jane dark's sugarhigh!

the last king of scotland

One goes to watch the purported star do his thing, but for the most part can't see the Forest for the trees. Or not even: the view to his predictably wracked and troubling performance isn't obscured by a larger, holistic view of the Ugandan Seventies, but by, natch, someone else's story.

That social struggles ought be told as the dramas of individuals, and that this rule takes on force in direct proportion to the money involved in the telling, is not news, and would scarcely be worth mentioning except for how certainly it means to escape both mention and notice as a rule of art in the current dispensation. But we can at least take note of what is allowed and even demanded by this iron rule: the dominating form of the close-up, the apotheosizing of individual performance (which might otherwise have been left as a relic of the stage, had cinema taken up the formal possibilities available to it). So, in short, all there is to do, all there ever will be, is to enjoy individual performance and camera moves (in which we include various special effects).

But the effects of this cinematic determination are just as marked in the social activities depicted in the film. Surely it must be notable that the narration of the fall of Idi Amin (or at least the collapse of his regime's credibility) pivots, in this film, not around the political or the social but the personal. Even this is unexceptional, not worth mentioning, other than the fact that "the personal" narration of the political climaxes here — in way that would make even Faulkner blanch — in the fact of miscegenation.

This, finally, is a quite ludicrous structuration, even within the context of single-subject cinema: less a story of Africans getting fucked by the white man than yet another projection of the boundless historical power of the white dick. The best one could hope for in this movie, in other words, is to watch an actor's attempt to inhabit a consciousness unfamiliar both to him and to us, and to see what that might be like; one gets a bit of this, and its pleasure. For the most part, however, one endures not the worst but finally the most predictable substitute, a kind of "idea" that has the force of perfect idiocy.

if one wanted confirmation that modernism was in fact threatening to the bourgeoisie...

...or if one simply wanted to hear what anti-intellectual panic sounded like, or how it might lead a managerial class volkspoet to insult poetry at the same time he insulted all Japanese people, one could have attended the reading by Ted Kooser at the University of California, Davis, last Thursday, when he said, claiming to be quoting Karl Schapiro (as if that shored up the position, or made it not his own):

The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs that fell on American poetry were Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.

white bread black beer

Once upon a time there was a boy named Scritti, and though this was a strange name, nobody teased him, for he had a beautiful voice, and a falsetto that was like honey injected into the veins. And he grew up with the desire to make jangly pop music woven from strands of romance, left politics, reggae, post-structuralist theory, black soul, and everything resting in the sentence, "the music of the Beatles and Bowie prepared me for every subsequent adventure, intellectually, politically, aesthetically, structurally."

One day a funny thing happened to Scritti, because funny things happen to everyone in history. As he was figuring out his jangly pop music and bringing discreet pleasure to several people, pop music itself became less jangly, in part because digital technology favored a sharper snap in general, and in part because it was part of a constellation that would eventually be called hip-hop. And Scritti liked this sound very much. He heard Michael Jackson and Run-DMC and it was good. So it came to pass that instead of giving this historical development the Heisman and insistently making a now-nostalgic jangle, Scritti made some romantic black-soul-loving pop music with digital snap, and brought indiscreet pleasure to many many people.

But this didn't make Scritti especially happy, and what's more, his headlong romantic leap into history's fastest pace meant that autumn would come as swiftly as summer, and before too long he found himself in a cool season with winter coming on. And so he retreated to the gloomy Usk Valley to spend a season drinking ale and thinking about what to do next.

A season turned into a few and then into many, as they tend to do when one is brooding in the gloomy Usk Valley, ancient kingdom of Gwent, where the coal miners mine coal and the years pass. And still Scritti puzzled over what to do next, or not. After a long while he came to an idea, and it grew and grew. His idea was that, though he had taken up the sonic snap that has so entranced him in the early Eighties, he had not truly taken up the hip-hop that he greatly loved.

And so it came to pass that Scritti walked out of the Usk Valley sometime near the end of the second millennium according to the Christian calendar, and released an album that featured his beautiful soul falsetto equally with several extremely minor pseudo-hip-hop characters, who had perhaps been chosen because they were open to nearly-forgotten intellectual Welsh pop singers with leftist leanings, and affordable by production budget of same, rather than because of their excellence. Though this strange brew had its moments, it was somewhat confusing to have pseudo-hip-hop songs which were also lovely falsetto parables involving Heloise and Abelard, and everyone was confused, Scritti not the least.

Perhaps the greatest confusion was the last song on the record, "Brushed With Oil, Dusted With Powder," which was the prettiest song but at the same time a ballad, and a remarkably gentle, soothing ballad at that, with no pseudo-hip-hop elements in the music, though the sweetly breathy lyrics did concern rides in police cars and, in some haunting manner, the song seemed to be taking place in the beauty of the Usk Valley and the scenario of American hip-hop at the same time. This was a true oddity and there was no way to make sense of it, but that seemed okay because it was the last song on the album and they are understood to be outside-the-work, and forgiven their incoherence, as a general rule.

After the last inconsequential song ended, some more years passed.

In those years a strange idea took hold in Scritti's mind. The idea was this: that the inconsequential, beautiful song was in fact the key to everything, or at least the key to his next album. He would make an entire record with no minor or even major hip-hop characters, but one charged with his love of early Eighties hip-hop, and his melancholy distance from it. But it would be an album of rock so soft that "soft rock" couldn't do it justice, and album that would make Quiet Storm radio formats feel like they might need to calm down a little and maybe attend a yoga class. It began with Scritti sighing "the boom boom bap...." But he did not sound like KRS-One, he sounded like Scritti but older, honey dipped in morphine on a slow drip.

It was like the dream of Brian Wilson that Brian himself could never really approach, of an easy listening album that was at the same time a work of genius. And if Scritti was occasionally compelled to murmur the the titles from an entire Run-DMC album in a distantly pretty bridge, or coo angelically to the effect that punks jump up to get beat down, sounding exactly as if he was blessing the beasts or inventing a lullaby for a child who had been dead for two decades, well, this was the sense of the album, though sense was not very much at stake. Something else was, though it was hard to be sure what, exactly, and this mystery was the album's greatness, or perhaps it was the invention of a previously unknown category of pop music, or the way a voice can trace its own history, and the relation of the individual to history, or how it felt to live in a beautiful and perfectly numb present, at the edge of a hole into which years and things one loved kept falling.

futuresex / lovesounds

"Slash fiction" takes its name from the slash in "K/S": a subcategory of Star Trek fan fiction given over to desublimating the deep love between Kirk and Spock. The slash, that is to say, might be imagined as the blade that cuts out the mediating stuff separating the pair in the televised version; at the same time, it's the third term which separates the K and S, even as it opens the path to a lil consummation. As a linguistic mark, it takes the place of what keeps them apart while allowing them to come together — it's the slash between men. As a sign-function, it's almost helplessly suggestive of the more humanly-charged role of the woman in Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick's famous analysis of triangulation:

[Between Men] attempted to demonstrate the immanence of men’s same-sex bonds, and their prohibitive structuration, to male-female bonds in nineteenth-century English literature…[The book] focused on the oppressive effects on women and men of a cultural system in which male-male desire became widely intelligible primarily by being routed through triangular desire involving a woman.

— (Epistemology 15).

Surely this structural relation must have been on someone's mind in titling the current Justin Timberlake album. The two worlds of the title themselves don't do much but remind us that, though Justin sings and dances like a somewhat mechanical King of Pop, he'd rather be a Prince. But the slash tells a different story: the story of K/S, and of Sedgewick. The album itself, both in its sonic intertwinings and lyrics, is almost entirely about the great love between Justin Timberlake and Tim Mosely, who basically sing, rap and murmur romantic, sensual phrases to each other for about an hour, climaxing mid-album with the slinky, beautiful "What Goes Around...."

The album, that is to say, is J/T porn. Of course, per the analysis, this erotic drama must be disguised by the presence of a woman — so literally a figure rather than a person, or even a character, that she is named, in song after song, "Girl." She exists not at all, except as a convenience so Justin and Timbaland can rub up on each other in the sweetest and most lubricious ways; it's actually quite romantic, and probably better queer disco than Alcazar, Infernal, or Gnarls Barkley.

remember:

I deology

U topia

the beautiful soul

Thus the “beautiful soul”, being conscious of this contradiction in its unreconciled immediacy, is unhinged, disordered, and runs to madness, wastes itself in yearning, and pines away in consumption.(9) Thereby it gives up, as a fact, its stubborn insistence on its own isolated self-existence, but only to bring forth the soulless, spiritless unity of abstract being.

— G.W.F. Hegel, "Conscience: The “Beautiful Soul”: Evil and the Forgiveness of it"

This kind of idealism has a history. To return to it, in discussions of, say, collectivity, or kindness, or "types," is to ignore history altogether — an interesting and perhaps Utopian fantasy, but a fantasy all the same.

a response to many things at once in the poetry chattersphere

Anyone who speaks of collectivity, of groups, of community, without explicit reference to everyday life — to the experience of being dragooned with or without our complicity into the "collectives" of social class — has, as has been said, "a corpse in his mouth."

the only halloween costumes for people of conscience

"at this stage of his life"

From the annals of Anglophilia, this fantasia from the estimable Enid Starkie. Gathering momentum as it goes, it consigns Baudelaire's talent to the paternalistic mercies so redolent of Empire, with an easy confidence that, had he only been heir to such management strategies, he could really have had a chance to straighten up and fly right, never doubting the desirability of this imagined outcome, a kind of starched quasi-achievement which is invested with more and more libidinal force with each clause before collapsing back down to the fleshpots of Paris.

In England Baudelaire, at this stage of his life, would have gone to either Oxford or Cambridge, as an undergraduate, where, under proctorial and tutorial supervision, he would have done himself no permanent harm. He would probably have made a name for himself in undergraduate circles, in artistic and literary clubs, and this might have satisfied his need for eccentric self-expression. In this simple and adolescent manner he would have grown out of his 'green-sickness', and, under tutorial pressure, might even have learned to work at set hours, in order to pass his examinations. It is, however, probable that he would have been a serious student, for, with his facility and felicity in Greek and Latin, he might have been a Balliol Scholar, and have read with distinction for Honour Moderations, while his taste for metaphysical and philosophical argument might have led him finally to Greats. But, in whatever manner he chose to spend his time, he would have been kept under kindly supervision during these critical years. Unfortunately the university system in France does not fulfil the same function as it does in England, and the life into which artistic and literary young men and plunged, on leaving school, is the Bohemian life of the Latin Quarter, the life of cafés, literary circles and student balls.

— Baudelaire, Enid Starkie

political undertakings

Note that black suit and coat have not only political beauty — as an expression of universal equality — but also poetic beauty: an expression of public spirit, an immense parade of political undertakers, love-stricken undertakers, bourgeois undertakers. We're all celebrating some kind of burial or other.

Charles Baudelaire