Dialectical Dissonance

In Transition/Under Construction Part 3

2010-05-03T18:42:00.000-07:00

Autostraddle is running a multipart series about perspectives on queer feminism, so I figured it would be a good time to present mine. I'm also going to throw my hat in the ring to join in for the next part if they're interested in adding a trans perspective to the mix.

Looking back on it now with my spiffy hindsight goggles, I think I was being steered towards becoming a feminist since around the time I was born. Stretched out along a timeline it really feels like part a long and difficult process that went from taking women as a whole off of a lofty pedestal to figuring out just what a woman- especially a strong one- really was and finally realizing that she is what I’d been striving my whole life to become despite that pesky penis of mine. Because of that it feels a little bit wrong to place the emphasis on the tipping point that pushed me into taking up the mantle of feminism, but I’ll get over it because I’m sure that as I continue to sort through the tangle of my identity as a transwoman and my feminist ideology I’ll get around to writing about all those little fits and starts at some point.

Growing up, my impression of feminism as an institution was split very decisively between past and present. What I didn’t understand until later was that it’s the line between first and second wave feminism. Women who fought for the vote and put lead weights in their parasols to defend themselves against the vile minions of the patriarchy were the epitome of cool because they didn’t take shit from anyone. They were never in short supply either because Canadian broadcasting has this really weird fetish for producing period dramas that take place in the Maritimes between the turn of the century and the Great Depression. They also produced “Heritage Minutes” that lionized pioneering feminists in Canadian history like the first female doctors and educators, which lead me to the naive conclusion that oppressing women went out with chamber pots and the bubonic plague.

My mother graduated from UVM and moved up to Canada to pursue a career as a dental hygienist. She enjoys her work and went back to it once my sister and I were school age and could be left with a babysitter for a couple hours a day. What I didn’t know until years later was that my mother had strongly considered joining the airforce, but changed her mind based on the terrifyingly high incidences of rape that women were subjected to by their fellow airmen.

I was raised to respect women, use a condom, and understand that abortion is not a difficult issue at all; it’s the woman’s body so it’s ultimately her decision. It was pretty much just baseline behaviors with no real stance one way or another on proactive feminism. Contemporary feminism had a really bad rep where I’m from- Calgary- at the time somewhat owing to none other than K.D. Lang, the barefoot vegan lesbian who kind of looked like a dude and was harshing the local cattle industry. I was mostly bewildered and vaguely hostile to the idea of her at the time because it seemed to be the prevailing attitude at the time and I wasn’t old enough yet to really understand. Somewhere around a decade later I’m kind of out as a transgendered vegetarian, so it turned out okay.

I was very geeky and ostracized as a teen, so every chance I got was spent escaping into comics and video games where more often than not I was following or controlling the exploits of a badass chick with big guns both real and metaphorical. There was always a definite sexual attraction there in the case of someone like Lara Croft, but I’m convinced now that I was also acting out my fantasies of leaving my boring awkward male body behind for a curvy and far superior female vessel. I drew reams of fan art of Lara back then, posting what I thought were the best bits in my locker and protesting vehemently when my classmates called it out as fap material. “It’s not that! Lara’s more than just hot, she’s awesome!” I would shout down the halls at them.

But it all came crashing down one night in 2004 when the curtain was pulled back and I finally understood the horrible truth. My gun toting heroines were a humbug, and a cruel one at that. I was directed to Gail Simone’s notorious Women in the Refrigerator polemic by a wise friend who understood very well that my notions of equal opportunity Nazi bashing were a far cry from an accurate indicator of female progress inside or outside of comics and the like.

The site, and the well known trope by the same name gets it’s name from an incident in Green Lantern where the eponymous hero- civilian name Kyle Rayner- came home from heroing to find a note from an enemy saying “I left you something in the fridge.” That something was the dismembered corpse of his girlfriend. A true fridging in the parlance of the scene occurs when a female character- usually a love interest- is maimed or killed solely to advance or add pathos to a male protagonist. It’s a widely used plot device in all manner of other media, but the combination of it’s startling ubiquity and Gail’s passion have for better or worse tied it to comics.

I thought I had done well by steering clear of the testosterone overloaded 90s antiheroes that made me dry heave at the sight of their inexplicably glowing eyes and proliferation of useless pouches and yet I was almost worse off. But despondency soon turned to hope as I discovered that female and queer comic fans- almost as a consequence of their marginalization- seem to have the best taste. Or at least the tight circle who took me in and rehabilitated me with a steady diet of provocative and intelligent material, did. Those comics in turn awakened a growing curiosity and passion for feminist and queer theory that exploded out of comics and into my entire worldview with the power of a thousand exploding suns. It was either that or the time that I was at the drug store as a kid trying to reach a copy of Mad Magazine and was bitten by the radioactive copy of Bitch that was lying in wait behind it.

Tony Stark Addresses Harvard Engineering Class of 2010

2010-04-13T07:21:00.000-07:00

I used to hate doing these things, getting up here and giving the last compulsory speech to kids like you about to experience real freedom for the first time in your lives. It always seemed a little insane and condescending for someone like me who came up breaking all the rules and doing everything I could to exploit my position of privilege to lecture to kids who fought tooth and nail just to get the chance to tug at the collar of a hideous robe in sweltering heat with a flask of vodka strapped to your chest that you just cannot wait to break open. I never used to write these speeches either because I never had a single honest thing to tell kids like you before today. I had Cornell grads for that.

That didn’t matter in the Clinton years either. I was here to smile, wave, and wish you well in a world that was eager to hand you money. I saw David Simon earlier, who’s here to talk to some journalism grads. I have no idea what he could possibly tell them. Ten years ago he would make them laugh and then get real serious and you know do something like make it clear that if they gave up a source or pulled a Stephen Glass, he would find them and murder a pet or family member. That was the extent of our concerns about journalism. Now, he has to get up there and explain to them how it could possibly have been worth it to do incredibly reckless things in the name of their GPAs like take amphetamines to cram before an exam when all they’re going to have tomorrow morning is a hangover, a piece of paper, and a crushing debt load in a world that is not only in steep decline, but has jettisoned journalism as an institution almost entirely.

You’re the spawn of the Clinton years, that great little era when we still thought we could sustain the hologram America for as long as we wanted. Move the jobs overseas, borrow heavily, and create entire industries around moving money that does not even exist yet. When you were coming up, engineering was being thrust on you as the next best thing based on the Segway. Dean Kamen is a great role model, educators thought. Well, I’m here to tell you that Dean Kamen is an asshole. I punched him at a party one time, but I’m fairly certain it had nothing to do with the Segway. He did some great things like invent the first insulin pump, but no one knows that. Mention the name Dean Kamen and the only thing you hear about is the Segway, the biggest blight on engineering the world has ever seen. Smart people like Steve Jobs once said that it would revolutionize society, and to this day I have no idea why anyone would think that.

Everyone who's seen Highlander 2 raise your hand. Right, okay, I'm getting old then. Now keep that hand raised if you can tell me how a Segway is of any use to anyone in that world. Just to be clear here since maybe fifty of you even raised your hands in the first place, Highlander 2 takes place in a so called future where the sky is completely black and it’s just basically a broken shit hole. There’s no sun light to speak of and it’s just a miserable place in general. Now how would a Segway improve your life in the slightest in that time and place?

It wouldn’t, and the reason for that is that the Segway is a solution desperately seeking a problem. We lived in a world that was so sure that it had all the problems licked that it had to start inventing solutions that didn’t have problems to solve. It’s the Bush Doctrine for engineering, I suppose. Look at where we are right now. Do we need Segways with the barbarians at the gates and Rome in flames? What I want to impress upon you here today is that the paradigm of engineering that you were raised on- making things just because you can- is dead.

Engineering- true engineering and not this phony business of creating things that nobody needs or coming up with pie in the sky let’s put a tinfoil dome over the North Pole nonsense- is the fine art of problem solving. Specifically it’s making things with your hands to solve the major problems of life. For much of my early life, I made things just because I could, and the world loved me for it. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but I had an epiphany that changed my outlook on engineering forever.

As I’m sure you know, I was was kidnapped a few years ago by terrorists and held in a cave for weeks. Myself and another captured colleague were presented with the first real engineering problem of our lives. There was a piece of shrapnel from a mine that detonated near me lodged deep in my chest and working it’s way towards my heart. Lacking the necessary tools to extract it surgically, we created a magnetic apparatus that repulsed it powered by a car battery. That’s when I stopped building things to destroy and started building things towards more productive goals.

Being reactive, solving problems as they come along is a fine thing, but it’s not what is going to see us through what is going to probably be an awful decade. It’s our ability to identify the problems we are going to face in the future and begin developing solutions for them now. We don’t have time to sit around drawing up plans for massive geo-engineering projects that require technology and money we don’t have. We need to learn to use what we have now to solve tomorrow’s problems by yesterday. We cannot rely on politicians to sustain us on a diet of hope and change. They will not deliver us because they are cheerleaders, people who are very good at delivering very bad news and not much else.

Only us, the engineers can save the world now. But we have to stop dicking around and act like real engineers to do it. Stop tinkering on some bullshit new take on the Segway that you think will make you more money than I could spend in ten years, because it won’t happen. Go outside and look at how people are living and what they’re saying. I do that a lot. I go out and I put on a bunch of ugly shit I bought at Eddie Bauer and I buy a bowl of soup at the kind of diner where you stand up to eat. It’s not civilized or particularly dignified, but it’s what you learn to live with when you live elbow to elbow and hand to mouth in New York.

That’s the kind of place you go to find the real problems that need solving, you go to where the real people, the end users, are and you listen. The minute we stop doing that, paying attention to what the world really needed and how a product would function in the real world is the minute we become redundant. I remember hearing this one story about a kid that built some kind of portable shelter for homeless people and a few media outlets made a big deal out of what kind of a genius he must be. What they didn’t cover was that the damn thing didn’t last a day because the kid failed to account for the assholes who kicked it down just to mess with the poor bastard trying to sleep in it.

We have this tendency as Americans to get addicted to grand narratives, as if we need to be given a role in some giant stage production in order to get anything of note done. If you feel like you really need one, I’ll give you all one for free here today because you are not going to be getting one anywhere else. Your grand narrative is that you need to start making things for a world that looks like Highlander 2. Sure, you’re being undercut now by cheap third world shit because people do not want to pay for quality, but as we circle closer and closer to the drain, it is going to become critical at an equally fast rate. You need to do more than just make America spend it’s money inside it’s own shores again, you need to make America believe in quality for the first time in fifty years. This is your moment. Go out and seize it because if you don’t, there probably won’t be anyone left to pick up the pieces.

In Transition/Under Construction Part 2

2010-03-18T04:54:00.000-07:00

Gender in the 21st century is a pretty contentious thing, which is one of the few things that most people can agree on when the topic comes up. Of course it gets even more contentious where transgender issues are concerned. If I say that gender is largely a social construction, then in some quarters it must mean that being transgendered is somehow irrelevant or counterproductive. Why would I say that I want to look and act like a woman? Isn't that supporting the idea of women and men having specific codified roles in society?

Depends on your perspective. On the one hand, referring to a certain set of qualities or characteristics as being specifically masculine or feminine does appear to support the concept of a binary gender system. However, the implementation of those characteristics and qualities by the sex opposite to that usually associated with them suggests that while they may be a specific set of tropes, they are far more modular than generally assumed. That is to say that while the traits we generally refer to as being feminine or masculine based on social expectations of heteronormativity do typically manifest themselves more or less as cohesive wholes, they do not require the corresponding sex organs. Hence the butch/femme diagnostic employed by the LGBT community.

This point- while having always been hovering somewhere in my subconscious- never made it into my conscious thought patterns until I was reading a relationship advice column in the local LGBT free newspaper Xtra West. The article was written by someone you'd generally refer to as being a "butch lesbian;" a woman attracted to other women who espouses and exalts traditionally masculine traits over feminine ones. What was interesting about the article is that it was advice for those of the butch persuasion on how to get over a bad break up. Because of the lack of male/female or sexual orientation connotations, the article was easily accessible and equally relatable to men and women both gay and straight given that they have more of an interest in building things and being stoic than buying a new pair of shoes and eating a lot of ice cream.

That modularity is what makes the butch/femme diagnostic the most useful and accurate description of contemporary gender. While it would probably be preferable to use tags that are completely free of association with the sexes, the nomenclature must remain understandable and relatable to the general public if there is to be any widespread recognition or adoption of it. Butch women and femme men may face a bigger share of discrimination and ridicule for stepping outside of the expected gender norm, but accurately describing how they express themselves is the only way forward. You cannot collapse a false dichotomy without first proving that it is false.

Just as important as removing gender from the context of sex is removing it from sexual orientation. No matter how much we'd like to pretend otherwise, we do still live in a world where if you are homosexual, you are assumed to emulate the qualities of the opposite sex and visa versa. I can't say I'm aware of what the prevailing FTM stereotypes are in terms of orientation but it's rather safe to say that if you are transwoman, you are assumed to be homosexual or perhaps more accurately; androphilic. As if it is unthinkable that you could be born a man, feel more comfortable as a woman, and be sexually attracted to women all at the same time. There are, of course, a great many androphilic transwomen but gynophilic transwomen exist as well which is of course how I identify myself in that context. It's an excellent illustration of just how intrinsically linked sex, gender, and orientation are in everyday life, which is truly unfortunate given the truth of the situation.

One of the more laudable things that substituting traditional gender labels with the butch/femme diagnostic is that it breaks down barriers between the different elements of the queer community as well as those between the queer and straight communities. It provides common ground for traditionally segregated or oppositional groups. The clearest usage of the butch/femme diagnostic to break down barriers between fundamentally different groups is the propensity for straight women and (femme) gay men to socialize, something that by comparison rarely happens between straight men and (butch) lesbians.

The key here is that we are still a long ways away from being able to retire an essentially binary diagnostic tool for gender, but there is still a great deal of progress that can be made by detaching the language we use for defining gender from sex and orientation to become something completely modular. Real change occurs incrementally, after all.

In Transition/Under Construction Part 1

2010-03-14T14:23:00.000-07:00

I’ve mostly tried to use this particular blog to talk about narratives; either my own developing ones or extant ones and how they interact with the basic fabric of our lives. An extended attempt at vindicating myself for “thinking too much” about what some of the cumulative effects on modern society the prevalent themes in the pop we digest have. Or at least that’s the self deprecating log line.

I’m going to try to steer the ship in a different direction for a while, or maybe just send out a dingy to explore an island for a bit while the ship weighs anchor off the coast. The island is the transgendered aspect of my personality. It’s something I generally avoid in most of my communication, only ever usually referring to it in passing to a select few confidants. I want to try to organize a few pieces to explore all the facets of the issue as they relate to me directly and other perspectives as well and hopefully come to terms with it as I do.

In my experience, I can only speak for myself on this, realizing that I was in fact transgendered was a slow process of questioning and awakening. One that I believe based on the testaments of my homosexual friends is not very far removed from discovering and coming to terms with your sexual orientation if it differs from societal norms. For the longest time I really knew that I did not fit in with most other guys, and of course that doesn’t mean that feeling alienated by your gender peers means that you’re trans. That’s one of the key things that anyone grappling with their gender identity has to deal with; going from the idea that they don’t want to be what they are to actively wanting to be the other thing.

It isn’t healthy or productive to define yourself as what you are not or do not want to be, despite the fact that most changes we make to our looks and how we present ourselves to the outside world are born from dissatisfaction with one thing or another. I’m too fat so I want to lose weight would be the simplest iteration to use as an example. The first thing to be thinking about is not how you can lose weight. The first thing to be thinking about is what gave you the idea that you are fat and why you feel driven to lose that weight. If you can’t fit into your favorite pants anymore and would like to fix that, you’re on the right track. It stops being about not being fat and starts being about wanting to fit into those pants again. Of course you then have to determine how much weight you should be losing and whose standards you’re working to conform to.

Gender identity works very similarly. Like I alluded to before, feeling uncomfortable in your body does not make you trans, and being trans does not necessarily mean that you should be investigating gender reassignment surgery. For me it started off with a “I’m too fat,” train of thought. General feelings of malaise and dissatisfaction with being male. But what really pushed me over the top was the positive experiences that I had either while in drag or in social contexts where I was completely free and encouraged to indulge what I would refer to as being my more feminine side. Being a guy isn’t all bad and I don’t entirely hate it. There will probably be a few things that I’ll miss about it if I do go through with transitioning- which I intend to- but at the same time my experiences that allowed me to tap into femininity in both a physical and metaphorical context were so liberating and rewarding that it seems downright masochistic not to pursue it further.

I guess from here I’ll try to pick apart the different components of the transgendered experience and try to provide some insight into how becoming cognizant of it has changed my perspective on a lot of things.

Let's Make a Sandwich

2010-03-14T10:21:00.000-07:00

The internet is abuzz, Lady Gaga has a new video out and it is nine minutes long. That's pretty stunning in and of itself. The whole thing takes a few viewings to properly digest because it's incredibly dense for something so seemingly shallow. I want to attack this thing from about a dozen angles, so apologies if it loses coherency for the sake of completeness.

The first and most remarkable thing about the Telephone video is how queer it is. Gaga's talked about being bisexual in the media before but until The Fame Monster, it hadn't even shown itself except subtly in her lyrics. If it wasn't for the Rolling Stone interview, a lot of people including myself wouldn't have figured out that Poker Face is about distracting a guy to get with his girlfriend. By contrast, the only time anything hetero appears in the Telephone video it's Tyrese's cameo and he's really just there to be sacrificed on the altar of Beyonce and Gaga's girl-love.

It's not particularly notable for having girl-on-girl sequences, but it is very notable for how they're portrayed as this run down of Music Videos With Content of a Lesbian Nature by the ladies at Autostraddle makes very clear. Probably the biggest thing to mention is that it's Gaga herself who is making out with the ladies in the prison yard and not a proxy of some kind as is usually the case. The amount of self-possession it takes to break that kind of ground in the mainstreamiest of the mainstream is truly laudable. But it doesn't stop there. The women in the jail sequences of Telephone are not tarted up hetero girls put there to please the boys in the audience, they're a wide range of butch and femme with the butch end of the spectrum getting the most play. One of the most socially marginalized demographics in North America is African-American lesbians. To wit, recent articles have alerted me to the fact that they face wildly disproportionate discharges under the DADT act and African-American women in general (in the US) have reported a median wealth of five dollars. Despite that, it's a black leatherdyke who is given the honour of flashing Lady Gaga's own headphones in the more obvious instances of product placement in the video.

After comments about the appearance of the infamous Pussy Wagon, "Let's Make a Sandwich," and "Told you she doesn't have a dick," the product placement is one of the most discussed things about the video. What a lot of people are missing is- again- the context of that product placement. Yes, someone is on a laptop accessing Plenty of Fish and the screen brightness is magnified so that you can't possibly miss it but who is that at the keyboard but the muscly, masculine in bearing dominatrix prison guard. That's a seriously ballsy way to promote your dating site because after all this is not a Teagan and Sarah video where you could conceivably tailor a spot to appeal to a niche market sight unseen by the mainstream. The Virgin Mobile plug happens right in the middle of what was shaping up to be a jail yard lesbian threesome during which Lady Gaga is wearing sunglasses that are decorated with lit cigarettes. The sheer amount of things that offend contemporary mores and prejudices is mind boggling and any one of them would usually be enough to send any advertiser running for the hills, but Gaga's appeal seems to be making the risks involved for the firms palatable which is why she's so goddamn important.

One of the more tragic reminders of the very narrow appreciation for film- and I suppose culture in general- that my generation has is how often and to what extent Quentin Tarantino is mentioned in reference to Telephone. The reason that an artifact typing itself explicitly to Tarantino was required in order for Ackerland and Gaga to express their love for his work is that his aesthetic is very difficult to invoke without attribution because of how referential it is. The irony of course is that a very large portion of his audience has no direct experience of his influences and thus conflate anything that uses the grindhouse aesthetic with him despite the fact that he is quite vigilant in crediting his influences through his dialogue. What all too frequently gets missed is that Paparazzi of which Telephone is the narrative sequel has the shadow of Frederico Fellini looming over it just as heavily as Tarantino (his contemporaries and influences inclusive) does Telephone. Beyond evoking Fellini's life long fascination with the Italian elite- be it aristocracy or movie stars- the very name has it's genesis in his most famous film (La Dolce Vita) which is a derivation of the Italian word for "sewer rat."

Now begins speculation of which iconic film director Gaga and Ackerland will pattern their next outing after. My money is on David Lynch based on his indelible imprint on pop culture, love of Woman in Trouble narratives, and reputation for being impenetrable and "weird." After Telephone, it's hard not to hunger for their take on Mulholland Drive or Wild At Heart. Another brilliant subversion would be to take on film's most notorious and unapologetic misogynist, Lars Von Trier.

Of course this whole thing ultimately traces it's way back to Michael Jackson who is largely responsible for the music video as an art form and most definitely the progenitor of the long form version of it. Witness the side to side clawing the air look at me I am homaging Thriller dance move that Gaga has been using since Beautiful Dirty Rich or the everything but a crotch grab little dance she does on her release from prison in Telephone. Until her first splashy foray into the long form video, it was a dying art form that had become little more than a plug for the single with rapidly declining time share on the cable channels that were birthed to showcase them. When was the last time people were talking this much about a music video? Probably Marilyn Manson's Coma White video that portrayed him as JFK being shot in the head, literally over ten years ago. Of course Paparazzi- if not so much Telephone- shares a lot of themes and statements about fame and media martyrdom with Coma White and the corresponding Manson album. No wonder Gaga and Manson are BFFs.

Love her or hate her, Lady Gaga is dominating the pop culture discourse and she understands precisely how to weaponize it. She's doing the counter culture's work from within the mainstream. Infiltrate, subvert, destroy.

formspring.me

2010-02-23T13:53:00.001-08:00

Ask me anything http://formspring.me/gonzochaote

Queer

2010-02-23T10:52:00.000-08:00

I think that I need to finish my first novel- that vampire thing I always talk about- pretty soon. I'm always switching gears and trying to take on new perspectives thanks to that pesky hypervirus that infected my brain a few years back, but I'm feeling a growing distance forming between the me that conceived of bloodampersandink and the direction that I'm rapidly heading into. Back then, I was the fish out of water naive wannabe artist grappling with the whole falling for the bad girl thing and adjusting to life out here on the coast, and those are the goggles through which the protagonist sees the world. There's some decent sized chunks of my budding feminist dialectic in it and perhaps the early seeds of my confusion, guilt, and recriminations about my gender identity but there's no room for my full blown transgenderism or the other trappings of the rapid queering of my worldview over the last two years in the novel. I think I was trying to light the way for a contemporary brand of enlightened (post) feminist compatible masculinity, but I've fled so far and so fast from heteronormativity that I'm not sure that I can see it without squinting anymore.

It's becoming a retrospective, a eulogy of sorts I guess. This is my Dear John letter to heteronormativity, to accepting my life as a man. I'm occupying a strange kind of space right now that is completely outside the binary gender system. I've been kind of shocked at how easily and readily my friends have adapted to my... well I'm not sure if I should call it queerness or eccentricity or even if I ought to make a distinction there. For most of my life Mark has been a signifier of some kind of oddness because I've almost always been seen as an eccentric in one way or another but it's really reached it's apotheosis in my gender identity. To several, I'm Mark as if saying my name in italics is enough to define my otherness (which is just peachy with me). To some I'm one of the girls. I also have three separate nicknames integrating the word "Dyke." At some point I'll talk a bit more about the butch/femme paradigm and how it became a cornerstone of my queer informed perspective on gender and sexuality.

I was feeling pretty anxious and confused about the whole thing when I started writing this, and then I saw an article over at the Huffington Post about how Lady Gaga has posed for a magazine cover topless in leather pants, pointy Edward Scissorhands gloves, and a strap on. She's out there doing that so that I can be here doing this. Thank you Lady Gaga for reminding me that it's my responsibility and duty to go flat out. I'll be a Little Monster until the day I die.

Taylor Swift is not one of us, one of us, one of us.

2010-02-10T02:15:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking lately that a lot of people these days have lost their sense of what it means to be subversive and dangerous. Not even subversive, I guess. The essential issue is that you can't just go by what turns your gut when you're trying to figure out what's out there having a noxious effect on the general state of affairs. It's like people are standing knee deep in sirloin talking about how there's beef in the streets a good five blocks down. To a degree, that's what got me all riled up about that site that spends its time digging for symbolism and conspiracy where there almost certainly is none. People want their conspiracies and degenerate behaviour to take on familiar forms that they can recognize and denounce. The problem is that life is not a Dan Brown novel. Symbolism in the information age is a complicated beast, and human behavior is even more complex.

I'm a student of the occult. It's fascinating, fun, and useful but as with all things you can't rely on it or a singular version of it to make sense of the whole world for you. That's when you start getting bent out of shape about a Jay-Z video and miss the real and far more serious things going on in pop culture. Beyond being distracting, conspiracy theories- especially ones that focus on occult oriented ur-groups like the Illuminati- promote a really poisonous world view. Conspiracies run by globe spanning monolithic entities are by their very nature unstoppable. Ascribing them objective reality does precisely nothing but promote defeatism, apathy, and paranoia. But I covered that on the last episode.

This morning I got an article passed my way called Why Taylor Swift Offends Little Monsters, Feminists, and Weirdos. I'm all three, so I got ready to be offended. I'll be honest here; I've never knowingly heard one of her songs. The first I'd seen of her after having vaguely heard her name here and there was the incident with Kanye West. I don't put any stock in music award shows whatsoever, so all I really got out of it were the internet memes and the like. Imagine my surprise when I learned that Taylor Swift is in fact everything I hate. I'm not really going to get into it from the perspective of her being an incredibly regressive figure when it comes to femininity and sex. I'd rather you read the original article for that, because it's done quite well.

The thing that really angers me about her is how she is allowed to blatantly front like she's some kind of social outcast and moans on endlessly in her songs about how the pretty boys don't go for her. You'll notice a brilliant side by side comparison in the Autostraddle article of Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga expressing their perceived freakishness. Taylor is staring out the window wearing massive framed glasses and some absurd t-shirt. The Lady Gaga shot is from the Bad Romance video with the frizzy pink hair and giant iris contact lenses. The implication is that Swift's glasses are a poorly staged affectation while Gaga's appearance is the product of a far more febrile and thus genuinely unconventional mind.

I didn't immediately glom onto Lady Gaga the way that I did Shirley Manson or Pink. It took constant immersion on the dance floor during a year that was superheated with club anthems for her to catch a toehold with me. Even so it wasn't until I began curiously peeling back the layers and slowly realizing how self constructed she was that I started down the road to becoming a Little Monster. The Rolling Stone interview was when my adoration reached critical mass. Perhaps bits and pieces of it had to do with her elucidation of her origins, intent, and dialectic but it was the revelation that she is good friends with Marilyn Manson that changed everything for me. Suddenly it all slid into focus and I realized that she is in many ways the Anti-Christ Pop Star. The aesthetic similarities between her current oeuvre and Manson's Mechanical Animals phase didn't begin to surface overtly until the premiere of the Paparazzi video and has only just barely seen it's most dizzying heights with the release of the Fame Monster. Compare the videos for Bad Romance and The Dope Show if you're still skeptical.

Real geeks, the crazy visionary ones who sat in the bleachers pining for adoration and understanding of the seemingly tyrannical masses did sit in the bleachers and probably at one point or another wore glasses and stared out the window. But they never, ever let their drama stay that small. It took on truly cosmic proportions that transformed them into avatars of their dreams, nightmares, and insecurities. They built new identities, new mythologies in their little dark corners. Strapping on a pair of frames and doing your best to look meek doesn't make you an outsider, it doesn't validate you as an artist. It just outs you as a cynical predator, or a stooge for cynical predators looking to make money off teenage malaise.

I'm sure that there are people out there that are worried that there are millions of little budding maladroits out there being hoodwinked by Taylor Swift's driving in cars while crying about boys who look like sunshine at two in the morning. The real maladroits are the ones crouching in corners cursing her attempts at co-opting their suffering while the truly wretched self styled Bellas wander through life listlessly waiting for their Edwards to appear. Probably while driving in a truck while crying at two in the morning. Taylor Swift is the kind of thing that conservative parents foist on their children when they catch them with purloined copies of The Fame Monster. It's a sad state of affairs that leads to inventions like the artificial hymen, but there are now and always will be dark forces trying to hold us back. Taylor Swift might be getting her moment in the sun right now, but it really seems that the culture is not primed to be wrapped up in a regressive throwback response to the excesses of the teen idols of Five Years Ago. MTV can hand out statues to whoever they want, it won't change the fact that the people spoke long before Kanye West rushed the stage; Lady Gaga is the biggest thing to happen to pop since Madonna and she isn't going anywhere anytime soon, and she's there precisely because she's a freak. Welcome to 2010, it's a beautiful time to be a Little Monster.

I've got 99 Problems but the Illuminati ain't one

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

I have the tendency to ask people this one rhetorical question; “You know what I hate?” The problem is that question never comes off as rhetorical because I hate a lot of things and people actually want to guess what’s bugging me this time even though it’s usually something brand new when I say that. I might even start a new tag called “TIH” or “things I hate” in long form. In a tag cloud it would be the size of your face.

I’m pretty sure in that last entry I meant to talk about the decontextualization of imagery in the information age, but it got lost in the shuffle of Everything I Wrote in the Last Five Years. In a certain way, the Internet experience is frequently one where people take slices of non-native media and either present them naked of their original context or present them in a new context that reconfigures their meaning. Typically this phenomenon spawns “memes” which result in “lulz.” But it also has to do with what I was talking about in reference to Fight Club where people actively refuse to look beneath the surface of the act being presented or write off the symbolic as being arbitrary. In recent years, the word “random” has been repurposed to refer to anything allegorical, symbolic, or surreal that the speaker cannot account for or understand without further investigation which is not likely to be forthcoming. It’s a close relative to “tl;dr.”

Disastrously, a second phenomenon has risen into prominence on around the same timeline that is perhaps even more insidious, although occasionally useful for clever, subversive minds such as my own. I don’t have a neologism for it yet, but it will likely involve an unsubtle reference to Dan Brown. The way it works is that someone of at least and usually not much more than average intelligence makes a ridiculous postulation somewhere on the Internet that seems legitimate because they cited a few sources that look like they could be credible because they got printed somewhere off the Internet on actual paper with a solid binding. The most well known incidents include that one time that Dan Brown stole a bunch of half baked conspiracy theories and joined them together with a few action verbs and called it a novel and a rather bizarre and quickly forgotten flash video about how google and amazon were going to take over the world with friendster being the lynchpin of their awesome scheme. No, I did not make up the word friendster, someone actually owns a copyright on it and allegedly had a service by that name at some indeterminate point in the past.

I don’t mind laughing about people who buy into idiotic conspiracy theories, but what I do mind is people who use lazy scholarship and selective application of it to poison the well for those of us who are actually in it to win it, especially when it comes to so called occult analyses of pop culture. I’m no slouch when it comes to this shit. Today I’m calling out “The Vigilant Citizen” because they’ve caught press not only from my favourite screwball corner of the net- Coilhouse- but The Huffington Post on a slow news day for their kooky suggestions that everyone from Lady Gaga to Jay-Z are fronting for the Illuminati. You know guys, I read the Illuminatus! trilogy too. It was diverting and an interesting variation on Catch-22, but it’s derivatives like The Invisibles really showed it up. Stop fronting like you’re legit when you’re tilting at windmills like a motherfucker while I break it down like an instructional Ikea video on rewind.

First of all. There is no such thing as a “semi-subliminal.” Either you’re subliminal or you are not. Next up, occult symbolism does not work like “that kinda sorta looks a bit like that, so it must not only mean that but it’s also a perfectly functioning symbol.” Symbols are charged images that point the way to powerful concepts. You don’t half ass it in the occult, especially if you’re biting from the OTO, which is one rigid fucking organization no matter what kind of dirt old man Crowley was up to back in the day. Which doesn’t really explain how Satanism, the OTO, the Illuminati, and the Knights Templar all come together into one ur-group. I’m fairly certain that both the Illuminatus! trilogy and Foucault’s Pendulum are both found in the fiction section of your local library. The whole thing about the spontaneous manifestation of the ur-group in Foucault’s Pendulum was an extended shout out from Umberto Eco to his hero Jorge Luis Borges who wrote some pretty nifty shit about the interplay between fiction and reality, the creator and the created. It was not an expose of the secret chiefs of Lemuria or wherever.

As far as that skull in the video goes, it’s fairly simple. For the Love of God is the world’s most expensive piece of artwork, the product of a cynical ploy by alleged artist Damian Hirst. When art critics referred to it as the kind of thing that only a third world dictator would want to own, the hip hop world seized on it. One of 50 Cent’s video games was all about murdering a country full of Arabs to get it back. I’m sure there’s some stealthy narrative in there about how Fiddy is actually one of the Merovingians or something. Look how easy that was. Anyway, pouring a viscous black liquid over it has nothing to do with drinking blood out of a skull, especially since there is no drinking of anything in the video. Essentially, it’s just HOVA stunting. He’s telling you that he’s so far ahead of the game that he can trash the world’s most expensive art without blinking. In fact, in that video, and at least one other for a Blueprint 3 single feature him trashing and insulting traditional symbols of wealth either as a measure of how wealthy he is or as a way of disassociating himself with what he sees as juvenile street culture in favour of a more mature and sophisticated vision of wealth. Kind of when Denzel threw the pimp coat in the fire then went skeet shooting in a really naff jacket with elbow patches in American Gangster.

The whole video is about Jay-Z abandoning the common tropes of gangster rap and going “onto the next one,” which is clearly inspired by high fashion. An institution well known for shallow and frequently less than accurate appropriations of various cultural symbols. Dragging The Crow and The Dark Knight into the mess was just goddamn stupid. I mean seriously, Heath Ledger was not wearing skull make up in that movie. It was a sinister interpretation of classic clown face paint. “Deeply occult” my ass. A title riffing off Saint John of the Cross with a central theme evocative of gnosticism and Frederick Nietzsche does not qualify as “deeply occult.” Kenneth Anger films are “deeply occult.” Asshole.

As for The Crow, gangsters the world over are obsessed with it for the simple reason that it looks slick and they typically come from places where they do not expect to live past the age of around twenty five. These two clearly tamed and non threatening death figures, especially the one that keeps fucking up his make up, represent Jay-Z’s triumph over death if it represents anything at all. It also suggests that the halo is telegraphing that he’s reached the status of being a hip hop saint, a position he has confirmed numerous times from The Black Album to the present by placing himself in the exclusive company of the Notorious BIG and Tupac Shakur.

Here’s how it breaks down. Symbols do not have occult power on their own, removed of context. They only function in a magical capacity when manipulated as a part of a ritual made irrelevant by the fact that HOVA himself is never seen in the video to be taking part in any of the ritual acts that the imagery is supposedly referring to. If you want to know why he puts that creepy pyramid you see on money on his clothing line, then go read The Secret. It’s called The Law of Attraction and it’s about as secret as the fact that The White Stripes are not a brother-sister duo.

Adios. I’m- wait for it- On To The Next One.

Five Years, One Post

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

I talk about altered states of consciousness a lot, but it’s not all that often that I really dig in and talk about the mechanics of it or the magical perspective on it. I hate to really rehash what smarter, more experienced magicians have elucidated elsewhere so I’ll be brief here. One of the underpinnings of the school of thought generally referred to as postmodern magic (whose most famous iteration is probably my native Chaos Magic) is the concept of gnosis as a kind of magical fissile material. Traditional magic uses ritual to raise energy to apply towards whatever change the magician is trying to effect. You see that principle in pop culture whenever someone say sacrifices a person or an animal to achieve a specific end like Low Shoulder attempting to sacrifice Jennifer in Jennifer’s Body, or the latin incantations in the Harry Potter world.

English artist Austin Osman Spare however, developed a highly influential paradigm that hinged on his understanding of the relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind. He basically posited that in order to achieve your goal, you have to interrupt normal consciousness and embed the desire in the unconscious. Variations on this theme crop up frequently in the contemporary new age movement and seems to have achieved some measure of validation in the murkiest depths of theoretical quantum physics (more like hypothetical quantum physics, but i digress), but it’s the derivative of Spare’s work that post modern magic pioneers in the burgeoning UK scene in the eighties employed that is of interest here.

In order to achieve the necessary interruption of conscious thought necessary to fire the desired intent into the subconscious, authors such as Peter J Carroll and Phil Hine advocate the achievement of altered states of consciousness achieved by dancing, ingestion of certain drugs, intense fear, fatigue, orgasm, meditation and other such activities. In my five years of sporadic use of this paradigm, I’ve come to look at extreme emotion and altered states of consciousness as not being the products of certain thought processes or the arbitrary results of related stimulus, but as tools that can be manipulated and applied towards a number of effects in both magical and more prosaic pursuits which has lead me down some very interesting trains of thought as a writer and nascent film critic.

Almost every day I’m in a venue where not just the merits of individual films (which we can broaden to really include all narrative) are debated, but the merits of different critical paradigms as well. It’s really soggy earth that you tread on when you start trying to define what objective metrics you have at your disposal in judging something as mercurial and divisive as film. There is one objective metric that cuts across all art though, and that metric is emotion.

Discussion of The Notebook for example, will always skew towards it’s ability to make the audience cry to the point where it will almost be inevitably classified as having been engineered specifically to make the audience cry just as deliberately as the Jackass franchise was engineered to provoke unease and disgust. It’s hardly a mystery or a scandal that filmmakers from screenwriters through to producers, directors, actors, and art directors make a great many of their creative decisions based on the expected emotional response of the audience, sometimes to the exclusion of all other considerations. The sociologist and psychologist are drawn to questioning why we are drawn to these communal evocations of emotion. The magician (and the politician) are drawn to pondering to what ends the emotions evoked (or energy raised, to use the ritual magic vernacular) can be applied.

Basically, most films without an overt political or religious agenda that are engineered to provoke a specific (and usually intense) emotional response seen from a magical perspective are spells lacking a purpose. Equations lacking a result. You could of course posit that it’s all one big money spell, but I want to narrow the scope here to films that were produced with the overriding goal of producing an extreme emotional response, to the exclusion of profit. Generally speaking, writers and directors considered to be at the top of their craft working in the horror genre for example are enjoying the fact that they are making money at what they do but their passion lies in scaring or disturbing their audience. Money is not the primary artistic (which is interchangeable with magical) goal in terms of the phenomenon I want to explore.

I first found the outer edges of this territory when I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and happened upon a specific passage that I’ve come back to countless times in my writing. In a conventional three act screenplay it’s what’s called “plot point two,” the point at which the protagonist is at his lowest point and he is forced to- in the words of Zombieland’s Tallahassee- “nut up or shut up.” The dark night of the soul (which is the wordplay at the heart of that one movie’s title) in a microcosm.

In an uncharacteristically poetic moment, Hunter describes being able to see the high water mark of the zeitgeist of the 1960s and goes on to explain the root of it’s failure, which in his estimation (and a notion shared by many other observers), was that success was implied, assured. In terms approaching the occult he states that the general attitude was that their energy would simply prevail. My head was in a very strange place when I originally read the passage as around the same time I had been reading about the ill fated free concert at Altamonte, an essay on the occult potential inherent in raves, and The Invisibles among other things, and slowly a picture started to sew itself together in my head.

I wondered- from a magical perspective- about Woodstock as a mass ritual given the constant refrain of energy, consciousness raising, and vague occult principles surrounding it. The problem- as Hunter pointed out- wasn’t that there was a lack of energy raised, it was the lack of a direction for it. An equation without a result. An incomplete spell. Interestingly enough, Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea tapped into that principle in the climax of their Illuminatus! trilogy, resulting in an apocalyptic struggle for control of the energy raised between the forces of absolute control and absolute chaos.

Without delving too far into occult theories of etheric energies, we can still say that emotional responses can be used to inform and contextualize rational thought, sometimes to the point of overthrowing reason. In the context of film, the easiest example is the religious fervor whipped up by Passion of the Christ or the polarizing political effect of Michael Moore’s filmography.

Violence in film is an interestingly complicated issue though. You can’t simply wield it like a club and expect to get a uniform, lazer like response directed at the target of your choice. Prior to the release of Saving Private Ryan, the Second World War- and the Normandy invasion in specific- was a vague specter in the collective unconscious. It was a valiant victory far away from the visceral horror of Vietnam until Spielberg left the most indelible mark on cinematic violence since The Wild Bunch. At the time of production, he mused that it had been rather difficult to capture a level of violence that exceeded what contemporary audiences were used to processing without trouble. In a particularly inspired move, he used video (rather than film) cameras on an unprecedented scale in the opening invasion sequence to capture the invasion from a disarming first person perspective. It went on to become possibly the most critically lauded war film in history.

Less than ten years later, Fight Club was vilified in the mass media ostensibly because it celebrated violence, when in reality it was a deeply misunderstood film that ruthlessly criticized the rapid desensitization of western audiences to glamorized violence in film by using the very same techniques as Spielberg to portray young men so lost that they had to resort to violence in order to feel something genuine. It was further criticized for intentionally and deeply disturbing audiences with it’s portrayal of violence, much like what Spielberg was celebrated for but quite unlike the widespread praise lavished on The Exorcist for driving audiences to flee theaters if they were able to escape them before fainting, with no apparent justification or reasoning behind the offending content than to produce that exact response.

What I’ve come to recognize about violence in film is that you are essentially free to provoke as extreme an emotional response to it as you want as long as the content and it’s context do not provoke uncomfortable questions in the social and political power structure. Over the past year, I’ve explored film to a depth and breadth far surpassing anything I’ve ever been capable of before and I’ve run across what seems like an ever increasing amount of extreme content in film from a whole host of countries ranging from Japan (Ichi The Killer, Audition) to France (Martyrs, Irreversible), Russia (Cargo 200), and Sweden (Millennium The Film).

I wouldn’t say that I’m drawn to that kind of content, but I’ve long been curious about it and why it’s there. I don’t have any blanket answers, but I can safely say that the one that got me thinking the most was oddly enough Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects. Far from being a cartoonish slaughterfest like it’s predecessor House of a Thousand Corpses, it was one of the decade’s most haunting and well constructed films that balanced the inhuman sadism of it’s protagonists with jarring scenes of innocent joy and familial love. It wasn’t so much that people who could cut a man’s face off and force his wife to wear it like a mask could then drive off down the road eating ice cream; it was that they seemed completely well adjusted and even endearing while arguing about the ice cream.
Again, and by complete admission by Zombie himself, The Devil’s Rejects is essentially an answerless equation. He created a portrait of extreme villainy so deft in it’s subtle strokes that it’s lack of statement or agenda becomes almost maddening. It did get me thinking though. About how if I could learn how to create something that unsettling and aim it in the right direction, it could take a kneecap off. Until it got that whole ball of yarn unrolling- which brought together the threads of all the most persistent topics I’ve covered in the five years I’ve been throwing words at the Internet- I didn’t really have a coherent answer for why I should elect to dig as deep as I could into disturbing content in my narratives as I was considering. It wasn’t so much that I was toying with arbitrary violence, but that I was unsure what the final point might be that would vindicate it’s usage until I was contemplating the brutal efficacy of The Devil’s Rejects and how envious I was of Zombie’s ability to make the audience feel something that intensely and arguably did it most effectively in a sequence in which not a single drop of blood was spilled. Emotion, especially extreme emotion- as I reminded myself- is a tool and in this case a tool that I could use like a whetstone to sharpen my narrative’s dialectic into a knife point.

New Name, Same Great Taste

2010-01-28T13:21:00.001-08:00

You know what I love the most about these so called Tea Bag Conservatives? They claim to be some kind of brand new arch conservative that is going to save the country when in reality, the Tea Bag Way essentially works out to mean "study the excesses and ludicrous missteps of the ordinary neo-cons, then out do it!" Witness Republican congressional candidate Joe Walsh react petulantly for coming under legal attack from the Eagles' Joe Walsh for doing the same thing John McCain repeatedly got in trouble for during his presidential campaign. Of course Tea Bag Joe Walsh is blaming "Hollywood liberals" for attacking his "right to parody" for playing The Eagles' song without permission in his campaign ad. Because if you play it yourself, it's not theft; it's parody. These are the people who flock to Glenn Beck and claim some arcane right to rule the United States through a selective, contradictory reading of it's history.

News round-up 012810

2010-01-28T04:01:00.000-08:00

- Jimmy Choo wears heels to the club. But are they his design?
- Hulk Hogan claims to have fought in PRIDE. Twenty years before it existed.
- JCVD signs up for a real kickboxing match against an Olympian to hype his new movie.
- The psychic from Poltergeist died. Now you've only got those assholes from Supernatural to protect you.
- A Tesco in Cardiff has banned shopping in sleep wear. Welsh sleepwalkers are naturally incensed at the decision.

Uncle Hugh

2010-01-28T03:28:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, Playboy is hilarious. Especially when they come off as that uncle of yours who tries to stay hip and with it, yet are perpetually a week behind everyone else. Courtney Cruz and her girls doing a Star Wars burlesque show (NSFW) was great water cooler material. When everyone's favourite San Francisco bar owner posted it ten days previous. Or accidentally discovering ur-fetish model Apnea through Tumblr (still NSFW) years after she rose to prominence at Suicide Girls and her acrimonious departure was splashed from one end of the net to the other. What's most funny about it is a feature on the Playboy site featuring precisely the kind of model they've ignored on the magazine side of things for ages. I guess the moral of the story is that you can't rely on Playboy to stay current on anything in the crazy world of naked women that doesn't involve Lindsay Lohan.

Whip It

2010-01-23T03:55:00.000-08:00

It's pretty rare that you get a movie whose ultimate charms lurk far below the surface and are realized several hours after viewing at the soonest, or at least that's what it's been feeling like. Most big movies from this year really wore not just their log lines, but their entire heart and soul on their sleeves, and that goes just as much for Up In The Air as it does Inglorious Basterds or District 9. Against all odds, Whip It is the film that carries it off.

At first it rolls up to you as the John Hughes formula dolled up in the Fuck Off charm of the Suicide Girl roller derby fantasy, an uncomfortable but compelling shotgun wedding of classic teen movie tropes and the edgy underworld of forbidden female aggression represented by the roller derby circuit. We've seen the idea before; teenage girl eager to rebel against mother signs up for something that she is not old enough to do, finds out that she is awesome at it and gets all the respect she ever dreamed of until she gets found out by her mom which causes act three falling out and a heartwarming resolution at the climax. I'm not going to lie, all of that happens in Whip It, and you will probably be able to guess when it is coming.

But the first thing that really separates Whip It from the rest of it's genre is the strength that the roller derby angle gives the entire narrative. Bliss isn't out there moonlighting as a fashion designer or being a model or a figure skater or something, she's getting the crap beat out of her learning to assert herself as a woman in a sport that is somewhere half way between fight club and ice hockey. It's promoting a very different kind of self image that expands beyond the flat track and even learning to party like a rock star, it's about engendering a physical and social independence that extends to all facets of life. You get the obvious moment where Bliss hipchecks the school bully off a railing, but there's far more rewarding scenes to be had such as her proud father proudly displaying a sign with her team name and number on their front lawn to show up his neighbour's similar posting of his sons' football accomplishments, but Whip It shines best in it's understated romantic subplot.

It's almost compulsory that a film in this genre have a romantic subplot, but the script deftly avoids what would have otherwise sold out the film's entire dialectic. Bliss' pursuit of an indie rocker isn't the objective, inspiration, or purpose of her joining the Hurl Scouts as it would have been in the John Hughes formula, it's a well deserved fringe benefit that frequently veers towards cliche land at several points but veers out just in time at every turn. Whip It's romantic subplot demands mention because of how refreshing it is in a scene dominated by insincere patriarchal nonsense peddled by the likes of Twilight.

I'm not much of a fan of sports movies, but then most sports are not roller derby. Unsurprisingly I first ran across it in it's current feminist reclamation fueled incarnation at a tattoo convention and declared it to be brilliant. It seems to carry with it that same unique cachet that the UFC has, that it's unpolished presentation, unpredictability, and sanctioned violence lend it a unique character that speaks to the generations furthest down the alphabet more convincingly than any of it's mainstream counterparts, which Whip It preserves commendably with a complete lack of irony. Verily, the sporting elements of Whip It most resemble Slapshot complete with a pair of ultra violent side characters known as the Manson Sisters.

Far from being all stars, Bliss' team the Hurl Scouts compete convincingly for disfunctionality with the Chiefs with an eclectic cast of Generation Xers from Barrymore herself as the obnoxious stoner Smashley Simpson to Deathproof's Zoe Bell and rapper turned actress Eve with the legendary Juliette Lewis appearing as Bliss' chief rival from the nigh unbeatable Holy Rollers.

All in all Whip It is for the teen movie what Star Trek XI was for science fiction this year, the klarion call to wake up, modernize, and be awesome. It doesn't appeal to girls by exclusion and it doesn't appeal to guys by pandering. It appeals to all because it's fun, fresh, and unapologetic.

Brand Me

2010-01-23T03:30:00.000-08:00

My customers tell me I should write reviews, that I should blog. I find this to be ironically hilarious because allegedly, I do. Except that as all three of you can see, I pretty much never do. I guess sometimes I get tired of building my "brand" up again. I did it once back at Gaia and that built to the fever pitch that got me to Binary Culture, which is the gig that I really get wistful for these days, no matter how unsustainable that little bubble was.

I guess the thing is that despite you know, my reluctance to do this as often as I should, people like the things I do with words so I should give them more of my words. You've got to market /yourself/ these days is what a lot of industry people are saying right now. If you want to get your masterpiece script slash manuscript or whatever published, you have to be able to sell yourself. I remember back in like two thousand and six I was hearing out of the Engine from various indie comic book types that the publishers were wanting you to come to them with a built in audience. Have a web presence like a DA page with a legion of followers or a successful web comic or something. Now I'm hearing that the slush pile slash spec script business is starting to look the same. You've got to establish yourself, and they mean /yourself/. Producers are optioning blogs of all things, apparently.

So now comes me posting regularly and mediating on how to build an audience from scratch for the third or fourth time. Must summon clever shouty words and fling them at twitter.

Thank You For Smoking

2010-01-10T11:14:00.000-08:00

Practically since I've started working at the video store I've been trying to fill the sizable gaps in my movie watching. Apparently it shocks and confuses people that I have gaps at all, as if I project some kind of image of a movie expert. Maybe it's because I've been reading about film since before my balls dropped, or maybe it's just because I know how talk with an air of authority on the subject.

Which is probably what first attracted me to the protagonist of my latest in remedial viewing, Thank You For Smoking. Nick Naylor may be a lobbyist for Big Tobacco, but he's also man who knows how to weaponize the spoken word. In his own words "I get paid to talk. I don't have an MD or a law degree, I have a bachelor's in kicking ass and taking names." Obviously it isn't a terribly deep movie, but it certainly is clever and insightful in terms of it's discourse about what it means to be media savvy, which is the bulk of the plot.

Without ascribing any specific political context to the film- which I hadn't seriously considered until after I finished the film- it's a fairly straight forward critique of western media driven culture. What Nick shows us most convincingly is that it really doesn't matter what you're backing as long as you're able to back it effectively. If this seems somehow cynical, you've really got to wonder where the cynicism is coming from. Is it Nick, who gleefully works the system to his advantage, or is it the system itself and our willing participation in it which is built with the expressed purpose of being manipulated by Nick and his cohorts? Interestingly enough, in the DVD extras director Jason Reitman mentions being decried by an audience member at a Berkley screening for not attacking the corporations and tobacco companies within the film, for which she was widely booed.

Reitman was more surprised that she seemed to be the one dissenting voice in the audience of what he described as being a libertarian minded film. It's a fairly widespread problem, that young film audiences since the sixties- and Canadian audiences in general- not only demand a clearly liberal world view in their films, they will complain loudly in it's absence. I'm not conservative in any of my politics in the least, but it's counterproductive and narrow minded to expect to be mollycoddled by facile political parables. Keep watching guilt ridden latter day science fiction schmaltz like Avatar and you'll start to think that the world is changing around your torpid rear end, that because you're seeing some unrealistic strawman fueled whinge fest on the big screen it must mean that's what's going on in the halls of power.

One of the most basic attributes and powers of fiction is the potential to represent a multiplicity of concerns and perspectives, the very principle which totalitarian concerns assault first. The greatest strength of Thank You For Smoking is that it presents a world with no easy answers in which the binary forces of opposition at work look disturbingly similar when you hold them up to a magnifying glass. Perhaps Nick is only putting on airs of requesting that the American people be able to retain an admittedly dangerous amount of liberty and self determination, but then isn't the Senator putting on airs of acting in the best interest of the public for political capital while accepting the money and influence of people just like Nick catering to other, potentially just as dangerous concerns?

Say what you will, but when his son grows up he'll be making his own decisions on his own terms because he learned to think for himself from the best. Whether he buys that pack of cigarettes or not is rather moot.

The Hurt Locker

2010-01-10T07:29:00.000-08:00

If I asked you how many bombs you've seen diffused on film and television in your life time, I'm sure you wouldn't have an answer, it's incalculable. A better question would be to ask when the last time you genuinely felt like the result was in question, that you were less than certain that the bomb would be diffused and the hero walk away unscathed. I'm pretty sure that for me it was X-Files: Fight the Future, but that's because the guy who sat in front of the bomb in the pop machine had pretty much no intention of stopping the bomb whatsoever.

That principle is probably the key to figuring out the success of The Hurt Locker, a film that despite being about the biggest action movie cliche in history, is practically guaranteed a nomination for Best Picture at the Academy Awards and jockeying for the top spot on end of the year lists with the likes of Inglorious Basterds, Avatar, and Up in the Air.

I remember quite clearly the moment I first got excited about The Hurt Locker, back when it's trailer debuted over at Apple. It wasn't that they were trying to defuse bombs, or that they were doing it in Iraq. It was that shot of the dust and debris on the roof of a car being flung into the air from the shockwave of a blast. You can't describe the way that Kathryn Bigelow and her DP Barry Ackroyd capture an explosion, it's shockwave, and how they edit them together but it creates an intensely unique viewing experience. Not only does it bring you into much more intimate contact than anything since Blackhawk Down and perhaps even before that if ever, it creates- or at least for me- a bizarre ambivalence. Every time Sgt. James and his team got called out to an incident, I wanted them back behind the wire safely at the end of it, but at the same time I would think good goddamn, I want another one of those explosions.

Watching Jeremy Renner's cavalier Sgt. James at work and you'd have to think he'd agree with you and at times without the qualifier of making it back behind the wire in one piece. Sgt. James is routinely described by reviewers and even director Kathryn Bigelow as being addicted to combat, and when he first appears flouting all the procedure and protocol of his (very dead) predecessor the label seems all too accurate, but as the film progresses it seemed clear to me that he wasn't out there to push himself as close to death as he could or to feel a spike of adrenaline, but to find a purpose, to see life staring back at him in the face of death. He certainly doesn't see it in the cereal aisle at the grocery store back home.

While The Hurt Locker is an electrifyingly tense film that goes well beyond the specter of a hidden bomb to stop the audience's breath in nearly every scene, it feels entirely sordid and wrongheaded to use the kind of superlative nonsense usually reserved for spectacle driven farces like G.I. Joe that I've seen floated around. Certainly the tension and suspense in The Hurt Locker is equal to anything Inglorious Basterds or Paranormal Activity had to offer, but it's in service to something far more profound, recalling Kurosawa in it's deft touches (as does Inglorious Basterds, but that's beside the point).

Francis Ford Coppola famously claimed "Apocalypse Now isn't about Vietnam, it is Vietnam." Kathryn Bigelow lacks the hubris necessary for such a statement, but I'm comfortable in saying that in so far as a film could capture the experience- the nature of a particular conflict- The Hurt Locker does just that, and on a far more visceral, literal level than Coppola's masterpiece.

Fuck Flying Cars

2009-11-10T03:26:00.000-08:00

Last night I read an interview with Bon Jovi where he says- tongue planted firmly in cheek- that the plan he came up with for his band while working in a women's shoe store in his home state of New Jersey only took him as far as the millennium, at which point he would be thirty eight and driving a flying car. We still have this notion somewhere that the future didn't happen, that the (more outlandish) speculations of the first half of the 20th century didn't manifest in the second half. Even in the sixties the concept of human history reaching two thousand years by the Gregorian count seemed so far off that it was a blank canvas to project whatever astounding technocracy they could dream up onto.

It usually comes around to the Jetsons where you've got the wholesome nuclear family with the stay at home mom who lives a quiet life of self indulgence and the husband with a manufacturing job, something not much less blue collar than Fred Flinstone but without the need for any real physical exertion. Nothing there really panned out, and I'm not talking about the flying cars or the pill for dinner. Besides America not being that white anymore by any definition, the atom that is the nuclear family was split decades ago, Mom's been venturing outside the house for work, and America's manufacturing base fled East long ago. There's nothing really recognizable to 21st century goggles in the Jetsons, which shouldn't be all that surprising given that particular vision of the American family drove Willy Loman over a bridge in a fast moving car.

Meanwhile the darker, some would say more paranoid visions of the future started assembling themselves in front of our eyes. Why is that? Why is it that more of the things we feared from the future came true than the things we wanted? Well, the Jetsons was always just bullshit meant to make people feel comfortable in a status quo that never had any hope at sustainability under the social, political, and even environmental pressures that were already bombarding it. That fixation on the American Dream is the currency that politicians, corporations, and myriad other interests used to buy our present right out from under us in exchange for the promise of a future no one could reasonably expect. The biggest example of this is the steady unraveling of sanity in the real estate industry that allowed credit to balloon to the point that all it took to shred the world's most powerful economy and bring the entire world down with it was a run on a single company using an obscure and highly unethical stock trading technique.

Thanks to all that, the American Dream is dormant if not dead altogether and it's not really something that we should be standing around mourning either. It was artificial and chasing it as far and as hard as we have made us vulnerable, made us weak. It's been pretty easy since this whole mess started to stand there and point at people who took these insane sub-prime mortgages as being weak or stupid or deserving of their fate. It's fair enough to say that they made some short sighted decisions because they wanted the Jetsons life, but the problem is that life has been inculcated in us as being the final destination and the holy grail since our ability to hear was developed in the womb.

Some time between The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S Thompson defined the wider context for his prose to be the search for the American Dream, which turned out to be a very ill defined journey. I'm not entirely certain if that was Thompson's fault due to his aimless meandering style or because many of the basic assumptions of what America was and what it wanted were shattering under the weight of the social upheaval of the 1960s. The idea of wanting to pursue any kind of straight, ordinary existence after having seen how the other half were attempting to live- most importantly during his time in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco- became ridiculous and farsical to him even as he watched the ebb tide of the Summer of Love from a roadside bar in Nevada. What he did correctly observe as early as that horrible epiphany in Nevada that bisected his most famous outing, was that there had been no discernable sustainable alternative to the American Dream presented by any of the social pioneers of the age of aquarius.

When Nixon was elected President, Thompson and many others took that as the end of the Summer of Love or whatever it is you want to call that brief, heady trip into the unknown. Perhaps it was the final bleeding out of the killing stroke it received at Altamont, but whatever it meant for the past it was taken as a sign of things to come. With Nixon at the helm, things would get back to "normal," back on track to that Jetsons future that is frequently called Manifest Destiny. That's what the Republicans of the day would tell you that they stood for, this return to an idlylic tranditional world of family values. It wouldn't have been a disaster either if that's what the actual agenda was. Instead, Nixon was forging the ties with China that would let successive presidents- culminating in Clinton- get cracking on builing that trade deficit and ship our manufacturing base overseas. Apparently that and bombing countries like Cambodia into the stone age were integral parts of assuring us a Jetsons future.

The whole apple pie and flying cars was never really a projection of the future. It's what politicians and various corporate concerns use to put the customer at ease. When we talk about the lack of flying cars in the 21st century, it isn't an honest disappointment that cars still have wheels. It's the disappointment that no one drove us into a bright sparkly future where things make more sense, are easier, and familiar. It's the anger and bafflement of being born into The Matrix and suddenly being unplugged. We were told that it was going to be better, instead it's a broken Philip K Dick hole. But when the discource of how bad things are happens, it isn't happening miles under the Earth in a spit and bailing wire post apocalyptic commune. It's happening on Twitter. It's being tweeted about from an iPhone.

It seems a bit incongruous, that. Talking about how Rome is in flames from a device that with a few smart taps of your fingers on a smooth buttonless surface will then carry that signal across the goddamn globe. When Rome burned, they didn't have toilets that flushed. I'm not saying that the modern world isn't in trouble, I'm not going to disagree with Bruce Sterling's assertion that we're entering an age of what he calls Gothic High Tech. What I will say though is that the sooner we abandon the American Dream, the sooner we can actually start building a future we want to live in. When I'm feeling more focused I might try to lay out why exactly I feel like most of the trouble we're in now has to do with clinging to the American Dream despite the fact that it disappeared somewhere around the Second World War. If it was a book I'd call it Hunter's Wake.

X Files 1.2 "Deep Throat"

2009-11-05T02:15:00.000-08:00

Not one hell of a lot to say about the second episode beyond the fact that I feel they jumped the gun by giving the viewer undeniable evidence that the government has UFOs and they'll do whatever they can to protect them. I would have liked to see the show play a bit more with the ambiguity of the situation instead of giving Mulder credibility right off the bat. Put it into the mix a couple episodes later and it would have been great, I think the second episode would have been better used for the first MOTW (monster of the week) episode so as not to lead the audience to the conclusion that the show is just a government conspiracy/UFO show.

Other than that it was a fun episode with a great pre-Buffy cameo by Seth Green, (which establishes a two degree separation between Twin Peaks and Buffy) and the very first official Scully-ditch.

The X-Files: Pilot

2009-10-20T03:52:00.000-07:00

As with most of my adventures in narrative since 2005 my re-introduction to The X Files has been fairly serendipitous, mostly owing to the fact that I am nearly finished it's immediate predecessor Twin Peaks which ended two years before the pilot of The X Files aired. What makes Twin Peaks so significant to the X Files is that despite it's spiral into oblivion into the second season, David Lynch's first foray into television broke a great deal of ground in terms of what mainstream television audiences considered compelling as well as how malleable the standard genres of television truly are.

One hypothesis that I want to explore during the course of my X Files viewing is that the continued presence and guidance by series creator Chris Carpenter is what ultimately not only kept the series from spiraling out of control but allowed it to reach a point where it not only grew out of the fertile soil left behind by Twin Peaks, but flourished to create an even more enduring and influential series.

My first thought in approaching the pilot- which I did not originally see in 1993, but as a re-run somewhere in the late nineties after having seen several other episodes- was to make a mental note of how it compares to other Fox pilots over the intervening years; most notably Fringe, Firefly, Dollhouse, and Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Curiously there are no motorcycles present and the pilot was in fact aired first. But seriously it appears to be uncharacteristically untrammeled, which is seriously welcome considering my current familiarity with the kind of interference Fox is famous for saddling Joss Whedon with.

Curiously the pilot suggests to us that Scully is to be the protagonist (which had been Carter's original intent) but from the moment that we are introduced to "Spooky" Fox Mulder onwards, the episode takes place firmly in his world. While I felt pounded over the head by the initial cascade of spooky things that happen to Mulder and Scully before they even reach the Oregon town where their case is based and many of the details of the case reached a bit too far and presented this huge orgy of bizarre things from apes with metal things up their noses in coffins where there should be people to strange scars and time distortion, it still did a fantastic job of setting the tone for the series, establish the dynamic between Mulder and Scully, and clearly establish just what the series was going to be.

I can understand Marty's perspective that they made it a little too clear what the conspiracy was from the very beginning, but approaching it from my perspective of having just finished Twin Peaks, I think it was fairly important that they clearly establish that fact. I knew going in what Twin Peaks was going to be; that it was going to be really strange and that I would have to put my David Lynch hat on. The problem with that is of course that the original audience of Twin Peaks did not have the benefit of having seen Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, or Inland Empire and so the actual basis for what was happening in terms of Bob, the owls, and the other more esoteric elements were a complete surprise to the audience and something that contributed to it's downfall. Of course at this point we know that it's a government conspiracy. What we do not know is if there are real aliens involved, what they want, what the government has to do with it, and what the government's goals are which leaves us at about the same place that the Fringe pilot did in that we knew that there was a company called Massive Dynamic with connections to the DHS that run even deeper than Olivia's.

Continue the comparison between those two shows and you can see how much better and clearer we can see the protagonists in the X Files. Olivia is curious, she wants to understand why John Scott died and what he was up to. Well that's just dandy. With Mulder we have this life long obsession driven by his sister's abduction (that goes on to become central to the most electrifying revelations in the entire series) and this very sinister game that the FBI appears to be playing with one of it's own agents. Why does it make any sense to task Scully- who is suggested to be overqualified for her role at the FBI within the first five minutes of the pilot- with observing and assisting what appears to be a waste of departmental resources? We still have no idea who the factions in play are and how many there are.

Overall, it really is one of the best pilots I've ever seen but The Wire still takes the gold medal.

Jennifer's Body

2009-10-08T02:04:00.000-07:00

Question: How do you market a subversive feminist indie horror-comedy from an academy award winning screenwriter?
Answer: You package it as an exploitation flick and only release footage of Megan Fox being slutty.

That's how the geniuses at Fox seem to operate anyway. Forget the fact that we just got through the media backlash against Megan Fox brought on by Paramount's carpet bombing publicity for Transformers 2, and just plaster her image everywhere. There's no way that could fail, right? Apparently that tactic failed so terribly that people think I'm making a dumbass joke when I tell them it's actually a great movie. Well Megan Fox's acting is fairly flat and Diablo Cody still needs to transition as a writer who delivers great short stories into someone who can deliver nuanced character studies that add dramatic weight to her unique insights and razor sharp comedic instincts, but it's still an indispensible slice of pop that turns the genre on it's ear.

Ever notice how in the oh so cleverly postmodern Scream franchise- whose killer app is discussion and deconstruction of the cliches of the genre it resides in- never bothers to question why most of the victims are women, that they exploit female weakeness, and punish them for stepping outside the bounds of conventional morality? I won't hold it against you if you didn't, because the point of Scream was a vindication, a justification for the morbidly self indulgent and systematically misogynist brand of film it represents.

There's no tedious metafiction to be found in Jennifer's Body, instead Cody's screenplay wisely leaps forward to show us what it looks like when the sexual predator is a woman preying on the stereotypical weaknesses and insecurities of teenage boys (primarily their sexual appetite), shining a very bright and uncomfortable light on the tropes that most mainstream audiences have become desensitized to over the course of three decades of screaming, bleeding teenage girls. It's viciously, gleefully exploitative in a way that is sure to offend and anger a lot of male viewers and makes no apologies for it.

What is probably most interesting and unique about Jennifer's Body isn't it's insights and commentaries on teenage sexuality or high school politics but Cody's manifesto of shit kicking take no prisoners feminism. Amanda Siefried's "Needy" transforms from spineless wallflower into a plucky self assured vigilante who refuses to appeal to male authority or muscle for help in a way that few contemporary teenage girl protagonists do. When the system, conventional morality and rule of law fail her Needy doesn't give in or let justice slip through her fingers. She rolls up her sleeves and gets shit done no matter what the personal cost. Perhaps it's fitting that the perpetually overshadowed and underestimated protagonist got completely lost in the signal to noise conflict between Jennifer's Body the film and it's marketing, the ultimate poetic justice in a film set in a world that is never fair and frequently punishes the unconventional.

I could talk some more about the film's feminist dialectic, Jennifer's character arc and her willing victimization or what the conflict between Needy and Jennifer has to say about the confrontation between sensible emotionally honest sex positive feminity and "female chauvenism," but instead I'm going to tell you to go out and buy a ticket. This movie needs you, and needs you badly if what it has to say is ever going to make any impact. It's smart, funny, hip, and will speak directly to you in ways that very few movies do.

Bottle Shock

2009-09-29T03:08:00.000-07:00

Many films attempt to convey the passion, craftsmanship, and heart that are poured into the given trade or pursuit they portray but few truly succeed in transferring that passion to a debutant audience as deftly as Bottle Shock. I'm no wine buff and I'll be first to admit that I was forced to use the phone a friend life line at the liquor store in order to find a decent wine to compliment the film (I went with a Yellow Tail 2007 Chardonnay), but I was well and truly caught up in the passion of winemaking by the poignant, human, and ultimately whimsical portrayals of the founding fathers of the California wineries that transformed the industry from being centered on a single country to a truly global affair.

To shed a bit of perspective on the film and the central tasting that occurred in 1976 one need only stop by their local liquor store and take in the multiplicity of countries producing top quality wine, something that until now I took for granted. Being born most of a decade after the tasting depicted in Bottle Shock I grew up with wine enthusiast parents who as far back as I can remember have been drinking wines across four continents. I even grew up with the Nappa (and Sonoma) Valley as a house hold name, but had no idea until watching Bottle Shock that it was scarcely five years after the historic tasting that my parents travelled down to California on their honeymoon. Thus, I could end the review by simply stating that the importance of the events portrayed justify a viewing all on it's own but that would be selling the film itself extremely short.

Beyond just being a story about wine, Bottle Shock (as a video release) enters the canon of American filmmaking at an almost unprecedented time of penitence and self mortification largely brought on by the lingering ghosts of the Bush administration, and is thus a welcome breath of fresh air of what might as well be called the American equivalent of the Arthurian spirit, evoking that which is greatest about Americans; the entrepreneurial drive and almost need to take the role of the scrappy underdog challenging the established elite (see Hidalgo, The Last Samurai, Rocky, etc). It isn't a post imperial expression of American hegemony but the human and affecting tale of an uncompromising quest for legitimacy, for vindication.

What really marks Bottle Shock as being an important film in it's own right irrespective of the historical and cultural impact is that it has a heart a mile wide and a vulnerability of spirit that denies it any kind of ribcage of post modern ironic distance or Hollywood bravado. Shades of Waiting for Guffman are especially present in the unlikely, ungainly characters who make up the California wine growers vying for the attention of Alan Rickman's visiting wine guru, but the script never compromises them for a cheap laugh and instead uses stunning silent moments of dense visual texture to vindicate them through the literal fruits of their labour, most brilliantly portrayed in a quiet, subtle sequence in which Rickman's character tastes guacamole for what one is lead to believe is the first time of his life.

Rickman functions as a clever and effective foil for the eccentric but human and richly compelling performances by Chris Pine and Bill Pullman who play the real life father son wine growing team at the heart of the narrative. Pine's charm and swagger are transcendent in his breakthrough role (which he followed up with by leading JJ Abrams' Star Trek reboot as the legendary James T Kirk), balanced by Pullman's rumpled cynicism. Their dynamic, however bizarre it gets, (specifically their penchant for stepping into an outdoor boxing ring set up in the middle of the vinyard to face off against each other whenever tempers flare) is tempered by layered, organic performances that drive the core of the film and do most of the legwork in giving the viewer a reason to invest in their world and rise to fame from obscurity.

In short, Bottle Shock is a contemporary classic of American film that is unmissable for a multiplicity of reasons, but most of all because it moves beyond the cliches of so called indie cinema to return to a form that is as compelling as it is entertaining.

"Cees"

2009-09-22T02:41:00.000-07:00

I got the chance to watch Crips and Bloods: Made In America, a brilliant little known documentary chronicling the black presence in Southern California from the industrial boom at the onset of World War 2 until the present in an effort to chart the social conditions that led to the creation of the Crips and Bloods gangs whose ongoing war has lasted for decades unabated except for a brief period during and after the riots triggered by the Rodney King verdict.

Out of everything I encountered one specific line of narration has haunted me, the fact that many of the people living in the effected areas of Los Angeles have never seen the Pacific Ocean. From that basic fact arose the idea for a story that for now I'm just going to call Cees, a hip hop slang term for children that I believe I first heard in Dead Prez's Bigger Than Hip Hop. The basic plot is that two young brothers (aged somewhere between nine and twelve) living in war torn Los Angeles get it into their heads that they are going to the beach to see the ocean and nothing is going to stop them.

One thing I've noticed in practically every current narrative portrayal of abject poverty and the violence it generates in the urban US children are portrayed as not much more than victims of circumstance that more or less function as subjects of pity. I loved the fourth season of The Wire as much as anyone did, but the youth put in prominence were there to show the human cost of the breakdown of the social safety net and education system. Outside of surrealist and fantasy cinema (Pan's Labrynth, Surveillance) there hasn't been much of a report on the resilience and spirit of children in the face of adversity that crushes most adults.

What I want to create is something that is as whimsical and hopeful as it is poignant and disturbing, like the early childhood scenes of Slumdog Millionaire but with more mythic grandeur. To my protagonists in Cees, their trip to the beach- incredibly banal by the standards of most of the intended audience- carries the same mythic weight and dizzying sense of adventure as Frodo Baggins joining Gandalf or Luke Skywalker leaving Tattooine for the first time. They're crafty, canny youth who understand how to navigate the complex and dangerous jungle of their home environment albeit with the guileless naivety of youth. Stay tuned.

Aphorisms Round One

2009-09-20T02:22:00.000-07:00

1. The most radical perspective/experience in our heterosexual male dominated society is that of the feminist lesbian.

2. People complain about the fact that Quentin Tarantino brought talking about movies within movies into vogue. What's more important is that he initiated an open dialogue about the significance of pop culture in every day life as well as empower the average viewer to begin interpreting film in new ways. Consider the sequence in Inglorious Basterds where the Nazi officer guesses a description the plot of King Kong as being "the experience of the Negro in America," which is a perfectly valid and darkly comic interpretation of the film itself. In every one of his films Tarantino invites and encourages his audience to investigate and interpret film, movies, and music in new and imaginative ways.

3. There are two groups of old white men from whom the control of popular narrative in the (western) world must be taken if we are to move forward into a progressive future; the ones placed as the arbiters of what is Important and the ones who control the mediums through which new narratives are created and transmitted.

A Brief Feminist Critique of Mulan

2009-09-20T02:14:00.000-07:00

I've been getting a lot of shit lately for attacking Mulan, as if the movie is somehow "empowering" or "positive," which is probably the biggest farce I've heard in a while.

1. Mulan has to dress up like a man and pretend to be a man to be accepted as an equal among the men.
2. Mulan at no point in the film demonstrates her ability to succeed without a man. Even her little dragon mentor Mushuu is a man.
3. Mulan is never shown to be equal or superior to her male romantic interest. She is submissive to him at every turn, and returns to the typical accepted appearance and role at the conclusion of the film.

There. Fuck off, it's just as paternalistic and retrograde as The Little Mermaid, if not moreso for attempting to trick people into thinking it's somehow empowering to women.

Fringe season two news!

2009-09-18T03:30:00.000-07:00

One of the great things about working in a video store in Hollywood North is that almost every day you have people in the industry coming in to pick up movies and shows they worked on. Today I got lucky enough to talk to a guy working on the second season of Fringe (filming here in Vancouver, the first season was filmed in the US) who was renting the first season to get caught up on what happened before he joined the production.

Apparently he's one of the self described "monster guys," prosthetics specifically. I can't really convey into words how excited he was to be working on the show, that's how stoked he was. According to him they're pouring money into Fringe to the tune of what is usually spent on a feature film and the intent of season two is to go far beyond the scale of events in the first. He also said that they've been on set for up to eighteen hours when TV shows do not typically run that late (feature films frequently do).

Add in the rumour that Fox is attempting to bring Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny onto the show as a pair of famous FBI agents and you've got one hell of a production. I can't wait to finish season one and get onto the new season now!

The Elephantine Mouse in the Room

2009-09-16T02:09:00.001-07:00

One of the most important things I ever learned from Doctor Who is that humanity will never cease to surprise, and by no means is that always a positive. Until quite recently, I was dead certain that we lived in the information age where the importance of intellectual property and who owns it was very well understood. The complete lack of concern over Disney's purchase of Marvel proved otherwise. This is a pretty terrible thing, and I'm not talking about any kind of phantom fear of Daredevil having to change his name to Dareangel or anything that insipid. What we are staring down the barrel of is one singular corporate entity weilding a massive fucking chunk of the most valuable and well known intellectual property in the world. Why it's particularily frightening that Disney is that entity takes a bit of context and a history lesson of sorts.

The year is 2007, it's a balmy summer evening in Calgary and I'm ignoring a beautiful sunset over the river because I'm gamely trying to impress the most beautiful woman I've ever seen with a kind of stump speech- that kind of irreverent yet pointed interpretation of pop culture you usually see in a Kevin Smith movie- about the lack of interesting or progressive male role models in Disney films. With the exception of Bambi, which was in my mind the real hook. That plucky little deer who grows up practically without a father, saves the forest, and refuses to buy into the might-makes-right alpha male complex when it comes time to fight for his woman. It all went according to plan. Until she responded.

According to her, the look on my face when she demolished my argument and completely reconfigured my perspective and understanding of Disney films was such that she never expected to hear from me again. (She's now my girlfriend.) Her opening line, a verbal left jab to the head, was to shift the focus from Bambi and his merits to the fact that his mate was little more than a docile, submissive female there for him to protect and bear his children. Pop went that balloon, but on she went, going through each Disney Princess and tearing each one down, explaining which stereotype each belonged to and why it was essentially worse that young girls had these characters to look up to than if they had none.

Beyond just dismantling my opinion, what Katrina highlighted was how Disney has, through their films, been able to influence public discourse on femininity and the role of women in society by disseminating a decidedly patriarchal perspective to a massive audience of fertile young minds. Feminist literary critics have for years wryly pointed out that womens' stories typically end in either marriage or death (say nothing about the fact that the literary female is almost to a fault defined by the men in her life). Disney Princess stories all end in marriage. Marriage to rich, handsome princes.

While it's true that the majority of Disney films- especially those dubbed Princess Movies- are based on much older material than the cartoons, there has never been much interest or attempt at altering the source material beyond changing the endings where the protagonist died to the protagonist getting married. There is not a single Disney Princess movie that does not feature a romantic relationship that is based on a man coming to the rescue of a woman. While some of the female protagonists assert themselves or attempt to gain control of one facet of their life or another, they are all ultimately submissive to their male love interest.

Which, is how the Sex and the City movie ends, with Big proposing to Carrie using one of her diamond encrusted shoes in lieu of a ring. The obvious reference to Cinderella wasn't even truly necessary to illustrate what the ultimate arc of the series- or at least Carrie's character arc- was; which is essentially that the duty of the Post Feminist Woman is to toil at a career and navigate the jungle of contemporary dating just long enough to find the Prince Charming ready to sweep her off her feet. It's all a cleverly masked shell game; it pretends to celebrate female economic and sexual independence while ultimately giving a thumbs up to the traditional paternalistic view of marriage. It's Disney for Grown Ups, and the best example of how pervasive the influence of Disney's repackaged fairy tales is, especially in fiction targeted at women.

At this point, it probably isn't all that clear what the social and cultural impact of Disney Princess movies has to do with the Marvel purchase. When the news about the purchase broke, representatives from Disney were widely quoted as saying that it's primary interest in Marvel is to reach the young male demographic that has- relative to it's female counterpart- eluded them in recent years. Given the kind of conservative, self-limiting message Disney has been hugely successful at marketing to young girls, I am very concerned about these same people gaining control over a large stable of characters aimed directly at impressionable boys.

Which is a very important point to make even if you take the deluded perspective that Disney only wants Marvel as an intellectual property farm for movies and merchandising, which I simply cannot believe given Disney's history in meddling with their subsidiaries, most notably film studio Miramax, pressuring the Weinstein brothers to push back release dates, purchase the international distribution rights from Disney to be sold to a third party, or in the case of Kids, purchase the film from Disney altogether, effectively removing their name from it. In every case the dispute was caused over objectionable content that sparked backlash from political and religious groups, most notably in the case of Michael Moore's documentary Fareheit 9/11. This of course contributed greatly to the Weinsteins' acrimonious departure from Disney to found their second company, The Weinstein Company.

Disney also had very public and acrimonious disputes with another collaborator; 3D animation juggernaut Pixar. It's important to note that the majority of the disputes between Pixar and Disney came while Pixar was under contract but a separate entity from Disney, and that the later purchase of Pixar came with negociations that resulted in many consessions in Pixar's favor due to their status and worth including a restructuring of the animation department that re-opened the 2D animation department and closed the direct to video department (after the release of Tinkerbell, which was the culmination of a bitter battle begun with Disney's attempt to make a Pixar opposed Toy Story sequel that forced the creation and release of Toy Story 2, taking John Lasseter off production of Monsters Inc and later led to a public debate between Steve Jobs and Michael Eisner).

In addition to Marvel having no such leverage over how Disney as a corporation will interact with them and their properties, the current leadership (above and beyond Editor in Chief Joe Quesada) has been traditionally fidgety in issues that may offend the sensibilities of important Hollywood types. In short, Avi Arad watches what happens in the comics carefully and is never afraid to lower the boom. The most notorious incident involves internet muckracker Rich Johnston informing The Daily Mail that Peter Milligan and Michael Allred were prepped and ready to publish a comic that featured the reanimated spirit of Princess Diana on a superhero team. The story goes that it was pressure from Arad, who was losing face with his Diana-worshipping Hollywood connections that forced Milligan and Allred to re-create the arc using a dead brunette popstar of their own invention, which greatly compromised the story and it's impact in parodying contemporary celebrity culture.

Since at least 2003 Avi Arad and Dan Buckley were eager to sell Marvel to Hollywood, although they bitterly argued about whether they should make overtures to Sony or Paramount (among other things), which as the example above shows, compromised the more daring creative minds at Marvel and the political manoevering doesn't end there. Shortly after the controversy surrounding the X Statix arc broke, Rich Johnston was in contact with a source either from within or close to Marvel going by the name Felicia who outlined- filtered through her own interpolations and opinions- what the next few years of Marvel would look like. The only thing that stopped it from happening is that it took another six years for Marvel to find the right buyer.

One of the more important parts of her diatribe was to point out that- in 2003 (before the release of Spiderman 2 or 3)- the publication arm of Marvel accounted for 5% of the company's revenue, which among other things led Dan Buckley to do insane things to attempt to justify its (read his) continued existence. With Quesada in tow, the two poured over every communication from the west coast they could in order to find tidbits of how the characters would be interpreted in the movies and as much as possible integrate these changes into their comic book counterparts as soon as possible, including such things as Spider-man's organic webbing and Bullseye's revised Colin Farrel look not to mention the primary unspoken motive behind the "One More Day" fiasco. Quesada's personal vision for the continued existence of Marvel comics is a literal interpetation of the company's nickname the "House of Ideas," to essentially become a pitch farm for movies and video games, a concept that so far has only been successful for individual creators (Mark Millar, J. Michael Strazynski, Tim Seeley, Robert Kirkman) but has shown no promise for entire companies. Successful or not, the tactic serves only to diminish the potential and actualization of the medium.

At the end of the day, the Disney purchase is just adding one more layer to an already poisonous cake that will not- under current leadership- result in the enviable creative and market position currently enjoyed by DC. The degree of creative autonomy enjoyed at DC and their upcoming shift to a position of contribution and consultation in brand usage across Time-Warner did not come overnight. It required the integrity and determination of Paul Levitz, Karen Berger, and Jim Lee as well as Warner Brothers' hands off approach to DC's output that allowed them the freedom to craft daring narratives, and tread on nearly any ground they desired. None of the elements of that equation exist in the current leadership at Marvel, and none of it is present at Disney either. I'm not here to Chicken Little, I'm here to remind you that Dark Reign is the perfect metaphor for Marvel. You've just got to hope there's an Emma Frost at the table.

Che Part One: America Fuck Yeah!

2009-07-15T04:31:00.000-07:00

Che Part One is a great movie. It does everything that contemporary film should. I guess that’s the problem. If practically anyone but Steven Soderberg had directed this film, I would probably be rather ecstatic about it. The problem is that I know his capabilities too well to be fooled into thinking that this tremendous achievement is the high watermark of his achievements. It lacks the inventive spirit behind the creative choices made for The Girlfriend Experience or the raw emotional brutality of Traffic. It feels too objective and polished for Soderberg, more his attempt at Kubick than a genuine entry into his body of work.

I suppose it’s only personal preference getting in the way of my enjoyment of the film, but when I go in for a Tim Burton film I expect nothing less than the full force of his idiosyncratic vision, which is perhaps an unfair comparison given that Burton has a very specific visual style, while Soderberg has thus far been more interested in allowing the script to dictate the techniques used whether it’s the gritty shot on video hyperreality of Traffic or the subdued soft focus ambient light of The Girlfriend Experience. Perhaps my consternation is that Che Part One is a film about a revolutionary by a revolutionary filmmaker, and yet somehow is not a revolutionary film.

Everything about the film, even the Post-Tarantino intercut narratives, is familiar to your average American film goer, which has a certain amusing poetic justice to it given that Che Guevara is a formerly incendiary figure from the perspective of American history who today is very little more than a commodity both in the United States and Cuba.

Del Toro’s virtuoso performance will endear itself to audiences, especially the Democrat dominated youth culture eager to embrace any figure who stands in opposition to classical Manifest Destiny America. Guevara is the perfect hero for Post-Bush America; audiences can cheer his battle against oppression and American Imperialism as an exorcism for the lingering guilt of allowing Bush to indulge his disastrous doctrine of pre-emptive warfare with the added bonus of his early death ensuring that the world would never have to face his inevitable transition from revolutionary to dictator. There’s a reason people don’t wear Fidel Castro t-shirts and it has little to do with the good doctor wearing a cooler hat.

The video release also sees American audiences brilliantly prepped for the film in that it closes on it’s eponymous hero at his peak, flush with victory and ready to take on the entire world (which he does literally at the United Nations General Assembly), which mirrors the current arc of President and Pop Icon in Chief Barack Obama. Perhaps the ultimate purpose of Soderberg’s oeuvre is to give Americans the romantic, idealized vision of their own recent history cleverly packaged as a historical drama charting the rise of one of the most enduring political figures of the 20th century. Is the real truth of the matter that politics be damned, Che Guevara is in fact the ultimate American action hero, the President we’ve always dreamed of but haven’t had since Washington?

The 2008 election campaign, when viewed from this perspective, really was an attempt at turning soul grinding machine politics into some kind of mythic struggle of cosmic proportions. Consider how pathetically desperate it is to label a broken, callous old man whose best years ended a generation ago a maverick. Consider the irony of a street artist enthralled and inspired by communist propaganda changing the entire campaign with a piece of artwork informed by the personality politics embraced by tyrants spanning the full depth and breadth of human history. Children in Africa wave banners with Obama’s face on them as a symbol of hope for the future, the perfect recursive image of South American children waving banners of Guevara handed down to them by their grandparents.

We will sit in the hushed silence watching a brash, young Che stand against colonial backed oppression, daring to make enemies of the most powerful nation in the world! America- grown fat and indolent on industry driven imperial conquest- stares at him balefully, unable to recognize the fierce sparkle of it’s own youth in his eye. This is George Washington reborn, revolution at it’s most circular. The hero become the villain, tea stained Indian costume moldering away in the back of it’s closet.

Perhaps this then at last is Soderberg’s genius. He has created for us the vehicle through which we will finally understand how truly American Che Guevara is, how he lived and breathed the mythic bedrock of our republic more truly than any man born on our soil. Che Guevara has achieved ultimate immortality as the Great American Action Hero, dispensing justice and freedom for all with a cigar and a machine gun. Hasta la vista, baby.

I am an Asshole Projecting the Future

2009-07-11T07:53:00.000-07:00

The phrase "literary bad boy" has been thrown around a lot since the emergence of the founding fathers of Generation X, but the insistent buzz surrounding first time novelist Mark Osborne seems to suggest he warrants it. Ever since his debut novel Blood Ampersand Ink cracked the New York Times Bestseller's list stories started surfacing about black magic, cross-dressing, and his scandalous girlfriend SG's own Mewsette Suicide. We sent Gene Grey out to the wilds of Vancouver to meet the self proclaimed Rock Star Novelist to sort out fact from fiction.

Gene Grey: I checked the NYT Bestsellers list on the way here, and Blood Ampersand Ink was eighth. What does that feel like?

Mark Osborne: Ambivalent, I guess. I like the idea that I can walk into any bookstore in at least two countries and see my book there, that people can get a copy from Winnipeg to San Diego. That's a nice feeling. But the Bestseller's list doesn't mean anything real. It's all about putting product in stores.

GG: So the numbers don't really concern you.

MO: The real numbers do. I worked at the lowest rungs of the book industry, both in retail and distribution. I know how many copies of my book are going to be shredded or recycled or whatever. At some point, I'll prod Vintage into telling me how many people have actually read my book. It'll mean something when I start my book tour and people actually show up to listen to me. That will be a real trip.

GG: It seems like authors in general are very divided about doing public readings, where do you fall in?

MO: I love reading my stuff, far more than I do handing it to someone and waiting for them to read it. I get anxious, I interrupt them. I'm a real asshole when someone is trying to read my stuff in front of me. (Laughs) When I read something out loud, I can gauge the reactions in real time. I can see people responding in real time. Back before we were even dating I used to read my blogs to my girlfriend over the phone because I didn't want to wait for her to read them.

GG: How does that compare to reading to an audience?

MO: Well, as I found out later, she was mostly masturbating the whole time because she likes the sound of my voice. It would be pretty awkward if I caught people doing that at a reading.

GG: (Laughs) Then you'd be Chuck Palahniuk.

MO: Chuck's gay, you'd have to feel for any poor girl getting off on his voice.

GG: Your girlfriend is Mewsette Suicide, how does that impact your relationship?

MO: My relationship with her, with my peers, or what?

GG: Let's start with her.

MO: I don't know that it really does. She probably denies this now but I harassed her into applying for ages. I was wearing a Suicide Girls t-shirt the day we met, she didn't know what it was yet. At one point she talked about how she had too many tattoos to be in Playboy. I just sort of scoffed at that because to me Suicide Girls was something so much more interesting, and yeah more titilating. Playboy just seemed too manufactured or whatever.

GG: Just to clarify, we aren't paying Mark to say that.

MO: (Laughs) To be fair, she bought me my first issue of Playboy.

GG: That's one hell of a woman, to buy you a Playboy.

MO: Sure, but she knew damn well I'd spend more time geeking out about an interview with Norman Mailler than leering at Kim Kardashian.

GG: It's kind of inescapable that tattoos are an important part of your novel, what kept you coming back to that?

MO: Well, I started the novel at a time in my life where I think that I'd fallen away from myself to work through some issues and try to get back on track. It was months since I'd drawn a thing or even thought about trying to get an apprenticeship in any productive way, so at first it was a bit of a reminder that tattooing was what I was trying to work towards and then it just kind of got a life all of it's own because of how how potent and contemporary it is.

GG: So writing this novel was a kind of therapy for you?

MO: Aversion therapy, I guess you could call it. The idea to write this first came a few months before I started writing, when [Mewsette] suggested I write her a novel as a Christmas present, with the stipulation that it had to have werewolves and vampires in it. We had a bad fight not long after Christmas- nothing to do with the novel or lack thereof- and it was looking like I'd never talk to or hear from her again, which was a very special kind of agony. So, when I sat down and started writing it, the initial idea was to sort of eulogize our friendship and all the ways that in the fairly brief time we'd known each other that she had changed my life.

GG: One of the criticisms that you've faced in the media recently is that you're, and I'm quoting this, "wildly inconsistant" about just what the novel is, what it's about, and what it represents.

MO: Oh sure. A while back, a buddy of mine who appears in my comic that I've been working on, was privy to a conversation where I was asked what the story I was working on was about, and I was struggling with coming up with what Bruce Sterling would call a bumper sticker. Chris just kind of waded in there and he said that based on my influences he'd figured that the geometry, the cross section of my work to be non euclidian. You can't just map it in normal 3d space.

GG: What exactly does that mean?

MO: You'd have to ask Chris, I just like that line. I just sort of, as a consequence of how I think, work on a few different levels at once. I'm never happy doing something simple and straight forward, I have to be hiding shit and pushing a few concepts at once. In one sense, Blood Ampersand Ink is a narrative guidebook to the city of Vancouver. Taken a different way, it's a post feminist subversion of classic vampire fiction. Read it again and you might see it as an attempt at codifying Generation Y into the canon of western literature. I tried to do a lot of things and hopefully there's someone out there to respond to each one if not all of them.

GG: You mentioned that your methods are a consequence of your influences. Have you used a certain methodology or technique that you gleaned from a specific writer?

MO: Not directly, no. You could call it gonzo to a degree. I've done things that were called "pure one hundred percent wild turkey gonzo" before, even though I generally drink Jack Daniels. I have adapted some of Thompson's methodology in writing the novel, for sure. I don't do anything crazy like cocaine or LSD, but I do make liberal use of alcohol, caffeine, and sleep depreviation. There's a lot of emotionally raw stuff that I had to write to make this feel legitimate. I couldn't just clam up and shut down the way I would if I was dealing with someone during a situation like that. I suppose I could write Yayo clamming up and fucking off, but when you're writing the narrator doing that, you have to lend it that authentic voice, describe the thought process behind that action.

I've read up on hallucinogenics and drugs. Kesey, Huxley, all kinds of reports of the halluciongenic experience. These drugs, they interrupt the way your brain usually communicates with you and you get this outpouring of sensory information from parts of the brain that do not usually do that. I'm probably doing a really shitty job of paraphrasing something that Pinchbeck or Rushkoff said in a talk somewhere. My point here is that when I'm writing those tough parts, and what I mean isn't how I justify Yayo getting ahold of a kalashnikov and using it to shoot at angry biker werewolves but how I get into the frame of mind where he's standing there on the deck of a ferry talking about how mythology has abandoned him, there's nothing to hold onto, nothing to give him comfort and he is going to die, I have to get in the way of my ego. I have to interrupt my shame and insecurities about laying myself bare. People say shit, real honest unvarnished shit, when they're drunk or sleep deprived or whatever. They lose their filter, put their guard down. So I just had to duplicate that, demolish myself down to that kind of ugly place.

GG: You talked about writing the novel under the impression that [Mewsette] was out of your life permanently, but obviously that isn't the case. What changed?

MO: I don't think anything really changed per say. I think it was more that we both came back to where we should have stayed. It isn't as if we had this big long cry and worked out a ton of deep seated issues or anything as banal as that. I just used her birthday to test the waters. I sent her a text, she responded and we just picked back up into that odd space we occupied before. It was the exact opposite of The Notebook. Neither of us wrote letters destroyed by an evil parental unit or pined away or whatever. We just tried to lose ourselves in whatever came naturally, which always involves alcohol and sex with other people, but for me it was mostly the writing. Then it was her birthday and we were talking and we just sort of started to surface again, until we got back to that part where we remembered that we're stronger together than apart.

GG: Were you finished the novel by then?

MO: Christ, no. Let me tell you it almost sunk the entire novel, getting her back into my life. It's hard to write about falling in love with someone who disappears when they come back. That feels about as phony as mourning Jesus on Good Friday knowing he'll be back in a few days. At the same time though, it completely re-energized the first two acts, where Cat is this amazing whirwind that just sweeps into Yayo's life and flips it completely upside down.

GG: Did you begin writing the novel hoping that you would hear from her again?

MO: Oh absolutely. I started out pretty naive, thinking that oh maybe if she saw it on sale somewhere, that kind of Slumdog Millionaire logic that she might look me up and we could work things out then, at some magical future interval. That she'd crash a book signing. If I wasn't feeling so cynical and down on myself at the time, I probably would have been more honest with myself and known that the act of writing would bring her back into contact with me.

GG: In what sense?

MO: In the sense that for a long time now, I 've had an odd relationship with what I create. When I first met her, there was something that I felt was familiar about her despite the fact that I had never met anyone remotely like her before until one night I was digging through my notes on an old comic idea I'd had back in 2004 and that was 2007, and I found this character who was predicated on Catwoman that had these biographical details that matched her perfectly. I didn't create this character with the idea of her being any kind of ideal mate, but I could see where the signals got crossed somewhere between my creative process and a spell or two I'd fired off since then. It was a really peculiar sense of malaise, given that there were even some dates that correlated between when I'd worked on this character and when certain things had happened in her life that brought her closer to me, closer to meeting me.

So of course I went to my mentor, who I figured would get this. It usually has a more intentional aspect, but it was close enough that I figured he could help, I told him that I had apparently somehow created or manifested this woman in my life. He was very calm about the whole thing, and made it clear I couldn't let it go to my head or anything, that the key was to ask her when she invented me.

GG: That's a lot to process. You're saying that you created each other.

MO: That's the simplest, but not necessarily the most accurate way of putting it. I think something happened for sure. I don't know that anyone's biographical details got retroactively changed because of someone else's daydream or doodle. For all I know, the inspiration for the character was the result of some kind of premonition or omen telling me that she was coming. I can't say that I know in any concrete sense where artistic inspiration comes from, none of us do. But I've seen too much to be able to say that words on a page are never more than the sum of their parts.

GG: You believe there's a mystical aspect to writing.

MO: That sounds a little too pretentious for me. I think that a better way of putting it is that fiction and reality, life and narrative have the potential for a far more open dialogue than most people are willing to allow. There's two breeds of writer in that sense; the kind that read Borges and feel kind of whistful like they think some of his ideas, what he portrays would be amazing if it were real the same way that kids naturally have more interest in going to Hogwarts than a real school, but realize that there isn't an owl coming for them. The other breed reads Borges and decides they're going to make that happen. Guys like Burroughs and Dick.

GG: Burroughs and Dick went crazy, though. Is that something that concerns you?

MO: I'm already crazy in the sense that people like to write off what I say as the product of mental illness so that they don't have to contemplate the implications of it or they write me off as saying whatever to get attention and boost my circulation. But if you're asking am I worried about becoming mentally ill to the point where I become completely incoherent or unable to function normally in every day society because of my pursuits in metafiction, my answer is no. Burroughs and Dick did a lot of hard drugs.

Bad Dreams

2009-07-09T04:59:00.000-07:00

Out of everything I read to do with The Girlfriend Experience, the one thing that everyone including me could agree on about the film was that it was somewhat amusing and shocking that the guys who wrote it also wrote Ocean's Thirteen. Roger Ebert mused that they must have been standing around waiting for something better to do. Granted there's a reason that it's "One for the money, two for the show," and not visa versa. I'm fine with considering David Lean and Brian Koppelman to be auteurs in need of rent money rather than hacks hit by lightning.

Akiva Goldsman, well the jury's out on that one. Ever since finishing Dollhouse, I've been carefully following TV writers because I've come to appreciate the fact that more than just pop juggernauts JJ Abrams and Joss Whedon work on their brain children. The opening credits of Fringe season one, episode 14 (Bad Dreams) spat a vaguely familiar name as the writing credit so I scurried off to the IMDB to find out who Akiva Goldsman is. Apparently a man whose entirel body of work I loathe and have made a great deal of noise about. He's done some truly souless hack work in his time including both Dan Brown adaptations as well as the Shoemacher Batman films, some of my most hated films of all time. I was almost expecting his writing credits to include Twilight, but definitely not A Beautiful Mind or Cinderella Man.

So I watched Bad Dreams not with something I'd call apprehension, because up until that point the series had been very consistant in tone and writing, but more along the lines of morbid curiosity. The writing on Fringe is absurdly better than Alias after all, even if it isn't anywhere near Dollhouse. So, enter my surprise as Goldsman- who also directed Bad Dreams- turned in the most compelling and thrilling episode of the series to date. While there was one bit of lurid voyeurism where we get a convenient excuse to have Olivia- bathed in Lynchian neon light- become transfixed with an incredibly bored stripper and share the most tentative, diplomatic kiss I've ever seen, that was the only actual low point for the episode.

While Bad Dreams is ostensibly an Olivia centric episode that pushes her to her psychological breaking point (without mentioning John Scott, which scores Goldsman huge points); Goldsman's script shines brightest in his characterization of Walter, simultaneously exploiting his position as being the comedic relief and building on the pathos of his involvement in the ZTE manifesto.

JJ Abrams must have seen something in Goldsman that no one else has until now, because Bad Dreams isn't just the best episode of the series so far; it's also one of the most critical plot wise, with deftly handled fresh revelations about the conspiracy. Damn good work for the guy who assassinated the Batman franchise, even if there was a really lame pseudo girl on girl scene. Maybe Fox made him do it. I know they make people put motorcycles in things.

JCVD

2009-07-09T04:54:00.000-07:00

By this point, it should be fair to say that 2008 was an oddly consistent year in terms of the themes explored by the most widely applauded films in of the year, especially where redemption and rehabilitation are concerned. It’s tempting, but too simple to simply point to the political arena of that same year, as the voting population of America elected Barack Obama on a mandate to rehabilitate the country’s image abroad after the ravages of the Bush double feature. While it’s true that Harvey Milk, Richard Nixon, and even George W Bush were offered up to audiences as martyrs of the American political machine and fictional wrestler Randy the Ram bore much the same cross for his excesses while staring at the wreckage he left behind, two other films bring a more cosmopolitan perspective to 2008’s sobering and painful journeys.

The Reader inarguably provided the most honest and searing portrayal of guilt- that of an entire nation laid on the shoulders of the generation that oversaw the worst crimes of modern history and their horrified, uncomprehending progeny- seen on screens in the past year, and yet bears no discernible connection to the Post-Bush American condition in any concrete way. There are lessons to be learned and applied, to be sure, but there is no evidence of the concurrent American introspection in the English led adaptation of a generation defining German novel.

It seems absurd that JCVD should have anything to do with such sobering issues as rescuing the soul of a nation from the crimes of it’s government, and it truly is, except to say that JCVD is no less instructive or revealing of what the cost of redemption is and whether it is to be allowed at all, perhaps even more so than W or Frost/Nixon display within the films themselves.

Jean-Claude himself is an easy corollary to Mickey Rourke’s Randy The Ram, fusing the wreckage of the character to the shared relative state of Rourke’s career, a process that appears naked in front of the audience in JCVD, but only achieved reality in Rourke’s mind for The Wrestler. Where Rourke was allowed to gain his professional vindication wearing the mask of his character, Van Damme is left naked before the audience to plead his case. Taken against these other films, the narrative of JCVD almost necessarily becomes incredibly trivial and vain in examining the fall of an international movie star, but it retains a peculiar strength through it’s metafictional conversation with the audience and it’s methodical stripping down of the barriers between Van Damme and the audience until he finally turns to approach them directly.

Thus, no matter the successes or failures of any other aspect of the film, it is nothing more or less than Jean-Claude Van Damme that will make or break the film for audiences, a heavier risk than even the producers of 8 Mile could claim, as Eminem’s ferocious popularity could easily insulate the box office draw from critical drubbing. JCVD is a film that dares to believe in a man who has little to no reason to believe in himself and demands that you do the same.

The true suspense of the film is not if Van Damme will leave the post office alive, just as it has never been in any of his films. Instead, the suspense is purely metafictional in nature, which is- refreshingly- the foundation of the film. JCVD is perhaps the first of Van Damme’s films in which the screenwriter sought to defy rather than pander to the audience’s expectations and succeed. The premise and bulk of the plot operates as a serviceable European elevation of the Post Tarantino (and perhaps Post Ritchie as well) heist flick, putting it easily in the same league as Spike Lee’s The Inside Man, but it remains the mis en scene for Van Damme’s personal and public reckoning.

Even the effortlessly immersive camera work, a cut above Luc Besson’s heir apparent Pierre Morel on his best days, is there to support and amplify Van Damme, most tellingly and successfully in the film’s two climaxes, that of Van Damme’s character arc and of the heist itself. In the former, Van Damme recognizes that his hotly anticipated mea culpa cannot be sufficient if delivered to his captors or a fellow hostage, and begins to address the audience as his chair and the camera are elevated above the edge of the backdrop to the massive black lights hovering over the set, signaling a break from the supposedly fictional events unfolding below.

In the second sequence, the absurdity of the unfolding scene- Van Damme being dragged out of the post office at gunpoint by one of the criminals- seemingly causes the film itself to shake and threaten to break, much as the metafictional weight of Tyler Durden addressing the audience at the end of the second act of Fight Club caused the film in the camera to shake until it broke free and the perforations at it’s edges were visible. The cause of this disruption turns out to be Van Damme’s wishful fantasy of the resolution, where he elbows free of and roundhouse kicks his captor, before high fiving the SWAT team and saluting the screaming crowd. Order is restored and the scene is replayed with Van Damme elbowing his way free, only to be tackled to the ground and dragged into a police car over the screaming protests of the other freed hostages.

Despite his heroic role in the film and his disarming candor about his personal life and failings, he is not let off lightly. Any traces of a Hollywood ending disappear with the replay of his exit, and he plays out the epilogue from a jail cell for using the heist to “extort” money owed to the lawyer representing him in a child custody case. This punishment he accepts with the cheery resignation of the samurai way that he confesses to wanting to return to in his speech to the audience. The cost of his redemption is harsh, especially for a film that could have given in to vanity at any time it chose, and he is left to his most daunting task without the audience’s help; reconnecting with his daughter from behind a pane of glass.

This is perhaps where JCVD is allowed to shine the brightest, as many of the resolutions of the other films mentioned here were intentionally less than satisfactory. Nixon leaves the sound stage with nothing harsher than a media indictment and a pocket full of cash. Oliver Stone’s eponymous W stands tall in front of his infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner. We leave Randy with his relationships shattered, but his final fate as he flies from the turnbuckle is an ultimate mystery. Irony favors death in victory, but with the box forever shut the cat cannot be said to be conclusively dead.

Other than the tragic, yet almost necessary conclusion of The Reader, JCVD is the only film presented to offer lasting closure and hope for the future, perhaps the only notable film of 2008 to do so other than Slumdog Millionaire, but then it is also the only one that holds itself accountable to it’s audience first and foremost rather than history.

Musings

2009-07-06T04:00:00.000-07:00

It's a fact that culture is contingent on it's milieu; the here and now of the there and then. The BBC had a lovely photo up the other day of William S. Burroughs sitting beside the wire baskets he used to jumble up his writing while pioneering that whole cut-up thing of his and it got me thinking; what if Burroughs had access to modern computers back in the Beat days? Coding and compiling programs to spit out novels based on some arcane algorithm.

Twitter.

William S Burroughs got ahold of Twitter. Microblogging heroin soaked fever dreams of reptilian rent boys spurting corrosive semen from every pore while a row of disembodied, reanimated womens' heads watch from above on silk pillows neatly arranged on a window sill as they spit and hiss in jealousy.

William S Burroughs junk-sick and disoriented typing useless entreaties to P Diddy, begging to know the arcane knowledge inherent in being "locked on."

Warren Ellis bludgeoning someone to death with his blackberry because he isn't the maddest tweeter on the block anymore.

Boom, Bust and Echo

2009-07-01T09:34:00.000-07:00

Fire bad. Tree pretty.

I finished Omega ten minutes ago. I am tabula rasa. I am on the verge of tears. This is a state of mind I know, one I cherish but have only experienced on three previous occasions. At the conclusions of The End of Evangelion, Promethea, and... The Invisibles. Let that last one linger in your mouth a little. Swirl it around and get it's flavour like a fine wine. Anyone who knows my engagement with pop culture even a little knows what The Invisibles is to me. I need to go put on Porcelain by Moby, before I continue. I lied. Extreme Ways.

I'm not really sure where to start this, and how. I suppose I'll start with Nietzsche, even though Omega was sheer Neo-Platonic Transcendent Gnosticism. Nietzsche posited- as have many other philosophers and critics and well everyone- that it's all been done, yet he was somewhat unique by saying that the Greeks had done it all. They were the alpha and the omega of cultural output. Alpha and omega. The Beginning and The End. The best we could do, according to him, was to shuffle things around in new ways. One could then- if one were to be able to quantify a unit of cultural output- mathematically determine how many permutations of Nietzsche's finite cultural elements are possible. This would not be the upper limit of how long it could take an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters to produce the complete works of Shakespeare, it's how long it would take them to produce Jorge Luis Borges' The Library of Babel.

That doesn't really take quality into account though. How many of those permutations are going to be worthwhile? If you have cable television, you already know the answer to that question. If you've watched Twilight you know the answer to that question. The ratio of shit to gold once the sum total of possible configurations of cultural units has been completed is going to be absolutely fucking abysmal. Perhaps then, the question is why the massive indefatigable engines of contemporary culture across all mediums are relevant, worthwhile, or necessary as anything other than a near futile intellectual exercise in figuring out how long it will take before the human species has quite literally produced a word for word perfect duplicate of Plato's The Republic because there's literally nothing else possible that has not been done.

Is that it, then? Is all human culture locked in an evil, grim joke? Is all our culture the eventual answer to the question of how long it would take an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of keyboards to produce the complete works of Shakespeare twice? If your answer is yes, stop reading now and shoot yourself. There's nothing left for you in this life. High five Nietzsche when you get there. Otherwise, we have to reject Nietzsche and continue searching for understanding why pop could possibly mean anything and how we can surpass not only the Greeks, but anyone and everyone who has come before us. No, I'm not implying exactly what you're probably thinking, but you're on the right track.

Perhaps culture is something more. Perhaps the sum total of the canon of human culture is an essentially collaborative Gematria, perhaps the monkeys on typewriters- the ghoulish zero sum game that they are- miss the mark entirely. Perhaps we have the potential as a species to be six billion rabbis attempting to decode existence in both the act of creation and consumption. Perhaps pop is a constantly mutating, evolving entity that expands to grow new organs as each medium changes and adapts to the times and in response to political, social, and technological changes (especially the much vaunted "flattening" of the post-Internet global cultural and economic exchange).

That might be even more tragic given how intellectually disengaged the general masses are these days. Sure, as a species, we're more educated than a hundred or so years ago, but that doesn't mean that we necessarily have any fucking clue of how to put that education in use or that we have any reason to. Hence Twilight. Reading Jane Austen and thieving certain set pieces and broad strokes does not make you her contemporary any more than shooting a tiger makes you George Orwell.

The tragedy of our times is not that people are shooting tigers. The tragedy is that much of both the critical establishment and general audience has lost the ability to tell a poacher from a hunter. A fraudulent hack from a genuine talent. Stephanie Meyer from Joss Whedon. I see a hemisphere of gullible, essentially exploited individuals singing the praises of a regressive misogynist fairy tale to my right and the most daring, provocative, and ontologically progressive tv show in the history of the medium becoming most notable for being the lowest rated show to ever be picked up for a second season (ostensibly because for the first time in history Fox was actively seeking to avoid a hundred million angry emails).

I'm not going to pretend that from the first episode I knew that Dollhouse was going to pancake me. I will say that I knew I was going to have a shitload of fun and that I saw all I needed in the pilot to guarantee my ass in the chair straight through to the finale, however. Bringing in Eliza Dushku to star, casting Battlestar Galactica alumni, and playing both Lady Gaga and Frontline Assembly within the first ten minutes of the pilot was essentially Whedon dedicating the series to me, and me alone. Yes, that's right. Joss Whedon created Dollhouse for me. He was so glad that I finally came around and started worshipping at the altar of The Slayer that he rewarded me just as any benevolent pagan god worth his salt would. Not that I had any idea to what depths that would feel true until Omega.

It's interesting to note that Dollhouse drew cast from the two productions that Whedon and every member of the writing staff and production team must have known the show would attract the most comparisons to given the themes, plot, and even set design of the show. It's especially interesting given that Tahmoh Penikett essentially reprises his Battlestar Galactica role. At first I was somewhat taken aback at how ridiculous the similarities were, and then my jaw hit the fucking floor with the words "There is a vase on the table with three flowers in it."

The brilliant thing about it though is how much more ultimately devious the Mellie imprint turned out to be than anything Battlestar Galactica achieved before it crumbled into a shambling fucking mess. Jumping the shark at the five yard line is unforgivable in that the identity of the final cylon was the stupidest fucking thing I have ever seen in my life. It isn't simply the shock factor and pathos of Ballard unknowingly sleeping with a doll, but what the twin deceptions of Dewitt and Dominic's manipulations of the Millie imprint changed Ballard and triggered the endgame scenario.

An important thing to note is that the basic conceit and plot devices shared by Dollhouse and Battlestar Galactica originate with Phillip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. The producers of BSG acknowledged it in their appropriation of the phrase "skinjob" and the casting of Edward James Olmos, who played a supporting role in Blade Runner as the guy who made the paper cranes. Of course an argument could be made for Ballard being just as informed by Deckard as he is Helo with November as Rachael and Alpha as Roy. Pop, as I said before, is a team effort. From Dick's original story straight through to Dollhouse we see not simply several appropriations but successive incubations and advancements of the same basic concepts towards largely different conclusions.

Case in point is that Ballard's character arc closely resembles a personal favourite template of Clive Barker's in which the protagonist begins investigating some form of fringe behaviour or criminal activity, becomes enthralled with it- utterly obsessed- until they integrate into the originally opposing force. In discussing this on the commentary track to The Midnight Meat Train, Barker quoted The Marquis de Sade ("The greatest pleasure is an aversion overcome,") as the philosophical vindication for his frequent usage of the character arc, especially in the Hellraiser franchise. Incidentally, De Sade appears in The Invisibles working alongside the eponymous subversives to fully explore the furthest fringes of humanity- especially in sexuality- in a way that offers itself up as a potential answer for the taunting riddle of just what the true purpose of the Dollhouse is.

Grant Morrison also used a similar arc in The Filth that resulted in more of a synthesis of the two opposing forces rather than a complete integration. At this point in the series- while it's indisputable that Ballard has to a certain extent integrated into the Dollhouse both as a "customer" and "employee"- it is far too early to close the book on his development considering that if we can expect Ballard (and Dollhouse) to survive Whedon's five year plan, we've only seen a fifth of his overall character arc, which is a microscopic amount for any Whedon character.

Everything Dollhouse borrows, it surpasses. Yes. I did just call one single season of Dollhouse superior to the entirety of Battlestar Galactica. I'm fine with series that unfold over a few seasons and take their time with where they're going. Whedon's done a couple of those that were quite good. However, Dollhouse Daft Punked every mark that Battlestar Galactica aimed for. (Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.)

As for The Matrix? Well fuck The Matrix. No one is clever for making the dentist chair correlation, which is incidental. You score a few points if you noticed that Echo is (a) Buddha though. The imperfection of Topher's tabula rasa and imprinting process have crystal clear parallels with a broad interpretation of Buddhist cosmology and the phenomenon of "past life regression" that several of the Actives- Echo most notably- undergo throughout the series. It's thematically most important in the episode where DeWitt runs a test allowing Echo, Victor, Sierra, and November to escape the Dollhouse essentially unmolested, which functions best as a metaphor for achieving enlightenment or nirvana in the sense of it being equivalent to escaping the constant cycle of reincarnation, the state of duḥkha (suffering) inherent in life in the material realm.

In some interpretations of Buddhism, there is essentially a choice to be made once you reach Nirvana; stay there, or go back and free everyone else. That's why the Dalai Llama- according to dogma- keeps coming back. Or in the Platonic interpretation alluded to earlier, she left the cave and came back to show the other dolls that there is more than shadows and dust. But there's a great deal more to Echo than being what is fast becoming a cliche.

There's Omega.

It's fair to say that Echo and Caroline are still essentially the same person, that the residual bits of Caroline that survived Topher's wipes still inform her actions as Echo in both Tabula Rasa and Active modes to the point where in Needs, Adelle is able to easily make the correlation between Echo's actions during the drill and when she broke into the Rossum lab prior to joining the Dollhouse. "That's Caroline," Adelle says with something bordering on maternal pride. In that sense, Needs foreshadowed Omega and gave us all we'd need to know about why Alpha and Omega are so fundamentally different.

The use of the term Tabula Rasa in Dollhouse is mostly ironic, but still critical to any interpretation of the series. The most common usage of the term is in reference to the philosophical position that we are born into life with a blank slate. From a biological perspective it's on the extreme side of the nature versus nurture debate, but is most useful in contemporary discussion in taking a non deterministic view of life, that we are open to write our own destinies.

In Dollhouse, Tabula Rasa is less to do with beginnings than it does second chances, as the dolls have all signed contracts with the intent of escaping their previous lives and transgressions with the promise of starting over fresh- Tabula Rasa- at the end of their five years at the Dollhouse.

But over the course of the first season, a point most clearly made in Omega, there is a certain irrepressibility about the dolls' personalities. Alpha- for instance- is not an insane criminal because he experienced a composite event and had all of the imprints designed for him loaded at once, but because he was a flawed vessel and thus the result was literal cognitive dissonance. Topher couldn't change the basic nature of Alpha or any of the other dolls, only interrupt and inhibit it.

Alpha's character arc is essentially the same as that of Alex in A Clockwork Orange; he is a violent offender who volunteers to be rehabilitated through science, through attempts to alter his behaviour at a physical level with disastrous results. The point of A Clockwork Orange was not that violence is glamorous or that man should be free to indulge the whims of the id, but that to seek to limit that which makes us human- both the positive and the potentially negative (as we see that Alex's treatment robs him of the ability to defend himself or engage in consensual sex)- is to rob us of our humanity. That, and that science can never fully prevail over nature. Of course there are also shades of Phillip K Dick's We Can Remember it For You Wholesale, which is better known as the Arnold Schwarzenegger film Total Recall.

While Alpha is the more obvious analog to Alex, Echo's character arc functions much in the same way but predicated on very different instincts. I'm sure that many viewers saw the last line in the episode (Omega) as being a subtle reference to Citizen Kane, it also evokes A Clockwork Orange, which ends with a smirking Alex daydreaming a sex scene, implying that the attempts to control him through behavioral modification had failed, much the same as "Caroline," implies that Omega persists in Echo's head.

Alpha and Omega are more than simply experiments gone wrong, they represent the point at which Dollhouse begins to explore the concept of identity the deepest and overlaps with The Invisibles (as well as Grant Morrison's run on The Doom Patrol. For nearly his entire career, Grant Morrison has been writing about the mutability of identity and the interpretation of Tabula Rasa that suggests not only is there infinite potential for society to shape identity and human psychology, but that the individual can modify their own identity, which is a re-ocurring theme most notably employed in The Invisibles, Doom Patrol, as well Batman.

While identity modification has many sources and implementations across his writing, the inspiration and philosophy behind it is heavily informed by post modern magic and the occult, most notably in the chaos magic approach to invocation, in which the practitioner seeks to take on the desirable personality aspects of a godform. The "Kali in the Disco" chapter of Phil Hine's Condensed Chaos describes methods and means for ritually taking on aspects of the personality of a given mythological figure, the eponymous example being a female acquaintance of his who invoked the goddess Kali in order to be more confident and seductive while clubbing. Morrison himself, in his Pop Magic essay, takes the concept one step further by suggesting invoking pop culture figures such as James Bond or Metron. In many ways the imprints that Topher creates for the dolls are based on the same underlying principle.

In the final issue of The Invisibles Dane and his protege infiltrate a corporation about to release a video game based on the training and doctrine of the Invisibles a decade after the end of the main plot of the series, only to find that the corporation is being run by King Mob, who was involved in developing the video game, which takes the form of a virtual reality simulator in which the player lives out several randomized lifetimes. The five year contract of the dolls is very similar in premise to the Invisibles game, given the range of identities and situations that the dolls can be expected to take on over the course of their five years.

Which brings us back to Alpha and Omega. While the intent of the imprints is that they are to be used one at a time and forgotten, both the accident that "created" Alpha and the procedure he used to duplicate it and thus create Omega brought them all into interaction. This of course drove Alpha even further insane than the man he was before joining the Dollhouse was, while Echo's strength of character and empathy allowed her to become not a cacophony of competing voices, but a confident and high functioning gestalt, several individual personalities working in tandem. Taken together Alpha and Omega mirror the beginning and eventual end of Doom Patrol member "Crazy Jane's" character arc whose many personalities each had a separate super power.

While officially unable to add it into the narrative for copyright reasons, Morrison has suggested that Crazy Jane of his Doom Patrol is the same individual as Ragged Robin of The Invisibles, who creates The Invisibles in the future, travels to the past in order to join them, and then travels into the future through the supercontext (another metaphor for leaving Plato's cave), ending her journey at the apocalypse in 2012 where she provides King Mob with what he needs to defeat the King of All Tears, which frees them to evolve into their next stage of existence.

Which brings me to my conclusion. I'm not going to say that it was necessarily written with this intent, but my personal interpretation of Omega is that she's Crazy Jane/Ragged Robin downloaded into Echo's body (slash the Dollhouse world). Hence; Fire bad, tree pretty.

Field Guide

2009-02-12T07:05:00.000-08:00

When I'm down in the trenches debating misogyny in media, I run up against that line between portraying misogyny and being misogynistic.

At left is a classic George Lois cover about what the sixites were doing to young women. At right is an article from Details in which bankers whinge about not being able to spend fat stacks on hookers and blow any more.

Sometimes it really is this easy. Nabbed from The Reverse Cowgirl.

Sukiyaki Western Django

2009-02-10T07:25:00.000-08:00

I've finally decided to resign myself to the undeniable influence of Japanese agent provocateur Takahashi Miike, the uncompromising sadistic creative force behind Audition, Multiple Personality Detective, and Ichi the Killer on my own creative pursuits.

It would be hard to argue that my viewing of Ichi the Killer didn't fuel a complete re-evaluation of Japanese pop and fringe culture that fed directly into the creative approach behind Shinigami and Tentacle Hunter, with emphasis on the latter, but Sukiyaki Western Django represents something of a reconciliation between us. I was originally drawn into the movie by the audacious anachronism of a Japanese matinee idol with a labret piercing decked out in a hybrid of Tokyo street fashion and Spaghetti Western costume and further drawn in by the apparent cameo by the eponymous ambassador to Asian cinema Quentin Tarantino, but the revelation that it was a Takahashi Miike film made me apprehensive in a way that necessitated a viewing.

Sukiyaki Western Django is best described as Miike beating Stephen Chow senseless with a tire iron. Comparing it to Chow's now classic Kung Fu Hustle is as unavoidable as it is inadequate. True it is just as ludicrous of a spoof with many of the same tropes, but where Chow injected the whimsy of classic American cartoons and the pure self indulgent spectacle of Akira Toriyama anime, Miike infuses Django with the narcisisstic anachronistic flare of Baz Luhrman's Moulin Rouge and an earnest yet sarcastic investment in the western genre to rival David Cronenberg's A History of Violence and Eastern Promises.

With the exception of Tarantino the cast is entirely Japanese yet in an amusing twist the vast majority of the spoken dialogue is in heavily accented and poorly structured english, sly satire of the long dead Spaghetti Western. American fans of Miike's work will recognize his fondness for playing with spoken language from the Lynchian Gozu where an American character reads her dialogue off cue cards written in romanji, but the effect is much more akin to the lighthouse shoot out in Battle Royale in which the polite teenage girls snarl at each other in Yakuza tough guy one liners.

Much like Shinichiro Watanabe's Samurai Champloo, it helps to know Japanese cooking to understand the joke behind the title. Sukiyaki, which Tarantino's character makes, describes, and throws at a woman is a Japanese noodle dish whose significance in the title is to complete the appropriation of the Italian Spaghetti Western. "Django" then is the true title of the film with "Sukiyaki Western" establishing the genre.

Fusions of Japanese and American cinema have been done in varying forms since Kinji Fukasaku directed the Japanese portions of Tora, Tora, Tora! to varying degrees of success with a surge in popularity within the last decade most notably in Kill Bill Volume One, Samurai Champloo, Afro Samurai, Speed Racer, and Road to Perdition most of which were American led productions cashing in on lucrative Japanese tropes and cliches. The problem with most of those productions and even lesser ones like the spate of reamkes of Japanese horror films including Miike's own One Missed Call is that few have managed to step out of the shadow of the material they borrow from to become a truly unique film. Even Kill Bill, for all of it's unmistakable Tarantino flair still feels more like a patchwork quilt of homages than a singular film.

Miike, however, has no time for such indulgences and eschews any obvious homages or references to pre-existing work to create a singular ideosyncratic vision much like Pineapple Express and in direct contrast to Hot Fuzz. The influences of period and genre are unmistakable, but not of individual films from the period and genre, which creates a much more coherent and independently enjoyable experience. As much fun as the Pegg-Wright winking is, at the end of the day I'd rather enjoy James Franco attempting to kick the windshield out of a car while behind the wheel for what it is than being told which film he saw it in or being made to feel like I'm sitting a movie geek SAT exam, wracking my brains to see if my kung fu is strong enough to recongize who kicked the windshield out of a cop car while driving it in what movie.

To me Sukiyaki Western Django represents Miike stepping out of the shadows of fringe cinema and take his seat at the table as one of the world's premier action-comedy directors along with other idiosyncratic entertainers such as Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg (Hot Fuzz, Sean of the Dead), Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (Pineapple Express), Ben Stiller (Tropic Thunder), and Guy Ritchie (Snatch, Rocknrolla) at a time when the genre is not only thriving but dominating it's more serious cousin. Sukiyaki Western Django is for anyone who managed to see past the gore and tits of Afro Samurai to be deeply disappointed that it didn't do anything interesting. It's for the people that thought that singing Nirvana in Moulin Rouge was cool, Sweeney Todd needed more samurai swords and less singing, and that Wild, Wild, West just plain sucked.

It ain't easy being green II

2009-02-03T09:05:00.000-08:00

More musings by my hypothetical Brainiac 5:

“Am I concerned about Ultra Boy’s effect on the children of the United Planets? In a word no. I would imagine that somewhere, somewhen there has been a tense and angry meeting of executives about the subject, arguing back and forth between the inevitable backlash from purportedly concerned parents and the potential revenue streams related to using his comically absurd antics.

It has not escaped my notice that I have been inextricably linked to him in this broadcast, I am a twelfth level intelligence and you are sixth at best editing together footage for an audience you cynically assume to be fifth or fourth. I am capable of extrapolating you see, and this wondrous power suggests to me that this diatribe is being used as a voice over for footage of Ultra Boy drinking ludicrous amounts of alcohol and then setting himself ablaze while trying to light a pipe stuffed with some narcotic I do not want to contemplate the existence of.

This fact, and the eventual controversy he will cause, do not concern me in the slightest. Why should I wring my hands at the fate of children who set themselves on fire when statistics on the matter will conclusively prove that they would have done so with or without Ultra Boy? It isn’t as if the Science Police would allow a broadcast that functions quite well for them as a de facto wiretap to be interrupted over something so petty.

In all honesty, the tragic stupidity of a chosen few will serve as a smoke screen for an even smaller, far more important minority. It is inescapable that there will be a certain amount of children who will see me speak, and it will stir something in them. Being of this terminally lost, self indulgent civilization they will understand little of what I say, but they will understand just enough to realize that they wish to understand more, and as they grow and seek the knowledge their parents disdain, they will slowly but surely undermine and subvert the very foundations of this crumbling empire until one day their parents and by extension the establishment will wake up to find that in the long dark sleep of their ignorance they have lost control to these brilliant few.

So I invite you to use me as an ironic foil for his stupidity, and I further invite the audience the men and women of the United Planets to invent sordid drinking games to put them in the stupor that Ultra Boy lives in because it will make the business of apprehending everything you hold dear and replacing it with something worthwhile all the easier. Ultra Boy will indeed be the downfall of society, but not in the way you imagine.”

“Why do I smoke? I had thought it to be self evident, but you are never lost for finding new and disturbing ways to lower my expectations of human intelligence. Smoking, at one time in your history, was a grand and poetic paradox at the heart of human civilization. It was a burgeoning industry that was instrumental in maintaining a rigid status quo of life from the nineteenth century through to the twenty third. Smoking sapped the health and disposable incomes of the working class, distracting them nearly as well as alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine from the larger unpalatable truths about the status quo they were fenced into. It was a subject that could constantly be revived for public debate regarding the legality of it’s use and the inane details of when and where it ought to be allowed to keep the public discourse out of inconvenient arenas. It fueled and maintained the healthcare complex from both the perspectives of the medical establishment and insurance firms, while funding a myriad of charities and events through tax revenue and regularly debated advertisement. Smoking was a brilliant tool of conformity and control marketed and mythologized as an expression of individuality and cavalier fearlessness.

Smoking now of course represents the ultimate victory of the main aim of human scientific pursuit within that same timeframe; the harnessing and reversal of natural processes. This of course started modestly with ideas such as gas lamps to make work and leisure possible at night, caffeine and other pharmaceutical products designed to interrupt and adapt sleep cycles, snowballing from there into mad fever dreams of dominating and subverting nature in new and frequently horrifying ways. I need not reiterate what science on this planet has wrought in the intervening years, but the amusing passage from ironic tool of repression to curious taboo of the cigarette is worth noting.

Cancer, emphysema; these are matters of history that have long since passed out of the public vernacular, and yet it is rare and even incredibly taboo to be a smoker in this day and age. Not for the long conquered ill effects of inhaling the smoke from burning leaves into your lungs, but the fearful hand wringing by the establishment of the anti-social free thinking image associated with the smoker throughout antiquity, which is laughable at best since the brand of free thinking most usually associated with the historical smoker is a louche sort of affair that lends itself more to petty crime and a lack of common sense than it does intellectual superiority or genuinely subversive acts.”

“There is a certain indomitable quality to the human spirit that I have come to both admire and disdain. I have seen Garth- Lightning Lad- broken and bleeding with a smile on his face. I have seen him clawing himself away from a brutal beating by the Science Police, his fingernails snapping and breaking against the concrete as blows continued to rain down on his cracked and broken ribs. He is confident that his strength of will will see him through and his faith in his comrades is as well placed as the synapses in his brain. This self same spirit is what convinced me that helping him to found the Legion would be a worthwhile pursuit. That Garth will never bend or break heartens me and allows me to indulge in some measure of hope for his people and planet.

However, Garth has my backing, a twelfth level intelligence. Our opponents, most notably the Science Police, do not. However, they maintain that same dogged determination as Garth, which leads me to believe that it is more than simply a faith in my ability to carry him through that drives his spirit and by extension theirs, which is a source of some consternation for myself. I have made it clear to our enemies that their determination is moot. I am likely the most intelligent entity in the universe and most certainly the most intelligent entity on Earth. Victory will inevitably be mine. The Science Police once shared with Garth a vision of the future, a vision of their future; it was their boot crushing his face again and again as long as could be done. Allow me to use this to explain how utterly hopeless it is to oppose me. Even that simple profane dream is not safe from me. No enterprise, no wish, no plan, no hope is tenable should I oppose it. You may attempt to slow, inconvenience, annoy, or stymie me. You may brook as great or as little opposition to me as you wish, it is destined to fall to ruin. I alone am Brainiac 5. I am the unstoppable force, there is no immovable object.”

Momotaru

2009-02-03T07:25:00.000-08:00

This is a treatment I wrote up for a personal take on the Japanese legend of Momotaru, the Peach Boy who expelled the Oni from Japan.

The Japan we know is a juggernaut of concrete spires a-glow with neon sigils, a bustling center of technology and fashion that the rest of the world claws and struggles to keep up with, but this was not always so. In times long past, man did not enjoy unchecked hegemony over the land, he struggled and fought against primal forces that stalked the land in fantastical shapes; animals, demons, ogres, and even some forms that defied description of the written word. There was a time in history, long buried under shame and embarrassment to be forgotten when the great nation of Japan was dominated by these forces, the shogun’s very castle occupied by marauding oni who swam from their island to Edo in search of conquest and sport.

The shogun’s men fought valiantly but were swiftly crushed, as many as a dozen falling at once to the mighty beasts’ kanabos. Within a fortnight the army was routed and the oni descended on the shogun’s castle which they transformed into their personal den of iniquity after murdering the shogun, ravaging his wife, and imprisoning her in the dungeon below.

Unknown to the oni, the shogun’s wife was impregnated. Whenever the oni passed out in drunken torpor, her former servants attended to her, and on one such night they delivered her baby son, whom they concealed in a giant peach imported from the oni’s island. The baby was then secreted over the castle wall and floated down the river, hopefully to find a better life.

The next morning, an aging woman out in the country side was doing her wash, when she saw the peach floating down the river. Amazed at the sight, she waded out to retrieve it and brought it home to her husband. Once inside, they heard the baby boy crying and opened the peach to find him concealed inside. They named him Momotaru as an homage to his origin and raised him as their own.

Momotaru grew up to be an incredibly strong and hard working young man, who did the work of four men out in his parents’ small rice paddy, which he was able to extend to the largest in the prefecture through hard work and accumulation of wealth. Unknown to Momotaru was the fact that his parents were forced to pay a hefty tribute to the occupying oni. He was kept out working in the paddies whenever the oni came, as his parents knew he would never bow to such creatures no matter how troublesome the results could prove to be until one morning when his father had fallen ill and he was left to tend the household.

When the oni came around to collect his regular tribute of rice and coin, Momotaru slew the beast with his bare hands and took it’s kanabo for his own, slinging it to his waist from a sash. When his mother chastised him for his actions and declared that more oni would surely follow, Momotaru told his mother to make him enough millet dumplings to last him on a trip to Edo, as he planned to travel there to overthrow the oni once and for all.

On the morning of his departure, Momotaru was met by a dog who began to follow him. When he questioned the dog, she answered that her pups had been eaten by the oni, and for the price of one of his dumplings, she would sniff out any oni hiding along the way for him. Momotaru agreed and they traveled on until they met a pheasant who called to them from the air. She begged for help, her eggs were being stolen by a marauding oni looking for a treat. The trio were too late to save the eggs, but Momotaru and the dog struck down the oni and killed it.

He then offered the inconsolable bird one of his dumplings if she would scout the path ahead from the air for oni riding out to meet their advance, and she agreed. The trio continued on until nightfall when they came upon a village, where they stayed the night at the inn. In the morning, they were woken by the local yakuza and the village elders, who had already heard about Momotaru’s feats in battle against the oni.

They begged him to find and apprehend a scurrilous monkey who had robbed them of what little riches the oni had left them with, and Momotaru agreed on the condition that in return he could take the young woman of his choosing as his wife in return. The men hastily agreed, and so the trio set off in search of the monkey, whom they pursued to a cave in the foothills of mountains not far from the town.

Cornered, the monkey pleaded for his life. He offered his services in stealth to help them defeat the oni in exchange for his life and one of Momotaru’s millet dumplings. The foursome then returned to the village along with the stolen goods, where Momotaru was faced with the decision of choosing a wife. He told the women to go home and bake him a batch of millet dumplings. Whoever baked the best, he would marry.

And so Momotaru, his new wife, and the animals all depart for the final leg of their journey. They stop on the outskirts of Edo and wait for the pheasant to see what they’re up against. The pheasant returns to say that the oni have retained about a hundred samurai that they keep in their service by threatening to kill their families should they attempt seppuku. The monkey then suggests that they wait until nightfall, at which point he left on his own and stealthily stole every one of the hundred swords without anyone stirring.

So when Momotaru arrived to the shogun’s castle to do battle with the oni, the human samurai panicked and were forced to come out brandishing kitchen knives, wooden practice swords, and boat oars. He then declared that all their swords belonged to him, and thus their service. He took the swords to prevent them from committing seppuku once the oni were defeated and their families were safe. They pledged their loyalty to Momotaru as the new shogun should he survive the coming battle, and the monkey led them to their swords while Momotaru, the dog, and the pheasant went on to fight the oni.

But the monkey led the samurai to the wrong place and revealed that he was an oni shapeshifted as a monkey to kill Momotaru and take control once Momotaru had killed the leader of the oni. The monkey oni slew all of the samurai and returned to the castle to await his chance. Unfortunately for him, the leader of the oni could see quite well that he would not escape Momotaru alive and hid himself as a rat in the castle. Frustrated and angry at his disappearance, the pheasant and dog revealed that they two were really oni as well and they attempted to kill Momotaru. He bested them easily, then continued on to free the prisoners in the dungeon below, with the rat oni following close behind. Momotaru found a dying woman in one of the cells who revealed to him that she was his mother, and his father was the leader of the oni with her dying breath.

The leader of the oni retreated back to Oni Island with this information secreted away while Momotaru anguished at the secret truth of his parentage. Still he became the new shogun and raised a son, hoping to put time and distance between himself and the truth. However as he aged and his hair thinned, he began to notice that his skin was becoming redder and redder, which he countered by secretly having his face powdered like a geisha and wearing heavy robes everywhere to conceal the rest of his body until one night his wife noticed that there were horns growing through his thinning hair, proving his worst fears true.

In a panic, Momotaru murdered his wife and sawed the horns off, leaving nothing but nubs behind. He bundled her body and the horns in a sack and threw it over the wall and into the river as he had been as a baby. He then ordered his son, now a man, to take fifty samurai and conquer Oni Island, knowing his son would not return. He reasoned that he was doing his son a kindness by sending him to a heroic death, rather than let him grow old and eventually become a full oni like his father.

Momotaru’s ploy worked, and his father sent the head of his grandson, Momotaru’s son, back to him in the hands of a single survivor. Momotaru then set off to Oni Island alone, swimming out to the island with nothing but his kanabo slung at his waist. Oni fell by the scores to his wrath and he beat a bloody path up to and into his father, who expressed a smug kind of glee at his son’s final embrace of his true nature. Even so, Momotaru murdered his father and swam back home.

Returning home to his bedchamber, Momotaru was greeted by a shadowy figure. His dead wife returned as a twisted hanya. She fell upon him and slashed his throat, killing him while his eyes were still open wide in surprise.

It ain't easy being green

2009-02-03T07:21:00.000-08:00

Snippets of dialogue and musings from my version of Brainiac 5.

"The fundamental truth of any doctrine is that it will decay. History is not so kind as to tell us when. There is no radioactive half life that tells us when a manifesto of peace is sung to the beat of the drums of war, when a religion of unity divides and conquers, when an uprising of democracy devolves into tyranny.

One can only hope, and must do so fervently, that the Legion- our struggle to this point- is quickly and decisively lost to history before it reaches that most tragic of critical masses. I have no doubt that no matter how righteous we remain, no matter how strictly scrupulously we act, the doctrine of the Legion will be used to propagate the very things that we seek to eradicate today. This is the problem with speaking to the future of course. It may have already begun; already word of the uprising on Earth has spread throughout the United Planets. These words might very well be the epitaph of the Legion, a bitter memory of a better time. This is the eternal paradox of the revolutionary

The predicament of our times is that we fear the future, which is most poignantly displayed by the fear of youth that necessitated our uprising. It is tempting to embrace the future, to turn to that which our elders eschewed, but replacing one extreme with another is never the answer. No, what we must do is fear for the future. The future is a perpetual birth, and if we are to see the future take a better shape then we must take responsibility. The Legion must become the midwives of the future if we are to achieve anything of note."