Tricky‘s new album Vulnerable is the best thing he’s done in quite some time, I think. Dark, twisted lyrics, vocals by Costanza (whoever she is, she’s the best female vocalist Tricky has worked with since Martina–Tricky is once more in touch with his feminine side, as he was not in his last few post-Martina releases, as Charles Mudede has twice noted), and a variety of musical styles from almost-r&b to almost-metal (but the metal sound works here as it did not on Tricky’s previous album Blowback). Under it all, a more driving rhythm than in any of Tricky’s previous albums, though these songs are mostly too depressing to dance to. In a way, Vulnereable could almost be seen as an attempted mainstream move on Tricky’s part, in the way he seems to have abandoned for good the avant-garde fragmentation of his earlier work like Pre-Millennium Tension (still my absolute favorite among his albums) in favor of a more commercial sound. But what’s great about Vulnerable is how he manipulates, twists, and perverts that sound, so that even the (originally fairly downbeat) songs he covers on this album, by XTC (!!) and The Cure (!!!) seem negatively, malevolently transfigured by the treatment Tricky gives them, Vulnerable shows Tricky at his almost-best, and it’s about time.
Tricky‘s new album Vulnerable is the best thing he’s done in quite some time, I think. Dark, twisted lyrics, vocals by Costanza (whoever she is, she’s the best female vocalist Tricky has worked with since Martina–Tricky is once more in touch with his feminine side, as he was not in his last few post-Martina releases, as Charles Mudede has twice noted), and a variety of musical styles from almost-r&b to almost-metal (but the metal sound works here as it did not on Tricky’s previous album Blowback). Under it all, a more driving rhythm than in any of Tricky’s previous albums, though these songs are mostly too depressing to dance to. In a way, Vulnereable could almost be seen as an attempted mainstream move on Tricky’s part, in the way he seems to have abandoned for good the avant-garde fragmentation of his earlier work like Pre-Millennium Tension (still my absolute favorite among his albums) in favor of a more commercial sound. But what’s great about Vulnerable is how he manipulates, twists, and perverts that sound, so that even the (originally fairly downbeat) songs he covers on this album, by XTC (!!) and The Cure (!!!) seem negatively, malevolently transfigured by the treatment Tricky gives them, Vulnerable shows Tricky at his almost-best, and it’s about time.
Well, I finally saw The Matrix Reloaded, weeks after everybody else.And unlike nearly everybody else, I actually liked Reloaded better than the first Matrix film–and certainly better than I expected to…
Well, I finally saw The Matrix Reloaded, weeks after everybody else.And unlike nearly everybody else, I actually liked Reloaded better than the first Matrix film–and certainly better than I expected to…
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Chantal Akerman’s La Captive is a film so beautiful, so intense, and so claustrophobic that it is well-nigh unbearable. I mean this as unambiguous praise. La Captive is an adaptation of Proust–it is based on La Prisonniere, the section of A la recherche du temps perdu that narrates the narrator’s obsessive love for Albertine. And Akerman’s film is fully worthy of its source. Everything in La Captive is understated and underplayed: the lover’s jealousy, his efforts at surveillance, his relentless interrogation of the beloved, and her blankness and pliability. But this understatement is precisely right for the somber, nocturnal mood that is being depicted–love as a delirious possessiveness, doomed to impossibility, the attempt to possess a shadow, not merely another empirical person, but that person’s very otherness and mystery. It’s like trying to grasp the wind, or the darkness, in your two hands. Akerman conveys this, above all, through the rhythm, the temporality, of her film. This is a time that stops running, that turns back on itself, that keeps you waiting: not emptiness exactly, but the time of an anticipation that can never be fulfilled by presence.
Chantal Akerman’s La Captive is a film so beautiful, so intense, and so claustrophobic that it is well-nigh unbearable. I mean this as unambiguous praise. La Captive is an adaptation of Proust–it is based on La Prisonniere, the section of A la recherche du temps perdu that narrates the narrator’s obsessive love for Albertine. And Akerman’s film is fully worthy of its source. Everything in La Captive is understated and underplayed: the lover’s jealousy, his efforts at surveillance, his relentless interrogation of the beloved, and her blankness and pliability. But this understatement is precisely right for the somber, nocturnal mood that is being depicted–love as a delirious possessiveness, doomed to impossibility, the attempt to possess a shadow, not merely another empirical person, but that person’s very otherness and mystery. It’s like trying to grasp the wind, or the darkness, in your two hands. Akerman conveys this, above all, through the rhythm, the temporality, of her film. This is a time that stops running, that turns back on itself, that keeps you waiting: not emptiness exactly, but the time of an anticipation that can never be fulfilled by presence.
Altered Carbon, by Richard K. Morgan, has been widely acclaimed–rightly–as one of the best science fiction debuts of the last several years. Morgan transports the hardboiled detective style of Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler, or (more recently) Elmore Leonard, into a future world that he describes in convincing detail. Good prose style, good plotting, exciting read. But what interested me most about the novel was its take on the mind/body dilemma, the idea of downloading your consciousness into another body…
Altered Carbon, by Richard K. Morgan, has been widely acclaimed–rightly–as one of the best science fiction debuts of the last several years. Morgan transports the hardboiled detective style of Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler, or (more recently) Elmore Leonard, into a future world that he describes in convincing detail. Good prose style, good plotting, exciting read. But what interested me most about the novel was its take on the mind/body dilemma, the idea of downloading your consciousness into another body…
Continue reading “Altered Carbon”
My wife, Jacalyn Harden, has just had her first book published. Double Cross: Japanese Americans in Black and White Chicago. The book is truly interdisciplinary: ethnography, social history, and race theory. It tells the story of a group of Japanese American political activists, now quite elderly, who were active in political struggles crossing racial, ethnic, and gender lines. It places this story in the context of the relocation of Japanese Americans to Chicago after World War II, at the same time that the Great Migration of blacks from the South to northern and midwestern industrial centers like Chicago was taking place. And it uses these experiences and this history in order to question our understanding of race in America, by showing how Japanese Americans stood in relation to both black people and white people, and how this means that race in America is more than just a question of “black and white.”
My wife, Jacalyn Harden, has just had her first book published. Double Cross: Japanese Americans in Black and White Chicago. The book is truly interdisciplinary: ethnography, social history, and race theory. It tells the story of a group of Japanese American political activists, now quite elderly, who were active in political struggles crossing racial, ethnic, and gender lines. It places this story in the context of the relocation of Japanese Americans to Chicago after World War II, at the same time that the Great Migration of blacks from the South to northern and midwestern industrial centers like Chicago was taking place. And it uses these experiences and this history in order to question our understanding of race in America, by showing how Japanese Americans stood in relation to both black people and white people, and how this means that race in America is more than just a question of “black and white.”
In certain ways, Adrian Sherwood‘s Never Trust a Hippy and Andre Afram Asmar‘s Racetothebottom are very much alike. These are both electronic dance records, which use dub techniques in order to incorporate a wide range of “world music” sounds within the general framework of a reggae-influenced beat. Sherwood and Asmar are both celebrated producers, who have produced many famous albums by others, but who have rarely or never recorded under their own names before. Yet in terms of my response, these albums couldn’t be more different. Racetothebottom, frankly, bores me. It never comes into focus, but rather seems to me to be an exercise in pointless, all-over-the-place eclecticism. Never Trust a Hippy, on the other hand, is a delight. It somehow combines the spacy feel of dub with a surprising sonic density. This CD really moves, maintaining a plateau of high intensity throughout. And the samples, from a wide variety of musical styles, always pack a punch and make musical sense to me–they are eclectic for sure, but they never seem merely eclectic. So go figure; as is usual when I write about music, I don’t quite have the words to explain why my experiences of the two CDs are so different. It’s a matter of affect: either the sounds intersect with my nervous system in exciting ways, or they don’t.
In certain ways, Adrian Sherwood‘s Never Trust a Hippy and Andre Afram Asmar‘s Racetothebottom are very much alike. These are both electronic dance records, which use dub techniques in order to incorporate a wide range of “world music” sounds within the general framework of a reggae-influenced beat. Sherwood and Asmar are both celebrated producers, who have produced many famous albums by others, but who have rarely or never recorded under their own names before. Yet in terms of my response, these albums couldn’t be more different. Racetothebottom, frankly, bores me. It never comes into focus, but rather seems to me to be an exercise in pointless, all-over-the-place eclecticism. Never Trust a Hippy, on the other hand, is a delight. It somehow combines the spacy feel of dub with a surprising sonic density. This CD really moves, maintaining a plateau of high intensity throughout. And the samples, from a wide variety of musical styles, always pack a punch and make musical sense to me–they are eclectic for sure, but they never seem merely eclectic. So go figure; as is usual when I write about music, I don’t quite have the words to explain why my experiences of the two CDs are so different. It’s a matter of affect: either the sounds intersect with my nervous system in exciting ways, or they don’t.
Demonlover, by Olivier Assayas, is a dazzling and brilliant film, even if not an entirely successful one. It’s a cyberthriller–with a great score by Sonic Youth–about corporate espionage and Internet porn, with (I am glad to say) mostly unpleasant characters. The plot is initially compelling, but it eventually spins out of control in a way that is, alas, silly rather than delirious. But Demonlover remains an exhilarating experience nonetheless, because of Assayas’ style–the way the film visually and sonically embodies what it is talking about. The camera moves about restlessly, usually in close-up, often blurry. Sometimes you get the impression of fractal replication across all scales, other times of the reduction of the image to its ultimate pixels. This is literally the case when a computer screen fills the film screen, but it’s a visual logic that predominates everywhere in the movie. The world has been transformed into multiple images, all different scales existing simultaneously, constantly throbbing and metamorphosing, never permitting anything like a synoptic (let alone panoptic) overall view. The world has been transformed into a pornographic videogame, and there is no external perspective, you are always in the midst of the action. The elisions and disconnections of the plot, and the way that the characters–mostly women–can never quite be pinned down in terms of motivations–even apart from all the secret alliances and double-crosses–have a long tradition in French art films; but Assayas carries them through in a new way, one that is somehow spacy and visceral at the same time. Demonlover is too much of an art film to have the kind of immediate excitement that recent thrillers borrow from computer gaming; but it works as a dreamlike meta-reflection on the logic that such pop films embody. Despite the fact that Assayas never manages to capture the sort of melancholia and over-the-top kitschy craziness of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, or the outrageous meta-leaps and imploded action of comix by Grant Morrison or Warren Ellis, or the truly bizarre and twisted visions of, say, Sogo Ishii’s Angel Dust, Demonlover is still a powerful exploration of the strange metamorphoses of the image in postmodern global capitalism.
Demonlover, by Olivier Assayas, is a dazzling and brilliant film, even if not an entirely successful one. It’s a cyberthriller–with a great score by Sonic Youth–about corporate espionage and Internet porn, with (I am glad to say) mostly unpleasant characters. The plot is initially compelling, but it eventually spins out of control in a way that is, alas, silly rather than delirious. But Demonlover remains an exhilarating experience nonetheless, because of Assayas’ style–the way the film visually and sonically embodies what it is talking about. The camera moves about restlessly, usually in close-up, often blurry. Sometimes you get the impression of fractal replication across all scales, other times of the reduction of the image to its ultimate pixels. This is literally the case when a computer screen fills the film screen, but it’s a visual logic that predominates everywhere in the movie. The world has been transformed into multiple images, all different scales existing simultaneously, constantly throbbing and metamorphosing, never permitting anything like a synoptic (let alone panoptic) overall view. The world has been transformed into a pornographic videogame, and there is no external perspective, you are always in the midst of the action. The elisions and disconnections of the plot, and the way that the characters–mostly women–can never quite be pinned down in terms of motivations–even apart from all the secret alliances and double-crosses–have a long tradition in French art films; but Assayas carries them through in a new way, one that is somehow spacy and visceral at the same time. Demonlover is too much of an art film to have the kind of immediate excitement that recent thrillers borrow from computer gaming; but it works as a dreamlike meta-reflection on the logic that such pop films embody. Despite the fact that Assayas never manages to capture the sort of melancholia and over-the-top kitschy craziness of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, or the outrageous meta-leaps and imploded action of comix by Grant Morrison or Warren Ellis, or the truly bizarre and twisted visions of, say, Sogo Ishii’s Angel Dust, Demonlover is still a powerful exploration of the strange metamorphoses of the image in postmodern global capitalism.
I’ve been reading Harvey Pekar‘s comics for over twenty years, so I was very happy to see American Splendor, the new film about Pekar and his autobiographical comics of that title. Pekar’s comics are naturalistic to the extreme; they are slices of life from Pekar’s own life, and the lives of people he knows, works with, or meets. At the same time, these comics are quite self-conscious, aware of themselves as a medium, and as the progress they increasingly reflect the fact that Pekar’s semi-fame as a comics author is a big part of his life. The film remains pretty much true to the double nature of the comics, combining dramatizations of Pekar’s life, as recounted in his books, with the excellent Paul Giamatti as Pekar, together with on-screen commentary by Pekar himself, and photographed scenes that replicate drawings in the comics, not to mention the real places they are based on. What I’ve loved most about Pekar’s comics has always been their down-to-earth humor and grimness–Pekar is funny, but also even a more negative, doom-and-gloom pessimist and depressive than I am. The film does justice to this sensibility, while at the same time pointing up the comic’s reflexivity. It even manages to be quite charming, without being offensively sappy in a way that Pekar would hate.
I’ve been reading Harvey Pekar‘s comics for over twenty years, so I was very happy to see American Splendor, the new film about Pekar and his autobiographical comics of that title. Pekar’s comics are naturalistic to the extreme; they are slices of life from Pekar’s own life, and the lives of people he knows, works with, or meets. At the same time, these comics are quite self-conscious, aware of themselves as a medium, and as the progress they increasingly reflect the fact that Pekar’s semi-fame as a comics author is a big part of his life. The film remains pretty much true to the double nature of the comics, combining dramatizations of Pekar’s life, as recounted in his books, with the excellent Paul Giamatti as Pekar, together with on-screen commentary by Pekar himself, and photographed scenes that replicate drawings in the comics, not to mention the real places they are based on. What I’ve loved most about Pekar’s comics has always been their down-to-earth humor and grimness–Pekar is funny, but also even a more negative, doom-and-gloom pessimist and depressive than I am. The film does justice to this sensibility, while at the same time pointing up the comic’s reflexivity. It even manages to be quite charming, without being offensively sappy in a way that Pekar would hate.
11’09″01 is an omnibus film about the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Eleven filmmakers from around the world each made a short film about the events of 9/11; each film is exactly 11 minutes, 9 seconds, plus one frame long. Nearly every section is powerful, or at least interesting; but the film does not have a distributor in the USA, because it is considered to be too anti-American. Though no more so, I would argue, than the events warrant. Among the most powerful sections of the film were: Samira Makhmalbaf’s portrait of Afghani schoolchildren exiled in Iran, who are unable to comprehend an event that will nonetheless have extreme consequences for them; Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s extraordinary sound collage (with only a few images appearing on an otherwise blank screen) of the fall of the Towers; Mira Nair’s story about a Pakistani woman in New York whose son has been killed trying to rescue people from the Towers, but who is wrongly suspected by the FBI of being a terrorist; Amos Gitai’s single-take depiction of a terrorist bombing in Israel; and Shohei Imamura’s oblique fable of a war veteran who comes back home transformed into a snake. Denis Tanovic reminds us that September 11 is also the anniversary of the Srebrenica massacure in the Bosnian war; Ken Loach memorializes September 11, 1973, the day that Salvador Allende’s government in Chile was overthrown by a CIA-sponsored coup. The one American entry, directed by Sean Penn, is kind of sappy and dumb in terms of its concept, but it is redeemed by the wondrousness of 11 minutes of closeups of an elderly Ernest Borgnine.
11’09″01 is an omnibus film about the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Eleven filmmakers from around the world each made a short film about the events of 9/11; each film is exactly 11 minutes, 9 seconds, plus one frame long. Nearly every section is powerful, or at least interesting; but the film does not have a distributor in the USA, because it is considered to be too anti-American. Though no more so, I would argue, than the events warrant. Among the most powerful sections of the film were: Samira Makhmalbaf’s portrait of Afghani schoolchildren exiled in Iran, who are unable to comprehend an event that will nonetheless have extreme consequences for them; Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s extraordinary sound collage (with only a few images appearing on an otherwise blank screen) of the fall of the Towers; Mira Nair’s story about a Pakistani woman in New York whose son has been killed trying to rescue people from the Towers, but who is wrongly suspected by the FBI of being a terrorist; Amos Gitai’s single-take depiction of a terrorist bombing in Israel; and Shohei Imamura’s oblique fable of a war veteran who comes back home transformed into a snake. Denis Tanovic reminds us that September 11 is also the anniversary of the Srebrenica massacure in the Bosnian war; Ken Loach memorializes September 11, 1973, the day that Salvador Allende’s government in Chile was overthrown by a CIA-sponsored coup. The one American entry, directed by Sean Penn, is kind of sappy and dumb in terms of its concept, but it is redeemed by the wondrousness of 11 minutes of closeups of an elderly Ernest Borgnine.
Rounds, the new CD by Four Tet, is another beautiful instrumental hiphop album–if that is not too much of an oxymororn–in a year that has had several great ones already (notably those by Prefuse 73 and by DJ Krush). Four Tet mixes seemingly organic noises and folk-like harmonies with a full repertoire of twisted beats, micro-glitch soundings, and Satie-esque melody lines.The result is something that I can only call magical (despite my fears about the triteness of such an adjective). This is an album of strange encounters and quicksilver transformations.It seems lighter than air, and it is suffused with an oddly impersonal warmth (I insist both on the sense of impersonality, and on the warmth, oxymoronic–again–as these may seem in combination with one another).
Rounds, the new CD by Four Tet, is another beautiful instrumental hiphop album–if that is not too much of an oxymororn–in a year that has had several great ones already (notably those by Prefuse 73 and by DJ Krush). Four Tet mixes seemingly organic noises and folk-like harmonies with a full repertoire of twisted beats, micro-glitch soundings, and Satie-esque melody lines.The result is something that I can only call magical (despite my fears about the triteness of such an adjective). This is an album of strange encounters and quicksilver transformations.It seems lighter than air, and it is suffused with an oddly impersonal warmth (I insist both on the sense of impersonality, and on the warmth, oxymoronic–again–as these may seem in combination with one another).