Up Up Up Up Up

Terrific interview with Meika Loe about the broad cultural implications of Viagra. Remarkable and disquieting stuff...

The most interesting thing I’ve found is watching the public face of Viagra change over six years. We’ve moved from Bob Dole, with an emphasis on erectile dysfunction and a real attention to medical conditions, to Rafael Palmiro, who is a pro-baseball player. There's more emphasis on younger men. So the demographic has changed; it's wider in terms of age and ethnicity. These marketing campaigns liken sexual performance to performance on the field; everything is reduced to performance. .... These marketing campaigns can have the effect of reinforcing very narrow ideas about what’s "normal" for men ....

Dead-on. I've long thought that Viagra was perhaps the most pointless mass-market drug ever; Its marketing was a textbook case of creating a problem in order to sell a solution, and perhaps the most egregious example of the continuing medicalization of the human condition—of characterizing any unpleasant aspect of life as a "disorder" to be "treated" (preferably by pricey medications) rather than as an experience to be endured—and from which we may even learn things worth knowing.

It’s no longer normal for men to have sexual problems. Men in their early twenties ... who are plagued with performance anxiety, and want to ... see themselves as well-performing sexual beings—they're turning to pharmaceutical treatments to make that happen, rather than maybe talking with their partner or experimenting on their own without the help of medicine.

.... A performance culture is what we are bolstering here. It would be nice if there was room for human error and vulnerability and human reality in the broad spectrum of sexual pleasure and masculinity in all its form and more of a human based model here.

Yup. It's a deepening of the mind/body split in Western culture and medicine, where we demand that our meatframes function at baseline even when we're a mess inside. It's an unsustainable paradigm; you end up with a well-tuned, high-performance race car with a driver weeping so hard he doesn't notice he's headed for a brick wall.

And there's a palpable coarsening of our cultural discourse on sexuality in the wake of these boner pills, and it extends beyond the smutty jokes on late-night TV. It lies in the increasing commodification of sex qua sex, outwith any context of emotional companionship or even real pleasure—ability for ability's sake. It lies in the conceptual reduction of masculinity—not just male sexuality, but maleness itself—to a stiff prick.

And it lies, too, in a newly overground obsession with size. There was always a sub rosa economy based around "male enhancement"—the back-page ads for the creams and the pumps and the "exercise books" in their plain brown wrappers. But Viagra made possible the mainstream marketing of dodgy herbal supplements—and made possible, too, the frankly disturbing ad campaign featuring the mute "Mr. Big," with his terrifying rictus grin. Unleashing this priapic Joker onto the public airwaves is itself unforgivable, in my book.

There's one bit of encouraging information here, though:

[A] statistic from Pfizer [shows] that half of the men who have prescriptions for Viagra do not refill their prescriptions. This may be because of side effects. It may also be because it’s not working for many men, particularly men who have severe erectile problems or impotence. And it may just be that Viagra is not really solving the problems in the relationship or in a man’s life, and that there are other avenues for dealing with those issues.

Well, duh. To think that the keys to a better sex life may lie not in artificially-heightened blood circulation, but in trust, understanding and communication, in forgiveness, in being kind to yourself, in taking time, in talking...

Better keep that quiet. Talk like that is bad for business.

September Song

This is mostly for me, for later reference. Been looking for a nice, painterly piece of artwork with an autumnal theme—something hyper-rendered but also fantastical—and Maxfield Parrish was failing me. And then, out of this discussion of aesthetics in the service of ideology, a scene slid up sideways and all out of context...

A spectacular birch forest in Mongolia, its leaves a perfect yellow for only one week out of the year. Youth fighting experience. Spirits fighting gravity. All of us fighting inevitability.

In the memory, the sequence lingers as a series of vistas, a widescreen panorama; for all the billowing scarlet silk and steely clash of Maggie Cheung and Zhang Ziyi at the foreground, the landscape is the real star. But in looking at the stills, we find that the wide shots are few and brief. The memory of the whole is stitched together from fragmented glimpses. That's the power of the montage—this sleight-of-eye, this capacity to make you see what you don't actually see. The most famous example (I just mistyped most as moist—wholly appropriate, actually) is the shower scene in Hitchcock's Psycho. If you've read anything about the film, you know that we never see the knife stab Janet Leigh.

But we feel it. There are twenty-eight edits in those twenty seconds, and they hit with an almost physical force. This is—to pull out a debased and oft-misused word—kinetic filmmaking; not just fast, but conveying an actual sense of motion. Screenwriters sometimes use the term "smash cut" for this kind of edit. It's a brutal term, almost desperate—flailing for a way to convey, in words, the feeling of impact that you can get from image and sound.

I'm not sure what you'd call Zhang Yimou's technique of using many shots of a limited field of view to imply a much larger arena, this building up a picture of the whole from numbers of smaller bits—aggregatory editing, perhaps? But there's a recursive element at play here, as well; that is, the complete picture can be extrapolated from each of the pieces. Every shot of Flying Snow's ruined beauty, or the above shot of Moon's terrified bravado, contains within itself the whole story. And it's the story of autumn. The story of Autumn Leaves.

Would Edith Piaf have understood the ferocity brought to bear here against the evidence of time and the loss of love? Maybe not. But Cannonball Adderly? One hundred per-fucking-cent.

Huh.

Just noticed that when you roll over the link to my blog from Joe's sidebar, a little descriptor tag pops up: "Benign, grumpy, and wise."

Heh. Two out of three ain't bad.

Sunday Papers

Oh dear. I like James Lileks, I really do¹. Sure, his political writing is too often based on gut reactions to complex topics, and his worldview contains any number of unexamined assumptions. But he's a keen cultural observer, his geek cred is peerless, and best of all, he's funny—sometimes savagely so—and often moving; when he writes about the quiet joys of a quiet life, it resonates. Even in his occasional lapses into cornpone shtickery, the lines hum with honesty.

And then he goes and does something like this.

Oh dear.

Listen: Everybody likes to kick around a straw man, now and then. But this bit about the Times magazine and its imagined readership is fundamentally dishonest, as well as smug and patronizing.

And not a little desperate. There's a faint whiff of sour grapes and flop-sweat here, the mingled pride and anger of a man who has a deep need to believe that the Minneapolis Star-Tribune is just as important as the New York Times.

And it is. But by protesting overmuch, James is only hurting his own case. That, for me, encapsulates the paradox that makes it impossible for me to take seriously the majority of conservative cultural critique; Mainstream (i.e., Conservative) values are the bedrock of civilization, imperishable and self-evident in their manifest Rightness—and yet they must be constantly defended against assaults mounted by—whom? By a tiny "élite" routinely described as pathetic, out-of-touch, clueless, and morally-bankrupt.

So where's the threat? He's only a straw man after all, and you made him up yourself; Why does he scare you so?

¹ Boilerplate disclaimer autogenerated by a bloghelper scriptbot. Or at least it should be, given how often I find myself using it or some phrase much like it.

“See! Our Sentence Is Up.”

Offered without comment for the moment, because however true it rings, I need to get my head around the more precise mathematical and biological implications of the central analogy here; Words are powerful, and it would not do to be careless in their usage...

“Three years reading, five years sitebuilding and three more years working on the net boils down to this one obvious finding: Internet culture is nomadic. Web communities work like institutions—like school, like university, like prison. The newbie-top dog-release arc is the same. The only difference is that you have to realise yourself when your time’s up, and go and find the next one. This is nothing to do with the web contra the ‘real world’—of course your online experiences are real. But a web community is not a community: it’s a vector.”

Dancing About Architecture

Claire, who is eight, brought home a notice from her new music teacher; as an exercise in writing and critical thinking, each third-grader is being asked to keep a listening journal—a composition book in which the child will, at least once a week, write a little something about a piece of music that s/he has heard recently, and what s/he thought about it.

And thus the next generation of musicbloggers is born.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

¡Hijo de Una Gran’ Puta!

Shrieked, memorably, at the retreating form of Clint Eastwood by Eli Wallach, the New York Jew who inexplicably became the late Sixties film world’s go-to guy for playing Mexican banditos. Yeah, I was watching The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly last night, watching as I watch many DVDs—while ironing a pile of shirts, late at night, when everyone else in the house has gone to bed.

It’s been a long time since I watched the film, and I was struck by how its many bizarre incidents and images (e.g., the riderless coach careening across the desert, or the Union battalion gray and ghostly with the dust), which would, in a lesser film such as Cold Mountain or Dead Man, come across as whimsical or pretentious, never seem particularly outlandish in context. For all that his style can accurately be called operatic, even epic, Sergio Leone’s real genius is in keeping the movie grounded. Every bloody betrayal, every ghastly surprise, seems entirely plausible.

But I digress. I meant to talk about closed captions.

So I had the volume down to a whisper, out of courtesy to the wife & kids sleeping upstairs; and as I am wont to do, when watching TV with the sound turned down, I had switched on the closed caps. CC’s are kind of cool. Firstly, they’re generally in all capital letters, so it makes watching TV sort of like reading a comic book. And since they’re intended for the hearing-impaired, they convey a lot of information that simple subtitles don’t, things that a hearing viewer might pick up from a foreign-language film even if he doesn’t speak the language, but that a deaf viewer might not; closed captions are rife with indicators like [Sarcastically] or [Laughs nervously] or even [Romantic Ballad plays].

Imagine, then, my delight when the following captions appeared on my screen as the famous credit sequence began:

AAHHH EEEE AHHH

[CANNON FIRES]

AH-AH-AH-AH-AHH

[WIND INSTRUMENT REPEATS CRY]

My jaw dropped: were they going to attempt to replicate the entire score in text form? I awaited captions reading [MANIC SURF GUITAR] and [MANLY GRUNTS], but soon a single line came up: [THEME TO “THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY” PLAYS].

Which is a hell of a time-saver, when you think of it. By that logic, they could have handled the whole movie with a single caption reading [DIALOGUE AND SCORE FOR “THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY” PLAY].

And the rest, as they say, is silence.

Wittgenstein’s Telephone, Part II

How do you communicate with a person who never actually tells you anything, who breaks sullen silence but rarely, and then only to say, in accusing tones, “We never talk anymore”?

Wittgenstein’s Telephone, Part I

“Apropos of little, in college I helped to organize a radio broadcast of [John Cage’s] 4'33"—a performance on Baroque instruments, or so we claimed. It lasted only one minute, because tempos were much faster in the Baroque period...”

Love While You Dare To

Recently posted on the films-in-development website Done Deal:

Title: Ikiru
Log line: A low-level bureaucrat discovers that after 30 years in the same job, he’s contracted stomach cancer. Determined to seek more from the remaining moments of his life, he seeks out decadent pursuits before deciding he wants to leave behind something memorable.
Writer: Richard Price
Agent: David O’Connor of CAA
Buyer: DreamWorks
Price: n/a
Genre: Drama
Logged: 9/10/04
More: Remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film. Jim Sheridan will work with Price to polish his script. Walter Parkes and Stone Village’s Scott Steindorff will produce. Jim Sheridan will direct. Tom Hanks may star.

Now here I thought Tom Hanks already starred in a remake of Ikiru... or does nobody remember Joe Versus the Volcano?

A Slim Chance in Tight Pants

Found at Freaky Trigger: an appreciation of perennial Britrock also-ran Paul Carrack, which spares me the trouble of having to write one after rediscovering the modest, workmanlike virtues of his solo semi-hit “Don’t Shed A Tear,” as found on a recently-unearthed mixtape from 1988 or so.

The Death of a Thousand Cuts

Mash-ups are so-o-o-o-o 2002, I know—but you really need to hear the Hanzo Steel compilation, featuring radical remixes of music from the Kill Bill movies.

[I]nspired by Quentin Tarantino’s style of filmmaking, which combines elements of different genres (ie. spaghetti westerns, kung fu action films, 70’s blaxploitation cinema, etc.) into a new and exciting hybrid. The goal of the project was to ... essentially create an alternate soundtrack to the film.

It’s good, gimmicky fun, knowingly, boldly silly, but at the same time deeply funky. Beastie Boys sidekick Billions McMillions combines the Quincy Jones theme to Ironside with a bit of House Of Pain’s “Jump Around” and a loop of Big Boi and god knows what else into “Ironside Jumpoff,” the feel-good jam of the summer.

What’s funny is that this stuff would sit comfortably on the actual soundtrack—the same aesthetic is at play in Malcolm McLaren’s reworking of “She’s Not There,” by the Zombies—the McLaren track is called “About Her,” I think—which worked so beautifully in Part II.

Not What They Mean by “Math Rock”

There have always been people who go into music because they’ve got no head for numbers. But then there are some who drag dubious computations into their songwriting and end up just embarrassing themselves.

Take the opening stanza of “Revenge,” by the Flaming Stars:

Oh Julie I feel weary now
Older than a man of thirty-three
The gates of Hell just opened
After twenty years, the warden says I’m free

A quick fiddle with the calculator shows us that this poor broken convict was just thirteen years old when he went to the Big House for killing the man who murdered his girlfriend—who was also, apparently, the town bicycle...

Well God knows, you were no lady
And the witnesses all said you were to blame
With the way you teased the menfolk
The jury all agreed you knew no shame

They grow up so fast, don’t they?

This peculiar revelation gives added poignancy to a later verse’s complaint that “Them lawyers took my money / and the Louisiana road gang took the rest.” You can’t help but feel for the kid; there’s a whole summer’s worth of paper route savings, gone in a flash.

Even more problematic is “Johnny Come Lately,” a track from Steve Earle’s breakthrough Copperhead Road. Like the title cut, it’s a multi-generational family saga. The musical backing (courtesy of the Pogues) is lively—but the chronology gets all hinky in the final verse...

Well my gran’daddy sang this song
Told me about London when the Blitz was on
How he married Grandma and brought her back home
A hero throughout his land
Now I’m standing on a runway in San Diego
A couple Purple Hearts so I move a little slow
There’s nobody here, maybe nobody knows
About a place called Vietnam

The problem, naturally enough, is that the Vietnam war was in fact fought primarily by the children of WWII veterans—which is part of the reason why it created such a traumatic rift between the generations, but that’s another story. Let’s confine ourselves to looking at the numbers, here.

Assume Gran’daddy was in London immediately after the US got into the war. The lyric “It took a little while, but we’re in this fight” would seem to support this. So we’re talking December 1941, at the earliest. Let us further assume that he got Grandma with child immediately upon meeting her. The offspring—our narrator’s future Daddy—would be born September 1942.

As for our narrator: Assume him to be involved in the war in Southeast Asia as late as possible, as the last GI out of Saigon—30 April 1975. Further assume him to have volunteered on his eighteenth birthday. His actual time spent in Vietnam may have been brief—Senator Kerry, after all, only needed four months to earn his two Purple Hearts. Still, our soldier boy would have to have been born in 1957—and sired in early 1956, when his own Daddy was just...

...thirteen.

Shit, you don’t suppose “Revenge” takes place in between the second and third verses of “Johnny Come Lately,” do you?

Ice-Cream Castles in the Air

Thievery more obscure, but no less apt: Listen to the twice-repeated melodic figure whisper-sung early on in Sixtoo’s “Storm Clouds and Silver Linings,” before the song devolves into an old-school Damo Suzuki shriekfest. D’you hear it? Though it’s almost unrecognizable in this context, it’s an echo of the verse melody to Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now.” That can’t be a coincidence...

Radio Flyer

What’s that progression at the heart of Wagon Christ’s “Saddic Gladdic,” underneath all those squawking vintage synths (including, if I’m not mistaken, an ARP ProSoloist, which I used to play myself)? The same chords that anchored “Am I The Same Girl?”, the (other) big hit by Swing Out Sister. Wagon Christ mainman Luke Vibert is always good for a grin—Stop The Panic, his collaboration with BJ Cole, would be a perfect party album, if I could only find the right kind of party—and I was certainly grinning as I sang that indelible horn line: sol sa la ti ti, ti ti ti, sol la ti do do, do do do... Just brazen, and joyous in its shamelessness.

The Idea of North

A while ago, when t.A.T.u was ascendant, I wondered aloud, “Are the former Eastern Bloc countries going to be the new factory-laboratory for immortal-yet-disposable vocal pop music? Is the Ukraine the Sweden of the new century?” But t.A.T.u seem to have faded now—and as for Sweden, she has life in her yet: the ABBA influence still looms large, wedded to a glam-rock stomp (and more hooks than Izaak Walton’s tacklebox) in The Ark’s thrilling “Echo Chamber,” which has been stuck in my head for two solid weeks now.

Nothing is Something, Something is Something

Speaking of transformative covers: Klonhertz's version of “Three Girl Rhumba”—first recorded by Wire, riff pinched by Elastica for “Connection”—is hands-down the best thing I've heard in the last twelve months, and possibly the Best Thing Ever; it's one-hit wonder pop fizzgiggery at its insubstantial finest.

Amusingly, many club-music reviewers don't seem to realize it's a cover: “Although some of the lyrics lean rather too heavily towards teen angst ... Three Girl Rhumba is a fine calling card for a band with a big future ahead of them.”

Heh.

They say rock'n'roll never forgets—but the dancefloor has the memory of a mayfly.

Two Steps on the Water

So Joe was talking about a recent cover of “Hounds Of Love,” and wondering if it represented a sufficient transformation to allow it to stand beside the original, as the best covers do. That is: if I want to listen to (say) “Can't Help Falling In Love,” sometimes I'm gonna want to listen to Elvis, sometimes to Lick The Tins, sometimes (god help me) to Luka Bloom. The same song, but different—not a replacement, but a supplement. Joe argued that this particular remake of “Hounds” was surplus to requirements because, given the choice, he couldn't imagine ever wanting to listen to The Futureheads over Kate Bush—in part because the differences seem so superficial (boy vox, loud guitars, and backbeat) as to constitute no difference at all.

But I would argue otherwise—that the Futureheads have pulled the song across genre lines, from Pop into Rock, not (just) by modifying the sonics but by reconfiguring its emotional core. There's the little differences that make all the big difference, I'm thinking.

F'rinstance: parse, if you will, the 'heads' brusque “comin' at me through the trees” vs. La Babooshka's “...coming for me”—not so much in the sense of “the difference between seeing what's coming as a form of attack and being a little bit open to the possibility of being spirited away,” as Joe opined, but more that “comin' at me” implies, to me, stark bugfuck confusion—I don't know what this is, I don't know what it wants, but holy cow! Here it comes!

Kate sings “Hounds” with the voice of someone who's known all along that love would come for her, though she's been ambivalent about it—it's been the Beast in the Jungle; though she's never seen it, she has always been aware of it lurking there. The 'head boys, though, sing like they're overwhelmed by the sheer sensation, a sensation too strong and too new to have been sorted or categorized as either promise or threat, as either fear or desire. That's what adolescence feels like—being confronted by stimuli which you as yet haven't the filters to process. The Futureheads can't even acknowledge or name the Beast at the climax: where Kate admits her need at last, the 'heads break off into a frenzied babbling (“D'you know what I need? D'you what I need? Ah-huh-yuh-yuh-yuh-yuh-yuh-yuh-yuh...”) that never resolves itself into the word “love.”

That inchoate, overwhelmed quality is, I would argue, the very essence of rock'n'roll as opposed to pop—emotional incoherence vs. self-awareness. And it's that recontextualization, that shift in tone from romantic ambivalence to overstimulated freakout, that makes this “Hounds” a rock'n'roll song—and, I think, worth listening to on its own.

"In fact, down there in Rand-McNally, they wear their shoes on their heads, and hamburgers eat people!"

Chronological backwardness of blogreading am totally Bizarro! Heh.

Hello for now! Me hope you go away later!

Talking of which: Can't find the reference now, but someone on the 'lith called me "Bizarro Warren Ellis" once. Maybe.

Or maybe Warren is the Bizarro me.

You think? Blogs are the answer records of the interweb, after all...

Nahhh.

...But the Little Girls Understand

Having heard a handful of tracks from The Go! Team, god damn I'm jonesing to hear more. They're one of those great Pop Unclassifiables, who send all the cognoscenti scrambling to their record collections looking for some unlikely combination of antecedents that will somehow explain the band's existence. The pundits never quite get it, do they? Not the way the kidz do.

But it occurs to me—with their mysterioso image-making, spacy guitars, piano, urgent brass, oddball found-sound vocals, rough, martial drumming, and general anthemic air—The Go! Team are Godspeed You! Black Emperor, distilled to three-minute pop blasts, complete with oddly-placed exclamation point, but with the addition of—holy shit!—a sense of humor.

This would be the Bizarro World GY!BE, then.

Wot?

A question for Dizzee Rascal et al; how hard would it be to actually sing on key? You're obviously aiming for a Biz Markie effect on "Dreams," but the result is cringeworthy rather than amusing. Maybe I've been blessed with a preternaturally keen ear for melody, but it seems to me that anybody should be able to manage the sing-songy doddle of "Happy Talk" without hitting those blue-murder clinkers. Not suggesting you go all R. Kelly on us, but really—it wouldn't make your singing any less charmingly amateurish if you were to, y'know, hit the fucking notes. Eminem's no singer, but he manages the chorus of "Cleaning Out My Closet" (best heard in the blistering Jacknife Lee remix, BTW) without embarrassing either himself or us. If you can't at least manage that standard, then fer fucksakes leave it to a Hook Girl.

Quantify

CDs worth of songs I've obtained from MP3blogs in the last eight months
Three.

Predominant themes of these CDs, as indicated in compilation titles
RockaRolla, indie rock and pop, including a few nuggets of out-there 70s AOR
FancyDancy, electronica, dance-pop, and hip-hop, with a smattering of indie-rock
FolkyDokey, singer-songwriter-y stuff, with or without an acoustic bent.

Numbers of times I teared up while listening to these new CDs
Three.

What triggered the waterworks

• Johnny Cash, "The Man In Black" (after the line about Jesus "talkin' straight to you and me" and continuing to the end of the song
• 16 Horsepower's cover of "The Partisan"¹ (when it switches to French and all the different voices come in).
• Yeah Yeah Yeahs, "Maps" (as soon as Karen sings that first "They don't love you like I love you..." I just dissolve, every time.)

¹ itself not written by Cohen, and therefore a cover: who knew?

Peerless

So. Bring it.

Writing about music, then.

Luckily, I've been listening to quite a lot of new(ish) music lately. No mean feat, this—the radio situation in the Flower City is not what it could be, I've had precious little discretionary income to spend on records, and since the death of my hard drive last December I've been working on a borrowed laptop with no P2P software. Just about my only exposure to new music has been through MP3blogs, the ubiquitous and perspicacious Fluxblog foremost among them.

So I've been amassing music for months, but that aforementioned borrowed laptop has crummy, underpowered speakers—so I feel as if I didn't really hear these songs until last week, when I finally got around to burning some compilation CDs and listening to them in the car. Listening to them loud. Lovely, lovely new music. My feet are barely touching the ground.

Études (An Introduction, of Sorts)

Haven't exactly been neglecting the blog, of late—the last week saw an uptick in posts—but the actual writing of them has been something of a struggle. The words are coming slowly, amid clouds of second-guessing; quotes and links and reworkings of message-board posts have been useful crutches (they always are), but I miss the flow. It's not like Writer's Block, where you're pushing and pushing against the immovable; it's more like trying to run wind-sprints in gumboots—you've got freedom of motion, to an extent, but you just can't work up the velocity.

I am looking to remedy that. Like the Boy Fly, I find the quickest way to jumpstart the process is to write about music. To this end, a fistful of short tuneful jots this week.

Ten-finger exercises. I ask you, Constant Reader, to indulge me, if you will.

Coin of the Realm

A Sufi teaching story, from the writings of Farid ad-Din Attar of Nishapur...

Some Israelites reviled Jesus as he walked through their part of town. He answered them by repeating prayers in their name.

His disciples asked Him, "You prayed for these men—did you not feel incensed against them?"

Jesus replied, "I could repay them only with what I had in my purse."

Kitano? Kita-YES!

Rochester is a pretty cool town, but I'm still not sure where it ranks in national distributors' hierarchy of worthwhile markets. In my uncertainty, I had resigned myself to waiting for the DVD, but HOLY SHIT! Zatoichi hits the heart of the Flower City, slashing up the big screen in the lovely Little Theatre!

WHOSE HOUSE?

BEAT'S HOUSE!!!

I'll tell you, with this plus the Zhang Yimou one-two punch of Hero and House Of Flying Daggers (which, if it lives up to its title, will be the Best Movie Ever) plus—if you want to argue the point, and I would—the two Kill Bill pictures, this is shaping up to be a fine year indeed for A-treatments of traditional B-movie genres.

Let me expand from the specific to the general for a minute...

The A-treatment is a curious beast. There's a certain undefined element—maybe "class" is the best shorthand—that separates a real A-movie from a big-budget genre picture that is simply a very expensive B-movie. Unforgiven, a defiant genre picture, is unquestionably an A-movie. But Gladiator? Best Picture Oscar or no, it's a B-movie. That the Lord of the Rings pictures were A-movies¹ and, say, Krull was a B has, at the bottom, very little to do with budget, art direction, cinematography, or even acting—and everything to do with a sort of intensity and purity of vision. Put simply: While a B-movie may lack for either budget or integrity or both, an A-movie has both integrity and the budget to back it up. Thus Crouching Tiger, which cost a pittance by Hollywood standards, is an A, while Waterworld, compromised from the get-go, is a B.

This theory requires some refinement, but I think it's a decent working premise...

¹ To those Rings partisans who might insist that such holy source material could never generate anything less than a masterpiece, I present as evidence the Ralph Bakshi and Rankin-Bass animations. Stripped to its bare bones, the trilogy is perfect B-movie fodder—a phantasmagoric road movie with episodes of high adventure and an atmosphere of creeping doom. The animated treatments of the 1970s pretty much took the B-movie approach, and, while both have their dubious pleasures, they serve mainly as a reminder of how easy it would have been to get Tolkien wrong, and of how fortunate we all are that, in Peter Jackson, the material met with an auteur with a vision as single-minded, even obsessive, as Tolkien's own. Though the Jackson films are far from perfect, considering the generally-unhappy history of the high-fantasy genre in Hollywood, we are fortunate indeed.

Nay!

And while I’m at it, a furious sidenote about the continued slow death of copy-editing. There’s no surer way for a writer to make hirself look stupid than to employ a highfalutin phrase incorrectly—as with Jennifer Bleyer's “Peter Lamborn Wilson, née Hakim Bey.”

A note to Ms. Bleyer: née does not mean the same thing as “a.k.a.”—it literally means “born”: the proper form is Assumed Name, née Birth Name. Also, it is a gendered adjective, so the final e should be dropped when speaking of a male subject. e.g.: Marilyn Monroe, née Norma Jean Baker; Sting, né Gordon Matthew Sumner. I mean, Jesus, do newspapers no longer use style manuals?

(Many thanks to Tannhauser Dan, for his vigilance and his kind assistance)

Turnips For The Turkey

Speaking of Hakim Bey—and I was, in a kind of sidewise fashion—there’s a bit of a shitstorm-in-a-shotglass over on the ‘lith (from which I’m recycling some of these comments: caveat lector) about his, erm, uncharitable comments in re: the Internet.

At this I can only shrug. What more would one expect? Though Bey is a gifted and expressive writer, his contribution to the discourse seems to be primarily taxonomical—in finding useful names for things that most of us already intuitively understand, like Immediatism and the Temporary Autonomous Zone itself. (We used to have T.A.Z.s when I was a kid, but back then we called them “crime scenes.”) Even there, though, his track record is hit-and-miss: his attempt to rebrand sewing circles and book clubs as “Tongs,” for instance, was just kind of silly.

My major problem with Bey, though is that, however gorgeous his prose, he’s really not a particularly deep or systemic thinker as regards the consequences of unlimited freedom. His tongue-in-cheek-but-still-troubling advocacy of incest and pederasty points towards a larger failure to understand that his God-given rights end where my God-given rights begin. His is not a political philosophy—it’s hedonism, filtered through a narcissism bordering on solipsism.

And it’s starkly unegalitarian—buying into the Nietzsche-by-way-of-DeSade notion that absolute freedom is the province only of those supermen (like Bey, of course) with the guts to seize it, and that it’s a meat too strong for the sheep-like masses. As a design for changing the world, it’s utter shit, but you can see how it plays to alienated teenagers and the Burning Man set.

His “anarchism” is deeply reactionary—as anti-modern as any radical Islamist’s theocratic medievalism. Bey is not just a Luddite, but an Adamite—there’s a palpable yearning for a return to a mythic, less-mediated past, an extended infantilism; what is “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” but nostalgia for a pre-Fallen world?

It’s an impression only bolstered by the tone of this interview, with the cranky-old-man rantings about These Kids Today With Their Internet And Their Loud Music and their Ethical Consumerism:

The idea was that alternative media would allow us the space in which to organize other things. Even in the ’80s I said I’m waiting for my turkey and my turnips. I want some material benefits from the Internet. I want to see somebody set up a barter network where I could trade poetry for turnips. Or not even poetry—lawn cutting, whatever. I want to see the Internet used to spread the Ithaca dollar system around America so that every community could start using alternative labor dollars. It is not happening. And so I wonder, why isn’t it happening? And finally the Luddite philosophy becomes clear. We create the machines and therefore we think we control them, but then the machines create us, so we can create new machines, which then can create us. It’s a feedback situation between humanity and technology. There is some truth to the idea of technological determination, especially when you’re unconscious, drifting around like a sleepwalker. Especially when you’ve given up believing in anti-capitalism because they’ve convinced you that the free market is a natural law, and we just have to accept that and hope for a free market with a friendly smiling face. Smiley-faced fascism. I see so many people working for that as if it were a real cause. "If we have to have capitalism, let’s make it green capitalism." There’s no such thing. It’s a hallucination of the worst sort, because it isn’t even a pleasurable one. It’s a nightmare.

That’s Bey in a nutshell: the fuzzy utopianism, the denial of economies of scale, the paranoia, the contempt for those with whom he disagrees, the characterization of his ideological opponents as unconscious, sleepwalking, hallucinating. The prophet scorned, furious because his paradigm didn’t pan out, instead of being open to the possibility that, y’know, maybe he backed the wrong horse. Thus guaranteeing his own irrelevance.

I, for one, would gladly exchange turnips for Bey’s poetry, if I could but hurl my turnips with the necessary force and accuracy.