jane dark's sugarhigh!

hot fuzz

Saw this movie.

And now, on to an update on the rankings, with a reminder that these run from worst to best, or from least preferred to most preferred, as indicated by the numbers — so that, for example, the movie numbered "1" is the "number 1" movie on the list.

23) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
22) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
21) Paris je t'aime (didn't have Hayden Christenson)
20) Waitress (Cheryl Hines' micromonologues, Nathan Fillion's smile)
19) Severance (theatre was quite clean)
18) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
17) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
16) Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten ("White Riot" a capella)
15) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
14) Hot Fuzz (lighting in British supermarket)
13) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (pleasure of SRO crowd in huge theatre)
12) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
11) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
10) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
9) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
8) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
7) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
6) Knocked Up (Seth Rogen's delivery, the jokes about Martin's beard, Paul Rudd's three smiles)
5) 28 Weeks Later (Goodbye Dover Beach...)
4) Transformers (has entire theory of American history, plus robot fights)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

transformers

Given the clarity and accuracy of the reviews here and here, we will merely register in passing the grimmest moment in this generally grim film.

During the climactic battle (which takes place in Los Angeles, Nevada), there's a brief "shot" of the late-arriving Decepticon, Starscream (in his mechanical form as a jet) smashing into and blurring through a couple floors of an office tower. As if in a dream, we watch from a magical viewpoint, mid-air outside the office windows; they spool past like frames of film stock, detailing impossibly the interior stuff — desks, fluttering papers, bodies — being tossed asunder, before Starscream blasts out the building, leaving a defined exit wound. The sequence lasts less than two seconds, maybe less than one.

And yet it is by far the most detailed reconstruction of the iconic violence from the events of September 11, 2001. Indeed, among visualizations, this is the one that has been pointedly disallowed, the image not recreated in the increasing wealth of historical recreations: we have been allowed to see the tower only from the outside, from pre-contact to the leaping bodies. To render that interior image from a perspective too close to reality would be, as we are all given to understand, somehow pornographic; one way to understand this movie is as a sort of measuring device displaying the necessary distance of fantasy at which the events in question can be screened. Or as a particular registration of the certainty that this one day in history is to be the Rosetta Stone of American cultural imagery for the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, this gets at the moment of truth within the Transformers franchise, and the occasional brilliance of this resurrection. No other device so lovingly preserves the boy's dream that every single object in the world is weaponized: cars, planes, bodies, existing beyond the capacities of conventional armies. Car-bomb, 9/11, suicide bomber: the fantasy of weaponization is merely the reality of asymmetric warfare, and the story of how it was finally brought to the United States. The movie really should be titled Transformers, or a Brief History of 21st Century Combat. Square-jawed officer Josh Duhamel's one task in the film is to deliver the news to just-a-boy hero Shia LaBoeuf: "we're all soldiers now." This, coming only a few moments after Starscream's arrival, is surely the most dispiriting moment in peculiarly dispiriting — which is to say, peculiarly affecting — film.

harry potter and the order of the phoenix/joe strummer: the future is unwrittten

British Prep School Boys Against Evil.

Only one of these movies has Johnny Depp in it, and Depp's dead man's chest is not to be found in Potter's field. Rather, he shows up to testify on behalf of the oldest and deadest member of the Clash. The curious thing is that he was apparently interviewed on the set of one of the Pirates movies. Either that, or he dresses like that all the time: Depp gives the standard issue Strummer-is-god monologue in full Jack Sparrow regalia, down to the double-dangles of the beard, which automatically makes it the most riveting part of the film except for early Clash footage (especially the opening of Joe laying in the vocals for "White Riot") and the brief second or two of Big Audio Dynamite live.

Now that you mention it, that may be the best future for Harry. Though we hear he ends up a wise Hogwarts parent, it would be a bit better if the Pirates trilogy turned out to be the last three episodes of Harry Potter, wherein Harry, now a wizened and amoral pirate, has to decide again and again whether to be good or evil; the appearance of Keith Richards as his dad would explain almost everything.

Also noted: brief shot across the bows of postmodernity. "The Ministry has determined," says the sadistic schoolmarm Dolores Umbridge, "that a theoretical knowledge of spells should be enough to pass your exams." Quoth Harry, "what good is theory when you're actually attacked"? Etc Etc. Dolores is of course from the Ministry, and is en route to deposing good ol' Dumbledore from his post. As with The History Boys, the posing of theoretical or abstract knowledge as proper to those who have achieved and maintain political power is merely bizarre.

In Order of the Phoenix, the training montage is replaced by a teaching montage, in which Harry takes on the task of imparting pragmatic knowledge of magic to the other students. "You're a really good teacher, Harry — I've never been able to stun anything before."

For Joe Strummer, this was less of a problem.

old book review

Paris Journal 1965-1970, by Janet Flanner (Genêt)

Flanner's regular reports for take an interesting measure of the era, and are superb for the quotations they preserve. Her style is itself definitive of the journal for which she reports, The New Yorker. Though she certainly has her own habits of mind and maneuver (seemingly half the entries start by noting that it is the such-and-such anniversary of something-or-other), there is little sense of period prose; the cheery pseudo-objective style veneered in delicate ironies could be from the 1920s but isn't, which continues to be the case at TNY today. She hates traffic; is largely indifferent to popular culture but mad for Jean-Louis Barrault, actor and director of Théâtre de France. She is beguiled by Malraux and bewitched by De Gaulle, in whose direction everything tilts. Even the boilerplate TNY strategy of scoring free-thinking points via easy shots at aristocrats works for the General; more than once she takes pains to point out that the ultra-wealthy have rarely supported Gaullist policies or the man himself, which is at once pillories their blind avarice and their inability to confront reality, while propping up De Gaulle as a progressive figure.

Big Charlie was not without his moments. Though not quoted in Flanner's book, he did manage to suggest in 1967 that Israel "is organizing, on the territories which it has taken, an occupation which cannot work without oppression, repression and expulsions — and if there appears resistance to this, it will in turn be called 'terrorism.'" Well, you know what they say about broken clocks.

Flanner herself is called to politics as frequently by Art as by world events. In 1965 she quotes from Sartre's translation — Algeria still on his mind — of The Trojan Women at the National Popular Theater:

"Make war, mortal imbeciles! Ravage the fields and the cities, and torture the conquered. You will all die of it."

Even in 1968, as the reporter slowly comes to take the Spring events seriously (against her initial and habitual treatment of willful students and factory strikers as particularly French divertissements), she can report only from the perspective of a Generalist — in her Paris, everyone is waiting around to see what De Gaulle will do. And certainly this is not her Paris alone. But her distance from the other city is marked, and that comes painfully clear in the notes filed in this period. Finally, as well, it comes clear that, as much as she worships the General, she is not on his side: longer than any single discussion of the politics, or the events, or even of De Gaulle on television, is her July 11 report on how much the May days will cost the city of Paris to clean up. In high TNY style, she sees the merits and defaults of the aristocrats and workers, of the students and politicians — sees them clearly and without ideology, of which she has no need, being on the side of money itself.

global cities: seeing there

The Global Cities show at the Tate Modern endeavors to take the measure (especially the measure of change) of ten cities: Cairo, Istanbul, Johannesburg, London, LA, Mexico City, Mumbai, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, and Tokyo, by way of understanding something (but what?) about the ongoing process of urbanization, especially insofar as it might describe the general motion of humanity toward the future.

Much of the exhibit presents itself most immediately as "information" rather than traditional "art" (though there are some thrills often considered to fall into the latter category, some unfamiliar Andreas Gursky photos not the least of 'em). The data is organized by five categories taken to be critically instructive about the situations: size, speed, form, density, diversity. Some of these are revelatory, as in the 3D contour maps of urban density. Dude, Cairo is serious.

But for the most part the show isn't about these things. It's about graphicalization of data as a problem — data that in their implications and scope threaten to overwhelm understanding — and about rhetorics of graphicalization. In thus reveals exactly the horizon of "information art," generally sacrificing the sublimity of what's been called elsewhere "the data sublime" on the pyre of comprehensibility. Perhaps this is a virtue, the opposite number to Fredric Jameson's postmodern art: the art which finally fails to articulate the complex space of late capitalism. At the same time, a museum isn't a library, and shouldn't be. Nor should it be a mortuary with a conceptual veneer and an awesome foyer, which is what the Tate is, for the most part.

The question, then, of capturing both the information and the experience of late modernity, of global cap and life in the ultropolis — of the existential conjuncture of collective and monadic — remains open, even as the Tate show closes it rather mildly. This goes again to gesture at the greatness of Gursky (to whom we shall not link as his affect is lost on these little screens), and the fundamental divide between him and Jeff Wall, who has of late supplanted him as the international photo-hero. Wall is brilliantly self-reflexive, a visual theorist of the social structure of visuality. But finally he speaks to the individual looking at (or for) the singular. Gursky's best efforts are exactly toward capturing the conjuncture, the both/and, the singular eye peering after the always-escaping affect of the world system.

everything new is old again

As noted in this article, the city of Paris has instituted a low-cost civic bicycle system. It is unfortunate (though not perhaps surprising) that the one US resident reaches exactly the wrong conclusion: “I’m never taking the subway again,” said a beaming Justin Hill, 47, a real estate broker from Santa Barbara, Calif.

The Paris Metro is, of course, extraordinarily effective for getting around the city, and practically sublime for experiencing the social existence of the city. The bicycles, as one suspects is obvious to most folks who are not Santa Barbara real estate brokers, are meant to decrease private rather than public transportation.

Such is the history of like schemes. Only in very brief passing does the article note the system's beginnings as one of the various "White Plans" of the Amsterdam Provos, promulgators of a radical environmental urbanism that seems now as prophetic as it does hippie-dippie. One notes that among their numbers one finds the artist, the architect, and tract-writer Constant, who made the picture above, from his series New Babylon.

severance

The serial obliteration of a bunch of employees for a defense firm by the ghost remainders of the Balkan troops they've armed is the obvious moralizing structure, but in fact is almost trivial. Rather, this film achieves even the barest intelligibility (even within the flexible near-magical-realism of the horror b-film) via the acceptance of one unquestioned premise: that First World anglos are unable to distinguish between a luxury hotel and a derelict state medical facility.

As long as it's in Eastern Europe.

And this is in fact somewhat interesting, highlighting exactly the peculiar place of Eastern Europe within the core/periphery order of civilization, as it exists in anglo imaginations: at once industrialized and premodern, citizens of a new European order in which state war seems unimaginable — except for the actual presence of internecine conflicts, that thus seem to belong to more distant states and centuries. The cultural anxiety is clear: geographically, it seems like the kind of place that should follow First World "rules," and thus be navigable by, well, us. And yet even in the last two decades since the breakdown of the Warsaw Pact, it isn't.

Would we know what a nice hotel looked like? And might our lack of code-comprehension, our uncertainty about the success of the project which involves remaking the world core in our image, turn out to be fatal?

evolution: five paragraph essay

It seems inevitable he will have to run for President at some point. There's just something so...pure about Michael Bloomberg.

Extraordinary wealth among national leaders has likely always been with us. The collusion of wealth and image mastery with the modern media environment takes an important step with John F. Kennedy's televised debates with Nixon en route to the White House, but reaches a new intensity with the ascent of a media figurehead to the Presidency in 1981. The telltale sign of this ongoing intensification was Ross Perot, who appeared in 1992 as a retrogressive test to determine whether unalloyed cash — money as such — could still bid for the job.

After that signal rebuke to mere money, the new logic was extended even further in the laboratory of Italy's Second Republic, wherein staggering wealth and media power (rather than mere prowess and access) were synthesized in the avian body of Silvio Berlusconi.

But from intensification to purification can be a more subtle leap than we imagine. This is the true achievement of Mike Bloomberg, in whose existence the historic accommodation closes upon itself as both set of facts and as ideological space. Not only does he possess Perotesque wealth beyond the realm of mere tactics, strategic wealth, but his media empire is about money: "Bloomberg L.P. is the largest financial news and data company in the world."

In this sense his herald was Steve Forbes, but Bloomberg achieves a far greater clarity; his company sells information about money largely to financial institutions, and before its founding he worked for Salomon Brothers, the largest issuer/trader of bonds in the country, and the firm that pioneered the shift to entirely derivative-based trading. It is no secret that the position of politics lags several years behind that of economics; surely the time has come for a true son of Spectacular Capital to assume the position.

psycho-alpha-disco-geo

[above: ceiling domes of the Passage Colbert and the Bibliothèque Nationale Richelieu]

Speaking about his grand project, Walter Benjamin wrote:

This piece, which is about the Paris arcades, was begun under a clear sky of cloudless blue, which formed a dome above the foliage but was made dusty by the millions of pages with which the fresh breeze of industriousness, the heavy breath of research, the storm of youthful eagerness and the lazy gust of curiosity had been covered. The painted summer sky which looks down from the arcades into the reading room of the Bibliothèque Nationale, in Paris, has cast its dreamy lightless blanket ceiling over the first-born of its sources of understanding.

The language is Benjamin in high form, mobile and punning (the page/leaf device works far better in French — and is that a pastry joke in there?), a shifting self-reference which at once displays and disguises the connection between one figure and the next, real and painted skies, domes over the reading room or the arcades, a final uncertainty about the final subject of the sentence...here the elusive experience of tracking thought in spiraling flight, the presence of Benjamin's thinking which makes of him a poet.

The painted dome of sky in the library is actually nine domes, designed by Henri Labrouste, hovering at an implausible height above the reading room, which therefore has a sense both of massive volume and extraordinary gravity. Stilted and quiet, it's a bit hard to match up with the commodity-bustle of the arcades. For linguistic source, one searches through time, alights upon this from Berlin Childhood Around 1900: "later in the year, a dusty canopy of leaves brushed up against the wall of the house a thousand times a day, the rustling of the branches initiated me into a knowledge to which I was not yet equal" (from the section titled "Loggias"). The dusty canopy returns decades later as the blanket ceiling, dusty from the million de feuilles, associated still with a knowledge and understanding upon which it weighs.

One must in fact know the territory to see that his reference ("The painted summer sky which looks down from the arcades into the reading room") is not a forced metaphor to link one space to another, succeeding on some figural aptness. Rather it's a metonymy, or even literal: the reading room where he did his work, and the arcades where the flanêurs set about their own projects, are no more linked by concept than by geography. The reading room, one discovers on a visit to the old library, opens directly onto the Galerie Colbert across the narrow Rue Vivienne. A true adjacency; they do indeed peer into each other's faces. The Passages Vivienne and Choiseul are a leaf's blow away.

(Note: space's way of remembering what time forgets.)

games people play

A recent article in Salon details a designer of multi-user online ARG (Alternate Reality Games). As it says, "her overarching goal is to reduce human suffering in the world," and she plans to win a Nobel prize for her contributions. Said contributions include a game called "World Without Oil," sort of a trial run for severe energy crisis described as "a new kind of alternate reality game, one that came equipped with a social conscience."

Now it may seem to you that such a game is as much a disciplining and information-gathering tool as it is some kind of social intervention. You might note as well that its author is employed by the rather conservative Institute for the Future, founded by RAND researchers — and that one of her notable projects was an elaborate promotional scheme for a new video game from Microsoft. Wow, social conscience is fun and well-paying these days.

But such suspicions pale in comparison to the meat of the article:

Already, strategies that McGonigal first spied in the games are appearing in the real world. Talking Points Memo presented a nice demonstration a few months ago, when the Department of Justice released more than 3,000 pages of documents relating to the fired U.S. attorneys. "TPM Needs YOU to Comb Through Thousands of Pages," the blog's editors wrote to its readers. Dozens of people worked deep into the night, reading through documents and posting interesting snippets on the blog....

McGonigal has a long list of plans for ARGs, like running giant international games that could bring together young players from, say, India and Pakistan. She's also talking with scientists at MIT about designing a game that folds in time-consuming scientific tasks. "We could have gamers teach [artificial intelligence] programs language and common knowledge as part of a game," she says. "It's basically applying supercomputing to AI development, which we've never been able to do, because we need people to be the supercomputer."

So, in short, the extra-super-Nobel-worthy achievement of these inventions is, um, ah, to wrangle unpaid labor from people on the pretext that it's a "game." Naturally, we at sugarhigh! could not be more excited, and are also looking forward to the ascent of drywall-hanging as an Olympic sport. Hey, we hear the next Olympics are in Beijing: the time for international competition as a thrilling recompense for cheap labor is now! And has been for a while!

lines du jour

quotha Annie Le Brun,

....Oh you dissatisfied of every kind, don't warm up to the idea of a new mode of violence that you could wear, without danger, in town as in the country, and throw away, after using it, at the bottom of the coffin-beds of some up-to-date individualism, like a Great Inquisitor of desire set free.