"If you fake the funk, your nose will grow." — Bootsy Collins
I don’t usually put links without my own extended commentary into this blog, but this time I couldn’t resist. Warren Ellis has a wonderful rant about fanatic protesters against genetically modified food.
I don’t usually put links without my own extended commentary into this blog, but this time I couldn’t resist. Warren Ellis has a wonderful rant about fanatic protesters against genetically modified food.
My office. This is a test of MFOP2, which allows me to post photos directly from my new Nokia futurephone. Yes, I have a new phone, with a camera and email, so that now I can post images directly to this blog, to my regular photoblog Macular Hole, or to the new, occasional moblog I have created, Missed Encounters. These multiple blogs should keep me busy…
My office. This is a test of MFOP2, which allows me to post photos directly from my new Nokia futurephone. Yes, I have a new phone, with a camera and email, so that now I can post images directly to this blog, to my regular photoblog Macular Hole, or to the new, occasional moblog I have created, Missed Encounters. These multiple blogs should keep me busy…
Seattle’s Grand Illusion Theater is one of only four theaters in the country showing a complete Aki Kaurismaki retrospective. I’ve written about Kaurismaki before; I’ll just add that tonight’s entry, Match Factory Girl from 1989, is a well-nigh perfect film. Minimal, deadpan, it’s about a young woman (Kaurismaki regular Kati Outinen) who’s abused by her parents and lover, and takes appropriate revenge. Every shot is perfectly framed, and every shot is a surprise. The icy lighting is a wonder to behold. And the film somehow combines world-weary fatalism with (dare I call it?) a sense of justice, and Fassbinderian melodrama with Bressonian intensity. All this, and the film is modest and unpretentious as well. I’d seen Match Factory Girl before, but seeing it again reminded me of why I love Aki Kaurismaki. (And it’s purely as a compliment that I named my dog after him).
Seattle’s Grand Illusion Theater is one of only four theaters in the country showing a complete Aki Kaurismaki retrospective. I’ve written about Kaurismaki before; I’ll just add that tonight’s entry, Match Factory Girl from 1989, is a well-nigh perfect film. Minimal, deadpan, it’s about a young woman (Kaurismaki regular Kati Outinen) who’s abused by her parents and lover, and takes appropriate revenge. Every shot is perfectly framed, and every shot is a surprise. The icy lighting is a wonder to behold. And the film somehow combines world-weary fatalism with (dare I call it?) a sense of justice, and Fassbinderian melodrama with Bressonian intensity. All this, and the film is modest and unpretentious as well. I’d seen Match Factory Girl before, but seeing it again reminded me of why I love Aki Kaurismaki. (And it’s purely as a compliment that I named my dog after him).
I watched the first episode tonight of The Apprentice, Mark Burnett’s new reality show. It really is Survivor in the corporate boardroom, with Manhattan as the island that the losers are booted off of. The show is insufferable, and some sort of masterpiece, for the way it epitomizes everything that is most sick about American society, from the idealization of “teamwork” among people who are just waiting to stab one another in the back, to the inane business-speak that permeates any understanding of activity and character, to the way the 16 contestants grovel before Donald Trump as they seek to curry his favor, to the way Trump himself eats it up and takes it as simply being his due, to the nouveau riche vulgarity of Trump’s apartment (I can just imagine the scorn with which the old rich would regard its collection of fake Italian Renaissance artifacts), about which Trump expansively explains that “this is what it’s all about”, to the gender stereotypes running rampant throughout the show (the initial contestants are 8 men and 8 women, they are divided into teams by gender, and the women seem to be showing their business acumen by competing as to who can wear the shortest skirts and the highest heels), to the conclusion in which the evidently Jewish man is the one whom Trump decides to (as it were) banish from the island first (I don’t think this is a coincidence)
I watched the first episode tonight of The Apprentice, Mark Burnett’s new reality show. It really is Survivor in the corporate boardroom, with Manhattan as the island that the losers are booted off of. The show is insufferable, and some sort of masterpiece, for the way it epitomizes everything that is most sick about American society, from the idealization of “teamwork” among people who are just waiting to stab one another in the back, to the inane business-speak that permeates any understanding of activity and character, to the way the 16 contestants grovel before Donald Trump as they seek to curry his favor, to the way Trump himself eats it up and takes it as simply being his due, to the nouveau riche vulgarity of Trump’s apartment (I can just imagine the scorn with which the old rich would regard its collection of fake Italian Renaissance artifacts), about which Trump expansively explains that “this is what it’s all about”, to the gender stereotypes running rampant throughout the show (the initial contestants are 8 men and 8 women, they are divided into teams by gender, and the women seem to be showing their business acumen by competing as to who can wear the shortest skirts and the highest heels), to the conclusion in which the evidently Jewish man is the one whom Trump decides to (as it were) banish from the island first (I don’t think this is a coincidence)
Shion Sono’s Suicide Club is a very strange movie, which apparently has acquired something of a cult following. It’s one of those recent Japanese movies that pushes the limits when it comes to gore (which is sometimes ridiculously theatrical, as in the opening scene when 54 schoolgirls commit suicide by simultaneously throwing themselves in front of a speeding train, and blood splatters everywhere; and other times disturbingly visceral and difficult to watch, without the redeeming and distancing aestheticism of, say, Kill Bill). This is definitely not a film for the faint of heart. But it doesn’t seem to me to be very similar to sicko splatterfests like Takashi Miike’s Audition either; Suicide Club is less concerned to shock, more philosophical, and ultimately far kinkier in its subtlety.
(I’d never heard of the director Shion Sono before, but apparently he also makes gay porn flicks, as well as being known as an avant-garde poet).
In any case, Suicide Club is an oblique film, for all its gore. It seems to change genre every fifteen minutes: from grotesque social satire to police procedural to horror to Rocky Horror Picture Show knock-off to baroque tragedy to poetic meditation to feminist detective thriller to I don’t even really know what. Visually the film is also quite discontinuous from scene to scene; sometimes there’s a jerky handheld camera, other times the scenes are almost classically composed.
In terms of plot, the film is about a plague of suicides, mostly by young women, though sometimes by boys and men and older people as well. There are also chains of sewed-together pieces of human skin that are found at the scenes of some of the mass suicides.
The suicides seems to be orchestrated through the Internet and cell phones (one brief scene of cell phone fetishism especially got to me, probably because of my own predilections that way). At one point it seems that an insane death-glitter-rock band is behind the suicides, but that turns out to be a red herring. Apparently the blame really lies with a bubblegum-pop group whose singers are five 12-year-old girls who wear matching cute costumes and do coordinated dancing as they sing their relentlessly upbeat ditties.
The film ends on a ritualistic note that I didn’t entirely understand; but I don’t think tying up loose ends was in any way the point. Existential conundrums are also repeated in verbal formulas throughout, often by small children.
I don’t really know much about Japan beyond the level of cliche; but it does seem to be a culture that is as imbued with latent (and sometimes not-so-latent) pedophilia as contemporary American culture is. At least, that’s what Suicide Club suggests. It intimates disturbing links between the sexualization of young children and the hysterical insistence upon their innocence, and between both and the romanticization of death.
In short, I’m not sure Suicide Club is a great film, exactly, but it’s definitely going to stay with me for a while.
(I’d love to see an American remake, but that will never happen; this isn’t The Ring. Besides, the only way to do it justice would have to be as an unlikely collaboration between David Lynch and John Waters).
Shion Sono’s Suicide Club is a very strange movie, which apparently has acquired something of a cult following. It’s one of those recent Japanese movies that pushes the limits when it comes to gore (which is sometimes ridiculously theatrical, as in the opening scene when 54 schoolgirls commit suicide by simultaneously throwing themselves in front of a speeding train, and blood splatters everywhere; and other times disturbingly visceral and difficult to watch, without the redeeming and distancing aestheticism of, say, Kill Bill). This is definitely not a film for the faint of heart. But it doesn’t seem to me to be very similar to sicko splatterfests like Takashi Miike’s Audition either; Suicide Club is less concerned to shock, more philosophical, and ultimately far kinkier in its subtlety.
(I’d never heard of the director Shion Sono before, but apparently he also makes gay porn flicks, as well as being known as an avant-garde poet).
In any case, Suicide Club is an oblique film, for all its gore. It seems to change genre every fifteen minutes: from grotesque social satire to police procedural to horror to Rocky Horror Picture Show knock-off to baroque tragedy to poetic meditation to feminist detective thriller to I don’t even really know what. Visually the film is also quite discontinuous from scene to scene; sometimes there’s a jerky handheld camera, other times the scenes are almost classically composed.
In terms of plot, the film is about a plague of suicides, mostly by young women, though sometimes by boys and men and older people as well. There are also chains of sewed-together pieces of human skin that are found at the scenes of some of the mass suicides.
The suicides seems to be orchestrated through the Internet and cell phones (one brief scene of cell phone fetishism especially got to me, probably because of my own predilections that way). At one point it seems that an insane death-glitter-rock band is behind the suicides, but that turns out to be a red herring. Apparently the blame really lies with a bubblegum-pop group whose singers are five 12-year-old girls who wear matching cute costumes and do coordinated dancing as they sing their relentlessly upbeat ditties.
The film ends on a ritualistic note that I didn’t entirely understand; but I don’t think tying up loose ends was in any way the point. Existential conundrums are also repeated in verbal formulas throughout, often by small children.
I don’t really know much about Japan beyond the level of cliche; but it does seem to be a culture that is as imbued with latent (and sometimes not-so-latent) pedophilia as contemporary American culture is. At least, that’s what Suicide Club suggests. It intimates disturbing links between the sexualization of young children and the hysterical insistence upon their innocence, and between both and the romanticization of death.
In short, I’m not sure Suicide Club is a great film, exactly, but it’s definitely going to stay with me for a while.
(I’d love to see an American remake, but that will never happen; this isn’t The Ring. Besides, the only way to do it justice would have to be as an unlikely collaboration between David Lynch and John Waters).
John Crowley’s The Translator is a beautiful and deceptively simple novel, with surprisingly little of the fantastic in comparison to Crowley’s other books. The novel is set during the Kennedy presidency, in the early 1960s; it concerns the relationship between I. I. Falin, a middle-aged, exiled Russian poet, and Kit Malone, an undergraduate woman at an unnamed Midwestern university where Falin teaches, and who helps him render his (unpublished in Russia) poems into English.
It’s hard to say whether almost nothing happens in the course of the book, or whether almost everything does. This is because the novel’s style is clear and crisp, and seemingly naturalistic; and yet everything important is elided, not by authorial whim, but because what is most important is what somehow cannot be said, cannot be recognized, cannot be narrated.
For instance, Kit and Falin are certainly in love in some sort of way, but it is never clear whether they ever have sex – years later, Kit sincerely cannot remember. When finally, toward the end of the book, they spend a night together, “It seemed to her that they spent a very long time there together: not hours but days, years even, the whole course of a long deep love affair… And yet she couldn’t actually remember it, long afterward, remembered nothing of what really happened.”
The Translator is about many things: about the trickiness of language and the impossibility of translation; about the nature of poetry, always trying to say the nothing that cannot be said, and of inspiration, that is as real as it is transient, and that can be passed on to another, but not really possessed by oneself; about the deepest passions, not those that dominate our every waking moment, but those that creep upon us when we are asleep, as it were in spite of our wills, those that make us demand things impossible and impalpable, the mysterious otherness of the person we love, rather than his or her simple, self-evident presence; and also how the personal relates to the political, to the inescapability of history, of society, of the sinister forces that rule us.
For the novel takes place during the Cold War, with all its creepiness, paranoia, and repression. (In fact, it is one of the best portraits I have read of the anxiety of that period, and of its pressures of conformism and groupthink. Kit is free neither from social censoriousness, nor from the spying of the FBI). As for Falin, exiled from the Soviet Union (instead of being sent to prison), he finds himself in an America where he is still under surveillance, still under suspicion, still able to live only under the sufferance of powers who are, themselves, accountable to no one. And the book culminates during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962; Crowley’s conceit is that, in some inexplicable way, Falin must sacrifice himself (relinquishing both his life and his poetry) in order to avert the ultimate catastrophe of all-out nuclear war.
The Translator is mysterious, exactly to the extent that it is utterly lucid. Reading it is a haunting experience, because everything is right there on the surface, both the naturalistic descriptions and the metaphors and themes; and yet this supreme lucidity points to something that is intrinsically ungraspable, so that, after I had finished reading the book, only then did I start to be possessed by all the details that I had read through or read over without any difficulty, but that in retrospect turned out to be dense and labyrinthine, as if it were only in the clear light of unambiguous evidence that we could stumble upon what is truly enigmatic.
John Crowley’s The Translator is a beautiful and deceptively simple novel, with surprisingly little of the fantastic in comparison to Crowley’s other books. The novel is set during the Kennedy presidency, in the early 1960s; it concerns the relationship between I. I. Falin, a middle-aged, exiled Russian poet, and Kit Malone, an undergraduate woman at an unnamed Midwestern university where Falin teaches, and who helps him render his (unpublished in Russia) poems into English.
It’s hard to say whether almost nothing happens in the course of the book, or whether almost everything does. This is because the novel’s style is clear and crisp, and seemingly naturalistic; and yet everything important is elided, not by authorial whim, but because what is most important is what somehow cannot be said, cannot be recognized, cannot be narrated.
For instance, Kit and Falin are certainly in love in some sort of way, but it is never clear whether they ever have sex – years later, Kit sincerely cannot remember. When finally, toward the end of the book, they spend a night together, “It seemed to her that they spent a very long time there together: not hours but days, years even, the whole course of a long deep love affair… And yet she couldn’t actually remember it, long afterward, remembered nothing of what really happened.”
The Translator is about many things: about the trickiness of language and the impossibility of translation; about the nature of poetry, always trying to say the nothing that cannot be said, and of inspiration, that is as real as it is transient, and that can be passed on to another, but not really possessed by oneself; about the deepest passions, not those that dominate our every waking moment, but those that creep upon us when we are asleep, as it were in spite of our wills, those that make us demand things impossible and impalpable, the mysterious otherness of the person we love, rather than his or her simple, self-evident presence; and also how the personal relates to the political, to the inescapability of history, of society, of the sinister forces that rule us.
For the novel takes place during the Cold War, with all its creepiness, paranoia, and repression. (In fact, it is one of the best portraits I have read of the anxiety of that period, and of its pressures of conformism and groupthink. Kit is free neither from social censoriousness, nor from the spying of the FBI). As for Falin, exiled from the Soviet Union (instead of being sent to prison), he finds himself in an America where he is still under surveillance, still under suspicion, still able to live only under the sufferance of powers who are, themselves, accountable to no one. And the book culminates during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962; Crowley’s conceit is that, in some inexplicable way, Falin must sacrifice himself (relinquishing both his life and his poetry) in order to avert the ultimate catastrophe of all-out nuclear war.
The Translator is mysterious, exactly to the extent that it is utterly lucid. Reading it is a haunting experience, because everything is right there on the surface, both the naturalistic descriptions and the metaphors and themes; and yet this supreme lucidity points to something that is intrinsically ungraspable, so that, after I had finished reading the book, only then did I start to be possessed by all the details that I had read through or read over without any difficulty, but that in retrospect turned out to be dense and labyrinthine, as if it were only in the clear light of unambiguous evidence that we could stumble upon what is truly enigmatic.
Yes, I know. Me and My Brother, by the Ying Yang Twins, is nothing but stupid (stoopid?) party music, heavily misogynistic and relentless in its praise of getting fucked up, wearing its ghetto “authenticity” on its sleeve (not the least through endless repetitions of the n-word), but probably appealing mostly to frat boys. Still, I can’t help myself: I basically ignore the words, but I find the beats infectious. The Twins’ production is at the opposite extreme from Timbaland’s: maximalist instead of minimalist, hitting you over the head instead of subtly insinuating, putting the listener (well, me, at least) in a hysterical state of sensori-motor overload. (And I really do mean that “motor” part: listening to this album on headphones, from my iPod, while sitting on the bus, I can’t exactly dance, but I feel that twitching all through my nervous system, from my ears down to my toes).
Yes, I know. Me and My Brother, by the Ying Yang Twins, is nothing but stupid (stoopid?) party music, heavily misogynistic and relentless in its praise of getting fucked up, wearing its ghetto “authenticity” on its sleeve (not the least through endless repetitions of the n-word), but probably appealing mostly to frat boys. Still, I can’t help myself: I basically ignore the words, but I find the beats infectious. The Twins’ production is at the opposite extreme from Timbaland’s: maximalist instead of minimalist, hitting you over the head instead of subtly insinuating, putting the listener (well, me, at least) in a hysterical state of sensori-motor overload. (And I really do mean that “motor” part: listening to this album on headphones, from my iPod, while sitting on the bus, I can’t exactly dance, but I feel that twitching all through my nervous system, from my ears down to my toes).