Brutal Fucking Murder.

The first known toon porno.

2011-12-27T20:56:00.000-08:00

You're welcome.

Some movies I saw or wanted to write about in the year 2011.

2011-06-22T16:14:00.000-07:00

Under the perhaps (definitely) misguided notion that you actually care in the slightest what I think about movies, here are some reviews I wrote. To my one and a half readers: enjoy!

Le Rayon Vert: With great shame, I have a confession to make: this is my first Eric Rohmer. I know, I know. But if all, or most, or even a third of them are like this one, then things are looking good between Eric and me, because I could watch leggy French women pick flowers, go swimming, accost each other, explain their dietary preferences, flirt, and cry uncontrollably, for days on end. Months, even. Which would be a preferable summer to the one had here by Delphine, whose inability to enjoy herself is a greater mystery to nobody more than it is to her. The title refers to an optical phenomenon explained at much length, then witnessed, to her infectious delight, capping a pattern of green things that provides to her a sense of order and meaning (however elusive) otherwise missing from her life. Only a pensive, leisurely, largely improvised slice of life like this, shot in gorgeously grainy 16MM, could make that kind of magic realism poignant and not insufferable. That, or only Rohmer. I'll get back to you on that one. I have some catching up to do.

Bridesmaids: My attention span for women on the verge of tying the knot, meanwhile, is considerably less than for their leggy French counterparts, so I haven't subjected myself to much of what Hollywood has to say on the subject - and therefore can't bring myself to appreciate Bridesmaids as the departure from retrograde chick-flick convention, etc. etc., that everyone tells me it is. This second-date compromise struck me as a whole lot of whatever but what do I know? In one scene, the ladies fend off against food-borne illness just as they're trying out dresses in a reservations-only boutique (where else?). Sweat starts to pour, an intestinal depth charge sounds from the fat one, and off they go to unleash all sorts of mayhem on the business's ill-equipped plumbing. The theater around me was in stitches but my mind was on other things. Specifically, the indignity of groveling on the toilet for laughs. Where does a scene like this fall on the totem pole of what-actors-will-do-for-a-paycheck? Do they think it's funny? Do the writers? Does anyone? Then, dread set in: oh God, was I becoming a square? Did I no longer share a sense of humor with my fellow man? Could I really consider my own farts the highest form of comedy, but not laugh once during this scene? And just as I was beginning to resign myself to a life of miserable and hermetic prudishness, my salvation: the inimitable Maya Rudolph, squatting on the street with her wedding dress on, in perhaps the only pose that could simultaneously signify modelling for Elle and taking a dump - and I laughed. Whew! That was a close one.

The Social Network: Life lessons abound in David Fincher's latest, so I wrote a post about it. Chief among them was, "intellectual prodigy is always at the expense of social grace," an irony not lost on this account of the birth of Facebook and its callous creator. No surprise that it's so utterly schematic. Like the far superior Zodiac, it arranges nonfiction characters into functional types, expediting the brass-tacks narrative economy that no doubt tricked many Academy voters into thinking it was good writing. Not that it's bad writing, especially not its zinger-laden dialogue (my favorite line: "I'm working on an algorithm to define the connection between Jewish guys and Asian girls"), but it can be hard not to notice it checking off dramatic requirements when you give as minuscule a goddamn about stories like these as I do.

The King's Speech: I tended to explain away my indifference to The Social Network's story of rich kids whose ingenuity makes them richer as the same as how I feel about the travails of royal life, so it goes without saying that I'm not huge on this Oscar-winner either. Heavy hangs the head that wears the crown when the sinecure duty of making periodic radio addresses is compromised by a severe stutter. Everyone is reliably great - I especially liked Bonham Carter's turn as the vaguely haughty queen - but as with the Fincher film, the production and sometimes the words were the only things keeping me on board for immaculately-rendered, important-in-name-only fluff.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams: Spelunking doesn't figure highly on my list of interests, either, nor does 3D cinema, but here's the trick to making me care: be Werner Herzog. The digital photography is as breathtaking as the southern French landscape deserves, and nobody justifies 3D the way he does. What amounts to a gimmick in most cases, highlighting the limits of, rather than deepening, representation (see: the loincloths in Avatar), in Cave of Forgotten Dreams shapes the natural world as dimensional and vast. That much is nowhere more apparent than in the cave itself, as highly selective flashlights illuminate our primitive ancestors' not-so-primitive illustrations amidst pitch black darkness. The squinty-eyed kraut's wide-eyed preoccupations gain visceral gravity by consequence, making the difference between boredom and persuasion in several instances of impromptu philosophizing (many of them featuring a heroically patient French anthropologist).

TRON: Legacy: The 3D agenda's rigorous enforcement will probably turn all our children retarded, or at least destroy any investment they once had in things not flung at their faces, but TRON: Legacy suggests there might be an upside: fewer cuts. Movies tailor-made for the format understandably don't stand to gain much from so-called "queasy cam," a regrettable recent action movie trend that minimizes how long any one image is on-screen, leaving little time for inspection or awe. TRON, like its 1982 predecessor, is all awe: awe in the dichromatic landscape it imagines existing inside a computer, realized via state-of-the-art visual engineering. It's a bit of a trade show, in other words; a showcase for cutting edge technology. Perfect for 3D, and though I saw this TRON in only two dimensions, I admired its year-young vision more than I did the first's, which bored me to tears when I first saw it twenty years after the fact. Still, TRON: Legacy plays like an Audi commercial, and is about as exciting.

Kick-Ass: Fascinating cultural object. A compendium (in spirit) of John Hughes' overvalued career, meaning both the teen comedies everyone remembers he did (Weird Science, Ferris Bueller's Day Off) and the brutal slapstick everyone forgets (Home Alone, Dennis the Menace). The hook is that they've been merged via R-rated superhero justice, much of it dished out by an 11-year-old girl, perish the thought! Imagine a Ferris Bueller who spends more time wanking than pranking, facing off against Harrys and Marvs made of blood and bones that bleed and break, and you're on the right track. But here's the weird part: as A.O. Scott points out, Kick-Ass is a "thoroughly mainstream entertainment," rather than something from the low-budget, bottom-feeding, "far margins of acceptability." Cue the appointed voices of reason cursing its name for daring to defy double standards about how we like our on-screen carnage. The real problem, though, is that it isn't terribly clever, least of all vis-à-vis Hit Girl, the offending young lady. A better movie might address the exploitation of her youth - Dana Stevens suggests Lolita, I'm thinking more Ichi the Killer - but no such luck. All we get is a foul-mouthed otaku abstraction. Yet though none of Kick-Ass works, for demonstrating how closely we guard the arbitrary boundaries of our cinematic fantasies, I'm still glad it exists.

A Serbian Film: As far as I can tell, this one's allegorical implications are thus: when the Man gains control of your manhood, everyone gets fucked. Profound! Srdjan Spasojevic ain't no Peter Greenaway; the title and about twenty seconds of tossed-off dialogue are the only signs that this has anything to do with the Yugoslav wars. He doesn't even bother with ethnic identity politics, which you'd think would be a no-brainer for depicting Serbian ultranationalism - No Man's Land made tolerable with sex, maybe? No such luck. Not that A Serbian Film really has much to do with sex or the sex industry as it exists in any conceivable reality. Like Antichrist and, to a lesser extent, Irreversible, it's the work of a man who probably weeps during orgasms, someone so deeply ashamed of lust that he can only imagine despair as its outcome. Also like those films, it speaks in the murky sensationalism of torture porn, a shadowy world of rusty blades that go snicker-snack whenever they appear, as some kind of moralizing cold shower. It's a touchingly naive miscalculation young filmmakers refuse to be disabused of, no matter how hungrily gorehounds lap up their films. So let's be clear, folks: there's no level of degradation that ceases to be titillating and becomes meaningful by intensity alone, no matter how laboriously you may argue there is. Have you seen Last House on the Left lately? The original, I mean? This stuff doesn't have a very long shelf life. That's how and why this cottage industry of shock-jock oneupmanship continues to exist at all.

And because it looks and sounds and feels like its brethren at the "far margins of acceptability," I was fully prepared for A Serbian Film to ratchet up the turpitude dutifully. (I was also provided a hero who wholly disapproved of what he witnessed. Say what you will about Kick-Ass, but at least that "thoroughly mainstream entertainment" proposed a world where even purportedly moral characters were okay with vicious brutality. Now that's shocking.) In a hundred minutes that include a mid-coital decapitation, a woman masturbating to death, and the rape of an infant moments after exiting the birth canal, the only moment that moved me was when the film's sole "strong" female, a platform-wearing femdom caricature, has a cock shoved into her freshly toothless mouth. It moved me because it somehow hit close to home, because that biological adjustment isn't outside the realm of actual pornographic fantasy. It suggested a different movie entirely, one envisioning consequences to casual depravity - not witlessly and tediously indulging it.

Enter the Void: In which Last Year at Marienbad gets remade on the set of Paz de la Huerta's luscious ass. Before an IFC Center screening this year, a matching game appeared on the screen listing indie directors and the films they chose to show there. Gaspar Noé and Salò were among the handful that I recognized at all, and I thought, smirking on the inside, "Wouldn't it be predictable if Gaspar Noé chose to show Salò at the IFC Center?" Well, guess who chose to show Salò at the IFC Center. Not that I fault the crowbar-mustached enfant terrible his choice, but I have a feeling his admiration is for all the wrong reasons. While a reputation for excess precedes Salò, what makes the teeth-gnashing classic special is its selectivity and restraint. The 120 Days of Sodom has no shortage of impieties, among them a delightful episode in which a fetus is yanked out prematurely and replaced with smoldering mercury, but Pasolini gives corprophagia the most screen-time, undermining, in long-shot after righteous long-shot, de Sade's specious notions of libertinism as some kind of exemplar for human progress.

Noé only ever deals with shit in the metaphoric sense, but when he does, he rubs our noses in it. Enter the Void has nothing to match Irreversible's excruciating center-piece but it's every bit as pretentiously sleazy. Noé sets a lot of his nearly-three-hour endurance test within the confines of trendy nightclubs, continuing the cinema's inexplicable love affair with discos and strip clubs, the only discernible purpose being getting Ms. de la Huerta into a thong. (If only he knew Jarmusch got her naked for longer and cheaper, but never mind.) Maybe he sees the after-hours world as the scourge of civilization - it's where his characters tend to suffer the most abuse - but he doesn't seem to disapprove of it much; he could learn a thing or two from his hero Stanley Kubrick, whose underappreciated Eyes Wide Shut, like Salò, illustrated bourgeois iniquity as pathetically banal. But Enter the Void has no class-consciousness to speak of, one of the many ways it wastes its Tokyo setting. It concerns itself instead with the subjective experience of its supremely uninteresting main character. That's admittedly absorbing until his death, after which point the film becomes an inexcusably aimless tone poem, a kind of uninspired Resnais homage, filmed from the all-too-apparently fudged vantage point of bird's-eye omniscience. Things get far more existential than either I Stand Alone or Irreversible (culminating in a ludicrously intimate image of conception), but everything else is signature Noé: The homophobia is embarrassing (a male character is forced to suck cock as karmic retribution for betraying the hero); the sound design is visceral (the memory of a car crash from their childhood is genuinely terrifying); and no beautiful creature goes untarnished (we're treated to the image of de la Huerta getting an abortion). And after much portentous dawdling about, the hero's primary regret in death is that he never got the chance to fuck his sister. Trust me, it's much less fun than it sounds.

The Tree of Life: My main beef with Enter the Void is admittedly a matter of taste: I much prefer The Meaning of Life to the Meaning of Life. These somber, self-consciously poetic philosophical ruminations, typified by movies other people love like Wings of Desire and The Fountain, do nothing for me; I reached satisfactory answers to the questions they raise a good ten years ago. The only exception to this has ever been 2001, but after seeing Terrence Malick's latest, I now have another. The Tree of Life is the anti-Enter the Void in almost every conceivable way. Both move freely around loved ones as one man sees and remembers them. But where the Malick views them from below, like tragedy, the Noé watches from above, like comedy. Architecture in Life denotes the continuing attempt by humans to organize and control their world (with only some success, as the polygonal skylights framing Sean Penn's nonplussed face suggests); and more specifically, the boundaries confining overheard disputes and other people's memories, upheld by insecure adults, breached by their recalcitrant children, and finally eliminated entirely in visions of nirvana. Architecture in Void is at first tortuous, then flat, but always anonymous, all sound and fury, signifying nothing. In Life, death in the family is the occasion for spiritual and familial reassessment; in Void, it's cruel melodrama supporting a nihilistic thesis. Life distinguishes its prototypical family with the carefully accumulated details of their personalities and interactions; Void distinguishes its personality-free brother and sister with salaciousness. But above all else: The Tree of Life, at 138 minutes, with long passages depicting the beginning of life on Earth, is the first movie in a while that I genuinely did not want to end; Enter the Void, at 154 minutes in its American cut, is interminable.

Yes, The Tree of Life has stretches that are as corny as its New Age-y title, some featuring CGI-dinosaurs, most of them making none-too-subtle use of the symbolic significance of water. But it is so deeply felt, so keenly calibrated to the paradoxes of human behavior - particularly the way that love between parent and parent, parent and child, and child and child so often seems like anything but - that the corny stuff feels earned, even indispensable. As Malick's camera roams restlessly through his 1950s Waco milieu, dry and ruthless Texas winds whip its face. Brahms' 4th symphony links scenes as discrete as childhood and creation itself, at once source music and non-diegetic; along with the mother and father's archetypal roles of nurture and discipline, it signifies the subjective distortion of the past, only far more subtly and poignantly than any movie I can remember. If my progress on last year's films is any indication, it'll be awhile before I'm caught up with all of 2011's, but if the mincemeat The Tree of Life made of all my cynical defenses is any indication, none of them will be better than this one.

Cooked-to-order wunderkind for the culture-starved Chelsea intelligentsia.

2011-06-06T18:25:00.000-07:00

My man Alex Hilhorst has a righteously bitter post over at his excellent blog on a certain 4-year-old painting prodigy who's currently the talk of the town [EDIT: she's apparently actually 3, but no matter]:

A [three] year old Australian girl of Russian extraction is having a solo show of her paintings in a New York art gallery. FOUR YEARS OLD. It's very likely that Harold Camping was right all along and that the world really did end on May 21st and we're all stuck in some kind of LOSTian limbo, or at the very least, this is a clear sign of the end times. Either that, or this is all some elaborate Banksy prank. Or maybe God is just fucking with me.

Attending the opening of "The Prodigy of Color" last night was a bizarre experience. It kinda felt like Alison and I were in a movie but were the only characters who realized it. An entire room of the gallery was devoted to Andre, the walls adorned with over a dozen of her works, several of which, including the appropriately titled "Dinosaur Island," had already been sold for upwards of $5000 (the simply titled "Horse" was sold for 8,700 fucking goddamn sonuvabitch dollars I hate all of you).

Do you realize what this means? This means people- actual people- are paying nearly 10 gs for a painting made by a fucking [three] year old. And to be perfectly frank, these paintings are nothing to write home about. Picture Jackson Pollock if he were a baby and super-glued My Little Ponies and glitter onto his works. That'll give you a pretty good idea of what Aelita Andre's paintings look like, that is to say, they look like the paintings of a four year old.

I'd be pretty much the last of my kind - that is, the kind whose gallery visits in the course of a half-year can generally be counted on two hands maybe - to cry out that a 3-year-old could do this!! so part of me is happy that the unwashed masses have finally gotten the artist they deserve. The problem, of course, is that she's only currently known to the bleeding edge that exalts her, so the self-parody is mostly just sad instead of funny. Except for the part where she "peed her pants," which she had also done while "being interviewed by the Associated Press the day before." Hahahahahaha! Serves you right, you self-important little twat.

Superhuman.

2011-05-09T18:41:00.001-07:00

Bad education.

2011-04-26T14:04:00.000-07:00

(via Boing Boing)

In which the intrusion of the intellectually disinterested free market is shown to be the scourge of higher education:

If tuition has increased astronomically and the portion of money spent on instruction and student services has fallen, if the (at very least comparative) market value of a degree has dipped and most students can no longer afford to enjoy college as a period of intellectual adventure, then at least one more thing is clear: higher education, for-profit or not, has increasingly become a scam.

(via n +1)

Panda Bear: Tomboy.

2011-04-12T23:34:00.000-07:00

My review of Panda Bear's disappointing fourth album, Tomboy, is up at PopMatters.

Tomboy’s modesty is, reportedly, the product of extensive labor, and it shows; the album’s chief virtue is its rich sound, and that isn’t faint praise. Lennox’s commitment to detail is readily apparent. But perhaps it’s an overcommitment. He eschews legibility, of structure, melody, and ambient coherence, so as not to distract from details that sometimes cooperate—as on “You Can Count on Me”, where depth charge blasts rhythmically subsume the ongoing doggerel in a very trippy way—but usually don’t, wafting and overlapping with little perceivable purpose. You’re not likely to hear another record that’s at once so dense, and so diaphanous.

One thing on Tomboy is coherent, though: its glumness. Like a mopey introvert, it relishes generic eeriness (“Scheherazade”), deviates from moderato lassitude rarely, and shows only guarded mirth (“Surfer’s Hymn”, “Friendship Bracelet”). It will undoubtedly prompt the tireless work of faithful fans to redeem it, to uncover its secrets, its hidden logic—to piece together its many subtleties. As with many introverts, that work will be futile. My own project was to see if “Afterburner” was this album’s “Bros”, that unlikely 12-minute hit that disguised seismic shifts of tone and phrasing under insistent, incessant strumming—a miracle of modern pop. It wasn’t. And isn’t.

Nancy.

2011-04-02T11:09:00.001-07:00

(via It's a queer, queer, queer, queer world)

Happy-Go-Lucky.

2011-03-31T20:39:00.001-07:00

As someone often accused of unnatural cheeriness, I suppose I should be grateful for Happy-Go-Lucky. Here’s a movie that finally makes the argument, hey, happy people are people, too, dammit, and deserve better than the abuse they generally get on the silver screen. Anti-heroes have had a monopoly on the popular imagination for God knows how long now, and their good-hearted counterparts have been forced to the sidelines, sometimes insufferable but always ready to die for their sins. Anyone with half a brain knows that being depressed has little to do with depth, and even less to do with intelligence, so this preoccupation with brooding types must be some kind of fantasy-fulfillment. I guess. Mike Leigh has a taste for demystifying the world, which isn’t so rare, but most slice-of-life filmmakers prefer more sensational subjects. So, I’m happy Leigh chose this less-than-sensational one.

Poppy, played by a radiant and deservedly recognized Sally Hawkins, isn’t just a chipper gal, but a real chipper gal, so not only does she crack jokes non-stop, but she works full-time, goes to the chiropractor, likes sex, and – this is crucial – gets lost in thought occasionally. Moments of silent contemplation like these are common in the movies because they're direct and representational. But here they are somehow more pregnant than usual. They signify actual contemplation. They seem to exist for her benefit, when in other movies, they seem to exist for ours.

So as I said, I’m grateful. But my gratitude has its limits. For one thing, I don’t appreciate the identity politics that come into play in the (mesmerizingly performed) driving lesson scenes. Maybe I’m just a grumpy guy (of which I’m also accused; I think my friends are just trying to confuse me), but I find it hard to believe it takes a paranoid mama’s boy with a chip on his shoulder to find Poppy’s sprightliness irritating, and the racism forced into his toothless cockney mouth is insulting.

Also annoying are the intimations of minor sainthood, which I guess are inevitable. Poppy doesn’t emerge as an ersatz Messiah at any point, thank the Lord (remember Patch Adams?) – even when she pulls a bully off the schoolyard porker, she’s just doing her job – but she does share an extended scene with a homeless man so improbable, it borders on surrealism. Like all hobos in the movies, he’s not so much a hobo, as he is the idea of a hobo, and all the public shame he embodies. Predictably, he speaks in earnest gibberish, which Poppy – bless her heart! – responds to as if she understands. And maybe she does. The creepy subtext to this scene is that she possesses the ability to communicate with humans at their most abject – creepy, because the implication is that we don’t. She may be no Messiah, but she, I, and well-adjusted people like us are still spiritually superior to the rest of you miserable wretches, it suggests. And we are. But not this much.

Maybe that's why nobody likes happy people: we're just so fucking smug.

Human metamorphosis.

2011-03-31T10:35:00.000-07:00

Human Metamorphosis (via My Modern Met)

Separated at birth?

2011-03-25T15:45:00.000-07:00

Breakdancing Mr. W?

xoxo.

2011-03-23T15:51:00.001-07:00

Death Metal Friday.

2011-03-21T08:19:00.000-07:00

I suppose this was inevitable. God-willing, this will be the last word on Rebecca Black. (via LA MENSTRUE)

Harvey Milk at Union Pool.

2011-03-20T20:44:00.001-07:00

One of the frequent criticisms lobbed at heavy metal is that you can’t take it seriously. Another is that it’s way too serious. Both can be traced back to sources generally unfriendly towards the genre, or at the very least dismissive, so it makes sense that Harvey Milk, a rare example that answers both complaints in equal measure, is among the least approachable. The Athens veterans record in the fine tradition of such upstanding young men as Eyehategod, Soilent Green, and King Buzzo, with a bottom end fit to raze buildings and the diaphragmatic vocals to match. But where the NOLA boys – the first two, alongside Crowbar, Acid Bath, and Down – wailed under the onus of Southern-fried anxiety, Buzzo and his bandmates in Melvins (and, to a lesser extent, in Buzzov*en) sounded serious but never quite were. (Sometimes, as on the jokey Stag, they didn’t always sound it, either.) It’s something of a punk rock thing, a refusal to relinquish their sense of humor in the face of increasingly humorless peers, a winking “fuck you” to counter-culture pedantry. Harvey Milk took that ball and ran with it, from their avant-garde beginnings, to the anguished pub rock of the albums that bookended their millennial hiatus.

When they played Brooklyn’s Union Pool last Monday – the first of three eventually sold-out shows at the amicably hip venue – they stretched this duality as far as they ever have. Their newest disc, 2010’s agonizingly depressive Small Turn of Human Kindness, got played front to back, and while it’s not exactly my favorite of theirs, I admire its commitment to the almighty dirge, and the tenacity with which is gets replicated live. This is heavy, heavy metal, and I say that after having seen Boris, Sunn 0))), and Boris & Sunn 0))). Those groups are louder in volume, no doubt, but they’re also aloof and technical in their loudness. They find dimension in sound; Harvey Milk finds it in vocal agony. Creston Spiers’ baritone – gravelly and hyper-earnest, like a heavy metal Tom Waits – exactly like a heavy metal Tom Waits – augments their deep, dry, power trio sound with something resembling human feeling. It turns the whole thing into a kind of psychological synesthesia. The noise is more than just noise. It really must be seen to be believed:

Almost as soon as they finished Small Turn, though, Spiers demanded we sing along to “Rock and Roll Party Tonight,” unless we wanted to “get the FUCK out!” And then there were their notorious t-shirts over at the merch table, featuring such metal images as ET smoking a cigarette, the Three Amigos, and my favorite, Shaq holding a pizza with Ronnie James Dio on top (RIP). Their goofy is goofier than the goofy of most, just as their bleak is more depressing than the bleak of most. In a genre noted for macho antipathy – which might be behind not being taken seriously and being too serious – this duality strikes me as unusually bold. Certainly more manly than the Satanic posturing and faux-anarchism of their peers, at least.

Considering Harvey Milk, I couldn’t help but think back to seeing Wino and Scott Kelly at the Mercury Lounge a few weeks ago. What struck me then was how different the headliners’ performance were. Both men, grizzled doom veterans, sang roughly the same material – blue collar tales of loss, love, loneliness, lawlessness. The difference was in delivery, and it was staggering. Wino’s speed-freak eyes suggested he had seen more of the world’s sorrows than Kelly, and yet he reeked of affectation. Kelly, meanwhile, humbly strummed his guitar and completely silenced the room. Then they joined forces and took on Ian Curtis:

If you can’t take that seriously, there’s no hope for you.

Sonic Youth: SYR9: Simon Werner a Disparu.

2011-03-18T10:56:00.000-07:00

After a short dry spell, I got two leads in one week over at PopMatters. The first review was of New York Dolls' Dancing Backward in High Heels, the second was of Sonic Youth's new SYR entry, SY9: Simon Werner A Disparu, excerpted below.

Simon Werner is somewhere closer to those criminally neglected Earth albums from the ‘90s (especially “Dans les bois / M. Rabier”)—simple riffs, at times mammoth, never dumb, always on the verge of combustion. It’s high drama in alt-rock shorthand. In that way, it’s also not too far from post-rock, a genre loosely defined by its fondness for atmospheric suggestion—particularly Friends of Dean Martinez and Dirty Three, with their dusty desert soundscapes; and Tortoise circa TNT, which played like implied short-form crime fiction. If I have to draw a likeness from the SY oeuvre, it would have to be the less song-oriented pre-EVOL records, particularly Bad Moon Rising, which always seemed to sound to me like—well, a soundtrack.

New York Dolls: Dancing Backward In High Heels.

2011-03-15T09:20:00.000-07:00

My review of New York Dolls' latest is up at PopMatters.

And therein lies what might really be behind us young folks’ mercilessness: rock’s elder statesmen no longer have to fight for recognition. Their page in history already written, they now proceed with immunity with nary a care about their market value. When an indie hopeful switches between giving a girl “sugar” and telling her, “You don’t have to cry / You can dry your eye,” it’s a rock ‘n’ roll cliché. When New York Dolls do it, they’re just doing their thing. Holding them to unusually high standards is a way of leveling the playing field.

It’s at this point that, after owning up to my Gen Y prejudices, I must respectfully defect from my peers. Pop runs just as much on personality as on music, so of course the appeal of the former helps us overlook shortcomings in the latter. And of course that would strengthen with familiarity over time. What’s the use of denying that? So, yes, I think the concessions to the sound-du-jour made on Dancing Backward are wise. But as a fan, I also affectionately accept their refusal to part with their outdated vernacular. It’s just part of what makes them the New York Dolls. Generational obligations aside, it would be dishonest to report that, aside maybe from one reggae track too many, they’re in anything but top form.

Vagina bubbles from Hell.

2011-03-14T19:49:00.000-07:00

Pause for soft-core.

2011-03-09T21:32:00.000-08:00

Life lessons I learned from The Social Network.

2011-03-07T22:34:00.001-08:00

Intellectual prodigy is always at the expense of social grace.
Striking out with a lady is always a spectacle of the lack of said social grace. Never a mutual failure. And certainly never a mystery.
Said lack is no barrier to the insatiable attraction of accomplished babes.
…nor to a casually keen understanding of makes humans tic.
…which is, according to Aaron Sorkin, very simple: that spurned BU beauty who we could never have and certainly never deserved. And by "humans," I mean "Mark Zuckerberg."
Landing the role of a Stanford girl depends on your willingness to enter a shower in soft focus. And have a nice ass.
Brilliant people are only interested in other brilliant people. All normal mental capacities need not apply.
Business is always foreplay to a serious bromance.
You’re not an asshole. You’re just trying so hard to be one.

Kaboom.

2011-03-07T20:37:00.001-08:00

True to form, I made it into the city with negative time to spare for the cab ride to the will-call ticket awaiting me at Anthology. The ticket in question would get me into Matthew Pollack’s Run, Run, It’s Him, which had its world premiere on Saturday as part of CineKink NYC, but the only trait more persistent than my prurience is my habitual tardiness. And thus, it was not to be. Which is too bad; the documentary, seven years in the making, follows a Canadian “porn connoisseur” around in an attempt to demystify his shiftless life and the distorted worldview his addiction has given him. Interesting, right? Oh, well: I had to settle with the uptown F train and Gregg Araki’s Kaboom instead.

The only other Araki I’ve seen is The Doom Generation, which I hated. The good news is this one is lightyears better. It’s a cute little candy-colored queer comedy with some inevitable nonsense about cults and the end of the world thrown in for good measure. That world is a Southern Californian fantasy-land where every building’s a Pereira, every party is a rave, every lesbo's a lipstick lesbo, and everyone is a little bit gay (you better believe the Kinsey scale gets not only name-dropped but explicitly explained). Not such a bad place. Especially when Cut Copy and Explosions in the Sky stand in for background ambience.

Predictably, this is also a world where the hetero male ego gets dragged through the mud as if straight men have never heard of “feelings.” And if there’s a bistro called The Ontological Void, there’s also the rhetorical groaner, “Does Mel Gibson hate Jews?” But belabored as Araki’s hipness might be, it’s hardly offensive, which is more than I can say for his flippantly fascist Doom Generation. More pertinently, he regards his actors and their frequent trysts with sincere – and sincerely lustful – affection. I daresay only Bertolucci could make skin look as scrumptious as it does here. And a mid-film ménage-à-trois is so warm and inviting, even the most sexless cynic would be helpless but to dream that for his birthday, he might one day wake up to Juno Temple and Andy Fischer-Price having their way with him, too.

Don’t think that a couple lame jokes means Kaboom isn’t funny, either. There are as many sardonic zingers as you’d probably expect from a snarky sex romp like this, and while the sci-fi angle starts out giving the film unwelcome gravitas (including the discovery of family ties, and traumatic revisitations à la Enter the Void), it ends up bringing the film to one of the funniest conclusions in recent memory (followed by Placebo over the end credits – natch). Oh, and did I mention the nymphomaniacal older sister from Fat Girl plays a psychotic lesbian witch?

Wrist-cutting.

2011-03-06T21:10:00.000-08:00

Secret Sunshine and The Housemaid.

2011-03-01T23:48:00.001-08:00

Let me ask you something about the last time you were at a foreign film, and I do mean one with subtitles. When a funny line came along, when did you laugh? Once you finished reading it? Or after its delivery? For most viewers it seems to be the latter (from my personal experience). Responsible for this phenomenon might be the mob mentality one somewhat-willfully succumbs to when the house lights go down. That, and the noble desire to receive a Foreign Film on its own terms. We want to believe we’re responding to facial gestures and delivery, when we’re really just laughing at a good translation. That’s how strong our desire to abolish our inner philistine is. And that’s what I assumed was at work when Western adjudicators at 2007’s Cannes named Jeon Do-yeon Best Actress for her turn in Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine – and again when critics agreed she was the highlight of Im Sang-soo’s remake of The Housemaid.

I assumed that, anyway, until I actually saw these films. And then I understood. Their divergent quality notwithstanding – the one is great, the other merely not-bad – her performance in both films is a marvel to behold, so physiognomically pitch-perfect, it’s hard not to wonder if we’re watching not the usual asymptote of Method and histrionic mastery, but the real thing. And maybe we are. Her role in both films involves a uniquely keen connection to children – which in Secret Sunshine, is the source of tragedy; in The Housemaid, of respite from adult cruelty – that she could very well draw from real life. At thirty-eight, it’s not infeasible she has a kid or two of her own, but Wikipedia is about as clueless as I am. In any case: my inner philistine abolished, I’ve seen the light. I’ve recognized great acting in another language – one about as phonetically and inflectively dissonant from English as Korean, no less - and this is it.

Secret Sunshine makes that tremendously clear by settling itself almost entirely – but not completely - on her shoulders. She’s a bereaved mother left to fend for herself, in a small city of middle-class people living in each other’s pockets. Her mourning proceeds as a veritable checklist of all the ways we “act out” in such times. She goes mute. She stares blankly. She wanders the streets listlessly. She finds the criminal responsible and can barely surpass indifference when he’s put to justice. She finds religion. She loses religion. She lashes out, shoplifts, and vandalizes. She visits the convicted killer in prison seeking some kind of closure only to leave soon thereafter, much worse for wear. She coerces a pious man into infidelity, as much an act of primal desperation as sly revenge against his insufferably officious wife. This last act leaves the man frazzled, naturally, but leaves another man, indirectly and more importantly, confused and crestfallen. He’s the closest Do-yeon has to a foil: naïve and impulsively solicitous, like her, but unprepossessing, unlike her – and so he works tirelessly to make a romance between them as convenient as possible for her, like so many unprepossessing men assume they must. His determination continues well into her unraveling and produces a comedy of manners that’s merciless in its irony: at no extreme of mimicry does he absorb, or even seem to notice, the gravity of her grief. That some of this seems contrived is inevitable; while it’s likely that someone would go through some of these modes of mourning, it might not be that she’d go through them all. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible. And for every moment like the one where she hijacks a congregation’s PA system to play a song called “Lies,” there’s one like her unwanted suitor’s puzzled reflection, “Am I really that much of a loser?” or another like her brother’s blunt appraisal of her absent husband – and the gluttony for punishment that harbored his abuse – that erases all doubt.

Miss Do-yeon has more artifice to work through in The Housemaid. And of course she does. It’s an upstairs-downstairs tale with all the attendant bitchiness, backstabbing, infidelity, inebriated spectacles and pregnancy drama. So, a lot of that artifice is her fellow actors. That isn’t a knock against them. They do exactly as they should, with all the flair a melodrama like this requires. It’s Do-yeon’s luck, really, that she gets a role that can seem real even when, well, sorely underwritten. But, it’s to her credit and hers alone that she has the sensitivity to grasp a character both guileless and actively receptive to sexual advances – something rare in a world where the scripts exist for these traits separately, but never in combination, for women. How novel! Fittingly, her female employers conspire against her, but still blame the lean, aloof patriarch for his philandering ways – not considering for a moment that the affair could be just as much on her terms as on his. I’d have to see the original to gauge whether this doubt cast upon the assumption of complete male control is an update for more enlightened times; it certainly feels like it. Other pleasures include: the deliciously cold androgen child; the sleek, brutalist interiors and the leering photography capturing the drama within them; and the older maid, whose drunken, half-naked, solitary ramblings hysterically – and poignantly, really – belie her outward severity. The ending is utterly, awesomely ludicrous, in the mode of what The Housemaid truly is under its high-gloss façade: a better-than-average Asian drama, forgoing nuance for delirious thrills. If it were in English, it'd no doubt be banished to the middlebrow abyss of network television. But it's foreign, so it's at the IFC, where the audience I saw it with took it very, very seriously. Now that's what I call mob mentality.

Drunk baby.

2011-02-28T12:19:00.000-08:00

I've seen this a few times and I still marvel at how closely an infant acting naturally resembles a fat, sloppy old drunk. Unreal.

Jacko.

2011-02-27T11:49:00.000-08:00

(via commitcrime.com)

Macc & dGohn: Some Shit Saaink.

2011-02-09T19:12:00.000-08:00

Here's another review I did for PopMatters that was recently published, on a drum & bass album off Aphex Twin's Rephlex label.

An excerpt:

So what I’m left with is a verdict that veers frustratingly close to “it’s just not really my cup of tea,” which is such a bummer. Why keep an open mind at all if some music will always close itself off to me? It’s also not entirely true. As a stoned teenager, I found LTJ Bukem’s mellow jungle positively mind-blowing—although a lot of things were as a stoned teenager. Now, when I hear the same stainless steel cyber-thriller ambience recorded in 2010, I’m forced to wonder if this is really so compelling for bass-heads that the slightest deviation—to something genuinely frightening, perhaps, or at least more specific—would alienate Macc and dgoHn’s fanbase. Or their contract with Rephlex. One would hope not.

A little more on Dexter.

2011-02-06T21:57:00.000-08:00

One scene that deliriously breaks the 4th wall: At about 21 minutes in, the round-table in the forensics lab, one seat filled by Dexter's thoughts. Sgt. Doakes looks at him and asks, "What was that?"

EDIT: Another: Dexter meets himself in a dream, as a child, and the child Dexter warns him of the man behind him in real life.

Impressions of Dexter.

2011-02-02T19:56:00.001-08:00

Acting on an array of recommendations, I delved recently into the first season of Dexter via my new Netflix account, piece by 20-to-60-minute piece at my after-dinner leisure. My first observation was that nothing at all would work on the show if Michael C. Hall weren’t so damn sexy. He’s awfully likeable for a total misanthrope. But then, if not for his overbearing narration, we might not consider him a misanthrope at all – dramatically, he’s just another endearingly obsessive, impossibly competent forensics guy, a Renaissance Man as much as (and no more than) any primetime protagonist must be. But the show is crafty with its many linked hooks. First and foremost is that our hero is a serial killer. Novel, but morally questionable (presumably). Solution? He operates according to a strict code of psychopath cannibalism: he only kills the others killers. Our vicarious conscience wiped clean, we’re free to watch and relish his murders without remorse. As long as Dexter’s more our ego than our id, that is, lest he sully our tender palates with excessive savagery. So, he carries out each kill with the precision of a surgeon – or a forensics guy, with a taste for rituals to match (every victim is tranquilized, stripped bare, and bled from an incision in his cheek before meeting his individually customized demise). It goes without saying that it's suddenly no longer by the miraculous happenstance only possible on TV that Dexter is great at his job. See how that works?

So there’s tension between Dexter’s desensitized thought process and the admirable ways he’s learned to cope with the world. He’s charming, he’s a good dresser, he has a sense of beauty, and he’s smart. He’s good with kids, too. What a touching fantasy, that serial killers would be the kind of guy you could bring home to your mother. In real life Dexter might be a little less hunk and a little more Ed Gein, but Dexter doesn’t have anything to gain from that kind of realism. The kind it can, it seems, is that of Miami’s Cuban element, which provides an awful lot of mileage. Why? Beats me; it doesn’t seem to have much to do with Dexter’s existential dilemma, which, affected as it may be, is at least interesting.

Something else interesting about the show is its anxiety. It comes spilling out all the sudden in the first season, when the police suddenly begin to detect Dexter – or at least, his killings – and he’s estimated to a copycat killer. Dexter believes in the power of media violence, it seems,, and imagines its hero as a product of it. Dexter doesn’t come across as a news junkie; he doesn’t even seem to own a TV, so I began to wonder over the course of my week watching the show what he could possibly be imitating. I guess this could be considered a drawback, but it does open up an element of psychological intrigue to the series by making a convincing explanation of Dexter’s pathologies somewhat elusive. That sounds about right, that a serial killer is kind of complex, right?

Two unqualified compliments. The show looks and sounds good, making liberal use of its colorfully chic Miami backdrop, and employing a chilling tango of a soundtrack. It also has a healthy amount of zingers. My favorite: “Her attraction to me keeps with her total sense of entitlement.” But I had to somewhat force myself through the first season. Maybe the second is better?

Nancy.

2011-01-27T05:08:00.000-08:00

Iron & Wine: Kiss Each Other Clean.

2011-01-26T12:06:00.000-08:00

My review of Iron & Wine's new album Kiss Each Other Clean is up over at PopMatters.

An excerpt:

This is, in other words, a pop record. The young crowd who found poignancy in his intimate Stereopak yarns, myself included, might balk at such a development. I certainly hesitated at Beam’s tinny, clean, amplified vocal lead on opener “Walking Far From Home”, but only because Julian Casablancas wasn’t the first comparison I was prepared to make to Beam. The move to singles, meanwhile, isn’t something I can fault him for. The singles game is a tough game to play—maybe the toughest—because it’s largely a numbers game: the strength of a record becomes a merciless ratio of good tracks to tracks overall. That must have been daunting for a man whose weaker songs could once be carried along by moody coherence, even on the relatively brawny and brassy The Shepherd’s Dog. No wonder he hedges the odds and sticks with ten songs on this one.

Unfortunately, even just those ten are pretty hit-or-miss. Two of them are unqualified triumphs. Two more are not at all. The six that remain waver between listenable and good enough, the kind that you might warm up to with familiarity but won’t be adding to your shuffle anytime soon.

Game Boy.

2011-01-23T21:42:00.000-08:00

(via yeah i was in the shit)

Dawn.

2011-01-15T08:58:00.001-08:00

(via yeah i was in the shit)

Old man morbidity and Marathon Man.

2011-01-09T21:34:00.001-08:00

My elders and I get along because I’ve always treated people with an adult’s sense of respect, but also because we share an appreciation for gallows humor. On my way to brunch with my friend’s father this morning I was reminded of this. He told us that he was the only one at the gym this morning (naturally, it’s a Sunday), a fact in which he found relief until the possibility occurred to him, in his words, “What if this is when my heart stops? What if I keel over where I stand, and the treadmill sends me rolling slowly to the back of the empty room? An hour later the next old fart will come in, without his glasses –‘cause he’s just there to work-out- and I will be invisible to him even as he runs in place over my freshly crumpled corpse.” Poetry.

One thing we sometimes don’t agree so much on is movies, not because I don’t like old movies but because my sensibilities aren’t quite as classicist as theirs. Case-in-point: once we sat down to omelets and bottomless coffee, the topic turned to John Schlesinger’s Marathon Man, which my twin sister and I had seen (most of) for the first time the night prior. His son praised the film’s old-school sense of craft, its whole-hog commitment to racketing up the tension in every scene, and his example was the practically non-sequitor opening car chase. I found the car chase, which begins with an ornery exchange between a Jew and an anti-Semite and escalates into a fuel truck slooooowly backing out, cartoonish, and said as much. (A mistake, I later realized, when everything I did or said was deemed “cartoonish.”) Then the paterfamilias solicited my opinion – not something that occurs often these days, so I was grateful – on Laurence Olivier’s “dynamite” performance as the Nazi-dentist-in-exile. It turned me off at the time because it was so carefully poised on the edge of restraint between understatement and scenery-chewing, too diplomatic to make a commitment either way. He admired exactly that, though, and now I’m giving it a second thought. It is, in retrospect, rather great: sternly, reticently evil, highly controlled where one concession to ostentation – a histrionic kraut accent, say, or wild gesticulations of lingering fascist fervor – could send it spiraling into comedy. So great, the “cartoonish” movie around it seems wholly undeserving.

Why didn’t I realize that at the time? Am I so hardened to the middlebrow compromises of mainstream cinema that I’m rejecting acting that departs at all from either extreme of mumbled realism or Nicholas Cage? I guess that I might be. It’s a hipster imperative to embrace either the lowest or highest of culture with a disdain for anything in-between, and being all too aware of that, I make a point of not letting myself be too forgiving of cheapo horrors or Antonioni. And yet, I can’t avoid my impulses, and my impulses direct me pretty fiercely against these kinds of something-for-everyone A-list date-movies – a genre most espionage thrillers, rife with exotic locales, tasteful bloodletting, and even more tasteful sex and Cary-Grant-lite banter, fall into almost by default. That’s an odd thing to come to realize, because really, I kind of love this shit. Not the high-stakes poker games, or convoluted plots, or inevitable crawling through catacombs of heavily-guarded mountain compounds, but definitely the sexy locales, the haute couture, the impossible gadgetry, the women, and the car chases. It’s not art, but it’s fun! Right? When the hell did I become such a cranky-pants?

The Kids Are All Right.

2011-01-02T22:29:00.001-08:00

I have to give this left-of-center dramedy credit for keeping it lean and meaty. Lisa Cholodenko’s California soap opera moves a series of expressed longings, first meetings, significant questions, overdue confrontations, and tough decisions along rather expediently, which made me wonder about the hosannas heaped upon it by the mainstream press for “realism.” But it’s social realism, not dramatic realism, that they like. Finally, a gay married couple that’s just another married couple, they say. But is it? Would I enjoy watching said couple swap spit as much if it weren’t Annette Bening and Julianne Moore? More to the point: just like the similarly GLAAD-approved Chasing Amy, lesbianism is envisioned as something that occurs after, not instead of, heterosexual desire. Where Joey Lauren Adams’ straight conversion via Ben Affleck played out as Kevin Smith’s well-meaning but thinly-veiled straight male possession fantasy, though, Moore’s genuflection at the altar of Mark Ruffalo’s cock comes across like alliance-building in reverse (Cholodenko is a muff-diver herself, don’t-cha-know). Sure, she writes it off with the couple’s peculiar affinity for beefcake porn, but then so much for just another married couple.

The Kids Are All Right wears its heart on its sleeve, which is not a knock against it (what does it say about you if listening to a character open up makes you squirm?), but like many of the upper-middle-class liberals to whom it caters, the film’s effusive sympathy is limited. After giving Ruffalo’s motorbiking bachelor more than enough to work with, it unceremoniously dumps him. His exit isn’t exactly dramatically abrupt, but it is dramatically lazy, as if the third act were a holdover from a first draft featuring a much flatter character than Ruffalo plays, disposable as soon as he’s done embodying 1) Moore’s latent desire for a man; 2) the kids’ patent desire for a dad; and 3) Bening’s blatant need for a foil. Which is, come to think of it, usually how women are treated in the movies. How progressive!

Back to curmudgeonliness.

2011-01-02T19:34:00.001-08:00

There comes a point in every young critic’s life when the demands made on his productivity exceed the consistency of his silver tongue. That’s how it seems to him, anyway, so he retreats, stops writing much if at all, takes up transitory trades requiring little of his creative energy, and tries to keep himself distracted (copious masturbation inevitably ensues). Meanwhile he attempts to stay abreast of all the newest music and movies and whatever else it is he loves enough to have wanted to write about, and more and more he finds himself inventing pithy little quips in the darkness of the movie theater, on his morning and evening commutes, in the bathroom, and other spaces of not-so-idle thinking. This backlog of snark and hesitant praise swells like a brain tumor until he’s forced to face the facts: if his writing sucks so much, then not writing is going to make sure it stays that way.

He returns to that blog that wasn’t ever brimming with content to begin with, that had become a Tumblr-like/-lite repository for animated GIFs in the interim, and tries again. This time, though, with fewer wasted words. Less need to expand on those pithy little quips, and more need for cogency and humor. And above all, no more bloated introductory diversions like this one.

Marsha.

2010-12-26T20:37:00.000-08:00

(via yeahiwasintheshit.tumblr.com)

Fuck off.

2010-12-06T20:55:00.000-08:00

Little women.

2010-11-14T18:33:00.001-08:00

Goddamn!

2010-11-06T20:47:00.000-07:00

(via therailrat.com)

Shit!

2010-11-02T21:15:00.001-07:00

(via yeahiwasintheshit.tumblr.com)

Sakura Sena.

2010-09-28T10:32:00.000-07:00

Above is Sakura Sena. She is a Japanese porn star. She has absolutely gigantic breasts, the kind so swollen from repeated augmentations that they appear to have lost all softness. I've encountered her before, when my taste for smut was more attuned to the yellow fever I had in real life. Those days are long gone, but one of her videos was posted on Fleshbot the other day, and I became curious. What began as an inquiry into her age, ended at one of the most sedately salacious Wiki bios I may have ever seen:

Sena was born January 31, 1975 to a middle-class family in Chigasaki, Kanagawa Prefecture. Sexually precocious from an early age, Sena's first exposure to pornography was at the age of 13 when she secretly viewed a hardcore American video in her father's collection. She attributes her preference for foreign men to this experience. Another of her father's videos inspired Sena to begin masturbating with a vacuum cleaner. She recalls, "I eventually did it so hard that my skin ripped and blood was going everywhere. That's when my grandfather came in... he saw me against the wall, my legs spread apart wide and a vacuum cleaner hose in my pussy. He just told me that I had a phone call and left... He looked too embarrassed to say anything."

Sena lost her virginity while still a 14 year old junior-high school student. During this time she gained sexual experience through encounters with older men, including her friends' fathers, whom she credits for teaching her about sex toys. About a year after her first sexual encounter, she was picked up by members of the yakuza. The gang took her to a love hotel, where other men were waiting. She was forced to give fellatio to members of the gang for two hours. This encounter, to which she credits her oral skills, was followed by a karaoke session.

Camouflage.

2010-09-21T11:46:00.000-07:00

(via is mental)

Camp.

2010-09-20T20:59:00.000-07:00

(via I HATE MY PARENTS)

Ivy League babes.

2010-09-19T16:00:00.000-07:00

The worst part about coming back home after ogling Princeton freshmen all day is that none of them have websites.

Hell is standardized tests.

2010-09-17T16:30:00.000-07:00

There's no good reason to rail (or should I say inveigh?) against the evils, or at least, fundamental stupidity, of prerequisite exams like the HSPT, SAT, GMAT, and MCAT. The game is always (or should I say inveterately?) rigged. Complaining (or should I say grousing?) about it would be tedious (or should I say insipid? vapid? jejune?).

But it is a little silly that I scored [insert perfectly reasonable score] on both the verbal and quantitative reasoning sections of the GRE. My night before was not dissimilar to how I imagine manslaughterers, Tony Hayward, and victims of stigmata spending most of their slumber: tossing, turning, tearing at their souls, wracked with unfathomable spiritual burdens. As winged bards hailed the coming morn, I hadn't a wink of shut-eye under my belt, and was prepared either to cry or go into the kitchen and start destroying things. Somehow I eked out three hours, caffeinated, adrenalized, and made it through the computerized slog with acceptable success. That being said, some of those math questions were beyond the pale. I hit the ground running, because I knew I had to, but about halfway through, all that algebra was rearranging itself and telling me which senators were actually Soviet agents. Meanwhile, some of that vocabulary needed to put up its feet and relax for once. Smattering: grasp? Nigga please.

Anyway, it's over, so fuck it. GRAD SCHOOL HERE I COME.

Untitled.

2010-08-18T06:57:00.000-07:00

Marilyn.

2010-08-03T12:07:00.000-07:00

Maybe I should just stop lying to myself and start a porn Tumblr.

EDIT: I replaced the broken pic with a new one. Not quite as good, but the same, sexy, savory Ms. Monroe.

Apple bottom.

2010-08-02T07:59:00.000-07:00

Don't shoot!

2010-07-30T23:45:00.000-07:00

Rotwang.

2010-07-09T21:14:00.000-07:00

Ladybugs.

2010-06-13T17:37:00.001-07:00

Forgive us, Lord, for worshipping the intellectual mind.

2010-06-09T08:13:00.000-07:00

Anna.

2010-05-27T20:40:00.000-07:00

Lou Reed gimped.

2010-05-24T23:05:00.001-07:00

Lou Reed playing "Sweet Jane" likes it's a goddamn Peter Frampton song, all power chords and organs. Bleh.

Cocaine dulls the senses.

2010-05-23T21:14:00.000-07:00

Thoughts while riding NJ Transit.

2010-05-21T06:38:00.000-07:00

My eyes must be going senile because the same sight repeated itself, twice, on Metro platforms in Manhattan: high-heeled cold fish looking away with combined disdain and disinterest, as a sturdy gentleman eagerly eats her neck. Like peep toe sneakers, this situation begs for a commitment one way or the other: either gently push him off, or show some enthusiasm, you stupid bitch!

---

The best way to take stock of your night's conversations is to list your "Speaking of..."s. Ours: "Speaking of midgets..." and "speaking of existentialism." That was in the course of about an hour, so I'd say we were doing pretty well.

---

Two cats form part of my daily life. One of them is a sweetheart and we love each other dearly. The other is genetically incapable of accepting human touch. Every time I reach out to pet her, she glares at me with big, round, mustard-yellow eyes, and hisses. Wouldn't it be great if human females adopted this mode of rejection? So much time and energy is expended by women, perfecting the painful practice of turning guys down, when Nature's method is as crystal-clear as it gets. As it stands, modern people loathe the process so much that they do it as passively as they can manage, which becomes an excuse for men both persistent and clueless to take "no" as a "maybe" and continue trying their luck, until she's forced to put on her bitch face and end all doubt. What if, instead of all that, she started things off by baring her teeth and growling? Like, literally? Amusement would replace lingering resentment, and she'd be rid of his lame pick-up lines and overpowering cologne. Everyone goes home happy. Can I get an amen? Amen.

Message from Iranian prison.

2010-05-20T06:40:00.000-07:00

Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi has been imprisoned for making counter-regime films.

He was given a spot on the jury for this year's Cannes, but because of his current situation, his chair has been left symbolically empty.

Like any good leftist, he's put his physical well-being on the line and declared a hunger strike. Somehow, he's managed to get a message to the press from the confines of jail:

I hereby declare that I have been subject to ill treatment in Evin prison.

On Saturday May 15, 2010, prison guards suddenly entered our cell, n° 56. They took us away, my cell mates and I, made us strip and kept us in the cold for an hour and a half.

Sunday morning, they brought me to the interrogation room and accused me of having filmed the interior of my cell, which is completely untrue. Then they threatened to imprison my entire family at Evin and to mistreat my daughter in an unsafe prison in the city of Rejayi Shahr.

I have eaten and drunk nothing since Sunday morning, and I declare that if my wishes are not respected, I will continue to abstain from drinking and eating. I do not want to be a rat in a laboratory, victim of their sick games, threatened and psychologically tortured.

My wishes are :

- The possibility to contact and see my family, and the complete assurance that they are safe.

- The right to retain and communicate with an attorney, after 77 days of imprisonment.

- Unconditional liberty until the day of my judgment and the final verdict

- Finally, I swear upon what I believe in, the cinema : I will not cease my hunger strike until my wishes are satisfied.

My final wish is that my remains be returned to my family, so that they may bury me in the place they choose.

R.I.P. Frank Frazetta.

2010-05-10T14:04:00.000-07:00

Now showing.

2010-05-04T22:47:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I forget, at my own peril, how totally, completely, unbelievably, undeniably excellent Akira is.

EDIT: My stoned self, which could just barely make it through the ten minutes of Maya-Deren-lite bullshit at the end, would beg to differ. The explosive mutation scene is still pretty rad, though.

Haters gonna hate.

2010-04-28T10:17:00.000-07:00

Poor taste.

2010-04-26T07:42:00.000-07:00

Scorpions was so rad. Not because they were any good (they weren't) but because they really took rock 'n roll decadence to a whole new level with the cover of Virgin Killer, pictured above. It's like Sticky Fingers and Country Life were the dead baby jokes all the wine-swilling Factory types were tossing off, and Virgin Killer is the excruciatingly detailed pederastic rape fantasy involving torn genitalia, slaughtered parents and all manners of scatological abjection told by a guileless outsider who thought he had finally found some kindred spirits. What he really found, of course, were the bounds of decency for even these nihilistic art fags, who would proceed to exile him as a fascist pervert. I mean, Histoire de Melodie Nelson is one thing, but Lolita is no Salò, if you catch my drift. Anyway, my point is that Scorpions were tasteless weirdos before death metal made that cool, and instead of dialing it down, they got more sly about their offensiveness.

This shit is just plain surreal. It's not in the least bit sexy and it bears a creepy, Robert Heinlein vibe (unsurprisingly, I hear it's designed by the guy who did Pink Floyd's cover sleeves in the 70s). I mean, where the fuck is this even taking place? The rest of the eighties were given over to the bridge-and-tunnel misogyny of Poison and "Cherry Pie," but Scorpions were the real deal and I think it's about time we recognized them for being such fearless pioneers. Am I right?

Hey. Hey. Hey. HEY.

2010-04-25T21:10:00.000-07:00

You fell asleep watching a DVD.

Asshole.

That's the last time I invite you over.

Getting real about Reagan.

2010-04-25T10:05:00.000-07:00

The best cure for a Sunday hangover is two parts empiricism and one part personal anecdote. A bit of fresh air about the most fervently revised presidency in recent American history, from the one and only Christopher Hitchens:

I only saw [Ronald Reagan] once up close, which happened to be when he got a question he didn't like. Was it true that his staff in the 1980 debates had stolen President Carter's briefing book? (They had.) The famously genial grin turned into a rictus of senile fury: I was looking at a cruel and stupid lizard. His reply was that maybe his staff had, and maybe they hadn't, but what about the leak of the Pentagon Papers? Thus, a secret theft of presidential documents was equated with the public disclosure of needful information. This was a man never short of a cheap jibe or the sort of falsehood that would, however laughable, buy him some time.

(via Slate)

Kablooey!

2010-04-24T22:33:00.000-07:00

Verboten.

2010-04-23T07:30:00.000-07:00

Surprise over morning coffee: my site has been designated by Google as 18+ only! Meaning you have to go through one of those "Content warning" screens before entering!

Which means, of course, that somebody was browsing my utter shit ramblings and decided they were inappropriate. I'm seriously very honored.

Tolerance.

2010-04-22T22:54:00.000-07:00

Riverdale High now has an openly gay student! And it's not Archie!

It's some pretty Aryan named Kevin Keller.

I'd say the jury's still out on Archie, though.

Antidote.

2010-04-21T14:27:00.000-07:00

Half a day later, I still can't get that video off my mind. What the hell could have led to that? A breakup? Infidelity? Chewed-up So Cals? Are they, to repeat a question from a few days ago, simply EVIL? (Probably.)

All I know is I hope somebody in that party grew a conscience, ditched his asshole friends and helped out the poor little puppy. In the meantime, here's a little bit of nature's remedy for everything: vintage tits.

(via Vice)

(via Vintage Ladies)

(via RETrOZONe)

(via nistagmus)

Killing kittens, pt. 2; or, Doggy style.

2010-04-21T08:04:00.000-07:00

This video is exactly what the URL sounds like, so don't watch it if you're not a sick fuck like me.

Daily disappointment.

2010-04-20T10:57:00.000-07:00

Leonard Cohen's "Joan of Arc" sounds nothing like Melvins' "Joan of Arc."

This actually really let me down.

Oh while we're on the topic, what the fuck is this adult alternative garbage?

Leonard Cohen was never exactly punk rock but for Christ's sake, show a Jew a little mercy! Who managed this tour, Phil Collins?

EDIT: Shit, and apparently Guru from Gang Starr just bit it!

Where's a stash of Colt 45s when you need them?

Love and marriage, pt. 7.

2010-04-19T11:31:00.000-07:00

Shit like this boggles my mind.

According to the National Center for Lesbian Rights, an elderly gay couple residing in Sonoma County was torn apart when the older man had the gall to fall down a flight of stairs. The ensuing bureaucratic nightmare left them separated into different old folks homes, without any of their shared belongings, and deprived the younger of any of his established rights as common-law husband, including power of attorney and even visiting rights. The older guy died three months after their separation.

The only sources available for this story have been advocacy groups and sympathetic bloggers, so every "fact" comes packaged with righteous indignation (you can practically hear the chorus of sucked wind and clucked tongues at every listed indignity: "Tragically!"; "Outrageously!"; "What happened next is even more chilling!"; "Adding further insult to grave injury!"; "Compounding this tragedy!"). As Garland Gray points out, the case was listed on a Sonomy County Board of Supervisor's agenda for dates that match up, and was apparently addressed in a closed session. Hence, the lack of public disclosure.

But what a cliffhanger! If this story is true, what the hell is in it for Wine Country lawmakers? They're not really so strapped for cash that they need to seize the modest net worth of some old queens to supplement their income, are they? Is a coalition of the health industry and regional government trying to validate Proposition 8? Are they, as one commenter incredulously suggested, simply EVIL? In Mississippi, or even eastern California, this would all be old news, but in the north bay? None of this adds up, but since it's clearly actually happening, I'm hooked.

Sometimes I wonder if courts make these decisions just to keep things from getting dull.

Doom.

2010-04-18T11:22:00.001-07:00

No justice.

2010-04-16T19:52:00.000-07:00

Why the fuck hadn't anyone said anything about A Cross The Universe? No, not the abominable Beatles movie from a few years ago. The documentary from their 2008 tour across America. It's all about these two spoiled and gorgeous Parisians RVing through the States, putting on explosive performances effortlessly while sleeping with groupies and indulging in various "American" activities - lying in the dirt beside the freeway, eating enormous cheeseburgers, and carrying handguns. Most of it is probably staged, but I don't care, because it's awesome.

Start with the first one.

What game?

2010-04-16T09:59:00.000-07:00

Let's be friends.

2010-04-09T19:01:00.000-07:00

Class consciousness.

2010-04-09T08:41:00.000-07:00

Even overhyped hipster icon Banksy understands what it's like to feel like an insignificant turd.

Some asshole teacher has taken to attaching McDonald's applications to failed math tests. Accusations of having no future is a time-honored pedagogical tradition, to be sure, and yet, this story really touches a nerve. Long before I entered the working world, I'd watch movies (mostly comedies) where just desserts were served to villains via the supposed fall from grace that comes with joining the working class (see: Big Daddy). Whatever happened to that pride in work, value in humility, and equality of the masses stuff I had drilled into my head by the secular and religious world alike? It's nothing less than a class minstrel show: shaming wage-slaves for being wage-slaves is just another step in the continuing process of entering the middle class, just as blackface became the vessel by which Jews and the Irish enforced their own whiteness in the early 20th century.

Anyway, my point is that when short-order food service stands for lack of ambition, and lack of ambition stands for the highest of capitalism's crimes and misdemeanors, we get what we have now: the overqualified unemployed who have to fight tooth and nail to supersede the judgment of their peers (real and imagined - and of course, it doesn't really matter which, does it?) with any sense of self-worth. Meanwhile, over on Wall Street, yet another high-power investment firm has let it slip that it's cheating a system that already treats it much, much better than it'll ever want you to believe. I know that juxtaposing the ruling class with the American proletariat is beyond played-out these days, but that's because it's so reliably damning.

The worst part of the current Goldman Sachs embarrassment is that, as always, their tax-dodging is accommodated by a byzantine maelstrom of numbers that complicates itself the same way a blowfish puffs up to ward off predators. The only way to break into the industry of financial subterfuge is, I guess, to start pulling As on those calculus exams. I understand that high school is more about showing the world that you can study and tow the line, than actually retaining knowledge, but the irony is still pretty thick, wouldn't you agree?

Fairy tales are whack.

2010-04-02T10:22:00.000-07:00

Getting drunk and telling foreigners that their national heroes were lame is the great American pastime, so when I did exactly that last Sunday in Brooklyn, I was simply fulfilling my civic duty. It was a rainy night in Bed-Stuy, and I had fallen into the company of some well-dressed, attractive Danes (are there any other kind?) at a Death by Audio noise show. After finding out that the only other male in the group was also once in a drum corps (and now formed part of a DJ crew called 'Shitty Hands' in Copenhagen) and exchanging compulsory high-fives, we started talking about Hans Christian Andersen for some reason. "Fuck Hans Christian Andersen," I opined. "No no no. FUCK Hans Christian Andersen."

Why the vehemence? Ask the eight premium pilsners in my stomach. Really, I was trying to get a rise out of some Scandinavians, whose pride is more annoying than that of the French. But backing down from your own erroneous assertions is a sign of weakness, so I rolled with it and formed an argument along the way. Thinking back to it, I find that my shitfaced instincts are more trustworthy than I give them credit for.

One of the Danes argued, "But who isn't able to relate to 'The Ugly Duckling?'" Nobody. The vast majority of sensitive people understand the struggle of feeling unusually worthless. Point taken. But then the ugly duckling becomes a beautiful swan and outshines everyone else. See, she might be ugly to begin with, but EVENTUALLY she becomes beautiful. What is that all about? Suffer now because in the future it'll be better? Sounds like a whole lot of Lutheran bullshit to me, and the fact that so many can "relate" to it makes it all the more dubious. My mom proposed that children probably just see this as a metaphor: it's what's inside that counts. Really? Then why does the ugly duckling become a pearly-white, graceful swan and not just some quiet average Jane Doe who volunteers at the Special Olympics or something? Kids don't read anthropomorphism abstractly. They probably relate better to animals than they do to most adults. What they're left with, then, is the vague hope that while no one may appreciate them NOW, at some point, puberty will catch up and turn them into supermodels whose beauty and fame and glory will make all those bullies sick with regret.

It's a little like that horrible movie Balto, some sub-Don Bluth picture from the nineties about a husky who gets exiled by an Arctic village until he saves a child or something. When they realize what a good dog he is deep down inside, they hail him as a savior, and it's a big victory for misfits everywhere. We watched this back when I was a camp counselor for six-year-olds, and it made me want to throw the TV out the window. Redemption is gaining the favor of those who used to shun you. Is that what how we want the next generation to understand the world? Sure, the learn-to-love-thyself lesson plans of the PC brigade are gayer than an explosion at the rainbow factory, but is this thinly veiled lesson in humble subservience the only alternative? I want once, just once, for a Balto who's only kidding when he hangs his head after getting banished, and returns under the cover of night to take a big diseased dump in the water supply. Two months later, the villagers die of ringworm, and Balto frees all the sled-dogs from their pens. They occupy the newly-vacated houses and start the first agriculturally advanced canine colony. Instead of aiming for the status quo, they go "fuck it" and speed up evolution instead. Now THAT'S something we could all learn from.

Pardon my French but fairy tales are whack. Every culture has them. It's not uncommon for the same story to pop up in totally disparate societies; there must be at least ten versions of Cinderella, for instance. They populate the simplest stories imaginable with stock characters, so they can cut to the chase and unleash a moral agenda on their young audience. Like Krakauer said, the lowest culture best reflects a society's superego, and accordingly, a people's folklore is a vital source of information about their values and philosophy. Aesop's fables taught sensible, realistic lessons that sprang right from the heart of the sensible, realistic Greeks. The only exception I can think of is the story of Jupiter, Neptune, Minerva, and Momus, in which the first three summon the final (a mortal) to judge their works - only to damn him back to Earth when he criticizes all three. According to the Grosset & Dunlap anthology I grew up reading, the moral of this tale is not to criticize others until you've created something of equal value yourself. The real moral, though, is don't badmouth your superiors. Ever. Not too extraordinary for a culture whose gods incited human wars for their own amusement.

When Western art and culture secularized after the Renaissance, this hard-line ideology didn't disappear, it simply pretended to. Remember The Lion King? Everyone in your graduating class loved the shit out of that movie, but nobody ever acknowledged what a corrupt and awful piece of work it was. All you ever heard was, "Oh my goodness, a cartoon with pathos, how novel," and "Disney's so clever, transplanting Hamlet into the African Savannah," and "who would have thought that Elton John could compose?" I guess no one has seen Bambi. Also, does anyone see the irony in smoothing out all the dramatic power of Shakespeare by giving it to animals? Sure, Scar's an evil bastard and that final slo-mo battle between him and Simba is pretty rad, but good and evil are color-coded instead of mapped out through psychology, and the entire movie becomes an apologia for monarchy. How else do you read that first sequence? All the animals that bow before the new king at Pride Rock are going to be eaten by the lions. Hence, "Circle of Life." The light of divine providence splits the clouds and shines upon the unelected sovereign. The message is clear: some are simply born to rule over everyone else. It's an easy pill to swallow because Elton John is a pretty good composer.

Hans Christian Andersen was never so regressive and boneheaded as Disney, but I've always taken issue with his insufferable moralism. The Grimms punished women pretty harshly, but at least their fear of vaginas was filtered through pragmatic wisdom, making it sound like the off-color advice of an old codger: if you venture out into the woods, you're probably going to get eaten and/or captured by creeps, widows, or other assorted weirdos. In Andersen's universe, they get their feet chopped off for their godless vanity.

But, maybe I was being hard on the Danes' favorite storyteller. He was a repressed gay man who struggled with his faith, and finally, when he wrote "The Steadfast Tin Soldier," his soul came bursting out the closet of obsolete mythologies. In this one, the titular military man is stationed in front of a castle in a child's play room. What separates him from his comrades is his stump leg, which the tinsmith didn't have the tin to complete. This disability alienates the soldier, until one day, peering through a castle window, he spots a ballerina of breathtaking beauty. Locked in an Arabesque, the paper dancer appears to have only one leg - just like the soldier, who immediately becomes obsessed with planning her escape. Unfortunately, a series of unrelated events knocks the tin soldier off a windowsill and into a sewer. Barely able even to tread water, the soldier rushes with the current, until a fish swallows him. As luck would have it, this fish is caught and prepared for dinner by a cook who works for the very house the soldier used to inhabit. The house's patriarch carves into the fish and pulls out the soldier with a mix of surprise and delight, setting him at the center of the dinner table. From this new vantage point, the tin soldier has a clear view of the castle where his beloved ballerina resides, and is overjoyed. Then, for no apparent reason, a child at the table swipes at the tin soldier, knocking him straight into the fireplace. A gust of wind blows the ballerina in with him. She incinerates immediately while he watches in agony and melts into a miserable lump of hot tin. ISN'T THAT SOME SHIT? As if to underscore the horrible chaos of it all, the soldier blames his mounting misfortunes on the jealousy of a jack-in-the-box who only appears in the beginning of the story. Sorry kids: we were lying about that whole 'natural moral order' thing. And Santa Claus. And Jasper's not on doggy vacation. He's dead. Uncle Sören ran him over in his Volvo. You know what? I take back what I said about Hans Christian Andersen. He was alright.

Love and marriage, pt. 6.

2010-03-30T08:58:00.000-07:00

Cutting edge scientific research.

2010-03-29T19:54:00.000-07:00

Once again, the Dutch are at the forefront of progressivism. According to USA Today, a group of scientists in Holland have determined that a preference for skinny women is not necessarily the product of social conditioning:

In the study led by Dutch psychologist Johan Karremans of Radboud University Nijmegen, researchers recruited 38 men, 19 of them blind. Half of the seeing men were randomly fitted with blindfolds for the experiments, "conducted inside a van that served as a mobile laboratory room," the study says.
It's not what you think (it's weirder.) "In the van there were two female mannequin dolls with adjustable waist and hip circumferences," says the study. "The mannequins wore identical tight-fitting dresses."

So those recent Photoshop Fails in Ralph Lauren ads and on the cover of W aren't slimy attempts to sabotage the body image of insecure women everywhere. On the contrary: they're heralding a future of truth and 70% waist-to-hip ratio!

(via Nothing is Sacred)

Truth and consequences, pt. 2.

2010-03-23T08:58:00.000-07:00

From The Wall Street Journal a few days ago:

Bernard Madoff, who is serving a 150-year sentence in North Carolina for running a fraud scheme that cost investors billions of dollars, was physically assaulted by another inmate in December, according to three people familiar with the matter.
After the attack, Mr. Madoff, who pleaded guilty a year ago and was sent to a federal prison in Butner, N.C., was moved on Dec. 18 to the prison's low-security medical center for treatment. At the time, the Bureau of Prisons said that rumors of an assault were false and that Mr. Madoff suffered from dizziness and hypertension.

But gee, whatever in the world could make an inmate deny being attacked in prison?!

It's not uncommon for prisoners to deny being beaten because they don't want to risk a reputation as a snitch, according to prison experts and prisoner advocates.

Oh, okay.

For your erectionation:

[Another inmate] said Mr. Madoff's assailant was a beefy man serving time for a drug conviction. The alleged assailant's mother said in an interview her son had not mentioned any scuffle with Mr. Madoff but that he had been a body builder and held a black belt in Judo until he was injured in a shooting in 2002. While behind bars he has regained strength and gotten back into shape, she said.

And finally, go figure:

Mr. Madoff advised him to diversify, saying he should invest in funds that track the S&P 500 index of stocks "where my money would be on all the stocks instead of putting my eggs into one basket," the former inmate said.

He said Mr. Madoff also warned him off of day trading. "I was trying to get into day trading and he's like, 'That's not for you. That's for individuals like me with millions to spare,' " he said.

He described Mr. Madoff as discreet and select in the company he chose to keep behind bars.

The financier often dined with John Mancini, a 56-year-old pharmacist from Wappingers Falls, N.Y., who was sentenced for illegally distributing about five million tablets of the painkiller hydrocodone, the former inmate said. Mr. Mancini's attorney didn't return a call seeking comment.

Both inmates said Mr. Madoff also socialized with reputed Colombo crime-family boss Carmine Persico, whose attorney couldn't be reached.

Truth and consequences.

2010-03-22T07:42:00.000-07:00

Now showing.

2010-03-19T20:54:00.000-07:00

Chinese environmentalism.

2010-03-18T12:15:00.000-07:00

Things are getting pretty naked over in the Middle Kingdom, where local superhero Brother Power is defending the environment from rapacious modernity one car at a time:

Brother Power’s expression unrelenting, revealed the reason: “Ugly modern society must retreat!! By 2012, my power will be enough, and I will thoroughly destroy this ugly modern society!!!”

(via chinaSMACK)

EDIT: Link died. Meme no more.

Love and marriage, pt. 5.

2010-03-15T12:56:00.001-07:00

Love and marriage, pt. 4; or, Hamburger Cake

2010-03-15T10:13:00.000-07:00

Love and marriage, pt. 3.

2010-03-14T19:43:00.001-07:00

Love and marriage, pt. 2.

2010-03-14T09:06:00.000-07:00

Love and marriage.

2010-03-10T12:25:00.000-08:00

The six funniest movies I've seen.

2010-03-05T06:20:00.000-08:00

After being on a waiting list for about a month, I finally got my hot little hands on our local library's copy of Roy Andersson's Du Levande, and it's one of the funniest fucking movies I've seen in a long time. The thing is, Du Levande (You the Living in English) is also kind of sad. When Roy Andersson films people, they never look much healthier than victims of leukemia, and his Sweden is always washed-out and sad. But come to think of it, few of the movies that really kill me are capital-F Funny. I knew a kid once who said he couldn't stand it when someone else in the theater laughed at the same joke as he. Maybe it's something like that. It could also be that I think of movies the way I think of people, and people who are always trying to be funny generally piss me off, while someone elusive and complex telling the same jokes might make me laugh.

So I decided to compile a list of six movies that crack me up, which is subject to change, at any time, with no rhyme or reason.

1) Du Levande (You the Living), Roy Andersson

50-or-so absurdist vignettes about mostly-middle-aged Swedes who wail to postmen that nobody understands them. It's all in medium-shot and meticulously staged; every interaction is a collision of crossing vectors; every actor is as much a part of the set as the set itself (and often about as vivacious). Might sound like Wes Anderson, except it's hilarious instead of cloying. It's also often quite melancholy, which just makes it more hilarious, at least to people like me (and the rest of New Jersey, apparently, considering the length of that waiting list).

A dream sequence:

2) Sherlock Jr., Buster Keaton

Call me crazy but I always preferred Buster to Charlie. Maybe that little 'stache invokes my knee-jerk Jewish repulsion, but it's more likely that Keaton's unflinching stone face makes everything funnier. I mean, just look at him:

See how totally dejected and over it he is? He's that way all the time and it's the funniest thing ever. He embodies the conventional wisdom that comedians are the world's saddest people.

3) Polyester, John Waters

Charlie Chaplin once said that real life in long-shot is comedy. Roy Andersson applies this principle with academic zeal, while Keaton works it into his facial physiognomy. John Waters dismisses it altogether. His movies are anarchist stinkbombs laid at the foundation of the American suburbs. Their interest in unloveable misfits is confrontational, cartoonish, and often in close-up. A Waters film is almost always pretty spotty, but his first big(ger) budget picture, Polyester, strikes the best balance between the X-rated insanity of his earlier films and the accessibility of Hairspray and Serial Mom. The one-liner count is off the charts, and Divine gives basically the performance of a lifetime, proving once and for all that s/he is the cinema's finest comedienne.

Fans of The Avalanches will recognize this clip:

4) Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino

Continuing with the film-as-people simile, Tarantino's classic is an exception to the rule that familiarity breeds contempt. I must have seen Pulp Fiction about a thousand times by now and it only gets better. One wonders to what extent Tarantino knew his material was so gut-busting hysterical; on one hand, the dialogue is too deliberate to be an accident, but on the other, everything is played straight, and it's shot like a thriller. So many second-rate imitations have boiled it down into a simplistic hybrid of comedy and violence, a lot of them starring Colin Farrel, and they've all sucked. The only real competitor is P. T. Anderson's Boogie Nights, which is almost as funny, much less violent and far more miserable.

When I was the only one among my friends who had seen Pulp Fiction, I used to bring the video over and start laughing at the beginning of scenes because I knew what was coming. Comedy, like horror, is all about suspense, and dramatic irony only intensifies it. The tablecloth scene in Du Levande nails this, and so does Sam Jackson's cheeseburger dialogue.

"Oh, I'm sorry, did I break your concentration?" Also, Bruce Willis's adorable French girlfriend gets me everytime:

5) North by Northwest, Alfred Hitchcock

Hitchcock was the master of suspense, so it's no surprise that among his prolific oeuvre there'd be at least one pisser. It's not long before everything starts going wrong for Cary Grant's Roger Thornhill, and it's always funny because it's happening to Cary Grant. The iconic crop-duster scene epitomizes the movie as a whole, topping the absurdity of everything that came before it and also being scary as hell. Yet my personal favorite scene might be when Roger gets arrested for drunk-driving. Why aren't drunk people funny in the movies anymore? MADD really ruined everything, for everybody.

6) Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam

Some folks like to claim that The Holy Grail is the best Monty Python movie, but those are generally the kind of folks who have goatees, wear fedoras to class and quote entire scenes in regular conversation. In other words, the most annoying people on Earth. Also, they're wrong: nothing tops The Meaning of Life. After The Life of Brian, Universal approached the Pythons with an interest in bringing John Cleese's dream of early retirement into fruition. They took the studio's money and spent it on destroying expensive sets with gallons and gallons of fake blood and vomit. It's a stream-of-consciousness affair that hurdles from skyscraper pirates through songs about sperm and the cosmic insignificance of humanity and finally into a tank of talking fish, basically inventing Mr. Show about a decade ahead of time. In the world of Monty Python, sex-ed is accompanied by live demonstrations and Heaven is a topless Tony Bennett-style musical revue. The high-gloss equivalent of the visual dreariness of Monty Python's earlier productions is just as dark, but far more spectacularly offensive, and therefore a hundred times funnier. The whole thing is brilliant but the scene with the Grim Reaper is the best:

It's movies like these that make it impossible for me to like Seth Rogan movies.

The Devil in Miss Jones is really fucking weird.

2010-03-02T06:58:00.000-08:00

Toby Dye's video for the Massive Attack track "Paradise Circus" draws its inspiration from Gerard Damiano's classic porno, but to put it bluntly, it's way hotter. One reason for that is the Hope Sandavol-sung song itself, which is undoubtedly the best thing on Heligoland. Another is that Georgina Spelvin parallels her experience making the film with Jones' descent into lust, with the camera as her Devil. It reminds me of a part-time model near and dear to me who liked to wax rhapsodic on the aphrodisiacal effects of getting photographed, which was hard not to get turned on by, and given that Spelvin speaks directly into the camera, the effect is maximized. It's like Robert McNamara taking responsibility for basically all of Vietnam in The Fog of War, except that instead of giving me a perspective of newfound clarity on American foreign policy, it gives me a boner.

Well, it's unlikely that Dye was channeling Errol Morris when he was filming the interview. More likely that he was imitating the close-ups of Jones that book-end The Devil in Miss Jones. It's said that so-called porno chic came about when film school graduates couldn't find work, so they made dirty movies like Deep Throat and thus ushered in the short-lived mainstream viability of hardcore in the 70s. There's little reason to doubt that this is how it went down, considering these first shots of Devil play like a thesis on "The Imaginary Signifier." Spelvin looks directly at us and says, "If you touch me, I can get off! We- we'll get off together! Just...put your cock in me. Would you like to put your cock in me? Then we can get off? I can't do it by myself! Dammit, touch me, please!" Cut to some silver-haired stud who we realize she's addressing, but it's not for nothing that we didn't know he was there before she started talking.

Now on paper this wouldn't look at all out of the ordinary for anyone with even the most cursory familiarity with porno. Dolled-up babe begs for dick and pants orgasmically? Yawn. A kittenish coo, some silicon tits and this could be anything on Spankwire. But, no, the way it actually goes, she sounds more desperate than horny, and the guy isn't even the least bit interested. Anyone breaking out the Vaseline at this point will know that there's something amiss. And they'd be right, because in the next scene, our heroine commits suicide. Yep, she just straight-up gets undressed, sits in a tub, slashes her wrists and dies. This isn't some Lifetime Original smokes and mirrors, either: we watch every step of the way as she cuts open each vein and clouds the water with blood, then winces and stiffens before her head falls limply to the side, jaw ajar, eyes glossy and agape.

Sure, you could say it's a Buñuelian piss-take on a genre that didn't really exist yet, but priming us for filth by dousing our hard-ons? Holy chutzpah. She meets with who I suppose is St. Peter, and the plot unravels. Taking her own life has trapped Jones (whose first name is Justine, in a nod to de Sade) in limbo, so she strikes a deal with the gatekeeper that before she goes to Hell where a Catholic God would send her, she gets to overload on pleasures of the flesh.

What follows doesn't depart that much from what you'd expect from disco porn. The Massive Attack video includes perhaps the weirdest part of the middle section, Miss Jones fellating a boa constrictor. Other than that it's pretty standard. Oh, except for the music, which sounds like something stolen off an 8-track in the back of Ennio Morricone's studio space, all shimmering baritone and sad piano.

But then:

"My voice is nothing. My thoughts are nothing. In many respects, I'm like you: nothing." Excuse me? Hey, this party is great but who the fuck invited Camus? Yet not even that quite tops the moral hangover of an ending for sheer WTFness:

The beginning finally makes sense, and our lesson is learned: a life of sin leads to eternal blue balls (like the film itself? How meta!) in a sterile basement with the most celibate man in the universe. Hell is other people, indeed.

Old white man, you crazy.

2010-02-17T11:15:00.000-08:00

Shit just got for real down in Oakland today. I think it's Oakland, anyway; it's AC (Alameda County) Transit, so it can't be San Francisco, and there're no other real city cities in the East Bay.

Check it out:

The reactions all around are perhaps the most priceless aspect of this video. The African-American grandma tries to keep the peace, and even puts her arm out to prevent this foolhardy young'n from getting into any more trouble, to no avail. The woman taking the video eggs him on ("Beat his white ass!"), and when the older dude (the Motherfucker, we shall call him) throws the first punch, all are on their feet - all except that one well-dressed babe to the left, who doesn't even so much at bat an eyelash as she calmly observes the fracas.

I have no idea what's going on in this follow-up video, but holy Christ, get a load of these comments.

"This whole incident is why no one likes 'groids."
"the great white race owned you nigger"
"The older man is the winner! Fucking crack niger[sic] .. "
"you fucking coon bitch"
"this nigger steals from war heroes, she needs to die along with her ghetto lobster offspring!"
"Ok, you people need to sit in the BACK of the bus and STAY there. You aint supposed to be going up to the front of the bus and pick fights with your former master."
"yaa savage porch monkeys yaa get mad at me. y u always angry porch monkeys, u made ur self poor, porch monkeysss. this is why people hate u negroz u give ur self a bad rep. the president is black yet u coons act like ur still slaves. how does the slimy wet cum of truth feel like on yo face. peace out niggz"
"dont be surprised if you start seeing mass lynchings across america because of this...whites dont like niggers, but they are afraid to say it, and if they do condone niggers, they are obsessed with them and want to dress with them, and eat pies made out of dirt just like the haitian negroes"
"HOLY FUCKIN' SHIT! No WONDER black men love White wimmenz so much! It's because black females look like you! Fuckin' hell, wow!! White women, remember, if you're going to fall for some nigger buck just because he's got "swag" or can sweet talk you, remember that your kids will wind up lookin' like this! Wow I can't believe this thing is a fucking human! This nigger whore was telling her nigger buck friend to beat up the white man! All the time that beautiful, angelic White woman is sitting there, stoic! Sometimes I think that one day angels will come down and swoop up the remaining whites on earth and take them back to utopia based on the racial differences I see in beauty and demeanour. This is really opening some eyes!"

They're coming out of the woodwork! Usually I assume that people who feel this way aren't capable of typing, or using computers, so whenever I see the word "nigger" I assume that whoever uses it likes to think he's really smart, and leave it at that. But, I'm pretty sure there aren't enough hipsters in the world to populate the comments section of these videos, so there's gotta be something else going on. iyannaw08, the lady who took the video, eventually gave a verbal apology of sorts, but not until she had aired some grievances of her own. A response, of any sort, to the racist language in these comments, is conspicuously absent:

Following the profile of one such helenawilhelm, who commented that "shes reading it like her homeboy obama reading his teleprompter," I saw that about half her friends had Confederate flags and white power crosses behind their heads in profile pictures, and her three posted videos all pertained somehow to the White Supremacist movement, like "Nationales Netzwerk in Duisburg erreichen!" If you haven't picked up on it by the title of that video, Helena is a German, and judging by her profile picture, a good-looking one. For some reason I tend to fixate on these cases. I mean, I couldn't care less about some dime-a-dozen redneck doofus, but European racism is so old-school that it's kind of...vintage, maybe. I mean, let's face it, northen Europe practically INVENTED racism! As usual, America gets all the credit while the fine xenophobes of Scandinavia and the British isles go ignored. The pretty-girl-who's-also-a-total-fucking-neo-Nazi thing is just icing on the cake. When I stumble upon shit like this, it's like moving in next to a flat full of dudes who have been dressing rockabilly since the 90s. The Sagas of the world are like meeting a girl whose utter untouchable coolness puts her totally and completely out of your league which you are thankful for at a later age when you look back and realize that birds like that eat men for breakfast and make terrible girlfriends anyway.

This cat, in response to the incident, is about as real as it gets:

"...and this is why, I don't take the bus, because too much drama, go on, on them buses." DROP THAT KNOWLEDGE!

More animal abuse.

2010-02-13T07:27:00.000-08:00

Do you ever notice that people with intimacy issues are often great with their pets? I've got nothing but anecdote to support this, but it does seem rather prevalent. In prisons, they put small animals in the care of sociopaths to help them rehabilitate and become functioning, compassionate members of society again. While the devil on my shoulder leads me to believe that this would lead to a lot of mangled and mutilated puppies and rabbits, I'm willing to give the method the benefit of the doubt because it does kind of make sense. If there is any hope at all that someone is going to start caring about the well-being of others, best to start with baby steps. Animals are simple, focused on survival, shitting and fucking. They provide love in only the most basic of forms, so taking them under your wing gives you an outlet for all your nurturing capacities without the messiness of symbolic communication or reciprocation.

Only really in theory, though.

For one thing, not everyone takes part in the linear progression that social psychologists propose. If anything, I think that for the more misanthropic members of our species, pet love takes the place of human love. That's why you always see thugs with Rottweilers and ice queens with toy dogs. A puppy's devotion provides the blank slate for imagining exactly the kind of return you want without having to adapt or worry about betrayal. Not that I think everybody needs to love one another, but if we are to accept the narrative of rehabilitation, it becomes clear that Fido is a crutch for a lot of people.

For another, not everyone shows love in...ahem...the same way. Like that picture up top? It came from a list of 25 Hardcore Pets (via Metal Underground) I posted on Facebook a little while ago. While most respond with disgust (more than would react so to a story of, say, infanticide), I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that while some of these folks are simply vain as fuck, some might just be very, very needy. Check it out:

Rasputin here REALLY loves his poochie. Loves him so much that he wants to give him badass decals so they can take MySpace photos together before hitting the town to troll for bitches. More importantly, though, those tats pretty much guarantee that no one else will ever want him, and that he'll be his forever. It's kind of like that guy who forced his boyfriend to become a nullo for him, except way easier, because even the most recalcitrant pups will have a hard time resisting the whims of their despotic owners.

John Mayer uses the word 'nigger' in an interview.

2010-02-11T07:19:00.000-08:00

B.B. King is as shocked as you are.

MAYER: I am a very…I’m just very. V-E-R-Y. And if you can’t handle very, then I’m a douche bag. But I think the world needs a little very. That’s why black people love me.

PLAYBOY: Because you’re very?

MAYER: Someone asked me the other day, “What does it feel like now to have a hood pass?” And by the way, it’s sort of a contradiction in terms, because if you really had a hood pass, you could call it a nigger pass. Why are you pulling a punch and calling it a hood pass if you really have a hood pass? But I said, “I can’t really have a hood pass. I’ve never walked into a restaurant, asked for a table and been told, ‘We’re full.’"

PLAYBOY: It is true; a lot of rappers love you. You recorded with Common and Kanye West, played live with Jay-Z.

MAYER: What is being black? It’s making the most of your life, not taking a single moment for granted. Taking something that’s seen as a struggle and making it work for you, or you’ll die inside. Not to say that my struggle is like the collective struggle of black America. But maybe my struggle is similar to one black dude’s.

PLAYBOY: Do black women throw themselves at you?

MAYER: I don’t think I open myself to it. My dick is sort of like a white supremacist. I’ve got a Benetton heart and a fuckin’ David Duke cock. I’m going to start dating separately from my dick.

PLAYBOY: Let’s put some names out there. Let’s get specific.

MAYER: I always thought Holly Robinson Peete was gorgeous. Every white dude loved Hilary from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. And Kerry Washington. She’s superhot, and she’s also white-girl crazy. Kerry Washington would break your heart like a white girl. Just all of a sudden she’d be like, “Yeah, I sucked his dick. Whatever.” And you’d be like, “What? We weren’t talking about that.” That’s what “Heartbreak Warfare” is all about, when a girl uses jealousy as a tactic.

(Playboy via Hot Chicks With Douchebags)

Killing kittens...with kindness.

2010-02-10T15:39:00.001-08:00

(via People's Daily Online)

Why aren't YOU dating hotties?

2010-02-10T09:25:00.000-08:00

So asks Paul Janka, playboy extraordinaire and author of The Attraction Formula. He used to send me emails periodically, which stirred my interest at first because I was genuinely open to his advice. Once I started having some success as a single man on my own terms, though, they became more of a morbid fascination for me. A few months ago they stopped coming. Maybe he really can read minds.

The thing with the so-called 'seduction community' - a loose, international network of pick-up artists united by the exchange of strategies and anecdotes - is that because it's driven by a specific sexual philosophy, it's nearly impossible to feel neutral towards it. No press on Janka, Neil Strauss, or Warren Beatty can shake the editorial compulsion, whether directly or via quotes from feminist/family values talking-head finger-wagging. The disapproval always stems from the assumption that straight male promiscuity requires disrespect for and abuse of the opposite sex. Some pick-up artists attempt to disabuse us of this notion. Janka spoke often of the "strong ladies" in his life (i.e. his mother, grandmothers, and sisters), and even Max, who suffers no qualms about treating women like objects (see above link), claims on his website, "I LOVE women." (Note the capitalization, and the emphasis it provides.) Furthermore, under the heading of turn-ons in his About Me, he lists "aggressive women, funny women, [and] successful women." Not exactly a large leap forward for the dissolution of the gender binary but I'm sure you catch my drift: rather than simply dismiss the accusations of being worthless chauvinist pigs, these guys are actively engaged in refuting such claims, even if like Max they claim not to give two shits. To the blanket condemnation of womanizing as sexist, shameless, and a signpost of our species-wide moral decay, they offer recourse to the Nature arguments favored by Enlightenment-era thinkers, proposing that a man's libidinal excess is neither the workings of Satanic temptation nor of an addictive personality (and all the pop-psych rationalization that comes with it - daddy issues, sexual victimhood, et cetera), but simply the inevitable outcome of our biological bimorphism. Women ovulate once a month and like commitments because they're into finding the father for their children, while men produce armies upon armies of little sperm soldiers every minute because they would very much like to father the world. This isn't a lifestyle choice, it's written into our genetic code. Bedding as many girls as possible isn't everything. It's the only thing. People like Janka reserve their respect for women who, by participating in this masculinist politics, clearly harbor no illusions and like men to be, simply, men.

The appeal of this kind of post-feminist ideology is obvious enough if you're a guy who isn't getting laid. Because let's face it: nice guys don't get laid. I mean, they do, but not nearly as much as their raging dickhead counterparts. This is a fact that only the most brutally honest chicks will ever admit, at least before their late twenties. Until then, they tend to believe the myth that they were ten years ahead of boys ten years ago, and therefore don't grow up because they don't think they need to. My dad is about the nicest man in the world, and he likes to tell me about how after his first marriage he had to fight off the same women who just three years ago, at 24, hardly gave him the time of day. Generation X and Y are basically given two choices: don't be an asshole, or have a lot of sex with different people. The problem is that nobody ever acknowledges the viable alternatives between these extremes, probably because the backlash that sends one racing to the other is too impassioned to provide for a reasonable middle ground. I can understand that. By now I've gotten over the feeling of being victimized for being a gentleman (compassion is as much a part of one's Nature as his sex drive, so why shouldn't it enjoy the same expression?), but I still sympathize fully with the unapologetic attitude of pick-up artists. The mix of puritanical and progressive moralism that informs our social conditioning has given me and my peers a disproportionate guilt about getting our rocks off. It has gone beyond abolishing virility and begun to seep into the conscience of a perfectly healthy, moderated sexual appetite. It's doing for straight men what Freudian neurosis did for pre-60s homosexuals: satisfying the libido requires an allegiance to crime. If men could stop feeling the need to apologize for wanting to fuck then we'd have a lot less douchebaggery.

What ensues from the unapologetic pride of the seduction community is the dubious belief that honesty is blamelessness. This is a view shared by most people in their first stages of learning how to be good people, usually followed by the realization that responsibility for the feelings of others is an unavoidable element of intimacy, not a choice. Sure, the Mysterys of the world might be plain to their dates about what they are and aren't going to get, but it's fairly damning that in their early 30s they're still chasing 20-year-olds. As I said, I stopped taking Janka's messages seriously early on, but continued to read them because I think that there are parts of his philosophy that are useful, and being a good agnostic I give just about everyone the benefit of the doubt. Once this particular email arrived in my inbox, though, I couldn't even justify an academic interest. I guess Heather Fink was right.

Ug.

You lift another spoonful of food to your mouth
as she drones on about her day...something about
wearing the wrong slacks to the meeting - black
instead of gray. You stare down at your plate and
push some overcooked carrots to the edge. You
look up at her, a faint moustache visible from
the overhead lighting.

Yeah, she's okay - you've been dating a couple
of months, but things have plateaued - Is
this really it? You've both settled into the
comfort zone - Netflix and Chinese food.

Slowly looking up, across the restaurant, you
can't help but notice the two hot blondes in
spandex, tight shorts and taught ponytails.

They're on their third drink and boy are they
having fun... One of them gets up suddenly, waves
out the window and sits back down. "I haven't
EVER seen an ass like that..." you think to
yourself. You've stopped doing your girl doggie
style because of the spread...

You return to your girl, hoping the check would
come so you could skulk out of the joint, back to
the comfort and familiarity of your apartment.

How'd you end up with Sarah, anyhow? An
introduction from your cousin...she looked so
good that day at the BBQ... Or did she? A few
extra pounds here and there, and a smile that
showed too much tooth - but hey, she was sweet.

"I never dated a really hot girl," you think.

You signal to the waiter - "Check, please." You
look back at Sarah and she's still talking, but
you've lost her.... Oh, yeah... what happened at
work. Something about a broken copier...

You look up the hotties and your stomach sinks
deeper when see a third smoking hot girl - this
one brunette - approach their table and pull out a
chair. And wait...what's this...? A guy, just
like yourself, is arm-in-ar m with her? Everyone's
laughing, the two blondes get up and go around
the table to hug the guy. Clearly, he's the man.

You check him out - what's he got that you
don't? Same height, same clothes. He even looks
kinda like you... What gives?

Why does this guy get the hotties and you don't?

Isn't it time you stepped up to the plate and
learned how to get what you really want?

Aren't you sick of watching all the action from
the sidelines, settling for less than you deserve?

You can be that guy banging all the hotties,
getting attention from models, and making all
of your buddies green with envy.

But in order to make this happen, you need to take
action now. Use my techniques, they've been
perfected over the course of thousands of pick-ups.
It works, all you have to do is take the next step.

When is too much too much?

2010-02-01T04:23:00.000-08:00

This old-school Mario commercial creeped me out as a kid. It'd be fine if the guy just burst and we heard an exploding noise. That would just be silly. Instead, stomach viscera comes shooting out, splattering surrounding restaurant patrons. Whose bright idea was it to rip off Monty Python to sell video games to children?

Photoshop pukes up the Internet.

2010-01-29T18:40:00.000-08:00

...and by 'the Internet,' I mean 'a whole lot of candy kid and 4chan memes.'

Hi-res here. (via Geekologie via Matt)

Neutrality.

2010-01-29T13:02:00.000-08:00

At first I thought once and for all that the Internet was the gift that keeps on giving, but then I found this:

Some things are too good to be true. (via tiny picnic)

Feline apathy.

2010-01-28T20:18:00.000-08:00

A classic from MTV's Cartoon Sushi. A little old lady bites the big one before feeding her beloved kitty. Apropos of my previous post. You should probably just skip that first minute and a half of "Beat the Meatles" nonsense, although it did remind me that this exists:

Holy Meryl!

2010-01-28T19:09:00.000-08:00

She still looks great, sure, but it doesn't seem fair that I was born too late to know what a stunner Meryl Streep truly was in her hey-day.

Killing kittens.

2010-01-24T09:20:00.000-08:00

Mahatma Gandhi used to say that "you can judge a society by how they treat their weakest members." Gandhi was pretty damn wise, even if the idea of a society having distinctly "weakest members" is an inconvenient reminder of the fact that the same guy who basically invented civic disobedience was also an unabashed caste system apologist. In any case, lift those words out of the context of the Indian resistance to British colonial powers and you have a canny summary of the rhetorical method in any number of anti-establishment texts. Swift took on the voice of an imagined British aristocrat with an utter disregard for the lives of Irish children in "A Modest Proposal." Sinclair muckraked the shit out of the American meat-packing industry's exploitation of immigrant labor in The Jungle. Michael Moore spends most of Sicko hearing the stories of middle-class Americans getting the business end of health insurance providers' greed. Tales of systematic mistreatment are at their most potent when they focus on the have-nots, especially here in the US, where envisioning ourselves as having pulled ourselves up by the straps of our boots is a permanent part of our collective consciousness. And who am I to defect, when the banality of upper-crust woes has barred me to this day from getting all the way through any Austen? The bell curve of wealth may belie our inherent spiritual equality and all that "We Are the World" bathwater, but it's still tough to care about Emma FINALLY realizing that, duh, Mr. Knightley is the one she wants, when not too far from the flowing pastures of Hartfield in south London some Cockney bastard son is shimmying his way up to the slave wages and tuberculosis at the top of suburban smoke-stacks. Materialist tunnel-vision or an attempt to cover my liberal arts laziness with delusions of enfant terrible grandeur? Either way, I can't deny the influence of Gandhi's words on modern moral representation, and neither can you.

Check it out: is there any foreshadowing of pathological violence more common than cruelty towards animals? It seems like conventional wisdom puts the kid who pulls the wings off flies on a one-way ticket to being the next John Wayne Gacy. No reasonably innocent act of burning ants under a microscope is likely to escape a tongue-clucking or two from the daytime television crowd. Hell, I was a pretty good-natured kid, but the moment I grabbed a softball bat when I just couldn't take my siblings' pestering anymore, my older sister told me with disgust that I was destined to be a serial killer when I grew up. The causality isn't without merit, coming as it does from the myriad research that makes careers out of empiricizing the obvious (and that's hardly an insult; if you think that we pay scientists to blow our minds, then I'm going to have to ask you to leave my electoral region, please, because you clearly don't value education). Psychiatrist John M. Macdonald identifies a triad of childhood behavioral characteristics that often emerge in profiles of eventual killers, consisting of "firesetting, cruelty to animals and enuresis [bedwetting]". (Bedwetting? An impulse-control thing, claims my older sister, who is now a social worker.) He provides some examples of animal abuse from psychotic adults.

One man derived satisfaction from telling his wife again and again of an incident in which he assisted in the birth of a calf by hitching the cow to a post and tying a rope from the presenting legs of the calf to his tractor. He gunned the motor and eviscerated the cow. (Macdonald 1963)

Holy cow. But seriously, is anybody getting flashbacks to standing in some trendy bookstore at St. Mark's Place perusing one of those Vice photo anthologies and becoming totally fixated on that one photo of a pregnant steer who collapsed from heat stroke and whose fluids had bloated her carcass so much that her fetus burst out and lay lifeless on the ground beside her, still attached by its umbilical cord? Because I am. It made me think of that scene in Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, when Ace pulls an apple out of some guy's stomach through his esophagus, cheery pseudo Afro-pop stomping on the soundtrack, and then proceeds to deliver a baby by pushing down on the mother's stomach, causing the infant to fly out and land in the overjoyed father's hands. Anyway, my point is that taking pleasure in the pain of animals is part and parcel to doing the same with people.

You've heard of the Dnepropetrovsk maniacs, right? Long story short: three teenagers got together one day and decided, hey, let's launch a killing spree in the middle of rural Ukraine, nobody will catch us, we'll get nostalgic about it when we're old, it'll be great. Throughout 2007 that's exactly what they did, killing 21 different people, completely unprovoked, ranging from children to twenty-something drunks to a pregnant woman whose unborn child was cut out Nanking-style. Eventually they got caught and some footage from different junctures of this massacre surfaced during the trial. Some of it would go on to gain viral notoriety as "3 Guys 1 Hammer," which you can go ahead and Google on your own (hint: it's not on YouTube), because one time is enough when you're watching some guy's pot belly getting punctured with a screwdriver for 12 straight minutes with little discernible on the soundtrack beyond the non-selectively recorded wheezy gurgling of slashed vocal chords. Another much tamer video was basically the cameraphone equivalent of the part in a James Bond movie when the villain explains his dastardly plot as a laser beam gradually approaches our hero's genitals. In this one, an interesting item hangs in the background:

(Spoiler alert: it's a cat.)
There's so much we can take from this.
1) Chronologically, this took place prior to the killing of humans, corroborating Macdonald's triad.
2) ...and these motherfuckers knew it. Why else would they not only make a point of coyly including this detail in the composition, but also put the body in a noose, preventing suspicion that it was simply roadkill?
3) The kill is barely discernible under family-friendly fuzzing, an act of censorship that demonstrates quite clearly to the potency of this image. Mission accomplished.

The question remains: BUT WHY? Why is cruelty towards animals such an unequivocal signifier of human debasement? It seems that the term 'humane' is used just as often, if not more, to describe the treatment of others species than other humans. In fact one of the big animal rights organizations out there is called the goddamned Humane Society. I'm not sure I really get it. People are so mean to each other, every single day. People get mugged, raped, tortured, castrated, disemboweled, and killed all over the world with every passing second, yet we never quite shuffle these behaviors under the category of cruelty. My older sister, who is probably about as wise as Gandhi, confessed once that she would more easily understand wanting to kill a child than wanting to kill a pet. This struck me as abhorrent and I lorded it over her because I'm her brother and that's my job, but in retrospect her point is well-taken. It's so much easier to imagine that a child deserves to be punished than an animal, based on a basic assumption of potential for intelligence if not intelligence itself. Back in eighth grade this vegan chick vilified meat-eaters in my language arts class, citing as scientific fact that beasts, unlike humans, have no concept of the time-line of suffering - when they begin to hurt, they don't anticipate that it will ever end. A bolt of lightning to be sure, but fact? How could anyone ever arrive at this conclusively? But that's just it: it's impossible and that doesn't matter. The notion that our pets are dumber than we are is at the root of why we want them as our pets. Violent assault is the last resort of the natural struggle, the ultimate outcropping of the need to establish dominance and superiority, acceptably preceded only by the acknowledgment that whatever you're fighting has the potential of being on even ground with you. Fuck with a mountain lion, and he'll stand tall above your lifeless corpse. Animal abuse, then, is like marrying an Untouchable in Hindu society: a corruption of a widely understood hierarchy of power.

For some reason, though, we all prescribe to this gracious permission of animals' savagery, and then anthopomorphize them in our minds when it comes to reciprocating our affection. "It just doesn't make sense. We fed him everyday, we put a roof over his head, we give him vaccinations and cut his balls off so he can avoid any awkward illegitimate children, and he kills the neighbor's cat, bleeds it dry all over the patio and takes a dump on my brand new cashmere sweater. WE DID SO MUCH FOR HIM AND THIS IS HOW HE REPAYS US?!" I guess that's where the phrase "don't bite the hand that feeds you" comes from. What a stupid phrase. Of course he's going to bite the hand that feeds him. He's a fucking dog. This guy I was talking to recently made the point that the only reason we can domesticate cats is that they're so small. If we had a pet puma that bitch would kill the whole family, ransack the cupboards, break all the windows and leave. That's why cats are so much better than dogs. They just don't give a fuck at all. I'll keep an open mind about dogs, though. I'm sure they can be just as punk rock. That's probably the best part of Amores Perros: Echevarrío returns to find that the dog he just saved has slaughtered all the other dogs, and is shocked and appalled. And thus, his optimism about the essential goodness in nature is gone. How touching.

From the sublime to the ridiculous.

2010-01-20T07:58:00.000-08:00

"SAY SHALOM TO MY INTERPLANETARY MINDFUCK!" (via STREET BONERS and TV CARNAGE)

Hype is a bitch.

2010-01-09T12:51:00.000-08:00

After nearly a decade of eluding me, a DVD copy of Amores Perros finally ended up in my hands this weekend. It came via my parents' Netflix queue, but they passed it on to me after the first ten minutes proved "too violent." Two glasses of Old Grand Dad and soda later and I don't really know what all the fuss is about.

Of course, I do know what all the fuss is about. Alejandro González Iñárritu's Mexico City is sunburnt and smoggy and made up of overlit groceries, dilapidated dens and the broken gravel of undermanaged streets. Greasy faces glisten in naturalistic lighting. Scenes of urban despair are glimpsed through open blinds when not rushing by from the back of a speeding car. Lovers make love on washing machines and stab their enemies in long, tense, bloodsoaked takes. It is sexy, urgent, and appealing.

That's just the problem, though. Kitchen-sink realism makes the melodrama palatable to audiences whose supposed distaste for bullshit would reject the same thing under the spit-polish sheen of daytime Spanish-language television.

Of course realism, like punk, is just a style, and isn't handcuffed to any particular structure. Because it originated on film as an opposition to the fairy tales of Hollywood, though, it remains tied to the objectives of investigation and exposure at its roots. The effect is like a friend telling you an O Henry story as if it actually happened. A movie like Amores Perros can have it both ways, earning the admiration reserved for "raw" representations while pledging allegiance to mainstream myths.

To the credit of Iñárritu - and his fans, for that matter - these stories, outlandish as they may be, aren't trite. It wouldn't be fair to accuse Amores Perros of parading out the same tired old stories in new clothes. Rather, it's a deficiency of the storytelling itself that I take issue with.

The character development in this film is jarringly malnourished. This can be a hard claim to quantify, so let's instead look at the methods that stand in for it. Gael García Bernal's lovesick slacker nurses a serious crush on his sister-in-law, which we sympathize with...why? Because she's pretty (she is)? Because her husband treats her like dogshit (he does)? Because Bernal's life is so dismal that desperate passion is not only understandable, but necessary (who fucking knows)? Or, because his brother's callous infidelity and sidejob robbery establishes distinct parameters of Good and Evil (bingo)? The venerable Emilio Echevarrío plays a gun-for-hire squatting with an army of mutts, whose longing to reconnect with his daughter is evoked via conveniently systematic revisions to a photo album. If there were only three things I learned from John Hillcoat's lifeless adaptation of The Road, they were: 1) Viggo Mortenson is one of the great actors of this generation, 2) only the Coen Brothers should be given Cormac McCarthy treatments, and 3) there's nothing more banal than evoking memory via remnants of "the good times," especially photographs. As if to add insult to injury, the third act ends with the kind of anti-hero moralism that made that "if you aren’t back in school on your way to being a veterinarian, you will be dead" scene in Fight Club such a cringe-worthy experience: the would-be assassin puts two combating lovers in a room together, instead of killing one at the behest of the other, and urges them to work it out. If only. Meanwhile, back on Earth, we wonder if it's really going to take nothing more than a shave and a haircut to worm one's way from homelessness back into your middle class brethrens' lives. The second story I won't even address, as it was too flimsy even to consider during the film's testimony of its status as worthwhile art.

Then there are the dogs. They provide the emotional fulcrum for each discrete narrative, representing the opportunity for freedom, the reason for escape, and objects of nurture. In all three stories, these roles are undercut by Iñárritu's loyalty to brutal realism (one dog gets shot, another devoured by rats under the floorboards of a fancy condo, and another, finally, kills all the other dogs in Echevarrío's stable after he nourishes it back to health). The lesson is that life is tough and our romantic inclinations rarely pan out when faced with the whims of primal nature. Fair enough, but is this really so profound? I suspect that it's this realism that makes it so, in the eyes of so many. Because we see these soap operas play out through the glamorous grit of a Banksy mural, they tickle our desire for the real, and fill in the gaps left open by the oversights of the script. Implausible or not, these look like Real People, and sound like Real People, and therefore must in fact be Real People with Real Problems. My problem isn't so much that Amores Perros isn't great cinema, it's that it sells itself on seeming like great cinema. It's the trendy version of the same thing Ron Howard has been doing for years with his high-gloss, middlebrow Academy bait, and because it gives independent filmmakers access to depth without its achievement, it has ignited a wave of similarly lauded descendants: City of God, No Man's Land, Crazy/beautiful, Crash, and of course, Iñárritu's 21 Grams and Babel.

But back to those dogs. They're easily my favorite part about the film, perhaps because of the sheer excess of those dog fight scenes. No expense is spared in depicting the visceral inhumanity of this gambler's sport, and the images crackle with the rage of someone who witnessed such things with his own eyes on one too many occasions. Unfortunately, it's the blood, and not the righteous indignation, that's easier to imitate.