Berkeley - Welcome to the Machine

(Sorry for missing a couple days - Red Sox, sloth... but on we go.)

In our previous installment I offered some thoughts on Berkeley's big production numbers in the Warner's musicals - how they relate to the world of the film, some of their formal properties, what they look like. About the abstraction of those numbers - the way the content gives way to a pure play of line and motion. This post is about something else - it is about the mechanics of Berkeley's dance numbers - the work involved.

No matter how extravagant Berkeley's numbers get, he never lets you forget the work involved with putting these dances together. I could refer here to Jane Feuer - she argues (in the first chapter of The Hollywood Musical) that Hollywood musicals always aim to hide the work involved in making them; to create a sense of community between the audience and the performers, largely by making the performers seem to be amateurs - etc. There is merit in her argument - though I think it applies far more to later, MGM style musicals than to 30s musicals - especially the WB musicals. (A full discussion of what I think she gets wrong is a topic for another day. And the truth is, she tends to make exceptions for Berkeley's work - so using her as the departure point might be a bit of a cheat. But - for now...)

We can start to talk about Berkeley. Now - there’s no question that his musical numbers tend to efface the individual performer, in a host of ways. Many of the dances consist, more or less literally, of perfectly mundane movements - walking in circles - sprawling on your back scissoring your legs - floating in a pool: the "dance" is constructed out of the patterns formed by the dancers. His numbers often function much more as live action animation than as dance numbers. Even when the dancing is more complex, like the tap dancing in "Lullaby on Broadway," the dance steps are secondary to the overall pattern. (And in this case, as in others, the main affect is as much the sound of 100 tap dancers as the dancing.) But for all this, one of the striking things about Berkeley’s dance numbers is that you see how they work. You can see the patterns the dancers form - you see the things they represent - but you also almost always see the mechanisms, how they get there.

Take the dancing pianos in Golddiggers of 1935: on a black stage we see a host of white pianos played by women in white gowns. The pianos are moving - and under them, you can see men's legs, moving the pianos around the stage. The men are wearing black pants and black shoes - they are almost invisible on the black stage - but not invisible. It might be tempting (I don’t know if people do this or not - they didn't at the show I saw, but who knows) to mock - to think this is a continuity error - but that seems wrong. It would not have been hard to hide the legs - just drape something there... I think the legs are intentional - and that they add to the scene. One thing they add is an obvious sexual component to the scene - the pianos become men, the women playing them (and the men bent over, more or less into the girls' laps). They also emphasize the fact that the women are dancing with the pianos - you can see both partners. But I think beyond this, the legs are a reminder of the physicality of what you see - you see how things work, you see that these things are work, are being performed by people.

Something like this happens in too many of Berkeley's dances to ignore. I think this represents something of a fascination with machines, as machines. These numbers fetishize machines - they focus on the material, on the interlocking parts - it's reminiscent of 20s films, Vertov or Eisenstein or Lang, with their pumping pistons and such. But there’s also delight in how things work. Berkeley seems to want to go to some trouble to show you how the dancers are doing what they’re doing. The pool dance in Footlight Parade ("By A Waterfall") shows you the parts moving - you see the swimmers, but also the people supporting the swimmers. He tends, in many instances, to slow down the action enough that you can see the ways it is put together. And since he does not always do this - I think he is doing it deliberately.

Ultimately, this has three effects, I think. First - it shows the machinery, with a kind of pride, like an inventor showing off the way his stuff works - it has a Rube Goldberg quality to it. Second - I think it creates an interesting tension between the extreme abstraction of the dances - the way they are live action animation, the way they are so often reduced to patterns of color (black and white, in these films at least), to lines, shapes, plays of light, and so on - and the physicality of the dancing itself. And third, it creates a more abstract tension, between representation and abstraction itself. In this, it is similar to the way he shoots the city symphonies ("42nd Street" and "Lullaby of Broadway"), or big extravaganzas like "Shanghai Lil" or "Forgotten Man". There is always a stylization to these pieces - they are quite deliberate in maintaining a sense of irreality. They show realistic scenes, but in very abstract ways - they feel balletic. Partly, of course, because they are a clear precursor to Gene Kelly’s “ballet” sequences - which are also often meant to show simple enough things, but in an extremely stylized way. That’s here, too.

Berkeley’s habits of showing the machine - and the way, even in the most extravagantly impossible number, he will insert shots that refer back to the mechanics of a real stage production - seem to be meant to create the same feeling. I think that there is, in his work, a real sense of trying to transform the world. Getting back to Jane Feuer for a bit, she writes about the use of props in dancing (as well as the use of “natural” movements as dance) - these are both ubiquitous in Berkeley’s work. (The writers parody it in Footlight Parade - having Cagney complain that he’s made dances out of everything in the room). She emphasizes the way these devices are used to hide the technology required to make and film musical numbers - I don’t think that's quite what's going on in Berkeley's work. In his numbers, there is a clear sense that dance - and cinema - transforms the everyday. (Actually, I think that’s true of everyone who does this, actually - I think her argument about bricolage being part of the strategy to deny the difference between the everyday and Hollywood misses the point. First - the use of props in musical numbers derives at least as much from 20s silent comedy - Chaplin and Keaton - as from anything else; and second, I think the purpose of that kind of dancing in musicals is to imbue the everyday with the transcendent.) Berkeley’s dances routinely take everyday settings and actions and turn them into something extravagant - the sense of transformation is crucial - and it depends on the ties back to the mundane.

Procrastination and Sport!

Woe to those who come here seeking further ruminations on Busby Berkeley! Ha ha! After keeping on something like a schedule all week, you knew I had to fall behind eventually! If blame must be assigned, assign it here - yes, I scored a ticket....

We do have time for Friday's Random Ten:

1 Reason to Believe - Rod Stewart
2 Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except for me and My Monkey - The Feelies
3 Church Not Made with Hands - Waterboys
4 Fa ce la - Feelies (2 of em! cool!)
5 Cheers - Charlie Parker
6 Sound the Alarm - Deerhoof
7 I Had too much to Dream (Last Night) - Electric Prunes
8 Data Control (Live) - Husker Du
9 Mountain Side - Flaming Lips
10 Night Falls on Hoboken - Yo La Tengo

That'll do. Out about the blogosphere, the Friday top ten seems to have become a source for anxiety - as long as old Feelies, old Flaming Lips, Charlie Parker, Husker Du, Deerhoof keep coming up, I can sleep at night...

Berkeley - Stage and Screen

So - building on my last post, where do Berkeley's films, particularly the Warner Brother's films, fit in that schema? How does his choreography relate to the rest of these films? And - what does his choreography, and its relationship to the stage, say about film itself? For that is what these scenes seem to me to be about....

On one level, these films (42nd Street, Golddiggers 33 and Footlight Parade) are all backstage musicals - more than that - they are all strictly performance based. That is, all the music in these films is presented as if it were being performed, for an audience, even if just an audience of one. At the same time, though, the big production numbers completely abandon the stage - the "real" space of the performance. They do this without establishing any sort of fantastic space, however - the films don't present these numbers as anything other than literal stage performances. (And in fact, Berkeley occasionally seems to be deliberately reestablishing the stage as the space for these performances, often by detailing the mechanics of the dances [that will be the subject of yet another post! still to come!]... The exception, though, is Golddiggers of 1935 - which does introduce framing devices into the big production numbers, as we will see below.)

Berkeley's productions get more and more extravagant with each film - and often within each individual film. This is most obvious in 42nd Street, I think. The first number ("Shuffle off to Buffalo") is quite spectacular, with its chorus girls and sleeper cars, but perfectly believable on a stage - Berkeley even keeps the camera in a position to represent the audience, to some extent. The next big number, "Young and Healthy," still seems possible to mount on a stage, but the camera has abandoned the audience and headed for the flies - and the dance itself, with its spinning girls (and wheels inside of wheels) forming patterns only discernable from above - would be utterly pointless on a stage. The choreography here is aimed exclusively at the camera, even if the staging is sort of possible within the "real" space. This kind of choreography is, of course, already something of a Berkeley trademark - the overhead camera, the girls making patterns on the floor.... Usually, though - in the Cantor films I've seen, for example - these scenes are part of the first type of musical - they are not meant as performances as such. In 42nd Street, they are performances - for an audience that couldn't possibly see them. And in the third big number, "42nd Street" itself, the stage space is completely exploded - oh, the dance may start on a stage, but the camera goes diving into the set, and the editing, sets, camera work, choreography, everything is used in a purely cinematic way - creating a number that could exist only on film. It uses space cinematically - in ways that seem deliberately to negate the stage.

In the subsequent films (including, with some variation, Golddiggers 35), this obliteration of the stage continues. Golddiggers of 33 starts, like 42nd Street, on the stage ("We’re in the Money" is completely stagebound), but that's all - the rest of the film takes full advantage of the camera - changing sets on the fly, having the dancers go through multiple costume changes, using editing tricks, and of course making art out of the camera movements and angles and lighting. The usual array of Berkeley devices can be seen - cameras going between the dancer's legs, the overhead shots, the live action animation (dancers forming patterns and pictures), abstract use of light and dark, shapes, tricks with depth and angles of perception, his customary practice of superimposing things - dancers, objects, etc. - on top of one another (the lines of dancers peeling off, revealing another dancer where the first had been. This is often interpreted politically (and another subsequent post will discuss politics, in relation to Mark Roth's essay on the New Deal and Warner Brothers musicals) - as a way of erasing the individuality of the dancers. There's something to that, though I don't know quite what - what's clearer, I think, is the abstraction of these devices. They take on a pure graphic quality - the dancers' faces or bodies replace each other on the screen, creating a kind of flicker - creating constant movement, yet without changing the image. (There might be some who read another metaphor for the cinema here. I will not dispute that interpretation - there doesn't seem to be much of anything in Berkeley's work that can't be read as a figure of cinema.) The graphic quality of Berkeley's work is always very powerful - all the pictures, shapes and such his dancers created - all the lines and circles and curves and patterns of light and dark they made. In dances like "Shadow Waltz", when the lights go out except for the electric violins the dancers are carrying - everything dissappears except the play of light and dark, the streaks of neon violins, arcing around the screen like, well, frames in a strip of film...

Now - in Footlight Parade there is no attempt to even pretend the big numbers are possible on a stage. They are short films - unabashedly. "Honeymoon Hotel" is set in a hotel, with multiple sets, elaborate camera movements, multiple camera angles, editing, and more; "By a Waterfall" - I mean - really*: sure, Dick and Ruby start out on a set that might, sort of, be doable on a stage (but on a stage shared by a movie screen? Though if you say, in front of a movie screen - so that Ruby Keeler leaves Dick Powell and goes into the movie - well - yeah... and symbolically, that's what all of these dances are doing, when you get down to it.) And "Shanghai Lil" looks like a movie set - it is staged like a movie - the sets change, the angles change, the thing is edited - everybody changes costumes half way through... it is pure cinema, without any pretense at anything else. It is as if Berkeley is seeing how far he can take this idea.

The answer is probably given in Golddiggers 1935 - though there are a couple differences in this film. One (stepping back a bit) is that there are musical numbers of the first type - Dick Powell offers up a couple songs out of the blue in this one. And one number - the opening dance by the hotel workers - is something - I don't know where it fits. Everyday life turned into a dance - it turns up in films often enough (like the dancing peasants in Beat Takeshi's Zatoichi, of all places), but it's hard to fit into my scheme, andI'm not sure it's common enough to justify adding a category of musical number. It's a variation on #1....

But Berkeley (who directed this film) also treats the big numbers differently. Specifically, he uses clear framing devices. For "The Words are in my Heart", we start with Dick Powell crooning to Gloria Stuart in a garden. The camera pulls back, and there is a dissolve to a shot of the garden as a model; the camera moves to show the model on top of a piano, with four women reprising the song; the camera then dives into the piano and comes out on a spectacular stage with an army of women in white playing white grand pianos - which start dancing with them, forming typical Berkeley patterns. When it ends - the camera dives back into one of these pianos, coming out to the four women and one piano - then it dives back into the garden model and comes out to reveal Dick Powell and Gloria Stuart again. There is nothing like that in the '33 films - Berkeley's numbers in those films always start by showing a dance performed on stage - and just shifts to the cinematic production number without any transitions of frames.

"Lullaby on Broadway" also has a framing device - it begins with a woman (Winifred Shaw) singing -we only see her face, small and white in a sea of black - the camera comes in closer and closer until she is in closeup as she ends the lyric; the camera spins, so her face is upside down, and there is a dissolve to an map of New York City in place of her face (more graphic matching, if you're looking for that) - the camera then dives into this map and we get the full number. I must drop the pose of studied neutrality here to agree with the critics, and Berkeley himself - this is the peak of Berkeley’s career: this is his best work. "Lullaby on Broadway" is a city symphony - it has all the elements - the dawn to dawn structure, the attempts to show all aspects of the city - the pacing, the musical style. It is also explicitly cinematic - the framing devices ensure that, as do the sets, the story line, the whole structure of the piece. There is a fairly explicit sense of leaving the stage behind and dreaming about the city. It is, thus, the closest of all of Berkeley's numbers (that I have seen) to the third type of musical number - the fantasy sequence. This is true even though it contains one of the best sustained “real dancing” numbers in Berkeley’s career, the tap dance in the nightclub. It's notable that even here, the dancers are subordinating to the camera. Even at the beginning, the two dancers, descending a staircase like Fred and Ginger, are subordinated to the set, the staging, the camera. The camera pulls back as they dance down a huge winding staircase, and they are swallowed by the set, and - more importantly - the full design is revealed: a huge multilevel stage, stairs in the background, and platforms to the left (with a group of revelers - or the orchestra - my memory fails me), and right - where Dick Powell and the girl sit, alone, high above the floor, looking down on the dancers. Then, of course, a veritable army of dancers come out and do an extravagant tap dance - and the camera goes giddy with excitement, and starts shooting from everywhere - even through the floorboards. (And that has to be one of the high points of American cinema.)

When it's done - the camera returns to the map of New York, which dissolves to the singer's face, then pulls away, leaving her, again, a receding white face in a dark field....

And that's a good place to leave it, for tonight. Coming up next - something about the "machinery" of Berkeley's dances, and a postscript on politics and meaning.

*For those looking for a description: Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler are lounging on a riverbank, "By a Waterfall" - they croon the song... then Dick takes him a little sleep, and Ruby sneaks off for a swim - plunging into a series of ever larger pools, full of more and more bathing beauties, who end up enacting a number of common Berkeleyisms - the camera goes between their legs while they're swimming, they form a giant zipper, which someone dives into and unzips, then zips back up - etc. You sit back and enjoy the ride along about here somewhere, wondering what he could do to top it....

Types of Musicals

Before I dive into Berkeley proper, I think I have to say something about musicals in general. There are, I think, three main types of musicals* - defining them by how the music is integrated into the rest of the film.

1) Music as expression of emotion: This is what most musicals seem to do. Characters will break into song in the middle of a scene, in the place of "normal", representational interaction. This is usually a means of expression the ineffable - when the emotion gets to be too much, they start to sing or dance. Sometimes these performances are rationalized as performances - or combined with performances, on stage, etc. - this happens in most Fred Astaire films - he is usually a professional dancer - but one who, when he meets that right girl, will break into a spontaneous bit of hoofing. This is what people tend to think of when they think of musicals - especially when they are inclined to make fun of musicals. It requires some suspension of disbelief, as we are expected to accept the fact that people start singing and dancing in the course of their daily lives. But it is a very powerful way of expressing emotion, especially - well, love, joy, desire, sex - it works as an intensification of the emotions, a realization of emotions in movement and sound. And hell, most of us, when we are happy, are inclined to do a jig or croon a bit... aren't you?

2) Performance-based musicals: this is the premise of the backstage musical - that the musical performances in the film (as film) are also performances in the story in the film. People in these films do not start singing when they start falling in love - they sing because they are on stage, or rehearsing, or to impress someone with their singing or dancing. In these films, music remains subordinated to the representationalism of the film - the musical numbers are always naturalized in the story. Films that are not always taken as musicals do this - Marlene Dietrich's films - Blue Angel, Morocco, Blonde Venus - do this. She never sings to express her inner being as such - she sings because she is a professional singer. Obviously, the songs can be expressive of what she really feels - but they are still presented as performances in a realistic (in this sense at least) story. Documentaries also do this, of course - as do mockumentaries, and musicals about rock bands, biopics, and the like.

3) The Singing Detective style musical: this type of musical number is not very common in the 30s. Here, the musical numbers are presented as imaginary. That is - in the performance-based musicals, the music is shown as a more or less realistic performance in a diegetically consistent world. In "expressive" musicals, characters start singing in places they would not in "realistic" films - their singing and dancing is not presented as a performance in the film - but as an extension of their normal behavior. It is, however, completely, literally real, in the world of the film. This third type of musical, on the other hand - represented by films like The Singing Detective, The Hole, etc. - depicts the musical numbers as imaginary - it creates a second order of reality, a fantasy world. In The Singing Detective, the characters don’t literally get out of bed and start crooning - they only imagine it. I'm not sure what the original of this is - but it has a clear precursor in the “ballet sequences” in some of Gene Kelly’s films. They are set apart from the main diegetic world of the films (which in most cases does include "expressive" singing and dancing, and usually performances to boot) - either as explicit dream sequences, or as deliberately non-diegetic inserts.... This kind of musical is much more common now, in the 80s-00s, then it was in the classic days, and it occurs in a much purer form now. Kelly's films, even if you consider the ballets to be the ancestor of this kind of film, always contained conventional performances, of both types. Films like The Singing Detective do not - the music is always fantasy. They also tend to make these kinds of musical numbers functions of their characters' psychology as well - rather than as formal devices, dropped in by the director, say, to comment on the material, or just for the hell of it.

These types are interesting to Berkeley for a couple reasons. First - the 33 films are strictly backstage musicals - characters do not start dancing or singing to express their emotions - they always perform. (There may be a couple exceptions but I don’t remember any.) Now, these performances often carry the same function as the other kind - but they are still naturalized. Take Dick Powell singing to Ruby Keeler in Golddiggers of 1933 - he’s obviously pitching woo to her, but he does it in a completely diegetically plausible context. He is demonstrating his latest song, which happens to be about her. Second - though the singing and performances are always naturalized in the film - always presented as performances - the actual dance numbers are completely impossible. This is one of the things that makes those films so striking, formally. It gives them (among other things) some of the affect of the third type of musical number - it creates another world, existing purely in the film. This effect is particularly strong in numbers like "42nd Street" or "Lullaby on Broadway" - these pieces create imaginary worlds, that only refer to anything in the film outside them obliquely, maybe symbolically - they are self-contained, and primarily self-referential.

Next up - turning to the films themselves, and seeing what we can find there.

*Actually, that's silly - there are a lot more than three - what about, oh,
Umbrellas of Cherbourg? Forgive me for oversimplifying... The three are the ones useful for talking about Busby Berkeley.

Busby Berkley - An Evaluative Overview

Here we go then. Busby Berkeley. But before we really get going - I rather tiptoed around evaluating Berkeley's career, the grand overview - so let's start there. He is, I'd say, an "auteur", even if he wasn't a director for his whole career. He was certainly more significant as a choreographer than as a director, but that hardly seems to undermine my claims that he was an auteur - even in fairly narrow cinematic terms. You can see some hints of his choreography in his directing - the way the camera moves, the way people move, the way things sometimes form those little patterns he loved - certainly, the way music and the story are combined. But his greatness is as a choreographer. What's more, as a choreographer, he was intensely cinematic - his dances are aimed at the cameras, and the best of them work much more as short films than as dance routines in a film. The 4 Warner Brothers films I've seen (which I'll be analyzing in some depth in the rest of this series) take this the farthest - they may set their musical numbers on stage, but they explode the stage - the spaces are impossible, the camera goes into the space, and shoots from all kinds of angles - the dances are staged for the camera, using the angles and editing for their effects, and so on. And because of this, I think it is fair to compare him to directors, more than to other choreographers...

Now then: a quick overview of the films of his I have seen. Some more than once - most not though.

Whoopie - 1930 Eddie Cantor film - he runs off to a dude ranch with a girl. He compares operations. He sings and dances and makes waffles. 2 strip technicolor! I saw this many years ago, and can't remember the Berkeley numbers all that well - I remember Eddie, at his swishiest.

Palmy Days - Eddie Cantor vehicle from 1931, in which he gets set up as an efficiency expert at a bakery through the machinations of a phony psychic. The Goldwyn Girls bare most of it, and what they don't bare they flaunt. 2 fine Berkeley pieces - one with the girls in a gym (shot in a freezer from the looks of the girls - as Guy Maddin might say, the boner quotient is very high), the other Cantor's "My Baby Said Yes, Yes" number, which adds dancing girls and trains and extravagent camera angles before it is through. This is a delightfully silly film.

Roman Scandals - another Eddie Cantor vehicle. In this one he dreams he's in ancient Rome, where he is sold into slavery, discovers a magic smoke that makes you laugh (oy), does a blackface routine in a bathhouse (double oy), and exposes corruption in the dream and real life. Contains great comic chariot chase, but the rest is pretty flat; even the Berkeley numbers are dull, even with some barely concealed nudity.

42nd Street - the most famous Berkeley musical, and a masterpiece - backstage comedy and melodrama, with a good deal of fairly technical backstage stuff, not to mention political metaphor (putting on a show as the New Deal!). Bebe Daniels breaks her ankle, Ruby Keeler is pointed to the stage - then Berkeley takes over - his dances exploding the illusion of the stage, leaving it far behind. A good deal more to come on this humble blog about these films.

Golddiggers of 1933 - Ned Sparks would put on a show, if he only had the money. Dick Powell writes songs and checks, and then saves the day on stage when the regular juvenile succumbs to old age. But wait! Dick's from Boston! so Warren William as his brother and Guy Kibbee as the family lawyer come to save the family name - but they weren't counting on Joan Blondell! this is fine fast and furious Warner brothers comedy, with Berkeley's bits tacked on more haphazardly than usual - but they are perfectly magnificent bits.

Footlight Parade - the stage is dead! replaced by Busby Berkeley musicals! But Jimmy Cagney finds a niche, staging preludes to movies - he has to bang out a dozen a week, and he's going mad - somehow that's not enough, he has to bang out 3 in 3 days, and play all three in one night. Does he do it? "Honeymoon Hotel", "By A Waterfall" and "Shanghai Lil" follow - by this time, Berkeley wasn't making the least pretense at keeping his production numbers on stage, even though they are incorporated into the story as stage productions. These numbers are made for the cameras, made in the cameras, with multiple sets and editing effects and the works.

Gold Diggers of 1935 - first film directed by Berkeley - set at a hotel, where everyone is trying to skim from everyone else. A rich miser arrives with a useless son and a beautiful daughter who waste little time hooking up with a pair hotel employees (who cheerfully drop each other for the chance to marry money) - Adolph Menjou as a Russian producer. Then the music starts - dancing pianos, and the spectacular city symphony, "Lullaby of Broadway".

Babes in Arms - Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland are the children of vaudevillians, whose parents have hit hard times, thanks to Hollywood Musicals. They decide to put on a show - unfortunately, this is at MGM, so the production numbers are resolutely physically plausible, the camera seldom ventures above the top of the actor's heads (and they're all frigging kids!), except for one scene of the kids marching through a town singing and starting fires.... One thing worth noting - in both this and the next film, even though everyone's well being depends on the kids putting on a show - they never seem to actually do it. But they get rescued by a broadway impresario ex machina anyway.

Babes on Broadway - second Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland film Berkeley made for MGM. Has some moments of Busby Berkely in it, but not enough. Has some first rate singing and dancing in it, though more conventional than in BB's WB days. This film is prettygood, though - and the leads were in fact damned good at what they did - there's a reason those two got to be such stars, and for once it has to do with their actual abilities.

Busby Berkeley Part 1

The Harvard Film Archive recently ran a Busby Berkeley retrospective, and I managed to catch a good part of it. It's very inspiring. Those are some inspiring films. I saw, of their series: Forty-Second Street; Golddiggers of 1933; Footlight Parade (Warner Brothers' trio of 1933 musicals, all with huge production numbers by Berkeley); Golddiggers of 1935 (a similar film, directed by Berkeley); Palmy Days and Roman Scandals (a pair of Eddie Cantor musical comedies); and Babes in Arms and Babes on Broadway, with Berkeley directing Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland for MGM. I missed a couple - Dames particularly - that I wish I could have seen - but I am human, and I need my sleep, once in a while*.

The Warners films, especially the '33 films, were the high point of the series. That's not surprising - they would be the highlights of most series'. They have many virtues, almost too many to count. The musical numbers, of course - but even without them, they are funny and sharp, cynical in that Warner Brothers way - they feature great casts - Golddiggers of 33 has Joan Blondell and Ginger Rogers, Aline MacMahon, Warren William (whose presence alone makes most films great) and Guy Kibbee - along with Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler, and all the Warners' character actors (Ned Sparks and the like)... Forty-Second Street has Warner Baxter; Footlight Parade has Jimmy Cagney, hoofing and crooning, as well as putting on a show... it's great stuff! Seeing the films all together like that has some odd effects - like - I began to really get Dick Powell. He takes his lumps - not as bad as poor Ruby Keeler (the Boston Phoenix called her a "roped steer"), but he gets them... But he's not half bad. I didn't quite notice it until I saw hism in 4 films in a row, but he is quite deliberately self-deflating. He's a target because he makes himself a target - he seems to be quite aware that he is playing the charming crooner as a bit of a clown. He is willing to look ridiculous - his love scene with Frank McHugh in Footlight Parade comes to mind. It is interesting that Blessed Event was his first film - it looks like a parody of his persona, but it came before the persona did. There is plenty of parody in the persona itself. The fact is, he is very funny, and I suspect that he only seemed to not be in on the joke - not being in on the joke is the joke...

But good as the rest of the films are, it's the Berkeley numbers that lift them into the stratosphere. You need some kind of hyperbole to discuss the dances, especially in the Warners' films - they are so disruptive, so extreme, they explode off the stage - pretty close to literally. That is, in fact, the gist of this post - or rather - series of posts. How Berkeley's numbers relate to the films they are in - how they relate to other musicals - how they relate to the stage and screen. I know much ink has been spilled on this subject before - but I'm still going to try to work it out. This post, in fact, is something of a warning of things to come: I am going to offer my thoughts on Berkeley's production numbers here in subsequent posts; these may get excessive, but that is life. I can't make too many claims for this - I feel guilty in that I have seen most of these films just once (a few of them more than that) - to do this well, I should have them on hand, to pore over - at least, I should see them a couple times and try to memorize them. But that's the advantage of a blog - you can wing it a bit more....

So that's what's coming. Something like a draft of a longish essay on the musical, especially, the structure of the musical - with Berkeley's work (especially in the Warner Brothers films) used to illustrate those ideas, and examined for the ways it is different from most musicals. There may even be some theory involved - I have reread Jane Feuer and Mark Roth for this, and if I find other commentaries in the next few days, may work those in too. The best thing about this series of posts is that you shoulnd't have to wait the usual three weeks between substantive posts here - a lot of this stuff is close, and just needs some editing and organizing. I should be able to add something every day or two. I'm not promising the world - just - this stuff fascinates me, and I find there are usually people around who share my interests. So here we go!

* The real problem, the reason I missed this film, is extremely deflating. I took chicken out of the freezer over the weekend, and had to take a night to cook it - it was either Dames or the Eddie Cantors, and since I'd seen, and loved, Whoopie! back in the day, I opted for the Eddie Cantor. I wasn't disappointed, though I wish I had seen Dames as well. I should have been thinking ahead before I started defrosting stuff.

Late Start to Long Weekend

Another Friday - come and gone! However, a double feature - Babes in Arms and Babes on Broadway - kept me out late, so... Here then, late but - here it is - the one thing on this sorry blog you can count on: the Friday Random Ten!

1 Source Tags and Codes - ...And You WIll Know us by the trail of our Dead
2 Non, je ne regrette rien - Edith Piaf
3 Shimmy - System of a Down
4 Little Jonny Stinkypants - Dr. Nerve
5 Eat Y'self Fitter - The Fall
6 Honeymoon Blues - Robert Johnson
7 Ex Lion Tamer - Wire
8 Tears of Rage - The Band
9 Skhandraviza - The Ruins
10All there is - Rites of Spring

Random Title Here

It's Friday, so you get your weekly post of random i-pod stuff. Lots of skronk on the guitar front this week, Sonic Youth and Melt Banana and if I took the next bunch of songs that came up, more Sonic Youth, some Erase Errata.... noise noise noise! Meanwhile, Madvillain comes up a hell of a lot, on Fridays anyway, for just having one record in there...

1. Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell - Stooges
2. Tapir's Flown Away (live) - Melt Banana
3. A shy dog - Yo La Tengo
4. We're Going Wrong - Cream
5. Satisfaction - Rolling Stones
6. What people are Made of - Modest Mouse
7. America's Most Blunted - Madvillain
8. She Belongs to Me - Bob Dylan
9. Stella Was a Diver And she Was Always Down - Interpol
10. New Hampshire - Sonic Youth

A Reminder

I have let this go unremarked here - The Dowling Street Memo - that's the one that discussed the invasion of Iraq back in July 2002. The one producing this much reproduced paragraph:

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

This is old news - Slacktivist had a post up about it today, reminding me... It's upside down world, maybe, to read all the controversy about Newsweek, the hand-wringing about the deaths it caused - and almost nothing about the other story. Where the people who were responsible for the war - whose actions caused pain and suffering, are shown to have been lying.

Bah! enough!

Friday Random 10 Post

Another work week in the books, another random ten songs post...

1 John Riley - the Byrds
2 If I were a carpenter - Bobby Darin
3 I fought Piranhas - White Stripes
4 Bistro - Madvillain
5 Catch the Wind - Donovan
6 Laughing - Pere Ubu
7 Zajyu - The Ruins
8 Tension - Minutemen
9 The Circle - The Wipers
10 Novocaine for the Soul - Eels

Wednesday

So far so good. Or not so good. Woke up when the alarm went off - got out of bed - then discovered that, somewhere between the alarm going off and walking to the kitchen, there had been a power outage. No coffee! No internet! I decided to leave the fridge shut, so didn't make lunch. At least the hot water worked...

So here I am at Starbucks, about to head off to work... Listening to Starbucks radio, or whatever it is - they're basically looping Dave Matthews, Bruce Springsteen (the new one, I think, which sounds almost as bad as the last one), and some female singer I don't recognize. Not good. Nope.

Otherwise, I guess there's not much more to say. Thank god for wireless. Get my news, blogs and sports fix in the AM before I go into the office - ohh sure, I could do that stuff from work, pretending it's "research" or some such nonsense... But the point is to get the brain working - and you ca't do that at work.

Sounds About Right

Sometimes, there's just nothing more to say. Here it is, The Official God FAQ.

Link via P.Z. Myers, not too surprisingly.

Staying Dry At the Cinema

Nice old fashioned spring nor'easter outside, most of the day - so I spent as much of it as I could indoors, seeing films. Two in the afternoon - a third at night.

[Please forgive some of the sins of this post, and please do not be surprised if it continues to change over the next couple days. I hope to polish it a bit, but want it online while I do. So expect further editing.]

1) Cowards Bend at the kneee - Guy Maddin; almost silent, shot like a silent film, in 10 chapters, originally made to be shown in 10 peep shows. A frenetic tale of hockey, surgery, murder and vengeance, ghosts, sexual restlessness ("the joy joy joy of meeting someone new!"), and the cowardice of men unwilling to deal with the troubles of marriage and family. Vaseline, subtitles, film loops, and frustration abound. It's a delight, let's not deny it, a convincing dream narrative.... Shown along with three shorts - Sissy Boy Slap Party, Sombra Dolorosa and A Trip to the Orphanage.

2) Bad Guy: an older film by Kim Ki-duk , director of Spring, Summer, Autumn Winter... and Spring and the new 3-Iron. Starts with a creepy looking gent flirting - sort of - with a college girl. She and her boyfriend say mean things about him, he kisses her, she humiliates him - so he frames her, and before long she's been forced into prostitution. You may think it is a spoiler to add that he is in love with her and she eventually sort of falls in love with him - if you think that is a spoiler, you need to see more movies. I will say no more here - at the bottom of the post, you can find much in the way of spoilage, if you're so inclined.

3) The Man Who Left His Will on Film: 1970 film by Nagisa Oshima - story concerns 2 students, Motoki and Yasuko, who look for information about a (possible) third student who left his will on film before he jumped off a building. These 2 (or 3) are part of a group of students trying to make political films during student demonstrations - though the rest of the students seem far more interested in arguing, accusing one another of apostasy and wrong thinking and moral, political and aesthetic bankruptcy. Motoki and Yasuko watch the testament film, argue about it while having sex in front of a projection of it, and finally end up trying to film an exact replica of it - or rather Motoki does, Yasuko tries to stop him. In the end - well... think circles.... It is a fairly interesting experiment - showing the paranoid style of the late 60s early 70s (an international style, after all)... Though what emerges from it, most interestingly, is the footage of Tokyo - buildings, roads, streets, apartments, neighborhoods, shops, signs, bridges, electric wires, etc. The landscape starts to feel real, while the people are insubstantial ghosts flitting about within it.

Now then: back to Bad Guy.

I am not sure what I think of Kim Ki-duk. This is hardly a pleasant film. The pimp kidnaps this college girl - spies on her with her clients, as she learns the trade, broods over her. Eventually the pimp and his pals fall on one another, and most end up dead, though he survives (quite miraculously, as he is stabbed twice during the film, sentenced to be hanged (but reprieved at the last moment), and bears the scar of a past throat cutting), and sets off to the coast with the girl, where she starts tricking among the fishermen. There is also, unfortunately, a bit of magic - the girl finds a torn up photograph that turns out to show the two of them together on the beach... Hey! It's just like Robbe Grillet or something! like the Oshima, come to think of it!

Anyway - the plot is obnoxious enough. At least the soulful pimp and Stockholm syndrome stuff. The style is odd: it is very handsome at times, there are a few extraordinary shots - but Kim hasn't got the greatest since of rhythm, his films tend to fall flat. I saw The Isle a couple years ago, and felt the same way - handsome looking, but with very little snap or rhythm; there are some startling images (the fishhook business in The Isle is worthy of Takashi Miike), but they are not well integrated into the film as a whole. Bad Guy is similar - it looks good - that understated, slightly gritty style that some Korean and Japanese films feature (never as slick as American crime pictures, even Tarantino - nor as jumpy and unsettling as Hong Kong films, or the more aggressive Japanese and Korean films - or European crime pictures, which tend to go for the documentary look, if I remember right.) The acting is also understated - or - the main characters are: they are ciphers - the people around them, oddly, are far more animated than they are. Have more, clearer, motivations, backstories, emotions, etc. than they do.

Though it's things like that that keep me from writing Kim off as a hack (the "Freddy Mercury of Korean cinema" as Tony Rayns put it in Film Comment.) It's hard to get a handle on some of the features of this film, but it's something. One example is the way the central characters are flatter than the secondary ones. Another is the way Kim undermines expectations - scenes that look like they are about to turn violent become comic; scenes that look like two characters might connect, or turn romantic, turn violent or abusive - or a character will hit the wrong person. Here are two examples: 1) in prison, Han-gi's friend (Han-gi is the pimp) stages a breakout when Han-gi is on the way to the gallows - the friend locks up one cop and charges down the corridor with a club, and attacks - Han-gi... he also confesses the crime Han-gi is about to die for, so Han-gi is soon back on the street... 2) The end - the pimp and the girl have become friends - escaped the whorehouses and gang wars, gone to the sea. There, he fixes up a truck with a bed, two pillows, and they drive to the coast - where, in so many films before this, the crook asks for honest work and leaves his life of crime - but here, he's looking for customers for the girl. Logical, probably more believable than the usual story, but sill a mild surprise, which Kim exploits.

But is this enough to overcome the problems? The plot - which is no less predictable than offensive - of course she falls for him! Jeez, that's what whores do with their pimps! And the style of the film has the same problem - there is nothing here that hasn't been done before. (Except maybe the flat center, deeper periphery - maybe; and that might not be intentional.) There is never a feeling that there is anything new going on. None of those surprises are all that unusual - they are nicely done, subtle enough that you have to think about it a while to really catch the pattern, but definitely there.... But they are still nothing new. It rolls along without any real individuality, any real sense of invention or exploration. Compared to other Korean films I've seen recently (I've seen quite a few lately - I've been trying to track them down), Oldboy or Memories of Murder, say, even Joint Security Area (which I finally saw a couple weeks ago), there's very little here that feels like you're seeing something new. The whole thing feels like an attempt to work out how Beat Takeshi (say) makes a film.

Rendering unto Caesar

This story is making the rounds: a North Carolina baptist church expelled its democrats recently. The preacher is a rabid republican, who told his parishioners how to vote - he told them if they were going to vote for Kerry, they should leave the church - some of them resisted, and he finally demanded they sign a loyalty oath. ("he expected them to sign forms supporting his political and moral beliefs" - sounds like a loyalty oath to him, if that's any worse.) They walked out and were voted out. That is not pretty. Religion is a powerful force - but it is a force that is concerned with one's soul. And while it makes clear demands on one's behavior, behavior never translates directly into political positions. Politics, after all, is not about behavior, primarily - it is about organizing society. Morality intersects with politics but cannot be said to drive it. But the church's power over individuals is strong - the ability is there to bully people into doing things against their consciences. It's hard not to see that here. When this happens - religion ceases to be religion and starts to be nothing more than politics. And that is what the first amendment is meant to protect us against.

Changes

I have added a category to the sidebar - "The Arts" - being links to sites containing actual art, or artists. Right now, there's not much - a couple indispensible comic strips, with fairly direct links... More to come, hopefully at a quicker pace than I have been posting lately.

The devil is in the details

Uh oh! Apocalypse watchers beware! Turns out, the mark of the beast is 616 not 666.

A fragment from the oldest surviving copy of the New Testament, dating to the Third century, gives the more mundane 616 as the mark of the Antichrist.

I guess it wasn't Ronald Reagan after all.

Friday's Ritual Music Post

Without much adornment:

1 Babe, I'm on Fire - Nick Cave
2 Falling - Mission of Burma
3 Whiy Not - Yoko Ono
4 Two Little Fishes, Five Loaves of Bread - Sister Rosetta Tharpe
5 Parachute WOman - Rolling Stones
6 Galang - M.I.A.
7 Mojo Queen - Ike and Tina Turner
8 Cain't No Grave Hold My Body Down - Sister Rosetta Tharpe (so how does this happen exactly? 20 gig of music, and 2 songs come up off one record?)
9 Singapore - Tom Waits
10 Wasted Life - Stiff Little Fingers

Day Late, but...

iPodding! I have been on the road, and not updating here - this isn't much, but it's something; keeping a finger in...

1. Rambling on My Mind - Robert Johnson
2. Accordian - Madvillain
3. You are My SUnshine - Norman Blake
4. I shot the Sheriff (live) - Bob Marley
5. Hell's Bells - AC/DC
6. Blue Spark - X
7. The Moon in June - Soft Machine
8. Discipline - Sun Ra
9. Purple Haze (Live at Winterland) - Hendrix
10. Inhuman - Sonic Youth

One for Idaho

Sweet! a bill, "Stating findings of the Legislature and commending Jared and Jerusha Hess and the City of Preston for the production of the movie "Napoleon Dynamite."" - it is the coolest public document I am likely to read this - century? I don't know. But it warms the heart, no?

(Link from The Valve and Terry Teachout.)

Another Friday Ritual

Yes, the mp3 shuffle game. This week's crop, I coulnd't have done better if I were picking them on purpose.

1) Silver - Pixies
2) Plastic Palace People - Scott Walker
3) Rockaway Beach - Ramones
4) Maggie May - Rod Stewart
5) Will the Circle Be Unbroken - Staples Singers
6) Spiders and Flies - Mercury Rev
7) Dry Rain - Meat Puppets
8) 5-4=Unity - Pavement
9) Big Fat Ma and Skinny Pa Went Dancing - Louis Armstrong and the Hot Fives
10) Moonage Daydream - David Bowie

April 19

It has been 10 years since Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah building in Oklahoma City. I don't remember how I reacted. I don't remember hearing about it, or thinking about it - I remember the aftermath - people on the radio accusing "towelheads" - me thinking they were probably wrong - and somewhere realizing what day it was.

April 19, 1993 is much clearer, the memory. It was Patriot's Day; I had been to see the Red Sox, and then gone to Cambridge with my pals; we were eating at the Border Cafe. The TV's were on, and the news came on, the shots of tanks driving into David Koresh's compound, the news that the place was on fire - the news that there did not appear to be any survivors. I felt horrified. I felt, before that, that there was no reason on earth not to simply wait Koresh and company out, and that any overt attack would lead to something horrible. It did. And in the aftermath, I thought it would create copy cats - the paranoids would spring into action. They did.

The Oklahoma City bombings left me numb. I remember feeling confusion and denial, numb despair, but very little else. It matters that I can't find my journals from the time - if I recorded any thoughts, they are gone. I don't think I recorded many thoughts - the bombing was too stark an event. It was not something you could have an opinion about - it was just horrible.

We must acknowledge these horrors. The memory of these evils. Those who suffered and died. Take a moment and reflect.

2 Korean Films

So are Korean films going to be the next big thing? They have, I think, been the next big thing in some circles for the last few years - and recently, seem to be making inroads in American commercial theaters. Chunhyang and Chihwaseon have been released; so have Untold Scandal and The Tale of Two Sisters - and Kim Ki-duk's films are becoming regular features in the states: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter… and Spring was released; 3 Iron is going to be released; Bad Guy and The Isle are shown various places.... And so, this weekend, two Korean films turned up, and I saw them both....

OLDBOY took second place at Cannes last year, the Quentin Tarantino jury, and it’s easy to see why. It’s got all the Tarantino factors - ultraviolence, metaphysics, tricks with time and sequence (though not excessive), dark humor played close to tragedy (and tragedy played as comedy) - it does it all very well. The other obvious influence is Takashi Miike - ultraviolence, comedy, taboo shattering - and it lifts a couple scenes directly from Miike. It is, however, a luded up Miike - it is telling that the moment most obviously swiped from Miike comes at the climax of Oldboy - Miike put his version about a third of the way into his film, played it a lot more graphically (and funnily), and, well, topped it a couple times before he was done. Miike consistently starts where other people end up... In any case, Oldboy is slower and more ponderous than Miike - and a bit less clear than the best Tarantino. Still, it’s quite good, if not quite great.

MEMORIES OF MURDER, meanwhile, was a huge popular and critical hit in Korea, and is now being shown in the states. It is a serial killer policier set in 1986, and apparently based on real events. Two women are found raped and murdered - the local cops start investigating, but they are hacks - a cop from Seoul shows up and tries to investigate for real. Not surprisingly, they clash: the locals manufacture evidence and kick confessions out of suspects - the big city cop preaches science and real police work and makes some progess, enough to save the poor saps the locals try to pin the crimes on, anyway. But the plot is not quite the point - they find clues, they close in on the killer, but can't quite find him - and they can't stop people from getting killed. There is a political subtext to all this - the story takes place about the time of the collapse of the military regime in South Korea, and the protests and political unrest, as well as the government's continued oppression, keep interfering with the police investigations. The political tensions build (never quite at the center of the film, but always there), and end in a brawl, where the cops' sins finally come home to roost - the fact that, by that time in the film, most of the cops have become noticeably less brutal is just an added irony... And it's that - the development of the characters of the policemen, and the depiction of their interaction - that makes the film remarkable. The cast is superb - the cops are absurd, affecting and sometimes very nastyl all at once; the filmmaking emphasizes their performances and relationships. And throughout, the film maintains a funny, off-kilter style. The opening sequence sets the tone - one of the cops turns up at the first murder scene, where a bunch of kids are playing. One of them crouches on the drain where the body is, imitating the policeman, while the rest of the kids find the murdered woman's clothes in a nearby field and start playing with them. The film maintains this tone throughout, even as events become more and more appalling, and the police grow increasingly desperate - while creating an undercurrent of tragedy, particularly through subtle use of repeated imagery objects and situations.

Of these two - Oldboy has the hype - it has the international honors, it has Tarantino, it has a better distribution deal - but Memories of Murder is one of the best films of the decade.

(Update: Some editing for wording, and a couple more links added.)

Hen Mines

I have been struggling to come up with something to blog here today - I have to blog something here today - all that work redesigning the place (well - clicking on a different template - that's work, no?) and.....

Thanks to Electrolite for this link to Defense Tech - where we learn:

Like me, you've probably stayed awake countless nights wondering, "Did the Brits ever make plans for a nuclear landmine, powered by chickens?"

Well, dear reader, I'm here to tell you that the answer is yes.

What follows is, well - well,it's worthy of the opening....

Turn and Face the Strange....

Changes!

Yes, it's redesign time. Why, you ask? To dabble with the "blogroll" a bit - though that's probably still to come. The main reason is to make it easier to read, especially if I start posting longer pieces. I've posted a couple - and hope to continue to post longer pieces every week or so. And I find them hard to read in the narrow, fixed width layout I was using. This template lets you expand the text a bit. So - that's the point. That and I was kind of tired of the green. I don't know if this orange lifesaver look is a lot better, but, it's what we're going with for a while.

It's Friday - what's on your iPod?

1 Bombastic Intro - Big Black
2 Kingdom Of Heaven - Thirteenth Floor Elevators
3 The Recluse - Cursive
4 Randy Described Eternity - Built To Spill
5 Caligari’s Mirror (Live - One Man Drives While The Other Man Screams) - Pere Ubu
6 God Only Knows - Beach Boys
7 Jet Plane In A Rocking Chair - Richard & Linda Thompson
8 Swimming Ground - Meat Puppets
9 Drunken Hearted Man - Robert Johnson
10 Araca Azul - Damon & Naomi

It was, I should add, something of a difficult commute home - usually I can get through 8-10 songs, depending on how many I skip or whether any epics come up. But today - those 10 got me one stop! Getting home took another 6, on the train alone... fun times! screaming kids, people crammed in like sardines - and a drunk on the platform as I was getting off, pushing against traffic, bouncing off people, and coming about 6 inches from going in front of an incoming train. Another day on the red line...

So here's my bonus 6. Lots of married couples in there...

Kid A - Radiohead
Back To The Base - X
Take Me Down To The Hospital - Replacements
I Can Learn - White Stripes
Miss Doris - Sonny & Linda Sharrock
Teenaged Lobotomy - Ramones

Separating the Friday Posts

This is pathetic. Here it is Thursday night, and the last post on this thing is last Friday's iPod random ten. Pathetic! I am at least glad I started posting iPod lists every Friday - it forces me, every week, to realize what a sluggard I have been. (Last week, for what it's worth, I had an excuse - the flu; irritating work developments. But this week, I have had - well, I guess I have had something like an excuse - Wong Kar-wei series at the Brattle - I went to a couple of those - makes for long nights... But should give me somethign to write about.... sad.)

Enough! The movie world is getting interesting - this weekend, Oldboy is opening - can I believe the hype? Soon we will find out. Next weekend, it's Kung Fu Hustle - Stephen Chiao is always good for a laugh, and sometimes more... Can't be bad!

Last weekend, I had to settle for Eros. Not horrible, but given the talent, you could expect a bit more. The first episode - Wong Kar-wei's - is pretty good, though a bit repetitive and formulaic. I think the handover ruined poor Wong Kar-wei’s artistic reason for living. His recent films keep going back to the 60s, but with a mournful, nostalgic tone, which is a change for the worse from the much better, much more urgent movies he made before the handover. Even the ones set in the past were made with a sense of a deadline - they were dominated by time, and the sense of time running out. That sense is gone. It is completely missing from "The Hand", and not as compelling in In the Mood For Love as it was in any of his other films. So - much rides on 2046 I guess - he needs to find something, do something to move forward. If he keeps remaking In the Mood For Love he is not going to be a great filmmaker again.

The rest of Eros is not much. The Soderburgh episode is funny, but kind of a toy, a kind of in-joke . . . and not very sexy by any standards . . . The Antonioni piece is vile - a parody of Antonioni, with bad acting, bad dubbing, bad dialogue, naked models running around in fast cars and riding horses, fucking each other in crumbling towers and dancing naked on a beach . . . atrocious! No amount of FFN can make up for the inanity of it all!

Another Friday Music Post

On goes the iPod - and what comes out?

1 For You - Big Star
2 Airbag - Radiohead
3 Ramses - Steve Coleman and 5 Elements
4 I'm the One - Van Halen
5 One Lonely Night - REO Speedwagon
6 Walk All Over You - AC/DC
7 The Green Manilishi (live) - Fleetwood Mac
8 Celebrated Summer (live) - Husker Du
9 Dead Set on Destruction - Husker Du
10 She Sells Sanctuary - The Cult

So I don't know what principals of rendomness are at work when Husker Du comes up back to back like that, but whatever they are... well, I can't complain too much. As long as it's Husker Du and not REO Speedwagon.

Friday iPod Blogging comes on Saturday this week

30 Seconds Over Tokyo - Rocket From the Tombs (live)
Can't you Hear Me Knocking - Rolling Stones
Trouble on the Line - Loretta Lynn
Randy Describes Eternity - Built to Spill
Cheating on You - Franz Ferdinand
Embraceable You - Charlie Parker
40 - U2
In D - Acid Mothers Temple
Julio Iglesias - ButtholeSurfers
Thank You - Led Zeppelin (BBC recordings)

Dead Souls

This will be more pleasant than the last post (if it ever posts.) I started this last night, it wouldn't post - I know I should try to do something Funny Here, in Honor of the Season, but I think I'm getting the flu again, so I'm going to skip the levity and stick with, well, facts.

And what are those facts? Evidence that someone has some interesting writers! I was watching Jeopardy last night, and what should come up in double jeopardy, but the following three categories - "Warsaw" - "She's Lost Control" and "'Joy' Division" - very nice.

End

Terri Schiavo is dead. I'm not going to say much about it - it's a sad, painful story, turned into a disgusting spectacle by the republican party and the media. The vultures are still circling - Tom Delay making threats: "The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior, but not today." And James Dobson, uttering this stunning piece of hypocrisy on CNN:

But neither of them check the courts. They're totally out of control. And there is, you know, almost a feeling of futility when it comes to the courts handing down decisions that contradict the will of the people.

You know, we saw it two weeks ago with regard to executing minors. Seventy percent of the people disagree with that. It doesn't matter what the people think and the -- neither the executive nor the legislature will step in.

Oddly, the fact that the polls on Schiavo's case were uniformly against government interference doesn't seem to register. You'd think the principal would be the same there.... Of course that assumes that the talk about activist courts and sanctity of life means something - it doesn't. It's smoke, and it's meant to cover their perfectly consistent agenda - asserting the state's control over your body. Not over their bodies - the hypocrisy of these scumbags - and that is what Dobson and Delay and everyone like them are - is that they fight tooth and nail for control over your body, but they themselves fully believe themselves immune from that control. So Delay wouldn't bat an eye at the contradiction between his own behavior when his father was on life support. The rules are for you, not for him. He's Tom Delay!

Anyway... I feel very sorry for Ms. Schiavo's family - her husband, her parents (however much they created this situation) - it was very sad to witness.

Just about Exactly My Commute

It being Friday, and me being a follower of all things fashionable a couple months ago... here, once again, the the last 10 songs my iPod offered. Not only a nice run, but all of it stuff I was in the mood to hear...

1 Stephanie Says - Velvet Underground
2 Personality Crisis - New York Dolls
3 Dirt - Mission Of Burma
4 Death or Glory - The Clash
5 Moya - Godspeed You Black Emperor
6 Apartheid - Peter Tosh
7 It’s So Easy - Buddy Holly
8 Garden was Crowded and Outside - Liars
9 Walk Awhile - Fairport Convention
10 The View - Modest Mouse

Sometimes the Jokes Aren't

We all got some amusement out of Billmon's post on David Horowitz's Cultural Revolution. But then we read this story about a new law in Florida, with this lovely quote: "While promoting the bill Tuesday, Baxley said a university education should be more than “one biased view by the professor, who as a dictator controls the classroom,” as part of “a misuse of their platform to indoctrinate the next generation with their own views.”"

The language there is a bit blander, but the sentiment - the sentimentality, really - the whininess, disguised as Political Correctness (don't forget where that term came from) - could have come straight from the thing itself.

It's the usual dreck, the usual Horowitz tactic of trying to destroy both liberal speech and free speech itself, wrapped in the language of political correctness itself (oh, god the irony! it burns us!), with plenty of the whiff of sulfer and hints of brickbats to follow that the Red Guards loved.

I mean, this is wicked hyperbole, calling Horowitz a Moaist - except - wasn't he basically a Maoists (or Stalinist or something) in the 60s - what sign is there that he is any less a Stalinist now? Certainly no evidence from this. Don't be fooled by the fact that then he called himself a leftist, now he says he's on the right - he's the same monster he was then isn't he? He is, in as direct a way as it is possible to be, exactly what he says he hates.

Passionless

1) I finally rented Passion of the Christ. I skipped it when it came out, for a variety of reasons. I’ve never had much interest in bloated epics - I haven’t seen any of Mel Gibson’s earlier bloated epics - so why see this one? That and the crowds - mobs of the devout... I feared I would react badly. I remember seeing Titanic - and having to control my laughter at the end, with the CGI’d people slipping off the CGI ship. Human pinball... There were a lot of places in that lousy film that demanded a laugh - or at least ironic appreciation of the melodrama. I rather liked the melodrama of Titanic - just that instead of a taut, silly picture, reveling in its genre heritage (ironically, like Almodovar or Maddin, or not), drawing the real emotion out of the conventions of its expression, it was a bloated epic, full of cheesy music, cheesy effects, cheesy, gratuitous camera work, big gaudy sets that require time, to appreciate... God! How to ruin a fun idea! Anyway, around me all the poor girls were sobbing, and I had to hold back the laughter...

2) Let’s cut to the chase: The Passion of the Christ looks cheap. The opening sequence looks as fake as anything in Guy Maddin, but it looks like Mel is trying to pass it off as a real Hollywood movie set. Once you get to the crowd scenes, you can see Mel saving money, by shooting things tight, to minimize the amount of background he needs to dress. Even longer shots are kept within fairly narrow bounds. Of course I could be wrong - it could just be that Gibson is a complete hack, who simply doesn’t know how to make a film look good. I don’t know. I think it’s the money. I think he wanted this to be a real bloated epic, but did not have a bloated budget. $25-30 million - that’s low for bloated epic, though a pretty good amount for a real movie. So I may be right. The problem is - trying to look like a bloated epic on a modest budget is a formula for making a really boring looking film. If Mel had had $100 million to throw around, he probably could have made something truly spectacular (though undoubtedly gaudy and vulgar in the worst way - but that was the point of the film - to turn the last hours of Christ’s life into thrilling spectacle, full of gore and the simulation of high emotion) - lacking the budget, he also lacked the imagination to make a film that looked like anything other than a cheap bloated epic.

3) What kills this film more than anything is the pacing. It is slow and ponderous - not because Gibson wanted to make a slow, meditative film - this is not meditative in any sense - but because it is slow and ponderous. Scenes are dragged out endlessly - with lots of pointless cutting around the room, and portentous music, the actors deliver their lines in slow monotones, as if they were reading them phonetically of cue cards (what are the odds?); scenes drag on and on, repeating their main points... This reaches a kind of nadir not so much with the flogging, though that’s pretty bad - take the structure of the flogging scene: slow start, lots of posturing and leering by various romans; some sad looking onlookers - then the beating begins; it stops - we get the same foolishness we started with, almost a reply of the beginning of the scene - then more, worse beating - and another pause, and they flip the poor SOB over and more of it.... then Jesus' followers coming out to sop up the gore and - you expect them to start writhing in the blood or something disgusting like that.... No, bad as it is, that isn't the nadir - the nadir comes later, the march through the streets of Jerusalem - slow, repetitive, clichéd - how many times can you show poor Jesus flopping to the ground in slow motion, with the cross bopping him on the head as he hits the ground? Watch and find out! Over and over - like a loop: Jesus staggers under his cross - Romans leer and flog - crowd shots - Romans growl and flog the crowd - sympathetic onlooker! - Jesus falls - Romans snarl and leer and whip the crowd - they drag Jesus to his feet and Mel replays the loop... This was when I gave up and started fast forwarding...

4) There is exactly one effective moment in the whole film: the moment of Jesus’ death. His face is shown in tight close up with a wide lens, lit/colored in blues and shadows - it flattens his face out, stretches it, so that for a second there, it looks like an ikon, and has the spiritual effect of an icon. (Evoking, we could say, the Transcendental Style of art.) For that shot, almost by accident, the film achieves something moving and beautiful. It is fleeting - it is literally one shot. It is gone.

5) There have been exactly two great Jesus movies. One is Life of Brian - it is not exactly a Jesus movie, but it is a very sharp satire on religion and politics, the JPF or PFJ and poor Reg/Loretta and the rest based, perhaps, on student politics of the 60s (if I remember the commentary tracks right), but probably as accurate a portrayal of Palestine during the life of Christ as you can find. Dozens of radical sects, political or religious, all squabbling among themselves, accusing one another of betraying whatever they were betraying... I'd bet on it.

The other - one of the greatest films ever made - is the magnificant Gospel According to Matthew. God, but this film shames Gibson's movie, on every conceivable level! But let's stick to just the one level - the tone of the film - and it's pacing. It is odd - there are those who like to say that Mel's Jesus movie is the most faithful adaptation of scripture ever - that is total nonsense. For one thing, it completely hashes the tone and pace of the scriptures. A decent adaptation has to get the strengths of the original, I would think, and that style is one of the best things about the gospels. Pasolini gets that just about right. Read the Gospel of Matthew - it buzzes along at a murderous clip. Then read the Gospel of Mark - which slims it down and speeds it up. Their style is economical, taut, spare - they are never bloated. And the dominant impression one gets from Pasolini's film is of speed - watch how Pasolini shoots Jesus. Over and over we see shots of Jesus walking away from the camera, shouting over his shoulder at a crowd of (literal) followers, who are trotting along at his heels, camera and all. Not to mention shots where Jesus turns his back on the camera (and his followers) completely - demanding we follow him. He's always running away - he's always moving into a new world, that demands that we move to follow him.

It's embarrassing and depressing to compare Pasolini's mastery to Gibson's hackery. And it is ironic that the effect of Gibson's lack of style is to stop the film completely - drain it of its violence and its energy (it's too late to be impressed by a bunch of fake blood, I'm afraid - that's not violence - that's makeup), it's sense of tumult, its radicalism. It reduces Jesus to sentimental flotsam, a cheap plastic replica of something once emotionally and spiritually powerful.

It is a bad movie. A depressing movie - the gospels tell a hell of a story - Jesus is a great character, who represents all manner of powerful things. Gibson's movie seems deliberately designed to strip the direct challenge of Jesus' message and character out - to obliterate the possibility of a real individual response, and to substitute a mass sentimentality, controlled from above, controlled and shaped by some other authority. It is a completely "priestly" movie, in Nietzsche's sense. It wants to make herds. And it succeeded marvelously, drawing in herds of viewers who responded like cattle. It's a disgrace.

Slow Down

Time to try to get back to the movie blogging. First up - Tsai Ming-Liang's Goodbye, Dragon Inn. (This is somewhat obscure, but it's available on DVD and might get screeneed around the country - it is not entirely impossible to find. If it matters, I am not going to skimp on details - I could say "plot details" but as we shall see, that might not be the word. Anyway, if that sort of thing matters...)

All right then. You can check out the position of this film on my best of the 00s list. Second best Taiwanese film of the decade! It’s a good one. What makes it a good one? That is harder to answer than I wish I were. I was challenged, recently, to defend it - the usual complaints were aired: "it's so slow, there's no point, nothing happens." That provokes a small crisis. It's a problem because films like that, films paced like that, are very hard for me to defend normally. I am happiest when I can defend a film intellectually - I can't deny that I am most comfortable talking about films on rational, analytical grounds. And the truth is, I think I can defend Goodbye, Dragon Inn on those grounds - I can work out the logic of it, the themes and structural felicities and so on - it's just that with films like this, slow, minimalist films, those analytical points almost seem to be floating free in the air. Because the markers of conventional aesthetic and intellectual values are so subtle, it is easy for those who don't see them to say that they aren't there, and that the film's defenders read them into the film. And - in films like this - those doubts sometimes gain some footing.

But I see them, all the things this film does. I get it. And that creates the temptation, to fall back on some variation of the "I must be smarter than you" defense, or worse, the “I am more sensitive than you, Philistine!” defense - both vile, disgusting habits. But it's hard not to. This type of film - minimalist art in general, probably - creates this problem. It is as if you either can see what is going on in this type of art or you can't - if you don't see what is going on, without thinking about it, you won't see it when someone explains it to you. Because that kind of subtlety gets right down next to what you are - it is close enough to blankness, emptiness, that it is a real question whether there is anything there. Whether the film does show you anything, or if it simply reflects what you want to be there.

Obviously, I think it is there (the value); I think this film is as dense as any Miike or Imamura or David Lynch film. Visually, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. One reason is that I think art is fractal, like maps and Mandelbrot sets - when you move closer or further away, there is just as much information in them. A movie like this, where things don't seem to happen on the story level, contains as much information as any conventionally dense film, just placed differently. The placid surface conceals or mutes the complexity of the film - though even saying that implies something wrong, implies that the surface does not itself create specific and valuable artistic effects. But...

The film itself? I say, it is as dense as any film you are likely to see, in even the most conventional sense. It's just not all stated explicitly. What happens?

It is set in a movie theater - a huge, sprawling movie theater, with halls and attics and storage rooms surrounding the screening room. King Hu's Dragon Inn is playing to either a packed house or a handful of lonely men more interested in cruising than the swordplay on screen. A woman with a limp walks around, sweeping floors, spying on the film or the projectionist, flushing toilets. One man in the audience tries to pick up another man in the theater - then tries the men's room - then tries the storage rooms, which are full of men, silently wandering among the boxes. 40 minutes into the film, there is a line of dialogue - "this theater is haunted. There are ghosts here." "I am Japanese" replies the man we have been following - probably the only words he knows in Chinese. He goes back to the movie, and is annoyed by a woman eating nuts. The film ends and 2 men meet in the lobby - one is Miao Tien, who has been playing the father in Tsai Ming-liang's films for more than a decade. (He was a ghost in the last one.) The other is Shih Chun - one of the stars of King Hu's Dragon Gate Inn (Miao also appeared in King Hu's film.) "They have forgotten us," he says.

It fits in with Tsai's career. The long takes, of people sitting still - or walking along a corridor - climbing stairs - or standing at a urinal - watching the film playing on screen; sexual longing, the need for connection, but no connection. It has Tsai's brand of comedy - using those long takes to lull you, then slowly springing a joke on you (2 men stand beside each other in a long row of empty urinals; they stand there for several minutes. A third man comes in, and stands beside one of them. They stand there for several minutes. A man emerges from a stall behind them, washes his hands. They stand there for several minutes. Someone inside the stall reaches out and closes the door. The three men at the urinals stand there for a few more minutes. Another man comes into the room, walks up to the threesome standing together, reaches between them and takes a pack of cigarettes from the shelf above them. They keep standing there. It's in the timing. Trust me. If you've recently read some Beckett, you will understand. If you have seen enough Tsai, you will understand Beckett.) At the very end, the star of the film (of all of Tsai's films) appears for the first time, for 2 or 3 scenes. But he's playing the projectionist, so his presence has permeated the film. Outside, it rains.

That's what happens. Digging into it a bit - you have, basically, two characters, the the Japanese guy and the gir. These two move through the theater, driven by their desires, which are somewhat over-determined - she is working, but she is also looking for the projectionist, who avoids her. He is cruising, but he is also just trying to stay dry (and take a piss, maybe). These are powerful enough motivations, and interesting in their own - but Tsai skips the conventional story you might make out of these elements, and structures what is there in ways that give it its own depth. Take the patterns of presence and absence he creates - the cycling of the people in the space, the play of perception and time. Consider the role of the projectionist - framing what happens, controlling the plot, such as there is, in a way, yet absent - not seen until the end. Consider the circulation of objects - the steamed bun the woman eats, the food she offers to the projectionist then takes away. Consider the function of the film being screened, and of the actors from that film watching it. The effect is to create a series of displacements - the film, the actors, the woman and projectionist - the sense of different times occupying the same space created by the shifts from crowded areas to empty areas, or by the comparison of King Hu's film and its actors - who, again, are also Tsai Ming-liang's actors. (Miao Tien is almost as important to Tsai's work, as Lee Kang-sheng.) Miao and Lee certainly evoke Tsai's other films - in which they usually play father and son. Here, neither is on screen much - in fact, their presence (especially Lee's) is specifically withheld - and they have no interaction in the film. But that is part of the significance of the film, part of its language - to offer and deny possibilities of connections - to play off previous relationships, even if just by denying them. (Or by using the Japanese man as a kind of surrogate for Lee.)

Blogs and Deviation

On women bloggers - P. Z. Myers says something here that I completely agree with. In fact, he says it so goddamned well, I am just going to quote it:

We're all concerned about politics, so most people toss a link to the political blogs, just to keep track of what's going on in these things that affect all of our lives…but you know what that means? The political blogs are the lowest common denominator. They're like bacteria, ubiquitous, omnipresent, floating and sliming and breeding everywhere. But people don't aspire to be bacteria (not that I have anything against bacteria—wonderful critters, interesting and deserving of respect), we try to be a bit more complicated and diverse. Sure, we come up short when everyone starts bragging about their colony size or how many petri dishes they've infested or how many clonal descendants they have, but seriously, who cares? We want to be unique. We want to explore unusual experiences. We want to express ourselves in different ways. Let's agree to be different people. Flaunt your metazoan nature, rather than wishing you were more like those prolific prokaryotes.

As a reader (and I think much of the function of blogs is to indicate what you are reading, and to point to things you think other people might like to read), I know that politics is not what pulls me. It's true that the last 3-4 years have been very politically charged - so I have been reading a lot of politics - but other than the period right around the beginning of the Iraq war, and the whole election season, politics has always been a bit secondary. I get my Atrios fix, and check in on Josh Marshall and Alterman now and then, but most of my reading is elsewhere. Pharyngula; Majikthise; Long Story, Short Pier; Berube and Wolcott; Crooked Timber (currently down) and John and Belle; Pandagon. Teresa Neilson Hayden was, for a long time, at the top of the list - she has cut back on the number of posts lately, which is the only reason she isn't so high anymore...

None of these is a traditional politically oriented blog. Pandagon is closest, especially when Ezra Klein was on board - and I had slacked off reading them before Mouse Words came on board. She is not a traditional political blogger - though the problem there seems to be more with the "traditional" part than the "political" part. She writes plenty about politics - but it's not policy wonkery, it's, oh, frightening court cases or insane Christians. Which, as far as I am concerned, is what makes her worth reading. The Kevin Drum types get very boring very quickly - letting them define politics (as policy, really) is bad enough - letting them define what constitutes blogging is even worse.

So... I can see, by the way, that I listed more men than women in my list of favorites - I have also noticed that as I have tried, over the last month or so, to find more variation in the blogs I read (basically, to shift from politics to culture/academics/the arts), I have started reading more women bloggers. If that is because women don't blog on "politics" I think that might be because women who are interested in politics have a broader and more sophisticated view of what politics is.

Friday iPodding

Since I was listening to it on the train, I might as well post it...

Raw Power - Stooges
Crash the Party - Richard Thompson
On Some Faraway Beach - Brian Eno
Joe Bean - Johnny Cash
Shore Leave - Tom Waits
Return the Gift - Gang of Four
Crosseyed and Painless (live) - Talking Heads
Wear My Ring - Gene Vincent
We all Know - Devendra Banhardt
Paint it Black - Stones

Colossal Wastes of Time

I have been thinking about posting something about the Congressional investigations into steroid use - though it's hard to come up with words for such naked grand-standing by useless old men... It is not that steroids are a good thing -but they are not all that big a thing. Overall? in the long run? it will be a joke, something to snicker about, whine about, use to bash Barry Bonds and McGwire and Sosa and whoever else you don't like... that's about all, unless it makes baseball as boring as the Olympics, where it seems half the results get thrown out on appeal.

Anyway, in related news, I hear next week, Congress will be calling NBA point guards to investigate allegations of palming and double dribbling. And the week after, it's baseball again, as we get tot he bottom of the Scandal of the Phantom Tag.

She'll wave her red book...

Billmon provides context for Chairman Horowitz and his merry band of cultural revolutionaires.

We will purify. We must purify. For the sake of that security we all want. (As David Thomas put it.)

On Irish Letters

Happy St. Patrick's Day, friends! And over at Salon, Allen Barra offers excellent advice for celebrating - track down some Flann O'Brien, and wallow in his mastery! At Swim-Two-Birds in particular is a masterpiece - one of the great novels of the 20th century, a book as infinitely re-readable as they come. Cowboys, Irish mythical heroes, drunken college students, civil servants, devils and fairies, innkeepers and serving girls drink, play poker, bet on the horses, recite poetry, cadge cigarettes, stay in bed for days at a time, tell jokes, discuss politics and indulge in literature and literary theory. It is incomparable, though occasionally imitated - it is marvellous beyond words.

Halfway to 2009

This is something I have to do more of - write, and write about movies, probably more than anything else. I have, in fact, 2 or 3 posts in the pipeline, some of them with real content! But for now - best of the 00's posts have started popping up around the internet (spreading from blog to blog, more precisely) - so since I've been sitting on a list for 2 months... Time to post. I was waiting to get around to writing comments, but at my usual posting rate, that'll be done in time for the end of the decade. So enough - here it is:

1 Yi Yi - dir. Edward Yang
2 Goodbye, Dragon Inn - Tsai Ming Liang
3 Mulholland Drive - David Lynch
4 House of Flying Daggers - Zhang Yimou
5 Donnie Darko - Richard Kelly
6 Ichii the Killer - Takashi Miike
7 Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary - Guy Maddin
8 Nobody Knows - Hirokazu Kore-Eda
9 Songs from the Second Floor - Roy Anderson
10 O Brother Where Art Thou - Coens

I hope to come up with reasons for those choices: in fact, one or two of them are currently being incubated for some lengthy commentary... But for now, for the moment at least, there you go.

For Your Sunday Comics PLeasure

Found this link on Pharyngula - Something Awful offers photoshopped comic book covers. Read all about "the menace of Yao Ming, NBA Star!" Great stuff.

Friday with my iPod

I guess this is a bit of a tradition in blogland - the old, play 10 songs on the iPod/iTunes/MP3 randomizer. So - this is what came up on the train. Though I did fast forward a couple times. I won't say where...

1. Nature Boy - Nick Cave
2. Desolation Row - Bob Dylan
3. Tame - Pixies
4. Madison Blues - Fleetwood Mac
5. Soon - My Bloody Valentine
6. Sympathy for the Devil (live) - Rolling Stones
7. Higher Ground - Feelies
8. Pavement Saw - Big Black
9. Union Square - Tom Waits
10. So Stark - Pavement

Or maybe Boots 209?

This is very amusing - Attention Strippers!. (Via P. Z. Myers). Alas, coming up with a name - first pet? Street you lived on? - would require a herculean exercise of memory.... I have the horrible feeling one of the names would be "Laddie"....

Metalogic?

Yesterday on Crooked Timber, an account of an exchange between Richard Rorty and Scott Soames, with special emphasis on the topic of vagueness. This is very interesting. I suppose I notice it, and remark on it here, because of my ongoing binge of reading Samuel R. Delany - a good deal of this debate sounds like it could be taking place on Lux on Iaputus in 2112 as readily as today. This debate is full of what looks suspiciously like Modular Calculus: "whether and how language gets in touch with the world" says Rorty, not to mention the question of what is a heap? That is: say you have something that is not a heap of sand. If you add one grain of sand to it - you do not have a heap of sand. Add another grain of sand to that still-not-a-heap-of-sand, and you will still not have a heap of sand. So - if n grains of sand (goes the argument) is not a heap of sand - then n+1 grains of sand is not a heap of sand. So - when do you get a heap of sand? This question is at the core [there is some irony in saying that) of the philosophy of vagueness - and of course, Delany's "metalogics". It's all about boundaries - when does a not-heap of sand become a heap of sand? When does few become many? When does white become not-white, or the Taj Mahal not the Taj Mahal?

I wish I had a better idea what philosophers in particular Delany was drawing on in books like Trouble on Triton. He writes about these kinds of things - boundaries of concepts and correspondence between models and reality - quite a bit, both in the novels and in his nonfiction. But since he is a novelists, primarily, not a philosopher - he writes about the things from the perspective of a ficteur, and an amateur philosopher. And, in practice, one does not get the references and footnotes and the like one would get if one were reading Rorty or Soames.

I'm certainly curious to find out. It is an odd feeling - there is undoubtedly more to this than I can see, but the philosophy of vagueness really looks like what Delany was writing 25 years ago. I wish I knew more about the philosophical underpinnings of what he wrote - how his fiction corresponded to the philosophers. It's also very interesting, in itself - Trouble on Triton is an interesting book, very much about the vagueness of boundaries between concepts - a world where almost everything is turned into a set of probabilities, where almost everything is seen, somehow, as both much more quantifiable than we see things, and fuzzier - the boundaries between things (genders, races, pleasure/pain, etc - all the old hierarchies made so much of by structuralists and post-structuralists) are vague, blurry. What makes a woman becomes as vexed a question as what makes a heap. I think I can talk, fairly intelligently, about Delany - but moving past him to these similar discussions, in contemporary philosophy, drops me completely out of the conversation.

Which itself, in a sense, is related. Certainly the questions of correspondence are relevant - correspondence to reality, but also, the correspondences between a fiction, a literary (or paraliterary) text and philosophical texts... A question Delany's work (fiction and non-fiction) has explored repeatedly.... And - where does my ability to speak, with some authority, on a novel turn into an inability to speak, with authority, on philosophy?

There may be a metablogging post somewhere in the shadows around here. What am I trying to do with this blog? I know I'm doing it badly - but even if I weren't - what would I be doing? The answer, in fact, I think is this - I am trying, simply, to point to things that catch my eye. The point of this post, say, is certainly not to defend or challenge or really add anything to the Rorty/Soames debate - it might be, somehow, to comment on some of Delany's themes - and certainly, the Delany connection is what I am most interested in here. No - the point of this post is to say, goddamn - this stuff is interesting. I am going to have to look up some of this stuff and read it. This Vagueness stuff looks very interesting... So there you have it. Whatever it is.

Every Day I Learn Something New

Today, thanks to David Horowitz's Moonbat Central bog (which I am still not sure is a real Horowitz site and not a Jesus' General style comedy site), I learn that the reason Martin Scorsese has never won an Oscar is because of Kundun.

Hollywood is put off not only by the stark violence of his vision, but also because Scorsese stuck to his guns (and so, to its credit, did Disney Corp.) in making Kundun (1997). This life of the Dalai Lama showed Communist China’s brutal invasion and rape of Tibet. Beijing threatened commercial retaliation again Disney (and Hollywood) if it released this movie. Scorsese is to this day one of only 50 people officially prohibited by China from entering Tibet. Perhaps this is one factor that explains why more Hollywood figures are careful not to embrace Scorsese too warmly. Greed mixed with left ideology make a powerful cocktail.

That makes perfect sense, just like my theory that Pete Rose managed to get Paul Giamatti blacklisted by the Academy. Anyway, read and enjoy. There's some nice comedy about Roger Ebert in there too.