sshaviro – Page 24 – The Pinocchio Theory

Meetups

Tonight I went to, not one, but two meetings arranged through meetup.com. The first (pictured) was for users of Movable Type, the software that runs this blog. The second was for supporters of drafting General Wesley Clark for President. Due to the fact that both meetings were at the same time, as well as that we needed to go home to put Adah to bed, I didn’t get to spend much time at either meeting. Hopefully I will get another chance to meet my fellow bloggers, all of whom seemed to be genuinely nice folks.
As for the Wesley Clark meeting, it was enormous, and showed that many people have great enthusiasm for a Clark Presidential run. Me, I’m supporting Clark, at least for the time being, because I think he has the best chance of actually being able to defeat Bush. Among the Democratic contenders, Kucinich and Sharpton are the two with whom I am most in ideological agreement, but neither of them has a snowball’s chance in hell of winning either the nomination or(if one of them did, by some fluke, get nominated) the general election. As for the party hacks who are in the race – Lieberman, Gephardt, Edwards, Kerry – they are all tired, and spell worse-than-Gore disaster in November 2004. That leaves Dean, who is in some ways admirable, and who is very popular in Seattle, but I don’t really believe he can defeat Bush either (not because he is too “liberal”, which he really isn’t, but because I think is appeal is too limited, and he is too unexciting a candidate; he could carry the northern tier of states (like New England and the Pacific Northwest) which more often than not go Democratic anyway, but not much else. Clark, however, is telegenic and smart – I really think he’s the only Democrat who could wipe the floor with Bush in a debate. I don’t know many of his stands in detail, but his defense of Enlightenment values and secular liberal democracy on Bill Maher last weekend was quite encouraging, and he can get away with it because he’s a General (no way Bush, Rove, and company will be able to impugn his patriotism).
So I guess you could say I am taking a Kierkegaardian leap of faith in endorsing Clark – just as Hunter Thompson did when he came out for Jimmy Carter.

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Tonight I went to, not one, but two meetings arranged through meetup.com. The first (pictured) was for users of Movable Type, the software that runs this blog. The second was for supporters of drafting General Wesley Clark for President. Due to the fact that both meetings were at the same time, as well as that we needed to go home to put Adah to bed, I didn’t get to spend much time at either meeting. Hopefully I will get another chance to meet my fellow bloggers, all of whom seemed to be genuinely nice folks.
As for the Wesley Clark meeting, it was enormous, and showed that many people have great enthusiasm for a Clark Presidential run. Me, I’m supporting Clark, at least for the time being, because I think he has the best chance of actually being able to defeat Bush. Among the Democratic contenders, Kucinich and Sharpton are the two with whom I am most in ideological agreement, but neither of them has a snowball’s chance in hell of winning either the nomination or(if one of them did, by some fluke, get nominated) the general election. As for the party hacks who are in the race – Lieberman, Gephardt, Edwards, Kerry – they are all tired, and spell worse-than-Gore disaster in November 2004. That leaves Dean, who is in some ways admirable, and who is very popular in Seattle, but I don’t really believe he can defeat Bush either (not because he is too “liberal”, which he really isn’t, but because I think is appeal is too limited, and he is too unexciting a candidate; he could carry the northern tier of states, like New England and the Pacific Northwest, which more often than not go Democratic anyway, but not much else). Clark, however, is telegenic and smart – I really think he’s the only Democrat who could wipe the floor with Bush in a debate. I don’t know many of his stands in detail, but his defense of Enlightenment values and secular liberal democracy on Bill Maher last weekend was quite encouraging, and he can get away with it because he’s a General (no way Bush, Rove, and company will be able to impugn his patriotism).
So I guess you could say I am taking a Kierkegaardian leap of faith in endorsing Clark – just as Hunter Thompson did when he came out for Jimmy Carter.

(Non-) Cult Films

Abel Ferrara, New Rose Hotel
Nancy Savoca, The 24 Hour Woman
Alex de la Iglesia, Perdita Durango, aka Dance With the Devil
Alison Maclean, Crush

These are all astonishing films which almost nobody has seen, and which have yet to get anything like the recognition they deserve; not even the underground following of, say, Donnie Darko.

Seeing that Alex Cox film the other day reminded me of other recent films which, from my point of view, OUGHT to be recognized as great cult films but which unaccountably aren’t. Here’s a short list (undoubtably, I am leaving things out, but here are some that come to mind immediately, in addition to Cox’s Revengers Tragedy). These are all astonishing films which almost nobody has seen, and which have yet to get anything like the recognition they deserve; not even the underground following of, say, Richard Kelly’s brilliant Donnie Darko.

Abel Ferrara, New Rose Hotel
Nancy Savoca, The 24 Hour Woman
Alex de la Iglesia, Perdita Durango, aka Dance With the Devil
Alison Maclean, Crush

Revengers Tragedy

Alex Cox is mostly known for just one film, his first, Repo Man. But in fact, he has been making superb, innovative films for two decades now, mostly outside Hollywood, and without access to Hollywood funding. Many of his films are not well distributed and hard to see, but among the ones I’ve seen, I certainly think that Sid and Nancy, Walker, and El Patrullero, at the very least, are major works. To their number can now be added Cox’s latest work, Revengers Tragedy. This film is a contemporary staging – set in grimy Liverpool – of the Jacobean play of that name by Thomas Middleton. Murder, rape, incest, fratricide, revenge, venality, corruption, and grotesquerie (poisoned skulls!) are the order of the day; Middleton’s vision translates well to a contemporary world of grimy slums and fashionable clubs. Cox’s direction is always visually inventive, with fluid camera movement, odd framings, and unexpected cuts and inserts. The soundtrack is mostly pounding dance music, together with a wide variety of modes of speech, from Middleton’s blank verse to British working-class slang to the formal, standardized language of media and political pronouncements. The film as a whole is both kaleidoscopic and subtle, and it really does manage to convey the tone of the play, at once grimly nihilistic and absurd.

Alex Cox is mostly known for just one film, his first, Repo Man. But in fact, he has been making superb, innovative films for two decades now, mostly outside Hollywood, and without access to Hollywood funding. Many of his films are not well distributed and hard to see, but among the ones I’ve seen, I certainly think that Sid and Nancy, Walker, and El Patrullero, at the very least, are major works. To their number can now be added Cox’s latest work, Revengers Tragedy. This film is a contemporary (or rather, near-future) staging – set in a postapocalyptic, grimy Liverpool – of the Jacobean play of that name by Thomas Middleton. Murder, rape, incest, fratricide, suicide, revenge, venality, corruption, and grotesquerie (poisoned skulls!) are the order of the day; Middleton’s vision translates well to a contemporary world of grimy slums and fashionable clubs. Cox’s direction is always visually inventive, with fluid camera movement, odd framings, and unexpected cuts and inserts. The soundtrack is mostly pounding dance music, together with a wide variety of modes of speech, from Middleton’s blank verse to British working-class slang to the formal, standardized language of media and political pronouncements. The film as a whole is both kaleidoscopic and subtle, and it really does manage to convey the tone of the play, at once grimly nihilistic and absurd.

The Wicker Man

I finally got to see The Wicker Man, a British cult film from 1973 with a checkered release history, which was quite difficult to see until it was finally released (in cut form) on video and DVD in 2001. It’s a clever and effective ultra-low-budget horror thriller about a Scottish island where the inhabitants observe the old pagan customs, up to and including human sacrifice to propitiate the gods after a poor harvest. The protagonist is an uptight cop from the mainland, a devout Christian, who comes to investigate the alleged disappearance of a young girl, and is shocked and scandalized by the islanders’ sinful ways. The mood could be described as low-key delirious, with scenes ranging from hilariously kitschy (especially Biritt Eklund’s nude dance scene!) to genuinely creepy, to…. I’m not quite sure what to call Christopher Lee’s amazingly weird performance as Laird of the island and leader of the pagan cult: it’s sort of low-key demented and blandly cheerful at once. There are lots of other eccentric performances, and though the culminating Mayday pagan ceremony is a bit lethargic, the final plot twist is well staged and delightfully perverse. All in all, I was glad to finally see this film.

Bug Jack Barron

Norman Spinrad‘s 1969 SF novel Bug Jack Barron has its roots in the Sixties, when it was written, but deals with issues that are still relevant today: the power of the media, the power of drugs, what it means to “sell out” (and how it’s impossible not to), race relations, the quest for power, and the quest for immortality. The protagonist, Jack Barron, is a former “Berkeley baby Bolshevik” who has cynically dumped his political ideals in order to become America’s most popular TV personality. But he finds his cynicism and his past idealism both put to the test, when he is sucked into a maelstrom of political intrigue centering on a rich man who controls the secret of human immortality. Certain aspects of the book seem dated: particularly its lame, all-too-typical-of-its-era portrayal of the main female character. But for the most part, Bug Jack Barron is still powerful and relevant, with its Burroughsian insights on the vampiric price of personal immortality (something today’s Transhumanists would do well to keep in mind), and its understanding of media spectacle: “He suddenly realized that to the hundred million people on the other side of the screen, what they saw there was reality, reality that was realer than real because a whole country was sharing the direct sensory experience, it was history taking place right before their eyes, albeit non-event history that existed only on the screen.”

Whitehead

I’ve started reading the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead 1861-1947). Whitehead, like his almost exact contemporaries Henri Bergson (1859-1941), and John Dewey (1859-1952), was famous and highly esteemed during his lifetime, in the first half of the twentieth century, but was almost entirely forgotten during the second half.

Bruiser

Bruiser is the only film that the great George Romero has been able to make in the last ten years. It’s about a man who lets everyone use him as a doormat, until one day he wakes up and finds himself without a face – there’s nothing but a blank mask. He goes on a revenge spree, killing his bitchy wife, his alleged best buddy who has ripped him off, and everyone else who has betrayed him, ending with his evil, sexist, exploitative, self-aggrandizing boss. The film is psychologically tense and intense, and especially delicious in its sarcastic portrayal of corporate culture; though it doesn’t quite have the allegorical richness and resonance of Romero’s best films (among which I would include, besides the Living Dead trilogy, Martin and Monkey Shines). But even this lesser effort shows what a brilliant director Romero is. It is sad, and a telling symptom of the general rottenness of the film industry today, that he has gotten so few opportunities to direct films under his own control in the last decade and a half.

Bruiser is the only film that the great George Romero has been able to make in the last ten years. It’s about a man who lets everyone use him as a doormat, until one day he wakes up and finds himself without a face – there’s nothing but a blank mask. He goes on a revenge spree, killing his bitchy wife, his alleged best buddy who has ripped him off, and everyone else who has betrayed him, ending with his evil, sexist, exploitative, self-aggrandizing boss. The film is visually striking (in a nicely overwrought sort of way), psychologically tense and intense, and especially delicious in its sarcastic portrayal of corporate culture. All in all, though, it doesn’t quite have the allegorical richness and resonance of Romero’s best films (among which I would include, besides the Living Dead trilogy, Martin and Monkey Shines). But even this lesser effort shows what a brilliant director Romero is. It is sad, and a telling symptom of the general rottenness of the film industry today, that he has gotten so few opportunities to direct films under his own control in the last decade and a half.

“Legal” Digital Music Distribution

Reading the “Terms of Use Agreement” on buymusic.com, which aspires to become the biggest digital music store on the Web, I find the following:
“All downloaded music, images, video, artwork, text, software and other copyrightable materials (“Content”) are sublicensed to End Users and not sold, notwithstanding use of the terms “sell,” “purchase,” “order,” or “buy” on the Site or this Agreement…End User may only download, transfer, copy and use the Digital Downloads as stated in the particular song, partial album or album’s Metadata Information, which is hereby incorporated by reference. No other downloads, transfers, copies or uses of Digital Downloads are permitted. ”
This is why I will not order anything from BuyMusic.com. Because, in short, you are not really able to buy any recordings there. You can always BUY CDs: I do it all the time, and usually I then rip the music from the CDs in order to play them on my iPod. But you can only “sublicense” the music on BuyMusic.com, not buy it, despite the site’s name. Welcome to the era of “digital rights management”, where corporations will have control of the use of their “intellectual property” in perpetuity.
I wonder: since you are allowed to burn the songs you download at BuyMusic.com to CDs, is it possible then to rip unprotected, unrestricted mp3s from those CDs? It seems like that would be too easy a way to circumvent these regulations.

Lucky Wander Boy

Lucky Wander Boy, by D. B. Weiss, is a smart, funny, and ultimately poignant novel about love and illusion, creativity and commerce, and video game addiction. The twenty-something narrator is obsessed with the (now obsolete) video games of his youth; these games are not only the focus of his passion, but provide a mythical template for his life. The novel itself plays with this as a metafictional conceit, in a way that is totally compelling (rather than, as it could easily have been, corny): the video game as the codification of dream logic, or of the desires, or better, the self-deceptive fantasies, that animate us. Along the way, we get – among other things – disquisitions on the Gnostic subtext of Donkey Kong, the best definition I have ever seen of what it means to be a geek (“A geek is a person, male or female, with an abiding, obsessive, self-effacing, even self-destroying love for something besides status”; which is true – I should know – although the most painful part of it is that this configuration does not exclude, but is indeed usually coterminous with, narcissistic self-absorption, such as the narrator exhibits throughout); and a great satiric account of the dot-com boom and bust. This is a novel that remains light on its feet, even as it goes ever further out on a limb that it keeps on sawing off behind itself (a strained metaphor, I admit, but a good account of the book’s actual accomplishment; and if it sounds too much like a back-of-the-book blurb, so be it; the inextricability of commerce and commercial promotion from our innermost fantasies is something that this book doesn’t insist on, so much as it simply takes it for granted as an aspect of The Way We Live Now).

Human Nature

Human Nature, directed by Michel Gondry from a script by Charlie Kaufman, was a box office flop and got mostly hostile reviews, but it’s a brilliant film. Basically, it’s a postmodern version of Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy”, which is a story about an ape who has been trained to become a human being. In Kaufman and Gondry’s film, the ape-turned-human is supplemented or mirrored by human beings who idealize (and want to go back to) nature; but the film’s sardonic reflections on humanness, language, and civilization are very much in the spirit of Kafka’s story. The man who was raised as an ape is “civilized” by being taught (along with language) refined table manners and the enjoyment of opera. He goes along with this charade because he presumes that becoming “human” is the only way he will ever be able to get laid; although his training includes brutal electric shocks every time he gives way to “animalistic” sexual urges. Of course, after learning language, he will never be able to go back to the wild, although he can make eloquent speeches about his desire to. Meanwhile, the twisted human characters are puppets of their own unanalyzed and out-of-control sexual desires, equally when they espouse the virtues of civilization, and when they seek to “return” to a more “natural” life. Kaufman, rather like Kafka, undermines and ridicules both sides of the nature/civilization duality, suggesting that high culture is in fact driven by base instincts, but that these base instincts, far from being animalistic, are only thinkable in linguistic human creatures.
By describing the film in these terms, however, I’m risking making it sound more like an intellectual, analytic exercise than it actually is. The script is definitely schematic in its outlines, but it comes across much more as a delightfully perverted comedy of manners. That is to say, it’s more late Bunuel than early Godard. Gondry’s direction is gorgeously anti-naturalistic, in a way reminiscent of his videos for Bjork, giving the movie the flavor of a fractured fairy tale. Or say it is as if Jacques Demy were recounting a tale that was a cross between an I Love Lucy episode and a short story by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. I’m flailing about here, giving absurd comparisons, because the film is quite sui generis, and can’t really be compared to anything less bizarre and ridiculous.

Human Nature, directed by Michel Gondry from a script by Charlie Kaufman, was a box office flop and got mostly hostile reviews, but it’s a brilliant film. Basically, it’s a postmodern version of Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy”, which is a story about an ape who has been trained to become a human being. In Kaufman and Gondry’s film, the ape-turned-human is supplemented or mirrored by human beings who idealize (and want to go back to) nature; but the film’s sardonic reflections on humanness, language, and civilization are very much in the spirit of Kafka’s story. The man who was raised as an ape is “civilized” by being taught (along with language) refined table manners and the enjoyment of opera. He goes along with this charade because he presumes that becoming “human” is the only way he will ever be able to get laid; although his training includes brutal electric shocks every time he gives way to “animalistic” sexual urges. Of course, after learning language, he will never be able to go back to the wild, although he can make eloquent speeches about his desire to. Meanwhile, the twisted human characters are puppets of their own unanalyzed and out-of-control sexual desires, equally when they espouse the virtues of civilization, and when they seek to “return” to a more “natural” life. Kaufman, rather like Kafka, undermines and ridicules both sides of the nature/civilization duality, suggesting that high culture is in fact driven by base instincts, but that these base instincts, far from being animalistic, are only thinkable in linguistic human creatures.
By describing the film in these terms, however, I’m risking making it sound more like an intellectual, analytic exercise than it actually is. The script is definitely schematic in its outlines, but it comes across much more as a delightfully, cheerfully perverted comedy of manners. That is to say, it’s more late Bunuel than early Godard. Gondry’s direction is gorgeously anti-naturalistic, in a way reminiscent of his videos for Bjork, giving the movie the flavor of a fractured fairy tale. Or say it is as if Jacques Demy were recounting a tale that was a cross between an I Love Lucy episode and a short story by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. I’m flailing about here, giving absurd comparisons, because the film is quite sui generis, and can’t really be compared to anything less bizarre and ridiculous.