Friday is here. Today's post will be simple - a random 10. Next week, I hope to get a Gettysburg anniversary post up (maybe more than one: I find I have no difficulty gassing about the big battles of the Civil War)... and another musical top ten. I should write something about politics - it's been a very political month. From Obama's Nixonian side and the continuing adventures of Edward Snowden, boy spy, and Glenn Greenwald's troubles with "journalists" like David Gregory.... to the Supreme Court's inexplicable burst of decency in overturning DOMA - inexplicable, because everything else they did last week diminished the freedom and power of human beings in our great country, most perniciously, gutting the Voting Rights Act - putting an end to Reconstruction Part II... to the local entertainment of a special Senatorial election here in the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts (God save it!, as Charles Pierce would say)... If I get a moment between the hard work of vacation (picking strawberries and eating them; grilling hamburgers and the occasional tuna steak; hanging around beaches and pleasant hillsides; witnessing parades or visiting historical sites; killing mosquitoes and complaining about the humidity) I may try to devote a page or two to some of those subjects...
But not today. Today, let us just enjoy a few musical numbers as selected by the randomizing algorithms of iTunes:
1. Gang of Four - 5.45
2. Minor Threat - Out of Step
3. TV on the Radio - Keep Your Heart
4. Meat Puppets - Vultures
5. Paul McCartney - Too Many People
6. Jonsi - Tornado
7. Keiji Haino - A Secret
8. Neko Case - Dirty Knife
9. Pink Floyd - Fearless
10. Radiohead - Morning Mr. Magpie
Video? It's almost Canada day, so here's a Canadian! Neko Case, live:
And something a little different - Government Mule, covering the Floyd:
Friday, June 28, 2013
Tuesday, June 25, 2013
June Director - Kon Ichikawa
I missed last month's installment of the Director of the Month through a mix of travel, car trouble and monitor trouble. It's a risk in the summer - I spend a lot more time on the wander, and things can drop for a while, especially things that require me to sit in front of a computer for some length of time. We sometimes get nice weather here! This month, though, I am ready (maybe because it rained for half the month, so it was easy to sit in front of the computer), well before the end of the month.
This month, I am going to reverse myself a bit - instead of continuing to count down my favorite Japanese directors, I am going to drop back a bit, to #7 - Kon Ichikawa. He's fairly well known in the states, but doesn't quite seem to have the cachet of the really highly regarded Japanese directors, nor the narrower, but usually more passionate following of people like Oshima and Imamura. But he's not far from any of them. If he stays below the best - it might be because he doesn't seem to commit to things. He is an great aesthete, and a fascinating experimenter, but he has less of the strong identity of the other great Japanese directors. Though it's easy to overstate that - I mentioned before that his eclecticism reminds me of Oshima - and that he shares with Oshima a kind of consistent tone, cool irony in everything. He reminds me, also, of Stanley Kubrick - his irony, distance, analytical, almost clinical style; they share a sense of cruelty, that never quite abandons the characters, an undercurrent of disgust and sympathy.
Though how much of that is Ichikawa and how much was Natto Wada? She was his wife, and his screenwriter, almost from the beginning up through the mid-60s - which is roughly when his films started to lose their way. (At least that is the conventional story - in fact, he still made a fair number of quite solid films after this). Their collaborations, in any case, have the strongest taste of his most characteristic - or most effective - style, that tone I mean. However those collaborations worked, his films are marked throughout the period by that sharp ironic style, and his utter mastery of composition and construction. He was, over all, a master.
Top ten:
1. Fires on the Plain - one of the greatest war movies of all time - I have written it up at length before. I'll add here that it makes a kind of perfect double bill with the Burmese Harp - that film is optimistic and sympathetic to everyone, a film about hope and redemption. This - is not.
2. The Burmese Harp - A lovely, moving film about soldiers going home. It is sometimes criticized for avoiding the Japanese responsibility for the war - but like Fires on the Plains, it is explicitly about the experience of the men on the ground. That is an important tradition - the war is hell on soldiers story, like All Quiet on the Western Front or the Red Badge of Courage. This tradition ignores culpability and portrays everyone as suffering. In this case the suffering is real - the problems are hinted at but not treated - the resolution, the assertion of human possibility is very powerful and convincing. And in any case, we have Fires on the Plains to tell the other side.
3. Kagi - Hitchcock style thriller from a Tanazaki book. An old man spies on his younger wife and a younger doctor who's engaged to their younger still daughter. Plots schemes and betrayals ending with the crowd of them poisoned by the maid, who the cops release, thinking she is trying to protect the mistress from accusations of suicide. The story is nasty piece of work, perverse and strange and observed with an odd mix of distance and ironic identification, a trademark of both Tanizaki and Ichikawa. There's no wonder he kept returning to Tanizaki. As is also common through most of his career, Ichikawa uses cinema to full advantage - the screen is all chopped up, divided, full of blank spaces and odd relationships among the characters; the film generally is full of odd features - an opening monologue addressed to the audience, freeze frames of the main characters, like in a cop show showing the comings and goings of villains - ending with a voiceover by the dead Nakadai - "why? why was I poisoned? I didn't do anything." Great stuff.
4. Makioka Sisters - another Tanizaki adaptation, lavish and gorgeous - the point of which is made at the end. The film is about 4 sisters: one married to a banker, the next to a businessman, the third looking for a husband, the fourth a terror who runs off with a lover. At the end, sinter #2 visits her and says, in proper Japanese fashion, "the seasons come and go, but nothing really changes, does it?" - well,I don't know if she knows better, but the film, and I'd bet the book, is dedicated to refuting that bromide at every point. It is a film about the end of the world. Inside the film, everything is changed: the family is broken up, they all atomize to their individual desires, they accept the end of their dynasty - and outside the film, it ends in 1938, with the world is tottering on the edge of the end. The film itself is ravishingly beautiful, cool and distanced, funny, sharply, and sometimes disruptively edited. Ichikawa's style is on display - overwhelming graphicism, the symbolic and aesthetic use of color and composition, the tendency to favor a series of static compositions, with very little camera movement, and what there is is not used to create the kind of fluid temporalized space Mizoguchi specialized it. There are 180 degree cuts - there are lapses in and out of flashbacks, there is use of sound to link and dissociate images - there are graphic matches, there are games with black and white and color, there is clever use of text.... All of it is sharp and clear. It's a masterpiece, in the old fashioned sense of the word.
5. The Wanderers - 3 Toseinin, wandering thugs, in 1844, having adventures. Mostly they get involved in local feuds and serve as temporary muscle - resulting in wild fights where people try to look mean without hurting each other, though sometimes these get ugly. Ichikawa shows these fights in all their splendor - men hacking away at each other with swords and sticks and farm implements, slipping and sliding, falling into holes, the whole thing. The fight scenes are ridiculous, brutal, sometimes gruesome... Eventually the three of them get involved in a more coherent plot - one of them is compelled to kill his father, then disowned by the boss who made him do it; the three of them, plus a farmgirl the patricide “seduced” then convinced to run away with him head out for home, though things go about as one could expect. They sell the girl to an inn (though promising to redeem her in three months); one gets tetanus; the other two fight over which of two gangsters they will betray, in the course of which one falls over a cliff. The end. It’s a harsh, funny, totally unsentimental film - you can, sort of, feel sorry for the poor devils, but you can’t forget they are in it because they are idiots, though it’s hard to see how anyone else around them isn’t also an idiot.
6. An Actors Revenge - A famous female impersonator exacts revenge on the men who ruined his family. Theatrical and extravagant, the kind of film that just explodes when you see it on a big screen. Gorgeous strange staging, odd structure, a weird perversity, a wildly unconventional and artificial way of depicting things - fights all flashes of swords, a dead person shown as a still photo.... One of the films where Ichikawa lets out all the stylistic stops - and since he was always something of a showoff - this one is pretty stunning to look at.
7. Mr. Pu - Sketch comedy that turns dark, adapted from a manga. Lots of Chaplin; also lots of its manga roots - episodic, built around isolated incidents and sketches. Broadly speaking, follows the ruin of a modest teacher. He's his by a politicians car; he's humiliated by his students; he's demoted - he's lured to a rally by some of the students, and when the rally turns violent, he's hit in the head, photographed, and everything goes to hell. It is very dark - another characteristic of Ichikawa's comedies, in particular. Here, everyone suffers - Mr. Pu's friend is fired, the politician is arrested, the students suffer, the girl Mr. Pu liked takes up with another man, but her mother forbids her from marrying him - they shout and insult both father and teacher. In the end, the girl tries to commit suicide, but fails (the cops fol her), and Mr. Pu gets a job and goes to work. It is a fascinating film, full of vignettes from early 50s Tokyo - unemployment, clinics, schools, intellectuals in all their absurdity - it's really quite extraordinary.
8. Tokyo Olympiad - Documentary about the 1964 games - starts with a shot of the sun filling the screen - cuts to a wrecking ball knocking down a wall - interesting. Focuses on the effort of sports - the athletes preparing, working, waiting - the spectators - the mechanics of the sport - tending to ignore the competition, except in a couple instances; the volleyball finals,say, which Japan won. Some great moments, reaching a kind of peak with the marathon - an Ethiopian running all alone at the front, an English runner kicking in to pass a Japanese at the finish line for 2nd - and the other runners struggling, suffering, creeping in or not making it. Fairly marvellous film - a bit disconcerting to see a film about the Olympics giving 2 seconds to basketball though.
9. I Am Two - Surprisingly wonderful little film, narrated from the POV of a 2 year old. Begins with the child's birth - narrated - shadows and shapes that only later made sense - accompanied by rather marvellous visuals, out fo focus colors and lights, filmed through gauze (out of focus and a kind of fuzz effect) - slowly taking form - the face of a woman, saying the baby is smiling - still ringed with the same fuzzy effect - and here we get the first of many little pricks at the sentimentality of the material - the narration says "I was trying out my muscles - I used some muscles on my face and she thought I was smiling." - it continues from there. The story is loose enough, but not entirely loose - part 1 establishes the household, the relationship between father and mother, their social standing and so on (with nods to Ozu along the way - I WAS BORN BUT... especially) - part ii has them move in with his mother - the grandmother and wife struggle over petty things, but come to understand and like one another - then the old woman dies, leaving the other 2 1/2 alone.... All this is nicely observed, handsomely shot - it is funny and sweet, sometimes delightfully whimsical (there are two or three wonderful bits of animation), but also full of the sharpness Ichikawa is known for. The premise of the child's narration is plenty cute, and there's plenty of cute in it - but it is also usually unsentimental, undercutting the pretensions or worries of the adults - and once in a while, Ichikawa uses the premise to great effect. A serious discussion of life and death, heaven and hell, is ended by the child saying he has to use the potty - that is perfectly characteristic of Ichikawa/Wada...
10. Kokero - Soseki novel - a young man befriends a professor who doesn't have a job - there are psychological quirks invoved - eventually the man tells how he stole his best friend's girl, causing the other man to kill himself - he has hated himself since. Ends with the old villain killing himself - right as the Meiji emporer dies. It's got political subtext, but I can't totally parse it - but the death of fathers, the sense of compromise and betrayal all seem aiemd at a comment on the end of the Maiji era, and perhaps its failure.
This month, I am going to reverse myself a bit - instead of continuing to count down my favorite Japanese directors, I am going to drop back a bit, to #7 - Kon Ichikawa. He's fairly well known in the states, but doesn't quite seem to have the cachet of the really highly regarded Japanese directors, nor the narrower, but usually more passionate following of people like Oshima and Imamura. But he's not far from any of them. If he stays below the best - it might be because he doesn't seem to commit to things. He is an great aesthete, and a fascinating experimenter, but he has less of the strong identity of the other great Japanese directors. Though it's easy to overstate that - I mentioned before that his eclecticism reminds me of Oshima - and that he shares with Oshima a kind of consistent tone, cool irony in everything. He reminds me, also, of Stanley Kubrick - his irony, distance, analytical, almost clinical style; they share a sense of cruelty, that never quite abandons the characters, an undercurrent of disgust and sympathy.
Though how much of that is Ichikawa and how much was Natto Wada? She was his wife, and his screenwriter, almost from the beginning up through the mid-60s - which is roughly when his films started to lose their way. (At least that is the conventional story - in fact, he still made a fair number of quite solid films after this). Their collaborations, in any case, have the strongest taste of his most characteristic - or most effective - style, that tone I mean. However those collaborations worked, his films are marked throughout the period by that sharp ironic style, and his utter mastery of composition and construction. He was, over all, a master.
Top ten:
1. Fires on the Plain - one of the greatest war movies of all time - I have written it up at length before. I'll add here that it makes a kind of perfect double bill with the Burmese Harp - that film is optimistic and sympathetic to everyone, a film about hope and redemption. This - is not.
2. The Burmese Harp - A lovely, moving film about soldiers going home. It is sometimes criticized for avoiding the Japanese responsibility for the war - but like Fires on the Plains, it is explicitly about the experience of the men on the ground. That is an important tradition - the war is hell on soldiers story, like All Quiet on the Western Front or the Red Badge of Courage. This tradition ignores culpability and portrays everyone as suffering. In this case the suffering is real - the problems are hinted at but not treated - the resolution, the assertion of human possibility is very powerful and convincing. And in any case, we have Fires on the Plains to tell the other side.
3. Kagi - Hitchcock style thriller from a Tanazaki book. An old man spies on his younger wife and a younger doctor who's engaged to their younger still daughter. Plots schemes and betrayals ending with the crowd of them poisoned by the maid, who the cops release, thinking she is trying to protect the mistress from accusations of suicide. The story is nasty piece of work, perverse and strange and observed with an odd mix of distance and ironic identification, a trademark of both Tanizaki and Ichikawa. There's no wonder he kept returning to Tanizaki. As is also common through most of his career, Ichikawa uses cinema to full advantage - the screen is all chopped up, divided, full of blank spaces and odd relationships among the characters; the film generally is full of odd features - an opening monologue addressed to the audience, freeze frames of the main characters, like in a cop show showing the comings and goings of villains - ending with a voiceover by the dead Nakadai - "why? why was I poisoned? I didn't do anything." Great stuff.
4. Makioka Sisters - another Tanizaki adaptation, lavish and gorgeous - the point of which is made at the end. The film is about 4 sisters: one married to a banker, the next to a businessman, the third looking for a husband, the fourth a terror who runs off with a lover. At the end, sinter #2 visits her and says, in proper Japanese fashion, "the seasons come and go, but nothing really changes, does it?" - well,I don't know if she knows better, but the film, and I'd bet the book, is dedicated to refuting that bromide at every point. It is a film about the end of the world. Inside the film, everything is changed: the family is broken up, they all atomize to their individual desires, they accept the end of their dynasty - and outside the film, it ends in 1938, with the world is tottering on the edge of the end. The film itself is ravishingly beautiful, cool and distanced, funny, sharply, and sometimes disruptively edited. Ichikawa's style is on display - overwhelming graphicism, the symbolic and aesthetic use of color and composition, the tendency to favor a series of static compositions, with very little camera movement, and what there is is not used to create the kind of fluid temporalized space Mizoguchi specialized it. There are 180 degree cuts - there are lapses in and out of flashbacks, there is use of sound to link and dissociate images - there are graphic matches, there are games with black and white and color, there is clever use of text.... All of it is sharp and clear. It's a masterpiece, in the old fashioned sense of the word.
5. The Wanderers - 3 Toseinin, wandering thugs, in 1844, having adventures. Mostly they get involved in local feuds and serve as temporary muscle - resulting in wild fights where people try to look mean without hurting each other, though sometimes these get ugly. Ichikawa shows these fights in all their splendor - men hacking away at each other with swords and sticks and farm implements, slipping and sliding, falling into holes, the whole thing. The fight scenes are ridiculous, brutal, sometimes gruesome... Eventually the three of them get involved in a more coherent plot - one of them is compelled to kill his father, then disowned by the boss who made him do it; the three of them, plus a farmgirl the patricide “seduced” then convinced to run away with him head out for home, though things go about as one could expect. They sell the girl to an inn (though promising to redeem her in three months); one gets tetanus; the other two fight over which of two gangsters they will betray, in the course of which one falls over a cliff. The end. It’s a harsh, funny, totally unsentimental film - you can, sort of, feel sorry for the poor devils, but you can’t forget they are in it because they are idiots, though it’s hard to see how anyone else around them isn’t also an idiot.
6. An Actors Revenge - A famous female impersonator exacts revenge on the men who ruined his family. Theatrical and extravagant, the kind of film that just explodes when you see it on a big screen. Gorgeous strange staging, odd structure, a weird perversity, a wildly unconventional and artificial way of depicting things - fights all flashes of swords, a dead person shown as a still photo.... One of the films where Ichikawa lets out all the stylistic stops - and since he was always something of a showoff - this one is pretty stunning to look at.
7. Mr. Pu - Sketch comedy that turns dark, adapted from a manga. Lots of Chaplin; also lots of its manga roots - episodic, built around isolated incidents and sketches. Broadly speaking, follows the ruin of a modest teacher. He's his by a politicians car; he's humiliated by his students; he's demoted - he's lured to a rally by some of the students, and when the rally turns violent, he's hit in the head, photographed, and everything goes to hell. It is very dark - another characteristic of Ichikawa's comedies, in particular. Here, everyone suffers - Mr. Pu's friend is fired, the politician is arrested, the students suffer, the girl Mr. Pu liked takes up with another man, but her mother forbids her from marrying him - they shout and insult both father and teacher. In the end, the girl tries to commit suicide, but fails (the cops fol her), and Mr. Pu gets a job and goes to work. It is a fascinating film, full of vignettes from early 50s Tokyo - unemployment, clinics, schools, intellectuals in all their absurdity - it's really quite extraordinary.
8. Tokyo Olympiad - Documentary about the 1964 games - starts with a shot of the sun filling the screen - cuts to a wrecking ball knocking down a wall - interesting. Focuses on the effort of sports - the athletes preparing, working, waiting - the spectators - the mechanics of the sport - tending to ignore the competition, except in a couple instances; the volleyball finals,say, which Japan won. Some great moments, reaching a kind of peak with the marathon - an Ethiopian running all alone at the front, an English runner kicking in to pass a Japanese at the finish line for 2nd - and the other runners struggling, suffering, creeping in or not making it. Fairly marvellous film - a bit disconcerting to see a film about the Olympics giving 2 seconds to basketball though.
9. I Am Two - Surprisingly wonderful little film, narrated from the POV of a 2 year old. Begins with the child's birth - narrated - shadows and shapes that only later made sense - accompanied by rather marvellous visuals, out fo focus colors and lights, filmed through gauze (out of focus and a kind of fuzz effect) - slowly taking form - the face of a woman, saying the baby is smiling - still ringed with the same fuzzy effect - and here we get the first of many little pricks at the sentimentality of the material - the narration says "I was trying out my muscles - I used some muscles on my face and she thought I was smiling." - it continues from there. The story is loose enough, but not entirely loose - part 1 establishes the household, the relationship between father and mother, their social standing and so on (with nods to Ozu along the way - I WAS BORN BUT... especially) - part ii has them move in with his mother - the grandmother and wife struggle over petty things, but come to understand and like one another - then the old woman dies, leaving the other 2 1/2 alone.... All this is nicely observed, handsomely shot - it is funny and sweet, sometimes delightfully whimsical (there are two or three wonderful bits of animation), but also full of the sharpness Ichikawa is known for. The premise of the child's narration is plenty cute, and there's plenty of cute in it - but it is also usually unsentimental, undercutting the pretensions or worries of the adults - and once in a while, Ichikawa uses the premise to great effect. A serious discussion of life and death, heaven and hell, is ended by the child saying he has to use the potty - that is perfectly characteristic of Ichikawa/Wada...
10. Kokero - Soseki novel - a young man befriends a professor who doesn't have a job - there are psychological quirks invoved - eventually the man tells how he stole his best friend's girl, causing the other man to kill himself - he has hated himself since. Ends with the old villain killing himself - right as the Meiji emporer dies. It's got political subtext, but I can't totally parse it - but the death of fathers, the sense of compromise and betrayal all seem aiemd at a comment on the end of the Maiji era, and perhaps its failure.
Sunday, June 23, 2013
Pre-Gettysburg Post
As we work up to Gettysburg - a few links, and a bit of an essay.
Charles Pierce is running an Anniversary Series, written by Robert Bateman, covering a bunch of things in the run up to the battle - well worth checking out.
This piece by Tony Horwitz, discussing the cost of the war, and the shifts in our assessment of it, is getting some attention. I found it through Ta-Nehisi Coates; I've seen other comments, such as P. Z. Myers'.
Myers takes the anti-war position, the uselessness of war in general, the waste of this one in particular, and the refusal to try to romanticize it. There's a lot to be said for that position - war is hell, and this one was an extremely nasty one. Even wars fought against unambiguous evil, wars that lead to better things, carry mind-boggling costs; and the Civil War's horror was compounded by the fact that, whatever good came out of it, much of it was lost in the aftermath. Slaves were freed, but it took barely a decade for Blacks to be disenfranchised again, for apartheid to be reestablished, for the people who led the rebellion to return to positions of respect and leadership. It's hard to look at the next century without wondering if the war was worth it.
But Coates, as always, keeps bringing us back to the broader context of the war. Reminds us - "we" did not go to war: the South seceded and started the war, attacking the United States. Talking about whether it was worth it is somewhat beside the point when someone else attacks you. He reminds us where it came from - the war did not start for Africans and their descendants in the Americas in 1860 - it started in 1660, and went on from there. He reminds us what the war actually accomplished: that it was legal (for instance) to sell your own children in 1860; not in 1866. And those things - it is true, the North did not fight the war to end slavery at first - but the South certainly fought the war to preserve - and really, to expand - slavery. Fighting for the union at some point probably inevitably would mean fighting for emancipation, because fighting against the union certainly meant fighting for more slavery. And - to speak of the costs of the war, they are appalling, but again - the USA did not choose those costs, the CSA did. And - Coates repeats - the costs of the war represent the shifting of the cost of slavery from African Americans to all Americans. What else could have been done? Coates also puts paid to the idea that we could have ended slavery without the war: the costs would have been prohibitive, and the South wasn't going to do it that way anyway.
And - Coates and Horwitz both point out that the notion of asking if the Civil War was worth the cost was never free of politics - a question originating partly in the aftermath of WWI (which made everyone question the costs of war, but didn't actually seem to stop anyone from starting new ones), but also from the Southern perspective. There's no getting around the fact that the South won the peace - stopping Reconstruction, rolling back what rights were won by African Americans, and even rewriting the story of the war, to make it less about slavery, more about different interpretations of the 10th amendment - and all a terrible misunderstanding.
And so it goes. Coming up on this, the largest battle of the Civil War, it is fitting to ask about the costs, about what was gained and lost. And to do that, and do it fairly, we probably need to learn to hold more than one thing in our minds. The horrors of the war, the evils of warfare, are not something we should ever let out of sight. But we should also not let out of sight the horrors of slavery and the direct connection between that and the war. And we should not forget that the war did accomplish that one great thing, or two great things - preserving the union, and freeing the slaves. Though that too - doesn't undo the fact that the country backed off from the implications of what it did in 1865, it reimposed a harsh form of racism that lasted another century in its open and virulent form, and continues to poison the country today.
Charles Pierce is running an Anniversary Series, written by Robert Bateman, covering a bunch of things in the run up to the battle - well worth checking out.
This piece by Tony Horwitz, discussing the cost of the war, and the shifts in our assessment of it, is getting some attention. I found it through Ta-Nehisi Coates; I've seen other comments, such as P. Z. Myers'.
Myers takes the anti-war position, the uselessness of war in general, the waste of this one in particular, and the refusal to try to romanticize it. There's a lot to be said for that position - war is hell, and this one was an extremely nasty one. Even wars fought against unambiguous evil, wars that lead to better things, carry mind-boggling costs; and the Civil War's horror was compounded by the fact that, whatever good came out of it, much of it was lost in the aftermath. Slaves were freed, but it took barely a decade for Blacks to be disenfranchised again, for apartheid to be reestablished, for the people who led the rebellion to return to positions of respect and leadership. It's hard to look at the next century without wondering if the war was worth it.
But Coates, as always, keeps bringing us back to the broader context of the war. Reminds us - "we" did not go to war: the South seceded and started the war, attacking the United States. Talking about whether it was worth it is somewhat beside the point when someone else attacks you. He reminds us where it came from - the war did not start for Africans and their descendants in the Americas in 1860 - it started in 1660, and went on from there. He reminds us what the war actually accomplished: that it was legal (for instance) to sell your own children in 1860; not in 1866. And those things - it is true, the North did not fight the war to end slavery at first - but the South certainly fought the war to preserve - and really, to expand - slavery. Fighting for the union at some point probably inevitably would mean fighting for emancipation, because fighting against the union certainly meant fighting for more slavery. And - to speak of the costs of the war, they are appalling, but again - the USA did not choose those costs, the CSA did. And - Coates repeats - the costs of the war represent the shifting of the cost of slavery from African Americans to all Americans. What else could have been done? Coates also puts paid to the idea that we could have ended slavery without the war: the costs would have been prohibitive, and the South wasn't going to do it that way anyway.
And - Coates and Horwitz both point out that the notion of asking if the Civil War was worth the cost was never free of politics - a question originating partly in the aftermath of WWI (which made everyone question the costs of war, but didn't actually seem to stop anyone from starting new ones), but also from the Southern perspective. There's no getting around the fact that the South won the peace - stopping Reconstruction, rolling back what rights were won by African Americans, and even rewriting the story of the war, to make it less about slavery, more about different interpretations of the 10th amendment - and all a terrible misunderstanding.
And so it goes. Coming up on this, the largest battle of the Civil War, it is fitting to ask about the costs, about what was gained and lost. And to do that, and do it fairly, we probably need to learn to hold more than one thing in our minds. The horrors of the war, the evils of warfare, are not something we should ever let out of sight. But we should also not let out of sight the horrors of slavery and the direct connection between that and the war. And we should not forget that the war did accomplish that one great thing, or two great things - preserving the union, and freeing the slaves. Though that too - doesn't undo the fact that the country backed off from the implications of what it did in 1865, it reimposed a harsh form of racism that lasted another century in its open and virulent form, and continues to poison the country today.
Friday, June 21, 2013
Solstice Random Ten
Friday - happy first day of summer! this week, I'll keep to a quick random ten:
1. Yo La Tengo - Last Days of Disco
2. The Pogues - Rainy Night in Soho
3. The Nashville Teens - Widdicombe Fair
4. U2 - I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For
5. Tom Waits - The Last Rose of Summer
6. Wire - Moreover
7. Panda Bear - Comfy in Nautica
8. Flaming Lips - See the Leaves
9. Red Crayola - Victory Garden
10. Klaus Nomi - Total Eclipse
Video? Who doesn't love Klaus Nomi?
or Yo La Tengo? (especially augmented with parts of Sonic Youth.)
And off the list - being summer and all - here's Galaxie 500, Summertime:
1. Yo La Tengo - Last Days of Disco
2. The Pogues - Rainy Night in Soho
3. The Nashville Teens - Widdicombe Fair
4. U2 - I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For
5. Tom Waits - The Last Rose of Summer
6. Wire - Moreover
7. Panda Bear - Comfy in Nautica
8. Flaming Lips - See the Leaves
9. Red Crayola - Victory Garden
10. Klaus Nomi - Total Eclipse
Video? Who doesn't love Klaus Nomi?
or Yo La Tengo? (especially augmented with parts of Sonic Youth.)
And off the list - being summer and all - here's Galaxie 500, Summertime:
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
June Film Roundup
Been about a month since the last round-up, so time for another. NOthing fancy, just capsules:
Stories We Tell - 12/15 - story of Sarah Polley and her family. They had a secret: was she really her father's daughter? they treat it as a joke, she pokes around, and finally, almost out of the blue, she finds her biological father. When this, in turn, threatens to come out in public, she has to work it out with her family - and ends up filming it. The film approaches the story through all the people around the story - she uses interviews with her family and people they knew, home movies, fake home movies (presented as real home movies, until the end, when she reveals the crew filming them), and, given a central place, her father's account of his marriage, and their family. The title tells you what the film is: it's about the stories we tell, how we construct the meaning of our lives, and how everyone around you has their own version, and how they are all, somehow, to some extent, brought together. Life itself as a kind of collaborative improvisation. Very clever and moving film.
Deceptive Practices: Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay - 10/15 - very enjoyable documentary about Ricky Jay - his mentors, his connection to the past of magicians, as well as plenty of magic. Might be lightweight in the end, never really digging into the material, but since it consists mostly of Jay talking, it is inherently fascinating and very entertaining, because, in the end, he is.
Frances Ha - 11/15 - Noah Baumbach's latest, co-written with Greta Gerwig. GG is Frances, who lives in NY, is a dancer, though only an apprentice, shares an apt with her best friend, has a boyfriend - and proceeds to shed these impedimenta... She breaks up with the boyfriend rather than move in with him; her friend decides to move to Tribeca, gets engaged, moves to Japan; the dancing business slowly fades. Frances, meanwhile, drifts around New York - spends some time with a pair of rich brats (one beds a string of women, though not her; the other has an odd passive aggressive friendship with her ("undatable")), until the money runs out. She lives with another dancer for a while, who doesn't like her - though Frances manages to get a weekend in Paris out of it. Goes back to her old school for the summer, and then, I suppose, finally, faces the facts a bit... All through - she is flighty and friendly and a bit weird, and not very good at anything, but cheerful and deluded and inclined to lie to cover up her inadequacy, until the end. She takes a plain office job, she manages to stage a piece of choreography, she gets an actual apartment of her own. It is a nice little film, entirely built around Gerwig, and carried by Gerwig, who is, after all, a nearly infinitely charming actress when she gets the chance.
Before Midnight - 11/15 - Linklater, Hawke and Delpy are back, 9 years after the last one. Now, Jesse and Celine are together, with twins, live in Paris, but spending the summer in Greece. Starts with Jesse taking his son to the airport, to fly home - the boy's fate, and Jesse's relationship to him and his mother, becomes the plot engine of the film. They drive back to the place they are staying, have a nice dinner party with friends, who are as talkative as they are - then are sent on a romantic night alone at the hotel. But things unravel.... This one is different from the previous two. Not just that they start the film as a couple; the film is not about this couple, by themselves - from the start, they are plunged into the world. It starts with Jesse and his son; then the family; then with their friends - through the first half of the film, they are constantly surrounded by other people. They are alone in the second half - but not really alone. The boy calls; they start arguing, about the boy, the ex-wife, the twins, jobs and cities and where to live - they are, now, as a couple, completely entangled with the rest of the world, with all those other people, and can't get out of it for love or money.... It is, then, another fine movie, part of a very impressive series of films - so impressive, I'm tempted to note, that Julie Delpy has a parallel franchise of her own running on more or less exactly the same theme... Indeed, this one feels a bit more like Two Days in New York than the other Linklater films - fraught relationships and inescapable relatives....
Post Tenebras Lux - 12/15 - New Carlos Reygadas film, and for me, his best to date. (Though I haven't seen Silent Light, one of those films that got a fleeting screening somewhere and was gone, and seems, somehow, not quite right to watch on DVD.) Very fragmentary, hallucinatory film. The story, roughly, is about a rich family living in the country - man, beautiful wife, 2 adorable kids, a bunch of dogs. They have their troubles - he is addicted to porn, and some other hints of the couple's malaise come out; the man, in particular, interacts with the workers around him in ways that hint at trouble - he acts friendly, but is condescending, and carries a streak of violence and exploitation with him... The family heads off on vacation, but leaves something behind, so he goes back alone, to a Major Plot Point.... Talking about it that way doesn't come close to describing it, of course. The film consists of scenes arranged without obvious connections, isoolated from one another, though usually fairly stable inside them - long takes, usually with a mobile camera; lush scenery - jungles, rain, exteriors shot with a doctored lens that looks like vaseline, though apparently it isn't. We see the family together at different points in their lives; we see the workers in their town, mostly "Seven" who cuts down trees, does handiwork, and runs a kind of AA program; we see a family reunion of appalling rich people, kids playing rugby, and an orgy in a steam bath with things like the Duchamps room and the Hegel room. Throughout, much is made of class differences, class and race; there are many animals of all kinds, and trees, and landscapes and weather; there is, as well, of course, sin and redemption. It flirts, I suppose, with the worst kinds of Art Film Smugness - but it's too beautiful to succumb to it, and stays too close, most of the time, to something solid - the earth, and faces and bodies, and light. I liked it: I don't trust Reygadas, and had to talk myself into seeing this - but was caught up in it. It felt, somehow, like other films - Lisandro Alonso at times; Raoul Ruiz at times - I can't say it's as good as either, but it works.
An Oversimplification of her Beauty - 10/15 - interesting essay, love story, something, directed by Terance Nance. All of it loops around an incident - a young man who likes a young woman, expects to see her one night, but she calls and says she can't come over - "how would you feel?" The story loops around this, expanding the set up, his bad day, his history of love affairs, and so on... And loops around a short film (Called How Would U Feel) that he made of it. A girl he half loves, a friend, an ambiguous relationship; where will it go? With this as an anchor for his musings on his life, his other lovers, also lost, and on his career, his art, and art, memory, what have you.... It is very clever, and might end up being too clever - it does seem to get stuck in that initial conceit, and though the expansion on it is also very well done, it bogs down... Still: a very interesting film, an essay film, of the kind people did on video 25 years ago. A very interesting debut.
Stories We Tell - 12/15 - story of Sarah Polley and her family. They had a secret: was she really her father's daughter? they treat it as a joke, she pokes around, and finally, almost out of the blue, she finds her biological father. When this, in turn, threatens to come out in public, she has to work it out with her family - and ends up filming it. The film approaches the story through all the people around the story - she uses interviews with her family and people they knew, home movies, fake home movies (presented as real home movies, until the end, when she reveals the crew filming them), and, given a central place, her father's account of his marriage, and their family. The title tells you what the film is: it's about the stories we tell, how we construct the meaning of our lives, and how everyone around you has their own version, and how they are all, somehow, to some extent, brought together. Life itself as a kind of collaborative improvisation. Very clever and moving film.
Deceptive Practices: Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay - 10/15 - very enjoyable documentary about Ricky Jay - his mentors, his connection to the past of magicians, as well as plenty of magic. Might be lightweight in the end, never really digging into the material, but since it consists mostly of Jay talking, it is inherently fascinating and very entertaining, because, in the end, he is.
Frances Ha - 11/15 - Noah Baumbach's latest, co-written with Greta Gerwig. GG is Frances, who lives in NY, is a dancer, though only an apprentice, shares an apt with her best friend, has a boyfriend - and proceeds to shed these impedimenta... She breaks up with the boyfriend rather than move in with him; her friend decides to move to Tribeca, gets engaged, moves to Japan; the dancing business slowly fades. Frances, meanwhile, drifts around New York - spends some time with a pair of rich brats (one beds a string of women, though not her; the other has an odd passive aggressive friendship with her ("undatable")), until the money runs out. She lives with another dancer for a while, who doesn't like her - though Frances manages to get a weekend in Paris out of it. Goes back to her old school for the summer, and then, I suppose, finally, faces the facts a bit... All through - she is flighty and friendly and a bit weird, and not very good at anything, but cheerful and deluded and inclined to lie to cover up her inadequacy, until the end. She takes a plain office job, she manages to stage a piece of choreography, she gets an actual apartment of her own. It is a nice little film, entirely built around Gerwig, and carried by Gerwig, who is, after all, a nearly infinitely charming actress when she gets the chance.
Before Midnight - 11/15 - Linklater, Hawke and Delpy are back, 9 years after the last one. Now, Jesse and Celine are together, with twins, live in Paris, but spending the summer in Greece. Starts with Jesse taking his son to the airport, to fly home - the boy's fate, and Jesse's relationship to him and his mother, becomes the plot engine of the film. They drive back to the place they are staying, have a nice dinner party with friends, who are as talkative as they are - then are sent on a romantic night alone at the hotel. But things unravel.... This one is different from the previous two. Not just that they start the film as a couple; the film is not about this couple, by themselves - from the start, they are plunged into the world. It starts with Jesse and his son; then the family; then with their friends - through the first half of the film, they are constantly surrounded by other people. They are alone in the second half - but not really alone. The boy calls; they start arguing, about the boy, the ex-wife, the twins, jobs and cities and where to live - they are, now, as a couple, completely entangled with the rest of the world, with all those other people, and can't get out of it for love or money.... It is, then, another fine movie, part of a very impressive series of films - so impressive, I'm tempted to note, that Julie Delpy has a parallel franchise of her own running on more or less exactly the same theme... Indeed, this one feels a bit more like Two Days in New York than the other Linklater films - fraught relationships and inescapable relatives....
Post Tenebras Lux - 12/15 - New Carlos Reygadas film, and for me, his best to date. (Though I haven't seen Silent Light, one of those films that got a fleeting screening somewhere and was gone, and seems, somehow, not quite right to watch on DVD.) Very fragmentary, hallucinatory film. The story, roughly, is about a rich family living in the country - man, beautiful wife, 2 adorable kids, a bunch of dogs. They have their troubles - he is addicted to porn, and some other hints of the couple's malaise come out; the man, in particular, interacts with the workers around him in ways that hint at trouble - he acts friendly, but is condescending, and carries a streak of violence and exploitation with him... The family heads off on vacation, but leaves something behind, so he goes back alone, to a Major Plot Point.... Talking about it that way doesn't come close to describing it, of course. The film consists of scenes arranged without obvious connections, isoolated from one another, though usually fairly stable inside them - long takes, usually with a mobile camera; lush scenery - jungles, rain, exteriors shot with a doctored lens that looks like vaseline, though apparently it isn't. We see the family together at different points in their lives; we see the workers in their town, mostly "Seven" who cuts down trees, does handiwork, and runs a kind of AA program; we see a family reunion of appalling rich people, kids playing rugby, and an orgy in a steam bath with things like the Duchamps room and the Hegel room. Throughout, much is made of class differences, class and race; there are many animals of all kinds, and trees, and landscapes and weather; there is, as well, of course, sin and redemption. It flirts, I suppose, with the worst kinds of Art Film Smugness - but it's too beautiful to succumb to it, and stays too close, most of the time, to something solid - the earth, and faces and bodies, and light. I liked it: I don't trust Reygadas, and had to talk myself into seeing this - but was caught up in it. It felt, somehow, like other films - Lisandro Alonso at times; Raoul Ruiz at times - I can't say it's as good as either, but it works.
An Oversimplification of her Beauty - 10/15 - interesting essay, love story, something, directed by Terance Nance. All of it loops around an incident - a young man who likes a young woman, expects to see her one night, but she calls and says she can't come over - "how would you feel?" The story loops around this, expanding the set up, his bad day, his history of love affairs, and so on... And loops around a short film (Called How Would U Feel) that he made of it. A girl he half loves, a friend, an ambiguous relationship; where will it go? With this as an anchor for his musings on his life, his other lovers, also lost, and on his career, his art, and art, memory, what have you.... It is very clever, and might end up being too clever - it does seem to get stuck in that initial conceit, and though the expansion on it is also very well done, it bogs down... Still: a very interesting film, an essay film, of the kind people did on video 25 years ago. A very interesting debut.
Friday, June 14, 2013
Friday Random Music
Pouring rain again; a strange couple weeks here. Not the weather itself so much as the fact that it seems to have settled in - we had a big bad heat wave a couple weeks ago, then it started raining and has barely stopped since. This time of year, in this part of the world, you rather expect to run through three or four seasons a week. You seldom get the chance to get tired of any particular tie of weather.
Anyway - onward: after last week's more ambitious effort, I'm afraid I'm back to more modest devices. Though I like the idea of a big countdown a month - there will be more coming. (Which means I am going to owe you all at least three relatively big posts at the end of this month - a director, a favorite band - and a very big sesquicentennial around the first of the month... All that around a holiday week? I'd better get it done now....)
iTunes says -
1. Radiohead - Dollars & Cents
2. Mudhoney - Crooked and Wide
3. Interpol - The Heinrich Maneuver
4. Times New Viking - I Smell Bubblegum
5. Minutemen - Storm in My House
6. The Residents - Numb Eron
7. Ryan Adams - Tina Toledo's Street Walkin' Blues
8. Blue Oyster Cult - Joan Crawford
9. Pere Ubu - Rounder
10. Social Distortion - Sick Boys
Video? "Policemen are hiding behind the skirts of little girls"...
The Art of Walking, with Pere Ubu:
Anyway - onward: after last week's more ambitious effort, I'm afraid I'm back to more modest devices. Though I like the idea of a big countdown a month - there will be more coming. (Which means I am going to owe you all at least three relatively big posts at the end of this month - a director, a favorite band - and a very big sesquicentennial around the first of the month... All that around a holiday week? I'd better get it done now....)
iTunes says -
1. Radiohead - Dollars & Cents
2. Mudhoney - Crooked and Wide
3. Interpol - The Heinrich Maneuver
4. Times New Viking - I Smell Bubblegum
5. Minutemen - Storm in My House
6. The Residents - Numb Eron
7. Ryan Adams - Tina Toledo's Street Walkin' Blues
8. Blue Oyster Cult - Joan Crawford
9. Pere Ubu - Rounder
10. Social Distortion - Sick Boys
Video? "Policemen are hiding behind the skirts of little girls"...
The Art of Walking, with Pere Ubu:
Friday, June 07, 2013
Beatles Top Ten
I have a new scheme in mind for music Fridays - once a month (we'll make it the first Friday of the month, for simplicity's sake), I will post a list - the 10 best songs by one of my favorite bands. Simple enough, though setting out to do it raises all kinds of new questions - never mind the difficulty of picking just 10 Beatles songs - what order should I post these lists in? Count down the bands? or count up the bands, starting at #1? or alphabetically? or, look for monthly themes? I don't know. I know I can't do some kind of countdown - it's enough trouble coming up with an arbitrary order for songs - for bands? No - that's too much anxiety for one post - I need a different scheme.
I think instead I will try for a loose kind of autobiography - what I listened to over the years. The bands I loved, and love, in the order (roughly) that I came to love them so. This has many merits - it allows me to acknowledge the changes in my tastes, and to hold on to some of the values I've held more at other times. Though my musical tastes haven't changed all that much, at least not since late high school - or rather I should say, while there have been a couple rather dramatic swerves in emphasis over the years, I have never quite abandoned the things I used to like. Rather - hearing new, different (more different than new, since much of it was discovering things that had been around for decades) music sometimes added substantial new types of music to what I liked, I didn't really stop liking what I liked before. Does that make sense? I don't know. Maybe it will make sense as I make my way through this series.
And so to start - starting at the beginning means we are going to start at the top. At the top because to this day, I don't think any band can really measure up to the Beatles, and at the beginning because, even when I was very young and did not listen to the radio on purpose, the Beatles were the one rock group that was an inescapable part of my experience. Ads were on TV all through the 60s when I was too young to know anything about it - I liked them, could sing bunches of their songs ("I wanna hold your ha-a-a-a-and, I wanna hold your hand...."), my parents marveled that such things could exist, but still thought little tykes singing Beatles songs were terribly cute. In the 70s, when I started to listen to the radio deliberately, on my own, the Beatles weren't around - but Paul McCartney and Wings were (and John Lennon, Ringo Starr - some George Harrison), and I suppose like a lot of kids, I was amazed to discover that was the same guy who did Hey Jude... but still, it didn't take that much time to get to know the Beatles as such, and like them - and realize that they were the real deal, that the more you heard of them, the more amazing they got. And by the time I was a more or less complete music lover (which, in its earliest days, meant, I'm a bit sorry to say, a confirmed Kiss fan), I loved the Beatles - and continued to do so through every stage of my education and development as a fan, every step of which, somehow, made them seem a bit deeper and better, and usually, to have gotten there first. So - they are the place to start, I guess. Here goes - I give you - my 10 favorite Beatles songs:
1. A Day in the Life
2. Norwegian Wood
3. Hey Jude
4. Revolution
5. Dear Prudence
6. Tomorrow Never Knows
7. Everybody’s Got Something to Hide But Me and My Monkey
8. A Hard Day’s Night
9. Help!
10. She Said She Said
A completely hopeless exercise, obviously, but there it is. And video? IN the studio...
And on TV...
I think instead I will try for a loose kind of autobiography - what I listened to over the years. The bands I loved, and love, in the order (roughly) that I came to love them so. This has many merits - it allows me to acknowledge the changes in my tastes, and to hold on to some of the values I've held more at other times. Though my musical tastes haven't changed all that much, at least not since late high school - or rather I should say, while there have been a couple rather dramatic swerves in emphasis over the years, I have never quite abandoned the things I used to like. Rather - hearing new, different (more different than new, since much of it was discovering things that had been around for decades) music sometimes added substantial new types of music to what I liked, I didn't really stop liking what I liked before. Does that make sense? I don't know. Maybe it will make sense as I make my way through this series.
And so to start - starting at the beginning means we are going to start at the top. At the top because to this day, I don't think any band can really measure up to the Beatles, and at the beginning because, even when I was very young and did not listen to the radio on purpose, the Beatles were the one rock group that was an inescapable part of my experience. Ads were on TV all through the 60s when I was too young to know anything about it - I liked them, could sing bunches of their songs ("I wanna hold your ha-a-a-a-and, I wanna hold your hand...."), my parents marveled that such things could exist, but still thought little tykes singing Beatles songs were terribly cute. In the 70s, when I started to listen to the radio deliberately, on my own, the Beatles weren't around - but Paul McCartney and Wings were (and John Lennon, Ringo Starr - some George Harrison), and I suppose like a lot of kids, I was amazed to discover that was the same guy who did Hey Jude... but still, it didn't take that much time to get to know the Beatles as such, and like them - and realize that they were the real deal, that the more you heard of them, the more amazing they got. And by the time I was a more or less complete music lover (which, in its earliest days, meant, I'm a bit sorry to say, a confirmed Kiss fan), I loved the Beatles - and continued to do so through every stage of my education and development as a fan, every step of which, somehow, made them seem a bit deeper and better, and usually, to have gotten there first. So - they are the place to start, I guess. Here goes - I give you - my 10 favorite Beatles songs:
1. A Day in the Life
2. Norwegian Wood
3. Hey Jude
4. Revolution
5. Dear Prudence
6. Tomorrow Never Knows
7. Everybody’s Got Something to Hide But Me and My Monkey
8. A Hard Day’s Night
9. Help!
10. She Said She Said
A completely hopeless exercise, obviously, but there it is. And video? IN the studio...
And on TV...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
