jane dark's sugarhigh!

this long gyre or, the rhetorical wonder of the permanent present tense

A prizewinning college essay in The Nation begins a sentence, As the Iraq debacle spirals out of control... (July 17, 2006).

Bodies pile up in morgues as Iraq spirals out of control, reads a headline from The Times (February 23, 2006).

In Iraq the situation started to spiral out of control with the blowing up of the Askariya Shiite Muslim shrine in Iraq on Feb. 22, 2006, our particular favorite from a site named Revelation 13: Saddam Hussein, the former evil dictator of a modern-day Babylon, and the Wars in Iraq -- A Bible prophecy and New Age analysis.

The Nation is no newcomer to the war spiraling out of control: per an editors' note last year, The war has also become the single greatest threat to our national security. Its human and economic costs are spiraling out of control (November 28, 2005).

In all, at least 30 people died Saturday in politically motivated violence across Iraq — stark evidence of a security situation threatening to spiral out of control, according to China Daily (October 31, 2004).

Stanford expert says Iraq spinning out of control, notes a San Francisco Chronicle headline (April 25, 2004).

Rebel war spirals out of control, according to a headline from The Observer (November 2, 2003).

Well, the fear is that this is just a spiral, that this is spiraling out of control, Hassan Fattah, editor of Iraq Today, told interviewers on CNN (August 28, 2003)...

...to which Soledad O'Brien inquired, Is it spiraling out of control?...

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.

excursive notes

• Best use principle: remarkable that the site, with its internal vistas, endless balconies and catwalks, bunkerlike pavilions, irregular outcroppings and overdetermined lines-of-sight, hasn't been consecrated to an ongoing paintball tournament.

• Another way to pose the situation: there are more cafés than there are great paintings.

• "Based on the example paintings, I want to go to the fuckin' niveau supérieur of the East."

• Compare to the Alamo: "race war Disneyland."

• Title of a section of the John Heartfield exhibit: "Battle of Images in Magazines." Possible reasons this couldn't be title for culture in general: none.

• "Passive appropriation may simply be another name for culture."

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.

americanarama

You may recall that, in the most recent national election — after Abu Ghraib, after the complete failure to stabilize Iraq or install a democratic regime or install a regime — both presidential candidates ran on a strongly pro-war platform. You may also be aware that — after more Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, worsening situations in Iraq and Afghanistan — the minority party's leading candidate for the next election continues to support the war aggressively, while the majority party whips up a constitutional amendment on gay marriage that proposes about the exact same thing that the current minority party already signed into law as the Defense of Marriage Act back when they held the presidency, when they were also busy engineering and signing NAFTA so the other party wouldn't have to waste their effort or ink.

To some, this may seem an alarming and blurry sameness; indeed, to the cynic, it may appear that the two parties are not offering you the actual spectrum of human possibilities. Or meaningful product differentiation, which is your right as an American.

However, you may take a different view of what the full range of possibilities is, and what's more you may be more open to nuanced distinctions. Indeed, perhaps you find yourself dizzied by the choices on offer betwen the Republicans and Democrats. You are, let's say, unable to navigate the yawning gap between whether we should not discuss retrieving troops from Iraq for at least a year, or not discuss it at all; exhausted, perhaps, by the labor required to parse whether one ought to prefer an estate tax which effects three persons in every thousand, or none.

This is why a third party is needed. The two parties are simply too different to allow for rational choice, and how can anything get done in such circumstances? We need some clarity, some narrowing of the gab between these insanity-threatening polarities.

This is where Unity08 comes in. A serious player on the national stage, founded by veterans of the Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter administrations, it promises to bridge these impassible political chasms and heal the national wound by nominating and electing a ticket with a Republican and a Democrat (or even an independent, as long as said person displays their independence by "committing to a Unity team"). You say that, although the two parties do not offer you an option to favor a woman's right to choose, nationalized health care, an end to the death penalty, greater social support, the equal protection of marriage for all persons, or ten thousand more things that any European person might cast a vote for (much less a ban on SUVs, an end to home ownership and animal testing, or a 1% tax on every international business transaction) there is still too wide a range, too much polarization, too much national pain. Focus08 hears you. Free at last, free at last — no longer are we bound by the panoplies of choice so fearsomely threatened by American politics! Let the healing begin.

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."

how not to write: journalism none-oh-one

Should you be called upon to write a longish essay on the Next Big Thing...

...and should you adopt the common strategy (trade name: procatalepsis) of establishing the NBT's exceptionality by stipulating first what's not exceptional about them, in this case their form, like so: The Arctic Monkeys are a fucking great band. No, they don't have some earthshakingly original sound—in the broadest terms, it's much the same funk-tinged postpunk we heard from bands like Franz Ferdinand, the Strokes, and Kaiser Chiefs, albeit with occasional fuzz-rock passages that recall the White Stripes...

...and should you then make your essay's rhetorical turn, signaled not once but twice — by a section bar which is followed this lay-your-cards-on-the-table explanation of the argument: So no, it's not the Arctic Monkeys' form that sets them apart; it is, rather, their content...

...you should then not, repeat not, totally fail to turn, nor should you instead immediately launch into a very long paragraph extolling the band's sound — their musical form — as if it reasonably followed from the rhetorical turn, rather than refuting it, like so:

So no, it's not the Arctic Monkeys' form that sets them apart; it is, rather, their content. There's a furious drive to all of their songs (as opposed to just the singles), a righteous energy that can come only from utter self-confidence. Band lore has it that both singer-guitarist Alex Turner and Jamie Cook received guitars for Christmas in 2001, and it's readily apparent that the two of them learned to play guitar with one another, as it's rare to hear such precise and intricate interplay between a band's two guitarists even in acts 15 years older than these guys. The rhythm section—especially Helders—more than maintains the often ferocious pace right behind them. The drummer cites a somewhat surprising source as a band-wide influence: "We were rap fans more at school more than now, but yeah, it's still there," he says. "It still influences in some ways, like for me, it's the drummin'. The groove element, like foon-keh music."

Friends don't let friends write like that. Neither do competent editors. What's up, Village Voice?

the leaving tradition

If we were the Dixie Chicks, we'd probably grab up our satchels and leave country music behind as well.

Except for how it's what we're really good at. But young hearts run free.

The Chicks, meanwhile, are a good story. Almost all the coverage of the return of the Dixie Chicks with their first album since disrepecting a sitting president in wartime, feud with Toby Keith, and the concurrent general renunciation by Nashville's fans and industry apparatchiks, discusses the way in which they've renounced right back; because of cultural/political differences with the country base, they've packed up their fiddles and headed out west for a more LA-pop MOR sound. And most of the reviews mention, in a polite and even optimistic way, that this sound is lovely and all, but maybe just a little less incisive and dynamic than what we remember, and what we might've hoped.

The irony here is how closely the critics have hewed to the rhetoric — not just Nashville's, but the Chicks' — and not the musical history. There are eight million stories in the naked et cetera, and people prefer tales of difference and change. From the position of political rhetoric, this story has its measure of difference; it's true that one doesn't recall, say, Faith Hill, Shania Twain, Trisha Yearwood, Mary-Chapin Carpenter, or Dolly Parton spitting nails at the chief.

And yet, sameness and tradition, as country music knows all too well, are hard to outrun. Taking off for the West and independence is, in fact, an iconic activity in traditional country...as is the conclusive reminder that such an activity is itself always part of a cyclical tradition. Here's a platinum song that breezes us through it:

Many precede and many will follow
A young girl's dream no longer hollow
It takes the shape of a place out west
But what it holds for her, she hasn't yet guessed...

You know: the girl has to leave the country home for the wide open spaces out West, causing generational angst, but in the coda, it turns out the parents did the exact same thing:

As her folks drive away, her dad yells, "Check the oil!"
Mom stares out the window and says, "I'm leaving my girl"
She said, "It didn't seem like that long ago"
When she stood there and let her own folks know...

As the cultured reader will recognize, these are the first and last verses from the title track to the Chick's breakout album.

But it's not just to say that there's a mythic history of heading West that the Chicks are currently acting out, the latest generation to imagine themselves to be quitting a dumbshow whose script they're in fact following to the letter. It's true that this is what they're doing...but to settle for calling it a mythic history is to miss the industrial history, the marketing script the Chicks are also following. The pressures of maintaining and increasing market share drive almost every modern female Nashville superstar — Faith Hill, Shania Twain, Trisha Yearwood, Mary-Chapin Carpenter, and Dolly Parton, to choose a few examples from just the last dozen years — to leave behind the horizons of twang for a deracinated pop-40 MOR sound. Once you sell five million, this thing the Chicks are doing (in both sound and cultural positioning) is just what you do.

The last irony is that it doesn't work very well; with the possible exception of Dolly Parton (an exception in so many ways), none of these women increased their market share or made particularlly good records. But that drives the cycle too; other than Chapin (who was always a folk singer playing at country), each of these artists arrived inevitably at the moment of return, when LA suddenly reveals itself as bankrupt and you point the Pontiac southwest to record the comeback album with the recaptured core values and banjo.

Political chatter proving to be interesting and appealing and utterly irrelevant in terms of the career narrative, we can know that, no matter what they say, we can look forward to the continuation of the traditional country story, from which the Chicks have yet to deviate by so much as an iota. One can only hope that the Dixie Chicks disc wherein they embrace traditional values and are welcomed back into the cockles of Music Row's mechanical heart is half as good as something from 1998, though, if tradition holds, the odds against that are perilously steep.

did we say 'poetics'? we meant 'film criticism'

In a longish essay about a collection of American film crit, British Film Institute honcho Clive James clarifies the stakes of a variety of debates by tendering two promises. The first is that theoretical approaches are just plain worse:

It quickly becomes obvious that those without theories write better. You already knew that your friend who's so funny about the "Star Wars" tradition of frightful hairstyles for women (in the corrected sequence of sequel and prequel, Natalie Portman must have passed the bad-hair gene down to Carrie Fisher) is much less boring than your other friend who can tell you how science fiction movies mirror the dynamics of American imperialism. This book proves that history is with you: perceptions aren't just more entertaining than formal schemes of explanation, they're also more explanatory.

The editor, Phillip Lopate, an essayist and film critic, has a catholic scope, and might not agree that the nontheorists clearly win out. They do, though, and one of the subsidiary functions that this hefty compilation might perform — subsidiary, that is, to its being sheerly entertaining on a high level — is to help settle a nagging question. In our appreciation of the arts, does a theory give us more to think about, or less? To me, the answer looks like less, but it could be that I just don't like it when a critic's hulking voice gets in the way of the projector beam and tries to convince me that what I am looking at makes its real sense only as part of a bigger pattern of thought, that pattern being available from the critic's mind at the price of decoding his prose.

That The Times believes it gains by reviling intellectualism in the arts is scarcely news; said tendency has grounded certain discussions of the stakes of theory in poetry and poetics (many of which are linked to from within this post). In those debates, the opposite number of theory tends to be a vitalist array of everyday life, immediacy, to-itselfness. James' (ahem) theory, as it creeps up through his weedy prickishness, is that the opposite of theory is observation.

Already this is a useful binary (and please understand that the word "binary" always already means false binary; we can simply save typing time by agreeing on this). It becomes practicallly revelatory as it leads James and us to the second tender:

For as long as the sonar-riddled soundtrack of "The Hunt for Red October" has me mouthing the word "ping" while I keep reaching for the popcorn, I don't want to hear that what I'm seeing is an example of anything, or a step to anywhere, or a characteristic statement by anyone. What I'm seeing is a whole thing on its own. The real question is why none of it saps my willingness to be involved, not even Sean Connery's shtrangely shibilant Shcottish ackshent as the commander of a Shoviet shubmarine, not even that spliced-in footage of the same old Grumman F9F Panther that has been crashing into the aircraft carrier's deck since the Korean War.

But in the movies they are.

The virtue, per the estimable James, of observational criticism — the reason it is finally and irrevocably superior to theoretical criticism — is that it will forever and only confirm for us what we already know, what we flawlessly decided for ourselves without any fancypants hovering over our shoulder. As in, say, physics, the conclusions are already known; now we just need a lifetime supply of observations to justify them.

Let's nevermind the continent-sized hole in the logic (what about observational critcism whose observations dispute our own? what of theoretical readings that confirm our own initial pleasures and displeasures?) We'll ignore this yawning gap because James does, the only way he can: he defines it out of existence. Quicker than you can say "tautology," James proceeds as if we had all already agreed on the definitions: if a thought confirms our initial suppositions, it's an observation; if a thought confounds them, it is theoretical.

Which is another way of saying something that's been said before: theory is what you think, while my aesthetic judgment is common sense.

Which is to say that Clive James and sugarhigh! finally agree: theory absolutely should be excluded from film criticism, music criticism, poetry, poetics, politics, and every other sphere — if one is satisfied with rendering the tastes of a certain population as objective truths, and if one is satisfied with being limited to endless variations of whatever set of observations can be seen to achieve this objective.

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?