The Sacred Dice by Anthony Cristofani

Cristofani- x-mas card from a hooker in Minneapolis.

2011-12-26T22:43:00.000-08:00

Fox News is Right: The Muppets are Commies and That's Why We Love Them

2011-12-14T21:10:00.000-08:00

FOX NEWS GETS IT RIGHT: THE MUPPETS ARE COMMIES! THAT’S WHY WE LOVE THEM!

Fox news came out and called “The Muppets” communist, leading well-meaning liberals to scramble to defend the Muppets against such a slanderous attack. Um, sorry to break it to you, liberals, but Fox News is sometimes right: the Muppets have always been commies. That’s what we love about them. In fact we love communist principles in all our heroic movies, we just don’t know it, because we have no idea what communism is in this country. The Muppets act as a horizontal, democratic ‘people’ with no clear hierarchy. Despite Kermit’s central role, he is always deferring to others’ ideas, commands, needs, etc. Let’s call him Subcommandante Kermit. We’ll go into more detail below but the principles are the same as Iron Man, V for Vendetta, Fight Club, Batman Returns, X-Men First Class, and the Star Wars saga: distrust of the market as arbiter of what people need and get; distrust of rich men; prizing communal over individual work and art; the critique of USA hyper-individualism, an emphasis on embodied being, not disembodied morals, and of course the problematizing of the public/private divide (along with other sectors and genres).

I read an incredibly lame Rolling Stone review of “The Muppets” saying it didn’t have the magic of the Muppets, because among other things, it’s embarrassing to pander to today’s kids by putting in Cee-Lo’s “Fuck You” (they said “Forget You”, which is all you need to know about them). Huh? The Muppets always riffed on the popular music of the day. That kind of oversight is an example of the nostalgic way we tend to view art.

The real magic of the muppets has nothing to do with how familiar the song is or the allusions. It can be summed up in one phrase: a lack of cynicism. In fact, the villain (a capitalist pig, as all meaningful movie villains are) says of the sell-out Mooppet Vegas version: “It’s a hard, cynical band, for a hard, cynical time”. Indeed, he summed up most television and film, kids offerings included (the trailer for the latest Chipmunks movie left me so nauseated I almost couldn’t stay for the Muppets. Thank goodness for marijuana). What’s cynical? Low ambitions. Trying what works instead of what SHOULD work. Trying what’s good instead instead of what (you think or surveys say) people want. Wait, isn’t that undemocratic, not giving people what they want? Only if you consider consumerism a fundamental human right and an expression of what people truly want. Anti-cynicism is opening not with Lady Gaga or some jokey old metal song but Paul Simon’s “Me and Julio Down By The Schoolyard”. Anti-cynicism is, as with Moulin Rouge using colors that only exist in children’s films that deny the reality of the world, but here they exist not to deny the reality but to make this reality. (Before his comrades lift him out of the private sector Kermit laments “my green is turning gray”, and sure enough the poser sell-out Kermit in the Moopets is gray in color).

Make this reality…or surreality. After all, the Muppets are always up front about how impossible it is what they do (another communist trait—belief in the ‘impossible’). Their Muppet Show would make sense if it stuck to the show itself—of course puppets can move around and feel things like that when manipulated during a puppet show. But the show always took us backstage as well, as if to say all of life is a puppet show: stop worrying about who’s real and who’s a Muppet, and just pick a goddamn awesome character and play your heart out. (“Anyone who ever played a part/Wouldn’t turn around and hate it” – Lou Reed). Or as animal puts it: “Show!!! Show!! Show!!!!” (leaping into a television screen). For this to work it must be honest. Perhaps the best thing about the muppets is how resolutely unreal they are (that doesn’t mean untrue of course). I made a similar argument for why Tim Burton’s Batman films are so superior to the Nolan brothers’. Magical realism is the rule of the day (in a time before it was in in the USA).

The wider purpose of this lack of realism in great art is always the same: to remind us that the magic is in the ideas, principles, the praxis of a life well-lived. The principles of physics and space-time are irrelevant, and space-time itself as we know it is a neoliberal production (cf. Henri Lefebvre (paper forthcoming on this to link to!). It doesn’t matter how Gary and Mary got to L.A. from middle America in 30 minutes (“we traveled by map!”, i.e. quoting John Williams Indiana Jones music and mimicking the map travel of all four Indie films. To me it’s a sly poke at how we like our heroes to have no boring middle time between feats). What matters is never the plot. Only the theme. This is partly because we are often arrogant about what makes a good plot, caught up in the sensibility of our time (um, Punch Teacher?) and not the sensibility of our timelessness. (“It’s lonely out in space/ On such a timeless flight” – Bernie Taupin, “Rocket Man”)

It’s also partly to remind us that at our best, we aren’t so much ‘merely human’. We are, as the song goes, either a Muppet of a man or a very manly Muppet. To me the Muppets echo Nietzsche in the subtlety of balancing a celebration of all of humanity’s foibles and sins (so as not to live in denial) while affirming that we are only truly admirable when we’re not us. Yes, that’s right self-help gurus, being yourself is a horribly mediocre ambition. Being ‘even better than the real thing’, as U2 argued during their ZooTV tour, is where it’s at. (Zoo Tv and Muppets run together often in this simultaneous exposure and uncynical embrace of the artificial: “You’re my hero, you’re on my watch”, says Walter to Kermit, showing his fan watch. It is an instance of fan collecting redeemed as true care: you’re on my watch; I will not let you fall into this rich man’s hermit trap of private sector blues and fear of the market artistic defeatism. The moral of the Muppet is—if you’re going to be good at something, follow that thread of talent and spirit to its apotheosis. Animal must never be calm, and Rowlf must never be excited. This isn’t a ‘lack of balance’. The balance is in the group as a whole, it’s not in each person. Thus each person is stupendously, powerfully different, and yet all health and effectiveness, all happiness and virtue is only achieved in the community as a whole. The riddle of communism. Deflating American style individualism without trampling on the spirit of each individual.

There are signs of this fierce refusal to be anything other than the most bombastic and unflinching persona everywhere—while Jason Segal’s character Gary grows taller, and his Mom marks heights off on the wall, Muppet Walter lines up eagerly to find that he is always the same size. Of course. He’s a Muppet—he was made that way. Like all Muppets, his tongue is perfect pink cartoon-shaped heart—a popheart not a human heart. Thus he will ride a tandem bike with his brother and sing about both pedaling…but his feet won’t reach. Thus he will brush teeth with his brother though he has no teeth. The Muppets have always reminded us that they are more our spirit animals than ‘real’ people. At the same, time there is a marked materiality to the Muppets. They are not animated, classically or with computers. They are physical beings, and one of the reasons it’s so thrilling and hilarious when they recklessly through their bodies about is they’re actual bodies, hitting actual fences and walls.

Which is why the plot of this film is so much more compelling than that of the others. In the 2^nd best film, the first “Muppet Movie”, the danger is of selling out. Here the stakes are higher—the danger is of giving up in a market-driven individualist world where the Muppets are irrelevant now that we all love ‘Punch Teacher’ (the wonderful obviousness of the capitalism critique is one reason people as dumb as the Republicans picked up on it. “Punch Teacher” is the most popular show in a culture devaluing free public education like never before, and the villain is named Tex Richman. Yes, rich men are indeed the villains). In such a world the Muppets are reduced to taking on the trappings and ideologies of American hyperindividualism. Kermit has retreated into a gated mansion with an electric fence and unaccountable ‘privacy’. Animal is in a self-help circle, forbidden to drum and made to utter ‘in control’ as a sad mantra (I’ll be honest—that made me cry, to see the one I relate to reduced by a self-help culture I’ve often been considered crazy for railing against. Like Animal, I grew up petting what I was supposed to eat, and vice versa. Smashing what I was supposed to kiss, and vice versa…)

Is it lost, the magic innocence and passion of the muppets? (Kermit in “Pictures in my Head”: “Would anyone watch or care/Or did something break we can’t repair?”) Yes and no. The film does achieve and surpass the magic of earlier Muppet efforts, but not by means of mere copycat techniques. There is always the sad acknowledgment here and there of what is lost forever, from the decrepit Electric Mayhem bus to the celebrities unwilling to help. For all the allusions to contemporary pop phenomena that Rolling Stone idiotically attributed to ‘missing the point’, the spirit is there (here I think other languages work better: Geist or esprit perhaps). That spirit is the bold and often clueless embrace of the Muppets’ communal and individual values and ambitions. In one scene Mary’s students say ‘noooo’ when they hear it’s spring break, and ‘yeaaa!” when she says don’t worry in two weeks we get to study again. This isn’t cynical irony—this is my memory of school, and it’s a reclaiming a legitimate belief in the curiosity of children, placing the blame not on ‘culture’ but the ‘Punch Teacher’ political oppression of public resources and spaces. Again, the magic is in the energy and spirit. In the songwriting and raw material immediacy of the puppet performances.

How is the film communist, you ask? First, I know I will be treated to the trite, used-up commentary that any piece of art made through the capitalist art machine can’t be communist, and I will say once again: nonsense. That’s like saying that under a repressive regime where dancing is not allowed there are no dancers. Just because Henson and co. go through this machine doesn’t diminish the power of the message. The same goes for Michael Moore’s films, The Wachowskis’ films (particularly V for Vendetta, and Speed Racer), Fight Club, Che, etc. I could care less if a kid bought a Che Guevara shirt at Hot Topic. That face is still good to see on the street.

On to all the leftist propaganda. First of all, the Muppets do everything together, from cleaning up their theater (no hierarchy of labor here) and performing in it. In the opening song, “Life’s a Happy Song”, our heroine laments that it’s not just ‘me and him, but ‘me and him and him’. Sounds like a nice polyamorous triad to me, but the mainstream audience is conditioned to wait for our hero to learn his lesson and return to the capital-affirming confines of the nuclear family, safely demarcated from the community at large. Instead, during the reprise of the song, the entire gang including the two lovers sings “and you and you and you and you and YOU!” (Us beyond the third wall that the Muppets are perpetually demolishing). To solidify Mary’s uptake into the commune instead of the smalltown marriage, when Gary finally proposes her response is a Muppet’s: mah nah mah nah, doo doo doodoodoo. Speaking of the entire gang singing—the muppets tend to sing in unison rather than harmony, and they sing in their own voices, unlike the modulated idiots on the radio today. And Animal plays the drums even on ballads without any acknowledgment for the ‘tasteful’ non ‘busy’ tradition of drumming to rock ballads. When he finally gives up the self-help nonsense and becomes (greater than) himself again, he slams into the “Rainbow connection” finale like it’s a Black Sabbath song. The villain makes a point when he gets a hold of the Muppet theater to insist it’s PRIVATE PROPERTY, including the Muppet name (now his), and they should get out. The response and finale acknowledges the zeitgeist of this year of revolution and occupation, as the Muppets and their supporters (false dichotomy: in the Muppet world we’re all in the show of life ) occupy Hollywood Boulevard and shut it down for their poly/commie dance number, which includes lots of older and bigger actors instead of the usual fit dancers.

I could rail on of course about the unmitigated eccentricity of ‘for all ages’ characters in a time when that usually means the relentless pursuit of ‘relevancy’, which is a euphemism for ignoring the long past and the future that could be. Gonzo is either polyamorous or polygamous, with his loving family of chickens (all cuddling together with him in the rafters). Mushrooms make a conspicuous presence all of the film (hmm…) Markers of the decade are inconsistent (what’s with the fifties Greyhound bus and the small town America?) You can add your own favorite bits of muppet weirdness in the comments.

I leave you with the most important question of the film: “Do you think we’re working for the bad guy?” (If only cops and soldiers would ask themselves that more often.)

And I dedicate this blog to “the lovers, the dreamers, and me.”

HELL OF ROAD TRIP USA V: THE FINALE

2011-08-08T14:23:00.000-07:00

COLORADO

I personally reject the eastern part of Colorado that looks like Kansas. Colorado is required to fit into the Rocky Mountain archetype. So I have removed the first two hours of the drive from my mind. I will say that it is baffling to me that the city of Denver could be a mile high, because the drive doesn’t feel or look like a climb at all. It must be the longest steadiest climb in the U.S. We were late for a date with Vanessa’s sister Lauryl, so we didn’t get to see much, save for a small town that advertised itself as “friendly and full of family values.” We had a few hours to kill before Lauryl got home, so we followed our usual method of finding interesting parts of cities—ask around about what part is ‘dangerous’ and go there. I forget the name of the neighborhood, but the houses were tiny and quirky and the people eccentric and pleasantly unpredictable. It was then time for Captain America: The First Avenger with Lauryl and Sam. A brief digression on the film:

For all the red-white-and-blue advertising, I was pleasantly surprised to find the film not jingoistic at all. On the contrary, the enemies are fascists, and at the end we fast forward to present day, where the U.S. military now seems quite fascist itself in its tactics of paternalistic secrecy and violence-for-the-sake-of-security. The message seems to be that WWII was the last time there could really be a captain ‘America’ we could root for. I also like the more Nietzschean than Christian ethical sensibility in which good and bad are of the same ilk (both the Red Skull and Captain America took the same super serum, which amplifies both good and bad). It was brilliant to have Captain America’s career begin as nothing but propaganda for the government. During that phase, he wears a cheesy costume identical to that in the original comic books (later when it’s time to be a true warrior he adopts the modernized one on the movie poster). The message seems to be that the original take on Captain America was also ideological propaganda. Nice move. The film does well to stay conscious of the more disturbing elements in this character's geist and zeitgeist. On the other hand, as with most films, the villain’s motives for world domination and the psychology of his followers are disturbingly simplistic and barely registerhouldn’t someone who yearns for a human being beyond what we are today—an ubermensch—already love human beings? This is a standard Christian misreading of Nietzsche, in which it is assumed anyone who wants a superhuman must not like humans. It’s the opposite—they love humans so much they want to see them outdo themselves. LINK TO NIETZSCHE? It’s idiotic the way they create villains who are so faithless and cruel to their followers—you don’t win so many followers without being appealing to them. Tim Burton’s version of The Penguin serves as a good counterexample—his army of ‘bad’ guys is convincing because they are all freaks like their leader who weren’t accepted by Gotham’s good citizens.

After a ridiculously hearty meal at The Breakfast Palace (which beat out Breakfast Queen in our crazed breakfast search that morning), we took off into the Rockies. Two hours driving into a sunset stretched out over the Rockies, punctured by the absurd quanity of peaks. We were on a roll, ready to make it all the way across in one evening when Vanessa reached for her backpack and found nothing. We had left it in Denver. Back to Denver. Poor little Toyota Yaris (named “Aayla Secura”). Luckily for us, Brie and Lucas saved the day. They were a couple drinking a coffee in Frisco, CO, and they invited us to stay in the cabin that they from a friend. I admired their willingness to trust complete strangers, especially given that the cabin wasn’t even theirs. Nothing warms my heart like United Statesians who aren’t afraid of strangers, even when they’re ex-cons and sex workers. A far cry from the nurse taking my blood, who told her co-worker "I used to have to take blood from the prisoners. I would shake so much they'd have to give me ____ every time." I asked the nurse if she was afraid of inmates. She looked blankly at me like it was obvious, then bristled: "Well, it's just a very intense situation." The implication that prisoners are a threat to anyone and everyone, including a nurse there to help him, is vile to me.

Anyway, Brie and Lucas cooked us dinner and breakfast, we blew their minds in return for the meals, and we all watched Disney’s “Aladdin”, which contains the barely disguised sex scene “Whole New World.” The cabin seemed stuck in the eighties—it came equipped with VCR’s for every TV and an original Nintendo gaming system with all the games my brother and I fought over as children, until my Mom got sick of our addiction and stomped on the machine (bravo Mamma! You saved us from a form of addiction more ruthless than nicotine). There were also large books on how to ski better written in the sixties and seventies. One talked about a ‘revolutionary’ new French method. As an admirer for real French revolutionaries of the sixties, I am always annoyed when advertisers use the word ‘revolutionary’ for a bourgeois leisure activity. A recommendation: do drive the Rockies. Don’t take the interstate they tell you to take through Salt Lake City or below them down through Vegas (unless your car is old and overheats easily).

UTAH AND NEVADA

Onward through more vast space, empty of construction. Like Arizona, Utah and Nevada are states where you tend to keep your drugs in your lap so you can stuff them into a crevice on your body if you get pulled over. Many voting citizens are much more concerned about marijuana usage and gay marriage than they are about poverty and homelessness. We went to Arches National Park and continued our arch-themed trip (see last post on St. Louis). After an hour there with all the cocks and cunts nature has to offer, we took off down the “loneliest road in America”, Highway 50. Of course, since Nevada seized on that moniker in its advertising, it has become quite un-lonely, but it’s still an amazing stretch of mountains and valleys broken up by only three small towns, running halfway through Utah and all the way through Nevada.

Many of the towns in this area were former mining towns, which means that today they’re barely functioning. We spent the night in WHAT, Utah, in a room with 8 beds, designed to accommodate travelling groups of laborers. The ‘café’ part of the motel and café’ was inexpensive and featured tableside meant-to-be-funny books by a local writer, with platitudes and stereotypes about women, marriage, etc. Our waitress was so surprisingly cute Vanessa couldn’t believe she’d never stripped. She had, however, been trained in nursing and given it up because waitressing paid more than nursing. (Wow.) The town was mostly Mormon, and the bars were still called ‘social clubs’, despite Utah’s recently changing their laws to allow for actual bars.

We really wanted to stop in a polygamous town but unfortunately they were too far off the road. We settled for the town museum in Eureka, NV, with its printing presses, schoolroom, and other artifacts from the late 19^th century. I was most interested in a collection of newspapers from 1934, and read stories about the exciting new WPA and Tennessee Valley projects and the big corporations that sternly warned of the likelihood that they would lead Americans towards unionization and communism.

We went to a small Shoshone American Indian reservation by Ely, NV. I didn’t expect to be anything less than depressed in a reservation, but I wasn’t prepared to see three or four houses with American flags waving from the porches. That’s like a rape victim cheering her rapist on at a high school football game. Yuck. Part of the problem is that the military seized on the proud warrior traditions in these cultures and put forth an "American soldier" to fill the gap left by the more noble battles of the past, including the AIM movement.

Like a lot of the USA, the towns were sad and the space inbetween more gratifying. At least the long stretches of rocky canyons and red rocks can admit of no classism, except I guess for the fact that the working class can scarcely afford the gas it costs to cross this area! In desolate parts of the country like central Nevada, you can find state and national parks with no one in them—it’s just you, the ghostly whistling wind, and the thousands of years old petroglyphs that predate even the American Indians as we know them. One set of petroglyphs was in such an unlikely place, in a fiercely hot ravine accessible only by very bumpy dirt road, with only one sign and a couple of picnic tables, that it altered the definition of ‘tourist spot’ for me. Only the hardiest tourists would camp here (for free). We saw no one. The petroglyphs were oddly avant-garde, with humanoid shapes boasting strange and indecipherable geometric additions. These were drawn a few thousand years before Homer dreamt up the Odyssey. We’re not so young a land, after all.

HOME AGAIN! I LIKE TO BE THERE WHEN I CAN

After two days of unfathomably unfamiliar territory we pulled into Reno, our yearly launch point on the way to Burning Man. From there on out we were in the beautiful Sierra Nevadas, which for us by now means either excitement about the Burn to come or excited processing of the Burn that just happened. It was a good lesson in keeping our senses and critical skills attuned and working together, now that we were in familiar territory. And that is how we ended Hell of Road Trip pt. V, at my parents’ house in Los Gatos, CA, after picking up Lindsey in Berkeley: determined to continue to act, even at home, like we were on the road, talking with ‘locals’about their labor and leisure practices, noting the city planning or lack thereof, finding the quirky spots, and overall training our senses for the most important truth: there is nothing you've already seen. Nothing repeats. All is new every time, every glance, every moment. After all, we are in route, always changing, always moving, and doing it best when the destination is not held dogmatically in the mind like a guard rail. Here’s to the perpetual road trip, at home and abroad.

ADDENDUM: FAMILY REUNION IN BIRMINGHAM, AL

The day after we returned, my wife and I flew to Birmingham for a family reunion of the Israel clan. Plenty of interesting people there but I think if I heard one more person insinuate how bad unions are for America I would have blown up. Lindsey winning a freestyle MC battle at a downtown bar was a highlight, as was the Birmingham history center, and the Civil Rights Institute (which was mysteriously missing communism and Black Panthers), but I think the top moment was when the whole clan was performing a string of karaoke numbers, mostly country with a little Vanilla Ice and Bon Jovi thrown in. We were all white and the servers were all Black. I went up to one of them and said: “I would pay a large sum of money if would put Ice-T’s “Cop Killer” on this Karaoke list so I could perform it tonight.” We both laughed hard and long. Let’s end on that note: Ice T.

HELL OF ROAD TRIP pt. V USA PT. 5

2011-08-02T12:45:00.000-07:00

MISSOURI, KANSAS

Missouri contains some of the best drives we’ve ever seen. I didn’t tell you last blog about one of the other amazing drives: through the backcountry of Pennsylvania. Always leave the interstate if you want interesting stores, people, roads. This particular road took us through towns called Desire, Panic and Paradise. In desire, we saw a sign for ‘local honey’ that lead us to a private property. We couldn’t figure out why such a poor-looking house owned four horses until we saw the buggies in the shed: Amish! The 7-year old girl rocked a baby on the porch as if she was a mother, not a child. Other children played with homemade toys. The father wore a long beard, Jim-Carrey-in-Dumb-and-Dumber haircut. Everyone had dirty clothes. He brought out honey in repurposed salad dressing bottles, for only two dollars a generous bottle. Delicious. We could see the bees buzzing in the hives across the yard. My phone went off during the transaction and the little boy looked at is as if a UFO had landed in my pocket. The drive took us through towns with populations under 100, where we pretended to shop for bunnies, bought cinnamon rolls from an arrogant Israeli (“What country do you think I’m from?! The country that doesn’t take shit from anyone.” OK, thanks Israeli Steven Seagal), and wondered incessantly what the hell people do for money in towns out here without any stores, plants, factories or tourism.

Missouri held its own with Pennsylvania and Louisiana in the beautiful drive department. We once again left the interstate and followed the Missouri river, through rolling hills of surreal bright green. We passed our fair share of racist landmarks, such as the Daniel Boone home (not to be outdone by the Pony Express stations that glorified the brave riders who had to put up with “hostile Indians”). The air was hot and wet and hung on you like a giant jellyfish. Not just in Missouri but everywhere. We chose one of the hottest Julys in recent history, and the heat followed us around the entire country like a determined child molester until the first bits of relative cool (by that I mean temperatures in the nineties that actually felt like the nineties, since the humidity was gone) in Denver.

Time and space bent every which way on this trip, as we tried to ignore the maps and trust our senses, so you won’t mind if I discuss St. Louis after I discuss the drive which succeeded it, will you? St. Louis has my favorite monument in the entire USA. It’s called the Jefferson Expansion Memorial, but since the last thing I want to pollute such an amazing work of art is the memory of our genocidal ‘expansion’ (a euphemism for invasion), I will simply call it THE ARCH. It’s surprisingly big. It’s surprisingly abstract for something so big. We in the USA like our memorials to be more obviously referential: big presidential heads carved into rock, big statues of Lincoln or Washington, or a massive cock (the Washington monument) to symbolize how Washington tries to penetrate the rest of the world, contemptuous of consent. But the arch is magnificently unique. Shiny metallic and higher than the whole city, it’s the antidote to our usual border symbolism: gates, fences, walls, buildings. The arch is open. It goes both directions, a liminal space between east and west United States. Vanessa and I stood below it, watching the Mississippi river flow), and promised to make an arch of our families, marriages, work, bodies, and, if possible, country. Amen. No wonder the one of the most brilliant tours of all time, U2’s “Popmart” featured a massive arch as its centerpiece, and ended with a big bleeding heart on the screen under that arch.

St. Louis is the murder capital of the USA. Not the metro area, of course—just one of the areas where we like to shove the people of color. It has some of the smallest houses in a United States city I’ve ever seen. We stayed at the Congress Inn for 30 bucks, with its two dollar key deposit and four free channels of porn. I respect a motel with free porn. It’s the least we can do in a country that insanely outlaws prostitution. Vanessa called the premiere strip club, Centerfolds, and was invited to work there, but got sidetracked by the arch and its bizarre museum with animatronic American Indians and settlers. St. Louis hasn’t had a Republican government or Mayor since the forties, so it makes sense that the museum was less brazenly racist and revisionist than some of the shit we saw in Texas, Kansas and the Carolinas. We read about the various American Indian resistances, all of which end in defeat. It is mind-boggling the number of treaties that the U.S. government broke, lied about, changed, etc. Every time a tribe made a deal, it seemed like it couldn’t possibly get any worse than this. But in fact it did, every dishonest and broken deal by dishonest and broken deal, for two centuries, until the last real glimmer of hope in the 1960s and 1970s, the height of the American Indian Movement (AIM). This land was in better hands when its people believed in spirits rather than a single improbable and ridiculously cruel God.

KANSAS

After a stop at the astoundingly good Gates BBQ in Kansas City, where the waiters are so nice you think they are going to walk you home and tuck you in, it was into the great void of Kansas. A motel in Abilene, KS, right next to a ramshackle trailer park, replete with friendly Mexican-American roofers from Pueblo, CO who were shipped here to work for three weeks. In the morning we ate at a café with literally no décor (it was like eating in a cardboard box) except for dire signs about teenage drinking. I like to read local papers, especially editorials, so I picked up a Topeka paper and read an editorial about how disastrous it will be for the working class (they didn’t use the word ‘class’, of course, because they like to participate in the United Statesian whitewashing of all issues of class) if Obama made good on his promise to diminish the tax breaks for corporate jet owners. Yes, seriously—corporate jet owners. The plane industry is big in Kansas, but it was yet another attempt to perpetrate the lie that if rich people (oh, sorry—“Job Creators”) don’t get enough tax breaks they’ll just fire every one and maybe even stop working altogether. News flash: rich people love money. They won’t stop earning it even if the government takes a higher share of it (as in nearly every other Western country). And when they do lay people off to try and scare people into never voting down tax breaks again, that’s a fault of a capitalist system that makes it too easy too fire and manipulate workers. Another example: the most powerful Kansan energy company, Westar, is threatening to drastically raise consumer energy prices because of new EPA pollution standards. Sorry Westar, it’s simply time to earn less money, not raise the prices of the 6-person family living in the shotgun shack in North Topeka.

Ah, Kansas, thanks for adding fundamentalist Christian bigot Pat Roberts to the Senate. Then again, if Burroughs wanted to die there, it’s got to have something. There’s always something brilliant, weird, and unlikely hiding in every state. One of Kansas’s such wonders is the Garden of Eden. Who knew the Garden of Eden was in Kansas after all? We went through a French-Canadian (that’s right!) town, where one of the daughters who spoke no French (only the old people barely do) had repainted all the storefronts’ titles in French . We tried to eat steak at a place googlemaps led us to called “Bill’s Steaks”. We drove through the non-paved streets of this town, whose five businesses were all closed at 3pm, only to be directed to an abandoned schoolhouse where we met Bill, who did not in fact own a steakhouse but rather a place to buy wholesale gigantic slabs of beef. Oops. Through fields set off by rock fences we rolled along through towns that the maps said existed but our senses said did not: everything caved in and vacated. Just when you thought it truly was a ghost town, a mechanic would emerge from a crumbling building with a faded, nearly unreadable sign like ‘Car Repair’ and you’d realize that place is actually open. In rural Kansas I kept wondering—where are the Black people??? Take note readers: that’s a good question to ask wherever you go and see none. Then ask ‘why’? Hint: LINK

The next part of the blog is Colorado, and should be a departure from Kansas, shouldn’t it: Rocky mountains, big important city, thin mountain air. But strangely, once you cross the border from Kansas it still looks like Kansas for an hour or two. I wish states magically changed color when you cross the border like they do on maps. We drove into Colorado still reading about Kansas in a tourist map that included such gems as “What is There To Notice About Fences”. Answer? “Oh, many things!” This brochure told us that although there were many places to get facts about Kansas, what we held in our hands was the only one with “fun facts about Kansas”. Oh, many things.

Have I made it clear yet my main pieces of road trip advice here? (1) Leave the interstate. (2) Talk to the locals (3) Go to the quirky not-so-touristy stuff. Finally, I should add: never believe white people who tell you to stay away from certain areas. Don’t do that. Go there. Remember the Forbidden Forest in Harry Potter, where it turns out that it's so 'dangerous' only because of racist fear/disdain for the locals (centaurs)? Remember the Wachowski’s Matrix trilogy? Avoiding people is just taking the blue pill. Those houses that are far from each other so you don’t have to hear or see other human beings except when it suits you—they’re just an illusion in the matrix. Real life, real humanity is only the whole thing, the totality, the manifold. Get in.

USA ROAD TRIP pt. IV

2011-07-25T16:12:00.000-07:00

PENNSYLVANIA, OHIO, MICHIGAN, ILLINOIS, MISSOURI, KANSAS

Toledo, Youngstown, Cleveland, Detroit. A string of broken towns. Would the lucky few doing well be insulted I call them broken? Yes—because like most bourgeois they think of doing well as an individual concept, not a group one. But when this many people in your town are suffering, when this many houses are vacant and dilapidated, when hoods like Slavic Village only have a handful of Slavs left, as everything and everyone flee the dying neighborhoods as fast they can, one by one, well then don’t tell me your town’s not broken. One of the most annoying bourgeois pigs I’ve met was this college student in Youngstown, Ohio whose band played with The Sacred Dice when we played there in 2006. We were singing the praises of Springsteen’s heartrending “Youngstown”about steelworkers there in Northeast Ohio. He said ‘people’ hated it because it made people think Youngstown sucked. By people he presumably meant white upper middle class friends (see the Brooklyn reading segment from my last blog). Son, the displaced working class is more of an issue here in Youngstown than the laughable relationship issues your indie bands sing about.

We drove through the ugly square houses and shops around Youngstown State to reach the Museum of Labor and Industry, and dove into that Springsteen song in earnest. 12 hour days, 7 day weeks, towns ownede by one big company that then paid in vouchers for the company store, ran the entire town like a monopolgy, and murderously fought unions for an entire century. This is the kind of image I have in mind when I stare aghast at flag-wavers on July 4 talking about our proud country and its proud traditions. The immigrants came in wave after wave, in this land of immigrants that is still somehow one of the world's most hateful towards immigrants. I can't believe how pervasive the Italian presence is in the USA. They seem to have reached everywhere, this little country of homebodies who tend to find it difficult to embrace the non-Italian. If you haven't done any research on mining or the steel industry, do a little spelunking. You'll get a little taste of why people like me don't think of the rich as 'job providers', as the rhetoric goes.

In Cleveland we ate pizza at an Italian’s place. He opened it 22 years ago when it was a quaint little Euro-tinged community. Since then, it’s become a ghetto of vacated houses, with prostitution and drug sales as the main career opportunities open to its residents. Welcome to trickle-down economics, where the rich people move the production to wherever they have to avoid even more taxes than they already scandalously avoided, and the poor are left behind with nothing but the Republican’s lie: “anyone with work ethic and diligence can make a good living.” This guy can’t afford to close up shop, but he’s barely afloat now, and he doesn’t recognize anyone anymore. We chatted with a drunk guy talking at no one and a prostitute taking some shelter in the tiny waiting room of the pizza house. We went to the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame and walked into a great blessing from the rock gods: they happened to be screening U2’s excellent U23D (see Vanessa’s blog on it HERE); the room screeing the 3 hour 25^th anniversary concert happened to be at its best moment, U2’s set. I marveled like a child at the material artifacts of the greatest tour of all time, U2’s ZOOTV, including the East German trabant cars that hung as spotlights, the neon ZOOTV sign, and Bono’s The Fly and Mr. MacPhisto costumes. There is something melancholy about seeing the artifacts of a great tour such as that. Rock n’ Roll at its best feels like eternity, and one expected Mr. MacPhisto to live eternally, in a succession of liminal moments between night and day, as the line “Midnight is where the day begins” plays on an eternal loop. But there was his retired costume. And now Bono is back to playing the alter ego the naïve call ‘himself.’ The saddest part of the museum? The exhibit on women in rock. Their costumes were less eccentric, brave than the men’s, more predictable. People like Gwen Stefani and Heart just can’t compare to Lennon and Springsteen. Worst, probably the most fiercely unslavish female rocker besides Joplin, Sophie B. Hawkins, was not even represented at the museum. I was left with the feeling that feminism has a lot more work to do in rock n’ roll.

It’s weird how states seem to change scenery as soon as you cross into them. Do zoning laws apply to types of crop and flora as well?! Illinois was all corn, and now Missouri is all a green trance of rolling hills. Ambient green. A much brighter green than California’s green, almost unrealistic. Some lines spoken to us in Missouri: “I don’t think you need to pay parking meters at night in St. Louis, even if it says you do.” “A foreign company took over Annheiser-Busch this year. Such a shame. That was Missouri.” “Well, I like it better here [than Merced, CA] cuz you only have to fight off Blacks for your white girls, not just Blacks and Mexicans.” Of course he’s “not racist at all.” One form of racism is the sense that white girls are a scarce resource that other races are poaching. Either way, most of the sickest human behaviors come down to a belief in property and propriety.

Detroit. I took a lot of photos. I’d like to staple them to the foreheads of anyone I hear telling me that the USA treats its citizens better than any other country. Detroit is the venereal disease the U.S.A. contracted after many decades of unsafe fucking-over of its people. I’m not trying to insult the amazing people we met there, from the anarchist collective house to the friendly direction-givers to the cousins. Detroit is almost a ghost town. Major streets are empty of cars and people. So many houses are abandoned it looks like a science fiction movie after a plague hits. Of course that’s exactly what happened. The plague is called capitalism, in its ugliest form: plutocracy. In areas like this the billboards announcing that abortion is murder are particularly cloying. Apparently the religious freaks would like to bring even more unwanted children into a city that has no jobs or social services by which the teen mothers could support them. Nice move, zealots. There’s nothing like religion for making people completely ignore economic realities in the name of hand-me-down morals.

But you didn’t think the Detroit section of the blog would be only depressing did you?! Not when there’s the Heidelberg Project!. A local artist, with the help of local residents (including a 10-year old kid we shot a few hoops with), transformed a few blocks of a poor neighborhood (kind of a redundant phrase in Detroit) into an art project: houses with hundreds of stuffed animals glued to the outside. Houses painted polka dots. Telephones and clocks glued to trees, anti-drug war messages everywhere, strange conglomerations of abandoned tools. The part that I found particularly brilliant and anti-bourgeois was that it was a functional street, not a set-aside piece of art. Interspersed in the art are actual residences with families living in them. Their children get to play on a street filled with art. It’s an oasis of CARE when it comes to aesthetics in a city and country that usually abandons aesthetics in the name of efficiency and practicality, as well as the ever-urgent late-capitalist imperative to keep everything distinct and separate, lest there be intellectual and class miscegenation. For all of the USA’s small ugly square-building towns with half their stores and houses over and done, there are little oases of hope and inspiration. These are the signs and wonders that point to revolutionary possibility still alive in this country where most slave for the profit of a few.

We met my brother-in-law Spencer Hawkins and his girlfriend-poet Ann Marie and went to bar with the best jukebox in America. Amongst the jewels such as George Clinton, obscure Leonard Cohen and Dylan albums, and Woody Guthrie, was The Coup’s Party Music, which I never see in jukeboxes. I texted Boots Riley, a comrade of all Teds, and he revealed that he lived in Detroit til he was 5. Talk about loyalty to your people! Detroit could use a little Boots-led revolution right now.

We drove across Michigan through a massacre of roadside woodchucks that almost matched the armadillo massacres of the South. Across Indiana in a drive so uneventful I wonder if Indiana is a figment of my imagination. How can I be sure it exists? There wasn’t even a state sign. I can be sure Illinois exists, however, because Chicago looms like a Jungian archetype over land and lake. Chicago is the architectural capital of the USA. There are so many funky, stylish, weird, majestic, nostalgic and many other kinds of styles crushing up against each other, it’s like a more organic and tasteful Las Vegas. It definitely has some Euro charm, but the sheer eclecticism of the architecture makes it unique. Strangle and marvelously, unlike, say, New York City, the confluence of styles doesn’t seem haphazard. It somehow seems perfectly planned out, as if all along the city planners and financiers had aesthetics in mind. Is this a legacy of a city that helped birth the American Socialist party and was hotbed of radicalism for so long?

Lucky for us “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” was playing for free in Wicker Park. Despite the usual flattening and deadening presence of hipsters, it was a gorgeous hot sweaty evening watching yet another of George Lucas’ magnificent visions. The film displays Lucas’ usual obsession with holding up a mirror to imperialist USA vis-à-vis the various empires in his films (Nazi, Galactic, British Colonial, Cold War USA, etc.) It also reminded me that one must stray off the path to the university to find the pressing educational experience. They’re ripping hearts out on the road that leads away from the university, even as they rip the heart out of the Humanities in the university itself.

We got to stay in the exceedingly cute basement of the exceedingly cute squished-against-other-houses residence of Gina Frangello, whose five-year old child reminded us that if we’re not looking, talking, smelling, and thinking like we’re five, we’re old and stupid. One of his gems: “I’d like to tell you about myself. I like to think a lot.” We were also told “I’m really cute and lots of girls like me.” If only one of the stars we know in Hollywood would talk so abjectly. Gina talked about trying to get behind the Mommy masks at her Mommy reading group, to the pot-smoking sexual beings underneath. I’m sure her very sensual fiction helps in that cause. Vanessa performed her usual magic on the streets of Wrigleyville and procured us two $75 dollar Cubs tickets for free. There’s something invigorating about going to the local city temple to watch the fallen idols try to win a game in a season that’s already lost, after 103 seasons without a championship. It reminds one of the importance of playing the full game out in life, of supporting your comrades even when the cause is lost. Rooting for the Cubs is like being a socialist. But as longtime Cubs-sufferer Tom Morrello texted Vanessa: “I think it’s likely we’ll see a full scale USSA utopia before the Cubs see a World Series.” Say it ain’t so.

You don’t really want to hear about the rest of Illinois on the way to St. Louis do you? Corn. Corn. So sad all the corn in the Midwest—it’s not very good for you and it’s a racket that keeps us all so cornfed. More to come!

HELL OF ROAD TRIP USA PT. 3

2011-07-24T11:41:00.000-07:00

SOUTH CAROLINA AND NEW YORK: SUPERBALL IX!

In the morning, Janet, Lindsey, Vanessa, Max and I drove out of New York City in a crazed podracing scene, shooting over the Manhattan bridge and out into New Jersey. It was as five-hour drive to the remote upstate New York town of Watkins Glen, where Phish and their collaborators (us all!) were to stage a 4-festival called Superball IX. Aaron and Karine drove down from Montreal and we all met outside the grounds. For the entire festival we introduced ourselves only as Ted, an increasingly common practice whenever we are together. Strangely enough, we’ve met two other separate groups of Teds since we started doing this—apparently we’ve given birth to a meme. Soon Teds will be everywhere. We all have Ted jerseys, with different numbers but the same name on the back: Ted. Other times we wear our The Sacred Dice shirts, the name of our revolutionary salon. Everyone has the same name because our chief aim is the birth of a new mass culture of cooperation, collaboration, miscegenation, de-identitfication. I’ve written about Phish on this blog before, so I won’t go into great detail about the show. I will say that I feel like The Sacred Dice and Ted are engaged in an experiment that takes friendship into an art form and a political formation at the same time. There is nothing casual about real friendship. One thing I’d like to encourage in the art of social interaction: political speech. By this I do not mean jumping on a soapbox for a lecture. I mean attentiveness to the kind of crowd you’re in, and changing the subject to the kinds of issues that are challenging for them (or for you, vis-à-vis them), in order to create interactions that are not the route of least resistance but that prize confrontation as the form of communication where something new arrives. Sometimes you can do this simply through dress and casual speech. At this festival for example, we all wore bandanas of the Quebec flag that Karine gave us, and spoke French as much as possible (the majority of Teds speak French). Given that both Canada day and Independence Day took place over the weekend, this led to some interesting conversations. We also moved in and out of the various time periods in American history built by the fabulous artists hired by Phish, role-playing everything from polygamous settlers in the West to guerillas.

During the show Vanessa kept talking about how much Trey Anastasio was fucking her and the rest of the crowd. I got to thinking about something I said on one of her blogs about U2, that sharing an audio-visual-spiritual moment like that with others can be as intimate—if you’re allowing yourself utter vulnerability—as conversation with my uncle over whiskey in Cassano d’Adda, Italy at midnight, as cuddling with friends, as losing your virginity. The indie kid nonsense about U2 or Phish shows being ‘too big’ ignores this capacity for intimacy. Intimacy is not a function of size or number (non-polyamorous people are especially vulnerable to this latter prejudice), but of commitment to connection and communication, to abandoning oneself completely to what leonard cohen calls ‘the holy and the broken hallelujah”. Thanks to Phish and all my comrades for achieving that this 4^th of July weekend, even in the face of a bunch of idiots waving the flag proudly not that far from the factory towns where people have been exploited for two centuries.

It’s so interesting that when you run around in jerseys that all say “Ted” on the back at an arts festival, people assume you are part of the show, i.e. that Phish created us. People speculated that we were, variously, a marching band, bocce team, ushers, soccer team, etc. We answered differently every time: “revolutionary salon”, “the winning team at Superball IX”, “Venezuelan spies”, etc. I wish these fans would go back to their various cities expecting and acting like everyone was in on the show. Because we are all in fact in the show right now. That is the theme of the encore of night one, Show of Life.

NEW YORK CITY

Vanessa went with Aaron and Karine to Montreal. The original plan was for me to accompany them, but Canada’s increasing willingness to be the USA’s punked-out prison bitch means that I can’t get in the country with my criminal record. This is of course a post 9/11 measure taken for all of our safety and security. And lame, insecure Anglophone Quebecois wonder why my comrades want to secede. It’s embarrassing how beholden to the USA Canada is these days. I’m surprised they even bother to beat them at hockey.

So I instead took Janet and Max back to New York, dropping Lindsey off at the airport to go back to Berkeley summer school. That meant for me a week and a half in Brooklyn with them. Yes! There’s nothing like actually settling into a city and even getting some work done there. I’ve been writing in various coffeehouses, parks, and libraries by day, Tedding out by night. It’s daunting to write about New York City because everyone who loves cities eventually does. What strikes me most is how many people people are forced to run into in their daily lives. There is no hiding from people here—they swarm the sidewalks, from Queens to Brooklyn to Manhattan; they’re on the subway with you, which sweeps along rich and poor in its perpetual flow; they barbecue and throw parties on sidewalks and stoops, and the parks and playgrounds are chalk full. In short, New York City makes it nigh impossible to participate in the noxious and obnoxious American dream of excessive privacy and separation. In Los Angeles, you can safely tuck yourself away from people—most people drive everywhere and everything’s so spread out every class and every color and every culture can exist nearly self-sufficiently in their own neighborhood. It’s depressing. It’s actually inhuman. Human beings access their humanity most salubriously when they are in constant contact with other—especially The Other—human beings. That’s why it is the best interests of rich capitalists to defund anything free and public that encourages public gatherings, and to stratify cities via zoning and tax schemes into distinct worlds; why there are insane laws such as this one, and why Los Angeles can produce such a large number of inhumane humans: they just don’t see jostle and bump enough human beings in their daily lives.

Of course, there’s that famous New Yorker orneriness, which can lead to your getting yelled at on the subway for waving your hand too close to someone, or for crossing the street at the wrong time, but this is par for the course if you’re Italian, so no (copious amounts of) sweat off my back. Some of my friends come back from New York with tales of the Statue of Liberty and Broadway. I’m sure you guess that’s not where I’m heading. My notebooks (and by that I mean iphone notepad—notebooks is just a romantic word I still use) are filled with everyday meetings and sightings. A conversation with a Palestinian who sold me an excellent schwarma, about the Freedom Flotilla (“The USA would switch sides in a second if the other side suddenly got their hands on their interests.”). Conversations with Hassidic Jews, Senegalese immigrants, a student from Tucson freshly arrived to try her body out in the modern dance world, and a former U.S. Congressman (“The reason Obama isn’t what he seemed is that when you become president you find out things you didn’t know, like how many crazies there are out there trying to hurt us, and so your chief job is to defend us”. Actually, it’s the reverse: it’s our ‘defense’ itself which inspires the greatest number of ‘crazies’—nice technical term there—and their craziest actions.)

I took a five-hour walk with my brilliant friend Jon Cotner, participating in his project of creating unlikely moments of street solidarity through pereptual use of banal one-liner conversation openers or affirmation to everyone who passes. We met with radical publisher-activist, Anthony Arnove to discuss ways of bringing Vanessa and Anthony thoughts to the world. We went to the Native American museum, the Sex Museum (disturblingly unpolitical and lacking anything on prostitution or polyamory), the Museum of the Moving Image (who knew Jim Henson was an experimental filmmaker in the sixties? Not me), and the Tenement Museum. We saw Max Hodes brilliant band, Black Cosmic Mother, which seems to be an attempt to produce a wall of noise and then distinguish faint shapes of resistance, rebellion and love in the distorted Totality. Later Max and I went to the Met museum high and played "be the art". This involved us doing vocal jams to the art we were watching, and filming ourselves dancing in front of the art. A guard told Max: "No singing in the museum." After that we started grunting at the art, and talking like squirrels. Surely, that's not illegal.

But mostly we walked and wrote. The tenement museum was awesome, yes, but mostly the museum of human beings. What I thought was: New York City actually take human beings out of the museum and makes them participate in the regular bowel movements by which the universe shits out the toxins and prepares to receive the new day. In my favorite novel, Beautiful Losers, Leonard Cohen writes “I am the sealed, dead, impervious museum of my appetite. This is the brutal solitude of constipation, this is the way the world is lost", and for me he is talking about the USA. Talk about constipation and not understanding what the city is all about: I went to a reading in the Dumbo section of Brooklyn that was bourgeious par excellence. I use that word a lot, in defiance of the hipsters who think it’s too old-fashioned and the rest who don’t even know what it means. If you don’t, let me sum it up: it’s middle class white people giving lecture-readings that are supposed to be funny about how ‘people’ are and what ‘people’ like and don’t like. Our resident bourgeois pig started from the premise that ‘people’ don’t want to hear other people, and that one of the main struggles in the city is to get people to shut up: at coffeehouses, in museums, in movie theaters, etc. For one thing, this tool obviously has very few African-American, Italian or West African friends if he thinks ‘people’ value soft speakers so much. You can whine to me all day about whether or not that’s over-generalizing (I will say that the racist white assholes in prison scorned Blacks for how loud they were, and prided themselves on mumbling everything they said inaudibly), but the point here is that bourgeois folk want access to all the goodies in the city while still preserving the sick hyper-privatized isolation of their suburban experience growing up. In sum: they’d like to have the city without the community, the street without the piazza, the feeling that they’re not alone without actually having to recognize the Other. Ask yourself always whether what you think ‘people’ need or like is not actually the people in your particular class, city, country, trade, etc.

Luckily, right after the gathering of people-haters in Brooklyn the Teds and I gathered in Times Square for the opening of the last installment of the Harry Potter saga. Tons of teenagers in full costume and with no desire whatsoever to maintain a quiet street, lobby, or theater. For the 21- and 22-year olds, it was the symbolic true end of childhood, as they had grown up being the same age as all their heroes for 10 years, in a sometimes horrifying parable of post 9-11 USA. We stumbled off the subway at 4am and fell asleep for the last night in Brooklyn, ready to meet Jim Morrison’s challenge and embrace the West again.

2011-06-28T09:24:00.000-07:00

HELL OF ROAD TRIP PT V, Pt. 2.

Well that stripper chickened out and rudely abandoned us without informing us. We were sitting in the parking lot of the club at 2:30am when we figured it out. In all my years of road-tripping and couch-surfing, this was the first person who said yes then chickened out. We must be looking shiftier these days. Or else she figured out that her rigger husband, coming back the next day after weeks at sea, wouldn’t be too happy to find us there? Who knows. In any case, it forced us to rent a should-have-been cheap (we’ve hit a few $30 places, after we figured out what every southerner knows—camping in the summer in the south is impossible. It would be like camping in a steamroom with mosquitos) motel that was strangely expensive. Noone had bothered to remove the children’s stickers pasted on the wall behind one bed. The lamp had no shade, the pillows had mold, and there was no shower curtain, which meant we flooded the bathroom. Nevertheless, the bare light bulb hanging over the bathroom mirror made for gorgeous light and photo, so never stop looking for beauty in the trash.

We stopped for coffee at a tiny diner, but the absurdly friendly locals, tantalizing beignets, and $3 egg breakfast enticed us to stay for more. The beignets were the best I’d ever had, better than Café du Monde, and the 21-year old local boy who made them bragged to everyone who came in: “They came all the way from Los Angeles for my beignets.” This made Vanessa cry. Many things do. This is her strength. David the alligator hunter kept saying what a blessing it was that we were here to talk to them. He had a pet raccoon who liked to shower with him. How did he get it? “I killed the mama.” Then he sold it to Goose from Top Gun. I really can’t believe how friendly everyone is in the south, all races included. In L.A., people size you up to see how much of a threat you are to their self-esteem/status/standing in the industries they are desperately trying to be a part of. In LA (Louisiana), people don’t size you up, they just give you sizeable portions and chat amicably. I remember talking to a Black family from Baton Rouge on the Gulf Coast who were nothing but appreciative and jolly, despite our crazy clothes, strange behavior (they wouldn’t let their kids swim in the Gulf waters because of the oil spill), and white skin. This is not my experience in the Northeast or California. Then again, I imagine if we were Black and chatting up white locals we may not get so friendly a welcome. I am always reminded as we tool through small towns or places where only locals go, that with our California plates and packed-up car, we may have a less sociable welcome, especially from the local law enforcement, if we weren’t white. These communites, after all, can be incredibly segregated. Savannah, GA comes to mind—a colonial house, droopy-treed luscious downtown of little museusm and coffeehouses…and mostly white people. Move 1 mile in any direction and it’s all Black. Same with New Orleans, outside of the French Quarter or St. Charles mansions. Indeed, the most disturbing stop so far was Magazine Street in New Orleans. Why? Because of the hipster takeover. Don’t get me wrong—I’ll take a hipster over a frat boy or out-and-out racist anyday, but hipsters are particularly American in their franchiseability: no matter where you go in America, the hipsters where the same thing and bring the same shops into town. It was depressing to see Buffalo Exchange, American Apparel, Starbucks (in New Orleans?!), Ben and Jerry’s, and overpriced thrift stores with the same tired hip slogans and safe nostalgic ironic T-shirts. New Orleans, after all, like Austin, is distinguished for its plethora of ma and pa stores and unique businesses. I do recommend, once you get past the hipster area, Frankie and Johnny’s, where we ate delicious alligator soup, more spiced-up than Lindsey’s Aunt Jimmy’s southern language.

Louisiana really is another country. A better country. It has everything that for me the rest of America lacks: a distinctive, excellent cuisine; a city to rival the best cities in Europe; a totally unique music scene; and, a little bit of French sensibility (though the Cajun and creole traditions are of course unique) . Notice I used ‘distinctive’ twice. Los Angeles, New York, Chicago are distinctive, of course, but there is so much there that is still so predictably American. New Orleans doesn’t even seem like America to me. (It certainly wasn’t treated like it was part of America by the Bush administration post Katrina. I remember how thankful they were in 2007 for our tourism, and even on this trip one waitress said “Thank you for caring.”)

I really can’t get over the shotgun shacks, totally derelict houses, and the victory of nature over civilization in this part of the country. There is no holding back the rampant, roiling vegetation. The countless armadillos littering the roadside remind me that cars are a relatively new invention that the world still struggles to adapt to. Let me some up the housing situation, though, more forcefully: this country is ABSOLUTELY SHAMEFUL in what it has allowed to happen to the majority of its citizens, from their health care situation to the lack of tax dollars going to community projects. Suck it Republicans. Suck it Democrats. We need a strong Socialist party. Anyone who thinks America is strong country full of happy people lives in a gated rich community and doesn’t road trip through the small towns of the South. Plain and simple—I’m sick of hearing friends in Beverly Hills tell me what’s wrong with America (our taxes are too high!). Why don’t you get out and see it, before you talk about it, you armchair pundits.

MISSISSIPPI, ALABAMA, FLORIDA, GEORGIA, SOUTH CAROLINA

After days in Texas and Lousiana, we sped through 5 states in two days. It’s all a blur of thick, wet air, a cacophony of nighttime insects, and lush greenery. The panhandle of Florida is particularly depressing. A long tunnel of trees broken by anti-abortion, power of prayer, and tractor sale billboards. Native American names everywhere and Native American presence nowhere. Lots of gun stores. I particularly enjoyed the “Guns and Fireworks” drive through. Savannah, GA is one of the most beautiful cities in the USA. Try to go. Bring an air-conditioned space suit.

Now we’re in Eutawville, South Carolina, visiting Lindsey’s family. Lindsey flew out to meet us, and will join us for the next week of Hell of Road Trip pt. V! We played in the Citrusville Citizens’ Sports Tournament, masterminded by Lindsey’s genius 14-year old brother Raymond. He also gave us an impressive organ concert.

HELL OF ROAD TRIP USA PT. I

2011-06-24T14:27:00.000-07:00

HELL OF ROAD TRIP PT. V BLOG

Well, well, well, if isn’t you, United States of America. I grew up calling you ‘America’ like so many others, until some smart people let me know how incredibly, arrogantly, well, American, that is, considering that Canada, Quebec, Venezuela, Honduras and many other countries also comprise ‘America’. “United States” is also a laughable term, once you drive across America and explore its towns. These states are anything but united. You can read billboards in Texas saying “Yes we can secede!”, and maybe that’s ok—Texas can secede and become a new fascist state, and San Francisco can secede and become a communist one. Yay.

I’ve been a lifelong roadtripper. I took my first one with my high school comrade Craig the summer after high school. We took off in a tiny car with no destination or map, winding or way up to Seattle and back. We slept in the car on suburban streets, or else at people’s houses we happened to meet. We ate grocery store food and spent almost no money, and filmed everything in a ‘Furthur’-like movie. The catchwords were ‘aimless’, ‘passion’, and ‘weird’. This is version five. It’s nice to know that this praxis of deterritorialization became the dominant theme of my scholarship later in my professional career.

It’s a long hot desert from L.A. to Arizona. Around three hours into the trip Vanessa informed me breezily that she had brought ALL our drugs with us in the car. And let me tell you, Hunter S. Thompson would be proud of our selection. Smart people would not be proud of Vanessa’s shocking naïveté at attempting to bring them over the border into fascist states like Arizona and Texas. There are dogs. (Poor misused doggies. How would you like to work for a cop?) So, we stopped at a rest stop just outside of Arizona and sadly said goodbye to an eighth of my paycheck, still lying there in a dumpster in case any of you are desperate for free highs. We thus passed safely through the border patrol checkpoint, who are mostly uninterested in white people anyway. They like to use countless taxpayer dollars to satisfy the white people whining about taxpayer dollars used to give illegal immigrants health care and schooling. We listened to Bruce Springsteen’s “The Line” and “Balboa Park” to contemplate the plight of entirely mistreated immigrants. What a joke of a job, anyway, ‘border patrol’. Borders are symptom of a disease called sovereignty, which can only be cured by an opening into a concept of the people as multitude.

What can I say about Arizona besides that? Nothing, except saguaro cacti are sooooo cool. I love their independent spirit. I like the poly ones with one strong base and three-five strong upright branches. Took a long walk through the desert. For all the dessication, it’s soul-quenching. New Mexico? Well, we only stopped in Lordsburg, where we visited the ghost town of Shakespeare only to find that it was closed. Towns can close. A family owns it. A family owns a town. Back in the day it had hundreds of residents and absolutely no law enforcement. My kind of town. Let us police ourselves. Lordsburg, like most small American towns off this stretch of the 10, has been left behind by trickle-down economics and its legacy, continuing through the Bush tax cuts and Obama’s shameful continuation of them. People can work in a Mexican restaurant or in law enforcement (border patrol) or fire management. We met a lady from New York and discussed the ridiculouslessness and fruitlessness of the drug war. Everyone fretting about how dangerous Juarez and the drug trade is, trying to curb corruption and capture gang leaders when all they’d have to do is legalize all drugs. Duh. Duh. Duh. This no-brainer at first sounded strange to the locals, but as they figured out that they were serious,t hey let their guard down and actually agreed. Apparently you have to watch out with views like that around here. They needed a safe space to agree.

TEXAS

Do you know how long it takes to drive across Texas? Probably as long as it takes to drive all the way top to bottom in Italy, during which time (in Italy), you cross though hundreds of languages. There are of course a few languages on hand in Texas—the German/Czech contingent is particularly odd to me. But it’s laughable that the dominant conservative caucus in Texas talks about ‘taking back Texas’ or taking back America, when the white people behind it are the minority, their favorite places all have Spanish names, they could barely exist without immigrant labor, and they stole the fucking land in the first place. If anyone should be ‘taking back America’ it’s the natives, anyway.

We stayed at a trucker motel next to a thinly disguised whorehouse in El Paso. The first Dunkin’ Donuts appearance warmed my soul as always. Then we drove. And drove. And drove. Texas never ends. Across the Czech and German towns, alongside frontage roads, stopping at bars with locals who started out giving us odd looks but soon opened up. (I think my sparkly shorts with the cut-out sides contribute to our initial reception. Or else it’s the communist/atheist/free love Reed College T-shirt. I usually stay away from the tourist areas of big cities, and even from big cities in general when I road trip, but I recommend the Riverwalk in San Antonio to anyone. It’s a bit like Pirates of the Carribean ride. The flora is amazing and if you go late at night are so there are few people, just you and the ducklings, in your short sleeves and shorts sweating at midnight.

HOUSTON

This is a strange town. You’d think any town built on oil would be repulsive, but it has a thriving arts scene, an openly-gay mayor (wait, TEXAS?!), a plethora of unique museums, an irreverent rock n’ roll tradition (“Houston Noise”) , delightfully strange city planning (I like the streetlights), and my favorite venue The Sacred Dice ever played at, Superhappyfunland! That’s where I write from tonight, one of the many couches in this Eastside arts/music happy land that, just as when we played here five years ago, let us crash here for free. I spent the past hour talking to the leader of the Houston insane-rock band Rusted Shut. His girlfriend and bass player of 23 years left him unceremoniously by telephone. Imagine the music industry and your love life falling apart at the same time. And yet he presses on, playing gigs at places like this awesome little multi-color fuck you to capitalism from which I write.

Every great city boasts unique weirdness, and in addition to the weirdest and best music venue, there is an Orange Center for Visionary Art and the Houston Art Car parade. We went and prayed to the god of Orange at the bizarre and tangy house built at the End of Hope (1979), and then to the universal gods at the Rothko chapel over in the museum district. By far my favorite chapel, the Rothko is an unsassuming square brick structure on the outside and a grey and black circle on the inside. There are meditation cushions and benches from which you can contemplate the Rothko canvases, which at first appear to be sheer matte black, but in fact admits of subtle variations in color and pattern. Since black absorbs all light, and since the chapel is organized in a circle rather than the spatial separations between worshippers and holy (wo)men of most churches, temples, mosques, etc, the effect for me is a presentation of the sacred as all inclusive and non-hiearchical—sacred communism! We left feeling very centered.

On the way out of town, my Dunkin’ Donuts locator iphone app took us to what was once a Dunkin’ Donuts but is now “Dunk Donuts”. They kept all the same logos and advertisments, blacking out the ‘in’ in ‘dunkin’ with a sharpie. Dunkin’ Donuts refused to lower their franchising fee so the local owner just took things into her own hands. Hilarious. Everything else was the same, even the donuts and (sacred of all fast food delicacies) the coffee.

LOUISIANA

Just when we were beginning to believe that we were in a sequel to Sartre’s No Exit in which the Texas highway goes on forever, we crossed into Lousiana. Almost immediately everything looks different. Coming from California, it’s always bizarre to see the houses with no yards to speak of—they’re just plopped there on green plots with no fences between each other (I like that, needless to say). Things get junglier, stickier, wetter, yummier, greener, sexier, greasier. We took tiny ‘highways’ deep down into the bayou, bypassing Interstate 10. One is struck first of all by the poverty. We passed through ‘historic districts’ with nearly all the businesses permanently closed (saw this in Texas a lot as well). So many shotgun shacks, cheap mobile homes, and houses falling apart. We stopped at a Waffle House (I love how they’re all shotgun shack-shaped as well!) and heard three stories from three people working the 8pm-4am shift. “There’s nothing here for kids, for anyone, really,” said Crystal, speaking of Morgan City, Lousiana. “There used to be arcades and stuff but that’s all gone.” She overcame a prescription pill addiction (apparently the big drug out this way, after a meth phase half a decade ago) to win her kid back after her husband died. They pay her $3/dollar. We tipped her 40 % but I left with a deep sadness and bitterness about this country and the ravages of capitalism. It’s not just the low wages, poor benefits, and union-busting. It’s the utter lack of money and effort (owing in part to the scandalously low tax rates) put into the kinds of community resources that by comparison are overflowing in Europe. And what you always hear out this way—the cops are corrupt. Of course.

But my god the food. It’s the only food in America that doesn’t make me embarrassed when showing it to European friends. We took a walk through what seemed to us like a jungle today, in the Palmetto State Park, and ran across massive black wild boars and a gaggle of armadillos who, apparently because they are well armoured, did not care how close we got. We’ve been listening to a lot of Bruce Springsteen, mourning the death of Clarence Clemons, and no one besides Woody Guthrie got the United States better. Every sax solo cuts to the heart these past few days, and Phish broke our hearts with a touching, thrown-together and abject tribute to Clarence . In any case, it makes me want to tip everyone 30%. I am disgusted at my rich friends who tip 15%.

We finally went to a strip club here in Houma, LA, off the 90. Vanessa has been wanting to go to a bunch for her research. This one was the size of my garage and featured the most overweight stripper I’d ever seen. She was a marvel to watch as she shook her butt relentlessly for the pleased patrons. We met a dancer named Georgia who invited us to spend the night at her place. She has three kids, the first when she was 17. Her husband is a rigger working off the coast, and is gone for weeks at a time. I’m now at a Waffle House writing this at 1:35am, waiting for her to get off work. See you in Mississippi.

Who needs Love Stories? We want FreedomTruthBeautyLove Stories!

2011-03-21T19:43:00.000-07:00

I like to take the indefensible positions by pop culture and academic standards. Mind you, those are two different standards, but they are equally dogmatic. By pop culture standards, Moulin Rouge can’t be one of the finest films because pseudo-intellectuals and film buffs champion ‘realism’ (a joke of a term, when it comes to all film), dialogue, and ‘moral ambiguity’, by which they really mean films without an ethical commitment that make cheap stabs at profundity through ambiguity and overly psychological (instead of political, social, aesthetic) musings. By academic standards, Moulin Rouge is no closer to the top because, well, it has pop songs and did too well at the box office.

The reason I think it’s near the best is that it combines revolutionary sensibility with bombastic pop accessibility, which after all is what revolution should be about—accessibility. And the T-Rex song “Children of the Revolution” is an essential self-identifying characteristic of the movie’s heroes. That the number of heroes in the film is in the hundreds only makes it more revolutionary. It also makes use of what film does so beautifully that other arts can’t imitate: montage, as well as the combination of music with narrative and visual imagery. Indeed, no film that does not make meaning with music can fully live up to the emotional possibilities of film.

But let’s talk about freedom, truth, beauty and love. Kudos to writers Baz Luhrman (also the director, as I’m sure you know if you bothered to read this far about such a tastelessly idealistic movie) and Craig Pearce for refusing to cower to cynical, hip valuations of any such slogans as ‘not complex’ enough. Please—as I argued in another blog, what passes for complexity in Hollywood—No Country for Old Men—is but politically ignorant late capitalist obsession with individual characters. Kudos not just for those four words, but for their interrelation. The film is painstakingly constructed to reveal (and embody the truth that) each of those ideals is impoverished without the other. Beauty is impoverished without truth (Satine’s sexuality is fake and unsexy until the truth of the poet’s words get through to her). One needs Love to maintain the spirit to fight for Truth. Love without Freedom is bourgeois (see Forrest Gump and its writing off of all freedom fighters as mere cultural ‘phases’ which our dumb hero is somehow above and beyond with his apolitical love). Lastly, Freedom without Love easily descends into dogma and tyranny (see Fox News talking about ‘freedom’ in America).

The most bizarre criticism I hear about the film is that its vision of love and its love scenes are too escapist or unreal. Huh? That’s how being in love looks. Also, it’s a love story between a bohemian revolutionary and a prostitute, which celebrates drug use, doggedly refuses to separate romantic sentiment from civic consciousness, and ends with death. The use of contemporary popular songs is seen by some to be creatively lazy, but to me it’s a stroke of genius, which does the opposite of simply riding on other people’s genius—Luhrman makes all of those songs more powerful than they are in their contemporary context, trapped in the specific spaces allotted to them by capitalist production processes. It is good for us to hear “Heroes” mapped onto turn-of-the-century Bohemian values, with Toulouse-Lautrec in mind, and to hear McCartney’s “Silly Love Songs” lifted up where it belongs beyond silly Paul McCartney and into the more John Lennon landscape of revolutionary turn-of-the-century Paris. And sure enough, 100 years later, the world still hasn’t got enough of silly love songs.

Why? Because they’re not so silly in the right context. We may like the songs “Children of the Revolution” (the revolutionary song) and “Come What May”(the love song), but they appear in the movie as but drafts, moments of dawning consciousness that are not fully realized until they are wed in the grand finale, in which both songs are sung together. Thus, “I will love you, come what may” is spliced with “stand our ground, for freedom, truth, beauty and love”, “you won’t fool the children of the revolution”, and the poet’s song as well (“my gift is my song”). I can’t underscore this moment enough—it is the most brilliant moment in the film and one of the most brilliant moments in film history. By themselves each of those songs is inspiring and moving. Combined together, sung both as part of a production and part of the real lives in that production, they are revolutionary.

The film looks superficially like a tragedy, given that the heroine dies, but it is filmed untragically. First, when she learns of her impending death, the pimp/owner of the Moulin Rouge leads the ensemble of the theater in “The Show Must Go On.” Luhrman takes care to film everyone involved in the production, from the stars to the underlings and the old men working the rafters. We start to realize that there is something bigger than the little loving twosome going on here. When Satine dies, the camera pans up (again capturing some of the workers normally uncaptured in such love stories) and over the curtain, where the audience is applauding—they are applauding because Satine DID succeed—although her performance was one night only, and although her life is over, she gave the performance of the century, which transcended acting, broke down the third wall, and became real. She sang the song written for a fictional situation sincerely, truly, heartrendingly, in a real situation. This is the purpose of great art. This is how great people react to art. They do not separate the stage and the street. They bring the songs to the street, to the bedroom. That is what it means to be the children of the revolution. A far cry from the American habit of leaving the movie’s message in the theater. (Did you notice, Star Wars fans, that the heroes are “terrorists” and revolutionaries??? Live up to your cheering habits…) That is why the “Elephant Love Medley” ends with “we can be heroes”. That is why in the hands of Luhrman the can-can becomes a Nietzschean affirmation: yes we CAN CAN CAN!

Che Guevara maintained that the true revolutionary is guided by feelings of true love. Equally so, the true lover is guided by revolutionary spirit. If love is not revolutionary, it is but affection, affirmation, comfort, stability, what Nietzsche calls “wretched contentment”. It is interesting that the villain maintains many of the notions of love, freedom, and truth that underpin late capitalism. Interesting because the audience ostensibly identifies not with the villain but the lovers. This is because we think of film, like the villain thinks of the production within the production of Moulin Rouge, as a form of spectacle that doesn’t hold true in real life. But everywhere the film reminds us that such a perspective is merely refusing to accept our revolutionary responsibility to write our own stories. As I argued above, this is why Christian walks off the stage in the middle of the final production. It is also why he walks back on when his lover demonstrates that she understands that their art is more powerful than reality itself.

So watch it again. Notice the progression of the songs, culminating in the pitch-perfect finale (perhaps the greatest finale in film history). Notice how you feel. Then take it to your bedroom. Once you’ve perfected it there, take it to the streets. THAT’S what this story is about. Come what may.

Burning Man 2010: Metropolis: an Art Review

2010-09-14T05:04:00.000-07:00

Sure Burning Man is a survival adventure, a party, an anticapitalist civic experiment, a science experiment, a new Home. But for me, it is above all an arts festival. Where to begin, though, when addressing the art? It’s everywhere. It’s not just the honorarium installations on the playa, nor the unfunded ones either. People turn their homes into art (theme camps), their bodies into art, and merely in walking and biking around people alter the art, continue it, fulfill it, finish it. There is art that only functions when the people play it, such as a three legged crystal of glowing cubes with touch pad rhythms at the end of its tentacles.
There is art that must be completed by us, such as the communist bar lying towards the end of the playa—one bar, four bar stools with a hammer and sickle, a table and chairs, a bench, and saloon doors with no walls. It was up to various enterprising and generous artist/visitors (the line is blurred) to bring alcohol and man the bar, offering their best communist musings. There is the art of writing at Burning Man, in a little dome on the edge of town or perhaps an office desk and chair standing their alone in the middle of the desert.

The best I can do, then, is offer some musings on the swirling, changing art manifesting on the playa in expanding and contracting circles and layers.

- Playa walk #1, in the hot midday sun. I’m talking deep into the desert, far from the safety of the tiny, heat-blurred center camp. I pass a Marcusian vision—fish leaping out of the ground, baited by circuit boards, with a beach chair in the center. Each fish is painted uniquely, but each fish falls into the same technofetish trap. The spectator/fellow-artist sits in the beach chair to rest, forced to contemplate the kind of constant baiting going on even while we rest.

- Further out, we reach a feat of sacred geometry—a pentagon in the center, five of us sitting with our backs to a side. Across from the slanting sides were mirrors, so that we could see our selves and the other four fanned out around us. All the while, a machine hummed at a frequency almost too low for human ears. The frequency and the perfection of shape and color (perfect red and perfect blue) were supposed to help us find balance or grace or at least pause. It worked for me.

- I stumble along: there is a (fake) man in a biochemical suit operating a mine detector in front of a blooming flower. The flower seems fierce, defiant. In this Metropolis, Mother Nature often asserts its power, from these surprising growths, to honeybees transplanted to the desert, to the awesome all-consuming power of fire.

- I reapply my sunscreen and trundle on—there in front of me is the obelisk from Kubrik’s 2001. I think of Also Sprach Zarathustra, the symphony and the text, and the birth and rebirth of civilizations. Does Burning Man constitute a birth. Will it’s model ever spread? I come again, with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent – not to a new life or a better life or a similar life: I come back eternally to this same, selfsame life, in what is greatest as in what is smallest, to teach again the eternal recurrence of all things…" (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche, “The Convalescent”)

- Water from the camelbag. Scribble some notes in front of the obelisk. Mutter “Civilization lurches towards its destiny with the first weapon” to a woman who walks up, walk past a solar-powered upside down city, manifesting on the underside of a pop globe. I am too tired to walk over to that one. It occurs to me that no one curates Burning Man, nor are we ourselves curated by Burning Man. I make it to “The Heart Machine” : a giant underground heart, with four ventricles popping out of the dust further out. If three others placed their palms on the sensor at each ventricle, with enough energy we could speed up the heartbeat until the ventricles shoot fire. But alas I was out there alone.

- I turn back to look at the Man. He is perched on the pure Form of Skyscraper. Just the scaffolding, without the offices. When we burn this man we burn the skyscraper, too.

- I pass a small town park, everything symmetrical and in proportion, from the number of arched entryways to the position of the benches. It is important to pay attention to detail when the desert threatens to blow away one’s piece of precious meaning-making. Then I pass a temple dedicated to all religions. This, too, seems incomplete without our participation, so I perform a wedding ceremony between a woman and the world: “…Do you agree to progress from a mere twosome to a conjugation with the world itself, to love and to cherish, to live and to perish?...” Etc.

- After a conversation with a naked couple in their fifties, I make my way towards a large metal globe consisting entirely of city streets mapped over city streets, in three separate layers. Despite the lack of open spaces, I find it strangely beautiful, the criss-crossing designs formed by our attempts to connect everything. The piece works as a reification of our lived experience of metropolis.

- After so long I am grateful to find a shade structure. Shade structures at burning man combine aesthetics and utility. It is wondrous strange to finally reach a distant piece of art only to realize that you need this piece for shelter, recuperation, rehydration. Out near the trash fence is a double dome, so low to the ground you think there is no opening. But there is. Inside it is cooler, even with eight people crammed into the dome, most of them named Ted. There are pens and crayons everywhere for writing on the cloth interior of the dome. There is a dynamic of focused respite here in these shade strucutres, unlike the unfocused relaxation spaces we are used to. It may be focused towards beliefs, as the little house-shaped one with paper leaves on which we are supposed to write beliefs, and read others’. (One I wrote down: “The power of the boy overrides the mind. Enjoy.” I wrote: “I believe in believing.”) It may be focused on education, like the beekeepers’ dome. Perhaps it is focused on memory, like the tiny house playing a recording of someone’s memories. A gratitude emerges in all cases, perhaps even an anger on behalf of all those without shelter in our various Metropolises. In any case, I see a cloud of dusty hurtling towards me, swallowing all the art and people until they are gone. In these instances you know the dust storm is your destiny, that there is no direction to run. You affix your goggles and bandana and it hits you, until only the sounds of drum and bass remain, like the manifold heart of metropolis itself. I duck inside the serendipitous shade structure and wait it out, talking to six strangers about King Lear, which is what I am ‘gifting’ today in our gift-run economy.

In addition to the shade structures are the manifold cushiony areas to lay one’s weary, sun-stroked body. They may take the form of the Pleasuredome at our own Polyparadise. Perhaps it’s a massive dome filled with giant glowing mushrooms and crystals, or it could be a circle of hammocks suspended among willowing shawls. The important thing is that they are open to all, like most ‘private’ spaces at Burning Man. Indeed, Burning Man questions our American attachment to property and privacy. Only the gauche here talk about ‘my space’.

- Time to take the long walk home. Along the way I pass a pile of metal refuse, littered also with plastic easter eggs. The instructions say to pick one, take it’s treasure, and leave your own. I remove the glowing ring, put it on my ring finger, and leave in its place a Star Wars Valentine that says “Together we Can Rule the Galaxy”.

- Next piece: a cross between a graveyard and junkyard, with various plaster limbs and dismembered bodies. This world is still manipulatable, as you may stack stones, roll gigantic metal boulders, even arrange the limbs. But the joy of manipulative power is tempered by the sobering fragmentation of bodies. Is this piece a commentary on the disembodiment an dis-membership of capitalist society, with its shortage of embodied and whole activity, and its fruitless opportunities for movement and manipulation of our environment in a way that does not alter the fundamental stark reality of society’s organization?

And so on through the desert, reading Leonard Cohen poems with this group, handing out Star Wars valentines with epigrams my friends and I thought up. Each one of us in named ‘Ted’ here in the world of playa names, in a communist-absurdist theme camp ploy/play. I participate with the art, leaving a notebook that says “Lab rats have more meaningful careers than I do” on an office desk manifesting there in the deep playa. Perhaps it will be taken by someone, adding to his life—an exchange of goods occurs equally between art and public and between two people…with no market whatsoever! Perhaps it will remain an addition to the work itself. It’s hard to know what was ‘meant’ to be there. Nothing, perhaps.

Of course the playa art is not the only art. There are the theme camps, from the expensive collaborative projects to the hastily thrown together little havens on the edge of town—from sacred space villages to techno-lush domes; from Cuban beaches to teahouses. There are also the art cars, this year as fascinating as ever. A schooner which required passengers to don hot rubber fishing suits and was capable of depositing a 100 ft. diameter fishing net to ‘catch’ a fish art car. A futuristic tank with a 19th century drawing room as its inner compartment (always disorienting to be blasted with techno music within such a room). A land speeder from Star Wars, a massive, glowing, travelling 8-track recorder. The key here is defamialiarization. Sure, it’s always fun to ride a yacht. But riding a yacht across the desert, that moves the experience from relaxing to revealing. Aaron and I descended into the hold of the yacht to find a land of cushions and pillows, people draped in every style of repose. A man announced that he and his wife would perform for us, but she left. “She’s shy,” the husband said. Riding art cars is doing Burning Man in style. How much is better is the art when it’s viewed from on top of or within art?

It all ends with the temple burn, the temple wherein thousands wrote messages to the dead, deposited books of photos and stories, set up shrines and left diaries and artifacts. All of it up in flame, in a silent catharsis (it’s stunning how silent the playa becomes). When the man burns, we burn away that which in us is overripe, stale, needs to be purged. When the temple burns, we allow our grief freedom to leave us. Either way, to every thing there is a season, burn, burn burn. What are you going to burn next year?

The Other Guys and the other economic system

2010-08-25T12:25:00.000-07:00

I hope those of you who saw "The Other Guys" avoided the ADD rush and stayed for the credits.(Please click on the link and look at them!) If you do, you get to see a litany of statistics detailing what's wrong in our capitalist system, played out over a ruthless Rage Against the Machine version of Dylan's excoriating "Maggie's Farm". Specifically, it's about what's wrong with the system of subsidized banks and nonsubsidized people. There are some revolting statistics--I won't detail them here, except to say watch them, and watch for the one about the exponential rate of growth of the proportion of CEO earnings to working-class earnings. Another tidbit: The $700 billion T.A.R.P bail out is enough to give each man, woman and child in America $2,258.
The credits are just one element in a strikingly anticapitalist and some would say anti-American (although that is just a conservative term for refreshingly critical) film. I thought it was courageous, for example, to play out a somewhat typical shoot-em-up action scene (with action heroes The Rock and Samuel L. Jackson) that ends in an arrest. A reporter then asks the cops if 20 million in city damage was worth arresting the culprits for what amounts to a misdemeanor quantity of pot. Their answer? "Why don't you ask the people of New York City? Best city in the world!" Rarely have I seen such satire of post-9/11 jingoism covering up wrongheaded policies such as the drug war. (Hollywood's complicity in the Drug War is spoofed throughout the movie as Mark Wahlberg's character thinks every lead and every bad guy points to some form of drug-dealing, when in fact all villainy in the movie belongs to the world of finance capital). The villain speaks at the "Center for American Capitalism", and the hero at one point, asked about the importance of law enforcement, says: "How about a community of socially-responsible citizens simply all doing their part?"
From spoofs of gun-happy cops to jibes at the S.E.C., the film is a veritable tirade against the age of corporate dominance and the complicity of law enforcement, the media, and the entertainment industry. Sure, the film is no "South of the Border" (Oliver Stone) or "Tout Va Bien" (Godard), but it's a step in the right direction. When interviewed, stars Wahlberg and Ferrell asked them if they were on board a propos the film's radical politics. They said: "Of course--that's why we did the film." Did I mention it was funny? I suppose that deserves some applause as well, since the combination of socially important and funny is a rare one indeed. Strange that almost none of the reviews I read mentioned the political messages. Then, again, that's not so strange, after all. It's part of the problem. One of the more insidious elements of the capitalist treatment of time and space is the division of everything into departments, sectors, and of course genres. Philosophy departments don't intercourse with Economics departments, a rock audience is now clearly delineated from a protest , and politics doesn't mix with entertainment, especially comedy. Even when it does, critics and viewers tend to tune out the socially relevant (see the mass exodus during the credits of this film) in favor of a pure form of the opiate of the masses. No, not religion, ENTERTAINMENT. Sure, there are always exceptions, and I close this note with gratitude for those who bleed the spaces together, such as Tom Morello and Stanley Aronowitz.

A PHISHING TRIP PT III: JUXTAPOSE!

2010-08-10T19:04:00.000-07:00

Let me tell you what it was like to listen to music in prison. I told you what it was like the first time I put on headphones in months. Heart-flooding. Thereafter, I developed a relationship with music that was a sublimation of my frustrated sensuality and sexuality. It was also a tunnel into the world.
Let me start by describing what was for me the opposite experience of standing on a prison yard: standing in the middle of the crowd at a Phish concert. Phish is a band that jams its songs into unrecognizable, unpredictable times and spaces. You can—and I have—follows them for a few shows and never hear the same song twice. When you do hear it twice, it can barely resemble the last version. Already this sounds nothing like prison, of course. But being there, on the road, on the run against time, was unparalleled, since I myself never got to participate in a revolution or even a minor uprising of the people.
Ana and I were on bail, awaiting our sentence when we followed Phish up the West Coast of these fractured states of America. Originally we thought that first night in jail was the first night of our sentence. Then we were bailed out, and looked forward to a couple months of freedom. Time to get our things in order, say what needed to be said to friends and family, make our peace with the disappearing free world. We lived every day like it was our last, embracing desperately, pouring forth promises and apologies and new dreams for a new millennium, with a new consciousness of class born of our being summarily thrown into a new class. Only weeks left! Only one week left! Only a few days! And then…
We go to court and see our trial date moved back another few months. Sweet merciful bounty of extra life! Bonus freedom! Commence the process again: living in vivid colors, vivid sounds. The last colors. The last sounds. The last chance power drive. Back to court….another suspension of our bodies in this sweet coupled time and space!
And so on. And so on and on. A whole year living each day intensely, fully, consciously and conscientiously. It was heady, high and exhausting. A month in Las Vegas stripping to pay my parents back for the lawyer. Reading the history of prisons, reading the great philosophers of solitude and strength—Nietzsche, Bukowski, Benjamin, Dostovesky, Roberto Benigni, Tyler Durden. Reading each other in an attempt to memorize each other.
And then on this tour, from Chula Vista to Mountain View to the empty plains of Eastern Washington, following them with a motley group of human living off of the goods they made and sold in the parking lots. We supported ourselves by making fake tickets (which nonetheless, back in the days before scanning, worked) and selling them in large numbers. Out under the September west coast stars.
And what I wanted in prison was this: the bass like a heart that lets you know it will go on when yours stops. The ringing of the guitar like a WASHING. The melody which is the one in our heads. You need the breeze on the neck. You need to see a few dozen smiles in your peripheral vision. You need the smell of marijuana, sweat, perfume, pine trees. Of course you need her next to you.
You need that strobe light as they hit the high notes. Why? Because a strobe and a machine-gun guitar line shake the lines. We expect the lines that form the shapes of our world to be mostly constant. In prison, we know them to be constant, deprived as we are of soft materials, of women, of mind-altering substances, of rock n’ roll lighting. The strobe is the limit of difference.
It’s a particular feeling.
For a certain kind of housewife or househusband: it’s when every appliance in your kitchen matches.
For five year olds: it’s when you read your first book to everyone you meet, and see that we can all be in the same story.
For lovers, it’s like falling in love, but with the whole world.

I put on my headphones in my cell in prison and could hear the soundtrack of those times: 11.20.98, Hampton, VA. 9.11.99, George, WA. Sweet merciful
All I wanted was to get out and be among the people in this way again. But it was and is, I realize now, not so cut and dry, the superiority of this musical experience over the one in jail. The real opening of possibility and perception comes from juxtaposition. In prison, one pines for the openness, pines for the breeze and the warm burble of friendly voices, that thump in the chest that is more than mere hearing. But back in the show, out of prison, one in fact pines for the focus and intense consciousness of solitude. Headphones, after all, are the preferred tool of the connoisseurs of sound.
More to the point, in either state, one sinks into that state, normalizes it. Ceases to be rocked by it. The ideal, then, would be back and forth: prison/show/prison/show. A bizarre juxtaposition. An impossible one. In and out. This is the rhythm of revelation and revolution. Not the copout of staying in or staying out, but the copulation.
IN OUT
Back forth
Past present
Red blue
Flood spot
Constrained free
Me us
Juxtapose! Juxtapose my scholarly work and my creative work. My professional life and my ‘private’ life. Literary and pop. Jazz and rock. Sex and spirituality. Politics and art. Class and consciousness. Indeed, the lack of juxtaposition is a product of time and space and produced by capitalism, which divides everything into sectors, genres, departments, for the purposes of maximizing efficiency and minimizing the dangerous effects of…juxtaposition! Mixing, coming together, hybridity…revolution.
Fuck that. No, literally, fuck it. In and out, in and out, hear her groan, the moon and the sea. Back and forth. Of course this is an impossible dream—to jump in and out of prison. If we could, we would be brilliant. But the closest I can get is to go back to the show and let the song intersperse with the version I listened to in prison. Or to let the one I listen to in prison intersperse with one from a past show. And to let my notes from the two experiences mix and match. Because I forget the truths of being locked up when I’m free, and forget the truths of freedom when I am locked up.
Juxtapose!

A PHISHING TRIP PT II: NOTES FROM THE OVERGROUND 8.05.10

2010-08-10T18:50:00.000-07:00

Here we are: a Greek theater. A tragic chorus, a comedic chorus. A tribe in the midst of the dance where everybody dances.

Uncle John is working the show, as an electrician. We are in the show, as electricity, conducted under the soft blue dome of sky.

One becomes an expert at listening, working through one’s psyche, spelunking in the caves of the Id, in a three-night stand like this. As Bergson knew, duration is the key to understanding time. Seeing multiple shows offers the wisdom of marriage.

Hi my name is: ___Andy_________. (There is the contribution of my neighbor. My journal is his name tag).

The drugs work! I can work! Here’s some work:
Learn how to funk it up in the face of death. The lesson of this song “Possum”, a meditation on driving down the road and being confronted with death. But this meditation grooves. It takes metaphysical talent to groove this hard with death. But Trey Anastasio is reading his guitar cues somewhere above our heads, gaping, eyes intent on some kind of telos prompter.

Another neighbor writes in my journal: Laugh and the world laughs too.
My response: get high and the world gets high too.

The jam is always relevant. Because it fits everywhere. You cannot have an irrelevant night here unless you are lazy.

Most of my life has been spent making sure a woman won’t leave me.
“This time will be different, this time will be different…until I do it again” he sings. But the third time he leaves off the ‘until I do it again’ and just jams. Of course this time will be different—every jam is. In every jam there is the hope that we are not just repeating ourselves. That, contrary to Cesare Pavese’s intuition, it is not the case that “what has been, will be.” In any case this blues has become supersonic blues, elevating it into the realms of pop.

Time really only offers up its fruits when you lose track of it. Hard, because you love it so much and you have so little of it. There lies the rub.

Set break:
1 pill of aderol and 4 shots of supersonic blues. We want to believe anything is possible. To do this, start with techniques of defamiliarization and deterritorialization, using light, duration, chemical alteration, unfamiliar language. Then, we need a direction. Find a city, the band says, via David Byrne. Not enough. There needs to be a sense that anything is possible politically, which is to say that the political is now social and material.
To imagine crazy things such as flying horses and women as large as the temple is good training for this kind of belief. Good training for, say, the belief that we could do without the really poor or really rich. For the belief that property rights are not what make us human or happy. For the belief that it’s possible to all together disrupt the machine merely by quitting out little cog-parts.
There is plenty of faith—look at the churches.
There is plenty of will—look at the philosophers.
There is plenty of energy—look at this show.
But now we need a direction. The band provides fist in the air power. Now write the fight into this power. “Got a blank space where my fight should be”, to revise Trey’s lyrics. That’s my challenge to you.

So loving and casually eternal with my Linz tonight.

Things to remember:
- type with the kind of ruthless forward movement of “Weekapaug Groove”
- the show of life is being played right now. You’re on. Play.
- You can always be at the show at least with Vanessa and Lindsey.

A PHISHING TRIP PT I: SETLIST NUMEROLOGY

2010-08-10T18:35:00.000-07:00

Phish played “Harry Hood” on both 12.30.99 and 8.07.10. Unlike most rock bands, the difference between those two performances varies greatly—such is the nature of the jam. I keep the numbers in my head like buoys spread out across great swaths of formless, merciless sea. This isn’t “Harry Hood”, it’s “Harry Hood 12.30.99”. The difference between jams is not only a matter of material, e.g. the notes, chords, melodies, themes vibrating in the cool humid Florida (12.30.99) or strangely chilly dry Berkeley (8.07.10) air. There is another part of the jam—your part. The part where your memories, hopes and present feelings swim and swirl around in the rarefied air of the jam, changing its contours.
Of course, “When the Circus Comes” jams quite differently with your own love on 12.31.99 than it does on 10.31.09. For when he sings “Could have had a chance to get out of this mess / The time that you came and the day that you left”, he was talking about one woman in 99 and another in 2009. In fact, in 1999 you held your wife and the chill went through your heart as your remembered your first, long lost love. In 2009 you do so with your 2nd wife, remembering your first. The song goes on, both in newer and newer incarnations, and in newer incarnations of older versions, since listening to 12.31.99 on 8.10.10 alters the meaning of the song again. “It didn’t mean that much / It didn’t mean that much”. It didn’t on 12.31.99, but it does listening to 12.31.99 on 8.19.10. Some numbers match up well. Sometimes they fall into place and out of the chaos swims a line of grace. A melodic line. And this time, you get what she had been trying to tell you. Or this time, you let it go once and for all, changing ad hoc the sense of a decade of versions of the song. But you cannot get too revisionist—the numbers are there to remind you of what you have forgotten. That is why some of those who do not want a reckoning with their past do not go back and listen. They know the numbers don’t add up. The difference between me and the friend who accompanied me for a 7.31.97 version in Mountain View, CA, is I’m still writing and rewriting the meaning of that number.
Meanings swim in and out of each other, back and forth across time and space. 8.17.97. 7.13.03. 8.07.10. Limestone, Maine. George, Washington. Prague, Czech Republic. Ana. Lindsey. Erica. Craig. Crime. Punishment. Freedom. Swirls and curls, through time, and always those numbers, flashing like the matrix at the beginning of the Wachowski Bros. film. What was trauma on 9.11.99 is grace on 8.08.09. The “Harry Hood” jam plays in my earphones—8.07.09, the Gorge. I think of all the Hood jams. All the hoods: Louis’ summer at Mt. Hood. Alan Moore’s “Under the Hood”. Ana’s clitoral hood. The hoods I knew in prison. The band sings “you can feel good, you can feel good, good about hood!” This is not some hippie clarion call announcing the oneness or the goodness of all things. No, this is multiplicity. A sometimes terrifying multiplicity of possibilities, meanings, hearts clashing. What matters to me is that we are continually revising, continually revisualizing, continually drawing new lines of flight through the matrix of versions of these songs. This is what I call jamming across space-time. Try this at home.

Legalize Drugs and There Go All Our Dramatic Plots

2010-03-16T00:48:00.000-07:00

For me, the entire discussion of good film is denuded of a higher purpose to the word ‘good.’ It is not that good, unless it is political. (Yes, of course there are plenty of exceptions). As such, this blog is of a piece with my last one about political music. This is not because I dislike apolitical or purely aesthetic film. It’s because there is no such thing. If it is apolitical, aesthetic, more concerned with psychology than social reality, then it has a definite political reality—that of late capitalism. Frederic Jameson astutely
“Let me try to state this distinction in a grossly oversimplified way: one of the determinants of capitalist culture, that is, the culture of the western realist and modernist novel, is a radical split between the private and the public, between the poetic and the political, between what we have come to think of as the domain of sexuality and the unconscious and that of the public world of classes, of the economic, and of secular political power: in other words, Freud and Marx.” (Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” in New Political Science, Summer 1986 No. 15)
It is a privilege of the ruling political theory and ruling class to even have the time and space to say they are not interested in politics. To even have the idea that it is possible to separate social relations from ‘inner psychology.’ Soviet film and literature is today written off as “socialist realism,” but it is not as if the fiction we are used to is more moderate, less of a product of ideology. Our brand of fiction could just as easily be called “capitalist realism.” We don’t call it that, though, in MFA programs. We call it “good fiction.”
This is why I think arguments about the artistic worth of movies such as No Country For Old Men or Miami Vice are trapped to one side—and that side is not the left. They take for granted one of the absurd tenets of the War on Drugs, which is that drugs should be illegal. There are many reasons for this, but the top 3 are:
1) We’ve made no progress on the Drug War over the past few decades, wasting billions of dollars. Every time there is a drug bust, it only makes it more profitable to get or stay in the business. We could save enough on legalization to give everyone schooling and health care.
2) As for the danger of the drugs, they are dangerous chiefly because they are illegal. As such, doses are not consistent, they can be cut with anything, and the stigma associated with them discourages users from seeking practical help or rehabilitation.
3) In addition to taking the more than 50% of drug offenders out of prison and into rehab or productive jobs, legalization would cut down on most other crimes, since, as flipping through the television will tell you, most crimes are drug related. That is, related to drugs being illegal, since that’s where the profit is.
There are many more reasons, but this isn’t the place for them. This is the place to assert that if drugs were legal, we’d lose most of our television dramas and a good portion of our film as well! Let’s start with Miami Vice. Michael Mann is a good director; the film was tense, well-plotted and paced, and full of those ambiguities film critics love: Does Sonny place his personal attachments over his professional ones, etc? How about instead does Sonny get some god-damned POLITICAL attachments? Like the one to legalize drugs so that every murder and mutilation in the film wouldn’t have to happen?
As for “No Country for Old Men,” it’s yet another ‘psychological’ drama wherein we investigate or observe via the eccentric, unflinching eyes of the Coen Brothers’ camera the inner reality of a pathological hit man and a hapless group of people caught in his crossfire. The problem is, there is no acknowledgement from the Coens (and I assume the same for Cormac McCarthy) of the real tragedy, which is that this hit man only exists because drugs are illegal. All of the death and destruction in that horrifically violent film because drugs are illegal. You may say, judge art for its aesthetic merits, regardless of the politics of its makers, but that is only to assert your own ideology, the one created in the forges of capitalism, where the political is sliced off from the personal, and the economic sliced off from the social. It’s always passed as cheap profundity to leave big questions unanswered or indeterminate: What could drive men to behave this way. Sorry Coens, but we know an answer to the biggest Why in this film, but you obfuscate it. So it’s not a great film to me. Not as great as Godard’s Tout Va Bien or Oliver Stone’s JFK, or even the Wachowski Bros. Speed Racer, all politically sophisticated films. This is an ailing country, and it’s no country for old ideologies.

U2 and Bruce Springsteen At The Top

2010-01-02T10:46:00.000-08:00

The four-hour television-special concert celebrating the 25th anniversary of the rock n’ roll hall of fame of course boasted a collection of astoundingly good musicians playing astoundingly good music. But I am not interested in writing about musicians or musicality. This is one of the pleasures of writing a blog as opposed to journalism—you don’t have to keep up the farce we call objectivity, or the thinly disguised relativism we call respecting other’s tastes. I’m not interested in the tastes of musicians and music aficionados. I’m not interested in what the Rolling Stones did for style, posturing, or blues songwriting. I love the smooth sound, virtuosity, and courageous racial-barrier leaping of groups like Little Anthony and the Imperials, but that’s not my critical specialty. I love Bonnie Raitt’s honest voice, Stevie Wonder’s songwriting. Paul Simon is a genius and breakthrough songwriter, and Garfunkel has one of the most gorgeously sincere voices I’ve ever heard, but even they were dwarfed by the world-straddling power of what I’m interested in.
What am in interested in? Music that, as Bono put it, “believes the world is more malleable than you think.” And there were only two such manifestations at the 25th anniversary concert: Bruce Springsteen and U2. (We killed off one of the rare others this year—Michael Jackson). Every time a best of the year or best of the decade list comes out, I just shake my head at what the necessary abstractions and lies of objectivity require—including anyone other than these two at the top. The best ten songs of the year were all by Springsteen and U2 (OK, and Dylan). The best 10 albums of the decade were all Springsteen and U2 (Ok, and Dylan). The reasons were on display where they should be on display—at a concert celebrating the best in rock history.
Let’s start with Springsteen. First of all, he doesn’t play in a band—he travels around in a perpetual spiritual battle. If Springsteen came before Hegel, Hegel could have saved me a lot of the headaches and desperation of reading The Phenomenology of Spirit, since he could have written a collection of Springsteen concert reviews instead. Springsteen closed night one with an epic set, not just mining the deepest reaches of various genres of rock n’roll, but celebrating those genres in the exercise of their most ambitious, engorged power. He brought out the most soulful of the soul men, Sam Moore. He knows enough to know where the soul is. Musicians will point to better musicians and songwriters than Sam Moore. But Bruce just looks at faces and bodies. Moore came out, in a shirt reading “SAM IS WHO I AM”, shaking his body outside the bounds of practice, of hipness, of posture, with an unfamiliar stage presence—as if he was infinitely grateful to be on stage and loving every minute of it.
Next Springsteen cared about the world, practically and palpably. There is a name for this that Americans—especially rock n rollers—are afraid of. It’s called being political. He gave a speech about Woody Guthrie and his tradition of topical, ruthlessly critical songwriting, taking issue with the barbarism of nation actually debating whether or not everyone deserves health care coverage. But it is not just the courage to make such a speech. He doesn’t just know who matters in these times—Woody Guthrie—but also writes contemporary songs that update Guthrie for the 21st century, such as “The Ghost of Tom Joad.” While Simon and Garfunkel are playing their hits (as opposed to, say, Simon’s courageous, gorgeous songs (Songs from The Capeman) about a Puerto Rican betrayed by our sick system of crime and punishment), Bruce is playing this modern folk song from one of his least-selling albums, along with the 10-minute storytelling masterpiece “Jungleland”, a strange choice at an all-star concert with short songs and brisk pacing. “The Ghost of Tom Joad” did not rest on its lyrical laurels—Springsteen and revolutionary artist Tom Morello sang and guitar soloed with vein-busting anger more at home in underground hip-hop than rock n roll: “Wherever there’s a cop beating a guy/wherever a hungry newborn baby cries…Wherever there’s somebody fightin’ for a place to stand/or a decent job or a helpin’ hand/wherever somebody’s strugglin’ to be free / look in their eyes Mom you’ll see me.”
As for U2, Bono sings every note with his entire body, with his entire life. It looked exhausting. Despite the tribute-and-history nature of the gig, the band played four newer tunes, along with one classic, a Springsteen song, and a Stones song. Like Bruce, Bono tends to pick songs that send double-meaning messages. “Stuck in a Moment”, then, was as much about the current state of the music industry, terrified of its own shadow, terrified to return to major risk-taking, as it is an outreach to a suicidal friend. But again, as with Bruce, the true power is in the ability to direct our energies and our attention in speech. “It’s a dangerous thing, this business of building idols, but at least rock n’ roll is not at its best in worshipping sacred cows. It’s about the thousands of voices gathered in one unwashed congregation, like tonight. For a lot of us here, rock n’ roll just means one word. Liiberation. Sexual, political, spiritual…liberation.” Don’t forget the middle child there—political--that’s where the world waits for our help. Those who say “I don’t like talking politics” are really saying, “I don’t like talking life.” The two are forever bound, now. As are U2 and Bruce (OK, and Dylan).

How to Stay in the Jam: Lessons From the Road with Phish

2009-08-17T10:36:00.000-07:00

What is the jam? It is a difficult question, complicated by more than just the usual fog of language and social habit. The fog—jam is misused as a term for R&B and hip-hop songs that most of the time have little or no connection to the jam. Dr. Dre high on his living room grand piano experimenting with a hip-hop version of Holst’s “The Planets” is more in tune with The Jam then any of his 3-minute ‘jams’. How about ‘jam bands’, an increasingly popular form of rock music, wherein the popular radio format is eschewed for long live songs obsessively recorded and deconstructed by traveling fans? This is closer, but most of these jam bands play jam songs—songs that announce themselves as anti-pop—and thus the element of magical extension and duration is undercut by sonic familiarity.
The Jam can be accessed everywhere and by everyone in tune with it—in this sense it is akin to George Lucas’s ‘Force’, which I think is best likened to love, which in turn is best rescued from self-help and Hollywood via the formula articulated in the most unlikely of places—U2’s neo-disco surfaceslipping anthem “Discoteque”:
You can push
But you can't direct it
Circulate, regulate
But you cannot connect it

The Jam traces the kind of intertextual, interstitial, international matrix best described as ‘rhizomatic’ in the most jammed-out book ever written—Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. If you haven’t read it, no worries—LSD costs less and only takes up 5-6 hours of your time.
My comrades and I began this summer under the aegis of the masters of The Jam—Phish, led by one of the few real-life Jedi knights, Trey Anastasio. How exactly does the jam work? It doesn’t work exactly, but Phish will serve as a useful microcosm-cum-macrocosm. The problem with anyone, any song, any event, any film, or any moment whatsoever that doesn’t JAM IT OUT is that life jams. It’s OK to want your art to be prettier, more succinct and digestible, and have more closure than life itself tends to have. The problem is we start to confuse this kind of art and daily practice with life. But life does not have closure, does not lend itself to clear beginnings and endings, to ‘authors’ (read: creation stories). It’s not only that Phish refuses to play the 3 ½ minute pop song, the anti-life format par excellence. Unlike other jam bands, jazz cats, or classical composers, they do embrace the pop song…and then they bend it and stretch it into oblivion. They do what David Lynch did to television with Twin Peaks, what Michael Jackson did to music videos, what Joyce did to the novel, what Kubrick did to science fiction(and—little recognized act of genius—what whoever the hell directed it did to science fiction with Star Trek: The Motion Picture).
But like the rhizome, the jam would merely be a caricature of what it intimates if it had a time and place. You may have heard there is a time and place for everything. That time and place is the jam. The jam doesn’t take place, it creates it. It cannot be clocked, only engaged with greater and lesser awareness throughout life. Vanessa Carlisle was the first in our travelling rebel brigade to articulate this. At her 3rd straight show at Jones Beach, Long Island, she turned to one of us and said: “I had it all wrong. I thought I was coming to a Phish show. I am merely entering the easiest-to-recognize part of the Jam.”
Here is how it happens: the house lights go out and the band starts playing music. This gives the illusion that some ‘thing’ has begun. We get lost in a 15-minute, manic “Maze”, which blends seamlessly (though seemfully) into a dark-and-stanky spelunking trip through the most intractable parts of our disease (“Down with Disease”. The jam begins so triumphant and joyous we forget the name of the song. This is the first step to becoming as brilliant as a child—forgetting the names of things. Soon you forget time, lose simple boundaries delineated by words such as ‘this song’, ‘this band’. Then greater boundaries go: ‘MY self’, my country, performer vs. audience, the show vs. the night-at-large etc.
The band takes a break. Our conversation and physical interactions with the audience soon take on an improvisatory tone until we realize the jam is still happening. We are jamming out the set break. The next set begins. In between the third and fourth (?!) song the band stops to confer—this too seems like a spoken jam. The guitarist jams according to motions of woman in the third row, who moves according to his jam—a perfect dialectic. Except that there are so many other elements jamming, it’s a polylectic. As the music reaches its frenzied climax, the complex system of lights jams with it. It would be oversimplifying to attribute this light show however to a light rig or the lighting designer, since the setting sun, arena lights, and manifold lights produced by the audience are part of the jam (glowrings in the thousands, like constellations loosened and losing both their place and our place). Soon, if you are tuned in, your memories, your identity, history itself is revealed as jamming with the band. This wisdom is not new of course—think of Buddhist entreaties to recognize the interconnectedness of all things. Or Qui-Gonn Jinn (Star Wars Episode I) entreating Obi-Wan Kenobi to “pay attention to the living force”, or telling young Anakin Skywalker that “your focus determines your reality.”
The show ends and the walk to the car is part of the jam. As such, we do not fall into the trap of thinking that it’s over. It’s merely that the onus is on us now to improvise with this Jedi-level of attunement to each other, to our city, to history. Nothing ends and nothing begins. We drive down the coast to Lindsey’s father’s house in South Carolina, and carry out the jam there, utilizing a downloaded version of Phish in Knoxville, TN, each of us jamming with whatever was at hand: caffeine (Aaron), aderol (Lindsey Kate), heartbreak (Vanessa), ghosts of Phish tours and marriages past (me). When Bruce Springsteen joined Phish onstage at the Bonnaroo music festival, both Springsteen and Phish fans were a bit put off, as many of them have imprisoned their band of preference in ‘genre’ or ‘style’. But there is no need to experience this particular coupling as anything but a natural and archetypal moment in each band’s performative history. That’s how it was us, for Bruce and Trey, and for anyone who can stay with the jam, free of the violent, compartmentalizations that form default everyday consciousness: ‘early Michael Jackson’ vs. ‘later Michael Jackson’ (cf. also early vs. late U2, Star Wars, Godard, Bob Dylan); the concert vs. the workday; the personal vs. the public sphere. French sociologist Henri Lefebvre attributes this compartmentalization to the way space must be invented in capitalism—“geometric—neutral, empty, blank—mental space”—posited in order to avoid the unpleasant, contradictory nature of social space (jam space!!!), which it displaces.
As a space where strategies are applied, abstract space is also the locus of all the agitations and disputations of mimesis: of fashion, sport, art, advertising, and sexuality transformed into ideality. (Lefebvre, 1991, 309)…We need space to be abstract to preserve the formal unity that gives our space-time meaning: capital. The heterogeneity, the conflicts and contradictions, are not disclosed in this formal unity. Things, acts and situations are being replaced by representations, and this homogenous abstract space is divided safely into sectors or systems: transportation system, school system, the work world; the world of texts, the money market…Ideologues, whether technocrats or specialists, convinced of their own freedom from ideology, isolate the sectors, with the end result of a tautology masquerading as science and an ideology masquerading as a specialized discipline. (Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 1991)
Capitalism has always been bad for the jam.
The band moves on around the country. Fans slip off and on tour. Songs appear three days after their last incarnation sounding totally different. Sometimes they sound the same but recent events (Michael Jackson’s death, the umpteenth illegal U.S. meddling in South American affairs, a friend finding out they’ve contracted an incurable disease) mean you jam with them differently. Then we come home from tour and back to our work. Some of us to writing (you are jamming with that right now—jam it out in the comments section!), some of us to our computer programming, some of us to our own music (wifey—although anyone who understand the jam never holds a proprietary position in respect to their music…or their land, lover, life). And we continue the jam. Phish will tour again next fall, then next summer, but this isn’t a separate tour. It’s all a continuity, and, as Leonard Cohen reminds us in Beautiful Losers, “it’s all diamonds.”

We Killed Michael Jackson

2009-06-25T21:33:00.001-07:00

Everyones taking control of me
Seems that the worlds
Got a role for me
Im so confused
Will you show to me
Youll be there for me
And care enough to bear me
- Michael Jackson

I’ve written about Michael Jackson a number of times, but the stampede of facebook lemmings writing things like ‘sicko, but great artist’ has moved me to write (the way rancid uncooked chicken moves me to vomit). I can’t remember an entertainment personality who was the victim of as much malicious venom as MJ. Not convicted rapists like R. Kelly or Mike Tyson. Not those caught cheating. Not murderers, heroin users, sexist and homophobic rappers, female pop stars who set back feminism twenty years.

What’s it about? Even before an obviously money-lusting couple of abusive parents sacrificed their child’s mental health to get money out of MJ, the King of Pop was the celebrity spittoon of gossip mags and of workplace water coolers, where abject cruelty and easy-target pot-shotting is passed off as humor. People couldn’t stop talking about his strange pets, plastic surgery, sleeping chambers, outfits, etc.

Watching Man in the Mirror a few years back, I figured it out—we hate him because he makes us feel bad about ourselves. Really bad. Because he is good. Really good. When all of pop music was turning ironic and narcissistic, he took the risk to write sincere songs about the suffering of other human beings. He spent more of his money on charities than any singer. He turned his house into a playland for children with terminal illnesses. He also took artistic risks, going for epic showmanship, symbolic power, and theatrical sincerity. He hired excellent directors and singlehandedly turned the music video into a viable art form. How could the shoegazer generation forgive someone who attempts not just to entertain or provide an outlet, but inspire and move to action?

Michael Jackson causes us to look up from our self-obsessed Depeche Mode/Mars Volta/Alice in Chains/singer-songwriter snowglobe and face the world. We resented him for it and wanted to believe—NEEDED to believe—that only a severely fucked-up individual could be like this. We do the same thing to other generous celebrities (Bono, John Lennon). And so we made special allowances to discredit Michael Jackson: innocent until proven guilty doesn’t fly for MJ. Our trite self-help philosophies about not caring about appearances, about looking how you want to look? Sorry MJ, doesn’t apply to YOU.

We killed Michael Jackson, just like we killed Laura Palmer, Charlie Parker, Pier Paolo Pasolini. Our cynicism killed him. May we give birth to the next heroic ATTEMPTER to make up for our crime. Will you be there?:

Psychology is for Bourgeois Pigs: X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

2009-05-11T07:50:00.000-07:00

I had a revelation while watching X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Bad films are better than good films. Of course, they’re not better than great films, by Antonioni, Godard, Wenders, Kusturica, Lynch, Fellini, as well as the films whose greatness slips by most critics consciousness: musicals and all six Star Wars films. But they’re better than good films, usually because they are free of the tired virtues of good film.

Which brings me to action and suspense, chills and thrills. Here I have a surprising list for you:
Great films: X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Speed Racer, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the Watchmen, Iron Man, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), Ang Lee’s Hulk, Batman Returns
Mediocre films: Bourne whatever, Independence Day, The Dark Knight, Munich, Mission: Impossible, The
Professional, Eagle Eye, Patriot Games, Daredevil, blah blah blah, the list goes on: if it’s called ‘suspense-thriller’ or if it looks or feels realistic, it SUCKS.

It sucks because films aren’t realistic. None of them. The closest thing to a realistic film is Andy Warhol’s Sleep or Richard Linklater’s Slacker. Pacing and plot—those are unrealistic concerns. Good dialogue and good acting? Unrealistic. Everyting about film is unrealistic, but apparently because the camera APPEARS to capture real human beings, capture material reality in some way more immediate than written text, we think ‘realism’ is a useful criterion. Indeed, the lack of realism in a Wolverine action scene or dialogue is less disturbing than Scorcese’s The Departed, where cops act just a little too punch-happy and are a little too emotionally involved with their criminals. “A little too”, in this case, is more problematic than ‘a lot’.

My least favorite kind of realism? Psychological realism. Yawn. Of course this is all that the discourse on screenwriting, directing and acting has become, especially among American film critics. I’m not interested in adducing what might be so psychologically complex about my films. Wrong question. I’m not defending the empty psychological content of these films—I’m praising it. I’m not asking for more ‘complexity’—I’m asking for less. This may be news to those who grew up in the eighties—the worst decade modern man has ever faced—or beyond, but complexity in film is established in lighting, framing, separation shots, music, etc. Dialogue and plot are mimetic crutches for novels (even novels have moved beyond them, in many cases!)

So please don’t bore us here in Diceland with your discussions of Jonathon Nolan scripts. Let’s look at some of Roger Ebert’s language in his Wolverine review: “His utterances are limited to the vocalization of primitive forces: anger, hurt, vengeance, love, hate, determination. There isn't a speck of ambiguity.”
There are two problems with psychological realism (1) It’s not possible in film. (2) it’s not desirable almost ANYWHERE.
(1) It’s not possible because cause and effect, human motive, the role of emotions in decision-making, trauma, language, epistemology in general—all of these elements are barely able to be addressed adequately in massive tomes by Immanuel Kant, Henri Bergson, James Joyce or Marcel Proust, which take a minimum of 10 hours, in my experience, to get through. A film is two hours long, at least one hour of which—especially in an action film, takes place without words. So please, enough of your aspirations to psychological complexity in dialogue and character development. What you are better served doing, and what Wolverine or Star Wars Episode I do, is emptying the dialogue of psychological ‘content’, and replacing it with suggestive images, allegories, epigrams. Likewise, dispense with character development and simply access epic, mythical, or even modern themes (not characters), that draw their complexity not internally from the mere two-hour film, but externally from the vast array of texts they reference. Wolverine does this well. To begin with, like any good comic book adaptation, it does not seek to be self-contained, but rather contains a multitude of references to the comic book canon, as well as the previous three X-Men, films. To those who want to go to any movie without needing to read/see other texts, I say: they make films for lazy people like you. Go to them.

Why, for, example does a person turn bad? Unlike the Nolan brothers, director Gavin Hood doesn’t aspire to a fatuous ambiguity (Batman) or to convenient, rushed character drama (Harvey Dent). We just get the bare facts: Logan (Wolverine) is raised by a kind father and mother; his half-brother is raised by a violent drunk father. As for the rest—we get to imagine. We get to imagine the connection between a violent father and a man who makes friends with rats in prison (again—just an image, not a piece of dialogue), or a man who allows the government to become his surrogate father. The writers and director understand these character formations require novels, not film dialogue, so they simply present the situation and let you add what you know from the various sphere of allusions: Myths, suggestive costumes and weapons, camera angles that resemble other mythic film moments, etc. Wolverine, hypercool badass, recently voted favorite comic book hero of all time, derives his name not from the ‘action movie’ qualities of a wolverine, but from a native American myth of unrequited love. The New Yorker’s Dave Denby calls the film nothing but action, since “the story….is meaningless, and the emotions in the movie are no more than functional.” Like many Denby wants to be force-fed their meaning via dialogue. We don’t need it. Just meditate on what you’re seeing: Wolverine is self-healing, and at one point we find out anesthesia doesn’t work on him. It’s up to us to form our own ‘substance beyond the action’ by thinking about what that means, as we watch him undergo the painful experimental military-medical procedure. (For example, how it subverts the self-help version of self-healing, which involves anesthesia.)
Or meditate on the angles: shot from above of Wolverine holding a dead body, looking up at the sky in anguish. This shot is occurs no less than three times: first with his father as a boy, then with his lover, then again with his lover. The repetition is ingenious because the first time, he (and we) think she’s dead, and she’s not. His trauma is enormous. It is a film trope that we are familiar with—both the shot and the plot. The second time however, she really is dead, and yet he is not anguished, for he has lost his memory and no longer knows her. In these repetitions lies the difference between derivative film and subversive creativity. Let’s check with Ebert again: ‘Nothing here about human nature. No personalities beyond those hauled in via typecasting. No lessons to learn. No joy to be experienced.” No lessons to learn because the loss of memory subverts the trope of ‘character development’, and this subversion is underscored by the final instance of the repeated framing’s containing less meaning for Wolverine than the first two, as well as by Wolverine’s final line: “I’ll find my own way”. Those looking for clever lines miss the profundity of this line, because they forget that it’s all about juxtaposition—where the line appears. It appears just after he has forgotten everything. The implication is that the individualist loner hero that Wolverine embodies, par excellence, is the product of forgetting who one loves, which community one belongs to, one’s own family and history. To wit, capitalism. Our very reasons for loving Wolverine are interrogated.

As I said, smart directors of these heroic narratives work on allegory (not irony and ambiguity, as in The Dark Knight or The Incredible Hulk. This is incidentally why, contrary to near-universal opinion, Ang Lee’s Hulk is superior to both those films). Here the loss of memory is an allegory for what is most horrific about American identity in general, and more particularly identity under the aegis of revisionist nationalism and jingoism (since it is the government who removes his memories). The work is there for you to do: what does it mean that this girlfriend turns out to be both the trickster and the moon-lover from the Native American myth? What does it mean that a liar is ‘a credit to your [mutant] species’? What is the significance of the facts surrounding a simple image—Wolverine’s heart flatlining: he is underwater, part of a government experiment, having his bones replaced with an indestructible metal alloy, he wrongly believes his love is dead, etc,etc.
Coupled with memory, the film’s other tragic allegorical tragic loss—language—renders it truly chilling. The treatment of language is yet another brilliant move by the filmmakers. They make the character Deadpool a clever, wise-cracking (and sexy) swordsmith, as per comic book canon. It would be interesting enough that his humor is fresh and slightly surreal in the action-scene context. He is a good ‘character’, by our fetishistic critical standards. As such, you’d think the creators would make sure they get a lot of use out of that mouth. Instead, they have his mouth sealed shut, and this time the father-government allegory is explicit—his father, who does it to him, works for the government, a government that must concern itself “with all threats, foreign and…domestic.” Indeed, after another Deadpool joke, irreverent of heroic action discourse (the kind of discourse that defines the cinema of life as practiced by U.S. government), his father tells him that he would be the perfect warrior if he didn’t have that mouth on him. Memory and language—perhaps the most precariously human of elements, both destroyed. How could there be ‘nothing here about human nature’? What Ebert meant was there is nothing here of Hollywood psychology. Again, the depth is in the surface: Deadpool masters the use of two swords, but then against his will has them fused to his body, as his retractable bones. His humanity is reduced when he no longer masters weapon but is turned into one.

The real issue critics are having, as Nietzsche might argue, is with life, not the film. (Speaking of Nietzsche, one hero fights with playing cards. That's my kind of hero.) They don’t like when a mere action film reminds them that our narratives of progression and character development are forced and false. (If they do get a film that reminds them of this, they need it to be ‘subtle’ and ‘complex’, like No Country For Old Men, so that they can distract themselves cooing over nuanced acting and nuanced dialogue). They don’t like the mere ‘primitive forces’ Ebert speaks of—therein lies the function of our ‘nuanced’ dialogue and acting. Denby’s right—the emotions are indeed just there to set up the next fight. If only he took the step and realized that is our national and personal pathos, as well, and it’s a simple patriarchal relationship at the base of it. One expertly (un)presented in this film. As for those bored with actions scenes, I was pleasantly surprised by how little action there was. More importantly, I love action scenes—they give me a chance to process what I just saw, perhaps to write. If I watch two hours straight without processing, I lose half of it. Action scenes are so useful! They fund the movie (since most people are paying for those scenes), and they allow me to ‘put down the text’ and think a bit. I’m telling you, friends, you don’t have to watch movies as you were taught to. Or, as Mary Poppins sang to me last night, “anything can happen, if you let it.”

THE MARXIST SEDER: PASSOVER CHEZ CRISTOFANI

2009-04-09T01:31:00.000-07:00

What is the meaning of Passover? You want to ask an authority? Which authority? Which sect? Which century? Orthodox or Reform? Yahweh-lover or atheist? Who is Yahweh, anyhow?
I’m not interested in these questions. Rather, I’m not interested in writing about these questions. Give me good friends and the right mixture of bitter and sweet (maror and charoset), or give me some psilocybin, and I’ll gladly launch spiritlong into the great beyond where such questions lead.
But this meditation is about the material reality of Passover. The stuff. I like the phrase ‘foodstuffs’. At first it sounds profane, but it reminds you that food is not stuffed, in material reality, with abstractions such as ‘sustenance’, ‘pleasure’, and ‘economic necessity’. Nor do aesthetics (“doesn’t that look nice!”) or biology (“the body requires x”) do justice to food.
So observe the following ritual: let the water of the cleanse (Urchatz) carry away into TOTALITY the separate little cells of the ego, the psyche, the world. The safe sectors that separate economics from entertainment, creative writing from politics, your marriage from your civic center.
Next, respect the great brokenness (Yachatz). The broken heart, the broken history, the broken narrative. The whole contains the sum of its parts, but the broken points to the infinite. Trust in the wisdom of Leonard Cohen: “To every heart love must come / but like a refugee.” Or: “There is a crack in everything / that’s how the light gets in.” The whole broken-hearted host cries: the miracles begin with and in the fragment. Why do you think Roland Barthes and Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in fragments? Neither in defeat, nor in impatience, but rather to begin again.
To begin to tell (Maggid). The exodus: it is not from Egypt to the promised land. It is not from the past to the present. It is what is happening now when you understand freedom. You don’t own or copyright freedom. You don’t attain or occupy or administer it. The USA thinks it’s actually branded freedom. Freedom is nothing but an on-the-way. A Not Yet. The exodus goes on. Egypt is everywhere. The Palestinians face Egypt in the form of Israel, just as the Jews in Poland face Egypt in form of neo-Nazis. The exodus from empire is the hope and duty now of the American working class.
Is this getting too abstract for you? Then return to the material: the bread, which, like you, starts as a seed and is nourished by the earth and comes to fruition. Reject those who want to separate your body from your spirit. They do that so that they may exploit your body, while your spirit stays on life-support with television, xanax, God. That’s not divinity. Divinity can’t be written. It’s a four-letter word: it could be LORD, or it could be FUCK. I personally think it’s LOVE. Let the material reign. Grab your piece of bread, your matzah. Recline and tear into it. This is your body. This is the body of your ancestors and your brothers and sisters, of every stripe. You can taste when the food is bitter, when the bread is hard and moldy. You can see it in your brothers too—don’t let your country abuse the bread, abuse the bodies. This is our body. This is not pure text. Bite into this blog. Digest it.
Some will call your new bodily consciousness bitterness. There is no shame in the bitter. You should not get used to Egypt. You should not learn to belong there. Remember that 80% of your people did…and died. For those of us still alive, hoping to save other lives, the bitterness is the first taste of the sweetness of freedom. The bitterness reminds you what you believe in: dip it in some sweet pop music paste, swallow it, and carry on with the exodus from the empire.

now watch and listen, if you will:

YAHWEH U2

The Tide is Turning: America sings from the big RED heart

2009-01-31T22:03:00.000-08:00

Sunday, January 18, 2009, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, under the umbrella of a concert event called “We are One”, the gorgeous moments were plentiful. There was Bono singing tribute to Martin Luther King Jr., reiterating that the dream is “not just an American dream, but an African dream, a European dream, an Israeli dream, and…[long pause before he hollered it into an isolated American consciousness]: “a Palestinian dream…” There was Bruce Springsteen and a gospel choir performing “The Rising”, a song whose challenge and hope we failed in 2002, but redeemed six years later. There was Stevie Wonder in his opulent Obama jacket, playing “Higher Ground” to a country that finally decided to take it.
But the best moment was a veritable coup. I imagine its masterminds are still laughing joyously at having pulled it off. Richard Nixon’s grave has been desecrated. Ronald Reagan’s library probably collapsed on itself. The voices of millions upon millions of murdered, imprisoned, disenfranchised and disheartened leftists of the twentieth century were finally allowed to join in the chorus of a song at an American inauguration.
Why? Because the concert closed with communist folk singer Pete Seeger standing next to his heir, Bruce Springsteen, singing Woody Guthrie’s communist hymn, “This Land is Your Land.” To be sure, the popularity of the song was always a coup—little grade school kids all across America singing a communist song during the Reagan years has to be one of the more amusing and bemusing instances of our long and storied tradition of incompetent lyric reading. But in America’s defense, we were never taught to sing the whole song. Conveniently excised were the parts that impugned private property, the church, and our callous practice of writing-off the homeless and poor as having poor ‘work ethic’.
But those verses were not only included Sunday night, they were spoken by Pete Seeger, clearly and loudly and insistently, before each line was sung, so that we could not possibly indulge in our habit—developed during decades of opiate-lyric abuse—of closing our eyes and simply swaying to a familiar melody:

As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing
That side was made for you and me

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people
By the relief office I seen my people
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

Nobody living can ever stop me
As I go walking that freedom highway
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me

Take note, Metallica—those words aren’t anybody’s intellectual ‘property’. They are our intellectual inheritance and our intellectual hope. The tide is turning. When we let go of the old allegiances and welcome whatever seems the most democratic, the tide is turning. In the rubble of the Berlin Wall in 1990, Roger Waters and friends sang his “The Tide is Turning” in honor of the fall of a communist regime and the hope of democracy. Sunday the tide was turning away from a horrifically capitalist regime towards a hope of democracy, this time inscribed by the greatest communist song ever written.

Perhaps the remnants of Bush’s police state are intact enough to track people like me who blog words like ‘communist’ and ‘Hugo Chavez’, who want to legalize drugs and prostitution, who don’t think Antonio Negri is a terrorist. Even so, nobody living can ever make me turn back. This land was made for you and me, not for anything so crass as a ‘nation’, a ‘people’, an ‘audience’ or a ‘demographic.’

Meditation on My Pet Rats

2009-01-27T14:31:00.000-08:00

I like having pets, especially rats, because they don't speak. No, this is not another facet of american anti-intellectualism, championing the simple and dumb. Rather, it's an exercise for me--and for them--in attempting to understand those who can't speak. Because that, in the end, is the duty of the activist. The feminist reclaiming the voices of the women silenced by patriarchal literary practices. The gay man listening for the love song of the queer with no microphone, or no record company that will consent to record such love. Pramoedya Ananta Toer compiling at the end of his memoir a list of all the men who died in his prison camp, with details such as their religion, number of children, source of death.
My two rats, Gianluca Zambrotta and Gianluigi Buffon, suddenly found themselves, last week, in a cage devoid of two other members of their family. They could not ask me any questions, as to why I took Marx and Engels out of the cage, like so many times before, but this time did not return them. They are smart animals and they register the loss. They have changed: Buffon is more loving now; Zambrotta seems more skittish. But I can only guess as to what they think and feel. And to do so I watch them, intently. More intently than we watch or listen to those whose capacity and right to speech we and they take for granted.
And so in my studies I turn to the socialists in Chile, the United States, Italy, Indonesia, and watch, listen closely to the parts of history that did not allow them to speak. That in fact imprisoned, killed, or otherwise silenced them. I look for signs and clues as to how the speechless processed the twentieth century.
At the very least, I will give them what every pet owner's manual insists upon: attention. Even if it is, for now, uncomprehending attention.

In Defense of Greatness, Against Psychology

2009-01-12T00:16:00.000-08:00

What do Michael Jackson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Moulin Rouge, and George Lucas have in common? None is allowed by contemporary tastes to be great. I could write a hundred blogs on the destructiveness of our craven tendency towards the psychologistic reduction of human beings, bearing in mind that it is not so much psychology but its practitioners that are so stagnant. Today I want to talk about two all-too-common words of judgment vis-à-vis great authors, thinkers, singers and great beings in general: motives and needs. In an essay on confessions within autobiographies, Stephen Spender argues that we are uncomfortable with too much information in autobiography, because we are afraid of the inherent danger of the inner life of human beings. “The antidote was once the Church. Today it is the vast machinery of psychological analysis and explanation.” Right on, Spender. Except that he himself attempts to locate an antidote to the greatness of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, earlier in the essay, by writing off Rousseau’s courageous honesty and inclusiveness in the Confessions as a confessional need to absolve oneself with the public.
And there’s the rub. We don’t trust ingenuous. We don’t trust sincerity. We certainly don’t trust great motives. In fact, the very use of the word ‘motive’ belies our need to find reasons other than the one proffered by the author. In many cases, this is a good idea. But I am dismayed by the current need to write off anyone and everyone who announces their high ideals as having ‘ulterior motives’. It used to be we dealt with our inferior ambition, will and commitment in various healthy ways (heroic striving to be like them) and unhealthy ways (self-loathing, apathy, class consciousness). Currently, a ridiculously unhealthy way reigns: impugning the motives of anyone who seems ‘suspiciously’ pure-hearted.
And so the reaction of my classmates to Rousseau, who announces on the first page of his Confessions: “I have never put down as true what I knew to be false…”, and resolves to present a true, unflinching portrait of one man—himself. My classmates scoff: no way he’s telling the truth. Spender the lit critic scoffs as well: “There could be no better example of this secret motive of the human heart than the opening pages of Rousseau’s Confessions.” Really? I could think of 1,000 better examples. Does anyone want to take pause and wonder if maybe Rousseau has a true socio-political agenda here? Maybe he believes absolute honesty will further the human understanding. After all, this is a man who wrote one tome about revolutionizing the education of children and another about revolutionizing the state. I remember when my ex-wife resolved to say it out loud whenever her experience of date rape popped into her mind, as a form of political resistance against the marginalization of the body and its violations into the pure realm of ‘subject matter’ or ‘lessons’ or ‘principles’ instead of real facts and real stories about real people. About a lot of people. About the woman you work with. And yet there in the work place, and many other places, she was accused of ‘trying to get attention’ (the most banal of our current crop of knee-jerk, passive-aggressive, psychologistic faux-analyses), or vanity. The same thing happened to my current wife when talking about her high school bulimia. And myself when talking about my prison time. In fact, anywhere I go, anywhere I read or watch, those who tell the truth are subjected to this facile impugning of motives. I call Rousseau’s decision to write about his sexual fetish for punishment and his kleptomania, especially coming from a respected political philosopher, courageous and revolutionary. Honesty itself is revolutionary.
Let’s look at a contemporary example: Michael Jackson, whom even respectable media outlets
feel justified in referring to as ‘Jacko’ in the midst of so-called serious reporting. Michael Jackson gave absurd amounts of money to charity, spent absurd amounts of time trying to stop the suffering of children, and wrote absurdly sincere songs about such suffering. We all felt guilty that we were writing or listening to “Don’t You Wish Your Girlfriend Was Hot Like Me” or another song about ‘me’ or ‘you’. So, as Bono said in dedicating U2’s “Bad” to Michael Jackson, he was pronounced guilty by all the moment he was accused. Only an artist as sincere as Michael Jackson could inspire such hatred for having a llama and a monkey among his friends, let alone being accused of pedophilia by gold-digging, guilty parents. Captain Eo was ostensibly scorned because it was cheesy to fight evil by dancing with animals in a flashy suit. I say it was scorned because the implication of dancing one’s way to justice reminded people of their own distance from the life-affirming joy that Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, in Multitude, calls essential to revolutionary change.
Then there’s Baz Luhrman, whose style could be described as the antidote to cynicism. This was barely tolerated in Moulin Rouge, mostly buoyed by its appeal to the musical-loving demographic, but it ultimately sunk his recent Australia. What was wrong with Australia? No irony, no cynicism, nothing but big ideals, big heroics, big love, aligned against big business. As with Michael Jackson, once a work of art disallows us the ironic detachment of a nihilistic actor eating a hamburger in a Carls Jr. commercial (“Don’t talk to me, I’m eating”), we are left with its naked and bare commitment to its own principles. Often this means its politics. Michael Jackson has politics. Rousseau has politics. Luhrman has politics. The American tendency to artificially separate the public from the private leads some to decry overtly ‘political’ art. In fact, I was taught in Creative Writing classes that only bad art is written with a cause in mind. I side more with Indonesia’s greatest writer, Pramoedya Ananta Toer: “The literature that ‘rejects’ politics, that professes to be wholly apolitical, is obviously produced by those writers who have found a comfortable niche in the halls of power.” Toer’s take is an apposite response to recent reviews of Soderbergh’s Che, which accuse him of an overt political (Marxist) stance. All art has a political stance. When it doesn’t look like it does, that means it’s affirming the status quo (see Forrest Gump, the most reactionary film of the 1990s).
The ‘ulterior motives’ are anywhere and everywhere. A football player celebrating creatively after a score is judged needy of attention. As is U2’s frontman Bono, who appears everywhere in print and other media talking about Africa. The Wachowski brothers must have made their stunning, avant-garde, Marxist film Speed Racer flashy and bright in order to pull in money from the growing video-game crowd. As I finish this essay, in fact, the 12th episode of George Lucas’s Star Wars: The Clone Wars begins with an epigraph: "Fail with honor rather than succeed by fraud." I love a television episode that begins with a moral principle, unironically. And then proceeds to illustrate it, unironically. George Lucas really pisses off critics and fans unnerved by the political groundedness and “self-seriousness” (their word for ‘serious’, since they can’t separate anything from the self) of his prequel trilogy. Lucas angers them more than most because they don’t get to use their typical strategy of attack: accusations of ‘selling out’ to the producers and studios and audience. Because Lucas owns everything (owing originally to an extraordinary and visionary act of faith and initial disregard for wealth), he gets to make whatever fits his peculiar vision, pushing him close to the Nietzschean artist, who disdains to make “one single compromise.” The venomous, bizarrely herdlike hatred, for example, of one his minor characters, Jar Jar Binks, didn’t stop Lucas in this episode from using Binks as unironic hero who subverts the hipness of the Jedi while not only maintaining their ideals, but one-upping them. Despite his clumsiness, he quite graciously works within the multitude of the planet, and all its creatures and rhythms, communicating with the kind of beasts the hipper heroes usually fight. It’s an extraordinary ‘fuck you’ to Star Wars fans to make no less than two episodes both centering upon and glorifying a loathed character, and I read the ‘fuck you’ as follows: Star Wars is not a logo for your identity flag. It’s a mythos and an ethos, and both mythical meaning-making and ethical action run right over, swallowing whole, cool and uncool.

References
- Spender, Stephen, “Confessions and Autobiography”, in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney, Princeton, 1980
- Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Confessions, pg. 1, trans. J. M. Cohen, 1953
- Toer, Pramoedya Ananta, ‘The Role and Attitude of Intellectuals in the Third World’, trans. Harry Aveling, in Pramoedya Ananta Toer 70 Tahun, Yayasan Kabar Seberang, 1995

Who the hell are you to say a woman can't sell her body?!

2008-10-21T22:52:00.001-07:00

San Francisco, via Proposition K, is attempting to decriminalize prostitution. That might sound radical to you if you live in America, but it is probably common sense to you if you live in Europe. I am continually amazed that in our Western liberal legal tradition we have somehow permitted ourselves to outlaw consensual acts between two adults. Robbery, stabbing, rape--sure, make them illegal, because one person in the equation is definitely not willing the transaction. But drug use, prostitution, vacations to Cuba...we think we have the right to tell people they're being victimized when they might not think so? Check out the comments of San Francisco D.A. Pardini:

"The proponents usually paint a fairly rosy picture of two consenting adults and a monetary exchange at the end," Pardini said. "They don't factor in the people that are being exploited and people that are being controlled, the ones manipulated both physically and chemically."

Right on. Pardini paints a fairly rosy picture of himself as defender of the exploited, controlled, and manipulated, physically and chemically. I actually find that a noble sentiment, but in the tradition of impartial, impersonal Western justice, let's go all the way and criminalize all exploitation and chemical/physical control: let's criminalize candy and soda companies for their exploiting of consumers via chemical addiction to one of the most destructive drugs in America, refined sugar. Let's criminalize Michael Bay, Joel Schumacher, Larry Clarke, and other American filmakers who exploit the human capacity to be hynotized and morally shut-down by addictive action-images, or plots that keep us asking what's next instead of what's now, what do we have here. Let's criminalize campaign finance, advertising, HMOs, automobile companies, Walmart, and everyone and everything else that uses physically and chemically addicting substances, the fear of poor health or death, and manipulative rhetoric to accomplish their aims. I'd go so far as to claim that legalized prostitution is LESS exploitative than your average American job, considering how many live at or below the poverty level, and how companies like Walmart are run by greedy pimps, selling out anyone and everyone for that most sinister of euphemisms: 'competitiveness.'

Once again, I'm all for criminalizing exploitation, which is to say: initiating a socialist revolution (not necessarily violent, of course). But if that makes you uncomfortable, then at least be consistent and don't criminalize drug use or prostitution. Or do you really think Michael Bay is less whorish than, well...whores?

Notes from the American Nightmare: the Southwest

2008-08-13T17:07:00.000-07:00

I have been traveling across these marginally united states of America, a marginal citizen, given that most of the states I travel through wish that people like me would move to France. This is one of the few things on which I agree with them: I too wish I would move to France. Another belief we share: life is hard for the poor and we wish it were different. Where we diverge is that they actually admire and vote for the people and philosophies that make them poor, whereas I vote for the kind of people who could save them: the socialists. After all, so much of what is beautiful in this land is a direct result of socialists. How can that be, you say, having grown up as you have on a steady diet of Associated Press reports on Venezuela and Cuba. The national park system was largely built under the aegis of New Deal programs such as the WPA and CCC. Today we swam in a facility at Lea Lake, one of the “bottomless lakes” in New Mexico. This facility, like most at national parks, was built by New Deal workers. We all know that the New Deal was a structurally a socialist program. In fact, the late thirties into early forties was a politically socialist time in America. Why? Because we were facing hitherto unknown mass poverty.
Today, the rich-poor gap is higher than ever, the deficit is higher than ever, unemployment remains sky high, and millions of Americans suffer under inadequate health care and inept public schools, good education being affordable mostly for the middle class and up. And yet we have legislated no New Deal. I drove through Pecos, Texas today, a ramshackle town that rises coweringly out of a long stretch of flat desert scrub heading south from New Mexico. The town boasts the world’s first rodeo, the grave of the ‘gentleman outlaw’ (hmm, back in 1999 they told me there was no such thing), excellent cantaloupe, and the legend of Pecos Bill. In fact, the national monuments and western museum are about all that remain functioning in this all-too-common outpost in the most intense segment of the American Dream-cum-Nightmare: Texas. As we drove into town, we were greeted by scores of decrepit, gutted, boarded up, and collapsing houses. Where the houses were still occupied, the occupants seemed to be fighting a losing battle against economic and natural entropy. The sidewalks have lost out to the weeds, the churches have lost out to the bottle, and of course the businesses have lost out to the dogmatic religion of capitalism. About 25% of the businesses on Main Street remain functional. The rest are a motley collection of dirty FOR SALE signs, boarded up and broken windows, and long-since accurate town clocks, thermometers and celebratory signs. We stopped in for a Horchata shake at a fly-infested shop run by a 26-year old single mom, returned from San Antonio, TX to care for her ailing father. Therein I read the tiny Pecos Independent, with its bravely positive accounts of the Cantaloupe Decorating Contest and the rising unemployment. The opinion section was dominated by a ‘guest opinion’, whose credentials are a mystery, insisting that the “enviro-wacko, Marxist, liberal democrats”, assisted by the “biased mainstream media” (this mantra appeared three times), party line that high gas prices are good for us is in truth yet another totalitarian gesture designed to strip us of our independence. He also maintained that the battle to allow offshore oil drilling and to build refineries is the ‘battle for America’s soul.” Glad we straightened that out—‘soul’ has always been an elusive concept for me.
If Pecos, TX is independence, reduce my independence, please. Give me back generous funding of National Parks and life-saving preventative medicine. Give me an electric car at an affordable price to drive into the Joshua Tree National Park, so that the number of stars doesn’t fall by another eight thousand or so (last few decades). Give me that strong American collective spirit of activism not marshaled towards saving fetuses—cf. highway sign activism in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas—but towards saving single mothers in their thirties.
I should mention that as I am writing this, a fearless skunk is strolling past me, tail high in the air like a burgee of skunk identity. I am at a campground in Ft. Something, Texas, typing in a cactus garden while my laundry finishes. I should also mention that I love how much empty land is left in this massive country: the bracing sense of possibility driving across these “wide open spaces” that the Dixie Chicks sing about. The sense of possibility once you reach the towns themselves, on the other hand, the towns where the Dixie Chicks records were burned for their exercise of the freedom that enviro-wackos want to take away…well, that sense is barely alive, mostly in the form of a possible afterlife. There, the sky is the limit when it comes to standard of living. Let’s first work on the standard of living down here, where 1/8 of Americans live below the poverty level, where 1/3 of Americans are classified “low-income”, and where the architects and town planners don’t even try to echo nature’s beauty.
I’m sounding… who out there will echo me?

2008-07-27T20:57:00.000-07:00

10.31.98 A Four-Part Symphony

10.31.98: Set I

In. We’re in. We’re very in. The ritual is in progress and the ceilinged sky awash with manic stars. The music! How could I ever doubt that music is the ground of all higher being? Like stepping into a wind tunnel of rarefied air. The music sits thick and dominant in the air. The music is the air. We are swimming through the rim of the bodysea breathing the shimmering sounds as a voice says “I keep forgetting to turn the earth so both sides get their share of darkness and of light.” If every human being in America was in one of these temples tonight, world history would sing better the next day. The networks should decide the next season’s lineup in the hour after a dip in such a sonic wash. Likewise for Hollywood producers and Group of Eighth Notes meetings.
Begin, begin, begun. Be gin, be gun. Ogive in chamber...cock, fire, twirl your piece. Ready
go.
BLAM!
And in a flash: Ana!
Ana went! She is here! Somewhere between the temple door and the cella here where she stretches like a caryatid peeling off the column out of which she’d been carved back in La Canada, as she reconfigures her ANAtomy. Ana to my eyes jars with Ana to my mind. She is in control. She is stretching her arms out, chin up, eyes intent, committed to the scene here in Act I. Her outstretched hand accidentally brushes young red hair. Affectionate pat and onward, eyes up. Up to where? Posture is different—usually her shoulders hunch and belly is thrust forward. Now her chest is thrust up and out and her hips roll down and around, recalling her belly and presenting her understudy, pelvis. The music descends from overhead in waves, as the guitar winds its way downstream over and over guitar winds its way downstream winds its way down stream way down stream down and Ana up, strong salmon eyes, stronger than before. What has happened?
“What has happened to you?”
“The circus is the place for me,” she announces to me (to me? Is the addressee somewhere beyond me?) Now I feel at home.”
Strange, her response relaxed me and I think it’s because my mind tenses expecting, by now, a hesitant reply, a measured one. Something like “what do you mean?”, sullied with trepidation. But Hark! The cherry reply, not the chary one! Now the guitar has found a sweet note in the upper realms and slow dances around it for an eternity, her hair sonified.
“You really look beautiful,” I stammer.
She lowers her chin now for the first time at me, focus momentarily broken by blush, happy, but then the smile shapes itself again into the poised roomready one. “I think I just might be,” is her reply to my compliment. “Or becoming…”
I know what it is! What the beautiful people do. They are like Vincent: they stare intently. Ugliness is darty eyes. Beauty is fascination. Rapture. Intent. Not boredom, sighs, eyes imagining what they must look like looking out. Vincent stares all the time. Complete disregard for the laws of Been Around the Block Hip. Vincent hasn’t been around any block—every square inch of earth is a new block every time he turns his head. Look at him there, slackjawed stageward smile, eyes riveted on something up in the lighting apparatus, hands to his side as usual, posture irrelevant.
But the radical news—Ana has learned rapture! Her once solipsistic eyes fixed, now that they fix on things.
I hope this happens once again…

I Would Hate Myself If I looked That Different 20 Years Ago

2008-07-22T19:58:00.000-07:00

This was once really cool

Ever since what I was ridiculed for in high school--wearing two earings and tight clothes--became cool again, I have been bemused by how undisturbed everyone else is by the near universality of fashion sense. Watching Live Aid today, EVERYONE in 1985, from the great artists (Bob Dylan) to the mediocre artists (Phil Collins) to the useless (Hall and Oates), to the cameramen and audience, wore the same style. Apparently, we are not supposed to be concerned because, after all, it's just style. But if you're like me, and like theorists such as Baudrillard and Nietzsche, you understand that style influences concepts and judgments. Indeed, concepts and judgements are styles.

How can you not be disturbed, however, by the fact that those you rely on to hold their integrity in important decision-making sitautions all dressed the same in 1985? It means that our judgments are grossly affected, by osmosis, by the world that is given to us, immediately, around us. This is no secret to Heideggerians, of course, but it should still be disturbing. Are you less disturbed by the fact that if you weren't gay in 1985, you also made jokes about queers? Or that if you live in in 1960 you thought communists were the enemy? You'd like to think that you could never be racist, but unless you were an absolute visionary, you didn't want Blacks to vote in 1820. And don't get me started on the women who think they are feminists, but whose strict adherence to the 2008 sense of Woman proves that in the mid 1800s they would have firmly stood against women given political responsibilities.

Are you a visionary today, in 2008? Perhaps we should think about what is merely stylish now, but which we think is part of our unflinching identities. What is the equivalent of homophobia and racism today? Here are my guesses: I think that 100 years from now, we will scrunch our faces in disgust at the provincial closed-mindedness of people who made drugs illegal (as we do now at those who made one of them--alchohol--illegal 100 years ago). I think we will laugh at those who defended capitalism as the most just system of economic distribution. I think we will look upon as monsters those who denied global warming, and those who drove SUVs, those who continually vote against tax hikes in Los Angeles to fund a real subway system.

No trend is 'light enough to let go' if you are not aware of how it crept inside your system of judgment. Before you laugh at a mullet hairdo from 1983, remember that in 1983 journalists who turned against Lou Reed described his music as for sickos, drug users and faggots. The herd mentality is never a light matter.

I Believe in Harvey Dent...I Just Don't Believe in His Filmmaker!

2008-07-21T00:57:00.000-07:00

I am writing not so much to analyze a film as analyze a culture wherein a combination of philosophical unsophistication, the power of advertising, and the sometimes desperate need to justify "escapist fare" has made it possible for film critics to fawn and drool over one of the worst films of the year, "The Dark Knight."

The first problem is that we do not here in Hollywood seem to know what profound is. To the extent that these critics could find Truffaut, Godard or Wenders profound, it's only because they heard that they are supposed to. Here is a Dallas critic's take on the profundity of the Nolan bros. script:

"The movie is almost Shakespearean in its fascination with the good and evil that resides within all of us. It suggests that the greatest challenge of life is not to reject dark impulses outright, but to learn how to control them so they don't overwhelm our loftier goals."

First of all, Shakespeare doesn't ever suggest something so crassly didactic. This in fact is the movie's most appalling trait. It purports to be a serious study of the chaos and indeterminacy at the heart of human Being, exemplified by the nihilism of the Joker, corruptibility of the "two-faced" idealist DA Harvey Dent, and Bush administration spy tactics of Batman. But the film does not have the courage to follow the Joker's clever lines about human hypocrisy to their conclusion. Instead, the scriptwriters write convenient closing speeches for Batman about 'the inherent goodness of people", and contrive a plot device with the most unrealistic account of the goodness of the common man since San Raimi made his apology for 9/11-ravaged New York, "Spiderman". It is a craven move, the kind of move that serious artists wouldn't let slip into their narrative, even drugged out on their favorite drug as most good artists tend to be.

As my friend Carter Wallace pointed out, the absurdity of pinioning justice on a 'noble lie' scenario becomes painfully apparent if you later on proclaim the inherent goodness in the average citizen's decision-making. The city is lied to about Batman and Harvey Dent, and we are supposed to think this move is noble. OK, we'll parce that out with Plato. But I won't accept for a minute that love, too, between best friends like Bruce Wayne and his butler, is assisted by noble lies. It's bullshit, and it calls into question all the more the filmmakers' slapdash theory of justice. Lying is the convenient plot device by which they resolve most of the dilemmas. Everyone's a liar except for the Joker. Harvey Dent is a great man, not a two-faced demon, and yet these two-faced filmmakers have him spouting comic-book villain lines 15 minutes after one of his noble speeches. If all it takes is a dead lover and physical trauma to become superevil, I guess all 9/11 victims should be locked up.

Thus, the so-called 'grey areas' of morality are not so grey after all. Harvey Dent's fall from idealistic crusader (more noble than Batman, to be sure) to comic book villian is comic in its simplicity, although critics love to talk about how this is the first comic book movie we can take as seriously as any real crime drama (huh? batman as crime drama? And comic movies have been serious since 1978, with Superman. Quite a few of them. As I recall the same critics attacked Ang Lee's studious "Hulk" for being 'too serious'). The moral dilemma for me is in the filmmakers' work--how can they show such vicious violence to a crowd coming to watch a movie about heroism? If they want to deconstruct the hero myth, that's fine, but they chicken out and throw in quite traditional comic book morality in the last half hour. For that, they are irresponsible to make the film so visciously real. At least the post-traumatic stress wrought by watching obscene violence in Scorcese's "The Departed" doesn't turn comic book on us in order to appease each substrata of the focus-poll audience. The audience doesn't know how to draw coherent meaning out of a film with a hyperreal tonality about a man dressed up like a bat, who is four times as effective as Achilles. And it's not their fault--no coherent theorist could do so. Rolling Stone's occasionally trenchant Peter Travers lioninzed the director for "bringing a gritty reality to a cartoon fantasy." That would OK if they didn't try to keep it cartoonish and fantastical in its convenient plot threads in the last 30 minutes. Of course this is the same reviewer who claims that "Eckhart earns major props for scarily and movingly portraying the DA's transformation into the dreaded Harvey Two-Face." Eckhart earns major props for movingly portraying the nobility of Harvey Dent, but the greatest actor alive couldn't movingly portray the shallow transformation the Nolan brothers came up with. The film encourages schizofrenic critical receptiveness, making the Joker's consistency a relief. We are thus induced to respect the sicko more than the two heroes, both of which are literally 'two-faced'. Add to that the fact that nobody exists or ever has existed like the Joker--one is not simultaneously that mad and capable of such exquisite self-control and planning. That's simply bad pscychology. Yet once again Travers praises the 'deft script" for refusing to explain the joker with recourse to pop psychology. True, but the effect is weakened by their explaining everyone and everything else with pop psychology.

Where the moral landscapes are grey, the scriptwriters don't seem to intend it. Batman causes millions of dollars of damage to the city, allows a dozen or so people to die because he 'won't negotiate with terrorists' (can we say reactionary agenda?), and refuses to kill the Joker because that, we are told, is what good guys do. These critics who think this film is courageously brazen and complex in its moral spelunkings,as well as subversive of the superhero genre, do they actually condone this kneejerk falling-back on the oldest superhero convention: good guys don't kill? The Greeks would be horrified. If they want to explore real moral complexity, here's what a complex moral hero says: "In fact, if Christ himself stood in my way, I, like Nietzsche, would not hesitate to squish him like a worm" - Che Guevara. Hopefully Soderbergh will make Che more interesting than Batman (who is an astoundingly bad actor, by the way, once he puts on the mask). The Nolan brothers need to take screenwriting class from another set of brothers, The Wachowskis. Their hero in V for Vendetta is truly negotiating moral liminal ground, and he does indeed kill. The Nolans, conversely, also chickedend out at the end of the otherwise superb Batman Begins, when Batman says "I won't kill you, but I don't have to save you." Well, isn't that a nice and tidy way to keep the PG-13 rating and the comic-book parents paying?

Speaking of the killing, it is excessive. So many innocent people die in this film, it's a crime that it's not rated R. The only way to justify innocent deaths in a film is via serious grappling with the actual socio-economic injustices and challences of the civic enterprise, such as Blood Diamond. This film gaudily vaunts its ungaudy, gritty realism, but wants its cake and to eat it too: they're too afraid, as I said, to veer away from the superhero myth in the end. I say, if you want to make a superhero movie, then make one, like George Lucas does, or Tim Burton did in Batman Returns, a film so superior to this one Christopher Nolan should be penalized by serving Burton his coffee every morning for 10 years. If, on the other hand, you want to make a serious film about the darkness at the heart of human beings, don't conveniently dispense with the consequences of idealism run into the ground by force-feeding Harvey Dent ruthless villainous lines scarcely 10 minutes after he was delivering Erin Brockovich lines. And they say Anakin Skywalker's transformation was scantily developed?! At least Lucas took 3 movies, at a total running time of 7 1/2 hours, instead of cramming it into the last 30 min of a movie that already had a villain to develop in the Joker.

Two things in the film's defense: The joker has some brilliant lines, (and of course it's a brilliant performance, but I'm bored with talking about actors). Sadly these lines are cheapened and in the end left stranded, incoherent, unwoven into broad thematic layers, because the creators do not have the singular vision and committment that the Joker has. The denouement thus denudes the Joker's Gotham crusade of meaning, instead of allowing his verbal gems to cast far-reaching light. Indeed, it's hard not to respect the Joker more than we respect the filmmakers, except that he is a vicious killer with no ambition or scheme (unlike, say, Ras al Ghul in the movie that preceeded it). And in the end, this movie can't escape being like the Joker itself--brilliant in spurts but with no apparent ambition or scheme.

Which brings me to the 2nd thing I liked about it--the critique of money. Joker ridicules the mob bosses for being only concerned with money, instead of a message (although his message is a bit of letdown, philosophically: embrace the chaos. Stone did it better with Mickey and Mallory in Natural Born Killers). More impressive, Harvey Dent the idealist DA corresponds to the socialist vision of careful altruistic planning. He thinks the the greed, selfishness and chaos of human beings can be controlled and amegliorated through effective political provisions and laws. Once he becomes Two-face (don't whine about giving away plot. If you don't know Harvey Dent is two-face, you have no business seeing a Batman film. Start with the Frank Miller comics) he becomes a capitalist, believing as capitalists do in pure chance as the last arbiter of real justice. Thus he flips a coin to decide everybody's fate. Here finally is a bit of courageous critique, especially coming as it does on the heels of the Joker's criticism of Harvey, Batman, and all other 'good guys' for being schemers. Idealists, then, are schemers. So, however, are filmmakers like the Wachowski brothers, who are not ashamed to present heroes with a shining, unflinching message. Their Speed Racer, (which was as anathema to the critic herd as Dark Knight is tonic), for an example of a movie that stays true to its comic surreality and joy without in the least falling in to fluff. It's a ruthless and unhip critique of capitalism. And it was not written by brothers assisted by the usual Hollywood screenwriting committee, but rather by brothers assisted by nobody and listening to noone, apparently, save for Herbert Marcuse, Baudrillard, and the masterminds behind Popmart.

As for HeathLedger, now I know why he got depressed enough to down such a dangerous cocktail of drugs--it was demoralizing to transition from a brilliant, coherent director like Todd Haynes ("I'm Not There") to this overblown hack, who makes Ledger exhaust himself in brilliance, only to flounder in a film without a vision to match either the Joker's or Ledger's.

From the L.A. Times review: "Can he live with what he would have to become to effectively fight the Joker and his spawn? Can he accept the unacceptable things that have to be done to be the hero? Can there be an ending to his story, and to this film, that creates a sense of closure, a sense of peace?" Yes of course, there can--this is Hollywood. All you have to do is create a noble lie and ignoble plot device to prove how good people are. Which is why it's so galling that critics think this film transcends Hollywood. It's mired right in the stink of it. Travers marvels at how Nolan "brings pop escapism whisper-close to enduring art. " Actually, he ruined the pop escapism with his violent realism, and ruined the enduring art with his pop escapist ending. Shame on him and his brother, who should go back to writing quality short stories.