jane dark's sugarhigh!

"that annihilated place"

On this, the second anniversary of Katrina, there will be many forms of attention to the specifics of that event, of the current parlous circumstances of New Orleans, or the handling of the ongoing aftermath by George W. Bush, the Republican party, and the institutional racism in which they swim. The destruction of individual lives and communities will be detailed; testimonials from current and former residents will serve as indictments. Specific addresses, that is, will call out specific betrayals.

Little of this commentary will be mistaken. We wish only to add a soupçon of longue durée to the pungent local details. Following Mike Davis's argument in Ecology of Fear (and Paul Virilio's regarding "accidents" in the contemporary world) we would first note the error of considering Katrina's destruction to be either a "natural disaster" or a "singular event." It is instead an amplified example of what is one eventual outcome of elaborate human calculations, most obviously regarding where and how to build dwellings, and how to protect and maintain them against chronic and acute — but predictable — ecological events. Katrina is, one might say, the inverse event of the inevitable destruction when view-lot homes are built, underpinned by the promise of imported water, in wildfire corridors.

Again, it should be stressed that this realization in no way forgives the shameful and murderous response to the disaster. It is merely to try to understand both the event and the response historically. For it is similarly crucial to understand not just the destruction itself but the failure to rebuild New Orleans — the writing off of a major city and its populace — as a historical event, with a structuration that is not accidental or unique.

In 1970, the United States was ruled by a corrupt Republican regime; it is hard to suppose that there was substantially less institutionalized racism at that juncture then now. Nonetheless, it seems likely from here that, had the same event happened then, New Orleans would have been well en route to a rebuilt renaissance by 1972. This is a fairly simple economic deduction: that infrastructural repair and reinvestment would have been a lot easier to come by before the long economic downturn that began in 1973. Or, to rephrase the matter in terms of Giovanni Arrighi's Braudelian analysis of the United States' "long Twentieth century," wherein he holds that the peak of the US cycle of accumulation was 1973: the seemingly singular decision not to rebuild New Orleans is exactly the mark of an empire in decline. It's structural, not singular at all. The abandonment of a great city to time and tide is indeed both symptom and mark of empire on its downhill slide; it bears noting as well that pathetic, delusional and desperate regimes are equally an indicator of this decline.

That New Orleans was the first city to go (or was it Detroit?) means, among other things, that it won't be the last; when "Ozymandias" is written about us, the busted statue will not be found near the desert of ocean lapping over the Delta, but in the lone and level sands of Los Angeles, or New York, or Las Vegas.

boulevard of lost opportunities

Apparently this whole thing is really going to go down without any major news source addressing the resignations with a 72-point banner headline that reads CUT'N'RUN.

stardust

It is surely an act of unfairness to judge graphic novel culture on the basis of a movie, one made from a story that meant to be a novel and was only a graphic novel incidentally.

Still.

One gets the sense that Neil Gaiman's rep as a genius must somehow be a reflection on the subculture that has so elected him. Like the water-cooler boor who becomes the office analyst because he read a Jung book in college, Gaiman seems to have raised himself into the empyrean on the narrow shoulders of Joseph Campbell. Campbell is not a very persuasive starting position in the first place: a sloppy structuralism denuded of whatever force it might have had by spiritualization. Stardust, in film version at least, for all its stylized whimsies, seems like the most mechanical Campbelliana imaginable. There are no characters, only positions, in which squat a rather unfortunate set of actors. The little matrix of the hero narrative has been filled with requisitely "original" figures; it's a movie written entirely in a single page Excel spreadsheet.

To be fair, this may be true of almost every Hollywood movie: that the roles, relations and actions are fixed more remorselessly than in any Russian folktale, and that the pleasures and communications happen in the variations possible within such tight contours (one notes that this account is a mirrorworld of the caricature of Marxian description, wherein the lives of individuals unfold according to the merciless logic of dialectical history, allowed the most limited latitude of action which has an experiential relevance but no determining force on the outcome. Hollywood genre films, one might suggest, are the structure by which this non-determining and intensely limited activity is seen to be nonetheless the entirety of the film's substance, both despite and because of its irrelevance to outcomes).

What grows weary, if not downright aggravating, is when a movie (or graphic novel) wants credit simply for knowing about the structures, varying them scarcely at all — and this, we have been suggesting, is Stardust's calling card. Let's be plain: Joesph Campbell and the like are exactly incisive enough to make dumb people seem more intelligent; it's equally true that they make reasonably intelligent folk seem dumber if they take to parroting them. That Neil Gaiman appears as smarter his cohort...well, this is a verdict of considerable clarity.

This is not to say that the film is entirely without interest. There is something of interest in watching Robert DeNiro go about the grim task of obliterating his own legend, a task that dates at least to Analyze This and has, in contemporary culture, no comparison except perhaps Eddie Vedder (the strikingly unambitious boredom of the last dozen years must be on purpose, right?) By now, DeNiro is merely a poor substitute for other famous and famously stylized character actors in on their own joke (Walken, Hopper, Keitel, etc); at what point will he have effaced his own history enough to return to work?

ratatouille

Wow, Pixar really is the new Hollywood! In the sense that the films are consistently diverting and one must entirely discount the ideological payload and the last fifteen minutes in order not to experience them as exactly the shittiest thing that culture can foist on itself (in the truly insane postlude here, the figure of the intellectual — the critic — ends by confronting his true peasant origins, admitting that intellectual life is a parasitic sham except insofar as it on rare occasion valorizes natural genius sprung from the earth, and then ends by abandoning criticism for the true and authentic peasant life of a tuxedo'd finance entrepreneur).

Up until that moment, we have a different story: the swiftly-becoming-par-for-the-course Brad Bird deal about how true genius sprung from the soil can't be held down, and eventually the world's need for same will trump its need for a confabulated egalité (note to self: is film critique of French Revolution much as Incredibles was critique of cultural revolution?) Bird, perhaps after a thorough reading of Appadurai, seems to believe that the antidote to crass capitalism (the "frozen dinnering" of the deceased great chef's recipes) is, well, uncrass capitalism (see snooty entrepreneur, above).

Which is to say: it doesn't get any more incoherent than this. It's a tangled web.

And on this tangled web, which must be kept in view lest it finally entangle us all, it's a decent few minutes watching a cute animated rat hop about, and seeing how the plot mechanics will be cranked given the particularities of this input. Strictly Mickey Mouse.

good job

So, voting Democratic got you the brutal beating of your remaining Fourth Amendment rights. And let's be clear: this was done because Republicans and Democrats worked together. They are not oppositional parties.

Perhaps you could claim that you didn't see it coming when you voted. Just as you didn't see the Defense of Marriage Act, NAFTA, the end of Welfare. It would be an implausible claim, but you could make it. You could pretend you didn't vote for it, even though you did. You could wail and moan about such craven behavior, even as you ready to go back and submit your bodies for more. You could believe you're not the person making sure this keeps happening, and that change will happen through their behavior, not yours. Abused spouses and kids believe all kinds of stuff.

But it's time to break that model and make the move on up to sadomasochism. Be proud. Own it. The Democratic candidates are now telling you explicitly in words, as they have relentlessly in deeds, that they will not in reality end the war. The violence is all on the table: this is your real chance, killer.

i now pronounce you chuck and larry

There are basically two flavors of Adam Sandler movies:

1) the earlier ones, where certain juvenile male failings maintained into adulthood (aggression, rudeness, stubbornness, bad taste in music) are revealed, when set against calculating maturity, to be virtues that adults should have maintained (passion, forthrightness, loyalty, authenticity); and

2) the later ones, which are exactly the same except, by virtue of a contrived scenario of responsibility (sudden fatherhood, corporate leadership, marriage), the juvenile failings/virtues are revealed to actually be the constituents of adulthood.

This movie is of the latter variety. It also has an incredibly extensive set of mechanics to get the audience to accept without much attention the idea that Adam Sandler is not just desirable but an infinitely magnetic stud. Which pretty much tells us all we need to know about the status of fantasy in the narrative.

sunshine

Sunspotting.

26) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
25) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
24) Paris je t'aime (didn't have Hayden Christenson)
23) Waitress (Cheryl Hines' micromonologues, Nathan Fillion's smile)
22) Severance (theatre was quite clean)
21) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
20) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
19) Ocean's 13 (Soderbergh's knack for shooting Vegas so you can't tell if it's a set or not)
18) Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten ("White Riot" a capella)
17) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
16) Hot Fuzz (lighting in British supermarket)
15) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (pleasure of SRO crowd in huge theatre)
14) Sunshine (Soderbergh's Solaris plus 28 Days Later divided by Nietzsche)
13) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
12) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
11) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
10) The Bourne Ultimatum (Steve on Julia Stiles' role: "in like a magic bullet, out like a cigarette butt")
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)

the bourne ultimatum

...in which Jason Bourne, né David Webb — well-meaning, patriotic, brutally brainwashed into becoming a vacant killing machine — finds himself, late in the movie (the third in a series running since mid-2002, if dates are really needed), asking the lone sympathetic authority figure, Pamela Landy, why she's now helping him.

To which she explains that "this" (black ops, waterboarding, assassinations, etc etc) isn't what she signed off on, initially; now she wants to help him put a stop to it.

Which is to say that Matt Damon plays the American people, as imagined by, oh, The New Republic.. And Joan Allen plays Hillary Clinton as imagined by, oh, Hillary Clinton.

A curiously overrated film; it's not even the summer's most entrancing bit of propaganda, which is all we ever asked for.

25) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
24) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
23) Paris je t'aime (didn't have Hayden Christenson)
22) Waitress (Cheryl Hines' micromonologues, Nathan Fillion's smile)
21) Severance (theatre was quite clean)
20) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
19) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
18) Ocean's 13 (Soderbergh's knack for shooting Vegas so you can't tell if it's a set or not)
17) Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten ("White Riot" a capella)
16) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
15) Hot Fuzz (lighting in British supermarket)
14) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (pleasure of SRO crowd in huge theatre)
13) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
12) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
11) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
10) The Bourne Ultimatum (Steve on Julia Stiles' role: "in like a magic bullet, out like a cigarette butt")
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)

ocean's 13

Out at the airport Oedipa, feeling invisible, eavesdropped on a poker game whose steady loser entered each loss neat and conscientious in a little balance-book decorated inside and out with scrawled post horns. "I'm averaging a 99.375 percent return, fellas," he heard him say. The others, strangers, looked at him, some blank, some annoyed. That's averaging it out, over 23 years, he went on, trying to smile. Always just that little percent on the wrong side of breaking even. Twenty-three years. I'll never get ahead of it. Why don't I quit?" Nobody answering. — The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon

Nobody needing to answer, it being all too plain.

The house always wins, after all; the games are rigged. Not in the sense that they're cheats, but that the rules of the game say that the player will inevitably put in more than he or she gets paid out. Exactitude of bookkeeping isn't needed to clarify this knowledge; it merely reveals the margins. The only way not to lose is to quit.

But of course you can't quit, under threat of starvation and homelessness We're not talking about gambling, after all; that serves as merely as the most transparent metaphor for the structure of surplus value. For that is, finally, the rigged game you can't quit: labor itself, the only necessary rule of which is that it always returns less than you put in.

This and nothing else explains the development of that subgenre of the caper film which specializes in ripping off the casino, for which the modern locus is Bob le flambeur. It gets most directly at the pleasure of the crime whose victim is work itself; one might say that Oceans 11-13 are closer in spirit to Eisenstein's Strike! than they are to The Sting, much less a standard-issue crime film.

Ocean's 13 is generally flabby; for wit, the best it can do is Hollywood stardom metajokes, as when, caper completed, George Clooney suggests that Brad Pitt take some time off between "jobs" to start a family, have a couple kids — and Brad rejoins that Clooney should try to keep the weight off between gigs so he doesn't have to fight his way back into shape each time. That's one way the film has of knowing itself.

But not the only one. In the most ludicrous of the silly subplots, first Casey Affleck and then Scott Caan fall in with — what's that you say? — striking workers at a Mexican factory. The sharpest of ironies is that it turns out that the strikers' demands for annual salary increase — all of them, in total — can be met by what a Clooney makes in 45 minutes. But the automatic sympathy of the heisters for the strikers is the film's only moment of actual thought, on the verge of knowing what it's about.

24) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
23) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
22) Paris je t'aime (didn't have Hayden Christenson)
21) Waitress (Cheryl Hines' micromonologues, Nathan Fillion's smile)
20) Severance (theatre was quite clean)
19) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
18) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
17) Ocean's 13 (Soderbergh's knack for shooting Vegas so you can't tell if it's a set or not)
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)

confidential to manoel de oliveira

Seriously, dude, watch your back.