Minimalist Orgy

Japan, Social Cohesion, and Book Recommendations

2011-03-16T21:19:00.004-05:00

(Images stolen without permission from The Big Picture at Boston.com, which always has the most dramatic pictures out there. For a more quotidian perspective, go here.)

A friend of mine wrote to ask what I thought of this blog post about the lack of looting in Japan compared to Katrina, Haiti, etc. Since he's also a history dork, I felt free to let loose my full nerdiness. Maybe you're nerdy about culture and politics too! If so, read on. If this seems too bloodlessly intellectual, it could just be that I'm at that particular stage of the grieving process. I appreciate the human spirit on display as much as anyone does, especially from those obachans up there doing their calisthenics.

My first reaction is that he's letting his political biases (which I share!) distort his view of the question. His basic argument is that the Japanese attitude towards government is more positive than the American attitude, and therefore government responsiveness both before and after the disaster was better (i.e. it "hasn't created a massive, impoverished underclass" and the GOJ is well "prepared to respond to this kind of disaster"). Neither of these statements is as true as he thinks it is.

First, economic equality: Japan is good in terms of equality (copy that graph! It's hugely important), and certainly better than the US. But note that it's pretty close to France, whose rioting underclasses are not particularly known for their restraint (not judging!). I also think equality in Japan has been getting worse since the bubble burst (too bad the graph stops in 1990). There are no shortage of stories about poor job prospects for young people, etc. And it way too simplistic to ascribe the equality to government policy. (This is highly recommended on the roots of that equality.)

Second, you have to distinguish how amazingly prepared they were for earthquakes from how unprepared they were for the tsunami. As far as we can tell, pretty much everything was still standing for the 15 minutes between the quake and the tsunami, and of course the nuclear reactors shut down properly after the quake but started overheating when the tsunami knocked out the power to the cooling system. It is so astounding how well they weathered the FIFTH LARGEST EARTHQUAKE IN THE PAST 100 YEARS ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD. I mean, Christchurch was 6.3, and there have been about 15 AFTERSHOCKS that big in Japan. Also I suck at logarithms, but I'm pretty sure 9.0 is like 800 times bigger than 6.3.

(Further digression: I think I agree with Felix Salmon when he says "don't donate money to Japan." Japan has money. In fact they just created a whole bunch of it in response to the crisis; and the yen is at an all-time high against the dollar. (Why? Can you explain that?) The long-term economic effects may actually be positive--Kan (the PM) has called for a "New Deal," although I'm kind of worried that some global supply chains for electronic goods may be re-routed to China and Korea, etc., maybe permanently thanks to labor costs. Salmon's point is that giving money only to relieve the tugging on your heartstrings is not the best way to do it. Better just to give blood locally. Not that I do that either, but that's the better thing to feel guilty about.)

So how well is the government handling the relief effort? Better than average, from what I can tell. They're airlifting supplies in, too slowly but then these things take time. Most of the criticism they've had has been over lack of information on the nuclear situation. It's pretty typical of the Japanese government to be a bit slow getting information out. (A metaphor: Japanese doctors don't usually tell terminal cancer patients what's wrong with them, because that would just cause anguish.) But it's actually hard to judge how bad the nuclear situation is, or how much the media is reporting it because it's sexy. My twitter feed is a constant stream of "shut up about the nuclear plant, foreign media, the real story is half a million people without food or water or clothes or medicine, and now it's starting to snow." Oh but also "wow I never thought I'd be paying this much attention to Geiger counter readings." So yeah, conflicted. (Also: "Crap, the trains are really crowded, such-and-such a line is only running at 70% capacity.")

I think the point that there's just nothing dry to loot in a tsunami is more relevant, but of course he downplays that because it doesn't support his political point.

So no looting, but there's been hoarding. It's hard to say whether shortages on food staples (rice and bread) and gasoline are caused by hoarding or supply problems (this is the country that invented just-in-time delivery, because real estate is too expensive to keep large inventories), but they appear to be clearing up. Is hoarding evidence of a breakdown of social order that's not as severe as looting? It certainly argues against the idea that "their social dynamics focus on group harmony." On the other hand, the planned rolling blackouts in response to Fukushima-related energy shortages were more limited than expected because people made voluntary cut-backs in energy use. So that's nice.

Anyway, that brings up the question of "group harmony" as a cultural trait, which is the most difficult one to answer. Partly because it's a dumb stereotype and we don't want to be racist--I've seen so many dumb news stories on how the Japanese are so unified in their response, etc. (The dumbest are the ones about how "even in this disaster, the shelters are still separating their recyclables!" This is just AUTOMATIC for Japanese people, since burnable garbage is collected on different days than non-burnable, and goes in the green dumpster instead of the orange one. This is not a sign of social cohesion, it's just habit.) I think the roots of this stereotype are in a version of Orientalism, btw, which has been reinforced by a counter-Orientalism, which accepts the premise that Asians are less individualistic, etc., but claims that this is a good thing. Singapore's ex-president Lee Kwan-Yu is famous for arguing this. The book to avoid on the subject is Confucius Lives Next Door.

In general, Japanese life and Japanese politics are more contentious than they appear from the outside. There is already some muted criticism of the government from the opposition LDP, which before this happened was poised to undo the historic gains made by the DPJ last year, mostly because it (the LDP) has been incredibly obstructionist. Grassroots politics in Japan is fairly strong, which I suppose could account for some "social cohesion" and cooperation in response to the disaster, but this is a different explanation than the one that says it's because Japanese people trust their government. (In the Realm of a Dying Emperor is a good book about this, although a bit dated and very pessimistic, by an ASIJ alumna.)

But even more, the question of whether "group harmony" is cultural is so hard to answer because there are so many variables. Like, you could do game theoretical models that show that group-oriented responses are actually more rational than selfish ones in certain situations--this is how evolutionary biologists explain homosexuality, in case you need an evolutionary explanation for that--and perhaps some of these situations apply in Japan.

More generally, is it fair to say that looting is best described as a form of the moral economy that's been corrupted by the market economy? Or is that an oxymoron? Meaning: in the moral economy you respond extra-legally in order to correct a perceived economic injustice, by redistributing bread. Looting is also a correction of a perceived economic injustice, only instead of bread you do it with stereos or whatever. I'm not sure my thinking is correct on this. I bring it up just to say that I don't accept the idea that looting should be understood as a measure of "social harmony," whatever that means. I also wish I knew what the history of the moral economy is in Japan. I suspect there's an answer in Peasants, Rebels and Outcastes, which is sitting on my bookshelf waiting to be read. But Embracing Defeat probably comes first.

And while I'm recommending books, I think Underground might be the best introduction to contemporary Japan. It's about the Aum-Shinrikyo subway attacks. It's by Haruki Murakami but it's non-fiction. It deals pretty well with some of these questions (does Japanese social cohesion lead to susceptibility to cults? but on the other hand maybe the attacks show a lack of social cohesion?) without coming to any conclusions.

100 Best Chinese Movies

2010-12-03T13:40:00.003-05:00

Hong Kong Film Awards, 2005

1. Spring in a Small Town, Fei Mu (1948)
2. A Better Tomorrow, John Woo (1986)
3. Days of Being Wild, Wong Kar-wai (1990)
4. Yellow Earth, Chen Kaige (1984)
5. City of Sadness, Hou Hsiao-Hsien (1989)
6. Long Arm of the Law, Johnny Mak (1984) Sammo Hung
7. Dragon Gate Inn, King Hu (1967)
8. Boat People, Ann Hui (1982)
9. Touch of Zen, King Hu (1971)
10. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang Lee (2000)
11. Street Angel, Yuan Muzhi (1937) Zhou Xuan
12. A Brighter Summer Day, Edward Yang (1991)
13. Private Eye, Hui Brothers (1976)
14. The Mission, Johnny To (1999)
15. One Armed Swordsman, Chang Cheh (1967) Shaw Brothers
16. Fist of Fury, Lo Wei (1972) Bruce Lee
17. In the Heat of the Sun, Jiang Wen (1994)
18. In the Face of Demolition (1954) Bruce Lee
19. Chinese Odyssey, Jeffrey Lau (1994)
20. The Arch, Tang Shu Shuen (1970)
21. Rouge, Anita Mui (1988)
22. Chungking Express, Wong Kar-wai (1994)
23. Homecoming, Yim Ho (1984)
24. A Time to Live and a Time to Die, Hou Hsiao-Hsien (1985)
25. Red Sorghum, Zhang Yimou (1987)
26. Father and Son, Allen Fong (1981)
27. The Spring River Flows East, Cai Chusheng and Zheng Junli (1947)
28. Comrades, Almost a Love Story, Peter Chan (1996)
29. The Goddess, Wu Yonggang (1934)
30. The Big Road, Sun Yu (1934)
31. The Secret, Ann Hui (1979)
32. Infernal Affairs, Andrew Lau and Alan Mak (2002)
33. Drunken Master, Yuen Woo-ping (1978)
34. The Butterfly Murders, Tsui Hark (1979)
35. Ashes of Time, Wong Kar-wai (1994)
36. Made in Hong Kong, Fruit Chan (1997)
37. Sorrows of the Forbidden City, Shilin Zhu (1948) Zhou Xuan
38. Butterfly Lovers, Li Han-hsiang (1968)
39. Story of a Discharged Prisoner, Patrick Lung Kong (1967)
40. Zu Warriors of the Magic Mountain, Tsui Hark (1983)
41. The Terrorizers, Edward Yang (1986)
42. The Killer, John Woo (1989)
43. Once Upon a Time in China, Tsui Hark (1991)
44. Center Stage, Stanley Kwan (1992)
45. The Story of Qiu Ju, Zhang Yimou (1992)
46. This Life of Mine, Shi Hui (1950)
47. The Kingdom and the Beauty, Li Han-hsiang (1959)
48. The Winter, Li Han-hsiang (1969)
49. An Autumn’s Tale, Mabel Cheung (1987)
50. A Chinese Ghost Story, Ching Siu-tung (1987)
51. The Purple Hairpin, Li Tie (1959)
52. The Orphan, Lee Sun-Fung (1960) Bruce Lee
53. Two Stage Sisters, Xie Jin (1965)
54. City on Fire, Ringo Lam (1987)
55. Farewell My Concubine, Chen Kaige (1993)
56. Yi Yi, Edward Yang (2000)
57. Cold Nights, Lee Sun-Fung (1955)
58. The Break of Dawn, Sung Tsun-shou (1967)
59. Raining in the Mountain, King Hu (1979)
60. Police Story, Jackie Chan (1985)
61. C’est la vie, mon chérie, Derek Yee (1993)
62. The Wedding Banquet, Ang Lee (1993)
63. Platform, Jia Zhangke (2000)
64. The Wild, Wild Rose, Wang Tian-lin (1960)
65. The Great Devotion, Chor Yuen (1960)
66. My Intimate Partner, Chun Kim (1960)
67. Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind, Tsui Hark (1980)
68. Ah Ying, Allen Fong (1983)
69. Durian Durian, Fruit Chan (2000)
70. Little Toys, Sun Yu (1933)
71. Sorrows and Joy in Middle Age, Sang Hu (1949)
72. The House of 72 Tenants, Chor Yuen (1973)
73. Nomad, Patrick Tam (1982)
74. Dust in the Wind, Hou Hsiao-Hsien (1986)
75. 92 Legendary La Rose Noire, Jeffrey Lau (1992)
76. Shaolin Soccer, Steven Chow (2001)
77. Song at Midnight, Ma-Xu Weibang (1937)
78. China Behind, Tang Shu Shuen (1974)
79. The Spooky Bunch, Ann Hui (1980)
80. Taipei Story, Edward Yang (1985)
81. The Blue Kite, Tian Zhuangzhuang (1993)
82. Long Live the Mistress, Sang Hu (1948)
83. Mambo Girl, Evan Yang (1957)
84. Feast of a Rich Family, Lee Tit, Law Chi-Hung, Lee Sun-Fung, Ng Wui (1959)
85. Execution in Autumn, Hsing Lee (1972)
86. Hibiscus Town, Xie Jin (1986)
87. God of Gamblers, Wong Jing (1989)
88. As Tears Go By, Wong Kar-wai (1989)
89. Happy Together, Wong Kar-wai (1997)
90. In the Mood for Love Wong Kar-wai (2000)
91. Myriad of Lights, Shen Fu (1948)
92. Festival Moon, Shilin Zhu (1959)
93. Parents’ Hearts, Chun Kim (1955)
94. Lin Zexu, Zheng Junli (1959)
95. Dream of the Red Chamber, Fan Cen (1962)
96. Health Warning, Kirk Wong (1983)
97. Shanghai Blues, Tsui Hark (1984)
98. Invincible Pole Fighters, Lau Kar-leung (1983)
99. The Black Cannon Incident, Huang Jianxin (1985)
100. Rebels of a Neon God, Tsai Ming-liang (1992)
101. The Puppetmaster, Hou Hsiao-Hsien (1993)
102. Summer Snow, Ann Hui (1995)
103. Not One Less, Zhang Yimou (1999)

China (pre-communist) 11
PRC 13
Hong Kong 61
Taiwan 16

1930s 5
1940s 6
1950s 10
1960s 12
1970s 11
1980s 30
1990s 22
2000s 7

Source

The Pleasures of Film

2009-06-30T09:34:00.003-05:00

"It is occasionally agreeable to gaze upon charming girls, new fashions which will be forgotten tomorrow, or pretty children--but it will be even more agreeable to see them twenty years hence." Robert Brasillach and Maurice Bardèche, The History of Motion Pictures, 1935.

Why Iranian Events are Relevant to Your Life

2009-06-29T11:15:00.003-05:00

Interesting short article by Iran specialist Gary Sick. Relevant paragraph:

This is a formula for the kind of militarized and nationalist corporate state under a single controlling ideology that is not dissimilar to fascist rule in an earlier day. Like fascism, it defines itself not only in terms of its own objectives but even moreso by what it opposes: liberalism, individualism, unfettered capitalism, etc. There is no need to push the definition too far, since fascism tended to be specific to a particular time and set of historical circumstances. But the resemblance in nature and practice seems to justify use of the term.

I like that he includes those caveats. I like this as a thought experiment. I don't like that it gives less scrupulous people, some of whom have motives that are more admirable than others', the excuse to start throwing around the f-bomb. But I'm increasingly coming around to this viewpoint, that fascism is specific to a certain time and place (and level of technological development--not to say that Twitter is necessarily teh bomb). I'm not sure if that's just because I'm a historian instead of a political scientist, but it has something to do with it.

Now that Iran coverage is entering the hangover stage, and I'm starting to think about it more philosophically, I think that everyone's interest in these kinds of events is probably structurally similar to that of the neocons: we're all just trying to grasp a moment of global redemption which seems so much closer in revolutions than in ordinary times, and trying to read the signs to see how the final liberating revolution might come about. It's like trying to read the mind of god. Revolution is a spiritual need. It's no accident that the neocons are descended from Jewish Marxists who thought they found salvation in America (or Israel, but let's leave that aside for now). It's also no accident that the Iranian revolution was made by a coalition of Marxists and messianic Islamists. So when an analyst says "this revolution threatens the Islamic Republic," which seems too radical a statement to be merely a prediction that the Islamic Republic will evolve in a more democratic direction, am I supposed to read it instead as a neocon prediction that American-style secular democracy is coming to Iran? This seems unlikely, especially when one notes that the Jewish-American intellectual tradition might be particularly unsuited for analyzing an Islamic revolution--or is it? How else can I read that statement, given the inherent unpredictability of revolutions? This seems to me to be an urgent question, but one that's incredibly distracting when one is trying to write a dissertation. On fascism.

This is all just to say that obviously Walter Benjamin invented the way neocons think about the world, and the way we all think about fascism, and that everyone needs to go back and read the Theses on the Philosophy of History again.

Shopping in Iran

2009-06-23T13:51:00.003-05:00

Unconfirmed tweet from persiankiwi, 9am EST 6/23, (that's Tuesday afternoon in Tehran) via Sully:

Mousavi - the objective is to bring Tehran to standstill - millions of people go shopping but NOBODY SHOPPING - #Iranelection RT RT RT

Even if this is rumor or misinformation, I think it's interesting. Has anyone heard of this tactic before? The first thing that comes to mind is that this is a specific détournement of Bush's response to 9-11, when he told the American people that the best response was to go shopping. Here you go shopping without going shopping.

But there is a specific context here which complicates any attempt to see this tactic as anti-capitalist; as I understand it, the bazaars are allied with the clergy and the Revolutionary Guard, so this kind of active boycott looks more like the economic version of the street fighting we've seen the last few days. Falling short of pitched battles, these low-level skirmishes are the way a disorganized movement tests a more coherent, better armed force. Shopping-without-shopping is a similar process of flirtation and probing, where bazaari and customer eye each other the way policeman and rioter do. But the positions are reversed: in the street it is the rioter who coyly tempts the policeman to break out his truncheon, while in the bazaar it is the shopkeeper who tempts the customer to break out the wallet. And although it's hard to see from my vantage point, the gender roles are likely reversed as well. Men traditionally make up the shock troops in street fighting, although we've heard reports that in this case at least women are playing an important role urging them on. Will the women play a more primary role in the shopping conflict? Will men support and protect them in turn? In any case this seems more subversive than reading Lolita. I eagerly await further developments, without knowing what source will be able to adequately report on them.

In the end perhaps the most we can say is that this is an example of the macro shift away from the primacy of the producer to that of the consumer. And a reminder that despite the rumored "end of history" and the supposed importance of religious and tribal rather than economic loyalties, socio-economic realities are still important and perhaps decisive. See the New Yorker's summary of the Iranian economy for background on that.

Julie Christie

2009-06-16T10:12:00.001-05:00

Pandemic

2009-05-06T14:09:00.001-05:00

This is about a week late, but here's an artist's representation of a pandemic:

From here.

Trying to See Post-Fordism

2009-05-06T12:44:00.008-05:00

Note how some cities move beyond the extent of the original instantiation. This is a result of cities holding inertia as they travel towards their destinations. Cities are not aware of their arrival time, so when they reach their destinations, they are traveling too fast to stop, and shoot beyond it. Slowly the cities oscillate and stop precisely at their destinations.

(Click on picture for a minute or so of intriguing confusion. Via.)

Two interesting pieces on what a post-Fordist economy will look like. The shorter one (from Richard Florida at the Atlantic) is a breakdown of some very-hard-to-interpret poll numbers about what appliances and objects Americans think of as necessities. Basically, it seems like a shift away from the "auto-housing industrial complex," but perhaps not moving towards "tech-driven consumption" as quickly as one might expect. The point is that even if we're right that the post-recession economy will have to be more green and more information-centered, it will take a while to get there, and we don't know exactly what it will look like.

The longer article (by new urbanist Ben Adler in the American Prospect) is a contrast between two Washington, DC suburbs, one walkable and one not. Shocking differences, as one would expect. Two ideas were new to me. First, that "traffic is good." Congested roads encourage people to take subways. I'm not sure this is the best way of thinking, and I'm positive that it's not the best way to win over skeptics. Second, that Kentlands, the walkable suburb, was constructed before the public transportation that now serves it--bus lines were added thanks to public demand. It required a leap of faith. As with the "necessary" appliances, trying to forecast a less auto-centric future is difficult.

There is something to be said here about the role of utopian imagery in providing the initial blueprint for a hazy future. I just wish the imagery for new urbanism didn't try to look so traditional.

Film Posters

2009-04-17T16:50:00.002-05:00

I'm as much of a fan of Criterion covers as the next guy, but I'd like to see more DVD releases that just use old posters, because a lot of them are just fantastic.

Poem from My Music Library

2009-04-10T13:57:00.002-05:00

I am a kitten
I am an astronaut
I am mops
I am Star Wars
I am the cosmos
I can't stand the rain
I could never be president
I did acid with Caroline
I don't care what the people say
I need the sun
I walked with a zombie
I want to be President
I'm allergic to flowers
We're from Barcelona
I'm in love with a German film star
I'm lonely
I'm on fire
I'm your teenage prayer
I've been mistreated

Thoughts on Dubai

2009-02-21T15:22:00.005-05:00

Ant sculpture outside Dubai International Financial Exchange. The message: work hard, know your place, and we can build something big out of sand.

Really fucked-up story about the real estate crash in Dubai. I'm really interested in Dubai as a nasty social experiment that in retrospect was bound to fail, but we're still not sure HOW it's going to fail. Like, will there be a revolution by the migrant workers? (Population is 3/4 foreign workers, mostly construction I think; male/female ration is 3:1) Will the Emirates clamp down even harder (somehow)? Will everyone just go home and leave a ghost town of empty skyscrapers? The metaphor of castles built on sand is unavoidable, but exactly how they're going to fall is going to be instructive to watch.

But the way this is presented is even weirder. First, the video seems like half business report and half promotional video--look at the great deals on houses! Only 12 million Euros! Second, the end of the article is basically just there to make fun of the superficial nouveau-riche, a palm-tree-shaped island being the scaled-up equivalent of a pink flamingo lawn ornament. I have no problem with spotlighting the foibles of the super-rich and criticizing those who profited from creating a hollowed-out bubble economy, but I suspect that bad taste in apartments was not among the worst of their sins. The article suggests that cultural value gets created at the bottom, then gets diluted on the way up the food chain, and Dubai's biggest problem is not having enough hipsters. Never having been to Dubai, I don't know if there is an autonomous culture among the migrant workers, but if there is I suspect that it's too conservative for the authors of this article to be able to recognize or admire it.

But this trickle-up model of cultural economy just suggest an infinite regression: if all this is based ultimately on hipsters, what is hipster value based on? Maybe it's just turtlenecks all the way down.

More pictures here.

Sorely needed...

2008-12-17T11:26:00.001-05:00

Vanilla Bicycle

2008-12-06T14:31:00.002-05:00

Rash and Rationality

2008-08-26T13:32:00.001-05:00

The name of a Black Adder episode? A pamphlet on how to properly deal with skin disorders? No! It's the Pratt siblings!

The Hills mines basically the same territory as Jane Austen: interpersonal relations, alliance formation, all that. Now we have "Rash and Rationality" to prove it.

Aspirational vs. Intellectual Viewing

2008-05-07T11:12:00.006-05:00

The characters on The Hills are not real to me.

You have probably read that sentence as a criticism of the show, as meaning that the characters don't seem sufficiently life-like to capture my attention. And further, as an accusation of hypocrisy, since the show advertises itself as a reality show. But I don't mean either of those. I just mean that the characters on the show are constructed in pretty much the same way that characters are constructed in fictional shows. And they come into my living room the same way any sitcom character does. The knowledge that there are real people in Los Angeles whose lives are the raw material for the show enters my mind exactly as much as the knowledge that the steak on my dinner plate was once a cow. This may seem cold. It is. What's even colder is that, unlike that steak, I don't actually LIKE any of these characters.

This is probably largely a function of demographics: the show is most popular with tweenage girls, whereas I'm male and in my early 30's. The minimalist characterization that the show uses--long pauses on the nearly expressionless faces of the characters as they interact with each other--serves a different purpose for me than for more aspirational viewers. For young girls it offers an abundance of time to empathize with the character; the inscrutability is also a chance to practice reading the subtle verbal and facial clues that are key to complex social interaction. These are not things I'm interested in. For me these pauses are more awkward and noticeable--the fact that the conversations don't look natural mostly serves to defamiliarize classical continuity editing. So for most young girls the pleasure is in placing themselves in the melodramatic (and therefore meaningful) life of Lauren Conrad, while for me the pleasure is in feeling myself aware of (and therefore superior to) the constructed nature of the show.

I've been accused of intellectualism and elitism, and not for the last time. My writing is formal and exact. I know this turns some people off, even when I try to be accessible. But my point is that both of these ways of viewing the show involve complex cognitive processes. If you sat me and a tweenage girl in front of the The Hills and did brain scans on both of us, they would show equal amounts of mental activity. Her brain might show more empathic activity (brain scans can show that, right?) because of her identification with the characters, but that doesn't mean she's thinking about what she's seeing any less than I am. She's registering the social clues, and puzzling through the social strategy of the characters; I'm registering the framing choices and the cuts. But neither of us are more or less involved in the show. Whether she likes it more than me--well, I don't really see the point of that question.

Hills Reading List

2008-05-07T08:59:00.002-05:00

Mona Lisa Overdrive, William Gibson. Science Fiction, features a character who is the star of a reality show but feels herself increasingly trapped. How can she escape?

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers. For the MTV Real World audition chapter, and for the reality vs. fiction problem.

Watching Dallas, Ien Ang. Exactly what kind of pleasure do people get out of TV melodrama? What sociological conclusions can we draw from these shows. Nothing on reality TV here, but a good introduction to media studies.

Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia. An overblown and infuriating book, with absolutely no credibility, but it's fascinating in its depiction of the complex ways in which people use art and myth to create their personalities.

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman. A game theoretical approach to the minutest types of everyday interactions. How we present ourselves, and how we examine other people's presentations of themselves for information.

Videos

2008-04-29T01:21:00.003-05:00

Just so you don't get the impression that all I ever think about is The Hills, here's my other unhealthy obsession: Shiina Ringo. I've bugged some of you about her before, but here she is in convenient YouTube form, so you have no excuse now but to appreciate the genius. All things considered, this pretty much has to be one of my favorite music videos:

Cowboys? Samurai? And that's probably the best scream since "Frankie Teardrop" (that one's long). So it narrowly beats out the cosplay one, and the one with her playing electric guitar in a kimono.

Would you get the impression that I really wanted to see it?

2008-04-29T00:09:00.002-05:00

Lo: "I wonder if the neighbors have seen me naked yet."

A Beautiful Lie

2008-04-24T21:15:00.004-05:00

T-shirts with things written on them are not cool, but it's okay because Audrina is Rock 'n Roll. But she's not really Rock 'n Roll, because the shirt says she's beautiful. But actually she is Rock 'n Roll, because it also says that's a lie. But really she's not Rock 'n Roll, because she actually is beautiful.

No such thing as a guilty pleasure

2008-04-21T14:41:00.010-05:00

No matter how disappointed many Hills fans might be at that New Yorker article (a pointless, lazy exercise in condescension that didn't even make a good faith effort to understand the show), it's not nearly as bad as this embarrassingly gushing review like this one of Gossip Girl. The conclusion to that article is that GG offers "profound social commentary." By which they mean: "The show mocks our superficial fantasies while satisfying them, allowing us to partake in the over-the-top pleasures of the irresponsible superrich without anxiety or guilt or moralizing." Um... let's just say that my definition of "profound" is very different from the one used by Ms. Pressler and Mr. Rovzar. "Social commentary," too. Or is that irony I smell? I can't quite tell, which in itself is a bad sign.

Actually I'm not sure Hills fans care that much about the New Yorker thing. The official MTV blog puts a positive spin on it, claiming that any mention in the New Yorker is an accomplishment, given the prestige of the magazine. They don't really need to take it seriously because the group of people who 1) read the New Yorker and 2) might possibly watch more than one episode of the show is approximately... me.

The two shows are actually pretty similar. Both are about the romantic lives of the hyperrich, centered on a Betty/Veronica rivalry; both include lots of references to text messaging and general new media connectivity as a nod to their interconnected audience. The difference between New York and LA is not that great. The real difference between the shows is that Gossip Girl allows for distanced, ironic viewing while The Hills does not. Kristen Bell's kitsch narration has a lot to do with this--because she doesn't appear in the show, the effect is to distance the viewer from the action and allow viewers to not feel guilty about indulging in their "superficial fantasies." Lauren Conrad's narration is limited to the "previouslies," and takes itself very seriously.

So we have people feeling superior to Gossip Girl but liking it anyway, and people feeling superior to The Hills and mocking it incessantly. None of this is surprising. But there's a way to feel superior to the show without mocking it or calling it a guilty pleasure--analyze it! Compare it to Antonioni, analyze narrative distance, name-drop Derrida and Barthes to show you've got more cultural capital than Heidi Montag. There's an obscurantist tendency in cultural studies to analyze the most disrespected aspects of popular culture; this may in the end be as condescending as simply dismissing them. To be honest, my appreciation of the show has very little to do with my feelings for its stars--Nancy Franklin is not far off when she says "I have yet to hear any character on the show say something interesting or funny." But the pleasures, for me anyway, lie elsewhere: I'm enough of a theory geek to actually enjoy all that cultural studies stuff.

Finding the Camera

2008-04-20T10:18:00.004-05:00

Look in the mirror--that's Whitney. She always knows where the camera is.

The Forces of Good and Evil at War for Heidi Montag's Soul

2008-04-18T16:53:00.003-05:00

She's on the edge between light and dark. Black leather jacket and dark eye-shadow, but bleached blonde hair and white fingernails.

Reality TV, Reality Effects, and Realism

2008-04-18T10:31:00.007-05:00

Justin at Songs About Buildings and Food hates this New Yorker article because it hates The Hills. I agree that the tone is a bit nasty, but the analysis is not too far off:

“The Hills” isn’t aiming to stimulate or inspire; I think people watch it mostly to figure out why they’re watching it.

Close, but I actually think people watch it mostly to figure out what they're watching, not why. Both questions are very difficult to answer, though, and either way this is more self-awareness than you get with most other shows.

So here's an example of a tendency on The Hills that I mentioned last week, when a character enters a scene with their face obscured even though the entrance is staged. This is Audrina closing the door behind her as she comes home:

There's no logistical reason why the camera can't be moved a few feet in order to catch her face. This is a location that appears in every episode, and I guarantee that the producers know how to shoot here. So the question is, why obscure her face? What purpose does this serve?

I suggested last week that it has something to do with the "reality effect," a concept developed by literary theorist Roland Barthes. If there's a descriptive detail in a novel that serves no narrative or symbolic purpose, then its very meaninglessness is used to signify that the novel takes place in "reality." This is one way of pointing out that the "realism" of any artwork is not a result of how faithfully it reproduces the outside world, but how much it signals to the reader or viewer "this is real." But since TV and movies (leaving aside animation and special effects) are already constructed out of accurate pictures of the outside world, adding more details doesn't actually reinforce the realistic effect. The principle that "lack of meaning = reality" still holds, though, except that the lack of meaning comes not from extraneous details in content, but from unmotivated camera choices, in this case framing. So one reason this shot is included could be to signal to the audience that this is reality. "If this shot were planned, don't you think we would have planned it better? Therefore, it's obviously real."

But in the stylistic history of film, this has not been the usual way of signaling reality. Usually, you use long takes to better show a natural dialogue between characters, including things like awkward pauses and people talking over each other. You show scenes where very little happens in terms of plot. The Bicycle Thief is a classic example the realist school, or for something more recent try Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days. This is precisely the opposite of what The Hills does, following Hollywood convention. Dialogue is chopped up into alternating shot/reverse-shot angles in order to 1) encourage spectators to identify with one of the characters and 2) streamline the conversation and make it flow. (1) And the weird thing is that The Hills is actually less streamlined than most Hollywood entertainment: after a conversation is broken down into its constituent parts, The Hills puts it back together with the awkward pauses either still there or possibly even deliberately edited in.

My point is that camera placement and editing in The Hills turn out to work against interpreting the show as "real"--instead, they highlight the show's constructedness. The show is purposely trying to look as much as possible like a Hollywood film, to the point of taking the Hollywood editing style to such extremes that the way it's constructed is blatantly obvious. And that includes the obscured faces, which are part of the currently popular "run-and-gun" style of filmmaking, where the best example is the Bourne films. This is also the reason the show is shot in widescreen.

1. By the way, this is basically the film-editing version of Taylorism, where actions taken by factory workers are broken down into the smallest possible pieces and then analyzed for efficiency--actually one word for this editing style is analytic. I'll say more about work on The Hills in a future post, to expand on my comments last time about industrial vs. information economies.

Dissertation progress yesterday: Finished Staging Fascism, which was excellent. Did about 40 pages of indexing/notetaking. Wrote about half a page, still on Nanook/primitivism.
Last movie watched: Crazed Fruit (1956), which is apparently the best of the Taiyozoku films. Based on an Ishihara Shintaro story, it was an influence on the French New Wave. Truffaut loved it. There's a lot to be said about the post-Occupation rejection/imitation of America by the Japanese counter-culture (if you can call it that).

Flipping the haters

2008-04-15T09:41:00.013-05:00

Okay, it has come to my attention that certain people (you know who you are) are reading this and wondering how exactly The Hills might relate to my dissertation on French Fascist film reception. That's my fault for not being clear. This blog is basically a place for me to brainstorm about things I will write more formally in the dissertation, but sometimes I forget that and wander into intellectual masturbation, and the title of the blog becomes a little too apt.

The central assumption of the dissertation is that the ways in which a work of art is produced and distributed has political implications. So take film. A movie is (or used to be, anyway) a long strip of celluloid with pictures in sequence, which is projected onto a white screen in front of an audience that is sitting in the dark. Filmmakers address this audience in different ways. They can present them with performers who will do a song and dance to entertain them; they can show them footage of distant cultures or recreations of historical events in order to educate or persuade them; they can tell a story which will cause the audience to identify with the protagonist and involve itself or lose itself in the film. This last one is most interesting to me. Why would you want to lose yourself? What can someone make you do when you lose yourself? Is losing yourself in a film audience anything like losing yourself at a fascist rally?

This image is taken from Triumph of the Will (1935), the most famous Fascist film. Audiences can react in different ways to it. Many Germans would have watched it in order to be part of the mass ritual it depicts, to bind themselves to the nation as depicted in the film (the word fascism comes from an Italian word meaning "to bind"). Today we watch it to educate ourselves about a historical period and a political movement.

There were no French Fascist films, mostly because fascists never came to power in France (unless you count Vichy, which was too traditionally conservative to qualify). But there were a few very prominent French Fascist film critics--the critic for the most important literary daily, and the authors of the first history of film to be published in French, were all Fascist. Just like filmmakers, film critics make assumptions about the film audience. What do they want? Are they each individuals or do they form some kind of collective body? Are they bound to each other by language, by race, by class? The types of films critics like, and the things they say about them, tell us a lot about what they think about film audiences, which tells us a lot about their politics.

Okay, now take The Hills. The way in which this show is produced and distributed, the way in which people watch it, and the assumptions that critics make about it are all very different from the conditions surrounding 1930's films. Those differences also have a lot to do with what kind of audience watches the show, or what kind of audience is created by the show. Contrary to what most people assume, the show rewards and encourages a very sophisticated viewing, a type of viewing that is simultaneously absorbed in the plot and detached from it. Younger viewers are probably on average better at this than older viewers. Here's Lauren with her iPod. Notice that one earbud is out--she's multitasking, listening and not listening at once.

The reason that The Hills is better at this than other shows is that it destroys the difference between reality and fiction. All actors on the show are living their real lives, but those lives just happen to include an entourage of cameramen, make-up people, wardrobe, etc. The show has been criticized because it pre-plans scenes, makes suggestions to its actors about what might make for good TV, and even reshoots some scenes. Critics claim that this destroys its legitimacy as a reality show. But the show isn't aiming for this kind of legitimacy--it makes no claims to be educating its audience about reality. Actually very few reality shows do.

So you would assume that the show invites its audience to become absorbed in the story, to identify with one or more of the characters as they would in a fictional drama. You can indeed watch it like a fictional drama, which confuses some first-time viewers who aren't familiar with how the show works. "Is this a reality show? It can't be, because it's so well scripted and so well shot." But if you watch it only in this way, you're missing out on all the fun stuff, which comes from watching the double meaning of everything that occurs--every line and every action is motivated by the show's narrative, but even more so by the characters' attempts to position themselves in the public eye.

An example from last week's show: Heidi and Lauren have had a major fight, which was the big event of last season, and Heidi moved out of the apartment they shared and are no longer talking. Heidi is now trying to renew her friendship with Audrina, Lauren's roommate, and stops by the apartment ostensibly to pick up some stuff she left behind when she moved out. When Lauren gets home, she learns about this from Audrina (I'm paraphrasing):

Audrina: Heidi was here.
Lauren: What, she just stopped by?
Audrina: No, she called and said she wanted to pick up some stuff.
Lauren: Did she just pick up her stuff and leave?
Audrina: She sat down for a minute.

When Lauren asks whether Heidi just stopped by, we can interpret that as her asking whether this scene was filmed. Will the Heidi-Audrina encounter be part of the show? Yes, it will. Lauren must now proceed knowing that millions of people may eventually watch her asking Audrina what happened. She solicits more information from Audrina, and the extended drama of Heidi vs. Lauren continues. The point is that we have just glimpsed a small part of the way the show is made. Very few TV shows or movies are willing to expose their conditions of production, and most of those that do play it for laughs. The Hills not only exposes this, it does it in virtually every scene, and it turns it into the whole subject of the show. Viewers constantly shift back and forth between what they know of these people in real life and what they see of them on the show, between distraction and involvement.

What does this have to do with politics? Well, Heidi has recently endorsed John McCain for president, but that's not what I'm interested in. I'm concerned with what types of audiences are created by different types of movies or TV shows. I hope I've shown how the audience for the Hills is potentially very sophisticated. It is more able to evaluate official visual images in light of other sources of information. The show is an example of intertextuality, which means that it exists not only as a TV show but also as every single other medium in which these actors are mentioned. The photo of Lauren above, for example, is a "behind-the-scenes" photo that I got off the MTV website. But Lauren is in character for that photo, as she is her entire life, and so that photo is part of the show, in a very literal way. So is every magazine article, every late show spot that Lauren or Heidi or any of them appear on. This very blog post is actually part of the show. So are you, the reader.

The implications of this type of audience are still being worked out, which is what makes the show so cutting-edge. One thing to watch is how people respond to the fact that there are now people out there whose job it is to BE THEMSELVES. As we move from a product-based economy (where real things are manufactured) to a service-based economy (where nothing but information is produced), this is an important question. Will this shift allow all of us to get paid for being ourselves? Is this really what we want? Will it make us happy? Tune in next week to see.

Dissertation progress yesterday: Read half of Staging Fascism, about a crazy theater project in Fascist Italy which attempted to use a new type of theater (involving a truck as the main character, not even kidding) in order to create a new, fascist, audience. Indexed and took notes on about 20 pages of newspaper articles. Wrote about a paragraph on fascist opinion of early documentary film.

Movie I watched last night: Eternity and a Day (2001), by Theo Angelopoulos. Contemplative movie about a dying Greek poet, and his last day remembering his past and dealing with his present. Long takes, slow camera movement.

Hills Blogging

2008-04-08T12:45:00.003-05:00

So let me just say first that The Hills is the most complex show on TV. This is Cold War level game theory going on here--how much information do you give to your adversary/ally/frenemy? And how much do you trust the information they give you? Keep in mind that "information" here includes not just facts and opinions but also facial expressions and body language. In addition, the RAND guys never had to deal with the reality-TV component to this--everything that's filmed WILL eventually reach all interested parties, either through the producers or when the show finally airs. This season looks like it's going to be about détente--the slow and difficult process of accomplishing a reconciliation.

Game theory aside, the most interesting thing about the show is the uncertain relation between the storyline (presented within and across the episodes) and the actual lives of the characters (namely, anything that is not filmed by MTV), which is absolutely mind-bending. The narrative is never confined to what we see on the show--every single tabloid piece, every public appearance, every blog entry, is actually part of the show. Some people have mentioned how the show has the most expansive authorship ever, since the actors are all involved in creating the story, but it also proves Derrida right: there is no outside-the-text.

The first question I have--and it may seem trivial given all that lit theory, but I want to start to try to bring visual analysis into the discussion--is why do so many characters make entrances with their faces obscured? Entrances are obviously planned and staged, so why create that second of confusion when you see that a character has entered an apartment but don't see who it is? To create a reality effect?

The second question is also visual--is there a pattern to the "pillow shots" between scenes? Do they comment on the upcoming scene? What position does the narration take? They are not like Ozu's pillow shots, which always place the action. These shots signify "Los Angeles," before providing an exterior establishing shot--"Lauren and Audrina's apartment," or wherever. What's the point of the aerial shots?

Flowing Cognition

2008-04-02T10:10:00.004-05:00

Is this something?

What about this?

Top image from Unknown Pleasures (2002); second from The World (2004); both movies directed by Jia Zhang Ke

If you see only one movie this year...

2008-03-14T19:34:00.003-05:00

...then you will probably miss some of the complexities, since watching movies takes practice. You should probably stick with something easy to follow. If you watch a lot of movies, on the other hand, you will probably find it easy to enjoy some movies that others find strange or disturbing.

Note: this is not quite an endorsement of the Everything Bad is Good For You idea. Johnson argues that lots of "trashy" TV shows and video games are good learning tools because their complex narratives make high conceptual demands on their audiences. He has some good things to say about film too, arguing that the Lord of the Rings trilogy is narratively more demanding than the Star Wars trilogy--using the number of characters as a rough measure of narrative complexity. I'll grant him that, as a generalization. But he goes on to say that movies are not quite as good as TV or video games because the shorter time limit for movies limits narrative complexity. Here's where I think he's wrong.

First, complexity of narrative is not the same as amount of narrative. Which is harder to follow: a tightly plotted show like 24 which provides a clear McGuffin and where each character has only one motive at any time, or something like Pulp Fiction where 90% of the talking is entirely irrelevant to the plot but which contains a few narrative ellipses and disorderings? My point is that time constraint has nothing to do with how demanding a narrative is.

The second issue I have with his dismissal of film is that he focuses solely on narrative, explicitly dismissing "quicksilver editing" as something that might challenge an audience. While it's true that faster editing is not necessarily harder to follow--this is the whole point of the term "intensified continuity" as I understand it--it's not true that "narrative" is the only thing spectators must engage with cognitively. Or to be more precise, film narrative is built from things like framing and editing, and spectators have access to the plot only through these cinematic techniques. In movies that differ from usual Hollywood practice, the viewer will be cognitively engaged with "form" as much as or even more than "content." This is why slow movies can be harder to follow than fast movies.

Another Jennifer Jason Leigh Post

2008-03-12T11:33:00.006-05:00

In my continuing quest to say new things about movies that are so old no one cares about them anymore (see the Last Days of Pompeii post below), I want to take on Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which I saw this weekend.

This is an entirely different experience from seeing it on TV, and not in the way you think.

Sure, you get to see Phoebe Cates topless, which is nice if you're into that kind of thing. But the other scenes that get cut, the ones where Jennifer Jason Leigh gets naked (yes, there are two of them), are so crucial to the plot that leaving them out changes the movie entirely. When I Love the 80's talking heads go on about how cool Spicoli was or admit how many times they jerked off to the bathing suit scene, they give the impression that this was some kind of raunchy proto-American Pie. Roger Ebert basically says the same thing with less approval, calling the movie sexist. (Is that an apology for Beyond the Valley of the Dolls? None needed, actually.) Here's his argument:

[Leigh's] sexual experiences all turn out to have an unnecessary element of realism, so that we have to see her humiliated, disappointed, and embarrassed. Whatever happened to upbeat sex? Whatever happened to love and lust and romance, and scenes where good-looking kids had a little joy and excitement in life, instead of all this grungy downbeat humiliation? Why does someone as pretty as Leigh have to have her nudity exploited in shots where the only point is to show her ill-at-ease?

Basically, Ebert has no problem with sex in movies as long as it's unrealistic. He seems in denial about the fact that the movie is almost feminist. The main point is that all of the boys are losers who are so lost in their male fantasies that they can't satisfy Leigh. She's not humiliated or embarrassed, she's actually pretty much in control of the situation. Yes, she's disappointed, but not as much as Ebert is at not getting to see more beautiful people fucking. At least Leigh's character is honest about her situation, whereas Ebert has to hide his disappointment behind false concern about Leigh being exploited. (Shorter Ebert: "Only ugly people should be exploited to show sexual embarrassment; beautiful people should be exploited to make me hard.") And by the way, he's wrong when he calls her a ~~slut~~ "promiscuous sex machine": she has sex twice in the period of a year.

(Spoilers here.) The disastrous second sex scene, in the poolhouse, actually entirely changes our interpretation of two different characters. The next scene has Leigh and Cates talking about how long their respective lovers take. Having seen Mike's little incident, we know that Leigh is lying when she says he took 15 minutes. So we interpret Cates's answer (30-40 minutes) as a lie too. In fact, I think we're supposed to assume that Cates's long-distance boyfriend is entirely imaginary, an excuse she uses to make herself seem sophisticated even though she's scared to death of sex. Mike also comes across as both less promiscuous and less honest. He flakes out on the abortion not because he's an insensitive jerk, but because he's embarrassed. All his talk about how great he is with women is just a bluff to hide his inadequacies. Okay, so he's still a jerk, but he and Cates's character are also more human than they appear on TV. And way more human than any character in American Pie.

Celine and Globalization

2008-03-05T12:48:00.003-05:00

No, not that Céline.

That Celine.

I just finished reading Carl Wilson's book, which I highly recommend to anyone who's a music snob or wants to understand a music snob. I won't say much about the Bourdieu aspect of it, which I think makes a lot of sense. I'm more interested in his argument for music criticism that is more personal, "a tour of aesthetic experience, a travelogue, a memoir." He does this well for Celine, relating her to his divorce and his feelings about getting older, in ways that make sense of why he doesn't like Celine but why he feels conflicted about not liking her.

The most exciting pop music discoveries I've made in the past few years have all been foreign: MIA, Françoise Hardy, Fela Kuti, and Shiina Ringo. This is not to say that these are now my favorite artists, just that there's an extra element of surprise and pleasure in finding something slightly strange or exotic that still sounds great and totally accessible. All four make music rooted in their respective national traditions (although MIA is probably more globalized), but they all respond to dominant American musical genres. My personal aesthetic travelogue would include the fact that I'm not entirely happy with America or with living in America. So my attraction to this stuff is political and personal. MIA and Fela are both explicitly political, while Hardy and Shiina come from countries I've lived in.

One of Wilson's arguments is that because Celine is Quebecoise, people around the world hear her as just slightly non-American. He might have said more about why this is attractive to so many people right now, but the fact that she's huge in Iraq right now is a huge hint. People can hear the positive aspects of America, especially the rags-to-riches dream, without also hearing the music as culturally oppressive. My point is that my appreciation of foreign music (and movies too, probably) is the mirror image of their appreciation of Celine. Both tastes are structured around an understanding of America as the cultural superpower, both attractive and threatening.

Which is also to say that if I were Iraqi, then maybe I'd like her too. But I'm American, so I think she sucks.

Double Feature

2008-02-28T12:46:00.007-05:00

During the summer, the Harvard Film Archive creates double features out of entirely unrelated movies that have surprising similarities. My favorite was Mouchette, which ends with a drowning and church bells, followed by Don't Look Now, which starts with church bells and a drowning.

Last night I accidentally saw a double feature of my own: Shallow Hal followed by Washington Square. Both movies feature women whose beauty is, let's say, not immediately obvious. Both women have lovers who see their true beauty, and fathers who don't.

In Shallow Hal Jack Black gets ~~put under a gypsy curse~~ hypnotized by a motivational speaker to see only people's inner beauty, and falls in love with Gwyneth Paltrow, fat but nice. Misunderstandings and hijinks ensue. This might be a better movie than it looks--I saw it on TV so it's hard to judge. Is it actually a parody of make-the-hot-actress-ugly Oscar bait? Could be. If you ignore the giant-underwear gags, a lot of the uncomfortable moments come from the directors playing with film grammar. There are times when you know a cut to Paltrow is coming, but you don't know whether it will be the hottie or the fattie. It's impossible to watch this movie simply to ogle Paltrow. Or to put it in academic speak, our expectations of a fetishizing male gaze are undermined, which is a neat way to provide a distancing effect.

Washington Square was towards the end Jennifer Jason Leigh's 90's hot streak, and the role is perfect for her. The issue here is social skills instead of hyper-obesity, so the mumbling actually works to her advantage. She's hands down the best mumbler in film, and she shows it here.

The direction by Agnieszka Holland is flashier and more "prestige." I'm not sure what the long opening tracking shot was supposed to accomplish, or why she puts so many distractions in the foreground. Even in the shot above there's a sleeve in the way--is that an attempt to disrupt the shot-reverse shot dynamic? No dice, suture is still in effect here, so it looks more like a compromise to make the pan-and-scan process easier. If you're not going to use the whole frame, why shoot in widescreen? I don't mean to pick on this film, since this is pretty common. Sometimes it works, but this is not exactly a Bourne film.

And it shouldn't be. Bourne is intensified continuity, and Shallow Hal uses continuity for gross-out moments; what we want from a female director is another way of looking at the story. We get a little of that, but a whole lot more melodrama.

Still, I liked it. And it was funnier than Shallow Hal.

When Legends Gather

2008-02-26T15:58:00.003-05:00

Check out If Charlie Parker was a Gunslinger... Lots of great stuff.

Georges Sadoul, Madame Kawakita, Donald Richie.

Resigned woman slipping away from observant man

2008-02-25T10:58:00.002-05:00

Inspired by Cinetrix.

400 Blows

2008-01-29T10:27:00.000-05:00

Last Days of Pompeii

2008-01-03T11:39:00.000-05:00

The vicissitudes of film preservation (or lack thereof) have turned The Last Days of Pompeii (1913) from a solid tableaux epic into an analysis of film representation. Also possibly a meditation on classicism and modernism in the approaching fascist years. The print is damaged exactly where it should be, in the eruption scene, proving that great art can sometimes occur accidentally.

Two thoughts on I'm Not There

2007-12-11T17:04:00.000-05:00

1. There was a nearly sub-sonic tremble from the left-hand side of the theater at a couple points. I would have guessed an air-conditioning problem if this hadn't been Boston in December. Turns out Beowulf was showing next theater over. This is bullshit. If your sound insulation can't handle a movie, turn the fucking volume down. Don't screw the people next door trying to watch a film about music. This article about projection problems and what to do about them (short version: complain) is right on, but it misses the point. I'm not going to leave the movie for something that will likely resolve itself before I get back anyway, and complaining after is kind of a hassle. But there's probably a free ticket in it, so I really should have said something.

2. Jane Dark wants to put aside stunt casting, which drops Blanchett down to fourth best performance. I don't think this makes any sense, not for a film like this. Watching Blanchett's ironic distance from the character only reinforced the sense that Dylan's own ironic distance was a way of escaping a persona he was tired of. It's a reinterpretation of Don't Look Back. When Blanchett says "I know more about you than you'll ever know about me," she sounds disappointed; when Dylan said it he just sounded superior. Seeing her watch us through not only Dylan but through Dylan's estrangement was, for a second, breathtaking. Brilliant ending.

La vie en train de devenir le rêve

2007-10-31T23:01:00.000-05:00

If you don't have an hour and a half, skip to the 45 minute mark.

Darjeeling Limited

2007-10-29T11:01:00.000-05:00

It's hard to be sure yet how good Wes Anderson is. I'll just say that I think Darjeeling Limited goes a long way towards breaking out of the fetishisms (commodity and others) that were so endearing/inhibiting in Royal Tenenbaums. Apparently Satyajit Ray is the new fetish, but I think it mostly worked. Still too reliant on a cool soundtrack, though.

Oh, and if Schwartzman cared about street-cred, he could have at least gotten his nose broken to match Brody and Wilson. Seriously, no props on that one.

Creating a Non-Bourgeois Audience

2007-10-24T15:58:00.001-05:00

Kino-Eye, dir. Dziga Vertov, 1924

Kino-eye is a pastiche film, held together mostly by the loose focus on a troop of Pioneers (Soviet boy scouts, basically). This doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a plot, though: think of it as a bildungsfilm, the hero of which is the audience, which in the course of the film learns to become conscious of itself.

Vertov was probably a bit naïve, but he believed that Russian peasants who had never seen a film before would not be spoiled by bourgeois viewing habits. They were to be a tabula rasa out of which he could create a new kind of audience.

The film creates its own audience by presenting it with what Vertov called kino-pravda: truth that could only be revealed by the camera. His camera tricks seem pretty tame today, and to be honest they are used to greater effect in The Man with the Movie Camera. But their purpose is clear: to let the audience experience a new way of seeing. For example, Vertov uses slow-motion to emphasize the movement of the human body—as in the diving scene as well as this shot of a boy being thrown into the air:

And he uses reverse-motion to connect ordinary people to the conditions of production—as in two extended sequences in which he follows a cut of meat back through the slaughterhouse to the cow (it’s less gruesome in reverse), and a loaf of bread back through the bakery and the mill to the wheat field.

The message is that only film trickery can reveal the real conditions of existence. Vertov doesn’t try to hide the special effects, as is the case in what’s called the Institutional Mode of Representation—he realizes that the tricks are what people want. Like Méliès, he thinks of himself as a film magician. He shows us a real magician entertaining his audience, something he would repeat in The Man with a Movie Camera.

Unlike Triumph of the Will, which also shows a lot of audiences, Vertov literally shows the creation of the audience, as in this shot of a crowd gathering around an accordian player.

And he also places the viewer spatially within that audience, instead of just showing it from above.

And unlike Triumph of the Will, the audience turns out to be watching itself, as in this shot of a peasant woman making a short speech. She is taken out of the audience and for a brief moment becomes the star. Her joy at this simple example of self-expression is infectious.

The nature of the audience becomes more problematic towards the end of the film. Instead of an audience watching a live spectacle, they become a mass media audience.

How is it possible for a mass audience to watch itself? Well, through Vertov’s film, for one. Okay as far as it goes, but there is the disturbing possibility that the act of the country constituting itself as an audience must be mediated by the party, or the leader. This becomes more pronounced ten years later in Three Songs of Lenin (although there are other things going on there). This is nowhere near as bad as Triumph of the Will, though, where the perspective is often that of Hitler—it is only through his observation that the audience exists as one.

There is a strange section at the end which depicts some type of mental institution, probably meant to show that the state is taking good care of the least of its citizens. What’s strange is that it could be read as a criticism of state paranoia. This man yells (in the intertitle) “You are a police officer of the old regime, and it is unacceptable that the Workers’ Soviet doesn’t know about it.”

Even stranger is the close-up of his eye, which echoes the promotional poster shown above:

Is Vertov suggesting that his camera is insane? Or worse, his audience?

Les Sucettes

2007-10-22T17:46:00.001-05:00

I'm pretty sure this is illegal, but fuck it.

Chinese Carmen

2007-10-22T17:05:00.000-05:00

Captive Audience

2007-10-19T18:57:00.000-05:00

Sullivan's Travels, 1942, dir. by Preston Sturges

The basic plot is this: bigshot director John L. Sullivan is tired of directing mindless comedy, and wants to do a message picture. He realizes he doesn’t know anything about the problems of the poor, so he dresses up as a hobo and goes out to look for America. A case of mistaken identity leads Hollywood to assume he’s dead, and he ends up with a six year hard labor sentence. At this point, he and his fellow prisoners are taken to a black church to see a movie.

Sully has been making trouble for the warden, and thus for himself, by insisting he is not supposed to be there. (There must be some mistake. You see, I’m rich!) This makes the movie scene a tense, even scary moment. His hope, and our fear, is that he might see himself on screen, and make more trouble.

His hope that the movie will liberate him would be touching, except that the audience (in the film and outside the film—all audiences are both inside and outside the film) knows that films do not liberate. How is he imagining he would be freed, exactly? Seeing his name on a film would do nothing to prove he is who he says he is. Even suppose he is able to demonstrate a total knowledge of the film; this mastery over the film would free him from the manipulations of the film itself, but would do nothing to convince the skeptical warden that he actually made the film. After the studio distribution process, he has no more right to the film than the rest of the audience does. The culture industry enchains even the director.

Expecting to see his own reflection, what he gets instead is this:

A charitable reading of this would be that Sturges is making light of Sully’s pretensions. You think you’re a bigshot? You and your fellow humans are nothing but silly animals. There’s nothing to do but laugh at the human condition.

That would probably be more appropriate if we were looking at Chaplin, someone showing his own ridiculousness. (There’s a difference between Sturges the writer-director and Chaplin the director-actor—Chaplin's self-mocking is direct, Sturges's is indirect.) But there’s no pathos in Mickey Mouse, it’s pure product. This is a defense of the worst aspects of the culture industry: you are prisoners, film will not free you, it will only make your bondage slightly bearable. There is nothing anyone can do to change it, so don’t try.

The only way I can see this movie as anything else is to read the deus-ex-machina ending that comes right after this scene as an ironic attempt by the film to subvert itself. (See: The Last Laugh.) Saved by modern mass media! His sentence magically reversed! No sympathy at all for his fellow prisoners. A huge plot hole that shows the inadequacy of the very type of movie it claims to be. Somehow I don’t think this was how it was intended, or received.

The camera in Stagecoach

2007-10-16T11:15:00.000-05:00

Stagecoach, 1939, directed by John Ford.

In classical Hollywood, you’re not supposed to be aware of the camera. So it’s interesting when you ARE aware of the camera.

This is the iconic shot of the movie, and the iconic shot of John Wayne’s career. Why is it so powerful?

Until then, the movie has shown the stagecoach’s journey in three kinds of shots: 1. interior shots of the passengers, 2. exterior shots of the top of the coach, with Buck driving and Curly riding shotgun (literally)

and 3. extremely long shots of the coach moving through Monument Valley.

Inside the stagecoach, all camera positions are motivated by character points of view—they are looking at each other as they talk, and Ford uses these eyeline matches to construct the interior space (without ever showing it all in one shot) as well as to illustrate the social relations between the characters. The two exterior shots are not motivated in this way. Who exactly is looking? The two-shots of Buck and Curly are especially jarring, because unlike the long shots they contain significant narrative information, and so they can’t be explained away as transitions between scenes. The viewer is slightly disturbed.

Along comes John Wayne to save the day. Ah ha! It’s HIM. Well, that’s okay. In Lacanian terms, “the missing field is abolished by the presence of somebody or something occupying the absent-one’s field.” (Daniel Dayan, “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema.”) Wayne is the authority figure, the law, because he’s the unseen watcher. More theoretical jargon: “The Absent One, also known as the Other, has all the attributes of the mythically potent symbolic father.” (Kaja Silverman, “On Suture.”)

But because this is John Ford, every shot is recuperated by the narrative—even the long shots of the coach which seemed to be nothing more than some nice scenery to look at. In contrast to the Buck-Curly shots, though, the “missing field” here turns out to be filled by the Apaches—far more sinister. In both the shot seen above and the shot of the Indians, Ford moves the camera to draw attention to the importance of the shot: he dollies in on Wayne, and he whip-pans from the coach to the Indians overlooking them from the top of a cliff.

Whereas Wayne is the authorized observer (Buck is on the soundtrack: “Hey, it’s Ringo!”) the Indians are not (ominous music plays). They threaten Wayne’s privileged viewpoint, since theirs is more commanding. The stage (so to speak) is set for the climactic face-off between Wayne and the Apaches.

The camera also shows up here, at the ford. Coincidence?

What woud Rizzo do?

2007-10-08T09:25:00.000-05:00

So the fake ex-first lady wants you to "never outlive your money." Okay poor people, you know what you have to do: die early.

The Little Foxes

2007-09-30T21:55:00.001-05:00

The Little Foxes does for depth of field what Birth of a Nation did for cross-cutting.

I suppose this was supposed to be a liberal film. Lillian Hellman wrote the screenplay from her own play, and there’s no doubt that it’s a bitter satire of rapacious industrial capitalism. The new class of merchants, personified by the Giddens clan (L to R below: Oscar, Regina, Ben) is accused of exploiting the poor (and black) for their own depraved ends. So far so good. But what alternative does the film offer? The late lamented southern aristocracy, represented here by Aunt Birdie (that’s her in the background, drunk and ignored.) That’s right, we’re supposed to believe that industrial capitalism is more exploitative than SLAVERY. If this weren’t racist enough, the portrayal of blacks in the film is, well, let’s just say problematic.

But no one watches The Little Foxes for its insights into the shift from agricultural to industrial capitalism. We watch it to see Bette Davis be eeevil, and for cinematographer Greg Tolland’s depth of field. In this shot you have the whole movie, basically: Aunt Birdie gets pushed to the background, Bette Davis sits in the middle, scheming with/against her brothers, and this is all conveyed through staging in depth. And the stairs in the background, which I’ll come back to in a bit.

André Bazin’s big point about staging in depth was that it is more democratic because the audience, when given the opportunity to scan the image at its own leisure, was more involved in constructing the meaning of each shot for itself. Compare this to continuity editing, where the audience is led step by step to the only possible reading of each scene. Ideally, for Bazin, you’d have a lot of shots like the following, where Xan and her father Horace enter the hotel in the background while David scans the newspaper in the foreground. This is one of the more natural looking, least choreographed stagings in the film, and it gives a sense that these characters inhabit a more complex but freer social space.

Compared to this, the schemers are often squeezed tightly into the frame, even though the house is certainly large enough to give them some space.

This works very well to convey information about character and story--their world is menacing and claustrophobic. One other nice example: here various characters are gathered around Horace on his deathbed. We get a shot of (L to R) the doctor, Xan, and the nanny Addie. (Yeah, Addie is shoved to the back. See what I mean by problematic?) The three are united in the frame, just as they are united in their concern for Horace.

Then the camera pans to the left to reveal Regina, isolated and uncaring.

The lesson from this is that depth of staging is what you make of it. It’s not necessarily democratic, and it’s not even necessarily less theatrical. Apart from Bette Davis, the most important character in the film is the stairway. It’s a good way to show the hierarchical nature of southern society, and it makes for some dramatic framings.

But compared to the way Renoir can use the camera to show social relations between characters in any setting, inside or out, it seems like a weakness that Wyler has to rely so much on such a heavy-handed symbol. But I guess that fits the film's fuzzy-headed politics.

The Face of Garbo

2007-09-29T21:24:00.000-05:00

In Mythologies, Roland Barthes says that Garbo in Queen Christina "represents this fragile moment when cinema is about to draw an existential from an essential beauty, when the archetype leans towards the fascination of mortal faces."

That may be. But the film feels more like a defense of the star system as monarchy.

"The people follow blindly the generals who lead them to destruction. Will they not follow us, who lead them beyond themselves where there is grace and beauty, gaiety and freedom?"

"Europe is an armed camp, your majesty."

Well yes, in 1933 it was headed in that direction. But I hardly think monarchy was the solution.

"Must I smile for the masses, chancellor?"

No, Greta, you can just sit there and look gauzy and ethereal.

Perfect.

Yeah, we get it--she's an icon.

But uh oh! She falls in love with the Spanish ambassador. Forbidden fruit, y'know.

And because the Swedish people love her too much to allow her to pollute her pure Aryan blood by marrying a filthy spick, they storm the palace.

This is the part that I think is interesting. She stops them with the power of her gaze, in extreme close-up. This is the tightest shot in the film.

"No petition? No speech? You come then just for a glimpse at me?" Well actually, that's what monarchs are for. It's all a performance.

Her argument here is this: "I don't come down to the smithy to tell you how to be a blacksmith, so don't come here to the palace to tell me how to rule. My father was good at it, so therefore I'm good at it too." And they accept this. No matter that it's already been established that the peasants don't particularly LIKE being sent off to Germany to fight in a pointless war, all for the glory of the monarchy and the church. They are a mob, and so they have no political will. They are ultimately insubstantial and indistinguishable, just like their shadows:

Crisis averted! Whew, that was a close one. Good thing they don't know about democracy. Don't question your rightful leaders! And don't stop worshiping your movie stars! Only problem is it turns out she doesn't actually WANT to be queen.

"I'm tired of being a symbol, chancellor. I long to be a human being."

See, stars deserve their privacy too. She abdicates.

And rides off into the sunset.

But does that look like a "mortal face?" Not really--the director had to create a special filter to get the most flattering shot possible.

One interesting note: the famous scene when she walks around the room in which she's trysted (as they say) with the Spanish ambassador--the scene Bertolucci quotes in The Dreamers--was so strictly planned that she did it to a metronome. (This is according to IMDB.) So at precisely the point when the character has escaped most thoroughly and feels most free, the actress is most strictly controlled.

Two thoughts on Knocked Up

2007-06-18T13:09:00.000-05:00

1. At first he didn't even remember that they had sex, but then eight weeks later he remembered the whole condom disaster in great detail. This is a minor quibble, but it seems like a stupid inconsistency just for the sake of a couple jokes that weren't even funny.

2. More importantly, the not-so-sub-text of the movie was that women are just better than men (prettier, smarter, better-adjusted) and that this gives them the right to ~~nag~~ improve their husbands/boyfriends, or to at least try. The only thing that the guys have is that they're funnier, which is always either a defense against the ~~nagging~~ improvement or a way to entertain the women, since they've got nothing else. This really bothers me, because it's exactly the same formula as half the sitcoms on TV, starring a fat comedian and his hot wife. And it's not an excuse that Judd Apatow (the director) is married to Leslie Mann (the sister.)* This is a significant step down from Freaks and Geeks, where the Geek actually realized he was too good for the cheerleader, and the Freak couple had the most interesting relationship on the show.

This is a return to the idea of the domestic goddess, updated for the world of career women. Oscar Wilde tore this to shreds at the end of An Ideal Husband, by bringing the wife down to size. This is probably why the Knocked Up birth scene is so graphic--probably the most graphic I've seen in a movie: it symbolically brings her down to size. But that just implies that female biology is secretly ugly, so the original idea that women are better than men is proven wrong in the end.

It's a very anti-feminist movie.

* Judd Apatow is not fat, but he's less attractive than Leslie Mann. Leslie Mann is funny, but she's probably not as funny as Judd Apatow.

Each day seems like a natural fact.

2007-05-04T11:04:00.000-05:00

Not sure what's going on here. Mannequins can now do theory? Are theory people being mocked for their anti-humanism?

Theory is apparently a popular label. "[T]his is one-stop shopping for the sleek." I suppose on the practical level, such a no-frills line needs a justification for charging over $100 for a pair of shorts, and they way to get that is to emphasize that they are selling nothing more than signification. The commodity fetishism that was formerly denied is now proof of quality. Is that new?

Bipolar world?

2007-03-29T01:20:00.000-05:00

So if the EU gets credit for the lack of major wars in Europe since its inception--Bosnia excepted, but of course it's not part of the EU--what accounts for the lack of major wars in Asia during roughly the same period? There are obviously too many variables to offer a clear comparison, but no major Asian power has been involved in a war since Korea.

I'm a fan of the EU, but I am always annoyed when people defend it by saying that Germany and France have not gone to war again, as if they are natural and implacable enemies. They are not. The post-war European peace, and to a lesser degree the post-war Asian peace, stem from 1.) the reshuffling of populations that occured at the end of the war, which lessened ethnic tensions and 2.) the patience and realism the post-war reconstruction efforts. Part of that reconstruction was the vision of a united Europe, but not the only part.

Short stroll off Long Wharf

2007-03-29T01:14:00.000-05:00

Google maps is apparently unfamiliar with the idea of air travel, because a trip to Europe following their directions would get a little uncomfortable.

xkcd

2007-03-28T09:11:00.000-05:00

xkcd.com is an internet comic updated three times a week. For something drawn entirely with stick figures, it's often surprisingly poignant, but almost always also funny.

Not today, though. Today's is just nerdy. In fact it's the nerdiest thing I've ever seen, and I'm ashamed to say I got the joke.

Attack of the Mooninites

2007-02-01T17:52:00.000-05:00

Over/under on when real Err grafitti shows up in Boston? I give it two days.

Fun with amazon

2006-11-07T16:02:00.000-05:00

I went to Amazon to explore the wonders of Jewface (via Joshua Glenn at the Boston Globe Ideas section).

Pretty good stuff, but I also found this list of the Greatest Albums of All Time. Guy has a sense of humor.

Best name ever

2006-10-16T12:54:00.000-05:00

How does a balding, average looking guy get to marry the most famous film star of his generation?

His name is Urban Gad.

Yesterday's purchases

2006-10-10T11:03:00.000-05:00

Fela Kuti, Confusion/Gentleman If you'd told me even three years ago that I'd be listening to, let alone buying, world music, I'd have called you crazy. And MPAA take note: this would not have happened without illegal downloading.

Francoise Hardy, The Vogue Years All the ye-ye you'll ever need.

Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth Everyone loves it, so I'll give it a try.

George Herriman, Krazy and Ignatz, 1927-1928, Love Letters in Ancient Brick No one has yet explained to me why this is such a work of genius, so for now I'm still a bit skeptical.

Alberto Manguel, A (not THE) History of Reading When he was a teenager, Manguel read to the blind Jorge Luis Borges. That's enough for me.

R.R. Palmer and Joel Colton, A History of the Modern World This is probably unnecessary considering the number of history textbooks I own, but I wanted the best. Not the latest edition, but it was relatively cheap.

The Landmark Thucydides which is in no way "by" Victor Davis Hanson, as Amazon says. Neo-con conspiracy? In any case, I expect that this, like the Manguel, will remain unread for a few years. But like than man says, it's a "possession for all time."

W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz Hardcover, because everyone should have a first edition copy of their favorite book. (Madame Bovary and Gravity's Rainbow will be tough, so let's just pretend this is it.)

Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life Also not strictly necessary in any sense of the word. Probably fun, though.

Margaret McMillan, Paris 1919 I've skimmed this and didn't find it great, but enough people I trust like it enough that I should give it another chance. Underlining might help. Finally, something that might help me write my dissertation. (Oh yeah, that.)

Total: $130. Comics are new paperbacks, the rest are used hardcover. Not too bad, I don't think. Let's hope it tides me over for a good while.

Café Lumière vs. Early Summer

2006-07-18T16:07:00.000-05:00

Since I discovered Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Tsai Ming-Liang a few weeks ago, I've been on an Asian film bender. Latest was Café Lumière, which is an explicit homage to Yasujiro Ozu. There are a lot of superficial similarities between Ozu and Hou, and also a lot of people eager to debunk them. Let's look at some shots side by side, shall we?

Here's the beginning of early summer. It shows most of the extended family, and even tells us what their roles are: father going off to work, sister watching the kids, grandfather and kids with few responsabilities. Low camera, as always in Ozu.

Here's the introduction of the family in Café Lumière. Very similar shot, with the low camera and the use of the doors to frame the action and divide the space. Also shows the roles of the characters: mother in kitchen, father relaxing at the table, daughter somewhere in between. I'm sure the similarities are planned, but so are the differences: this is a more modern family, smaller and with more clutter.

Clearly both directors are concerned with social interactions within the family. Here is another pair of shots whose similarity is obvious. Both come at relatively dramatic moments of the film, and for both the face of the young woman is hidden. Here's Early Summer:

And here's Café Lumière:

The point here is similar: the movie is less about the dramatic revelation itself and more about the way the family deals with it. Later scenes in both movies make it clear visually that these announcements cause some consternation. Noriko's parents turn their backs on her in frustration:

and Yoko's parents react strangely too. Her father says nothing, pushed to the corner of the frame. Her mother is more busy, running in and out of the frame (that's her on the right):

My point is not that Ozu and Hou are that similar. Like I said, this was planned as an homage to Ozu, so similarities in story and mise-en-scène are greater here than in other Hou movies. Their concerns as filmmakers are different, too. Hou is a much more modern director than Ozu, and is more comfortable with movement. There are trains in both movies, lots of them, but they're used differently. Ozu uses his as a contrast with the satisfactions of a slower way of life:

That's the grandfather sitting behind the train, watching the clouds.

Hou's trains provide a more complex, even livable space. Here's Hajime on the train, seen from another moving train, in a shot that was understandably a bitch to get right. The speed is still there, but the movement of one train relative to the other is fairly slow. The speed of the modern city is something we've learned to deal with. In Hajime's case, something we can even find beauty in--here he's recording the sound of trains.

Oh, and one more thing. Usually when you subtitle a movie, you also translate the dialogue. But not always:

Little girls crying

2006-07-07T02:14:00.000-05:00

Also check out Team Zizou.

So happy I could oblige

2006-06-08T19:17:00.000-05:00

Teaching evaluations came back today. Funniest one:

What are the strengths of this instructor?

a. Can be funny at times
b. Knows the material
c. his incredible awkwardness made the class at least a little interesting

Blanche Neige

2006-06-07T23:29:00.000-05:00

Action Française loved Snow White (May 13, 1938). Of course they did: imagine seeing this in a period when every other film was black and white, when people were just getting used to sound film.

It's my job to figure out what this means, though. The Snow White story seems to have gone through various versions, but it was written down by the Grimms. (There's no Prince to kiss her, that's stolen from Sleeping Beauty. The dwarves drop her glass coffin and she wakes up.) So it's German, and obviously so, considering the similarities between the dwarves and the Nibelungen. This is not a connection an educated Frenchman at the time would be likely to miss, and we're talking about a rabidly anti-German paper. But there's nothing in the review about that. OK then, are the dwarves the oppressed working class? I guess not: there's no mention of economic questions, also strange since Socialism was the AF's other bête noire.

No, they just loved it because it suggested what "pure" cinema could do. They compare it to Caligari, another German film that can be read politically. The idea of "pure" cinema is interesting in itself. "Animation is the richest, freest form not only of cinema, but of all spectacle: it's the spectacle of which everything is permitted." What is "pure" cinema? Is there a connection between the desire for "pure" art and xenophobic politics? I'm guessing yes.

Go here for more Socialist dwarves, and other French language detournement.

Excuses

2006-06-07T22:58:00.000-05:00

I'm trying to spend as much of my time as possible here:

and pay absolutely no attention to current events. Which will probably make for boring blog posts. But since no one comes here anyway, screw it! Posts about 1930's French movie reviews!! Ever wonder what the French right wing would think of Disney movies? Stay tuned!

Crooning vs. Bosa Nova

2006-05-20T01:24:00.000-05:00

For a second it looks like Sinatra is in love with Jobim. It's irony vs. sincerity, and I'm pretty sure Sinatra comes out looking like an asshole.

Isaiah Berlin Version

2006-05-15T13:18:00.000-05:00

The Fox is the poor man's Hedgehog.

I mention this only because I just decided I was a fox. Oh well, what are you gonna do?

Japxploitation

2006-05-15T08:20:00.000-05:00

Delinquint Girl Boss: Worthless to Confess is pretty much a must see for anyone reading this. It has everything you need from a movie.

Naked girls with kick-ass tattoos:

Very strange insults:

Random lesbianism:

Ramen:

Crazy butterfly go-go dancers:

Then the Yakuza show up (of course) and start making ridiculous demands:

What!? Sever ties with Midori? That's the last straw. Time for an all-out sword fight, girls against boys.

But even in the middle of the fight, there's still time for more lesbianism:

The girls win, of course, but then they all get shipped off to prison (for more girl-on-girl, no doubt.)

They really don't make 'em like they used to.

Too bad

2006-04-25T16:00:00.000-05:00

It's kind of hard to find May '68 posters online, I recently discovered. Some are here, but not all the ones I wanted.

Lost

2006-04-07T13:25:00.000-05:00

So Dougie R. doesn't like where Lost is going. I've got news for you: Lost isn't going anywhere. It will not make sense in the end. It will never get wrapped up. It's not an interesting show because there is some big mystery that we think we'll get to the bottom of, it's an interesting show because there are a bajillion theories, none of which make any sense at all.

Lost is the anti-reality show. Reality TV is wallpaper. It's background music. Artfully made but having no meaning in the real world. Lost as a TV show is sloppily made, and doesn't hold together, but the fun stuff happens on THIS side of the TV. All those fans on the internet.

Judas vs. Dan Brown

2006-04-07T09:58:00.000-05:00

Background reading for the Judas story:

1. Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels. An examination of the other paths Christianity might have taken. The Judas Gospel is by all accounts Gnostic; Pagels of course didn't have access to it when she wrote this book, since it was sitting in a safety deposit box in New Jersey. But this is the context. (Gnosticism seems hot right now; Philip Pullman seems to be responsible.)

2. William Klassen, Judas: Betrayer or Friend of Jesus? Klassen points out that while paradidomi is usually translated as "betrayal," it really means something more neutral, like "handing over." Judas's bad reputation is thus based on a mistranslation.

3. Jorge Luis Borges, "Three Versions of Judas." Theologian Nils Runeberg shows that the savior of humanity was not Jesus but Judas. Classic Borges; also gnostic.

4. Andrew Lloyd Weber, Jesus Christ Superstar. As with Milton's Satan, Judas is the most interesting character.

This is the thinking man's Dan Brown. In the DaVinci Code, the idea is that Jesus was fully human to the extent that he had sex and his ancestors live to this day. This is exactly opposite the conceit in gnosticism, where the earth is something to escape, and where salvation is achieved through knowledge and the ideal. The former is focused on the material, the latter on the immaterial. In both cases, the church is assumed to be the betrayer of the real message of Christianity rather than its protector. And in both cases, the problem of interpretation is removed by focusing on the supposed existance of a secret code. All uncertainty about the meaning of the ultimate message is removed, because it can only be understood in one way. A terrible blasphemy: you really think the word of God means only one thing, instead of infinitely many?

Quickly noted

2006-03-31T14:05:00.000-05:00

Been real busy ignoring my work these last few weeks, so I haven't been able to pay enough attention to the Isreali Lobby piece (short version: yes most of the claims are a little exaggerated, but probably not enough to deserve such vitriol) or to whatever's going on in Paris.

But those schoolchildren learned a valuable lesson...

2006-03-17T19:57:00.000-05:00

Reality TV has a body count.

Horn-rimmed, rose colored glasses

2006-03-17T19:37:00.000-05:00

The blogosphere has been stepping to the wayback machine this week to play gotcha with quotes from the original Iraqi invasion, three years ago. (Hmm... guess which side turned out to be right?) My favorite is from David Brooks, 4 April 2003:

An Iraqi civilian in Najaf exulted, "Democracy! Whiskey! And Sexy!" giving the war its first great slogan.

Also the first time I've agreed with David Brooks: that really is a great slogan.

via Radosh

Human Rights Crisis?

2006-03-12T22:52:00.000-05:00

Milosevic's death (or rather, his death prior to conviction) and the UN HRC problems (this article is vague, hopefully more will be out soon) are an interesting news pairing. Is there a crisis in human rights? I know very little about human rights theory, besides the fact that some in France (Benny-Levy? Furet? See, I know nothing) have criticized it as an inadequate basis for freedom and equality. The US also seems to be totally uninterested in supporting its enforcement, to the point where it doesn't really disturb a lot of Americans that we're breaking those rules. (To be fair, the BBC story doesn't say what the US objections are--maybe they want more sweeping reforms than others do?) This seems a fairly popular way to think about foreign policy from a non-realist perspective. Do we need another way? What are the alternatives?

One idea I'm toying with, and considering sharing with my students: Europe bases much of its postwar (or maybe post-cold war) self-image on being anti-genocide. Which is a fine thing to be, except that it has the annoying side effect of pissing off lots of Muslims, many of whom see their situation as comparable to what happened to Jewish Europe in 1940-45. I don't happen to agree with them, but to privilege genocidal oppression over versions of colonial and post-colonial oppression seems, shall we say, a little path dependent. Or to be less charitable: suspiciously convenient, from a European perspective.

The usual way this question gets raised is this: why does no-one rally to support Holocaust deniers like David Irving, but when it's a matter of anti-Muslim cartoons everyone jumps on board the free speech bandwagon? Andre Glucksmann says it's a matter of truth (the Holocaust was a fact) versus belief (Islam is merely a religion.) I think this is wrong: the idea of "the Holocaust" as a historical object is a construction that (if I'm right about Europe using it to ground its identity) is just as motivated by political and social reality as is the Muslim religion. I realize I need to be careful here: I don't doubt for a second that 6,000,000+ people died, nor that their deaths were willed by Nazi leaders, nor even that this was unprecedented and a crucial event in human history. I just question whether we can neatly separate that event as a genocide from the thousand other atrocities of the period or even now. Especially considering the Eastern European context, it's fair to say that there were other factors in play. It was genocide, but it wasn't JUST a genocide, and to pretend that's all it was is to let ourselves off to easily. "Never again" has become a sick joke at this point--let's be honest with ourselves.

I would prefer a lower bar for going after human rights abuses--Milosevic's trial would have been faster had people been less concerned with convincing everyone he was the reincarnation of Hitler and more concerned with pinning him with every one of his individual crimes. That would make the reconciliation process easier, probably. Tough in the case of Milosevic, who was less directly involved than Karadic and Mladic. I'll hold off dancing on Milosevic's grave and pray instead that they get those two.

Dammit!

2006-03-10T21:28:00.000-05:00

Zizek has this theory (or buy it here) that the West wanted 9/11, that it was the fulfilment of an unconscious desire for the destruction of "the capitalist utilitarian de-spiritualized universe." We all wanted to wake up from the Matrix, basically. I had one of those "where were you" conversations about 9/11 a couple days ago--those few days right after there were awful, obviously, but I think they gave everyone the feeling that they were living in the real world for at least a little bit, and five years on that can make us a little nostalgic.

I say this because I'm trying to figure out what makes 24 a good show. One reason is that it brings up cultural issues in such a subtle way that you're not quite sure which side the show is on. For every bitchy mannish female boss, there's a douchebag President resorting to prayer as the last option in a hopeless situation. It should be shocking that a show about terrorism has not generated a single major protest in five years. I don't think this has anything to do with the quality of the show. It's just that no one can pin it down.

But what's the attraction of the show? It moves too fast to achieve anything more than superficial character development. And it sure as hell isn't a thoughtful examination of how one goes about stopping a terrorist plot. So it's basically counter-terrorism porn. But as with all porn, the viewer is not really sure which side they're on. Case in point: the most recent episode, in which (spoiler, but it was days ago, so get over it) CTU is the victim of a nerve gas attack. As with 9/11, the viewer is secretly rooting for the terrorists to succeed, as long as we (meaning the main characters) survive. How many faceless drones died without us giving a shit, before Edgar waddles in and supposedly makes us feel sympathy? The important part is not that we care that he's dead, but that Chloe now has an excuse to pull out her m-16. So the show is wish fulfilment in a different way: we WANT terrorist attacks mostly because it gives us justification for the fucked up things our government is doing.

Me, I'm still waiting for Jack to torture somebody who turns out to legitimately not know anything. Funny how he always turns out to be right, huh?

Vive la bourgeoisie!

2006-03-10T21:11:00.000-05:00

Vive la bourgeoisie! Défense d'uriner
Originally uploaded by cicilief.

Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies. The sound film, far surpassing the theater of illusion, leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience.

T.W. Adorno

Spring break, and I'm disappearing

2006-03-10T16:53:00.000-05:00

So far

2006-03-05T15:49:00.000-05:00

create your own visited countries map

Civl war?

2006-02-24T18:27:00.000-05:00

Very recent developments in Iraq are very bad, but there is probably a glimmer of hope in what news I've seen: the fact that Iraqis are stunned at the violence of the last few days probably means we won't see this continuously. There may be further outbreaks of this sort or worse, but hopefully they'll be infrequent.

I think now is the time to ask a tough question: at what point should we say Iraq has crossed the line from "sectarian violence" into "civil war"? What are the criteria that separate the two? On first reflection, a civil war seems to require (at least) two sides with competing claims to legitimate rule over a certain territory, but this seems unlikely in a time and place where the nation state looks very different than it did in (for example) 19th C America. Neither terrorist organizations nor fundamentalist Islamists--and I'm told there's an overlap there--seem to be interested in collecting taxes or providing police service. So let's come up with a broader definition of civil war, in order to fully reflect the violence of the situation if and when the time comes.

I propose this: we can call it a civil war when bombings and disruptions such as this are not resolved in any way before the next one occurs, so that the events run together enough to be considered one large event. To be more precise, this will occur when the period between major violent events is shorter than the news cycle. There will be at least two objections to this definition. First, that the length of a news cycle is undefined. I agree, but I don't mind leaving this as a subjective definition, open to reasonable interpretations. As a rule of thumb, let's remember that the Cheney shotgun story, which was drawn out longer than necessary because of a sloppy media strategy, lasted a little under a week. The second objection will be that this defines the term on the basis of our Western perception of events rather than that of the Iraqis, who would obviously be most affected by this hypothetical war. I don't really have a problem with this. The closer you get to the ground, the less it matters what you call it. If you die as a result of sectarian violence, you're just as dead as if you die in a civil war, and your family is just as devestated. It's only as you move away from the events that names become important. If we have a good idea what Civil War is, we'll have a better idea when to admit failure and change strategies.

That is, if anyone can think up something good.

Enough of that

2006-02-10T02:47:00.000-05:00

One of my biggest disappointments was being to big to fit into Japanese clothing. My mother used to have a sweatshirt featuring the great Larry Biod, and I got nothing. Well, now my prayers are answered.

Le Canard Enchainé shows 'em how it's done

2006-02-09T01:12:00.000-05:00

Anti-clericalism can be funny and non-racist.

What do you expect from a Yankees fan?

2006-02-09T00:11:00.000-05:00

Muslim-baiting vs. violent fundamentalism? A pox on both your houses. Free speech is an important value, but sometimes silence is more honest. It's very hard to say anything in this matter without taking sides, and I don't want to do that.

But I'll say one thing: U.S. newspapers should run the cartoons now. They're legitimate news items. Not running them shows a lack of respect for the people of the Islamic world, since it assumes they can't tell news from racist provocation.

Click on the picture for smart commentary from Der Spiegel.

New Acquisitions

2006-01-27T15:27:00.000-05:00

I was just going to pay rent and deposit my stipend check, but the used book stores sucked me in. It's an addiction, I swear.

Richard Farina, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me. So far I haven't gotten past Pynchon's intro; their Cornell seems to be a very different place than mine was.

Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity.

Janet Flanner, Paris Journal, 1944-1965. I love Paris Was Yesterday. This one's out of my period, but I'm sure it will be just as much fun.

Kobo Abe, The Woman in the Dunes. I'm told it's weirder than Murakami. I'm not a huge fan of Murakami, but weird is good.

Montaigne, Essays. It wasn't until I left the shop that I remembered I was planning on buying these in French.

Where can I find one of those?

2006-01-25T10:40:00.000-05:00

From the Times:

Mr. Meloy, 30, has the look of a confident, unhurried graduate student.

2006 in Bowl Games

2006-01-05T01:11:00.000-05:00

The year of the failed lateral and the missed field goal. Just goes to show that failure is more interesting than success. The winners: all the losers.

New Pornographers

2006-01-05T01:06:00.000-05:00

Music sounds different on the radio. Use It is way too complex rhythmically to work with anything less than complete attention and passable sound quality. Which makes me wonder why that's the one that's getting airplay. Sing me Spanish Techno!

Not a top ten

2005-12-18T17:59:00.000-05:00

Totally predictable list of music I didn't hate this year:

Architecture in Helsinki, In Case We Die. Along with Deerhoof, I think AiH is a great example of the resurgence of pop music. Challenging but catchy as all hell, both of them. Just goes to show that 69 Love Songs is the most important record of the decade, the way Nevermind and Loveless were for the 90's.

Bloc Party, Silent Alarm. Backlash-proof. Yeah it's another Gang of Four ripoff, but it sounds good, y'know?

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Yeah.

Edan, Beauty and the Beat. Yes I'm white. Why do you ask?

Feist "Mushaboom," Coralie Clement "Bye Bye Beauté," Keren Ann "Chelsea Burns." I'm not sure it's fair to lump these three together. I like them in very small doses, but these are all great songs convincingly performed. Fragile and soft is the new riot grrl.

Four Tet "Joy." Less beautiful than "My Angel Rocks Me Back and Forth. "

The Kills, No Wow. I didn't listen to this enough, but I have no doubt that it'll hold up, so I can still listen to it next year. Shows the Yeah Yeah Yeahs how it's done.

Metric, "Monster Hospital" and Ladytron, "Destroy Everything You Touch." The best political songs are the ones that don't get noticed as political songs. "When the President Talks to God" sucks. M.I.A. is still awesome, though. "Rich Man's War," by Steve Earle too.

Of Montreal, "The Party's Crashing Us Now." I have more songs and fewer albums on this list than I would have had last year, because have an iPod now. Put them in with AiH and Deerhoof as quirky pop.

New Pornographers "Bleeding Heart Show." I don't think the album's great, but this song is. Less pop than the first two albums. It seems like they're starting to take themselves seriously, which normally I'd say that's a bad thing, but here it works.

Nouvelle Vague, s/t. This is how songs get canonized. Right on the border between a novelty record and a standards album.

Stars, Set Yourself On Fire. "I am trying to say what I wanted to say without having to say I love you." What kind of self-respecing neurotic can't identify with that?

Sleater-Kinney, The Woods. Are they turning into hippies? I still like Call the Doctor and Dig Me Out more, but this is good. I'm imagining stoned teenagers in the seventies listening to Zeppelin and Deep Purple and saying "man, this just ROCKS," and now I know exactly what they meant. In those "music genome" projects that people are working on right now, do you suppose there's a category for how much something "rocks"? This one would be at 11, obviously.

Oh, we know you're listening

2005-12-17T03:38:00.000-05:00

Authors reading what bloggers have to say about them. "Seems narcissistic" indeed.

The mistake Ms. Paul (it's the Times, after all) makes is that we really care about people who write books. Lots of us are people who write books, or will one day write books. And still we don't care. We're just writing stuff to see ourselves in print.

I'm cool, I swear!

2005-12-05T01:49:00.000-05:00

Because I bought Europe Central before it won. I didn't read it before it won, but that's because it's like a thousand pages long.

That counts, right?

Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro

2005-11-28T15:40:00.000-05:00

I had Thanksgiving dinner with a former president of Providence College, who now teaches one course, on contemporary ethical issues. We didn't have much of a conversation about any of those issues, partly because I don't know much about ethics and partly because he quickly derails any conversational give-and-take into a story. He's one of those older men who have an endless supply of stories to tell, and tell them fairly well, and jump at any slight excuse to tell them. The problem is the stories themselves aren't that great, and have to do mostly with law suits the college won, and students who come to class in baseball caps. John Heineman was like that too.

My point? None really, except that after reading Never Let Me Golast week, I've been thinking about contemporary ethical issues.

I'm not sure how much Ishiguro intended this novel to be part of the debate over cloning issues, and how much he simply wanted to write one of those poignant, frustrated love stories that he seems so fond of, which just happens to take place in a slightly alternate reality. The title is taken from a touching, intimate scene in the novel that has nothing to do with cloning at all, so it suggests that the balance is meant to be towards the latter. But remember that Remains of the Day used a seemingly apolitical love story to comment on democracy and fascism, themes which very rarely popped up explicitly, and bore very little of the plot's weight. Same here.

I don't mean to say that this is an anti-cloning novel, because despite the obvious inhumanity of the society depicted, it isn't. But it's not really a love story either. It's a story about how acceptable certain horrific injustices can feel. Ishiguro reveals the details of the cloning scheme slowly, which emphasizes the fact that none of this seems particularly shocking to the characters. It does to us, of course, but there is no preaching about the evils of cloning--to us, as they are to themselves, the characters are fully human and individual. The effect could just as well be to remind that there are real-world injustices which are nearly as horrifying, and which we block out the best we can.

The controlled, slow reveal has fooled some people into thinking of it as a mystery story, but there's really not much suspense. Unfortunately there is one of those climactic scenes in which all is revealed, a la Miss Marple, and in my opinion this is the least successful passage. But it's ambiguous and unsatisfying enough to not cheapen the experience of the book up to that point.

It's a bit to easy to find a "live life to the fullest" message for my taste. I know, it's probably good advice. But if I were living life to the fullest, I probably wouldn't have had time to read the novel, now would I?

Two hacks

2005-11-20T18:04:00.000-05:00

In an attempt to put that embarrassing letter to Salon.com behind me (seriously, I need to work on my web presence) I responded to this here.

He blames the riots in France on socialism. I'm not sure if he knows whether or not the French government is not in fact socialist, not even in name. In fairness, I suspect that he might not have written the title of the piece, which is the only place in which he states (rather than implies) that Chirac is a socialist. I didn't write the title of my piece either, which was a mistake on my part, because it does a very bad job of explaining my point.

I wish I'd known about Timothy Smith's bookbefore I wrote it. Smith's point is that as much assistance as the French government gives, it's not redistributive in an egalitarian way. So while the middle class gets great pensions, the banlieux get the CRS. More on this later.

Wait, high school students having sex is a bad thing?

2005-11-20T17:07:00.000-05:00

George Will starts out this stupid stupid column by saying "let's be good cosmopolitans and offer sociological explanations rather than moral judgments..." and then offers up moral judgements in the guise of sociological explanations. Tricky.

A numbered list of the problems I have with the column:

1. He argues that having rules simply for the sake of having rules is a good thing, instead of a totally arbitrary constraint on entirely value-neutral forms of culture.

2. Turns out that one specific form of culture that is destroying politeness is black culture. How convenient for Will that he happens to be white and catholic and rich. Also, he puts scare-quotes around "street" and "gangsta" and "edgy." George, just because you have no idea what those concepts are doesn't mean the concepts don't exist.

3. Using the iPod as an explanation for any (non-musical) cultural trend is so two-years-ago. He needs to go read Steven Johnson.

I think the (supposed) decline of manners might have more to do with a growing realization that moralists like George Will are full of crap.

The world is changing, man

2005-10-15T13:42:00.000-05:00

This is kind of amazing:

I don't know what to say about it. Microfilm will be obsolete in 10 years. And there aren't going to be any collectors out there, like there are for vinyl. We can tell our children stories about how we used to use film where the writing was really really tiny...

-Wait, what's film?
-You know, like in a camera.
-What? Cameras don't have film.
-Shut up. The writing was really tiny but it was there, and there was a lens and it blew up the figures and projected them on a screen.
-You mean like a computer screen?
-No, just a flat sheet of plastic.
-Oh.
-It sucked. Your eyes got tired after looking at it for an hour or so. And we had to walk two miles through the snow to get to school. Uphill. Both ways.
-That's stupid. Gimme some ice cream.

Screw it, I'm not having kids. Little ingrates.

"What are they doing?"

2005-06-13T15:45:00.000-05:00

That's what my boss asked me when I told her that I'm nerding out over EU politics. Short answer: France and Holland voted down their constitutional referenda, and now nobody has any idea what the hell is going to happen. But you knew that.

I tried to explain about delocalisation and Polish plumbers but that's not what I really care about. What I really care about is the related question of what this means for the project of constructing a post-national world. I would love for Europe to become the world's biggest NGO. Because it's a wild concept. Because I'm not a huge fan of nationalism anyway. And yes, because it will be the best way to avoid the dangers of hyper-puissance. Not just the US, but China too--Europe should be on the same side as the US on 90% of the issues.

The person who deserves most of the blame, I think, is Chirac. As I said, I agree with the idea of constructing a strong Europe, but I think it was a terrible mistake to connect this to Gaullism and gloire. There's a fundamental contradiction in what he asked France to do: on the one hand he appeals to nationalist sentiment, and on the other he wants to give up a certain amount of sovereignty. People were right to suspect that his vision of Europe had more to do with economic and military power than with social justice. If you want to create a Europe that can balance American power, you're not going to convince anyone by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of America. You have to trust that the European vision of society (i.e. "social") can hold its own against the American (liberal) and the Chinese (authoritarian-capitalist). Emphasize that nationalized health care is cheaper. Point out that European society is admirably egalitarian. That it isn't torturing people. Make it the beacon of hope and liberty that America used to be.

Why couldn't the Socialists make this case? Why couldn't they appeal to the great French tradition of exporting democracy and justice? The EU acts to inspire democracy in Ukraine, in the Balkans, in Turkey the same way the French Revolution did in Germany and Italy. And yet the Socialists turn away from enlightened internationalism. Very disappointing.

Why France?

2005-02-13T14:19:00.000-05:00

Apart from the question of "why fascism?" there is also the question of "why France?" And the answer cannot be simply because I know France, and French. This project is also in part an attempt--pointless to deny it--to offer the French experience of citizenship and nationalism as a model for the world. The tension in French citizenship between the national and the universal, which stems from the Revolution and the resulting habit of thinking of France as the cradle of democracy, obviously has its problems. It excuses a certain amount of belligerence, especially when it comes to the colonies and even ex-colonies. It causes a bit of self-righteousness, as with de Gaulle and Chirac, for example. But it is, I think, the best model we have for a national identity that has the necessary flexibility to survive globalization.

And French Fascism has this tension too. It was not simply nationalist, it was universal too. The problem was to create a French version of an incredibly popular international movement--because from their perspective (and they weren't far wrong) Fascism was a wave sweeping over Europe. So this was one step in the development of the French nationality.

Engineers are all evil

2005-02-03T19:38:00.000-05:00

Henry at Crooked Timber defends us liberal humanists against the charge that Al Queda's ideology comes from supposed anti-Western nihilism in the academy. Turns out that most of their members are professionals; engineers and architects to be precise. Interesting in light of Herf's study of support of National Socialism among engineers.

Not that Al Queda and the Nazis have anything to do with each other. Except I suppose they both hate freedom.

My senior year in college I shared a house with 13 smart people. I was the only one in the humanities. The rest were mostly scientists and engineers. None of them are either fascist or terrorist, as far as I know.

Fascist membership

2005-02-03T18:58:00.000-05:00

From where (geographically, class) did Fascist organizations draw their membership? Soucy (is it Soucy?) claims that they had little success luring workers away from the Socialists, but these people still lived in the city, no? Or the banlieu? This should be pretty straightforward, but it might be the first chapter. Go to Soucy to find where one can get membership records. Police reports? Did the ligues keep membership rolls, and have they survived? Has no one answered this question yet?

A more complicated question is whether they were recent arrivals, or had always lived there. Harder to determine.

If you want to claim there was an urban element to this, this is a simple way to do it.

Why are we here?

2005-02-03T18:33:00.000-05:00

What purpose to historians serve?

I mean apart from teaching history, which is a complicated and necessary task in itself, and involves various tasks. Entertaining. Passing on some kind of cultural legacy. Legitimizing certain forms of thought and expression. Ranking students on the basis of these forms of thinking.

But what good does the historian as researcher and writer serve? Is this an entirely selfish endeavor, whose only point is to allow us to surround oneself with the things in human history that we think are cool? A form of self-expression, the presumptuous presentation of one's own worldview as the truth?

No answer at the moment.

Material and Process

2005-02-03T17:15:00.000-05:00

The process of producing history necessarily involves raw materials; history can't be produced out of nothing. And what sources one looks at still determines what type of history you do more than the way you read those sources. This is not the same thing as saying that the source yields a clear and uniform meaning, which is rarely or never true.

As far as I see it, there are two motivations behind the act of studying history. The first is an interest in the material of history. Whatever one thinks about the existance or observability of the past "wie es eigentlich war," there exist traces, or signs, which come from the past, and that these are the materials which lie at the heart of the act of producing history. Most undergrads, most people in fact, assume that history is the sum total of all these materials, and that historians are interested in these for their own sakes. I can't deny a childlike fascination with looking at something that possibly no other living person has seen before.

The second motivation is an interest in the process of historical change. No one really knows what if anything lies at the heart of movement in history. Hegel thought he did. Others have ideas. But any answer to this question will always depend on the way in which you shape the materials of history into patterns, and thereby give them meaning. This is of course an entirely unconscious activity, most likely a linguistic one. See Hayden White on this.

There are times when one needs to ignore Hayden White and the postmodernists, though, and pretend that the past actually exists in an intelligable form. Nietzsche, as always, strikes a balance here by reminding us that it's all a fiction ("truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions") but that its a necessary fiction.

Go to the sources. They are true. They will do the work for you.

Contaminated Identities

2005-02-02T13:57:00.000-05:00

There's discussion at Language Log about Prince Harry's brilliant Nazi costume idea. Bill Poser essentially tells everyone to calm down, since this is not necessarily a statement in favor of Nazism. I agree with this, and I love that a guy named "Poser" is talking about costumes. Arnold Zwicky argues that "certain identities are highly contaminating culturally, to the extent that playing with them lays the performers open to attributions of actually having the portrayed identities." Homosexuality is his other example: if I pretend to be gay, people assume I am gay.

Zwicky makes no mention (unless it's encoded in the Goffman reference) of why these particular identities are contaminated. The two have certainly been linked in popular imagination--think of Ernst Rohm and Robert Brasillach. I think the connection is one or both of the following:

First, we are worried about whether we might share these identities. This is most obvious in the case of homosexuality. "Gay" is an identity that wasn't an option even a few decades ago, and it's being embraced by more people than one would have thought likely in Wilde's day. Or even Proust's, or even Foucault's. We wonder whether we're gay ourselves. In the Nazi case, this might be less obvious. "Of course we're not Nazis." Well, no, we aren't; we all hate Hitler and think the Holocaust was a bad thing. But aren't we secretly fascinated? Haven't we all been to sporting events and rock concerts where we've felt something like what one must have felt in the thrall of a charismatic speaker who gives your life total meaning? See Susan Sontag's "Fascinating Fascism" essay, and Le Bon too I suppose.

Second, the act of playing or performance is essential to both identities. Homosexuality, again, obviously. Playing straight for so long, then coming out and demonstrating gayness publicly. Fascination with Broadway musicals. Dressing up and marching in a parade. The mass demonstration is the most obvious example in Nazism. To their emphasis on action, one might ask if "act" here means to do or to pretend. (Does this work in German? Does it work in French? Faire can mean "to seem," although it's probably not as striking as in English. Agir is not something you do in a play. Does Action Francaise have this unintended meaning?)

A final question is how to interpret Zwicky's word "contamination," with its suggestion of an inside (the identity) and an outside (from where the contamination comes). One thinks also of various Red Scares, a certain number of communists having infiltrated the State Department, etc. (And one should contrast this imagery with that of a barbarians at the gate, the hun threatening from the East.) Is this a subtle attempt to make the essentialist argument about gays and fascists?

So this is an attempt to determine how we think of fascism. More later on how fascists themselves thought.

Statement of Purpose

2005-02-01T18:25:00.000-05:00

A new addiction...