Miles Davis - On The Corner

It starts right in the middle of something, attacking the listener with what seems like chaos. I know nothing about jazz, but this album, recorded in 1972, seems almost like contemporary music to me. I don't think the advances it represents have been completely exhausted yet, and if they have I haven't heard them. Besides being the great grandfather of Jungle and Trance, what impresses me most about this music is the lack of empty spaces. One thing I always associated with Davis prior to hearing this was the pauses and silences in his music. Everything is filled up here, there are no more cracks in the tableaux.

At the ages of 13 and 20 Marcel Proust answered the same series of questions. You can find the questions and the answers he gave here.

The Hulk

A few disjointed thoughts:

The Hulk's appeal lies in our own impotent rage. While we may pound our fists against immovable objects, he can tear through them. The thrill in watching him is the vicarious feeling of power, of a total surrender to it.

Jennifer Connelly needs to gain about 20 pounds. What has she done to herself? How do you go from this to this?

I'm gonna stay away from the sexual subtext in this movie. But I want you to know that it's there. (See "impotence" vs. "potency" - so THATS why she dumped him.)

Yes, it's slow. Maybe even too slow. But those expecting a regular "comic book movie" have never probably thought through the needs of a project like this. Spider-Man could be funny and sweet because it's about adolescence. Batman could be weird and gothic because that is what it represents. And so on. The Hulk, on the other hand, deals with profoundly adult issues. To treat these themes with anything less that the utmost seriousness would be to fatally misunderstand the subject matter. I like even more that the film doesn't go for an easy reconciliation, and it shows true courage in making the father the ultimate villian, rather than the misunderstood misfit.

Some beautiful transitions, and some great editing as well. I need to see it again to gauges whether the comic book style multi-angle approach works for the story or is simply a pretention. It's neat though, and not something I've seen in this type of film before. Lee manages to achieve some genuine visual poetry in the desert and especially the space scene.

The action is far more successful than I expected. It's genuinely exhilirating at times, and it shows great imagination. I just wish there was more of it. Interesting that the film goes to great pains to show the price of these outbursts. The fight with the dogs has a tenacity to it, a kind of horrific violence, that is unsettling.

The father's Nietzchean outburst towards the end shows the allure of what the Hulk represents: the impulse to nihilistic destruction. What the Hulk doesn't do is rebuild, and I almost wish there were greater consequences for Danner in the film, since as it is he somehow manages to kill not a single person on screen. The final scene is nice because it shows that Danner has harnessed this power within all of us, the dark pit of rage and nihilism, to a useful purpose. It's no accident that he is delivering medicine to needy third-worlders, and that the desctruction of some local thugs is immanent. It's a nice way to end the film.

Stuff I've been listening to lately:


Can - Future Days
I love this so much. The slow building percussion of of the first track is mesmerizing and it hardly lets up from there. The 20 minute closer, Bel Air, is some kind of pot smoking sci-fi jam, and it's beautiful.

The Sugarcubes - Here Today, Tomorrow Next Week
Wasn't sure about this but decided to take a chance, and I'm glad I did. The first 30 seconds of Tidal Wave were enough to render the recieved wisdom on this album dead wrong. A spazzy and misunderstood classic, but obviously an acquired taste.

Kraftwerk - Autobahn
Very good, if not the revelation it's promised to be. But then how could an album from 1974 be a revelation? I suppose it's supposed to conjur up images of driving, but I just feel as if I'm in an Atari video game, and that's better anyway.

Boredoms - Rebore Vol. 0
A remix of tracks from Vision Creation Newsun that often manages to be the equal of that album. Whatever vestiges of rock/pop structures that remained in VCN (and there were very few) are now completely gone.

The War Zone

I had a visceral reaction to this film. My stomach hurts after watching it. Interesting that the film doesn't ask any questions. Why does this happen? How could it be prevented? These are not really questions that can be answered. Instead the film merely presents its story, like a punch in the gut.

I make it sound quite extreme, but with a few notable exceptions, it shys away from showing too much. Most of the violence occurs off screen, the horror is always out of sight, creeping up behind the characters. The story most obviously belongs to Tom, who quite literally flys with innocence at the beginning of the film, but by the end is as devastated as anyone, as hollow as his sister was when it began. At what cost do we keep up the lies that sustain us? For how long can we look away?

Will Ferrel's Harvard Commencement Speech is one of the funniest things I have ever read.

The first sentence of Leszek Kolakowski's Metaphysical Horror:

A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading.

I agree with that statement, and sometimes I think the above sentiment is perhaps the wizard behind the curtain of modern philosophy, or even perhaps its dominant motivation.

Woman in the Dunes

Film as texture. Three elements: Sand, skin, and water. The long, lingering shots of their bodies, moist with perspiration, beaded with sand, are some of the most extraordinary things I have seen in a film. Rarely in a movie do you get such a sense of the tangible, which made this sand-phobic person squirm. The plot is interesting but too complicated to explain here. In any case the movie is best described as a contest between sand and water, with skin caught in between. Borrowing from Sisyphus, a new element is born at the conclusion: spirit.

Those old foundations keep crumbling:

according to the latest estimates, we share 98.8 per cent of our DNA with the chimpanzees. What distinguishes us from our closest living relative is due to a 1.2 per cent genetic distance.

Question: is radical subjectivity simply another form of (attempted) objectivity?

Bjork - Royal Opera House DVD

Probably the best possible version of a concert based around Vespertine, an album almost claustrophobic in its intimacy. Bjork has always been a somewhat erratic live performer (ranging from "good" to "amazing"), but, predictably, she seems to be becoming a bit more of a professional with age. Her solution to the obvious difficulty of staging something like Vespertine live in a venue as large as the Royal Opera House is to simply punch it up a bit. Consequently, some of what makes the album so special is lost (though some of the discomfort that often coincides with the album is also gone). But that doesn't mean it isn't made up for in other areas.

Vespertine does have a "big" side, but it's slightly tongue in cheek, a reflection of and counterpoint to the tiny revelations contained in the music. This angle is played up in the concert to great affect, making the whole affair rather impressive but not for the cynical. The harpist Zeena Parkis is a wonder to behold (I've never seen someone do to a harp what she does) and Matmos is absolutely perplexing, but it's fun to watch them selectively recreate sounds by stepping on ice or clapping or rubbing a microphone on clothing. The Inuit choir gets the job done, but I was hoping she might bring in the giant childrens choir used on the album. I mean, if you are gonna go over the top, you might as well go all the way, right? I'm still waiting for an updated version of "Birthday," however...

The always great Charles Taylor on female oriented erotica. The subject is a book of erotic photographs of women, shot by women photographers. This is actually a very interesting idea, and, if Taylor is right in his observations, then the failures of the project are quite meaningful. As Taylor writes,

Were the photos in "Women by Women" presented without crediting the photographers, it would be hard to tell whether they were shot by a man or a woman. Still, the photos here feel different. It's not a case of their being "softer." That's only a politically correct use of the canard that when it comes to sex women are interested in the gauzy and prettified. Some of the work here, like Marie Accomiato's soft-focus sepia print of a pregnant woman, do fall into that category. Maybe the best we can come up with is to paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart's famous definition of pornography: I don't know what female erotica is, but I know it when I see it. But, like those Goedde photos of Aria Giovanni, the photos in "Women by Women" seem more interested in the totality of the model, in a low-flame sort of a turn-on rather than an immediate one.

Do women "see" each other differently than men do? It would be interesting to see photos of men taken by straight women and compare to them to traditional pornography (that is, pictures of women taken by men).

If, as Taylor suggests, it is impossible to tell the difference (and looking at the gallery, I certainly can't), then is it all a matter of context? In other words, just because I know the photograph isn't meant to be exploitative, then does it cease to be so? And why deny heterosexual men the ability to make these claims as well? Obviously, this is highly po-mo territory, but I think the real work here is done by the viewer, in the terms of how they decide to contextualize the image, and the use they put it to.

Nostalghia

I like to say of Tarkovsky that his films are so slow that you go past boredom into something else entirely. I only mean this half jokingly. Tarkovsky himself said that he tried to find "time within time," or, as I read that statement, eternity. Searching for eternity in an art form as temporal as film is setting a near impossible task for a director, but if Tarkovsky fails (which I suppose he does, but then do we ever find eternity in any form?) his films are artifacts of such sustained beauty that it hardly matters. That this beauty, so often presented in takes so long they resemble still photographs or paintings, is ultimately fleeting makes it that much more precious because it represents a heroic striving.

The final scene of Nostalghia depicts a man attempting to carry a lit candle across an empty pool. Twice he fails, and the candle goes out. When he finally reaches the other end of the pool with the flame still alive, he collapses with exhaustion. As in almost every single Tarkovksy film, he leaves us with an image (always an image! He is the consumate filmmaker) of eternity. And like every other Tarkovsky film, it is devastating.

Stanley Fish shows the power of calm and reasonable argument while writing on those who abuse the threat of censorship whenever they get a little heat for what they do or say. This article reminds me of those who, when told to shut up, or that their comments are inappropriate, shout about their first amendment rights. When a Colombia professor publically wished for a "million Mogadishus," and he was (rightfully) attacked, some people rushed to his defense as a matter of the first amendment, when that was never the issue.

Ran

The work of an old man. Kurosawa, in his seventies when he made his version of King Lear, was always a pessimist. One need only witness the curious intensity he brought to his other Shakespeare project (and masterpiece), Throne of Blood, to know that.

Ran isn't quite as successful. It is an epic, color coded, and beautifully scored descent into hell, but Kurosawa seems more intent on pointing out that you can't escape your past than Shakespeare's meditation on the pain of love and family (among many other things of course, but that always seemed the heart of the play to me).

The major difference between the play and the movie (even more than changing the daughters to sons) is the inclusion of a vengeful wife, out to get the family for past transgressions against her. Essentially the movie becomes a revenge tale, draining away the cosmic dimensions of the original. So what is put in its place?

"Man loves sorrow and war," a character says near the end. The most powerful scene in the movie portrays an intense and bloody battle, with the sound turned off, and looming violin strings play on the soundtrack, heightening the curious beauty of the scene. Perhaps this leads to the point of the film, making it a depiction of beautiful horror.

CMT picks the 100 Greatest Country Songs

I didn't realize that "Stand By Your Man" was so highly thought of. I don't particularly care for it (killer chorus of course, but the verse is very weak and boring). I would (in my total ignorance of country music) have chosen something by Patsy Cline surely. She is possibily my favorite female singer ever, so it's a no brainer for me. It's interesting that the top ten are all incredibly poetic for pop songs, many of them dealing with pain and loss in a very mature, un-pop culture like way. The exception, of course, being the Garth Brooks tune "I've Got Friends in Low Places," a stupid but very fun song. And come to think of it, Brooks doesn't really shy away from loss either.

And all of this makes me wonder: is country music the painful antidote to the happy love songs of mainstream pop music? What dark perpectives and truths are buried in this music so often derided as being for "poor white trash?" Maybe it simply reflects the wounded pride and harsh realities of the post-war american south. And if that is so, is the current pop-oriented sound coming out of Nashville evidence of the fact that the South has finally recovered? Or (a darker possibility) is it being ignored in favor of the coporatized sound now popular in Nashville, sold to white middle class suburbanites?

The Boredoms - Vision Creation Newsun

This is the perfect band for anyone disenchanted with music. I can't promise they will do for you what they do for me, but at the very least you will have heard something different, and that's no small thing. Tribal rhythms vie with rock guitars and synthesizers for prominence, and it all gives way to straight out noise at times, but it is never noise intended to annoy as the "conceptual violence" of their earlier records was, but instead the noise of spiritual striving. Always striving, but never quite reaching consummation, making each repeat listen open to new possibilities.

The Village Voice sets the record straight on Vincent Gallo's Brown Bunny. See Movie City News for more if you are interested. Also Roger Ebert.

I must say the film seems very interesting! I will probably be willing to see it, though I am more interested in Gallo as an actor than as a director. Ever since Buffalo 66 (where I also first saw the grown up version of Christina Ricci--the movie is essentially driven by the considerable personality of two great actors) I have wanted to see him in more movies, but he has only appeared in small parts and foreign films (and a music video). He has a great presence on screen. The scandal at Cannes makes my ever paranoid mind think he is up to some Lars Von Trier style media-manipulation-as-performance-art, even enlisting the great french director Claire Denis in his little conspiracy! (Check out the part about him being a conservative republican and match that up with the picture below to get an idea of what I mean.)

The General

An art form is generally at its best in infancy. Think the Iliad, Gregorian chant, or the Venus of Willendorf; these are works of art free from metaphor, allegory (the greatest sin in art), and cliche. They exude the sheer joy of creation, even in their tragic dimensions. All art since refers back to these foundations, creating a hall of diminishing reflections.

Silent film is perhaps the last true art we will ever experience (unless video games count). Of course, cliches abound, but they are so old that Jung renamed them the "collective unconscious," thinking we are born with them, and perhaps we are, but I doubt it. A better explanation may be that pure art requires what will eventually become cliche.

The General (and another silent I saw recently, Sunrise) seems to derive from a place deep in my own memory. I felt like I had seen it before, though I knew I had not. The film doesn't really mean anything, and the plot itself is irrelevent. The General, and movies like it, derives its power from somewhere deeper than something as superficial as meaning.

Remember those Coors Light commercials with the stupid song proclaiming what guys love? "Football on tv, etc." It was a dumb commercial, but one part in particular caught my attentions. Near the end, we are presented two nubile young blondes, and are informed that they are twins, obviously implying a three way with sisters. Isn't that a bit, well, incestuous? Finally, Salon notices too. Since Salon has decided to become annoying as hell with ads, here are some parts I liked in the article:

Besides being just plain hot, the aesthetically gifted 26-year-old blondes featured in the campaign are twin sisters. Twin sisters whose four blue eyes seem always to be saying, "Hey boys, anyone up for a three-way?" Sisters in a three-way? Gross.

Diane and Elaine are knockouts, no question, relatively not super skanky, and entrepreneurially spirited. But is their combined T&A factor that much greater than that of two equally hot but unrelated models? And, if so, why?

This part made me laugh out loud:

Greg, a 30-year-old business school student, went dumb when I asked him how he felt about the incestuous connotations in the "Here's to Twins" Coors ads. The look of incredulous annoyance on his face -- it read, "What the hell is your problem?" -- was one I would come to know well. I would also come to know that explaining I have no problem, but am simply wondering why it is that the implicit sexual relationship between twin sisters sits just fine with him, and in fact strikes him as fucking awesome, was not only futile but cruel. I had no idea that asking men to analyze the biological relationship between Diane and Elaine Klimaszewski would be like asking a 7-year-old to analyze the time frame for Santa's worldwide toy delivery schedule.

Ok, this is the conclusion, which is startling because I think she gets it exactly right. Who would have thought to find insight in Salon!

From my research I learned that men find real-life relationships are hard enough. All those post-coital responsibilities -- holding, talking, breakfast, phone calls, talking, commitments, talking, anniversaries and valentines, plus all that talking -- can really stress a guy out. So the less they have to act like decent human beings in their fantasies, the better. Even the most universal of male fantasies -- having two women at once -- turns nightmarish when interrupted by thoughts of emotional obligations. (Does this mean I have to call both of them the next day?) Their fantasies are about what could happen in a world free from the rules of wives and girlfriends (and, obviously, the rules of attraction) and from the reality that two identical women are biological twins. Even if they are really, really hot.

This is why Diane and Elaine are such a bargain. At least for fantasy purposes, men seem to perceive the pair as essentially one woman, with the bonus of two bodies. Two bodies servicing his body. Four boobs for the price of two.