jane dark's sugarhigh!

further notes on cities

Is a city wall a quantity or a quality?

If one walks from the heart of Paris (the geographical center is here) toward one of the poorer banlieues — north to St-Denis, say — one will not necessarily pass any clear marking when one has left the city proper, clambering over the memory of a wall. That is, unless one passes through a last remnant of the 1845 wall, born with a price on its head. The city has had many walls, rising and falling as civic boundaries, and the needs for defense, for tolls and imposts, have changed; the 1860 expansion didn't come with ramparts, and the last wall was gone by 1925.

Against this absence, an experience: the northward stroll. If one pays attention, there are qualitative shifts as one leaves the center for the periphery: the tall buildings get taller, their designs more modern even as their physical condition grows more decrepit. The amount of sun that falls on the pavement decreases slowly, at about the same rate as the price of a coffee. The value of appearance changes, block by block. The maintenance of the downtown as a museum-city gives way to a more contemporary daily life — though this may be inaccurate, as who is to say whether the urge for preservationist ecologies is less modern than apartment towers or hardware stores? Either way, the tourist economy cedes pride of place to other forms of life (though not entirely, by any means).

But there is another way to quantify this radial stroll: one might rather note the steadily increasing percentage of darker skin, a geometric progression at least. This is the kind of quantity that is often experienced as a quality — difference rather than differential, often a difference charged and problematic.

The differentials of each quarter, the ratios, are calculable, knowable; this is the point. It's a set of quantities that describe one's departure from the Paris of postcards to the Paris of the news. And one of these quantities maps onto the city wall: a differential, a skin-tone palette, that means one has crossed a limit. However, it is not experienced as a figure, but as a feeling, a sense of place that poses as an abstraction and is exactly what is left of the material of the city wall.

Perhaps this is what certain feelings are: the traces of calculations that can no longer be made, or that one wishes not to make. Certainly this describes something about the experience of excess; certainly this informs the seemingly mystical complexity of modern markets. One suspects further that critical moments in history are defined by a welter of conversions between quantity and quality.

Meanwhile, one could do worse than to imagine what it would be like for another, differently-colored, to walk from St-Denis inward, toward downtown, quarter by quarter and block by block.

further notes on cities

"Psychogeographical zones" and "ambience" are necessary abstractions — or, not abstractions, but qualitative terms when the quantitative finally won't suffice. And there is a way within these ideas to understand the city as a not-unsubtle instrument of self-detection.

Ambling around a city which is specifically unfamiliar but filled with legibilities that thus feel familiar — a North American city for one who has spent years in North American cities — one can realize certain things measure of response to certain regions, neighborhoods, zones.

That is to say, when one comes to the neighborhood never-before-seen and feels at first an ease, a satisfaction...proceeding to the sense, the distant certainty that this is likely the place in which one would live if one lived in this pleasant city, one has discovered far less about the neighborhood than about oneself, about how one's tastes and pleasures and self-regards have become fixed.

Life is not on the side of the mute acceptance of this, alas.

the instruction manual: cut'n'paste poetics blogwar

A: You say your art fights the power but in fact it's complicity itself.

B: Hey man, you're an authoritarian — this whole "my way is the way" thing is indefensible. It's part of a discredited history. Stalinist! There are many ways, and we're all in this together; let's all just respect that.

A: Um, yeah, good intentions — except that there are differences in the world, there is betrayal and deception, everyone thinks they're down and that's sort of a problem; what makes you think you're magically righteous, and who does that your beautiful inclusion really serve?

B: Who are you to decide, though?

A: I won't play "Show your credentials." Here are my credentials!

B: Neither will I. Here are mine! Also, despite your credentials, you're an asshole!

A: That's ad hominem, you sellout bastard!

B: Everyone's a sellout in this world, so that's not worth mentioning. By the way, you're a sellout too! Radical chic! And you drink!

exeunt omnes

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?

[after two days at harvard]

Patsy isn't quite the right word. An instructive case would be John McCain, whose long term political strategy involves periodically breaking with his party of quasi-substantive issues, providing a sense of independence and objectivity, which in turn allows him to store up what might be called rhetorical capital, which is inevitably expended at critical junctures — major votes, candidate endorsements — to bolster the party line from which he is reputedly so autonomous.

But the McCain case is modulated by at least two factors: its extension over decades, and the fact that he hopes to be president. Both of these set horizons for exactly how far any given apostasy can go, and how much of his rhetorical capital he can sacrifice on the altar of his boss. This is why, finally, Colin Powell is a purer case, and far closer to being a patsy.

From the perspective of history, the entire narrative of Colin Powell, with its ambvalences and inconsistencies, can nonetheless be seen to have been directed toward a single moment. This can be phrased as a question: how does one go about accruing enough rhetorical capital in a single body that one can walk into a room, a room at the very center of the often decentered-seeming spectacle, and pass off as the truth the single utterly incredible lie you've been asked to tell? Despite the particularities and wonders of his career and the facts of his life, there is nothing about Colin Powell's life that is not the answer to this question.

Certainly Colin Powell was the author of his moment; surely he had intentions. That is as nothing. Or, rather, if one cannot grasp from this actual existing event what it means to say that the author is dead and intention is empty, one is likely to grasp little. "The world" (which here means, as so often, the balance of institutional and superinstitutional powers) needed one exact Colin Powell, and turned out to have taken the necessary steps to make sure one would be available.

Authors are Colin Powell writ small, patsies for what the social needs to get done. What's interesting is how the social — how history — has to go about the confabulations, what signs and wonders are needed to take care of business. Significations and form. In the contours of history's methods: the possibility for understanding social production that much better.

For Juliana: After two days at Harvard, we sing of the majestic need for credibility, and the majesty of the accrediting machines.

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?

back in your old neghborhood...

Iowa City: On the sidewalk, a girl of indecipherable age (eleven? fifteen?) in a blue gingham dress with white apron, half-sprawled and twisted very much like the figure in this picture , except that instead of bracing herself with her arms she had them halfway around a light brown dog to whom she was speaking in childish tones; there were long white socks over her dessicated legs, and her aluminum forearm crutches lay on the dirty sidewalk next to the dog and her, in front of the chain record store, through the door of which came Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper."

...the cigarettes taste so good

Berkeley: on the diagonal corner from the coffee counter, two men in their fifties smoking a joint and chatting over coffee in the weak sun, eleven on a Sunday morning, as if serenely confident that the steps of the Quaker meeting house where they sat was a diffrent country, where California laws held no dominion. Crossing the street downhill, passed in front of theformer travel agency and thought, as I often do, at a level that seems to be underneath the mind, the last place I saw him alive, which is strange in that as far as I know, he persists, and it's really just the last place I saw him, sitting on the sidewalk and talking with his grown son; have not heard that he is dead and have no reason to think so, beyond the usual.

three 6 mafia: the gift that keeps on giving

Consider, for example, this headline.

film professor flarfs!

Yes, thank you for your question, wonders will never cease.

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.