Pretend

Julie Talen’s Pretend, which I saw tonight at the Seattle artspace Consolidated Works, is a powerful and formally innovative no-budget film (actually shot on digital video, not film).

Julie Talen’s Pretend, which I saw tonight at the Seattle artspace Consolidated Works, is a powerful and formally innovative no-budget film (actually shot on digital video, not film). Pretend tells an emotionally wrenching story, about a nine-year-old girl who stages the fake kidnapping of her six-year-old sister, as a ploy to prevent their parents from breaking up. Children spend a lot of time playing make-believe, but what happens when their fantasies cross over into actuality? With its unreliable narrator and presentation of multiple possibilities, the film offers no easy answers.
But what really makes Pretend a remarkable film is its use of multiple frames and screens-within-screens. Split screens are used now and again in Hollywood films; Andy Warhol experimented with multiple images projected at once in the 1960s; Mike Figgis’ Timecode divided the screen into four quadrants, projecting the simultaneous output from four synchronized cameras; and Peter Greenaway has done a lot with frames-within-frames. (Talen herself gives a detailed history of the use of multiple frames in an article that appeared last year in Salon).
But no narrative film (and probably no avant-garde film either) has ever done anything on the order of what Talen accomplishes in Pretend. The screen is continually being divided into three, five, nine, twelve, or as many as forty-two frames; sometimes there is a checkerboard pattern, other times the screen is split top and bottom, or left and right; still other times, frames of different sizes appear as boxes floating in front of an image that would otherwise cover the entire screen. Sometimes the various frames show different but simultaneous scenes; sometimes they show the same scene from different angles; sometimes they depict variations, or metaphorically associated scenes, or fantasies that somehow relate to the action in other frames. The movements and arrangements of the multiple frames often seem to be organized according to musical principles; speaking about the film, the director spoke of some of these sequences as “fugues” of images. Other times, the visual arrangement of the frames seems more directly motivated by the narrative.
Of course, none of this could have been done before the arrival of digital video, and programs like Final Cut Pro. In addition, Talen makes much of the visual properties (and limitations) of digital video. Sometimes different frames are given different color balances; sometimes some of the frames are blurry, or shot with a slow shutter speed, or blown up so much that individual pixels appear on the screen.
While the effect is sometimes close to abstract, the film as a whole never loses sight of the narrative in which it is anchored. The result of all this is extraordinary: at times, while I was watching Pretend, I felt that I was perceiving things in an entirely new way, as if the very process of vision had been reinvented. (But it’s important to note that Talen’s radical visuals never interfered with the narrative, but made total sense as a way of conveying it, just as more familiar cinematographic and editing techniques do).
The sort of fragmentation of the visual field that is evident in Pretend is really just a way of moving cinema, that quintessential 20th-century art form, fully into the 21st century. Marshall McLuhan said that technological changes, the invention and dissemination of new media, results in changes in the “ratio of the senses,” mutations in the human sensorium itself. McLuhan , writing in the 1960s,was concerned with the way that television was different from movies. Today, under the impact of computers, and more generally the information and communications revolutions of the last thirty years, our minds have become more accustomed to multi-tasking, and our visual experience has become ever more heterogeneous and fragmented. Think of the multiple windows on our computer screens, or for that matter of the multiple windows, with text ticker at the bottom, of a station like CNN Headline News. Pretend is the first film I have seen that does full justice to these changes in our everyday visual experience; what’s more, it doesn’t just mimic these changes as a formal exercise, but deploys them in a way that is intellectually challenging and emotionally resonant.

The Matrix Revolutions

I have almost nothing to say about The Matrix Revolutions. Instead of upping the ante on the comic-book metaphysics of the first two films – which is what I had hoped for – the Wachowski Brothers give us basically a straight action film. The attack on Zion by the machines is exciting (for a while) and state-of-the-art, but it can’t compensate for the almost complete absence of the conundrums that fueled the previous installments. It’s almost as if the Matrix itself didn’t exist, so little attention is paid to the virtual-reality theme. And despite (all-too-brief) reappearances by the Merovingian and the Architect, almost nothing of philosophical import is said by anyone. We are left with some treacly utterances by the Oracle (now played rather ineffectually by Mary Alice, replacing the late Gloria Foster) about love and belief. (You have to snort in derision regarding the “love” between Keanu Reeves’ Neo and Carrie Anne Moss’ Trinity, who must be the most robotically affectless couple in movie history). What’s more, the climactic fight scene between Neo and Agent Smith seems utterly perfunctory in comparison with their battles in the prior two films; and the overall plot resolution is a complete cop-out. Second parts of trilogies are often problematic and disappointing; but when has the concluding installment of a trilogy ever been so lame a letdown? I still find Nona Gaye sexy, but that is about the only positive thing I can say about this film.

FannyPack

I suppose this counts as a “guilty pleasure,” though I am not usually prone to use that category. I find myself quite enchanted by FannyPack, and their album So Stylistic. FannyPack is two twenty-something guys, Manhattan producers/hipsters, who write and perform the music, and three teenage girls from Brooklyn, all fashionably interracial, who rap (though I don’t know if they write their own lyrics, or if the words are written for them by the two guys).

I suppose this counts as a “guilty pleasure,” though I am not usually prone to use that category. I find myself utterly enchanted by FannyPack, and their album So Stylistic. FannyPack is two (white, I think) twenty-something guys, Manhattan producers/hipsters, who write and perform the music, and three teenage girls (well, they range from 15 to 21) from Brooklyn, fashionably interracial (well, one’s white, one’s half-Puerto Rican, half-Thai, and one’s half-black, half-Indian according to band publicity) who rap in New York accents that are welcome to the ears of this exile. I don’t know if the girls write their own lyrics, or if the words are written for them by the two guys.
There’s something disturbingly pedophiliac about how these underage (or barely of age) girls are ultra-sexualized and made out to be innocent at the same time. Everything about the group seems calculated to play to some middle-aged fantasy (“middle-aged” meaning anybody older than the band members) of what urban teen girls are like.
The lyrics are stuff like: “Parties, movies, candy, toys,/ Clothes, shopping, music, boys,/ Flowers, beaches, Mom and Dad,/ These here things make me glad.” Though there’s also the song about the “Cameltoe,” and the one about sneaking into clubs with fake IDs. One song talks about hating school, another about the importance of good grades.
The music is bouncy, perky, and entirely synthetic party music: snaking synthesizer lines above beats borrowed from salsa, disco, Miami 1980s electro, and lite funk.
This music is so ostentatiously lightweight and “fun”, so unorganic, so stylized, so pre-calculated, so phony even (or especially) in the gestures it makes toward high-school-confidential street authenticity, that I can’t help myself: I love it. It’s airily, mindlessly pleasurable and adorable in a way that makes Britney, Christina, and even Beyonce seem utterly strained and clumsy in comparison. Basically, FannyPack is to these other post-teens-singing-for-pre-teens as Mozart is to Mahler, or as the Sex Pistols are to Bachman-Turner Overdrive.
It seems to me that this is what pop music always ought to be like. The weird part of it is, that although FannyPack was certainly being groomed by Tommy Boy Records for superstardom, the CD was apparently a big flop. Almost nobody bought the album. Is there no justice in the world?

San Diego Fire

I’m in San Diego. Yesterday we went to see the results of the fires of two weeks ago. Amazing to see everything all burnt out, even more amazing to see how close the fire came to homes, gas stations, and chemical plants, and that it was only a 15 minutes’ or so drive from downtown.

San Diego Fire.jpg
I’m in San Diego. Yesterday we went to see the results of the fires of two weeks ago. Amazing to see everything all burnt out, even more amazing to see how close the fire came to homes, gas stations, and chemical plants, and that it was only a 15 minutes’ or so drive from downtown.

Frenzetta

Richard Calder‘s Frenzetta is a decadent fever dream of a novel. Set in a future where humanity is divided between the “pure” (reactionary straights) and the “perverse” (people who have been genetically re-engineered to include the animalistic in their nature; they include wolfmen, catgirls, insectmen, spiderwomen, among numerous others), the novel traces a delirious course through various scenarios of lust and catastrophe. The narrator, a zombie (seven-feet tall, supernaturally strong, but impotent, returned from the dead and remaining animate through a diet of fresh brains) and his beloved Frenzetta (a sneering 17-year-0ld punkette, half-rat, and fated to die in the throes of orgasm) wander through the continents of a decaying earth (in which former human technologies are gradually forgotten, due to the influence of the perverse, and the pigheadedness of the pure) searching for a deliverance – both sexual and existential – that they are unable to define. The novel’s philosophical reflections on the nature of desire are given with a light touch, never overshadowing the novel’s delirious, overwrought prose. All in all, the novel is sort of pop Bataille, a melancholy underwriting its numerous titillations, with an overwhelming awareness of the fatal clash of sex and death, but also a sense of futility and decay suggesting the unattainability of the ideal, even of self-annihilation.

Richard Calder‘s Frenzetta is a decadent fever dream of a novel. Set in a future where humanity is divided between the “pure” (reactionary straights) and the “perverse” (people who have been genetically re-engineered to include the animalistic in their nature; they include wolfmen, catgirls, insectmen, spiderwomen, among numerous others), the novel traces a delirious course through various scenarios of lust and catastrophe. The narrator, a zombie (seven-feet tall, supernaturally strong, but impotent, returned from the dead and remaining animate through a diet of fresh brains) and his beloved Frenzetta (a sneering 17-year-0ld punkette, half-rat, and fated to die in the throes of orgasm) wander through the continents of a decaying earth (in which former human technologies are gradually forgotten, due to the influence of the perverse, and the pigheadedness of the pure) searching for a deliverance – both sexual and existential – that they are unable to define. The novel’s philosophical reflections on the nature of desire are given with a light touch, never overshadowing the novel’s delirious, overwrought prose. All in all, the novel is sort of pop Bataille, a melancholy underwriting its numerous titillations, with an overwhelming awareness of the fatal clash of sex and death, but also a sense of futility and decay suggesting the unattainability of the ideal, even of self-annihilation.

Comfort Woman

In the past, I’ve liked Meshell Ndegeocello‘s more visceral yet outgoing, angry, and political albums – like Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape – better than I have her more inward-looking, personal albums – such as Bitter, which was, I guess, not funky enough and too Lilith Fair-like for my taste (OK, so perhaps I’m more of a stereotypical guy than I like to think I am). But her new album, Comfort Woman, seems to me the best of both worlds. It’s a quiet album, made mostly of love songs. It’s even happy, optimistic, and upbeat for the most part – as Bitter was not. Yet despite my resistance to music in such a mode, Comfort Woman entirely wins me over. The album performs the rare feat of conveying a (non-ecstatic, or non-orgasmic) joy without being lulling. And this is all on account of the way it moves. The album is deeply funky, albeit without the hard edge of Cookie and some of Meshell’s other records. (I’d like to just call it “deep funk,” by analogy with “deep house”). Under the melodies, which are mostly gentle, there is a lot of roiling and seething rhythm. Not harsh or aggressive, but deeply – alive. Cross-rhythms percolate in some songs, an off-center beat pulls you along in others, a potent dub energizes others. Not to mention the best song on the album, “Liliquoi Moon,” which introduces the one note of negativity in the album – “death’ll come fast, I want to be free, closer to the sky” – but even this negativity is lyrical and strangely hopeful – “I want to fly” – and then the song concludes with an intense hendrixesque raveup guitar solo by Doyle Bramhall II. All in all, Comfort Woman is riveting; all the more so, perhaps, for the way it sneaks up on you, delivering on promises you didn’t even realize it had made.

In the past, I’ve liked Meshell Ndegeocello‘s more visceral yet outgoing, angry, and political albums – like Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape – better than I have her more inward-looking, personal albums – such as Bitter, which was, I guess, not funky enough and too Lilith Fair-like for my taste (OK, so perhaps I’m more of a stereotypical guy than I like to think I am). But her new album, Comfort Woman, seems to me the best of both worlds. It’s a quiet album, made mostly of love songs. It’s even happy, optimistic, and upbeat for the most part – as Bitter was not. Yet despite my resistance to music in such a mode, Comfort Woman entirely wins me over. The album performs the rare feat of conveying a (non-ecstatic, or non-orgasmic) joy without being lulling. And this is all on account of the way it moves. The album is deeply funky, albeit without the hard edge of Cookie and some of Meshell’s other records. (I’d like to just call it “deep funk,” by analogy with “deep house”). Under the melodies, which are mostly gentle, there is a lot of roiling and seething rhythm. Not harsh or aggressive, but deeply – alive. Cross-rhythms percolate in some songs, an off-center beat pulls you along in others, a potent dub energizes others. Not to mention the best song on the album, “Liliquoi Moon,” which introduces the one note of negativity in the album – “death’ll come fast, I want to be free, closer to the sky” – but even this negativity is lyrical and strangely hopeful – “I want to fly” – and then the song concludes with an intense hendrixesque raveup guitar solo by Doyle Bramhall II. All in all, Comfort Woman is riveting; all the more so, perhaps, for the way it sneaks up on you, delivering on promises you didn’t even realize it had made.

Lyra’s Oxford

Philip Pullman‘s slender new volume, Lyra’s Oxford, is best thought of as a little present for those of us who love the His Dark Materials trilogy. It’s a short story, “Lyra and the Birds,” which picks up the life of the trilogy’s heroine two years after the events of the final volume; together with a number of other artifacts (including a map) from the Oxford of Lyra’s world, and in one case (perhaps) from that of our own. The book has some nice illustrations, and a fine red binding. The story – which you can read in twenty minutes – is about the vagaries and uncertainty of interpretation; “everything means something,” Lyra says, “We just have to find out how to read it.” And again: “everything has a meaning, if only we could read it.” The difficulties of reading are not just a matter for those who deal with arcane texts; they are very much the fabric of our lives. Pullman is one of those rare authors I love utterly unreservedly – even though (in contrast to my other favorites) his preoccupations are in many ways quite distant from my own.

Philip Pullman‘s slender new volume, Lyra’s Oxford, is best thought of as a little present for those of us who love the His Dark Materials trilogy. It’s a short story, “Lyra and the Birds,” which picks up the life of the trilogy’s heroine two years after the events of the final volume; together with a number of other artifacts (including a map) from the Oxford of Lyra’s world, and in one case (perhaps) from that of our own. The book has some nice illustrations, and a fine red binding. The story – which you can read in twenty minutes – is about the vagaries and uncertainty of interpretation; “everything means something,” Lyra says, “We just have to find out how to read it.” And again: “everything has a meaning, if only we could read it.” The difficulties of reading are not just a matter for those who deal with arcane texts; they are very much the fabric of our lives. Pullman is one of those rare authors I love utterly unreservedly – even though (in contrast to my other favorites) his preoccupations are in many ways quite distant from my own.

Gabriel Tarde

‘ve been reading some of the books of Gabriel Tarde, a French sociologist of the 1890s, once famous, the intellectual antagonist of Durkheim (but Durkheim won). Reading Tarde is an unexpected pleasure. The guy is so brilliantly wacko that I’m amazed that he was ever taken seriously as a sociologist. He’s more a crazy metaphysician of social (and other) forms of organization, than someone who has anything concrete to say about any actually existing society of his time.

I’ve been reading some of the books of Gabriel Tarde, a French sociologist of the 1890s, once famous, the intellectual antagonist of Durkheim (but Durkheim won). I started looking at Tarde out of idle curiosity, but now I’m glad I did…
Continue reading “Gabriel Tarde”

Groove Music

I find that I like Erykah Badu‘s new album, Worldwide Underground, better than anything she has previously done; though I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that many (most?) of her past fans like it less. This (both why I like it better, and why others might like it less) is because it’s really groove music: that is to say, it deemphasizes melodies, or at least strong melodic profiles, and relies instead (or much more) on repeated grooves and riffs, giving the songs, and the album as a whole, a kind of warmly propulsive feel – except “propulsive” isn’t quite right, in that it implies progression, whereas Worldwide Underground eschews any sense of forward motion almost entirely. Also, it’s not even “propulsive” in the James Brown sense of funk that really makes you MOVE, even if in fact you aren’t going anywhere (i.e. you are vibrating in place, rather than going in a particular direction) – it’s way too laid back to be doing anything like that. Most remarkably, the album sustains this sense for 50 minutes or so even at the expense of de-emphasizing Ms. Badu’s rather formidable voice, which here blends into the mix rather than dominating it as it did on her previous albums.
I’m not sure where to go with this observation, aside from saying that I like the results. It seems too obvious and cliched, and thereby saying far too little, to classify this music in gendered, sexual terms, e.g. by identifying Badu’s “feminine” pre-orgasmic rhythms in opposition to “cock rock” (I’m not quite sure what the equivalent term would be for hip hop or r&b); nor am I quite able to classify it in drug terms in the way one can often do with music (I mean, in the sense that certain dance music is clearly linked to Ecstasy, or that D’Angelo’s Voodoo, to my mind the greatest-of-all-time example of laid-back groove music, is so clearly stoned-out). So I’ll just have to go with the flow on this one (can’t believe I actually wrote that).

I find that I like Erykah Badu‘s new album, Worldwide Underground, better than anything she has previously done; though I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that many (most?) of her past fans like it less. This (both why I like it better, and why others might like it less) is because it’s really groove music: that is to say, it deemphasizes melodies, or at least strong melodic profiles, and relies instead (or much more) on repeated grooves and riffs, giving the songs, and the album as a whole, a kind of warmly propulsive feel – except “propulsive” isn’t quite right, in that it implies progression, whereas Worldwide Underground eschews any sense of forward motion almost entirely. Also, it’s not even “propulsive” in the James Brown sense of funk that really makes you MOVE, even if in fact you aren’t going anywhere (i.e. you are vibrating in place, rather than going in a particular direction) – it’s way too laid back to be doing anything like that. Most remarkably, the album sustains this sense for 50 minutes or so even at the expense of de-emphasizing Ms. Badu’s rather formidable voice, which here blends into the mix rather than dominating it as it did on her previous albums.
I’m not sure where to go with this observation, aside from saying that I like the results. It seems too obvious and cliched, and thereby saying far too little, to classify this music in gendered, sexual terms, e.g. by identifying Badu’s “feminine” pre-orgasmic rhythms in opposition to “cock rock” (I’m not quite sure what the equivalent term would be for hip hop or r&b); nor am I quite able to classify it in drug terms in the way one can often do with music (I mean, in the sense that certain dance music is clearly linked to Ecstasy, or that D’Angelo’s Voodoo, to my mind the greatest-of-all-time example of laid-back groove music, is so clearly stoned-out). So I’ll just have to go with the flow on this one (can’t believe I actually wrote that).

More Songs About Love and Home

Since I’m stuck with Windows for the time being (when I can afford it, I intend to go back to the MacOS, which I abandoned some years ago), I was very happy that Apple released iTunes for Windows last week. It’s a better tool for managing my iPod than ephpod was (not to mention infinitely better than the horrible Music Match Jukebox, which was the software Apple previously officially provided to Windows iPod owners). Plus, now I can buy from the Apple Music Store: though I don’t like copying restrictions in general, Apple’s seem less onerous than those that come with most of the other legal online music sites, so I suppose I can live with them.
Anyway, the first songs I bought from the Apple Music Store were a few cuts from Bubba Sparxxx‘s new album, produced by Timbaland: remarakble stuff, especially “Comin’ Round”, which somehow melds the razor-sharp hiphop beats Timbaland is famous for with Appalachian fiddling, a genius culture-meld I’ve never heard anything like before.
Among recent listens, I also like the latest from the always brilliant Go Home Productions, “Sly Beyonce Walks Like A Nerd,” a clever (and highly illegal) track that (as the title suggests) mixes Beyonce and N.E.R.D. (The Neptunes), with a little Sly and the Family Stone thrown in for good measure, to produce the ultimate neurotic love song.

Since I’m stuck with Windows for the time being (when I can afford it, I intend to go back to the MacOS, which I abandoned some years ago), I was very happy that Apple released iTunes for Windows last week. It’s a better tool for managing my iPod than ephpod was (not to mention infinitely better than the horrible Music Match Jukebox, which was the software Apple previously officially provided to Windows iPod owners). Plus, now I can buy from the Apple Music Store: though I don’t like copying restrictions in general, Apple’s seem less onerous than those that come with most of the other legal online music sites, so I suppose I can live with them.
Anyway, the first songs I bought from the Apple Music Store were a few cuts from Bubba Sparxxx‘s new album, produced by Timbaland: remarakble stuff, especially “Comin’ Round”, which somehow melds the razor-sharp hiphop beats Timbaland is famous for with Appalachian fiddling, a genius culture-meld I’ve never heard anything like before.
Among recent listens, I also like the latest from the always brilliant Go Home Productions, “Sly Beyonce Walks Like A Nerd,” a clever (and highly illegal) track that (as the title suggests) mixes Beyonce and N.E.R.D. (The Neptunes), with a little Sly and the Family Stone thrown in for good measure, to produce the ultimate neurotic love song.