Libertinage dangereux

Over at Videogum, my favorite recurring feature is The Hunt for the Worst Movie of All Time. What makes it so great is that they don't go for the obvious dreck -- anything from the Scary Movie franchise or starring a cross-dressing Eddie Murphy, for instance. No, they go straight for the jugular of movies that people (sad, misguided people) actually might have liked, movies that were packed with Important Ideas, trying-too-hard movies that may, in their time, have been envisioned as Oscar-bait.

Having recently watched The Libertine, I immediately found myself composing a mental HFTWMOAT review, and now that my impotent rage has waned to mild irritation, I think I'm finally fit to type it out. And lest ye worry about spoilers, let me stress that this movie is already as spoiled as the rubbery carrots that have been slowly putrefying at the bottom of your fridge for the better part of a year. Have no fear. I've taken the bullet, so feel free to sit back and observe the carnage.

The biggest problem with The Libertine is that it starts out with so much promise. Here we have a sultry-eyed Johnny Depp (yes!) in period costume (yes!!) playing the "notorious rake," satirical poet, and general bisexual orgy-having man-about-town, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (yes!!!)... and aside from a few nipple-slips, there's hardly even five total minutes of erotic content (uh, what?). In the opening scene, Johnny (you know you've got a potential disaster on your hands when the main character has the same name as the actor) stares straight into the camera and deadpans a sultry monologue on how he is "always up for it" with women and men alike, how we should all think about him the next time we shag, and how we're really, really not going to like him. Oh, how right he is.

Though this intro is probably the most titillating part of the whole film, already there are signs that something is rotten in 17th century London. For all the hotness of hearing Johnny Depp pepper his blithely artificial British accent with an assortment of period-appropriate obscenity, I couldn't help feeling like this was more of an audition piece than the first scene of a major Hollywood film. Any minute, I expected Mr. Depp to bow his head, then raise it again, fixing the camera with a Tobias Funke style shit-eating grin, triumphantly declaring: "aaaand scene!" It's fairly bizarre that he was so incapable of getting into a part that was clearly written for him, and it's even more bizarre that a large chunk of the central plot revolves around Johnny giving acting lessons to an aspiring Shakespearean leading lady (played by the wasted talent of the lovely Samantha Morton, who for some inexplicable reason is always referred to in film diegesis as the "plain girl," when it is clear that in real life she would be referred to as "smoking hot.")

And that's just the start of the troubles. Because when the movie picks up, it becomes clear that everything Johnny Depp just said viz. pricks and cunts and other teasing hints of sexual congress is a complete and total lie. For a film about a libertine, called The Libertine, there is shockingly little in the way of libertinage. Nothing, in fact. It turns out that Johnny is married to a beautiful, if somewhat frosty English heiress and loves the shit out of her in the most doofy, boring, unlibertine-like way. And then he falls in love with Samantha Morton's character and goes head-over-heels for her, also in the most doofy, boring, and thoroughly adolescent way. This movie should have been called The Failed Hetero-normative Love Conquests of Mister Johnny Wilmot, Aged 28 and been rated PG-13. It could've starred Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles and played well to the early high school set. In fact, the only love scene in the whole damn two hour spree of terrible is so cloyingly candlelit, soft-music-accompanied, passionately makeouty, and utterly fake that its predecessor can only be the canonical "first time" scene of a teen dramedy.

And, lest you imagine that this two-hour-long simpering soft-core lovefest could somehow be ameliorated by the continued presence of a dashing Depp in ruffles, frills, and wanton curls -- sadly, you are mistaken. Not even that pleasure is given to us, the much-abused fangirl/boy audience, because halfway through the film Johnny gets leprosy and spends the next hour horrifying us with peeling skin lesions and an artificial nose.

Along with the alarming lack of sex in a movie that promises it in buckets, there is also a ridiculous attitude toward the idea of libertinage in general. The OED defines a libertine not only as a lusty Don Juan, but as someone "acknowledging no law in religion or morals; free-thinking; antinomian." At first, it seems that this ubermensch-y definition of a libertine is being taken quite seriously, albeit with the characteristic ham-fistedness of a directorial debut. The King invites Johnny back to court so he can use his powers of charisma to charm people into backing various monarchic policy, but Johnny balks and refuses to be a royal puppet. "I know it's fun to be against things, but there comes a time when you must be for things, as well" -- actual quote from "The King," played by an egregiously fake-nosed John Malkovich. Subtle! But. The rest of the film belabors the point that being against things is inherently bad, that it ruins your life, that if you do it too long, you'll catch leprosy and have to wear an artificial nose (though still not one as ugly as Malkovich's putty prosthetic). In other words, this is a good old-fashioned morality play, and a boring and predictable one at that. It's also pretty transparently "topical." In the stunningly unwatchable "climactic" last scene, the leprosy-ridden Johnny finally performs his long-awaited service to His Majesty, crashing a session of Parliament and giving a rousing speech on the importance of trial by jury. As this film was released in 2004 -- right around the time of the heated debates on the restriction of habeas corpus for terrorist suspects -- Johnny's speech is clearly meant to win some hearts and minds with cheerily vacuous liberal self-congratulation. Except: Johnny is still all leprotic, and he's still hopelessly in love with a woman who doesn't love him back, and his only literary legacy is a poem called "Signor Dildo." He's a miserable wreck, and he's the poster-child for the anti-"War on Terror" camp? Is that really the artifical-nose-wearing, weeping-sores face of a "free-thinking, antinomian" individual? The face that launched a thousand Neo-Cons, I guess.

Other assorted outrages:

John Malkovich's fake nose. Honestly, it's just the worst. The horror could easily have been averted if they'd stuck to full-face closeups, except some brilliant cinematographer decided to film an entire scene with The King in profile in front of a really bright sunset. You can literally see the real tip of John Malkovich's nose twitching under layers of glowing, semi-transparent putty. Awful.

Female stereotype count: Hooker with a heart of gold? Check. Endlessly faithful and devoted wife? Check. Bitchy judging mother? Check. Ambitious girl who knows that love = failure and thus becomes a cold, loveless shrew in order to be successful? Indeed.

The last scene, where all the brash and bravado from the opening have given way to a desperate, teary-eyed Depp pleading for the audience to like him. It's just too, too much. If you're really so desperate for public approval, Johnny, maybe you should just stick to pirates -- that's something people seem to like.

Saints and sinners

There are a lot of things that I love about New Orleans -- and if you're around me for any length of time, you'll hear me expound on them... excessively.

But perhaps my favorite thing about the city is its willingness to suspend time and reality and get really drunk and rowdy at the drop of a hat; or, as this article on NOLA and Saints fans puts it, on "Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest, Halloween, days that end in ‘y’..." (add to this list: Southern Decadence aka Gay Mardi Gras, St. Patrick's Day, Art for Art's Sake, Voodoofest, Swampfest, French Quarter Fest, Soulfest, Po'boy Fest -- and these are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head). We all agree that there's something wonderful about official holidays, when the genus Working Stiff is given an arbitrary reprieve and told to putter around the house in jammies instead of slaving away in the pursuit of Das Kapital. But, obviously, it's much more wonderful to have holiday be the rule to the work-day exception, and in New Orleans, that it is. When I found out I'd gotten into grad school, for instance, it just happened to be in the middle of the month-long affair that is Mardi Gras season -- which means that I wasn't alerted via post (not functioning) or email (wasn't checking it), but by a phone call from my mom, who'd been rung up by the department secretary and told in a concerned and slightly baffled voice that I'd officially been accepted but hadn't yet responded. Did I then instantly rush off to bang out a humble, conciliatory email, dripping with gratitude and obsequiousness? Not really. From what I recall, I went around triumphantly banging on the doors of my roommates, then filled a flask up with whiskey and drunkenly biked through Uptown to catch a parade. Priorities.

Of course, this kind of hedonistic atmosphere is not conducive to getting things done, and all the petty and not-so-petty corruption in the state of Louisiana notwithstanding, all levels of infrastructure there are as dependable as will-o-wisps. But, really, who cares about getting things done? In other cities, people live for the weekend, that brief sliver of time into which is squeezed all of sweaty, unwieldy, genuine human experience. In New Orleans, people float from carnival to carnival, each new instantiation of which appears with the mechanical regularity of a roving cloud-platform in a level of Super Mario. The weekends are mainly for sleeping. Unfortunately, going from the latter paradigm to the former feels like being violently thrust from a lush, technicolor utopian dream into a black-and-white German expressionist film. There's no way to adjust -- and, sadly, no way to get across to your new fellow wage-slaves just how wonderful institutionalized irreverence can be.

And, to wit, I leave you with this little gem of NOLA reality (culled from the gchat status of one of my former students -- thanks, Dan). What other city would have the brass to use fine art as gambling chips in a Superbowl wager? Well, Indianapolis, I guess... but who wants to live there?

Blank generation

A longish, but amazingly epic article on the state of "indie" music today. Also, quotes from Thomas Frank. Love.

Even though it feels weird to admit as an alt-looking 25-year-old, I've never been a huge music fan. Maybe it's because my formative years were spent in Seattle circa 1993-2000, where everyone from the kid behind the Pizza Hut counter to the homeless guy on the street-corner was guaranteed to know more obscure indie shit than thou. I did my time -- pored over a hard copy of The Stranger every Friday while skipping pep rallies, went to Sonic Youth and Pavement concerts at Bumbershoot, and made my share of jokes about Death Cab For Cutie as they got really big -- but generally avoided the bulk of the rabidly cultish indie scene, which felt too hopelessly contradictory and trendy to ever traverse. Or maybe it's the simple fact that I was never able to listen to anything but ambient noise or wordless jazz when reading or writing, and the latter two things always took precedence and ate up most of my time. Whatever the case, college pretty much confirmed my dilettantish stance towards music; my friends were into college radio, and I was happy to feast off the crumbs of knowledge they'd occasionally toss my way in the form of mixes and mp3s. I went to see a lot of good shows (New Orleans was unparalleled for that, bless her), but I still never really actively sought to unravel the Gordian knot of the contemporary music scene. Music was a lot of things to me -- meditative background, emotional refuge, dancing/drinking accompaniment, wooing currency. But it was never the focus of my intellectual energy, and thus never my life.

This has been changing lately, and I wonder if it's indicative of a personal attitude shift or a generational one. I realize that a huge chunk of credit goes to, ahem, certain illicit downloading technologies that make the acquisition of music frighteningly, mindlessly simple. But with that simplicity comes a healthy heaping of boredom, jadedness, and ennui that inevitably follows disposable culture, which I sense emanating heatedly from many of my friends who've been into music for much longer than I. Maybe I'm lucky to have missed the indie music craze of the 90s and early 00s, since it's allowed me to preserve a certain naivety and childlike eagerness about things that most people are already on their third degree of ironic removal from (my latest infatuation is Of Montreal -- need I say more?). Whatever the case, I'm certainly grateful to catch things in their twilit baroque phase. Being much more accustomed to the post-mortem flavor of literary criticism, the academic in me is so much happier to study things after they're dead.

Shiny happy plastic people

If you follow IvyGate (not that you should), you're familiar with a recent minor scandal from the wonderful world of the Cornell Greek system. No, not the Pike house getting shut down (god, are all Pikes terrible, no good people? I thought it was only the chapter at my undergrad campus, but apparently, I was wrong). I'm talking about the Pi Phi Sorority Dress Guidelines Debacle of Twenty-Ten (parts 2, 3, and 4 also choice).

Cornell was my first and only experience with a real-live Greek scene. I'd always figured that the whole point of those frat party things was to provide alcohol to (i.e., not-so-subtly lubricate) pretty underage girls, and going to school in New Orleans made that moot for me. But when I first walked into a Cornell frat party, I realized there was something else I'd been missing -- a certain aesthetic of opulent, upper-class hedonism that I'm sure only the top soror/frats actually have and the rest shamelessly copy. Amid tables groaning under the weight of food, drink, and dripping candelabra, scores of beautiful girls in prom-worthy gowns draped themselves around guys whose three-piece suits made them look like 50-year-old mafiosos instead of pimply young adults. If I didn't know any better, I'd say it was just a bunch of kids playing dress-up ("Look, I'm Princess Di!" "I'm Diddy!" "I'm Paris Hilton!"). Except these kids were drunk, up way past their bedtime, and, most importantly, practicing skills that would be crucial in their future upper-middle-class social strata. Over the course of the party and the ride home (in a shiny Lexus, natch), I watched the boys network and the girls husband-hunt in a manner so scripted that it could've come straight out of a Bret Easton Ellis novel. Business cards were exchanged and lewd overtures were made, and by the end of the night I learned more about the New York I-banking world and my roommate's methods of keeping warm in Ithaca winter than I'd ever cared to know.

But I digress. My favorite thing about the Pi Phi (famous alum: Valerie Plame -- I guess some girls network, too) dress-code is that it explains a mystery my naive, plebeian self had never quite been able to grasp; namely, why it is that when I show up to certain functions, I'm always an awkward drop in a sea of identically-dressed girls. This happened a lot when I started dating a law school student, of course, but it was also a sporadically occurring phenomenon at specific places in town. I once attended a downtown wine tasting gala where every (and I mean every) woman was wearing a three-quarter-length black dress. I'd chosen a bright red chinoiserie-print mini and got catty stares the whole night (though that may have been more the result of getting tipsy and inciting several men to passive-aggressively fight for my affection on the dance-floor). Where do they learn this stuff? I'd wonder, dreaming up all kinds of unlikely scenarios involving print media, signifiers, and social conditioning. Well, little did I know that there are literal memos passed out, and that I literally missed them.

Having recently mused on the still weirdly classist Brits, I guess I should also point out how bizarre the American instantiation of the class system is. Because, even after attending one of the most expensive private universities in the country, I'd never felt caste inferiority till I got to that frat party (and then, even more so, Ye Olde Ivy Bedecked Monstrosity where I'm currently enrolled). But the thing is, the classism here is so vestigial, so virtual, so... well, made up -- there's really no difference between being middle-class, upper-middle-class, and upper-upper-class in terms of what you can know, buy, or wear -- that, above a certain poverty level, you can choose to present yourself as anything whatsoever. And the fact that a quite sizable subset of society still chooses to present itself as some thrice-removed elitist fantasy from a blue-blood Stepford time that never was... is, well, kind of sick. It's sort of like that parable about the baby elephant that's trained to stay put by having a branch tied to its leg, and then when it gets older, all a trainer need do to immobilize it is tie a twig to its toe. Except instead of a twig, what we have here is top shelf liquors, mani/pedis, and boutique evening-wear.

Then again, this could all just be an East Coast/New England thing. In the South, the tendency is toward the exact opposite -- gleeful downwardly-mobile slumming. And maybe it's all equally dumb and just a matter of acclimation, but somehow, that feels so much more honest.

Bear life

Nudity good for you, story at 7?

Anyway, dumb article, but it gives me an excuse to bring up something I've been meaning to discuss: social nudity. Due to the onset of perilously icy street conditions, I've started running at the gym on a regular basis, and since I have to commute to use my free campus gym privileges, that means I've also started taking advantage of the gym shower. The last time I actually changed in a locker room was probably middle school, so I was fairly shocked when I first walked in to the ladies' changing area and found myself surrounded by a preponderance of casually naked flesh. The facility I frequent is not the main (read: undergrad) gym, and in the quiet interim between semesters it was home to mostly bookish, middle-aged types -- faculty, staff, extension school students. But these women seemed to have no problem stripping off their smart business casual streetwear and ambling around the locker room in what god gave them, while I huddled timidly in a corner and used the old 6th grade "T-shirt as tent" trick to put on my sports bra and shorts.

I mean, it's not like I'm some peevish stickler for decency. I recently watched a documentary on the Black Bear commune in the mountains of Northern California, and the whole thing made me pine for the 60s, radical utopian lifestyles, and the freedom to roam au naturale under the tender coastal sun. But nudity in the context of a tiled, fluorescent, antiseptic gymnasium is not the sun-kissed, romp-with-the-goats nudity of a California commune. In fact, it sort of gives me the heebies. Possibly, this has to do with aforementioned middle school connotations, but more probably, it's also a matter of historical/cinematic conditioning: any time you pack a lot of naked women into a small space with showers, I can only think of one thing (as, by the by, does Milan Kundera in this part of The Unbearable Lightness of Being).

But aside from all that, I find myself confronted with an uncomfortable voyeur guilt-spiral dilemma. It goes something like this: in our society, despite the prevalence of porn and porn-like advertising, we don't get to see a lot of real women naked. Hence: real women naked is an inherently fascinating sight. But! In polite bourgeois society, we're supposed to rigorously deny our urge to ogle and plant our roving eyes squarely on the cold tiled floor. Or, as Al Pacino so eloquently puts in the best law-cum-Devil movie of all time: "Look, but don't touch. Touch, but don't taste. Taste, don't swallow." Of course, if we were all traipsing around Black Bear Ranch, the metaphorical (or actual) trip would probably dictate the opposite: look till you get sick. It's the weird contradiction of "it's all out there!" coupled with "... but don't make eye contact" that sticks in my craw.

Interestingly, as classes have started up again, more and more ponytailed gazelles have flooded the locker room -- snapping gum, chatting about parties, and taking time out from a gazillion extracurriculars to whittle invisible millimeters of flesh from their already immaculate 20-year-old frames. Yet, in spite of their clearly superior muscle-to-cellulite ratios, it's the younger generation that remains fastidiously clothed, while the older women proudly parade around their various levels of saggage (although for the most part, they're still impressively fit -- this is the health-conscious upper crust of the Northeast, after all). I can't help feeling like there's some deeper story about the trajectory of feminism here, with all its false starts and unexpected retrogrades. I also can't help feeling kind of like my stupid, deathly self-conscious 6th-grade self when I bring my clothes into the shower stall to change. What am I afraid of? Some snot-nosed undergrad scoffing at my off-brand panties?

I wish I were as good at making radical statements as I am wasting time ruminating about them. Stupid Kundera and his stupid moral exhibitionism problem has ruined me for life.

Who dat

So, maybe I missed out on voting in that Landmark Historical Election and all... but at the very least, I comfort myself with the thought that I might become a citizen in the year that a team I actually care about wins the Superbowl. Patriotism win.

[Private blog: Mardi Gras, Feb. '05]

Maybe the constant tube-feeding of paranoia from this administration has finally gotten to me, but my mind instantly screamed conspiracy when the Patriots won the Superbowl.

Also, at Bacchus last night, the New York float featured a plane aimed directly at the Statue of Liberty. I think the theme was sports teams, and they were attempting to convey the general idea of "The Jets," but that still was one motherfucking hilariously offensive oversight on the part of the float committee.

It's Lundi Gras and I've got a bottle of cheap champagne with my drunken claw marks all over it.

Nail-gazing

Seven months ago, I lost a toenail to a dishwasher unloading accident involving one calamitously dropped glass Pyrex baking dish, a night of excruciating pain, and a paperclip heated over a candle to release a tide of pooled blood. The nail didn't die right away. Instead, it went the way of Terry Schiavo: massive internal hemorrhaging, then a vegetative state that persisted for another month, while I stubbornly coated the deadened husk with layer after layer of glossy purple polish and insisted it was still functional. Then one fine day, I decided I'd had enough of the charade and peeled it off from root to tip, exposing the raw, puckered reality underneath. I spent the record-high heatwave summer in Texas wearing closed-toed shoes and cursing fate.

But waking up every morning and padding to the shower, I'd also quietly observe the strange miracle that is the regeneration of living tissue. Nails, I discovered, don't grow back at all like I'd imagined. There is no dainty moon-shaped sliver of starter nail that patiently, concentrically expands like the rings in tree trunks. Instead, the flesh on the face of the digit quickly hardens into what Nabokov's Aunt Maude in Pale Fire calls "scarf skin." Then, slowly, agonizingly slowly, this fibrous tissue fuses into a yellowish chitinous pseudo-nail, more reminiscent of a jagged tusk or claw than the delicately polished, glassy substance coating the human fingertip. The pseudo-nail expands like a fungus, colonizing the digit and threatening to take over the other, healthy appendages. But then some strange alchemical twist occurs, and the erstwhile misshapen, evil scrap of cells gets smoothed out by an unseen hand, until, square millimeter by square millimeter, it begins to resemble something human.

Seven long months have gone by -- friendships have begun and ended, unexpected turns of fate brought strange victories and stranger surrenders -- and all there is to show for my recent cellular reconstruction project is a slight horny protuberance, the vestigial remains of the fungus-like pseudo-nail, which I am now loathe to snip off, signaling as it would the ultimate act in a riveting drama of life, death, and rebirth. The new nail is glossy and pink, as smooth and innocent as a newborn babe. I don't quite trust it yet. It has a lot to learn.

Ah, yes.

Vindication by 4chan = bittersweet.

This is why we can't have nice things I simultaneously love and loathe Internet youth subcultures.

White fright

So, with that overly judgey and self-righteous last post in mind, I did exactly what I criticized people for doing: after six years of totally neglecting it, I got back into Haitian history. Inevitable.

Somewhere between watching Max Chancy's 60s documentary Haïti, J'accuse (sorry, non-francophones, it's in French) and rewatching The Serpent and the Rainbow (based on a book I've unfortunately not read), I found myself blown away by how a certain idea about blackness has gone through the spin cycle of history and resurfaced somewhat twisted and warped in American pop culture. If you're unfamiliar, The Serpent and the Rainbow is an 80s Wes craven film, set in Haiti on the eve of the US-orchestrated overthrow of "Bebe Doc" Duvalier. Though not by any means a great film, Serpent and the Rainbow has the unique benefit of offering a different perspective on the zombie genre than the traditional American line of George Romero et al., the latter of which has less (though not entirely nothing) to do with race and more with a certain Western Marxist class critique. Serpent and the Rainbow, on the other hand, returns the genre to its race-based tribal roots, so to speak. It also makes zombification less of an allegory and more of a reality, since the premise of the film is that Haiti's Tonton Macoutes, Duvalier's secret police, use voodoo as a tool to control the helpless native population.

What I found fascinating about this premise is that it falls right into what Chancy says about the Duvalier regime: through constant, systematic terror, both Duvaliers not only managed to quell dissent, but in fact to internalize fear within each citizen, psychologically and politically paralyzing the population. For anyone who's ever studied a political cult of personality, this is nothing new -- Stalin did the same thing, sucking even sane and stable satellites like Czechoslovakia into whirlpools of self-inflicted bloodshed, and ensuring that a morally and fiscally bankrupt regime could essentially run on empty for a span of decades without any significant popular revolt. But what Chancy points out is that it is precisely the race factor that kept white Western superpowers unwilling and uninterested in interfering with this brand of fascism. Voodoo lent an exotic, quasi-mystical air to the whole thing, making it seem like some quaint ethnographic feature of the Haitian atmosphere, rather than a tool in the hands of a Western-educated dictator.

But that last bit should not be ignored. The Duvaliers weren't savage jungle warlords; they were degree-holding, university educated, cosmopolitan rulers. And whether or not the Papa of the dynasty was actually insane (there's certainly room for speculation, given his poor health and bizarre behavior), it's clear that he milked the "voodoo" angle for all it was worth -- calling his secret police, essentially, "The Boogeymen," and declaring himself Baron Samedi. We Westerners can laugh at this primitive nonsense all we want... until we remind ourselves of our own leaders' proclivities for ingratiating themselves into native cults. For all of our love of fetishizing, exoticizing, and Hollywoodizing the black other, the religion and power dynamic at home is all too similar.

So, back to Serpent and the Rainbow, where the white man (Bill Paxton) and the white man's system (democracy) rides in on its shining white horse and saves the day. Of course. It's the late 80s, apartheid is finally crumbling, we're all singing "Ebony and Ivory," and life is good. Okay. Well, cut to 2009, when, on the eve of electing a black president, the kids of this great nation are playing a little game called Resident Evil 5:



Serpent and the Rainbow redux! White man and pretty light-skinned black woman fighting zombies created by political instability! "Africa" is shorthand for anywhere with poor black people!

Now, I'm not saying I didn't play and enjoy RE5. I did, because it was a good game, and the absorbingly cinematic quality greatly contributed to that goodness. But there's no doubt that the image of blackness it presents -- machete-wielding, bile-colored blood-spewing, inherently susceptible to evil -- is uncomfortable at best. It reminds me, again, of what Chancy says about Haiti: cycles of corruption, violence, fascism, all of it is seen by Westerners as a matter of "negritude," i.e., a "black thing." And even when there is some attempt at a neo-colonial critique, as with the nefarious Umbrella Corporation and distinctively Aryan Albert Wesker orchestrating the zombie outbreak in RE5, the ultimate takeaway (featured on all the interface graphics) is that of contagion in the form of hideously mutated blood. Because what the Progenitor virus does to (white) Wesker is make him a near-invincible superman; what it does to the black population of "Africa" is turn them into ooze-dripping, brainless killing machines. Uh, nice. So, we're back to basic miscegenation and eugenics all over again -- dovetailing perfectly with the explanation for the mechanics of zombification in Serpent and the Rainbow: "It's a powder... a poison... that runs through the skin... to the soul."

Serpents and rainbows

While it's nice to see the generous outpouring of support for Haiti from celebrities and private citizens alike -- Twitter and Facebook all-calls, charity concerts and telethons, donations of everything from tour proceeds to planes -- I can't help but wonder where all this public outcry was through 30 years of the Duvalier regime, one of the most ludicrously corrupt, backward, and savage kleptocracies to ever exist in the Western hemisphere. Between the two of them, "Papa" and "Bebe Doc" Duvalier oversaw the siphoning of millions of dollars in GDP and charity money, created a private terror death-squad much like Ivan the Terrible's 16th century Oprichniki, and, apart from ordering the torture, rape, and murder of tens of thousands of people, were also famous for being completely fucking nuts. And throughout most of these three decades, the US firmly continued its tacit financial support, because there couldn't be another Cuba, and better dead than red.

To make the obvious, and by now totally hackneyed comparison, it also took mass devastation for anyone to pay attention to the fact that Louisiana was a cesspit of poverty and political corruption. Doesn't this just give credence to the idea that natural disasters are a sign from the heavens for us to pay attention to what's happening on earth? -- an idea that implicitly feeds into the Pat Robertson-style logic of God as wrathful panopticon. Why does sudden, unexpected destruction fill us with so much awe and reverence, while an ongoing repetition of man-made destruction just makes us yawn and change the channel?

And, obviously, the "throw money at it!" strategy sounds like a good one when faced with an unprecedented natural disaster, millions dead or missing, and an entire national infrastructure destroyed. But isn't that sort of what led to Haiti being the wreck it's been since Toussaint? You can generate all the charity money you want, but the bigger the unattended honey pot, the greater the chance that some rabid bear like a Papa or Bebe Doc will come along and gorge himself on it.

Quick lessons for the New Naturalization Test

Thank you for your interest in becoming a citizen of the United States of America. Your decision to apply for U.S. citizenship is a very meaningful demonstration of your commitment to this country and we applaud your efforts.

They wanted a nation ruled by laws, not men.

AMERICAN GOVERNMENT

A. Principles of American Democracy

1. What is the supreme law of the land?

I first learned to write with India ink in square, slim notebooks of lined paper. These housed my first strings of letters, meticulous repeated and trapped between two dark borders. When we moved, I got a new notebook in school, bright yellow with funny cartoon children holding enormous pencils and sailing on roller skates across the cover. Each page had lined paper, but it also had an empty box for drawings. The first thing I drew was the view I remembered from the airplane: wild, loopy pillows of pink and blue clouds. A few pages after that came a picture of myself wearing red, white, and blue and holding a microphone. Underneath, in awkward, ugly print, I scribbled: "We sang at the 4th of July. My favurit song is Yor a Grand Old Flag. I likk that song." I was six, and I had never written in pencil. It was exciting, but the most exciting part was watching a graphite smudge get slowly devoured by the rounded tongue of a Pink Pearl, then immediately writing over the watery blur underneath. Nobody cared about the mess.

B. System of Government

32. Who is the Commander in Chief of the military?

March 19th, 2003. we had a quiz in freedom class today. i woke up early to study the wrong chapter in my freedom book, so of course i failed the fuck out of that motherfucker. pardon my freedom.

les vacances sont finies.

Map of the United States including state capitals.

I've lived in California, Washington, Mississippi, Louisiana, New York, and Boston. Utah is an alien landscape of hollowed-out stone, backlit by the most beautiful sunsets I've ever seen. Texas sports a giant blue fishbowl for a sky. In Florida, there are glow-in-the-dark jellyfish floating in the ocean. Except Minneapolis/St. Paul, I've never been to the Midwest, but I imagine it as scattered pockets of clean, well-lit strip malls populated by the terminally blond. Two places I'd like to see are Phoenix and Baltimore.

AMERICAN HISTORY

60. What group of people was taken to America and sold as slaves?

I didn't know that I was white until high school. Until then, I always checked the "other" box on surveys and standardized tests. On the school bus, the girls all fought each other to play with my hair. They'd braid it, let it go, and laugh when the braids instantly unraveled into a mess of frizzy cornsilk. In Mississippi, a teacher asked me to join her dance team, "for color balance." When we danced to "Bombs Over Baghdad," I got real cornrows for the second time in my life (the first was in Mexico), and the girls all laughed again. "Why are white girls so tender-headed?"

B. The 1800s

71. What territory did the United States buy from France in 1803?

Sign on a float during the Krewe de Vieux parade, Mardi Gras 2006: Buy us back, Chirac.

C. Recent American History and Other Important Historical Information

81. Who did the United States fight in World War II?

From ages 8 to 11, I spent at least an hour a day at the home of the sixty-year-old Jewish man who lived across the street. He taught me how to play dreidel and invest in the stock market. His Anglo-Protestant wife taught me to make Jello eggs on Easter and cooked me pancakes on Sunday mornings. In middle school, after I'd moved to a different part of town and stopped seeing them so much, we were learning about the Holocaust. When I came home and reverently told my father that the Holocaust was the worst thing that ever happened in all of history, he got upset and wrote a letter to the school, suggesting that they devote at least some class-time to the other holocausts: Ukraine, Armenia, Yugoslavia. I was so embarrassed that I never delivered it.

INTEGRATED CIVICS

By learning this information, you will develop a deeper understanding of the United States and its geographic boundaries, principles, and freedoms.

A. Geography

88. Name one of the two longest rivers in the United States.

My senior year of high school, two classmates and I took an unchaperoned graduation trip to New Orleans. At Cafe du Monde, we met three boys from Texas who told us they were 21 but couldn't have been a day over 16. The one in the cowboy hat, who the other girls thought was the cutest but I didn't, took a special liking to me. He told me, in confidence, earnest blue eyes watering slightly, that I had the perfect body to be a stripper. We walked through the Quarter and stopped by the Mississippi River, where on one side of the bank, a team of amateur biologists was measuring the water toxicity, and on the other side, a naked fleshy homeless woman was taking a swim. "I bet you won't," I whispered, and the boy in the cowboy hat promptly stripped, goaded by hoots of encouragement from his friends. Wearing only his hat and white cotton jockeys, he jumped in. One of the amateur biologists crinkled her nose and informed us that there are at least fifty known carcinogens in that water. I may have smiled.

ENGLISH TEST

To help you prepare, USCIS released a reading vocabulary list found below.

Father of Our Country
right
Flag Day
How
lives/lived
pay
want
a
we
largest
American Indians
colors
dollar bill
free
fifty/50
red
taxes
white

Teenage suicide (don't do it)

This year, one of my Christmas presents was a collected essays edition of Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus -- which, it still being winter break and me having no real responsibilities, makes for some poignant subway reading on my way to and from the gym. Camus was my first French existentialist love (Sartre was too brittle and thuggish for my refined adolescent taste), but I'd always been more into his novels than the cut-and-dried philosophy, so I'd never read Sisyphus in its entirety. That's probably a good thing, though, because I'm sure it's more palatable the closer you get to the 30-year-old expiration date that Camus places on all human hopes and dreams. Any younger, and you're still convinced that this world might have something better to offer than arbitrary struggle against pain and death, so his whole theory of the absurd might not go down quite so easily.

For the Too French; Didn't Read crowd, the basic premise behind the parable of Sisyphus is that our life on this planet is completely absurd. The only thing of which we can be certain is our resounding ignorance in all matters of philosophy, science, and religion. Furthermore, our individual and collective hopes, dreams, and strivings -- all traces of our existence -- will unquestionably be obliterated in the centuries to come. Only those who foolishly delude themselves with thoughts of a god and an afterlife [foolishly because of the two quick death-strokes with which Camus punctures the idea: 1) if we have free will, then God allows evil in the world, which is antithetical to our idea of an omnipotent and benevolent God, and 2) if we have no free will, then God is himself evil because he makes us suffer, and, again, life is absurd] can possibly continue to hope for something better than a finite lifetime of pain, confusion, gradual decay, and death. Hence, the human race is Sisyphus, that poor sap whose punishment was to roll a giant rock up a hill, only to have it roll right back down again, for all of eternity. We toil and sweat and live for nothing.

So, again, especially great reading before and after an hour on a treadmill.

What fascinated me, of course, was Camus' reliance on Dostoevsky to bolster his point. Now, anyone who knows me and has heard me expound on this subject knows that I've been a lifetime member of Team Tolstoy. And anyone who knows what Team Tolstoy is all about would place better odds on Jews and Arabs skipping hand-in-hand down the streets of Haifa than a devoted member of TT breaking ranks and spending a few leisurely afternoons with a full-blown 400+ page Dostoevsky novel (it's kind of a thing in Slavic circles... similar to Camus v. Sartre, I guess, but even more firmly entrenched). Sure, I like his shorter stuff (stories, Notes from the Underground), and I'm okay with The Brothers Karamazov, but only because the 50-odd pages of The Grand Inquisitor story make the rest of the hack genre-fiction and schlocky theology padding worthwhile. So, it is with all due gravitas that I report to have picked up a dog-eared copy of The Possessed at a used book store the other day, in order to get to the root of Camus' allusions. I took one for the Team.

Camus isn't just interested in telling us that life is absurd; after all, everyone from Diogenes to your 13-year-old emo blogging neighbor down the street (no relation) has been gracing us this rather unshocking revelation. What Camus is really interested in is suicide -- specifically, why more people don't commit it, since we all at one point or another have to deal with the unsettling feeling that all of this pain and frustration is just not fucking worth it. That's where Dostoevsky and The Possessed come in. In this novel, a character named Kirilov is writing a book on this very subject. During a heated conversation with Kirilov, the narrator, who is horrified by the idea of suicide, exclaims, "'Man fears death because he loves life!'" To which Kirilov replies:

"That's a base idea and in it lies the whole hoax!" His eyes flashed. "Life is pain, life is fear, and man is unhappy. Now everything is pain and fear. Now man loves life because he loves pain and fear. That's how it's been arranged. We are given life for fear and pain, and that's where the swindle lies. Today man is not a real man. One day there will be free, proud men to whom it will make no difference whether they live or not. That'll be the new man. He who conquers pain and fear will be a god himself. And the other God will disappear."

Decades of canonical existentialist writing, of which Camus is only a germinal part, has taken this quote as a solid, universal maxim -- life sucks, forever and always. But I'm curious if the change of time and religious fervency hasn't changed the equation. In Sisyphus, Camus also talks about experience as the lone principle that makes sense in an absurd world. Since this, our all-too-human mortal life is the only one we've got, we may as well throw caution and accepted morality to the wind and have as many experiences as we can. Quantity over quality. (He refutes this somewhat, but not, I think, entirely.) And when I put this idea together with Dostoevsky's vision of the world I wonder...

Yesterday, I didn't leave the house at all. Hell, I barely left the living room couch. And yet, at the mere push of a few buttons, I had access to: hundreds of films and TV shows, new and old, streamed directly to my computer; countless articles and texts to read, share, comment on; innumerable hours of music of every conceivable genre; a dizzying array of pornography; a network of digitally-linked humans to chat with; and, in case all that wasn't enough, three video game systems with dozens of hours-long immersive gaming experiences to choose from. And it's not because I'm rich or noble or otherwise special. My dad came to this country with exactly fifty dollars to his name. I earn my monthly pittance, about as much as your average Starbucks barista, to teach kids about Dostoevsky and thesis statements.

My point is, we educated elite in the land of exorbitant wealth and nuclear stockpiles have, for all intents and purposes, stopped believing in God. But we certainly haven't gone all Kirilov on everybody and flocked to cliff-sides like lemmings. Maybe Dostoevsky's world -- a dark, dank Russia still functioning on de facto slave labor, simultaneously enthralled to medieval thinking and every passing current of misunderstood "liberalism" that floated its way from the West -- maybe that world was, for the most part, a cruel hoax. But I think the American experiment with utilitarianism has shown that it doesn't always have to be. Even if it's couched in the form of media oversaturation, bad-faith pleasure-proliferation, or just plain and simple False God of Capital, I for one welcome the death of the old God and the rise of our new Experience overlord. What keeps me on that treadmill and loving every minute of it is the pursuit and enjoyment of experience, and the knowledge that I'll never come close to exhausting its horizons. And what keeps me from getting burned out by the width of that infinite horizon is the knowledge that for others who aren't quite so lucky, it's not quite so infinite. The possibilities that I was (stupidly, arbitrarily, unimaginably felicitously) given, the ones that most of us have in this country and others like it, are just too damn precious to waste. And if that sounds dangerously close to Christian rhetoric, so be it. I'll happily plunder the moral system without any of the dogma.

So, in closing, if I can enjoy Dostoevsky, there might be hope for us yet. Also, blame Camus if I slaughter you in a race. It's all in the existentialism.

Love

I love this:



That is all. The dream of nontraditional sustainable living continues.

Red tape

Today, I got fingerprinted by the Department of Homeland Security.

These and other exciting soundbites brought to you by the N-400 Application for Naturalization, aka Application for Citizenship in the Greatest of Great Nations Ever, The United States of America!

I was a little apprehensive at first. My last dealing with the DHS was back when they were still called Immigration and Naturalization Services. In those day, all of their employees seemed to have been culled from the small percentage of recently naturalized who'd barely managed to scrape by the English and Civics portion of the application and now took their position of bureaucratic power as a mandate to harass and terrify all future applicants (apparently, they hadn't gotten the memo that the quota system had been abolished in 1965). Memorable moments at INS headquarters include the time my parents and I were herded into a tiny room by a furious man of indeterminate African origin and viciously berated for presuming to think we were worthy of receiving green cards. I was 13 at the time and had no idea why he was so angry, or why he thought two scientists from the former USSR were such a threat to his and the nation's security. My parents, more used to receiving arbitrary tongue-lashings from petty bureaucrats, just kept their heads down and took it. Strong contender for top ten worst moments of my life.

So, needless to say, I went into my appointment today with slight trepidation. This was step two, before the final interview but after the reams of paperwork in which I assured the good people of the DHS that I am not a terrorist, communist, Nazi, prostitute, or "habitual drunkard" (okay, there may be room for quibbling on that one). I even scrubbed my fingernails clean of chipped black nail polish, so I wouldn't look like quite such a delinquent. I went in with a smile, let a nice gloved Asian man apply alcohol strips and blotters to each of my fingers before smooshing them against a small glass screen, watched the psychedelic whorls of my unique human genome appear on a computer in front of me, and went on my merry way, smelling of rubbing alcohol and powdered latex.

While my fingers were being processed by the administrative organs of the greatest superpower known to man, I thought about how odd it is that we still use fingerprints to identify people. I mean, for The Year 2010, it seems a bit archaic. Can't we do cheek-swabs a la Gattaca already? Or, better yet, what happened to the whole dystopian tattoo bar code idea? I'd love one of those! No more filling out forms in triplicate just to prove who I am? Sign me up; I'll check my Orwell at the door.

So, all in all, the process was surprisingly painless. I like this kinder, gentler (if you're white and speak English, anyway...) DHS. They even had customer service cards! I gave them all "excellent"s -- I carry no grudges. Now, I just have to sit back, twiddle my non-terrorist/communist/Nazi thumbs and await my interview, which should be fun. That's when I get to take the English test (gee golly, hope I pass!) and answer some questions about the Constitution and Congress or something. I'm actually getting sort of excited about this. No more spending nights in "unwanted illegals" ghettos at airports. No more dirty looks from customs officials. I'll get to vote and find creative ways to skip report cheerfully for jury duty. Finally, I'll be a real boy!

Retweet

[From: private blog, January 12th, 2006]

Delta = change over time

I head out for New Orleans tomorrow, and rarely have I been sadder about leaving my stifling Mississippi cubby-hole. Returning from Ithaca on a clean air and frostbite high, I was anxious about seeing the South with clouded Northern eyes. New York was so much the ideal metropolis -- a giant steel and concrete octopus whose robot arms reach as far as the Catskills to carry the pulse of modernity into even the most remote mountain communities and ex-hippie communes. After experiencing the mess of organic tentacles that is New Orleans, the Holy Shit factor was high. But what I'm starting to figure out is that cities are simply the abstract ideal to which people in the region aspire. New York, being America's archetypal city, is this country's urban poster-child: immaculate cultural programming, fluid mobility, and a hermetical seal over a self-contained yet fully integrated system. This description not only applies to the city itself, but to the myriad of communities contained within it. However, to stretch that characterization onto each individual resident is ridiculous. Nobody is all New York, all the time. While many of us are indeed striving for that kind of automated efficiency, we still have to face the fact that, sometimes, nigiri at Nobu and an opening at the Met does not hold the same appeal to carnal pleasure as Popeye's chicken and Will Ferrell.

Which is where Mississippi comes in. When I stay here, I feel like I can let my rigid posture slump a little. Every city I've lived in has left some sort of imprint, but this Southern burg is like a lopsided down pillow placed at the small of my back. What it brings is bittersweet relief from progressive pretensions, as well as a unique chiropractic realignment. My mutant power has always been adaptability. This has not come by nature, but by a hell of a lot of painstaking nurture -- on the part of personal dedication, but mostly due to outside influence like the fall of the Soviet Union, cutbacks on governmental scientific spending, and one giant fucking hurricane -- and I think I've finally gotten a goodish grasp on the art of smelting and refining to suit an endless variety of molds. A lesson for a goddamn lifetime. When I come here to this itty-bitty backwater and enjoy myself so thoroughly, and when I'm mature enough to refuse the label of "slumming it" to describe my visceral enjoyment, this is when I know progress has definitely been made. Mississippi is not a slum. It is the other side of the coin, the broken backbone on which places like New York, both mentally and physically, are created.

If nothing else good comes out of this year, I've walked away with quite possibly the most important discovery in all my twenty-one years of life: the ability to keep myself sane and satisfied. And that, ladies and gentlemen, beats manic ecstasy in four out of five blind taste tests. Peace out, Mississippi. See you in the spring.

Reverse frontierism

The faster the new semester approaches, the more eager I am to kill what remains of my brain-power. To that end, and having exhausted all of the more mainstream trash-TV¹ fare on Netflix instant watch, I've jumped continent and raced through a series and a half of the British teen drama, Skins.

Skins is basically like Dawson's Creek -- if Dawson's Creek had rampant profanity, nudity, substance abuse, raves, and gay sex². So, in short, it's amazing. To the Puritan Americanized eye, it's like a cornucopia of possibilities one could never imagine existing on the small screen, let alone acted out by a cast of teenagers. For instance, if you've ever watched any American teen drama, you'll be familiar with one of the stock settings: a neutral "club" where all the characters frequently gather to discuss their current fiasco, but where no alcohol is served and nothing whatsoever is smoked unless it's a Very Special Episode. As a doe-eyed innocent and gullible kid, I was convinced that every town had one of these cool "teen clubs," where teens go to have important teen conversations that are pivotal to their teen character development (and, in the case of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, to hatching elaborate vampire-killing plans). Only much later did I realize that this was all pure fantasy, that the closest venue of this kind is probably Starbucks. Skins skips all this elaborately coded trickery and just puts the kids in a damn bar already, with beer, cigarettes, and speed in tow.

True story: in late middle school/early high school, my girlfriends and I jointly composed a similar kind of teen drama. It was called Shattered Tapestries. We were each responsible for a character, around which one issue would be centered, and we all tried to one-up each other by packing in as much crazy drugs, sex, and delinquency as we could, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that none of us had yet had any experience in any of these departments. In fact, I have to wonder if our little homemade production didn't somehow end up in the hands of the BBC, because many of the plot and character arcs are downright eerily similar (my character was a girl with a tall black-haired, blue-eyed bisexual boyfriend, for instance... hmm).

Anyway, my point is, for all the swagger about this show being so true to life, OMG, etc., there's clearly more than a bit of wish fulfillment on the part of the young, hip writing team. After all, you probably don't get to be a writer for a BBC network by downing Class As like Tic-Tacs and spending every night hammered in someone else's house. No, you're probably a tad rowdy -- just enough to give you insider knowledge of some pharmaceutical lingo and the latest dance moves -- but mostly clean, sober, and professional. Your wild side only comes out at the keyboard.

The problem is, when I'm watching something like Dawson's Creek, I can roll my eyes and groan at all the obvious fakery, the layers of buttercream frosting padding any potential kernel of reality. With Skins, though, I'm totally thrown off my guard. It's British! What do I know about Britain! Maybe they really do have glo-stick raves all the time! Here are some questions that I have about Skins that I would like to have answered by a real live British person one day:

1. Do you have glo-stick raves all the time? Are you aware that The Great House Music Craze of '96-'02 has come and gone? Why are you still wearing those pants?

2. How is it that 17-year-old students with no jobs and no other sources of income (some of whom don't even have parents!) are able to constantly purchase a veritable mountain of drugs? I mean, I can understand an allowance of petty cash being squandered on the odd ounce or whatever, but these kids are smoking weed and chewing pills about as frequently as they're having glo-stick raves; i.e., all the time! Is this what socialism actually means? Can you please publicize that?

3. Are you really still so classicist? Why are all the rich (sorry, "posh") kids evil?

4. How and why did Dev Patel become the breakout star of this series? I mean, really. He's adorable and all, but boy is he a terrible child actor. Just atrocious.

5. "Safe?" Is this real life slang, or quasi-slang that no one actually uses in conversation (aka, "dope")?

There are a myriad of other questions and conundrums, but I almost don't want them answered. I'd prefer to continue maintaining the illusion of England as a magical place, a liberated place, a kingdom of wonder and fantasy, with perfectly-sculpted cheekbones and blacklights for all.

¹Honestly, though, my taste in "trash-TV" is fairly pedestrian. I've long ago lost the stomach for any kind of reality show, televised competition, or original MTV production, which pretty much leaves me with back-episodes of Intervention -- and that's only a last resort for when I'm very, very depressed.

²Perhaps a more accurate comparison would be Gossip Girl (which I've never actually seen... though, come to think, I don't know if I've ever made it through a full episode of Dawson's Creek, either). However, even making that comparison goes to show how ridiculously sheltered/sheltering we 'mericans are as a culture, and how selectively puritanical. I'm given to understand that while Gossip Girl has plenty of raunchy indications, it runs on the CW and therefore can't possibly contain any actual adult content. Compared to Skins, it sounds like the Hollywood billowing curtain shot: all innocent innuendo, no sinful meat.

Quote-unquote "fantastic"

I can see why a number of critics have expressed the sentiment that The Fantastic Mr. Fox is the best movie of 2009. It's certainly one of the best, if not The Best, film Wes Anderson has made, though claiming the latter might make me dead to my husband and devoted Royal Tenenbaums acolyte (at the least, he should be comforted by the fact that the protagonists of both films share more than a passing similarity and quite a few memorable catch-phrases). Something about the claymation medium -- obsessively detail-oriented, childlike but imbued with a higher level of sophistication than 2-D animation, verging on T.S. Eliot levels of slippage between the American and British paradigm -- is insanely perfect for an Anderson production. And the plot, while peppered with all the trademark Andersoniana (master plans, goofy sidekicks, failure, daddy issues), actually manages to simultaneously coalesce and transcend some of the hang-ups that have plagued the characters and action of earlier films and made them feel too formulaic and phoned in. I doubt I was the only one who was disappointed by this in Darjeeling Limited, where the predictably quirky, neurotic characters could only find redemption through cheap orientalist epiphany. Fantastic Mr. Fox, in contrast, returns the focus to Anderson's strongest, most convincing creation: the Royal/Steve Zissou archetype of the lovable bastard.

Anderson has a lot of fine lines to walk when taking on this theme in the context of a PG-rated "kids' movie" (though there were plenty of kids in the theater with me, I'm inclined to disagree on both the rating and the wisdom of bringing small children to see this often very disturbing, very adult film -- will we ever start rating things according to actual content and not number of boobs or f-bomb?). The fact that he manages to do it so effortlessly is nothing short of astounding; it's one part ingenuity bordering on genius (substituting "cuss" for profanity, for instance, creates a cheeky subtext without sacrificing any atmosphere) and one part aforementioned childlike precocity, for which I'm sure some credit must also go to Roald Dahl (which came first, Anderson's obsession with twee, precocious children or Roald Dahl's twee, precocious child protagonists, one may never know). The fact remains that Anderson takes on the allegorical animal story, a genre practically as old as storytelling itself, and keeps it from descending into lax Disneyan morality or dry didacticism.

Because I'm working on allegory for my dissertation, I couldn't help being captivated by the particular tension that the allegorical form presents, a tension Anderson exploits to muddle the familiar black-and-white binary morality of Aesopian animal tales. According to Walter Benjamin, allegory is often misidentified and misunderstood to be a lazier, lesser method of aesthetic creation, the poor cousin of symbolism, which tends to get a lot more hype. Allegory is perceived to be worse because it seems to offer a one-to-one relationship between what's on the page/stage and the thing it represents in the real world. In the case of Fantastic Mr. Fox, the shallow allegorical reading goes something like this: Fox = man, Fox's wiles and tricks = man's savage nature, tempered by the stamp of modern civility. But, in practice, allegory is never quite so simple. Even after getting immersed in the diegetic reality of the film, I found myself questioning the "fox = man" equation and continually replacing it with "man = ?" To me, that's the true power of allegory -- affirming your own prejudices and preconceptions, and then gently shaking you into realizing just how little they really tell you about the world. Is man a "wild animal," or is this our own private escape fantasy? How important is inner nature, anyway, and isn't it at least partially constructed? Because in the end, "fox" is a man-made archetype, a trickster culled from human features, human frailties, and human triumphs. And yet, whether it's artificially implanted or not, Fox's essential nature is unquestionable. It's what makes him unique and, well, fantastic, but also what makes him maybe not the most exemplary human being. This is perhaps the finest fine line that Anderson walks, since it borders on slipping into the trite "everybody's special in their own way!" miasma of the RBBEAW^* generation. Luckily, instead of sugar-coating this rough pill, Anderson lets the message retain a bitter tinge (after all, Fox's antics nearly kill everyone he's ever loved, and the tension between his domestic and public personae is never entirely resolved in spite of the expected happy ending). In short, I think Anderson has finally found a way to distill the essence of his other anti-heroes (the absent father, the charismatic rake, the eloquent charlatan) into a form that both foregrounds and forgives their shortcomings. It's not that the one side or the other, animal or man, wins out in the end, but that both are combined into the contradictory, clashing force of human nature, in all its ambivalent glory.

^*Raised By Boomers, Everyone's A Winner; shamelessly stolen from McSweeney's.

On not having seen Say Anything

Though my knowledge of Brat Pack features is fairly comprehensive, I've somehow missed what is arguably the cornerstone of the genre: that classic John Cusack vehicle, Say Anything. The DVD of this film was given to me by a friend about a year ago, along with the heartfelt promise that we'd get together to watch it one day. To date, this promise remains unfulfilled, and the DVD sits unopened on a shelf, attracting dust with its clingy shrink-wrap polymer.

A year of not watching a film is a lot like a year of the day before Christmas. There is quite a bit of restless poking of the outer packaging, some experimental shaking, maybe a bit of sniffing. There is, of course, also endless speculation on the contents. Is it a doll? A game? A pony? One might argue that, in this instance, I have more to go on than the utterly inscrutable boxed gift, but I disagree. Just as the size and shape of a present's packaging gives clues to its content without really limiting it in hypothetical scope, so too does what little I know about Say Anything (it's a love story, John Cusack is in it, at one point he stands outside a girl's window with a boom-box playing Peter Gabriel) reveal the shape of the film without necessarily limiting the myriad of possibilities contained within the teenage melodrama structure.

In the deepest recesses of my imagination, the plot of Say Anything unfolds in a Borgesian labyrinth, with countless twists, turns, blind corners, and dead ends. During my darker moments, the action takes on a tinge of noir -- there is a spare black-and-white shot of an alleyway, with the faint echo of heels on cold, rain-drenched cobblestone streets clattering somewhere beyond the frame. Tight three-quarter shot: an unlit cigarette hangs from the lip of a hatted stranger. Raising his hand to touch a match to the tip, his face becomes visible from under the shadowy brim. It is John Cusack. Cut to boom-box and Peter Gabriel.

Other times, when my humor is more conducive to comedy, the boom-box Peter Gabriel scene is followed, after three seconds of deadpan prep, by the sudden appearance of a projectile banana cream pie. There are even days (and I'm not proud to admit this) that I imagine the censors to have been entirely too lax with the PG13 rating, since they somehow greenlit that thoroughly titillating scene of the teenage lovers caught copulating in flagrante by an unexpected cable guy, who gamely unstraps his utility belt and joins in on the fun. (The climax of this scene is, of course, punctuated by the heartfelt warbling of Peter Gabriel.) To me, Say Anything is more than a film. It is a Schrodinger's cat. A vortex. A rabbit hole of infinite possibility.

I will never watch Say Anything.

Descartes before the horse

As promised, more dubious insights-- erm, meditations on Avatar... this time with 75% more links and up to three times the geekery!

Pandora is an interesting choice of nomenclature. Though I could write a hell of a lot on the myriad of mythology- and religion-based associations (fyi, Greek Pandora = Christian Eve), I'm going to go the less literature-grad-student route and talk about video games. To those familiar with recent PlayStation 3 games, this choice to call the planet Pandora is interesting because it's also the name of the alien planet in one of last year's big, hyped-up new releases, Borderlands. In fact, while there's certainly no conscious cross-pollination at work, there's more than a titular resemblance between the Pandora of Avatar and that of Borderlands. Both are fundamentally hostile places, both are populated by a particularly nasty breed of mammal-lizard hybrids¹, and both are home to a precious resource for which many humans would happily kill (though in Borderlands, that's actually a positive thing).

Of course, this kind of environment is far from new. Most sci-fi geeks pick up on the Dune thing right away. Additionally, the friend with whom I saw Avatar -- ironically, the same girl I saw Titanic with when it first came out! -- pointed out that the Na'vi are suspiciously similar to the Aiel in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time fantasy series, since, among other cultural overlaps, they also greet each other with the phrase, "I see you."

But gaming and sci-fi/fantasy have been eager bedfellows from the start, and given the title of the film, Cameron invites the gaming comparison first and foremost². Avatar the film is, after all, one giant, breathtaking, gravity-defying cut scene. Not that I mean to downplay my own enjoyment of it by putting it in these terms. I simply mean that Cameron has tapped into the whole "immersive" idea so often talked about with reference to video games and made it a big-screen reality. I spent much of the movie with thumbs tingling for a controller, and when Jake first gets to inhabit his avatar body and takes it for a barefooted jog, I totally teared up. In a sense, we're all Jake Sullys, living dull gray lives, dragging around dull gray limbs that don't function nearly as well as we want them to, and the idea of having a fantastical meat puppet to play with is what makes first-person shooters like Borderlands³ so addictively fun. Not only are you controlling a character, but in some ways you are that character, and you live and die through his/her experience.

What appeals to me about both Cameron's concept of the avatar and the gaming equivalent is something I've been interested in since I first saw Ghost in the Shell⁴. In Avatar, it's safe to say that Jake Sully gets the easy way out of the human-or-avatar conundrum. I don't want to drop spoilery spoilers, but let's just say he gets his gigantoid blue avatar and eats it, too. In contrast, Ghost in the Shell deals with the matter at a much higher philosophical level, engaging both Descartes' evil demon problem and the larger issue of the brain in the vat. What would it really mean for someone to inhabit an avatar? Would they go crazy wondering which part of their life, the avatar-life or the human-life, is the true one? And even after they'd made their choice to be one or the other, would they forever be haunted with thoughts that maybe, just maybe, a part of their true self, their "ghost" or whathaveyou, is forever stuck on the other side of the fence?

Obviously, it's not an ontological dilemma we'll be faced with anytime soon (I can turn the damn console off anytime I want, I swear!), but as technology advances, it might. I still wonder whether I'd be the kind of intrepid soul who'd jump aboard the virtual reality/cyborg body boat (I always take this rhetorical position in arguments about the brain in the vat or cyborgs in general), or whether, probably more in line with what I actually know about my own psychic limitations, I'd be unable to go through with it.

One last word on Borderlands. I've been waxing rhapsodic over the cover art for quite some time now, and here it is for your viewing pleasure:



Aside from the lovely Mad Max nod, I think it brilliantly encapsulates a certain facet of the gaming experience that's not often discussed by serious gamers who try desperately to sell the idea of gaming as serious business; that is, the gleeful nihilism, the sheer joy of literally melting your brain cells by engaging in hours upon hours of killing pixels. Now I'm wondering if my reading it this way doesn't provide an insightful Rorschach test into my own overly-conscious consciousness, and if someone (an ex-Marine, let's say...) who'd just see it as "Cool pic, bro," wouldn't be a hell of a lot more suited for a cyborg body in the first place.

¹Compare the skag of Borderlands to the thanator from Avatar. Essentially the same chimerical beastie.

²It's a shame that the actual game tie-in to the movie turns out to be, anecdotally, a piece of shit, but I think that just goes to show how much money, technology, and personal investment are available to the movie industry and not the gaming industry, despite the fact that games are capable of meeting or exceeding movie profits.

³To the purists: yes, yes, I know. It's not quite entirely an FPS; it's also an RPG. Get over yourselves.

⁴For the anime neophyte: this series originated in manga, moved to the small screen, then spawned movies, video games, and gave the Wachowski brothers the idea for The Matrix. The premise is fairly simple: William Gibson-like cyberpunk future, cyborg bodies. The protagonist, a busty ass-kicking babe, was outfitted with a cybernetic body at age 9, and the series revolves around the question of whether or not she truly has a "ghost" or soul.

SCIMITAR (err, Avatar)

I have every reason in the world to hate Avatar. For starters, there's this whole debate about Hollywood's downright uncomfortable portrayal of race, which points out that the storyline is essentially a mash-up of Dances With Wolves, Fern Gully, Pocahantas, and The Last Samurai. Which is true. There's also this argument from Slate's Movie Club, from which I quote this pithiest of insights:

One of Avatar's many unintentional ironies (they have to be unintentional, right?) is how, even though it's about the use of technology to transcend technology and return to a noble precapitalist Eden, the movie itself is a triumph of both technology and capitalism.

Amen. These are just a few of the critical strands that raise my hackles and make me want to dismiss the whole thing as a corporate monstrosity whose sole purpose is to sell Big Macs to obese suburban youngsters. Oh, and let's not forget this. On a whim, I just Googled "Avatar orientalism," and this was the first hit (note to self: stop worrying so much if your mom/PhD adviser/landlord reads your blog and just make it available to search engines, already -- at this very minute, someone out there is desperately Googling "falling Paul de Man strip-mall" and coming up woefully empty-handed!). That blog post doesn't specifically mention Chateaubriand or his seminal work in the native-girl-makes-good genre, Atala, but when I first saw the splashy posters of Zoe Saldana all pliant and seductive-eyed, I immediately thought of that, mixed in with the Persians from 300, and how everyone got all up in arms about their overt sexualization -- but, of course, a girl being sexualized in Hollywood is like falling off a log, so.

As I said, I have every reason to hate Avatar. Every reason to walk out halfway through when I went to watch it tonight, in all its ridiculous 3D glasses glory. But, no. I sat through the whole thing -- and grinned like a blithering idiot through all two hours and forty minutes of it.

Here's the thing that no review of Avatar will tell you about Avatar: spoiler alert! it's about American cultural mythology. I know, I know... you might protest that I always reduce things to American cultural mythology, possibly because I still don't feel fully 100% integrated into your Borg or whatever, and that's just how I happen to approach your strange, inscrutable culture. But this time, I really mean it. Avatar is a glorious paean to America's perception of itself, in full-on technicolor rainbow capitalist mass-market new hoozit splendor. And guess what? Spoiler alert! America is pretty fucking cool.

But let's be clear here. There are ways of showcasing America's perception of itself that lack any self-awareness or sophistication, but unwittingly expose the ugly reality behind blind, narcissistic jingoism. Avatar is a far more nuanced exploration of the hidden binary framework behind America The Allegedly Beautiful, and in a way this answers some of the criticism about the storyline being dated and redundant. At heart, Avatar does what all those other movies (Dances with Wolves, espcially) do, but much more balls-out extravagantly, by merging the two archetypes nearest and dearest to American hearts: cowboys and Indians. And somewhere in that unstable melange, a nation was born -- or, perhaps more accurately, a nation's belief about itself, which is no less powerful.

Allow me to elaborate. The main character of the film, Jake Sully, is a typical American cowboy. Now, when I think of the archetypal American cowboy, I don't necessarily think Clint Eastwood or John Wayne; no, I'm a child of the 80s and 90s, and the first mental image that cowboy-as-archetype conjures up in my mind is that scene from Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark. You know the one. Indy is in the marketplace, fighting all sorts of devilish Arabic bad guys (I'll hold off on the orientalist critique on this one, because it's fucking Indiana Jones, okay?), and just as he's done demolishing all of the lesser minions, the big boss with the scary swords comes out to play. Big Boss does an impressive sword routine, almost certainly taught to him by his father, and his father's father, and etc. etc. And then Indy pulls out a pistol and shoots him in the face^*.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is an American cowboy. He has no time for silly rituals, costumes, or tribal dances. He's not going to play by centuries-long rules, because he recognizes their inherent absurdity. And that, like it or not, is why America is on top of the game of global domination. It doesn't play by the rules. It doesn't really care about your Tree of Life, or your fuzzy-wuzzy quasi-Taoist global ecology movement, and especially not about your stupid glow-in-the-dark Ancestors. It just comes along, shoots you in the face, and gets what it wants for it and its own. And that's who Jake Sully is. He breaks the rules. Spoiler alert! He tames the big fucking dragon that nobody else can tame, because instead of cowering in fear, he just flies a little higher and jumps on the back of that sucker. And hell, that's obviously why the hottest chick in the village falls for him. Why else would she risk life, limb, and tribe for some ghostwalking schmuck? Why? Because we girls love our Dirty Harrys and our Indiana Joneses, and all those other untameable bad boys who might break our hearts, and who just need some sweet, sensual, monogamous-for-life-because-the-Tree-of-Life-SAID-so lovin'. Or so I've heard.

But, obviously, the cowboy thing is not all there is to Jake Sully. And, as I've mentioned, it's always that noble savage, doe-eyed native girl -- from Atala to Pocahantas -- who's instrumental in coaxing it out. Because the cowboy thing is not all there is to America, either. America loves its unrepentant opportunists, but it also loves the underdog. Again, see here. I'm not sure if this is the product of a long-standing colonial/continental inferiority complex, but there's definitely a hidden streak in the American popular imagination that gets off on thumbing its nose to "the man." The scrappy underdog versus slick establishment dynamic is omnipresent in Hollywood film, perhaps nowhere more clearly than that other great Harrison Ford franchise, Star Wars. The battle between Empire and rebellion has been the building-block of countless features, both big and small screen (the brilliant Firefly being an outstanding representation of the latter), and this dynamic relies to some extent on the sheer, ridiculous hopelessness of the battle (arrows and dragons and Nature against machine guns, yeah sure) but most importantly on the inevitable triumph of blithe idealism, no matter how absurd. And it's this tree-hugging, grassroots-network-forming, Obama-electing, kinder-gentler facet of America that saves it from being a complete monster. Because while America may steal your land and plow over your civilization, it will still continue to offer its children the attractive alternative of saying to hell with it, jumping ship, and going native. All the unobtainium in the world (seriously, UNOBTAINIUM; surreptitiously add that to the list of reasons why I should hate this movie) can't buy the things Jake Sully really wants. He wants to live free, to fly, to run, and to sex his hot 8-foot-tall blue girlfriend. He doesn't want to be generalissimo of the space brigade, or the head honcho of a big multinational corporation, or an orthodontist. He doesn't even really want to be chieftain of the Na'vi tribe. What he really wants is what this movie sells to you for a measly 10 bucks (with free 3D glasses! Does not include the price of popcorn): visceral pleasure. And on that front, it delivers. In buckets.

This is getting about as absurdly long and bloated as your average James Cameron fare, so I'll leave possible talk of the geeky-gamer implications (aka my favorite topic ever: CYBORG BODIES) for a future entry and close by giving the final word to Science. Sort of. According to Google, one hit of acid costs about 10 dollars. Avatar cost about 200 million dollars to make. So, if 200,000 people go see this movie instead of taking a hit of acid -- which is essentially what this tripped-out glo-light thrill-ride accomplishes -- the US economy will actually benefit, because that money will leave the realm of untaxed under-the-table transactions. And this is why James Cameron spending the GDP of a small nation on one movie makes sense. Yes. At least, I think this is how economics works. I don't know; I just read books.

^*May not be actual shot in the face: this scene comes to you from the working memory of my eight-year-old self

Tranche de vie

There is exactly one (1) good thing about New England winters. It is as follows: after the sun has set and the sky is dark, there is an occasional perfect melding of light, nature, and man-made contrivance, such that a smooth carpet of snow -- virgin white, totally unsullied by the vulgar gaping cavities of footprints -- is gently illuminated by the powdery pink-and-blue rococo tinges of strip-mall neon. It's as if these exact hues, which had just minutes earlier been present in the twilit wintry sky, bled out of the heavens and into the very earth itself, leaving the former black and blustery and the latter quietly luminescent.

Other than that, New England winters can pretty much suck it.

Of all the many affronts to human dignity that this world of ours offers, none are quite so painful as the remnants of heavy and prolonged snowfall. It is only then that the veil of modern convenience is ripped away from us, and we are exposed to the reality of a universe that has no concern for our safety, well-being, or sock dryness. It is also this time of year that highlights the reality of America's pedestrian existence as the halfhearted sham that it is. Sure, in summer, we can pretend that it's no problem to take public transit and trundle around to get where needs going. But in winter, all you need do to realize your pitiful place in the navigational hierarchy is look at the sad, neglected state of most sidewalks: caked in the yellow-gray detritus of snow plows, under which lurks the menacing frozen ooze of ankle-breaking ice. In stark contrast, a mere hour after the flakes start falling, the roads are as meticulously salted as the hallowed ground of Carthage. Thanks a lot, "America's Walking City!"

Obviously, I took my first long snow walk today, and obviously, I fell. Of the many affronts to human dignity that this world of ours offers, the absolute hands-down worst is slipping and falling on ice. Actually, probably the very, very worst moment in all of existence is that infinitesimally short instant when you realize that the ground you've stepped on is not the solid footing your boot was searching for. You know what's coming, and though you might splay out your arms to steady yourself, or make some sort of "oh oh ohgawd" noise to draw the attention of helpful passers-by or, at the very least, friendly dogs who might summon help, in the end you are powerless to stop your body's downward momentum. Paul de Man, with his esoteric interpretations of Schlegel and Benjamin, links falling with irony -- according to him, just as the fall makes us momentarily terrified that we will henceforth exist in a perpetual state of falling, so, too, does one instance of irony open up the possibility that everything around us is ironic and therefore chaotic, meaningless, absurd. Every time I fall, all I can think of is de Man's smug Belgian face breaking into an "I told you so!" grin, and then shuffling off to go mutter something pejorative about the Jews. Well, screw you, too, de Man. I like Benjamin better, anyway.

Діаспора

Let the record state: I love subcultures. Big ones, small ones, ones as big as your head. I love the simultaneous exclusivity and community-building of flashily displayed signifiers, be they dyed hair, Ed Hardy T-shirts, Timberland boots, or LOLspeak. My favorite thing about spending time in large, open areas through which herds of people migrate -- airports, train stations, mall food courts -- is watching the unspoken interaction of all these signifiers, the chaotic jostling of colors and brands. I especially love the zeal showcased by the younger members of the species, whose entire bodies, in spite of an insistent outward display of boredom, act like quivering antennae, submitting a dozen urgent signals to everyone in range: Hello, world. I may look young, but I'm actually really into The Clash, and also I like old-school gaming systems, but not ironically, unlike this SpongeBob T-shirt, which is sort of ironic, but if you look closely, you'll see there's actually a delicate vein of innocent, childlike love, too, which you'll find I also exhibit in relationships, and you may find charming if you're the Prince Charming type. But as evidenced by this studded belt, I'm obviously too smart to fall for the Disney princess cliche, because I'm actually very mature for my age. Even though it has very little to do with what I'm working on for my PhD, my favorite work done in an academic setting has been stuff on subcultures, and despite feeling somewhat dated, the Bibles of my inner bibliography include such sine qua nons as Dick Hebdige and Greil Marcus (unabashed shill for Lipstick Traces, the wackiest, most engrossing pseudo-academic, quasi-Marxist, mostly-memoiristic cultural study ever published by Harvard University Press).

...which is probably why I have a love/hate relationship when it comes to diaspora communities; aka, the reified remains of old foreign subcultures.

I've never seen it cohesively stated, but I'm almost certain that someone has already made the comparison between marginal ethnic communities and contemporary subcultures. The similarities are too seductive: both arise as a product of a too-broad and thus somewhat alienating dominant culture. For ethnic communities, it's the big multiethnic empires of the past two centuries (which is why Bavarians, with their Weißwurst and lederhosen, seem so much more authentically German than the cosmopolitan Berliners, giving us two German archetypes in the American popular consciousness -- quaint, robust lederhosen-clad peasants and soulless Bauhaus urbanites in black turtle-necks), and for subcultures, it's the global juggernaut of bourgeois conformity and capitalist mass culture. Also, both are created by a system of signifiers that turn the dominant hierarchies on their heads -- for example, ethnic communities subvert the official state religion by injecting it with old pagan practices, and subcultures revel in taking ordinary objects (sneakers, safety pins) and turning them into signs of rebellion. And, finally, both are selectively celebrated and repressed, according to the political climate of the day. Sometimes, it's in the dominant culture's favor to trot out the subculture as a symbol of diversity and freedom, and other times the subculture represents too much of a challenge to the universalizing rhetoric of the dominant culture and needs to be stamped out. Sometimes, the time-table for these cultural mood swings is incredibly narrow: one day, Stalin is singing the praises of the diverse Soviet nationalities, and the next, it's terror and the Gulag for Jews, Gypsies, and Ukrainians. Similarly, one day the Putin administration is heaping scorn on the cultural degeneracy of the Western-influenced Russian rap phenomenon, and the next day, this:



So, okay, the affinities are legion, but what complicates the matter is when ethnic communities emigrate and form diaspora communities, which are a strange hybrid of the ethnic and cultural categories. Take, for instance, this New York Times article on Veselka, the East Village Ukrainian diner. There are repeated mentions of hippies and beatniks who used to frequent the place in the 60s -- ostensibly, for the Counterculture Grand Central location and good, cheap food. But, obviously, I think there's more to it than that. I think subcultures naturally gravitate to ethnic joints because their signifying systems are extremely compatible. Moreover, these days, both the New York subcultures and Veselka have gone mainstream; the place was featured in the abysmal Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, for god's sake. Age-old story: something a few people love becomes something marketed to the masses, and all of a sudden you get Michael Cera selling you a Hollywood hipster fairy-tale.

Which brings me to my last point about the similarities between ethnic and contemporary subcultures: an uncomfortable dynamic of authenticity and artifice. Contemporary subcultures, as constantly evolving, living-breathing things, tend to cycle through signifiers at a dizzying rate. While it's fun to trace their trajectories (the reggae of the British slums moving to high-class London art students moving to American rock bands moving to Bob Marley posters on 1 out of 3 college students' walls), it's hard to ignore the artifice behind the whole subcultural enterprise. For instance, there may be some small percentage of early adopters or true aficionados who could argue that reggae was their music, or that punk was their style, but for the majority of the members of these subcultures, it was theft, pure and simple. Of course, that's part of the fun -- would dyeing your hair electric red and pretending to be an alien be so captivating if it weren't for the underlying acknowledgment of ridiculousness, sham, performance? But artifice and ethnic community don't mesh quite so well. Part of the marginalized ethnic project is, again, to continually insist on the authenticity of its cultural experience, in contrast to the artifice of the dominant culture. In diaspora communities, this insistence on authenticity continues to play out -- except the dominant culture is now American mass culture, with the ethnic acting as the marker of authenticity against the conformity of corporate capitalism. See: Gogol Bordello.

As someone with a toe in both worlds, I find the overlap equal parts fun and disturbing. Fun because, hey, my personality was forged in ethnic kitsch, and there will always be some part of me that gets off on foreignness as elite, exclusive subculture. But also disturbing, because this just hammers home how tendentious culture really is, and how insignificant ethnicity really is, except in self-deluding fantasy. And these days, I'm more comfortable with that level of self-delusion in the form of an American teenager wearing a Ramones T-shirt, rather than a folk costume, if for no other reason than the disposability and mutability of the former as compared to the latter. But maybe that's just the impending citizenship test talking.

Fuck the police: three ways

In Postwar (a breathtakingly thorough overview of European history since WWII), Tony Judt makes an interesting claim about the progression of popular culture in the 60s and 70s. According to Judt, immediately following the violent, radicalized, leftist youth movements of 1969 -- the French student movements, American civil rights, second-wave feminism, various Marxist and pseudo-Marxist organizations -- came the much more solipsistic, hedonistic wave of the Sexual Revolution. Judt is fairly skeptical of the purity of the former trend, but the latter is clearly even more of a problem in his eyes, representing as it does the full-on self-indulgence and navel-gazing of the adolescent Baby Boomer.

While I was reading Postwar over the summer, "Mrs. Officer," that Lil Wayne song, was on heavy rotation on the radio. Arguably the best lyric in that song is, of course: "And all she want me to do is fuck the police." (Ha ha because it's about wanting to have sex with a female police officer, get it?) So, with Judt in mind, I wonder if it's not so outlandish to say that radicalism is generally replaced by a decadent period of sex and solipsism. When NWA first sang "fuck the police," it was all about violent machismo mixed with political subtext, heavily in line with the aesthetic principle of a Weather Underground^* or Black Panthers-style organization, but already declawed enough to venture into the mainstream. Today, when Lil Wayne sings his version of "fuck the police," it's self-conscious, childishly naughty, and totally harmless -- on par with the saccharine sex of early disco or the stage antics of Sir Elton John.

When I first thought of this brilliant cultural analogy, I saw the Lil Wayne "fuck the police" moment in Judt's terms: a degenerate version of the slightly (only slightly) more "pure" NWA moment. But when I was reminded of it by Ryan over brunch today, his argument for the Lil Wayne version really stuck. Ryan was much more willing to give self-indulgence the benefit of the doubt, and I can see his point about it being more honest with respect to the whole enterprise of pop music in general. By the time NWA came out with that song, rap was already appearing on MTV, marketed toward a suburban, white audience, and thriving on the manufactured controversy. Lil Wayne's whole "Young Money" project, in contrast, is unapologetic in its anti-topicality. From start to finish, it's pure, childish fantasy -- youth culture at its most honest and, arguable, at its best.

Which brings me to "Fuck the Police" mark 3: the 2001 song by J Dilla. So, a new iteration of the cycle through a return to radical, politically-conscious machismo? The circle of life, it moves us all?

^*Ironically, but further bolstering my rap dichotomy, the "Weathermen" moniker is being used today by a contemporary rap group recycling the NWA-like sound and ideology.