Greg Tate’s Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience is as brilliant a piece of music writing as I have read in a long while. Tate seeks both to evoke Hendrix’s sound, and to theorize Hendrix as a musician and cultural icon. He succeeds in both aims, with a coruscating prose style that crackles with sharp insights as much as with extravagant metaphors. Tate’s main goal in the book, or his “racial agenda,” as he self-consciously calls it, is to place Hendrix as a Black musician. That means dealing with the paradox that Hendrix appealed, and still continues to appeal, almost exclusively to a white audience. (Many other black musicians, before and since, have had such “crossover” appeal, but usually they have also had more following among blacks than Hendrix seems to have). Tate shows how fully grounded, both culturally and musically, Hendrix was in the African American experience; and he links the seemingly magical way Hendrix was able to “pass” among otherwise racist white audiences to the alchemy he performed on musical traditon. He illustrates both art and life from a variety of perspectives, ranging from a straightforward and insightful accounting of musical developments, to a deliriously poetic take on Hendrix’s semi-divine position in music history and in the history of black (and just plain American) culture. The volume also includes first-person accounts by other black folks who knew Hendrix, and even a horoscope. The overall effect of Tate’s book is to freshen what might have seemed utterly banal (since probably no popular musician of the last half century has been written about as extensively, and as hagiographically, as Hendrix has), as well as to put the question of Hendrix’s blackness into a totally new light.
Greg Tate’s Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience is as brilliant a piece of music writing as I have read in a long while. Tate seeks both to evoke Hendrix’s sound, and to theorize Hendrix as a musician and cultural icon. He succeeds in both aims, with a coruscating prose style that crackles with sharp insights as much as with extravagant metaphors. Tate’s main goal in the book, or his “racial agenda,” as he self-consciously calls it, is to place Hendrix as a Black musician. That means dealing with the paradox that Hendrix appealed, and still continues to appeal, almost exclusively to a white audience. (Many other black musicians, before and since, have had such “crossover” appeal, but usually they have also had more following among blacks than Hendrix seems to have). Tate shows how fully grounded, both culturally and musically, Hendrix was in the African American experience; and he links the seemingly magical way Hendrix was able to “pass” among otherwise racist white audiences to the alchemy he performed on musical traditon. He illustrates both art and life from a variety of perspectives, ranging from a straightforward and insightful accounting of musical developments, to a deliriously poetic take on Hendrix’s semi-divine position in music history and in the history of black (and just plain American) culture. The volume also includes first-person accounts by other black folks who knew Hendrix, and even a horoscope. The overall effect of Tate’s book is to freshen what might have seemed utterly banal (since probably no popular musician of the last half century has been written about as extensively, and as hagiographically, as Hendrix has), as well as to put the question of Hendrix’s blackness into a totally new light.
I saw two Chinese films yesterday at the Seattle International Film Festival. The Best of Times, by Chang Tso-chi, from Taiwan, is a drama about two 19-year-old boys who get into big criminal-related trouble. But what distinguishes the film is its formal style, with carefully distanced and framed camera positions, black-outs between scenes, and emphasis much more on everyday family life, than on high-octane plot. It’s really a film about the intractibility of character, and the nearness of death, more than it is a juvenile/gangster movie. The accretion of detail, and de-emphasis of heavy dramatic gestures, makes for an intelligent and affecting film (even if Chang is not the equal of his mentor Hou Hsiao-hsien).
The Eye, a horror film from Hong Kong by the Pang Brothers, is the best new horror film I have seen in a number of years. Like all great horror, it combines visceral thrills with intellectual depth. A young woman, blind for many years, has her eyesight restored due to a cornea transplant. She sees the beauty of the world for the first time since the age of two. But she also sees dead people—and must learn to come to terms with such a burden. The Eye is in every way (except budget) vastly superior to The Sixth Sense, with which it shares this premise. The Pang Brothers make something truly unsettling and haunting out of corny camera and editing tricks: out-of-focus photography, sudden pans, odd framings, abrupt cuts, and the like. The undeparted dead are not evil in this film, but the mere fact of seeing them cannot help being deeply disturbing for the protagonist–and for the audience as well. This is a film about the dangers and fragility of seeing; it is about mortality, and passivity, and the need to come to terms with trauma, and the impossibility of ever really settling one’s accounts, since the world is infinitely unpredictable.
I saw two Chinese films yesterday at the Seattle International Film Festival. The Best of Times, by Chang Tso-chi, from Taiwan, is a drama about two 19-year-old boys who get into big criminal-related trouble. But what distinguishes the film is its formal style, with carefully distanced and framed camera positions, black-outs between scenes, and emphasis much more on everyday family life, than on high-octane plot. It’s really a film about the intractibility of character, and the nearness of death, more than it is a juvenile/gangster movie. The accretion of detail, and de-emphasis of heavy dramatic gestures, makes for an intelligent and affecting film (even if Chang is not the equal of his mentor Hou Hsiao-hsien).
The Eye, a horror film from Hong Kong by the Pang Brothers, is the best new horror film I have seen in a number of years. Like all great horror, it combines visceral thrills with intellectual depth. A young woman, blind for many years, has her eyesight restored due to a cornea transplant. She sees the beauty of the world for the first time since the age of two. But she also sees dead people—and must learn to come to terms with such a burden. The Eye is in every way (except budget) vastly superior to The Sixth Sense, with which it shares this premise. The Pang Brothers make something truly unsettling and haunting out of corny camera and editing tricks: out-of-focus photography, sudden pans, odd framings, abrupt cuts, and the like. The undeparted dead are not evil in this film, but the mere fact of seeing them cannot help being deeply disturbing for the protagonist–and for the audience as well. This is a film about the dangers and fragility of seeing; it is about mortality, and passivity, and the need to come to terms with trauma, and the impossibility of ever really settling one’s accounts, since the world is infinitely unpredictable.
In Cory Doctorow‘s SF novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (also downloadable for free), death, scarcity, and mandatory work have been eliminated. The network is direct-wired into your brain, and mortality is averted by backing up your brain, and downloading it as needed into a new clone body. People spontaneously cooperate–well, most of the time–and wealth isn’t measured by money, but by your reputation among your peers. Doctorow imagines a society in which many of the last decade’s utopian fantasies about new technology are actually given flesh. Among other consequences, this means a society in which Disney World is seen as the absolute pinnacle of aesthetic achievement, the highest accomplishment of the human species. Doctorow doesn’t limn this situation with cheap irony, but takes it pretty much on its own terms. There’s something slightly creepy about the dampened affect, the sincerity and desire to please, the embrace of warmth without a hint of tragedy, the way unhappiness is pathologized and therefore not taken seriously; but the novel works because Doctorow doesn’t belabor this creepiness, and indeed seduces us into accepting it, as a reasonable price to pay for conquering mortality. So you might say that what I found disturbing about this novel was precisely its refusal to be disturbing; but I cannot really say that without falling into an infinite regress, a self-reflexive loop. For in fact, as I read the book I didn’t find it disturbing; and if I find this lack of disturbingness disturbing, it is only because what I find disturbing is that I didn’t find this lack of disturbingness disturbing; and so on, ad infinitum. I think this means that Cory Doctorow is far more postmodern than I am, or than Baudrillard is, or than Dave Eggars and the whole McSweeney’s gang could ever hope to be.
In Cory Doctorow‘s SF novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (also downloadable for free), death, scarcity, and mandatory work have been eliminated. The network is direct-wired into your brain, and mortality is averted by backing up your brain, and downloading it as needed into a new clone body. People spontaneously cooperate–well, most of the time–and wealth isn’t measured by money, but by your reputation among your peers. Doctorow imagines a society in which many of the last decade’s utopian fantasies about new technology are actually given flesh. Among other consequences, this means a society in which Disney World is seen as the absolute pinnacle of aesthetic achievement, the highest accomplishment of the human species. Doctorow doesn’t limn this situation with cheap irony, but takes it pretty much on its own terms. There’s something slightly creepy about the dampened affect, the sincerity and desire to please, the embrace of warmth without a hint of tragedy, the way unhappiness is pathologized and therefore not taken seriously; but the novel works because Doctorow doesn’t belabor this creepiness, and indeed seduces us into accepting it, as a reasonable price to pay for conquering mortality. So you might say that what I found disturbing about this novel was precisely its refusal to be disturbing; but I cannot really say that without falling into an infinite regress, a self-reflexive loop. For in fact, as I read the book I didn’t find it disturbing; and if I find this lack of disturbingness disturbing, it is only because what I find disturbing is that I didn’t find this lack of disturbingness disturbing; and so on, ad infinitum. I think this means that Cory Doctorow is far more postmodern than I am, or than Baudrillard is, or than Dave Eggars and the whole McSweeney’s gang could ever hope to be.
Tian Zhuangzhuang is one of my favorite Chinese directors. His new film, Springtime in a Small Town , is his first since The Blue Kite (1993) got him in trouble with the Chinese authorities for its acerbic portrayal of the Cultural Revolution. Springtime in a Small Town is a far quieter and less ambitious film, but a beautiful one nonetheless…
Tian Zhuangzhuang is one of my favorite Chinese directors. His new film, Springtime in a Small Town , is his first since The Blue Kite (1993) got him in trouble with the Chinese authorities for its acerbic portrayal of the Cultural Revolution. Springtime in a Small Town is a far quieter and less ambitious film, but a beautiful one nonetheless…
Continue reading “Springtime in a Small Town”
Reading James Howard Kunstler’s The City in Mind was a depressing experience. While I am inclined to agree with Kunstler’s main premise–his love for livable cities, and his dislike for suburbs and for development in which the automobile is favored at the expense of clustered living in which you can shop, go to work, and meet people in a local cafe, all within walking distance or easily accessible via quick public transportation–and to admire his vigorous and sometimes vituperative prose, I was also (perhaps contradictorily?) annoyed by his moralism, his snobbery, and his often dubious generalizations. The moralism and snobbery are evident in Kunstler’s utter disdain for Las Vegas; he writes as if the delirious simulations of Caesar’s Palace and the Bellagio and New York, New York were somehow an insult to the human spirit–it’s worse than reading Adorno’s denunciations of jazz. As for the dubious generalizations, I find many of Kunstler’s broad historical strokes–swooning over the enlightened despotism of Louis Napoleon, or blaming Aztec human sacrifices for the woes of Mexico City today, or celebrating contemporary gentrification as a way to renew inner cities–hard to take. At his best–denouncing the evils of modernist architecture, and praising the active street life of Paris–Kunstler pretty much just repeats arguments that were propounded more rigorously, as well as more generously, by Jane Jacobs. At his worst, he seems ignorant of how power and class work; he is all too ready to denounce the greed and stupidity of real estate developers (about which he will find no disagreement from me) but unable to grasp the systematic workings of economic exploitation and social exclusion in the modern and postmodern world.
Reading James Howard Kunstler‘s The City in Mind was a depressing experience. While I am inclined to agree with Kunstler’s main premise–his love for livable cities, and his dislike for suburbs and for development in which the automobile is favored at the expense of clustered living in which you can shop, go to work, and meet people in a local cafe, all within walking distance or easily accessible via quick public transportation–and to admire his vigorous and sometimes vituperative prose, I was also (perhaps contradictorily?) annoyed by his moralism, his snobbery, and his often dubious generalizations. The moralism and snobbery are evident in Kunstler’s utter disdain for Las Vegas; he writes as if the delirious simulations of Caesar’s Palace and the Bellagio and New York, New York were somehow an insult to the human spirit–it’s worse than reading Adorno’s denunciations of jazz. As for the dubious generalizations, I find many of Kunstler’s broad historical strokes–swooning over the enlightened despotism of Louis Napoleon, or blaming Aztec human sacrifices for the woes of Mexico City today, or celebrating contemporary gentrification as a way to renew inner cities–hard to take. At his best–denouncing the evils of modernist architecture, and praising the active street life of Paris–Kunstler pretty much just repeats arguments that were propounded more rigorously, as well as more generously, by Jane Jacobs. At his worst, he seems ignorant of how power and class work; he is all too ready to denounce the greed and stupidity of real estate developers (about which he will find no disagreement from me) but unable to grasp the systematic workings of economic exploitation and social exclusion in the modern and postmodern world.
Liu Bingjian’s Cry Woman is a powerful, laconic and understated film about a woman who ekes out a living in the Chinese countryside as a professional mourner at funerals. This after she leaves Beijing, where she is hassled by the police, irritated by her good-for-nothing husband, foisted with the care of a child who is not her own, and finally forced to flee from creditors as well as from the consequences of her husband’s incarceration. The tone with which the film recounts all this is neither comic absurdism nor built-up pathos, but a kind of blank, elliptical observation. This seems to parallel the situation of the heroine herself, who must block out her own feelings of pain in order to be able to function at all, in order to just survive. It’s almost too perfect an irony that she earns her living by weeping and singing, for cash, at funerals–she can express other peoples’ pain, at the price of repressing her own. As the film progresses, it all gets to be too much; but the camera never falters. A beautiful and unusual film.
Liu Bingjian’s Cry Woman is a powerful, laconic and understated film about a woman who ekes out a living in the Chinese countryside as a professional mourner at funerals. This after she leaves Beijing, where she is hassled by the police, irritated by her good-for-nothing husband, foisted with the care of a child who is not her own, and finally forced to flee from creditors as well as from the consequences of her husband’s incarceration. The tone with which the film recounts all this is neither comic absurdism nor built-up pathos, but a kind of blank, elliptical observation. This seems to parallel the situation of the heroine herself, who must block out her own feelings of pain in order to be able to function at all, in order to just survive. It’s almost too perfect an irony that she earns her living by weeping and singing, for cash, at funerals–she can express other peoples’ pain, at the price of repressing her own. As the film progresses, it all gets to be too much; but the camera never falters. A beautiful and unusual film.
So here is a website that is posting lots of people’s Starbucks photos.
So here is a website that is posting lots of people’s Starbucks photos.
Another great Iranian film. It’s amazing how many fine films have come from Iran in the last ten or fifteen years. (Better enjoy them while we can, before Bush, Rumsfeld, and company destroy the country). Anyway, Marooned in Iraq, by Bahman Ghobadi, takes place in Kurdistan, in isolated, mountainous territory on the Iran/Iraq border. An old musician goes with his adult sons to look for his ex-wife, rumored to be in a refugee camp after Saddam’s chemical and bombing attacks against the Kurds. What he finds, or what the film finds as it follows him, is terrifying, surreal, sometimes almost absurd and carnivalesque. Like many other Iranian films, Marooned in Iraq relies on non-professional actors, real locations, and picaresque, relatively unscripted plots. Ghobadi, however, is more expressionistic in his style than many other Iranian directors; also, his insistence on the Kurdish language and Kurdish ethnicity is something of a political statement. All in all, this is a powerful, deeply affecting film, moving from grotesque comedy to sublime tragedy to a very tentative humanist affirmation.
Another great Iranian film. It’s amazing how many fine films have come from Iran in the last ten or fifteen years. (Better enjoy them while we can, before Bush, Rumsfeld, and company destroy the country). Anyway, Marooned in Iraq, by Bahman Ghobadi, takes place in Kurdistan, in isolated, mountainous territory on the Iran/Iraq border. An old musician goes with his adult sons to look for his ex-wife, rumored to be in a refugee camp after Saddam’s chemical and bombing attacks against the Kurds. What he finds, or what the film finds as it follows him, is terrifying, surreal, sometimes almost absurd and carnivalesque. Like many other Iranian films, Marooned in Iraq relies on non-professional actors, real locations, and picaresque, relatively unscripted plots. Ghobadi, however, is more expressionistic in his style than many other Iranian directors; also, his insistence on the Kurdish language and Kurdish ethnicity is something of a political statement. All in all, this is a powerful, deeply affecting film, moving from grotesque comedy to sublime tragedy to a very tentative humanist affirmation.
Under Another Sky, by Gael Morel, is a French/Algerian film about clashing cultures that leaves no easy answers. Samy is French, but of Algerian ethnicity. When he gets in trouble with the cops, his parents ship him back to relatives in Algeria. He finds himself in a strange landscape–he doesn’t know the language, the customs, or the politics (the threat of fundamentalist terrorism), even though Algeria is ostensibly “his” country. This is a grim, tormented film, shot in a carefully controlled, but understated style: there are mostly tight closeups in some sequences, handheld cameras in others; the style varies according to what is happening, but it is always claustrophobic and relentless. The film is both political and psychological; it seems impossible for Samy to find release, let alone freedom, in either France or Algeria.
Under Another Sky, by Gael Morel, is a French/Algerian film about clashing cultures that leaves no easy answers. Samy is French, but of Algerian ethnicity. When he gets in trouble with the cops, his parents ship him back to relatives in Algeria. He finds himself in a strange landscape–he doesn’t know the language, the customs, or the politics (the threat of fundamentalist terrorism), even though Algeria is ostensibly “his” country. This is a grim, tormented film, shot in a carefully controlled, but understated style: there are mostly tight closeups in some sequences, handheld cameras in others; the style varies according to what is happening, but it is always claustrophobic and relentless. The film is both political and psychological; it seems impossible for Samy to find release, let alone freedom, in either France or Algeria.
The Soft Pink Truth is Drew Daniel, who is otherwise one half of Matmos. But the new Soft Pink Truth album, Do You Party?, is a goofy, chintzy pop album, very different from Matmos’ experimental electronica. Catchy beats, silly lyrics, electronic bleeps and squiggles. This is what pop music ought to sound like.
The Soft Pink Truth is Drew Daniel, who is otherwise one half of Matmos. But the new Soft Pink Truth album, Do You Party?, is a goofy, chintzy pop album, very different from Matmos’ experimental electronica. Catchy beats, silly lyrics, electronic bleeps and squiggles. This is what pop music ought to sound like.