jane dark's sugarhigh!

26 singles of the year/"melodic range"

As ever, the singles list excludes songs that appear on the albums list for this year (though, idiosyncratically, it doesn't exclude songs that appeared on last year's list (Miranda Lambert) or are likely to appear on next year's list (M.I.A.). Moreover, the list is generated from iTunes play counts aggregated from all the sugarhigh! terminals, modified by a simple algorithm that accounts for song's release dates (so that "Wunderkind," e.g., added on January 8th, places lower than "Hell Yeah," which had nine fewer listens but wasn’t added until June 23rd. The main thing this algorithm does is count how many listens a song got in the first week, first month, and over the entire span, and then calculate both a song’s rate of “decay” in popularity, and what the stock analysts would call its “beta”: its relative volatility. This equation is highly proprietary.

1) "Do It To It," Cherish feat. YoungBloodz. See note here.
2) "Too Little Too Late," JoJo. Best achievement in melancholy AutoTune since Cher. Machines sing with more feeling than people. When Donna Harraway and Kathryn Hayles talk about the posthuman, this is what they mean. Best-case scenario, that is.
3) "18 Dummy," The Federation. In a year in which the hyphy movement the truly euphoric subgenre, The Federation were its purest product and greatest failure. The album long whispered to be in the can never came out, the movement failed to find a focal point once everyone realized E-40 was on some other melange, and we were left with nothing but a few impossibly great mixtape singles that left us wondering what exactly the Federation was: indie-undie little label localism from California's unlikely Central Valley gone wild? Production whiz kids passing them off as superthugs? "I'm from Fairfield, that's where my mind stays — strapped in my backpack, nothing like Kanye." No doubt.
4) "Unwritten," Natasha Bedingfield. You’d know if you saw the video. Free indirect gospel presented as elevator music.
5) "Check On It," (Beyonce ft. Slim Thug). Though this appeared on a Destiny's Child hits collection, it remains officially credited to Beyoncé. The main writer is, get this, named Angela Beyince. Could who does what get any more meaningless? Er, except to the accountants.
6) "Promiscuous Girl," Nelly Furtado feat. Timbaland. Furtado is more of a Simpson than an Aguilera, vocal skills-wise. But lesser artists would have wilted in front of this beat, even recycled as it is from a better Xzibit song; Nelly steps in there and holds her own, and that's all it takes. Quite possibly the best-natured song of the year (and, as we know from the long version of Aaliyah’s greatest moment, good-natured rumbling is really what rapper Tim Mosely should stick to).
7) "Tim McGraw," Taylor Swift. Sounds sort of like everyone else. Isn't.
8) "Hell Yeah," San Quinn (feat. E-A-Ski). "Yep yes si with a hell in front of it."
9) "Wunderkind," Alanis Morissette. We here at sugarhigh! are awful. Just terrible.
10) "Ain't No Other Man," Christina Aguilera. GIven that, jazzercizing in abeyance, this is basically a concept album about how much she digs her new husband, we can conclude that Jordan Bratman is pretty much one good single's worth of one good man. See album review here.
11) "Get Drunk and Be Somebody," Toby Keith. Without much by way of inventiveness, and an attitude more than a worldview, Toby Keith has turned out to be one of the most insistent, playful hit makers of the decade, ever since he grew out of his youth, filled out his baritone, and hit his stride with 2000's "How Do You Like Me Now" — as a sure thing, he's somewhere between Nineties Sheryl Crow and Nineties Tori Amos. See note here.
12) "I Don't Feel Like Dancing," Scissor Sisters. It is a fundamentally good thing that someone decided their project would be to marry the queer rock classicism of Elton John and the queer glam underpinnings of early disco; they leapt for the BeeGees and landed on Leo Sayer and that's just fine by us. Hey Williamsburg, you should try to enjoy this a lot; it's the only payback you have coming for enduring the misery of the Fischerspooner years.
13) "New Strings," Miranda Lambert. A song so clear that children youtubing their versions from their bedrooms to the world can see right through it.
14) "Standing In The Way Of Control," The Gossip. See note here.
15) "Fast Cars And Freedom," Rascal Flatts. Everyone talks about how country "is really old-fashioned melodic pop-rock," which is still a way of liking country while pretending not to like, you know, country. Except in the case of Rascal Flatts, which is really old-fashioned melodic pop-rock.
16) "Bumpin' My Music," Ray Cash. More fun.
17) "One," Mary J. Blige feat. U2. Pet Shop Boys, Johnny Cash...this is not the first great U2 cover, and it won't be the last. There's a reason for that: however swell the songs might be (and this is one swell song), Bono can't sing. His vocals are thin and mawkish and have a stident need to be liked, and each of these covers provides a massive benefit, be it Neil Tennant's yearning irony or Johnny Cash's singular gravitas. Mary J broadens out the tones to the Baptist breadth to which they always secretly aspired, and gives them an emotional thickness that, well, Bono doesn't have and she does, in spades. Secondary lesson in all this: The Edge may be more of a genius than we thought.
18) “Life Ain’t Always Beautiful,” Gary Allan. See note here.
19) "Men And Mascara," Julie Roberts. Ballads are easier to write than uptempo numbers, but much much harder to sing.
20) "Call Me When You're Sober," Evanescence. Listen, no one is more annoyed than we are at the capacity of self-righteous religious zealots to write good melodies.
21) “With You,” Jessica Simpson. One of the two best guitar loops of the year, along with some track in the middle of the Clipse album.
22) “Irreplaceable,” Beyonce. Looking forward to comparativist study of the way this last syllable is pronounced by Mick Jagger (“Respectable”) and Beyonce. Also: as sugarhigh! adviser Chris Nealon notes, “does she know her album is named Bidet?”
23) “The Way I Live,” Baby Boy. Fun.
24) “Fergalicious,” Fergie. At first it’s hard to know which crude Eighties triumph of trocheeic dimeter this is ripping off mercilessly; if it seems at first like “You Be Illin’,” but when the double-time electro kicks in halfway through, one twigs to the fact that it’s ye olde “Supersonic,” by JJ Fad. The metre varies for effect here and there (most peasingly in the “try an’ tell”/”clientele” rhyme), but mostly it’s intent on its extended, virtuosic trochees: “FERgaLIcious’ DEFiNItion: MAKE them BOYS go CRAzy” and on and on.Ever since rap’s rigid vocal metricality yielded to the conversational vernacularity of hip-hop — that is, ever since rap’s Rakim-midwived modernity — few songs have paid as much attention to classcial lyrical beat patterns as this, one of the most precise songs of the times.
25) “It's Okay (One Blood),” The Game. As close as sugarhigh! has ever come to voting reggae.
26) “XR2 (turbo mix),” M.I.A. Well, where were you in ’92? This is “The End of the World As We Know It” or “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” or maybe Joe Brainard’s “I Remember,” except redolent of M.I.A.’s Londonized machine nervosa. The proposition that all memories can be stored in acronyms used to seem like a fact about the music biz (who here remembers Reunion’s “Life is a Rock”?) but now seems like a fact about memory in these times, in some way a kind of negotiation with computers and digitization — which is to say, a lyrical negotiation with the formal and technological history of pop music itself. As a final note: those still wondering about the derivation of Maya’s foundational quasi-word “galang” (Who the hell is hunting you/in your BMW?”) might wish to spend some time with sub-sub-Tom Clancy author Jack Buchanan, who has a novel titled M.I.A. Hunter/la Gang. We don't make this stuff up; we just report it,

ON MELODIC RANGE IN POPULAR MUSIC

Sometime in the Nineties — say, after "Waterfalls" and well before "No Scrubs," to use the TLC calendar — mersh R&B narrowed its melodic range. It didn't necessarily use fewer notes (though this was often the case), but chose notes from within a narrower scope in any given song. Largely gone were the transcendent/ludicrous ascents and resolves, the struggle/release/euphorias of "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" or "Man in the Mirror"; the duotone themes of "No, No, No, No" and "Say My Name" carried the day.

This condensation was meant to convey coiled sensuality, tense menace, moral seriousness. In part it borrowed these sensibilities from hip-hop, the center of authority in popular culture. One might argue that the structures of tune in American pop float between forms where affect is largely conveyed by speech, and where it's indexed to variations of melody keyed to the Western scale: upper limit country, lower limit rap, as Louis Zukofsky surely meant to say.

In the event, R&B was successful enough in expressing its revised set of feelings that it had a dialectical effect on the entire Billboard Hot 100. On the one hand, a new genre arose immediately for the express purpose of rescuing melodic range: this got named teenpop, and its genius took up the explicit project of extending the melodic scope of the Top 40 through complex modulations, moments after R&B narrowed its own scope. But on the other hand, the new significations of R&B, every time someone in an adjacent genre was feeling, well, dippy, they could emulate the move to refashion themselves as mature, controlled, serious.

And so, for example, when Mariah Carey of the famous range, of "Dreamlover" and "Fantasy" and "Emotions," needed to indicate she was no longer Glitter-y and/or crazy, she stopped down to the minimal palette of "Shake It Off" and etc. And when Britney, who had become synonymous with teenpop, needed to "grow up," she just repeated history: the passage from "Oops..." to "Slave" tells the story of modern R&B again, offset by a few years, with the naked significatory intent that had always been her stock in trade. The genius of "Toxic" lies exactly in how much it manages to do within the late phase's restrictions, between the low ceiling and high floor.

Shifts, of course, never happen all at once: uneven development, three-steps-forward and two-steps-back, little gestures here and there, these turn out to have been key junctures in a story that the market is trying to tell. And this is the story that "Irreplaceable" begins to narrate. It's a good song, not a great one; nobody thinks its within seven rungs of "Crazy in Love" on the ladder of the Ideal Pop Song. That song had decent range as well, but it also had other things on its mind, and returned relentlessly to the three-note theme. "Irreplaceable" seems to have as its main purpose the restoration of melodic range to pop. That it found traction with an audience that had proved itself indifferent to the far-narrower B singles that preceded it is the most telling fact — not in the least in that it demonstrates how Beyonce had better dance to the tune of the times, having lost the imperious capacity to make the times dance to her own tune.

That song answered by the finally far more appealing "Too Little Too Late," by JoJo, which hauls out Cher's AutoTune (and here we recall that "Believe," sung by a gorgeous octogenarian, was a pivotal moment in teenpop's story, collapsing the tween and disco audiences into a coherent mass) to describe explicitly the new opening-out, as the song modulates from its close opening melody into the full, ecstatic chorus via the machine, as if to suggest it requires industrial force to put that gloomy history in the past, as if that set of melodic moves was too little and it was too late for that indeed — at which the song turns to recalibrate itself, not without a melancholy sense of loss, to the deliriums and euphorias that had once sounded like a natural condition

eleven albums of the year/"generationality"

1) Scritti Politti, White Bread Black Beer. See review here.
2) E-40, My Ghetto Report Card. Standing on the shoulders of children who are standing on the shoulders of grown giants, one of whom is him.
3) Nadiya, Nadiya. See notes here.
4) Ghostface Killah, Fishscale. The most curious thing is how many enthralling details there are on an album which offers as its main appeal the fact that it could just go on and on with its endless nonsense and soulspace shuffle without anything in particular mattering very much. What did Q-Tip say, "Infinite on my mind every minute"? Yeah, that, exactly inverted: moments in the midst of the infinite.
5) Justin Timberlake, FutureSex / LoveSounds. See review here.
6) The Wreckers, Stand Still, Look Pretty. When teenpop loses interest in broad melodies, broadly melodic teenpoppers will build a home in the country.
7) Charlotte Gainsbourg, 5:55. Somehow this all makes Zero 7's aping of Air: A French Band make sense by reversing the Channel crossing. Or: never has anyone sounded so much like Sarah Nixey. Especially a French person.
8) Clipse, Hell Hath No Fury. Four years ago, it took the Neptunes' sounds to make sense of Los Bros' crude'n'curious style; herein, the favor is duly returned, as the real Yin Yang Twins' brutal intricacy provides a context for Chad'n'Pharrell's astringent loops to sound once again like minimalist elan rather than dispirited sparsity. Moreover, moments like these explain why popular culture as a general sphere is such a remarkable place: it's where you can still be too raw and too literary at the exact same time, via the very same gestures, and sell only 78,000 out of the box. Hubert Selby, Jr. should be so lucky.
9) Dixie Chicks, Taking the Long Way. See review here. Their least lovely studio album since Natalie joined is still about three songs better than most of the year's popular country albums. This is a fact both about the year in country and the actual greatness of the Dixie Chicks. Natalie Maines, by the way, is one of the greatest singers. Ever.
10) Tori Amos, A Piano. A bunch of tracks that anyone who cares already has, and a few they might not, which is just fine as long as the music's basically free (what's up, allofmp3.com!) Kind of nutty: "Dolphin Song." Kind of slept on: "Sweet the Sting." Kind of unbelievably great: "Ode to my Clothes."
11) Pretenders, Pretenders (reissue). Sometimes a reissue is just reminiscence. Sometimes it's rear-view mirror magic. The live version of "Stop Your Sobbing" is, in some degree, quite predictable, with its slow, emotionalized vocal first passage eventually opening out into a full-force charge. And yet, leaving almost no cliché unturned, the song succeeds in sounding like a torn, tragic elegy in advance for James Honeyman-Scott, who reaches into the solo and fearlessly tears up his own funeral.

NOTES ON GENERATIONALITY:

[We do not claim any Christgauvian/Archimedean overview of the year in music, nor is this note particularly relevant to the Albums List, as opposed to the forthcoming Singles; we're just putting things in places distributively]

Every year bears some traces of generational shift. Sometimes it takes the form of Oedipal agon; sometimes it appears as a necessary refurbishing of the industrial machine along its cycle of planned obsolescences; and sometimes it seems to be little at all until long after the fact: a novelty hit that turns out to have founded a genre; an ignored debut that revivifies a form; a star's album that stiffs a little, secretly presaging the unremarkable moment when a whole cohort loses its juju.

Generationality happen. The market requires it, as do Ezra Pound, Sigmund Freud, and Machiavelli. More interesting in any given year is where it happens, and what that says.

This is not to say that it's always surprising, and this year it wasn't surprising at all. It didn't happen much in rock, unless the fermentation of emo as the ubiquitous form of guitar-combo pop counts as a generational shift, which it really doesn’t, and didn’t produce much good music (you miss Fall Out Boy now, bitchez, don't you?) The best moment of the year in emo was probably the truly stupendous mono-argyle on that Panic! At the Disco guy’s top hat.

Conversely, hip-hop made a big point of generational shifts, most notably via Jay-Z finally getting out of the rap game. This millennium’s pantomime retirements were ways of sustaining his spectacular rule, his justified domination of hip-hop’s centrist regime; only an actual yawn-worthy album could have removed him from the throne, and he finally obliged. Meanwhile, though it may just indicate a clearing of the golden throat and mind, this was the first year in memory that Missy Elliott, the other best rapper alive, didn’t do something that was complete and absolute genius, and in fact didn’t really do anything at all.

The vacuum in the national consciousness wasn’t filled by longtime critical demi-gods like Cam’ron or his Dipset dudes (snooze), nor the even-more-fetishized second coming of The Clipse; it was filled by actually juvenile fellows who figured out how to turn the local sound of southern rim cities just enough toward the center to consolidate national audiences. What was once a few frontier scenes is now the capital of the hip-hop century, stretched along the length of the Southern Smile: it starts in the Bay Area’s hyphy movement, dips down through Houston, New Orleans, Atlanta, and rises again to complete the grin right there in the syncopated surf of Virginia Beach that laps against the decaying wood paneling of Teddy Riley’s old 48-track analog console.

Plenty good hip-hop from elsewhere (peace to Miami, and to The Game, probably the most pleasing total cartoon poseur since Robbie Williams) — but the generational action is along that Smile, which might be a grimace, concealing a confederated grill from whence shines the brightest diamond, Lil Wayne himself, who clarified the whole situation by being the first person ever to say he was better than Shawn Carter and mean it. Meaning it doesn’t mean you’re right. Yet.

The generationality of country was kinder and gentler, natch, but even tidal shifts seem dramatic on a molasses sea. Johnny Cash was really really dead, Garth supernally irrelevant; meanwhile, Carrie Underwood morphed from up’n’coming talent to king of the world over what seemed like no more than weeks, and ex-pop stars and their backup singers were going country just like Alan Jackson promised, and Taylor Swift...well, Taylor Swift.

By country’s measures, Tim McGraw is still a pretty young thing: he showed up a while after Clint Black showed up a while after Randy Travis showed up a while after George Strait showed up, and George Strait’s still making hits on the regular down at the Young Country station. For what it’s worth, Tim McGraw is five years younger than Trace Adkins, who made everyone and their mother throw up in their mouths a little with last year’s “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk” (maybe that’s what Missy’s doing; she’s gone country, if she wasn't there already). And yet, there was Taylor Swift, born a month after the border between East and West Berlin was opened, treating Tim McGraw like a distant memory in arguably the best country single of the year (its competition was “Leave the Pieces,” by Michelle Branch and Jessica Harp, twenty-something escapees from teenpop’s decadent era).

“Tim McGraw” is more or less a rewrite of Deanna Carter’s “Strawberry Wine,” firmly in the long country tradition of adolescent summer love narratives; it’s delicate and quietly pissed off, a feeling that keeps converting to melancholy by the end of every bar, so that it can’t figure out if it’s truer in the first or third person, and the final gesture reads as both a romantic bid and a knife-sharp kissoff, albeit impossibly sweet. Part of its mystery, what kept the song alive all year long, was the way that that Tim McGraw shows up: “when you think: Tim McGraw, I hope you think my favorite song, the one we danced to all night long, the moon like a spotlight on the lake.” This is not like Garth giving props to an unknown Chris LeDoux; it's the forced conversion of a star to a legend. Converted to hip-hop years, it's like misting up when you say, "Remember way back when we used to listen to Juvenile?"

In this single gesture, Tim McGraw — not yet 40, about Jay-Z’s age — is banished to the realm of the dead, like Johnny Cash or Sinatra or Billie Holiday, surviving only in recordings and myths, a totemic figure whose recollection, whose absence, gives structure to the lives of the living. For real, how did she think she was going to get away with that? Or, more importantly, by what manner of magic did such a curious idea allow the writing of a perfect song?

It’s worth noting, lastly, that as hip-hop has smiled southward, country has inevitably forwned north: Gretchen Wilson’s Illinois home was just a forecast of Taylor Swift’s roots in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania. This is not to say that they don’t remain worlds apart, alas for Cowboy Troy. Progressive critics often want to note that people listen more widely across the genres than the imagination of encamped culture warriors suggests, and at a literal level this is true; that doesn’t mean that poptopia is a beautiful rainbow coalition. Folks are still real good at choosing the cores and borders of their own identifications, and merely indulging in the rest; the idea that all commodities are equally available turns out not to have collectivized the nation. This is why the “rockist” debate persists, even if a lot of critics like Justin Timberlake’s album.

Meanwhile, to put the matter crudely, generationality happens where genres are both historical enough to have generations, and alive enough to be worth renewing. That aliveness is, of course, as much a story about money as about other kinds of emotional or libidinal investment. That hip-hop and country were the scenes of substantial generationality this year in one ways tells us what we already know: that these are the leading forms of indigenous music here in the hegemonoculture, where the greatest investments are made. Or at least it reminds us of that, since we seem to be so good at forgetting it every fifteen minutes. It’s not just that these musics are popular, and thus abstractly “populist,” and so should be reckoned with on those grounds; it’s also that they’re the most musically vital, the living forms, and if one’s way of measuring songs can’t recognize that, it’s the measure that’s got to go.

the good shepherd

As another review had it, "all cloak and no dagger." But that doesn't quite account for this film's seemingly endless plod: sometime in the third hour, one starts to feel like one is at a Rivette movie, except there's nothing particularly Rivetting about it. Several parts of the plot are just nonsense. For example, the purported goal of one elaborate Soviet operation is to compromise spymaster Matt Damon's son, so that dad can be blackmailed . Except that the compromise in question doesn't make anyone especially blakmailable, and the real threat is that the Soviets might hurt the son. This is, as it happens, a threat that could be made without any of the subtle espionage nonsense on which the film spends about an hour of our lives — an hour which is in fact a total irrelevance (except as an excuse to huck a woman out of a plane).

From a certain perspective, such indifference to plot mechanics makes sense, since this film, by way of being more-artistic-than-your-ordinary-espionage-flick, is basically all subtext. Text be damned. Indeed, the endless unfolding of subtext turns out, exactly because it dominates the whole operation rather than informing the text, to itself be a sort of waste of time. Thus the movie spends even more of our lives working through suggestive homoerotic and gender cues — men wrestling naked, repeated cross-dressing, the way Matt Damon's freaking Soviet code name is "Mother" — to little point, unless it's some banality about spy culture involving repression. Since we can't imagine the explanation's so banal, we are completely set up for, say, Damon's quiet, wincing son to be gay. Except he's not! Or there'd be no narrative excuse to huck the woman out of the plane! No, that justification would then have to come from the sub-subtext, which is that women are awful: teases, betrayers, opportunists, spies. Perhaps in that regard this film does capture the "worldview" of lame, stunted imperial apparatchiks. So it's got that going for it.

the queen

The Queen has drawn praise for three different (albeit overlapping) reasons: 1) Helen Mirren's superlative acting; 2) the film's insightful portrayal of its characters and circumstance; and 3) how extraordinarily well-made a movie it is. These purported felicities are, respectively: boringly true, piffle, and the exact opposite of the case.

1) It's well-known that Oscar-bait roles involve playing disabled or wicked ugly. The other thing that critics just love is lead characters who are fundamentally inexpressive, at which point capital-A Actors can haul out their minimalist retinal tics, lip quivers and eyebrow twitches, allowing critics to blather on about how nobody so eloquently indicates a complex inner life with nothing more than a glance, a crinkled earlobe, blah blah blah. We should never have to read that sentence again. Sure, it's a skill: a mildly technical skill that's no more challenging than being appealing or sexy, witty, smart or funny, awful or fearsome. Probably less so. But it gives critics and others a chance to display their nuanced recognition of nuance, and so these nuanced Helen Mirren perfs will be with us indefinitely. Listen, she's perfectly good at that sort of thing, and the role called for it, so: good casting, guys! As a 2006 acting "achievement," it doesn't rank with Shareeka Epps, Juliette Binoche, Maurice Bénichou, Maggie Cheung, Sacha Baron Cohen (in Talladega Nights), Rob Brydon, Gong Li, Steve Carell, Lucy Liu (in Lucky Number Slevin), Nick Nolte, T.I (in ATL), Leonardo Nam (Tokyo Drift), etc. Not sure it's more compelling than that guy who played the lead in Crank.

2) The monarchy hasn't really kept pace with changes in the velocity of culture and the popularization of celebrity. But actual politicians have because they traffic in that stuff. The former will be broken on the wheel of the latter, but sympathetically. Whoo.

3) The best that can be said about The Queen's cinematic construction is that it's very taut; not a move is wasted. That's what "well-made" means, most often, and it's exactly the problem; it's as if the film were trying to make the case for "the art film" being every bit as rigid and determined a genre as anything Hollywood could come up with. At least Hollywood films have the courage of their lack of conviction, and the capacity thus to be excessive, muddled, absurd. There is no moment nor gesture in The Queen that escapes its fate as crudely telegraphic (at the beginning when he's just an uncertain commoner, the quite short person playing Tony Blair wears football jerseys; you can tell when he's come into his own because he starts wearing suits!); as a mechanistic part of the parallel plot structure (which guy in the PM's camp is like which guy in the royal retinue? We'll never figure it out!); or as broadly symbolic (the noble old stag being harried in its solitude across the vast spaces of Balmoral — this noble old stag with which the Queen is obsessed — a stag eventually slain not by an aristocrat but a mere businessman hunter up from the City — the stag stands for...the Queen!)

If there is anything interesting about this movie, it's the extent to which to like it requires a commitment to nostalgic values that were always markers of privilege in the first place, though in this debased age they just resonate as "quality"...which is to say, to like this movie is already to identify with the royals (though alas, such narrowminded "standards" resonate more with prickish Prince Philip's character than poor uptight Eliz). If the deck weren't stacked enough in setting up this parallel (and, as noted, the film doesn't hesitate to make these matters blatant), we know that Diana's funeral is a truly debased event because, in the news footage edited in, we see a sprinkling not of aristocratic dignitaries but mere entertainers captured in pointed slo-mo, pointedly including Stephen Spielberg. Boo! Hiss! Now if only this movie were one seventeenth as interesting as Jaws...

flushed away

They say that Washington, D.C, is Hollywood for ugly people, but so is animation. Or it should be. Thus the employ of perfectly attractive persons — persons who trade heavily on their perfect attractiveness — as mere voices is a bit of a mystery (or at least a humiliating sidelong glance at how thoroughly we fetishize prettiness, that we'll pay for its name on a poster even if we never get to, you know, see it.)

Kate Winslet, that is to say, is — shipbound again — more convincing as an odalisque than a swashbuckling rodent. And Huge Ackman, given his talents, has no business playing a prissy cartoon rat; he misreads the lines so consistently that the movie never sets the kind of breakneck-witty tone it needs to carry us along on its sewer screwball, and as a result feels mostly static despite (or in contrast to) numerous and accelerated chase scenes.

Indeed, unlike Winslet (who's actually done just fine in a couple of different scenarios, including the deprogrammed cultist in the Campion's Holy Smoke, whose escape from a desert safe house is abetted by volumes of Dostoyevsky strapped to her bare feet), Ackman should stick to the one role he's made for: the monstrously angry manchild seething under a protective layer of sardonic flirtation, oscillating between seduction and murder. He is finally nothing more nor less than Wolverine, and he rings only small change on that performance in...

scoop

Woody Allen has made two movies (review of Match Point) in swift succession. Both are set in the posh Britain of London townhouses and country estates; both dwell, in ways both different and more egregious than his Manhattan movies, on real estate porn; both star Scarlett Johansson (who is herself swiftly turning into something akin to real estate porn).

More pointedly for the director whose work we most associate with his "personal life" (not because of his charismatic appeal, but because no one has — paradoxically — sacrificed more to be an auteur), both revolve around a low woman who threatens to bring down an ascendant British pretty boy from his aristocratic perch by exposing sexual indiscretions. In both cases he kills her. A little weird to make that movie twice in one year, hmm?

In the earlier film Johannson takes on the low woman role, a striving but ungifted American actress; in this version, though Scarlett again "plays" a base American forced to employ her non-existent acting skills (so that's weird), the low woman in question is a British prostitute we never see. Here the suave monster is played by suave monster™ Huge Ackman, more capable but somehow less persuasive for it than Scoop's appropriately overmastered Jonathan Rhys-Meyers). The repetition compulsion (the director's, not the actors' or characters') is so pungent that it's hard not to wonder what's up, and from a small distance it seems like Woody has merely remade the first film so as to write a role for himself — as a bumbling magician, no less, doing the same lame trick over and over on a rickety stage.

One wonders how many times Woody Allen can parlay such a minimal scenario into (apparently) releasable films in the short window available to him. He's always been a prince of nostalgia; here the act of nostalgia is in having to recollect (despite contemporary settings) the lost moment when the United State's unrefined, upstart vitalism was last a source of anxiety for Britain's still-regnant aristocratic class (1944? 1923? 1898?), rather than itself a vanishing fact. That lost era has replaced (the conspicuously absent) jazz as the anachronistic tell of the Konigsberg project; it must somehow count as strange that, at this moment, the director has replaced a long-standing cultural fantasy with an explicitly nationalist one.

Addendum: given Allen's stature in France, perhaps his new obsession with Britain's old panic over ceding world-hegemonic power to the US becomes a way of pandering to French audiences.

stranger than fiction

A more confusing fable than it first seems. In the core narrative, a guy stops going to work and his life gets a lot better in every way except he fears he will die soon. He is an IRS agent In the shell narrative a woman discovers she can no longer do her work, or at least can't do it in the way that everyone agrees makes it meaningful work. She is a novelist. Both of their realizations pivot around the "reality principle" of his imminent death.

It would seem on first pass that we have thusly a tale about the primacy of first order, or "actual" labor over second-order cultural work — an old theme, seemingly renewed here in the mildest way by the insertion of the information worker into the role that, 20 or 50 years ago, would have been a manual or industrial laborer. Even the feint wherein Dustin Hoffman — mediating between the two orders (which is, apparently, the destiny of the English Prof; holy mackerel does he have a huge office!) — ruefully proclaims the social priority of great art and seems to sentence the worker to death, only serves to underscore the apparent conclusion, in which it becomes clear that decency is on the side of the IRS agent (ironic, innit?).

The film isn't quite that simple or resolute; at a minimum, it's clear that the agent's life has become worth saving exactly because he has, confronted with his own death, become for the first time truly alive — and the necessary condition for this is not showing up for work. A life worth saving is an autonomous life; it's the autonomy from work that makes the life real enough to be a matter of import to the novelist. This import, this caring about his actual life, is what grounds the author's relevance — is what gives culture a meaningful relationship to social reality. His autonomy is the condition of possibility for culture's famed semi-autonomy.

This is why he must be an information worker, of course. He already dwells in the intermediate zone between labor and culture, between the real, exploited proletariat and the purely exploitative owners of the means of production. He is an instrument which information and capital, both in utterly abstracted form, use to get from one place to another. It's no coincidence that he works at the exact juncture of "the economy" and "the government." He is, in short, a representative of the supposed "new class" much ballyhooed in post-Marxist social thought — a class which is literally a middle class.

This existence of this new class is, one fears, a fantasy, designed to allow the imagination that the era of fundamental class conflict is somehow over (a fantasy that the movie baldly restates in the inverse: the love interest, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, is an actual laborer — a baker! how prole can you get? — who nonetheless stands in the place of non-alienated labor, because she is pursuing both her pleasure and her vocation and, get this, abandoned the emptiness of law school for said pursuit. Take that, information workers!)

Thus the movie gets to have it both ways. This new class of information workers is socially unnecessary, and — just like artists and other cultural workers, who in fact are also members of this class — could cease to work on the morrow, without toppling the system of daily life (confirming the suspicions of many of the wealthiest and poorest members of society). However, they are far from irrelevant. Exactly by being able to abandon work without disastrous effects, they demonstrate that social existence is in fact not entirely determined by work. That is, they fulfill their "new class" duties not by doing new class work (for aren't tax collection and storytelling quite old jobs, really?) but by showing, not singly but collectively, that class struggle is itself an old idea, no longer consonant with new conditions.

Both of them — him with his freshly uncovered pleasure in the texture of daily existence, her in her final choice of a single life over a great artwork — embody the virtues of universalist humanism, which is the film's completed and total proposition. From the perspective of labor and capital, this middle class doesn't exist. But from the perspective of the social imaginary, they have serious work to do: their true function is to express outward the basic antirevolutionary ideology of liberalism itself, a message that must be endlessly received by the actually existing classes so as to not recognize themselves as such.

déjà vu

The amusing and the troubling thing about Enemy of the State were the same thing: that the glossy, staggering surveillance tools of the NSA were operated not by grizzled spies or desk veterans but still-adolescent video-game weasels (an uncredited Seth Green, Jack Black, and less colorful sorts) who might otherwise have been apprentice derivatives analysts, sitting around hi-fiving and still adjusting to their haircuts as they zeroed in on the Fresh Prince.

Déjà Vu is the Scott/Bruckheimer team's return to Enemy of the State, with couple notable exceptions, most obviously that "the State" is now the good guys, and their implausibly panoptic, futuristic surveillance technology is no longer sinister-going-to-murderous but neutral-going-to-redemptive. The operators are now pleasant, concerned, diverse; a kinder, gentler technocrat. Sweet sixteen's turned 31; 1998's turned 2006. Shit happens. Things change.

But you know what they say about things changing. It's still a movie that images total power as having the totality of images at one's disposal, and moreover, in this film's turn of the ideological screw, having access to them as reality. There's a book or two about this lying around somewhere. Even if the achingly slow among us are still discovering that this is fascinatingly metacinematic (I almost suspect this reviewer's lighbulb moment of being satire about credulous film critics, but alas, he seems so excited at this new idea! Has the Voice in its parlous reformation taken to hiring Rip Van Winkles?), it's not a film about film; it's a movie that struggles, rather ineloquently but not too boringly, to figure out what might count as plot in the era of total information awareness, while pasting a candy heart on the sleeve of the PATRIOT act. At least it is in some way of its moment.

Thus the last irony, which is that Déjà Vu pretends to be ahead of its moment, presenting a surveillance environment not yet in existence. Of course, so did Enemy of the State — but did anyone really doubt that technology was already in use in some bunker, and would be publicly offered soon enough? Fiction is just the beta build of fact. And Enemy of the State was merely the first official release of Google Earth Cinema; this must somehow be good news. By our calculations, we have no more than a handful of years to wait before we can download Google Time.

casino royale

After 53 years of James Bond; after an opening sequence rehearsing how he became a double-oh and got his license to kill, which is finally the great taboo exception on which the series is based; after all the ritualistic reiteration of formulae that establish "the Bond movie" as a genre unto itself with its own structuralist consistency despite finally empty changes in actors, characters, names, settings, political situations, historical backdrops; after the relentless repetition of Bond's drive to devour both enemies and lovers who inevitably wish to devour him equally; after all this, it's hard not to wonder if the underlying desire that's sustained the interest in the franchise concerns cannibalism, you know?

the framers

Near the end of October, cognitive linguistics guru George Lakoff, who writes books about how the Democrats can close the framing gap with rhetorically savvier Republican speechifiers, wrote this in The Gray Goose (reprinted at The Huffington Post):

"Stay the course" is a particularly powerful metaphor because it can activate so many of our emotions. Because physical actions require movement, we commonly understand action as motion. Because achieving goals so often requires going to a particular place -- to the refrigerator to get a cold beer, say -- we think of goals as reaching destinations.

Another widespread — and powerful — metaphor is that moral action involves staying on a prescribed path, and straying from the path is immoral. In modern conservative discourse, "character" is seen through the metaphor of moral strength, being unbending in the face of immoral forces. "Backbone," we call it.

In the context of a metaphorical war against evil, "stay the course" evoked all these emotion-laden metaphors. The phrase enabled the president to act the way he'd been acting — and to demonstrate that it was his strong character that enabled him to stay on the moral path.

This is perhaps the pivotal case of an idea Lakoff has been hammering for quite some time: the idea that language is connotative as well as denotative, basically, with specifics about how some language is better at motivating unspoken/unconscious images and attendant emotional freight, and thus more capable of persuading people of positions before they can be arbited in the full light of reason. Moreover, in classic cog-sci fashion, these responses are proposed to be more-or-less hardwired, as the cognitive activity happening in the shadows underlying rationality is quasi-automatic. "The laws of language are hard to defy," as he has it. His sense of the nature-of-the-beast quality of these linguistic actions verges on the absolute, and permeates his own rhetoric, as in this not from a year earlier, plumping his own product:

Negating a frame activates it in the minds of hearers, as Richard Nixon found out when he said “I am not a crook” and everybody thought of him as a crook. The very title of my book, Don’t Think of an Elephant makes the point: if you negate a frame, it reinforces the frame.

Charged with certainty about the invariable effectiveness of certain successful metaphors, he concluded that June 29, 2005 piece, "The Democrats can learn from Bush and Rove: Stick to your guns and stay the course." Meaning: get a well-crafted message that sends out the right cognitive codes, shows a clear and strong direction, and don't waver from that. To drive his point home with a rather obvious irony, he again highlighted the excellence of the Bush slogan, which works not just as a specific emotion-motivating phrase but as a general rhetorical strategy. Stay. The. Course.

If the phrase and strategy is such a winner, how did it lose so baldly earlier this month? The Democrats, as has been more than well-remarked, never found — much less hewed to — a vision to articulate beyond entirely vague forms of We're not them; after the election, one still heard the Party Chairman proclaiming "this was a call for a "new direction"; that was our slogan, and the American people have blah blah blah." Meanwhile, "stay the course" turned out to be the albatross around the neck of every Republican candidate, if not the anchor.

So how does a cognitive linguist explain that? That is the conundrum — and the occasion for Lakoff's late October essay quoted above. It turns out that "stay the course" stopped working because the president failed to stay the course in his speeches:

The Bush administration has finally been caught in its own language trap.

"That is not a stay-the-course policy," Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, declared on Monday....Listen, we've never been stay the course, George," President Bush told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News a day earlier. Saying that just reminds us of all the times he said "stay the course."

What the president is discovering is that it's not so easy to rewrite linguistic history. The laws of language are hard to defy.

To not stay the course evokes the same metaphors, but says you are not steadfast, not morally strong. In addition, it means not getting to your destination -- that is, not achieving your original purpose. In other words, you are lacking in character and strength; you are unable to "complete the mission" and "achieve the goal."

"Stay the course" was for years a trap for those who disagreed with the president's policies in Iraq. To disagree was weak and immoral. It meant abandoning the fight against evil. But now the president himself is caught in that trap. To keep staying the course, given obvious reality, is to get deeper into disaster in Iraq, while not staying the course is to abandon one's moral authority as a conservative. Either way, the president loses.

Here the conundrum comes into full flower. The phrase can produce only one set of pre-rational, emotional responses. It always works. To abandon the phrase is to doom yourself; as Lakoff himself says, it's this "negating of the frame" that's "fatal." So why would the president even consider abandoning the phrase? Why would anyone trouble to change a successful formula with automatic, guaranteed results?

The answer passes swiftly amidst all framing stuff, and Lakoff buries it in a dependent clause, a bagatelle: "given obvious reality." We would not care to arbit the status of "reality" with Lakoff, insofar as our ideas about it are likely to be so divergent that there would scarcely be grounds for debate. But on this occasion we may find ourselves in a sort of agreement: the phrase "stay the course" stopped working because it referred to historical circumstances that changed. It indicates an idea, and the idea came more and more obviously to suck: to be fatal for bodies, to produce no pragmatic or ideological gains, to indicate a tangle of lies and manipulations.

This is not to pillory Republicans for the morass in the Middle East just now, but to hope to have done with Lakoff's lucubrations. For he himself has conceded, albeit in a three-word aside, that these powerful metaphors work until they don't work anymore; that the response is automatic and pre-rational until it isn't. Despite the scientistic frame that Lakoff invokes about his own studies, it turns out that there's no strong correlation between input and output; that cognitive science in fact can't give a steady account of how connotation works; that while metaphors may be "emotion-laden," there are no fixed (or even quasi-fixed) emotional responses. It may be the case that the phrase "don't think of an elephant" causes one to think of an elephant; how one feels about that elephant depends rather on shifting information about which cognitive linguistics may wish to keep silent, for fear of embarrassing itself.

One last averral. We do not wish to extol the primacy of the fact — to reduce this to the simplicities of Ah, but the real world had its way with language, eh? The historical conditions that changed, largely in Iraq, so as to change for a while the connotations of the phrase "stay the course," can't be reduced to "fact." They too involve rhetoric, spin, symbol management, "propaganda of the deed." The conception of a perfectly real world independent of language seems insupportable, and unnecessary; it's as futile as the idea of a sphere of language tied entirely to wired cognitive functions, fixed within a "frame," independent of the real of history — an idea that Lakoff has himself invalidated, against his own initial claims. Language, it would seem, is a mediation with history, and the way it works will apparently require negotiations at every turn. This is not a fresh proposition, except insofar as it is news that stays news.

The promise, from whatever political position, that symbol management is a total and self-determining reality, a frame that has achieved ultimate closure, has no historical truth — except as a symptom of a quite legitimate fear that there is no outside anymore, no history, no semi-autonomous sphere, no possible form of resistance other than participation at the level of symbol management. This is a basic banality of the spectacle, of course; one takes some small comfort in recalling that the spectacle itself is, if perhaps a kind of fact, necessarily one that is in all ways historical.

babel

Because we here at sugarhigh! HQ are limited in our grasp, we didn't understand this very complicated and conceptually ambitious film. However, we did mange to glean a couple useful lessons:

• Giving Brad Pitt a smaller role doesn't make him a better actor.

• When crosscutting between a third- and first-person camera to drive home some point via cinematic form comma dude, a director may pretend that deaf people don't experience bass.

• Deaf girls, or perhaps Japanese girls, are hot.

• Air power is the key to victory, just like on the History Channel, and is always on the side of good.

• Somewhere there is a cafeteria made of awesome synth, videogames, and plasma screens, named "J-Pop"; you should totally go there, if you can.

science of sleep

This movie might be imagined as Marie Antoinette seen in a reflecting pool, with some of the appearances repeated, others inverted. If the former is an American film in Versailles, the current title is actual cinema Versaillaise (that is to say, the director was born there; finance capital comes from everywhere, an everywhere that itself emanates from the United States). But both are built on a young lovely tossed naked into the Gallic tilt-a-whirl and forced to make her and his way, respectively — and, of course, both are dreamlives. Moreover, they share the basic quality of incidentally pretending, through their Frenchness (whether it be political history or aesthetic provenance) to a kind of significance to which they are signally indifferent.

That is to say that, like Marie Antoinette, The Science of Sleep is a petulantly slight and directionless movie. Because it's Gondry rather than Coppola fille, the flimsiness is one of whimsy rather than missing affect. Gondry tropes buzz about, inevitably temporal (time travel, reality blurring, memory failure, artisanal model-making); happily, they're separated from the maleficent influence of Charlie Kaufman, the faux-indie film industry's official metanarrative boor, with whom Gondry worked on his previous feature fictions, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Human Nature. Whimsy in the service of nothing is still better than whimsy in the service of maturbatory fake-inventiveness. And so we get to wander through the whimsy, in search of contentless satisfactions: sexy Gael Garcia Bernal's facial expressions and tone of voice, the cardboard sets, Charlotte Gainsbourg's sexy-is-for-lesser-beings knit minidress, très années Pop. When she's not busy smoking, she makes felt boats and ponies.

Unlike Coppola, Gondry doesn't quite maintain the courage of his lack of convictions, and the film eventually gets a lil heavy, just as — uncoincidentallly — his visual verve wavers; we're still waiting for a film as euphorically formal as his video for Kylie Minogue's "Come Into My World." Instead, we're handed an ambiguous ending. Is it a happy ending, or a final descent into delusion? Who cares. The real ambiguity is whether, lacking any idea how to get out of there, Gondry simply replicated wholesale an early Lyle Lovett song on purpose, or by magical accident, as Gael and Charlotte go out on the ocean, on their pony, which they ride on their boat.

the last king of scotland

One goes to watch the purported star do his thing, but for the most part can't see the Forest for the trees. Or not even: the view to his predictably wracked and troubling performance isn't obscured by a larger, holistic view of the Ugandan Seventies, but by, natch, someone else's story.

That social struggles ought be told as the dramas of individuals, and that this rule takes on force in direct proportion to the money involved in the telling, is not news, and would scarcely be worth mentioning except for how certainly it means to escape both mention and notice as a rule of art in the current dispensation. But we can at least take note of what is allowed and even demanded by this iron rule: the dominating form of the close-up, the apotheosizing of individual performance (which might otherwise have been left as a relic of the stage, had cinema taken up the formal possibilities available to it). So, in short, all there is to do, all there ever will be, is to enjoy individual performance and camera moves (in which we include various special effects).

But the effects of this cinematic determination are just as marked in the social activities depicted in the film. Surely it must be notable that the narration of the fall of Idi Amin (or at least the collapse of his regime's credibility) pivots, in this film, not around the political or the social but the personal. Even this is unexceptional, not worth mentioning, other than the fact that "the personal" narration of the political climaxes here — in way that would make even Faulkner blanch — in the fact of miscegenation.

This, finally, is a quite ludicrous structuration, even within the context of single-subject cinema: less a story of Africans getting fucked by the white man than yet another projection of the boundless historical power of the white dick. The best one could hope for in this movie, in other words, is to watch an actor's attempt to inhabit a consciousness unfamiliar both to him and to us, and to see what that might be like; one gets a bit of this, and its pleasure. For the most part, however, one endures not the worst but finally the most predictable substitute, a kind of "idea" that has the force of perfect idiocy.

white bread black beer

Once upon a time there was a boy named Scritti, and though this was a strange name, nobody teased him, for he had a beautiful voice, and a falsetto that was like honey injected into the veins. And he grew up with the desire to make jangly pop music woven from strands of romance, left politics, reggae, post-structuralist theory, black soul, and everything resting in the sentence, "the music of the Beatles and Bowie prepared me for every subsequent adventure, intellectually, politically, aesthetically, structurally."

One day a funny thing happened to Scritti, because funny things happen to everyone in history. As he was figuring out his jangly pop music and bringing discreet pleasure to several people, pop music itself became less jangly, in part because digital technology favored a sharper snap in general, and in part because it was part of a constellation that would eventually be called hip-hop. And Scritti liked this sound very much. He heard Michael Jackson and Run-DMC and it was good. So it came to pass that instead of giving this historical development the Heisman and insistently making a now-nostalgic jangle, Scritti made some romantic black-soul-loving pop music with digital snap, and brought indiscreet pleasure to many many people.

But this didn't make Scritti especially happy, and what's more, his headlong romantic leap into history's fastest pace meant that autumn would come as swiftly as summer, and before too long he found himself in a cool season with winter coming on. And so he retreated to the gloomy Usk Valley to spend a season drinking ale and thinking about what to do next.

A season turned into a few and then into many, as they tend to do when one is brooding in the gloomy Usk Valley, ancient kingdom of Gwent, where the coal miners mine coal and the years pass. And still Scritti puzzled over what to do next, or not. After a long while he came to an idea, and it grew and grew. His idea was that, though he had taken up the sonic snap that has so entranced him in the early Eighties, he had not truly taken up the hip-hop that he greatly loved.

And so it came to pass that Scritti walked out of the Usk Valley sometime near the end of the second millennium according to the Christian calendar, and released an album that featured his beautiful soul falsetto equally with several extremely minor pseudo-hip-hop characters, who had perhaps been chosen because they were open to nearly-forgotten intellectual Welsh pop singers with leftist leanings, and affordable by production budget of same, rather than because of their excellence. Though this strange brew had its moments, it was somewhat confusing to have pseudo-hip-hop songs which were also lovely falsetto parables involving Heloise and Abelard, and everyone was confused, Scritti not the least.

Perhaps the greatest confusion was the last song on the record, "Brushed With Oil, Dusted With Powder," which was the prettiest song but at the same time a ballad, and a remarkably gentle, soothing ballad at that, with no pseudo-hip-hop elements in the music, though the sweetly breathy lyrics did concern rides in police cars and, in some haunting manner, the song seemed to be taking place in the beauty of the Usk Valley and the scenario of American hip-hop at the same time. This was a true oddity and there was no way to make sense of it, but that seemed okay because it was the last song on the album and they are understood to be outside-the-work, and forgiven their incoherence, as a general rule.

After the last inconsequential song ended, some more years passed.

In those years a strange idea took hold in Scritti's mind. The idea was this: that the inconsequential, beautiful song was in fact the key to everything, or at least the key to his next album. He would make an entire record with no minor or even major hip-hop characters, but one charged with his love of early Eighties hip-hop, and his melancholy distance from it. But it would be an album of rock so soft that "soft rock" couldn't do it justice, and album that would make Quiet Storm radio formats feel like they might need to calm down a little and maybe attend a yoga class. It began with Scritti sighing "the boom boom bap...." But he did not sound like KRS-One, he sounded like Scritti but older, honey dipped in morphine on a slow drip.

It was like the dream of Brian Wilson that Brian himself could never really approach, of an easy listening album that was at the same time a work of genius. And if Scritti was occasionally compelled to murmur the the titles from an entire Run-DMC album in a distantly pretty bridge, or coo angelically to the effect that punks jump up to get beat down, sounding exactly as if he was blessing the beasts or inventing a lullaby for a child who had been dead for two decades, well, this was the sense of the album, though sense was not very much at stake. Something else was, though it was hard to be sure what, exactly, and this mystery was the album's greatness, or perhaps it was the invention of a previously unknown category of pop music, or the way a voice can trace its own history, and the relation of the individual to history, or how it felt to live in a beautiful and perfectly numb present, at the edge of a hole into which years and things one loved kept falling.

futuresex / lovesounds

"Slash fiction" takes its name from the slash in "K/S": a subcategory of Star Trek fan fiction given over to desublimating the deep love between Kirk and Spock. The slash, that is to say, might be imagined as the blade that cuts out the mediating stuff separating the pair in the televised version; at the same time, it's the third term which separates the K and S, even as it opens the path to a lil consummation. As a linguistic mark, it takes the place of what keeps them apart while allowing them to come together — it's the slash between men. As a sign-function, it's almost helplessly suggestive of the more humanly-charged role of the woman in Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick's famous analysis of triangulation:

[Between Men] attempted to demonstrate the immanence of men’s same-sex bonds, and their prohibitive structuration, to male-female bonds in nineteenth-century English literature…[The book] focused on the oppressive effects on women and men of a cultural system in which male-male desire became widely intelligible primarily by being routed through triangular desire involving a woman.

— (Epistemology 15).

Surely this structural relation must have been on someone's mind in titling the current Justin Timberlake album. The two worlds of the title themselves don't do much but remind us that, though Justin sings and dances like a somewhat mechanical King of Pop, he'd rather be a Prince. But the slash tells a different story: the story of K/S, and of Sedgewick. The album itself, both in its sonic intertwinings and lyrics, is almost entirely about the great love between Justin Timberlake and Tim Mosely, who basically sing, rap and murmur romantic, sensual phrases to each other for about an hour, climaxing mid-album with the slinky, beautiful "What Goes Around...."

The album, that is to say, is J/T porn. Of course, per the analysis, this erotic drama must be disguised by the presence of a woman — so literally a figure rather than a person, or even a character, that she is named, in song after song, "Girl." She exists not at all, except as a convenience so Justin and Timbaland can rub up on each other in the sweetest and most lubricious ways; it's actually quite romantic, and probably better queer disco than Alcazar, Infernal, or Gnarls Barkley.

sherrybaby

D's for never dirty,
MC for mostly Clean.

the long tail

When sugarhigh! considers the white male artists of the post-WWII era whom we find most thrilling and exemplary, three stand clear: Jean-Luc Godard, John Ashbery and Bob Dylan, artists we sometimes have great dfficulty confronting because the certainty and power of their stuff theatens a kind of despair at one's own efforts.

The casual isomorphism of this troika's aesthetic narratives in evident: despite working in media and places with distinctly different relations to pop, each has been starkly prolific (albeit with celebrated pauses in their individual output), remaking their fields in the period from 1955-65; each has responded to the inevitable fading of their mass-critical star with continued and sometimes accelerated production, clear into their current advanced ages.

Of course, the differences are just as notable (and more media-specific): the way Ashbery's critical ascendence didn't come for two decades, while Dylan and Godard took each less than a handful of years to reach the apex of their fields. Or Godard's almost invisible prolixity; in the United States, how many of the 49 titles he's directed since Letter to Jane have we had a fair chance to see, especially if we don't inhabit a town with a film festival? Or Dylan's late pause, after his serial religious conversions and Eighties dreck, to ponder over ancient ballads and return as a resecularized Tiresias, "momentarily returned to life and warmth and allowed once more to speak, and to deliver its long-forgottten message in surroundings utterly alien to it"?

Alright, that was an extremity; we enjoyed it. Still, it's the kind of extremity Dylan has demanded and received in spades, these last nine years and three original albums. So the least we can do is note how the singing is a lot better on this one than the last two.

The previous pair were defined by Dylan's croak; not quite tuneless, but impelled to let us know that he was a figure beyond the mere conventions of hitting notes, or trying to hit notes. These activities were for strivers, not immortals; the very measure of hiss historical greatness became the simple fact that he could miss, avoid, ignore the niceties of notes, and still win the Voice critics' poll. It would be pleasant to suggest that this gesture was somehow a throwback to his early years, when he was often written off as a hopeless, tuneless vocalist — something we now understand to be exactly false. He was, rather, singing differently, inventing a counter-style, and "Highway 61," much less "Visions of Johanna," now sounds deeply tuneful. We do not suspect anyone will make that case about "Million Miles."

So we must be appreciative that he's dropped the And You Shall Know My Importance By My Indifference schtick, and returned to a more sanguine vocal style, riding the melodies of old Western swing forms with a pleasing laissez-faire. Alas, that's the only pleasing thing about this album which is otherwise remarkable only for its boredom-induction: what a freakin' yawn. Nothing — nothing — of Dylan's greatness remains, and why should we expect it to? Or, more pressingly, why are we so compelled to pretend that it does? This can no longer even be compared to Bob Dylan; it would be dull and slight for a Lucinda Williams albm, and she hasn't been interesting in more than a decade. It's looking up at Ryan Adams, and sugarhigh! doesn't care for Ryan Adams. There are no especially bad songs (though the inevitable way-too-long last song is a bit of a groaner) but, far more substantively, there is nothing close to a good song, even a throwaway on the order of that burlesque he tossed to Sheryl Crow before desperately repo-ing for a lesser take, lo this last millennium.

Nothing here is worthy of invective, alas. At some point, in twent of 50 years, it might be productive to explore what conjuncture of forces allowed smart, serious people to hear this as pleasing, good, even great music. This is not to suggest that valuing this album is any more or less aribtrary and subjective than enjoying Bjork or Cam'ron; it is, rather, the particularities of this case have more to say about something like cultural momentum, and historical attachments — ideas which read interestingly against the suppositional temporariness of popular culture.

the black dahlia

Cinema note: Replacement of story with plot found to be the same historical motion as replacement of motive with psychopathology.

Movie review: "Mere psychology."

crank

A queerly macho fellow, loved by the ladies and the gays, cruises around heavenlit LA, sometimes on a motorcycle, visiting absurdly luxurious locations where white powder and the hidden schemes of power flow, trying to get out of the life, puzzling through a spiritual crisis, having a little public sex — an adequate remake of Shampoo.

the protector

Tom yum goong is not the first foreign-based film to take the English title The Protector, but it is the most recent, seemingly unrelated to the Indian silent Ajit Yoddho (1934), the French thriller Le Protecteur (1974).

Most reviews of the present film mention the torch-passing joke when Tony Jaa's character, arriving at Sydney's airport, exchanges a double-take with Jackie Chan, in turn exiting the country. It's a bit of an allegory, you see, about martial arts heroes breaking into the anglophone market. What these reviews don't manage to mention is that Jackie Chan's second effort at an EngLang incursion (after box-office bomb The Big Brawl) was Wei long meng tan, or as it was called in most markets, The Protector (1985). In that film, Chan's partner is killed and there's a kidnapped girl to recover; for Jaa, two decades later, his father is killed and the kidnapees are pachyderms. Didn't Karl Marx in fact say that everything happens twice: the first time as tragedy, the second time as elephants?

It's hard to say what this film is up to, investing so heavily in that lineage — but it's not misplaced, really. Jaa's kung fu style ("Muay Thai"), though ballyhooed per the rules of discourse as new and different, is deeply indebted to Chan's. This is not so much true in close combat (where the movie seems more interested in a parade of styles, from capoeira to "ultimate fighting") but in the movements of multiple combatants within enclosed, complex spaces. If the bravura sequence is a four-minute following shot where Jaa fights his way up the various levels of the familiar restaurant/club/thunderdome/kingpin's lair (getting noticeably exhausted and sloppy as he nears the top, which is a nice touch), the more eloquent choreography happens in some ludicrous crypto-warehouse containing, among other things, some strangely oriented chain-link fences and, oh yeah, a disemboweled bus. In these scenes, Jaa's particular kinesis, alternately highlit and obscured by the camera's deep desire to look at things from below, is plenty thrilling.

Jaa himself is peculiarly impassive — "peculiar" because it's not really the familiarly Orientalist imperturbability intent on suggesting an interiority that is at once absolute and inhuman, the subject without subjectivity. Jaa offers something like a negatve impassivity: while elaborating Chan's goofball ballet of violence, he seems intent on refusing Chan's comedic charisma. Physical comedy is Chan's gift to martial arts; Jaa returns seriousness to it , a comic seriousness of which the little elephant is the emblem. Indeed, Jaa is the little elephant; his character has, it seems, never aged beyond the opening scenes, when we see him as a child, bonding with his charges. Over the full course of the film, Jaa hasn't the slightest flirtation, nor moment of self-awareness. He is a serious boy, with all the implacable destruction that implies.

Or maybe Jaa the actor is just another Keanu, constitutionally unable to express anything at all beyond a vexed wonderment that people will still fight him, given his manifest physical superiority. Hollywood, too, suffers from that puzzlement, and is gruesomely acrobatic as a matter of course in going about its business. This just might work out.

half nelson

After Shareeka Epps finds Ryan Gosling, her high-school teacher, collapsed in the bathroom with a crack pipe, he eventually asks her to help him up, at which point the film has a choice. If it doesn't show her helping him, it abandons the moment to the purely metaphorical; if it shows the 13-year old girl reaching out and taking his hand or shoulder, it abandons itself to sentimentality. The film navigates this deftly, with a little jump-cut so that her hand is just suddenly there and then he's wincingly upright; it's a small choice but the right one, and indicative of the film's attention to its own risks. Indeed, in many ways the film is about navigating the tepid and silted waters of its own set-up, which it does with parallel care at almost every juncture. Other best thing about movie: even as it manages to get a name act to contribute a budget sondtrack, it stages Broken Social Scene as nothing but numbing sentiment for self-pitying hipsters.

accepted

Movies in many ways inherit their genres and their genremes (as we have come to call the minimal units that establish and fulfill genre expectations) from earlier forms, theater and literature most obviously. They have in turn modified old and developed new genre codes, with all the inevitability of medium specificity: the soundtrack accompaniment to episodes of horror, romance, or suspense, e.g., or the plot horizons required to manage the absurd beauty of Hollywood actors in "real" roles.

But once a genreme is in place, it can no more be abandoned than it could in the Russian folktale; to jettison such a thing would be to jettison the genre itself. And so it is occasionally amusing to watch a film wrestle with a genreme to which it is utterly indifferent, even if — perhaps especially if — this wrestling takes the form of cheerful laziness.

And so it goes in Accepted. Ostensibly the story of how the Mac guy starts an open, student-run university organized by elective affinities, literally a former insane asylum, now run by the inmates — and thus in distinction to the high-class, top-down bureaucracy up the road (is this still the Mac/PC parable? Or is it about the Sorbonne 1968? Who can tell anymore?) — the film still remains compelled to include a subnarrative about the hot girl after whom Mac guy longs, but who is of course dating blandly totalitarian PC guy. And of course, as these things go, she eventually sees that her alpha guy is actually a jerk, and that the sweet boy who used to mow her lawn is in fact a quirky charmer with a true heart blah blah blah.

What's actually charming is how this pro forma narrative is played out in a haphazardly pro forma way: no drama, no tension, not much time wasted. Presented with the choice, she makes the right one in fairly short order and that's pretty much that, excepting one later pro forma reversal which is itself reversed pro forma in about twelve seconds of screen time. Max.

The film doesn't have the desire to flout openly or mock genre conventions (itself a genre, natch); it just can't be bothered to treat them as requiring much investment at all, and dispatches them with cheerful laziness. It's just getting by, fulfilling the minimum requirements without ever pretending they have any value, not letting them interfere with the fun — doing just enough to avoid getting kicked out and sent home. In that regard, the film is a perfectly realist account of the college experience for any reasonable student, after all.

little miss sunshine

Little Miss Sunshine finally can't escape its fate as the feelgood movie of the summer. As the story of a clutch of struggling and troubled individuals coming together as a family — an elliptical circling of the wagon around the usual twin poles of the death of the elder and the defense of the kid's innocence, ending with the rebuilt nuclear family sacrificing pride for mutual dependence and dancing their defiance of the external world — it's exactly as limited as such a movie must be.

It must be said that it does as well within those horizons as it possibly could; it may be close to the best such feelgood flick. Its struggle not to subvert genre clichés (which itself is so often a yawn, anyway) but to make the most of them is pulled off sort of superbly; irascible grandpa's death, though played for pathos (again, rather effectively: "GO HUG MOM") turns out to be essential to the finale's unfolding. He's taught young Olive a dance, see, for her big finale in the Little Miss Sunshine competition — one which, though it's frequently rehearsed, we don't see until its actually performed.

The dance turns out to make a mockery of the pageant, and all children's beauty pageants. Here we must note that the film — which presents such pageants in all their vacuous horror, parading super-sexualized grade-schoolers who may or may not be in on the grotesquerie, and parents who clearly are — had the incredibly strange fortune to have its late-summer opening in parallel with the return of the national JonBenet Ramsey obsession, and the return of all her pageant images to the nation's television screens. In this movie, there's no doubt that the parents — any parents, at any pageant — did it; the only question is what "it" is.

The mockery of such pageants presents little challenge; the movie's stroke is to leave its status unknown and unknowable, exactly because grandpa's dead. Was that his plan, in teaching her the routine? Did he senilely believe it was a potential winner? Or was it simply the only "dance" he knew, as a crass, uneducated veteran? Any of these answers would be unsatisfying; the execution of all the possibilities to the exclusion of none is close on perfect.

The movie has that level of care at almost every level. One of its running sight gags is the famiily's need to push-start their VW microbus, done each time with much huffing and puffing and varying levels of exuberance; within the physical comedy, the film stages the family dynamics with choreographic ease in the order that each member hops into the accelerating vehicle. Again, it's an image with a limit, in that it must imagine familes as mechanisms, the separate parts working best when working together; the film's capacity to be eloquent despite such banal ideas is its nature and appeal.

Except for Steve Carrell, that is, who is appealing in and of himself; he's most engaging early in the film, when he's frozen and morose. In a very different way, he's as good with a squint as DeNiro. As his character's mobility and humor return over the course of the narrative, Carrell starts drawing from his general bag of comedy tricks, and the character loses some definition; one hopes he'll have the intelligence to take on a substantially serious role in the near future, just to see what he can do with it.

back to basics

Back to Basics forms a sort of complement to the White Stripes. Battening on to African-American musical traditions from the pre-rock era, they proceed as if that could make post-rock music good again. The difference is that the Stripes see the pop miscegenation as the problem, to the solved via purification: a staggering, hypocritical misreading both of musical history and their own role in it. Christina Aguilera is more interested in looking back through the miscegenation to choose her parents from a rattle-bag of race music, and then let the process of pop impurity run its course accordingly from those reimagined beginnings, to see what it can do. To say that this demonstrates that Christina Aguilera is eleven times smarter than Jack White — not canny, not "pop-savvy," but actual-synthetic-reasoning smart — will surprise only the few remaining humans who haven't yet understood that the talented lad Jack White is, alas, a moron.

None of this is to say that Xtina's retro-soul-chanteuserie is news, even for her. As the Village Voice review for her last album noted four years ago:

For 10 songs, Christina Aguilera's record is aggressively boring, unless you're fascinated by her half-repressed yen to remake "I Put a Spell on You" as it might be done by the Velveteen Rabbit.

There's something faintly amazing about taking the weakest idea on a record (none of the hits, you'll recall — "Dirrty," "Beautiful," "Fighter," "Can't Hold Us Down" — partook of this investigation) and deciding it must become the full-blown conceit for the next album. This is a bit like De La deciding after their debut that the follow-up should be all skits. It's just not likely to work; having a concept is not the same as having a good concept, or understanding your own strengths. The best that can be said is that the conceit is largely irrelevant: the album has three good songs, which is about what one would hope and expect from your basic Aguilera product (though the last had five or six; in a decade, we'll see that as a wild exception).

Buried beneath all that jazz and discourse, however, is an interesting drama: there seem to be two discs exactly so that they can confront each other face to face. Disc Two is the Linda Perry disc; she co-wrote every song on it, and this has been widely noted. Considerably less-remarked-upon (though Sasha touches on it here), Disc One is the Kara DioGuardi disc; she co-wrote every song but one, though the's often credited lower down the list. But don't let that fool you; this is because the producer is credited second after Xtina in each case — then, on all three of the disc's excellent songs ("Aint No Other Man," "Slow Down Baby," "Without You") comes Ms. DioGuardi. One can hear her willing the project's conceit to work, even if it means rewriting "I'm Free" and Welsh one-hitter Donna Lewis.

By now you will have done the math. If the album has three good songs total and the first disc also has three...the second disc is left with zippo. It's deeply awful. This brings us no pleasure, as Linda Perry is one of the facts that has made popular music great over the last half-decade. But in this staged but unstated confrontation between the two popstar whisperers (a perfect phrase stolen from Garrett Kamps) who have underwritten much of the Top 40 since, roughly, 9/11 and the end of the High Teenpop Era — in this competition conducted through the medium of Ms. Aguilera and contrived historical style, DioGuardi turns out to be the girl with the most cake.

snakes on a plane

Snakes are born free and they are everywhere on planes.

world trade center

"You kept me alive," John McLoughlin says to his wife Donna, as he's wheeled past her at the film's conclusion; he has just spent a long day and night buried, slipping away from human thought. It might as well be "9/11" itself on the gurney, whispering to Hollywood. What was once unrepresentable has slipped, without much intermediate phase, into what must be represented every few weeks — for no reason other than to make sure we still feel the right way about the formerly historical events which have already been replaced by thoughtless shorthand. Oliver Stone's claim that the film isn't political, which received so much scoffing from "both sides of the aisle," is more or less true; the memorial (and this film is a celluloid Iwo Jima statue, nothing more, nothing less) isn't any more "political" than soundtrack music existing only to tell you exactly how to feel about a set of supposed facts, the discussion of which would somehow dishonor the very feelings you've just been instructed to have.

Meanwhile, the best talkie about 9/11 continues to be this, which proceeds from the fact of the event itself's escape into history, taking the dead with it. No one comes back. Everyone is fucked up. Those facts, unrecuperable and unresolvable, are the whirlpool on whose banks every action and gesture takes place.

An epic poem is a poem including history, sez Pound, but don't get it twisted. History and "actual events" are, at this point, mutually exclusive, and pointedly so. But this is simply another way of naming the spectacle.

the dozens: bombs over blogdad

Thirteen songs worth stealing. Sort of.

12) Nâdiya, "Tous ces mots." In the summer of 2003, the French-Algerian chanteuse had a disco-rap hit,"Et c'est parti," of such starts-with-a-boxing-bell, string stabs'n'horn blares, "na-na-na," thumping obviousness that it took days to notice, with gathering amazement, its subtlety. "Et c'est parti," it begins, a French stock phrase meaning "And here we go," but also sounding suspiciously like a stock bit of oldschool, "Hey, say party!" Next came "pour le show," a cunning, almost-unnoticeable slip into franglish, and then "le stade est chaud," which translates as "the place is hot," but enunciated so as to be identical to "let's start the show," and really the whole opening gambit is just unbelievable, Zukofsky's Catullus to a disco beat. The big hit from her new album, a piece of glam-soul bombast called "Roc," is negligible junk in comparison, but her other 2006 single, "Tous ces mots," almost holds its own. The musical bed is perversely, energetically insipid, with "Separate Ways" synths, revving engines 'n' squealing tires, a metronomic rhythm guitar going nowhere fast. But somehow she supplies the song with an implausible urgency, racing through the franglish ("I don't wanna go — contre le macadam," she says, liquidly triangulating her markets) with athletic exuberance, like a sprinter — which, oddly enough, she once was, the French national champion at 16.

11) U.S. Air Force, "Bombs over Baghdad." Hate the war but love the warriors. Mention with great frequency that poverty is, in effect, a stealth draft. But remember also that all the soldiers at the beginning of this graymarket promo clip for death take equal part in the charming call'n'response that opens this salute. Meanwhile, the video is, at the same time, like a joke about how much traction there is in denying the political, as Andre 3000 did about this song in 2000: "That’s where the title came from, like really, like "Don’t beat around the bush.” Our first single, we were trying to let people know we weren’t playing around at all. That’s what it meant.” Good luck with that.

10) Dixie Chicks, "The Long Way Around." The first single "Not Ready To Make Nice" (fifth-best song on the album) is "Heart of Gold" with an extra minor thrown down the shaft. "The Long Way Around," on the other hand (second-best song after "Lubbock or Leave It"), is like a gradeschool primer about the content of form: Look! Their friends from high school, with their circumscribed lives, get two dull chords repeated claustrophobically. Observe! How the introduction of the "I" is accompanied by a new minor chord, to indicate both difference and said difference's difficulties. Notice! How the chorus, with its story of departure and rambling freedom, passes through the minor chord to arrive at the heretofore withheld major, inhabiting for the first time the breadth of the key, giving the complete and spacious feeling of the "long way around." See also! The simplest ideas still work, at least a little.

9) Field Mob feat. Ciara, "So What." "So what" indeed. A track of such indifference that it reads like an experiment in how little you can do and still have an appealing song, which is perhaps a way of saying that Jazze Pha is still in the zone even when he's sleeping, and that Ciara, who so recently still seemed like a sort of convenience, Jazze's Aaliyah without the emotional reserves, now seems like the queen of all summer afternoons for the foreseeable future.

8) Jessica Simpson, "A Public Affair." A is for Autotune, B is for Bubbly Bassline, C is for Chic guitars; Daisy Dukes makes it work via the Janet Jackson retreat into breathy undersinging™, letting the machines and studio whizzes do the work at which they excel, without undo interference. Much has been made of the, er, similarities to "Holiday"; if we're on the subject of genius Eighties art-disco delivered by less-than-gifted vocalists, we hear those opening bells and think ABC just the same — not the alphabet, the band. Shoot that poison arrow, it'll be so nice! Trevor Horn, Nile Rodgers, fifteen minutes and an eight-ball; you'll gonna get something like this, and like it.

7) Big & Rich, "8th of November." This surprisingly standard-issue tragic survivor's story, marred by cliché ("like a dark evil cloud, 1200 came down on him and 29 more") still has some curious resonances among Vietnam veteran tunes. It's far more stately than precursor "Still In Saigon," Charlie Daniels' least likeable hit. The guitars' elegiac backward skirl invokes a quite different song to which this is a sort of pendant, "Copperhead Road" (the death knell of the New Traditionalist's heroic period, wherein Steve Earle's memory-moored vet has returned home to be a paranoid pot-grower, a taking-up of the family's anti-authroitarian moonshining tradition that is at the same time grimly memorial of his training so recently sponsored by those same authorities — "I learned a thing or two from Charlie doncha know; you better stay away from Copperhead Road"). But amidst all this history, certain details of "8th of November" keep tugging at stray brainstrings: the funereal/anniversarial ballad form, the date, the number 29. And these finally to the formal heart of the matter: it's a remake of a song set exactly a decade and two days later. As one memorial website summarizes it, "November 10, 1975. The Edmund Fitzgerald — 29 lost." Huh. History's just so...weird.

6) Jake Owen, "Yee Haw." "You take yer alright, you take yer can't wait, a lot of bring it on, and some damn straight, you mix it all up with some down home Southern drawl, y'all, you got yer yee-haw. "

5) Fergie, "London Bridge." London calling, speak the slang now. O Ambivalence of culture! Will you never end? Despite the numerous allusions — Fifty's rhythmic "I don't give a fuck"; Nelly et al's "urra" for "every"; hints of Masta Ace and Luke Skyywalker — as a total event, this song is part and parcel a feckless, avaricious theft of "Galang," from the staticky drum on down to that chorus sounding like the microphone's gloved in aluminum foil, each effect planed down and rounded off, forsaking the original's sinister fuzz and unexplained paranoia ("who the hell is hunting you, in their BMW?") for the vacuities of "I'm such a lady but I'm dancing like a — ." Just compare this song's "londy-londy-londeee" to that song's "get down get down get down," or any number of other jacked vocal rhythms and intonations simulated and dragged toward the middle of the dial by the ineluctable gravity of a million dollar bills. From the perspective of "Galang," this song is an abomination, a case study in the betrayal of spirit. From the perspective of "London Bridge," well, even a pale shadow of a shadow of a copy of a shadow is better than anything we might have suspected Fergie capable of. From a neutral perspective, this exchange is just a sort of education, the best one yet, in what happens — sonically, socially — when a sui generis song is recuperated into the SoundScan sweet spot. Lesson: the neutral perspective is fucked.

5) Tom Petty, "Square One." Unregenerate — is that the word? Unreconstructed? When Neil Young dies, those stations that play the contemporary form of what will later be classic rock will be left with a playlist of nothing but Tom Petty. Worse things could happen.

4) Julia Roberts," Men and Mascara," and Ghostface Killa, "9 Milli Bothers." There are tropes and there are tropes. Among the many reasons to love country and rap — the two living indigenous forms of pop music — is that their rhetorical tropework is hot to death, like, every day. In Julia Roberts' case, it's syllepsis: "men and mascara always run," ends each chorus, so perfectly inevitable in its form that it expresses the inevitability of its formulation utterly without flourish, the kind of compressed formula that made this country great. Ghostface, on the other hand,prefers antonomasia, the fancy kind always beloved by the Wu, that makes a noun of the last name and thusly, an adjective of first: "that nigga jumped up and did the Damon Dash."

3) Tori Amos, "Ode to my Clothes." Though their senses of both narrative drive and melody are markedly distinct, Tori's ability to commit to the autobiographical mode without telegraphing whether or not it’s a fiction is matched only by John Darnielle. Maybe it’s the god thing, maybe god is in the details. It's just so goddamned poignant that she has that relationship with her piano, as if only things that go always with her can really know shit, can parse the levels of intimacy and invention, and it's telling how in Tori's world things themselves seem always on the verge of abandoning their muteness and letting spill the secret knowledge they've been soaking up like a leather chair stores body heat, hence this unreleased-until-September song: My clothes, nobody knows things like my clothes, my telephone life in the back of my jeans, so elegiac and funny and oh yeah, did we mention that "Ode to my Clothes" is also the name of a poem by William Schwenk Gilbert from 1865, one of the so-called "Bab Ballads," six years before he met his Sullivan.

2) E-40, "Muscle Cars." NASCAR for black people. At any given moment, hip-hop has a dominant tempo, a slow margin and a fast margin. The dominant tempo is where the money is, tautologically; the slow tempo is usually where the cult-cred goes to die, because it's usually sinister and introspective and has the space to elaborate gritty narratives, and wise heads love that shit. And then there is the fast margin, which is where hip-hop goes to dance, and because it's party music, it gets less dap from the credentialed. For the moment, Kanye squats in the middle of the road; Houston bobs its head in the slow margin. Over in the fast margin, hyphy is the best music in the world right now. The folks who complain this album isn't hyphy all the way to the bottom are right; 40 Water's not a pure product of the movement, which is formed by a bunch of kids half his age, standing on the shoulders of giants. 40's one of those giants, and for a handful of tracks here he stands on the shoulders of the kids — the child is father to the man, indeed — so monumental you can see him from eleven states away.

1) Nâdiya, "El Hamdoulilah." It turns out that, behind the bluster and guest rappers, Nâdiya's best at perfectly low-key and lovely piano ballads that mix French and a drop of English with Islamic religious interjections (you don't get that a lot in the Hot 100), including a lightly-swung track called "Inch'allah," and this one, our favorite ballad of the year so far, with Elton John changes and a title phrase that's used on many occasions, including that of waking up.

pulse

Pity Kristen Bell: required to be a sort of Buffy-substitute on television, she now finds herself frowning Grudge-ingly through an American remake of a Japanese neo-horror, which in its haphazard way doesn't seem to be about how suthin' bad happened in some house, but about how internet access leads to anomie, alienation, and suicide, just like in Durkheim but with more ordering take-out food. It doesn't do much with this cranky-grandpa diagnosis, though apparently it has something to do with our inappropriate desire to have do with the dead, hence the whole Japanese neo-horror thing. Apparently this was more carefully integrated in the original, wherein the teens are more Scoobies, less sitting around getting picked off one-by-one by the wifi.

The shot of the flaming plane passing overhead as it crashes to earth, so "reminiscent" of the shot in the recent War of the Worlds, and so suggestive of 9/11, is actually footage spliced in from Kairo, meaning it preceded both. O grandchildren of Hiroshima. When Steve Spielberg and American lo-budge horror are jacking their image-set from the same source as al Qaeda, the terrorists have won.

step up

Step Up adopts what we've called elsewhere the "Flashdance trope" of cultural miscegenation with considerable rigor: the female high culturist has, as usual, a dead parent and a problematic audition coming up, and her personal and professional problems must be resolved via the encouter with a male practitioner of a popular/non-white form.

The persistence of this trope speaks of two particular anxieties. One, obviously, is the fear of miscegenation itself, such that instead of actually, you know, happening, it's displaced into the cultural sphere. The other concerns the anxiety about how cultural forms which originally meant to signal autonomous identity must be recuperated into the white center, to be less threatening and more marketable.

But the center cannot hold — if we've learned anything from the ascendency of hip-hop into a quasi-universal cultural form, it's that. This might be explained in a variety of overlapping ways: as an actual demographic shift; as an image of globalization's indifference to any regime beyond capitalism itself; as the exhaustion of cultural whiteness in general. As a result, the idea of "recuperation" across ethnically/racially identifiable lines has become almost meaningless; basically, everyone's black now, except for the Aryan Nation and hipsters, two sides of one coin. And the movie knows this perfectly well. The ballet dancer actually dances more like someone in Janet Jackson's corps de funk — perhaps because that's what the actress in question was doing a couple years ago. And the film's street dancer, without much hue and cry, is without much hue: he's superduper white — which means, miracle de dieu, that the high culture chick and the street culture dude can actually make it, rather than having a brief encounter in traffic.

Indeed, this film's contribution to the genre (which turns out to be, in the same stroke, its annihilation) is to deliver the unproblematic wigger hero. He's neither an object of ridicule nor a villain; he's just the movie's lead black guy, and he just happens to be white. The movie, moreover, identifies this motion toward white black kids as ongoing, onrushing: while the film's only way to have an actual, pointedly white guy is to make him British, the wigger's younger sister turns out, in an otherwise-inexplicable aside, to be even more of a street-dancing b-girl than he is. The point is explicit: we are ever more closely approaching the moment when black/hip-hop culture is entirely naturalized as culture itself.

That's not to say that all conflicts have been somehow resolved by globalization's subsumption of cultural difference into a series of specious conveniences within a finally homogenous system. Having removed both the scrim of racial/ethnic difference and its interruption of the love story's easy progress, the film (and the logic of globalization it symptomtizes) is left with unadorned class difference, which, though it is almost the only conflict in the film beyond who will get what job in the end (these may indeed be seen as single conflict negotiated across different stages), remains peculiarly non-conflictual.

This may be because the film, while shot from the camera's point of view, nonetheless assumes everything to be understood form the perspective of its fancy people. Because there's no issue of protecting cultural identity, there's no reason — right? — for the poor kids to have any resistance to becoming rich kids. The film's wager is that dramas of cultural identity, now overcome, must cede the territory to class mobility porn. Perhaps that is "the camera's point of view" in Hollywood cinema?

a scanner darkly

In the recent annals of Squigglevision, A Scanner Darkly falls between that anthology of monologues for hipsters auditioning for grad school, A Waking Life, and heroic trifle Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist.

The squiggles, one assumes, are meant to indicate the unstable reality of both the addict and the subject of certain technologies the book envisions — two categories that overlap almost entirely, herein. Well, that's what paranoia does: it makes unities, and in that regard the visual strategy, which posits both a surface coherence and its falseness, seems justified.

But it's also up to something else: making an equivalent to the shaky intensity of Phil Dick's writing, which scarcely qualifies as elegant but never relents from its tremulous comedies of describing a world it's certain is a hoax. Dick's too freaked out to be boring, and the film goes for this effect. Alas, the film can't quite manage it.

The majority of Dick adaptations (Total Recall, most obviously) take the central conceit of a book or story and make merry with it, much to the annoyance of purists. And yet, watching Scanner, one understand that choice — this, a relatively faithful translation, must stew around in its inability to render Dick's textual twigginess into an equivalently charged visual field. No tragedy, certainly; the film's interesting enough, its surmise as timely as ever, its strangely-unearned elegiac finale still nonetheless redolent for a certain substantial portion of the crowd. It remains, nonetheless, a kind of half-failure of visual thinking — in classic slacker fashion, it doesn't lack the courage of its convictions but the ambition to see them past the horizon of the medium-cool idea.

the illusionist

The kind of film that gives literariness a worse name, The Illusionist was once a Steven Millhauser story. Now it's a period piece in which fin-de-siecle Vienna is inexplicably denoted by marginally teutonized British accents, the audible sign that Ed Norton, Paul Giammati and Rufus Sewell are Acting (Jessica Biel settles for Great Plains British, both more and less annoying); the Shakespearean allusions reveal the script's self-aware intelligence; and the stilted, awkward pacing of each scene indicates both seriousness and historicity. If one imagined a film that was nothing more nor less than a set of signs referring back to its own quality, it might look a lot like this one — especially if you added a closing Usual Suspects-type montage in which the detective, having been led about by the beard for two hours, suddenly twigs to the entire array of clues in a swirling montage so as to understand "the plot," ostensibly by way of standing in for the audience members who, contrarily, got all that shit an hour ago and are wondering what time it is, whether this film is a particularly cruel explanation of the idea that "you have to suffer for art," and whatever became of the Rufus Sewell of Dark City.

miami vice

One result of the series of events decades ago that freed actors from studio contracts, and the more recent shifts in the "media landscape" which have allowed stars to retain celebrity/bankability for lengthy periods without actually releasing new product, is that there is simply far less access to first-tier cinematic leads at any given moment. No recent movie has suffered more from this than Miami Vice. Michael Mann can't be said to lack for chutzpah, so one might assume that it was the financieros who refused to let him cast nobodies in the lead; at the same time, George Clooney was directing, Brad Pitt was interning with Gehry, and Tom Hanks is less an action hero than a symbologist.

And so America's best director was forced to cast Colin Farrell as Sonny. He did succeed in getting Jamie Foxx as Rico — a fairly irreproachable (if largely wasted) choice, though he would have done better, both in terms of smooth menace and cash outlay, to get Benicio Del Toro. But Colin gives the B-list a bad name. He once looked like quasi-feral rough trade, hungry, about whom you could at least imagine he might be a star some day (even if you knew it was a no-chance fantasy you were sharing with him). Since then, he looks to have sated his hunger: while maintaining his status as an agonizingly bad actor, he has also apparently eaten Philip Seymour Hoffman. And has awful hair.

Don Johnson wept.

Mann has learned a few things from HK cinema, the most persistent of which is tweaking the camera's depth of field so that the neon lights in the background shake themselves into an anxiously ambient blur. This is complemented by a strange depth effect resulting perhaps from his mission-specific hi-def cam whereby, in static shots, the background seems painted in (and rather expressionistically at that). One might say these ways of imaging are the film's star, but this would be a mistake; he also learned a thing or two about casting women (finally). Much as Spielberg's War of the Worlds was basically a Dakota Fanning film with the hapless Cruise hanging around only to make this fact evident, Mann's Miami Vice is entirely a Gong Li film, interrupted.

wassup rockers

Folks seem periodically anxious about how Larry Clark sexualizes the boy teens of Wassup Rockers — Clark himself is surely a bit anxious, if the violence with which he kills off the pedophiles within the film's frame is any indication. But such strategic disavowals seem as irrelevant as the moral tut-tutting; isn't the film's ideal audience equally the suckers who get with the movie's "message" and those who get with the deflated outrage about the film's slack excuse for visual usury?

About which: oh, yawn. If Clark's camera sexualizes his subjects, it's no more than seven out of ten cameras in Hollywood (Burbank, the valley, Studio City, New York). We — the market, that is to say, whether our response is indulgence, outrage, boredom, or some admixture — pay these people to do this very thing. Clark may be better at it in certain ways, but the idea that we're invited to consume innocent sexuality more here than in your basic Amanda Bynes vehicle is a curious one. And even if the reasonable response to that is, well that sucks too — it seems to us that a couple of hours (or decades) of making male bodies the crypto-porno objects of mersh cinema might be a swell correction. The movie even diligently draws the parallels: withhout making a big song and dance about it, the boys' episodic travails stem in every single case from the irresistable sexual appeal of their de facto leader (who is indeed their leader, the singer in the band, exactly because of his sexual magnetism), a magnetism he cyclically abuses and ignores.

It's as if the film was making a point about what variations, exactly, within the standard recipe of American feature film, motivate us to issue a little hue and cry...

marie antoinette

It's the cotton candy you bought one humid day by the canal, dissolving so swiftly it seemed to be gone before you put it in your mouth, not a taste, perhaps nothing more than a mood, to be recalled even an hour later not as an experience but as it feels to remember remembering. Insubstantial but not nothing.

Nor is it finally all that different from The Virgin Suicides, which had far less content than it was given credit for, but was a fine accompaniment to its soundtrack by Air: A French Band. It felt like something, vague and slight but something; the vagueness and slightness were its virtues, the affect it meant to convey. Both these films are successful in their mild ambitions, their whiff of burned sugar and xanax: Ambient Cinema Americain.

Still, it remains an open question why one would want to set one's little affect machine in the French court during the (narratively collapsed) years 1770-1789. The affect in question is notable, perhaps, exactly because it isn't anything as decisive as happiness; we are to understand, perhaps again, the weight of St-Just's revolutionary claim that "Happiness is a new idea in Europe" falling backward onto all the estates. But this alone wouldn't justify the simultaneous invocation/suppression of events that have as substantial a claim on world-historical drama as, say, Columbus' voyage or WWII.

Answers involving irony, or the depiction of oblivious nobility (complete with Paris Hiltonesque gestures toward pre-industrial forms of the cult of celebrity) are finally insufficient: even these raise the film to the level of critique, and it's hard to imagine anyone taking the movie thusly after actually seeing it. Thus we are tempted into psychologizing the auteur: the story of the poor little rich girl, born and then again delivered into an incomprehensibly-contoured world of privilege, glamour and public visibility which would offer her anything but real experience and the possibility of being taken seriously, proved finally irresistible to the director, and damn the context.

Surely this remains the least interesting way to decide to understand things. Perhaps, if we are to think about Sofia Coppola in such terms, we would gain more by recalling that, in the language of Antoinette and St-Just as she is spoken now, the phrase for cotton candy translates as "papa's beard." As it often seems, the gender dynamics of the French language are curious; do not the perfectly unrebarbative color, sweetness and texture of cotton candy signify the traditional opposite of the beard's masculinity?

By the same token, Marie Antoinette, a film populated almost entirely by women, makes a sort of complement to Apocalypse Now, populated only by men. Both of them, in extraordinary ways, are films of war without war. The present film might be a sort of fantasia on the most terrifying scene of Apocalypse Now, when Willard, in search of provisions and information, wanders and crawls through a detonating landscape illuminated by a firefight, fireworks, or the inferno. It's sort of beautiful. Over and over, Willard asks where the CO is, who's in charge, where can he find them? Nobody knows the answer; more awesomely, nobody cares. They just shoot their guns in some direction or another. Things explode. It comes down to this:

WILLARD
"Who's the commanding officer here ?"

SOLDIER
"Ain't you ?

Marie's Versailles, and her Petit Trianon, are not hell; they're paradisal. But paradise too is contentless; life reduced to form, to which traces of affect still cling. And this is the feeling, finally, of the movie: the feeling of contentlessness, the affect of missing affect, a very different kind of vacuum from the one directed by papa's beard — but a vacuum just the same, a vortex of candied hearts and coronations, war without war, happiness without happiness, the vague and slight paradise before the invention of life.

the devil wears prada

It's perhaps like watching Larry Bird play 2-on-2 in the driveway: it's swell to watch someone be really excellent at something, but there's scarcely any stakes or drama, and you'd rather go out for a beer. But since you can't go out for a beer as you are stuck in the theater, you watch Meryl Steep be excellent, and after awhile you start to think that it's more like watching Wayne Gretzky practice free throws: no stakes, and isn't something terribly wrong? Isn't she playing Martha Stewart, not Anna Wintour at all? How come nobody else seems to be noticing this? Meanwhile, every single significant moment in the movie is signaled by this soundtrack motif that's directly stolen from "All Kinds of Time" by Fountains of Wayne, and nobody seems to be noticing this either, and you start to wonder if the theater is filled with zombies...

pirates of the caribbean: dead man's chest/the libertine

Or: The Empire Strikes Back to the Future

The drab disaster of Pirates Deuce reminds us that an ontology of the blockbuster sequel is not beyond criticism's grasp — one that would not dwell on their failings as such, but would instead compile their shared traits. Clearly the first duty of the sequel is to make the crudest possible assessment of what made the first film more pleasing than it was expected to be, and amplify that so that it loses any structural relation to other elements of the film (one thinks, naturally, of the element of "philosophy" in Matrix: Reloaded).

But perhaps more compelling as an avenue of inquiry is how it's become such a rule of genre that the sequel must put administration on display: a seemingly odd choice for a popcorn film. The requirement seems to involve the making-explicit of political structures that were only implicit in the preceding film. This may strike some readers as an abstract formation: be assured it's quite literal. The council scenes in Reloaded are a comparatively understated (if overdecorated) version of Star Wars' shift from individual dramas to the Galactic Republic between the first and second episodes. But both do the same work: in the modern cinematic epic, all plots lead to bureaucracy. If the bildungsroman integrates the individual into the social body, the sequel explains the hero's place in empire.

It's interesting that this has become understood as an inevitability, a necessary element of the form (a genreme, as any reasonable person would say). It tells us something about the world, and about what Hollywood cinema thinks its role is, both in that world (where the sequel sings back the role of the first movie in Hollywood's global order), and in teaching us how to conduct our own negotiations with reality.

But that doesn't mean it's interesting as such. In fact, if the first movie was well-executed (and it's likely to have been, by local standards, if it has generated an expensive sequel), the implied world system probably doesn't need to be explained. Thus, the introduction of the East India Trading Company as the narrative frame of Pirates Deuce, though comprising a relatively small part of the movie, is not simply heavy-handed but completely unnecessary. That whole thing about white guys in uniform with limey accents in the Carribean from the first movie, fighting it out with pirates against a background of colonialism and new world gold? Again, my good screenwriting dudes: we got it. Stand away from the Final Draft software. We don't need the Company explained to us; don't need its "ruthless pirate hunter" Lord Cutler Beckett; don't need a press packet from the studio rehearsing how "times are changing on the high seas, with businessmen and bureaucrats becoming the true pirates."

But perhaps the verb tense of "are changing" begins to clarify matters. Perhaps the sequel's shift from hero to bureaucrat, repeated summer after summer, is a way of keeping the conversion from action to administration forever in the present — given that we are always between some epic and its echo, the shift is always happening. And thus, somehow, we can pretend that it hasn't entirely and completely happened, ages ago — and moreover, the only imagination of a world before world systems that we are allowed is that of the individual hero.

—————

Watching Pirates, we were reminded that we never reviewed The Libertine, seen in New York in Spring. Like Pirates, it features a main character who has, because of some curse, something foreign where his nose ought to be. Depp's Wilmot has lost his nose to diseases venereal, and concludes the film while wearing a sort of nasal sham; Pirates' Davy Jones , morphing marine like his crew, has a nervously pullulating cephalopod where his face once was (the remarkable face of Bill Nighy, at that). The former substitution has clear enough phallic suggestion; the latter seems (as well) metonymic for the Kraken that lolls about beneath the sea surface, waiting to wreak Jones' havoc.

The ontology of the tentacle remains to be written...

waist deep

Tyrese Gibson as Taye Diggs. Meagan Good as Tyra Banks when she was people not People. The Game as Mike Tyson after a year in Gitmo. Larenz Tate as himself remembering O-Dog wistfully the way we might remember Eskimo Pies or party rapping. Yo-Yo's voice as the radio dj. Sigh.

nacho libre

For the film's climax — after Nacho has quit the orphanage to triumph or die — the orphans, led by Sister Penelope Cruz's Twin Sister, show up just before he must battle the fearsome Ramses, each wearing little versions of Nacho's luchador masca. Sister Sister does not, because she is "pretty."

Anyway, okay, we get it. I am Spartacus. O Captain my captain! I am gay. I am V. I am Nacho. We're living the microera when this scene has leapt from being a trope to a cliché, practically a genre.

Given that such collective identifications are the absolute first step of any differential politics, Hollywood's presentation of this device as a political end (always at the end of the film, natch), as a victory rather than a basic banality, wavers between the facile and the mystificatory. But it's Hollywood, Jake — one would be foolish to expect more. What aggravates is how it just doesn't make for a very good movie; it's always now a tacked-on "value," in the same way that Jack Black cavorting like a seal and parodying rock singing are familar tails arbitrarily pinned to this film's donkey.

What Spartacus understood about this device is that it renders each film that uses it as a prequel. And who the fuck would want want to see the real action of Nacho Libre: Revolucíon, wherein the collectivized orphans in their identical and anoymizing masks take it to the streets and villages of Mexico against the corporo-thugs and corrupt officials for whom Ramses explicitly stands?

Especially when that movie doesn't need to be made, as Mexico has been living it for a dozen years.

a half dozen of the dozens plus one

7) "Numb/Encore" Jay-Z and Linkin Park. We are not mad at this song being the promo track for the Miami Vice remix, even if the Crockett/Tubbs-as-mashup semiotic is a little sledgehammer-to-the-brow. It's pleasing to notice how "Encore" is such an adamantine song that, like "Big Yellow Taxi," it basically cannot be ruined.

6) "Tell Me When To Go (remix)," E-40 feat Kanye West and Ice Cube. Everybody knows the dice are loaded, everybody Kanye is hip-hop for buppies and white rockers who like to talk about "the production" and enjoy Magnolia Electric Company. Out in the dust of Fairfield and V-Town, where hip-hop still draws racial lines, the indelibly soft Mr. West is on the other side: quoth The Federation, "I'm from Fairfield, that's where my mind stays, strapped in my backpack, nothing like Kanye." Which is why it's so hilarious when Kanye tries to be down. While scraping some cred off the current king of the streets, he promises, "any haters get they nose broken, yeah tell me when to go" — sounding about as threatening as a Gap store manager telling you the store is closing in fifteen minutes. Though perhaps there's genius at work here; we are always impressed when megamillionaires persuade us to be embarassed for them.

5) "I Wear My Stunna Glasses At NIght," The Federation. Hyphy for lifey. When you can make an idea this idiotic work out, you are having one of those can-do-no-wrong Nelly 2002 moments when every single thing you do is going to come out auratic, and you should be in the studio every night, just now, before the moment passes.

4) "Rock On," Def Leppard. Their first video ever to chart on VH1 is directed by NIgel Dick — who is older in video years than the band in rock years — is a sort of post-industrial western with the band perform-synching in a dusty, rusty abandoned factory yard while, on the wall of some background building, shredded posters for a Def Leppard concert featuring the white men in Hammersmith Palais yellow and flutter. Sign system very clear: a video set in the ruins of their own career. Narcissism, cruelty: two great tastes that go great together.

3) "Hell Yeah," San Quinn feat. E-A-Ski. The best song of this title since Montgomery Gentry. Possibly even better, and we do not say that lightly.

2) "One," Mary J. Blige feat. U2. Entering the VH1 charts just in time for Pride weekend, this video ends with a shot of Bono walking a few feet across the stage to clasp Mary's hand — a pointed gesture so you'll know they were actually in the same place at the same time, unlike the transatlantic cable collaboration between George Michael and Aretha Franklin (the parallel case in which white male queerness reaches out through the artifice of falsetto and realizes itself in the non-artifice of a black woman's "natural" voice). This actual being-together is important, one supposes, because they are one — because the song concerns the struggle over bodies being together. Of course, other things are exchanged, starting with access to the withheld portions of each other's markets. Mary also gets melody, of the sort that current r&b doesn't oblige. Bono gets to try, not for the first time, to fill the hole in his soul with a black woman. Well, at least he understands what he's missing. Even if we are not wool-dyed fans of Mary J., it's audible to us from the first vocal turn that she's everything absent from Bono's voice: depth and range and doesn't that about cover it, no wait, there's also the capacity to turn to Jesus and to "the social" without sounding hopelessly self-serious, tendentious. "One" was always a magnificent song despite Bono's singing, not because of it. Re Johnny Cash's cover of this song, Rob White noted "he sings better than Bono." Greil snorted and offered that "a cardboard box sings better than Bono." Mary is more like Johnny than she is like Bono, for what it's worth, and we at sugarhigh! thank Allah for Baptist singing traditions, like, every day.

1) "I Do," Toya. The best song of this title since Lisa Loeb. Psych! Much much better. The lyrics have some clinkers (do we still call guys "stallions"? wasn't that, like, the Seventies?), and a fascinatingly odd slippage about who's talking when, such that Toya seems to be calling the stallion a shorty, and herself an iced out player balling out of control, a confusion the song never resolves. And something about the confusion of who's who makes sense with the spectrality of the track, out-haunting the ghostly minimalism of Cassie's "Me & U" while gathering in a club full of sonic histories, the strangely-placed tch-tch-tch-tch-tch of moisture-free hi-hat inherited from Destiny's Child who got it from Timbaland who got it from England, the tuned percussion that clarifies how utterly the loop for "Can I Get A..." became the DNA for the kind of slow soul creep that made perfect sense in hip-hop clubs and ended up as snap'n'b, which this more or less is, and so the first half of the decade starts to take a kind of form, a kind of fluid give'n'take between transnational soul sounds and fiercely local scenes, wait, wasn't it always that way, isn't that an aging double-structure for world systems, how does it keep inventing things...?

the break-up

Those who are for some reason (Satan banned in your town?) unable to attend The Omen (2006), apparently almost a shot-for-shot remake of The Omen (1976), can perhaps gain some satisfaction from seeing The Break-Up, a shot-for-shot remake of every movie ever made.

the fast and the furious: tokyo dérive

On the IDD scale (Incitement to Drive Dangerously On the Way Home), the only scale which matters in such cases and to which all other measures are impediments and cold consolations, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift is around a 7: higher than Days of Thunder, which scarcely inspired one to walk back to the parking lot, but lower than Top Gun, which sent us whining through the Solano tunnel on a dangerous scooter tilted almost knee-to-asphalt — perhaps hovering around The Last American Hero, in terms of sending one careering anxiously through merge lanes onto the 80. Or perhaps we were moved by the pathos of a film that kills off its one competent actor halfway through...or amazed by the post-climactic big reveal, when the uncredited American star finally and arbitrarily makes his cameo, appearing miraculously out of the disco ball of Shibuya...the lights that speak only of the absolute emptiness of the absolute other, beaming hypnotically down on the two gaijin as they stare only at each other, cockpit to cockpit, surrounded by glittering Asian guys and gals, while the audience wonders how it could be so blindsided, how we could not have seen it coming, of course Bill Murray would show up here after lying in wait since the last shot of Lost In Translation, ready to take one last nitro-fueled shot at the emerging markets with his American muscle...

notes from all over (arbitron edition)

• In the world of Wikipedia, which just recently abandoned its universal anyone-can-edit policy, additional screen names invented by a user (most frequently to feign support in a vitriolic debate over a disputed page's content) are known as, wait for it, sock puppets, predictably leading to a policy page named Wikipedia:Sock puppetry.

• Priceless first line from Michiko Kakutani: This is the sort of book that gives the Left a bad name. It's a bit like a review by a pro-life zealot beginning, This is the sort of book that gives abortion a bad name. Now let's make a list of the books that would, in eyes of Ms. Kakutani, give "the Left" a good name. Perhaps one called We're Sorry. Or, We're Moving to the Center. Or one called Liberalism Has No Future Unless It Embraces the War On Terror without Reservation and with Bloody Teeth Bared and Purges Anyone Who Disagrees. No, whoops, that book already exists, and is called The Good Fight, and the Times has given it not one creamy review, but two. Actually, one supposes that any book which presents liberalism as the Leftern front might help the Ms. Kakutani and the Times rest easy.

• The House, Declaring that the United States will prevail in the Global War on Terror further "declares that it is not in the national security interest of the United States to set an arbitrary date for the withdrawal or redeployment of United States Armed Forces from Iraq" [emphasis ours]. These bright lights and sock puppets seem not to know exactly what "arbitrary" means, and use it as if it meant "specific." Existing in distinction to "random" (which would indicate a date settled on without any selection activity whatsoever), an "arbitrary date" would indicate one in which a choice was indeed made, but one without recourse to "necessity, reason, or principle." Which is to say that, per the House's own resolution, it would require nothing more than a reason — "worsening conditions" works for us — to commence withdrawal with honor at sunrise. Yes, we know: the dictionary is the sort of book that gives the Left a bad name.

a prairie home companion

Who do you think is running Congress? Farmers? Engineers? Teachers? Businessmen? No, my friends. Congress is run by lawyers. A lawyer is trained for two things and two things only. To clarify - that's one. And to confuse - that's the other. He does whichever is to his client's advantage. Did you ever ask a lawyer the time of day? He told you how to make a watch, didn't he? Ever ask a lawyer how to get to Mr. Jones' house in the country? You got lost, didn't you? Congress is composed of five hundred and thirty-five individuals. Two hundred and eighty-eight are lawyers. And you wonder what's wrong in Congress. No wonder we often know how to make a watch, but we don't know the time of day.

Is this really that different from Garrison Keillor's schtick?

—————

Directors change and huzzah for that — just try not to go for the okey-doke hustled out in note after note, including interviews with Altman himself, wherein he's now on accounta his octogentility making movies about death, and the passing away of some mythic form of the American way. O McCabe in the snow, O McCloud crashing toward the Astroturf™, O gun passing through the crowds of Nashville — what were those about, then?

It's the last that begs the question, not because it's canonical but because it's the same movie as A Prairie Home Companion thirtyone years earlier, cascading dialogue and provisional conversations while everyone's preparing for the next staged set piece and actors pretending to be character actors pretending to be semipro singers vamping the Americana and gosh, maybe Altman hasn't changed!

Except he has, and gulls can call it "sweetness" all they want, or maybe he drank the Kool-Aid up Wobegon way, but the change is basically in the way that, over the three decades since Nashville (and if the current historical conjuncture calls up any other year, 1975 is not a poor candidate — cue the helicopter over the Baghdad Hilton), Altman has concluded that old-timey Americana values, the loss of which are forever being bemoaned by millionaire populists and candidates, are indeed just plain good, rather than the petri dish of ideologues. So he's replaced Nashville's Hal Phillip Walker, America-for-Americans demagogue, with St. Paul's Garrison Keillor (the guy who ruined a perfectly good spanking of Bernard-Henri Lévy by pompously offering as Le Grand Conclusion that pompous little furriners oughtn't write about America if they can't set their own houses in order — our favorite form of nitwit provincialism!) in about the same spot in about the same structure: the radio voice at the center of the polyvocal web that Altman habitually throws across some particular time and place to capture what's past, and passing, and to come.

You'd think a person of Altman's cut would make this move, this substitution, to shore up our perception of Keillor as the latest in a line of such demagogues, which is what he is, retooled for NPR with a mildly different, Northern plains fundamentalism. No. The movie is still about death and Americana and mythic loss; these have ever been his subjects. What's changed is Altman's stance toward these things; piercing dubiety has melted away into its opposite, and jus' plain folks piety rules the day. In that regard, alas, Mr. Altman knows exactly what time it is.

the dozens ("how many pills?" edition)

12) "Wigwam," Wigwam. The philistine fans who stilll think singers are better if they write their own songs should have loved Betty Boo, who wrote or cowrote all three of her genius neo-disco rap songs 1989-90, "Hey DJ," "Doin' the Do," and "Where Are You Baby?" Even more than Cathy Dennis, a writer was all she was: busted for lip-synching back when that mattered, she slid under the waves. Well, she seems to be back, and half a band along with Blur's bass player? Which is weird? And they're really, um, aimless? And good?

11) "Absinthe," Beth Orton. Her songs all sound the same and even so, there's always one that, if you clip it from the mushy medium of its album, it's killing: My love's the star/you only saw/the traces of, she begins, ending a sentence with a preposition just as we've all been told not to. But when before/is not no more,/it's the em...bers...of, compounding the oddity into a rhyme so awkward it's endearing and sad, the everything that's been lost hanging just there in space, as space, the pointed hole following of, the possessive that possesses nothing anymore.

10) "Promiscuous Girl," Nelly Furtado. This beat was better when it was "Hey Now," by Xzibit, and didn't have the monotonous synth blonk which is either supposed to recall the Neptunes or remind us that, unlike clumsy rapper Xzibit, Nelly Furtado is a clumsy singer. Despite all of this, still the beat of the summer so far. What do they call you when your recycled and muddied loop is better than everyone else's top drawer? They call you Timbaland.

9) "Sugababes vs. Black Eyed Peas vs. Pussycat Dolls vs. Madonna vs. Gorillaz," DJ Smolli. Whoever added the ID3 tags to this MP3 (the things that tell iTunes what the song is called, etc) listed its "Track Number" as 666. They weren't lying.

8) "Leave The Pieces," The Wreckers. Not a complete song, but a perfect one. Given that half the Wreckers are Michelle Branch, preppy princess of teenpop's decadent era, this song might be part of a story that includes Bon Jovi's recent country countdown hit with Sugarland: a story about how used-up rockers are realizing that turning to hip-hop for some teen spirit is a losing gambit, and that the indigenous American genre that might give purveyors of the melodic songform some succor is country'n'western. But there's a different story, or a different way to tell the same story: melodic songwriters are an opportunistic breed who like to pay the rent, and they skitter from genre to genre according to where the hotness is, like lizards in the road. They were writing teenpop in '00 just like they were writing modrock five years earlier and whetever the hell "Since U Been Gone" is five years later. And when they can't figure out where to go to soak up the sun, well, for those who love melody and close harmony and verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus, it is always sunny on the roads of Nashville.

7) "Love In Action," Todd Rundgren. From 1978, the Nazz-arene's punkest rock. I'm sure some purist guy was annnoyed for the three-eigths of a second it took him to dismiss this. Of all the possible pities in this world: that guy's life.

6) "Bossy," Kelis. After "Got Your Money," Caught Out There," "Good Thing," "Young, Fresh 'N New," "Milkshake," and now "Bossy" with its springy southern minimalism, after seven years of this, we remain unsure what Kelis is. Which is a good start toward expressing how odd, sui generis, and great she can be.

5) "Life Ain't Always Beautiful," Gary Allen. One of those songs that starts out almost a cappella and you wish it would stay that way, not just because the instrumental production is gloppy and dull, but because even if it weren't, it couldn't possibly rise up to meet the grain of Allen's voice, surely the most riveting voice on the radio, entirely after-the-catastrophe and holding two contradictory beliefs in pure tension: that melody is all that's left to us now, and that it won't help. He pours negative capability as easy as a wake-up whisky.

4) The Greatest, Cat Power. Good company all the way through; the great benefit of adding that Memphis band isn't so much the Stax-meets-Xanax charm, but that the gang pulls Ms. Power, dragging her feet all the way, toward good ol' fashioned melody. However fun it was when she sucked the life out of those classic choons (answer: not as fun as Nouvelle Vague), this is funner, and sometimes there's even something to do besides feel good about feeling bad: you can tap your foot.

3) "Summertime," Kenny Chesney. What isn't detestable about Kenny Chesney? Something in otherwise-rote new single "Summertime." Not the changes, arrangement, or the spirit — of the 73,000 dudely songs about how excellent summertime is, and here we're only counting the ones with chicks in cutoffs, this one is so middle-of-the-pack it's all we can do pick it out of the crowd before we wander off in search of last summer's Jessica Andrews album. But someone had a good idea. In the quest for the mot juste, the telling detail, the song offers a ride to the, natch, swimming hole,

Two bare feet on the dashboard
Young love and an old Ford
Cheap shades and a tattoo
And a Yoo-Hoo bottle on the floorboard

The rhyme scheme is nifty enough, but the lucre's in that stupid brand name, a little container of Americana which, because of where it falls in the uneven (and thus strangely accented) rhyme scheme, offers Kenny the chance to yodel — and just for a second, surely the greatest second of Kenny Chesney's miserable artistic career, we can be listening to him and thinking about Jimmy Rodgers in heaven, about traditions and curiosities and the great tidal strangeness pulling away at the roots of even the newest Nashville.

2) "Sunset Strip," Courtney Love. While such cynicism isn't misplaced, it's actually not in Love's personal or economic interests to fuck up so badly; that's the difference between her and comrade fuck-up Danny Bonaduce, who has nothing better to do. What's compelling about both isn't just the car-crash of it all, but the relief from the relentless, numbing image-management that has become the dominant fact of fame, and made all the pop arts sub-categories of abstract celebrity. Danny Bonaduce's best line in all of Breaking Bonaduce: "I take enough pills to get full." It understands exactly what's missing from all the stage-managed consumption-destruction of Real Hollywood Stories, much less from the pieties of Bono and Thom Yorke: the human appetites themselves. Courtney Love exists to remind us that they survive, for all their horror and grossness, and how much we miss them within the beautiful purring airless flattened space of the spectacle. You can still hear them in this song from a couple years ago, her own version of Danny Partridge's verdict on himself. She still has appetites stronger than her publicist's, which makes her the the most rock of anyone still (barely) standing, and this ditty of the appetites and Hollywood still a candidate for the greatest song ever.

1) "Do It To It," Cherish feat. Youngbloodz. The video is offputting because the four members, some of whom are surely in their thirties, scheme to have a pajama party after their parents have left town. But this video, wherein the ladies and their choreographer endeavor to explain the nuances of ATL snap-dancing, makes up for it and then some. There will always be room in our hearts for minimal snap'n'b which wants only to be your dance soundtrack, and even suggests which dances you should be doing, plus casual pointers. "Le Freak" + "The Hustle" + "Lean Back" - most of the moustaches and any corrupting artfulness. Reason to live.

over the hedge

Your sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so small eaters, now, as I hear say, be become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up, and swaIlow down the very men themselves. They consume, destroy, and devour whole fields, houses, and cities. For look in what parts of the realm doth grow the finest and therefore dearest wool, there noblemen and gentlemen.. . leave no ground for tillage, they enclose all into pastures; they throw down houses ; they pluck down towns, and leave nothing standing, but onIy the church to be made a sheep-house. . . .Therefore that one covetous and insatiable cormorant and very plague of his native country may compass about and enclose many thousand acres of ground together within one pale or hedge, the husbandmen be thrust out of their own.

— Thomas More

x-men: the last stand

Score one for auteur theory.

The effects of massively collaborative for-profit venture, of studio mechanics (and in this case the effects of franchise ) trump the romantic ideal of individual vision with ease; on the rock of this obvious idea, auteur theory ran aground. And yet, while the queer subtext* that Bryan Singer (it would seem) brought to the first two X-Men films isn't entirely obliterated from the Brett Ratner-directed third, its 'momentum is barely enough to generate one rote and irrelevant sub-sub-subplot (and one that's subsumed by oedipality, at that) in the latest and, one hopes, last installment.

In its stead, we get a barely subtextual fear of, and hostility to, women that should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed replacement auteur Ratner's career. One by one, the X-Women are stripped of their powers: by cure, by election, and by death. And foremost among these cases is Jean Gray, the most powerful mutant of them all, whose very superiority and, natch, her inability to handle power must translate into evil, dishonest seduction, sexual destruction, and finally her own execution at the hands of a former lover. We are sure it's pure chance that Ratner's way of imaging the evil Jean is to render Famke Janssen as at once synthetic-looking and haggard, with an awful dye job — sort of like a Beverly Hills matron in costume. Even more tellingly, when her awful power runs amok and threatens to destroy the world, dude, you can see the veins in her face! Nothing as scary as an aging babe. Er, Ex-babe.

Of course, one can't blame Ratner, or accuse him of auteurist vision, for such a concept; one merely notes how, absent Singer, the franchise regresses to the par-for-the-course-tastic. The idea of the aging babe as destroyer of worlds belongs to Hollywood itself, wherein "world" always means market share. Just as the character of the Juggernaut is an imago of the film's imagined summer competition (as has been deftly noted by our colleague), Jean Gray must stand in (barely) allegorical place for the "facts" that doom any franchise based on female characters.

* Here we use the term "subtext" with the barest pretext; perhaps there's a better term for the level of story unstated on the diegetic surface which nonetheless is fully available to and known by the audience, determins the narrative, and provides the entirety of the sense that the movie is "about" something. As Giles said as early as season two, “I believe the subtext here is rapidly becoming the text."

three times

The majority of the promo images for Hou Hsiao-Hsien's latest film are drawn from the third time, the most contemporary passage in this temporal triptych (and why not, as it's the sexiest, with suicide threats, dark clubs, text messaging, hot epileptic chicks, and the cool blue abysses of hypermodernity?)

The majority of reviews prefer the second time, the most antique among the three, shot as a silent with intertitles and set in 1911 (at the revolutionary end of the Qing dynasty, though this like most cinematic revolutions these days is discreetly left offscreen in the space of studiedly understated allusion).

It's the first time, set in 1966 as the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution was beginning on the mainland, that's the most involving (like the others, it's a narrative of heteromance deferred; unlike them, it's neither overly contrived nor overly pointed).

From the perspective of the eye, a Hou film is never dull: like Godard, he seemingly can't frame a bad shot, and even the slightest films and passages have a singular way-of-looking. He's a director of aspect, and activity can come to feel like a sort of imposition.

This becomes a problem at the level of plot. With the partial exception of the Wong Kar-Wai Lite (or Heavy, really) Millennium Mambo (which shares with the "third time" herein an impassively scolding kids-these-days overcurrent), Hou develops narrative from within ways of looking, rather than finding ways to look at the doings (contra Adorno, in Hou and elsewhere, content is sendimented form). It's the form of cinema that justifies the term world-view, a term so often reduced to indicating someone who has a theory, or even just an opinion. But if action is to arise from the viewing of a world (or a corner of the world), this mandates not only slow films, but a slow development from one to the next. While one can conjure or buy a new plot in fairly short order, it would be unjust to expect even Hou to develop self-propelling world-views, ways of looking, in rapid-fire succession.

And so fails Three Times, even though it's almost unfailingly a pleasure to look at. It has about one way of looking, which is realized on the order of events by only one of the three times; the other two are attractive, lugubrious failures.

Finally, one can't avoid wondering about the success — whether Hou's aspect here is somehow more indexed to 1966 than it is to 2005 or 1911. If, as art historians have eloquently argued, historical moments have their own ways of looking, are these ways reconstitutable? Might one conceive of a film as documentary, not of how-people-lived but of a historically-charged way of looking?

the da vinci code

There is nothing about the scene of the museum visit which is not preparation for shopping (the daily itinerary of the culture tourist, ambling from the Carrousel du Louvre to the Galeries Lafayette, assures us of this). After queueing to get in, one enters the grand gallery and surveys the goods. Perhaps you've come to see some piece in particular, perhaps you're wandering; something captures the eye. You stand before it, contemplate, discern, deliberate. Your mind, as practiced as a fingertip reading Braille, runs itself over the surface of an imagined life which could accomodate such objects. You evaluate, make a judgment. All the while, a seemingly unsatisfiable cupidity builds in you. That's the basic problem with the Louvre, the sense of loss which makes it all so poignant: you can't buy that shit.

The flagship Apple Store has opened in the center of Manhattan, at the southeast corner of Central Park. If one recalls an open plaza there, between 58th and 59th at the foot of palaces, decorated with a fountain or two, fear not. The store is literally cavernous, for it's almost entirely submerged — an irony, in that this underworld seems meant for the people who float above the surface of the globe, cosmopolites whose digital cameras store images of Shanghai, Sao Paulo and Paris. Nothing marks the plaza but for a gleaming glass portal: a cube, joisted by geometry and chrome, empty but for a hanging sculptural logo. Inside, a spiral stair winds down to the business level, around the column of an open-platform elevator.

On the day the store opened, and the next and the next, the line to get in stretched the length of the plaza and around the corner, corraled by metal crowd control barriers.

If one has not been to France, or seen The Da Vinci Code (which opened on the same day as the Apple Store and opens and closes at the Louvre), we here at jane dark's sugarhigh! have prepared these visual aids for understanding Apple's semiotic system:

Here's the geometric glass entry portal...

...with the queue along the fountain-bedecked plaza in the center of the metropolis...

...awaiting the spiral stair/platform elevator that carries clients down to the action...

...and here's the plaza at night, with glass portal illuminated...

...while here's how it looks quand il pleut.

Apple, with its doxology of aesthetics-first, MoMAlicious industrial design, is the ideal candidate for this project. That's not to say the likeness of museum and store is a new one; after all, the already-condemned underground mall in the heart of Paris pointedly named its longest promenade La Grande Galerie, after the infinite hallway in the Louvre hung with Renaissance paintings (the very run in which The Da Vinci Code begins). The Louvre itself, understanding the condition of its captive crowd, has installed its own underground mall on the path from museum hall to Metro. Consider the cheek-by-jowldom of boutiques and galleries in the 19th-cenury arcades, or the overcome descriptions of the first huge department stores, as Stendhal syndrome leapt into the agora. This correlation cannot be said to have been discovered in the first place, any more than the freezing point of water can be discovered. It can merely be named. It's the expression of a general rule of the era, a basic relation; each specific case educates us in how the rule is followed.

What we might admire about the Apple Store is not the perfection of its likeness, but how that perfection seeks to overcome similitude, to finally collapse the museum and the luxury boutique into a single episode, one which doesn't risk the client getting lost in the museum until the shops have closed, which returns the aura of the singular painting to the singularish piece of couture — an episode in which you can buy that shit, and victory is assured.

friends with money

In which Nicole Holofcenter, the Sex & the City hack with indie cred, conspires to make a film for Jennifer Aniston about how Brad dumped her, she was sad, but she ended up with Vince Vaughan, and no, really, she's okay.

clean

Gathering up a burger with fat onion rings at a restaurant counter after getting out of the stir. Swiftly and silently running her hand along the naked body of a barely-known overdose, having not had the chance to touch her boyfriend's dead body when he OD'd earlier. These are two things Maggie Cheung does in Clean, gestures slight but not furtive; neither does the camera linger over them, nor do they intrude on the conversations happening. They are barely events, off to the side of the dialog-driven story, but each of them wrapped up in a sensuality that always concerns not what's sensually there so much as that which has been withheld until that moment. These are tiny gestures of presabsence, awfully moving. But then, we could watch Maggie Cheung knit for two hours, and sometimes this movie (made in 2004, just now released in the US) isn't much more than that. It's enough.

Equally, we could equally watch Nick Nolte stare into space for an hour. Here he conjures up a striking performance, perhaps his best, much of which is just that: staring into space and calculating, figuring things out, waiting for the recoil he uncertainly expects from Cheung after each of his polite, hopeful rhetorical brutalities. They never come.

Cheung's struggle isn't with him; it's with herself. Specifically, it's between her face and her hair. From the first scene, her black bat-coif is an ugly, stylized exaggeration that, against all odds, overdoes her famous face. The hair, in fairly simple manner, is her bad blood, her stupid rock mythology to which she clings, as if to the possibility of winning; it's her junkie self. When, later in the movie, she puts on an orange watch cap, her face changes dramatically: wide, defeated, plain. The defeat is her victory.

The absurdity by which she goes to San Francisco to get clean can't even be processed; here at HQ, that little bit of the Eighties that we can recall involved a constant stream of friends with habits leaving the Bay Area: for home, Hazelden, Hawai'i, "the land." That the sound of Mazzy Star is the sound of getting off dope is equally hard to suppose. But this is all in the last few minutes of the film, some kind of bookend to the opening number, Metric's "Dead Disco," which we are perhaps supposed to dislike (not so; a slight, perfect song). Well — narrative. Well — French person's America.

Mostly it's the faces, the physical gestures, the endless miniature image-defeats, the melancholy of the sensual, the watching.

united 93

The order in which the vics die in slasher movies (as a general rule, the women die per facts of coiffure: styled blonde, straight blonde, styled brown, with straight brown for the survivor) is formulaic, which is to say, formed: a way the film presents its madeness, no less than a sonnet's rhymes. Plot, harmony, a lead character's unifying experience, a moral...really any form of self-consistency and stability that offers a clear line from start to finish is, by its very unrelation to lived experience, a distancing effect (similar arguments resonate with plastic arts).

This is United 93's appeal. As everyone notes, the basic events, and ending, are already known and unchangeable; for most critics, this is an even though — the film is affecting despite this limit. This is an error. The film is affecting because of this limit (which is different from saying that it gets its force from the story already in place). Because the external form is fixed, the film's internal progress is freed to be relatively jumbled. The choice to have no hero or even heroes isn't simply a compulsorily ethical one regarding the need to honor all the dead and respect their familes equally; it allows for a telling that presents coherence-systems far less than most feature films. There's no rooting, no tracking a single character, not much strategically-paced revelation of events; in recompense, actions and phrases come from all directions, shaky and disorganized, far from familiarities of pacing.

It may indeed be a general rule of real-time, of which this film is a kind of terminal case: real-time without order and control always threatens panic. United 93 induces panic quite successfully, and in inverse proportion to expressions of madeness. Don DeLillo, in the most eloquently ambivalent formulation of White Noise, sez "all plots lead to death." But isn't the opposite true: isn't plot indicative of one's power to give shape to that real-time unfolding which has no shapeliness but that it ends in the tomb? Isn't plot the expression of control over death?

For all the inevitability of reviews' describing the last shots of United 93, the film — so effective up until this point — betrays itself a couple minutes before. As the passengers and hijackers equally ready themselves for the onrushing confrontation, the film opts to deploy parallel crosscuts between the two groups, the latter frantically praying to Allah, the former just as frantically to their god. It is not simply that this gesture has a didacticism unike the rest of the film, but that it's exactly what Coppola would have done. As a gesture, it's cinematic; it's shapely, made. And with that small decision, the film loses its effect, returns us to ourselves, viewers. Perhaps this is necessary, if not inevitable; though the film is after something like human immediacy within the iconic spectacle of "9/11," one does well to recall that those events were as much a part of an image-war as anything else, that their immediacy was not — could not — be conceived of as independent from the sphere of symbol management.

stick it

The "Flashdance trope," though one would scarcely claim it originated with that film, involves a young artist/performer (almost always with an absent parent, generally dead) who specializes in an art form marked as whiter-than-white. After failing or bailing a juried audition, the hero has a chance encounter with a dark-skinned Other who practices a newer and more populist form of the art; the hero then incorporates some elements of this vitalist street style into their own routine and, racially hybridized, dynamic and democratic, wows the judges on the second pass.

Coyote Ugly rehearses this narrative with absolute schematic certainty: "Violet Sanford" (Piper Perabo), struggling singer-songwriter, bumming out on her rooftop, hears some hip-hop from the next dirty building over...followed immediately by the lthoughtful staring/lightbulb inspiration/late-night work montage around which the film turns. All of this makes the film's jubilant ending as baffling as any cultural text on offer: when we finally hear Violet's song, it turns out to be an utterly white-identified country number, sung onscreen by Leann Rimes and written by Diane Warren. This makes sense insofar as the film is less an adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert's article about the New York bar Coyote Ugly than it is a Diane Warren biopic relocated to the East Coast. But it makes no sense in relation to the narrative of cultural mixing that the film so diligently sets up; the ending takes place as if that rooftop encounter, and the following montage, simply never happened. It's as if Jules, Jim and Catherine, in their final scene, drove off to In'N'Out Burger.

Stick It is more invested in the dynamic between female performer and panel of judges than either of these films, or any other film one might recall — it renders that scene not a crucial means toward the hero's future success, but an end in itself. This perhaps explains why the Flashdance trope must at once appear and be shuttled to a side narrative, and displaced from the unbearably white star (Missy Peregrym) to an already-nonwhite side player. The trope contains a central fact about this particular confrontation and its cultural payload, and so remains necessary; at the same time, the film's idea about what "success" would be is actually one stop more appealing, and so there's no room in the lead story for finally softening the judges' hearts to aesthetic miscegenation. For once, the movie has someting better to do than recapitulate the virtues of exogamy, and lands closer to "Bartleby" than "Rape of the Sabine Women."

ps: Hey Missy Peregrym — Piper Perabo called. She wants her stage-name designing algorithm back.

mission: impossible III

Cherie's "I'm Ready" — written by Kara DioGuardi, sung by Cherie, urgency courtesy of Foreigner — is as close to perfect as a pop song gets, and yes, that includes the Beatles and Nellie McKay. But the formal interest isn't its perfection. It's the possible relationship between its perfection and the singular fact of how few seconds there are in the song in which the melody isn't being sung: twelve seconds to the first verse (which turns out to be a lifetime); 0 seconds between verse and chorus; 0 seconds before chorus leads back to verse; less than two seconds between second chorus and bridge; 0 seconds between bridge and chorus, 0 seconds before the chorus repeats to outro. Once it starts, a total of two seconds that are not led by the vocal line.

Mission: Impossible III, by the same token, approaches being a perfect movie, in a way that makes perfectly cllear how much a perfect movie leaves to be desired. Someday, someone with a copy of the DVD will determine how many of this film's 126 minutes are not part of an action sequence — less than a dozen, one suspects. Perhaps an equally viable analogy is the format of a Squeeze song or Tom Waits' "Ol' 55," with a chorus so long, each part unfolding the next from what at first seems like a last gesture, that one despairs of ever arriving at its end, and gives onself over to the craven pleasures. In M:I:3, one can be certain that a long swing from one Shanghai megastructure to the next will lead into a long tumble down a canted glass face, a slide which is also a gunfight by the way, and leads directly to the grabbing of the macguffin and ensuing base-jump into a busy street, a quick game of human Frogger pursuing dropped item through traffic which inevitably shifts into the latest in car chase technologies...

Amidst all this activity, sugarhigh!'s favorite moment came when Tom Cruise descends dramatically into the Vatican's da Vinci-coded catacombs; we love it when movie stars sneak down there, and the fact that he does not run into Tom Hanks for a drawn out battle involving Israeli Army kung fu and laser cats is perhaps the least believable thing about the movie.

les amants réguliers

Philippe Garel was 20 in the May days of 1968; so too is poet François, the lead character in his '68 epic Les amants réguliers (2005). François just happens to be played by Garrel's son Louis, who a year or so before just happened to play one of the leads in wet dreamer Bernardo Bertolucci's film about the same historical occasion, The Dreamers. As if that intertext wasn't enough, somewhere in the middle of Les amants' three hours, a colloquy of stoned kid rock-throwers retreat to the crash pad of their trust-funded confrere to discuss culture. Have you seen Before the Revolution, asks one of another. No? At which point the speaker turns directly to the camera and enunciates, as if it were an elocution lesson, "Bernardo Bertolucci."

To which we can only say: take it outside, boys. Your pissing contest isn't amusing. We would love Les amants to have resurrected the Nouvelle Vague, to have restored dignity to the category "three hour French movie," or simply to have been better than the turgid anti-politics of The Dreamers. Perhaps it is better, if "better" means "less ridiculous" (though by the same token it's "worse," in the sense of "less hot"). Perhaps Garrel's idea — that the failure to disrupt regular life would come back to haunt the regular lovers a thousandfold — is at least an idea rather than a cheap insult. But the gap between what remains to be expressed, and what each film decides is expressive enough, is identical: Way Too Broad.

Michel Houellebecq's drooling, reflexive lampoonings of the soixante-huitards, aside from their Oedipal bathos, have what is either the critical acuity or sheer stupidity to rehearse the most basic distortions of the historical narrative: they present the entirety of the revolutionary desire as concerning personal liberties. In short, according to the way lots of people like to tell it, 1968 was about free love and a higher wage to spend freely on hash, not about toppling a government and revising daily life. We would hope that either Ber-nar-do Ber-to-lu-cci or Phillipe Garel could do better than that, could get at what might have been particular and resonant about that moment. Instead, the two seem simply to have flipped a coin by way of deciding which would tell their drawing-room tale of ruint romance in lurid color, which in somber b/w, as if those were the two approaches to history.

extensive/rock that meme

Without endeavoring to summarize the entire "is Stephin Merritt a racist?" discussion (one can find a recent note and an outlinked entry-point to the debate here and here), sugarhigh! offers a couple ancillary notes:
• It's interesting that the debate focuses on trying to ascertain some abstract truth about Stephin Merritt, as if that mattered at all. The soul of some individual you're unlikely to spend much time with: whatevs. What seems more fundamentally at stake is: does this possibility begin to explain something about Merritt's music and, far more importantly, about the extent to which people embrace and identify with it, despite its dullness? That is, is this an explanatory account, or just an insult?
• Somewhere around the heart of this lies what we see as a most fundamental issue about "taste," and what can be deciphered about ideology and social damage by tracing the chasm between someone's self-proclaimed beliefs and what seems to be revealed by their actual practices. But if we're going to do this, let's do this. No one thinks they're a racist, and as sugarhigh! can attest from asking strangers "what kind of music do you like?" reflexively for years, a vast majority of white people from metropolitan areas believe they have eclectic tastes, or enjoy "everything." This everything, as it happens, is a curious one: it never includes Too Short, or Christina Milian (or, for that matter, Toby Keith or Jessica Simpson).
• So, you are saying, there are two issues being conflated here: the racism implicit in the empirical preferences of some people who insist they're not racist, and the unstated opposition between "eclectic" and "pop" that renders the term "eclectic" as self-canceling — not just meaningless, but encrusted with a rather laden delusion. Indeed. This conflation, and the labor of spackling over the logical fissures of each portion, strikes at the heart of the basic problematic of taste as it regards mass culture in the United States (particulary when race is considered integrally with class). Stephin Merritt is just a cool test case: everyone believes they have self-determined, non-ideological preferences that are not only unbound but democratically virtuous; meanwhile, individual taste, when you look at someone's iPod, often turns out to be a map of exclusions — a map that is resonant with, if not isomorphic to, rather undemocratic histories.
• But why pillory poor Stephen? If the order of the day is to call bullshit on this phenomenon, there's a broader version we've been meaning to mention: the "playlist meme." Every now and then, someone sees fit to post a random list of ten or twenty songs generated by their digital music player. We understand this practice as meant to demonstrate the serendipitous collisions of songs that can be produced by randomizing; meant perhaps to archive a particularly pleasing set; and meant to celebrate the general excellence of the songs appearing. Swell. At the same time, let's remember these lists have two determinations: on the one hand, they are a "random" cross-section of the kind of music someone collects; on the other, they are a cross-section the person feels particularly compelled to share. They are, thusly, doubly representative of someone's empirical tastes. So let us love this empiricism, and invite everyone into the Merritocracy: if that playlist is all white people, well then, whatever it is that one thinks it is communicating about one's taste, and whatever one might claim about how that quality came to pass...

atl

So the gang got together and made a movie. It was a coming-of-age film about a foursome of African-American teens living, loving and rollerskating together down at the local rink. The ringleader would be played by a young hip-hop star, whose character would come from a broken home with a single male authority figure struggling feebly in the shadow of parental death. Said hip-hop star would be set on the course of romance with female lead who seems to float in from a diffferent world, and the narrative would build toward a climactic skate-off. Needless to say, rollerskating-jams abound on OST.

The movie was called Roll Bounce, and it was set in Seventies Chicago. And then, 200 days later later, it was called ATL, and set in Atlanta; Bow Wow had been replaced by T.I., Meagan Good by Lauren London, Chi McBride by Mykelti Williamson.

Brief verdict: ATL much better; T.I. charming; could've used more skating; what's up with mysterious Ivy League school known as "Brinton"?

Though meaning to be more charged with social substance than its predecessor, this one actually has the appeal of easy-goingness; T.I's voice and facial expressions are more like a lazy Sunday than anything Roll Bounce has on offer. O, fair realism!

every minute of it

"Turn Me Loose" isn't the most famous Loverboy song ("Working for the Weekend"), nor is it the best ("Hot Girls in Love"), nor is it the most significant (that would be late hit "Lovin' Every Minute of It," written by Robert John "Mutt" Lange; it was here that he shifted his boom-boom-bang hairmetal stomp toward pure pop and toward Canada, setting the stage for the world-historical discovery that would be Shania Twain). However, "Turn Me Loose" provides the bassline for "Standing in the Way of Control," by The Gossip, thus rescuing them from being The Cure by way of early Melissa Etheridge and distinguishing them from all the other bands currently named The [Singular Noun that is Too Inchoate to Comfortably Take a Definite Article and is Also Basically a Verb].

soul music quiz

yeah the big boss man he likes to crack that whip,
I ain't nothin' but a number on his timecard slip.
I give him 40 hours and a piece of my soul,
Puts me somewhere at the botttom of his totem pole —

In the preceding Toby Keith lyric, specifically about the experience of wage labor, the word "soul" signifies which of the following concepts:

a) The immortal portion of a human being
b) The seat of the emotions, feelings, or sentiments; the emotional part of man's nature
c) A sense of ethnic pride among Black people and especially African Americans, expressed in areas such as language, social customs, religion, and music
d) Surplus value

Followup question: to what extent might the answer all of the above serve as a provisional concatenation of the ideas present in the idea of soul music?

lucky number slevin

[compare to poster for Slither, below]

Surely we are at least a little taken aback to learn that the parents of the wunderkind in the latest spelling bee epic are played by Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne. Through the powerful transitive properties not simply intrinsic to but orchestrated by the film industry with its incessant circulation of the currency of stardom through a formal system of "roles," those with memories can't help but experience, in this case, the oddity of the experience that the pair, last seen with him beating the shit out of her en route to incarceration, and her rising off to heights of independent fame, have seemingly worked things out and achieved a successful, buppified parenthood, as if to say, even the most inconstant and extraordinary figures reconcile with the domestic middle way sooner or later: a tortured, metatextual restatement of what Lukacs and Moretti already knew about the modern social narrative.

It's not that one can get confused between actors and their various roles, but that the film industry actively pursues this confusion; one could theorize the chain of substitutions (and its pleasures) rather subtly, but in short, the strategy allows the marketing of the same film to one audience that actively wishes to see a film about, say, a hit man and a taxi driver in the Los Angeles night, and another (overlapping but distinct) audience that wants to go see a Tom Cruise movie, and another (ditto) that likes Jamie Foxx. Indeed, one way of describing (that is to say, valuing) film actors might be as a ratio between their presence as star and as character, in the audience's experience, as averaged across their careers. At the top of the ratio would be those who are the purest stars (Schwarzenegger, let's say); the smallest fractions would be "anonymous" character actors. It will come as no surprise that the pay scale and this ratio are isomorphic.

This whole complex lends a certain interest to figures like Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman: those who have successfully parlayed their ability to, in the clichéd language, "disappear into their roles," into a star-style career. This capacity is not profoundly mysterious; it requires, however, the parainndustrial structure of critics and awards and, as such, sheds much light on that structure.

One might write a brief monograph on the British variant of this phenomenon, wherein if one parlays well enough, one gets to become a freakin' knight of the realm or whatever. Hugh Grant, a pure star, is unlikely to make it; ditto the horrifically excellent character actor Timothy Spall. But somewhere in the moyen floats Sir Anthony Hopkins, and Dame Judi Dench, and so on — which brings us to Sir Ben Kingsley, and Lucky Number Slevin, about which we have only one thing worth saying: in how many films will Sir Ben Kingsley die with a plastic bag over his head and duct tape around his throat, and is this really something one can do over and over, or once you're a knight, can you pretty much just do whatever you want?

three 6 mafia: the gift that keeps on giving

Consider, for example, this headline.

basic instinct 2

This is the best movie ever. My cat can read. I am the King of France.

she's the man

• Estimated year by which all of Shakespeare's 37 plays will be remade in a high school setting: 2047.

• Factor by which this process is more interesting than watching Ang Lee systematically remake genre films as middlebrow romances in which the guy can't express his love because of social conventions: 3.2

• Predicted rank that She's The Man will hold (assuming that one counts only the best version of any given adaptation): 21st.

• Current rank: 4th.

• Predictive value of hotness of actors for ranking: Near-total.

• Expected rank of Titus Andronicus remake (given that Baz Luhrman's Romeo + Juliet doesn't count, despite expressing high-schoolness better than any other film ever, Fast Times at Ridgemont HIgh excepted): 1.

slither

After four days, we can barely recall a single detail from Slither — this, perhaps, summarizes its charms. Rarely has a movie been so indifferent to distinguishing itself, and so easy-going as a result; like discussing politics again down at the local, it's the relief of having a loaded conversation as if it didn't matter at all. This lack of self-importance is perfectly embodied by "star" Nathan Fillion, who played a similar role in Serenity; screwed by his handsomeness (he looks like a weathered Jason Bateman) into a lead role (both in the movie, and in the movie's town of Wheelsy), he graciously makes the least of it at every turn. Only occasionally does his witty recalcitrance reveal itself as an actual annoyance that he has to be the guy to take care of this shit.

Slither is a bit like Scary Movie (et al.) without the self-aware irony; it follows the program like a structuralist at a genre convention. The genre is one we have referred to elsewhere as "the narrative of ideological terror" — in which arises some non-human force whose pure drive is not absolute destruction but absolute homogenization (wherein all human bodies become mere automata, non-conscious extensions of a collective will), which is perforce resisted by the final survivor(s), possessor of "the last free consciousness, as yet untainted by ideology."

The classic form of this film is the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the incessant remaking of which faintly screams repetition compulsion: "We might say it is America’s national story, the one it remakes in times of crisis — akin to the Japanese film community’s habit of refilming the story of the forty-seven ronin cyclically, most famously in Mifune’s Chushingura (1962)."

[An an aside, we note that the narrative of ideological terror is what renders science fiction an important screen for the cultural unconscious of the United States — but shouldn't be limited either to sci-fi or America. In a chapter of the 1983 book Signs Taken for Wonders, literary historiographer Franco Moretti identifies one locus classicus of this narrative in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and in the general idea of the zombie. For the moment, we wish to note only that the film Death House (1987), also known as Zombie Death House, features a character named...Franco Moretti.]

From the position of industrial history, the only remarkable thing about Slither is that it was made by James Gunn. His previous film, the stealthily odd and thrilling remake of Dawn of the Dead, starred class act Sarah Polley (along with Ving Rhames, etc). What's more, it made meaningful money, famously besting Mel Gibson in its opening week ("Zombies Knock Off Jesus," said Variety) and ending up with a worldwide gross of above $100 million on a $28 million budget. Meaning that, with an intent more pointed than anything else about Slither, Gunn elected to move backward, away from whatever was offered him in the wake of success, to make an even more decisively pulpy film, without any box office names. Everything about Slither is largely free of the anxiety and banalization that haunt every object that wishes to succeed; the whole film is pervaded by a sense of relief, which for a horror film is curious indeed.

inside man

Spike Lee's new film goes to considerable lengths to have Jodie Foster's cosmopolite superfixer quote (pointlessly misquote, really) the titanic financier Rothschild, who said of property, "Buy when there's blood in the streets." We're supposed to blanch at this understanding of history; as advice, it focuses on the moment of choice, when one can ruthlessly climb aboard the worst forces of history or take the high road. And so is the moral dimension of Christopher Plummer's banker, a former Nazi collaborator, rendered.

Oddly, a different adage would have rendered the backstory far more illuminatingly, without offering us such an easy moral superiority: Balzac's "Behind every great fortune there's a crime." The difference is both slight and absolute, in that the former allows the imagination that there could be a billionaire banker who was right with the world; Plummer just isn't quite him. Evil, herein, is a matter off a single choice made years ago that coulda gone the other way. Had the film kept Balzac to hand, we would know that every bank holds a secret, and the snoozy peregrinations to explain why this bank would be obviated.

This is central; there's a record of Plummer's originary villainy in a safety deposit box, and on this document the plot turns. This is the film's problem. As a caper procedural with witty asides, Inside Man is at the top of the Hollywood heap, especially given the aura that the various crypto-political asides ("give me back my fucking turban") take on within the ambiguous tension of a film that is at once a) by Spike Lee, and b) studio contract work. On that level, the film's only real disappointment lies in the amount of time that the hero-criminal spends behind a mask, a choice that made a bit more sense for Hugo Weaving than for the absurdly charismatic Cllive Owen.

But in the procedural's relation between narrative and plot, the mechanics of the former are always more interesting than the "secret" of the latter, not least because the secret is always, y'know, Nazis. The motivation of audience sympathy in such films requires — no less than the domestic drama requires a child in jeopardy — that the villainous Grand Old Man have a specific and historical association with an agreed-upon absolute evil, of which there aren't all that many. Hence the predictability of the "secret," every time.

Had Balzac stood in Rothschild's place [a fine way to start any paragraph — ed.], we would be at once more fluid in our choices, and more honest. The film's failure to pick the right adage is identical to the film's failure to have an interesting plot.

This might be seen as a matter of narrative economy: the crimes crouching in bank vaults (literally, in this film) are rarely singular or easily narratable; they are crimes of duration, in which value is moved by force from some humans to others over time.

Our note is perhaps a banality: that Hollywood movies like to imagine that there are good billionaires and bad billionaires, and that the distinction is finally clear and identifiable. The appeal of this imaginary needs no detailing. What's profoundly ironic is the nature of this particular form of the fantasy, as regards Spike Lee.

The logic whereby historical evil within living memory pools around the Holocaust is exactly the justificatory logic which buttresses the state of Israel at every turn, often at the expense of other historical victims. The oddity here is not, as might first appear, simply that Spike Lee has turned his political thinking to the Holocaust, after decades of irritating Jewish audiences; the oddity is what vanishes, in this particular case, in the smoke of that choice. Lee himself has spoken against this with great vituperation, and indeed has publically posed the United States' defense of Israel against the historical treatmenty of slavery — which is to say, against the systematic, violent long-term extraction of value from black bodies to enrich white bodies. Lee (no more than Faulkner) identifies this as a founding and perpetually repressed story of America, of American wealth and power.

Spike Lee's longstanding reasoning about crimes, fortunes and power, that is to say, has been the exact opposite of the very historical imaginary that deforms and dullifies an otherwise charming and engaging Spike Lee joint; nothing, in fact, could structurally trace "what it means for Spike Lee to do studio contract work" more coherently than this incoherence.

tristram shandy (a cock and bulll story)

The easy delights of Tristram Shandy float mostly in the metacinematic, as when actor Rob Brydon, pondering his fate as a not-leading man, proposes to identify the color of his rotting British teeth "Tuscan Sunset," or the unremarked-upon casting of absurdly handsome Jeremy Northam to stand in for director Michael ("Mark") Winterbottom.

Despite the addition of a metacinematic layer (or, perhaps, given the nature of the book, one ought say supermetacinematic), the flick flits by in at what seeems like about an hour. This feels like an impossibility, though not one lingered over; what's most appealing in this version of Tristram Shandy is neither its imbrication nor slightness, but the insouciance with which it stages both — as if to be an affect guide for making unfilmable films. What next: the HBO Neuromancer? Gravity's Rainbow in the form of a trailer?

find me guilty

Here at sugarhigh!, we're told that voir dire means "to speak the truth" — it looks to one with humble French like the literal translation would be "to see to speak." That seems to give a fair narrative account of the trial fromat, from the juror's perspective: for a long time one looks, and then at the very end one is set loose to pronounce a sentence. Just like a film critic!

Twice in Find Me Guilty, mobster Jackie DiNorscio, arguing his own case before a jury, says “I’m a gagster, not a gangster.” Both times the plea is shot from the jury box. We’re the jury, of course; despite the Sidney Lumet imprimatur (where are the Dog Days of yesteryear?), the film is nothing but Vin Diesel’s case to be recognized as a comic actor, instead of the bigtime tough guy he has failed to be (a failure, we hear, forced by his testing as ugly to a big chunk of the international audience).

So, really, the patio at the Chateau Marmont is the jury box; the good citizens there sitting in judgment are the ones who must be persuaded to hire Diesel sometime down the line, to set him free from the prison of his physique and rehabilitate him as an amusing and employable guy.

v for vendetta

V for Vendetta stinks of books. Not in the sense that it’s based on an annoyingly lit’ry graphic novel from the Eighties, but in that same way that one knew syntagm-by-syntagm that The Matrix was propped up by a certain amount of critical reading, even without the Baudrillard product placement.

This is a mixed blessing, to say the least. Among purportedly pro-revolution Hollywood movies, V4V knows enough to dodge the obvious critiques: the individual hero, if he is such, diligently steps aside and lets the next generation have responsibility for changing their world, represented both by a teeming “Dude, we’re all Spartakus” collectivity and a radicalized woman-child. That seems to get it about right, and moreover the narrative doesn’t flinch from its own logic, except perhaps for the fortuitous set of eventualities whereby, the twin heads of the repressive regime having been dually dispatched, the headless government troops decline to fire on the uprising. One wishes as well that, at the climax, having persuaded her hangdog pursuer that the explosive-laden train must indeed be launched, Evey had inhabited the devil-may-care drive of anarchic destructivity enough to say “Wanna go for a ride?” rather than their both deboarding. Still, as a sort of bare-bones political text, oh, it’s fine.

That’s the problem: the film’s good enough that the ways in which it fails to be much good are particularly frustrating. These failures transpire at many levels: the confusion of preservationist values with resistance; the inability to make as good a use of the ever-lurking perversity of Natalie Portman’s murderous naif schtick as Luc Besson or Andy Samberg; the docile trot down the path from V’s mask to a lair congruent with the Phantom of the Opera’s.

But the decisive failing is in the cinematographic style; unlike The Matrix, or Bound, there’s no visual invention to speak of, no interesting shots, only a flat palette and a will to execute. Predictably well-read, the film doesn’t have a way to look. Without a substantial visual sense, there's no formal tension — no grinding of elements against each other, as one might hope from an account of conflict. This empties the narrative of drama; indeed, having successfully pre-produced its own anxiety — will the film be a political cop-out? — all it can do is palliate said anxiety at each turn. It’s like hearing somebody sing a pop song for the first time; they’re so studiously getting the notes on melody and the words enunciated on time, the performance lacks any spirit worth mentioning.

Or perhaps it’s akin to watching a particularly successful paintball player: another well-executed weekend diversion, hoping to be about life and death.

ultraviolet

For much of this film, one can't tell what kind of image one is looking at, stuck with a brain habituated to distinguishing between "live action" and animation. Here there's no distinction to be made, and the brain shivers. Milla Jovovich's face in closeup looks spectral and rendered, polygons and pancake makeup, each surface torquing onto the next with a kind of blurred elision; the buildings of the future city look about the same. From the first sequence onward, the image sometimes oscillates (and a narrow oscillation it is) between the two kinds of images, and sometimes plays out at an indecipherable limit, on the two-sided surface of extremely computer-aided graphics, a disorienting and frantically appealing blend that falls somewhere within the delta formed by Sin City, hi-end video games, and a-ha's "Take On Me" video.

It's at once hard to look at, and fantastic. And for a few minutes it seems that the movie Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom dreamed of but couldn't quite achieve (the problem of liberalism, as ever) might finally be reallized, the Hollywood film composed of nothing but action sequences. And then, after that dream has died, there is a lengthy moment when it seems there might be only enough narrative to get you from one ass-kicking, escape, or detonation scene to the next; eventually that dream too is doused, and once again a film decides it requires enough plot that one could say it had a plot. That, we fear, isn't helping anyone.

16 blocks

It's interesting: the particular filmic sequence in which someone, now a superhero, now a civilian, must needs make a way through the city without passing through the streets, exactly, traveling rooftop to rooftop, leaping perilously over the gaps, racing across the tarpaper and rubble, past the dovecotes and antennae. Circulation, somehow, has become a problem — perhaps because it's designed in part for surveillance and control. And so it is circulation itself that must be eluded.

There's a matching sequence, motivated by the same narrative needs for evasive action in traversing the downtown from here to there, but entirely different in affect and imagery. This is the passage from the lowest floor to lowest floor of buildings (a sequence featured more than once in 16 Blocks), requisitely smashing through walls as one goes. When such a sequence apears onscreen, it involves ground floors that seem basementlike, or basements themselves; bars figure prominently in this tradition, though not as much as grottos where some sort of restaurant prep work is being done, most frequently by Asian workers. This is in fact the classic mise-en-scene of the substructure creep: the basement of the Chinese restaurant, where non-English speaking workers scarcely look up beyond an impassive glance as the leads race through on their way to and from other lives, bloody and beweaponed.

Sure, you can just get from here to there by going basement to basement, like the winter-minded passages of the disneyland called MIT, or like John Cheever's voyager making his way home through the suburbs, swimming pool by swimming pool. But in the city, for whatever reason, immigrant labor is the necesary setting for this particular fantasy.

Often these sequences are set in the heights or depths of a particular kind of structure, stone-faced turn-of-the-century apartment buildings with a drab restaurant at ground level, the buildings that most surely and anonymously signify the massive population shift to urban areas (with attendant increase in labor density) that happened in the United States, 1880-1920. Their roofs and basements both provide for the spatialization of the urban 20th Century; they invented the third dimension for the city as surely as, per Apollinaire's poem "Guerre" (Calligrammes), World War I invented it for the globe. But if the roofs suggest flight, the basements with their sweatshop spectrality are more directly the scene of urbanization and industrialization istelf, the more material facts of western modernity.

Here one thinks of the tactic of urban combat in particularly dense blocks which involves entering one house and knocking through walls to move to the next and the next; didn't Benjamin write of this? Certainly the arcades convert this fantasy of fleeing from public space by cutting though city blocks — the hero appearing as a curiosity before the laborers — into its most profitable form, even in the late morning of modernity....

pink panther

Having promised to make a brief note about each new release we see this year, we find ourselves in the unfortunate position of having to say something or other about the latest remake of The Pink Panther, starring Steve Martin, whom we once found funny.

We don't remember the earlier rounds so well, but it seems in retrospect that the possible interest of the set-up — which seems on the verge of appearing at various moments in this iteration — lies in the fact that it's Clouseau's very idiot provinciality which makes him a successful sleuth. It's not that his bumbling turns out to be a virtue, but that it's symptomatic of the general lack of intelligence and grace on the part of French civil servants, who exist within a vast cocoon of pleasure in bureaucracy [surely there's a French or German word for this? ed.]...and this is finally the virtue. This seems like the plot that's trying to creep through; Clouseau's successes periodically seem to come from his knowledge of arcane and absurd civil codes and para-facts, things only a talentless grind might know. It's not that Clouseau's innate goodness will be redeemed, but that Clouseau will redeem the concept of bureaucracy itself. In this regard the narrative-in-waiting can be regarded indeed as a French nationalist tale, the very antipode of the American nationalist police story, which revolves dependably around the idea that only a rogue cop with disregard for the regulations can save us now, because regulation is what interferes with actual genius and the solving of problems.

And yet in this edition the idea is botched at almost every turn, periodically pillorying top cop Dreyfus for his own bureaucratic ways, when it should be doing the exact opposite, and brutally misusing the Clive Owens cameo, which ought to have been an instance of how the physically-talented and charismatic Bond style of crimefighting finally fails within this national context.

Is the inability to execute the one possibly workable idea explained by the production team's non-Frenchness — or just their astounding insipidity?

upright

1) regarding Steve Evans' formerly-serialized and soon-to-be-Baffled essay on Poetry Foundation and the apparitions of the fiscal imaginary in contemporary poetry, we note this passage from Ted Kooser's seemingly-unironically-titled The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice For Beginning Poets. Regarding unconventional grammar, spelling, capitalization, punctuation, typographic devices, or "any unusual shape in the way the poem is laid out on the page," the Poet Laureate advises, Don't be afraid to use the following devices, but give them a cost-benefit analysis.

2) If that's is supposed to funny, we'd prefer a somewhat more knowing rube's take on the economics of advice, free melody included! File under "game recognize game."

3) We are particularly bemused by Kooser's concerns about funny-shaped poems; he recommends one squint at a draft so thoroughly that it becomes pure shape, and then measure it as geostructure; is it about to fall over? Or does it stand solid and dependable? This urge to spirit poetry away from the realm of idea, to make it verifiable from the perspective of the craftsman-laborer—to render language as having the same relation to physics as do joists and drywall, columns and roofs—is a powerful one, to be sure. How are poems even to be considered as things if they don't conform to the logic of the most commonly desirable things? And how will we experience ourselves appropriately as virtuous craftsmen and laborers, rather than layabouts and leeches?

4) As one loves the foursquare prairie home, the common thing par excellance, the populist/individualist iteration of the forum and the very ideal of both concrete and abstract stability—one must hate certain kinds of poems as one must hate ruins, for their failure to be things. A ruin is not a negative thing. First it is obviously not a thing.

5) In other notes, have we mentioned the excellence of new hyphy track "18 Dummy," by The Federation? And in general sung the wonders of Rick Rock?

6) If we could actually do anything beyond the abstract realm of the affect worker—if we could actually manufact things—we would make the world a better place, possibly by wildcrafting designer ringtones for our friends. Under current conditions, the economy at the edge of the economy is a place where sweetness pools.

7) Having a big comeback around sugarhigh! world headquarters: "Wichita Lineman," Glen Campbell.

8) The possibility explored in the aforementioned Evans essay is one that is everywhere sullenly disavowed: that turns in poetic style could be explicitly (which is to say, not causally) connected to the styles of political regimes, even if many of the poets involved fancy themselves apolitical or even voted against the incumbent. Moreover, the call from Dana Gioia, Ted Kooser, the doyens of Poetry and the Poetry Foundation, for a return to a well-wrought poetic is not a new cry; surely it resounded in the France of Mallarmé-Dreyfus, the America of Ginsberg-McCarthy. If this moment is haunted, it's not a new ghost. Nor is the naming of the ghost a new fact; here's one appellation, written half-a-centtury ago:

...anything hybrid provokes the strongest rejection. The aesthetic condemnation of the ugly is dependent on the inclination, verified by social psychology, to equate, justly, the ugly with the expression of suffering and, by projecting it, to despise it. Hitler's empire put this theorem to the test: The more torture went on in the basement, the more insistently they made sure the roof rested on columns.

let's get crunk and be somebody

Recently we've been trying to rhyme "Joe Gross" and "snowglobe," just for the angular decentered feeling; he is, after all, our favorite Fugazi fan, and though we do not care for Fugazi, they are angular and decentered and that's something, plus we love Joe.

We don't find Fugazi terribly moving in the very arena they court movement. At their finest, they achieve the political weight of the fourth best track on any given album by The Coup. Better than nothing, and perhaps as good as one could hope from political musings composed from the position where critique can be freely chosen: the children of Marx and Bretton Woods.

What's most hypnotic about country'n'western, in addition to the melodies and presence of maybe a dozen of the 20 best vocalists in pop music, is its Steadicam point of view. Song after song is told from inside the forces Fugazi rails against from a distance. Even the slightest trifle — say, Toby Keith's latest, "Let's Get Drunk and Be Somebody" — measures out what it means to have a dominated daily life, without that having to be a special topic; it's simply the immanent condition behind every drinking song, and every other song. It's the air. The concision with which "all week long I'm a real nobody" rounds the turn of "Paycheck Friday" and becomes "let's get drunk and be somebody" is as straightforward as one could hope. It doesn't need to be about it, because there's no way not to be about it: the daily life which is at once an experience of and a compensation for the endless extraction of value from bodies.

This is what country shares with mainstream hiphop, which equally succeeds in indifferently alienating liberals for failing to have righteous politics; it's told, unceasingly, from inside what someone called "the tradition of the oppressed." The condition permeates their forms, and their narratives. If a central fact of the condition is that it requires each week to be like last week, the extraction of value perpetuating itself without change, one might suspect that the genre would — indeed, couldn't help but — reflect this quality. And yet people are baffled that the songs provide only the most local variations within an unchanging format, as if that were a shortcoming rather than a description, as if the songs would be more honest art if they expressed the exception rather than the rule.

Barbara Guest (1920-2006)

                    Leaving MODERNITY





               as if the encircled doe






          Medievality and in her hand, also dusted



                                        apparition no less

Caché

Not quite sure what to make of Michael Haneke's new film, Caché, seen in a tiny theater, sharing the front row with a party of five or more French persons, who also seemed somewhat nonplussed.

Though it earns its effects, its moments of disturbance, there's also a limit to the strategy of representing national/political struggles through the structure of family relations. The allegory of the fraternal here is far more persuasive than Arnaud Desplechin's awkward Leo, Playing "In the Company of Men," but in the end displays the limits of allegory itself, which implies a decodability that the movie is then compelled to wrestle mightily against.

The film is structured around two things. The first is the word "nothing" (rien), which is repeated incessantly throughout the movie; there's scarcely any question (what's going on, what did you do today, what's wrong, what's the import of that, what caused him to feel that way, etc etc) that can't be answered with this single word. The lite reading (which shows up in several reviews) concerns the failed communication of the aging bourgeois couple, which is somehow either the cause of the final, ambiguous events, or an effect of the presence of the something that can't be said.

But that really won't do, and limns exactly one of the failings of the allegorical structure. On the one hand, domestic fissures can scarcely bee causal; we know this is a story of the return of the repressed, or the collection of unacknowledged debt, and nothing can undo the initial repression or avert its return. On the other, to spend so much attention on the family fallout of the repression is at once cliché and a lowering of the film's national/political stakes, which are not so much screened as supplanted by domestic drama, the Battle of Algiers as retold by The New Yorker's fiction editor.

Indeed, one must largely ignore the marital tension (and that's a lot of ignoring) to find the film particularly powerful, to engage its nothing. Nothing becomes a pit into which all specific meanings are sacrificed only to be reborn as an unsayable something that threatens each character with destruction (regarding this howling white space, one notes that the son Pierrot's school is College lycee Stephane Mallarmé)—a someting that might well be described as history itself (just as one might understand that history itself is making the mysterious videotapes that appear a la Lost Highway; they are shot, to adapt Prof. Louis-Georges Schwartz's formulation, from history's point of view).

Beyond the rien that is not there is the rien that is. The movie depends on the physical aging, beyond the proscenium, of the once-irresistable and irresistably French stars, Daniel Auteuil (actually born in Algiers in 1950) and Juliette Binoche, each of whom here seems thick, slack, sculpted from lardoon. This more than any narrative move or linguistic device gives force to the sense of corrupted entitlement, lost erotism, congealed history. The sense that something has gone horrribly, unsayably wrong with Frenchness itself, with France's capacity to represent itself through romantic pale beauty; and the sense that this collapse must inevitably be captured by history's camera—this tells the story far more powerfully than the banalities of domestic dynamics. The movie might finally have been more effective had it simply montaged chronological clips of the two actors from the 'Seventies through the present, inserting flash shots of bleeding and drowning Algerians during each cut.

match point (quantity v. quality)

Here at sugarhigh! we're promised to write a brief something about each new movie seen, if only so that we can recall what we saw at the end of the year. After seeing Match Point last night, we pondered in conversation with friends whether it was more or less boring than Brokeback Mountain (seen in 2005), which admittedly managed some emotional weight despite the requisite Ang Lee yawns and horrific soundtrack.

It's not so much a difference in quantity as quality. Brokeback Mountain offers its boredom as a marker of aesthetic virtue: the standardized indie [sic] mode of proffering slowness (and its invocation of mid-century European cinema) as a proof that this is art we're watching, gosh darn it. Jim Jarmusch, we're looking at you! Though Ang Lee is at least as villainous in this regard; alas, no amount of homotext can free Brokeback from the director's addiction to making vague impressions of genre films that didn't need tarting up (or down) in the first place (cf. Crouching, Hidden).

Match Point, on the other hand, would have genuinely liked to be darkly sprightly, to zip along from plot point to plot point in an accelerating descent; Woody just doesn't seem to have the chops anymore (Mr. Rhys-Meyers' acting didn't exactly help), and the boredom is incidental to a more generalized incompetence.

We have no verdict, as yet, as to which of these qualities of bordeom is preferable. It may come down to a taste for landscape porn as opposed to real estate porn, or the reverse.

things said in Nelly songs that we are still trying to deal with

I'm leavin', please believe in oh! me and the rest of my heathens — "Hot in Herre"

where I got'em you can spot'em
on the top and the bottom
got a bill in my mouth just like hillary rodham
— "Grills" (feat. Paul Wall)