jane dark's sugarhigh!

from "monological poem #1"

There are hot forms and
cold forms and poems

no matter how you break them and
what you print them on

are always cold (no matter how
hot they were at the manufacturing stage).

And yet hot and cold
sometimes aren't even all that

far apart and it has been known
for the one to turn into the other:

— Durs Grünbein

miami vice

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

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

Don Johnson wept.

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

proverbs

The confusion of quantity for quality and vice versa is called subjectivity.

Corrollary: subjectivity is formed through the ongoing effort to reconcile the incommensurate; it's the asymmetrical surface between quantity and quality.

the fragile

More frequently than seems imaginable, one hears people — poets, even — denounce literary critics with a grounding in political economy as so many rigid Party men ("the good Joe in browns," was it?); ditto the urge to equivocate deconstruction with moral relativism, with its apparently inevitable slide toward fascism, yawn. We distantly remember this game from Intro to Empty Rhetoric: "1, 2, 3 Hitler," it was called. Since there's no sane analogy between dictators and theorists, we might assume the purveyors of such are drooling morons, hoping for whatever charge they imagine is to be gotten from shouting "Stalin!" or "Hitler!" in a crowded auditorium.

And yet, how much fear it must require even to pretend that people who make accounts of things are the source of your domination! It's a fear that must in some way be respected, or at least grasped for its compelling hysteria: as when a long-bound man turns his fury on the person trying (perhaps futilely) to strike off his shackles and shrieks, "Stop hitting me!" Or as when someone with a mortgage they can't quite afford, and a job at which they keep staying late, decides to decry utopian thinking, knee-jerk Marxism, and etc.

We can all agree that almost all the attempts to counter power, by ideas or other means, are doomed to fail. Nonetheless, to fantasize them as your oppression, to lash out at them, is little but a clinging at the pant-leg of your actual boss, a sort of Stockholm Syndrome of capital...

wassup rockers

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

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

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

for rod smith

What if the greatest song ever was a yé-yé knockoff of "Get Off Of My Cloud" written by Serge Gainsbourg for Anna Karina to perform in a made-for-tv movie in 1967?

[It's not. The greatest song ever is Courtney Love singing "Roadrunner/Ballad of Dorothy Parker"]

review image below, then guess world's top two arms exporters

il faut se manifester

¶ Poems (like humans) do better when treated by poets as ends, not means — manifesting, not causing. The insistence that poems should be instruments toward some social end is limiting and damaging.

¶ However, critics might take poems as means — as part of social production; this is independent of the poet's making of the poem-as-end. These are fundamentally distinct conceptual matters.

¶ This fact and nothing else explains the diffident relations between poets and critics, though the fact often appears masked and in costume.

¶ The recognition of this categorical difference is shaped historically by the catastrophe of instrumental reason that defines Western modernity; said recognition and nothing else is what is meant by "the death of the author," though this fact too often appears masked for occasions.

¶ Though the categorical difference often appears adversarial, this conceals the actual adversarial relations.

¶ The poet's adversary (and we are not at all abashed to speak in such terms) is reification, spectacle — that is to say, dead manifestation.

¶ The critic's adversary is, in short, the advertiser (or politician): someone who, adopting the critic's position regarding social production, recuperates art-as-means toward the end of consolidating and advancing current conditions.

marie antoinette

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

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

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

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

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

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

WILLARD
"Who's the commanding officer here ?"

SOLDIER
"Ain't you ?

It's a vacuum. Not a war any more, lacking sides or orders or strategies. Or it's war without content, just the empty form, the firing of guns and launching of rockets, and no one recognizable to anyone else other than just somehow being part of it, sucked into its howling vortex and the ambition of leaving entirely forgotten.

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

there's a brand new dance

Craig S. Smith, who seems to head the Paris bureau of The New York Times, has proven over the last year to have a mere few journalistic failings; consider the niceties on display in his account of the national reaction to Zidane's coup-de-boule:

PARIS, Monday, July 10 — In the end there was bewilderment, embarrassment and, among some, a sense of betrayal as the national party planned to celebrate France's World Cup victory and a glorious end to the career of France's star player fizzled in a moment of frayed nerves.

France could have used a triumph to boost the national spirit, flagging after a year of social unrest and political scandals. It could have used an unblemished hero, too.

Instead, Zinédine Zidane, the team's star and captain, ended his World Cup performance with an ignominious moment of pique that got him ejected from the game. It was his last game before he retires from international competition.

It is, one supposes, a reasonable attempt to fashion a fabric of national life from the pattern of a single incident (of a piece with the analogical thinking which seems to take on the order of an imperative for the Times, especially in the Op-Ed section); alas, pull on a thread and the whole thing unravels.

First, it is worth noting that "bewilderment and embarassment" do not seem to be the foremost feelings, much less universal ones, here in France. "Curiosity"? Certainly — and its mother, amazement. But if there is an accompanying affect (and there are many), unregistrable delight is probably closer to the truth. When Zidane gave a cable-tv press conference on the 12th, people filled the bars and crowded outside in the streets trying to watch through windows. Zidane soccer jerseys are exhausted at every store — and every store had been stocking more than many.

If Zidane seemed the most famous man in the world after the 1998 World Cup victory, he has eclipsed that now, and not in the form of a villain. He has made the true leap from sport celebrity to folk hero. It's less than a week since Zidane knocked down Materazzi with a single head-butt, and there is already a song about it: "Coup de boule," it's called, by Lipszyc and Lascombes. The title seems to continue, "Zidane il a tapé." It comes with a dance, naturally (one for which you will not require much instruction).

It's too early to measure, but it seems to be the most popular song in the country. It has already entered the charts as a ringtone, and as of this writing has almost certainly reached Number One; the song to follow. This is not exactly what "embarrassment" looks like.

How could Smith have gotten it so wrong? His first failing, a minor one for a reporter, is that he seemingly hasn't actually spoken with actual people — certainly not people in bars, French-Algerians, Marseillaises, immigrants, soccer fans, or anyone with whom we've had any occasion to make chat in the last week (for here there is only one topic, or was, until the bombing of Beirut). Nor, would it seem, has Smith listened to the radio or watched much television. Well, he's merely a journalist after all; he's not Superman.

As a result, Smith finds himself a bit like a reporter in Baghdad's Green Zone, insisting that the war's going well. His general observations about the state of things, though you wouldn't know it from what's written, turn out to be true for a rather small group of people, in a rather fortified area.

This analogy, while crude, clarifies some oddities in his attempts to annex Zidane's singular act to the condition of the national psyche (already an absurdity, a total misunderstanding of exactly what was beautiful about the non-institutional because entirely non-strategic act). Here's the passage immediately following Smith's lede above:

It seemed almost metaphorical for a country that, despite its successes, has been paralyzed by its recent failures. They began with last year's rejection of the referendum on a proposed constitution for Europe [....]

Then came last fall's outbreak of urban violence, which exposed the failures of the country's egalitarian ideals. Finally, the government foundered over a modest attempt to loosen labor regulations. Violence briefly surged again.

"Its recent failures" — but failures for whom, exactly? One suspects that last year's Non vote on joining the European constitution was a a success for some; perhaps the national majority that voted Non? Similarly, this spring's overturning of the CPE might not be considered a failure by the millions who marched, blockaded, and struck against the pro-business measure? As one slogan had it, Travailleurs, étudiants, chômeurs, sans-papiers— tous précaires, tous solidaires! "Workers, students, unemployed, illegals — all precarious, all in solidarity." Well, perhaps not the most elegant slogan; however, a useful list of folks with whom reporter Smith has not spoken, who are excluded from his national psyche.

This finally, is what links the embarrassment over Zidane and the year's "failures": they exist only for a small and perhaps imaginary minority. We can imagine it via all the persons this population does not include, as mentioned above: they are white liberal bourgeoises, sitting in their étage noble apartments and fretting about the decline of civilization, believing all the while that "France" still means them and them alone. They are cranks, perhaps, except, as is quite clear from Smith's measure, they are businessmen as well. It's from within their comically narrow worldview that Smith speaks in the voice of the universal subject, rendering his politics as if they are simply a set of facts, and discovering without much expense of shoeleather what's true for everyone — a truth requiring the fantasy that there is a single national condition, a country of a single mind, which just happens to be that of a few men in suits. And this is true, as long as the nation is limited to a few conversations within the carefully entrenched green zone. Beyond the Belle Epoque fortifications, the love for Zidane, if it must be made to tell a national story, would narrate it rather differently.

the perspective of the world

But perhaps I may be allowed to suggest one explanation, by the artificial device of an image.

— Fernand Braudel

oh zidane

Now why you wanna go and do that and do that, huh?

the devil wears prada

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

o'hara inedit

I don't like modern literature — anyway, no one does.

It's too precise at the outset; in the end too vague, and dancing before our eyes.

I wish it was more indefinite and more precise, that is, just what it isn't.

I wish its content were closer to what matters, to the stockpile of vital forces within its signs.

Actually, it's not O'Hara, but Gabriel Pomerand, dreaming in 1949 of some set of signs that would be their own content: "metagraphics," which turned out to be all-too-Egyptian.

It was not the signs but the dream of the signs; this, one suspects, is what Warburg chased after, and Pound in his Fenellosan error.

And it was not the signs but the dream of the signs, of annealing the fissure between signifier and signified, that allowed Pomerand to hear, in the bedside klaxon that summons us to work, the sound's dialectical double:

Throughout my life, I've had no other goal than to be an extremist, at that battlefront which alarm clocks suggest even as they lure us into the traps of life.

walk, drift, etc.

Last week, the estimable Lisa Robertson happened upon the recent reissue of Michele Bernstein's Tous les chevaux du roi and, by way of her temporary online journal, translated a couple passages just for fun and our good fortune, starting with this three-way chat:

—What do you do anyways? I don’t really know .
—Reification, Gilles replied.
—It’s serious work, I added.
—Yes, he said.
—I see, Carole said with admiration. It’s very serious work with thick books and a lot of papers on a big table.
—No, Gilles said. I walk. Principally I walk.

Bernstein's roman a clef of early Situationist history, mostly of her relationship with Guy Debord (to whom she was funder, wife, and procuress), has never been translated — in English, on par with funeral orations of Bossuet, the book is notable for its absence.

And yet the book contains one of the most-famous and most-translated passages in French literature since Baudelaire. In 1966, students at the University of Strasbourg put out two pamphlets that would play a substantial role of the chain of history leading directly to the events of May '68. The latter was called "On the Poverty of Student Life." The former, "The Return of the Durutti Column," was a celebrated early example of what would eventually make Jim Behrle's blog possible: comic strips with new text written into the bubbles, blanks and balloons.

Somewhere in the middle of the comic, two cowboys (Pancho and Cisco) have a conversation on horseback — the very conversation from Bernstein that Lisa Robertson first translates. In the intervening forty years, the passage has appeared in English over and over, every time the Debord or the SI program is up for discussion (most notably the Greil Marcus article for Artforum, "The Cowboy Philosopher" and his following book, Lipstick Traces). Rod Smith quotes it in this interview. It's the last line of the bilingual French/English poem mentioned in this note by Juliana Spahr. And so on — the language is everywhere, including in the name of the Factory records band Durutti Column.

But what language? Robertston, in her translation, has made a quite peculiar (if not entirely unprecedented) choice to translate the celebrated punchline, Non, je me promène. Principalement je me promène, as "I walk. Principally I walk." This gets much of the line's self-ironizing tenor just right, after the big build-up about reification and the weightiness of theory — its deflationary quality, and its reminder that philosophy must be lived in the quotidian, not applied from above.

Still, it's an oddly flatfooted choice. This phrase is not meant simply to deflate theory, but to redirect it. Se promener is not the easy way to say "to walk," after all (marcher), though it does have that secondary meaning. It also has the flippant sense one hears in English when telling someone to buzz off, "go take a walk." Still, the choice by Bernstein is surely meant to invoke the Surrealist tradition ("the perpetual promenade in the midst of forbidden zones," as Breton decribed it in 1930). It must also have to do with SI practices — and, as surely as they recommended détournement of comic strips, their other program was the dérive, the drift through the city as a critical act. Given that there's no verb form of dérive, se promener is often taken as such. Indeed, the most-common translation of the last line, by far, is "I drift. Mainly I drift."

But that isn't quite perfect either — there are only imperfect translations. Robertson's version is useful because it makes this clear (in addition to looping the passage back to her own title). What does it mean to propose, as a fundamental activity, an action for which there is no verb? To what extent does the historical pressure of this passage — the way in which it exists un- and overtranslated at the same time, celebrated and unknown, presabsent — index the extent to which a new language is needed, not for infinitely subtle parsing, but for the most basic considerations? It is here that poetry and philosophy pass closest to each other...

community (c'mon and ride it)

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

Or: The Empire Strikes Back to the Future

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

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

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

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

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

—————

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

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