ten good things
(it's been a while... hopefully the insane length of this will make up for my tardiness)
10.
i was in NYC about two months back, which afforded me the opportunity to geek out old-skool-style with purldrop about music. apparently both of our tastes are moving ever closer to seventies soft rock, of all things. the deeper we both delve into the folksy side of psychedelia, the more a mild hybrid of the two begins to open up. this soft little niche offers a number of charming, pleasantly arranged, well-conceived albums that don't get the love they deserve.
nick garrie's the nightmare of j.b. stanislas is one of the best of the bunch. released-- in france only (???)-- in 1969 to little fanfare, it fits nicely next to "baroque pop" gems like bill fay's time of the last persecution, nick drake's five leaves left and the first four solo albums by my beloved scott walker. garrie's breezy vocal delivery calls to mind early donovan, but his arrangements owe more to the psychedelic momentum that followed the release of sgt. pepper. the orchestration is often wildly inventive, but never overbearing. perfect summer music-- and probably the album that's been in heaviest rotation around these parts lately.
9.
my friend laura recently lent me chimamanda ngozi adichie's half of a yellow sun, which marks an unsettling first for danschank: the first novel i've read by someone literally younger than me (born in 1977). aargh! what am i doing with my life?
anyway, it's a remarkably accomplished book. it's a page turner that requires patience. an un-pretentious epic, let's say. the central narrative concerns the short-lived republic of biafra-- which seceded from nigeria in 1967, only to reunite in 1970 after a long conflict and intense famine. adichie approaches the subject through three figures: a beautiful young igbo activist named olanna, her 13 year old house-boy ugwu, and a british ex-pat named richard.
the structure of the book might be described as brilliantly lop-sided. from the start, i knew atrocities were coming. the famine that ultimately destroyed the republic was horrifying-- doctors without borders was formed as a response to it, for example. but rather than dive right into the horror, adichie spends nearly two-thirds of the book concentrating on her characters. beneath a cloud of oncoming pain and suffering, she offers an extended glimpse of long conversations, infidelities, difficult friendships, superstitions, celebrations, arguments and romances. i felt firmly located within her world by the time it began to unravel. during its final pages, it's as if its sense of gravity has transformed entirely. the balance begins to tip-- and the ship starts to sink. all the affections i'd generated over the previous 350-ish pages begin to mutate into something tragic and horrible. but also intimate and totally worthwhile.
8.
as many of you know from my recent art-related brainstorming, i'm preoccupied with the overlap between the political sphere and the world's resources. i've been browsing a number of eco-blogs like treehugger (really comprehensive, but too distracted by gadgets and celebrities) and world changing (more legit, not as fun to casually scroll through), and trying to alter my behavior as best i can. accordingly, i wanted to pass along a link to this article by paul roberts: the seven myths of energy independence.
.
i'm obviously not well-informed enough to offer a conclusive stamp-of-approval about everything it contains, but i found this piece comprehensive and convincing (not to mention funny... consider myth #5: some geek in silicon valley will fix the problem). roberts is especially weary of "gadgeting" our way out of the problem-- the idea that if we just keep consuming things with energy star or usda organic stamped on them, then al gore will carry us off to the heavens.
7.
when i think of "film canons," there's a certain kind of movie that always fits the bill. let's call it the david lean prototype: rise and fall of charismatic figure, grand historical backdrop, lavish sets, dynamic performances, and so on. in addition to lean's own stuff (lawrence of arabia, dr. zhivago), this type re-occurs throughout film history-- from citizen kane to the godfather to there will be blood. some of these flicks are great and some aren't, but they share a certain aesthetic path to critical acclaim.
still, there are weirder films that find their way to these "canons" as well. and not just brilliant, revisionist canons like jonathan rosenbaum's. your garden variety top-100 is bound to include ambiguous, understated films like the rules of the game or tokyo story. films with covert agendas, that lack battle sequences and handsome panoramas. for every wizard of oz, there's a sullivan's travels. for every stagecoach, a johnny guitar.
i recently revisited charles laughton's the night of the hunter, a film that's generally interpreted according to david lean-ish terms. hunter takes the guise of transcendental, biblical allegory-- its corny, moralistic side is brushed aside in favor of expressionistic photography and robert mitchum's charismatic performance. both of these things work splendidly, of course. but there's more to the picture.
revisiting night of the hunter, i was struck by what a knot of contradictions it is. it begins with the nauseating wholesomeness of a fifties sitcom. there's a remarkable lack of ambiguity-- it doesn't take long to sort the good guys from the bad guys, and character depth isn't part of its vision. even the strength of mitchum's performance (and let's face it, it's one of the greats) comes from its intensity rather than its complexity. but his arrival marks a tonal imbalance. mitchum, and the suddenly austere cinematography he seems to bring with him, appears as if from a different universe. the film becomes stylistically mis-matched. imperfect, even. this isn't cape fear-- it's our town, and mitchum marks a significant shift in the weather.
and he's not the only sign of climate change. laughton is an impulsive director-- he's hygienic one minute and nightmarish the next. instead of balancing the two, he lets each impulse exhaust itself. and the discordant physicality this creates is unlike anything i've seen.
when the harper kids famously take to the river, it's as if the film itself begins to dream. nothing that comes prior-- not even mitchum's malevolence-- prepares me for this extended, gentle twilight. in a typical film, the shift would be psychological. but laughton doesn't develop his characters. the kids remain dull and innocent, but their world begins expanding. as the boat moves on, it sheds its human skin. there's too much atmosphere-- too much darkness, too little dialogue, too many creatures of the forest. as a rupture in the film's narrative, it neither adds nor subtracts anything. but it creates a kind of simultaneity. the universe seems to express itself-- to align itself to the events onscreen-- and these kids aren't the only instruments of its expression. hell, they might not even be its focus.
and eventually the film wakes up. the boat comes ashore, and lilian gish makes her entrance. gish's den-mother moralizing isn't radically different from the stuff at the beginning of the film, but by this point i've been banged around quite a bit. the story she steps into is equal parts horror movie, bible study and surrealist dream. with her keen, silent-era physicality, she anchors these impulses. as she sits with a shotgun in her rocking chair at the film's climax, i get a sense of her gravity. she seems to embody the same eerie presence i felt on the river. when mitchum arrives, i buy into the biblical tension that results. it's as if the film prepares me for it physically, redefining my capacity to dream as it rocks me off to troubled sleep.
6.
while we're on the subject of idiosyncratic, well-respected movies that are worth their hype, i gotta say that WALL-E is pretty remarkable. a few scattered thoughts...
years ago, when pixar released toy story, i remember this conversation i had with my friend justin about it. i thought it was ok, being vaguely impressed with the animation. but justin hated it. he thought it subtly implied that creativity is bad. if you've seen the movie, the bad kid pulls apart all his toys and reassembles them. they then become evil monster toys that torment all the normal ones. justin thought the implicit message was: don't fuck with your toys. a cowboy is a cowboy, an astronaut is an astronaut and boring, bullshit actors like tom hanks and tim allen should be accepted uncritically as role models. fantasy should be passive and unambiguous.
now, WALL-E might also be a pixar movie, but its message is almost the exact opposite. one of my favorite moments in the film is where we're introduced to WALL-E's home. it's a cabinet of curiosities not unlike papa jules' cabin in l'atalante... but instead of old phonographs and KITTIES, there's out-moded computer parts and cockroaches. WALL-E is a radical aesthete-- he finds pleasure almost exclusively in the impractical. it's telling that "holding hands" becomes so central to the storyline-- a gesture that exists only to make something special. WALL-E seems to live exclusively for this sort of "specialness"-- which is repeatedly presented as impractical, accidental and "useless."
for a movie notable for its sweetness and sincerity, WALL-E is remarkably frank about some awful things. i couldn't help thinking of philip k. dick as i watched him do his "work"... transforming trash into compact cubes and creating obelisks out of them that no one sees. WALL-E's post-apocalyptic universe fits dick's definition of "kipple" (from do androids dream of electric sheep? among others) to a T:
Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday's homeopape. When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself ... the entire universe is moving towards a final state of total, absolute kippleization.
it's a sentimental movie in a lot of ways, but not about stuff like this. WALL-E's labor is stupid and soulless, and there's no redemption to be found in it. the film's also come under some criticism for its portrayal of obesity, but i think it needs to go as far as it does. there's a crunchiness to its world of disembodied, instant-messaging zombies that's timely and relevant. and the film is smart enough to argue against culture instead of individuals... in keeping with its love of the inconsequential, a simple act of introduction becomes a moment of redemption. when WALL-E accidentally bumps into "john" (voiced by cliff from cheers... nice touch), his greeting is enough to jolt him out of his passionless existence. like night of the hunter, WALL-E isn't focused on intellectual complexity. i'm not implying that its arguments are tantamount to the society of the spectacle (psst... they're better...). but it is that rare film that can make something with deep roots understandable to a wide audience.
in fact, much of its strength comes from this simplicity... from the way this little dude seems incapable of passive engagement, and the way he approaches each scenario with the same goofy generosity. even the romance avoids a lot of the usual trappings. hell, take away names and voices and it might well be genderless (eve's slender, i-pod "femininity" is cleverly canceled out by her ability to needlessly transform into a weapon of mass destruction). too often, romantic comedies-- whether aimed at children or adults-- are about boys trying to civilize themselves. it's true of lady and the tramp, and it's true of knocked up. the male character is brutish, or defiant, or vulgar, or filthy... and the woman forces him to clean up his act. which is a boring, unfair imbalance-- the dude gets to wrestle with various demons, have adventures, provide me with laughs... and the girl gets, i dunno, rewarded for her patience? in WALL-E, there's almost none of this nonsense. if there are "masculine" traits to be found, they belong exclusively to eve. she's the one who saves the day... and does it in the least angelina-jolie-sexpot way possible. but ultimately it's not about male/female at all. it's about making connections, and it sure as hell made one with me.
5.
man, i had a blast in chicago. it was all about great mexican food, decent conversation and AWESOME KUNG FU MOVIES. chicago seems like a great blend of a bunch of different cities. there's generally more enthusiasm there than here in philly, but none of that overbearing self-promotion horseshit i can't escape in NYC. i felt like it was really easy to chill out there, and i met some great people who were willing to do it with me.
plus, check out these handsome longshoreman i picked up down at the docks:
apologies if this is the 60th time this photo has ended up on your friends' page... isn't it weird how the grey-hair on my temples make me look like that stretchy guy from the fantastic four? also pay close attention to the intense awesomeness of everyone in the periphery of this photo... good times...
4.
i'm pretty sure bing_crosby mentioned this like three months ago, but since it's been forever since i put one of these together, i gotta mention how awesome carla bozulich's evangelista was live. *TOTALLY FUCKING INTENSE.* and to make things even better, i saw them in the chapel of the first unitarian church here in philly. it's gonna be tough to describe what this setting was like. here's a picture i found while googling that doesn't do it justice:
you can't quite get a sense of it, but the room is tiny tiny tiny. seats 50 people. and considering evangelista had about 8 people on stage at any given time, it was tightly packed. add to that the music itself, a really intimate mix of avant-garde noise, blues, and patti smith-style bad-ass-ed-ness. i wrote about it before, actually.
when the doors shut, and the performance began, it felt claustrophobic and inescapable. but in a good way. bozulich wandered up and down the aisles-- whispering, hollering, breaking the space between performer and audience in exciting ways. every once in a while, she'd drop the mike entirely and sing loud enough to be heard without amplification. i could feel it run up my spine when she did that. a one of a kind experience.
3.
as tired as i am with the whole stuff white people like schenanigans (i'm not linking to it... enough already), the site got me thinking about the ways that being white, educated, privileged, etc. actually does amount to a culture. maybe there's even a fear of "culture" simmering beneath that site. it's as if, by endlessly renewing my ability to condemn myself, my tofu-eatin' ass avoids the intimacy of "culture." these traits emerge as embarrassing residue, and the antithesis of authenticity. lazy self-ridicule replaces legit introspection.
which isn't to say that stuff white people like isn't spot-on sometimes. or funny, for that matter. but it's emblematic of this pannicky, guilty-white-liberal button that lurks beneath a lot of people i know (maybe myself?). i'm trying to un-plug that button, frankly. and i think one of the ways to do it is to be honest about my so-called "whiteness."
about a month back, i got pretty wrapped up in this HBO show called in treatment. it's not the best show in the world. it gets bogged down in a may/december romance that's never as interesting as it wants to be. and it lays on the melodrama a little too heavily. the premise is enjoyably simple-- each week, for a half hour at a time, a psychologist (played by gabriel byrne) meets with one of his patients. each patient (there's 3 individuals and one couple) gets a specific day, and then on fridays byrne visits his own therapist. that's it. the whole show is people talking.
my favorite plotline concerns sophie. as far as "whiteness" is concerned, sophie is about as wretched as they come. she's a spoiled suburban teen. she's defensive, petty and materialistic. she's cruel to byrne, she's really cruel to her mother, and she's EVIL to her friends and classmates. i would not have hung out with her in high school.
but rather than satirize her shortcomings, the show kinda buries itself into them. i guess the tactics aren't that unusual: get into a character's head to create empathy, follow bad behavior toward childhood trauma, vulnerability, etc. these tricks aren't anything new. but in treatment is unusually sensitive about them. the tone is respectful, and its intensity is often unforgiving. sophie's drama rarely falls prey to the soapy sensationalism that scars some other parts of the series.
her story is typical of white privilege at its worst. she's a product of superficial parenting, substituting wealth for care and concern. the adults that surround her are mostly suspended adolescents, too concerned with success and appearances and getting laid to attend to her. when sophie asserts the suicidal tendencies that land her on the therapist's couch, these adults barely know what symptoms to look for, let alone what help to offer.
sophie's alienation plays out almost exclusively in terms of the body. her sessions are repeatedly marked by physical feats, food taboos and sexual thresholds. her uncertainty is always performative; she uses movement both as a means of defense and as a cry for help. it's a little weird to talk about this as a dude, but there's something unfortunately familiar about her. in treatment got me thinking about the ways women-- and rich, young white women in particular-- often inhabit vastly different social bodies than my own. by the series end, i recognized that my own feelings of alienation-- which are almost always interior, private and psychological-- carry with them a kind of privilege. unlike sophie, i rarely feel obligated to parrot some unnatural social disguise. because of race and gender (not to mention weight and age... though less so with the latter!), i am entitled to feel "normal" physically. sophie is a potent reminder that most people aren't. i guess this is the kind of "whiteness" i'd rather be thinking about.
2.
i'm in love with the writing of rebecca solnit (more proof that when erin_lindsay says something is worth my time, it almost certainly is). i started with a field guide to getting lost, which is nearly perfect, and was so fired up by it that i quickly worked through storming the gates of paradise: landscapes for politics as well. solnit writes in a style i'm a sucker for-- a hybrid of social theory, history, art-history, philosophy and personal memoir. put simply, she's the kind of writer that might seem "unfocused" or "digressive," if her thoughts weren't so poetic and unique.
as far as content is concerned, she fits somewhere between the eco-uncertainty of mike davis and the cultural criticism of walter benjamin. solnit has a knack for unusual subjects and analogies. she describes the social neglect of urban spaces through the language of eighties punk. she sees similar trends in landscape photography and the pube-grooming standards of mainstream porn. she discovers that crows have profited from globalization as much as humans have, with similarly unsettling results. and there's no self-righteousness to her language. i can sense her curiosity as i read. it's as if she's sharing her thoughts as they appear in her head.
solnit is also chock-full of tidbits i can apply to the way i think about art. my own art, even. check out this little morsel from a field guide to getting lost (pages 89-90), about cities and ruins:
A city is built to resemble a conscious mind, a network that can calculate, administrate, manufacture. Ruins become the unconscious of a city, its memory, unknown, darkness, lost lands, and in this truly bring it to life. With ruins a city springs free of its plans into something as intricate as life, something that can be explored but perhaps not mapped. This is the same transmutation spoken of in fairy tales when statues and toys and animals become human, though they come to life and with ruin a city comes to death, but a generative death like the corpse that feeds flowers. An urban ruin is a place that has fallen outside the economic life of the city, and it is in some way an ideal home for the art that also falls outside the ordinary production and consumption of the city.
word to that.
1.
i've decided to make a mixtape for each season of the year. i posted spring's a few months back. the idea is to choose music that vaguely fits the time of the year. this is summer's:
cover image from square america aka the best site ever
1. nick garrie, "the nightmare of j.b. stanislas"
2. julie driscoll and the brian auger trinity, "indian rope man"
3. the osyatanaa show band, "disco africa"
4. the outsiders, "i love you no. 2"
5. david axelrod, "holy thursday"
6. the go-betweens, "cattle and cane"
7. grenadine, "i only have eyes for you" (sidenote: jenny toomey has the best voice in the world)
8. the bodines, "skankin queens"
9. the rolling stones, "out of time (orchestrated version)"
10. royal trux, "stop"
11. desmond dekker, "unity"
12. laurel aitken, "jericho"
13. nara leao, "fui bem feliz"
14. france gall, "chanson indienne"
15. mogollar, "sun flower"
16. p.p. arnold, "the first cut is the deepest"
DOWNLOAD HERE
let me know if those tracks don't load in the right order on your i-tunes. IT HAS COME TO MY ATTENTION THAT CLICKING ON "ALBUM" VIEW IN I-TUNES (I.E. PLAYLIST APPEARS BY ALBUM) IS THE WAY TO MAKE THE TRACKS APPEAR IN THE RIGHT ORDER. i'm trying to get the nuts and bolts of this right. also, track #16 is blatantly stolen from liamtheruiner's girl group mixtape. which, accordingly, is part of his amazing attempt to make 101 mixtapes in 101 genres. check them out if you're not already. it's probably the most awesome thing goin on in lj-land at the moment...
10.
i was in NYC about two months back, which afforded me the opportunity to geek out old-skool-style with purldrop about music. apparently both of our tastes are moving ever closer to seventies soft rock, of all things. the deeper we both delve into the folksy side of psychedelia, the more a mild hybrid of the two begins to open up. this soft little niche offers a number of charming, pleasantly arranged, well-conceived albums that don't get the love they deserve.
nick garrie's the nightmare of j.b. stanislas is one of the best of the bunch. released-- in france only (???)-- in 1969 to little fanfare, it fits nicely next to "baroque pop" gems like bill fay's time of the last persecution, nick drake's five leaves left and the first four solo albums by my beloved scott walker. garrie's breezy vocal delivery calls to mind early donovan, but his arrangements owe more to the psychedelic momentum that followed the release of sgt. pepper. the orchestration is often wildly inventive, but never overbearing. perfect summer music-- and probably the album that's been in heaviest rotation around these parts lately.
9.
my friend laura recently lent me chimamanda ngozi adichie's half of a yellow sun, which marks an unsettling first for danschank: the first novel i've read by someone literally younger than me (born in 1977). aargh! what am i doing with my life?
anyway, it's a remarkably accomplished book. it's a page turner that requires patience. an un-pretentious epic, let's say. the central narrative concerns the short-lived republic of biafra-- which seceded from nigeria in 1967, only to reunite in 1970 after a long conflict and intense famine. adichie approaches the subject through three figures: a beautiful young igbo activist named olanna, her 13 year old house-boy ugwu, and a british ex-pat named richard.
the structure of the book might be described as brilliantly lop-sided. from the start, i knew atrocities were coming. the famine that ultimately destroyed the republic was horrifying-- doctors without borders was formed as a response to it, for example. but rather than dive right into the horror, adichie spends nearly two-thirds of the book concentrating on her characters. beneath a cloud of oncoming pain and suffering, she offers an extended glimpse of long conversations, infidelities, difficult friendships, superstitions, celebrations, arguments and romances. i felt firmly located within her world by the time it began to unravel. during its final pages, it's as if its sense of gravity has transformed entirely. the balance begins to tip-- and the ship starts to sink. all the affections i'd generated over the previous 350-ish pages begin to mutate into something tragic and horrible. but also intimate and totally worthwhile.
8.
as many of you know from my recent art-related brainstorming, i'm preoccupied with the overlap between the political sphere and the world's resources. i've been browsing a number of eco-blogs like treehugger (really comprehensive, but too distracted by gadgets and celebrities) and world changing (more legit, not as fun to casually scroll through), and trying to alter my behavior as best i can. accordingly, i wanted to pass along a link to this article by paul roberts: the seven myths of energy independence.
.
i'm obviously not well-informed enough to offer a conclusive stamp-of-approval about everything it contains, but i found this piece comprehensive and convincing (not to mention funny... consider myth #5: some geek in silicon valley will fix the problem). roberts is especially weary of "gadgeting" our way out of the problem-- the idea that if we just keep consuming things with energy star or usda organic stamped on them, then al gore will carry us off to the heavens.
7.
when i think of "film canons," there's a certain kind of movie that always fits the bill. let's call it the david lean prototype: rise and fall of charismatic figure, grand historical backdrop, lavish sets, dynamic performances, and so on. in addition to lean's own stuff (lawrence of arabia, dr. zhivago), this type re-occurs throughout film history-- from citizen kane to the godfather to there will be blood. some of these flicks are great and some aren't, but they share a certain aesthetic path to critical acclaim.
still, there are weirder films that find their way to these "canons" as well. and not just brilliant, revisionist canons like jonathan rosenbaum's. your garden variety top-100 is bound to include ambiguous, understated films like the rules of the game or tokyo story. films with covert agendas, that lack battle sequences and handsome panoramas. for every wizard of oz, there's a sullivan's travels. for every stagecoach, a johnny guitar.
i recently revisited charles laughton's the night of the hunter, a film that's generally interpreted according to david lean-ish terms. hunter takes the guise of transcendental, biblical allegory-- its corny, moralistic side is brushed aside in favor of expressionistic photography and robert mitchum's charismatic performance. both of these things work splendidly, of course. but there's more to the picture.
revisiting night of the hunter, i was struck by what a knot of contradictions it is. it begins with the nauseating wholesomeness of a fifties sitcom. there's a remarkable lack of ambiguity-- it doesn't take long to sort the good guys from the bad guys, and character depth isn't part of its vision. even the strength of mitchum's performance (and let's face it, it's one of the greats) comes from its intensity rather than its complexity. but his arrival marks a tonal imbalance. mitchum, and the suddenly austere cinematography he seems to bring with him, appears as if from a different universe. the film becomes stylistically mis-matched. imperfect, even. this isn't cape fear-- it's our town, and mitchum marks a significant shift in the weather.
and he's not the only sign of climate change. laughton is an impulsive director-- he's hygienic one minute and nightmarish the next. instead of balancing the two, he lets each impulse exhaust itself. and the discordant physicality this creates is unlike anything i've seen.
when the harper kids famously take to the river, it's as if the film itself begins to dream. nothing that comes prior-- not even mitchum's malevolence-- prepares me for this extended, gentle twilight. in a typical film, the shift would be psychological. but laughton doesn't develop his characters. the kids remain dull and innocent, but their world begins expanding. as the boat moves on, it sheds its human skin. there's too much atmosphere-- too much darkness, too little dialogue, too many creatures of the forest. as a rupture in the film's narrative, it neither adds nor subtracts anything. but it creates a kind of simultaneity. the universe seems to express itself-- to align itself to the events onscreen-- and these kids aren't the only instruments of its expression. hell, they might not even be its focus.
and eventually the film wakes up. the boat comes ashore, and lilian gish makes her entrance. gish's den-mother moralizing isn't radically different from the stuff at the beginning of the film, but by this point i've been banged around quite a bit. the story she steps into is equal parts horror movie, bible study and surrealist dream. with her keen, silent-era physicality, she anchors these impulses. as she sits with a shotgun in her rocking chair at the film's climax, i get a sense of her gravity. she seems to embody the same eerie presence i felt on the river. when mitchum arrives, i buy into the biblical tension that results. it's as if the film prepares me for it physically, redefining my capacity to dream as it rocks me off to troubled sleep.
6.
while we're on the subject of idiosyncratic, well-respected movies that are worth their hype, i gotta say that WALL-E is pretty remarkable. a few scattered thoughts...
years ago, when pixar released toy story, i remember this conversation i had with my friend justin about it. i thought it was ok, being vaguely impressed with the animation. but justin hated it. he thought it subtly implied that creativity is bad. if you've seen the movie, the bad kid pulls apart all his toys and reassembles them. they then become evil monster toys that torment all the normal ones. justin thought the implicit message was: don't fuck with your toys. a cowboy is a cowboy, an astronaut is an astronaut and boring, bullshit actors like tom hanks and tim allen should be accepted uncritically as role models. fantasy should be passive and unambiguous.
now, WALL-E might also be a pixar movie, but its message is almost the exact opposite. one of my favorite moments in the film is where we're introduced to WALL-E's home. it's a cabinet of curiosities not unlike papa jules' cabin in l'atalante... but instead of old phonographs and KITTIES, there's out-moded computer parts and cockroaches. WALL-E is a radical aesthete-- he finds pleasure almost exclusively in the impractical. it's telling that "holding hands" becomes so central to the storyline-- a gesture that exists only to make something special. WALL-E seems to live exclusively for this sort of "specialness"-- which is repeatedly presented as impractical, accidental and "useless."
for a movie notable for its sweetness and sincerity, WALL-E is remarkably frank about some awful things. i couldn't help thinking of philip k. dick as i watched him do his "work"... transforming trash into compact cubes and creating obelisks out of them that no one sees. WALL-E's post-apocalyptic universe fits dick's definition of "kipple" (from do androids dream of electric sheep? among others) to a T:
Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday's homeopape. When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself ... the entire universe is moving towards a final state of total, absolute kippleization.
it's a sentimental movie in a lot of ways, but not about stuff like this. WALL-E's labor is stupid and soulless, and there's no redemption to be found in it. the film's also come under some criticism for its portrayal of obesity, but i think it needs to go as far as it does. there's a crunchiness to its world of disembodied, instant-messaging zombies that's timely and relevant. and the film is smart enough to argue against culture instead of individuals... in keeping with its love of the inconsequential, a simple act of introduction becomes a moment of redemption. when WALL-E accidentally bumps into "john" (voiced by cliff from cheers... nice touch), his greeting is enough to jolt him out of his passionless existence. like night of the hunter, WALL-E isn't focused on intellectual complexity. i'm not implying that its arguments are tantamount to the society of the spectacle (psst... they're better...). but it is that rare film that can make something with deep roots understandable to a wide audience.
in fact, much of its strength comes from this simplicity... from the way this little dude seems incapable of passive engagement, and the way he approaches each scenario with the same goofy generosity. even the romance avoids a lot of the usual trappings. hell, take away names and voices and it might well be genderless (eve's slender, i-pod "femininity" is cleverly canceled out by her ability to needlessly transform into a weapon of mass destruction). too often, romantic comedies-- whether aimed at children or adults-- are about boys trying to civilize themselves. it's true of lady and the tramp, and it's true of knocked up. the male character is brutish, or defiant, or vulgar, or filthy... and the woman forces him to clean up his act. which is a boring, unfair imbalance-- the dude gets to wrestle with various demons, have adventures, provide me with laughs... and the girl gets, i dunno, rewarded for her patience? in WALL-E, there's almost none of this nonsense. if there are "masculine" traits to be found, they belong exclusively to eve. she's the one who saves the day... and does it in the least angelina-jolie-sexpot way possible. but ultimately it's not about male/female at all. it's about making connections, and it sure as hell made one with me.
5.
man, i had a blast in chicago. it was all about great mexican food, decent conversation and AWESOME KUNG FU MOVIES. chicago seems like a great blend of a bunch of different cities. there's generally more enthusiasm there than here in philly, but none of that overbearing self-promotion horseshit i can't escape in NYC. i felt like it was really easy to chill out there, and i met some great people who were willing to do it with me.
plus, check out these handsome longshoreman i picked up down at the docks:
apologies if this is the 60th time this photo has ended up on your friends' page... isn't it weird how the grey-hair on my temples make me look like that stretchy guy from the fantastic four? also pay close attention to the intense awesomeness of everyone in the periphery of this photo... good times...
4.
i'm pretty sure bing_crosby mentioned this like three months ago, but since it's been forever since i put one of these together, i gotta mention how awesome carla bozulich's evangelista was live. *TOTALLY FUCKING INTENSE.* and to make things even better, i saw them in the chapel of the first unitarian church here in philly. it's gonna be tough to describe what this setting was like. here's a picture i found while googling that doesn't do it justice:
you can't quite get a sense of it, but the room is tiny tiny tiny. seats 50 people. and considering evangelista had about 8 people on stage at any given time, it was tightly packed. add to that the music itself, a really intimate mix of avant-garde noise, blues, and patti smith-style bad-ass-ed-ness. i wrote about it before, actually.
when the doors shut, and the performance began, it felt claustrophobic and inescapable. but in a good way. bozulich wandered up and down the aisles-- whispering, hollering, breaking the space between performer and audience in exciting ways. every once in a while, she'd drop the mike entirely and sing loud enough to be heard without amplification. i could feel it run up my spine when she did that. a one of a kind experience.
3.
as tired as i am with the whole stuff white people like schenanigans (i'm not linking to it... enough already), the site got me thinking about the ways that being white, educated, privileged, etc. actually does amount to a culture. maybe there's even a fear of "culture" simmering beneath that site. it's as if, by endlessly renewing my ability to condemn myself, my tofu-eatin' ass avoids the intimacy of "culture." these traits emerge as embarrassing residue, and the antithesis of authenticity. lazy self-ridicule replaces legit introspection.
which isn't to say that stuff white people like isn't spot-on sometimes. or funny, for that matter. but it's emblematic of this pannicky, guilty-white-liberal button that lurks beneath a lot of people i know (maybe myself?). i'm trying to un-plug that button, frankly. and i think one of the ways to do it is to be honest about my so-called "whiteness."
about a month back, i got pretty wrapped up in this HBO show called in treatment. it's not the best show in the world. it gets bogged down in a may/december romance that's never as interesting as it wants to be. and it lays on the melodrama a little too heavily. the premise is enjoyably simple-- each week, for a half hour at a time, a psychologist (played by gabriel byrne) meets with one of his patients. each patient (there's 3 individuals and one couple) gets a specific day, and then on fridays byrne visits his own therapist. that's it. the whole show is people talking.
my favorite plotline concerns sophie. as far as "whiteness" is concerned, sophie is about as wretched as they come. she's a spoiled suburban teen. she's defensive, petty and materialistic. she's cruel to byrne, she's really cruel to her mother, and she's EVIL to her friends and classmates. i would not have hung out with her in high school.
but rather than satirize her shortcomings, the show kinda buries itself into them. i guess the tactics aren't that unusual: get into a character's head to create empathy, follow bad behavior toward childhood trauma, vulnerability, etc. these tricks aren't anything new. but in treatment is unusually sensitive about them. the tone is respectful, and its intensity is often unforgiving. sophie's drama rarely falls prey to the soapy sensationalism that scars some other parts of the series.
her story is typical of white privilege at its worst. she's a product of superficial parenting, substituting wealth for care and concern. the adults that surround her are mostly suspended adolescents, too concerned with success and appearances and getting laid to attend to her. when sophie asserts the suicidal tendencies that land her on the therapist's couch, these adults barely know what symptoms to look for, let alone what help to offer.
sophie's alienation plays out almost exclusively in terms of the body. her sessions are repeatedly marked by physical feats, food taboos and sexual thresholds. her uncertainty is always performative; she uses movement both as a means of defense and as a cry for help. it's a little weird to talk about this as a dude, but there's something unfortunately familiar about her. in treatment got me thinking about the ways women-- and rich, young white women in particular-- often inhabit vastly different social bodies than my own. by the series end, i recognized that my own feelings of alienation-- which are almost always interior, private and psychological-- carry with them a kind of privilege. unlike sophie, i rarely feel obligated to parrot some unnatural social disguise. because of race and gender (not to mention weight and age... though less so with the latter!), i am entitled to feel "normal" physically. sophie is a potent reminder that most people aren't. i guess this is the kind of "whiteness" i'd rather be thinking about.
2.
i'm in love with the writing of rebecca solnit (more proof that when erin_lindsay says something is worth my time, it almost certainly is). i started with a field guide to getting lost, which is nearly perfect, and was so fired up by it that i quickly worked through storming the gates of paradise: landscapes for politics as well. solnit writes in a style i'm a sucker for-- a hybrid of social theory, history, art-history, philosophy and personal memoir. put simply, she's the kind of writer that might seem "unfocused" or "digressive," if her thoughts weren't so poetic and unique.
as far as content is concerned, she fits somewhere between the eco-uncertainty of mike davis and the cultural criticism of walter benjamin. solnit has a knack for unusual subjects and analogies. she describes the social neglect of urban spaces through the language of eighties punk. she sees similar trends in landscape photography and the pube-grooming standards of mainstream porn. she discovers that crows have profited from globalization as much as humans have, with similarly unsettling results. and there's no self-righteousness to her language. i can sense her curiosity as i read. it's as if she's sharing her thoughts as they appear in her head.
solnit is also chock-full of tidbits i can apply to the way i think about art. my own art, even. check out this little morsel from a field guide to getting lost (pages 89-90), about cities and ruins:
A city is built to resemble a conscious mind, a network that can calculate, administrate, manufacture. Ruins become the unconscious of a city, its memory, unknown, darkness, lost lands, and in this truly bring it to life. With ruins a city springs free of its plans into something as intricate as life, something that can be explored but perhaps not mapped. This is the same transmutation spoken of in fairy tales when statues and toys and animals become human, though they come to life and with ruin a city comes to death, but a generative death like the corpse that feeds flowers. An urban ruin is a place that has fallen outside the economic life of the city, and it is in some way an ideal home for the art that also falls outside the ordinary production and consumption of the city.
word to that.
1.
i've decided to make a mixtape for each season of the year. i posted spring's a few months back. the idea is to choose music that vaguely fits the time of the year. this is summer's:
cover image from square america aka the best site ever
1. nick garrie, "the nightmare of j.b. stanislas"
2. julie driscoll and the brian auger trinity, "indian rope man"
3. the osyatanaa show band, "disco africa"
4. the outsiders, "i love you no. 2"
5. david axelrod, "holy thursday"
6. the go-betweens, "cattle and cane"
7. grenadine, "i only have eyes for you" (sidenote: jenny toomey has the best voice in the world)
8. the bodines, "skankin queens"
9. the rolling stones, "out of time (orchestrated version)"
10. royal trux, "stop"
11. desmond dekker, "unity"
12. laurel aitken, "jericho"
13. nara leao, "fui bem feliz"
14. france gall, "chanson indienne"
15. mogollar, "sun flower"
16. p.p. arnold, "the first cut is the deepest"
DOWNLOAD HERE
let me know if those tracks don't load in the right order on your i-tunes. IT HAS COME TO MY ATTENTION THAT CLICKING ON "ALBUM" VIEW IN I-TUNES (I.E. PLAYLIST APPEARS BY ALBUM) IS THE WAY TO MAKE THE TRACKS APPEAR IN THE RIGHT ORDER. i'm trying to get the nuts and bolts of this right. also, track #16 is blatantly stolen from liamtheruiner's girl group mixtape. which, accordingly, is part of his amazing attempt to make 101 mixtapes in 101 genres. check them out if you're not already. it's probably the most awesome thing goin on in lj-land at the moment...