESG.

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. "

"39 Years to Pension!" Wendy and Lucy + Morvern Callar

2009-05-12T13:01:00.001-07:00

Not 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Young Berg over at No Trivia 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

Interview with Kelly Reichardt at Slant Magazine
http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/features/kellyreichardt.asp

Interview with Lynne Ramsay at warp records
http://www.warprecords.com/morverncallar/home/pages/interview.html#

Both films available on dvd (and instant watch!)

Milking It: Commodifying Harvey's Legacy, Neglecting Fox and His Friends and Ignoring Gays with "Gays"

2009-04-17T06:35:00.001-07:00

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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!

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.

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.

"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

2009-04-17T04:56:00.000-07:00

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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:

I've written here extensively of Z-Ro's depression, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Rachel Getting Married

2009-04-07T17:31:00.000-07:00

(I know I'm late on this, but it's now on on dvd so go watch it)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Blackness we can put our money behind!

2009-03-17T13:16:00.000-07:00

Apologies to anyone who is studying graphic design and/or has seen a legitimate flyer. This is happening on friday at my school:

(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!)

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.?

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.
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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.*

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.

End scene. Here's to an open-minded future.

*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.

Listed

2009-02-28T11:28:00.000-08:00

Okay, 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!
Some rap albums I like, a lot
No order, just because I don't believe in hierarchy (omg, anarchism 101!)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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..."

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.

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.

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.

Outkast - Southernplayasticadillacmusik/ATLiens - The sound of two gifted young MC's just playing with the possibilities rolling off their tongues. Touching stuff.

Nas - Illmatic - Who else wrote stuff like this at 18? Puts academia to shame with the heights contained within.
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.

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.

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!)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

And yeah, not 25, but ^&*% there's too many to mention so I'll cut it here.
Thanks for the time!

Ehud is an ace hoodlum; Waltz with Bashir

2008-12-31T14:01:00.000-08:00

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.

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 "too imprisoned in the familiar ceremony of war," 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.

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 "The Big Freeze", a method of putting the peace process in formaldehyde.

"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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, "I Punched an Arab in the Face," 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."

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.

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.

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.
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.

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.
The IAF, bullies of the clear blue skies

Kill the poor (with kindness?): Out at the movies with the people down the tracks!

2008-12-25T20:50:00.000-08:00

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.

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?).

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.

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).

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.

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).

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.

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?

"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."

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."

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.

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.

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 John Taylor Gatto's Against School 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.

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.

Happy-go-lucky, Higher Education and Hyphy Hyphy Hyphy

2008-10-19T00:01:00.000-07:00

http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html
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.
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:
"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."
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.
Considering Wallace's recent suicide, this bit is sadly ironic, but not delegitimized in any way by his ultimate action.
"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."
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!

http://www.apple.com/trailers/miramax/happygolucky/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
"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."
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.
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.
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!

Peedi Crakk's Sweet Dreams (Jay-Z) and G-Side's Speed of Sound + Slow Motion Soundz

2008-10-14T07:15:00.000-07:00

Peedi Crakk - Sweet Dreams (Jay-Z)

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!

G-Side - Speed of Sound (produced by Block Beataz)
http://www.thefader.com/articles/2008/10/3/freeload-g-side-speed-of-sound
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.

G-Side- on everything
http://www.myspace.com/gside74
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.

Paper Route Records
“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.
http://www.myspace.com/paperrouteenterprise
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.
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.

(click to enlarge!)

Further reading -
http://www.urb.com/features/429/HoodHeadlinazNewJackpotCity.php
http://www.thefader.com/features/2008/9/16/fader-51-paper-route-recordz-feature

My President & Rich Folk

2008-10-13T07:36:00.000-07:00

Young Jeezy - My President

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.
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
"Just Cuz You Got An Opinion Does That Make You A Politician?"
"I Say And I Quote 'We Need A Miracle'
And I Say A Miracle Cuz This Shit Is Hysterical"
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.
"I Said I Woke Up This Morning Headache THIS BIG!
Pay All These Damn Bills Feed All These Damn Kids
Buy All These School Shoes Buy All These School Clothes
For Some Strange Reason My Son Addicted To Polos "
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.
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.
When Thousands Of People Is Riled Up To See You
That Can Arouse Ya Ego You Got Mouths To Feed So
Gotta Stay True To Who You Are And Where You Came From
Cuz At The Top Will Be The Same Place You Hang From
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.

Plies - Rich Folk/A Hundred Years
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.

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.
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. There'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, 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.
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.
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.
"Fuck hood rich, I wana be rich for real, I don't want no gun I want a million fuckin dollar
bills, be in mind it's brand new and sit it on da edge, walk into my sons room, and you can't
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
to college and pay it up for four years, let the streets be mad and tell em he anit real, the
motherfuckers hate you when good is how you live, cus nine days broke is wat da streets call
real, the same mother fuckers who can't pay there fuckin bills, take it from me bein broke,
that ain't trill, it feels even better bein worth a couple mill"

"Irony is for b*tches, I'm down for Byrony, fools!"

2008-08-02T03:52:00.000-07:00

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.
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.
Here are some of my favorites.

Method Man featuring Blue Rasberry - Release Yo' Delf.
Please watch: Actual video, embedding disabled by request of universal music group. Songstress front and center, then Meth owns it.
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.

Z-Ro - Continue 2 Roll (ft. Tanya Herron)

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.

Crime Mob - What is Love

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.

Cam'ron - Girls

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.

Beanie Sigel - Wanted

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.

Billy Squire's The Big Beat in Jay-Z's 99 Problems and Dizzee Rascal's Fix Up, Look Sharp

(This was so much fun to shout during Rascal's set)
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.

Kanye West - Good Morning
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.
Original song- Elton John: "Somebody Saved My Life Tonight"

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.
Guess which song this ended up in.

The Dark Knight: Bummer, or, No Country for Old Self-Righteous Billionaires

2008-07-23T17:33:00.000-07:00

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."
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?"

p4k afterthoughts: Sunday

2008-07-22T20:58:00.001-07:00

Okay, 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.
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.
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).
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!
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.
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.
"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.
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.

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)

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.
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.

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!)

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?).

Related posts:
P4k afterthoughts: Friday
P4k afterthoughts: Saturday

p4k afterthoughts: Saturday

2008-07-21T23:26:00.000-07:00

Awesome weather. Apparently Fleet Foxes and No Age weren't the only atmospherics carried over from Sub Pop's 20th Anniversary Festival.
After rekindling my intellectual insecurity by dashing any hopes of reading the $5.50 copy of war and peace I bought from the Myopic Bookstore (thanks stilted translation and grammatically careless public domain!) my host offered me a raincoat. Initially hoping that, along with Rick Ross styled shades some stranger left at my house, it would help me look the part of the "im only here for the Rascal" a-hole, I was dismayed that it instead made me look like the unabomber if he intended to use his publicity to push a career in rap as the ultimate outlaw, but couldn't get past the whole dweeb aspect.
It was nice to be able to rely on public transportation in chicago, mainly because the train system in miami is a non-existent development failure. Apparently intended as a sprawling syndicate of interconnecting railways it ended up being one line across US1 that inconveniently passes by the airport and curves off into the middle of nowhere.
Not knowing much about Titus Andronicus except for their penchant to just fucking tell you already, gosh, I hopped over to the B stage to strike my globally cultured world (weary) pose. Boban i Marko Markovic Orkestar were setting up and I was willing to use my cognitive dissonance to strike out Kusturica's Milosevic associations and remember the fun parts of his movies, mainly the bombastic and triumphant score that carried his scoundrels from one scandalous feat of irreverence to another. It's a shame his view of a united Yugoslavia comes under the banner of a Machiavellian realism. Either way, that Balkan Brass was mighty uplifting, none of that melancholic warble Beirut grounded his eastern-european impressionism with (not that I'm opposed). I haven't been to temple in forever, but if services were entirely made up of that rendition of Hava Negila, I'd bring the manischevitz.
For some reason their set left me in the mood to soak up some blood visions. Perhaps it was the end of Titus Andronicus blaring over the port-a-potty's that convinced me it was time to tussle. The end of their set reminded me of the birthday in my last year in high school where my Conor Oberst obsessed friend made me go see Bright Eyes on their I'm Wide Awake It's Morning and all it took was an anti-bush screed to convince me their sobbing and whined out country bamboozle was actually pretty rockin' underneath the Olympia Theater's garishly fake starry night. They kind of sound like someone who has something really important to tell you right when your favorite band is playing, and they're emotionally vulnerable at the moment so if you don't listen to them they could do something crazy that you might regret, which is either unfair or a sign that they really respect your opinion and can't wait for it.
I hopped over to Jay Reatard where King Kahn was out in a hawaiian shirt, carrying a cup of what looked like smoking dry ice, letting his gut hang out while he propped up his bud through his sunglasses. I never really got into King Kahn and the shrines but that guy looks like a lot of fun. Jay Reatard on the other hand was all business. Totally wronged by who knows what, whatever joy, or mock wistful fright to be found Blood Visions was replaced by harried shouts on beat. The bass player more than made up for his anti-charisma and filled in the facial gestures. Meanwhile, King Khan totally goofed from the side of the stage, apparently starting something he carried over to the aftershow later that night, mainly letting the crowd know that Jay Reatard gave him a blowjob before the show and that he's totally happy. Now, unlike Public Enemy, I could actually justify people flailing into each other here and took my unabomber outfit right into the middle of the fairly mild mayhem taking place in front of the stage. I haven't been that ecstatic about being elbowed in the teeth in, like, ever. I was more dismayed when Jay Reatard finished his set with a middle finger. It was silly and lame. Interesting vocal choices though, he sang half the songs in a screeching falsetto.
I spent most of Caribou waiting for my hosts to arrive and it turned out to be great background music. On record the music kind of streams into oblivion and that shimmery psychedelia ain't really my thang. Some vaguely trip hoppish cover of Here Comes the Sun was put through the motions when the clouds started clearing up, and as background music I wasn't at all annoyed but at some point Dan Snaith got off the keyboard and joined in a whirlwind dueling drums session that brought back fond memories of that black eyes show I caught before they broke up. I couldn't tell but either Snaith or the guitarist set off a noise loop that ran atop it and I became convinced that drum solos should never be dolo.
This morning should bring on embarrassing footage of me attempting to disprove the main thesis of Where Da G's by being extremely enthusiastic and limbically loose throughout Dizzee Rascal's set. I was beat though by a girl who pushed up beside me and knew all the lyrics. Again, I have no idea how people do this, but my retention for rap lyrics, or any lyrics for that matter, is almost non-existent. It's helpful because it's consistently refreshing when listening to it at home, but live, when the only thing you hear is bass and Dizzee's chirping it would be nice to fill in the blanks. Your parent's record collection got dissed when Dizzee came out and summed up Fleet Foxes as that fuck shit he was there to get rid of. Not that Alex Turner is the antithesis of fuck shit, Fleet Foxes harmonizing is kind of pleasant but ephemeral in the same way that nostalgia for classic rock passes when you turn on big 105.9 and a sports announcer is cramming useless factoids about The Eagles down your throat.
Even without knowing the lyrics, I almost lost my voice in unrestrained giddiness shouting out various dirtee stank associated buzzwords throughout the set, or merely spout gibberish that could be construed as enthusiastic. Old school dance moves, neon pink and green dj headphones, an unnecessarily self-censored version of Pussy'ole which was still fun because yelling "blood! don't make get old school!" is a blast, Tom Breihan's soundless visage seemingly cackling with unlimited benefits from the VIP section, and a genuine interest in getting the crowd to stand up tall made it one of the best sets of the weekend, or ever.

Dizzee Rascal performing Sirens (strangely, sound is clearer on this video than it was at the show)

Now, I don't think Vampire Weekend should be held accountable for being influenced by an afropop that they genuinely seem to enjoy. I do think they should be held accountable for being unnecessarily affected about the ordeal. From what I've garnered out of the few listens of their album that I was able to make it through (actually I haven't made it through, stopped somewhere round track nine) their lyrics are more about class disparities that ivy league campuses pretend to be insulated from but aren't because there's always a kid there on scholarship. Unless why would you lie about how much coal you have is from the perspective of a rich kid calling out a poor poor kid trying to fit in with a made up status. I honestly could care less because the barbershop quartet vocal affectations stop my enjoyment dead cold. From someone who paid attention I was told the crowd was twice as large for Vampire Weekend as it was for Public Enemy. They were flabbergasted because Vampire Weekend had no S1W's. I'd say that maybe if Public Enemy were white kids with a taste for hip hop they could broach the color line, to white ears. But I'm glad to say that aside from Eminem, rap has still not been expropriated by anyone other than its founding race. Not that i'm not for the globalization of hip hop. Palestinian rappers DAM are an excellent example of how it can transcend borders, but generally in the united states, when the white kids get on the mic they've got to consult their dystopian sci-fi jargon because they can't imagine how shitty it already is two miles over.
Anyways, I'd like to see XL take a random sampling of bands and launch them to national superstardom overnight with the help of pitchfork and see what kind of response they get. If kids can't listen to Phil Collins unironically, how can they identify with this? I'm also pretty sure the bigger the band the more assholes present in the crowd. I actually had an interest in hearing M79, as it reminds me of the rushmore soundtrack and is kind of catchy. Unfortunately I had to deal with tall, gel spiked bro with a muscle t-shirt and designer shades who obviously cared more about running a dialogue about what I'd be willing to offer in order to get in front of him. He wasn't sure I even liked the band and I almost admitted I didn't. They were less grating live, the instruments sounded perfect (conspiracy?), but if there's anything more painful than the vocals it's Ezra Koenig's facial expressions. Brocappella sincerity, arched eyebrows, mary poppins singing to a bird. Either way I wasn't bummed about it, it was jaunty and kind of fun. Not a convert or anything, but if that's what the kids want...then please, Koenig, go to Africa and bring back some golden polyrhythms! The kids, they just skip over the Ghana Soundz with the 8.8! You be their 8.8!
Then the afternoon took a turn for the worse as I made the worst mistake I made during the festival and, in a psychosomatic need for water, left the !!! stage before that turned into the dance party of the century. On record I can't stand Nic's vocals, but waiting for the hold steady, he looked like Nick Swardson as Jessica Biels' gay brother in I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry, basically, awesome. It was kind of what I wanted at that moment and in anticipating what the Hold Steady's set would bring, kind of wished I went back and made friends with that one person who made the sarcastic comment about how to exit when I stepped in front of him trying circumvent the lawn people to his left. Instead I called him out on his snark and he told me "Fuck You!" and I got my water. Not exactly refreshing. I may go next year to see if every saturday at 6 some kind of asshole moment happens. Last year I brought my little brother to Mastodon. Him being an avowed metal fanatic for some reason disavowed mastodon as more of the same old same old. I wanted him to sit on the railing with me, because last year the sound tent people didn't mind as much some patrons hopping up the rails to catch a glimpse over the crowd. If they wanted the discomfort that brought their glutes, then so be it! Any ways, two guy guys/bro dudes had gotten there first. Not to sit on it or anything, just to kind of stand next to it. Now, there was totally enough room for me. But because I hadn't staked out their the extra five minutes they probably took, I could not ask them to kindly move half a foot so my little bro could sit next to me. Instead, cutting my somewhat passionate speech about his ability to move a little bit to his left he told me I could keep on talking but it didn't matter because he wasn't going to move. Killed the mood. Same with this saturday's convo.
Anyways, yeah, The Hold Steady. If you're not drunk and don't wear their lyrics on your sleeves don't bother trying to have any emotional investment. I don't know how kids adapt a band's lyrics about girls with pill problems as a rallying cry, but actually chips ahoy is a pretty great song about wasted potential and reliance on external enhancements for what's already there. Still, the words really meant something to everyone right around me and as much as I tried to feign enjoyment I wasn't drunk enough and it wasn't bar enough, so I left to wander aimlessly in search of the hosts. I ended up walking through Atlas Sound's crowd, having missed the other jam of the evening, Extra Golden. Atlas Sound really fit into the background well, and my initial lack of success turned into hazy reverie reminiscent of the non-annoying scenes in labyrinth. Festival people can be wierd, lotus positions with gyrating shoulders with really sincere closed eyes and whatnot. Fest wasn't too far from burning man yet.
At that point I wasn't able to muster up any excitement for no age, who sounded exactly like they did on record, except on record I didn't have the option of being elbowed in the teeth. At this point in the day I wouldn't have minded just putting them in a glass of water by the sink and calling it a night. I didn't try to maneuver with the crowd folk for animal collective because there was an abe vigoda, high places show, but their performance of the symphonic communication sequence from close encounters of the third kind kind of won me over on the way out and made me regret not sticking around a little bit longer to see how they make their songs entirely unintelligible even to their most devoted fans.
The rest of the night was a series of social faux-pas as my host actually turned out to be friends with High Places and I had no idea what they looked like and as a result, once their set won me over I totally geeked out and asked a bazillion questions about vinyl availability and touring schedules and personal info and so on. I'll cut right to it because I want to go to sleep but the hazy ethereal quality they drown the drums in on record (at least from the sound of their myspace) is nothing like the chinese drum circle they drop on you live. I'd imagine the perfect setting for a performance by them would be cross between a chinese restaurant in a bamboo forest and the temple of doom, though for maximum enjoyment the latter part would have to be without the enslaved children and the live heart stealing. What would make it the temple of doom then? LAVA. I haven't had a chance to fully digest them but the way her words drift into the drum patterns and wind chimes is like a post-grad wistfully watching over her family while her younger siblings grow up without her and life moves on, and she could say hi but this curse is rustling her surroundings while a disorienting loss of familiarity pulls her front yard from under her and all you hear is "you know why, don't you?" and images of her climbing trees with her sister and saying grace at the dinner table and idyllic rural memories turn into reveries on a pillow in a hostel somewhere in East Asia. I swear, I wanted to cry.
Instead it rained and we had to rush to the car, but i'll be spinning the 7" and 10 song cd I bought in search of those moments for a while, I hope.

Related posts:
P4k afterthoughts: Friday
P4k afterthoughts: Sunday

P4k afterthoughts: Friday

2008-07-21T19:32:00.000-07:00

So I cashed in and went to the pitchfork festival this past weekend.
First off, I'd like to thank Owen Ashworth and Holly Rotman for making this possible by opening up their couch to me and making Chi city feel like a place I can call Chi city without sounding like a white kid that listens to Kanye. Oh, wait, that's impossible because I'm a white kid that listens to Kanye! But still, hearts warmer than the weather.
SHOWTIME - already accepting that there were relatively few token rap acts, and that I could look forward to skipping Spoon and taking advantage of lackluster options to skip around on scheduling conflicts, I was pretty much ready for thunderdome.
I arrived late and unfortunately missed Mission of Burma. The entire Don't Look Back curricula requires a band foregoes making a live mixtape for its audience and sets the odd stricture of having them perform an entire album that you may or may not skip around when listening to on your own. I guess it's the emergency action directive from the save the album campaign. From what I read about their history I assumed that it was the spontaneous nature of their improvised setlists that allowed for their shows to be either chaotically awesome or novelty trainwrecks that either way would have been transfixing, otherwise they'd be forced out of their element. I used this excuse to comfort myself when I saw Barlow and Co. were setting up while I was walking in.
In middle school my neighbor burned "bakesale" for me and I developed an abstract concept of relationships as burying your head in your lover's bosom in order to bestill their beating heart, possibly yours too (wasn't double suicide so superficially poetic back then? Ugh. Kids need more Myth of Sisyphus (I did, it's sadly gone unread by me). If you're going to piss off the world, stick around to gauge its reaction, no? Pissing off yourself does no one good, though I haven't ever been in a situation that was unbearable and inescapable, so I'm not one to talk. Though I think I'll always be morbidly fascinated and stuck in awestruck reverence when it comes to self-immolation). So yeah, bakesale. It was awkward, and this is probably made up because I was into it more for the lingering traces of light in his melancholic delivery. Music was all about moods back then. But reading about Barlow's awkward virginal sexual history, and how it made him odd man out in Dinosaur J, taking homophobic potshots from J Mascis and adding disturbing psychosexual undercurrents to sucking on the cookie monster's eyeball in J's face as revenge strategy, until he pulled the band from its Mascis Comes Alive! trappings to play a Gnostic God's underling with two tape decks and in doing so falling in love with a college DJ at age 20, gave me some comfort during high school. Kind of like reading about Fugazi cooped up in a motel room and becoming friends for life by revealing their deepest, darkest secrets to each other. I didn't envy it as much as appreciated that bonds like that could be created, and sure, would have liked to sit in and tell them everything. I was in odd confessional mode in high school, not realizing how awkward that can make some friendships. But aren't friendships better than psychologists because with friends your not paying them 100 dollars to measure your sanity but giving them morsels of your heart so you can know that everyone is a little fucked up? Lou Barlow's lyrics seemed to stem from not being able to let out like that.
Any ways, I had never heard Bubble and Scrape, but it pretty much sounded like a Sebadoh album. I was in the port-a-potty when they started, which is where I can imagine the songs were either written or meant to be heard, or a real john, slumped up against a sink hung over from too much drama. For a few moments I thought, hey, this is what Sebadoh used to make me feel, tonight's going to be all right! And then I got bored and darted for the record fair. Numero Group was there, reliable as usual, taking 55 dollars for a selection worth over 80. Waiting for public enemy I met a photographer who thought it was worth a free download (I later tell myself that the packaging and the liner notes are worth it. Did not get into the ethics of downloading, because I totally have half the bands from the coming weekend on my mp3 player illegally). Found out the vegan Soul Veg cart in Tallahassee, run by Hebraic Africans raising money for a pilgrimage to Israel, was also a Chicago staple and are directly related to the Soul Messengers from Dimona. From the liner notes ",,,Dimona, Israel. It's an arid and rocky landscape: perfect for secret nuclear facilities, ideal for raising goats, and according to track twelve, the spiritual capital of the world." Way to bring on the apocalypse. So looking forward to this.
A great moment was catching Lou Barlow reacting to the Bomb Squad cutting into his solo acoustic encore on the Jumbotron. It looked like a kind of a shrugged acceptance. "If my music isn't sad enough..."
Yeah, bomb squad, I would have loved an hour DJ set from them. I can safely say that was the best usage of the soundsystem all weekend, as, intending to move the crowd they forced the crowd to move by shaking the ground. The Shocklee claims of still bringing us something new rang false considering Public Enemy's decline and forever waning status outside of Robert Christgau's head as politically or even sonically relevant, but that really didn't matter because their dubstep/dancehall blitzkrieg brought ear-shattering body rocking nonetheless. Before the Shocklee exit, "we made the public enemy sound, we won't be on stage, but don't you forget!"
I hadn't been keeping tabs on public enemy so Terminator X1's absence took me by surprise. Also Chuck D's loyalty to Professor Griff, outfitted for the new rap era, and apparently at a loss for words on his own contributions to the old one. More later. S1W's in ROTC formation marched Chuck D out, who, reliant on the power of his words, was done up in a basketball Jersey (perhaps a reference to He Got Game, the last time a music contribution of theirs made any waves?). I haven't heard the album in forever, and always favored Malcolm X over Farrakhan. Finding out their politics were informed by his was a somewhat harsh blow to my understanding of them as progressive. At least the follow for now line gave room for growth. Except when it came to Professor Griff, who locked himself up in black muslim conspiracy theories. And Flava Flav, too, really, who locked himself up in his own exploited image.
I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, their relevance at that point in time can't be stressed, I honestly can't think of another rap group that seemed to have the ability to affect politics radically, as opposed to now where a celebrity endorsement for Obama and a spot at the Democratic National Convention is the epitome of high-powered celebrity activism.
Though I wasn't expecting them to come out and say something in support of a gay, atheist communist like Angela Davis I was still a little glum over their Obama endorsement.
Anyways, show sounded awesome, Chuck D ran out and did his thing like it was embedded in his system and if he didn't periodically release it he would explode. As per usual, I couldn't decipher any lyrics in a rap show, all I could follow was the cadence. Of course, it seems the point of rap shows is to know every word before going so you can sing along. My retention is shit though, so I went back to moods, and the mood read blown away.
Various contingents of the mostly white audience reacted as if they grew up on public enemy via the Anthrax collabo on Tony Hawk and thought it was appropriate to mosh. Just because they collaborated with Scott Ian doesn't mean you have to get caught in a mosh, kids! A man of east-asian ancestry brought his two year old to the show, outfitted with ear plugs, a tiennamen square reference could probably be written off as an example of orientalism, but if he doesn't go opposite pop's route like alex p. keaton, who knows what power will come through the barrel of his gun (or guns like popeyes, but the guns of his mind, wishful thinking, right Gelderloo?)! Almost made me wish my first concert wasn't U2 in a baseball stadium in elementary school. But I used to really like the batman forever soundtrack when I was 10, so in retrospect that worked out really well!
So Flava Flav clocked in one song late and played that loveably goofy foil to Chuck D's fiery rage, decked out in clock and green medallion advertising his new sitcom about a wild street-savvy black guy crashing a bourgeois negroes upscale seclusion from his brethren. I was surprised Flava Flav actually rapped, he carried a whole song by himself while Chuck D went all Parents Just Don't Understand behind him. He asked Professor Griff to join in and then called him out for not remembering a word of his own venerable institution.
Best part:
Flava Flav - Hey, check out my new show Under One Roof every wednesday at something something on TBS.
Crowd - Boo!
Flava Flav - What? Don't boo me! All y'all booin', what, what, what are you, ghosts? You know who you boo, your spouse, you call your spouse boo. You should be proud of a brotha!
Now I'm not one to talk about one man's actions setting an entire race 15 years back, because that's usually a misconception of how a race should be presented in white eyes, calling for some kind of fascistic united but homogenized front as opposed to allowing for said race to express all expressions of the human psyche. But his reality tv shtick probably did a lot to aid in the undoing of Public Enemy's image as a consciously political group. Unless they decided to become a dada parody of the worst aspects of capitalism's instant gratification in the form of exploitative self-glorification. Chuck D kept dissent to Flava Flav's image to a minimum, but I remember him leaving Flava Flav at the altar when it came to the friar's club roast.
Chuck D asked all the REAL hip hop heads to make some noise, making another silly old guard distinction between their music and what's on the radio. If only they knew that this white audience might have heard NPR's eloquent deconstruction of MIMS' This is Why I'm Hot. If only they knew this audience loved listening to radio rap when recontextualized by a white nerd with a keyboard who threw their parents record collection as a backbeat! If only they made more songs with Buffalo Springfield as the backbeat! (Oh, whiteness, how self-aware you can be while remaining entirely ignorant at the same time! Don't worry, i'm totally including myself in that)
The saddest part came right before I left midway through the album. Chuck D made a claim that thanks to the audience's reception of their album as the rap Sgt. Pepper, the world realized that rap was here to stay. I got my nostalgia kicks in, and cashed out after the only possible damage they might have caused was to pitchfork's relation to the city's noise ordnance.
Looking in the DIY record tent it seemed that not only was rap not there to stay, but neither was Public Enemy, themselves underrepresented in a festival they were co-headlining. When the token rap act doesn't have a token prop, then a token ain't worth nothing more than flop. Jazz, having lost its cutting edge unless it frees itself into atonality, was widely present in the used record bins. I fear that rap itself will suffer the same fate, forty years after it caused a stir it would be relegated to elevator music until something new came along with a widely polarizing effect. Accepted only when it's a tourist trap on bourbon street. Old blokes doing renditions of Soulja Slim and the Hot Boys for white folks with a new sense of intolerable non-p.c. kicks. Hand grenades will still be their drink of choice.

Related posts:
P4k afterthoughts: Saturday
P4k afterthoughts: Sunday

Shattered Dreams and Freak Though (Larve, Fuh Real Pt. 2)

2008-07-04T00:06:00.001-07:00

Shattered Dreams by UGK (though this is Pimp C's show)

Lyrics (please read them in all their glory)...

I finally bought UGK's Underground Kingz after bumping it for a while on my mp3 player. I've never listened to it from beginning to end and for some reason have been digging into it something fierce lately. Repeated listenings have brought out a more variegated understanding of the UGK mythos.
As stated in an interview with Bun B, apparently proceeds from the records are split up between Bun B and Pimp C's widow and children. Reading that he had a wife and family brought on the same effect learning of Juvenile's placid, warm domestic setup as described in "I Know You Know" had. Pimp C's nasally wrath has always brought unexplainable joy in me in that it's able to transform the most vile of statements into intentionally caustic man-child ruminations on juvenilia, but for some reason the misogyny in his lyrics always had an overriding grate that barred fully desensitized enjoyment. His lyrics in One Day U Here were heartbreaking but more often he came off a wild card side saddle to Bun B's stable grown man sensibilities. After his death I began reading more about him and learned he was a renaissance man of sorts, who learned multiple instruments growing up, was in the school choir, and handled much of the production work in UGK's early albums. It's usually his voice that croons that falsetto on their songs. I didn't realize how much that passed over to his lyrics until I heard Shattered Dreams.
There was a lot of word in the press round the time of Underground Kingz release that Real Women was supposed to be the antidote to Two Types of Bitches nasty, paranoid misogyny. I always thought that was bullshit because all real women did was thank spouses who basically compromised their lives because their romantic entanglement got tangled up and caught. Ran their lives into the ground so they could play side saddle to someone else's game. I thought it was particularly restrictive and the praise was backhanded, and it's a shame that Shattered Dreams got nary a mention because this is the male-scribed feminist anthem that Real Women's lightning was stolen from. For me, this was totally uncharacteristic of Pimp C. And as much as I loved hearing Pimp C say stupid things, there was always an emotional distance that came from his hardline approach against women. From all the verses I heard never once did I hear him say something contradictory to "if you ain't a bitch, then you a ho". But honestly, this is one of the most emphatically sympathetic verses to come from a male rapper ever.

It seems to start like any other rapper's "Heart to Heart" -

Man I refuse to let the bitches take away my pride
Them hoes can lock my body up, but they cain't lock my mind

And here is where I'm for the widespread usage of "bitches" and "ho's", not thrown around as a specifically misogynistic derogation, but instead reconstituted as a genderless defense against any woe bearing foe. It would be silly to eradicate a modern fixture in our language (though lord knows how many words from Shakespeare's time are not still around today outside of academia) when it can so easily be transformed into an equal opportunity force of defenestration against all haters and stooges playing stopgap to the good life.
Pimp C explains why he calls some women bitches and some women hoes and then tells them they have the option of staying out of that line of fire by changing up their lifestyle. True, for someone who glorifies the backstreet profession of exploiting women's bodies and raking in surplus value via hierarchically unfair wage distribution, it's hypocritical to make a judgement call on women who sleep around for free. Or takes pimping out of its monetary definition and sleeps around for free but calls out the girls for sleeping with him (there is something self-deprecating in that self-glorification, like, "if sleeping around doesn't mean anything that must be why it's so easy for me to do it?")
But Pimp C does the honorable thing and places hoes and pimps in the same line, giving an empathetic barrier-breaking olive branch to both and saying that just because the game thrives off of you doesn't mean you have to survive off of it. Both parts of the equation, the pimp and the ho, are relegated to the dregs of society because that's where they're allowed to fester, but the main concept of the song is that if you're there you probably think it's because you have no future, that you're future is over and here you are, commodifying your pussy, or someone else's pussy, until eventually that money pit dries up and you're in a pit drying up. But if you stop thinking like that, you might be able to crawl on out that hole.
He must know there are girls listening to his songs, and it's truly touching when he says

"Just cause you sold your body don't mean you a hoe for life,
I got to speak it right for all the one that paid the price".

Then the next verse is about family care for those who didn't Plan their Parenthood.
"To all the babies havin babies on ya own, I know you feeling up fucked up and feelin' all alone" and he gives words of encouragement, telling them just because society judges them as failures and fuck ups doesn't mean society has to live with their choice, doesn't even mean their definition of fucking up is applicable because if you, the lil mama keep on keeping on, taking care of your own who the fuck is someone totally unrelated to drop some dime a dozen excoriation that'll get you nowhere but a grief counselor.

"Ya only fucked up if you lay down and don't continue to fight - uh!"

And then he moves on to the pops, here assumed to be a young street soldier slanging dope like it's a rope that'll hang him 'fore he's high. His friends might want him to duck and cover, hang with the boys, but they're not going to be around when his girl is feeding his boy. I honestly wish I could sum this up in a way that's more heartfelt than Pimp C's words of encouragement, but I can't bring myself to tears like that.
And because this song is basically the self-esteem anthem of last year that should have been for young women, the third verse is also great. Here was the perfect response to the Imus controversy, or Chamillionaire calling the women in the NBA nappy headed hoes.

"I know they say, 'It ain't enough room in the NBA'
You tell them haters, "Save that bullshit for another day"

Then, in what I guess is a rip at the prevalence of female rappers flipping pimp status to be more gender equal, staying in the game by merely being as nasty as their male counterparts, he tells 'em they can do their thang and people won't be talking to their thong.
And here's the last part that just blows my mind.

"Some people gay, what can I say? The only judge is God
But don't be shame and try to hide cause then you livin fraud
Cause everythang done in the dark, gon' come to the light
So do yo' thang, cause cain't no man tell you what's wrong or right"

He takes Kanye's path one step further and puts it on record. It might have been a song on the second half of the album buried in the tail end, but they know their fans are going to stick around. UGK made albums, not singles, and that they released a double album is indication that they wanted to give their fans as much as they could, and to flip the standards they delightfully spent masticating on all the preceding tracks in order to take time for some real talk is a lot more of a genuine move at opening up dialogue with their audience than some last ditch effort to say something and drop out.
What's great about this song is it doesn't gouge what Pimp C has to say in isms or grand statements, every one of these verses is only interested in the pragmatic, like a high school counselor who has ten minutes to be a parent for someone who doesn't have one. He's not going to drop pamphlets on the kids, he's going to talk to them about how to best make the choice about this particular rough spot in their life.

Freak Though by T.I. (featuring Pharrell)
Now here's a song whose practicality is of a whole nother sort. It's sympathy deviates not from where something went wrong, but from where something was perceived to go wrong when it was right from the start. Basically, the song is about a girl that T.I. starts seeing and finds out she's a freak, but not just from bedroom behavior, also from neighborhood reputation. Here is where a lot of rappers succumb to a hypocritical assessment of the freak's life (except for maybe Devin the Dude, who will quietly pine in her absence) and castigate her lifestyle choices when they run parallel to theirs but are done from the receiving end as opposed to the giving end.

"She got angel eyes, wit the baby face
(But she's a freak though)
I want my momma and daddy to meet her
Maybe have my baby
(But she's a freak though)
They keep talking about you
Because they - can't keep up with your pace
You're my - super freak! super freak!
You're my - super freak!"

Instead of disposing of her as some misguided, passion induced floozy, he actually takes her seriously. Well, he says she might have been a little misguided, but then again so can he be. Another insanely stupid maxim tossed around as hip hop dictum is the notion that you can't turn a ho into a housewife. Before asking can you turn a pimp into a husband, T.I. writes the whole thing off, asking why the fuck would he want a housewife? Perhaps it's not the Feminine Mystique, but it's definitely a boot in the notion that a ring is a token to be exchanged for a prize possession, not necessarily prized but shelved for decoration. The entire song he basically upends the standard derogation of a ho. Everyone else can sheep it up flock style and kick back with their homeboys, T.I. is going to spend the night, have breakfast, lay in bed and actually try to establish a human connection with what his friends left off as a conquest. Obviously they didn't conquer anything because they totally missed out on the treasure buried underneath. That's why a line like "give every ho a hug" is one of the nicest things a rapper could say ever. With this as that line's backstory he's basically saying there are no ho's, there are women taken for granted by douschenozzle's who gave up their distinguishing faculties to their dicks.

I just respect that she herself and she don't hide it
Though she may have been a tad misguided
All she need is a little affection, a lot of direction
A nigga wit a constant erection

But one that beats with a bleeding heart.
I can't wait for paper trail.

Related Post:
Larve, fuh real

Brotha Lynch Hung or NYOil, false dichotomy, probably, but i'm still tillin' this soil

2008-05-07T21:32:00.000-07:00

Lupe Fiasco -Hip Hop Saved My Life

Here is why I don't get all the false, inflated "scandalism" of Fiascogate. He seems to be the least insular/insolent of the self-proclaimed conscious rappers. Perhaps it's because I never understood the appeal of multiple guys offering multiple perspectives of nothing about nothing, but I think it's important to note that he mentioned having grown up on Spice 1 instead of the Tribe. For all of the Tribe's supposed elevated awareness, they really just threw down a whole bunch of party tracks with minimal flourishes of new muslim idioms and jazz samples to make it seem like the partying wasn't in vain. Don't get me wrong, yes i can kick it, but consider "Can I Kick It?" It samples one of Lou Reed's saddest songs about street stalking trannies, then proceeds to wax superficial about nothing in particular, throwing in the term afro-centric, tapping into black consciousness by a mere head nod and then moving on. Which is fine, but when the struggle is over and all you slung was rhetoric, what'll there be left to talk about? And the struggle isn't over. And as much as crack rap and gangster rap is begrudged as regressive, its roots are entirely in black consciousness, more so than conscious rap's aversion of it.
Consider the Crips. The Crips were originally an offshoot of The Black Panther Party, and the name is an acronym for Community Revolution In Progress, and was led by Stanley Tookie Williams. In the wake of the civil right's movement's demise (yes, at the hands of the FBI), the focus of the group became more violent and less community-oriented, eventually getting swallowed up in the drug trade (thank you, CIA). So, when a purportedly nihilistic gangster rapper has a pang of conscience and takes time away from the fictional narrative they've built (because yes, like hollywood before them, much of rap persona is a creative writing experiment in the first person) to muse on the fact that regardless of their don status, they're still just a foot soldier in the destruction of their hood, it's more legitimate then someone yelling "afro-centric" mid track and then discarding it for creatively worded nonsense.
So, getting back to the beginning, here's this video where instead of lashing out at apparently vegetative rappers about their regressive tactlessness, he writes a story of how something as simplistic and superfluous as stack that cheese is actually a monumental catalyst in keeping a drug dealer off the streets by making legitimate money that can feed his family and repay his mother for adolescence. In the video Willie D and Slim Thug appear on the wall, and Bun B shows up for street support roll call. It's just nice, not overly pretentious, and unlike dumb it down's excoriation of the record industry and metaphor haters, it sticks up for the rappers who do what they have to do in order to not do what they had to do.
So, then comes NYOil, who, from what I understand, is not active as anything but a musician, furiously excoriating the state of modern rap as an insult to the civil rights movement. That Malcolm X and Martin Luther King died for their sins and they should be repenting by being active citizens. This is where my confusion sets in, where are NYOil's activist credentials, what exactly is proactive in rapping about other rappers not being proactive, going so far as to adapt the white racist vernacular and suggest they be lynched, because they're so backwards. This is where conscious rap's dismissal of fake thuggery uncomfortably reminds me of the notion of the bourgeois negro's embarrassment of their black brethren. While somewhat rooted in their successful resurgance in a higher economic echelon, it's mostly the burden of that echelon's throne bearers, that their black brethren aren't adapting properly to the society they were forced into building and should therefore disassociate completely to ensure their legacy's safety in white company when passing on.
Now, conscious rap tends to be radical in theory, reactionary to white power structures, but it seems to be within the context of the professional, white vernacular. Kidz in the Hall may have finally gotten together with Bun B and the Clipse, but their preceding album was about distancing themselves from the hood by getting an ivy league education. When Little Brother makes an album called the Minstrel Show and calls out rappers for feeding into a black stereotype for white money, doesn't that in itself feed into black stereotype? The mere perpetuation of the idea that a different lexicon suggests intellectual inferiority is a horribly white misinterpretation of the beauty of linguistics.
Boots Riley of the Coup suggests that crack or gangster rap's semi-fictional narratives are in fact more helpful to the poor than denigration of their cultural output. That in telling someone who's been abandoned and left to fend by disinterested authority figures how to survive on the streets is far more useful than another lesson in how stupid you are because you aren't updating your brain processing structure to societal norms, specifically the ones found acceptable on fox news. He also suggests that conscious rap is merely an aesthetic ploy that hides a much more misleading superficiality underneath than the supposedly superficial genres of coke and gun rap purportedly wallow in. That a jazz sample is somehow classy and smart can only go so far to cover up equal amounts of misogyny and stupidity.
While this is directed to the general dismissal of southern rap by other regional powerhouses, the particulars are just as familiar within the context discussed above.

Willie D's verse on Quit Hatin' The South by UGK:
I'm blastin off on you hoes like NASA
Your double standards and hypocrisy, remind me of Massa
We ain't good enough to eat at ya table but when ya dick get hard
You wanna run up in our broads
I from the get.. coke but I'm still clockin figures
Bitch.. hoe.. cocksuckin nigga
And that goes for all you visitors too
If you don't like it down here, get the fuck on fool!
They say you can't rap and they questioning our intellect
Friendly ass niggaz jumpin bad on the internet
Ain't nobody typing that much, can't be a danger
Catch you in person, bitch I'll break yo' fingers!
It's some trash in the South but I promise you
From the East to the West, some of y'all garbage too
As long as the beat knock and the lyrics hot, son
I can give a rat's ass where a rapper is from
I remember N.W.A. and PE
Had me feelin like a rapper was the thing to be
You can't fuck with Willie D, UGK either
Disrespecting the code, jealous muthafuckas need to quit hatin' the south

Diasporin, the cream of choice for the fractured heritage of the Jewish people

2008-04-30T21:25:00.000-07:00

The self-dubbed New Historians, who sought and still seek to rewrite Israeli history along factual lines based on declassified military and government documents as opposed to national mythology, have just been blindsided by an even newer historian. Their work, specifically Avi Shlaim's, have allowed conversations in my household to move beyond battle lines based on platitudes, but there are still contentious issues in which the Israeli background cannot budge from the notion that the Jewish people are entitled to Palestine, with claims that the Palestinians are less of an identifiable entity than Israelis. An ongoing criticism of their self-determination being that it only started once the Zionists arrived and is really a ploy at keeping up with the Goldmans. This is in spite of recorded attempts at articulating political self-determination in light of Ottoman Rule.
I, for one, cannot understand how Israel makes the Palestinian refusal of recognition an issue when the government line in Israeli, as publicly stated by Golda Meir, was that there was no such thing as a Palestinian people. Despite government rhetoric having softened in that respect (made up for in bullets), it's still a widely held belief. It's also a widely held belief that Israel is historically Jewish land, which makes Palestinians look like opportunists when compared with the diaspora's attempt at reconstituting itself after 3,000 years of exile. Regardless of whether, even after 3,000 years of exile, a group that defines itself as an ethnicity despite it's binding force being a shared belief system can really section itself off on already inhabited land with a country devoted entirely to its people, the fundamental force is the belief that there is a historical legacy with which to justify that abuse of power.
Well, my parents happened to happen upon a book by a Israeli historian Shlomo Sand that basically seeks rectify that misconception by way of historiographic investigation. In a profile interview with Haaretz that will sum up the book far better than my blog entry ever will -
"According to Sand, the description of the Jews as a wandering and self-isolating nation of exiles, "who wandered across seas and continents, reached the ends of the earth and finally, with the advent of Zionism, made a U-turn and returned en masse to their orphaned homeland," is nothing but "national mythology." Like other national movements in Europe, which sought out a splendid Golden Age, through which they invented a heroic past - for example, classical Greece or the Teutonic tribes - to prove they have existed since the beginnings of history, "so, too, the first buds of Jewish nationalism blossomed in the direction of the strong light that has its source in the mythical Kingdom of David."
Now, here's the kicker -
"No population remains pure over a period of thousands of years. But the chances that the Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Judaic people are much greater than the chances that you or I are its descendents. The first Zionists, up until the Arab Revolt [1936-9], knew that there had been no exiling, and that the Palestinians were descended from the inhabitants of the land. They knew that farmers don't leave until they are expelled. Even Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the second president of the State of Israel, wrote in 1929 that, 'the vast majority of the peasant farmers do not have their origins in the Arab conquerors, but rather, before then, in the Jewish farmers who were numerous and a majority in the building of the land.'"

Whole article here -
Shattering a 'national mythology'
By Ofri Ilani

Anarchists and their love/hate relationship with the Palestinian Resistance

2008-04-30T19:21:00.000-07:00

Last night I was confronted with a contrarian viewpoint in a conversation, courtesy of an anarchist (full disclosure, this was frustrating because the general anarchist contention is not something I'm opposed to), in which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was reduced to a hypothetical about what grounds the Palestinian resistance should be struggled on if statehood is the option being sought since an anarchist cannot support a nation state, therefore unless the resistance is reconstituted as a libertarian-socialist makeover then it can only be supported on the grounds that it's wrong to occupy and oppress a nation because you don't want to live with them. It was frustrating because the viewpoint wasn't so much suggested as it was thrown out to deflate the conversation by conflating anarchist theoreticals with pragmatic analysis of someone else's plight. The excuse used was Chiapas, that that should be a shining of example of the direction the Palestinian resistance should take as opposed to seeking political organization as a nation-state.
While the idea of focusing on community organization and self-determination by means of using your resources to live as a nation regardless of international recognition while still resisting the occupation is commendable, there are a number of problems with it. Completely giving up political self-determination in favor of pragmatic self-determination Chiapas style requires that the entire Palestinian entity has to splinter off into localized communities that still remain within the territories they've been allotted because Israel, regardless of its enemy's newfound anarchism, still want to retain a Jewish majority. Perhaps it's a misconception on my part but it sounds entirely self-defeating. Sure, land is land and no one owns it, therefore the idea that one group would want to put up borders, erect a government and decide it's going to hierarchically orchestrate its own future along ethnic lines (either side) is absurd, but so is foregoing the notion of a nation-state to merely live as a diasporic nation. And it would be diasporic because Palestinians are split up into various refugee camps, and these would be the areas in which they would make like a Zapatista and call home, which does Israel a HUGE favor! Sure, the Zapatistas are a thorny undercurrent in Mexican society, but their entire existence is piecemeal as Mexican society is still overwhelmingly not liberated.
I've asked the person who made this comment to come forth and explain themselves and possibly rectify my misconception, so hopefully this entry writes itself into something more elaborate.

Awareness Pt. 2

2008-04-17T15:25:00.000-07:00

From a 1995 interview between Vibe magazine and bell hooks -

Vibe: You say "we" as if you identify strongly with these rappers.

bell hooks: I think all the artists who use the black vernacular in this society understand that, to white minds, the black vernacular has always been associated with the idea of being stupid. I guess I feel like part of my mission as an artist-this is what binds me culturally to an Ice Cube and even a Snoop Doggy Dogg-is understanding the beauty and aesthetic complexity in the vernacular. In the minds not only of whites but of privileged-class blacks, vernacular culture is seen as lacking complexity and depth. Even though black folks like Henry Louis Gates will step up in defense of "vernacular culture," the way they mount their defense has this patronizing aura, like, "We know better than these down-low black people what they really mean, and we can be the mediators between them and the dominant white culture."

(though she makes the extension from white to privileged-class black defense of rap, the same criticism could easily be launched at my previous post in which I talk about Z-Ro's prison interview, or really anything I've written in the blog thus far, and probably will write, ever in relation to "the black vernacular.")

"Z-Ro the crooked know the key to survival is fuck friends"

2008-04-15T18:14:00.000-07:00

Currently listening to - Z-Ro - King of Tha Ghetto - Power (released May 2007)

(demagogic ploy aimed right at your heart)
Have you seen this video?

It's nowhere near indicative of Z-Ro's autobiographical abilities nor his keen insight into societal problems. He doesn't make many fully coherent statements, and it comes off like he's a horrible interviewer. The entire set-up is absurd, though. A sycophantic rap blogger is momentarily breaking him out of penitential routine to talk about an album he didn't get to see the release of or celebrate the reaping from. Instead he gets biblical and talks about Christian apologia and reaping what he's sewn. That he constantly follows up his statements with a "you know" only to be met with blind, unknowing enthusiasm can easily be derided as an inability to properly communicate his thoughts, but he's also being asked to discuss on a soon-to-be widely distributed video what led him to where he is. For the record, he's in the Pam LYNCHner State Jail! Listen to the way he alludes to "situations" that he "found" himself in on the streets. That's the sound of someone who's already served life before hitting 30. Of course that's not what he's in there for but his gravel-throated utter sounds like he's channeling the dead that take up grave stones in his songs.
Eventually it seems like the the interviewer catches on to the absurdity of the situation and makes an onslaught of nonsense rhetoricals, as if pulling Z-Ro's teeth would be nothing without some dental work, asking him if he'd ever thought he'd make it on street flavor from the inside of a state correctional and then answering for him by saying it's awesome. Everything he may have wanted to know, though, is in his right hand already. You have to wonder what Z-Ro felt like walking back to his cell, probably convinced his convictions in regards to others were dead on, yet again solidifying his self-imposed exile from those around him, which, as the interview probably knows, was something well worked out in his lyrics. I have nothing against interviewing Z-Ro in jail, it probably gave him a chance to break out from the monotony of prison life, but Z-Ro doesn't come off like someone that wants to be taken out of his solitude. He's seen what the world has to offer and therefore desperately clings to Jesus in an effort to cash in on the broken promise of righteous living. What other explanation for the volatile bloodletting in a hail of gunpowder than the raging hellfire below. Well, you might say there's an existential nothingness that also highlights the arbitrary nature of man's suffering, but that doesn't give a satisfying answer as to what would drive this (neither does the devil, but fire and brimstone's legacy can pave way for this):

Man they tied up my nigga, and sawed off his head
The cold part about it, they ain't even take no bread

Now, if you haven't listened to Z-Ro, then here's a good primer, a Z-Ro Mix courtesy of Cocaine Blunts. It's not chronological, taking time to reach back to his solo debut, Look What You Did To Me while climbing round I'm Still Livin', but unfortunately doesn't include Z-Ro's exegesis "Another Song" from Let The Truth Be Told in which he apologizes to his fans for not having any upbeat club songs or songs that would make 'em smile by way of osmosis since Z-Ro would be rapping about having inner peace, then, over one of the happiest beats ever laid on him, goes on to rap about not being capable of writing such a song because he is never at peace, and lists the life-worn reasons that make up the why not. What it does include is the closing track on The Life of Joseph W. McVey, Happy Feelingz, in which he pulls the same stunt and raps about why he needs Lexapro. Aside from any of the three Geto Boys' wrangling with depression I've rarely heard rappers break down between bouts of depressive violence to talk about anti-depressants. It's only a line, but it's in line with his intensely confessional approach to rapping. Z-Ro may indulge in Don diva status, but more often than not finds himself entirely unconstrained by hierarchical corpse climbing, abandoning the crime syndicate to just be alone. Which is why the lyrical trajectory from I'm Still Living to his new album Power is so depressing in that in between depressive bouts of introspective solitude he jumps back on the gangster tropes and keeps it "real". This, though, is entirely selfish of me, considering my view of quality is how depressive the subject matter gets. When Z-Ro indulges in those tropes he sometimes sounds entirely comfortable not rapping about how much life sucks in reality. He weaves that weariness into his narratives but sometimes gives off that gangster fuck-all that sounds a lot more helpful than endless mining of one's demons for a way out. That too, though, is dismissive of something.
Consider the packaging and production on Power. The CD (Rap-A-Lot hates vinyl lovers), despite being a RAL release, seems to boast of itself as a tangential project under the moniker King of Tha Ghetto (a monarchic staff wielded multiple times in his oeuvre). When I first unwrapped the album (I had ignored the subtitle) I noticed the phrase "The Under Ground So Hard It Should Be A Real Album" and worried I had accidentally stumbled onto a quick fix compilation album in anticipation for something I should have waited for. I researched it and instead found it's rumoured to have been recorded in one week to satisfy fans with a quick fix before Z-Ro had to endure his next prison bid. But instead of that organic southern drawl or powerhouse Rap-A-Lot roster production, all of the tracks are produced by Z-Ro and Z-Ro alone. Considering the time slot the production work is impressive. Z-Ro knows what he sounds good on but also kind of just sticks to a pattern of stable beats. I first listened to it on headphones and the beats seemed less like a cohesive whole than a compartmentalized consistency of efficiently pro-tooled parts. No doubt they get the job done, but Z-Ro's voice has an authorial quality that seems to drift from the aether with the immediacy of a monsoon, so natural it's not even aware of its function as a wreck-inducing force of destruction. Like a construction crew falling prey to an accident while attempting to build a wall of desponden- okay, that's high-falutin' lameness, but if you listen to this man speak, you'll feel like your stepping in on something you didn't need to hear, like a deeply personal and awkwardly troubling conversation just enough within earshot to let you know not even a grief counselor could make something out of it. And sometimes the beats didn't live up to that. (Update, first time I heard this was on headphones. Second time I turned up the stereo speakers and it sounded pretty great).
I mention the aural aesthetic as an alternative to the lyrics because just hearing him is heartbreaking. On Power, no matter what he's singing or rapping about, he sounds like he's just biding his time until his time is out. The piano chords chosen are rarely triumphant and the guitar lines are wistful. The only dramatic force heard is that of dejected frustration. But I'm making it out to be a pity case, mother fucker knows how to get down. Just listen to the funk outs on Let The Truth Be Told. And as much as I'm making the beats out to be the aural equivalent of Emily Dickinson Z-Ro is just at skilled at dropping hooks. Once you get past what makes him tick, you also just want to bide your time along with him via his croons.
My introduction was I'm Still Living, where the only song to indulge in any senseless violence was M-16 (a stripped down, original version of which appears on Power). The rest of the songs found Z-Ro fed up with senseless violence, calling out the streets and people keeping it real for taking up the mantle of responsibility in their self-destruction. Now, I'm not running game on the hood with any anti-welfare tirades, dude's been in the shit and is trying to see up over what's gone down on his block, consider the opening track (also sung by Z-Ro, who has one of the finest voices ever to grace a gravelly-throated rapper's throat):

the hook (the hook!):

Damn these city streets, are hard to live in
Eighty percent of my partnas are dead, the rest in prison
All I see is the struggle, my tears drown my vision
I never forget to mention, god damn these city streets

And, in order to demonstrate his keen societal insight i'll bop this here, an almost hopeful lament about trying to keep things rolling, turning Spandau Ballet's True into a kind of reluctant hood anthem:

Lil' kids, witness father and uncles pass on
Then they grow up, to get they blast on
Everybody saying, that the black community is out control
Even in the suburbs, brains get blown
They blame rap, for the murder rate
But people go to the movies, and see murder for seven dollars then they imitate
What they done seen, on Terminator 1 through 3
Swarchengger's the Governor, we get L-I-F-E
Innocent victims, get a free ride to the grave
People that work hard get robbed, for every penny they save
It's like it ain't gon ever change, this world we live in cold
I hit my Hypnotic, then I continue to roll

It's what people completely missed in Jeremiah Wright's growling thunder, you don't locate a problem by making non-divisive statements, you don't take baby steps by patronizing it, you cry your heart out because you've had it. You don't care who's ignorance is going to be offended, you know what's real because you live it and you want it to stop. As God is the pastor's backbone, so it is Z-Ro's and the only thing he claims to find solace in is the lord. And I say claim because someone who's found solace in the lord isn't constantly talking about praying to find solace in the lord. It's someone desperate for anything but "this":

I'm 27, but I'm feeling 71
I pray so much, I feel like I'm kin to the heavenly son
I dodge bullets on the daily, if I don't duck I'm stuck
Then I'll be another murder case, in back of that black truck

Now, David Banner can talk all day about straddling the line between societal remedy and fuck-all commercialism, proudly boasting about his post-modern ploy to hit the radio and prove it's soullessness by first making sensationally violent and sexed up pop songs and then juxtaposing them with real talk, thereby proving the pull that the former has and the latter doesn't. Z-Ro isn't really at a place where he'd even bother pulling something like that, because one, who on the radio would play his songs? and two, who gives a fuck about the radio? Yeah, he's only 27 there, but it won't be any different any time before he's 71 and he knows it. Instead, he made an entire album of real talk dedicated to his most dedicated listeners or really to anyone who'll bother to listen. As far as I'm concerned it eludes rap canonization by the nature of its constricting locality. Niche marketing will keep it from broadsweep recognition and its distended belly is hungry less for fame than a solution to its ever inflating problem. It's one of the most effectively depressing albums I've ever heard, and the only recognition it needs is help.
The only help constantly fallen back on is GOD. Z-Ro, kind of goofily, attempts to make over the image of a thug by calling himself a True Hero Under God. But don't get him wrong, he has much more in common with liberation theology than he does with Eric A. Rudolph, consider this:

Everyday I see my people in poverty,
and when I say my people I mean everybody I see,
ain't no discrimination on Caucasians,
or Asian or Mexicans, lesbians or the gay men,
everybody gotta day to die and they wont miss it
better be ready for company when death come visit.
man I wish adam and eve wouldn't have been in the garden,
got the devil swinging at me got me weavin and bobbin,
homies are bein murdered by lieutenants and seargants,
life's weeds were rooted just as soon as we harvest
searchin' for sunshine, suffocated by darkness,
lookin for protection in court tippin there fortress,
they tell me when I make it there'll be no more pain,
aint gotta be nervous about someone knowin ya name,
everybody is your family theres love around you,
even on earth god is your upper, people down you

When Dostoyevsky writes about Alyosha's Christian compassion, this is likely what he's talking about.
Of the handful of reviews there are for Power (there are about two), noted is Rap-A-Lot's standard of lackluster (meaning no apparent) promotion. Z-Ro seems to be entirely aware of that and not particularly worried as this is just another album in his steadily growing catalogue and he knows that those who'll buy it are those that want it and they'll appreciate it. And on Lovely Day he even gives in to those fans looking for an upbeat song. Lovely Day, while still touching on fucking other people up, does that more out of obligation to habit instead encapsulating escapism by getting caught up in a good mood.

I must'a, woke up this morning on the right side of bed
Cause I can't find nothing to bitch about, even though I'm low on bread...
So chill homie, for real homie
Cause you don't wanna die, and I don't wanna kill homie
But I will homie...Except for right now, cause all I wanna do is lay back

Like that fleeting feeling it doesn't last long, and the next song comes on, back to the uppers. Two songs later is Pimp C, Spice 1 collaboration called Murder'ra where he laments "I used to think I'd have a future in basketball, but now all I do is put people in caskets y'all". There's a song on I'm Still Livin' where he talks about being riled growing up for being an egghead but now he's got gucci bedspreads, but you watch the prison interview and it honestly does not look like he's that excited to have made it on street flavor from inside the penitentiary. Like he really wants to have to be drowning in solitude looking to god again. Making his money releasing songs where "the key to survival is fuck friends."

Since Z-Ro's prison bids are on fairly trivial charges like possession of a controlled substance (something which he repeatedly illustrates helps him stay calm, war on drugs be damned), or parole violation, he'll be back soon to make another one (unless he already is and I just don't know, which is where I stand on a lot of things). Still not selling gold or platinum, instead doling out parts of his life so he can Continue 2 Roll.

"Raise your sons, train your husband."

2008-04-11T19:26:00.000-07:00

Mother of the Bride (Egypt, 1963) starring Tahiya Karioka and Emad Hamdi.
The above is advice is given to the eldest daughter of a nine deep family by the matriarch (Karioka), her daughter having encountered a bump in confidence with her fiance, telling her to hold out in resentment until he apologizes in order to ensure she has the upper hand in the relationship. This of course is swiftly discarded once the mother leaves the room as Ahlam, the daughter, is not her mother, and Galal, her fiance, is not his father. They both though will be inheriting a long standing tradition of marital union that, judging from the familial chaos surrounding the moment, portends their wide-eyed infatuation with marrying at first sight will have to be scrupulously managed in order to maintain at least some kind of semblance.
The film, about a lower class Egyptian family thrown into a tumult when the eldest daughter is eyed upon by a level-six engineer soon to be promoted to fifth, seems to guise itself in the madcap tradition of screwball comedy but only to heighten the ridiculousness of adhering to societal codes at all costs. The father, played by Hamdi, is a humble government bureaucrat who, even with the dowry put down by the groom's family, simply cannot afford the interior decoration that makes up the daughter's family's half of the engagement.
The first scene, an extended sequence in which multiple explosions of barely contained vitriol erupt around the morning's infant feeding routine (as the mother is still popping out kids making it seven and counting), while the father awaits news of a raise, would be epic comedy (which it is played for) if not for the utter desperation in which the mother and father attempt to rein in the siblings. That they entirely avoid parental nuance, opting instead to launch siblings onto another's resonsibility where, in a round robin of frustrated dismissal, everyone is at least once encountered with some kind of hyperbolic threat of violence, with the underworld invoked to ensure the ill will is felt. The chaos with which the routine is played out, instead of just evoking laughs (which it does, wonderfully) goes further and puts on display the factors required for two people to raise their pension.
The first scene on youtube!
One of the central points of the film is the father's inability to cash his government pension in order to afford the extravagances the wedding entails due to a bureaucratic rule that requires one wait a month before approval goes through the right offices. Upon realization that desperate times call for desperate measures, his expression grows sullen. His wife inquires as to why his character is so grave, he tells her he meant to give the pension to her. She damns the pension, saying she doesn't need. Why? She birthed seven children!
The eldest daughter opted to stay home instead of going to college, in order to help raise the family. The second eldest daughter plans to go to college and can't understand why her sister won't do the same. The eldest male, noticing the possibility of their abandoning the household, takes on a paternal responsibility and consistently attempts to thwart any of his sisters' romances. The second eldest of the sons is a violin player, wheeling and dealing in order to afford strings for his violin. The youngest son, probably five, is just a hustler with no end goal in mind. The youngest daughter is just defiantly holding herself up amid the ruckus. The baby, well, the baby is the handbasket they all send each other to hell in. We learn all of this within the first ten minutes merely by paying attention to what's being shouted.
There are some startling moments, such as the mother's nonchalant revelation to the groom's family that she had Ahlam at age 11 (perhaps I misunderstood, but she repeated it multiple times after being asked "oh, really" so I assume I didn't), yet there is no contempt towards her husband or her situation per se (the unbearably frustrated yelling indicates otherwise), as they reflect nostalgically on their beginnings while she frets over her daughter's departure, comforting herself with the notion, based on experience, that one falls in love after marriage. Or the second eldest daughter's choices in regards to her future plans, that, whether or not the intent of the filmmakers, still reflects the awkward transition into a modern society. Or the way the kids are cruelly dismissed by exhausted parentals without the audience ever once doubting their devotion to upholding a happy family. It's a shame the production of family films are taken for granted now, with films like Cheaper by the Dozen displaying affluent white families merely having children because they can, allowing them to run wild while the parent's main concern is their self-image. A film like Mother of the Bride would have fallen apart due to marketing pressures in which each of the film's elements would have to have been compromised in one way or another to appease a certain demographic. The chaotic familial maneuvering would have been debased to mere hijinks and schmaltz, whereas the matrimony would have been played for soft rom com a la Father of the Bride (which somehow managed to conflate whimsy voice overs with introspection), the classist tension cosmetically reconstructed as eccentric quirks (MBFGW), the eventual solutions played like morality plays and so on. The way this film balances all of those without submitting to one allows for one of the most dizzying wedding sequences put on film, as the climactic barrage of brass bands and belly dancing amid seemingly insoluble grief is great.
Apparently the mother and the father in the film are Egyptian film legends from the country's golden age of cinema. This was the only movie available with either of them on netflix. My mother insisted on renting it out of nostalgia for when she would sit around with her family and watch Egyptian films every night on Israeli television. I'm glad she did but saddened at the prospect of being bereft of most what that age had to offer.

Sorry, couldn't come in today, I was having a dream

2008-04-08T00:34:00.001-07:00

A (possibly) illuminating (as in blindingly white) anecdote in light of the anniversary of the Reverend's assassination:
This dates back to something my pops relayed to me on Martin Luther King day. My parents are in the dessert catering business and my father rode out on deliveries. I'm not sure if it was in light of a mix up of some kind or it was just to make sure the details were secure on a particular invoice, but he calls the head chef at one of the kitchens he's delivering to and one of his underlings picks up. The person who picks up is Carlos, whom my father points out is black as ash (which is kind of grey isn't it?), and he informs my dad that the head chef isn't in. My father inquires as to whether he's sick. As it turns out, he is not, he just took the day off saying it was Martin Luther King Day. Now, the head chef is the only one who didn't show up to work that day. More importantly, he's the only one on his staff who is white.

Children Underground

2008-04-04T23:23:00.000-07:00

Not to forever instill a dwindling distillation of hope, but I just finished watching a documentary called Children Underground which apparently is on youtube and it further solidifies my view of Romanian cinema as the black hole on which humanity rests on. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, guising itself as a black comedy that painstakingly details the flaws of the Romanian healthcare system through its negligence of a dying old widow, inadvertently blacks out sun blots faster than any Bergman monologue on existentialism could aim for. All without any discussion of it, just a naturalistic following through of peripheral snippets from the lives that continue around the central subject, itself becoming a peripheral snippet as the time wears on. 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days takes on totalitarianism and classism without ever mentioning any of them, and it's stark portrayal of abortion without hypnotic moral compass dangling again just lays it out.
Children Underground perfectly rounds out 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days in that it shows the lives of five out of countless children who abandoned their homes and orphanages out of desperation, something the filmmaker links directly to Ceascescu's ban of contraceptives in order to build up the workforce. They band up but squander in increasing desolation out out in the streets. In eschewing documentary narrative techniques and following the kids around their daily wares through their makeshift bucharest subway home or various institutions that for a glimmering blip offer them a way out before, in what feels like logical inevitability, fading out like a dead star, they become more fleshed out than sound bites in an evening news clip, the filmmaker's intent. Any ways, the film itself does more talking via silent immersion than anything in my dumbfounded post viewing analysis.

Thug Life is Ours

2008-03-25T23:54:00.000-07:00

I was on a slow laptop two mornings ago and put on VH1 soul to pass the time between pages, and this double barrel video suite played out that was probably intentional in programming but I'm pretty sure had nothing to with the show, which was a random slot of videos. I'll be honest, my inability to recognize songs immediately would not serve me well on the white rapper show, so when I looked up and recognized Prodigy I thought it might have been from the G-Unit days whose reputation caused aversion when I started back cataloguing.
I thought possibly the dank odor of corpses in the streets might have sent P on the waft into an ice filled chamber. Then I noticed Nas, and then the chorus came on and it listed Murda Muzik as the album and a serious disconnect set in since all I remember from that album was muzik, with murda buried underneath. Anyways, my vision of P. and Havoc ripping it from a street winter cold static was shattered, but the song is still fun and the video kind of funny, in a cavalcade of rap video cliches kind of way. Plus Nas at a Barbra Streisand concert.

Then this came on, and that totally broke it off.

One, it prompted me to look up Brandy and find out those manslaughter caused public blankouts were rumour (as per their not appearing on wikipedia) and her album is languishing in development. I remember completely disavowing this in middle school while slipping off to the comforting sounds of ALTERNATIVE ROCK. On the aural aesthetic, I enjoy this song a lot, lyrically, I wish they both decided to set off on the dude double timing them and calling him on his trifling ass instead of fighting each other for an inferior position in the patriarchal heirarchy. And then I read about the song's history and its taking off point having been a duet Paul McCartney sang with Michael Jackson in which they both vied for the same girl. Then it became kind of innocent and my gender studies 101 analysis collapsed in the wake of the term POP.
It also kind of warmed me over that two gangster rappers turned an R & B song into a hood anthem. I love it when that happens, kind of like when Z-Ro took Spandau Ballet's "True" and turned it into "Continue to Roll." There's no sacred ground then, and an appreciation of sounds regardless of their context. Despite the first song stressing a life of crime where money rivals bodies in the piling process and the second about two girls fighting over some multiple hen house clocking foghorn leghorn, there's community in their kinlike relation.

One day

2008-03-24T09:21:00.000-07:00

With hangman stoops being brought out for charges of racism on account of Obama's pastor I was really disheartened to find possibly the only rational, straightforward and visibly passionate statements to be made on the campaign trail so far were from Pastor Wright. Even worse is that the political climate finds Obama being forced to distance himself from such statements on the possibility it will alienate the patriotically white vote that conflates the notion of a guilty conscience with treason.
I'm only going to include the portions included by the press as to highlight the ridiculousness of the harangue.

Some wikiresearch into the Pastor finds him indulging in some conspiratorial nonsense like AIDS being a secrect government project, but those other statements, for the most part, are fairly right on, and I think would advance talk about government and race instead of dumbing it down.
That Obama recontextualized some of the outrage as old school heatstrokes harkening back to the civil rights movement like dissonant moments of clarity in a bout of alzheimers was also kind of sad. But I suppose holding it down with a cool set of undivisive words instead of bypassing your audience's ribcage and making juice out of its heart is what you need to move on up. May the floodgates open if he makes it past the nomination, the election and the inaugural address.

Anyways, here's to a different kind of level-headed analysis from a street level hustler not apt to get caught up in sensational electoral sweeps, and still gully enough to call Obama the lesser of two evils in light of third party neutralization.

Bun B Live at Levi'sÂ®/The FADER Fort from The FADER on Vimeo.

Rich Boy Sending The Backpackers Back To School

2008-01-27T20:18:00.000-08:00

Dirty South will rise again! Merely being conscious about your consciousness only makes it known it's not ghost of Terry Schiavo moving the Ouija board through your speakers. Knowing when to ask about touching that ass and when to get meta about the projects that raised that ass gets you off the pulsewatch and in control of the I.V. Religiously reciting the sacred hip-hop texts is academia regurgitate but lacing that crack with the sources, real talk!
Here's Rich Boy in XXL breaking it down on who those D's were being thrown on it for and why there's more D's than these!

That song is both heartbreaking and beautiful. The backing choir is like confession shot past a clueless father and falling straight into the heavens. With your feet half in the grave it's hard to know whether the voices are coming down from up top or shooting up from straight below. Unless they're coming from nowhere and the collection plate, taking in more money than the crack game, leaves you sonned with the realization that all you're left with is you.

Hell Up In Washington

2008-01-27T09:20:00.000-08:00

I wish these guys were (half still) running for president. This is a double team no one would step to.

This would be their campaign song.

I guess for now we're raftin', upriver paddlin'
"We never voted, we votin' for Oprah, Obama, and Eric B.!"

R.I.P. Pooh Bear

2008-01-21T00:17:00.000-08:00

I went to a punk show tonight, mainly to see friends, partly to see if my records arrived at the record store. There was a punk show inside railing against the usual punk trajectory of cops, government, system, whatever and outside a cop was busting a crackhead for bodily functions, he arrested those functions for appearing in an undesignated place (he peed on a wall). But it wasn't a white cop, or a black cop showing off for a white one, it was a black cop with no one watching but white and latino punk kids. It's just weird, two different levels of authority, all black, and the bottom feeders, black too, just containing themselves. "four crack dealers here, two there, you can get marijuana, crack, heron, it's all go" it's like there's no struggle, it's over. This is the dregs and the tea has lost it's flavor, it's being poured out and there are just some strained herbs waiting to biodegradably ethered.
"Security" as was written on his shirt, basically a dreaded and black Swayze from Roadhouse, telling me when he was younger he woulda layed that crackhead flat. Now it burns him up, he wouldn't be able to sleep at night, the acid in his stomach too hard to bear. So he just talks about how he could lay that sucker flat.
It was Little Haiti. Haiti's got people being shot left and right, no government. Aroudn me people were shooting up left and right behind closed doors, only to be given a shit about if they leave their confines. So yeah, I bought Lupe's new album about the streets in a place volunteer security calls crack alley. So i'm in tune, obviously. Lupe's got 21 dollars, the crack game's got donations to fiends mistaken for bums.

Torture is not unamerican! Or at least that's a half truth.

2008-01-09T01:26:00.001-08:00

Why is there a whole lot of odd posturing in the search for demographic approval in the outlawing of torture? Shouldn't it be across the board? Be it the ACLU or Wesley Clark (who apparently didn't get his Vietnam Service Medal with 3 service stars serving in Vietnam) the subject of torture's inherent wrongness have moved from its inhumanity (or if washed out cynics would have it, its appropriate approximations of humanity's underpinnings) to its patriotic obliviousness. Now it's a litmus test for austere citizenship? Has no one read the declassified documents being dug up with the use of the Freedom of Information Act about our shady past (like our country wasn't founded and built on it)? Didn't it reach even Hollywood for standard bad guy patsy in geo-political 80's action movies to have the CIA as a shady organization that Judas Priests the shit out of the constitution?
To even regionalize it like that would suggest that while being Unamerican, that's what allows us to be the leaders of the free world, which either doesn't exist because we haven't had the privelege of freeing it, or shouldn't exist because we haven't had the privilege of bearing down on it Grand Inquisitor style, castigating the assbackwards variety hour it's continually hosting in which freedom is proved to be an asset of man's fundamental suffering and in need of being straightened the fuck out in complete opposition to the last temptations of christ (though I'm starting to think, final revelation and all, that that's the modus operandi). But really, that shit is universal! Geneva may soon be the site of a hot new American Apparel boutique shop, but that don't make it made in america!

Here's a 6 minute rundown far more effective than any of the campaigns taking up the blogadspace.

Hey, No One is a great song

2007-12-01T00:17:00.000-08:00

Okay, follow-up on that insane Alicia Keys review in the Voice. I have no idea what Greg Tate is going through but I still don't understand how the new Alicia Keys album could have the same impact as Public Enemy when they first shot out of the cannon. Six tracks in I was confused. Why, in 2007, is a female singing about how much she needs a man? Over and over again? 2-0-0-7 = past even a man needs a woman, there is no gender binary! Motherfucking Angela Davis shot holes in the gender binary back in the 60's, kablow sexism! Then she has a song called Superwoman which I guess has the same sentiment as the Kanye line about trading it in as a spouse or whatnot, but then in the chorus is the equivalent of "something in your blouse, got me so aroused," they're not the superwomen, Alicia Keys is! And to emphasize that everytime she says a chorus chimes in saying "she's a superwoman!" wtf?! But that single she has right now, where she goes oh oh ah oh oh, I love that. Maybe I just didn't get to the part of the album where she gets rid of a whole bunch of guys for being stank and sorry. That's what I was expecting!

Go Girl

2007-11-01T23:08:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I know next to nothing about pitbull and just heard the second song here minutes ago. High school years spent idly decrying Miami's lack of hipster quotients measured in brooklyn quartz were misspent missing the glamor of banging beats on these shores. I should have crawled in my backpack and lobbed myself in a trashcan for totally missing out on the ultra-sexualized dialogue of Trina and Trick's Nann. So yes, in the liberated libertarian socialist society labor rights are restored as a heirarchical system is replaced by a cooperative framework, but how do people deal with each other if they can only speak frankly in political terms? Obviously, manuevering the bedroom, or the particulars of whatever public space made private, is up to each person individually, but open dialogue which doesn't reduce the acts to clinical terms and gender paradigms is probably productive as well, no?
Well, anyways, thanks for this one T 'n' T.

Now, I only heard this moments ago. It doesn't aspire to the lofty heights of Nann's sexual deconstruction, but damn if it doesn't move backends like coke rap moves bricks. Unfortunately Trina is damn near cut off during the end, which makes her O-Ren to Pitbull's Beatrix, but the dancefloor sure sounds like a climactic showdown and it's awesome.

P-Noid on all hallow's eve, hollow as the barrel of the pistol up my sleeve

2007-10-31T14:06:00.000-07:00

Yup, I was born far from the 5th ward but from what I understand this video tells me that If I had grown up there I wouldn't have had to dress up for it to be halloween, or even wait until the end of october.

Bamboo Banga'd

2007-10-30T07:33:00.000-07:00

So I finally got down to Strictly Business and this EPMD is on some strictly funky shit. Those rolling loops are so slippery that when EPMD comes in slurring like the best night out ever, you almost drown in the slobber. Between this and Mr. Scarface is Back I think I have wide enough proof that the whole old school preferentiality is a blind seeing-eye dog. It's like it doesn't matter if your block is being shot up or your party's being rocked, as long as you geet dooown. On that note, though, I wholeheartedly support The Cool Kids in whatever warped nostalgia they're dropping on hip hop. There were plenty of problems with the sound, like the beats being louder than the dirge-like power outages that play over them, but Mikey and Chuck are on some Buckaroo Banzai extra-dimensional time warp that synthesizes whatever you had no idea you needed from a rap show. That opening disclaimer that it's like the Beastie Boys reborn in Black is almost self-sabotage because the pretension in bringing '88 back is far more palatable than "I got more stories than JD got Salinger."
And so then MIA came back with the power, power, and in groundbreaking feminist logistics upended the Studio A soundsystem when it tried to take over the reigns of harnessing that power. It was as if the aural quality was built on the choice laid out in Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival and they went with hegemonic roar. Where the MIA's calls to the people began and the sirens directing them to the bomb shelter ended were one wondrous blur. But after the cool kids declared the concept of rocking a show to be so old, MIA came out in a wheelchair with some methamphetamines saying "fuck placebos!" Missing the string section for Jimmy or having the speakers do Neal Pert on your eardrums were almost worth it when you were upfront watching MIA grind like the snake 'fore the legs were cut off, the audience at a biblical beck and call. And her hypewoman? Dayumn! I don't know who the female rapper they brought out in place of the Wilcannia Mob, but I've never seen limb contortions like those. All three of them were whipping the crowd with lassos aimed right at the knees, like Trina devouring some nerve-shattered video boy with her sexual appetite.
Did you know you could Double Dutch using a person as a jump rope?
I think her third world populism was self-sabotaged by the opening video in which a bald Asian called for a complete overthrow of the government in favor of the minority, as if the majority doesn't get duped by elections, but it still tapped a basic tenet of the inability of representative democracy to represent the world town, because the world town can represent itself, thank you.
Capping it off I made my out during the encore, caught Pg-13 rocking out at the bar and realized the sound people had it wrong because way in the back of the club that part of the rainforest destroyed to make way for soy production was rocking the climate like it's inhabitants didn't have to fight for their homes. For ten minutes that soundclash gelled like the inner bone of a cattle.

"I don't want any gay people hanging around me while I'm killing kids."

2007-10-25T07:42:00.000-07:00

Reconsidering a long stasis born out of disillusionment of the neutralized persuasion (hyping is hard) I dug through videos I posted on facebook before I realized it wasn't a blog and the only thing it had in common with one is that aside from compromising photos, they both go virtually unviewed. At least in my case because I'm a shitty hype man. Self-deprecating invitations to hate just won't cut it!
So down at the bottom was this old Bill Hicks video. When I first heard him I could only kind of see what the reverence was about because the radical politics were buried underneath a miasma of self-righteous loathing, which is probably the cumulative effect of playing a sex-deprived lefty to faceless, unresponsive crowds in the deep south.
This video, though, cuts right to why endless panel reconfigurations on Bill Maher are just clearing out the room for lame punchlines and ironic non-discussions in Vice are only distractions from the final black hole they're seeking to be swallowed up in. Unfortunately, I don't know if Bill Hicks would have been a good panelist as in interviews he gave before his death he was generally withholding and less firebrand than on stage. But for some reason this is still an issue, and if only for two minutes he could come back and at no given time just drop a fire in the hole like this one next time there's a serious non-discussion about decorative technical aspects on whether or not gays should be allowed in the military, or someone has to invariably belt out a disclaimer in which they assure the audience that they support the troops before making a genuine criticism, that would be great.

Larve, fuh real

2007-10-09T06:13:00.000-07:00

I have a dwindling interest in (read: a spiraling black hole of fear from) post-modern deconstruction of the world as something that needs constant pseudo-scientific experiments on figurative sense deprivation and (unwittingly) paranoiac reinterpretations of perception and memory, as it reeks not of institutional insanity but institutional comfort that breeds insanity. I'm not going to pretend that everything is definite but it's a lot harder to deny you can feel something when you have a rubber truncheon being lobbed at the soles of your feet in some secret European prison cell.

On the other hand, when a rapper drops his game and pens an ode to his wife it's like a tangible link to reality that drops irony on his ouevre harder than a hipster with a pompadour for a coiffure.

Case in point: Juvenile. Juvenile of Back That Azz Up fame. Juvenile who once "reached back and stuck" a "bitch" who then pressed charges and when she brought her pa woulda stuck him too if he wasn't behind bars (in a song of course, quotes from "I Got That Fire") then in an odd choice of chronological retelling, bit "the titties" during sex and busted "a nut on her leg" (in a SONG, of COURSE). Yeah, that's coarse, but when he breaks down you start to understand the distant non-relationship between what's moving your Azz on the dancefloor and what happened before it hit the mic in the studio and all the channels it passed before it made it on tv and into your stereo.

bell hooks, a black feminist activist and writer, brilliantly sends up the industry that scapegoats it for society's misogyny on the one hand but profits off of it on the other, while also displaying how sexism in rap is not a vacuum but part of a much larger sexist continuum.
Misogyny and Gangsta Rap - Who Will Take the Blame is excellent in that respect but evades dissecting the nuances in Gangsta Rap that put holes in the facades of violent machismo. The examples I use couldn't have possible been foreseen as it was written in '94, but there were plenty back then as well.

Exhibit A: Last year's Reality Check, an album that for the large part is a post-Katrina reconfiguration of the crack game in New Orleans (where Juvenile lost his home in the 9th ward to hurricane damage) told with beats whose stark bombast swoop under his growl with the menace of a furnace blast. While his hustler status is repeatedly assuaged with stick-up kid swagger it's with a frightening older man's weathered interpolation of survival of the fittest, a nihilistic defense of bottom barrel gangsterism aware that the only point of it's existence is to fade out. These can easily be pointed out as gangsta rap cliches but these are attitudes only reinforced when the government sends in blackwater as the most immediate response to a natural disaster in order to make sure shops aren't broken into in desperation from lack of supplies by shooting shoplifters on site. Even before that, 9th ward probably shows you things you never wanted to see but have to live with.

I'm getting off the point, since that's not a large part of the album there's also a sizeable portion of club jams luridly appraising female attributes (i.e. Loose Booty) and vivid detailing of what Juvenile and his crew are going to do to them. It's all bullshit though. He doesn't just have a baby-mama he ducks and covers from, he has a wife and family to feed. He knows that, and in between all the shooting and fucking lifts his chin up and lets you know that he wants you to know too.

Really it's between him and his wife but it's one of the most heartening invitations to peek in on a genuinely touching domestic set-up:
I Know You Know does just that. He assures his wife it's her he's about, he's not a baller with an uncontrollable wad that needs to be blown on every fly girl that comes up in the game, not even one. In sweet terms that are unintelligble without a lyric sheet he assures her and reassures her on how he holds it down because he's got a wife that loves him and a family to feed. All that's for the money! But not money for money's sake, money for "us". Sorry, my heart swells when I read something like that.

Sometimes though, a line like the one about sticking a bitch isn't just a construct, and is really just a depressing and frightening glimpse of male dominance and how the fact that women can get out the vote doesn't broadside traditional institutions of patriarchal condescension and violence.
Love Hurts - Rap's Black Eye is a painful, necessary and extremely unfortunate indication of that.
Ever hear Me and My Bitch by Notorious B.I.G.? Putting aside the term bitch for a moment that is one of the sweetest declarations of love I've ever heard (I'm not a female so I can't swoon on behalf of the ladies, but I'll put a stake in this and show you the lyrics, for the run-up of a takedown on a hilariously flawed attempt at getting miffed on behalf of the minge click here) that almost makes bitch as soothing as boo (in the romantic sense, not the scary one). He puts his manhood on the line by starting off with

"When I met you I admit my first thoughts was to trick
You look so good huh, I suck on your daddy's dick."

Do you know how much clout you have to have on the streets to get away with that? I don't, but I imagine a lot. Even when admitting to cheating he recounts her taking his toothbrush and scrubbing the toilet with it. And when he envisions their future together he does it like this
"And then we lie together, cry together, I swear to God I hope we fuckin die together." It makes me want to cry! But then there's another line that always cold-cocked me figuratively in the possible indication that it represented a cold-cocking that was much less of a cringe than something to be frightfully scared of. "You talk slick I beat you right." Apparently Faith Evans, who was with Big at the time, and the article attests to this, used to walk around with Jackie O glasses to cover her bruises. She's currently spokesperson for battered women in Harlem.

But on the other hand it's not always an indication of what goes on outside the studio. Check Willie Dee from the Geto Boys. The Geto Boys are even more notorious than 2 Live Crew, because where 2 Live Crew got their aesthetic from porn, Geto Boys got it from slasher films informing a gruesome spectacle of raping and killing that while raking in millions at the box office only got petitions on the radio and subpeonas in court. It was all a construct though, a self-consciously knowing construct, with the slasher films as a defense and the label horrorcore as a reassurance.

Willie Dee's solo outings were more political and sexual without the slasher ineffectual. Known for songs like Bald Headed Hoes (in which he goes to capital hill and demands they be killed) in real life he's a community activist. He was the national spokesperson for Women In Trouble, a houston based organization devoted to rehabiliting victims of rape and battery and reintegrating them into school and the workforce and helping them get on with life. They even made a lifetime movie out of it! Minus Willie Dee, of course, but still!

In the end, shit's complicated, but it's worth figuring out those complications instead of swearing them off as deplorable and amoral because they might be onto a sociological definition of reality untouchable by p.c. theoretical work, y'know?

"Blackwater, there were six of us but now we are five..."

2007-10-07T04:41:00.000-07:00

Why is it that when a scandal like the Blackwater hooplah breaks out it's always in an uproar over one isolated incident that may or may not raise a larger question about the legitimacy of the entire operation and not a systematic problem whose most recent send-up of humanity is only a reiteration of the nihilistic mockery that came before it (see: Iran-Contra)? To their credit, and not to go fringe-lauding by saying only the radical press had anything about this back when it could have been stopped early, the New York Times already covered this in 2004! Sure, it was relegated to the editorial section, but the upshot is the art of persuasion (yet the author (a Mother Jones contributor, no less!) does end on a sympathetic tone to the private-sector almost in spite of the information he laid out beforehand...):
"Need An Army? Just Pick Up The Phone"
It does bring up an important point, though, that Blackwater recycles soldiers from previous dictatorships (oh, U.S. sponsored! ;D) and when they get down to business they've gotten down to it before.
And to move even further away from fringe-lauding while using the fringe for the purpose of lauding, Newsweek broke out a story about the Pentagon considering Iraqi guns for hire and calling it the "Salvador Option" in January 2005 that's probably going to go unmentioned in the most recent breakdown. Here it is going mentioned in Democracy Now (links and all) in an interview with Allan Nairn, who broke the story on the original Salvadoran Death Squads:
Is the U.S. Organizing Salvador-Style Death Squads in Iraq?
On the note of Salvador-Style Death Squads, please go here!
School of the Americas Watch
And if this blog ever gets read, we (you, possible readers and I) can carpool up to the protest vigil on November 15-18 and prove "Solitarity" wrong!

Subpeona for Maroon 5

2007-10-06T08:59:00.000-07:00

Can someone tell me why Maroon 5 aren't up on capitol hill defending misogynistic posturing in rock music, or in their case white filtered funk-lite/boys with instruments doing time as boy band replacement music? Has anyone seen this video?

All the deplorable amoral rap video cliches are on full display, if not distorted and made far more bizarre. Owning a woman by shooting her lovers on the side despite later appearances bumping uglies with a bevy of equally scant-clothed females, random acts of criminal violence, and macho posturing on behalf of patriarchal (buzz word!) cool. Wtf? (p.s. I don't know why, but my mom loves this song and made no objections to the video, also wtf?)
Why does David Banner have to go up to capitol hill and risk imploding lungs on behalf of rap, along with Michael Eric Dyson and Master P?
Though Master P was mostly likely there on behalf of a business proposition and his soundscans, offering to clean up his language. He may have apologized to women for using the b-word but now expects them to do their part and help fund his next appearance on a reality show publicly indexing lavish displays of celebrity wealth.
David Banner on the other hand is legit. You don't get a Visionary Award by the National Black Caucus of the State Legislature for post-Katrina aid work by merely going on tv and saying something about it (though that's entirely welcome, too).
Basically he went up to D.C. and brought to life what he had already eloquently penned here:
http://bossip.com/4347/crumps-open-letter-to-black-leaders/
Michael Eric Dyson is legit, too.
Here's him pulling apart Bill Maher's mug-plenty punchlines as replacement for serious political discourse, also on behalf of hip-hop. Unfortunately he cites Common as a positive counter-point to misogyny in hip hop when way back when it was Common doing the "got more hoes than Spellman" bit. That's a cap-off though, the rest is wonderful!

Awareness

2007-10-06T06:24:00.000-07:00

Of it, I am well. As should be every other typographically burdened thunder-cruncher whose biggest fear is that the CIA will punish them in a secret european prison cell by forcing their arthritis-ridden freedom fighters to plunk out blasphemy.