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).
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”