jane dark's sugarhigh!

26 singles of the year/"melodic range"

As ever, the singles list excludes songs that appear on the albums list for this year (though, idiosyncratically, it doesn't exclude songs that appeared on last year's list (Miranda Lambert) or are likely to appear on next year's list (M.I.A.). Moreover, the list is generated from iTunes play counts aggregated from all the sugarhigh! terminals, modified by a simple algorithm that accounts for song's release dates (so that "Wunderkind," e.g., added on January 8th, places lower than "Hell Yeah," which had nine fewer listens but wasn’t added until June 23rd. The main thing this algorithm does is count how many listens a song got in the first week, first month, and over the entire span, and then calculate both a song’s rate of “decay” in popularity, and what the stock analysts would call its “beta”: its relative volatility. This equation is highly proprietary.

1) "Do It To It," Cherish feat. YoungBloodz. See note here.
2) "Too Little Too Late," JoJo. Best achievement in melancholy AutoTune since Cher. Machines sing with more feeling than people. When Donna Harraway and Kathryn Hayles talk about the posthuman, this is what they mean. Best-case scenario, that is.
3) "18 Dummy," The Federation. In a year in which the hyphy movement the truly euphoric subgenre, The Federation were its purest product and greatest failure. The album long whispered to be in the can never came out, the movement failed to find a focal point once everyone realized E-40 was on some other melange, and we were left with nothing but a few impossibly great mixtape singles that left us wondering what exactly the Federation was: indie-undie little label localism from California's unlikely Central Valley gone wild? Production whiz kids passing them off as superthugs? "I'm from Fairfield, that's where my mind stays — strapped in my backpack, nothing like Kanye." No doubt.
4) "Unwritten," Natasha Bedingfield. You’d know if you saw the video. Free indirect gospel presented as elevator music.
5) "Check On It," (Beyonce ft. Slim Thug). Though this appeared on a Destiny's Child hits collection, it remains officially credited to Beyoncé. The main writer is, get this, named Angela Beyince. Could who does what get any more meaningless? Er, except to the accountants.
6) "Promiscuous Girl," Nelly Furtado feat. Timbaland. Furtado is more of a Simpson than an Aguilera, vocal skills-wise. But lesser artists would have wilted in front of this beat, even recycled as it is from a better Xzibit song; Nelly steps in there and holds her own, and that's all it takes. Quite possibly the best-natured song of the year (and, as we know from the long version of Aaliyah’s greatest moment, good-natured rumbling is really what rapper Tim Mosely should stick to).
7) "Tim McGraw," Taylor Swift. Sounds sort of like everyone else. Isn't.
8) "Hell Yeah," San Quinn (feat. E-A-Ski). "Yep yes si with a hell in front of it."
9) "Wunderkind," Alanis Morissette. We here at sugarhigh! are awful. Just terrible.
10) "Ain't No Other Man," Christina Aguilera. GIven that, jazzercizing in abeyance, this is basically a concept album about how much she digs her new husband, we can conclude that Jordan Bratman is pretty much one good single's worth of one good man. See album review here.
11) "Get Drunk and Be Somebody," Toby Keith. Without much by way of inventiveness, and an attitude more than a worldview, Toby Keith has turned out to be one of the most insistent, playful hit makers of the decade, ever since he grew out of his youth, filled out his baritone, and hit his stride with 2000's "How Do You Like Me Now" — as a sure thing, he's somewhere between Nineties Sheryl Crow and Nineties Tori Amos. See note here.
12) "I Don't Feel Like Dancing," Scissor Sisters. It is a fundamentally good thing that someone decided their project would be to marry the queer rock classicism of Elton John and the queer glam underpinnings of early disco; they leapt for the BeeGees and landed on Leo Sayer and that's just fine by us. Hey Williamsburg, you should try to enjoy this a lot; it's the only payback you have coming for enduring the misery of the Fischerspooner years.
13) "New Strings," Miranda Lambert. A song so clear that children youtubing their versions from their bedrooms to the world can see right through it.
14) "Standing In The Way Of Control," The Gossip. See note here.
15) "Fast Cars And Freedom," Rascal Flatts. Everyone talks about how country "is really old-fashioned melodic pop-rock," which is still a way of liking country while pretending not to like, you know, country. Except in the case of Rascal Flatts, which is really old-fashioned melodic pop-rock.
16) "Bumpin' My Music," Ray Cash. More fun.
17) "One," Mary J. Blige feat. U2. Pet Shop Boys, Johnny Cash...this is not the first great U2 cover, and it won't be the last. There's a reason for that: however swell the songs might be (and this is one swell song), Bono can't sing. His vocals are thin and mawkish and have a stident need to be liked, and each of these covers provides a massive benefit, be it Neil Tennant's yearning irony or Johnny Cash's singular gravitas. Mary J broadens out the tones to the Baptist breadth to which they always secretly aspired, and gives them an emotional thickness that, well, Bono doesn't have and she does, in spades. Secondary lesson in all this: The Edge may be more of a genius than we thought.
18) “Life Ain’t Always Beautiful,” Gary Allan. See note here.
19) "Men And Mascara," Julie Roberts. Ballads are easier to write than uptempo numbers, but much much harder to sing.
20) "Call Me When You're Sober," Evanescence. Listen, no one is more annoyed than we are at the capacity of self-righteous religious zealots to write good melodies.
21) “With You,” Jessica Simpson. One of the two best guitar loops of the year, along with some track in the middle of the Clipse album.
22) “Irreplaceable,” Beyonce. Looking forward to comparativist study of the way this last syllable is pronounced by Mick Jagger (“Respectable”) and Beyonce. Also: as sugarhigh! adviser Chris Nealon notes, “does she know her album is named Bidet?”
23) “The Way I Live,” Baby Boy. Fun.
24) “Fergalicious,” Fergie. At first it’s hard to know which crude Eighties triumph of trocheeic dimeter this is ripping off mercilessly; if it seems at first like “You Be Illin’,” but when the double-time electro kicks in halfway through, one twigs to the fact that it’s ye olde “Supersonic,” by JJ Fad. The metre varies for effect here and there (most peasingly in the “try an’ tell”/”clientele” rhyme), but mostly it’s intent on its extended, virtuosic trochees: “FERgaLIcious’ DEFiNItion: MAKE them BOYS go CRAzy” and on and on.Ever since rap’s rigid vocal metricality yielded to the conversational vernacularity of hip-hop — that is, ever since rap’s Rakim-midwived modernity — few songs have paid as much attention to classcial lyrical beat patterns as this, one of the most precise songs of the times.
25) “It's Okay (One Blood),” The Game. As close as sugarhigh! has ever come to voting reggae.
26) “XR2 (turbo mix),” M.I.A. Well, where were you in ’92? This is “The End of the World As We Know It” or “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” or maybe Joe Brainard’s “I Remember,” except redolent of M.I.A.’s Londonized machine nervosa. The proposition that all memories can be stored in acronyms used to seem like a fact about the music biz (who here remembers Reunion’s “Life is a Rock”?) but now seems like a fact about memory in these times, in some way a kind of negotiation with computers and digitization — which is to say, a lyrical negotiation with the formal and technological history of pop music itself. As a final note: those still wondering about the derivation of Maya’s foundational quasi-word “galang” (Who the hell is hunting you/in your BMW?”) might wish to spend some time with sub-sub-Tom Clancy author Jack Buchanan, who has a novel titled M.I.A. Hunter/la Gang. We don't make this stuff up; we just report it,

ON MELODIC RANGE IN POPULAR MUSIC

Sometime in the Nineties — say, after "Waterfalls" and well before "No Scrubs," to use the TLC calendar — mersh R&B narrowed its melodic range. It didn't necessarily use fewer notes (though this was often the case), but chose notes from within a narrower scope in any given song. Largely gone were the transcendent/ludicrous ascents and resolves, the struggle/release/euphorias of "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" or "Man in the Mirror"; the duotone themes of "No, No, No, No" and "Say My Name" carried the day.

This condensation was meant to convey coiled sensuality, tense menace, moral seriousness. In part it borrowed these sensibilities from hip-hop, the center of authority in popular culture. One might argue that the structures of tune in American pop float between forms where affect is largely conveyed by speech, and where it's indexed to variations of melody keyed to the Western scale: upper limit country, lower limit rap, as Louis Zukofsky surely meant to say.

In the event, R&B was successful enough in expressing its revised set of feelings that it had a dialectical effect on the entire Billboard Hot 100. On the one hand, a new genre arose immediately for the express purpose of rescuing melodic range: this got named teenpop, and its genius took up the explicit project of extending the melodic scope of the Top 40 through complex modulations, moments after R&B narrowed its own scope. But on the other hand, the new significations of R&B, every time someone in an adjacent genre was feeling, well, dippy, they could emulate the move to refashion themselves as mature, controlled, serious.

And so, for example, when Mariah Carey of the famous range, of "Dreamlover" and "Fantasy" and "Emotions," needed to indicate she was no longer Glitter-y and/or crazy, she stopped down to the minimal palette of "Shake It Off" and etc. And when Britney, who had become synonymous with teenpop, needed to "grow up," she just repeated history: the passage from "Oops..." to "Slave" tells the story of modern R&B again, offset by a few years, with the naked significatory intent that had always been her stock in trade. The genius of "Toxic" lies exactly in how much it manages to do within the late phase's restrictions, between the low ceiling and high floor.

Shifts, of course, never happen all at once: uneven development, three-steps-forward and two-steps-back, little gestures here and there, these turn out to have been key junctures in a story that the market is trying to tell. And this is the story that "Irreplaceable" begins to narrate. It's a good song, not a great one; nobody thinks its within seven rungs of "Crazy in Love" on the ladder of the Ideal Pop Song. That song had decent range as well, but it also had other things on its mind, and returned relentlessly to the three-note theme. "Irreplaceable" seems to have as its main purpose the restoration of melodic range to pop. That it found traction with an audience that had proved itself indifferent to the far-narrower B singles that preceded it is the most telling fact — not in the least in that it demonstrates how Beyonce had better dance to the tune of the times, having lost the imperious capacity to make the times dance to her own tune.

That song answered by the finally far more appealing "Too Little Too Late," by JoJo, which hauls out Cher's AutoTune (and here we recall that "Believe," sung by a gorgeous octogenarian, was a pivotal moment in teenpop's story, collapsing the tween and disco audiences into a coherent mass) to describe explicitly the new opening-out, as the song modulates from its close opening melody into the full, ecstatic chorus via the machine, as if to suggest it requires industrial force to put that gloomy history in the past, as if that set of melodic moves was too little and it was too late for that indeed — at which the song turns to recalibrate itself, not without a melancholy sense of loss, to the deliriums and euphorias that had once sounded like a natural condition

eleven albums of the year/"generationality"

1) Scritti Politti, White Bread Black Beer. See review here.
2) E-40, My Ghetto Report Card. Standing on the shoulders of children who are standing on the shoulders of grown giants, one of whom is him.
3) Nadiya, Nadiya. See notes here.
4) Ghostface Killah, Fishscale. The most curious thing is how many enthralling details there are on an album which offers as its main appeal the fact that it could just go on and on with its endless nonsense and soulspace shuffle without anything in particular mattering very much. What did Q-Tip say, "Infinite on my mind every minute"? Yeah, that, exactly inverted: moments in the midst of the infinite.
5) Justin Timberlake, FutureSex / LoveSounds. See review here.
6) The Wreckers, Stand Still, Look Pretty. When teenpop loses interest in broad melodies, broadly melodic teenpoppers will build a home in the country.
7) Charlotte Gainsbourg, 5:55. Somehow this all makes Zero 7's aping of Air: A French Band make sense by reversing the Channel crossing. Or: never has anyone sounded so much like Sarah Nixey. Especially a French person.
8) Clipse, Hell Hath No Fury. Four years ago, it took the Neptunes' sounds to make sense of Los Bros' crude'n'curious style; herein, the favor is duly returned, as the real Yin Yang Twins' brutal intricacy provides a context for Chad'n'Pharrell's astringent loops to sound once again like minimalist elan rather than dispirited sparsity. Moreover, moments like these explain why popular culture as a general sphere is such a remarkable place: it's where you can still be too raw and too literary at the exact same time, via the very same gestures, and sell only 78,000 out of the box. Hubert Selby, Jr. should be so lucky.
9) Dixie Chicks, Taking the Long Way. See review here. Their least lovely studio album since Natalie joined is still about three songs better than most of the year's popular country albums. This is a fact both about the year in country and the actual greatness of the Dixie Chicks. Natalie Maines, by the way, is one of the greatest singers. Ever.
10) Tori Amos, A Piano. A bunch of tracks that anyone who cares already has, and a few they might not, which is just fine as long as the music's basically free (what's up, allofmp3.com!) Kind of nutty: "Dolphin Song." Kind of slept on: "Sweet the Sting." Kind of unbelievably great: "Ode to my Clothes."
11) Pretenders, Pretenders (reissue). Sometimes a reissue is just reminiscence. Sometimes it's rear-view mirror magic. The live version of "Stop Your Sobbing" is, in some degree, quite predictable, with its slow, emotionalized vocal first passage eventually opening out into a full-force charge. And yet, leaving almost no cliché unturned, the song succeeds in sounding like a torn, tragic elegy in advance for James Honeyman-Scott, who reaches into the solo and fearlessly tears up his own funeral.

NOTES ON GENERATIONALITY:

[We do not claim any Christgauvian/Archimedean overview of the year in music, nor is this note particularly relevant to the Albums List, as opposed to the forthcoming Singles; we're just putting things in places distributively]

Every year bears some traces of generational shift. Sometimes it takes the form of Oedipal agon; sometimes it appears as a necessary refurbishing of the industrial machine along its cycle of planned obsolescences; and sometimes it seems to be little at all until long after the fact: a novelty hit that turns out to have founded a genre; an ignored debut that revivifies a form; a star's album that stiffs a little, secretly presaging the unremarkable moment when a whole cohort loses its juju.

Generationality happen. The market requires it, as do Ezra Pound, Sigmund Freud, and Machiavelli. More interesting in any given year is where it happens, and what that says.

This is not to say that it's always surprising, and this year it wasn't surprising at all. It didn't happen much in rock, unless the fermentation of emo as the ubiquitous form of guitar-combo pop counts as a generational shift, which it really doesn’t, and didn’t produce much good music (you miss Fall Out Boy now, bitchez, don't you?) The best moment of the year in emo was probably the truly stupendous mono-argyle on that Panic! At the Disco guy’s top hat.

Conversely, hip-hop made a big point of generational shifts, most notably via Jay-Z finally getting out of the rap game. This millennium’s pantomime retirements were ways of sustaining his spectacular rule, his justified domination of hip-hop’s centrist regime; only an actual yawn-worthy album could have removed him from the throne, and he finally obliged. Meanwhile, though it may just indicate a clearing of the golden throat and mind, this was the first year in memory that Missy Elliott, the other best rapper alive, didn’t do something that was complete and absolute genius, and in fact didn’t really do anything at all.

The vacuum in the national consciousness wasn’t filled by longtime critical demi-gods like Cam’ron or his Dipset dudes (snooze), nor the even-more-fetishized second coming of The Clipse; it was filled by actually juvenile fellows who figured out how to turn the local sound of southern rim cities just enough toward the center to consolidate national audiences. What was once a few frontier scenes is now the capital of the hip-hop century, stretched along the length of the Southern Smile: it starts in the Bay Area’s hyphy movement, dips down through Houston, New Orleans, Atlanta, and rises again to complete the grin right there in the syncopated surf of Virginia Beach that laps against the decaying wood paneling of Teddy Riley’s old 48-track analog console.

Plenty good hip-hop from elsewhere (peace to Miami, and to The Game, probably the most pleasing total cartoon poseur since Robbie Williams) — but the generational action is along that Smile, which might be a grimace, concealing a confederated grill from whence shines the brightest diamond, Lil Wayne himself, who clarified the whole situation by being the first person ever to say he was better than Shawn Carter and mean it. Meaning it doesn’t mean you’re right. Yet.

The generationality of country was kinder and gentler, natch, but even tidal shifts seem dramatic on a molasses sea. Johnny Cash was really really dead, Garth supernally irrelevant; meanwhile, Carrie Underwood morphed from up’n’coming talent to king of the world over what seemed like no more than weeks, and ex-pop stars and their backup singers were going country just like Alan Jackson promised, and Taylor Swift...well, Taylor Swift.

By country’s measures, Tim McGraw is still a pretty young thing: he showed up a while after Clint Black showed up a while after Randy Travis showed up a while after George Strait showed up, and George Strait’s still making hits on the regular down at the Young Country station. For what it’s worth, Tim McGraw is five years younger than Trace Adkins, who made everyone and their mother throw up in their mouths a little with last year’s “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk” (maybe that’s what Missy’s doing; she’s gone country, if she wasn't there already). And yet, there was Taylor Swift, born a month after the border between East and West Berlin was opened, treating Tim McGraw like a distant memory in arguably the best country single of the year (its competition was “Leave the Pieces,” by Michelle Branch and Jessica Harp, twenty-something escapees from teenpop’s decadent era).

“Tim McGraw” is more or less a rewrite of Deanna Carter’s “Strawberry Wine,” firmly in the long country tradition of adolescent summer love narratives; it’s delicate and quietly pissed off, a feeling that keeps converting to melancholy by the end of every bar, so that it can’t figure out if it’s truer in the first or third person, and the final gesture reads as both a romantic bid and a knife-sharp kissoff, albeit impossibly sweet. Part of its mystery, what kept the song alive all year long, was the way that that Tim McGraw shows up: “when you think: Tim McGraw, I hope you think my favorite song, the one we danced to all night long, the moon like a spotlight on the lake.” This is not like Garth giving props to an unknown Chris LeDoux; it's the forced conversion of a star to a legend. Converted to hip-hop years, it's like misting up when you say, "Remember way back when we used to listen to Juvenile?"

In this single gesture, Tim McGraw — not yet 40, about Jay-Z’s age — is banished to the realm of the dead, like Johnny Cash or Sinatra or Billie Holiday, surviving only in recordings and myths, a totemic figure whose recollection, whose absence, gives structure to the lives of the living. For real, how did she think she was going to get away with that? Or, more importantly, by what manner of magic did such a curious idea allow the writing of a perfect song?

It’s worth noting, lastly, that as hip-hop has smiled southward, country has inevitably forwned north: Gretchen Wilson’s Illinois home was just a forecast of Taylor Swift’s roots in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania. This is not to say that they don’t remain worlds apart, alas for Cowboy Troy. Progressive critics often want to note that people listen more widely across the genres than the imagination of encamped culture warriors suggests, and at a literal level this is true; that doesn’t mean that poptopia is a beautiful rainbow coalition. Folks are still real good at choosing the cores and borders of their own identifications, and merely indulging in the rest; the idea that all commodities are equally available turns out not to have collectivized the nation. This is why the “rockist” debate persists, even if a lot of critics like Justin Timberlake’s album.

Meanwhile, to put the matter crudely, generationality happens where genres are both historical enough to have generations, and alive enough to be worth renewing. That aliveness is, of course, as much a story about money as about other kinds of emotional or libidinal investment. That hip-hop and country were the scenes of substantial generationality this year in one ways tells us what we already know: that these are the leading forms of indigenous music here in the hegemonoculture, where the greatest investments are made. Or at least it reminds us of that, since we seem to be so good at forgetting it every fifteen minutes. It’s not just that these musics are popular, and thus abstractly “populist,” and so should be reckoned with on those grounds; it’s also that they’re the most musically vital, the living forms, and if one’s way of measuring songs can’t recognize that, it’s the measure that’s got to go.

late site notes

Fair readers:

Despite our diligent dozen-month preparations to be ready for the year-end polls, we find ourselves not taking part in such. That itself may be the first fact of the year in culture around here. Nonetheless, and despite the attempted kibosh proffered by our fine comrade Illexander Ephgé, the time for posting a few summary lists and comments is at hand. In advance, we note that, should one desire, one could revisit the year's cinema notes by selecting the appropriate category archive to your left; music the same; and both (and more) by clicking on "2006. " We do not expect to see any new films before January, though you may wish to brace yourself for sugarhigh!'s first ever theater review, sometime in the near future.

the good shepherd

As another review had it, "all cloak and no dagger." But that doesn't quite account for this film's seemingly endless plod: sometime in the third hour, one starts to feel like one is at a Rivette movie, except there's nothing particularly Rivetting about it. Several parts of the plot are just nonsense. For example, the purported goal of one elaborate Soviet operation is to compromise spymaster Matt Damon's son, so that dad can be blackmailed . Except that the compromise in question doesn't make anyone especially blakmailable, and the real threat is that the Soviets might hurt the son. This is, as it happens, a threat that could be made without any of the subtle espionage nonsense on which the film spends about an hour of our lives — an hour which is in fact a total irrelevance (except as an excuse to huck a woman out of a plane).

From a certain perspective, such indifference to plot mechanics makes sense, since this film, by way of being more-artistic-than-your-ordinary-espionage-flick, is basically all subtext. Text be damned. Indeed, the endless unfolding of subtext turns out, exactly because it dominates the whole operation rather than informing the text, to itself be a sort of waste of time. Thus the movie spends even more of our lives working through suggestive homoerotic and gender cues — men wrestling naked, repeated cross-dressing, the way Matt Damon's freaking Soviet code name is "Mother" — to little point, unless it's some banality about spy culture involving repression. Since we can't imagine the explanation's so banal, we are completely set up for, say, Damon's quiet, wincing son to be gay. Except he's not! Or there'd be no narrative excuse to huck the woman out of the plane! No, that justification would then have to come from the sub-subtext, which is that women are awful: teases, betrayers, opportunists, spies. Perhaps in that regard this film does capture the "worldview" of lame, stunted imperial apparatchiks. So it's got that going for it.

the queen

The Queen has drawn praise for three different (albeit overlapping) reasons: 1) Helen Mirren's superlative acting; 2) the film's insightful portrayal of its characters and circumstance; and 3) how extraordinarily well-made a movie it is. These purported felicities are, respectively: boringly true, piffle, and the exact opposite of the case.

1) It's well-known that Oscar-bait roles involve playing disabled or wicked ugly. The other thing that critics just love is lead characters who are fundamentally inexpressive, at which point capital-A Actors can haul out their minimalist retinal tics, lip quivers and eyebrow twitches, allowing critics to blather on about how nobody so eloquently indicates a complex inner life with nothing more than a glance, a crinkled earlobe, blah blah blah. We should never have to read that sentence again. Sure, it's a skill: a mildly technical skill that's no more challenging than being appealing or sexy, witty, smart or funny, awful or fearsome. Probably less so. But it gives critics and others a chance to display their nuanced recognition of nuance, and so these nuanced Helen Mirren perfs will be with us indefinitely. Listen, she's perfectly good at that sort of thing, and the role called for it, so: good casting, guys! As a 2006 acting "achievement," it doesn't rank with Shareeka Epps, Juliette Binoche, Maurice Bénichou, Maggie Cheung, Sacha Baron Cohen (in Talladega Nights), Rob Brydon, Gong Li, Steve Carell, Lucy Liu (in Lucky Number Slevin), Nick Nolte, T.I (in ATL), Leonardo Nam (Tokyo Drift), etc. Not sure it's more compelling than that guy who played the lead in Crank.

2) The monarchy hasn't really kept pace with changes in the velocity of culture and the popularization of celebrity. But actual politicians have because they traffic in that stuff. The former will be broken on the wheel of the latter, but sympathetically. Whoo.

3) The best that can be said about The Queen's cinematic construction is that it's very taut; not a move is wasted. That's what "well-made" means, most often, and it's exactly the problem; it's as if the film were trying to make the case for "the art film" being every bit as rigid and determined a genre as anything Hollywood could come up with. At least Hollywood films have the courage of their lack of conviction, and the capacity thus to be excessive, muddled, absurd. There is no moment nor gesture in The Queen that escapes its fate as crudely telegraphic (at the beginning when he's just an uncertain commoner, the quite short person playing Tony Blair wears football jerseys; you can tell when he's come into his own because he starts wearing suits!); as a mechanistic part of the parallel plot structure (which guy in the PM's camp is like which guy in the royal retinue? We'll never figure it out!); or as broadly symbolic (the noble old stag being harried in its solitude across the vast spaces of Balmoral — this noble old stag with which the Queen is obsessed — a stag eventually slain not by an aristocrat but a mere businessman hunter up from the City — the stag stands for...the Queen!)

If there is anything interesting about this movie, it's the extent to which to like it requires a commitment to nostalgic values that were always markers of privilege in the first place, though in this debased age they just resonate as "quality"...which is to say, to like this movie is already to identify with the royals (though alas, such narrowminded "standards" resonate more with prickish Prince Philip's character than poor uptight Eliz). If the deck weren't stacked enough in setting up this parallel (and, as noted, the film doesn't hesitate to make these matters blatant), we know that Diana's funeral is a truly debased event because, in the news footage edited in, we see a sprinkling not of aristocratic dignitaries but mere entertainers captured in pointed slo-mo, pointedly including Stephen Spielberg. Boo! Hiss! Now if only this movie were one seventeenth as interesting as Jaws...

cog diss

Time magazine's "Person of the Year" is "You"; in the words of the Houston Chronicle, the annual edition "cited the shift from institutions to individuals — citizens of the new digital democracy, as the magazine put it."

For those looking for proof of the individual's triumph over institutional power, one need search no further than this: US Army might break Goodyear strike headlines this article, which begins:

The US Army is considering measures to force striking workers back to their jobs at a Goodyear Tire & Rubber plant in Kansas in the face of a looming shortage of tyres for Humvee trucks and other military equipment used in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The strike includes 17,000 individuals: not digital enough, one presumes.

flushed away

They say that Washington, D.C, is Hollywood for ugly people, but so is animation. Or it should be. Thus the employ of perfectly attractive persons — persons who trade heavily on their perfect attractiveness — as mere voices is a bit of a mystery (or at least a humiliating sidelong glance at how thoroughly we fetishize prettiness, that we'll pay for its name on a poster even if we never get to, you know, see it.)

Kate Winslet, that is to say, is — shipbound again — more convincing as an odalisque than a swashbuckling rodent. And Huge Ackman, given his talents, has no business playing a prissy cartoon rat; he misreads the lines so consistently that the movie never sets the kind of breakneck-witty tone it needs to carry us along on its sewer screwball, and as a result feels mostly static despite (or in contrast to) numerous and accelerated chase scenes.

Indeed, unlike Winslet (who's actually done just fine in a couple of different scenarios, including the deprogrammed cultist in the Campion's Holy Smoke, whose escape from a desert safe house is abetted by volumes of Dostoyevsky strapped to her bare feet), Ackman should stick to the one role he's made for: the monstrously angry manchild seething under a protective layer of sardonic flirtation, oscillating between seduction and murder. He is finally nothing more nor less than Wolverine, and he rings only small change on that performance in...

scoop

Woody Allen has made two movies (review of Match Point) in swift succession. Both are set in the posh Britain of London townhouses and country estates; both dwell, in ways both different and more egregious than his Manhattan movies, on real estate porn; both star Scarlett Johansson (who is herself swiftly turning into something akin to real estate porn).

More pointedly for the director whose work we most associate with his "personal life" (not because of his charismatic appeal, but because no one has — paradoxically — sacrificed more to be an auteur), both revolve around a low woman who threatens to bring down an ascendant British pretty boy from his aristocratic perch by exposing sexual indiscretions. In both cases he kills her. A little weird to make that movie twice in one year, hmm?

In the earlier film Johannson takes on the low woman role, a striving but ungifted American actress; in this version, though Scarlett again "plays" a base American forced to employ her non-existent acting skills (so that's weird), the low woman in question is a British prostitute we never see. Here the suave monster is played by suave monster™ Huge Ackman, more capable but somehow less persuasive for it than Scoop's appropriately overmastered Jonathan Rhys-Meyers). The repetition compulsion (the director's, not the actors' or characters') is so pungent that it's hard not to wonder what's up, and from a small distance it seems like Woody has merely remade the first film so as to write a role for himself — as a bumbling magician, no less, doing the same lame trick over and over on a rickety stage.

One wonders how many times Woody Allen can parlay such a minimal scenario into (apparently) releasable films in the short window available to him. He's always been a prince of nostalgia; here the act of nostalgia is in having to recollect (despite contemporary settings) the lost moment when the United State's unrefined, upstart vitalism was last a source of anxiety for Britain's still-regnant aristocratic class (1944? 1923? 1898?), rather than itself a vanishing fact. That lost era has replaced (the conspicuously absent) jazz as the anachronistic tell of the Konigsberg project; it must somehow count as strange that, at this moment, the director has replaced a long-standing cultural fantasy with an explicitly nationalist one.

Addendum: given Allen's stature in France, perhaps his new obsession with Britain's old panic over ceding world-hegemonic power to the US becomes a way of pandering to French audiences.

notes on the new(s)

You will note that the style of this entry is stolen from the deeply pleasing mystery-rag that is The New-York Ghost¶To include more than four poetry titles in The Grey Goose's list of the year's 100 Notable Books would fly so thoroughly in the face of their audience's reading practices as to seem polemical. And there's a logic to the fact that the youngest poet included is a spry 62; no one in that world knows what to make of contemporary poetry; choosing already-canonical figures is a to-hand solution. The dissonance, finally, comes from the distance between this latter banality and the fact that the editors must — must — be aware that, if they themselves made a list of 40 books of poems they loved and recognized as significant (limiting themselves to original collections by 20th Century American poets), which they wouldn't have any trouble doing, they would shortly discover that the vast majority of these books were written by poets in their twenties, thirties, and forties. Ginsberg was 29 when he wroteHowl; its inclusion this year is the perfect myth, in the Levi-Straussian sense of an imaginary solution to real contradictions. It at once recognizes the way that much poetry that matters to us comes as a sort of shock or breakthrough rather than a consolidation, while opening the gateways only to figures who've been culturally validated. This, not "poetry" or "taste" as such, is the real horizon of the list, the discontinuity within its apparently smooth ideological gleam.¶In light of the Number One Leader's recent visit to Vietnam, we wonder if it makes sense to situate the last several years in Iraq in relation to the economic logic of Hollywood that tells us it's economically safer to pursue franchises, sequels, and remakes (up to and including the art-school variant of "shot-by-shot" covers of previous films of which Gus Van Sant's Psycho was only the best-distributed; the form finds its zenith in the loving recreation of Raiders of the Lost Ark by three adolescent boys, a story the rights of which have now been acquired by Hollywood). Such films have a massive head start in finding a place in the cluttered imagespace of the average American, while being simultaneously more cost-effective to produce and market. They are pre-imagined and pre-sold. Might we think of the United States' domino-theory global hedge action to be a sort of franchise, involving little more than cosmetic changes and an updating of the plot to seem relevant to current events? Might we indeed expect to start seeing shot-by-shot recreations of wars?¶Elsewhere our friend Herr Dinglö directs us to this almost incomprehensibly satisfying passage in a recent article on Beirut: “We have no work. We have nothing else to do, so we came to overthrow the government.”¶

stranger than fiction

A more confusing fable than it first seems. In the core narrative, a guy stops going to work and his life gets a lot better in every way except he fears he will die soon. He is an IRS agent In the shell narrative a woman discovers she can no longer do her work, or at least can't do it in the way that everyone agrees makes it meaningful work. She is a novelist. Both of their realizations pivot around the "reality principle" of his imminent death.

It would seem on first pass that we have thusly a tale about the primacy of first order, or "actual" labor over second-order cultural work — an old theme, seemingly renewed here in the mildest way by the insertion of the information worker into the role that, 20 or 50 years ago, would have been a manual or industrial laborer. Even the feint wherein Dustin Hoffman — mediating between the two orders (which is, apparently, the destiny of the English Prof; holy mackerel does he have a huge office!) — ruefully proclaims the social priority of great art and seems to sentence the worker to death, only serves to underscore the apparent conclusion, in which it becomes clear that decency is on the side of the IRS agent (ironic, innit?).

The film isn't quite that simple or resolute; at a minimum, it's clear that the agent's life has become worth saving exactly because he has, confronted with his own death, become for the first time truly alive — and the necessary condition for this is not showing up for work. A life worth saving is an autonomous life; it's the autonomy from work that makes the life real enough to be a matter of import to the novelist. This import, this caring about his actual life, is what grounds the author's relevance — is what gives culture a meaningful relationship to social reality. His autonomy is the condition of possibility for culture's famed semi-autonomy.

This is why he must be an information worker, of course. He already dwells in the intermediate zone between labor and culture, between the real, exploited proletariat and the purely exploitative owners of the means of production. He is an instrument which information and capital, both in utterly abstracted form, use to get from one place to another. It's no coincidence that he works at the exact juncture of "the economy" and "the government." He is, in short, a representative of the supposed "new class" much ballyhooed in post-Marxist social thought — a class which is literally a middle class.

This existence of this new class is, one fears, a fantasy, designed to allow the imagination that the era of fundamental class conflict is somehow over (a fantasy that the movie baldly restates in the inverse: the love interest, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, is an actual laborer — a baker! how prole can you get? — who nonetheless stands in the place of non-alienated labor, because she is pursuing both her pleasure and her vocation and, get this, abandoned the emptiness of law school for said pursuit. Take that, information workers!)

Thus the movie gets to have it both ways. This new class of information workers is socially unnecessary, and — just like artists and other cultural workers, who in fact are also members of this class — could cease to work on the morrow, without toppling the system of daily life (confirming the suspicions of many of the wealthiest and poorest members of society). However, they are far from irrelevant. Exactly by being able to abandon work without disastrous effects, they demonstrate that social existence is in fact not entirely determined by work. That is, they fulfill their "new class" duties not by doing new class work (for aren't tax collection and storytelling quite old jobs, really?) but by showing, not singly but collectively, that class struggle is itself an old idea, no longer consonant with new conditions.

Both of them — him with his freshly uncovered pleasure in the texture of daily existence, her in her final choice of a single life over a great artwork — embody the virtues of universalist humanism, which is the film's completed and total proposition. From the perspective of labor and capital, this middle class doesn't exist. But from the perspective of the social imaginary, they have serious work to do: their true function is to express outward the basic antirevolutionary ideology of liberalism itself, a message that must be endlessly received by the actually existing classes so as to not recognize themselves as such.