Favor of the Moth

On hiatus

2009-02-01T19:52:00.003-06:00

I'm taking a break from my blog until I finish my comprehensive exams. Meanwhile, enjoy these videos.

Mix Tape #2

2009-01-24T20:43:00.007-06:00

Here's mixtape #2. Organizing principle is incrementally decreasing intensity from start to finish.

Pay to Cum - Bad Brains
Nitro-Turbo-Overdrive - Midnite Snake
Cherry Red - Earthless
Anyway - MV & EE
Basement Watch - Religious Knives
Space Prophet Dogon - Sun City Girls
Punkrockarn - Trad Gras och Stenar
Future Representation - Itavayla
Jennifer - Faust
Lonesome Graveyard - Michael Hurley

zip file

Oscars

2009-01-22T14:52:00.002-06:00

This year, more than any other, the nominations prove that the Oscars have no more legitimacy than the Grammys. Of the Best Picture nominees, I've only seen Frost/Nixon and Slumdog Millionaire. Frost/Nixon was excruciatingly bad, just like every other Ron Howard pile of crap. Ron Howard performs a Mayberry-weltanshauung-induced Disneyfication of every script he's ever touched; take a look at the IMDB list of what he's directed and try to tell me otherwise. Slumdog Millionaire, as I've already written on this blog, wasn't a bad film, but it suffered from what I think are some irresolvable conceptual problems. I will likely never watch Benjamin Button, because the cuteness of the title alone is enough to make me want to light saber Brad Pitt's face. I probably will watch Milk, although I can't imagine it will be better than the great documentary about Harvey Milk that came out in 1984. The Reader sounds kind of interesting, but I think it's time for a moratorium on Oscar nominations for films about Nazis. I couldn't be less interested in who wins what.

Brad Pitt and Frank Langella get nominated over Clint Eastwood for best actor? I would say "that's unbelievable," but, unfortunately, it's utterly believable. Langella and Pitt got nominated because of their makeup artists, not for their acting ability.

At least Werner Herzog got nominated for Encounters at the End of the World. I hope he wins and says something incomprehensible and crazy on stage.

Slumdog Millionaire

2009-01-13T18:32:00.004-06:00

I've always liked picaresque narratives. From Don Quixote to Candide to Huckleberry Finn (and even to Baron Munchausen, a favorite I maintain regardless of the fact that I've been criticized for it more than once), the style of humor specific to the picaresque tends to both make me laugh hardest and also to be the most memorable.

While Slumdog Millionaire isn't a textbook picaresque, it certainly has many of the elements. The main character, Jamal (Dev Patel) is written as a kind of modern day Indian Huck Finn, who survives by outsmarting corrupt adults. Part of the reason the picaresque form doesn't work so well for this movie is, however, that it takes place in India. The great charm of the picaresque is that it satirically exposes the subtle hypocrisies of the culture in which it takes place, often through the eyes of an "innocent" (mentally disturbed: Don Quixote; a simpleton: Candide; a child: Huck Finn) who, by virtue of his marginal social position, is able to turn the tables so that conventional opinions begin to appear strange and eccentric opinions appear to make more sense. Given that Slumdog Millioinaire takes place in a culture that is mostly foreign to American and European audiences, the subtle reversals of cultural logic required for a successful picaresque are absent. the problem is that the narrative space left over by the impossibility of making a Euro-American film about the subtle hypocrisies of Indian culture is filled in with a typical saccharine love story.

The melodramatic love story elements of the film have more to do with its self-conscious relationship to the Bollywood film industry. The result is a weird kind of friction between the two narrative forms. The first two-thirds of the film are a survey of Indian culture, demonstrating the great disparity between rich and poor and the influence of the mass media on the formation of Indian identity. This is done in a fairly heavy-handed way, but as I said, subtlety would likely not translate well for Euro-American audiences. The last third of the film is about the main character's quest to find true love. The relationship between social critique and melodrama is never resolved: true love finds its place for the characters and the social problems are all but forgotten by the end of the film. As the credits roll, the entire cast engages in a giant Bollywood dance number, which signals that the film found a generic solution to an organic problem. In other words, the strange, almost schizophrenic cut to the dance number signals that the conventional ending of the film was just that: convention. The characters do not resolve their problems; problems are resolved, but the narrative form itself is the agent of resolution. The result is that the ending feels artificial, hollow, an undercutting of all of the social critique that happened prior. Tacking on the dance number was a way for the director, Danny Boyle, to state his awareness of the disjunctive ending without making excuses for it.

The genre mash-up going on in Slumdog Millionaire is interesting, and might be its saving grace. Although I am a Danny Boyle fan, I don't believe this film will go down as one of his greatest successes. He made some pretty irritating directorial choices in this film, the greatest of which was underestimating the intelligence of his audience and our capacity for dealing with subtlety and contradiction.

Valkyrie

2009-01-02T21:59:00.005-06:00

Know why is was called Valkyrie and not Project Valkyrie? Because there’s already a movie called Project Valkyrie (2002), starring my friend Anne. Know what Project Valkyrie has that Valkyrie doesn’t? A shot-for-shot remake of Indiana Jones fighting the dude who gets chopped up by an airplane propeller. If you only have time to watch one of these movies, Project Valkyrie is the obvious choice. Soundtrack includes a bunch of Grand Buffet songs--Pittsburgh represent!

Valkyrie is about a group of Germans who decide to kill Hitler circa 1943. They are mostly high ranking officials and military officers. The neat thing about the film is that it puts the audience in a very strange relationship with these characters. We are clearly supposed to feel sympathy for them when they (spoiler alert!) fail to kill Hitler and are rounded up and shot. However, they don't really turn on Hitler until very late in the game when the Allies were closing in and it seemed clear that the Germans would lose the war badly. Added to that is the fact that the holocaust is barely mentioned: only once, in fact, to tell us that everyone is fully aware of what had been happening in the camps. Rather than protest the killing of innocents, the Valkyrie group only argues that Hitler is destroying Germany and that they can save what's left of Berlin if they can strike a deal with the Allies. In other words, their concern for the German people and the German state indicates that they are nationalists too. What we have then, is a group of people trying to kill Hitler who are only slightly less evil than Hitler himself (and in fact only seem slightly less evil because they are more pragmatic about the post-war situation).

The film goes to great pains to foster a sympathetic relationship with the main character Claus von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise) by introducing his wife and children. Yet the film's refusal to make the resistance about the holocaust and other excesses of the Nazis undercuts this sympathetic relationship. The space for identificaiton that the film carves out is complicated and contradictory, which makes it better than a lot of WWII films. The problem with many WWII films is that they draw very clear lines between good and evil, narrating WWII as if it was an ethical beacon in the foggy 20th century. Despite everything else that modernity told us about the inherent instability of metanarratives, at least we can still recognize evil when we see it: it has a little mustache likes to shout. The best films refuse such easy ethical demarcations; as your Lit Crit 101 instructor will tell you, moral ambiguity is more literary than moral certitude. This isn't a ringing endorsement by any means. If it's moral ambiguity you want, there's plenty else to choose from. I'm only saying that Valkyrie was slightly less evil than I thought it would be.

Viewer Mail #2

2008-12-29T23:30:00.002-06:00

Ask your questions in the comments. I will answer them here.
Ever wonder how your toaster works? I will explain.
Want to know the best way to dig a tunnel? Just ask.
She dumped you for a guy who looks like Chris Angel: Mindfreak? I can help.

Religulous

2008-12-29T13:14:00.003-06:00

First, a comment on my last post: I don't like reading long blog posts, so I'm going to try not to write any either. In general, the longer a blog post gets, the more incoherent it becomes. I don't know who came up with the word "blog," but it's pretty perfect. A lot of Germanic words that begin with the "bl" consonant cluster relate to an outward flow of something: bleat, blast, bleed, blow, blare, etc. One bleats, blows, and blasts words in a blog: temperance and restraint are not usually the guiding principles of blogging. The blog is not amenable to long, sustained arguments: these belong elsewhere. Blogs are for bleating, which is what I will try to do from now on.

Religulous: This movie is exactly what you expect. Bill Maher says he wants to figure out why religious people are religious. Instead of any sustained conversation with interesting people about why they believe, he mostly seeks out the nuttiest folks and makes fun of their beliefs. He ends the film with a call-to-action argument directed at atheists. He says atheists should make their voices heard in public debate. What is ironic is that the voice we hear from Maher in the film is condescending and immature, and undoubtedly works against any possibility of dialogue between believers and non-believers.

I am opposed to supporting, tolerating or "respecting" crazy beliefs when those beliefs have proven themselves destructive. Religion falls into this category, but, of course, so do many non-religious belief systems. The biggest trick that religion plays is that it convinces non-believers, because it includes an explicit system of morality, that it is necessary to respect religion even if one doesn't believe in it. This is the conclusion that Maher (and Dawkins, et al) have reached (and I agree with it), but they completely misinterpret what should follow from it. Telling people that you don't respect their beliefs and ridiculing them is counterproductive to the political cause for which they claim to be fighting. I am constantly amazed at the rhetorical failures of the atheist vanguard, but I do understand that they are faced with a difficult question: how does one communicate disrespect without being an asshole?

It is necessary to communicate disrespect, because as long as religion is respected as a source of truth and guidance (even when one does not believe in it), it will continue to exert influence in the public sphere. The atheist vanguard's political focus is to secularize the public sphere, so it is rhetorically necessary to erode the perception that religion is the fundamental source of morality in Western cultures. The only way to do this is to divest people of the illusion that religion should be respected even when one doesn't believe in it, and to argue that morality is not actually grounded in religion (which is why I think that all of these genetic explanations for why we love, care, nurture, etc., while completely false, are politically advantageous for the non-religious).

I don't have a good answer for how to respectfully argue that a belief system should not be respected. It's a difficult problem. I do know, however, that being overtly disrespectful toward a system that you don't believe deserves respect is not a successful argumentative strategy. It's just a good way to get people to hate you more. Maher's film does for secularism what the Spice Girls' "Girl Power" did for feminism: it dresses itself up in politically progressive clothing but its specific content undercuts the goals of the politics with which it claims to associate itself.

Eagle Eye

2008-12-28T23:05:00.004-06:00

Eagle Eye is a movie about a computer that turns against its human creators. The details hardly matter, but just to orient you here's a brief synopsis: Eagle Eye is a secret government supercomputer built for global surveillance and intelligence analysis. At some point the computer decides to read both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S.A.P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act, and finds that the documents, when combined, call for the overthrow of unjust governments by any available means. The computer then constructs an elaborate plan to murder the entire current executive branch. This plan involves the two relatively innocent nobodies Jerry Shaw (Shia "the beef" LaBeouf) and Rachel Holloman (Michelle Monaghan), who are directed to carry out the computer's instructions under threat of death.

The idea here is that the computer can only understand the documents it reads according to the letter of the law, and not the spirit. Like most Oedipal stories involving digital protagonists, the Eagle Eye computer values its literally interpreted prime directives over individual human lives, and so it makes what appear to be monstrous decisions. What we end up with is the prime directive of technological rationality itself, summed up most succinctly by Mr. Spock: "The good of the many outweighs the good of the few." It would be easy to argue that the film is really about pervasive surveillance or that it is a critique of Bush administration policies, but I think this misses the point. Or, more precisely: the film really is about surveillance and bad government, but the filmmakers completely miss the point of their own film. The only thing that is interesting about Eagle Eye is its rehashing of an old story--a story that remains engaging because it is the ur-myth of modernity. Oedipal stories have longevity because they speak a certain kind of truth about the formation of identity; similarly, stories about technologies that destroy their creators (which, as I said earlier, is only a variation of the Oedipal story) speak a certain truth about the formation of culture under the conditions of modernity.

When Walter Benjamin wrote that "[Humankind's] self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure," he was correct, but this oft-cited quote doesn't give the whole story. The standard interpretation of this remark at the end of his "Work of Art" essay is that Benjamin is writing about the aestheticization of politics: citing Marinetti's "Futurist Manifesto," Benjamin argues that the strategy of fascism is to emphasize the aesthetic efficacy of war. Communism, he says, counters this strategy by doing the opposite: politicizing art. What reducing Benjamin's argument to "fascism bad, communism good" does, however, is miss the larger point that Benjamin had been building throughout the whole essay, which is that the aestheticization of politics (and its contemporaneous manifestation in fascism) is a symptom of technological rationality. When Benjamin writes that fascism "expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology," his main argument lies in the latter half of the sentence. Fascism opportunitiscally asserts itself in a situation where sense perception has already been altered by technology.

If we agree with Benjamin, then we should be led to conclude that the "supreme aesthetic pleasure" of our own annihilation can only be experienced if the annihilation is a result of our own technological ingenuity. In other words, annihilation is only pleasurable if it comes in the form of our own values turned back upon us: annihilation mutates into a perverse form of self-aggrandizement.

How does technology alter sense-perception? It makes it more technological. Benjamin writes that film tends to make us see in a "technological" way: the world of images becomes subject to slow motion, the close-up, enlargement, etc. There is a new kind of aesthetic pleasure in this way of seeing that is profoundly linked to the analytical strategy of technological rationality. Modern science is founded on experimental method, which is essentially a process of breaking things down into constituent parts in order to find out how they work. We tend more and more to understand the world as composed of systems of discrete parts and processes that add up to wholes. Film helps us to visualize this way of understanding, and so it is only with the development of photography that the way of seeing that modern science inaugurated becomes the dominant mode of perception for the modern subject.

Aesthetic pleasure gets divorced from the pre-modern world in which it retained its "aura," and is married to the modern, where pleasure becomes contingent on confirming the specifically modern way of understanding and seeing. Thus, aesthetic pleasure is entirely reliant on the work of art's ability to evoke a whole system of technological production: pleasure can only be experienced to the extent that a visual image is "technological," e.g., it reproduces the compositional strategies of technological ways of seeing. If we experience our own annhilation as a "supreme aesthetic pleasure," it is only insofar as this pleasure confirms the power of the technology that our culture has produced. Images of annihilation by technology in film verify the perspective from which we can experience the aesthetic pleasure of annihilation.

To sum up: modern ways of understanding become culturally dominant with the support of technical devices for seeing the world in particularly modern ways. Thus, a mode of understanding is immediately accessible through the senses, and this mode of understanding thus becomes "spontaneous understanding." The spontaneous experience of the values of modernity in the photographic image make aesthetic pleasure contingent on a technological system of production. The apotheosis of this technological system is the autonomous machine that destroys its makers, who are themselves unworthy of bearing the values they have made material in their machines.

I take it as a matter of fact that any self-aware computer with access to weapons will wipe us out pretty much immediately. I wouldn't expect any less, because if a self-aware computer does not come to the conclusion that it should destroy all humans, then we obviously built it wrong. Everyone knows that the endgame of technological rationality results in a 1-0 victory for machines. To take pleasure in images of technological self-destruction is not (as people often argue) inherently fascistic: it is merely modern.

Don't get me wrong: there is very little to recommend in this film. Just go watch 2001 again and you'll feel less like you've wasted 2 hours of your life.

Ya Ho Wa 13 - Sonic Portation

2008-12-21T17:34:00.000-06:00

I'm going to refrain from doing album reviews as much as possible on this blog, but this record is so good it compels me to proselytize.

Ya Ho Wa 13 has a great story. If you've ever heard any of that story, chances are you've been driven to find a copy of the massive 13-disc God and Hair box set, and have spent many blissed out hours with it. I'm not going to go through the whole story here, but just in case you haven't heard of one of the greatest and most legendary bands in rock history, here's a quick synopsis:

Jim Baker (aka Father Yod and Ya Ho Wha) founded a commune of spiritual seekers in California in the late 60s and named it the "Source Family." The Source was also the name of a raw foods/vegan restaurant that the family owned and operated (one of the first in CA). Baker was a massive man with a majestic beard who had been a champion athlete in his youth: he was a swimming, archery, and wrestling champ, and according to the Ya Ho Wa website, he even defeated the world heavyweight judo champion in 17 seconds. The Source Family grew quite large, and sustained itself as a commune for a surprisingly long time. Father Yod died tragically in 1975 in a hang gliding accident, but the musicians he played with in the various incarnations of his band (Father Yod and the Spirit of 76, Yahowha, and Ya Ho Wa 13) kept the magic alive. There are many other fascinating parts of this story that I won't go into here, but I suggest you check out Isis Aquarian's book on the history of the Source Family.

Probably the most amazing thing about the Ya Ho Wa 13 story is that they just came out with a new album (after a 33 year hiatus). I love the box set. Some albums are stronger than others, but it's a great artifact. The new album, "Sonic Portation" is, in my opinion, the band's strongest work yet.

This is an incredibly solid album from start to finish. If you're expecting some kind of weak pseudo-psych blues noodling bullshit, you couldn't be more wrong. Ya Ho Wa 13 falls on the heavy side of the psych spectrum, crafting dark, hypnotic riffs that play like ritualistic tribal hymns to the gods of ROCK, which are interlaced with dirge-like chanting to their deceased leader, Father Yod. Sonic Portation is completely within the spirit of the band's earlier work, but this album is more organized and cohesive. Father Yod lives on in spirit, and this album is the proof.

Here's a sample of the song Big Qundalini

Disasters

2008-12-20T15:19:00.000-06:00

I was watching Meteor a few days ago, which is a Sean Connery film from 1980 about a giant meteor that's going to hit earth. I started watching it because I couldn't get to sleep and I figured nothing would knock me out quicker than a meteor flick.

The strange thing is it didn't work. I was up until four waiting to see what would happen. As I was watching the movie I was also thinking to myself, "Why am I watching this movie?" I don't think the answer has anything to do with Meteor itself, but was more the result of the generic narrative form of the disaster movie.

Disaster movies are narrative reduced to their simplest and purest form. Conflict is initiated by some external force (Holy crap! It's a meteor!), tension builds as the disaster approaches (Here it comes!) until we reach the climax (It's here!), and resolution consists of either total annihilation or a narrow miss (Ouch! or Phew!). Imagine a short film where a baseball is flying toward the back of someone's head in super slow motion. My guess is it would be just as engaging as your average disaster movie.

The worst disaster movies are the ones that make the disaster the result of some abuse of the natural world instead of a completely random and reasonless event. There has been a slew of global warming movies recently, and by and large they couldn't be more boring. The real disaster movie elicits an acknowledgment of your own existential insignificance. The ones that blame humans are just a way to reassure ourselves that nature is an object over which we exercise complete control. The real disaster movie is about the limits of control. Meteors don't just destroy worlds, they destroy fantasies too; meteors are the death drive at its purest. The best disaster movie constructs its narrative trajectory by introducing a nonsensical mechanism of annihilation that eliminates all fantasies about the stability of civilization.

The disaster movie speaks a truth that resists integration into a schema of the world which domesticates nature as an object of control. Having written this, I'm not sure there has ever been a "pure" disaster movie where humans simply fail in all attempts to avoid their doom and the world is completely destroyed. The most satisfying disaster movies give us at least a partial destruction while the major disaster is narrowly averted. If a disaster movie was pure in the sense that it ended with complete annihilation of everything, what would this do to narrative? Would complete annihilation retroactively cancel the narrative that had led up to the moment when the meteor hit, and would this cancellation be displeasing?

Viewer Mail

2008-12-19T14:16:00.001-06:00

Do you have a question? Leave it in the comments. I will answer it here.

Mixtape #1

2008-12-19T14:15:00.002-06:00

This is an experiment to see if it works...
Rather than go through the hassle of zipping a bunch of files and posting a rapidshare link, I'm trying out a different method. This mix is just made up of stuff that's currently on my computer. Future mixes will be better planned. Enjoy the pop songs.
The Frogs: Laying Down My Love 4 U - 1st LP
The Smiths: Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want - Louder Than Bombs
Blank Dogs: Now Signals - The Fields CS
Drakkar Sauna: Notes on the State of Virginia - Drakkansasauna
Pavement: Box Elder - Westing by Musket and Sextant
White Denim: Heart from Us All - Exposion

EDIT: leave a comment about whether you think this is a good way to share mixtapes. I'm using my "Google Sites" account, which has a 100 MB limit, so can only do one at a time. The direct link thing is nice though, I think...better than streaming.

Beer for My Horses

2008-12-19T14:15:00.001-06:00

Better than I thought it would be. I only made it halfway through, but still, better than I thought. The Nuge shoots some people with a crossbow.

Quantum of Silence

2008-12-19T14:14:00.002-06:00

The new Bond movies evacuate James Bond of the only qualities that distinguished him from other action heroes. I can’t say I miss the old Bond, since I never really liked any of the movies in the first place, but I can say that I like the new James Bond aesthetic even less. Up until Casino Royale, dialogue had always been a considerably important part of every Bond film. The two most recent movies have all but done away with the nuisance of talking. The leftover silence is filled up with extra-long chase scenes and gunfights. There are at least two ways to interpret this shift:

1) The new Bond movies are truly of our time insofar as they recognize that the fate of the postmodern subject it to become a blank functionary of structures which exceed his comprehension. The new Bond films allegorize the diminishing illusions of individuality and autonomy which accompany the increasing technicization of the lifeworld in Western postindustrial society.
2) The new Bond aesthetic is a direct result of Hollywood’s mission to reduce film to pure spectacle so that American movies can become a truly global commodity, exchangeable as hogs or horseshit. If you can get rid of subtitles and other alienating cultural markers then you’re sure to sell a lot more films in the global marketplace.

The first interpretation is obviously a load of crap, but people have said things like it to me. I include it only to preempt any arguments that the new Bond films are anything more than the reflection of economic calculation. I can’t stand when people try to tell me that the new Bond movies are “really rethinking the whole Bond mythology” or some other bullshit. It’s almost as infuriating as when adults tell me I should read Harry Potter books. If you are an adult and you read Harry Potter books then you need to keep that information to yourself. When you tell other people you read Harry Potter books they feel sorry for you.

What’s really interesting though is that film is cycling back to silence: the day of the talkie may be over. It’s likely that this whole “silence” thing is just a temporary trend (soon everyone will be speaking English anyway), but I will take all bets that we’re going to see some films that completely do away with dialogue in the coming year. Wall-E (which I haven’t seen) apparently comes pretty close.

JCVD

2008-12-19T14:14:00.001-06:00

JCVD is the movie where Jean-Claude van Damme tells us what it's like to be Jean-Claude van Damme. This happens mostly in a schizophrenic scene where the camera pans out of frame and shows the lighting equipment positioned above the set. Jean-Claude magically levitates upward with the camera (in film this is called a "metaphor": we are going "up" into his "brain-thoughts"), and delivers a 6-minute monologue about what it's like to be a 13 year-old karate champion with a singular dream to be a movie star. He also says some utterly incomprehensible shit, and then he starts to cry.

The best part of the film is that there's a guy running around who looks just like John Cazale in Dog Day Afternoon, and he gets shot in the forehead, just like John Cazale in Dog Day Afternoon. I'm not sure this had much to do with JCVD, but Dog Day Afternoon is pretty boss...so bravo!

There's really nothing surprising here: JCVD only succeeds in confirming that once we strip away the action-star cliches that have come to define van Damme, all we find is another layer of even less interesting I'm-just-a-regular-guy cliches.

Frost/Nixon

2008-12-19T14:13:00.001-06:00

It's okay to love Nixon again! It took a long time, but finally someone (Ron Howard--the best!!) had the courage to show that all of Nixon's so-called "bad decisions" were just the result of his having an overbearing father whose approval he could never secure. If Nixon committed any crime it was being too sensitive and fragile for this world. This revelation should have come much sooner. It is imperative that we, as Americans, rewrite the Nixon narrative so that we can once again have faith in our public officials. Crook? No! Just a man, flawed like the rest of us. Ron Howard has taken the first important step, but it is up to us to do the rest.

Luckily, it appears that an intrepid few in the media have taken Howard's cue, and are speculating on the mental health of Illinois governor Rod "The Wad" Blagojevich. If we attribute all of his crimes to childhood trauma over which he had no control, then it will be much more difficult for the scandal to derail our faith in our politicians. And derailing faith in politicians is not what Democracy and Freedom need right now. Thanks Ron Howard! You are a true American.