jane dark's sugarhigh!

the golden age of arpeggiated guitar ballads

It remains a sort of remarkable fact that, in the long history of guitar rock, the two great ballads based around an endlessly repeating arpeggio, "Every Breath You Take" and "Missing You," were both released in the same year — so close together that one probably couldn't be a copy of the other. The third greatest comes only four years later.

the world does it for you

16-08-2006: Joshua Clover wrote:

Yellows grouped best-selling smarts. Responds escorted satin warm. Distinguishes showcased harmless musses. Grasses outshined direct clique. Enchants exploded chic riverbell. Freezes winged initiative cats. Flocks autographed acoustic mails. Flips batted parental tackling. Slangs accustomed ambitious adolescents. Disbands pupped masculine disinfectants.

yes say no

We all-heartedly agree with this sentiment. Henry Rollins, white rebellion relics, the historical moment that can't recognize its own historical nature — why, it's just like the soixante-huitards! Or no, wait, it's just like pretending that late Bob Dylan is as good as the seventh-stringer on Lost Highway!

Our only difference with the tiniest and luckiest of unicorns is in our understanding of how it keeps happening. Because even Henry Rollins' indomitable will is but a sparrow in a hurricane. And the abstract desire of a cultural generation to persist, to keep walking forward zombie-like well after it's dead, is...abstract, just that. It's a material problem, and needs a material solution. They will not go away if you denounce them, or mock them, or explain history/historicity to them.

They will go away if you stop paying them. The television shows, movies, and statues of tribute can be avoided if, and only if, you stop attending reunion tours. All of them. Punk, hardcore, new wave, no wave, paisley underground...the entirety of the rockin' gang of supreme righteous whiteness (plus Bad Brains! no, really, we're all super-diverse!) is a fairly coherent economic subsystem, and if you give money to Pixies, or Mission of Burma, or the Clash, or Celibate Rifles, well, you're just skywriting a message that says We Talk A Good Game But We Will Fund All This Shit Until Our IRA/Keoghs Are Empty — don't blame Henry Rollins or anyone else for keeping that moment suspended in its living death.

and the pulitzer for headlines goes to...

Missing Chechen Was Secret Bride of Terror Leader.

Wasting only two of its eight words on grammatical business, it stacks up not one, nor two, but three perfectly compelling noun-adjective pairs, perhaps the most insinuating hed ever for a story about which the readers are likely to have no prior knowledge.

Indeed, given that it could have run "Missing Chechen: Terror Leader's Secret Bride," the placement of the minimal verb and preposition seems designed exactly to point up the independent formulae, each in its crystalline irreducibility — an Int-News version of "Snakes on a Plane."

snakes on a plane

Snakes are born free and they are everywhere on planes.

world trade center

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

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

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

"she made reference to being with people associated with two words"

She also said, "There are six steps to building some unspecified thing."

Also five, and seven.

why pirates?

Why must it be the case that, at this historical conjuncture, the figure of the pirate multiplies itself through cultural space? Needless to say, there is no way to answer this question without at the same time taking up the question of empire, and the current forms it requires.

the dozens: bombs over blogdad

Thirteen songs worth stealing. Sort of.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

de gustibus

From a letter of James Schuyler to Frank O'Hara, dated Rome, Italy, 11/7/54:

I've become a moviegoer again, if not a bug or fan; it's like being an opium addict without getting any lift. Let's see, I've seen: Witness to Murder, Mogambo, Ulisee (I saw it in Italian, so that's what I call it), de Sica's dud, Stazione Termini, On the Waterfront, From Here to...and a couple of Italian ones I won't go into. Not to put a fine point on it, I thought them all hell; though many featured nice-lookers caught looking their best.

from 'Ambiguity and Theft'

Culture is neither ideology nor form, nor is it ideology and form; culture is the identity of ideology and form. I like saying that because it makes me feel like Hegel for a second.

when 700 detonators just aren't enough

Book'em, Dan-O.

Three Texas men were arraigned Saturday on terrorism-related charges after police found about 1,000 cell phones in their minivan, and prosecutors say they believe the men were targeting a bridge connecting Michigan's Upper and Lower peninsulas.

But two of the men said they were only trying to buy and sell phones to make money, and one said the money was intended to help pay for his brother's college education.

A magistrate set bond at $750,000 for each of the men, who are charged with collecting or providing materials for terrorist acts and surveillance of a vulnerable target for terrorist purposes. No pleas were made at the arraignment at a District Court in Caro, about 80 miles north of Detroit.

Officials have not said what they believe the men intended to do with the phones, most of which were prepaid TracFones. But Caro's police chief said cell phones can be used as detonators, and prosecutors in a similar case in Ohio have said that TracFones are often used by terrorists because they are not traceable.

"All we did is buy the phones to sell and make money," Louai Abdelhamied Othman told the magistrate. He said authorities had previously stopped the group in North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

pulse

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

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

step up

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

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

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

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

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

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

talladega nights: the ballad of ricky bobby

Though dating from the 1940s, NASCAR's modern era begins in the early 1970s. Here "modern era" means, among other things, its ascendence first over the immediate competition of Formula 1 racing, and then its indirect competition until it becomes America's second most popular spectator sport — as well as a category of politics: confluence not just inevitable but structural.

Talladega Nights, without going out of its way to periodize itself, takes the triumph over Formula 1 as one of its central plot points, via Ricky Bobby's combat with Frenchman Jean Girard (conjured immaculately by Sacha Baron Cohen, surely the film's big winner in the industrial sense). NASCAR vs. Formula 1 is played, in a series of telling diagnoses, as straight vs. gay, dumb vs. smart, faith. vs. existentalism (yes Jim, they use the word), blind will vs. ironic self-awareness, spirit vs. technique and...have we left anything out?...oh yes, America vs. Europe.

It's the last confrontation that stacks the deck — after all, the other sporto-political category of late, "soccer moms" is implicitly ur-European. It's particularly telling given NASCAR's rise right around 1973 — the peak of what historians of the longue durée refer to as the "secular trend" of the United States' primitive accumulation, and the beginning of the slow decline we are currently enjoying. Of course the Europe that America had bested in the only true international competition must be called up to be redefeated again and again in the cultural sphere; this is what Talladega Nights goes out of its way to celebrate. And of course it must be NASCAR, as opposed to some other spectacular form, that rises at the moment of the first international oil crisis and becomes the triumph of the decline: as a sport it is, after all, a hecatomb to the gods of OPEC disguised as a white pride rally. As an analysis of the cultural imaginary of an empire beginning to run dry, the film is peerless.

Will Ferrell also reasonably funny. Runs around in underwear. "That happened."

a scanner darkly

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

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

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

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

the illusionist

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

special to binky urban

A careful reading of the bestseller lists reveals, if one can make it past the Dan Brown titles, a marginally more enlightened moneymaker: books designed to make liberal types feel like they've had a meaningful encounter with the unfortunate peoples with whom we are in conflict. One could express one's dissatisfaction with the US imperial program via a brisk saturday march (perhaps carrying a placard)‚ penning a poem with fully ethical content, or staying at home to make one's way through The Kite Runner or Reading Lolita in Tehran.

Given the market for this kind of textual commerce with the recently, currently, or soon-to-be bombed Other, we would not hesitate to start filling in the gaps, especially if we were, say, Syrian. Insofar as this particular niche market seems fond of the fine arts, comparative religions, and gritty local color ("compassionate cosmopolitanism," anyone? Can we get a show on 'NPR already? What's the hold-up? etc.), we suggest a book titled something to the effect of Caravaggio in Damascus, in which Syrian painter Yousef Abdelke returns to his family home both to attend his childhood love's funeral, and to arrange a showing of Caravaggio's depiction of St. Paul's conversion, a nationally-anticipated event opposed by the non-Christian ministry, and requiring intrigues interrupted by the outbreak of the Israel-Lebanon war...

yeah, any day now

An article from today's New York Times:

In any event, Mr. Rumsfeld said it was difficult to gauge the ideal number of troops the United States and its allies should have in Iraq. Too many troops, and the Iraqis would see them as occupiers, leading to more unrest. To few, and the violence could spiral out of control. “There’s no rulebook,” Mr. Rumsfeld said.