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1. kelly's world of cheerleading (hat tip to paper rad); 2.-4. tien's ultimate dbz dimension; 5. homestar runner (sweet cuppin' cakes); 6. tien's ultimate dbz dimension; 7. krystal ishida; 8. lugia pokémon (artist unknown); 9. artist unknown
Steve Mumford wrote a nice review of an Albert Oehlen show a few years back for an art mag called Review. Quite unlike Oehlen's multilayered, idiosyncratic work, the paintings Mumford was exhibiting at the time--thickly-brushed renderings of classic American automobiles--were blandly illustrational. The drawings he's sending back from Iraq, part of his Baghdad Journal on artnet, continue the tradition: they are as lifeless as courtroom sketches. A bunch of these sepia-toned watercolors are on exhibit at Postmasters right now, and based on what's been shown on artnet, one could be forgiven for not making the hike to Chelsea. Being able to draw is cool but art isn't just observation. At some point anger or joy or sorrow--or an idea--should travel from your insides to your arm to the page. Mumford's losing energy somewhere along this drive train. Or maybe it's not there to begin with. Anyway, those pictures are dead, people. I'll stick to reports from Robert Fisk and photos from the foreign press--I don't need to see the Art Students' League turning the slaughterhouse into tastefully smeared contour studies.
Soldiers Host Orphans in Mosul
"[...] Each child was also given a lunch of hamburgers, french fries, soda and ice cream. The restaurant on the CMOC (Civil Military Operations Center) grounds provided the meals. The restaurant also provided many of the decorations on the grounds.
"Another event of the day was face painting. A local caricature artist painted designs on the children’s faces and colored the skin of a few soldiers as well.
"Soldiers interacted with the children, swimming with them, playing soccer and simply being a friend.
"The children each received a gift bag when it was time for them to leave. The bag contained items such as a t-shirt with the 101st insignia, a beanie baby, a soccer ball and personal hygiene items."
While troops are being killed and wounded all over Iraq, that's the kind of stuff being posted on the Centcom website. What is Centcom, exactly? The U.S. Central Command is essentially the military governor of our newest colony, a region including "25 culturally and economically diverse nations located throughout the Horn of Africa, South and Central Asia, and Northern Red Sea regions, as well as the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq." According to the Centcom site, "the entire Central Region is larger than the Continental U.S., stretching more than 3,100 miles east-to-west and 3,600 miles north-to-south." If you're looking for news at the website, though, forget it. The press releases come out of Florida, and it's one story after another about schools, rebuilding schools, paying for schools, helping children, entertaining children, and getting toys for children.
War News for Today. From the Today in Iraq blog. Each item is preceded there by the phrase "Bring 'em on," a pissed-off reminder that all this carnage is happening because of one determined and barely adult man (and many misguided enablers such as the "liberal hawk" contingent, who egged on the war). This is reposted here because the regular media would have you believe the California fires are "today's top story," rather than a frighteningly organized offensive that caused our troops to actually vacate their headquarters. In military terms this is called losing ground, despite the administration's attempt to spin it as victory. Sorry to be a politiical bore, but I think all this needs to be documented and discussed as much as possible. I get as numb as you probably do hearing all this disaster recited, and I think the bad guys want that (meaning our bad guys); nevertheless, not to recite it seems worse.
Two US soldiers wounded in firefight near Fallujah.
Two US soldiers wounded in bomb ambush near Balad. (Second-to-the-last paragraph of this story.)
US soldier killed, two wounded in mortar attack at Abu Gharib prison near Baghdad.
US troops reportedly open fire after bomb ambush in Fallujah. Four Iraqis killed.
Mortar rounds fired into US administration compound in central Baghdad.
Two US soldiers killed, two wounded in bomb ambush in Baghdad.
Suicide bomber kills 18 at Red Cross headquarters in Baghdad.
Ten wounded, including seven Iraqi policemen, in bombing at western Baghdad police station.
Suicide bomber wounds seven at Al-Shab police station in Baghdad.
Three Iraqi policemen killed, ten US soldiers wounded in bombing at Al-Elam police station in Baghdad's Khark district.
Al-Sayidah police station in Baghdad struck by car bomb.
F-Factor 2: detail (actual orientation)
Following up on my Jonathan Lethem post, I'm going to out-geek him here by noting that the cover he describes for an imaginary science fiction book (by "F. Fred Vundane") actually blurs two distinct eras of sf book illustration. The Miró/Tanguy-style cover mostly came out in the early '60s (below, left), a wildly experimental and exciting time (imagine: quirky abstraction on book covers!) but by the '70s, the period Lethem is describing, book jackets got much more blandly illustrational (right); the "computer style letters" he mentions, however, would more likely be seen in the latter decade. The "electric yellow," "Peter Max" influence did survive into the '70s (e.g., Brian Aldiss's Barefoot in the Head cover), but never with as much style as those early '60s editions. A nice picture essay on the Ballantine book covers, from which the blurry images below were taken, is at Strange Words, a regrettably-not-very-active sf e-zine.
Lethem also plays fast and loose with his Marvel Comics chronology, muddling Silver Age ('60s) stories and characters (eg, Silver Surfer, Black Bolt) with books produced almost a decade later (Luke Cage, Power Man). In 1974 he has kids looking at a book that wouldn't come out till 1976 (Dr Strange #12) and another that in '74 would be hopelessly vintage (The Incredible Hulk #115, 1969). OK, maybe the latter's not so implausible. Also borderline but still dubious is whether a kid would say "Use the Force, Luke" the "morning after the last afternoon of seventh grade" in 1977 when the movie opened in limited theatrical release May 27. (Star Wars opened in a few select theatres and word of mouth built over the summer; if Dylan had been part of the first-month vanguard for this generation-defining epic, you'd think Lethem would have at least mentioned it.) The discrepancies only irk because Lethem's so casual about forsaking the dweebs he claims to be one of--he doesn't have to get his facts right because these people don't matter any more; the readers and writers of Great Novels he wants to run with can be easily fooled with some comics lore tossed off for "authenticity."
My point here isn't to engage in literary class warfare but merely to express disappointment that Lethem has written an old-fashioned bildungsroman after a few forays towards a new kind of narrative, with one foot in popular trash and the other in post-humanity. For a writer grappling with the realities of the disassociated, multitasking electronic media age, the novel, Great American or otherwise, is a limited and convention-bound vehicle. Being obsessively true to pop culture without shucking literary skill could be a way to a different, more relevant verbal art, in the tradition of Burroughs, Kathy Acker, et al (and from there to performance video, games on CD-ROM, web-writing...) Hmmm. This may be circling back to the "Why is Wm. Gibson Writing and Not Blogging?" question. Theory in progress--more later. Also, I really need to finish Fortress before popping off again.
Jonathan Lethem's Gun With Occasional Music and Amnesia Moon read like better-adjusted Philip K. Dick: what's missing in authentic brain-addled paranoia is (almost) made up for in wordplay pyrotechnics. Motherless Brooklyn represents a quantum leap: suddenly an emotional undertow appears beneath the dazzling language and off-the-wall premise (a detective with Tourette's). The emergence of its unlikely heroes from a Brooklyn boys' home keeps the reader on the verge of tears, while the Tourette's creates constant suspense, because you never know how or when the protagonist's outbursts will get him in trouble.
Suspicions about the newest book, The Fortress of Solitude, should have been aroused when some fool came out in Salon, pre-release, calling it the greatest American novel. That's clearly the kind of accolade Lethem's after, because he's turning his back on that silly surrealistic stuff and Writing About His Childhood, thus satisfying English teachers, librarians, and people who give out book awards. Cause for concern number 2: the main characters are named Dylan Ebdus (a Jewish kid growing up in all-black Gowanus in the 1970s) and Mingus Rude (his black best friend). Bad, obvious sociocultural call.
This isn't a review, because your correspondent is only 153 pages into the 511 page book. I keep putting it down; I had already finished Motherless Brooklyn in this same amount of time. I'm enjoying the snippets of cultural criticism, written by the same guy who rhapsodized about nerdy collecting of Dick paperbacks and the Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name (Marvel Comics) in the pages of Bookforum and who wrote so engagingly about Prince and Don Martin in Motherless. Like Motherless, parts of the book make me sad, but other parts seem really contrived. (Just as Mingus is about to get Dylan in tight with his homeys by taking him on a subway-car-spraying expedition, a white woman walks up and asks Dylan if he needs any help, thus tagging him irrevocably as a privileged white.) I found more humor and pathos in the fall of Dylan's father from artist to paperback cover hack, as captured in this passage, where the book with his first published cover arrives in the mail, wrapped:
When he finally tore it open a shudder of self-loathing went through him, and he nearly ripped the package in half down the center [...]"R. Fred Vundane" breaks me up every time I think about it. This is Lethem getting in touch with his inner sci fi nerd, and it's more convincing than the race theme, which as Joshua Cohen writes in the New York Press, seems awfully sensitized:Neural Circus by R. Fred Vundane, the first in a series called the New Belmont Specials, heralded as "Mind-Warping Speculative Fiction for the Rock Age." Jacket art by Abraham Ebdus: a third-rate surrealist landscape or moonscape or mindscape of brightly colored yet somehow ominous biomorphic forms, indebted to Miró, indebted to Tanguy, indebted to Ernst, indebted even to Peter Max, and repaying none of those debts in the least. The art department of Belmont Books had overlaid his gouache-on-pasteboard with an electric yellow sans serif font meant to resemble computer screen lettering. Abraham Ebdus wished now he'd denied them the use of his real name, substituting a pseudonym instead, as the author apparently had: A. Fried Mothball or J.R.R. Foolkiller. The colors he'd applied with his own brushes hurt his eyes.
[T]he great white-written New York race book, especially Jewish/Black book, has already been written: The Tenants by Bernard Malamud. Published in the '70s as a direct response to racial tensions in post-hippie New York, it’s a heartfelt novel that makes Lethem’s attempt seem too little and too late. [...] In the last pages of Malamud’s masterwork, [the protagonists] end up killing each other; whereas Lethem, expounding upon the decades, offers something some critic or marketing exec would call "more complex" or "nuanced" or "textured."More when I've finished the book. If I do.
Miscellaneous links I've been meaning to post:
Computer Movies Suck. This rant is several years old but still entertaining. (Samuel Jackson Young girl hacker in Jurassic Park: "This is UNIX! I know this!" --described under the category of "blatant factual errors.")
Atomic Cinema. Well-written blurbs about cult, art, horror, and sleaze films, crafted to sell tapes and DVDs (you'll want to buy all of them), but with a prevailing point of view that is pro-erotic & anti-control process, much like RE/SEARCH's Incredibly Strange Films book.
Bonaire Webcams. From this desert island in the Netherlands Antilles, stationary views of beaches, a "reef cam" about ten feet underwater, and a view out the window at Kaya Rotterdam 2 (a street in the Hato section of the island).
At the performance Saturday, a video projector rolled a clip of Macchio playing a few notes, then the tape stopped and Cory tried to "beat" Macchio with his own, live guitar. This continued through several tradeoffs. Cory has the moves to pull this off, up to a point, but a small minority of people (who knew Crossroads) knew that inevitably Ralph was going to kick his ass. Thus, suspense was created and a kind of unconscious caste system developed in the crowd between the Crossroads elite and non-initiates. At the end of the performance, Ralph let rip onscreen with a long sequence of cascading notes roaming up and down the fretboard like an impossible physics formula, while the old bluesman looked on approvingly. This was the big moment, and singer Jamie asked the crowd if Cory should go for it, prompting a chorus of mostly yeses and a few skeptical jeers. Cory started a solo and then a few bars into it petulantly smashed his guitar to the floor and walked off, leaving the feeding-back instrument lying there howling. What else could you do?
Speaking of PreReviews, I need to eat some crow for calling The RZA's great Kill Bill music "generic hip hop" (without seeing the movie). Turns out the complex, sample-heavy score is one of the two reasons to see it. You don't really realize how much material was ingeniously mashed up until you watch the song credits scrolling forever at the end. [Update: For some reason Elvis Mitchell in the NYT gives credit to Tarantino for all the music choices and doesn't even mention the Wu Tang guy. What's up with that???] A really lovely tune plays while Darryl Hannah prepares to kill the comatose Uma Thurman; I want to go back just to hear it again.
Oh, and here is the other reason to go see the film, the second in a series of Females I'd Like to Be Slaughtered By (the first being the T-X Terminator). This kind of unabashed fandom is just to help the film industry and America's ailing economy, that's all, really.
Chiaki Kuriyama: Scary.
[The following found sentence has been inserted for design reasons, to put a kind of text buffer between completely unrelated photos. OK, there's an animated .gif, too, but it's way over on the right.] Less than a week before "putting to bed" the second half of Artforum's two-volume look back on the '80s, organized by my predecessor, Jack Bankowsky, I found myself seated across from sculptor Haim Steinbach at a Brooklyn kitchen, a late winter light waning on the running tape recorder and a half finished plate of marzipan between us.
Black Hole Sun
Above: The Black Hole, 1979, lobby card image Below: Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project, installation at Tate Modern, 2003
My dream is that we'll pull out of Iraq, soon, and that George Bush will be judged a miserable failure and consequently lose the next election. He'll then have to go back to the Midland Racquet Club, and spend the rest of his life tapping his friends on the shoulder and saying, "We gave'em a hell of a run, didn't we?" while they pretend to listen.
Well, if we can't have that (yet), let's settle for Bush's Dad giving a public service award to Ted Kennedy, who recently called the Iraq war a "fraud." Talk about a vote of no confidence from the Pops! I wonder, do they sit around at Kennebunkport making stupid small talk under Bar's authoritarian eye, and then return to their respective mansions and bicker via broad symbolic gestures? How did we get in the middle of this weird family's dysfunctional arguments? Anyway, if Junior's angry, and therefore one step closer to a (preferably non-nuclear) meltdown, we should all be happy.
Performer above: The Plantains; Song: "Pop Iconography"; Video Projection: English Kills; Event: NY Underground Film Festival "Audio Visual" Live Showcase, October 8, 2003. Picture in background behind the musicians: that guy who's passport the FBI found lying on the ground a few blocks from the World Trade Center on 9/11. The Plaintains are a slick, funny sendup of a British neuromantic duo circa 1982, a dapper Spinal Tap for the synthpop era. Other performers included LoVid, Jamie Arcangel and the Arcangels, and the incredible Dr. Doo, who sat at a drumkit working the sticks athletically while lo-fi symphonic synths chugged and transcendental cartoon videos dazzled (sample frame below). The vibe was Soft Machine sound-and-light shows circa 1969 by way of Atari and Gumby, and wonderfully loud. Music to drive the bad shit away. (On-the-fly rock journalism type photography by yours truly.) Oh, yeah, I really wasn't into the last act, Ssion, which I would describe as Voice Farm meets B-52s meets dancers from Cats. Their pop irony seemed too much like MTV pop irony. Tryin' too hard.
Below: C-level's Endgame: Waco Resurrection at the Kitchen. Players wear plastic polygonal David Koresh heads, and guide the onscreen Koresh around the burning compound, saving souls and shooting Feds. The inside of the virtual compound is exquisitely mapped with lots of plywood paneling, pile carpet, and Davidian women in pantsuits. Periodically Koresh lifts his rifle heavenward in an ecstatic gesture; at the spoken command "Gunshow!" an arsenal of weapons appears around him like a ring of holy fire. All my reservations are still intact after seeing the game live and fooling around with the interface.
Part of BushCo's "It's all good in Iraq" propaganda push was bragging about restoring the marshes that Saddam drained to catch elusive "marsh Arabs." See how environmentally friendly we are (at least abroad)? Well, the flip side of that particular coin is our Sharon-esque bulldozing of fruit trees further north. I guess some environments are just better than others.
US soldiers driving bulldozers, with jazz [?!]* blaring from loudspeakers, have uprooted ancient groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who do not give information about guerrillas attacking US troops. (The rest is over at CounterPunch)That makes me sick--I mean, we invaded their country, shouldn't they be fighting back?--as does the following statement by Joshua "Conventional Wisdom" Marshall:
I certainly don’t think we should pull out of Iraq. More importantly, I don’t know many of what I’d call mainstream foreign policy voices who think we should pull out of Iraq any time in the near future. (No, Dennis Kucinich doesn’t count.)Ha ha ha. So funny. Marshall's blog is well written and researched and all, but utterly conventional in adhering to the inside-the-Beltway zeitgeist of defense contractors, right wing think tanks, & scary Likudniks. It's too bad Kucinich isn't a stronger presence (some commentators describe him as creepy), because we need a real peace candidate, especially now that Dean has endorsed Sharon's attack on Syria. Stop the Middle East madness (or at least, our part of it)! I noticed Kucinich is co-sponsoring a bill with Houston libertarian Ron Paul to roll back portions of the USA Patriot Act. Good! That's where I find myself, at least on the subject of US imperialism and domestic spying--over where the far left meets the far right. The tiny, antiwar minority. Hey, we've been right so far.
*Cecil Taylor? Ornette Coleman? Nah, probably "smooth jazz."
Mercer Street - 2
Trees - 0
The wind blew down a big tree across the street from my apartment. It completely crushed a late-model sporty car that had the misfortune of parking beneath it. A couple of months ago, I watched aghast as some lame-ass utility contractors (for PSE&G, according to a neighbor) cut through the roots of that same tree to put in a new pipe. They loosened it just enough; today their negligence bore fruit. That's the second tree down on the block this year, not counting recently planted saplings that got scraped to death by who knows what.
Michael Sailstorfer, Schlagzeug, a slightly larger-than-life drum kit made entirely from a police car, at homeroom, Munich (the green and white colors would be recognized instantly by Munich residents as "cop colors.") In the background: a painting by Douglas Melini. The exhibition dates were May 31 - July 18, 2003.
Eddo Stern and Mark Allen of the digital art/gaming cooperative C-level spoke last night at the Kitchen. Much discussion centered on their new interactive game Endgames: Waco Resurrection, which premieres there October 16. Gamers enter the "mind and form of a resurrected David Koresh" through custom headgear--voice-activated, hard-plastic 3D "Koresh heads" worn like helmets. Koresh is the sole point-of-view character in the game; up to four of the (multiply-resurrected) cult leaders can play at a time. Inside the game, players defend the Branch Davidian compound against "internal intrigue, skeptical civilians, rival Koresh[es] and the inexorable advance of government agents. [...] Players voice messianic texts drawn from the book of revelation [to gain converts], wield a variety of weapons from the Mount Carmel cache and influence the behavior of both followers and opponents by radiating a charismatic aura." Each Koresh's objective is to convert as many followers as possible from among the government soldiers, rival Koresh flocks, and stray civilians (I think) wandering around the compound, before it meets its inevitable fiery doom.
Hearing this project described, I was a little concerned that it was applying bad-boy-cheeky humor to an event that is still problematic and much-debated: essentially the annihilation of 80 some-odd US citizens by their own government because they were different. (The Waco constabulary didn't think the Davidians, who'd lived outside the town for years, were a threat, armed or not--only the self-righteous, glory-hungry Feds who did the photo-op raid spun it that way.) Turns out the game is a high-concept, retroactive re-imagining of Waco based on the post-Clinton rise to power of a cult far scarier than Koresh and his crew:
Waco Resurrection re-examines the clash of worldviews inherent in the 1993 conflict by asking players to assume the role of a resurrected "cult" leader in order to do divine battle against a crusading government. While the voices of far-off decision-makers [audible inside the plastic Koresh head] seem resolute and determined, the "grunts" who physically assault the compound appear conflicted and naive in their roles. The game commemorates the tenth anniversary of the siege at a unique cultural moment in which holy war has become embedded in official government policy. In 2003, the spirit of Koresh has become a paradoxical embodiment of the current political landscape - he is both the besieged religious other and the logical extension of the neo-conservative millennial vision. Waco is a primal scene of American fear: the apocalyptic visionary (an American tradition stretching back to Jonathan Edwards) confronts the heathen "other." In Waco Resurrection, the roles are anything but fixed. (Emphasis added.)But surely "the clash of worldviews inherent in the 1993 conflict" was the secular, bureaucratic state vs. go-it-alone visionary cultists. C-level seems to be arguing that the naked fundamentalism of BushCo reveals a covert fundamentalist agenda behind Clinton/Reno. That premise may be shaky, but there's no question that if Waco occurred now rather than '93 it'd be Clash of the Holy Rollers. In any event, this seems like a lot of doctrinal subtlety to put into a computer game, but I should probably watch a few rounds of play next week before commenting further.
UPDATE: Photos and more discussion here.
One thing that really pisses me off is the indiscriminate use of the Comic Sans font. Actually I don't care that much but there is a movement by typographical purists to stop this juvenile-looking, Microsoft-spawned lettering from appearing on everything. It's called Ban Comic Sans and they have a sticker with the inventor of Comic Sans on it, which you can slap down wherever you see a gratuitous usage of these happy, dumbed-down letters. I once told a table full of people about the Ban Comic Sans movement and completely stopped the conversation, so I know exactly how important this is. (hat tip to Prof. C. Dirt)
Matthew Geller's urban earthwork Foggy Day, which I posted about here, made the front page of the New York Sun today, with an evocative photo. The conservative rag did some digging and figured out that a small percentage of the funding came from (gasp) public sources so they went to town, with the headline "Fog, Art, or a Waste of Tax Money?" and an outraged editorial in the back. C'mon, Republicans, the Culture Wars are over and you won, man! Compared to the glory days when they complained about crucifixes in urine and photos of men fisting, the Culture Cops are like high school hall proctors now, swooping down on the few remaining dimes occasionally changing hands for a piece of atmospheric installation art. The old "is it art?" question has even been dusted off from the early 1960s. Pathetic.
UPDATE: The pile-on continues: Geller is being interviewed and the fog piece will be featured on Fox News, Wednesday, October 15, at 7:00 pm EST.
"The world of Knight Realms takes place in a fantasy/medieval setting. It is a time of knights, wizards, monsters, and treasure. Suit up in your armor and grab your sword, for this is fantasy role-playing at its absolute best. Become a fearless warrior, a mystical magic-user, a mysterious rogue, a benevolent priest, an alchemist creating potions in a mysterious laboratory, or any of the other forty plus possibilities. We create an entire world for you to explore, complete with adventures and a thick plot. Imagine yourself acting out the part of a hero or heroine in a good fantasy novel, except it's not a novel, you are experiencing it at a much closer degree." Be sure to visit the video page. (Hat tip to Joe of Cimmeria)
Zerg Moderne, MSPaintbrush drawing, 2003.
Brian De Palma's Scarface is enjoying a limited theatrical run in connection with the 20th Anniversary DVD; it packs a wallop on the big screen. It's still over-the-top on every level: opulent set design, scenery-chewing acting, bloody violence, all mediated through Giorgio Moroder's disco dirge score, Oliver Stone's then-sharp politics (in the screenplay), and De Palma's meandering camera eye ("This is the first time that his camera's swoops and pans start to emote, to add substance to the narrative, to actually paint," says critic Ted G--although I'd say it was doing that as early as The Fury). If you're looking for your early-'80s fix, Scarface electrifies like a big, obscenely tall mound of blow (as opposed to Blow) shoveled toward the nose with the flat of the hand. Accept no substitutes (e.g, Kill Bill).
In any event, be sure to read Armond White's smart discussion of the movie's cult following, that is, the influence it had on a generation of youth more or less abandoned by the system who took it to heart as the template for the gangsta lifestyle:
On the new DVD, a 20-minute documentary made by music video director Benny Boom lets a platoon of hiphop-culture icons comment on what Scarface has meant to their lives and careers. P. Diddy, Method Man, Geto Boys’ Scarface, Eve, Outkast and more express their admiration for Tony Montana, the Castro exile played by Al Pacino who took advantage of the 1980 Mariel boatlift and Miami’s Cuban criminal class to enter the drug trade, grasping after the vaunted American dream with brutal tenacity. This drama was the beginning of "gangsta" as an appellation for ruthless bravery. [...] (Def Jam has released a CD of songs by various rap artists influenced by Scarface. It’s a funny, melodramatic array, although it omits Public Enemy’s "Welcome to the Terrordome" in which Flavor Flav imitates Tony’s "Who I trust? Me!")White's film criticism, which appears weekly in the New York Press, gets better and better. He's one of the few critics tackling race and class issues in movies; his only major soft spot is an inexplicable devotion to Steven Spielberg. Check out his review of Clint Eastwood's Mystic River, an "A"-list film that just sounds horrible.
Digimon: The Movie (2000). Don't get me wrong, this is a terrible film. You might as well hit your kids upside the head with a rolled-up newspaper as let them watch it. There's a lot of beautiful stuff in it, though, once you turn off the white-rapper-heavy soundtrack. Basically it's a k1ddy version of Neuromancer: children fight viruses and worms in the Internet with monster-avatars. Typical of the Japanese, though, there's a lot of confusion between the digi-world (which technically could only exist in computers or the Net) and the plain old garden-variety-anime "spirit world." Taxing suspension of disbelief beyond the breaking point, the digi-monsters constantly manifest themselves on a huge scale, in the middle of cities, etc. In the scenes above, the animators visualize the Internet as a graphic "clean room" environment, with superimposed pastel ferris wheels and parabolic merry-go-rounds suggesting a toddler's wallpaper rendered by parallel Crays. Avatars fight in this disembodied zone while their human masters watch on popup screens. Nice!
Vincent Price in The Last Man on Earth (1963), an incredibly faithful adaptation of Richard Matheson's novella "I Am Legend." In that classic '50s science fiction story, a plague turns the entire population of Earth into vampires; it was later remade somewhat ridiculously as Omega Man, starring Charlton Heston, and strongly echoed in the recent 28 Days Later.* Spoiler: Robert Neville (Price, called Robert Morgan in the movie) thinks he's all alone in the world, killing vampires by day and sharpening stakes at night inside his boarded up house. Turns out the plague has mutated; some people can survive with a pharmaceutical cocktail of defebrinated red cells and a bacillus-killling drug. In his ignorance, Price has been slaying these non-vampiric day sleepers, and they view him as the most unspeakable monster of all. As Stephen King wrote in his excellent culturecrit book Danse Macabre:
For a nation whose political nightmares still include visions of Kent State and My Lai, this is a particularly apt idea. The Last Man on Earth is perhaps an example of the ultimate political horror film, because it offers us the Walt Kelly thesis: We have met the enemy and he is us.Actually, I'd say Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are our latter-day Robert Nevilles. The poor deluded Cold War relics truly think they're doing some good in the world by killing thousands of Iraqi civilians. Unlike Neville, though, they aren't horrified when they discover Iraq is WMD-less, and even think getting rich is their reward for being so "noble." Talk about a monster movie!
*Hat tip to Sally for reminding me of this movie--the DVD retails for six bucks!
UPDATE: The brilliant blurb writer(s) over at Atomic Cinema believe that "[t]he real plot [of Last Man on Earth] is that an aging man loses everything dear to him, and finds whatever purpose to his senseless existence he can." I've been emphasizing the story's politics, but it's the undertow of melancholy and loss that makes it so powerful, an aspect of the Matheson story that the movie captures very well.
Art Fog in Tribeca
New York artist Matthew Geller is presenting Foggy Day in a section of Cortlandt Alley between White and Walker Streets in Lower Manhattan, Oct. 3-Nov. 14, 2003. The "urban earthwork," as the artist terms it, shrouds the street in fog at selected times during the day, with "a regular pea-souper that grows and dissipates as wind and weather conditions change." The picturesque Cortlandt Alley has frequently served as a set for film and photo shoots; in Geller's real-life version, the alley is enhanced with translucent rubber puddles on the sidewalk and trees growing from building niches, turning "a normal walk through the city into a kind of temporary cinema." The mysterious fog is activated at lunch and early evening Tuesdays through Sundays; for more info see the artist's website. (from artnet news)
The trailer for Gus Van Sant's new film Elephant is like a Hemingway short story. The action is all in the margins, revealed through hints and implications. Even as a tease it's sketchy, postmodern in that it knows audiences will map another well-known story onto it to complete it. Mostly it consists of pretty shots of pretty kids lollygagging in the halls and playgrounds of a modern suburban high school. You see a car crash into another car and think maybe the movie's going to be one of those jackass-themed comedies. But then one of the kids gets out and says "Dad, you shouldn't be driving." Brief shot of a wasted, forlorn businessman behind the wheel. Later, the same kid sees two of his classmates walking into the school dressed in fatigues and carrying heavy canvas bags. He spots a teacher about to go into the school and tries to warn him: "Don't go in there, trust me, you don't want to go in there." In the last shot the kid is at home crying, and his girlfriend gives him a kiss, thinking he's just sad.
Attended a party last night where each person brought clips from 3-5 science fiction films, each cued to a specific scene of up to 10 minutes. One could introduce the clips or not, and no one knew what anyone else was bringing. It was kind of fascinating to see the range, and that there was no duplication. (The 1970s predominated, however.) Food and booze were consumed. Below is each person's list, captioned by theme rather than the individual's name:
Sports Theme.
Rollerball (1975). James Caan explains the importance of using your ears and humiliates a cocky new team member.
Death Race 2000 (1975). David Carradine: "It's euthanasia day at the geriatrics ward. They do this every year."
Tron (1982). Light cycle race.
Bonus: An mpeg of hardcore role-players, in medieval costumes, calling out their powers and hurling tinfoil lightning bolts at each other.
Design Theme. Clips emphazing design and art direction.
Brazil (1985). The sliding desk scene.
The Fifth Element (1997). Leeloo drops into Bruce Willis's cab and a race through the multilevel city ensues.
Andromeda Strain (1971). Scientists are ritually humiliated as they descend through a succession of color coded "clean rooms."
Existenz (1999). Jude Law assembles the gristle gun in the Chinese restaurant.
Alien (1979). Opening scenes of the Nostromo chittering back to life.
Science Fiction is a State of Mind.
Land of the Lost (1974). Cute stop motion dinosaurs Grumpy and Alice menace kids in this Sid & Marty Krofft Saturday morning adventure.*
Waiting for Guffman (1996). Eugene Levy in a papier mache Martian costume.
Rushmore (1998). In a parallel universe, the Vietnam war is reenacted on a middle school stage.
Sleeper (1973). Miles Monroe escapes from the cops with an intermittently functioning helicopter pack.
John Carpenter is God; Going Crazy in Space; Forest Themes
Silent Running (1971). Bruce Dern plays poker with the maintenance drones Huey and Dewey.
Dark Star (1974). Talby breaks the communications laser and the bomb countdown begins.
They Live (1988). Rowdy Roddy Piper puts on special sunglasses and sees reality for the first time.
Castle in the Sky (1986). Sheeta and Pazu meet the forest keeper robot on Laputa.
*Script by Norman Spinrad (Bug Jack Barron, The Iron Dream). Other scripts in the series were by Larry Niven and Theodore Sturgeon. Who knew?
Hmmm. Whether to see Olivier Assayas' art film Demonlover. In the plus column, Roger Ebert pronounces it "completely amoral" and means it as a criticism (this from the screenwriter of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls!) On the other hand, a thumbs-up from Charles "I Love Actresses" Taylor in Salon signals the camera will probably be making love to the stars for the better part of two hours (Connie Nielsen, Chloë Sevigny, Gina Gershon). Well, maybe that's okay. So I went.
Report: Paul Virilio and half the regulars at Index magazine seemingly served as script consultants, but the movie's not so bad. Mulholland Drive for cyber-wankers. The score a too-busy encyclopedia of art-noise moves from the past 20 years, too much damn electric guitar trying to put the punk in the cyber (when the credits come up at the end: "Oh, of course, Sonic Youth.") Lots of topical references to anime, vidgames, and the Internet. Not so topical regurgitation of Videodrome. And geez, the pixel-bleeping of penetration shots from nasty hentai cartoons just to get an R-rating lacks a certain...courage. But then there's that scene of Sevigny lying on her stomach on a hotel bed, nude, playing an ultraviolent wireframe kungfu game. *heart melts*
One would be tempted to think this is a dot-com relic arriving late after being held up in some petty distribution tiff. The sense of indispensability and edginess it tries to give the Internet often feels tacked on. The last shot is brilliant, though, keeping the film humble and positioning it squarely in the here and now of diminished expectations. At least for me. And Connie Nielsen, the thinking dude's Jennifer Connelly, does have a lot of screen time. Even though she's really too nice to be noir. Sorry if this is breezy; I'm out.