jane dark's sugarhigh!

quotables

"...dangerous toys from Communist China..." threatens the comically-named Kitty Pilgrim on CNN, encoding in a single phrase the nation's transparent shuddering delight that the Cold War is still on! — but now without any political dimension whatsoever — to be fought entirely on the terrain of the commodity...

more teaser, less firecat

As much as we love Bobby Christgau and believe him to be not just decent but heroic, Latifah's had it up there with "democratic vitality." We assume he is not referring to any recent candidate's debates, and means something about the energetic breadth of the year's music. We find ourselves curious as to what traits distinguish this empirical phenomenon as "democratic vitality," rather than, say, "the current regime of niche marketing."

And voting Kala numero uno at the same time? The cognitive dissonance could just kill a man. Stay tuned for our year-end note...

best law & order episode ever

Pakistan Police Attack Lawyers at Protest

While trying to ignore the slavering banalities of the sovereignty-theory gang (hey look! that obvious thing we keep pointing out as if it were a revelation: still true!), one notes that this could not get any more embarrassing for the administration, given that Pakistan is now distinctly less democratic than Iran.

Moreover Musharraf has now demonstrably outstripped the supposed sins of Hugo Chavez, meaning that if the U.S. doesn't take action againt Pakistan, there will be no justification for opposing Venezuelan socialism. Which means, one imagines, that anti-Chavez activity will have to be even more covert. Seriously, he may be the big loser of this martial law, given that the Allende bullet now seems like the only workable solution for capitalismpanik.

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.

"no"

Of all the films that end in horror, only this can compare to Dirty Mary Crazy Larry: a ten-minute short about a person being forced to return to work by the very union reps and friends she believed had promised something else entirely. A French short (here with annoying German subtitles), it's called in English, Return to Work at the Wonder Factory, 10 June '68.

a specter is haunting china

reposted from marxists.org

MIA faces very significant challenges

In early November we came under sustained denial of service attack from Internet hosts in China attempting to exploit a misconfiguration in our server's operating system. The nature and origin of the attack, our previous history with the PRC, and the experience of others suggest that this maybe politically motivated and directed by the Chinese government. Protecting ourselves necessitated rebuilding part of the kernel and rebooting the system remotely. The failure of the system to properly boot into the new kernel caused a prolonged outage as we scrambled to find someone with the necessary access to get the system back into the previous configuration.

Details of the attackers origins [this link is now mysteriously dead — sugarhigh!]

While the attacks continued and greatly degraded MIA performance, we were understandably cautious about rebuilding the kernel and trying again. On January 15, the server became unresponsive and we asked for it to be remotely rebooted, taking the opportunity to bring it up with the new kernel.

While this alleviated the previous issue, it seems to have uncovered another, more serious, problem with our CPU that causes random errors (machine check exceptions) and cause the system to reboot.

Each time the system reboots, it causes our RAID storage system to reinitialize and rebuild, a lengthy process that severely degrades performance. To make matters worse, the redundant disk in the array seems to be failing.

As if that weren't bad enough, while attempting to make arrangements to buy a new server, we learned that our collocation facility will be closing on February 1, leaving MIA literally homeless.

At the moment, our redundant disk is back online and we are rebuilding the array to protect against data loss on the server. We also have offsite backups of all MIA content should the worst come to pass. We are furiously searching for new hosting space, but our data transfer needs (approximately 1.3TB a month) make this a very difficult choice compared with our previous non-profit host.

The bottom line: there is a significant probability that we will not be able to find and deploy an acceptable solution in time to meet the February 1 lights-out date. This means that the MIA will be off the air. We will make every attempt to bridge the gap with the help of our dedicated mirror operators though we may need to stop serving some of our more "expensive" content such as MP3s and PDFs. There is also a chance that our ultimate solution may require us to make a long-term evaluation of the type of content we serve and make things like PDFs available via alternate distribution channels (e.g. BitTorrent). However, despite our recent litany of seemingly fatal problems, the MIA remains a strong organization with a wealth of content, committed to providing the premiere electronic library of Marxist writings. Despite the political, technical, or economic pressures, rest assured that we will find a way to keep these works available to the world.

living all over me

The University of Iowa Virtual Soldier Research (VSR) Program
will be holding its first annual public lecture at the Shambaugh
Auditorium of The University of Iowa Main Library on Wednesday,
January 24, 2007, at 4:00 p.m. The public is invited.

The lecture will showcase the research developments and achievements
of the group, highlighting areas such as predictive dynamics, hand
modeling, posture and motion prediction, and muscle and physiology modeling.

VSR is an independent program within the Center for Computer-Aided
Design of the College of Engineering at The University of Iowa. VSR
conducts research aimed at creating human-like figures in physics-
based environments that are interactive and intelligent. These humans
can predict postures and motions and execute tasks.

VSR has successfully attracted significant external funding to Iowa
and has created a digital human called SantosTM, who possesses
accurate biomechanical and physiological characteristics that enable
him to predict motion and execute tasks unaided.

The lecture will demonstrate and explain the following:

- The application of Santos in the automotive, earth-moving
equipment, military, ergonomics, and safety fields
- Research progress in:
- leveraging game technology for science
- 3D human modeling
- real-time interactive human anatomy
- prediction of realistic human postures
- virtual reality in engineering
- the physics of predicting dynamic motion
- the ergonomic advantage of using human models
- How to partner with and help the program

We look forward to your participation in what will be an exciting and
engaging lecture.

For more information, please visit
http://www.digital-humans.org

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.”¶

no love is not dead

"Ideological purity" is indeed an impossible fantasy. But not a fantasy of some radical leftist position; rather, it's a fantasy that aligns the liberal-progressive with the corporate-conservative — appearing not as a demand, but as a twin foreclosure of thinking. One the one hand, it's longhand for "Stalinism," generalized such that the insult can be used to smear anyone who doesn't accept the supposed choices on offer from the current order. On the other, it's the shorthand of the whisper campaign concerning the lack of this supposed ideological purity, a negative seduction which always runs something like, you're complicit too, we saw working to pay your rent, we saw you buying a Coke, you're not so pure are you, nobody likes a hypocrite so why don't you just accept it and accept the supposed choices on offer from the current order? The fact that some turn this accusation against themselves as a justification of their activities proves nothing other than the proposition that Althusser really had a point when he wrote of the "Ideological State Apparatus."

In its very form, it proposes a Manichaean worldview of the pure/impure — stacked against the former, who are inevitably elites, tyrants, messianic crackpots, and/or hypocrites. However, even if it leaves these suggestions at the level of the implicit, it negotiates the binary via a second binary of impractical/pragmatic, with its rhetoric about striving for possible gains, actual alleviation of suffering, along with the usual apologetic promises to change things from the inside. It's the boilerplate, that is to say, that valorizes the idea of "the lesser of two evils," and proposes its apparent content.

Ironically, such Manichaean thought is at great hazard of finding itself quite contentless. If one first accepts the terms of the decision as being between "two evils" (having foreclosed the only remaining possibility, that of "ideological purity"); and if one will always choose "the lesser" regardless of the content of that position (regardless, that is to say, of its avowed stance on, e.g., military spending, universal health care, or capitalism); then the decision turns out to be purely formal. It finds itself on a slippery slope without any method of slowing its descent; there's no mechanism for knowing when one should stop preferring the lesser of two evils, and think about the entire system of choice in some different way.

An unceasing preference for the lesser of two evils, and for the worldview in which that seems like an accurate description of the choices, would mean that, for example, one would support the Vichy government, insofar as they would be likely to treat the population better than the National Socialists would, even if many concessions would have to be made. Indeed, this was how the case was presented, and it was persuasive to many.

History, alas, has judged these persons harshly: "collaborator" is the term that springs to mind. This is not by way of hurling further invective at the current avatars of "the lesser of two evils," but rather of noting that history is rather clear in showing more than two choices on offer. There were at least three: Nazi occupation, Vichy collaboration, or resistance. History suggests that, as a general principle, there are at least three choices; there is no crypto-ethical binary. History teaches as well that it requires no ideological purity, nor claim of same, to make the third (or any other) choice; that such choices are humanly (if not ideologically) open to everyone; and that such choices might be seen as supremely pragmatic. They require no test of purity at all, but the merely posing of the question, What would refusal look like, what would negation look like in this intolerable situation?

No matter how gracefully one might distinguish that political constellation from our current conjuncture, this final question presents itself with no less force.

It is perhaps also to-the-occasion to point out that every member of the resistance died (or will die all too soon), just like every Vichy sympathizer, and every Nazi. This includes the poets. Some are buried in Père Lachaise cemetery, or Montparnasse; some are not. Some are remembered; some are not. These are some poets who did not choose the lesser of two evils: Philippe Soupault was imprisoned and Breton fled; Rene Char, Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon, and Robert Desnos fought and wrote in the resistance.

No, love is not dead in this heart and in these eyes and in this mouth

hereby announcing the opening of its own requiem.

Listen, I've had it with picturesqueness, colorfulness, and charm.

Love's what I love, its tenderness and its cruelty.

Still, the one whom I love has but one name and form.

Everything's transcient. Mouths may plaster themselves against my mouth

But still, the one whom I love has but one name and form.

And if some day you happen to think of it

Oh you, exact form and name of my love,

Some day, on the seas between America and Europe,

When the last ray of sunlight is flashing off the surface of the tossing waves,

or on a stormy night beneath a tree in the country, or in a speeding car,

One spring morning on the Boulevard Malesherbes,

Or on some rainy day

At dawn just before getting into bed,

Tell yourself, I insist of your innermost soul, that I loved you more than any

other man did, and that it's a shame that you didn't realize it.

But tell yourself, too, that there's nothing to regret: long before me Ronsard and

Baudelaire sang of the sorrows of old women and thoroughly dead

women who despised even the purest love.

But as for you, when you die,

You'll still remain both beautiful and desirable.

I may already be dead by then but incorporated in your timeless and immortal body, in your incomparable

image present forever among the wonders of human life and eternity, on the other hand

should I outlive you

Your voice and its intonations, your gaze and its radiance,

The fragrance of you and of your hair and many, many other things about you,

will still go on living in me

Yes in me, a poet who's neither Ronsard nor Baudelaire,

Just Robert Desnos who, for having known you and loved you so well

Have become their equal.

Just me, Robert Desnos who except for loving you, doesn't want to be remembered for doing anything else

he's ever done while walking the surface of this miserable, despicable earth.

weltsystemangst

Monday is a great day of the week to be living in China. There's something nicely easygoing about it. You've got at least a good 13 hours on the United States; you can catch up on work, fill people's inboxes for their Monday morning, and feel generally virtuous about being so productive when back at home they're still lazing around at the end of a Sunday.

This remarkable passage begins a Slate "diary" by Deborah Fallows, written from Shanghai. The weeklong travel journal takes as its opening gambit the consideration of how it feels to be a good worker. It might be understood as a sort of meditation of a maxim of Adorno's — "Every Sunday is too little Sunday" — but with the values reversed. Adorno wrote:

The consciousness of the unfreedom of all existence, which the pressure of the demands of commerce, and thus unfreedom itself, does not allow to appear, emerges first in the intermezzo of freedom. The nostalgie du dimanche is not a longing for the working week, but for the state of being emancipated from it; Sunday fails to satisfy, not because it is a day off work, but because its own promise is felt directly as unfulfilled; like the English one, every Sunday is too little Sunday. The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.

It turns out that, in Shanghai, Sundays are satisfying — exactly because every Sunday is too much Sunday, and allows one better to keep up with (and, for a phantasmal moment, race ahead of) "the pressure of the demands of commerce." (Here we can't help but recall the Soviet science fiction novel translated as Monday Begins on Saturday).

The caricature of Marxist lit-crit's discoveries — that all writing these days (a couple centuries worth of days) is in some way about work — seems no longer caricatural, but merely quaint: why bother reading for the drama of labor, as opposed to, say, the emotional life of the characters, when these have become one and the same? Moreover, given that this confluence has not just perfected itself but fled the subtext for the text — rendering the concept of, say "the political unconscious" all but moot — why do we need literary criticism at all, anymore? In this passage we find an achieved position of such ideological purity that ideological analysis can be retired.

If any curiosity survives in Fallows' text, it's the seeming lack of specificity. After all, the diary is presumably somehow about Shanghai, cosmopolitan center of the new China. For the purposes of her unfolding of the conditions of her sense of wellbeing, it would seem that any spot in the time zone would do: Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Perth. The solution to this polite puzzle comes swiftly; the above-quoted passage is merely the first half of the first paragraph of the first day's report. It completes itself thus:

But as the end of the day approaches, and no one in the United States is awake yet, a bit of anxiety can set it. The camp counselor in me wants to cry out, "OK, gang, up and at 'em! There are 1.3 billion Chinese who are already a day ahead of you!"

If there is any figure of speech in the entire paragraph, it's the term, "camp counselor." For surely she means foreman, or manager, or factory whistle. But of course she can name everything but her specific job; to do that would be to see it as something limited, something she occasionally is not.

That one displacement aside, the motion of the thinking remains extraordinarily clear about its location. For not only does she identify herself and her happiness perfectly with her fate as pure labor (and isn't happiness, these days, always based on the success of that identification?), but she swiftly moves to identify her specific labor with its general place within, and contribution to, the world economy.

And this is the truly revelatory move — revelatory not in the least, again, because of how consciously and unproblematically it happens. This is why the report comes from China, and it's not simply nationalism in some abstract, patriotic form. One finds oneself in Shanghai, the laboratory and showroom floor of China's race toward becoming the leading regime of accumulation on the face of the globe. Every detail of Shanghai speaks of it, of the race forward; the pockets within the city of of foot-dragging tradition, in their charming difference, speak with equal force of the same race. These details, the sensuous here and now of it, serve to orient you in Shanghai no more and or less than they orient you to your place in the space of flows, the world economy. This is what it means to be a "traveler." To be a world citizen, albeit a world citizen of the managerial class, tied to the currency of the United States.

The anxiety of having to pay the rent, having to show up for work on Monday, is now only a start. There is a new anxiety into which that anxiety now hemorrhages. It's no longer enough to find relief in being always at work; that sense fades over the long Sunday. One must place that work and experience its sufficiency within the space of flows, within the interlocking, competing and colluding organizations of interstatal politics and transnational capital. And this knowledge comes with a price: weltsystemangst, "world system anxiety."

It would not be unreasonable to suggest that this sensation, this happiness that is always melting and resolving itself into weltsystemangst, is an echo of 2001, of the hole punched in the United States' horizon of sight so that it must look uneasily across the map — a view mostly banished after 1989. Indeed, Deborah Fallows' motion from "nicely easygoing" to "a bit of anxiety" begins to narrate something like weltsystemaffekt from the position of the United States over the years 1989-present, ending in this new feeling, this tomorrow-yesterday, this new Sunday of the world.

neoliberalismo: some questions

A suggestive essay in the current NLR regarding a recent national election, including an incidental list ways in which subjects of other countries (in this case Mexico) express their conclusion that voting might not achieve the changes they believe in. When was the last time you blocked a road? Seized a plaza?

Meanwhile, there's also an efficient summary of what it means to be as well a subject of the United States, even when one is a Mexican citizen, as in the case of

...the North American Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada, signed in 1993. The treaty eliminated duties on a broad range of us goods, and opened Mexico’s markets to foreign products, ownership and, notably, agribusiness—destroying Mexican small farmers, who could not compete with heavily subsidized American crops. The exodus from rural areas grew not only toward the United States, but also to Mexico City and the surrounding metropolitan area, to the Caribbean coast of Quintana Roo and other places where a living could be eked out through construction work or subsistence trade in the informal economy. In the northern border regions, two million of the unemployed found precarious, badly paid work in the maquiladoras, where transnational corporations profited from NAFTA's lax labour provisions and climate of corporate impunity.

How does your voting practice relate to this history?

nostalgia of the infinite

...or an archaeology of the future?

light breaking open with rock

Charité hospital: how the name creates the seeming that Germans must borrow a word for charity. Passed a parade in the street there? No, a manifestation: Ver.di, marching in solidarity with a strike (streik) at Charité Hospital. At the front, policement clearing the street. Behind them, the march leaders casting a martial tune through the PA: AC/DC, “Jailbreak.”

too much too little

the dozens: bombs over blogdad

Thirteen songs worth stealing. Sort of.

12) Nâdiya, "Tous ces mots." In the summer of 2003, the French-Algerian chanteuse had a disco-rap hit,"Et c'est parti," of such starts-with-a-boxing-bell, string stabs'n'horn blares, "na-na-na," thumping obviousness that it took days to notice, with gathering amazement, its subtlety. "Et c'est parti," it begins, a French stock phrase meaning "And here we go," but also sounding suspiciously like a stock bit of oldschool, "Hey, say party!" Next came "pour le show," a cunning, almost-unnoticeable slip into franglish, and then "le stade est chaud," which translates as "the place is hot," but enunciated so as to be identical to "let's start the show," and really the whole opening gambit is just unbelievable, Zukofsky's Catullus to a disco beat. The big hit from her new album, a piece of glam-soul bombast called "Roc," is negligible junk in comparison, but her other 2006 single, "Tous ces mots," almost holds its own. The musical bed is perversely, energetically insipid, with "Separate Ways" synths, revving engines 'n' squealing tires, a metronomic rhythm guitar going nowhere fast. But somehow she supplies the song with an implausible urgency, racing through the franglish ("I don't wanna go — contre le macadam," she says, liquidly triangulating her markets) with athletic exuberance, like a sprinter — which, oddly enough, she once was, the French national champion at 16.

11) U.S. Air Force, "Bombs over Baghdad." Hate the war but love the warriors. Mention with great frequency that poverty is, in effect, a stealth draft. But remember also that all the soldiers at the beginning of this graymarket promo clip for death take equal part in the charming call'n'response that opens this salute. Meanwhile, the video is, at the same time, like a joke about how much traction there is in denying the political, as Andre 3000 did about this song in 2000: "That’s where the title came from, like really, like "Don’t beat around the bush.” Our first single, we were trying to let people know we weren’t playing around at all. That’s what it meant.” Good luck with that.

10) Dixie Chicks, "The Long Way Around." The first single "Not Ready To Make Nice" (fifth-best song on the album) is "Heart of Gold" with an extra minor thrown down the shaft. "The Long Way Around," on the other hand (second-best song after "Lubbock or Leave It"), is like a gradeschool primer about the content of form: Look! Their friends from high school, with their circumscribed lives, get two dull chords repeated claustrophobically. Observe! How the introduction of the "I" is accompanied by a new minor chord, to indicate both difference and said difference's difficulties. Notice! How the chorus, with its story of departure and rambling freedom, passes through the minor chord to arrive at the heretofore withheld major, inhabiting for the first time the breadth of the key, giving the complete and spacious feeling of the "long way around." See also! The simplest ideas still work, at least a little.

9) Field Mob feat. Ciara, "So What." "So what" indeed. A track of such indifference that it reads like an experiment in how little you can do and still have an appealing song, which is perhaps a way of saying that Jazze Pha is still in the zone even when he's sleeping, and that Ciara, who so recently still seemed like a sort of convenience, Jazze's Aaliyah without the emotional reserves, now seems like the queen of all summer afternoons for the foreseeable future.

8) Jessica Simpson, "A Public Affair." A is for Autotune, B is for Bubbly Bassline, C is for Chic guitars; Daisy Dukes makes it work via the Janet Jackson retreat into breathy undersinging™, letting the machines and studio whizzes do the work at which they excel, without undo interference. Much has been made of the, er, similarities to "Holiday"; if we're on the subject of genius Eighties art-disco delivered by less-than-gifted vocalists, we hear those opening bells and think ABC just the same — not the alphabet, the band. Shoot that poison arrow, it'll be so nice! Trevor Horn, Nile Rodgers, fifteen minutes and an eight-ball; you'll gonna get something like this, and like it.

7) Big & Rich, "8th of November." This surprisingly standard-issue tragic survivor's story, marred by cliché ("like a dark evil cloud, 1200 came down on him and 29 more") still has some curious resonances among Vietnam veteran tunes. It's far more stately than precursor "Still In Saigon," Charlie Daniels' least likeable hit. The guitars' elegiac backward skirl invokes a quite different song to which this is a sort of pendant, "Copperhead Road" (the death knell of the New Traditionalist's heroic period, wherein Steve Earle's memory-moored vet has returned home to be a paranoid pot-grower, a taking-up of the family's anti-authroitarian moonshining tradition that is at the same time grimly memorial of his training so recently sponsored by those same authorities — "I learned a thing or two from Charlie doncha know; you better stay away from Copperhead Road"). But amidst all this history, certain details of "8th of November" keep tugging at stray brainstrings: the funereal/anniversarial ballad form, the date, the number 29. And these finally to the formal heart of the matter: it's a remake of a song set exactly a decade and two days later. As one memorial website summarizes it, "November 10, 1975. The Edmund Fitzgerald — 29 lost." Huh. History's just so...weird.

6) Jake Owen, "Yee Haw." "You take yer alright, you take yer can't wait, a lot of bring it on, and some damn straight, you mix it all up with some down home Southern drawl, y'all, you got yer yee-haw. "

5) Fergie, "London Bridge." London calling, speak the slang now. O Ambivalence of culture! Will you never end? Despite the numerous allusions — Fifty's rhythmic "I don't give a fuck"; Nelly et al's "urra" for "every"; hints of Masta Ace and Luke Skyywalker — as a total event, this song is part and parcel a feckless, avaricious theft of "Galang," from the staticky drum on down to that chorus sounding like the microphone's gloved in aluminum foil, each effect planed down and rounded off, forsaking the original's sinister fuzz and unexplained paranoia ("who the hell is hunting you, in their BMW?") for the vacuities of "I'm such a lady but I'm dancing like a — ." Just compare this song's "londy-londy-londeee" to that song's "get down get down get down," or any number of other jacked vocal rhythms and intonations simulated and dragged toward the middle of the dial by the ineluctable gravity of a million dollar bills. From the perspective of "Galang," this song is an abomination, a case study in the betrayal of spirit. From the perspective of "London Bridge," well, even a pale shadow of a shadow of a copy of a shadow is better than anything we might have suspected Fergie capable of. From a neutral perspective, this exchange is just a sort of education, the best one yet, in what happens — sonically, socially — when a sui generis song is recuperated into the SoundScan sweet spot. Lesson: the neutral perspective is fucked.

5) Tom Petty, "Square One." Unregenerate — is that the word? Unreconstructed? When Neil Young dies, those stations that play the contemporary form of what will later be classic rock will be left with a playlist of nothing but Tom Petty. Worse things could happen.

4) Julia Roberts," Men and Mascara," and Ghostface Killa, "9 Milli Bothers." There are tropes and there are tropes. Among the many reasons to love country and rap — the two living indigenous forms of pop music — is that their rhetorical tropework is hot to death, like, every day. In Julia Roberts' case, it's syllepsis: "men and mascara always run," ends each chorus, so perfectly inevitable in its form that it expresses the inevitability of its formulation utterly without flourish, the kind of compressed formula that made this country great. Ghostface, on the other hand,prefers antonomasia, the fancy kind always beloved by the Wu, that makes a noun of the last name and thusly, an adjective of first: "that nigga jumped up and did the Damon Dash."

3) Tori Amos, "Ode to my Clothes." Though their senses of both narrative drive and melody are markedly distinct, Tori's ability to commit to the autobiographical mode without telegraphing whether or not it’s a fiction is matched only by John Darnielle. Maybe it’s the god thing, maybe god is in the details. It's just so goddamned poignant that she has that relationship with her piano, as if only things that go always with her can really know shit, can parse the levels of intimacy and invention, and it's telling how in Tori's world things themselves seem always on the verge of abandoning their muteness and letting spill the secret knowledge they've been soaking up like a leather chair stores body heat, hence this unreleased-until-September song: My clothes, nobody knows things like my clothes, my telephone life in the back of my jeans, so elegiac and funny and oh yeah, did we mention that "Ode to my Clothes" is also the name of a poem by William Schwenk Gilbert from 1865, one of the so-called "Bab Ballads," six years before he met his Sullivan.

2) E-40, "Muscle Cars." NASCAR for black people. At any given moment, hip-hop has a dominant tempo, a slow margin and a fast margin. The dominant tempo is where the money is, tautologically; the slow tempo is usually where the cult-cred goes to die, because it's usually sinister and introspective and has the space to elaborate gritty narratives, and wise heads love that shit. And then there is the fast margin, which is where hip-hop goes to dance, and because it's party music, it gets less dap from the credentialed. For the moment, Kanye squats in the middle of the road; Houston bobs its head in the slow margin. Over in the fast margin, hyphy is the best music in the world right now. The folks who complain this album isn't hyphy all the way to the bottom are right; 40 Water's not a pure product of the movement, which is formed by a bunch of kids half his age, standing on the shoulders of giants. 40's one of those giants, and for a handful of tracks here he stands on the shoulders of the kids — the child is father to the man, indeed — so monumental you can see him from eleven states away.

1) Nâdiya, "El Hamdoulilah." It turns out that, behind the bluster and guest rappers, Nâdiya's best at perfectly low-key and lovely piano ballads that mix French and a drop of English with Islamic religious interjections (you don't get that a lot in the Hot 100), including a lightly-swung track called "Inch'allah," and this one, our favorite ballad of the year so far, with Elton John changes and a title phrase that's used on many occasions, including that of waking up.

de gustibus

From a letter of James Schuyler to Frank O'Hara, dated Rome, Italy, 11/7/54:

I've become a moviegoer again, if not a bug or fan; it's like being an opium addict without getting any lift. Let's see, I've seen: Witness to Murder, Mogambo, Ulisee (I saw it in Italian, so that's what I call it), de Sica's dud, Stazione Termini, On the Waterfront, From Here to...and a couple of Italian ones I won't go into. Not to put a fine point on it, I thought them all hell; though many featured nice-lookers caught looking their best.

for rod smith

What if the greatest song ever was a yé-yé knockoff of "Get Off Of My Cloud" written by Serge Gainsbourg for Anna Karina to perform in a made-for-tv movie in 1967?

[It's not. The greatest song ever is Courtney Love singing "Roadrunner/Ballad of Dorothy Parker"]

review image below, then guess world's top two arms exporters

there's a brand new dance

Craig S. Smith, who seems to head the Paris bureau of The New York Times, has proven over the last year to have a mere few journalistic failings; consider the niceties on display in his account of the national reaction to Zidane's coup-de-boule:

PARIS, Monday, July 10 — In the end there was bewilderment, embarrassment and, among some, a sense of betrayal as the national party planned to celebrate France's World Cup victory and a glorious end to the career of France's star player fizzled in a moment of frayed nerves.

France could have used a triumph to boost the national spirit, flagging after a year of social unrest and political scandals. It could have used an unblemished hero, too.

Instead, Zinédine Zidane, the team's star and captain, ended his World Cup performance with an ignominious moment of pique that got him ejected from the game. It was his last game before he retires from international competition.

It is, one supposes, a reasonable attempt to fashion a fabric of national life from the pattern of a single incident (of a piece with the analogical thinking which seems to take on the order of an imperative for the Times, especially in the Op-Ed section); alas, pull on a thread and the whole thing unravels.

First, it is worth noting that "bewilderment and embarassment" do not seem to be the foremost feelings, much less universal ones, here in France. "Curiosity"? Certainly — and its mother, amazement. But if there is an accompanying affect (and there are many), unregistrable delight is probably closer to the truth. When Zidane gave a cable-tv press conference on the 12th, people filled the bars and crowded outside in the streets trying to watch through windows. Zidane soccer jerseys are exhausted at every store — and every store had been stocking more than many.

If Zidane seemed the most famous man in the world after the 1998 World Cup victory, he has eclipsed that now, and not in the form of a villain. He has made the true leap from sport celebrity to folk hero. It's less than a week since Zidane knocked down Materazzi with a single head-butt, and there is already a song about it: "Coup de boule," it's called, by Lipszyc and Lascombes. The title seems to continue, "Zidane il a tapé." It comes with a dance, naturally (one for which you will not require much instruction).

It's too early to measure, but it seems to be the most popular song in the country. It has already entered the charts as a ringtone, and as of this writing has almost certainly reached Number One; the song to follow. This is not exactly what "embarrassment" looks like.

How could Smith have gotten it so wrong? His first failing, a minor one for a reporter, is that he seemingly hasn't actually spoken with actual people — certainly not people in bars, French-Algerians, Marseillaises, immigrants, soccer fans, or anyone with whom we've had any occasion to make chat in the last week (for here there is only one topic, or was, until the bombing of Beirut). Nor, would it seem, has Smith listened to the radio or watched much television. Well, he's merely a journalist after all; he's not Superman.

As a result, Smith finds himself a bit like a reporter in Baghdad's Green Zone, insisting that the war's going well. His general observations about the state of things, though you wouldn't know it from what's written, turn out to be true for a rather small group of people, in a rather fortified area.

This analogy, while crude, clarifies some oddities in his attempts to annex Zidane's singular act to the condition of the national psyche (already an absurdity, a total misunderstanding of exactly what was beautiful about the non-institutional because entirely non-strategic act). Here's the passage immediately following Smith's lede above:

It seemed almost metaphorical for a country that, despite its successes, has been paralyzed by its recent failures. They began with last year's rejection of the referendum on a proposed constitution for Europe [....]

Then came last fall's outbreak of urban violence, which exposed the failures of the country's egalitarian ideals. Finally, the government foundered over a modest attempt to loosen labor regulations. Violence briefly surged again.

"Its recent failures" — but failures for whom, exactly? One suspects that last year's Non vote on joining the European constitution was a a success for some; perhaps the national majority that voted Non? Similarly, this spring's overturning of the CPE might not be considered a failure by the millions who marched, blockaded, and struck against the pro-business measure? As one slogan had it, Travailleurs, étudiants, chômeurs, sans-papiers— tous précaires, tous solidaires! "Workers, students, unemployed, illegals — all precarious, all in solidarity." Well, perhaps not the most elegant slogan; however, a useful list of folks with whom reporter Smith has not spoken, who are excluded from his national psyche.

This finally, is what links the embarrassment over Zidane and the year's "failures": they exist only for a small and perhaps imaginary minority. We can imagine it via all the persons this population does not include, as mentioned above: they are white liberal bourgeoises, sitting in their étage noble apartments and fretting about the decline of civilization, believing all the while that "France" still means them and them alone. They are cranks, perhaps, except, as is quite clear from Smith's measure, they are businessmen as well. It's from within their comically narrow worldview that Smith speaks in the voice of the universal subject, rendering his politics as if they are simply a set of facts, and discovering without much expense of shoeleather what's true for everyone — a truth requiring the fantasy that there is a single national condition, a country of a single mind, which just happens to be that of a few men in suits. And this is true, as long as the nation is limited to a few conversations within the carefully entrenched green zone. Beyond the Belle Epoque fortifications, the love for Zidane, if it must be made to tell a national story, would narrate it rather differently.

oh zidane

Now why you wanna go and do that and do that, huh?

the fast and the furious: tokyo dérive

On the IDD scale (Incitement to Drive Dangerously On the Way Home), the only scale which matters in such cases and to which all other measures are impediments and cold consolations, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift is around a 7: higher than Days of Thunder, which scarcely inspired one to walk back to the parking lot, but lower than Top Gun, which sent us whining through the Solano tunnel on a dangerous scooter tilted almost knee-to-asphalt — perhaps hovering around The Last American Hero, in terms of sending one careering anxiously through merge lanes onto the 80. Or perhaps we were moved by the pathos of a film that kills off its one competent actor halfway through...or amazed by the post-climactic big reveal, when the uncredited American star finally and arbitrarily makes his cameo, appearing miraculously out of the disco ball of Shibuya...the lights that speak only of the absolute emptiness of the absolute other, beaming hypnotically down on the two gaijin as they stare only at each other, cockpit to cockpit, surrounded by glittering Asian guys and gals, while the audience wonders how it could be so blindsided, how we could not have seen it coming, of course Bill Murray would show up here after lying in wait since the last shot of Lost In Translation, ready to take one last nitro-fueled shot at the emerging markets with his American muscle...

notes from all over (arbitron edition)

• In the world of Wikipedia, which just recently abandoned its universal anyone-can-edit policy, additional screen names invented by a user (most frequently to feign support in a vitriolic debate over a disputed page's content) are known as, wait for it, sock puppets, predictably leading to a policy page named Wikipedia:Sock puppetry.

• Priceless first line from Michiko Kakutani: This is the sort of book that gives the Left a bad name. It's a bit like a review by a pro-life zealot beginning, This is the sort of book that gives abortion a bad name. Now let's make a list of the books that would, in eyes of Ms. Kakutani, give "the Left" a good name. Perhaps one called We're Sorry. Or, We're Moving to the Center. Or one called Liberalism Has No Future Unless It Embraces the War On Terror without Reservation and with Bloody Teeth Bared and Purges Anyone Who Disagrees. No, whoops, that book already exists, and is called The Good Fight, and the Times has given it not one creamy review, but two. Actually, one supposes that any book which presents liberalism as the Leftern front might help the Ms. Kakutani and the Times rest easy.

• The House, Declaring that the United States will prevail in the Global War on Terror further "declares that it is not in the national security interest of the United States to set an arbitrary date for the withdrawal or redeployment of United States Armed Forces from Iraq" [emphasis ours]. These bright lights and sock puppets seem not to know exactly what "arbitrary" means, and use it as if it meant "specific." Existing in distinction to "random" (which would indicate a date settled on without any selection activity whatsoever), an "arbitrary date" would indicate one in which a choice was indeed made, but one without recourse to "necessity, reason, or principle." Which is to say that, per the House's own resolution, it would require nothing more than a reason — "worsening conditions" works for us — to commence withdrawal with honor at sunrise. Yes, we know: the dictionary is the sort of book that gives the Left a bad name.

three times

The majority of the promo images for Hou Hsiao-Hsien's latest film are drawn from the third time, the most contemporary passage in this temporal triptych (and why not, as it's the sexiest, with suicide threats, dark clubs, text messaging, hot epileptic chicks, and the cool blue abysses of hypermodernity?)

The majority of reviews prefer the second time, the most antique among the three, shot as a silent with intertitles and set in 1911 (at the revolutionary end of the Qing dynasty, though this like most cinematic revolutions these days is discreetly left offscreen in the space of studiedly understated allusion).

It's the first time, set in 1966 as the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution was beginning on the mainland, that's the most involving (like the others, it's a narrative of heteromance deferred; unlike them, it's neither overly contrived nor overly pointed).

From the perspective of the eye, a Hou film is never dull: like Godard, he seemingly can't frame a bad shot, and even the slightest films and passages have a singular way-of-looking. He's a director of aspect, and activity can come to feel like a sort of imposition.

This becomes a problem at the level of plot. With the partial exception of the Wong Kar-Wai Lite (or Heavy, really) Millennium Mambo (which shares with the "third time" herein an impassively scolding kids-these-days overcurrent), Hou develops narrative from within ways of looking, rather than finding ways to look at the doings (contra Adorno, in Hou and elsewhere, content is sendimented form). It's the form of cinema that justifies the term world-view, a term so often reduced to indicating someone who has a theory, or even just an opinion. But if action is to arise from the viewing of a world (or a corner of the world), this mandates not only slow films, but a slow development from one to the next. While one can conjure or buy a new plot in fairly short order, it would be unjust to expect even Hou to develop self-propelling world-views, ways of looking, in rapid-fire succession.

And so fails Three Times, even though it's almost unfailingly a pleasure to look at. It has about one way of looking, which is realized on the order of events by only one of the three times; the other two are attractive, lugubrious failures.

Finally, one can't avoid wondering about the success — whether Hou's aspect here is somehow more indexed to 1966 than it is to 2005 or 1911. If, as art historians have eloquently argued, historical moments have their own ways of looking, are these ways reconstitutable? Might one conceive of a film as documentary, not of how-people-lived but of a historically-charged way of looking?

he who fucks nuns will later join the church

GIven that the quarters of Saint-Denis were among the most insurrectionary during the French riots of 2005, and that the birthplace of Paul Eluard is physical home to the highest percentage of immigants in France and spiritual home to French hip-hop, we should like to wonder if the residents have earned the title Saint-Denistas?

the da vinci code

There is nothing about the scene of the museum visit which is not preparation for shopping (the daily itinerary of the culture tourist, ambling from the Carrousel du Louvre to the Galeries Lafayette, assures us of this). After queueing to get in, one enters the grand gallery and surveys the goods. Perhaps you've come to see some piece in particular, perhaps you're wandering; something captures the eye. You stand before it, contemplate, discern, deliberate. Your mind, as practiced as a fingertip reading Braille, runs itself over the surface of an imagined life which could accomodate such objects. You evaluate, make a judgment. All the while, a seemingly unsatisfiable cupidity builds in you. That's the basic problem with the Louvre, the sense of loss which makes it all so poignant: you can't buy that shit.

The flagship Apple Store has opened in the center of Manhattan, at the southeast corner of Central Park. If one recalls an open plaza there, between 58th and 59th at the foot of palaces, decorated with a fountain or two, fear not. The store is literally cavernous, for it's almost entirely submerged — an irony, in that this underworld seems meant for the people who float above the surface of the globe, cosmopolites whose digital cameras store images of Shanghai, Sao Paulo and Paris. Nothing marks the plaza but for a gleaming glass portal: a cube, joisted by geometry and chrome, empty but for a hanging sculptural logo. Inside, a spiral stair winds down to the business level, around the column of an open-platform elevator.

On the day the store opened, and the next and the next, the line to get in stretched the length of the plaza and around the corner, corraled by metal crowd control barriers.

If one has not been to France, or seen The Da Vinci Code (which opened on the same day as the Apple Store and opens and closes at the Louvre), we here at jane dark's sugarhigh! have prepared these visual aids for understanding Apple's semiotic system:

Here's the geometric glass entry portal...

...with the queue along the fountain-bedecked plaza in the center of the metropolis...

...awaiting the spiral stair/platform elevator that carries clients down to the action...

...and here's the plaza at night, with glass portal illuminated...

...while here's how it looks quand il pleut.

Apple, with its doxology of aesthetics-first, MoMAlicious industrial design, is the ideal candidate for this project. That's not to say the likeness of museum and store is a new one; after all, the already-condemned underground mall in the heart of Paris pointedly named its longest promenade La Grande Galerie, after the infinite hallway in the Louvre hung with Renaissance paintings (the very run in which The Da Vinci Code begins). The Louvre itself, understanding the condition of its captive crowd, has installed its own underground mall on the path from museum hall to Metro. Consider the cheek-by-jowldom of boutiques and galleries in the 19th-cenury arcades, or the overcome descriptions of the first huge department stores, as Stendhal syndrome leapt into the agora. This correlation cannot be said to have been discovered in the first place, any more than the freezing point of water can be discovered. It can merely be named. It's the expression of a general rule of the era, a basic relation; each specific case educates us in how the rule is followed.

What we might admire about the Apple Store is not the perfection of its likeness, but how that perfection seeks to overcome similitude, to finally collapse the museum and the luxury boutique into a single episode, one which doesn't risk the client getting lost in the museum until the shops have closed, which returns the aura of the singular painting to the singularish piece of couture — an episode in which you can buy that shit, and victory is assured.

clean

Gathering up a burger with fat onion rings at a restaurant counter after getting out of the stir. Swiftly and silently running her hand along the naked body of a barely-known overdose, having not had the chance to touch her boyfriend's dead body when he OD'd earlier. These are two things Maggie Cheung does in Clean, gestures slight but not furtive; neither does the camera linger over them, nor do they intrude on the conversations happening. They are barely events, off to the side of the dialog-driven story, but each of them wrapped up in a sensuality that always concerns not what's sensually there so much as that which has been withheld until that moment. These are tiny gestures of presabsence, awfully moving. But then, we could watch Maggie Cheung knit for two hours, and sometimes this movie (made in 2004, just now released in the US) isn't much more than that. It's enough.

Equally, we could equally watch Nick Nolte stare into space for an hour. Here he conjures up a striking performance, perhaps his best, much of which is just that: staring into space and calculating, figuring things out, waiting for the recoil he uncertainly expects from Cheung after each of his polite, hopeful rhetorical brutalities. They never come.

Cheung's struggle isn't with him; it's with herself. Specifically, it's between her face and her hair. From the first scene, her black bat-coif is an ugly, stylized exaggeration that, against all odds, overdoes her famous face. The hair, in fairly simple manner, is her bad blood, her stupid rock mythology to which she clings, as if to the possibility of winning; it's her junkie self. When, later in the movie, she puts on an orange watch cap, her face changes dramatically: wide, defeated, plain. The defeat is her victory.

The absurdity by which she goes to San Francisco to get clean can't even be processed; here at HQ, that little bit of the Eighties that we can recall involved a constant stream of friends with habits leaving the Bay Area: for home, Hazelden, Hawai'i, "the land." That the sound of Mazzy Star is the sound of getting off dope is equally hard to suppose. But this is all in the last few minutes of the film, some kind of bookend to the opening number, Metric's "Dead Disco," which we are perhaps supposed to dislike (not so; a slight, perfect song). Well — narrative. Well — French person's America.

Mostly it's the faces, the physical gestures, the endless miniature image-defeats, the melancholy of the sensual, the watching.

les amants réguliers

Philippe Garel was 20 in the May days of 1968; so too is poet François, the lead character in his '68 epic Les amants réguliers (2005). François just happens to be played by Garrel's son Louis, who a year or so before just happened to play one of the leads in wet dreamer Bernardo Bertolucci's film about the same historical occasion, The Dreamers. As if that intertext wasn't enough, somewhere in the middle of Les amants' three hours, a colloquy of stoned kid rock-throwers retreat to the crash pad of their trust-funded confrere to discuss culture. Have you seen Before the Revolution, asks one of another. No? At which point the speaker turns directly to the camera and enunciates, as if it were an elocution lesson, "Bernardo Bertolucci."

To which we can only say: take it outside, boys. Your pissing contest isn't amusing. We would love Les amants to have resurrected the Nouvelle Vague, to have restored dignity to the category "three hour French movie," or simply to have been better than the turgid anti-politics of The Dreamers. Perhaps it is better, if "better" means "less ridiculous" (though by the same token it's "worse," in the sense of "less hot"). Perhaps Garrel's idea — that the failure to disrupt regular life would come back to haunt the regular lovers a thousandfold — is at least an idea rather than a cheap insult. But the gap between what remains to be expressed, and what each film decides is expressive enough, is identical: Way Too Broad.

Michel Houellebecq's drooling, reflexive lampoonings of the soixante-huitards, aside from their Oedipal bathos, have what is either the critical acuity or sheer stupidity to rehearse the most basic distortions of the historical narrative: they present the entirety of the revolutionary desire as concerning personal liberties. In short, according to the way lots of people like to tell it, 1968 was about free love and a higher wage to spend freely on hash, not about toppling a government and revising daily life. We would hope that either Ber-nar-do Ber-to-lu-cci or Phillipe Garel could do better than that, could get at what might have been particular and resonant about that moment. Instead, the two seem simply to have flipped a coin by way of deciding which would tell their drawing-room tale of ruint romance in lurid color, which in somber b/w, as if those were the two approaches to history.

further notes on cities

Is a city wall a quantity or a quality?

If one walks from the heart of Paris (the geographical center is here) toward one of the poorer banlieues — north to St-Denis, say — one will not necessarily pass any clear marking when one has left the city proper, clambering over the memory of a wall. That is, unless one passes through a last remnant of the 1845 wall, born with a price on its head. The city has had many walls, rising and falling as civic boundaries, and the needs for defense, for tolls and imposts, have changed; the 1860 expansion didn't come with ramparts, and the last wall was gone by 1925.

Against this absence, an experience: the northward stroll. If one pays attention, there are qualitative shifts as one leaves the center for the periphery: the tall buildings get taller, their designs more modern even as their physical condition grows more decrepit. The amount of sun that falls on the pavement decreases slowly, at about the same rate as the price of a coffee. The value of appearance changes, block by block. The maintenance of the downtown as a museum-city gives way to a more contemporary daily life — though this may be inaccurate, as who is to say whether the urge for preservationist ecologies is less modern than apartment towers or hardware stores? Either way, the tourist economy cedes pride of place to other forms of life (though not entirely, by any means).

But there is another way to quantify this radial stroll: one might rather note the steadily increasing percentage of darker skin, a geometric progression at least. This is the kind of quantity that is often experienced as a quality — difference rather than differential, often a difference charged and problematic.

The differentials of each quarter, the ratios, are calculable, knowable; this is the point. It's a set of quantities that describe one's departure from the Paris of postcards to the Paris of the news. And one of these quantities maps onto the city wall: a differential, a skin-tone palette, that means one has crossed a limit. However, it is not experienced as a figure, but as a feeling, a sense of place that poses as an abstraction and is exactly what is left of the material of the city wall.

Perhaps this is what certain feelings are: the traces of calculations that can no longer be made, or that one wishes not to make. Certainly this describes something about the experience of excess; certainly this informs the seemingly mystical complexity of modern markets. One suspects further that critical moments in history are defined by a welter of conversions between quantity and quality.

Meanwhile, one could do worse than to imagine what it would be like for another, differently-colored, to walk from St-Denis inward, toward downtown, quarter by quarter and block by block.

the years of magical thinking

Francis Fukuyama's recent change of heart is farce and tragedy at once. Fukuyama, the neocon and neo-neo-Hegelian, proclaimed in The End of History and the Last Man, with an inverted millennarism, that the long progress of historical spirit had found its final form — that U.S.-style liberal capitalism had superseded everything else. He then (somewhat oxymoronically) helped inscribe the strategic and ideological dogma for maintaining the supposedly steady state, in the famed "Project for the New American Century" documents. In the race to war, he served as a marshal.

But now, in the words of Tom Petty, there's been a change. The blinders are off! He is against the war! History may not be over quite yet! This change is recorded in numerous places, not the least of which is the seven-page abstract of new volume America at the Crossroads, featured in the paper of record's weekend fashion spread a few Sundays back (and archived for free here). A couple weeks later, reviewing the book itself, the POR opens by focusing its amazement on the book's apostasy...made all the more devastating by the fact that the author, Francis Fukuyama, was once a star neoconservative theorist himself.

Apostasy must be secured, natch, through the ritual denunciation of the apostate by a true believer — a labor taken up by Chris Hitchens, the neocons' potbellied attack pig, in the pages of Slate. That ought to do it; Fukuyama can now be a hero, or at least a name to proffer, for the progressive liberals who dream only of being allowed to say "I told you so" once in a midterm election.

Alas, Fukuyama's blinders aren't off so much as optimized. He is still searching for a successful strategy for American hegemony; he's just come to realize that a somewhat higher competence level may be required. A world in which this brings comfort to anyone of conscience is tragic to say the least. Meanwhile, his profound aspect-blindness is unchanged. One clear indication is in the piece Fukuyama wrote recently for Slate, in which he diagnoses last year's French riots as part of

....the ongoing struggle with radical Islamism (aka the "war on terrorism").

This is a smallish detail in the essay, but an utterly telling one. Perhaps he failed to read any of the serious journalistic coverage of the riots; perhaps he has no French friends, or, just as likely, his informants share his blindness. We have a name for that: ideology. Dude (as I like to say to destroy my own credibility), that wasn't radical Islam. That wasn't terrorism. That was poor, mostly immigrant kids. That was class conflict.

What the rioters had in common was, in ascending order of commonality, a) varying tones of darker-colored-than-Sarkozy skin, b) a history of being actively and passively brutalized by governmental agents, most notably cops with batons, tasers, and guns, and c) disenfranchisement.

To not see this is to see nothing. One wonders if Mr. Fukuyama is able to present the current unrest by poor and disenfranchised French youth as similarly linked to "radical Islamism," or if, in what may be an even greater achievement in magical thinking, he finds this wave to be unrelated and only coincidentally similar. Unable to see, much less speak, the obvious, these are his choices — and ours. Which is to say that, as an intelligent and informed person with the apparent capacity to open and change his mind, Fukuyama is the America we would like to believe in. But with his hysterical inability to mention social relations, social class, and the transnational, transreligious confrontation between the wealthy and the disenfranchised, Fukuyama is the America we know, in which any story can be told as long as it doesn't mention those niceties. In that regard, Fukuyama clings to to the murderous blindness of the New American Century as dogmatically any of his colleagues, while playing at debate — a farce indeed.

Caché

Not quite sure what to make of Michael Haneke's new film, Caché, seen in a tiny theater, sharing the front row with a party of five or more French persons, who also seemed somewhat nonplussed.

Though it earns its effects, its moments of disturbance, there's also a limit to the strategy of representing national/political struggles through the structure of family relations. The allegory of the fraternal here is far more persuasive than Arnaud Desplechin's awkward Leo, Playing "In the Company of Men," but in the end displays the limits of allegory itself, which implies a decodability that the movie is then compelled to wrestle mightily against.

The film is structured around two things. The first is the word "nothing" (rien), which is repeated incessantly throughout the movie; there's scarcely any question (what's going on, what did you do today, what's wrong, what's the import of that, what caused him to feel that way, etc etc) that can't be answered with this single word. The lite reading (which shows up in several reviews) concerns the failed communication of the aging bourgeois couple, which is somehow either the cause of the final, ambiguous events, or an effect of the presence of the something that can't be said.

But that really won't do, and limns exactly one of the failings of the allegorical structure. On the one hand, domestic fissures can scarcely bee causal; we know this is a story of the return of the repressed, or the collection of unacknowledged debt, and nothing can undo the initial repression or avert its return. On the other, to spend so much attention on the family fallout of the repression is at once cliché and a lowering of the film's national/political stakes, which are not so much screened as supplanted by domestic drama, the Battle of Algiers as retold by The New Yorker's fiction editor.

Indeed, one must largely ignore the marital tension (and that's a lot of ignoring) to find the film particularly powerful, to engage its nothing. Nothing becomes a pit into which all specific meanings are sacrificed only to be reborn as an unsayable something that threatens each character with destruction (regarding this howling white space, one notes that the son Pierrot's school is College lycee Stephane Mallarmé)—a someting that might well be described as history itself (just as one might understand that history itself is making the mysterious videotapes that appear a la Lost Highway; they are shot, to adapt Prof. Louis-Georges Schwartz's formulation, from history's point of view).

Beyond the rien that is not there is the rien that is. The movie depends on the physical aging, beyond the proscenium, of the once-irresistable and irresistably French stars, Daniel Auteuil (actually born in Algiers in 1950) and Juliette Binoche, each of whom here seems thick, slack, sculpted from lardoon. This more than any narrative move or linguistic device gives force to the sense of corrupted entitlement, lost erotism, congealed history. The sense that something has gone horrribly, unsayably wrong with Frenchness itself, with France's capacity to represent itself through romantic pale beauty; and the sense that this collapse must inevitably be captured by history's camera—this tells the story far more powerfully than the banalities of domestic dynamics. The movie might finally have been more effective had it simply montaged chronological clips of the two actors from the 'Seventies through the present, inserting flash shots of bleeding and drowning Algerians during each cut.