These posts are either "jump pages" for my weblog or posts-in-process that will eventually appear there. For what it's worth, here's an archive of these random bits. The picture to the left is by a famous comic book artist.
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Oscar bombs
"The Passion of The Frodo" sweeps, and more beautiful stars bravely impersonate the genuinely homely to great success. But all the crooked teeth in New Zealand can't save a dull, dull Oscar night
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By Cintra Wilson
March 1, 2004 |
Squarer than robot-shit. All the joy and irreverence of a hotel management seminar. Strictly by-the-book, and the book was the New Zealand census, apparently, and less interesting. The fearful cadavers of the Academy laid down the law with their spotted old talons and brought down an unbearable evening of easy-to-chew television for the elderly and prim that looked and sounded like a slowed-down version of the Lawrence Welk show without all the stimulating colors. Not even the clothes were interesting, apart from Uma Thurman, who wore a Fabergé baked potato.
Janet Jackson ruined tits for everyone, so the vast majority of dresses were strictly Mormon prom. Even Elvis Costello wore a plain black jacket, for The Christ’s sake. Nobody even had interesting new plastic surgery, apart from Joan Rivers, whose face looks like it was gnawed out of marzipan by the savages of Easter Island, and Angelina’s Billy Bob-shaped laser scar.
Actually, I think the horrendous cash success of The Passion of The Mel was responsible for all possible fun being extracted from this year’s ceremony -- cranky old Oscar figured out that most of America hates sex, dancing, gay people, ethnic people, ribald or drug-related humor, and opinionated or irreverent takes on current political events, so the golden man decided to show us just how well-behaved and self-censoring he be; Hollywood fidgeted like kids in Sunday school, and us unwashed heathen out here in TV land had to resort to binge drinking.
"Movieshe are the forshe thot bindshe ush togethah. Shelebrate the mahgic," croaked the decrepit Gone Seannery, establishing the octogenarian Bisquick casserole flavor for the evening in the first five minutes. Even the ordinarily amusing Billy Crystal had crystallized into a pillar of Klonopin -- who were his writers? Who in this day and age rhymes Old Man River with "Dark as mom’s chopped liver"? That’s comedy so anciently borscht-belt it should have been in Aramaic. When he picked Julie Andrews as his designated whipping-matron, it was clear the corporate fear factor was jacked up to orange alert.
There were no pleasant surprises. Tim Robbins beat out a token Asian and Djimon Hounsou, that beautiful African, for best supporting actor; I thought Hounsou deserved it more. The Wonderful Magical Black Person is now a cliché so absurdly pervasive I’m surprised there aren’t Franklin Mint collector plates of damp-eyed homeys gazing heavenward in a spiritual, Native American fashion, but Hounsou still brought a lot of heart to his role. Tim was not exactly a revelation in his dunced-out portrayal of an emotionally damaged guy, but he has been loitering purposefully around Hollywood long enough, and he must have promised to behave; usually an incorrigibly mouthy liberal, Tim’s thank-you was so safe, you knew somebody had his balls in a professional threat-sandwich.
The Road to Oscartown has always been paved with retardation and weight gain, which is why it was obviously Renee Zellweger’s turn to get best supporting actress -- fat, thin, fat, thin….she may be the greatest actress since Oprah. But lately, getting the award is all about Puttin’ On the Ugly: beautiful young Hollywood hotties playing grizzled and wizened hard-luck cases. Let’s review: It worked for Nicole Kidman and her extra nose last year, and Halle Berry’s realistically hideous sex with Billy Bob Thornton’s deflated ass-flaps in 2002. Hilary Swank got the gold when she transformed herself into young Donny Osmond, and it almost worked for Salma Hayek when she grew her mustache out.
But when I think of homely, miserable, ornery, masochistic jockeys with eating disorders, Tobey Maguire doesn’t exactly gallop to the forefront of my mind. Lizzie McGuire would probably make my short list before Tobey. Don’t try to tell me there’s no scraggly little ex-fuck-ups in Hollywood. You know what casting call might have been a stroke of casting genius for "Seabiscuit"? Corey Feldman. That kid has the face of pain. Any of Young Hollywood’s recently sober casualty-boys would have done the trick….but "Spiderman"?
Concurrently, when I’m thinking of hard, early American women barely scraping out a living, subsisting on tablespoons of dirt and weeds at the end of the Civil War, I do not think of Nicole Kidman and Renee Zellweger, the two most wildly pampered women in L.A. and possibly the world, who probably needed to have their hair strands individually mussed for hours each day they shot "Cold Mountain."
Hot-hot-hot model/ballerina/actress Charlize Theron bravely gained 30 pounds, shaved her eyebrows and spent a half an hour in the makeup chair each day getting all ragged-out and splotchy. Her genuinely terrifying performance notwithstanding, I’d have rather seen the best actress award go to an organically homely person.
"Lord of the Rings," realistically, had no competish.
"Master & Commander" was a silly male costume-drama, a moistened "Gladiator," what with Rusty Crowe and his locks of goldenest Clairol, pouncing manfully about the deck with his beefy guts of lager, minding scuppers both bow and stern. Whilst cannonballs splintered the poop-deck and wee boys arms were sawn off, me whistle was whetted for e’en finer upcoming computer graphicks dramas on the high seas, like "Troy." Nay, that film ‘twas neither sentimental enough nor was there sufficient bodice-rippage for the Oxygen demographick.
"Seabiscuit" was a stink-pony – superclean schlock from nose to bumper. Spare me the sight of quaint, depression-era crowd scenes that look like they’ve been swaddled in tweeds by J. Crew, surging in rapture to majestic life-insurance violin orchestrations. That shit was strictly for Burl Ives, Pepperidge Farm and creamy ranch dressing.
"Mystic River" – eh. Sorry, boys: Emotional Violence for Dummies. While Sean is great at bawling openly towards the sky-cam in "Why hast thou forsaken me?" fits of bathos, unrestrained Mook Feelings do not count as emotional nuance, in my book. I’ve seen more skillfully calibrated grief at Super Bowl parties. Sean Penn is unquestionably the finest actor of his generation, but his Best Actor win was strictly the Academy playing catch-up ball -- they got embarrassed that they didn’t recognize him for "Dead Man Walking" or his most naked Oscar bid, that dribbling "Sam I Am" gambit. Sean’s time was overdue, but Mystic River was just one Mexican soap-opera out of dozens he’ll flex his scenery-chewing skills on in the years to come; Bill Murray, on the other hand, may not get another shot. Sad, I say.
"Lost in Translation." OK – I’m jealous of Sophia, I admit it (knuckle-biting spleen, arrrgh, arrgh.) I haven’t seen the movie yet, but she’s clearly got great taste and gets her inspiration from smarter sources than anyone else, at the moment – still, she’s too young and the movie was too quirky to compete with the whole of Middle Earth.
I didn’t really dig the maudlin Irish sob-fest that was "In America" – it was a shamelessly heart-poking, Spielbergian emotional short-con -- basically "The Color Purple" for broke, co-dependant Catholic honkies, shot in glorious Technisqualor. Samantha Morton is the most Serious Actress going, these days, in that she tends to naturally look like she’s put on twenty extra pounds and a prosthetic nose, but that vintage Givenchy dress looked a bit like twin Edsel grills strapped to her tits, and it just wasn’t her night.
"Lord of the Rings: The Passion of The Frodo" was, for me, a great tool of conversion to Hobbitism. They got me where I lived. I was riveted to my seat for the full three hours; I cried so much that by the end I was holding a cardboard tub of polenta. A wildly ambitious and unbelievably realized monster achievement in the genre of epic filmmaking. Bully for the elves, but it’s not like this sweeping win of Peter Jackson’s was any great shocker – certainly, nobody needed to watch the dental nightmare that was the 76th Oscars all the way to the end to figure out who was going home with the big jackpot.
Shame on you, Oscar, for being such a craven corporate pussy. Shame, shame, shame. The only way you can possibly redeem yourself is to get Dave Chappelle to host in 2005 – if not, you may as well go lay down and die in some Opus Dei donation box, because the TiVo contingent will have nothing to do with you. You’ve never had genitals, but now you clearly have no spine.
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Dark Side of Free Trade
By BOB HERBERT
The classic story of the American economy is a saga about an ever-expanding middle class that systematically absorbs the responsible, hard-working families from the lower economic groups. It's about the young people of each successive generation doing better than their parents' generation. The plotline is supposed to be a proud model for the rest of the world.
One of the reasons there is so much unease among voters this year is the fact that this story no longer rings so true. Books based on its plotline are increasingly being placed in the stacks labeled "fantasy."
The middle class is in trouble. Globalization and outsourcing are hot topics in this election season because so many middle-class Americans, instead of having the luxury of looking ahead to a brighter future for the next generation, are worried about slipping into a lower economic segment themselves.
This is happening in the middle of an economic expansion, which should tell us that the terrain has changed. In terms of job creation, it's the weakest expansion on record. The multinationals and the stock market are doing just fine. But American workers are caught in a cruel squeeze between corporations bent on extracting every last ounce of productivity from their U.S. employees and a vast new globalized work force that is eager and well able to do the jobs of American workers at a fraction of the pay.
The sense of anxiety is growing and has crossed party lines. "We are losing the information-age jobs that were supposed to take the place of all the offshored manufacturing and industrial jobs," said John Pardon, an information technology worker from Dayton, Ohio. Mr. Pardon described himself as a moderate conservative, a longtime Republican voter who has become "alienated from the Republican Party and the Bush administration" over the jobs issue.
Mr. Pardon does not buy the rhetoric of the free-trade crusaders, who declare, as a matter of faith, that the wholesale shipment of jobs overseas is good for Americans who have to work for a living.
"There aren't any new middle-class `postindustrial' or information-age jobs for displaced information-age workers," he told me. "There are no opportunities to `move up the food chain' or `leverage our experience' into higher value-added jobs."
The simple truth, as Mr. Pardon and so many others have found through hard experience, is that enormous numbers of well-educated, highly skilled white-collar workers are having tremendous trouble finding the kind of high-level employment they've been trained for and the kind of pay they feel they deserve.
The knee-jerk advocates of unrestrained trade always insist that it will result in new, more sophisticated and ever more highly paid employment in the U.S. We can ship all these nasty jobs (like computer programming) overseas so Americans can concentrate on the more important, more creative tasks. That great day is always just over the horizon. And those great jobs are never described in detail.
These advocates are sounding more and more like the hapless Mr. Micawber in "David Copperfield," who could never be swayed from his good-natured belief that something would "turn up."
We've allowed the multinationals to run wild and never cared enough to step in when the people losing their jobs, or getting their wages and benefits squeezed, were of the lower-paid variety. Now the middle class is being targeted, and the panic is setting in.
No one really knows what to do — not the president, not John Kerry or John Edwards, and most of all not the economists and other advocates who have been so certain about the benefits for American working men and women of unrestrained trade and globalization.
What happens when the combination of corporate indifference and the globalized pressure on jobs and wages becomes so intense it weakens the very foundations of the American standard of living?
The fact that this critically important issue is finally becoming an important part of the national conversation is, to borrow a phrase used in another context by the chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, "a good thing."
Perhaps an honest search for solutions will follow.
Uploadphonix
By Rick Silva
Plunderphonics goes online in the zeros. If the Internet is the new street, than the cutup or bootleg is the sound pouring out of the boomboxes. Uploadphonix, the uploading of bootlegs and cutups, is the first musical movement born post peer to peer sharing technology and in large part, because of it. On the surface uploadphonix seems to use the net only as a convenience of distribution, but really it is a movement of creative exchange and reestablishing the aura that is lost in all pop (by pop I mean popular; heavy rotation, unavoidable) music. In uploadphonix bedroom remixers offer up their sacrifices to the web in hope that the web will return to them creative responses and inspiration.
In file sharing music is still king, and outside our homes in the telephone lines above our heads and under our feet spiraling bits of coded music pump nonstop from modem to modem. If we could tap into one of these phone lines and somehow decipher the packets of bits we would definitely "hear" music. The music of this conceptual internet tap would no doubt have a pop flavor to it; when we search for Britney on Morpheus, within a few minutes we get the prompt "You have received 2000 responses for 'Britney' would you like to continue searching?" whereas when we search for Steinski, we're lucky if we get one hit. But the collective music of the internet would not be just Britney or Eminem songs as we now know them; because these packets are downloading at speeds ranging from 14.4 kbs to 8 mbps, the sounds we would hear would be sped up and slowed down at amazing rates, and the output would sound less like pop and more like a crash of superimposed stretched and shortened pops.
But the mp3 formats all those long and short versions of a 3 minute pop song back to its original self and the Internet disappears, or disapeers, except in the bootleg. The remix makes all those simultaneous and sidereal downloads unstable again. It big-wave-samples an Outkast a capella over an unsuspecting Kraftwerk beat, speeds it up and/or slows it down to taste, adds a filter, and then is ready to serve. In the bootleg, one song exists in many forms or multiple songs exist in one. This phenomenon is not new to music; from John Cage's Fontana Mix and Miles Davis' tape reel cutups, to Steinski and Double Dee, John Oswald's Plunderphonics and Negativland, to the recent IDM modifications of Kid 606 and Knifehandchop. But the difference is that online the goal becomes community as well as communication. Online, the shape of song is outlined by an underground buzz of links and blogs. Boomselection.net is a gathering of laptop personas that consistently release block party quality bootlegs. Boomselection dabbles in most types of bootlegs, some are lengthy tracks that dissolve somewhere between a dj scratch sample album and the soundtrack to a cheerleading routine like Bit Meddler's ten minute "Shitmix 2000" which recycles 90's pop classics from Vanilla Ice, C&C Music Factory, Milli Vanilli and others into a glitchy raucous, and other tracks like "One Hundred Reasons To Be Sad" by Sad push it farther by mixing 100 different dance tunes into 15 minutes of four on the floor double takes reminiscent of Evolution Control Committee's classic "Chart Sweep". Other tracks like "99x," that overlay Nina's two versions of "99 Red Balloons" (German and English releases) over one another feel more like a conceptual sound art piece. For the most part the bootlegs take two songs and mix them together, they live in that space where most dj's live and good ones get paid for, the beatmatch. In a recent post to boomselection an assignment was given out, a call to remix eminem's latest track was followed by a link to the mp3 of the acapella version. A week later boomselection released a subsite dedicated only to the Eminem remixes because the response had been so positive. In the digital dancehall style of battleofthebeats.com the tracks were rated and posted. The number one track was number one mainly because of its amazing turnaround time. Within 10 minutes of the assignment someone had turned in a bootleg. The remixer took 10 minutes to download the a capella, find a track roughly the same bpm, sync it, record it, encode it to mp3, ftp it, and mail out the link. Other tracks followed that overlaid Eminem styling over M's "Pop Music," "Come on Eileen," and Timo Mass' "To Get Down" to name a sampling. The first example shows us the artistry of response, the duty to post as quick as possible something creative, making always with sharing in mind. The latter examples all try and outwit each other, which beat, tone, breakdowns best gels with Eminem's flow, who gets the rewind (or rescrub)?
Two weeks before the release of Eminem's album "The Eminem Show" a copy leaked onto a peer to peer share site. Fans were happy but Eminem and the record company were losing thousands of dollars every hour, so the record was released to record stores one week earlier than scheduled. Uploadphonix works on a different kind of economy, it's an exchange of creativity using the language that the media won't let us escape, the pop song. It takes out the top 40 overkill and gives a song an aura again, the bootleg becomes a hard to find, an underground rarity that oscillates between art and kitsch, an "avant pop" as Mark Amerika calls it. Uploadphonix adds an "and upload" to the end of Amerika's art of "surf, sample and manipulate." It becomes a tight spiral outwards of creativity that makes a music in tune with the ideals of the internet, a soudscape to fit the netscape. Proof that in the future all art works will come with a soundtrack.
© 2002, 21C Magazine