Monday, August 10, 2015
A Cheap Vacation in Other People's Misery
"The script is by John Hughes—the man who invented the 1980s—adapted from his Lampoon short story “Vacation ’58.” That story is functionally identical to the movie, except Clark goes to jail for the attempted murder of Walt Disney and it’s set in 1958. Yet in both cases there’s the nuclear American family as doomed pioneers, bound for the West no matter how many are buried on the trail.
"Director Harold Ramis used this as an opportunity to poke fun at the American myth (going so far as to have Clark wandering through Monument Valley expecting to find a gas station) and updated the setting to 1983, when suburban America tried to start from scratch and return to Eisenhower ideals despite the social upheaval and progressive shift of the 60s and 70s. Norman Rockwell’s sentimental ideal of piling into a car for a ramshackle family adventure had a more desperate appeal, then.
"So Clark foists his own nostalgic idea of fun—a 1950s invention, when Disneyland (thinly disguised as Walley World in the film, because Disneyland never closes for repair) was new and the road trip was a conveniently packaged coming-of-age ritual—on his apathetic family. But he does it all wrong. Chase plays Clark as twitchy and glib, a pathological liar utterly devoid of empathy. Basically, he’s a high-functioning psychopath. He’s driven exclusively by pride and self-interest; the man has no moral compass. But he gets by.
"When he meets somebody who doesn’t get by—Cousin Eddie, a caricature of everybody Reaganomics wasn’t helping—Clark feigns empathy but doesn’t achieve it. Here’s Clark, in a new car, which happens to have the unfortunate luxury of being tacky, and here’s Eddie, clutching a six-pack of Coors in the middle of the day, with a rope for a belt, a daughter with no tongue, cheeseburgers with no meat, and dependent on a mean aunt’s social-security pension for even that. His wife works more than one night job. And Clark does his level best to ignore all of it. Clark is the National Lampoon‘s idea of the suburban 80s dad, and it’s scary as hell."
- Kaleb Horton, Rewatching the Original National Lampoon’s Vacation, a Postcard from Reagan’s America, Vanity Fair
From Darkness
Emily Howell is an artificially intelligent computer code created by UC Santa Cruz professor David Cope that was fed a database of music and programmed to interpret feedback, musical and verbal, that it could interpret into its wholly original compositions
Friday, August 7, 2015
We Need a Retromania of the Left
Courtesy of Scarfolk Council
Some interesting notions in Steve Fraser's recent historical account of left resistance that concludes that America is too deeply into the reign of capitalism to be nostalgic for anything outside of it, fueling the notion that "there is no alternative".
"This is key to Fraser’s thesis. What fueled the resistance to the first Gilded Age, he argues, was the fact that many Americans had a recent memory of a different kind of economic system, whether in America or back in Europe. Many at the forefront of the resistance were actively fighting to protect a way of life, whether it was the family farm that was being lost to predatory creditors or small-scale artisanal businesses being wiped out by industrial capitalism. Having known something different from their grim present, they were capable of imagining — and fighting for — a radically better future.
"It is this imaginative capacity that is missing from our second Gilded Age, a theme to which Fraser returns again and again in the latter half of the book. The latest inequality chasm has opened up at a time when there is no popular memory — in the United States, at least — of another kind of economic system. Whereas the activists and agitators of the first Gilded Age straddled two worlds, we find ourselves fully within capitalism’s matrix. So while we can demand slight improvements to our current conditions, we have a great deal of trouble believing in something else entirely.
- Naomi Klein's review of Fraser's The Age of Acquiescence, New York Times
Corey Robin actually one-ups this notion by indicating that it was a sense of lost futurism that was propelled the pre-industrial masses. They didn't want to go back to a time before the technological advances. Indeed, they wanted to collectivize and democratize technology, to have advancement advance them and not just the gilded class.
"In 1820, 80% of Americans were self-employed; by 1940, 80% worked for someone—or something—else. “The individual has gone,” declared John D. Rockefeller, “never to return.” Driven into the mills and the mines or onto the rails, these refugees from the shop and the farm were injured, maimed, or killed (35,000 per year) by industrial capitalism. They were the lucky ones. Many Americans couldn’t get work at all. In the 1870s, unemployment became a census category for the first time. So desperate were jobless New Yorkers that they got themselves arrested just to enjoy a night off the streets, in jail. They also struck, marched, organized, bombed and killed, launching decades of class warfare, literal and metaphoric, that would haunt the country’s elites for years to come.
"The fact of unemployment, Fraser writes, struck these men and women “as shocking, unnatural, and traumatic,” as did the astronomic new wealth of the nation’s plutocrats. That’s because they remembered a life before wage labor and their pervasive dependence on—and the compulsion of—the market. So powerful was this memory of a pre-capitalist past that it framed the way they understood their enemies: well into the twentieth century, Fraser reminds us, FDR was railing against “economic royalists” and “Tories of industry.” Not merely as propaganda but as a residue of the world not long ago left behind.
"But it was precisely that memory, Fraser argues, that shock of the new, that made these rebels so ready to demand something even newer: a cooperative commonwealth, in which production would be collectively managed and profit democratically shared. Scandalized by the novelty of capital, they did not opt for an escapist nostalgia. They instead turned to the state, traditionally an object of opprobrium, and demanded that it assume new responsibilities: take over industry, tax wealth, supply credit, store surpluses—all for the sake of a vision drawn from a pre-capitalist past.
- Corey Robin, "We Have the Left and Right All Wrong: The Real Story of the Politics of Nostalgia and Tradition", Salon
Thursday, August 6, 2015
Wednesday, August 5, 2015
Tuesday, August 4, 2015
Monday, August 3, 2015
Sunday, August 2, 2015
Rape Culture Intervention/Listening to Women
I know most of you that have wanted to have probably already seen the story (and no amount of trigger warnings can prepare you). It was all over the news. My only two cents:
This has to be some kind of watershed moment in the history of rape culture. Can you even recall another time when the victims were the story and not the accused/victimizer? New York magazine cannot be given enough kudos for flipping the dynamic.
Sublime-inal Cinema
RIP "Rowdy" Roddy Piper
At a cursory glance, They Live appears to be a film that toys with ontology as a cheap gimmick to decimate monsters. Perhaps the most lasting impression of the film is what Lethem dubs the “perfect sequence”, an artfully shot scene of Nada slowly uncovering the truth about his world as he strolls past a newsstand, through an upscale grocery store and bank. Here, with his new glasses on, he finds that all billboards are subliminal masquerades for stark commands like “Consume” and “Marry & Reproduce”. Lethem is absolutely correct in identifying the scene as “Ten minutes of cognitive dissonance as sublime as anything in the history of paranoid cinema, shot partly in black and white, and composed with the serene assurance of Hitchcock or Kubrick”, but if it weren’t so spellbinding as cinema, it’d be numbingly didactic and reductionist. There is absolutely no subtlety in the interpolation of advertising and media iconography as ultimately absent directives about obedience and conformity. That the “true” world itself is filmed in black and white doesn’t help matters (though Lethem offers his own interesting series of explanations for this stylistic choice).
Furthermore, Nada’s response is extremely troublesome. After he begins to believe his eyes, Nada has an almost instantaneously turn to violence. Without so much as an expository soliloquy on the part of the ghouls explaining their evil intentions, Nada gets right to slaughtering. Our overlords are never given an actual voice anywhere in the film. Instead, for Nada, the medium is the message, and it’s divisive enough to dictate that the newly manifest Manichean morality be reinforced by violence.
Lethem points out that, without the glasses (and even with them), the scenes of gunning down unarmed ghouls in white collar get-up is a horrific evocation of the endemic office shootings that regularly pop up across America. Nada (who is white), and later, his black construction worker friend Frank, become emblems of the emasculated male delegitimized under late capitalism, the very picture of a workplace shooter as described in Mark Ames’ treatise on the subject, Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan’s Workplace to Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond. Lethem also takes pain to note that Nada seems to reserve a particular bile for the indulgences of middle class housewives and the petty standards of high society ladies, breeding an unsettling undercurrent of misogyny throughout the narrative.
"It’s the second act revelation though, more than the third act revenge fantasy, that definesThey Live. This is a film about what goes unspoken, not only the ontological distance between our consented capitalist roles and our capitulated communal duties, but also the narrative gaps of experience. Nada spends the first part of the movie witnessing something happening, but he remains uncertain of what it is. Frank, too, remains underserved by society-at-large, but requires an overlong fist fight with Nada in order to put on the glasses himself, the subtext being that the black experience in America is difficult enough without the knowledge of what lies on the other side of the veil. Other characters side with the ghouls, proving that knowledge or “awareness” is not always an end unto itself. “Delusion,” Lethem says “is effortless, routine and stable, while the ‘truth’, acquired in some disreputable street transaction, is grueling, bewildering, and grotesque.”
- from my review of Jonathan Lethem's book on They Live
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