o hand in hand

i've been seeing a lot of great movies lately, and at the top of my recent faves sits film, samuel beckett's 1965 near-silent collaboration with director alan schneider.

everything about film produces meaning. in fact, i would argue that there is more legitimate content (as opposed to narrative flourishes) in the twenty six minutes of this concise treasure than in most three hour epics. gestures, jokes, angles and actions are all multiple in a sense-- stretching laterally across horror, laughter and allegory. and, more or less, at its center sits an elderly buster keaton, here cast as a paranoid man who wishes not to be seen.

keaton's other-worldly presence resonates from the very start. though he hides his face for at least twenty minutes of screen time, one is keenly aware of his singular corporeal abilities. through his demonstrative lexicon of postures, a kind of woozy dance occurs upon the threshold of terror and laughter. beckett and schneider manage to pinpoint that threshold and hold it; they examine it through a variety of lenses and physical predicaments. keaton's fear of his own kittens, for example, is not a distraction from its otherwise foreboding airs, but rather an expression of the affective space that film inhabits. the kitties are cute, of course-- but "cute" is rendered uncanny.

in the end, one could say that film encourages some sort of allegorical meditation... is beckett poking fun at the nausea produced by our addiction to images? or does he have something more personal in mind... our inability to escape ourselves, etc.? both of these possibilities (especially when shrink-wrapped into blog-entry sound bytes) are insufficient explanations of film. and though perhaps its intention is to trigger a larger philosophical meditation (at least in some regard), there is much to say of the "earthly" side of film-- the structure and the schematics of it. the physical distress it produces while watching it-- and how that distress sort of tickles you somehow. i certainly haven't "cracked the code" of beckett's eventual meaning(s)-- though i suspect he has something less-than-rigid in mind. with or without a clear allegorical leaning, if your eyes and ears are sufficiently open, you will hear film's eerie laughter.

again, in no hierarchical order...

10. cramped urban sports demand a peculiar element of fantasy. unlike traditional playground sports, where one might fancy oneself a "michael jordan" anytime a skillful two points are scored, fantasy becomes integral to the game. the poor kids huddled around my neighborhood rowhomes are under obligation to imagine that the seven-foot-tall wooden bucket they've planted along the sidewalk is a "regulation net." they must skillfully weave a cohesive whole out of a series of fragmented gestures-- a stop-and-go of passing cars and scornful adults. it takes a strange breed of juvenile integrity to even bother with such a thing. the kids are dreaming all around me, but not because they want to dream...

9. my cat (arthur) and my roommate's cat (dwayne) are actually getting along.



instead of eating one another alive, they wander around the house together, pausing to explore bodily smells or to compete for my affection. plus, dwayne can clearly kick arthur's ass (but is indifferent to any temptation to do so), which is creating a paradoxical state of good behavior, and making my arms and legs less of a scratching post...

8. kane quaye is an artist from ghana who specializes in making coffins shaped like actual objects. his mercedes benz coffin is currently on display at the place that pays my bills (part of the "african art, african voices" exhibit currently on display). the evocations of this sort of thing are endless, and i won't ruin its impression by providing my own.



7. george michael bluth provides just the right sprinkle of humanism into the thick soup of arrested development, thereby adding a strange balance to the show's occasional nastiness, and keeping things from becoming too smug and obnoxious.



6. part of the deal with my new as-of-yet-not-fully-moved-in-roommate, is that i get to keep my studio (all to myself), which for the past two years has been split with another person. as a result, i have sprawled out, littering the whole room with bits of cut paper, and gotten (increasingly) to work.

5. another pleasant offshoot of having a roommate who isn't officially "around" is all the private time i'm afforded, during which i can sing scott walker songs out loud to my cat whenever i please.



"...yoooooo've become a strange-uhhhhhh..."

(furthermore, sometimes i don't even sing scott walker songs per se, as opposed to "songs in the style of scott walker." i did a rather heart-felt rendition of the jackson 5's "i'll be there" in the style of scott the other day... which was greeted with blazing feline indifference, as could be expected...)

4. the popularity of animal collective strikes me as an encouraging cultural decision. i can't really remember a time when a record as "avant-garde" as sung tongs enjoyed as widespread popularity. i'm tempted to say the boredoms' chocolate synthesizer... but i think that's just because they managed to wander on in to lollapalooza as a result of it. and sung tongs is damn good, too. more accessible than here comes the indian, but more distinct as well. the album feels fresh to me-- not confined to many of the tropes of "noise" or "new" music, and psychedelic in a way that doesn't immediately reek of spaceman 3. i'll also add that it's nice to see a band riff off of pet sounds and come up with something other than the umpteenth wanna-be elephant 6 record...

3. my roommate's dvd set of the first-and-only season of freaks and geeks is forcing me to slowly re-live every instance of abject humiliation that once marked my adolescent life. which inevitably raises the quizzila-esque question:

which of these poor specimens "would i be" were i a freaks and geeks cast member???



yes yes, y'all... for his love of groucho marx... for his hammy, over-eager attempts at wittiness (not unlike this very-insistent post you are currently reading)... for his strange way of translating inexperience and adolescent fear into a series of curmudgeonly old-man-isms... and finally, for his short stature... i am neil, ladies and gentlemen, for better or for worse.

2. one of the most well-advertised graffiti bandits of fishtown has chosen for himself the tag of "porn." that's right, porn. his tag name is PORN. sometimes "porn" is punctuated with an inverted pentagram (hey, why the hell not???) god bless you, mr. porn... this post goes out to you.

1. finally, i've refrained from my usual "review" style entry on this one, but jonathen lethem's the fortress of solitude is one of the best books i've read this year. it is also the third book of his i read this year (the others were: amnesia moon and motherless brooklyn), and it's by far the best of the three. it's nostalgic and analytical at the same time... it's a compelling account of how culture and privilege mask the nuances of race... it's an extremely affectionate examination of music-- what music does, how music circulates, why music moves you... it's a confession as well as a fable... and finally, it is fundamentally personal-- not neccessarily to provide a "a window into one's soul," but as a record of how the fabric of an era is woven into an individual. this intimacy is very powerful, and proved to be a remarkably personal experience for me as a reader, as well...

i just watched brian dannelly's saved!, that mandy moore movie about jesus and stuff. the movie's pretty bad (sorry ed, i know you liked it). it can't really make up its mind what it wants to be... it occupies this wishy-washy middle ground between cynicism and sincerity, resulting in an experience too cynical to be sweet and too sweet to be funny. macaulay culkin does a bad ferris bueller impression as a wise-cracking handicapped kid, proving that a few slutty photo sessions with harmony korine doesn't make for automatic, "character actor" charisma. the dude from almost famous is a little too post-pubescent at this point to re-iterate that (far greater) movie's doe-eyed sincerity. mandy moore is much better as the teen queen leading the fundamentalist witch trial, but that doesn't protect us for having to endure her rendition of the beach boys' "god only knows" in the opening credits. all in all, it's moderately well-intended, but certainly not a hell of a lot of fun.

ideologically, saved! is a complete mess-- it makes a thick soup of the contradictory desires currently brewing to a boil in spiritual america. for example, note its usage of martin donovan as a kool kat school principal, making constant embarrassing attempts to sell christianity as a bastion of hipness. donovan effectively reduces his character to a misguided simpleton, spewing forth infinite hip-hop slang gags to the delight of a savvy audience. which is fair enough until you consider that the film is sneakily re-iterating his character. ultimately, it struggles to maintain smug superiority over its own agenda. it smears its admirable pluralism all over the beast of fundamentalist christianity, but the beast shines through in the end.

this may sound somewhat rude and reactionary (but keep in mind i have a decade's worth of wretched catholic education to back this up *see note*), but perhaps the shoe of tolerance simply doesn't fit. the fairy-tale assumption of a film like this, where everyone gets the love of the lord in the end (whether gay or prep or punk or preggers), is precisely what's not happening in our culture right now. we have a president who hates condoms almost as much as he hates gays, we have a supreme court on the threshold of bringing back the days of the coat hanger, and we have mel-gibson-de-sade ready to burn us at the stake in our theatres. to say "enough christianity!" commits the sin of being obvious, and perhaps shatters a precious need to rebel against our liberal parents, but, boringly enough, it needs to be said. watching saved! scramble to give dubya's "values" voters a botox injection of secular good vibes amounts to either a seditive (at best), or a red herring (at worst). someone ought to make a teen movie that urges people to wake the fuck up instead.

(* footnote: the grumpiness of this post, to lay my cards on the table, has undoubtedly been triggered by this "sore spot" in my personal history)

india song, a 1975 film directed by french novelist marguerite duras, inevitably sent light bulbs flashing above the head of calvin klein. one wonders as to the number of euro-elitist perfume ads this film has inspired. in the canon of boho pretentions, one would have to look to an alain resnais or an ingmar bergman for a celluloid specimen more "sprockets-like" in its style and delivery. the film is ice-cold, humorless, crawlingly slow and filled with dialogue about "leprosy of the heart" and crap like that.

and, strangely enough, that is precisely its strength.

i'd imagine marguerite duras to be a pretty love/hate figure for anyone interested in twentieth century literature. there is no escaping the thick swamp of gloom and doom that hangs above her work, and you either dig it, or you don't. it's no different in this film, either. duras is unabashedly pretentious, sculpting a world of anemic aristocrats drowning in a sea of high brow melancholia, bourgeois boredom and fear-of-death. in india song, they don't even talk to one another directly. their foggy narrative unfolds in strange layers through a series of unseen observers and participants, speaking seperately from the action, often in a new-agey whisper. the actors simply wander around, alternately avoiding and confronting one another with their eyes. not to mention doing quite a bit of ballroom dancing for some reason.

i'm not making this sound like any fun, am i???

but duras comes through in the end. and not by means of any irony or trickery. she's just so damn insistent with this stuff. her affected tone reaches such unprecedented, hyperbolic heights that it leaps beyond its own avant-melodrama as a result. what should be dismissable and campy is instead hauntingly austere. her pomp becomes a posture, and one must re-adjust oneself accordingly.

there is drama, and then there is melodrama. and traditionally, one favors the former over the latter. but duras is capable of pushing melodrama to its breaking point. her affected obsessions are worn proudly on her sleeve, and their sharp frontality dismantles one's ability to dismiss them. the result does not obliterate her content in the name of some sensual sublime, but rather changes one's stake in it. duras uses her urgency to effectively alter the empathetic vantage point of a viewer. india song is tightly contained in a variety of static poses, and somehow it reveals too much. for all its ghostliness and deliberately drab engagements, it produces an excess of style-- a rich fog of exhausted romance that emerges as an event unto itself. the contained, claustrophobic interior through which india song is slowly enacted contains a crystallized ennui far weirder and more dimensional than her chic woefulness would lead one to believe.