Pan’s Labyrinth, War, etc.

So I really shouldn’t be writing now, I have a lot of reading to do, but I did want to chime in on a couple things and just keep my blogging muscles toned during this, the second week of class.

On Friday night I saw Pan’s Labyrinth. I really didn’t expect to dig it — a prestige picture from a heretofore work-a-day director (to my knowledge), a fantasy script, what looked to be a naive dabbling in fascism, politics, “magical realism,” the surreal. Certainly, the film was all these things — I don’t think that my expectations were wrong — but it also worked for me on these levels. My fear as I entered the film was that I’m actually interested in these topics, so it easily could have made only a few missteps and been a great disappointment for me.

It’s not a masterpiece, which is what I think some critics have been calling it. In fact, to my mind, it was a modest accomplishment. It was, basically, I thought, a creepy sort of meditation on the aesthetics of fascism, the story that fascism tells about itself or has told about itself. The special effects were employed to worthwhile ends and some of the imagery was impressively faithful to a native Iberian surrealist style, namely Dali.

Less so from this perspective, from its place in an Hispanic cultural tradition, but more so from the point of view of coping with or working through an historical trauma, I wondered if the film would resonate more in the eyes of a Spanish viewer. I imagine it would. It was refreshing to see a WWII movie, or at least, a movie at one remove from WWII, not set on the German side or the Amerikan, not focusing solely upon the slaughter of mechanized warfare or on the Holocaust, but on how that war also exterminated a set of folkways and traditions, a whole sort of worldview embodied, in the film, by the imagination of the young heroine or the spirit of the communist freedom fighters. Especially with this latter element, I couldn’t help but wax sentimental for other stories of Spain, the Civil War, and fascism from an Anglo-American perspective — For Whom the Bell Tolls and Homage to Catalunya — both favorite books of mine. Even though this association is clearly out of context, it still increased my enjoyment of the film. Recommended.

I also feel the need to reflect a little on the State of the Union. I forget if I’ve written on this yet. At any rate, I’ll keep it brief. In fact, I won’t write much at all except to say that I grow more disappointed every day that an anti-war movement is so slow in organizing itself in opposition to this war. When will we take to the streets? When will we form a counterculture? This question especially to me seems so vital. Late last night they were running some low-budget documentary on the 60s here in Charlottesville. I didn’t even watch it even though it looked as though it featured some cool interviews, but the brief bit that I did see reminded me that the staidness and conservatism of contemporary youth culture is a major impediment to the development of an anti-authoritarian social movement of any kind, and if the United States needs anything right now it is anti-authoritarian political agitation. I don’t think that democracy is dead in this country or as a political ideology, but it is time to recognize that in the United States the powers-that-be are acting wrecklessly and irresponsibility in a nearly dictatorial fashion. The Bush White House has no mandate for the actions that it is taking, actions which I fear will inevitably lead to some sort of low-scale military conflict with Iran in the not too distant future, and then we’re even further down the proverbial rabbit hole than we are right now. Since it’s too late to counter these actions in the polling booth, we must take to the streets, but we won’t without a dense and robust network of social, cultural, and political discourse. From my perspective, culture, as I say counter-culture, is the always missing element.

And one further small point that might unwittingly set this post to rights. I also heard that weirdo Tony Blankley on The McLaughlin Group this weekend say that Washington has nothing to fear from an anti-war movement because of how the Internet dissipates political energies. I definitely agree with this thesis in part, and I think I may try to explore it further in coming posts. Comments welcome and encouraged.

Arcade Fire Video, etc.

Classes started here in the UVA Graduate School of Arts & Sciences this week so I didn’t have much time to write and probably won’t have over the next couple months, but I’m going to try to keep up.

Today I visited pitchfork and saw that they had uploaded a video of Arcade Fire apparently performing in a high school cafeteria. The vid quality is understandably low, but I’m incredibly intrigued by the tune and the performance. It’s difficult to make out what’s being said or played — something about a soldier, some slide guitar, maybe some xylophones, or keyboards — but the whole thing is obviously, mightily anthemic, and for that reason, pretty impressive. On the Arcade Fire’s first album, I felt as though a lot of the monumentality and grandiosity was canned — that they relied on a number of music-formal and in-studio tricks to achieve monumental effects that weren’t necessarily merited by the songwriting either lyrically, vocally, instrumentally, or otherwise.

From the first, here — the strummed acoustic guitar intro — it seems evident that something more is going on. The lyrics, or what I can make out of them, are apparently more sensible than the worthless indie-rock opaqueness on their first album. The whole song, structurally, just sounds good in the most elemental way that a rock song can sound good. Bowie or Bends-era Radiohead immediately came to mind when watching this clip, and this is performed in a cafeteria for chrissakes!

Could this be a new direction for the Fire? Maybe, though the evidence is scant. It’s a low-grade youtube vid, and I think it’s obvious, too, that this is an insidious sort of viral marketing campaign that I’m playing right into by blogging on this. But like all mass culture, there is the utopian upshot. Will the Fire meet the shrewd hipster crassness of their five-night stands in London, Montreal, and New York with a heart-on-sleeves tour of high school cafs where they play songs of political substance — a sort of directly addressing, neo-Brechtian, post-critical theory attempt to push things forward, culturally and politically? Probably not, but it’s worth thinking about, right?

American Idol

Did you all have the chance to watch the American Idol season premiere tonight? Man, was it fascinating! And I actually missed the first half hour.  Shame on me.  Idol gets more and more repugnant with each passing season.

My personal favorite singer so far, who got on to the next round, was the self-admitted “crack baby.” Obviously, this is an impolitic, and probably inaccurate term medically, which made my draw drop even lower when the young lady, whose name I forget, described herself in this way. Really, there was a lot of pathos on the air tonight when Idol was on, utterly cringeworthy.

What about the guy with the devil sticks near the end of the broadcast? Clearly this poor kid had some kind of mild disability — Asberger’s Syndrome, ADHD — or he was just disturbed, so it was really awful to broadcast his post-audition explosion, certainly not entertaining, but also, to my mind, compulsory viewing.  Not only can’t you look away from this carwreck, you ought not to, and I’m serious about that.   Watching  American Idol always reminds me of Abbie Hoffman’s charge to aspiring gorilla (Yes, the spelling is intentional.  Think about it (if you haven’t already).) revolutionaries to watch at least one hour of network television a day, the trashier the better.  From the proper ideological perspective, such viewing shouldn’t dull you to the fact that we live in a barbaric shitbowl of a country, but draw your attention to it.  So I can’t wait ’til Idol goes to Seattle tomorrow night for more auditions.  And Jewel’s a good judge.

The Pain of Blogging

Ouch, for the second time this week, I have lost a tremendously long post and it hurts. I am really pissed right now, and don’t have the time to re-write everything, so you’ll have to settle for what was only the first section of a three-part entry.

The Birds. Well, obviously, I’m disappointed by the result of the game. They had plenty of chances to put more points on the board, for instance, at the end of the first half when they let the punter run for a first down, and obviously, when they failed to capitalize on the Saints late game fumble. Plenty of people are going to be ripping on Andy Reid’s decision to punt on 4th and 15 at the end of the game, this week and long into the future. Personally, I didn’t like the decision, because I was always nervous with the Eagles ‘D’ on the field this year, especially against a team with such a potent running attack as the Saints, but I understand Andy’s reasoning. I really think that a coach, in that position, really has no other choice than to put his confidence in his defense and hope that they can get the other team off the field, give the offense another chance. I don’t quite understand what made the 4th and 15 so different than the 4th and 10, necessarily, but I guess you can look at it like – the offense had their shot on 4th and 10, made a bonehead penalty, so now the defense gets their shot not to flub up. Don’t forget, after all, that the Birds were behind in a game that, I thought, was one of the most evenly matched that I’d seen in awhile. In other words, they were running uphill at that point, so the burden is on the players on the field, not the coach. If either the offense or the defense had just made it happen there, after the fumble, the result of the game would have been much different.

Good guitar albums in ‘06?

OK, so tonight I’m going to start my musical year in review with a reflection on guitar albums in 2006.  Whether or not they existed, and if they did, whether or not they were good.  Of course, this is going to include an extended excursus, at least for a little while, on the question, What is a good guitar album?

Well, it can belong to a number of categories, genres, or sub-genres.  It should include, most of all, probably, guitar-driven rock (whatever that is) and post-rock, good power pop and old-school punk (probably not hardcore).  It should include good guitar-driven psych . . . probably.  It does not include, for our purposes here, anything outright ‘experimental’ or ‘avant-garde,’ even though there is plenty of these sorts of musics that sounds good on a guitar.  It doesn’t include music that purports to be folk, neo-folk, or otherwise-folk either.  It might include metal.  It doesn’t include most electronic music.

Obviously, these are, to some extent, arbitrary distinctions, but no more arbitrary than the generic categories themselves, and somewhat less arbitrary since there is a single, discernible, and obvious commonality between what I will be ostensibly categorizing as good guitar albums — the strong, purposive, creative, and enriching presence of well played guitars, that is, riffs, virtuosity, classicism, best foot forward, structure, form.

But then the question arises — which we’ve all been waiting for — what was good? And that’s where I get hung up.  Picking my brain, I come up with only one immediate and obvious contender and that’s Mastodon’s latest Blood Mountain.  But I’m not going to write on that one now, because as I was brainstorming discs for this feature, I had the pleasure of listening straight through, for the first time, to the album that Mission of Burma put out this year, The Obliterati.

I mean, Mission of Murma, wow, right? I didn’t grow up with these guys, since they first split up when I was two years old, but I certainly listened to them growing up.  And they played a large part in it, my growing up, that is.  So I’ve always been skeptical of their recent reformation and apparent renaissance.  The reviews have always been good, but I’ve never been a believer.  Their two new albums, this one and 2004’s Onoffon, have been kicking around my iPod since they came out, but they never really bit me, until today, a most inopportune time I guess, since I was trying to write this year in review feature.  But maybe not so bad after all, since I would definitely now rank The Obliterati as a good guitar album in ‘06, and also because I knew trying to write a feature like this would doubtless lead off into a number of tangents that I, at least, will find more interesting and engaging than lending any structure to my feature, thus maybe turning this thing into a more involved and sincere blog than it usually is.

I don’t really know exactly what The Obliterati is about yet, since I haven’t been able to discern all the lyrics, but what seems obvious is that, like all Burma’s best work, it is, at least to some extent, about power.  Two kinds of power.  Musical and political.  Obviously, the title Obliterati, a play on illuminati, keys us in on this too.  The most politically rant-abulous song on the album is the scorching closer “Nancy Reagan’s Head,” a song that could have turned into a gag in less seasoned punk rock hands, but here transforms into something truly frightening, and frightfully clever.  The chorus is a killer: “I’m haunted by the freakish size of Nancy Reagan’s head,” and the gang vocal response, “No way that thing came with that body.” The chorus and the song and a whole lot of this album, actually, reminds me of Dead Kennedy’s style political punk, but in a good way, when Jello had a sense of humor and the band a sense of purpose (e.g. their first album).  “Nancy” closes the album perfectly with a weird sort of pizzicato string figure running throughout.  (Hopefully played on a guitar, but I can’t be sure.  No liners.) And there is a weird choral effect somewhere in there too, but I wonder if that’s emulated as well.

I wonder if guitars are producing that string sound, because really this album, in keeping with the theme for today, is a guitar album.  In fact, it’s like a field recording of a set of forty year old men having a super intense time being creative with guitars, and this is what is cool about it.  Such a scene of recording may sound masturbatory, and I guess it is, in a way, but no more masturbatory than most musicmaking, and the fact that it’s unembarassed about this is awesome.  To my mind, there is something profoundly humane about aging punks making an album of this ambition and depth and still being amateurish about it, recording it as if they were anthropologists not ‘indie-rockers’ (which they’re obviously not).  There are mistakes on Obliterati and there is studio chatter, but its amateurism and mistakes are calculated, and this is but one thing that, for me, punk was all about.  Latter day punkers could learn something from this immaculate slop, and they could start with the third track “Donna Sumeria,” which clearly has an oblongish disco inflection and a more apparent new wave sensibility in its few note guitar repetition, but takes us back to when dabbling in disco had some ideological significance and when new wave, in some circles, was a descriptor interchangeable with “punk.”

Not many guitar bands these days are writing songs with changes as ragged yet monumental as the ones in The Obliterati’s penultimate track and false climax, “Period,” because I don’t think many guitar bands are capable of it, because most guitar bands today flare out after one or two better than average albums.  Very few have an unexpected shelflife of nearly thirty years, like the Mission, and even less, I think, share the Mission’s palpable disdain for nostalgia, preferring instead instant nostalgia for a fleeting moment of brilliance that just never comes.  On Obliterati, it’s came.

Errata

Obviously, I was wrong. The Office wasn’t a re-run (see last post), and it was good : )

Springfield in the news

I think The Office is a rerun tonight, but I’m going to watch it anyway, but before I do here’s a link to an article in the New York Times about my hometown, Springfield, and my dad’s hometown, Clifton Heights. Most Springfield readers probably already know this, but I should also mention that the Rocco Polidoro quoted in the first paragraph is a family friend. I haven’t read the article yet myself, in toto, so I don’t really have any further comment on it, but it’s certainly an interesting piece of Springfield trivia. Don’t ya think?

President Bush’s Speech

I still plan on getting to the year in review stuff eventually.  In fact, putting the idea out there has given me a chance to organize some of my thoughts privately before I air them here for all to see.  So consider yourself lucky. Or warned.

Instead of posting the year in review stuff tonight, I’m going to comment a bit on the speech that President Bush delivered this evening.  I knew that it would be painful to watch, but I also felt like I was somehow obligated to watch it, so I grinned and bore it.  On an aesthetic, emotional level, as a gut check, it actually wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.  In fact, ever since the last election, I haven’t found the Bush ‘persona,’, or what we might better call his presentation all that galling.  Certainly, this is a matter of fatigue on my part, but like anyone in his position, I think that he has at least toned down his hubris somewhat, however infinitesimally, and that has made at least some difference to me.

The speech was somewhat honest.  I found the following section the most affecting:

“[Our troops in Iraq] have done everything we have asked them to do. Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me.”

When I first heard this, my response was quite visceral.  Immediately, it felt like a pose that I’ve never seen or heard Bush strike before–repentance, remorse, responsibility, guilt–the simple admission that one has made a mistake.  But of course, reviewing the text now, I realize that it wasn’t quite that.  As Mark Shields pointed out in his immediate response to the speech on PBS, “mistakes have been made” is Washington double-talk designed to displace blame.

Still, Bush’s tone was sober, and the strategy he presented for escalating the invasion of Iraq was, at least, not as vague as feared (though this is not really a good thing either).  Nevertheless, it was obfuscating–a mask–though this mask is thin and attenuated.  The president’s big lie is damaged and fraying.  Fatigue has set in–fatigue towards the war, towards the presidential persona, towards the politics of fear.  Does anyone buy the War on Terror rhetoric anymore? These days it almost seems as though it would be in Al Qaeda’s best interests not to attack the United States so that the War on Terror rhetoric will seem like more and more of a fraud to the American people and perhaps convince them to take their own action against their falsifying government.

It is difficult to see, but it is obvious that what Bush is talking about here is expanding the war effort, escalating the war effort.  This is really what he’s asking for–a tenuous mandate of silence.  He’s playing politics, so I will too.  I hate to sound like a Democrat here, because I know that this is the counter-spin that they’re posting up against Bush and his cronies’ preferred “troop surge,” but “expanding the war” is, in my opinion, a phrase to get behind.  It is the truth. (Note: The president doesn’t actually mention troop surge in the speech so I wonder if that’s already been taken out of circulation.)

From my perspective, with today’s speech, the United States government’s invasion of Iraq has come to resemble their invasion of Vietnam more than ever before. Of course, this development is a totally horrible thing for the people living in Iraq and for the soldiers attacking them.  But if the resemblance has a good side effect it might be, finally, to bring the utter brutality of war, all war, home to American citizens and perhaps inspire them to attempt, more forcefully, to put a stop to this invasion and all future invasions.  I visited Vietnam and Cambodia two years ago (and the former Yugoslavia the year before that), and to see the scars of war in these countries is to forever know that the mediated presentation of a sanitized war, a rational war, a just war, is an out and out lie and distortion.  I will be thinking of this fact as I watch and read of American soldiers going from door to door in the neighborhoods of Baghdad, not creating a peace, or securing a peace (there is none to be had!) but fighting a war, a war, I will have you note, that never came up in President Bush’s speech.  As he would have us believe, no war is being fought in Iraq (besides the war on terror, mentioned once, early on, in passing).  But of course it is.  And a wider war is being sought, and this, for the moment, we can only mourn.

(P.S. Some of my thoughts on this post were inspired by Phil Ochs’s song “We Seek No Wider War,” which was scrolling through my head throughout the entire speech.  I would quote it, but it’s difficult to pick up on its irony without reading through the entire thing, so here’s a link to the lyrics: http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~trent/ochs/lyrics/we-seek-no-wider-war.html  Or better yet, download it somewhere.)

Year In Review?

I’m gonna try my damnedest to blog every day this week and hopefully keep that head of steam going next week when my Spring classes start.  I want to do a musical year in review of sorts, but I’m not sure how to organize it.  I sure as hell ain’t gonna opt for the list format.  I hate that shit, epecially when ranked.  But then again, upon further reflection, I realize that it’s actually quite a convenient way to relate what you’ve dug in a year.  I always feel hamstrung in these efforts, though, by the fact that, as a private citizen with a limited income and limited time, I can’t listen to everything worth listening to, so to purport any sort of objectivity is misleading.  So I won’t do that.   My year end “list,” if you want to call it that will instead be a series of reflections on the musical year that was.  Of course, there is no reason why I should necessarily do this “yearly,” since the year is, after all, an ideological/economic construction, a necessity of the market, even if not a really galling one.  So on with the show . . .

But first I wanted to mention a movie I watched last night, Masked and Anonymous, directed by Larry Charles of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm fame, but also lately the director of Borat as well, which I also saw last week.  The movie stars Bob Dylan.  I don’t know why this movie was such a phenomenal failure.  Well, maybe it wasn’t a phenomenal failure? I know that it, at least, got mixed reviews.  I guess what surprises me is that such a star-studded movie (although mostly in cameos), featuring none other than the Bob himself, should not have enjoyed a lot more commercial success.  Or at least cult status, right? Maybe it is a cult movie? How can you know if you’re not part of the cult? Does anyone else like this movie?

Clearly, it was disjointed, both intentionally and unintentionally.  I started listening to Charles’s commentary today and it definitely sounds as though the movie was made on a shoestring, which probably led the filmmakers to cut some corners, but its presentation is also fairly artful or at least tasteful and its use of found and stock footage was provocative and creative.  The performaces were roundly excellent in a Coen Bros. movie sort of way, and the dialogue, although again inconsistent, was more often clever and funny, a blend of Beckett and Twain, which is saying a little and a lot at the same time.  Dylan is a hilarious actor, a Chaplin-like figure, or even the song and dance man that he so wants to be.  What’s best though are the musical performances.  They’re mannered, and I can’t really speak to how they stack up to all of Dylan’s performance archive, but they at least stand beside No Direction Home and Don’t Look Back as a worthwhile addition to the archive.  I was particularly frightened and fascinated by Dylan’s rendition of “Dixie” in Masked.  Of course, we all know the melody and are at least somewhat familiar with the song-text (“whistling Dixie”), but it was still shocking to me to hear Dylan kick out this erstwhile racist jam, and creepy because I really dug what he did with the song.  I have to imagine that Dylan and the filmmakers grasped the whole history and significance of this formal minstrel tune, which has solicited outright protest from civil rights activists, and this made its performance shocking, even more shocking because it’s really fucking good.  Some of the better Dylan I’ve heard this year.

And speaking of this year, this entry was supposed to be about the music this year, but now I’m winded, so the review will begin tomorrow.

The Departed

I made a mighty attempt at blogging earlier today on DVDs of movies made by 80s art stars, but the post got erased.  Maybe later this week . .  . Tonight I went to see Scorsese’s new one that’s not really new anymore, The Departed.  It was fun, and it continues what I’ve found to be a hot streak of his ever since Gangs of New York (I realize that not everyone shares this opinion).  The movie had plenty of twists and turns, and for this reason, some might find it convoluted.  I found it convoluted too, but in a good way, when all was said and done.  Leonardo DiCaprio was particularly good in it, and it makes one wonder why Scorsese is the only director who’s forgiven him Titanic and given him some juicy roles.  Remember, Leo was cast in Titanic in the first place because of his promising performances in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?, This Boy’s Life, and The Basketball Diaries before he became a teen heartthrob.  Departed features a lot of homages and allusions to 1930s crime movies, that is, the original gangster genre, when gangsters were Irish, and I dug that.  Nicholson’s performance, in particular, reminded me of the best of Jimmy Cagney–The Public Enemy, White Heat–and that’s saying a lot, those are a couple of favorite flicks and all-time fav performances.  Still, this wasn’t one of Jack’s best.  The William Wellman, Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks, silent von Sternberg elements are strong with this one.  Hell, it even features some Scarface exes (and that’s the original Scarface for those who are counting), and I’m always a sucker for telegraphed classical Hollywood movie references in postmodern meditations on Catholic identity.  It was a good movie.  See it on the big screen if you haven’t already.