Revolutionary Road

There is a scene, about 3/4s of the way through, involving a hand on a car window during a moment of passion that reminded me of Titanic. Except it's more like a reversal of that moment, or better yet a desperate attempt to reclaim something like passion.

One wonders how sympathetic we are to feel towards these characters. When I was trying to explain to a friend an odd theme in the movie I said that they were caught playing a role even when they didn't want to. He remarked that the self-awareness must be like another role itself, ad infinitum.

I think that "ad infinitum" actually captures exactly what I was thinking. To use a wildly pretentious phrase, it's the "infinity of boredom"--the "emptiness and hopelessness" as it's said in the movie. Even the despair is a hollow put-on, a show more than substance. And so that "emptiness" escapes from a simplistic attack on suburban tedium to become something much larger, much more intrusive and threatening for the audience. Something we can't condescend to (which the audience I saw it with seemed eager to do--as if things happening in the 50s are funny just by virtue of being in the 50s!). There would seem to be no way out, no way to be real, to "really feel things" as Frank puts it. The true tragedy of the story becomes evident in their descriptions of what "really feeling things" would be, it's either cliched or vague and undefined. Soon it becomes obvious that they've never really felt anything at all. Even their means of escape (dashing off to France, a banal cliche to everyone who hears it) is somehow staged, phony, just another example of bad acting...

While I would be a horribly unqualified film critic, I would be a disgrace as a music critic. I have neither the vocabulary, technical knowledge, nor historical perspective to be able to offer more than "I liked that" in regards to most music, despite the obscene amount of music I seek out and listen to.

Here's my best shot. I am still making my way through a LOT of music from 2008, and I suspect I will be for some time. So let's just say this is the stuff that made the strongest first impressions from what I was able to hear. No real order here--how can you order moods?

Kasai Allstars -- In the 7th Moon, The Chief Turned Into a Swimming Fish and Ate the Head of His Enemy By Magic

This is gorgeous, shimmering--the kind of music where you just sorta stop what you're doing and think try to take it all in. People tend to condescend to "World music" as somehow more authentic or heartfelt or, the reverse, as bland NPR background music. Which is one reason we should do away with such terms of musical colonialism. This is the third entry in the brilliant "Congotronics" series (I recommend them all) and easily the best for me. It's also the least chaotic (part of the wild charm of these albums) with a sly, silky complexity, especially on the first track, which could simply be the best thing I've heard all year.

The Goslings -- Occasion

Ferocious guitar noise, and like everything in this genre and to the surprise of those who don't listen to it, it's really about the pursuit of the most elusive and subtle beauty.

Beach House -- Devotion
I really didn't care much for this at all the first time I listened. But for some reason I kept putting it on when in one of those "I'm not in the mood for anything" kinda moods. These songs are almost all very strong. The melodies will pop up in your head at the strangest times.

Grouper -- Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill
Kind of part of the whole ghostly lo-fi folk thing going on lately, but this is truly spooky at times.

No Age -- Nouns
LA rock band...noisy and abrasive, like I like em.

Nomo -- Ghost Rock
As I said in an email to a friend, Nomo are like if someone said to themselves "let's make music with all the stuff Ryan likes thrown together." Therefore, this is not to every taste. Afro-pop, jazz, and rock all collide (really the best word) in this sunny set of instrumentals.

Other stuff worth mentioning:
Sian Alive Group -- 59:59
Suarasama -- Fajar Di Atas Awan
Torche -- Meanderthal
Ruby Suns -- Sea Lion
El Guincho - Alegranza (though anyone who says this is better than Panda Bear's Person Pitch is an insufferable obscurantist hipster!)

Reissues: The GAS boxset is simply astounding, some of the best electronic music I've ever heard. It's like being serenaded by benevolent all-knowing machines. The "Nigeria Special" compilations from the Soundways label are mind-boggling because what I purchased as a novelty (Nigerian Disco in the 70s? Cool!) turned out to be some freaking great music. All three comps (Blues and Afropop, Disco and Funk, and Rock) are solid from top to bottom. Special indeed.

Zodiac

There is an essential and perhaps constitutive gap between what we normally feel to be a conviction of truth and the evidence in support of it. To some extent, all evidence is somewhat circumstantial. How do we close that gap? How much certainty is enough to be "certain"?

One of the more provocative and interesting interpretations of Zodiac see the movie as dramatizing the arrival of the digital age as it encroaches upon and overwhelms the solid certainty, the contact, of analog. The solid certainties of hierarchies of truth and meaning give way to a digital flatness of equivalent 1's and 0's. The search for the killer, an ethical imperative and need for truth, marks this film as a tragedy, if only an epistemological one.

I did not write a "Best Movies of 2007" post, but this was the best movie of 2007.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream--and not make dreams your master,
If you can think--and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!

--Rudyard Kipling

The Rolling Stones



Why did it take me, a music lover and even more a classic rock lover, nearly 29 years to finally appreciate the Stones? Perhaps the inevitable (and unfair) comparisons to the Beatles, a band whom they share almost nothing in common. If the Beatles represent the 60s, free love, and LSD, the Stones are the 70s, sleazy sex, and cocaine. Perhaps it might be said they are the darker, more mature side of the immaturity of the rock ethos: self-destruction.

All of this is pretty much the standard line, and I don't have much else to offer at this point. But as far as the music itself is concerned, maybe the difficulty for this listener is due to the odd spaciousness of the arrangements, Jagger's heavily mannered and almost unmelodic singing style, and most of all the lack of truly insistent melodicism in the songwriting...The Rolling Stones, as odd as this might seem to say, don't insist on themselves very much. It's great background music...and given time and patience it blooms and burrows its way into your memory.

Give All to Love

Give all to love;
Obey thy heart;
Friends, kindred, days,
Estate, good fame,
Plans, credit, and the muse;
Nothing refuse.

'Tis a brave master,
Let it have scope,
Follow it utterly,
Hope beyond hope;
High and more high,
It dives into noon,
With wing unspent,
Untold intent;
But 'tis a god,
Knows its own path,
And the outlets of the sky.
'Tis not for the mean,
It requireth courage stout,
Souls above doubt,
Valor unbending;
Such 'twill reward,
They shall return
More than they were,
And ever ascending.

Leave all for love;—
Yet, hear me, yet,
One word more thy heart behoved,
One pulse more of firm endeavor,
Keep thee to-day,
To-morrow, for ever,
Free as an Arab
Of thy beloved.
Cling with life to the maid;
But when the surprise,
Vague shadow of surmise,
Flits across her bosom young
Of a joy apart from thee,
Free be she, fancy-free,
Do not thou detain a hem,
Nor the palest rose she flung
From her summer diadem.

Though thou loved her as thyself,
As a self of purer clay,
Tho' her parting dims the day,
Stealing grace from all alive,
Heartily know,
When half-gods go,
The gods arrive.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

This just about never gets old.

The Pursuit of Happyness

Only fools laugh at Horatio Alger and his poor boys who make good. The wise man who thinks twice about that sterling author will realize that Alger is to America what Homer was to the Greeks.
--Nathanael West

There was a pretty big disconnect for me between the advertising for this movie and the experience of watching it. For one thing, despite all the trappings of a supposed feel good Horatio Alger tale, one would have to be pretty oblivious to what can only be described as the utter panic running throughout nearly every scene. And secondly, one would have to ignore the (admittedly subtle) message that the division between wealth and poverty, success and failurere, and happiness or misery is precariously narrow. One of the opening shots of the film makes this abundantly clear by simply panning downward from the upwardly mobile heads and shoulders of the working elite to a homeless man passsed out on the side walk. A visual representation not only of the dreadful possibilities that keep those people working, but of the short distance one would have to fall to be there too.

So, to put it simply, I don't see the film as a celebration of American capitalism (nor, interestingly, a condemnation of it) but instead a sort of examination of what American capitalism feels like on the ground, from the point of view of those who are sold those dreams of success. You can take from this movie just about any political viewpoint you bring into it, which is to say it's not particularly interesting as a political film.

It's most powerful aspect, for me, comes from the basic clarity of the story: survive or perish. It's a parallel version of Cormac McCarthy's The Road with a happy ending, simply a father and son fighting for survival. Even the big speech from the trailers isn't as sappy as it appears, since the context in which it is delivered only serves to make our hero more human--it stems from his failures as father. If there's a sadder and more terrifying scene in a Hollywood movie than Will Smith crying in a public restroom, clutching his sleeping son and holding the door shut with his foot, then I'll be shocked.

When the Levees Broke



Probably the greatest sin of Spike Lee's masterful documentary is too often mistaking provocation for enlightenment. Kanye West's seemingly bold proclamation that "George Bush doesn't care about black people" may well be a daring political statement, especially considering it was delivered in a typically bland "we care about you" bullshitathon from Hollywood, but it collapses under the weight of the importance assigned to it. The fact is it merely repeats the same personalization of racial inequality that manages to obscure the real institutional, social, economic, and cultural factors that really contribute to the problem. It may even be true that George Bush doesn't care about black people, but that wouldn't tell us much about why or how Katrina (and the real issue: the desperate poverty in New Orleans) really happened. With these sorts of spokesmen, and the demagogic use to which they put the rage that they whip up at ineffectual targets, we're merely left celebrating the acquittal of O.J. Simpson as if it struck a blow for racial equality.

With that issue put aside, what's remarkable about the film in political terms is how little it resorts to the tactics described above. In one memorable section, Lee entertains and then debunks a conspiracy theory, only to provide a historical context that only raises the question yet again. The suggestion, it seems to me, is not so much the endorsement of "George Bush doesn't care about black people" or the theory that the government blew up the dam to protect the rich white neighborhoods of New Orleans, but instead the discouraging fact that these feelings still linger, that our past sins tend to revisit us. The seemingly wild conspiracy theories don't seem so wild (though still far-fetched) when we are forced to face our past transgressions. Suspicion is the lingering weight of the sin that we carry in this country.

Beyond all this, the film is most remarkable as a work of art, an ode to New Orleans, the South, Music, and African American culture. It's also a eulogy for the Utopian aspirations of that city, and a document to the legacy of Reconstruction in the South. It's a sad testament to meaningless mass death, made more ignoble by the anonymity of poverty. So many bodies left unattended, face down in the water. An army of nameless dead.

It's an angry film. It's a "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" for our time. A sermon which posits Hurricane Katrina not as cleansing baptismal waters but as a deluge come to wash away the false veneers we maintain about our culture. Fittingly, Lee seems to see Katrina as a critical moment for us to examine ourselves and see that the sins in the past of this country will not wash away so easily. No, it will take work.

Casino Royale


I don't very much about Bond movies. Just putting that out there. I don't really like them. The formula (gadgets, nice car, hot babe who is possibly a femme fatale, exotic locales) is nice once or twice, but it seems to sap the joy of surprise out of the films. Ultimately, the movies seem to blend into each other, offering infinite variation which only serves to underline their basic sameness.

I like this movie a lot. It starts out really great. A black and white scene which imagines Bond as a nearly sociopathic killer (exactly the type of man you expect your government to actually put to good use) and even gives the audience credit enough to fill in an unfinished line for the joke. Pretty bold really.

But eventually it reverts back to a "Bond" film and gets progressively more boring and predictable but thankfully it ends in time to preserve it from getting plain boring.

Thriller by Michael Jackson


Listening to this in 2006 creates a lot of cognitive dissonance. First of all, it's nice to hear some actual funk on this record, which moved Jackson one step further into pop from his best album, the almost all funk Off the Wall. There's a freshness and bounce to these songs, a sense of fun, that's all but lacking in modern pop, obsessed as it is with laughably over-serious porno style sexuality. (For another post: but why must all modern sexuality in the media be a variation on the porgnographic or the stripper; are all our modern celebrities masters of the lap dance, the strip tease, and the come-hither flared nostrils look?)

But here, as I said, it's light for the most part. Bille Jean is the dark exception. But it's a great song, with complex cast of characters and an interesting story to tell. Furthermore, it's a sonic masterpiece. The brooding bass, stabbing synthesizer, and Jackson's heavily mannered vocals create a pretty unique mood, somewhere between paranoia and dread.

But there's inevitably a sense of loss which accompanies all Jackson's good early work. Perhaps only someone as miserably disturbed and fully isolated as Jackson could come alive with joy, at at least the put-on of joy, in a performance, play acting at being happy, just as happy people play at being sad and serious. Jackson's real charade is that he was ever allowed to feel the emotions he claims to feel in these joyous songs.

Looking at his already slightly altered face on the cover of Thriller stings like a rebuke. To myself, my childhood, my culture, and this whole modern world. The assault he made on himself feels like a judgement to me, on judgement on us. Feel for one moment the sense of spiritual vacuity and emotional stuntedness that surrounds us, the fake gestures of sexuality that take on the aspects of pornography (ie, sex that only wants to sell you something), and the fear and anxiety that seems to rule over all our lives, and it's not hard to look at Michael Jackson's mutilated face and think you're looking in a mirror for Western culture. My face there, in his, and so is yours.

Superman Returns


There is another interesting post to be made on the pop-mythology in movies like this, and the fact that I feel a bit chagrined that stories such as Atlas, Prometheus, and even the Gospels are mined to lend this story a feeling of significance and unearned pathos. It's not the echoing and repetition of mythology I find annoying, just the implicit notion that a story like this can only have meaning if it makes its allusions as broad and obvious as possible, which is to say as an allegory. Which is also to say these modern comic book films lack any real purpose of their own, any real conviction in their own stories or characters. Superman doesn't need Jesus to be a moving or interesting story. And frankly, the constant recourse to classical texts that that the audience doesn't know anyway (and has literally explained to them in the film) merely serves to point out the poverty of the crap we're being spoonfed by the movies these days. Some people may find it refreshing that pop-art condescends to inform and make relevant the founding myths of Western culture, but for me it simply reveals how bereft we really are of any meaning our art anymore. If can't find the heroic around us, here and now, Jesus and Prometheus lose their power to truly mean something (sorry for the vagueness, but I'm rushing here) because they are detached from real experience. The crucifixion is merely bloody entertainment if you don't know what suffering means. It's all a hall of mirrors leading back to our continual modern self-regard, shedding the last bit of light left, as it continues to grow darker all around us.

But I digress! All I really wanted to say: Never did I think I would miss Christopher Reeves and Margot Kidder so much. Reeves knew how to play Clarke Kent in a way that emphasizes his utter dorkiness, so much so that the contrast, within himself, that Superman represents has a rare sort of pathos that this new film misses all together. Who is Clarke Kent this time? Just a hunk in glasses. What a shame.

Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism:

The best defenses against the terrors of existesnce are the homely comforts of love, work, and family life, which connect us to a world that is independent of our wishes yet responsive to our needs. It is through love and work, as Freud noted in a characteristically pungent remark, that we exchange crippling emotional conflict for ordinary happiness. Love and work enable each of us to explore a small corner of the world and to come to accept it on its own terms. But our society tends either to devalue small comforts or else to expect too much of them. Our standards of "creative, meaningful work" are too exalted to survive disappointment. Our ideal of "true romance" puts an impossible burden on personal relationships. We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves.

From G. Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form:

Let us consider, for a moment, the world as described by the physicist. It consists of a number of fundamental particles which, if shot through their own space, appear as waves, and are thus of the same laminated structure as pearls or onions, and other wave forms called electromagnetic which it is convenient, by Occam’s razor, to consider as traveling through space with a standard velocity. All these appear bound by certain natural laws which indicate the form of their relationship.

Now the physicist himself, who describes all this, is, in his own account, himself constructed of it. He is, in short, made of a conglomeration of the very particulars he describes, no more, no less, bound together by and obeying such general laws as he himself has managed to find and to record.

Thus we cannot escape the fact that the world we know is constructed in order (and thus in such a way as to be able) to see itself.

This is indeed amazing.

Not so much in view of what it sees, although this may appear fantastic enough, but in respect of the fact that it can see at all.

But in order to do so, evidently it must first cut itself up into at least one state which sees, and at least one other state which is seen. In this severed and mutilated condition, whatever it sees is only partially itself. We may take it that the world undoubtedly is itself (i.e. is indistinct from itself), but, in any attempt to see itself as an object, it must, equally undoubtedly, act so as to make itself distinct from, and therefore false to, itself. In this condition it will always partially elude itself.

It seems hard to find an acceptable answer to the question of how or why the world conceives a desire, and discovers an ability, to see itself, and appears to suffer the process. That it does so is sometimes called the original mystery. Perhaps, in view of the form in which we presently take ourselves to exist, the mystery arises from our insistence on framing a question where there is, in reality, nothing to question. However it may appear, if such desire, ability, and sufferance be granted, the state or condition that arises as an outcome is, according to the laws here formulated, absolutely unavoidable. In this respect, at least, there is no mystery. We, as universal representatives, can record universal law far enough to say

and so on, and so on you will eventually construct the universe, in every detail and potentiality, as you know it now; but then, again, what you will construct will not be all, for by the time you will have reached what now is, the universe will have expanded into a new order to contain what will then be.

In this sense, in respect of its own information, the universe must expand to escape the telescopes through which we, who are it, are trying to capture it, which is us. The snake eats itself, the dog chases its tail.

Damn I knew it!

Well, add A History of Violence to the list below, somewhere in the middle, probably after Munich. It's mostly just funny to me, not really worthy of the self-important seriousness many critics want to attach to it. It's a cartoon version of America and probably says a lot more about how we accept and use violent stories of innocence and corruption (see the two justly lauded sex scenes) rather than any sort of statement about violence and America itself. If you want that shit, just read Richard Slotkin....