jane dark's sugarhigh!

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.

explication du texte

Today's New York Times writes:

....That clause makes all the difference: if workers strike in the United States, they risk losing their jobs, but strikers in France do not fear for their jobs, regardless of whether they are union members. [1]

But most important, French unions have continued to play a leading role far beyond wage negotiations, fighting to shape a sort of workers' paradise [4] and amassing entitlements for the broader population along the way. It is primarily because of the strength of the unions that all workers enjoy a minimum of five weeks of vacation, affordable health care and a 35-hour week. [5]

This is an astonishing bit of journalism; one could spend a day meditating on the whiplash shifts between "fact" and "opinion," or more pointedly, the material and immaterial. Sentence [1] provides the all-important material explanation of why French workers feel able to strike; immediately, the article nervously suggests that they are a sort of docile bunch ("willing populace") who pursue their goals out of a kind of nostalgic abstraction — certainly not out of (just to pull something out of the blue) their own interests in how daily life is lived.

The next paragraph returns to some facts of labor, mystifying them at the same time. While noting factually that employees can join a strike without being part of the union and not fear for thier jobs, the article can't bring itself to note that this is true exactly because previous generations have "put pressure on the government." It then suggests [3] that the loss of pay in return for not working is somehow a strikingly insufficient punishment ("all they lose") — as if there were naturally some ethical dimension to showing up for one's wage job, some divine right that exists in the relation between employer and employed beyond wage negotiations.

With stunning indifference to its own rhetoric, the article in the very next sentence claims that, should the workers believe in some right beyond, whoops!, "wage negotiations," [4] they must be Communists ("workers' paradise": not the sublest code, sir). This villlainous spectre, when forced to appear in material form in the final sentence [5], turns out to be something like the basic protections that every worker in the world would hope for, and lacks only because their capacity to struggle for them has been systematically broken.

The article just barely stops short of saying that French workers, because of their myopic attachment to "entitlements" (health care is an entitlement, apparently. Can one take seriously a single word of anyone who talks like that?) are worse off and less productive than they are in a country without such roadblocks. Perhaps this hesitancy stems from the Times' recollection that this isn't actually the case.

Here at sugarhigh!, we should be clear: we find modern labor unions to be a revolutionary force only insofar as they mediate revolutions in capitalist production; their historical task is to make sure that increasing pressure on workers — to live less and produce more — is cushioned so that there won't be any substantial overturnings of the great apple-cart. We recall well the slow entry and swift exit of the CGT during France's last great unrest (all of which is why we believe, optimistically, that when Josh Corey writes of a union for poets, he means something far more like collectivity).

That said, it would be an error to suppose that the current labor action in France can be understood purely as a defense of the status quo, a maintenance of "entitlements" already in place. This is what the papers here and in France have endeavored to suggest, repeatedly, over the last week — including the Times, when it isn't paradoxically concocting its nostalgic anxiety about communism. Here are three reasons why not:

• The current issue does not concern some abstracted feeling that one is secure in one's job, a vague sensation that makes the cherries taste sweeter. Everyone (including the Times) admits that it is exactly and specifically the protection from unfair termination that allows workers to have any say in their own labor conditions — both now and in the future. The CPE (the law against which the current strikes are set) is part of an explicit removal of this protection, and thus a crippling blow to the possibility of any postive changes for laborers.

• The current unrest is part of a larger historical moment, which includes last autumn's riots in France no more more than the current debate about immigration and "guest-workers" in the United States — a moment in which the terms of the relationships between the enfranchised and the disenfranchised are being restructured. Each seemingly individual and local skirmish takes its place within an increasingly global confrontation; the rendering of any given struggle as irrelevant or insubstantial serves particular ends.

• It's a bit of nonsense, isn't it? By the same logic, the American resistance to the Townshend Act in the late 1760s was "a defense of the status quo," as was the Boston Tea Party. New taxes had been levied, and the colonists wished them to be unlevied — to return to the status quo, eh? This entire rhetoric is transparently absurd.

We are not suggesting these events are the beginnings of a revolution; likely, they will turn out to have been a systemic adjustment of labor relations as late capitalism seeks out a sleeker body to march across continents. But we remember well that no overturning comes from a single moment of athletic heroism. If the histories of the 1760s in the American colonies, the 1780s in France, the 1940s in India, or the 1980s in the Soviet bloc teach us anything, it is that — even as onlookers inevitably remark on their pointlessness — there must be quite a bit of calisthenics in the public square before any great weights are lifted, or thrown down.

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.

the years of magical thinking

Francis Fukuyama's recent change of heart is farce and tragedy at once. Fukuyama, the neocon and neo-neo-Hegelian, proclaimed in The End of History and the Last Man, with an inverted millennarism, that the long progress of historical spirit had found its final form — that U.S.-style liberal capitalism had superseded everything else. He then (somewhat oxymoronically) helped inscribe the strategic and ideological dogma for maintaining the supposedly steady state, in the famed "Project for the New American Century" documents. In the race to war, he served as a marshal.

But now, in the words of Tom Petty, there's been a change. The blinders are off! He is against the war! History may not be over quite yet! This change is recorded in numerous places, not the least of which is the seven-page abstract of new volume America at the Crossroads, featured in the paper of record's weekend fashion spread a few Sundays back (and archived for free here). A couple weeks later, reviewing the book itself, the POR opens by focusing its amazement on the book's apostasy...made all the more devastating by the fact that the author, Francis Fukuyama, was once a star neoconservative theorist himself.

Apostasy must be secured, natch, through the ritual denunciation of the apostate by a true believer — a labor taken up by Chris Hitchens, the neocons' potbellied attack pig, in the pages of Slate. That ought to do it; Fukuyama can now be a hero, or at least a name to proffer, for the progressive liberals who dream only of being allowed to say "I told you so" once in a midterm election.

Alas, Fukuyama's blinders aren't off so much as optimized. He is still searching for a successful strategy for American hegemony; he's just come to realize that a somewhat higher competence level may be required. A world in which this brings comfort to anyone of conscience is tragic to say the least. Meanwhile, his profound aspect-blindness is unchanged. One clear indication is in the piece Fukuyama wrote recently for Slate, in which he diagnoses last year's French riots as part of

....the ongoing struggle with radical Islamism (aka the "war on terrorism").

This is a smallish detail in the essay, but an utterly telling one. Perhaps he failed to read any of the serious journalistic coverage of the riots; perhaps he has no French friends, or, just as likely, his informants share his blindness. We have a name for that: ideology. Dude (as I like to say to destroy my own credibility), that wasn't radical Islam. That wasn't terrorism. That was poor, mostly immigrant kids. That was class conflict.

What the rioters had in common was, in ascending order of commonality, a) varying tones of darker-colored-than-Sarkozy skin, b) a history of being actively and passively brutalized by governmental agents, most notably cops with batons, tasers, and guns, and c) disenfranchisement.

To not see this is to see nothing. One wonders if Mr. Fukuyama is able to present the current unrest by poor and disenfranchised French youth as similarly linked to "radical Islamism," or if, in what may be an even greater achievement in magical thinking, he finds this wave to be unrelated and only coincidentally similar. Unable to see, much less speak, the obvious, these are his choices — and ours. Which is to say that, as an intelligent and informed person with the apparent capacity to open and change his mind, Fukuyama is the America we would like to believe in. But with his hysterical inability to mention social relations, social class, and the transnational, transreligious confrontation between the wealthy and the disenfranchised, Fukuyama is the America we know, in which any story can be told as long as it doesn't mention those niceties. In that regard, Fukuyama clings to to the murderous blindness of the New American Century as dogmatically any of his colleagues, while playing at debate — a farce indeed.

"meanwhile, i'm stiiilllll thinking"

Isn't there a risk that this line of reasoning serves to suggest that poets lacking a dedicated knowledge of the empirical bases of their own critique therefore court the self-deluded fate of style without true criticality?

Hmm, where have we heard that before?

house for mr. is-was

We are sympathetic with what we take to be our fair colleague's basic desire found herein: that, if one is to be thinking about something, it's better to know extensive and intensive stuff about it. An informed critic...etc, whether it be regarding literature or political economy.

Nonetheless: hmm. We would no more gloss "bourgeois," e.g., as a term of "19th century sociology" than we would gloss "Oedipal" as a term of 20th century psychoanalysis. While these may be the moments in which the idea has been most revelatorily described, the human relations expressed by the terms have been with us quite a while longer — and still obtain. As of this moment, here in this world, "bourgeois" is no more a nostalgia or an archaicism than is, say, "poverty," or "empire." But we are sympathetic again with the desire to put the idea in the past.

What would it mean to suggest, in France in 1785, that a peasant ought have knowledge of statecraft to speak about the King, about the condition and experience of being his subject — an experience that permeated daily life? We should certainly imagine that any subject of the King would be both entitled (har har) and qualified to express her opinion on the matter, and even to take up arms to change conditions; surely a theorized knowledge of Machiavelli's texts wasn't required?

And finally, what of those who do the endless discursive work in service of capitalist chic — which is to say, almost everyone, almost every day? One suspects they too lack the appropriate technical knowledge — yet this ignorance goes unremarked and unregistered, as does most such ignorance in support of domination. Do they need less rhetorical policing?

lit-humument

We are taking simple pleasure in the object. In this case, Jen Bervin's book NETS, found at the Ugly Duckling Presse table in Texas. Less emergent poetry than Hollywood, it's what you'd call high concept: an idea that can be pitched in the time it takes an elevator to go from the lobby to the mezzanine at the Chateau Marmont, a pitch that moreover follows the time-honored scheme of "It's [popular form X] meets [popular form Y with somewhat different demographic appeal]!" (cheerfully accepting and suppressing the knowledge that X and Y were both produced by similar device).

It's Shakespeare's Sonnets meets Tom Phillips' A Humument! And it is: laid out inside spare 6.5" x 5" space, name on spine and simple design on tan cover, one encounters nothing more than all the sonnets, with most of the text grayed down to what looks like about 20 percent; in each, a few words here and there at 100 percent black form, more or less, a single contingent phrase, both a derivative and variable of the source poem. Not earth-shaking, but pleasing, strangely immediate and calm.

One can probably imagine what it looks like. No need: the web arm of the Conjunctions empire has done a swell job of laying a few online, though the rollover effect — as equivalently obvious as it seems — perhaps takes a little from the soothing simplicity. Nonetheless, here it is; scroll down a ways, and click on "From Nets."

fragments of the austineum

Favorite part of our weekend trip: discovering that, according to the neighborhood childcare list magnetized to the refrigerator, some acquaintances of hosts Joe and Drema have named their daughter Aaliyah. Spelt right and everything.

how the thing is made

Every poet a MacGyver: one can build the ad hoc device (always for escape) just by jolting electricity through the cables, grasping the pair called Love and Benjamin and crossing the wires...

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.

oscar news from all over

Tonight, Ben reads at Bridge Street Books in Washington, DC.

This morning, Louis saw Sophia Loren in LAX.

At sugarhigh! world headquarters, we are studying the press release for this; we believe without hesitation that there should be a great book of poetry named The Magical Breasts of Britney Spears, but — given the blurbs from Mr. Collins, Mr. Daniels, and Mr. Suarez — we fear that this isn't it and, moreover, that it is not a sequel to this.

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....

algebrazeera

The concept of reverse snobbery is every bit as bankrupt as the idea of reverse racism: a rhetorical device with no analytic base. It cannot be practiced as it cannot describe actual conditions. To imagine that snobbery can simply be conceived of "in reverse" is to imagine that the antagonism between the classes, and the forces available to prosecute that antagonism, are equivocal — and that these antagonistic forces could be reversed simply through choice.

There could be no greater misunderstanding of the basic idea of social class than that present in the term.

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?

break somebody's heart just doing the latest dance craze

Perhaps, simply by inspecting the awkward, radiant delight we have taken in peering sidelong at the gifted and semi-gifted players of Dance Dance Revolution in the Student Union when we pass the machine, J-pop or K-pop burbling emphatically from the chipset—the whole thing seeming like a pure experiment in what might count as expression within this current technological regime—we might have supposed that the technology had other destinations, somewhat more removed from delight.