Month: December 2012

The Franchise: The Title: The Subtitle: The Catchphrase: The Roman Numeral

Culture, Media, Movies

There’s a brief comic moment in the second Lord of the Rings film—I don’t think it occurs in the original book—where Gimli the dwarf tells the noble niece of the King of Rohan, a sort of half-Norse, half-Hunnish horse kingdom riding out of the North of Tolkein’s fictive world, that men mistakenly believe that there are no dwarf women, whereas in fact dwarf women simply look so much like dwarf men that outsiders can’t tell them apart. Then Viggo Mortenson, future King of Gondor, which is a sort of half-Roman, half-Most Serene Republic, half-Carolingian kingdom in the south, says to her, sotto voce: “It’s the beards.” It’s an odd, modern locution given Jackson’s general fidelity to LOTR’s ponderous inversions of contemporary English’s Subject-Verb-Object order: epic was the dialogue; but for comic relief ordinary English rarely spoke they. Anyway, this is the common complaint about Tolkein’s universe in general, isn’t it?–the women are just beards for a locker-room full of fellas who prefer the company of other fellas. Poor Cate Blanchett as the mighty elven woman Galadriel really sums it up back in the first installment. Offered the One Ring of Power, she transforms briefly into a weird obsidian-eyed vagina creature and intones ALL SHALL LOVE ME AND DESPAIR, enacting in summary the generally worry of the Tolkeinian universe.

The Hobbit dispenses with women altogether—or, the book does, but it seems less overtly . . . strange, if only because it’s really a boy’s own adventure tale. Cate makes an appearance in Jackson’s film, which, like a middle third trimester pregnancy is both immensely swollen and still unformed. I just reread The Hobbit, and it’s really a shame Jackson had to go and make it epic. It’s such a pleasant little adventure yarn, with a surprising surfeit of bitchy authorial asides. In fact, The Hobbit’s prose is remarkably un-ponderous. Stripped of Anglo-Saxonism, Tolkein can be bumptious and quite funny. The voice in the reader’s head is a slightly drunken English uncle amusing the children after dinner. It’s a shame Jackson stole the movie back from del Toro, who might’ve done the book more justice, having a better eye for both childhood and the grotesque, although for my money, the best choice would’ve been Terry Gilliam, whose Time Bandits (an outright homage to The Hobbit already) was far closer to the tone and tenor of Tolkein’s brisk little tale than this 3-hour prologue. The company of dwarves is permitted its slapstick, but when axe comes to neck, everyone transforms into a superhero, while Ian McKellan’s more mischievous Gandalf seems somewhat flummoxed as to how his later filmic self emerged from this character. The problem here is not so much that the movie is overlong, but that it’s overladen. I don’t mind a long movie where nothing much happens, but this ain’t Barry Lyndon. After a busy opening and then a long fallow section in Bilbo the Hobbit’s house, action arrives with predictable regularity—the problem isn’t the pacing, but the design, or the overdesign. The movie creaks under the burden of its overattention to detail. I did not watch the high frame rate version, but even in regular ol’ projection, it looked like a movie going into post-production rather than emerging from it. The lighting was often either too bright or too dim, and I kept waiting for a boom to drop into the frame or a dolly track appear in the leaves.

It would be unfair to single out Jackson for larding the movie with the many edifices of Tolkein’s, ahem, legendarium just to stretch it out and thus squeeze more fucking money out of it. After all, for every pretention otherwise, the very published existence of Tolkein’s tales and epics and lost tales and lost epics and lays and poems and songs and so on and so forth owes to his estate’s and his publisher’s desire to do precisely that: having exhausted his finished works, they ransacked his papers in order to make more money. Rather, the problem is that movies and heroes may no longer have a limited scope. The adventures of small people in a world that is obviously vast and mostly unknowable to them is actually quite interesting as a conceit, most especially when it’s basically a children’s story, but by constantly panning back and helicoptering skyward to reveal the size of the countryside and the goings-on the next country over, what’s meant to be wondrous become merely banal. In the book, all of this is hinted at just enough by the weird wizard’s occasional disappearance and reappearance, his errands simply implying that greater histories are being woven elsewhere; in the film, we have to follow him around. Far from making the world more wondrous, it makes it less so, over-explained and over-determined, not a story in its own right, but a mere prequel—worse, an origin story, the curse of modern fantasy and science fiction. What is Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit? It is the longest, most expensive DVD extra ever made.

Lightning Is Striking Again

Books and Literature, Conspiracy and the Occult, Things that Actually Happen

Point1948

So as some of you know and some of you don’t, I’ve written a book, about which I will engage in some shameless promotion later on. But in this book, there is a guy named Winston Pringle, who believes that the Point in Pittsburgh is a nexus of intense magical energy, an axis mundi, where the three phenomenal rivers and the fourth esoteric underground river join in mystical convergence. Anyway, my good friend John Allen and his friend Dave were in town, and in honor of the end of the Mayan long count calendar, we walked through a wild snow squall to the Point, whereupon we encountered that very–I thought, since I made him up–fictional conspiracy theorist. Actually, he claimed that he was Philip R. Ford, director of the semi-legendary Vegas in Space.

Well, he was just down there to soak up the energy and collect a little river water. We had a great talk. He also claimed to be the brother-in-law of Lou Christie, one of Pittsburgh’s great early pop stars, whom you probably know by his one big hit, “Lighting Strikes”, here performed by Klaus Nomi, because that’s what Phil would’ve wanted:

“I asked the park ranger back there if there were any events or celebrations planned today,” he said. He was resting on a park bench. He used a cane. He was wearing a sort of cowboy-cum-Homburg, a pin with the outline of a scorpion and a ring embossed with a black ankh. “But he said there was nothing.” We nodded. “Well,” he said, “I guess we’ve got the energy all to ourselves, just the four of us.” Then he told us the roasting pans in his grocery bag were for a Christmas goose.

“I know times are dark,” he said, “But I happen to think we’re coming into a better age. Our collective consciousness is making the change. It’s going to be a more matriarchal period. I’m pretty sure about that.”

You could barely see the stadium on the other side of the river because of the snow. A construction worker down by the fountain kept trying to light a cigarette in the wind.

The loveliest sentiments are what the rest of us call mad.

The Confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers in December, 2012

Poetry

We thought the world would end, and so we made
a quiche, potato salad, lemonade,
and went down to the Point to watch the earth
open like a Titan giving birth
to a god, the rivers torn toward empty space
as if the edge of a medieval map, grace-
enshrouded, monster-guarded, void and deep
as an old mind entering death from sleep.
Well, shortly after noon it clouded up.
There was a little snow. A single boat
moved slowly toward the West End Bridge. I drank
some decent wine out of a plastic cup.
A distant siren sang a quavering note.
Someone tossed a stone, which skipped, then sank.

Burn After Spending

War and Politics

Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.

-Our Man in Havana

Another reason I enjoy Graham Greene is that his bleak humor is so often prescient, proving the necessary point that comedy isn’t just the highest form of analysis, but the only form. He really could have written this story himself: two posh American dilettantes playing at playing at war, while the Generalissimo supposed to be in charge is bonking his amanuensis.

Actually, with all the awards dinners and jocular wine-soaked, clothed-and-skirted confabs, the thing smells just as much of Gilbert and Sullivan, but in Greeneland people actually die, and die horribly as a pesky side effect of human vanity and stupidity, and that’s the sad tale here. Two genuine American crackpots, experts on empires that have ceased to exist, got scam salaries from a non-profit DC racket and literally sent hundreds of Americans and god knows how many Afghans and Pakistanis to be killed, crippled, and maimed while the real officers were off porking a bunch of self-inflated, over-leveraged, Floridian yoga-and-pedicure arrivistes. At least Wormold did it for his daughter.

Perfectly, this article arrives simultaneously with its own publisher getting on the box to tell us that Chuck Hagel is insufficiently committed to setting giant piles of money on fire to serve as the Secretary of Defense. Really!

Mr. Hagel took a very different position when asked about Mr. Panetta’s comment during a September 2011 interview with the Financial Times. “The Defense Department, I think in many ways, has been bloated,” he responded. “So I think the Pentagon needs to be pared down.”

That’s being offered as a criticism. To even suggest such a thing is to be rendered unfit.

Well, the Washington Post is also a scam, the rump entertainment product of a test-prep rentier on the equally bloated American university industry, and there’s a great and ironic similarity between two scheming profs running a con dispensing advice to the generals and a scheming tabloid running a con by doing the same to the rest of the ruling class.

I suppose everyone will have to be shocked by this latest revelation about the petty venality of our modern-day Scipios, even though it’s the most unsurprising thing in the world. Talk about vanity. Our wars are nothing but, in both the modern and the ecclesiastical sense. The real long con here is on you, America. Your main man Obama is chucking your shitty retirement plan in the meat grinder while a couple of humanities Ph.D.s direct a quadrillion bones or clams of carnage halfway around the world. Your job sucks, you haven’t got any public transportation, your city is on the verge of bankruptcy, and your unpaid parking tickets have been reported to the credit ratings agency, making it impossible to refinance your crap mortgage. Don’t worry, though. Some dude who once expressed some mild skepticism about the non-personnel administrative expenses of the most lavishly, obscenely capitalized entity in the entire world may yet, despite the objections of The Potomac People’s Daily, get confirmed in some big-shot political job that you don’t really care about anyway.

The Holocene

Culture, Poetry

Don Quixote accidentally killed
the only extant wild giant left
in the world; we called the proximate cause of death
acute misapprehension, then we chilled
some DNA for future generations
who with gods-offending hubris will
regrow the race for gate receipts, though still
remain afraid of their immense creations.
But the clonal giants will not breed,
and will not eat, nor lift the sagging sky,
nor much at all but mope and slowly die,
allergic to the atmosphere, badly in need
of supplementary dietary myth
and oceans of fresh water to take it with.

The End of the Affair

Culture

The retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion — a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe.

As a reader, I’ve always enjoyed Catholic writers. Greene is my favorite modern novelist, and I’m the rare bird who finds the second half of Brideshead as enjoyable as the first. I like the fact that they seem to come to god so grudgingly; it lends credence to their conviction, as they, or their characters, are dragged kicking and screaming—or, well, mooning and whining—toward an inevitable appointment with the “appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.” So when I encounter an exuberant display of Catholicism, as I often do in the work of Ross Douthat, the springiest peacock in the Alcázarian gardens of the New York Times, I have my doubts as to whether what I’m reading is real or just a trick of light on the feathers.

“The retreat from child rearing is, at some level . . .” Rarely do you find a phrase working as mightily to support the rickety edifice balanced above it as that at some level. Rarely do you find a single gesture that stands out so glaringly from the movement all around it, a single bow going the wrong direction among the violins. If you’re going to accuse the West of exhaustion and decadence, you really need to drop the silk glove and draw the sword. It’s worth noting, at some level, that the company one keeps when one starts shot-putting decadence and exhaustion consists of Islamic fundamentalists, former Soviets, and mid-century fascists. Well, actually, those guys (they are all guys) have a point; the capitalistic West is decadent. Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers, and all that. But, while Bishop Douthat trims his tree with moral directives to the generations now living and those yet to come, the base is drinking from a shallow think tank full of MBA-styled phrases like “America’s demographic edge.”

So you see, the divine imperative to reproduce logarithmically is really about guarding a competitive advantage, and the commandment to go forth and multiply is to be read as a metaphor for GDP growth and a sustainable path for entitlement program funding. Each child is a unit of production; each retirement a cost; and Christ cries Why Has Thou Forsaken Me? from his perch where the  marginal cost and marginal benefit curves cross. If you want decadence, this is decadence, a society in which the act of sexual reproduction is as holy as the latest All Users email from HR.

Douthat isn’t alone in worrying about the slowing domestic production of Human Beings ®. Even The New Republic devoted a whole cover story to the Very Serious Problem of old ladies giving birth to retards. They go to lengths to phrase it very delicately in the language of pathology and neuroscience, but that is the fundamental concern. The freedom to delay childbirth may render our children eugenically unfit to rule the world that we have conquered for them. The partial liberation of women from their biological clocks may doom us to idiocracy. Or worse, a white minority, since only rich white ladies have the economic freedom and the health insurance to control their wombs.

All this makes for a pretty tawdry prelude to the vast outpouring of public grief over last week’s Connecticut rampage. Our most precious commodity struck down by our most fundamental constitutional right. I’m surprised the simultaneous occurrence of these two things didn’t tear a hole in the fabric of the universe itself.

What you will not hear in the crushingly predictable debate about guns, “freedom,” and security that we’re about to endure for the thousandth time is that our society is so terrifically violent because we don’t really value human life except as instrumental to other ends—economic production, the global war on terror, winning the future against China, whatever. Life has little value in and of itself; in the American worldview, we are all either future middle managers or future terrorists, depending mostly on the chance of the geography of our birth; the death of the former is to be lamented, the latter, if not cheered, ignored. But what makes them similar, those extinguished lives, is that for all our protestations to the contrary, we cannot value life as life; the very idea is antithetical to the manner in which our culture assigns value.

One of our more popular current entertainments features the specter of a desiccated future North America in which children are pitted against each other in gladiatorial combat; the rich are rewarded with exaltation, the poor with grief, but for everyone, the result is entertainment, diversion from their gray and daily lives. As the news continues and you find yourself diverted and horrified by the dreadful, inevitable drip-drip of grotesque forensic and psychological detail, well, are you not entertained?

Fixie

Culture

I’m an ancient thirty-one-year-old gay dude. Chocolate hurts my teeth and twinks make me want to hump razor wire and I maintain a curmudgeonly stance toward the trespassing universe as a general attitude, and yet I’m not able to muster a hatred for hipsters, that is, everyone younger than me. Where bores style themselves as thoroughly verklepmt at the ironic distance of our present era, I axe you, what is more affected, what is more pretentious, what is more self-conscious and artificial, a mustache and a vinyl collection, or the following sentence:

Born in 1977, at the tail end of Generation X, I came of age in the 1990s, a decade that, bracketed neatly by two architectural crumblings — of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Twin Towers in 2001 — now seems relatively irony-free.

The author goes on to identify grunge as an example of anti-ironism, which strongly suggests she never bothered decoding the lyrics to Nevermind. In fact, it suggests that the false nostalgia she hates in the hipsters is an altogether more subtle and accurate form of historical awareness than the acute nostalgia she feels for her own lost youth in a culture that hadn’t yet sold out.

The fall of the Berlin Wall was more world-historically meaningful than the destruction of the World Trade Centers, but in reality neither was all that significant in and of itself; both were superficial symptoms of larger histories, and the authorial decision to turn them into this sort of clever little trope, anchored to importance by what their destruction represents, is, actually, a form of irony, as is the fact that the same strophe is then transmogrified into a blunderbuss with which to take wild potshots at these kids today. Well, why not just throw in the Holocaust as well? Do you know that the hot hairstyle with cute boys these days is a direct throwback to late Weimar, cropped sides and long on top? I am sure it signifies an insufficient reverence for the greatest historical catastrophe ever to befall . . .

The idea that a tenured academic, a newspaper journalist, can instruct a lot of twenty-something party kids in how to recapture the childhood openness and emotional bigitude of a 4-year-old is pretty fucking ironic, too. It’s also pretty weird if you think about it for a minute. Collecting He-Man Action Figures and wearing handkerchiefs in your jean pockets is supposed to be a sign of arrested development, whereas pining for the preliterate mind of a child is a mark of the moral seriousness so sorely lacking in America. Who’s the fucking yolo here?

It is every person’s right and duty to hate fixed-gear bicycles, but to dress aesthetic prejudices in the drag of moral disapprobation is the act of a coward. The kids are having more fun that you, and they are less worried about getting fired from their job making smoothies at the co-op than you are at losing your TIAA-CREF accounts. No one likes getting older, but you can’t recapture your past by demanding that the present reenact that hazy image of it forever instagrammed in your spotty memory.

They Gotta Score If They Wanna Put Points on the Board, Phil

Education

As exercises in question-begging go, the sporting press is beat by the education beat, which ranks right beside conspiracy literature in treating the assumed validity of its own conclusions as a priori evidence of their truth. So you find Louis Menand in the middle of a prototypical Oh-Those-Crazy-French piece on President Hollande’s plan to do away with homework, making an approving citation:

According to the leading authority in the field, Harris Cooper, of Duke University, homework correlates positively—although the effect is not large—with success in school.

Many things “correlate positively” with many other things, and without seeing the study, it’s impossible to know what this is supposed to mean, although you’d suspect that it means that there was some non-negligible adjusted r-squared value in the regression, ahem, the sort of thing that I don’t imagine New Yorker generalists spend a great deal of time . . . understanding.

Generally, though, saying that homework correlates with success in school is not very different from saying that success in school correlates with success in school; the existence of a necessary component of a condition when the condition obtains says nothing about condition itself. Here’s a question: what is success in school, and why should we want it?

True Lies

Movies

A lot of people are giving Kathryn Bigelow’s new flick, Dark Thirty Rock, or something, a lot of free publicity by jagging off over whether it does, or does not, embrace torture as an effective tactic of interrogation. The filmmakers have elsewhere claimed to have been engaged in something akin to an act of journalism, and that’s supposed to imbue their work with a sort of virtuous truthfulness that makes their depiction of an instrumentally useful waterboarding all the more despicable, or their depiction of a sordid act of ambiguous and questionably efficacious torture all the more morally compelling, depending upon your take as to their authorial intent. But these being filmmakers and this being a work of fiction, when they say “journalism,” what they mean is something more like “realism,” a bit of Anglo-American narrative artifice in which action and affect are supposed to synch up like Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz. Well, the point is that the film may or may not depict torture as having been necessary, or at least instrumental, in the killing of Osama Bin Laden, and the filmmakers either are or are not morally compromised for having included it in their otherwise realistic tale.

It’s interesting that we should take up this particular narrative detail as a mark of the movie’s verisimilitude (or lack thereof), given that the entire story is patently bogus. The tale of the gangland killing of Bin Laden is carved out of the stankiest pile of official bullshit: the fake vaccine program that may or may not have occurred; the wife who was or wasn’t there; the mansion that may or may not have been a hovel; the firefight that did or didn’t happen; the body unceremoniously dumped in the ocean; the national security cabinet watching a livestream, just like in a movie. Leave the gun, take the canoli. The tale is pure confabulation, a bunch of cinematic set-piece details straight outta Hollywood, which makes Bigelow’s film a sort of exercise in entertainment doping, blood extracted, saved, and re-injected into the veins of its own originator.

“People are gonna come out of this movie thinking that torture is how we got Bin Laden.” The problem isn’t the torture, but that they think we got Bin Laden in the first place, that this whole episode sits in a neat official history that traces a through-line from the World Trade Centers to the dusty exurbs of Abbottabad. As critics, the question we ought to consider is not, how does this film deviate from reality and, in so doing, become propaganda, but rather, what sort of reality can be so innately and inherently cinematic that it satisfies the artificial demands of narrative realism without significant alteration? If the question of the film’s realness and accuracy is simply, did torture work?, then we should ask: how could it be that a piece of actual history, but for a detail or two, is so neatly constructed that it fits without change into a wide-release, cinematic format? Consider that the movie contains assassination scenes filmed in real time based on assassination scenes filmed in real time. How do filmmakers make less true that which was arranged to give the mere appearance of truth in the first place?