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.

marie antoinette

It's the cotton candy you bought one humid day by the canal, dissolving so swiftly it seemed to be gone before you put it in your mouth, not a taste, perhaps nothing more than a mood, to be recalled even an hour later not as an experience but as it feels to remember remembering. Insubstantial but not nothing.

Nor is it finally all that different from The Virgin Suicides, which had far less content than it was given credit for, but was a fine accompaniment to its soundtrack by Air: A French Band. It felt like something, vague and slight but something; the vagueness and slightness were its virtues, the affect it meant to convey. Both these films are successful in their mild ambitions, their whiff of burned sugar and xanax: Ambient Cinema Americain.

Still, it remains an open question why one would want to set one's little affect machine in the French court during the (narratively collapsed) years 1770-1789. The affect in question is notable, perhaps, exactly because it isn't anything as decisive as happiness; we are to understand, perhaps again, the weight of St-Just's revolutionary claim that "Happiness is a new idea in Europe" falling backward onto all the estates. But this alone wouldn't justify the simultaneous invocation/suppression of events that have as substantial a claim on world-historical drama as, say, Columbus' voyage or WWII.

Answers involving irony, or the depiction of oblivious nobility (complete with Paris Hiltonesque gestures toward pre-industrial forms of the cult of celebrity) are finally insufficient: even these raise the film to the level of critique, and it's hard to imagine anyone taking the movie thusly after actually seeing it. Thus we are tempted into psychologizing the auteur: the story of the poor little rich girl, born and then again delivered into an incomprehensibly-contoured world of privilege, glamour and public visibility which would offer her anything but real experience and the possibility of being taken seriously, proved finally irresistible to the director, and damn the context.

Surely this remains the least interesting way to decide to understand things. Perhaps, if we are to think about Sofia Coppola in such terms, we would gain more by recalling that, in the language of Antoinette and St-Just as she is spoken now, the phrase for cotton candy translates as "papa's beard." As it often seems, the gender dynamics of the French language are curious; do not the perfectly unrebarbative color, sweetness and texture of cotton candy signify the traditional opposite of the beard's masculinity?

By the same token, Marie Antoinette, a film populated almost entirely by women, makes a sort of complement to Apocalypse Now, populated only by men. Both of them, in extraordinary ways, are films of war without war. The present film might be a sort of fantasia on the most terrifying scene of Apocalypse Now, when Willard, in search of provisions and information, wanders and crawls through a detonating landscape illuminated by a firefight, fireworks, or the inferno. It's sort of beautiful. Over and over, Willard asks where the CO is, who's in charge, where can he find them? Nobody knows the answer; more awesomely, nobody cares. They just shoot their guns in some direction or another. Things explode. It comes down to this:

WILLARD
"Who's the commanding officer here ?"

SOLDIER
"Ain't you ?

It's a vacuum. Not a war any more, lacking sides or orders or strategies. Or it's war without content, just the empty form, the firing of guns and launching of rockets, and no one recognizable to anyone else other than just somehow being part of it, sucked into its howling vortex and the ambition of leaving entirely forgotten.

Marie's Versailles, and her Petit Trianon, are not hell; they're paradisal. But paradise too is contentless; life reduced to form, to which traces of affect still cling. And this is the feeling, finally, of the movie: the feeling of contentlessness, the affect of missing affect, a very different kind of vacuum from the one directed by papa's beard — but a vacuum just the same, a vortex of candied hearts and coronations, war without war, happiness without happiness, the vague and slight paradise before the invention of life.

the dozens ("how many pills?" edition)

12) "Wigwam," Wigwam. The philistine fans who stilll think singers are better if they write their own songs should have loved Betty Boo, who wrote or cowrote all three of her genius neo-disco rap songs 1989-90, "Hey DJ," "Doin' the Do," and "Where Are You Baby?" Even more than Cathy Dennis, a writer was all she was: busted for lip-synching back when that mattered, she slid under the waves. Well, she seems to be back, and half a band along with Blur's bass player? Which is weird? And they're really, um, aimless? And good?

11) "Absinthe," Beth Orton. Her songs all sound the same and even so, there's always one that, if you clip it from the mushy medium of its album, it's killing: My love's the star/you only saw/the traces of, she begins, ending a sentence with a preposition just as we've all been told not to. But when before/is not no more,/it's the em...bers...of, compounding the oddity into a rhyme so awkward it's endearing and sad, the everything that's been lost hanging just there in space, as space, the pointed hole following of, the possessive that possesses nothing anymore.

10) "Promiscuous Girl," Nelly Furtado. This beat was better when it was "Hey Now," by Xzibit, and didn't have the monotonous synth blonk which is either supposed to recall the Neptunes or remind us that, unlike clumsy rapper Xzibit, Nelly Furtado is a clumsy singer. Despite all of this, still the beat of the summer so far. What do they call you when your recycled and muddied loop is better than everyone else's top drawer? They call you Timbaland.

9) "Sugababes vs. Black Eyed Peas vs. Pussycat Dolls vs. Madonna vs. Gorillaz," DJ Smolli. Whoever added the ID3 tags to this MP3 (the things that tell iTunes what the song is called, etc) listed its "Track Number" as 666. They weren't lying.

8) "Leave The Pieces," The Wreckers. Not a complete song, but a perfect one. Given that half the Wreckers are Michelle Branch, preppy princess of teenpop's decadent era, this song might be part of a story that includes Bon Jovi's recent country countdown hit with Sugarland: a story about how used-up rockers are realizing that turning to hip-hop for some teen spirit is a losing gambit, and that the indigenous American genre that might give purveyors of the melodic songform some succor is country'n'western. But there's a different story, or a different way to tell the same story: melodic songwriters are an opportunistic breed who like to pay the rent, and they skitter from genre to genre according to where the hotness is, like lizards in the road. They were writing teenpop in '00 just like they were writing modrock five years earlier and whetever the hell "Since U Been Gone" is five years later. And when they can't figure out where to go to soak up the sun, well, for those who love melody and close harmony and verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus, it is always sunny on the roads of Nashville.

7) "Love In Action," Todd Rundgren. From 1978, the Nazz-arene's punkest rock. I'm sure some purist guy was annnoyed for the three-eigths of a second it took him to dismiss this. Of all the possible pities in this world: that guy's life.

6) "Bossy," Kelis. After "Got Your Money," Caught Out There," "Good Thing," "Young, Fresh 'N New," "Milkshake," and now "Bossy" with its springy southern minimalism, after seven years of this, we remain unsure what Kelis is. Which is a good start toward expressing how odd, sui generis, and great she can be.

5) "Life Ain't Always Beautiful," Gary Allen. One of those songs that starts out almost a cappella and you wish it would stay that way, not just because the instrumental production is gloppy and dull, but because even if it weren't, it couldn't possibly rise up to meet the grain of Allen's voice, surely the most riveting voice on the radio, entirely after-the-catastrophe and holding two contradictory beliefs in pure tension: that melody is all that's left to us now, and that it won't help. He pours negative capability as easy as a wake-up whisky.

4) The Greatest, Cat Power. Good company all the way through; the great benefit of adding that Memphis band isn't so much the Stax-meets-Xanax charm, but that the gang pulls Ms. Power, dragging her feet all the way, toward good ol' fashioned melody. However fun it was when she sucked the life out of those classic choons (answer: not as fun as Nouvelle Vague), this is funner, and sometimes there's even something to do besides feel good about feeling bad: you can tap your foot.

3) "Summertime," Kenny Chesney. What isn't detestable about Kenny Chesney? Something in otherwise-rote new single "Summertime." Not the changes, arrangement, or the spirit — of the 73,000 dudely songs about how excellent summertime is, and here we're only counting the ones with chicks in cutoffs, this one is so middle-of-the-pack it's all we can do pick it out of the crowd before we wander off in search of last summer's Jessica Andrews album. But someone had a good idea. In the quest for the mot juste, the telling detail, the song offers a ride to the, natch, swimming hole,

Two bare feet on the dashboard
Young love and an old Ford
Cheap shades and a tattoo
And a Yoo-Hoo bottle on the floorboard

The rhyme scheme is nifty enough, but the lucre's in that stupid brand name, a little container of Americana which, because of where it falls in the uneven (and thus strangely accented) rhyme scheme, offers Kenny the chance to yodel — and just for a second, surely the greatest second of Kenny Chesney's miserable artistic career, we can be listening to him and thinking about Jimmy Rodgers in heaven, about traditions and curiosities and the great tidal strangeness pulling away at the roots of even the newest Nashville.

2) "Sunset Strip," Courtney Love. While such cynicism isn't misplaced, it's actually not in Love's personal or economic interests to fuck up so badly; that's the difference between her and comrade fuck-up Danny Bonaduce, who has nothing better to do. What's compelling about both isn't just the car-crash of it all, but the relief from the relentless, numbing image-management that has become the dominant fact of fame, and made all the pop arts sub-categories of abstract celebrity. Danny Bonaduce's best line in all of Breaking Bonaduce: "I take enough pills to get full." It understands exactly what's missing from all the stage-managed consumption-destruction of Real Hollywood Stories, much less from the pieties of Bono and Thom Yorke: the human appetites themselves. Courtney Love exists to remind us that they survive, for all their horror and grossness, and how much we miss them within the beautiful purring airless flattened space of the spectacle. You can still hear them in this song from a couple years ago, her own version of Danny Partridge's verdict on himself. She still has appetites stronger than her publicist's, which makes her the the most rock of anyone still (barely) standing, and this ditty of the appetites and Hollywood still a candidate for the greatest song ever.

1) "Do It To It," Cherish feat. Youngbloodz. The video is offputting because the four members, some of whom are surely in their thirties, scheme to have a pajama party after their parents have left town. But this video, wherein the ladies and their choreographer endeavor to explain the nuances of ATL snap-dancing, makes up for it and then some. There will always be room in our hearts for minimal snap'n'b which wants only to be your dance soundtrack, and even suggests which dances you should be doing, plus casual pointers. "Le Freak" + "The Hustle" + "Lean Back" - most of the moustaches and any corrupting artfulness. Reason to live.