jane dark's sugarhigh!

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.

paris je t'aime

...in which 18 directors set about proving it's impossible to make an interesting five to ten minute movie in Paris. The only ones who come close (Oliver Schmitz, Tom Tykwer) do so by approximating longer narratives via heavy flashbacking. Because otherwise it just can't be done.

15) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
14) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
13) Paris je t'aime (wasn't Smokin' Aces; didn't have Hayden Christenson)
12) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
11) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
10) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
9) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
8) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
7) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
6) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
5) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
4) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
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)

"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.

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.

a scanner darkly

In the recent annals of Squigglevision, A Scanner Darkly falls between that anthology of monologues for hipsters auditioning for grad school, A Waking Life, and heroic trifle Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist.

The squiggles, one assumes, are meant to indicate the unstable reality of both the addict and the subject of certain technologies the book envisions — two categories that overlap almost entirely, herein. Well, that's what paranoia does: it makes unities, and in that regard the visual strategy, which posits both a surface coherence and its falseness, seems justified.

But it's also up to something else: making an equivalent to the shaky intensity of Phil Dick's writing, which scarcely qualifies as elegant but never relents from its tremulous comedies of describing a world it's certain is a hoax. Dick's too freaked out to be boring, and the film goes for this effect. Alas, the film can't quite manage it.

The majority of Dick adaptations (Total Recall, most obviously) take the central conceit of a book or story and make merry with it, much to the annoyance of purists. And yet, watching Scanner, one understand that choice — this, a relatively faithful translation, must stew around in its inability to render Dick's textual twigginess into an equivalently charged visual field. No tragedy, certainly; the film's interesting enough, its surmise as timely as ever, its strangely-unearned elegiac finale still nonetheless redolent for a certain substantial portion of the crowd. It remains, nonetheless, a kind of half-failure of visual thinking — in classic slacker fashion, it doesn't lack the courage of its convictions but the ambition to see them past the horizon of the medium-cool idea.

walk, drift, etc.

Last week, the estimable Lisa Robertson happened upon the recent reissue of Michele Bernstein's Tous les chevaux du roi and, by way of her temporary online journal, translated a couple passages just for fun and our good fortune, starting with this three-way chat:

—What do you do anyways? I don’t really know .
—Reification, Gilles replied.
—It’s serious work, I added.
—Yes, he said.
—I see, Carole said with admiration. It’s very serious work with thick books and a lot of papers on a big table.
—No, Gilles said. I walk. Principally I walk.

Bernstein's roman a clef of early Situationist history, mostly of her relationship with Guy Debord (to whom she was funder, wife, and procuress), has never been translated — in English, on par with funeral orations of Bossuet, the book is notable for its absence.

And yet the book contains one of the most-famous and most-translated passages in French literature since Baudelaire. In 1966, students at the University of Strasbourg put out two pamphlets that would play a substantial role of the chain of history leading directly to the events of May '68. The latter was called "On the Poverty of Student Life." The former, "The Return of the Durutti Column," was a celebrated early example of what would eventually make Jim Behrle's blog possible: comic strips with new text written into the bubbles, blanks and balloons.

Somewhere in the middle of the comic, two cowboys (Pancho and Cisco) have a conversation on horseback — the very conversation from Bernstein that Lisa Robertson first translates. In the intervening forty years, the passage has appeared in English over and over, every time the Debord or the SI program is up for discussion (most notably the Greil Marcus article for Artforum, "The Cowboy Philosopher" and his following book, Lipstick Traces). Rod Smith quotes it in this interview. It's the last line of the bilingual French/English poem mentioned in this note by Juliana Spahr. And so on — the language is everywhere, including in the name of the Factory records band Durutti Column.

But what language? Robertston, in her translation, has made a quite peculiar (if not entirely unprecedented) choice to translate the celebrated punchline, Non, je me promène. Principalement je me promène, as "I walk. Principally I walk." This gets much of the line's self-ironizing tenor just right, after the big build-up about reification and the weightiness of theory — its deflationary quality, and its reminder that philosophy must be lived in the quotidian, not applied from above.

Still, it's an oddly flatfooted choice. This phrase is not meant simply to deflate theory, but to redirect it. Se promener is not the easy way to say "to walk," after all (marcher), though it does have that secondary meaning. It also has the flippant sense one hears in English when telling someone to buzz off, "go take a walk." Still, the choice by Bernstein is surely meant to invoke the Surrealist tradition ("the perpetual promenade in the midst of forbidden zones," as Breton decribed it in 1930). It must also have to do with SI practices — and, as surely as they recommended détournement of comic strips, their other program was the dérive, the drift through the city as a critical act. Given that there's no verb form of dérive, se promener is often taken as such. Indeed, the most-common translation of the last line, by far, is "I drift. Mainly I drift."

But that isn't quite perfect either — there are only imperfect translations. Robertson's version is useful because it makes this clear (in addition to looping the passage back to her own title). What does it mean to propose, as a fundamental activity, an action for which there is no verb? To what extent does the historical pressure of this passage — the way in which it exists un- and overtranslated at the same time, celebrated and unknown, presabsent — index the extent to which a new language is needed, not for infinitely subtle parsing, but for the most basic considerations? It is here that poetry and philosophy pass closest to each other...

pink panther

Having promised to make a brief note about each new release we see this year, we find ourselves in the unfortunate position of having to say something or other about the latest remake of The Pink Panther, starring Steve Martin, whom we once found funny.

We don't remember the earlier rounds so well, but it seems in retrospect that the possible interest of the set-up — which seems on the verge of appearing at various moments in this iteration — lies in the fact that it's Clouseau's very idiot provinciality which makes him a successful sleuth. It's not that his bumbling turns out to be a virtue, but that it's symptomatic of the general lack of intelligence and grace on the part of French civil servants, who exist within a vast cocoon of pleasure in bureaucracy [surely there's a French or German word for this? ed.]...and this is finally the virtue. This seems like the plot that's trying to creep through; Clouseau's successes periodically seem to come from his knowledge of arcane and absurd civil codes and para-facts, things only a talentless grind might know. It's not that Clouseau's innate goodness will be redeemed, but that Clouseau will redeem the concept of bureaucracy itself. In this regard the narrative-in-waiting can be regarded indeed as a French nationalist tale, the very antipode of the American nationalist police story, which revolves dependably around the idea that only a rogue cop with disregard for the regulations can save us now, because regulation is what interferes with actual genius and the solving of problems.

And yet in this edition the idea is botched at almost every turn, periodically pillorying top cop Dreyfus for his own bureaucratic ways, when it should be doing the exact opposite, and brutally misusing the Clive Owens cameo, which ought to have been an instance of how the physically-talented and charismatic Bond style of crimefighting finally fails within this national context.

Is the inability to execute the one possibly workable idea explained by the production team's non-Frenchness — or just their astounding insipidity?