Dying on the Outside

Notes on the Lightning Field

2011-10-07T08:31:00.000-07:00

Walter de Maria, "The Lightning Field", 1977.

Walter de Maria's Lightning Field is far away from everything. From Albuquerque, you drive three hours through deserts and range land and scorched lava fields to Quemado, New Mexico, one of the more remote, desolate towns in one of the most sparsely populated states in the country. (Quemado, by the way, means burned.) From there, you drive for 45 minutes on wasted dirt roads that twist and bend incomprehensibly and seem, after a while, to be passing through a dimensional fold. When you arrive, the only remnants of the human world are the small cabin where you eat and sleep and the 400 polished stainless steel poles, arranged in a one mile by one kilometer array, that make up the field itself.

1

Whether we like it or not, we are Westerners. We have inherited a culture that has learned to divide and manage space, learned to make it productive. For those of us used to inhabiting space that has been parceled, named and economized, the desert's vast emptiness is a shock. We literally do not know how to see such open, uncultivated space. It is not for nothing that the grid system was invented here in the western U.S., as a way of dividing, selling and managing--of rationalizing--the vast expanse. We are unused to land that has not been primed for consumption.

And so the Lightning Field, composed of identical rectangles, transposes that familiar grid system onto wild, wide open space. In doing so, it makes the space intelligible to us. It creates geometry and dimension; it creates boundaries and units, allowing us to perceive the space as habitable.

But the Lightning Field also reveals the limits of this process. Despite the geometries and boundaries, there is a surplus of space in the field. Space overflows; it rushes above and through and around, always exceeding the boundaries imposed upon it. The Field seems to say: despite our best efforts to manage and contain, to impose rational, economic sense upon the world, there will always be unclaimed ground. There will always be a wildness, an openness in the interstices.

2

There are (at least) two processes at work in our perception of the Lightning Field's geometry. First, imagine yourself standing on any of the vertices of a grid. You will see unbroken lines of points stretching longitudinally, latitudinally and diagonally. In between those lines, though, the points will seem to array themselves incoherently. So it is at the Lightning Field.

The second process: as we all know, objects closer to us appear to be larger than objects further away. And so, the poles forming those longitudinal, latitudinal and diagonal lines seem to slope smoothly downward as they extend out to the horizon. But, again, those interstitial poles cause us problems. They form strange matrices of alignment and height that resist immediate intelligibility and yet seem to resonate within us like some disorienting, coded harmony.

3

The day and night in September when we visited the field were perfectly clear. There was, in other words, no lightning. But we soon discovered that although lightning would probably be spectacular, light itself is the real medium and the real subject of the Lightning Fields. The poles do not produce their own light, they reflect, concentrate, channel the dynamic light of the environment. When the sun is high and bright, the poles share its almost translucent whiteness. When it is low, they radiate those warm, familiar peaches and pinks. A sunset may be the most commodified image in western culture, but the Lightning Field re-engages us with the sublime ache of the sun going down. It brings our awareness to the way in which the sun casts itself unevenly on the earth, imprinting light on objects, creating shadows, evoking color from the world.

Walter de Maria, "The Lightning Field", 1977.

4

At midday, the poles, bleached by the intense high light, almost disappear into the landscape. At night, they are absorbed into the desert's comprehensive darkness. At both times they are essentially invisible. But, as the sun rises and sets, at the margins of light and dark, they begin to glow, suddenly robust and sharply defined against the backdrop of the land. You can probably imagine how beautiful and poignant this is.

But also: dawn and dusk dramatize the constant, taken-for-granted process of phenomena moving into and out of visibility. As you stand in the field waiting for the sun to rise, sensing the light around you becoming fuller, the poles, once dark, barely visible shapes on the horizon, slowly absorb that pinkish dawn glow and emerge into perceptibility. By mirroring and magnifying this process, this revealing undergone by the rocks, the dirt, the mountains and all of the objects in the environment (including we ourselves!) the Lightning Field brings it newly and forcefully to our attention, a revelation of what is always already happening.

And this process really is a miracle; every day, things that were once invisible to us become visible. What was dark, becomes light. The poles remind us both of the wonder of our own perception but also of the incredible surplus of world beyond our perception. The essential fact of the unseen is that it has the potential to become seen. There is an overflowing of meaning in the world. It's important to remember that.

5

Because I had never been anywhere as empty and remote as the Lightning Field, I had never before experienced such an overwhelming lack of human sound. These are some of the things you hear there: the wind rustling the brush and rushing in your ears; birds chirping, birds flapping their wings; the creak and crunch of your footsteps; your own sharply defined, yet strangely contoured voice. If you stand close enough, you can hear the flowers.

Most intense: the sound of your own body in your ears. The heavy thrum of your blood. A deep, round, whispery drone, crested with tremulous overtones fading in and out of audibility. (Are these ringings an ever-present layer of sound obscured by the hum of urban life? Or is it our body's attempt to compensate for the lack of that hum?) This is your body's song. There is no silence.

Silencio

2011-09-14T11:28:00.000-07:00

In September, on Slate, Bill Wyman wrote this about Mullholland Drive, Memento, Waking Life, and Donnie Darko, four films released in the months before September 11, 2001 but that, for him, evoked something essential about that day:

A central character separates, in one way or another, from life, from the reality of being. Each film evocatively creates a heightened sense of reality for its characters that we the audience inhale as well. Each features a shock, a wrenching sideways, whether from that plane engine falling on a suburban house to the revelation that something is very, very wrong with poor Betty. The tragedy that hangs over each story is another similarity: In each case, the dread of loss touches the audience in some fundamental way...In each of these signal works, a sense of humanity, of the great worth of every life—and a shuddering appreciation of the apocalypse that accompanies every individual death—is palpable.

I want to speak now about David Lynch's Mulholland Drive because, of all of these films, it resonates most powerfully with the "wrenching sideways" September 11th still represents for me. I ask you to watch the scene below which is, for me, among the most terrifying in all of cinema.

...it's the second one I've had, but they're both the same. They start out that I'm in here...By disrupting our syntactical expectations, "Dan's" stilted language immediately communicates the moment's hallucinatory wrongness. There is his pale face, which becomes more discolored and sweaty as the scene proceeds. You can see him fighting against his mounting panic, struggling to maintain a relaxed expression--a struggle which only makes his face appear more contorted. There is the yet-unseen figure of the dark man behind the wall: He's the one that's doing it. Finally, there is the awful moment when Dan realizes that either he has not escaped from the nightmare, or the nightmare has invaded his waking life.

In many ways, this scene, which comes very near the beginning of the film and whose characters (apart from the diner itself) never appear again, is a template for the rest of the film. At the heart of Mullholland Drive is a deeply unhappy woman, her elaborate, desperate dream, and a great rupture that shears her from herself. As with Dan's nightmare and the film itself, this dream (or vision, or work of wild imagination) is ontologically unstable. It borrows and reconfigures facts from the waking world and burlesques that world's atmospheres and sensations. In return, the dream bleeds itself back through the gauze of everyday life. We never quite know what is fact and what is hallucination, what is "real" and what is imagined. This is a source of great dread.

* * *

Here I will defer to David Foster Wallace's great essay on Lynch's Lost Highway to help describe the way it feels to watch the first part of Mulholland Drive. Wallace argues that a thing feels "Lynchian" when "the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter." Among the most significant examples of this containment is Lynch's fascination with the mundane artifacts of daily life. No director since Hitchcock has invested everyday objects with as much totemic dread as Lynch. In Mullholland Drive, lamps, name tags, light bulbs and especially that blue box and it's blue key give off a sinister glow. The key difference: with Hitchcock, every filmic element is nested perfectly within his careful, ingenious plots. That teacup terrifies because we know that it's being used to poison poor Ingrid Bergman; that telephone turns us cold because we sense that it will collude in some dreadful act. In Lynch's films, objects are similarly transfigured but their meanings are more open ended. They derive their significance less from their relation to the plot's mechanics than from the film's broader, more ephemeral perceptual world; their only logic is the opaque, disembodied logic of dreams. Thus denatured, these objects become foreign and strange, signifying something hidden and nameless and vast.

In keeping with Wallace's idea that darkness is contained within the mundane: throughout much of Diane/Betty's dream, Lynch communicates a profound sense of dread through bright light and high color. The film's first hour radiates high-contrast reds, yellows and blues and is saturated with a painful Los Angelene brightness, a brightness that Betty--a parody of cute, frumpy American naivite--exudes in equal measure.

The platinum colors, the wide, constricted smiles and the alarming optimism all brim with a suspicious, itchy falsity. It isn't so much that these things are hiding something terrible; instead, we sense that, like those totemic objects, they themselves are somehow terrifying. This sense is reinforced by a dark, industrial drone, an airy hum that pervades the film and often blossoms into a menacing minor chord. It seems to emanate from the substance of the world itself, putting lie to Betty's optimism and rendering even the screwball-ish elements of the film's first section grotesque and unsettling.

Throughout Mullholland Drive's first hour, we are visited by strange voices, voices that seem to pierce the dream's bright sheen and communicate to us from the world beyond. Louise, a woman with hooded eyes and a black shawl comes to Betty's door and tells her in a panicked voice, "...Someone is in trouble! Something bad is happening!" Later, Adam, the director, meets a ghostly figure named The Cowboy who delivers bizarrely drawled, syntactically tortured koans, coded messages from some unseen power. All of these things--the light, the sounds, the objects, the cryptic sayings--impart a deep ambience of suspense, of some looming terror. But the source of that suspense remains mysterious; the film brims with a feeling of abstract existential menace--there's a man...he's the one who's doing it-- a dark presence under the skin of everything. Something bad is happening.

* * *

In the weeks and months after September 11th, I had some really awful dreams. Dreams of burning cityscapes, dreams of a thick, acrid smoke enveloping the city, dreams of white-sheeted children with terrible, bloody faces. Other times I would lie awake in bed almost paralyzed with panic, a heat rushing from my guts to the surface of my skin. The air molecules around me felt thick and still and geologically heavy. The frantic, multiplying thoughts in my head were not my own.

Everyday things became dreadful. Newspapers, TVs, the sounds of airplanes, police sirens, the mail, the noises of the city all sent small measures of toxic dread circulating through my body. Reality had been sundered and the world's substance now seemed deeply, irrevocably changed. Violence and fear had pervaded everyday life and were now enmeshed in it. Terrible things that had once felt so abstract and distant were now very close and very real. The world had become sinister and there seemed to be no way to escape. As a woman I met that September put it to me, with matter-of-fact resignation: "nowhere is safe."

One particularly unmooring element of this was the way that the disaster spun its awful aura in all temporal directions. Of course, both the present and our new future seemed suddenly unfamiliar and frightening. But more curiously, the past also felt infected. We came to see that reality before 9/11 was, as Wyman puts it, "heightened." I take that to mean: our culture had wallowed in a bored, almost campy self-parody. The optimism was too shiny and bright, the complacent self-involvement too engrossing. Even that morning, they sky was just too blue, the light too clean and pleasant. This past, like Betty's smile, now felt ominous and suspect. It was a deeply kitschy cultural moment and if David Lynch has shown us anything, it is that kitsch can be terrifying. In retrospect, it seemed that terror had been woven into the fabric all along.

Mulholland Drive's temporal structure speaks to this strange phenomenon. On its driest, most simplistic level, the film's chronology is relatively straightforward: Diane, a struggling actress, falls in love with Camilla; Camilla wins a role that Diane had desperately coveted; Camilla breaks Diane's heart by taking up with the film's director; Diane, by now deeply depressed, has Camilla killed; Diane re-imagines the entire scenario in a dream (with Betty and Rita assuming the Diane and Camilla roles) before finally killing herself.

Of course the film doesn't really work like this (and is considerably less interesting when seen this way). From the viewer's perspective, the dream occurs "before" any of the other events in the film--but an awareness of the film's conclusion has seeped into its emotional logic. Those awful events, including the death of the dreamer herself, are the source of the dream's sense of dread and foreboding. What's more: while the events within the dream unfold more or less chronologically and occupy a full three-quarters of the film's running time, the "waking" section's temporal scheme is fragmented and kaleidoscopic; events are doubled, elided, shifted in and out of sequence.

The result is a narrative shaped more by psychological, emotional and textural ambience than by a sequence of events. This kind of ambience mirrors the character of memory itself. In memory, as in dream, we create collages of image and sensation. We discover new stories in the mesh and pulse, in the shifting strands of wild perception. Through memory, the past becomes an ambient, perpetual present, a present that declares itself not through chronology or causation but through an ebb and flow of image and sensation. This is merely an element of everyday consciousness. But in the time after September 11th, this feeling became dreadful. The poisonous terror of that day seemed to radiate out into all temporal spheres: into our visions of the future, into our memories, into the abiding present.

But what was this terror? What exactly were we afraid of? Certainly, there was the fear of extreme, sudden violence, the very kind of stark fear that terrorism is meant to inspire. It is unquestionably terrifying that death could, without warning, rain down on you out of a clear blue sky and that our quotidian living spaces could be turned against us so suddenly and so profoundly. But nestled within that quite comprehensible fear is something more opaque and primordial. It is this kind of terror, at once nameless and omnipresent, that Lynch refers to by enfolding the horrible within the banal and that he conjures so powerfully in Mulholland Drive.

Our windows, we were told, were not sealed tightly enough. Poisonous air would surely leak through the cracks. It seemed that our bodies--vessels that we are taught to believe are discrete, self-contained objects, sealed off from the dangerous outside world both by our physical skin and by the skin of identity--were too porous, too riddled with perforations and respiring orifices. Those of you who were there will surely remember the acrid, burned smell that pervaded the city in those days. At all times, it felt, this toxic wave could penetrate our skin and compromise our bodily integrity.

Mulholland Drive speaks to this fear by strongly suggesting that we are not the discrete entities we believe ourselves to be. It does this first by questioning the notion that our voices are authentic emanations of our selves. In one scene, we see five singers performing a fifties bubble gum song. But as the camera pulls back we see first that they are in a recording studio, then that they are being filmed and finally that the studio itself is a set on a sound stage. The music is a recording; the physical space is a stage; the performance is a scene in a film-within-a-film. Later, in the beautiful (but really unsettling) "Silencio" scene, a singer performs an intensely moving Spanish-language version of Roy Orbison's "Crying." Betty and Rita (not to mention the viewer) are profoundly moved. Only when the singer collapses and the singing continues do we realize that the music was a recording. By severing the song from the singer, these scenes gently undermine the idea of the self as an expressible thing.

The skepticism goes deeper still. In perhaps the most disorienting of the film's many challenges to narrative expectation, the characters' identities are shown to be deeply unstable. Sunny Betty becomes morose Diane; Rita, a gentle amnesiac who poaches her name from a picture on the wall of a stranger's home, becomes hard-hearted Camilla. As actors, both characters assume new identities with frightening ease.

This instability is visually animated in two of the film's most striking moments. In the first, an image that calls to mind Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson in Bergman's Persona, Rita dons a blonde wig and becomes Betty's double, an empty vessel absorbing her counterpart's identity. (Not coincidentally, Ullman's character was also an actress, although mute, not amnesiac.) And in one of the film's most hallucinatory sequences, Rita and Betty venture into Diane Selwyn's dark apartment in an attempt to discover Rita's identity. When they find a horrifically decomposed body inside--belonging, we later discover, to none other than Diane--they flee in terror. As they emerge into the daylight, having just laid eyes on the dead body of the dreamer herself, on the creator of the very world they inhabit, the two characters dissolve into a halo of multiple exposures. As if cued by their awful vision, the ephemerality and multiplicity of Betty's and Rita's identities are laid bare.

In these scenes and throughout, Mullholland Drive calls into question the notion of a fixed reality and an idealized, integral self. The characters are multivalent and contingent; the border between inside and outside, self and other, is fluid. In an even remotely benevolent world, this fluidity and mutuality could be understood as perhaps our greatest attribute, the fount of our humanity and compassion. But the Hollywood of Mulholland Drive is a cruel, lonely place, a world of shadowy conspiracies, radical independence and deep isolation. And in such a world, to lose ones' integral selfhood is catastrophic.

We only really begin to understand this when we see the banal nightmare that is Diane's waking life. While the dream was bright and colorful, this new reality is gray and wan. Diane herself is a pale shadow of Betty, her dreamworld avatar. Her skin is sallow, her eyes sunken and bloodshot. While Betty exuded a painfully optimistic energy, Diane is jaded and tired. Her anger and grief have driven her to unthinkable acts and made her a grotesque, almost unrecognizable, version of herself. All of the flowing pluralities of identity, the mediations of self and voice, the layers of consciousness serve to illustrate Diane's loss of herself. And this loss, this apocalypse, as Wyman puts it, is, for me, the source of the film's deepest horror and the germ at the heart of our post-9/11 fear: that reality has been ruptured; that history has become a nightmare; that in the new world, we are not who we believe ourselves to be; that where there once was a self is now, at best, only a confluence of external forces or, at worst, a corroded, atomized reservoir of anger and fear.

* * *

In the margins between waking life and dream, between yesterday and tomorrow, between self and non-self, there is a cloud of unknowing; this is where we live; this is where the music comes from. But in Mulholland Drive's Los Angeles and, I fear, in too much of our own paranoid, atomized, bleakly mediated world, this unknowing, this disequilibrium, is a source of dread and loneliness and suspicion. The world outside cannot be trusted. These people mean you harm.

Breaking Bread

2011-08-30T21:39:00.000-07:00

"Hunger" (2008) is a very short, very quiet film about IRA volunteer Bobby Sands, who died in Maze Prison in 1981, on the 67th day of a hunger strike. It might be the best movie I've seen this year. "Hunger" was directed by English artist Steve McQueen. This is his film, "Deadpan":

When it came to arresting visual images, the IRA were no slouches themselves. This is one of their many terrifying murals:
In "Hunger," we are brought into close contact with the suffering body of beautiful Michael Fassbender. It is shattered and bruised; it blisters and bleeds. Finally, it withers away, evaporates like water.

In its attendance to physical ritual, to the practices of bodies in confinement, to the textures of silence, to the contours of human faces "Hunger," for me, recalls Robert Bresson's films, especially "A Man Escaped" and "Pickpocket." For McQueen, after Bresson, these phenomena are deeply expressive.
"Pickpocket"
"A Man Escaped"
At the middle of "Hunger" is a single, unmoving 18-minute shot of a conversation between Sands and a priest. It's a total fucking knockout.

It Was Earth All Along

2011-08-26T11:27:00.000-07:00

In the film "MVP: Most Valuable Primate" and its sequels, "MVP 2: Most Vertical Primate" and "MXP: Most Extreme Primate," a face-meltingly adorable chimp named Jack learns to: play hockey (see there's no rule in the league's bylaws that says chimps can't play); shred a halfpipe; snowboard; love. As I'm sure you can already tell, these are modern classics of the venerable chimp/human buddy genre.

Like its predecessors, these films depend on its lead chimp forging real, substantial relationships with his human companions. As one can plainly see from his heartwarming facial expressions, his endearing chirps and grunts and his attempts at sign language (plus his genius with a puck), Jack is more like us than the haters might like to admit. He can communicate. He has real emotions. He can give us a nice hug. Hey, just what does it mean to be "human" anyway?

Since the "MVP" trilogy was produced on a shoestring budget in the early aughts (although you'd never know it), the filmmakers can't really have been expected to know what a boon digital technology would have been to their enterprise. But it's 2011 now; we've got serious CGI and we can see exactly what it would really look like in real life if an alarmingly intelligent ape named Caesar fell in love with James Franco.

I'm speaking, of course, of "Rise of the Planet of the Apes," the prequel that lays out just how exactly a ragtag band of monkeys come to rule Earth. In general, "Rise..." is a cloying, ridiculously manipulative, mostly unintentionally funny melodrama (ie a human/chimp buddy picture). But although it does its large-hearted best to reaffirm our belief in humanity (or whatever), it is also another in a long line of paranoid sci-fi films; and a deeply uneasy conscience is one of that genre's hallmarks. (This hybrid, by the way? The chimp-buddy/paranoid future film? is really fucking weird.)

There is an awareness in movies like this--the "Terminator" and "Matrix" films and "Blade Runner" among many others--that the rise of human society has come at some great ecological or spiritual cost and that, as a consequence of these sins, humans are ultimately to be the authors of their own downfall. Apocalyptic catastrophe--and/or a subsequent futuristic dystopia--are the result of our hubristic quest for progress, our inability to understand and fully control our own technology.

So it is in "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" (seriously, that title). A select group of chimps are given an experimental drug designed to regenerate brain tissue in Alzheimer's patients. But obviously, it doesn't just regenerate damaged tissue, it also causes the apes to experience wild leaps in intelligence, emotional range and language skill--while also (rather conveniently actually, as far as the narrative goes) acting as a fatal virus on humans. Ok, got it, makes total sense. But strangely, the many non-infected apes, although clearly not as advanced as Caesar and his genetically altered pals, also possess curiously rich emotional capabilities. Their waxen, digitally processed faces are suspiciously, human-ishly expressive. Some of them sign in complete sentences (which really is just not possible). As in "MVP"--and really all cute critter films--the filmmakers are invested in narrowing the gap between human and animal.

This is neither new or surprising. After all, these movies (and many others) are machines designed to manipulate our sympathies, to act on our humanistic sensibilities by suggesting that everything seemingly wild and other is actually "like us." Always a comforting thought. But there's more going on here. The apes' rise is precipitated by their acquiring not just human-scale intelligence and sociality but also a kind of madness: a wild desire for freedom, the ability to imagine a new future. Why else would a gorilla choose to fight a helicopter?

In other words, Caesar and friends have come upon the very qualities that have made humans such wildly successful organisms, the qualities that have allowed us to dominate our primordial competitors, to manipulate our environment and transcend the privations of the food chain, to sail into endless, unknown seas. The irony--pretty much unacknowledged in the film--is that these are, of course, the very qualities that have brought us to our present moment of crisis, both in the movie and here in the world.

So there's a major ambivalence here between humanity reaping its just reward--losing the Earth and ushering in its own extinction--and a desire for the survival of something like essential humanness, borne by those ascendant apes. It's a tension between that bad conscience and our thirst for a future beyond ourselves. For many of us, this ambivalence is a familiar feeling.

Dirty Boots

2011-07-20T08:38:00.000-07:00

Watch "Mildred Pierce." Look at Joan Crawford's face. It is a mask of worried curiosity, of closely guarded openness; her large almond eyes wide open and searching, mouth and cheeks drawn and fixed, as if bracing for what she might find. Even when she reluctantly allows herself a brief, warm smile she then almost immediately withdraws, becomes distant and hard, as if even that small intimacy were a dangerous indulgence. Her body often rests in close proximity to other characters, but her rigid torso and sharp, broad shoulders are almost always inclined away. For me, any understanding of "Mildred Pierce" begins with this shuddering dance. Crawford physically isolates herself, makes herself harder to love. Was there ever a female movie star who so willfully resisted the audience's affections? Why would she do that?

* * *

The film opens with the dissolution of Mildred's first marriage, a relationship ruined by financial strain, contemptuous bickering and infidelity. For many (and for men in particular) the end of an unhappy marriage might be viewed as a way to freedom, to spiritual or sexual self-actualization. But we can tell from Mildred's defiant but deeply worried expression that she understands her new life as a field of exposure and risk. Now she is vulnerable financially; she is exposed to the the sexual advances of Wally Fay, her husband's predatory former business partner; she is defenseless in an exploitive, unpredictable world.

Mildred's solution to her woes is somewhat hilariously simple. In true film noir fashion, intention almost instantaneously becomes action. Mildred decides that she wants to open a restaurant and become wealthy and almost immediately does so. Problem solved. On another level, though, there is something stark and terrifying, but also rather ingenious at work.

Mildred begins to mediate all of her relationships with contractual agreements and with money. She enters into a business partnership with the insatiable Wally and into a contractual one with Monte Baragon, her dissolutely aristocratic new love interest. Above all, she uses money--to solidify her relationships, to ensure her own security, to reconstitute her dissolving family. In other words, Mildred has commodified her relationships. This is her hedge against the violence and instability of single womanhood in a paternalistic world. This strategy proves pretty successful for her (until it doesn't) but it comes with some serious costs; these are played out most gruesomely in Mildred's relationship to her oldest daughter, the ironically named Veda (pronounced veedah like the Spanish word for 'life').

Mildred has had to teach herself, with great sorrow, how to operate in such a cold, unforgiving place but for Veda it all comes naturally; she was born into it. For her, personal relationships are entirely transactional, contracts to be negotiated and won. She takes great satisfaction in her own aristocratic selfishness; she cruelly manipulates other characters into satisfying her tremendous material desires. She is a monster. (It is in the character of Veda, too, that a narrative of post-depression class anxiety plays itself out. Underneath Veda's crass, aspirational materialism is a paranoia of work and the privations and fleshy indignity that accompany it.)

Mildred knows all this about Veda but can't stop loving her anyway. Mildred goes to absurd lengths to buy Veda's loyalty and love. She seems to know that with every material indulgence their relationship becomes more coldly transactional and less human, but she sees it as her only hope for wooing such a venal child. This is the tragedy of "Mildred Pierce": Mildred craves authentic human relationships but the more she plays by the rules, the more she commodifies her life, the more she forecloses the possibility of those relationships.

Thus, Crawford's contorted posture and her torturously restrained facial expressions. In Crawford's body we see a matrix of openness, longing and withdrawn self-protection. Her human instincts pull her toward intimacy, but she just as instinctively understands two things: first, that intimacy invites danger and second, that it has been replaced by contractual exchange. As Don Draper tells Peggy when she demands to be shown a modicum of gratitude for her hard work and creativity, "that's what the money's for."

Why Do We Have Hands?

2010-02-25T19:08:00.000-08:00

From "100 Questions on the 100th Day of School"
by the 1st Graders of Global Academy, Columbia Heights, MN

Question 44: Where do names come from?

Question 46: Why don't numbers stop?

Question 10: Why are we shaped in a body shape?

Question 22: Why do strangers live in the world?

Question 61: Why do we have hands?

Question 83: Why do you tell secrets?

Question 20: Why is there a God?

Question 48: Why do robots live?

Question 7: Why do we need a world?

Question 14: Why are we not having fun?

Show Me the Season

2009-11-10T14:55:00.001-08:00

You've probably heard about this awful, stupid news. I just wanted to submit that, even though we didn't get a chance to know each other as well as I would have liked, I feel lucky and proud to have called this kind, generous, hilarious dude a friend.

On top of that, he was an astonishing musician. Jerry's playing was somehow both forceful and warm, frighteningly precise and expressive. A friend of mine rightly dubbed him "the romantic robot." Check it:

I miss you already Romantic Robot.

On "On Photography": Live Forever

2009-05-16T10:05:00.000-07:00

In a consumer society, even the most well-intentioned and properly captioned work of photographers issues in the discovery of beauty.
--Susan Sontag

Few things so aptly demonstrate Sontag's description of photography as a default mode of seeing as this: Elizabeth Peyton, probably America's most successful contemporary figurative painter, is essentially a photographer. More completely even than the photorealists, whose paintings were, to my eyes, much cleaner and glossier, much more brittle and less dynamic than most actual photography (or, for that matter, any kind of credible "realism"), Peyton's work has absorbed photography's aesthetic and perceptual standards. Almost without exception, her paintings draw heavily on particular genres of photography (and even on particular photographs by Stieglitz, Cartier-Bresson and others--a portrait of Sontag herself is among them): candid portraiture, photojournalism, film stills, street scenes, and, especially, celebrity and fashion photography.

Unlike the photorealists, Peyton isn't trying to trick the eye; with their thick brushstrokes and the sketched quality of the figures, her pictures are obviously made with paint and applied by a human hand. But these not purely mimetic painterly techniques actually contribute to the paintings' photographic quality. They possess the same flat but richly textured surface, the same distortions of proportion, the same privileging of the foreground and attenuation of perspective, and the same ambient, suffusive light--the same distinct qualities, in other words, that we have come to take for granted in photography's representation of reality.

And it's not just the compositional technique that makes these pictures so familiar. Almost all of Peyton's paintings strive to capture Robert Frank's "in-between moments," those ostensibly unposed, heretofore ignored snippets of everyday life. Forgotten objects, furtive glances, moments on the verge of becoming; for Frank and aesthetic contemporaries like Garry Winogrand and Walker Evans, even such marginalia could be laden with meaning. As Sontag says, "cameras make vision expressive." This aptitude for discovering beauty and expressiveness in the mundane is a gift that mid-century art photography has given the advertising and fashion photographers of today, who have rigorously stylized such ostensibly naturalistic moments and brought them far beyond the boundary of cliche (as everyone knows, appearing unposed can be its own pose). Peyton's great achievement is that she's so convincingly captured this way of seeing, now so commonplace among us affluent, educated, media-saturated, millennial Westerners. She perceives "us" the way we perceive ourselves (or wish to).

An aesthetic appreciation of the world is a major component of this mode of perception; it is fitting then, that Peyton's pictures are often so gorgeous. The colors and textures--particularly the dense, rich red of a coat superimposed over a luminous, semi-abstract background in "Nick Reading Moby Dick" (2003), the deep scarlet backdrop of "Princess Kurt" (1995) and the cool blues of her dimly lit nighttime scenes--can be pretty ravishing. This stuff is deeply, startlingly attractive.
Indeed, the sheer, seductive prettiness, of Peyton's work, in combination with its implicit claim to photographic realism, points to perhaps Sontag's deepest critique of photographic vision: the obscuring, distorting power of beauty. Sontag takes photography to task for its often inadvertent beautification of, in particular, ugly social realities--poverty or war, for example. This inescapably aesthetic relationship to objects, she argues, has the effect of creating "timeless" images; that is, images that remove objects from their political or historical contexts. Moreover, this aesthetic decontextualization grants photographic subjects their facility as objects of consumption. Stripped of their social and temporal specificity, they cease to be things in themselves and begin to exist only in relation to the viewer's interpreting, appreciating eye: "Even those photographs which speak so laceratingly of a specific historical moment also give us vicarious possession of their subjects under the aspect of a kind of eternity: the beautiful."

This is why photography lends itself so well to advertising and fashion. And this aestheticization, this making timeless and consumable, is Peyton's explicit aim. She infamously and unironically intermingles rock stars, celebrities, historical figures, characters from films and her own non-famous friends; and she portrays her subjects (including herself) as prettier and more youthful than they appear in real life. Its not just that this reveals an embarrassingly clique-ish, name-dropping vanity (which it certainly does). More importantly, in casting the lives of the young, famous and gorgeous in mundane, everyday (but beautiful and expressive) settings, Peyton restates the seemingly paradoxical claim of celebrity-obsessed consumer culture; stars are just like us, only prettier and more interesting. This is a lovelier, more poignant, more romantic present, a present that can be an object of longing, even nostalgia. This is a present that can be sold.

Peyton's show at the Walker was entitled "Live Forever"; if her work contained even a shred of irony or self-critique, I would have almost assumed that this was an homage to Sontag's analysis. Instead, it serves simply as an announcement of the paintings' intentions: to make reality timeless, beautiful and easily consumed. Still, it's a bit misleading. Maybe we want to live forever, but what we really sometimes seem to want is to not get old or sick, to not foreclose even an ounce of precious choice and possibility. What we really want, and what Peyton is completely willing to provide, is to live forever in that zone of memory granted us by photography, in which youth, beauty, softness and light bless our lives with a default poignancy. That this has very little to do with the disorder of lived reality, that it willfully forgets the processes of time and death, is its primary allure.

On "On Photography": Lost Book Found

2009-05-09T08:40:00.000-07:00

The photographer is an armed version of the stalker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes.
--Susan Sontag

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
--Walter Benjamin

I recently took one of those strange voyages through idea-world in which everything seems to echo and reverberate. The impetus was a serious, unsettling sit down with Susan Sontag's "On Photography" (1977, the year I was born); the echoes came from everywhere.

One of Sontag's most important arguments is that photography is both a response to and a symptom of modernity. That it attempts to replenish a material reality consumed and made obsolete by speed and progress, but that in its objectifying, nostalgic, aestheticizing gaze, actually contributes to that depletion, "turning reality into shadow". This aestheticization, Sontag says, has infiltrated our normal modes of perception. Vision has become photographic: "Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality, and of realism."

But then I happened upon Jem Cohen's "Lost Book Found". Sontag, an epic cinephile if there ever was one, seems to exempt film, with its narrative function, its ability to communicate in time, from her critique of photography. But Cohen is the most photographic of filmmakers, a self-described inheritor of Walter Benjamin's solitary walker, the urban transient who floats through reality observing and collecting forgotten and used up fragments of urban consumer culture. Cohen is New York's Atget, documenting the city's constant death and regeneration, its inexhaustible play of layers and depths, its ocean of objects. "Lost Book Found" is his memorial to the city's mid-'90's early-Giuliani moment, when its endless strange, scuzzy worlds were just beginning to be swallowed up by a new era of prosperity and cleanliness.

Sontag laments photography's tendency to turn "living beings into things, things into living beings," to render "the familiar and homely exotic." But anyone who's ever lived in New York can attest to the overwhelming vibrance of objects--and their will to speak. "Lost Book Found" is a gorgeous testament to the life and death and rebirth of objects within consumer culture (including the infamous dancing plastic bag which would reappear, with much teenaged pathos, in "American Beauty") and the strange life of human consciousness among those objects. Nothing could seem more appropriate to New York than to film it, to document that life. Perhaps vision and perception have become photographic but, Cohen seems to reply, our surreal, cluttered landscape has made it that way.

Surrealim lies at the very heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision...What could be more surreal than an object that virtually produces itself...?

The primitive notion...presumed that images possess the qualities of real things, but our inclination is to attribute to real things the qualities of an image.

The lure of photographs, their hold on us, is that they offer at one and the same time a connoisseur's relation to the world and a promiscuous acceptance of the world.

At the very least, the real has a pathos. And that pathos is--beauty.

In America, every specimen becomes a relic.

What is humanity? It is a quality things have in common when they are viewed as photographs.

The Ice in Me

2009-04-06T10:32:00.000-07:00

It is April. I'm not sure what that means where you live, but here it usually means low, gray sky, and moist, chilly air. The cold, muddy soil, saturated with melt and rotten leaves, rises to the surface, as if the Earth were recycling itself, taking a slow, deep breath in preparation for what come next. But the days are getting longer and its finally safe to expose your skin to the air. Safe, too, I think, to reflect on the dark, frozen world that is our state in winter. Specifically, the cold, that strange, empty condition of the air.

Extreme heat, at least in the country's humid center, is like a foreign object added to the air, a heavy substance that must be waded through or borne like an extra layer of clothing. The cold is a different sort of presence. More like a rearrangement of fundamental particles. Instead of being projected by objects, from outside, as the sun, buildings, cars and human bodies project heat, the cold--and I'm talking about serious cold, like -20 plus windchill--seems to be a simple fact of space, an altered state of matter. Molecules sharpen and become still; water becomes ice; geography and space are reshaped; the world becomes cold.

The few slushy, unfrozen sections of river exude hulking clouds of steam; the light is pale, wan and bracingly clean, every moment of daylight a version of dawn; the air is white. Stepping outside becomes a process of being absorbed into, and penetrated by this new physical reality. Our bodies are radically compromised, dissolved by cold. The weather is inside of us. This place isn't unfit for life, as many here joke, but maybe fit only for some new, diffuse kind of life, a species less reliant than we are on physical integrity as a basis for its identity. And, holy shit, don't even get me started on the wind.

Seen in this light, all other states of weather are like a variation on the theme of warmth, gradations within one basic category. The common springtime metaphor of awakening is pretty apt, I think. Its not just that new things grow, though. Its like everything--the air, the pavement, the sky, our skin and eyes and organs--is waking from a dark, strange dream, in which things were somehow both less whole and more vividly defined. I'm ready.

Macrophenomena

2009-01-23T15:48:00.000-08:00

You might know that in my not very spare time I write about professional basketball. In many ways its very much like a "job"--in that, for instance, I produce stuff and in return for that production I'm paid in money. It's a strange "job" for me to have in a way, since I've never been either an organized competitive basketball player--curiously, my lack of height, leaping ability and basketball skill appears to have been a hindrance--or a journalist of any kind. Not strange, though, because NBA basketball, especially when viewed very close up, as I have the outrageous good fortune to be able to do every week, is fucking amazing. Part of what I consider this "job" of mine to entail is attempting to convince thinking folks like yourselves of same. Of the physical genius and grace, the political fascination, the flux between order and chaos, freedom and constraint--basically the outrageous beauty of this game as practiced by some very tall, very rich men. Also, you might learn something (lots more than you'd probably ever want to, actually) about a really mediocre basketball team. So, if that piques your fancy, here are some recent examples. And my two faves from last season.

Perfect Sound Forever

2009-01-23T15:35:00.000-08:00

I guess its just that easy. You should watch some more of this wonderful Finnish lady.

The Song Said Let's Be Happy

2008-11-07T16:36:00.000-08:00

I don't want to overstate things. I have no interest in political messianism. And I know what the realities of public office can do to moments of possibility, glimmers of hope. I'm aware that these things are true. But this week, right now, I really would rather just think about how fucking awesome this is. I rarely make use of the diary function of blogs but some of the things I've felt in the last few days are just way too sweet to not record.

On the bus, early Wednesday morning: the light was thin and gray, the day was wet and cold but felt radically, beautifully new. Not that any extant problems were automatically solved but that, for the first time in years, I felt genuinely hopeful that maybe I could think of our time and place as anything more than a total nightmare. I thought of how wonderful and weird and unpredictable our country is; I thought about my friends; I thought about Abraham Lincoln and Sam Cooke; I thought about how proud I was that we could actually do something good. I felt (and still feel, I guess, when I think about it) really happy.

One beyond-amazing Minneapolis detail I want to leave you with. It was about midnight on Tuesday, post-chili, post-champaign, post-Black Eyed Pea holographic interface. Unable to resist the car horns and group shouts and popping fireworks and hi fives with strangers, my foxy co-conspirator and I took a walk. There were party sounds coming from multiple directions, but the locus of the noise seemed to be 26th and Lyndale. This is one of the more magical corners in our city, equally able to supply a body with used records, delicious muffins and serious, cheap intoxication.

So here's what was happening there: 50-100 folks of typical Uptown vintage--cycle hipsters, pink-dreaded, hemp-laden, culturally damaged, post-everything hippies, gutter punks and basically straight-laced grad students in full, celebratory uproar. Joyfully--chanting, singing, stomping, bikes and signs aloft--marching the intersection's full circuit. From the CC Club's southwest corner, to that shuttered building's southeast corner, to Treehouse Records on the northeast, to Common Roots Cafe on the northwest. Just basically crossing the street. With the light. Cops were on hand, but had no real beef since the throng were neither breaking any important laws nor significantly obstructing traffic. And when one driver did have to wait a moment to turn as the crowd filed off the street, he gently backed up and literally said "excuse me." He fucking apologized for almost interfering with a spontaneous street celebration. The whole thing was this beautifully raucous public expression of ecstatic politeness and rule-following. Living here can be just so hilariously awesome.

She Blinded Me with Blindness

2008-10-16T22:04:00.000-07:00

It's strange to go to a movie theater and watch a movie and come to a strong opinion about it and then to poke your head around Interspace and find that almost nobody agrees with you. That happened to me when I recently went to see "Blindness," the new movie by Fernando Meirelles, which, I think, is one of the best movies I've seen in a long time. And indeed, most people (critics, I guess they're called) strongly, and with some ridicule, disagree with me. (The generally reliable Andrew O'Hehir goes so far as to call out the one lady who stood up and tearily applauded after a screening of the film at Cannes, while the rest of the audience--according to O'Hehir--counted their lucky stars the the movie was finally over. I'm with you lady.) Anyway, "Blindness" totally blew me away and I'd like to offer some thoughts as to why.

The crux of my difference with these critics seems to be a matter of interpretation. Most see the characters' sudden blindness as a metaphor for our taking for granted society's fragile stability; for the thin veil between political civility and anarchic violence; for our susceptibility to tyranny; for our willful ignorance of our own capacity for evil. There but for the grace of God go we humans, always and forever. (My guess--though I'd probably better admit right now that I haven't read it--is that these are the main themes of Saramago's novel.) These things are certainly at work in the film and the epidemic of blindness is indeed the narrative engine that propels these apocalyptic events. And I would agree with many critics that such events, although always worth taking seriously in this totally rad world of ours, are not necessarily the freshest cinematic fodder (the fact that I have Lord of the Flies as an easy, time-tested reference is testament enough to that) and that some of these elements come off, in the film, as a little trite. If this were your primary reading of the film (and particularly, I would imagine, if you were a fan of the book), Meirelles' disorienting visual style would seem obtrusive, occluding and at cross-purposes with the film's narrative and political message. I also think that you might tend to see many of the characters, nameless as they are, as conveying only symbolic meaning, as mere placeholders in the allegory.

But I think that there's something essentially filmic (and non-novelistic) here that goes deeper than the aforementioned political message. Novels have the verbal breathing room to create rich political and social worlds, fictionalized historical contexts and characters with multi-dimensional inner lives. As evidenced by way too many failed adaptations, it takes a very subtle touch to translate this into a visual language (See, "Children of Men,"). Its appropriate, then, that "Blindness" (the movie) pays only glancing notice to the larger political world, concentrating instead on the hermetic world inside the hospital, on movement, on physical and spatial relationships, on the characters' profound struggles to relearn their bodies and navigate space. So I actually found Meirelles' dark, disorienting visual style appropriate and really powerful. The film's overwhelming whiteouts and blackouts, its chaotic closeups, the darkness and blur on the frame's periphery all serve to undermine our (the viewers') trust in our own vision (a fairly ballsy step for a filmmaker, I'd say) and allow us to share the characters' claustrophobic, radically unstable perceptual experience. Much of the film's power centers on explorations of this experience. There are moments of incredible delicacy, as characters grope and stumble through space or desperately reach for each other. And there are moments of suspense and even real horror as we share in their profound, frantic lostness.

So let me suggest, then, that blindness is neither symbol nor metaphor but the very subject of the film itself. And, further, that the catastrophic events in the film--the government's totalitarian response to the crisis, the hospital's squalor, the anarchic decay of decency that occurs inside--are not simply the results of an extreme political crisis. They also, and maybe more importantly, illustrate the characters' total, violent perceptual reordering and reveal their gross lack of self-knowledge. "Blindness" is about people who have become so alienated from an authentic understanding of their own bodies and the world around them (and remember, viewer, that you too are implicated) that, without their vision, they are completely lost. The world has ceased to exist.

This, I think points to the significance of the characters' anonymity: their old self-conceptions have been erased; without their sight, they are blank slates, people just on the verge of coming into being. They are forced to totally refashion their selves, to discover new meanings in the world, to forge new communities and create new sacraments. This, despite the terrifying things that it forces you to witness is why I felt that "Blindness" is a basically hopeful film. It believes that this overwhelming newness and discovery is possible. It is primarily concerned with the experience of Being, with the ecstatic, sometimes painful process of awakening to the world--and it includes the viewer in that intimate experience. While watching it, and for a time afterwards, I felt incredibly physically aware of the most subtle sensations: plays of light and shadow; the feeling of water on skin; the warm, close aura of other bodies. Did I mention that I loved this movie?

Sorry All Over The Place

2008-09-18T21:19:00.000-07:00

I know it's painfully, romantically fan-ish to offer an encomium to some newly dead artist/hero. Like being suddenly gripped by the urge to plaster Antonioni posters on your wall when, maybe, you find it kind of hard or impossible to not fall asleep during The Passenger or L'Aventura. It smacks of an instant revisionism in which artists suddenly mean more in death than they did in life. I want no part of that. But I'll tell you that just a few weeks ago I finished Consider the Lobster, Mr. D.F. Wallace's most recent book of essays. In fact, the book was two feet in front of me, on my coffee table, when I got the text message explaining that the fellow who wrote it had hanged himself. Its still there, in fact (the book). And then that very same night, in (I admit) a fever of the aforementioned romanticism, I picked up Infinite Jest which is over 900 pages long. Over 1,000 if you count the footnotes. I'm almost embarrassed at serving up such a bandwagon-ish homage, but reading those books has reminded me just how much this one particular author has meant to me. So you'll have to forgive me for briefly going off like its 1994, Nirvana Unplugged on repeat.

First, an apologia. If you know anything about Wallace, the author, you probably know about the self-consciously fragmented nature of his prose; that it was shot through with digressions, footnotes and appendices; that nearly everything he wrote was longer, by far (see above) than any reader could reasonably be expected to tolerate. This occasionally seemed like fussy self-indulgence; it came to stand for everything that was silly and hermetic about postmodern fiction, earning Wallace some exasperated teasing in the process.

My guess is that he viewed his voluble, non-linear narrative style as an almost embarrassing necessity. But, a necessity nonetheless. Because I think these choices (/compulsions) reflect one of the most complex compromises of (post-post)modern life: how to reckon with, but not succumb to, the world's often unbearable speed and glare and noise and kaleidescopic moral complexity. How to face these terrifying facts, understand them from within, acknowledge their amazing allure and potential and the fact that they are inextricable from each of us--how to do this and still mount a passionate critique of the terrible human costs of this ridiculous, profane culture. Wallace seemed to know that if he wanted to avoid dismissive, self-righteous culture warrior condemnation, the kind of humorless, out-of-touch critique common among moralists both right and left, he would have to actually speak our culture's language, would have to reflect and inhabit the fractured, surreal fabric of contemporary discourse.

The result of this effort was, for me, one of Wallace's great contributions: a record of a spoken language; unbelievably literate, rigorously intellectual yet hilariously ironical and colloquial. He was fiercely and unapologetically apologetic, always qualifying his own ideas (often with dense, explanatory digressions), often skirting and even crossing the boundary of solipsism. This needy hedging and addending could be maddening, for sure, but as Troy Patterson points out in Slate, Wallace was insistent on making the reader aware that his voice was entirely subjective, entirely personal. As such, his ideas were always humble suggestions, never authoritative decrees. Despite his staggering breadth of knowledge and intellectual ability, he never affected the expert's tone. He knew that we were already subjected to daily torrents of unearned opinion masquerading as smug expertise. He viewed himself, instead, as a stand-in for the reader, a subjective observer with no special claim to authority, only a responsibility to honestly report what he saw and what he thought about it.

In this voice, Wallace made some work that has lodged itself in my internal organs to the extent that its hard for me to imagine a time before I knew it. Most notably: his beautiful essay on David Lynch which doubles as on-the-set profile and personal homage; an argument on television which charts the movement from counter-cultural irony to mainstream consumerist cynicism and ridicule; an ostensible review of a dictionary that became a 70-page history and treatise on the political import of written American usage; an article on the Main Lobster Festival for Gourmet magazine that, we soon realize, is actually a meditation on the lobster's ability to feel pain and our complicity in its suffering; his coverage of the 2000 McCain campaign for Rolling Stone which, once again, far transcends his journalistic assignment and articulates both our deep need for a meaningful political discourse and our disgust at the state of current campaign politics. And, shit, Infinite Jest. Its an incredibly sad, incredibly funny book that is, in many ways, an example of Wallace's narrative style at its most distinctive. His voice is most somehow his own, even as it is refracted through myriad late-millennial vernaculars and perspectives (and hundreds of pithy, digressive footnotes): addled junky; radical separatist Quebecois; prep school Bostonian; futurist academic; AA sloganeering; avant-garde videography; absurdist ad copy and etc. And every word--every interior monologue and satiric, postmodern flourish--with such incredible heart. With such an unmistakable sense of, basically, giving a shit.

I guess what I'm saying is that when I read this stuff I get that rare feeling of seeing my own world (or an absurdist, imagined version of it) reflected. Of experiencing the relief of identification and real sympathy. In his voice, I've felt like I've heard a version of my own voice (though smarter, more articulate, better read) and I've heard the ceaselessly curious, funny and generous voices of some of the best people I know. These are people of unrelenting conscience, people who, unlike the great majority of cynical yelpers out there, are too humble and self aware to proclaim their own authority. The best way I can put how I feel about this: there's now one less kindred spirit, one less sympathetic voice pushing back on our culture's lonely, cruel banality. That really sucks.

I know that Wallace was intimately familiar with pain. He described, in the voice of Kate Gompert, a character in Infinite Jest, the feeling where "every cell and every atom or brain-cell or whatever was so nauseous it wanted to throw up, but it couldn't, and you felt that way all of the time, and you're sure, you're positive the feeling will never go away, you're going to spend the rest of your natural life feeling like this." So, in a way I don't begrudge him his choice, no matter how much it hurt people that loved him and loved his work. What scares me is that here is someone who knew how shitty and painful life could be, but who bravely spoke up about it, who showed courage with almost every word he wrote, calling us out for our boredom and inattention and cruelty, whose work I so deeply identified with and...finally, he just decided it was too fucking hard. Where does that leave us, the people still out here? What are we supposed to do?

Confusion is Next, Oscar Edition

2008-03-17T23:55:00.000-07:00

What really got to me was Denby's uncharitable reading of "No Country." (Here I'll be just assuming that you've seen this movie, mostly because I'm not feeling up to extensive plot summary--so there are plenty of spoilers and assumed knowledge) After taking the film to task for what he sees as the un-believability of the crime story narrative in general, and of Javier Bardem's monumentally homicidal bounty hunter anti-hero, Anton Chigurh, in particular--how is he never seen? how do the police not catch him? etc.--he gives us this:

"Some people have said that you cannot read the movie literally. Chigurh is Death, they say, a supernatural figure, a vengeful ghost...the ineffable spirit of Evil. But what do you do with the realistic body of the movie if you read this one element supernaturally?"

Now, I didn't come here to engage in a scene-for-scene on the effectiveness or believability of the film's crime narrative. I will say, though, that I was totally gripped by it and so was almost every single person I've talked to--and, you know, I feel like I know some pretty sophisticated film watchers. I'll also submit that the kind of "realism" typical of the crime genre, particularly its great villains, has always been a bit supernatural, has always resisted fact-based "real world" criticism, of the kind that Denby, rather cynically, offers. Finally, as Denby puts it himself, the film boasts “a formal precision and an economy that make one think of masters like Hitchcock and Bresson.” Movies that are this well crafted, this visually complete—not to mention deeply beautiful—create their own criteria for believability (I’m pretty sure it’s called ‘suspension of disbelief’). A story like this doesn’t work because the facts check out or because the plot is plausible, it works because the moral and visual world it creates is fully realized.

Denby is right in a way, though: it does break the rules of the film’s crime narrative if Chigurh is not actually meant to be a believable character, if he is meant to be merely symbolic in an arch, Bergman-esque way. And I realized, as I read those words, that this is exactly how I had been seeing that character: Chigurh is Death; death comes to us all; you can't stop what's comin': this is what the movie is about, lets all go watch "The Seventh Seal".

There is no doubt that the inevitability of death--and our own powerlessness in the face of it--is a major theme of the film, especially as expressed in Tommy Lee Jones' character, the maudlin Sherriff Ed Tom Bell "You can't stop what's comin'," says Ed Tom's paraplegic, painfully old brother "it ain't all waitin' on you--that's vanity." But there is a strange counterbalance to this sense of Biblical destiny. Carla Jean Moss, wife of the doomed hero Llewelyn, constantly pleads with her husband to give up on his ill-starred quest for wealth. And when Chigurh arrives to kill her, as he promised he would, but offers to spare her if she correctly calls a coin flip, she refuses to take part in the game. She chides Chigurh, telling him that he, not the random flip of a coin, can choose whether she lives or dies. How could this be? How can we have this kind of choice if death is our fated end? And how could Death himself possibly be held accountable for what he does?

Here, I think, is where the film's strange structure comes into play. For the most part, the movie does operate as a more-or-less traditional crime/film noir. The hero embarks on a mission into the underworld, from which he hopes to emerge unscathed, into a utopian future and, as seems preordained by plot mechanics and fate, meets a tragic end. But when the narrative arc does culminate as feared and expected, we are not even allowed to see the consummating event. What's more, Llewelyn is not even killed by Chigurh, his nemesis, but by a faceless gang of Mexican drug-runners who had been no more than side players (and dead bodies) throughout the majority of the film. It's a jarring and ignoble end to the journey; a total ("unforgivable" says Denby) anti-climax. What's more, just when the movie seems like it should be over, it proceeds to almost incoherently meander for twenty-odd more minutes: Chigurh is, with no narrative setup, badly hurt in a car accident; he has a grotesque, comedic conversation with two dumbstruck boys; Ed Tom recounts a series of dreams; the movie ends. It's open-ended and weird and put lots of viewers off.

The Coen's experimented with this kind of structural gambit in their under-appreciated "The Man Who Wasn't There," in which a fairly coherent film noir unravels into a quasi-mystic, sci-fi farce. But the strange, ambiguous interlude of random life in "No Country" is a little more pointed. I think that by undermining the integrity of the genre, the film is showing us that a single, familiar narrative scheme cannot possibly encompass the entirety of the film's world (and, by-proxy, our own world); that there are many strange, unpredictable, ridiculous, possibly boring things in the world beyond and outside of Llewelyn and Anton's bloody arc.

Most genre films seek to create a hermetic world in which the only possibilities for action are the ones presented by the expectations and conventions of the genre. We learn here, though, that the characters had a choice whether to embark on those familiar narrative paths. There is something extremely unsettling about the blank, un-contemplative way that Llewelyn makes the choices that lead him toward his death. And I think one of the real sources of terror in the Chigurh character is the way in which he abdicates his own will, as if his future actions--horrifying, murderous actions--had already been carried out. Both Llewelyn and Chigurh act as if they have no agency, as if their lives are bound to pre-written narratives.

Chigurh, then, does not incarnate (or represent) Death himself. Instead, he performs evil. It's a fine distinction--evil, after all, tends to deal primarily in death--but more than simply a semantic one. Death is transcendent; it comes to us from beyond the pale, from outside everything we can possibly understand. But evil is purely human; it is something that we do. As far as I can tell, evil is what happens when humans fancy themselves as agents of fate, fancy their own beliefs transcendent and then forcibly (often violently) impose that version of transcendence on others. So it surprises me that Denby would say, as he does, that Chigurh is unrecognizable as a character, a “trashy element” of the film. Because I think that he is eminently recognizable. The unbelievable abominations he commits; his sophistic, matter-of-fact rationales for committing them; the way he denies his own agency and secretes it into a protective cocoon of inevitability: these are horrifyingly familiar. Chigurh is no mythic avatar. He is the dumb, inexplicable, blank face of human cowardice, of human evil. I did not act; it was fate, it was history, it was God.

This unfortunate facet of human nature has always been a great boon to cruelty and institutional power, both as a method of self-justification and as a tool to manipulate average people into submission. It is no accident that all of the major male characters in the film are Vietnam veterans. For one thing, they have all been indoctrinated into a way of violence, have mastered its tools and techniques. But also, and at even greater spiritual toll, they are all practiced in enacting some other author's bloody story. Ed Tom is aware of this; it is the root of his stricken resignation, his worry at the condition of his soul. And he knows that Llewelyn should be just as aware. "He's seen the same things I seen," he says, "and they sure made an impression on me."

The insanely hard thing that this film asks you to do is to recognize that death is inevitable--"you can't stop what's comin'"--and then to act as if you are free. Act as if you are free even when consumer culture, when fundamentalist religions, when your own government all tell you that you have no choice, that opting out of their narrative is not an option. It's a matter of courage; this is why Carla Jean’s final, unbelievably courageous act is the film’s one truly heroic moment. She completely understands the reality of her situation. She knows and expects she's going to die and that Chigurh is going to kill her. Yet, she refuses to allow her fate to be decided by the chance flip of a coin, even though she knows it could save her life. She refuses to absolve Chigurh of his responsibility by allowing luck to decide: "It ain't no coin, it's you."

(Incidentally, I'm fascinated by the way that the Coens use women to critique the bloodlust and craven ambition of male protagonists. Reflecting back to Frances McDormand's pregnant, resolutely decent Marge Gunderson in "Fargo"--"all for a bit of money...I just don't understand it"--Carla Jean and Ed Tom's wife, Loretta, act as antidotes to the violent narrative of manliness. Carla Jean fights to bring the mute Llewelyn back from death. Loretta gently reminds Ed Tom to stay above the fray--"don't get hurt...don't hurt no one". They are the ones who show basic care for humanity, for life as a spiritual value.)

Here, I’ll sound one last note of amazement at the way the Coens unite the film’s formal and moral schemata. Pop narrative structures (in music, in literature, in visual culture) can be amazing and fun, but they can also too-easily change the shape of our expectations, teach us to buy into the stories that power tells us. That soothing familiarity brought about by a genre's alchemy of expectation and reward can cause us to uncritically accept certain narrative arcs as inevitable, can blind us to other possibilities. We begin to foreclose the possibility of anything outside of the familiar story and this foreclosure carries over into our real lives. In the character of Carla Jean, in the soulless trajectory of Llewelyn Moss and Anton Chigurh’s story, “No Country” reminds us that real living is contingent on a certain courageous imagination. And it attempts to encode this reminder in the very experience of watching the film. It is unsettling to have our narrative expectations undermined just as it is uncomfortable and scary to imagine new kinds of living, to create our own stories. This is why art like this, why experiences of strange, foreign beauty, experiences of sublimely subverted convention are so important. Because, if you listen close, such experiences remind you that freedom is real, but that choosing it requires outrageous courage.

Confusion is Next

2008-03-17T22:46:00.000-07:00

In a recent New Yorker, David Denby wrote a fairly backhandedly complementary piece on the Coen bros. Although the occasion for the essay was the brothers' Best Picture nomination (and eventual victory) for "No Country for Old Men," Denby proceeded to fairly seriously attack their entire body of work—and the films he does claim to like, he damns with faint praise. Basically, it fell into the tried-and-true "master-craftsmen, but cruel and cold" school of Coens criticism, a school with which I almost entirely disagree. Just so you know, this post started out as a letter to the editor and a conversation with my Dad. Two posts and 3,000 words later...(also, don't know why internet persists in single spacing the last half. Internet is magic.)

Denby spends quite a bit of time critiquing the Coens often burlesque treatment of supporting characters, which he finds cruel. What’s more, they hold up all of their characters as objects of ridicule, not as fully-formed people with whom we are meant to sympathize. He argues that the Coens’ films are neither sufficiently reverential of film history, nor sufficiently humanistic. Rather, they are cold parodies of earnest genres with a strong dose of elitist misanthropy at their core. At the center of this argument is a two-pronged observation: 1) the Coens’ characters are backward and stupid. 2) They are ridiculed and punished for their stupidity. Denby on the brothers’ first film, “Blood Simple”:

“What interests the Coens is how foolishly people behave, and how little they understand of what they’re doing. The lovers keep misreading signs and misperceiving what’s going on. The Coens may be the first major filmmakers since Preston Sturges to exploit the dramatic possibilities of stupidity. In Sturges’s movies, however, you don’t feel that the rubes and yokels are being put down. […] In [the Coens] world, stupidity leads to well-deserved disaster.”

This statement is the central misinterpretation in the piece. I’ve always understood “Blood Simple” in particular, and the greater portion of the Coens’ earlier work in general, to be, not a treatise on human stupidity, but a demonstration of the failure of information. It’s true that the characters constantly misinterpret, but only because they don’t’ have access to the viewer’s omniscient perspective; they can’t possibly know that their information is wrong until it’s too late. The subtle misunderstandings and cases of mistaken identity build over the course of the film and culminate in a climax in which literally none of the characters’ assumptions are correct. It is not that “stupidity leads to disaster” but that the breakdown of truth-correspondence is, itself, the disaster. Certainly, there’s no shortage of human malice and cruelty, but the main characters are victims of this malice and of the radically untrustworthy world in which they find themselves.

Deception and tragic misunderstanding have been narrative engines since forever, but the very structure of “The Big Lebowski,” subsists almost entirely on misinformation. The film, at first, seems to be a story of a kidnapping and subsequently blown ransom, with various groups and individuals serving as the chief suspects. It’s handled as farce, sure, but at least there seems to be a reliable plot. But, as the film proceeds, every single one of our assumptions turns out to be false; none of the usual suspects turn out to be culpable. In fact, there’s no kidnapping at all and no ransom money; in fact, the real heart of the movie truly is a stoner, The Dude, attempting to replace his urine-soaked carpet.

It’s true that, as Denby says, the film’s incredible likeability derives from its goofy sweetness, but it is not simply “ a tribute to harmlessness, friendship, and team bowling.” There is a radical skepticism at work here that is far from harmless. Though he is reportedly an author of the Port Huron Statement, The Dude has one of the most hilariously limited vocabularies in history. What’s more, he and his bowling buddies—the John Milius-inspired, maniac ‘Nam vet, Walter, and the loveable but vacuous Donnie—subsist mostly on repeated clichés and sayings, most of which are recycled media sound-bytes (particularly H.W.’s pre-Gulf War national address). And the entire film takes place within this absurd, perfectly L.A. milieu of performance art, radical nihilism, pornography and freeways, a world in which both plot and language have been revealed to be empty of content. It would be hard to find a more complete (and funny) treatise on millennial culture and the decay of meaning-based discourse.

I see “The Big Lebowski” as the culmination of the Coens fascination with the unreliability of formerly stable structures: narrative, political idealogy, language itself. To me, the characters are not so much fools, as prisoners of a world in which the traditional modes of communication are inadequate. This is definitely cynical, and the worlds they create are full of people at their worst, but its not misanthropic. In fact, the Dude’s gentle nature and the sweet, funny way in which the Coens handle his story—and, I think, the comedic tone of all their films as well as their obvious enjoyment of film culture—points to a real tender-heartedness, a real sympathy for the ridiculous fix we’re in.

Sad and Young

2008-02-03T20:29:00.000-08:00

Well, I just finished watching the carnival of humiliation, cruelty and machismo that is the Super Bowl. And that was just the commercials. Zing! Strangely, despite my own general disgust at the kind of power the Patriots represent and despite my good friend David's relentless, brilliant and hilarious deconstructions of the Pats' blandly vile aesthetic, I found myself desperately rooting for New England to pull the game out. And fully sickened when they didn't.

I have a couple of thoughts on why this might be. Obviously. Because this is a blog. First, I don't exactly share most people's adoration of the underdog. I mean, I can go for the occasional miraculous upset, especially at the high school and college levels. But mostly I like whichever team or player does the most amazing things and if that inclines me toward the traditional powerhouse from time to time, well that's the way it goes. To me "parity", the NFL's great egalitarian mission, has stood more for boredom and mediocrity, for the conservatism and fear of risk that has come to dominate the league, sucked it of its spontaneity and, well, amazingness.

More importantly, I think if we are to be honest with ourselves we'd realize that there aren't really any lovable underdogs in most professional sports and definitely not in the NFL. Sure there are shitty teams, but everyone subscribes to the same drab, faceless corporatism; the same fetishization of the body; the same exaltation of martial virtue; the same resentment of weakness; the same cruel exploitation of human frailty. The Patriots ruthlessness, their cold displays of power...these are things that every team in the NFL aspires to. Without a doubt the Giants and Tom Coughlin, their craggy, misogynist, fag-hating (probably, probably), gym-teacher/drill sergeant/sociopath of a coach aspire to this too. Depressingly, I also shared this fascination with the Patriots' ability to methodically wield their power. They certainly weren't spontaneous or much fun, but holy shit they were still unbelievably good. I realize that the part of me that still likes football at all--the part that still connects to the little kid in thrall to the armored, uniformed pageantry of a team on the field--that part can't help but respect the Patriots' basic effectiveness. This is not a fascination that makes me feel very good about myself.

The Patriots and the league and the whole fucking country exalt quantifiable success above just about anything else and what really bums me out about this game is that, although this is a huge upset, the Giants' victory does nothing to upset this order. No matter what incredible things this New England team has accomplished--the majestically powerful offense with their numerous scoring records--they, and everyone else, have staked their entire season on this all-or-nothing view of success. That only the end result justifies the effort. To me, this loss reinforces this view even more than a Patriots victory would have. At least if they had won, all of that incredible success would have been validated, would have actually meant something. Now, in the eyes of the league and the culture and probably the team itself, their entire year is just a footnote in someone else's narrative of victory, the forgettable story of just another losing team. When we view ourselves, our work, our lives this way, even our victories seem hollow and unsatisfying. This sick, inevitable, empty feeling makes me tell myself, as I seem to every year at about this time, that I'll never watch another pro football game again.

Please Say You Love Me

2007-12-27T11:22:00.000-08:00

Um, I guess I should do a year-end best-of list. I've never done one before, except in my head, because, like, who gives a shit? But now that I'm on the Internets I know that my inner thoughts and consumer preferences are public information and that you do care about them, you care deeply. Whom am I to withhold this vital content? Anyway, here's my seven favorite records of 2007:

Animal Collective--Strawberry Jam

I was a little disappointed at first. But then I realized that I shouldn't expect them to make music that sounds like rain and snow and confetti falling simultaneously inside my body anymore. Now they make pop songs, incredibly rich, beautiful, heartbreaking pop songs. I guess that's cool.

Marissa Nadler--Songs III: Bird on the Water

So lush and romantic, so indulgently gothic, so much gaudy emotion. Its almost embarrassing. But not.

LCD Soundsystem--Sound of Silver

This music comes from that part of the party when you tell everyone how amazing they are. Also, every single sound, from the perfectly grainy treble of the guitars to the warm electronic percussion, sounds completely perfect.

Yellow Swans--At All Ends

Each of the pieces on At All Ends begin with a simple melody or texture that grows in intensity, usually morphing into something pretty beautiful and dense. Yellow Swans have transcended many of the cliches of both metal and noise and created some patient, sonically complex and incredibly heavy music.

Magik Markers--Boss

A lot like early Sonic Youth except without the affected post-mod poses. Magik Markers make some seriously fierce, dark, seemingly un-self conscious music. Elisa Ambrogio's performances are pretty heroic and raw.

Growing--Vision Swim

Growing adheres to that same uncompromising sonic rigor as Black Dice, but to much different effect. While Black Dice is thoroughly of the East Coast noise tradition, Growing draws on Earth's droning, Pacific Northwest metal and its wide-eyed, beatific sense of wonder that probably originates in being surrounded by very tall trees.

Panda Bear--Person Pitch

I know Pitchfork already chose this as their record of the year, but what can I say, it is totally gorgeous. It was my favorite too, certainly because it is formally innovative, with its blending of sampled and manipulated sound, reverb drenched acoustic guitars and Brian Wilson harmonies--but more because Person Pitch seems to render moot all of those formal distinctions. It just sounds like colors and sunlight.

Tinariwen's Aman Iman: Water is Life, Kemalliaset Ystavat's self titled record and No Age's Weirdo Rippers were also awesome. Also, James Blackshaw's The Cloud of Unknowing. FYI.

And nine serious jams from other records:

Justice--"D.A.N.C.E"

Lupe Fiasco--"Dumb It Down"
My friend says that Lupe Fiasco is too smart for rap. I like this song.

Tegan and Sara--"Back in Your Head"

Dan Deacon--"Wham City"
By far, the most positive song of the year.

Soulja Boy--"Crank Dat Soulja Boy"
Doy.

M.I.A.--"Bird Flu"

Li'l Mama--"Lipgloss"

Public Enemy--"Harder Than You Think"
This one is about just doing your thing and staying positive no matter what the media tells you. Or something. I don't know. It makes me so happy.

Spoon--"The Underdog"

Hittin Sevens

2007-11-13T22:13:00.000-08:00

Speaking of chanting, I was just lucky enough to see Black Dice at an art gallery within walking distance of my apartment. The art gallery, by the way, is a both completely perfect and totally ridiculous place to see the band. They are sort of the epitome of the art-damaged punk: brainy, NYC-by-way-of-RISD hipster bartenders making electronic noise music. On the other hand, the music is so dense and inchoate and gutteral that the very idea of displaying it like a painting or a sculpture seems wrong. I’ve seen Black Dice twice now and both times it’s been hard for me to believe that their music could actually be performed by people. I would expect it to be exuded from mounds of earth, or washed up by the tide. Or something.

But display it they did, complete with gut-rattling bass and bad-trip pixelated video projections and I couldn’t have been happier. When I moved to New York, in 2000, Black Dice were art-noise provocateurs and, it seemed to me, not much more. But then, in 2002, they released “Beaches and Canyons” on DFA and blew my fucking brains out. The incredibly ambitious aim of that record seemed to be to use the tools of noise music—the mangled guitars, the distorted electronics—and pounding, tribal (yeah, you heard me) acoustic percussion to approximate “natural,” expansive beauty. And its a punishing ride, but by the end of the album’s closer, Endless Happiness, there you are staring into the ocean, the wind whipping at your face. The suggestion, it seems, was that “nature” is a more inclusive and encompassing term than is typically thought. This is the same feeling I get when standing on a street corner in Manhattan, taking in the city’s delicacy and power, its chaos and balance, its overwhelming feeling of permanence and dynamism: that the actions and creations of humans are not excluded from a full conception of nature.

Since "Beaches and Canyons", the band’s drummer has departed, leaving Black Dice an electronics driven three-piece, now lacking the lone acoustic, traditionally naturalistic sounding element. In many ways this change signaled a sea-change in the band’s approach, taking them away from their scenic vistas and toward a more synthetic sound. Their last release, "Broken Ear Record" seemed to validate that thought. It still contained Black Dice’s signature tensions—brutal processed distortion and lilting, curiously melodic guitar; painfully un-constructed electronic disco that opens into these almost beatific passages—but the spacious, pastoral feel of Beaches and Canyons was gone.

Now, I expected that I would really enjoy the show last week, but I was surprised to find that, in a live context at least, Black Dice had dissolved those tensions. It occurred to me as I stood there surrounded by the band’s utterly massive, throbbing swirl of noise, that they had focused their view from nature writ-large to the body itself. In a live space, filled with huge amplifiers and real, breathing people, even their most punishing tones were warm and rich. Things sounded so deep and wide that it really felt as if the sound was actually being produced by my own body, mirroring and amplifying my own internal processes. Every tone that came out of the speakers was profoundly physical and though much of it was overwhelming and uncomfortable, it was also incredibly soothing. Not pain exactly, more the pleasant discomfort of being embodied, like awakening from a deep, midday sleep and slowly coming the realization of being a corporeal thing. And what’s amazing about this, to me, is that these synthetic, electronically processed sounds could have become so much a part of our daily lives as humans and listeners as to feel this familiar and, well, natural. That something so seemingly artificial could feel so fleshily alive (think here, too, about our cultures humanizing of vintage machines—that objects as fantastically futuristic and mechanized as a tape recorder, automobile or electric guitar from the 1960’s could have ever come to seem organic and almost pre-modern is a testament to the way that we are able to naturalize our own technology. Incidentally, Black Dice’s ‘80’s arcade/early photoshop projections play on that same tendency). It is not only that synthetic things can mirror natural processes (something I think most of us are fairly comfortable with), or that Black Dice are tremendously awesome musicians (which they are) but also that our experience, our basic physical experience, has become profoundly mediated by human-made systems. Not only has the natural world expanded to include our mechanized imprint—our very bodies have become deeply enmeshed with technology. The border between the things we make and what we are has become very blurry. We are the world we have made. Or at least that’s what I thought about while shuddering under the shower of noise coming from the wall of amps, happily succumbing to Black Dice’s rough, bodily charms.

My Mother is a Fish

2007-11-13T22:08:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the generous iTunes of a good friend of mine, I’ve lately been delving deep into some serious folkways: the dark, arcane worlds of Six Organs of Admittance and Marissa Nadler. Traditional music only in that it taps into a tradition of dark vision and death, replanting in me an appreciation for the sung word, just disembodied enough by repetition or reverb, a perfect reminder that the voice can be just as hypnotic as any instrument. I guess that’s obvious. This is why we chant, right?

Jammers

2007-09-13T17:24:00.000-07:00

Let’s try to remember the Spring of 2004 if we can. We’re at the Knitting Factory in New York. Are you picturing this? Animal Collective’s sort-of breakthrough record, "Sung Tongs," that campfire chanting acoustic drone-y minor classic, had just come out. Many in the crowd were probably hoping for a return to the band’s noisy, pre-"Sung Tongs" identity. Many newer initiates were likely thinking: two guys with acoustic guitars and hackey-sacks sitting on stools maybe? Instead, the band, in full electric guitar regalia played one dreamily endless set of the as yet-unheard songs that would become their next album, "Feels". It felt like one long, continuous wave of gentle, but also overwhelming and joyous, melody. My friend Bill, a man of few words if there ever was one, described it as “magical”. I am not exaggerating when I say that I wept and held hands with complete strangers.
From that moment—and, for the people who bought Sung Tongs expecting the churning, bottomless pit of ritual sound that was "Here Comes the Indian", likely long before—Animal Collective have stayed one step ahead of their listeners. I mean that in a totally admiring way; the band is restless in the way of most great artists, never content to coast on the strength of previous successes, always searching for new ways to communicate. Although Feels traded heavily in those shimmering electric guitars, underneath was as level of synthetic, processed and sampled sound that served as a sort of textural counterpoint. Those sounds have come to the forefront on the just-released "Strawberry Jam". We hear digital clicks and hums, keyboards, tape loops, drum machines and all the rest. Guitars, if we hear any at all, have dropped way back into a supporting role. In another way, though, "Strawberry Jam" is the most conventional Animal Collective record yet. All of those elements are more polished and less organic sounding than they’ve ever been. And, in fact, they serve not so much as the substance of the music as a means of highlighting the band’s continually developing pop songcraft.
In general, when I read things like the last sentence I just wrote, I tend to have the sinking feeling that something I once loved will start to be a little less distinctive, a little less adventurous. And, in many ways, this is how I feel about "Strawberry Jam". The textures and landscapes on this album are not as rich, nor as original as they were in previous work; they seem to have taken a small step toward “electronic music” and the great, mushy indistinct mass that makes up the majority of that aisle in the record store. But despite all that, and despite my best efforts at disappointment, there are moments on this record that absolutely knock me on my ass. In whatever aesthetic framework they are working, Animal Collective just has that knack for the indescribable, ineffable moment of wonder; for finding those little crystalline pockets of beauty that make matter and time dissolve around you and make you look out at a suddenly brand-new world with your eyes wide, wide open. Avey Tare’s voice has never been this supple and expressive, his lyrics never more perceptive and heartfelt, and a few of these songs—'Peacebone', 'Cuckoo Cuckoo', and especially, my God, 'Fireworks'—well, I don’t really know what to say about them except that they fill my heart right up, over the brim.

For weeks now I’ve been happily lost in the dark hollows of viscous, unsparing instrumental music, a sometimes scary, sometimes enervating place. It’s a place I sometimes go when the world seems weird and songs with words and parts no longer make sense to me. I came to this Animal Collective record in that state of mind, expecting that same atmosphere, that same sense of danger. There is a bit of that for sure, but somehow, through their far-off clicks and buzzes, their strange world of sound, they managed to bring me back to the idea of the pop song, that direct, concise piece of unmoored time that arranges the world in its own image. Pop music comes in strange disguises: the songs of old/dead black men sung by a skinny, anti-social Jewish kid from northern Minnesota; the oblique compositions of an elfin, harp-wielding virtuoso; disco, as interpreted by two robot Frenchmen. The world is fucking ridiculous. We are desperate to communicate. Isn’t it amazing?

Welcome to the Jungle

2007-07-16T20:24:00.000-07:00

Hi dudes. Welcome to the internet. This right here is the first post on "Dying on the Outside" which is a "blog" on your computer. In it, I will tell you what I think about things and you will probably wonder how you ever got along without it. You will probably get your mind blown. Here are some things I might "blog" about: things to listen to; things to watch; basketball; what happened on "Jeopardy" today; the veggie burger I just ate; how the clouds look; feelings inside. Think you can handle that? Sweet. This will only happen when I feel like it. For instance, I was going to go see "Transformers" today but at the last minute, my pal and I changed our minds and went to see "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" instead. I'm pretty sure I would have "blogged" about "Transformers" because I have special feelings for Michael Bay and also for Transformers. But "Harry Potter"? Is there much to say about this besides the fact that Harry finally gets to make out and that Hermione Granger still makes me feel a little funny? No. Also for instance, we saw a preview for a movie called "10,000 BC", directed by our friend Roland Emmerich and appears to be about warriors and mastodons and wizards. Will I "blog" about this? Y0ur motherfucking right I will. Godspeed.