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New Yorker movie critic David Denby's self-lacerating book about losing all his money in the late '90s stock bubble, discussed briefly a few posts back, fits into a larger story, but not the one told here--of Denby the noodge dispensing crappy criticism. No, the real story, according to this month's Vanity Fair, is that Denby's wife left him for a woman, and his daytrading binges grew out of his rage over that, or some such. Katha Pollitt, mentioned here briefly, also has more interesting things to offer than her discussion of the hypocritical standards applied to campaign wives: in this month's New Yorker, she discusses her obsessive cyber-stalking of her ex.
I know people think that weblogs emphasize the confessional and the private over substantive analysis, but the reverse is increasingly true. Lately, if you want to discuss art and politics outside the usual defined boxes, parse the contradictory positions of institutionally compromised critics, and find a wealth of links to Internet metacriticism, you'll likely find that in the blogosphere. If you want a good gossipy wallow in the tawdry personal misfortunes of these same institutional critics, the major media is for you!
You may have heard that CBS refused a Superbowl ad from the grassroots organization Moveon.org, because it dared to criticize the President. Where are we living, North Korea? The ad emerged from a competition among independent film and video makers called "Bush in 30 Seconds." The finalists from the competition are here. I haven't seen all of them but my favorite so far is "What Are We Teaching Our Children?" (high bandwidth) / (low bandwidth). In this parody of a junior-high school election debate, kids stand up and enthusiastically attack Bush's sorry record on the War, the environment, the economy, and so forth. Reaction shots from parents in the auditorium show the discomfort so-called adults feel at such bracing exercises of free speech in our current McCarthyite climate. This was CBS's reaction, too. I recommend watching the ads tomorrow and experiencing the exhilaration of still being free. I also suggest sending the links to a Republican friend with the note: "See, we can still do this!"
 I've recently created an "Animation Log," a record of animation projects that have appeared in this weblog or that I am currently working on. Includes found .GIFs, html appropriation pieces, "remixes," goofy kids' art, and my own deeply austere work. |
Political Musings Around the Web, Part Whatever.
"Why do they hate us?" was the big question on many people's lips right after 9/11/01. My stock answer: "Well, how about us having military bases all over the world when we're not actually at war with anyone?" Frequent response to that: "Bases? We have bases?" OK, as belated evidence of my assertion, please read Chalmers Johnson's report. He says we have 700 by a conservative count: it's hard to know for sure because the Pentagon plays shell games--pun intended--with the true numbers. How do you suppose that makes people in base-saddled countries feel? Glad because we're protecting them? But from what? People in their own countries that might otherwise overthrow their governments? Johnson points out the crude indiplomacy of the military's term for the geographical parameters of our control. It's called "the footprint."
I'm not planning to see Errol Morris's The Fog of War, a capital-I important film consisting of interviews with Kennedy/LBJ-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. A principal instigator of US escalation in the Vietnam War, McNamara now claims with pride ("No, shame." "Pride, Precious." "No...") that he encouraged low-altitude flights during the fire-bombing of Tokyo--a conflagration that killed more civilians than the A-bombs further south. Of course, he would have been too junior to have that power in WWII. Anyway, no way I'm going to sit in the dark for 90 minutes listening to the self-justifications of that 83 year old pathological liar. Alexander Cockburn makes me feel better about my decision. He says McNamara really got the better of Morris.
Lastly, Cockburn and his Counterpunch co-editor Jeffrey St. Clair filed an amusing, dyspeptic campaign report from Iowa. Kucinich is probably the candidate closest to their views on the war (and mine, FWIW, although our "getting the UN involved" as a solution sounds pretty presumptuous--surely only Iraqi citizens can make that call?). In any event Cockburn/St. Clair aren't Deanies, which makes the following quote more in the nature of an unbiased, general ad hominem slam:
What’s Kerry got going for him, apart from the money of his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, who has propelled the sputtered Kerry campaign forward on a sea of ketchup dividends? Not much. Kerry is a chronic fence straddler on issues. Gore Vidal hit it on the head when he remarked that Kerry “looks like Lincoln…[pause]… after the assassination."Yes, that's mean, but does anyone actually buy Kerry's "poor pitiful me, Bush fooled me into giving him a blank check for war" argument? He should just admit he was afraid and went along with the Congressional pack, and then stop running.
Denby used to write terrible, boring, just-plain-wrong film reviews for New York magazine and now he writes them for the New Yorker. He's an earnest chin-stroking type that always holds movies to some ridiculous (or ridiculously conventional) standard of moral responsibility.* Well, it turns out he's also the Bill Bennett of sober left establishment pontificators--a gamblin' man who pissed all his money away in the stock market Bubble. That's pretty funny, but unfortunately he's now written a self-flagellating book about his experiences. Walter Kirn's sympathetic NY Times review is here. A choice excerpt from the review:
Denby, when young and living in California, had been something of a radical, dancing to the Grateful Dead and defiantly pitting culture against commerce, but he'd mellowed into a propertied intellectual who sneakily admired the system for its ability to supply the good life even to those who held it in partial contempt.Now there's someone I want to read about. And here's another quote, the sheer liberal piety of which might lead one to believe the reviewer is Denby's separated-at-birth twin:
As Denby's [investment] pile fluctuates his exact gains and losses are quoted in the chapter subheads, but the chapters themselves are an eccentric mix of often lacerating confessions about his rocky love life and seminarish meditations on capitalism, conspicuous consumption and the psychological roots of greed. His tone can be pedantic, but his intention -- to freeze and analyze the mental gyrations that allow a deep thinker to become a shallow speculator -- is worthwhile and appropriate. Denby even drops in snippets of movie reviews he wrote at the time to help show us where his head was at, but they don't add much. (bolding of inert words supplied)Excuse me, what was that about deep thinking? It's supposed to be surprising that the same person who can find "the good" in one packaged Hollywood movie after another also bought into the myths of the "Dow 10,000" years? It all sounds of a piece to me. I'll take a pass on his hard lessons on love and investing, thanks; it's bad enough that we're still stuck with his reviews.
* Take, for example, his review of the movie Monster, about a recently executed serial murderer. As always Denby finds something edifying and uplifting to justify our attention: "[Monster] is one instance in which art clearly trumps documentary 'truth.' The real Aileen Wuornos is too will-driven to show us more than one side of herself. In the end, you need a sane person and an artist [Charlize Theron] to bring out the humanity in a crazy person." Oh, we do, do we? If the "truth" is that Wuornos was an irredeemable mad dog killer, isn't "trumping the truth with art" the same as sentimentalizing it? Maybe the filmmakers had noble motives for distorting reality, if in fact that's what they did--to make an anti-death penalty tract or feminist bad-girl fable, say. But is the critic's job just to be a mindless booster for good causes? Based on this assessment I'd rather watch Man Bites Dog again and feel some real conflicted feelings, as its psycho hit man protagonist charms me into as much complicity as I can stand.
| SCRATCH AMBULANCE, ETC. Web-only EP! I made the tracks below using, let's just say, a very old computer (and also a turntable, but only on the second track). The first two, "Scratch Ambulance" and "Phil's Revenge," have funkoid beats, while "Monster Scales" is more of an electronic sound piece. More than this I don't want to say. This is kind of a trial run, so any comments on .mp3 quality, downloadibility, etc. are welcome. As for the content, try not to hurt my feelings too much. The 8-Bit Construction Set LP on the turntable was for demonstration purposes only and not used in any of these compositions. Thanks to Mark Dagley for ripping the MP3s from a cassette. Scratch Ambulance. .mp3 format, about 3.75 MB. Phil's Revenge (TM vs Ectomorph). .mp3 format, about 2.5 MB. Fades up. Monster Scales. .mp3, about 1.3 MB. |
The instant popularity of the first Matrix movie inspired not only a plague of clones (Underworld being the sorry latest) but a land-office rush to retroactively claim precedents from the science fiction genre. Critics often cite Philip K. Dick's body of writing as a progenitor for the "things are not what they seem" aspect of the story, and John Carpenter's Dickian They Live (1988) has also been mentioned for its vision of a consumerist sham earth uncovered by a hapless member of the underclass (this little-seen film was recently rereleased on DVD and should be mandatory viewing). For my money, though, the definitive Matrix forerunner is a novel that appeared 40 years before the Wachowskis' epic: the amazing Wolfbane (1959), by Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth. If "ex-batteries fight in crevices of machine planet" is the pitch, then Pohl & Kornbluth deserve some arbitrated credit.
The action starts on a future Earth that has been hijacked from the solar system and revolves around a tiny sun that barely puts out enough energy to keep the population alive. Believing that Sol has simply lost strength as some form of divine retribution, humans have devolved into a society of Puritanical calorie-counters. Periodically people simply disappear, which keeps superstitious fear running high. Unbeknownst to the humans, their kidnappers are robots--enormous, pyramid-shaped floating beings called Omniverters, who inhabit a dark planet orbiting the same tiny star. The humans who disappear are teleported to this bleak mechanical world and used not as batteries (a ridiculous element of The Matrix considering the meager kilowatts of bio-energy a human could be expected to produce) but rather organic microchips. Eight living brains wired together in series represents substantial analog computing power; when a mind wears out the Omniverters simply harvest another human from Earth.
The protagonist of the story is, for all intents and purposes, a "snowflake," one of those octabrains slaving away crunching data for the Omniverters. Fully conscious, mingling all the thoughts and personalities of its human subcomponents (representing a range of ages, sexes, classes, and geopolitical origins), the snowflake is a highly evolved genius entity that is nevertheless powerless, because the motor functions of its inert constituent bodies have been dedicated by the Omniverters to typing code all day. Until, that is, the snowflake realizes that one digit of its 80 typing fingers is never used, a kind of built-in margin of error. Below the radar of the Omniverters' attention, the snowflake begins tapping out a rogue line of code with that "spare finger," enough command line instructions, at least, to teleport a crowd of naked humans to the Omniverter planet, put them in an enclosed space, and then begin starving them.
From that point forward, these "mice" behave much like the free humans in the Matrix, scurrying around in the tunnels and heat vents of the Machine planet. Instead of recruiting more batteries, however, the mice start breaking things, under the snowflake's omniscient guidance. The big satirical payoff of the novel is learning what the Omniverters are: essentially labor-saving devices (described in ancient tapes that sound like '50s advertising pitches) that have killed their alien master and then spent untold millennia trying to revive his corpse. Despite such touches of McCarthy-era existential bleakness, the book bursts with ideas: the truly mind-blowing collaboration here isn't the snowflake's but Pohl's and Kornbluth's, whose tale remains a potent intellectual drug decades after its writing. Will the same be said for The Matrix forty years hence, I wonder?